The Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip has unleashed a torrent of veiled or explicit antisemitism on American university campuses, which are supposed to be bastions of rational discourse, ethnic and racial diversity and religious tolerance. Judging by a recent Anti-Defamation League survey, 73 percent of Jewish college students experienced or witnessed some form of […]
Approximately one million Jews from the former Soviet Union have immigrated to Israel in the past 30 years. They have adapted remarkably well to their new environment, but the integration process usually has been bumpy. Sovietzka, a fresh new Israeli comedy with dark undertones, grapples with this topic through the lens of the Goldenberg family […]
The first televised candidates’ debate preceeding the next U.S. presidential election in November was a disaster. On June 27, Joe Biden, the oldest president in American history, locked horns with Donald Trump, his Republican predecessor who seeks another four-year term in the White House. Their encounter confirmed widespread fears that neither of them is suitable […]
A week after Allied armies invaded Nazi-occupied France in the D-Day Normandy landings, which changed the outcome of World War II, Germany launched the first of 10,000 V-1 and V-2 rockets aimed at cities in Britain. These indiscriminate attacks killed thousands of civilians. In 1943, a year before the Nazi regime unleashed its reign of […]
Tony Bernard’s thoughtful and absorbing book, The Ghost Tattoo (Citadel Press), is dedicated to his late father, Henry Bierzynski Bernard, a Polish survivor of the Holocaust who was traumatized by it. At the very least, his memoir is intensely personal. As he writes, “It is also a part of my long journey to get closer […]
Justice has been served at last. In a unanimous, long overdue and important decision handed down on June 25, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that the decades-long exemption enabling ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students to evade compulsory military service and receive government subsidies rests on no legal basis, and that the Israeli armed forces are free to draft […]
Joe Biden, the president of the United States, recently delivered an impassioned speech at a Holocaust memorial event during which he strongly condemned antisemitism and described American support for Israel’s security as “ironclad.” Yet the following day, he threatened to withhold certain weapons from Israel if it launched a major ground offensive in Rafah, Hamas’ […]
The distinguished American food writer Joan Nathan began writing her latest book, My Life In Recipes: Food, Family And Memories (Alfred A. Knopf), at a sad but portentous time. Her husband of 42 years, Allan Gerson, had just died, and she had reached the golden age of 80. In this, her twelfth book, she covers […]
Israel’s low-intensity war of attrition with Hezbollah is heating up to the boiling point as the prospect of a full-scale war grows dangerously possible. In the past few weeks, the fighting along and near Israel’s border with Lebanon has escalated ominously as the United States and France have attempted to head off an all-out war. […]
Eleven Israeli soldiers were killed in two separate incidents over the weekend in the Gaza Strip, underscoring Israel’s difficulty in destroying Hamas’ military capabilities and thereby achieving its primary goal of the current war. In Rafah, Hamas’ last urban stronghold, eight soldiers from the Combat Engineering Corps died when their Namer armored vehicle exploded after […]