Helene Jawhara Piner’s cookbook, Sephardi: Cooking the History, is unique. “It is not based on family recipes but on the history of the Jewish people from Spain, and by extension the Sephardim, from the thirteenth century to the present,” she writes. Published by Cherry Orchard Books, an imprint of Academic Studies Press, this is a […]
On January 8, 2020, Hamed Esmaeilion’s life was torn asunder. Since then, he has struggled with loss, pain and agony. On that catastrophic day, Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 bound from Tehran to Kyiv was shot down by an Iranian missile. All 176 passengers and crew were killed, including his wife Parisa and nine-year-old daughter, […]
Kanye West, the malicious and ignorant American rapper/provocateur known as Ye, thrives on exposure and publicity. Without it, he’s like a fish out of water, bereft of oxygen. In the past few weeks, he has maligned Jews with a series of vile and crude outpourings of antisemitic insults and conspiracy theories. Instead of coming to his […]
As Netflix began streaming Farha, a restrained Palestinian feature film that presents the Nakba in microcosm, the United Nations General Assembly voted to adopt a resolution to commemorate the seventy fifth anniversary of this event come next May. The resolution, sponsored by Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Yemen, the Palestinian Authority and Senegal, was passed on December […]
Turn off your reality monitor as you watch Eyal Halfo’s The 90 Minute War, which can be viewed on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform. This fanciful Israeli film is built around a wildly implausible plot: The Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority have decided that the logical way to end their conflict is by means of […]
Harry Cohn, the chief executive officer of Columbia Pictures from 1932 until his death in 1958, prided himself on being unique. Regarded as the youngest Hollywood mogul, he was also the only president of a major studio who was head of production. In addition, he had the most diverse background of any of his contemporaries, […]
Please enlighten me. Has a former U.S. president ever invited an antisemite and a Holocaust denier to his home? Correct me if I’m wrong, but no such thing ever happened until Donald Trump, in a horrendous lapse of judgment that normalizes antisemitism, hosted a dinner for two such bigots at his Mar-A-Lago estate in Florida. […]
Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of the far-right Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) Party, demanded the public security ministry in Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet and got it. Yesterday, slightly more than three weeks after Israel’s fifth election in a little more than three years, Netanyahu’s Likud Party and Otzma Yehudit announced that Ben-Gvir would be the national […]
Until quite recently, Holocaust denial was a depressing and unchanging staple of Arab and Muslim political culture, with some public figures hewing to the mantra that recognition of the Shoah bolstered Israel’s claim to sovereignty and statehood. This attitude trickled down to the grassroots level in countries ranging from Syria and Jordan to Iran and […]
Judging by the last few U.S. presidential elections, ultra-Orthodox American Jews are firmly in the Republican Party camp. But of late, some Republican haredim have changed sides and voted for the Democratic Party, says Nathaniel Deutsch, a University of California Jewish studies professor who has closely studied this traditional and insular community. By far the […]