Russian President Vladimir Putin has shown his true colors yet again as an imperial aggressor bent on crushing a neighboring state and expanding Russia’s boundaries. Yesterday, nine days after calling up roughly 300,000 reservists in a partial mobilization, he announced that Russia would annex four regions in eastern and southern Ukraine heavily populated by ethnic Russians: […]
From Schindler’s List to The Pianist, feature films about the Holocaust have been ubiquitous. Since 1945, 443 Holocaust movies have been produced for theatrical, video and television release, according to Rich Brownstein, an American writer who has lectured at Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies. Brownstein, in Holocaust Cinema Complete: A History and Analysis […]
Yeshiva University has painted itself into an untenable, unsustainable and unacceptable position. As a secular institution, this flagship university of Modern Orthodoxy in New York City accepts public funding for its graduate programs, yet its undergraduate program is religiously oriented. The inherent tension between these diametrically opposed streams came to a head recently following the […]
Rashida Tlaib, the Palestinian American Democrat who represents the state of Michigan in the U.S. House of Representatives, clearly marches to her own drummer. Although she is not the only Arab American in Congress, she is still its only representative who rejects Israel’s existence as a Jewish state and calls for a binational state in […]
Stephane Freiss’ deeply atmospheric movie, Where Life Begins, unfolds on an idyllic farm in southern Italy divorced from contemporary ills and troubles. Yet it is precisely here, amid gently rolling hills, gnarled olive trees, a lush citron grove and a bleating herd of sheep, that unpleasant truths emerge. This Italian and French co-production, presented by […]
Saul Friedlander, the eminent historian, is a child of the Holocaust whose passage from adolescence to adulthood was marked by enormous turbulence and change. In his lucid, thought-provoking memoirs, When Memory Comes and Where Memory Leads, both published by Other Press in a paperback edition, he recalls pivotal events that shaped him to the core. […]
One can only hope that Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid was sincere when he endorsed a two-state solution in a speech he delivered at the United Nations on September 22. Speaking to the General Assembly, Lapid declared, “An agreement with the Palestinians, based on two states for two peoples, is the right thing for Israel’s […]
Jonathan Hayoun’s four-part documentary about the world’s longest hatred, Anti-Semitism: 2000 Years Of History, is an edifying survey of a mutating pathological phenomenon that shows no signs of abating. Now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform, this nearly four-hour French production, with English subtitles, is panoramic in scope and substance. The narrative is supplemented by […]
The miserable governing regime in Iran is consistently on the wrong side of current geopolitical and moral issues. In a demonstrative display of its venality, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi sounded off on three related issues — the Holocaust, Israel and the Abraham Accords — this past week and emerged as an unrepentant extremist. During the […]
The latest wave of Palestinian violence in the West Bank raises two salient questions. Is it yet another transitory manifestation of Arab anger at and frustration with Israel’s deeply-entrenched occupation? Or does it represent something far more serious — the first stirrings of a third uprising? No one can divine the future, but the recurring […]