New Jewish immigrants arriving in the United States in the first years of the 20th century usually settled in big northern cities like New York, Philadelphia and Boston or in nearby smaller towns. Scarcely any went to, say, Mississippi, an antebellum southern state defined by the strictures of segregation and populated by a very small […]
My eldest daughter called with the news around bedtime on April 2. The Canadian Jewish News, the weekly newspaper of record where I worked as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist from 1974 until 2013, was ceasing all operations with the publication of the April 9 edition. My first reaction was one of surprise and […]
Harvey Weinstein, the former Hollywood mogul, is justly behind bars after having been convicted in February of rape and sexual assault and sentenced to 23 years in prison. But Weinstein’s legal problems are far from over. On April 10, Los Angeles County charged him with one felony count of sexual battery. The scale of his […]
In the face of the life-threatening coronavirus pandemic raging around the world, some ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel chose to defy government directives to remain at home in quarantine so as to stem the spread of the deadly outbreak. This was not only astonishingly selfish, but unacceptably reckless. By their actions they risked exacerbating an unprecedented, […]
Israel has been hit hard by the novel coronavirus, which has so far killed 79 Israelis, infected nearly 10,000 and virtually shut down the country, in the worst natural disaster to befall it since its creation 72 years ago. The group most affected by this deadly pandemic has been Israel’s insular ultra-Orthodox community of 1.1 […]
The immortal words of Emma Lazarus’ poem, The New Colossus, are cast on a bronze plaque on the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my […]
When the Islamic State organization reached its peak of power and influence five or six years ago, new starry-eyed recruits poured in from Europe, augmenting its ranks by a fairly significant margin. Some were Muslims and still others were European and Asian Christian converts to Islam, fired up by the messianic notion of creating a […]
A court in Karachi, Pakistan, has overturned the murder conviction and death sentence of a terrorist and three of his accomplices who kidnapped and murdered the American Jewish journalist Daniel Pearl in January 2002. What a travesty of justice! What a shame! These murderers killed Pearl in cold blood just months after Al Qaeda terrorists […]
Conspiracy theories, which are always grounded in malicious lies and overblown fantasies, are the bread and butter of antisemites. Usually, their half-baked, slimy suppositions rear their ugly heads during a crisis. Jews were blamed for the Black Death, which decimated one-third of Europe’s population. And in the infamous blood libel canard, Jews were accused of […]
Alienated from the insular and regimented ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in New York City in which she was raised, Esther (Esty) Shapiro severs her ties with it, leaves her husband and starts a radically new life in Berlin. Esty, 19, is the central character in Maria Schrader’s four-part Netflix series, Unorthodox, which is inspired by Deborah […]