Curated playlist
Jewish historians
- Hans L. TrefousseHans Louis Trefousse spent eleven hours in Leipzig arguing with a Nazi commander who had barricaded himself and his troops inside a fortified position. When the negotiation ended, hundreds of lives had been saved. That single act of…
- Karl MarxOn the 14th of March 1883, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, Friedrich Engels left Karl Marx alone in his armchair for scarcely two minutes. When he returned, he found his lifelong friend peacefully gone to sleep, but forever. The…
- JosephusFlavius Josephus surrendered to the Roman army in AD 67, then told his captor a prophecy that would save his life. Trapped in a cave with forty companions after the six-week siege of Yodfat, he proposed that the group kill one another by…
- Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss died on the 30th of October 2009, at the age of 100, and for four days the world did not know. When French President Nicolas Sarkozy finally spoke, he called Lévi-Strauss "one of the greatest ethnologists of all time."…
- Eric HobsbawmEric John Ernest Hobsbawm was born on the 9th of June 1917 in Alexandria, Egypt, and he died on the 1st of October 2012 in London, just shy of his 96th birthday. In 2002, a right-leaning magazine called The Spectator described him as…
- Mark LewisohnMark Lewisohn was born on the 16th of June 1958, and since the 1980s he has built an entire career around one band. He has worked for EMI, MPL Communications and Apple Corps, moving from outside fan to trusted insider. He has been referred…
- Abraham ZacutoAbraham Zacuto was born in Salamanca on the 12th of August 1452, into a family that had lived on the Iberian peninsula since the expulsion of Jews from France in 1306. He came from a lineage of scholars: his ancestor Abraham Zacuto the…
- Erwin PanofskyErwin Panofsky looked at a fifteenth-century Flemish painting of a man and a woman in a dim room and saw something no one else had seen: a legal contract. The year was 1934, and the painting was Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait. Panofsky…
- Hans KohnHans Kohn was born on the 15th of September 1891, in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, into a German-speaking Jewish family. He died on the 16th of March 1971. By then, American scholars associated his name with the study…
- Abba EbanAbba Eban stood before the United Nations General Assembly in 1967 and delivered a defence of Israel so finely constructed that Henry Kissinger later said he had never encountered anyone who matched his command of the English language.…