Very unusually, Massoud Hayoun describes himself as “an Arab American man of the Jewish faith” and an “Arab first and last.” “Judaism is an adjective that modifies my Arabness,” he writes in his nostalgic-drenched book, When We Were Arabs: A Jewish Family’s Forgotten History (The New Press). Hayoun, a Los Angeles-based journalist who has reported for […]
The degree to which the Ukrainian community in Canada venerates its deeply flawed national heroes is shocking and disappointing. Case in point: Last month, a monument in the St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Cemetery in Oakville, Ontario, honoring the 14th Waffen SS Galicia Division was spray-painted with the words, “Nazi war monument.” At first, the Halton Regional […]
During the first week of July, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that Hagia Sophia, a popular museum in Istanbul that was originally a cathedral and then a mosque, would be repurposed as a mosque again. In a rhetorical flourish, he added that Hagia Sophia’s reconversion was a precursor to “the liberation” of the Al-Aqsa […]
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s much-vaunted election campaign pledge to unilaterally annex parts of the West Bank has so far turned out to be little more than a rhetorical flourish. Netanyahu assured supporters he would begin implementing his promise on July 1. Seventeen days on, nothing seems to have happened, and he has been reduced […]
The disquieting rise of ideological conformity in major cultural institutions in the United States, a trend that is ominously catching fire, has claimed yet another victim. Bari Weiss, an editor and writer in The New York Times’ opinion department, resigned on July 14 after three years on staff. She explained her motives in a frank […]
The philosopher Martin Buber (1878-1965) was a towering figure in academia, an interpreter of Jewish mysticism and Hassidism, and a dissident figure in the Zionist movement. The first major biography in English of this seminal German-Jewish thinker in more than three decades has been published. It is written by Paul Mendes-Flohr, a professor emeritus at […]
I was not entirely surprised by Peter Beinart’s recent disavowal of the two-state solution and his advocacy of a binational state or a confederation of states in place of Israel. The left-leaning, iconoclastic American Jewish writer and political activist long ago broke with the dogma that Jews are obliged to support Israel whether it is […]
Roughly 130,000 German and Austrian Jews immigrated to the United States from 1933 until 1945. Victims of Nazi oppression, they struggled to adjust to a new society as they learned English, adapted to different customs and looked for jobs. For many of these emigres, particularly in New York City, the German-language newspaper Aufbau was a […]
We all know by now that the coronavirus pandemic should be viewed with the utmost seriousness. Twelve million people around the world have been sickened by it and 553,000 have succumbed to its ravages. Like the Spanish flu outbreak a century ago, COVID-19 poses an extremely dangerous threat to the health and welfare of even […]
White supremacist John Timothy Earnest attacked a synagogue in Poway, California, on the last day of Passover in 2019, killing a 60-year-old congregant and wounding its founding rabbi. In a manifesto posted online, Earnest, 19, invoked an incident that occurred on Easter Sunday in 1475 in the town of Trent. As he wrote, “You are […]