Howard Lovy

Tag: Author Interviews

  • Unpacking the ‘Jewish Space Laser’ Conspiracy Theory

    Unpacking the ‘Jewish Space Laser’ Conspiracy Theory

    In a recent article and accompanying podcast, I had the chance to explore the perplexing and deeply troubling “Jewish Space Laser” conspiracy theory. We laugh about it, but should we? I interviewed Mike Rothschild, author of Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories. Our conversation aimed to shed light on how such theories often find their origin in antisemitism, particularly focusing on the Rothschild family as a recurring target.

    “Almost all of these theories eventually connect back to the Jews, and the Rothschilds are seen as the ultimate Jews—the kings of the Jews. So it all coalesced for me into writing a book to figure out who this family is, and who they are not.” – Mike Rothschild

    For the full article, visit Jewish Journal of Los Angeles.

    For the complete podcast interview, click here.

  • Life Inside the Annex with Anne Frank

    Life Inside the Annex with Anne Frank

    For Publishers Weekly, I interviewed the son of one of Anne’s protectors and his co-author on a new betrayer theory, life inside the annex, and second-generation Holocaust trauma.

    Anne Frank and her family were hidden in an annex at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam for 761 days between 1942 and 1944 before an unknown informant betrayed them to the Nazi occupiers. Since then, a great deal has been written about Frank and her famous diary, including books speculating on who tipped off the Nazi authorities. However, little is known about the life of Elizabeth “Bep” Voskuijl, the youngest of the five Dutch people who hid the Frank family. Her story, and the trauma it inflicted on her family, is the subject of a new book, The Last Secret of the Secret Annex: The Untold Story of Anne Frank, Her Silent Protector, and a Family Betrayal (Simon & Schuster, May 16, 2023).

    The book, a collaboration between journalist Jeroen De Bruyn and Bep’s son Joop van Wijk-Voskuijl, examines Bep’s role in supplying the Frank family with food and comfort while keeping her involvement a secret from everyone she knew. And they explore the possibility that Bep’s sister, Nelly Voskuijl, may have been the one who leaked the Frank family’s hideaway to the Nazis.

    Read the entire story at Publishers Weekly.

  • Hen Mazzig: Forget Your Preconceived Ideas About Jews

    Hen Mazzig: Forget Your Preconceived Ideas About Jews

    My guest on the Emet-Truth podcast is Hen Mazzig, a public speaker and advocate against antisemitism and for the Mizrahi community. His new book is called The Wrong Kind of Jew: A Mizrahi Manifesto, published by Wicked Son Books.

    You might recognize Hen as somebody who is very active on social media or who has made the news more than a few times as the object of protest by anti-Zionists on college campuses. But Hen fights battles that go beyond the struggle against antisemitism. He has always been an advocate for visibility inside and outside the Jewish community. As a Mizrahi Jew, an Israeli, and a member of the LGBTQ community, Hen has pushed back against his status as what he calls “the wrong kind of Jew.”

    In our interview, we talk about his family background, struggle for acceptance, and how he takes on all our preconceived notions about who he is. He hopes his book helps to educate Jews and non-Jews alike about the diversity within world Jewry and in Israel.

    Click here to listen to my interview with Hen Mazzig.

    More Jewish podcast links can be found here.

  • PW Interview: New Book Reframes Trial of Jesus

    PW Interview: New Book Reframes Trial of Jesus

    For Publishers Weekly, I interviewed an Israeli author who rethinks the trial of Jesus. He presents an evidence-based case that Jesus was the victim not of Christian-Jewish conflict, but rather an internal Jewish one. He hopes his book leads to Jewish-Christian reconciliation. A couple thousand years ago, a trial was held at night during Passover. That was highly irregular. The defendant was Jesus, and the hearing was conducted by a minority sect within Judaism. “I can tell, in my discussions with the students, there is still work to be done with regard to this issue of blaming the Jewish people for crucifying Jesus,” says the author, Israel Knohl. “If my book can improve that in some way, I would be happy.”

    Read the full story in Publishers Weekly. 

