Pedro Lilienfeld

In Chapter 8 of my autobiography, entitled The Making of an Atheist, among other subjects, I discussed the pervasive misogyny of the Abrahamic religions. I failed to mention the most egregious manifestation of that trait in the Christian tradition. It is embodied in the all encompassing Virgin Mary mythology. Ostensibly, an homage to a divine…

I find it noteworthy to cite here the, to me, rather pertinent words of Marc Bloch, the well known and ill-fated French historian, from his book Strange Defeat which analyses the causes of France’s WWII rout by the Germans in 1940: “By birth, I am a Jew, though not by religion, for I have never…

What is a Jew? A recent family conversation has elicited this question. The answer is far from simple and has been a subject of disputation since time immemorial. One simple answer is that a Jew is someone who considers himself/herself as such. But that skirts the issue. Is Jewishness a religious classification, an ethnic grouping,…

I will now address the thorny issue of the German culpability in carrying out the Holocaust. I had been reluctant to do so within my autobiography because that subject is both painful and quite complex. Furthermore, much has been written about this matter and my contribution may be more than redundant. And yet I feel…

Recently, I was reminded of the Kindertransport by a far removed cousin, George Fogelson, who is doing research on the Anker family[1] and its ancestry. His mother, as a young girl, was saved from the Holocaust by that operation. One of my best high school friends in Quito, Ivan Schön, equally survived through that rescue.…

I mentioned in my autobiography a hidden pro-Jewish agenda of Spain’s Generalísimo Francisco Franco stemming from a purported belated recognition of the cultural debt owed to the Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. The ambivalence of Franco on this matter, however, can now be deduced from information that surfaced in the 21st century that…

I described in my autobiography that the start of World War II – September 3rd, 1939 – occurred as my family and I were estivating in St. Brévin-les-Pins, a small coastal resort town on the French Atlantic coast. Within a few days, my father, Erich, was interned with other able bodied men of German, Austrian…

This timeline is presented to help in setting the stage for the events discussed in subsequent essays.

In late 19th century, the prevailing view of scientists, especially physicists, was that science had, at last, reached a full understanding of the laws governing natural phenomena and that we needed to simply work out some details, i.e., “dot the is”. This was, in retrospect, a complete misreading of the status of extant knowledge. I…

To me, the most spectacular manifestation of the awesomeness of our Universe is the photographic view of a galaxy, of almost every galaxy. There is an inherent beauty in its majesty, its largely symmetrical shape, its brilliance and, foremost, the implicit realization that its apparent fuzzy glow represents billions of suns sending us a stream…