My Jewish Ancestors Fled Spain. Will Returning Feel Like Home—Or Just Another Diaspora?

Pursuing the Country’s Offer of Citizenship Feels Like Claiming Privilege When What I Want to Claim Is Justice

When the government of Spain passed a law that offered citizenship to the descendants of Jewish people expelled 500 years ago by the Inquisition, half the people I knew sent me copies of news reports about it, or wrote and asked if I planned to pursue Spanish citizenship.

No, I always said. It sounded like a ploy for tourist dollars. And besides, I wasn’t even sure I could prove my connection.

My parents were born in Mexico and fled north to California in the U.S. in 1914 and 1930, respectively, during the …

by Kathleen Alcalá | April 29, 2021

It Takes a Village to Create a Nation’s Memory

Returning Jews and Local Communities Worked Together to Lead Germany Toward Historical Reckoning

by Helmut Walser Smith | January 11, 2021

In the early postwar years in the German town of Warendorf, no one contributed as much to facing the difficult past as Hugo Spiegel. He was not a learned man. …

What the Jewish Name Changing Narrative Gets Wrong

A Forgotten History of Antisemitic Exclusion and Isolation in Mid-20th Century New York

by Kirsten Fermaglich | September 17, 2020

In 1932, a man named Max Greenberger petitioned the City Court of the City of New York to change his last name and the last name of two of his …

Mitchell Duneier Explains the Invention of the Ghetto, as Place and as Idea

The Zócalo Book Prize Winner Discusses the Evolution of Ethnic Enclaves, from Renaissance Europe to the Modern U.S.

By Sarah Rothbard | May 15, 2017

When sociologist Mitchell Duneier was growing up in the 1960s, he said, “references to the word ghetto were references in my house and in my segregated Jewish community on Long …

When L.A.’s Jews Went Crazy for Albert Einstein

In His Three Semesters at Caltech, the Famed Physicist Brought Together a Divided Community and Earned Their Undying Love

by Noah Efron | April 24, 2014

When Albert and Elsa Einstein first visited in January 1931, the Jews of Los Angeles were besotted.

A hundred women and men, representatives of almost every Jewish organization in the city, …

Camp Conformity

I Was Sent to Bond With My Fellow Jews. I Failed.

by Rebecca Aronauer | July 12, 2012

Last month, for the first time since I was 15, I returned to summer camp. Some friends were getting married and had rented out a YMCA in upstate New York …

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