The notorious antisemitic campaign launched by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union after World War II is chronicled in exacting and chilling detail in Guillaume Ribot’s superb French-language documentary, The Black Book, which will be screened online on June 3 at this year’s Toronto Jewish Film Festival. Guillaume’s 92-minute film revolves around the Black Book, […]
Sara Goralnik, a 12-year-old Polish Jewish girl, survived the Holocaust by adopting the identity of her Ukrainian friend, Manya Romanchuk. Passing as a Christian, she worked on a small farm in eastern Poland from 1942 to 1944, until it was safe to return to her hometown near the Russian border. Sara’s story of survival unfolds in […]
Apart from having claimed the lives of nearly 300,000 persons around the world, the deadly coronavirus pandemic has emboldened xenophobes, white nationalists, white supremacists, racists and antisemites in the United States. The outbreak, which has killed 79,000 Americans so far, has forced a multitude of businesses to close and lay off or furlough millions of […]
In what can only be described as a heretical break with the past, the Saudi Arabian-owned MBC channel, the largest private broadcaster in the Arab world, recently broadcast a drama and a comedy that respectively portrays Jews in a positive light and lampoons Arab attitudes to Israel. The shows, Umm Haroun (The Mother of Aaron) […]
By all appearances, Barry and Karen Mason were a conventional middle-class Jewish couple defined by their normality and inconspicuousness. Yet the Masons were different, perhaps even subversive. For 30 years, until the summer of 2012, they ran Circus of Books, a gay pornography bookshop in Los Angeles, and distributed hardcore gay movies. The Masons are […]
Reports emanating from Israel of late suggest that Iran, Israel’s arch enemy, is gradually withdrawing its forces from Syria and that pro-Iranian militias there are also pulling out. If these reports are true, a major source of tension in the Middle East will have been removed and Israel will have scored a major victory over Iran, […]
Before the current coronavirus pandemic walloped the world, the opioid epidemic loomed large, claiming lives on a fairly significant scale. Joey Klein’s movie, Castle in the Ground, delves into that particular facet of the destructive drug abuse problem. Scheduled to open on the Bell, Rogers, Shaw, Telus, Cineplex Store, Apple and Googleplay platforms on May 15, […]
Antisemitic tropes and stereotypes, honed and refined over centuries in a multitude of countries, are so deeply engrained that they can turn up in the unlikeliest of places. This is precisely what happened a few days ago when Guy Smith, the president of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, the largest union in the province, […]
Much to its credit, Germany has finally cracked down hard on Hezbollah. Seven years after branding its armed wing as a terrorist organization and banning it in Germany, the German interior minister, Horst Seehofer, went one step further by effectively outlawing its civilian wing and prohibiting all its activities inside Germany. Seehofer made this announcement […]
Last year, following his announcement that the wartime papers of Pope Pius XII would be released, Pope Francis declared, “The Church is not afraid of history.” Maybe it should be. One of the most controversial pontiffs of the 20th century, Pope Pius XII led the Roman Catholic Church from 1939 until 1958. During World War […]