  • Ben Freeman Declares War On Internalized Antisemitism

    Ben Freeman Declares War On Internalized Antisemitism

    My podcast guest is Ben M. Freeman. He’s a Holocaust educator, activist, and author of two books: Jewish Pride: Rebuilding a People and the soon-to-be released Reclaiming our Story: The Pursuit of Jewish Pride.

    Ben was born in Scotland and is an internationally known author, educator and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion specialist focusing on Jewish identity. He’s about to embark on a tour of North America to promote his latest book, so I am very happy I was able to speak to him for about a half-hour before he leaves. We discuss what he means by internalized Jew-hatred, his own experience as both a Jew and a member of the LGBTQ+ community, and how to bring back a sense of Jewish Pride.

    Click here to listen to my interview with Ben Freeman.

  • Jewish Mobsters Knew How to Properly Punch Nazis

    Jewish Mobsters Knew How to Properly Punch Nazis

    Yes, Jewish mobsters knew how to properly punch Nazis. This feature for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency was fun to write. I talk to author Michael Benson about his book Gangsters Vs. Nazis: How Jewish Mobsters Battled Nazis in Wartime America. Before WWII, Jewish mobsters kept Nazis at bay in the US—with their fists.

    The way author Michael Benson tells it, one day in 1938, New York judge and Jewish communal leader Nathan Perlman sat at a bar and thought, “How come these Nazis get to march down 86th Street, goose-stepping and ‘sieg heiling’ like it’s the Macy’s Parade? Why are they so brazen?”

    It was because they were not worried about the consequences. Too few people in then-isolationist America really cared about what was being said about the Jews or what was happening to them in Europe, Benson said. What was needed, then, were Jews who weren’t afraid to break some laws — and some bones — as they challenged the homegrown Nazi threat.

    And that’s when, in Benson’s words, “Judge Perlman thought outside the box.”

    What happened next is the subject of Benson’s book, “Gangsters Vs. Nazis: How Jewish Mobsters Battled Nazis in Wartime America” (Kensington), published in late April. As the title suggests, Perlman had a few connections in the underworld. That included Meyer Lansky, an accountant, bootlegger and fixer whose work straddled both the Italian American and the Jewish mob. Lansky, in turn, had at his disposal Jewish members of a mob enforcement organization known as “Murder Inc.”

    Read the rest of my feature on Jewish mobsters at the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

    You can also listen to the full audio of my interview with author Michael Benson here.

  • Is Forgiveness ‘Wrong Way’ to Cope with Holocaust?

    Is Forgiveness ‘Wrong Way’ to Cope with Holocaust?

    What is Holocaust forgiveness? For whom is the forgiveness meant? And what if the crime is so big, there can be no forgiveness? I’ve been thinking about these issues the past few months because it popped up unexpectedly in my professional and personal lives. First, the professional, which you’ll find more interesting.

    Early this year, I wrote a feature for Publishers Weekly about what I consider to be a groundbreaking new children’s book about the Holocaust. It begins:

    With anti-Semitic acts on the rise worldwide and polls that show a disturbing lack of knowledge about the Holocaust, Michigan author Danica Davidson says the timing is crucial for her middle-grade book, I Will Protect You: A True Story of Twins Who Survived Auschwitz (Little, Brown, April 5). The title was co-written with Holocaust survivor Eva Mozes Kor before her death in 2019.

    “Eva’s argument was that if we wait until 12 or older to teach about the Holocaust or anti-Semitism, it’s too late, because the prejudice has already set in,” Davidson tells PW. “That’s why she wanted to reach younger kids.”

    You can read the rest of the article here.

    So far so good. I enjoy my occasional gig at PW because their religion editor allows me to interview some fascinating Jewish authors.

    Then came this letter addressed to pretty much every higher-up editor at the magazine:

    I was dismayed to see the article below on PW. Eva Kor is an anomaly among survivors of the Shoah. She has generated a great deal of anger over her disturbing accounts of forgiving Nazis for perpetrating genocide against Europe’s Jews. Most of her support has come from a small segment of Christians drawn to her message. You have the opportunity to highlight the many outstanding works which accurately educate readers, including young readers, about the truth of the Shoah. Even the title, “Forgiving Dr. Mengele,” of the documentary about her should have alerted you to the pernicious nature of her message.

    Please consider posting an update, removing this piece, or simply keeping in  mind the importance of accurate portrayals of the Shoah in the future.

