Fabienne Rousso-Lenoir’s documentary, Cabaret-Berlin, The Wild Scene, is a nostalgic excursion into a lost world. Currently being screened online by the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation, it’s a bold and brash movie, composed of a collage of eclectic images taken from movie clips, photographs, drawings and paintings. It is narrated in theatrical style by the German […]
A historic resolution condemning Holocaust denial and distortion was passed by the United Nations General Assembly yesterday. It was sponsored by Israel, co-sponsored by Germany and backed by the United States and Russia. Its passage was intended to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the diabolical Wannsee Conference in Berlin, during which 15 high-ranking Nazi […]
To no one’s surprise, Iran has carried out its threat to wreak vengeance on the United States for its central role in the assassination of one of its most revered national figures, Qassem Soleimani, who commanded the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Soleimani and his Iraqi associate, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the commander of the pro-Iranian Popular […]
One can readily understand why American Jews were rattled by the hostage incident at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, last Saturday. Although the four Jewish hostages escaped unharmed after 11 hours of captivity, and Muslim attacker Malik Faisal Akram was killed, the standoff left a bitter aftertaste in the mouths of Jews. In a […]
The Holocaust was set in motion not by one single momentous decision, but by several key events. The Wannsee conference of January 20, 1942 was one of those pivotal moments, or turning points, in Nazi Germany’s inexorable march toward genocide. Eighty years on, British historian Peter Longerich has written Wannsee: The Road to the Final […]
Karol Modzelewski was an iconoclast writ large, one of Poland’s leading dissidents during the communist era. A dyed-in-the-wool contrarian, he was Jewish by birth, yet identified as a Pole. He belonged to the Communist Party, yet openly criticized it. His fearlessness cost him dearly. During the 1960s and 1980s, he languished in prison for a […]
Several years before the Israeli television drama Shtisel took Israel by storm, Srugim was drawing in a multitude of viewers. Shtisel and Srugim ran from 2013 until 2021 and from 2008 until 2012 respectively. They unfolded in Jerusalem and were about the everyday lives of religiously observant Israelis. While Shtisel’s main characters were ultra-Orthodox Jews, Srugim […]
Justice has finally caught up with Anwar Raslan, a former colonel in Syria’s intelligence service. On January 13, a court in Koblenz, Germany, convicted him of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Now 58, he supervised the murder, the torture and the sexual abuse of dozens of prisoners. Though only a cog […]
Last May, as Israel fought its fourth cross-border Gaza war with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, deadly ethnic violence between Jews and Arabs erupted in a string of cities, shocking and disheartening Israelis. Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, compared it to a “civil war,” while an Arab member of the Knesset, Aida Touma-Sliman, likened it to the […]
Israel’s strategic alliance with the United States took shape between the 1967 Six Day War and the 1975 Sinai II disengagement agreement. This historic process was pushed forward on the American side by politicians in the House of Representatives and the Senate, Kenneth Kolander argues persuasively in America’s Israel: The U.S. Congress and American-Israeli Relations […]