Irish novelist Sally Rooney is looking for a new Hebrew publisher, having decided she can no longer work with an Israeli publishing house. Rooney is entitled to her views, however skewed they may be. And she is not the first foreign author to boycott Israel. Alice Walker and Kamila Shamsie preceded her. But Rooney should […]
For Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s former prime minister, political survival is not only a means to an end, but an indicator of his true persona. Several days ago, Netanyahu — a secular Jew in every respect — showed his true colors when he retweeted an appallingly divisive message from Aryeh Deri, the leader of the ultra-Orthodox […]
It was the least conceivable assignment these American Jewish soldiers expected to receive as World War II raged. Having enlisted in the U.S. armed forces to fight Nazi Germany on the battlefield, they found themselves instead in a secluded camp in Virginia interrogating captured German prisoners of war and scientists and engineers. Most of the […]
A trial is currently under way in a U.S. federal court pitting 24 white supremacists and neo-Nazis against nine plaintiffs who suffered psychological and physical trauma during a violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the summer of 2017. The rally, which took place from August 11-12, began on a Friday night as hundreds of white […]
Polish journalist Ksawery Pruszynski visited Mandate Palestine in 1933 at the suggestion of his Jewish friend, Mojzesz Pomeranz, a Zionist who would settle in Tel Aviv toward the end of that decade. Pruszynski, a conservative Pole from an aristocratic family hailing from what is now Ukraine, met Pomeranz when they were both studying law at […]
Philip Roth, the great American novelist, was 77 when he agreed to be interviewed for Roth on Roth, a nearly one hour documentary by William Karel and Livia Manera in which he bares his soul. Speaking candidly, he discusses a wide range of issues. Roth on Roth, currently being screened online by the Toronto Jewish Film […]
Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky was one of the titans of the Zionist movement, yet his residency in Palestine, the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, was extremely brief. A cosmopolitan Russian Jew fluent in nine languages, he was both a political theoretician and organizer, as well as a man of letters. During his life, he oscillated […]
Evan Jackson Leong’s grim feature film, Snakehead, takes us into the dark, often violent and ugly world of human trafficking. Currently available on VOD platforms, it is set mainly in New York City’s Chinatown. The chief character is a young Chinese migrant whose credo is survival and who ruthlessly transforms herself into a smuggler. Sister Tse […]
Chaim Nachman Bialik is Israel’s national poet, though he was not born in what is now Israel and lived there for only about a decade. A Russian Jew and a fervent Zionist, he played a central role in the revival of the Hebrew language and culture. A street was named after him in Tel Aviv, […]
Shots rang out in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem neighborhood on a winter night in 1986, prompting a resident to call the police. Arriving to investigate, Avi Samuel entered a two-storey building and stumbled upon a nightmarish scene. Nissim Cohen, 44, and his wife, Leah, 40, had been brutally murdered in their bed. Judging by their gruesome […]