It has been compared to Grunewald and Dahlem, two of the most sedate suburbs in western Berlin. Rehavia, a neighborhood in West Jerusalem near the Mahane Yehuda market and the old city in East Jerusalem, reminds the German writer Thomas Sparr of both cities. To him, Rehavia is new yet familiar. When he lived in […]
Ferenc Andai, a Hungarian Jew, was plunged into purgatory on May 16, 1944, when he was press-ganged into fascist Hungary’s forced labor service. He was only 19 when, along with 6,000 other Hungarians, mostly Jews, he was consigned to a copper mine in Bor, a town in Nazi-occupied Serbia. For the next four months, he was […]
Curious George, the whimsical cartoon character dreamed up by the German-Jewish refugee couple Hans and Margret Rey, is an international cultural icon. An affectionate monkey of renown, Curious George has captivated the hearts and minds of children for decades now. The Reys produced seven books about this adorable creature, their last one having been published […]
Paul Wieland’s appealing coming-of-age British drama, Sixty Six, unfolds against the backdrop of the 1966 World Cup in London. By chance, the final game of this global tournament coincides with Bernie Rubens’ forthcoming bar mitzvah. And herein lies the nub of Sixty Six, which is being screened online by the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation. A […]
Sheldon Leonard was a Renaissance Man in the highly competitive business of show business, moving seamlessly between theater, radio, film and television. He appeared in Broadway plays, starred in Hollywood movies, churned out radio scripts, and produced TV sitcoms. Leonard’s contributions to middlebrow American culture are highlighted in Allan Holzman’s breezy documentary, Sheldon Leonard’s Wonderful Life, […]
Mansour Abbas, the leader of the Islamist Ra’am Party and a supporter of Israel’s governing coalition government, is a realist. Judging by two of his most recent comments, he has a sound appreciation of the political environment in Israel. Several days ago, at a conference in Tel Aviv sponsored by the Hebrew-language Globes newsmagazine, Abbas […]
In what amounted to a settling of accounts, some Holocaust survivors in postwar Poland tried to avenge the deaths of their loved ones by exacting punishment on Poles who murdered Jews. These survivors regarded revenge as a therapeutic sacred right and duty, said Polish historian Katarzyna Person in a zoom lecture earlier this month sponsored […]
Claudio Lomnitz’s ancestors were wanderers, as his book suggests. Lomnitz, a professor of anthropology at Columbia University in New York City, has written a ruminative memoir about his family that will surely strike a chord with Jewish families that were forced to leave their ancestral homes in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th […]
Donald Trump, the ex-U.S. president, thinks he has a licence to spew nonsense. From his mouth of late have gushed out an astonishing number of statements divorced from reality. Last week, he lambasted Benjamin Netanyahu, the former Israeli prime minister, as an ingrate. Netanyahu offended Trump because he was performing his duty. He had the […]
Israel should exercise the greatest of caution and discretion as tensions between Russia and Ukraine grow over their increasingly bitter border dispute. Under no circumstances should Israel allow itself to be harpooned into this potentially destabilizing and dangerous conflict currently simmering in eastern Ukraine. Ukraine, a former republic of the now-defunct Soviet Union, declared independence […]