Gandhi

Kristallnacht Remembered

A lifetime has passed since Kristallnacht. Seventy seven years is long enough to empty popular memory of the scale and nature of events in Germany on November 9, 1938. To a generation that has forgotten—or one that never learned—the Night of Broken Glass seems not so different than Ferguson, Missouri, or any other urban riot within living memory. Even the name that has come down to us suggests broken shop windows, nothing more lethal than glass on the sidewalk. But there was more. Continue Reading
When Non-Violence is Vanity

Several letters that came in response to the previous post approved of Bishop Barron’s post-Paris insistence on a non-violent stance. They accepted that posture as the sole moral “formula for peace.” One quoted Gandhi as “a benediction” on a fallen world. Another refused to believe that Gandhi had recommended satyagraha to German Jews. It would be good, then, to look at Gandhi’s own words in relation to the situation of Jews in Nazi German. On November 20, 1938, eleven days after Kristallnacht, the barbarous wave of pogroms organized by Goebbels across Germany, Gandhi addressed Zionism and the Jews. Continue Reading