Anita Lasker-Wallfisch: The Cellist of Auschwitz

By Lilly Maier, Prins Fellowship (2025-2026)

Anita Lasker-Wallfisch: The Cellist of Auschwitz

At over one hundred years old, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch is the last living member of the Auschwitz Women’s Orchestra.

Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was born Anita Lasker in 1925 in Breslau, a city that was German at the time but is part of Poland today. She grew up in an educated Jewish family. Anita started playing…

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Passports and Identities: An Egyptian Jewish American Story

By Maytal Mark, Arcadia Graduate Student Fellowship (2025-2026)

Passports and Identities: An Egyptian Jewish American Story

In the fall of 1950, Victor Sanua arrived at Bowling Green State University in Ohio to study clinical psychology. He was a long way from his home and his family in Cairo, where he had been born in 1920. Not long after settling in for the semester, he…

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Williamsburg: A New Piece of the Old Country

By Martin Saps, Center for Jewish History-Fordham University Short-Term Research Fellow (2026)

Williamsburg: A New Piece of the Old Country

When it first opened in 1903, the Williamsburg Bridge was nicknamed the “Jews’ highway” for the sheer amount of Jewish New Yorkers leaving the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side for a better life across the water. By the 1960s, however, the children and…

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From the YIVO Stacks: Of Comic Strips and Antisemitism

By Andrew Kotick, Leon Levy Fellow at the Center for Jewish History (2025-2026)

From the YIVO Stacks: Of Comic Strips and Antisemitism

A 1926 antisemitic pamphlet documents the antisemitic moral controversy surrounding the Jewish publishers that helped pioneer early French comic strips.

In the collections of YIVO Library at the Center for Jewish History rests an unassuming, yet unsettling French pamphlet from 1926 titled…

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Behind the Cowl: Batman and Bob Kane

By Dr. Andrew Fogel, Visiting Scholar (2025-2026)

Behind the Cowl: Batman and Bob Kane

In 1939, Batman debuted in Detective Comics issue twenty-seven with a May cover date. The comic book hit newsstands, according to copyright records, on March 30. Eighty-seven years later, copies of this rare piece of Americana sell for nearly two million dollars. Batman helped build the comic book industry and laid the…

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