Gandhi on the Holocaust

Though the British had declared their support for the idea of a Jewish state in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, progress was slow. They turned from ambivalent to hostile; in the 1930s, the British began blocking Jews from immigrating to Palestine, frustrating Zionism’s fledgling hope that it could create a viable state. Then, between 1939 and 1945, t

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Perhaps the most astonishing lesson of World War Two is that, in the aftermath of total war and unconditional surrender, a hard reset of two very different cultures was possible. Judging from the Allied victory over Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, it certainly seems that one can bomb ideas—by obliterating many of the people who hold them. Kill a s

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The lesson of the Holocaust was that in the face of overwhelming concentration of power, acts of self-sacrifice and spiritual demonstration had little or no effect on the murderers. Classic moral traditions—martyrdom in Judaism, satyagraha in Hinduism, the cross and turning the other cheek in Christianity—were shattered in the Holocaust. Nor did th

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MEANWHILE, IN EUROPE, the Allied war against the Nazis progressed. On May 8, 1945, the Germans surrendered unconditionally and World War II ended four months later on September 2. Some sixty million people died in the war (about 3 percent of the world’s population in 1940), including the six million Jews (constituting one-third of the Jewish people

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