To download the flier: CLICK HERE

We Were the Lucky Ones

By Georgia Hunter

Discussion led by Sheryl Bronkesh, Phoenix Holocaust Association

Thursday, January 9, 2025 at 2PM

Discussion via ZOOM

Inspired by the incredible true story of one Jewish family separated at the start of World War II, determined to survive—and to reunite—We Were the Lucky Ones is a tribute to the triumph of hope and love against all odds.

It is the spring of 1939 and three generations of the Kurc family are doing their best to live normal lives, even as the shadow of war grows closer. The talk around the family Seder table is of new babies and budding romance, not of the increasing hardships threatening Jews in their hometown of Radom, Poland. But soon the horrors overtaking Europe will become inescapable and the Kurcs will be flung to the far corners of the world, each desperately trying to navigate his or her own path to safety.

As one sibling is forced into exile, another attempts to flee the continent, while others struggle to escape certain death, either by working grueling hours on empty stomachs in the factories of the ghetto or by hiding as gentiles in plain sight. Driven by an unwavering will to survive and by the fear that they may never see one another again, the Kurcs must rely on hope, ingenuity, and inner strength to persevere.

An extraordinary, propulsive novel, We Were the Lucky Ones demonstrates how in the face of the twentieth century’s darkest moment, the human spirit can endure and even thrive.

To download the flier: CLICK HERE

Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust

By Götz Aly

Discussion led by Mark Sendrow, M.A.

Thursday, February 13, 2025 at 2PM

Discussion via ZOOM

The two questions that make up the title of the German scholar Götz Aly’s book are the ones that many historians of the Holocaust have been attempting to answer for decades. And as the book’s subtitle suggests, the answer that Aly supplies is not radically new. The novel twist in his argument consists of the way he links envy and race hatred as causal factors: Aly argues that the German people’s “gnawing envy” of the Jews ended up combining “with a collectivist longing for a life among equals” and “paved the way for [the] racial theory” that the Nazis employed in their genocidal assault on the Jews in their own country and beyond.

What made the German Jews so enviable, Aly explains, was the way that they took advantage of the new economic opportunities that arose in the course of the 19th century, as the old feudal order gave way to the modern world. More literate and academically agile than their Christian peers, German Jews were “eight times more likely to earn a better class of secondary-school degree” and used their “educational head start” to pursue “well-paying forms of intellectual labor.” By 1914, Aly reports, they earned “five times the income of the average Christian.” As a consequence, “the Christian majority, only too conscious that they needed to move up the social ladder, became obsessed with how quickly Jews were bettering themselves.”

Reviews Jewish Review of Books, https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/1466/why-the-germans/#

Jewish Book Council, https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/why-the-germans-why-the-jews-envy-race-hatred-and-the-prehistory-of-the-holocaust