Despite her status as one of America’s greatest movie critics, Pauline Kael was regarded as a persona non-grata by certain Hollywood movers and shakers. Diverging from mainstream tastes, she would pan popularly acclaimed films such as The Sound of Music, Lawrence of Arabia and West Side Story, thereby enraging high-powered film executives, who barred her from […]
Should the Allies have bombed the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland and the railway tracks leading to it? This is one of the most burning moral questions of the 20th century, and it’s examined in some depth in Bombing Auschwitz, a taut and absorbing documentary by Tim Dunn due to be broadcast by the PBS […]
Major General Qassem Soleimani lived and died by the sword. Killed by a U.S. drone strike in the early hours of January 3, shortly after landing at Baghdad International Airport, he was head of the Quds Force, the offensive arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which aggressively advances Iran’s military and political objectives in […]
It’s a tragic truism that antisemitism, the world’s oldest hatred, confronts virtually every Jewish person in every generation in the Diaspora. And now, in the wake of a spate of violent antisemitic incidents across the United States since 2018, American Jews, particularly in the greater New York City area, are now exposed to this insidious […]
The prime minister of Israel, Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, appears to think he’s above the law. On January 1, as widely expected, he shamelessly asked the Knesset to grant him immunity from prosecution. Netanyahu dropped this bombshell about five weeks after Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit indicted him on criminal charges of fraud, bribery and breach of trust. […]
The Irish and the Jews, given their vastly different religious and historical backgrounds, are not exactly two peas in a pod. But according to Aidan Beatty and Dan O’Brien, the editors of Irish Questions and Jewish Questions: Crossovers in Culture (Syracuse University Press), they are “two of the classic outliers of modern Europe.” As they state […]
Germans during the Nazi era were “the targets of the most vigorous, lucid and sophisticated public relations campaign ever conjured up in all of history,” writes Nicholas O’Shaughnessy in his substantive work, Marketing the Third Reich: Persuasion, Packaging and Propaganda (Routledge), which follows on the heels of his first volume, Selling Hitler: Propaganda and the Nazi Brand. […]
Shortly after defeating Gideon Sa’ar decisively in the Likud Party’s December 26 leadership race, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu outlined his major strategic objectives. Apart from “finalizing” Israel’s borders and lobbying for U.S. recognition of its sovereignty in the Jordan Valley, the northern Dead Sea and the Jewish settlements of the West Bank, he would work for […]
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to the announcement by the chief prosecutor of The Hague-based International Criminal Court that there is a basis for investigating possible war crimes by Israel in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip was high on rhetoric and low on substance. Netanyahu could have attempted to refute her assertions point by […]
David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first premier, once joked that Golda Meir was “the only man” in his cabinet. Hard-working, persistent and outspoken, Golda was one tough lady who commanded respect. The only Israeli woman ever to be prime minister, she had sharp elbows and could not be pushed around. Forty one years after her death at […]