American historian Rafael Medoff has written an impressive and important book about the United States, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. The Jews Should Keep Quiet: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust (The Jewish Publication Society) is an unsparing condemnation of a president who was slow to help Jewish refugees and […]
It’s questionable whether Senator Bernie Sanders (Independent, Vermont) will be the Democratic Party’s nominee for the U.S. presidency now that Joe Biden, the vice-president under President Barack Obama, has regained his footing and pulled ahead of him in the quest for delegates. Yet if Sanders, a democratic socialist, can overtake and defeat Biden, he would not […]
Maybe, just maybe Benjamin Netanyahu got carried away by the inconclusive results of Israel’s March 2 general election, the third in less than a year. Aiming for a record fifth term in office, the 70-year-prime minister sounded euphoric as he addressed jubilant supporters following the election. Calling the projected outcome “the biggest victory of my life,” […]
Turkey and Syria, once the best of neighbors, are effectively at war. On March 1, Turkey launched a major offensive into northwestern Syria, the last bastion of Turkish-backed Syrian rebels fighting the Russian-backed regime of President Bashar al-Assad. The campaign is largely designed to stop the flow of some one million displaced Syrian civilians into Turkey […]
Known as the Jerusalem of the Balkans, Salonica — an Aegean port situated at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East — was once home to the world’s largest Sephardic Jewish community. One of the jewels of the sprawling Ottoman Empire, the city was annexed by Greece in 1913 and renamed Thessaloniki, an upheaval that […]
President Donald Trump’s national security advisor, Robert O’Brien, recently equated the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank with the growth of antisemitism around the world. It’s a bizarre and ridiculous conflation that needs to be refuted. Urging the Palestinians to abandon their rejection of Trump’s one-sided peace plan, O’Brien claimed it could be […]
Michael Winterbottom’s biting satire, Greed, which opens in Canadian theatres on March 6, is a caustic portrait of a fictional self-made British billionaire and a blistering commentary on the fast fashion industry whose downtrodden workers he exploits mercilessly. Retail mogul Sir Richard (Greedy) McCreadie (Steve Coogan) has decamped to the Greek island of Mykonos to […]
My parents, David and Genia, passed away in Toronto in 2016, leaving two less Holocaust survivors in a dwindling population of some 400,000 around the world. Mostly in their 80s and 90s, they are the last living links to an unprecedented tragedy — the systematic, industrial-scale extermination of six million European Jews from 1939 to […]
Zalman Shoval was Israel’s two-time ambassador to the United States during the presidencies of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Shoval, posted to Washington from 1990 to 1993 and again from 1998 to 2000, served four Israeli prime ministers. His term of office coincided with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the outbreak of the first Gulf […]
Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney who pressed charges of sexual misconduct against the movie producer Harvey Weinstein, got it exactly right when he described him as “a vicious serial sexual predator who used his power to threaten, rape, assault, trick, humiliate and silence his victims.” Vance was equally correct when he said […]