    Thank you,

    Emily Schneider

    I could tell that my editor at PW must have been in a slight panic over the prospect of wandering into an internal Jewish argument. I received an email in the evening asking what we should do about this.

    To find out what happened next, read the entire commentary on my Emet-Truth newsletter. 

  • Authors Bring Holocaust Story to Young Readers

    Authors Bring Holocaust Story to Young Readers

    Publishers Weekly ran a feature I wrote on a groundbreaking children’s book by Michigan author Danica Davidson and Holocaust survivor Eva Mozes Kor. The book comes at a crucial time in history, when antisemitism is on the rise and knowledge about the Holocaust is fading.

    Holocaust Story
    Eva Mozes Kor

    With anti-Semitic acts on the rise worldwide and polls that show a disturbing lack of knowledge about the Holocaust, Michigan author Danica Davidson says the timing is crucial for her middle-grade book, I Will Protect You: A True Story of Twins Who Survived Auschwitz (Little, Brown, April 5). The title was co-written with Holocaust survivor Eva Mozes Kor before her death in 2019.

    “Eva’s argument was that if we wait until 12 or older to teach about the Holocaust or anti-Semitism, it’s too late, because the prejudice has already set in,” Davidson tells PW. “That’s why she wanted to reach younger kids.”

    Holocaust education is under scrutiny today after a school board in Tennessee pulled Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-prize-winning Maus off its shelves, and a recent Pew Research Center poll shows that fewer than half of Americans know that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.

    Read the entire feature at Publishers Weekly.

  • Ben-Dror Yemini On How To Fight Media Bias

    Ben-Dror Yemini On How To Fight Media Bias

    Ben-Dror Yemini is a journalist on a mission to report the facts. You’d think that would be a basic job description for any journalist, but when it comes to reporting on Israel, the search for the truth can often be a rare exception. Media bias against Israel, including the false claims of “apartheid” and other crimes against Palestinians, is deeply woven into the narrative consumed by most Americans—most glaringly in the New York Times, Yemini says.

    Yemini is the first to admit that he has no magic formula to undo the damage caused by media bias—except to print the truth. No, he says, that does not necessarily mean printing only positive things about Israel. It means helping people formulate their opinions about what kind of society Israel is, faults and all, based on facts. If the facts were as well-known as the falsehoods, he says, then that would go a long way toward dispelling some misunderstandings that Israeli and diaspora Jews may have toward one another.

    I recently spoke with Yemeni in advance of something called the Z3 Project on Israel-Diaspora relations. The California-based group asked me to interview him about the media landscape and how it impacts Israel-Diaspora relations. The first question I asked was whether he believes that information gap is so wide, right now that American Jews are starting to internalize some of the false claims about Israel.

    Click here to listen to the entire interview with Ben-Dror Yemini

    Read more of my Jewish News and Commentary here.

  • Author Brings Executed Iranian Jewish Leader to Life

    Author Brings Executed Iranian Jewish Leader to Life

    IranianThe Jewish Telegraphic Agency ran a feature I wrote about the granddaughter of an Iranian Jewish leader who was executed in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

    As a news photo editor currently with NBC News, Shahrzad Elghanayan has worked with many photojournalists whose instinct is to run toward danger. It is, she said, “a sign of courage, empathy, and feeling responsible for your fellow human beings.”

    That instinct is part of what connects Elghanayan with her grandfather, Tehran businessman Habib Elghanian, who was the head of the Jewish Association of Iran until he was executed during the country’s Islamic revolution in 1979. There were so many times when Habib, at the time Iran’s most prominent secular Jewish leader, could have saved himself – but chose instead to stay in Iran helping Jews.

    “He stayed there to protect the Jewish community he had led since 1959 and what he had built from scratch,” Elghanayan said. “I can understand that.”

    In her book “Titan of Tehran: From Jewish Ghetto to Corporate Colossus to Firing Squad — My Grandfather’s Life,” published by the Associated Press in November, Elghanayan not only researched her grandfather’s death, but also celebrated his life.

    Read the rest of my story on Elghanayan at the Jewish Telegraphic Agency or in the Jerusalem Post.

    Read more of my Jewish News and Commentary here.