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Editors’ Pick

April 27, 2021

How a Jewish Novelist’s Account of Armenian Courage Inspired Jews to Fight the Nazis

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.

Over the weekend, Joe Biden became the first president to recognize the Ottoman government’s mass slaughter of Armenians during World War I, a series of atrocities that were accompanied by attacks on Ottoman Christians of other ethnicities, as well as the persecution of Jews. Much of the world first became aware of the Armenian catastrophe thanks to the Austrian Jewish novelist Franz Werfel’s carefully researched 1933 novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, which in turn helped to inspire Jewish revolts against the Nazis during World War II. Matt Lebovic writes:

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