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Alexandra Ell

Alexandra Ell

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

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The Violin With No Voice (For Children And Sensitive Readers)

The Violin With No Voice (For Children And Sensitive Readers)

Speaking about death and loss is never simple, and speaking to children about them is harder still. The Holocaust — six million lives extinguished,...

previous day 30

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Alexandra Ell

Hungarian Elections 2026: Security, Silence, and the Boundaries of Belonging

Hungarian Elections 2026: Security, Silence, and the Boundaries of Belonging

With the elections approaching, international attention has turned towards Budapest once more. The stakes are high, but not only for Hungary. The...

saturday 30

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Alexandra Ell

The Indefinite Article of Erasure: From ‘The Holocaust’ to ‘a holocaust’

The Indefinite Article of Erasure: From ‘The Holocaust’ to ‘a holocaust’

A recent New York Post headline reads: New Yorkers issued stark warning about opening ‘Pandora’s box’ of doctor‑assisted suicide: ‘Like a...

10.04.2026 30

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Alexandra Ell

The Rhetoric of Silence: Three Logics of Complicity

In moments of political crisis, one claim returns with striking regularity: “silence makes one guilty”. It appears in legal texts, prophetic...

28.03.2026 30

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Alexandra Ell

Belgrade, 1999: On Memory and the Moral Limits of Redeveloping Ruins

In the mid‑2010s, I lived on Admirala Geprata, a quiet street in central Belgrade just blocks from Nemanjina, where the bombed‑out Yugoslav...

24.03.2026 60

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Alexandra Ell

Broken Wings Over Empty Villages: Hungary’s Memory of 1944

There is an old story about Operation Margarethe, the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944. A German general asks: “How long would it take to...

19.03.2026 40

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Alexandra Ell

Queues of Gold: Crisis and the Practice of Belonging

Earlier this week, I spoke with someone I had known in another lifetime, back when I lived in South Korea. We have not met for two decades, yet across...

12.03.2026 70

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Alexandra Ell

Shoes on the Danube Bank: Where the Dead Have No Graves

“The shoes are full of stones scattered in them.” The sentence landed with the dull thud of something that should not be possible and stopped me...

04.03.2026 90

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Alexandra Ell

Selling Sesame Seeds in Samarkand: A Cultural Grammar of “What If”

Some sentences look simple but smuggle in whole philosophies of life. Take what linguists call a counterfactual conditional: a sentence that talks...

25.02.2026 70

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Alexandra Ell

Holocaust Distortion in the Examination Room: Auschwitz as a Diet Trope

Holocaust distortion rarely announces itself with the bluntness of denial; more often it appears in the form of casual statements, recycled clichés,...

20.02.2026 80

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Alexandra Ell

A Culinary Memory: Kindli and the Remains of the Remains

With the arrival of Adar and Purim drawing near, kitchens across the Jewish world begin to fill with Hamantaschen. In this corner of Central Europe,...

18.02.2026 100

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Alexandra Ell

Aspirin for Amnesia in Austria

14.12.2025 100

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Alexandra Ell

A Culinary Memory: Flódni and What Remains

12.12.2025 40

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Alexandra Ell

Queueing for Auschwitz

10.12.2025 40

The Times of Israel (Blogs)

Alexandra Ell