Baba is what I called my granny on my father’s side … or sometimes just simply “Ba.” My Baba was an amazing woman. Her folk wisdom and wit still inspire me to this day … even though I didn’t really even know her. I was only two years old when she died, so there were […]
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Interview with Oleg Atbashian, author of Shakedown Socialism
Back in 2011 I had the pleasure of speaking with Oleg Atbashan, author of Shakedown Socialism: Unions, Pitchforks, Collective Greed, the Fallacy of Economic Equality, and other Optical Illusions of “Redistributive Justice”. He shared with me some startling personal recollections of life in Ukraine—and, by extension, anywhere in the former USSR before the spectacular collapse […]
Continue readingUkrainian Jewish Heritage: Exploring the legacy of the Holocaust in Ukraine
– Written and narrated by Peter Bejger. Guilt, justice, and family ties. These dramatic themes are recalled today due to the recent publication of the Ukrainian-language edition of East-West Street by Phillip Sands, a book presented by the author at this year’s Lviv Book Forum. The Ukrainian publication of the critically acclaimed book by Sands […]
Continue readingUkrainian Jewish Heritage: Proposed Jewish Museum in Ukraine drawing inspiration from Poland
Written and narrated by Peter Bejger. How do you tell a story? Museums are essential places where stories about nations and cultures are told. But they are also places where the story may not fully told. Or the story may need to be retold. There has been a global boom in new museums. There are […]
Continue readingUkrainian Jewish Heritage: New initiative will help Ukraine preserve its Jewish cemeteries and heritage for future generations
New initiative will help Ukraine preserve its Jewish cemeteries and heritage for future generations “As if they are trees falling in the middle of the forest in the middle of the night.” This haunting remark was made by Phil Carmel, the CEO of the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative. The Initiative was launched to physically […]
Continue readingUkrainian Jewish Heritage: Russian Jewish author chronicles wartime horrors in Austrian-ruled Galicia
-Written and narrated by Peter Bejger. “I saw that that the windows of these ruined houses were stuffed with rags or boarded up. In these unheated kennels were human beings, whole families, starving, usually sick because all kinds of epidemics were raging….” One hundred years a bitter war was raging throughout Europe. One of the […]
Continue readingVictor’s Vignettes: The Music Of My Childhood — 1966-1975
Victor’s Vignettes … Stories about Life in soviet and post-soviet Ukraine. -by Victor Sergeyev Mikolayev, Ukraine The Music Of My Childhood — 1966-1975 When it came to music listening in soviet Ukraine, we always had choices. We could tune in on radio receivers to hear soundtracks of the two available TV channels, the state-controlled Moscow […]
Continue readingUkrainian Jewish Heritage: The Dark Side of Jewish Heritage Travel
– Written and narrated by Peter Bejger. Let’s take a moment to consider “dark tourism.” The concept is elastic, and quite multi-faceted. And it has a distinguished historic pedigree. Evidently there are assertions that Thomas Cook, yes the Thomas Cook that founded the famous international travel agency, took people to see public hangings in England […]
Continue readingUkrainian Jewish Heritage: Austrian Author Martin Pollack devotes life to deconstructing “Galician myths”
“How are we to explain the fact that today many people all but yearn for a world destroyed by their fathers and grandfathers?” The Austrian writer Martin Pollack poses uncomfortable questions in his work. But then he hails from a less than comfortable background. Pollack’s powerful book, The Dead Man in the Bunker, carries the […]
Continue readingUkrainian Jewish Heritage: Historian speaks at Lviv Media Forum on morality, meaning, and the miracle of metaphysics on the Maidan
-Written & Narrated by Peter Bejger Truth and lies. Facts and fiction. Reality and the unreal. In today’s unsettled, and often bizarre, media landscape the very definition of these basic terms takes on an urgent meaning. How they are defined—and more importantly, who has the power to define them—shapes the political climate. And the resulting […]
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