Otto Ullmann, a 13-year-old Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied Austria, bid his parents farewell in Vienna in 1939, just months before the outbreak of World War II. He was bound for Sweden, where he would live the rest of his life. Ullmann spent a year in a Swedish orphanage and then obtained work as a farm […]
Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, was conquered by Islamic State in June 2014 and recaptured by Iraq in July 2017. Matthew Carnahan’s gritty war drama, Mosul, which is now available on Netflix, focuses on a small Iraqi police squad as it carries out a mopping-up operation on the eve of Mosul’s liberation. He dedicates the […]
Israeli and Lebanese negotiators have met three times since October in a bid to demarcate their maritime border in the Mediterranean Sea, which is rich in gas deposits, among other natural resources. The negotiations, which have unfolded in the southern Lebanese town of Ras Naqoura under U.S. and United Nations auspices, have been blandly described […]
The Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, has urged the UN Security Council to deal with Iran’s flagrant violations of a disengagement agreement that resulted in the creation of a buffer zone along Israel’s border with Syria. The buffer zone, located on the Golan Heights, is 80 kilometres long and 0.5 to 10 […]
The leaders of two major Jewish organizations in Canada, in seamless lockstep with the Israeli government, have condemned Canada’s support of a recent United Nations draft resolution favoring a two-state solution. Passed by the General Assembly’s Third Committee by a lopsided margin of 163 to 5, with 10 abstentions, the motion was opposed by Israel, […]
The specter of fascism haunts Germany. Seventy five years after the ignominious defeat of Adolf Hitler’s racist regime in World War II, far-right extremism remains a gnawing problem in contemporary Germany. Thomas Haldenwang, the director of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency — the Office for the Protection of the Constitution — said recently that right-wing extremism […]
Molly Stuart’s 75-minute documentary, Objector, kicks off the ninth annual Human Rights Film Festival in Toronto, which runs online from December 3-10. Atalya Ben-Abba, a 19-year-old Israeli conscientious objector from Jerusalem, is at the center of this film, which begins six months before she’s due to be inducted into the army. Atalya grew up thinking […]
The Jonathan Jay Pollard affair, a highly contentious episode in Israel’s bilateral relationship with the United States, has reached one of its final chapters after 35 years of acrimony. On November 20, the U.S. Justice Department allowed Pollard’s parole restrictions to expire, enabling him to remove the wrist monitor that tracked his movements and permitting […]
Hugh Llewelyn Glyn Hughes, a British army doctor, and Rachel (Ruth) Genuth, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, never met, but their paths crossed in the Nazi concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in the spring of 1945. Hughes was one of the first British officers to enter Bergen-Belsen. “I have been a doctor for 30 years and seen all […]
Mike Pompeo paid a supposedly “private” visit to the West Bank on November 19, thereby becoming the first U.S. secretary of state to set foot in the West Bank since it was captured by Israel during the 1967 Six Day War. Pompeo went to Psagot, a Jewish settlement near Ramallah built on privately-owned Palestinian land […]