Professor Jonathan Haslam will discuss his most recent book, The Spectre of War. International Communism and the Origins of World War II, which explores the roots of the Second World War in the fear of Communism prevalent across continents during the interwar period. Jonathan Haslam retired as George F. Kennan Professor at the Princeton University Institute for Advanced Study last July. He…

Opera arrived in America as a European import, with Jews playing an essential role in its promotion from the moment Lorenzo da Ponte landed in Philadelphia. A century later, a generation of European refugees would take their operatic experience and use it to develop two of the most quintessentially American art forms: the Hollywood movie and the Broadway musical. But,…

In 1986, when her mother died at the age of sixty-four, Eleanor Reissa went through all of her belongings. In the back of her mother’s lingerie drawer, she found an old leather purse. Inside that purse was a wad of dried-up papers in a brittle baggie: fifty-six letters handwritten in German by her father, in 1949—only four years after Auschwitz—to…