Don Cherry’s abrupt dismissal as host of Coach’s Corner, a popular six-minute segment on Hockey Night in Canada, was drastic but unavoidable. Sportsnet, the cable television channel which broadcasts this Canada-wide program, fired Cherry — the wildly opinionated 85-year-old former hockey player and coach known for his loud clothes and inappropriate comments — on November 11 […]
In recent weeks, Israel has issued a slew of warnings concerning the possibility of an attack from Iran, its arch enemy. Iran, which once had diplomatic relations with Israel, turned against the Jewish state in the wake of the 1979 Islamic revolution. In the past couple of years, Iran’s hostility has spiked under the impact […]
FBI agents recently arrested a neo-Nazi terrorist accused of threatening to blow up Temple Emanuel, a synagogue in Pueblo, Colorado, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in the United States. Richard Holzer, the 27-year-old suspect, is a skinhead and former member of the Ku Klux Klan. In messages posted on Facebook, he likened […]
Israel is facing a sobering reality in its bilateral relations with the United States, its most important ally. Several of the candidates running for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination have expressed a willingness to withhold U.S. military aid to Israel should circumstances warrant such a drastic decision. For the past three years, Israel has received $3.8 […]
Nazi war criminals have been brought to justice in a succession of trials since the Holocaust. The trial of John Demjanjuk — a naturalized American citizen of Ukrainian descent accused of being the notorious Ivan the Terrible — still resonates three decades later. An infamously brutal guard who worked at the Treblinka and Sobibor extermination camps […]
Spain’s complex, convoluted and tragic relationship with Jews is the theme of Maite Ojeda-Mata’s comprehensive and nuanced work, Modern Spain and the Sephardim, published by Lexington Books. Beginning her inquiry in the 12th century, when Spain launched its campaign of persecution and expulsion against its Jewish citizens, she then focuses on the 19th and 20th […]
As hundreds of American troops hastily withdrew from bases in northeastern Syrian late last month on orders from U.S. President Donald Trump, Russian military police almost immediately took over these installations on behalf of Russia’s chief ally in the Middle East, Syria. Shortly afterwards, Russian and Turkish forces began patrolling a former Kurdish enclave in […]
Ira Sachs’ drama, Frankie, which opens in Canada on November 8, stars Isabelle Huppert as a famous French actress who invites her family, an ex-husband and a friend to Portugal for what may be a final summer vacation. This appealing film, set in the wooded mountains and sandy beaches of the rustic resort of Sintra, […]
Canadian poet, novelist and essayist Margaret Atwood once said, “I never thought I’d be a popular writer. I only wanted to be a good one.” Several decades on, Atwood has achieved not only popularity but admiration as a stylist. Thanks to her prodigious body of work — 17 books of poetry, 17 novels, 10 works of […]
They’re the last of the Holocaust survivors — the Jewish boys and girls who survived the genocidal Nazi onslaught and are now in the final years of their long lives. Maxwell Smart, Rose Lipszyc and Helen Yermus, all Canadian citizens, witnessed the destruction of their respective Jewish communities in Poland and Lithuania. Seventy four years after […]