David Dalin is a rabbi, historian, and author known for his scholarship on American Jewish history, Catholic-Jewish relations, and the papacy. He contributed articles to The Weekly Standard from 1999 to 2015, frequently writing about Jewish history, interfaith relations, and notably defending Pope Pius XII's wartime record regarding the Holocaust. He has authored and edited numerous books on religion, politics, and history.
The remarks of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem about the role of the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in the Holocaust have engendered a massive, and mostly critical response. It is important to define in more precise terms the role of the Mufti…
In this fascinating book Stephanie Deutsch recounts the story of the extraordinary friendship and philanthropic partnership between Booker T. Washington, founder of Tuskegee Institute, the vocational training school for black teachers that he had established in Alabama in 1881, and Julius…
For five memorable seasons, Sandy Koufax dominated baseball as no other major league pitcher ever had before. From 1962 to 1966, Koufax led the National League in earned run average, the only pitcher ever to do that. At the same time, he compiled a record of 111-34, a winning percentage of .766,…
When he died in 1986 at the age of 75, Hank Greenberg was widely acknowledged to have been the greatest Jewish player in the history of baseball. His achievements were beyond merely great—they were monumental. He played in the major leagues from 1933 to 1947, but lost four and a half seasons to…
A Moral Reckoning The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen Knopf, 362 pp., $25 IN ITS JANUARY 21, 2002, ISSUE, the New Republic devoted twenty-four pages to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's "What Would Jesus Have Done?"--one of the most…
The Popes Against the Jews The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism by David I. Kertzer Knopf, 355 pp., $27.95 OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS, Catholic-Jewish relations and the role of the popes in European anti-Semitism have been the subject of what seems like innumerable books. Most of…
Pius XII and the Second World War
EVEN BEFORE PIUS XII DIED IN 1958, the charge that his papacy had been friendly to the Nazis was circulating in Europe, a piece of standard Communist agitprop against the West. It sank for a few years under the flood of tributes, from Jews and gentiles alike, that followed the pope's death, only to…
Before his death in 1972, Abraham Joshua Heschel was widely considered to be one of the most influential Jewish religious thinkers of the twentieth century. In 1951, reviewing Heschel's Man Is Not Alone on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune, no less a figure than Reinhold Niebuhr…