Sheldon Kirshner's Latest Posts
Broken Lives
The 20th century brought calamity and renewal to Germany, transforming it from a military aggressor into a pillar of European democracy. Germany suffered territorial losses and hyperinflation following its defeat in World War I. The Weimar Republic was a time of hope, but the Depression paved the way for Adolf Hitler’s racist regime, which persecuted its […]
Turkey’s Invasion Of Syria Brings Chaos
President Donald Trump’s momentous decision to pull more U.S. forces out of Syria has unleashed a chaotic and confusing roller-coaster of events in the Middle East that could well be detrimental to American interests in the region. Trump, after phoning Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last week, withdrew some 50 U.S. troops from outposts in […]
The Specter Of Neo-Nazism In Germany
The reconstituted Jewish community in Germany is rightly shocked and appalled by the news that a heavily-armed neo-Nazi terrorist almost succeeded in murdering scores of Jews in the eastern city of Halle on Yom Kippur. In what could have been the most heinous assault against Jews in Germany since the nation-wide Kristallnacht pogrom of November […]
#Anne Frank: Parallel Stories
Anne Frank, the inspirational Dutch Jewish diarist, would have been 90 this year had she lived through the Holocaust. Anne, of course, was not the only Jewish adolescent whose precious life was snuffed out by the Nazis and their collaborators. Lest we forget, one million Jewish children were murdered during the Shoah, a tragedy that […]
Undercover In The Jungle
I wish I could have joined Will Benson and his intrepid crew in the Amazon rainforest of Ecuador. They spent almost a month in one of its wildest, most inaccessible areas, installing about 50 remotely-operated cameras to trees, at nesting sites and on animal trails to film its exotic wildlife in real time. Benson’s documentary, Undercover […]
The Threat Of White Supremacist Terrorism
The first anniversary of the deadliest terrorist attack on American Jews in U.S. history is approaching. On October 27, a heavily-armed, middle-aged antisemite named Robert Bowers walked into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and, in a frenzy of untrammelled hatred, fatally shot 11 of its congregants. Exactly six months later, John Earnest, 19, […]
Intimate Violence
During a tumultuous six-week period in the summer of 1941, following Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union and the retreat of Soviet forces from Poland’s eastern borderlands, a wave of pogroms swept over hundreds of cities, towns and villages in a vast region stretching from the Baltic states in the north to Romania in the […]
Dolce Fine Giornata
Jacek Borcuch’s drama, Dolce Fine Giornata, which opens in Toronto on October 11, oscillates between the sylvan splendor of Tuscany and the hard world beyond its soft, rolling green hills. Maria Linde (Krystyna Janda), a Nobel Prize laureate of Polish Jewish descent, lives in a rustic farmhouse with her Italian husband (Antonio Catania), her single […]
The Tobacconist
Nikolaus Leytner’s The Tobacconist, a German-language feature film set in late-193os Vienna, fleshes out an imaginary friendship between a young Austrian man and the celebrated psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Unfolding against the Nazi takeover of Austria, it is a jolting reminder of how easily a tolerant society can accommodate itself to totalitarianism and racism. The main character in The […]
Tolerance Trumps Bigotry In Toronto
Soufi’s, a Syrian restaurant in Toronto, shut down on October 8 after receiving a barrage of hate mail and threatening phone calls. On October 11, the popular restaurant reopened and its nine employees were back at work, serving up Syrian food like Maneesh, a savory flatbread slathered with various toppings; Knaffeh a shredded phylo pastry […]
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