I was happy to contribute some thoughts to Shira Li Bartov's new article in The Forward, "Could Social Media Really Have Stopped the Holocaust?" which addresses Elon Musk's use of counterfactuals to reflect on the legacy of the Holocaust.  See article LINK Here are my full comments, some of which appear verbatim in the article, which also quotes leading Holocaust scholars and Jewish historians like Christopher Browning, Doris Bergen, and David Myers. When Musk visited Auschwitz the other day, he was reported as saying that "[if] there [had] been social media at the time of ..read more

The famous Polish-Jewish-American artist Arthur Szyk is experiencing something of a renaissance these days.  Witness the important exhibit currently on view at Fairfield University's Thomas J. Walsh Gallery of Art, In Real Times. Arthur Szyk: Artist and Soldier for Human Rights. On October 5th, an important symposium was held in conjunction with the exhibit, in which the following speakers presented: Jonathan Petropoulos, PhD, John V. Croul, Professor of European History, Claremont McKenna College Wendy Lower, PhD, the Director of the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights and the John ..read more

Now that my new co-edited volume, Fascism in America, is out, you can finally read my essay on recent alternate history shows that imagine the United States succumbing to Nazism.   In the essay, I examine how The Man in the High Castle (2015-2019), Hunters (2019-2023), Watchmen (2019), and The Plot Against America (2020) represent the topics of collaboration, racism, and antisemitism. I also examine the degree to which alternate history has both anticipated the domestic turn toward fascism and offered a possible method of combating it by universalizing its significance. To orde ..read more

Like reuniting with a long-lost friend, I was pleasantly [sic] surprised to see that the new film, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, revives the familiar counterfactual premise of the Nazis winning World War II.   I’ve written a great deal over the years about this “what if” scenario – probably the most explored of all the premises in alternate history.  But it’s been a few years since I’ve discussed it in essayistic form.   My last opportunity was with the Amazon.Prime streaming series, The Man in the High Castle, which I discuss in my essay, “Fascism in America ..read more

I've been AWOL from my blog for a few months now, but I have a good excuse.  As you'll see below, I've been busy working diligently with my good friend and co-editor, Janet Ward (U. Oklahoma), to get our new edited volume ready for publication. The book is (unfortunately) about real history, not counterfactual history.  But my contribution to the volume is, in fact, entirely about "what ifs."  Entitled “Fascism in American Culture: How Alternate a History?” my chapter explores how works of alternate history have explored the United States’ fascist potential by examining how ..read more

I’m grateful to Larry Yudelson at Ben Yehuda Press for sending me a copy of Andrea D. Lobel’s and Mark Shainblum’s new anthology of Jewish alternate histories, Other Covenants.   I’m halfway through the book and I can already see that it’s full of clever and entertaining tales.  Of the two-dozen+ stories in the collection, more than half have been written especially for the volume (some older tales are included as well).    Among the stories that stuck out for me:   * Robert Silverberg’s short story, “To the Promised Land, leads off the volume by exploring t ..read more

Alternate history continues to have a bit of a PR problem.  The publication of a new four-part graphic novel, 1/6, by writer Alan Jenkins and artist Gan Golan on the topic “What If the Attack on the Capitol Succeeded?” is notable for receiving publicity in a new Washington Post article.  But it is notable that the author, Michael Cavna, declines to situate the graphic novel in its proper genre, alternate history.  Cavna speaks instead of “alternative history,” while Jenkins and Golan have described themselves as writing in the vein of “dystopian speculative fiction" and “dystop ..read more

The Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol is full of counterfactual claims that nicely illustrate the utility of counterfactual history.  As I have repeatedly noted, counterfactuals help us understanding history in terms of causality, morality, and memory.   Consider the main takeaway from the foreword of the Final Report.  The executive summary unambiguously declares the following:   “In the Committee’s hearings, we presented evidence of what ultimately became a multi-part plan to overturn the 20 ..read more

So I, too, have surrendered to curiosity and played around a bit with Open AI's new ChatGPT application that's been getting so much publicity this past week.   Needless to say, I wanted to see what its potential might be for counterfactual history.  Can AI compete with the human imagination for speculating about how history might have been different? As of this writing, I'm not that impressed with the results.  To be fair, it's amazing that any online application can spit out instant answers to counterfactual questions.   When I typed "If the South won the Civil ..read more

Like so many other Americans, I've been glued to the television since last night.  And while many races remain undecided, it's clear the GOP has tallied some wins. But there's probably a lot of frustration in Republican ranks this morning, since they could have been much more successful, IF ONLY... And this is where counterfactual history proves its value. If the GOP leadership is remotely sane (and that's open to question) they will take some time today and reflect deeply on the many missed opportunities to register a more decisive triumph in the midterms.  If they had only rejecte ..read more