Catastrophe Anticipated

a collection of North American thinkers from the religious (Rabbi Stephen Wise, Unitarian Rev. John Haynes Holmes) to the journalistic (Dorothy Thompson, later the first U.S. correspondent to be ousted from Nazi Germany) gathered to observe a , a memorial of, a then-monthly magazine that, these days, is all but forgotten. Read today, 84 years after their publication, the essays still crackle with anger and eerie prescience. Terror had come to Europe, particularly for the continent’s increasingly disenfranchised Jews. With the resurgence of populism and xenophobia around the world today, reading how early 20th-century authors analyzed the dangers posed by that era’s demagogues—long before their terrible plans actually played out—offers some insight into the present moment.