Nearly 55 years after its inaugural opening at the Imperial Theatre in New York City, Fiddler on the Roof, the iconic Broadway play, is still going strong. Such is its longevity that it has been performed every day somewhere around the globe since September 22, 1964. Based on the stories of Sholem Aleichem, this dark musical has been […]
Much to Israel’s discomfort, two of its staunchest foes, Iran and Hamas, have upgraded their bilateral relations. Hamas, which has ruled the Gaza Strip for the past 13 years, dispatched a high-level delegation to Tehran late last month, when tensions between Iran and the United States were on the rise and an outbreak of fighting […]
Secrets abound in Bart Freundlich’s drama, After the Wedding, which opens in Canadian theatres on August 16. Filmed in India and the United States, and adapted from Susanne Bier’s 2006 Oscar-nominated Danish movie, it pits a wealthy entrepreneur against an idealist whose lives are more intertwined than they initially realize. Isabel (Michelle Williams), the director […]
Krystyna Bierzynska is a Holocaust survivor par excellence. Born in Warsaw in 1928, the daughter of assimilated Polish Jews who perished during the six-year German occupation of Poland, she managed to leave the Polish capital as Jews were being herded into the doomed Nazi ghetto. In 1944, as a member of the underground Home Army, she […]
Founded in the 19th century as a manufacturer of brewing and malting equipment, J.A. Topf and Sons branched into a new business in the 1930s. From that point onward, the family-owned company, based in Erfurt, Germany, began producing industrial-scale ovens and ventilation systems to meet a growing demand for human cremations, a more modern, regulated […]
Benjamin Netanyahu is pushing ahead with his counter-productive election campaign promise to extend Israel’s sovereignty over the West Bank and thereby demolish the two-state solution. On August 8, the Israeli prime minister yet again reiterated his pledge to annex parts of the West Bank during a cornerstone-laying ceremony for 650 new housing units in the […]
Just minutes before killing 22 people, mostly Hispanics, at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, Patrick Crusius, a 21-year-old right-wing extremist, posted a racist and anti-immigrant manifesto online in which he expressed fear of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas” and warned that Caucasians in the United States were being replaced by foreigners. Crusius’ murderous […]
Germany’s preeminent newsmagazine, Der Spiegel, carried a story on the Jewish community of Germany in one of its latest special editions. On its cover was a vintage photograph of two elderly ultra-Orthodox Jews clad in traditional caftans. The Central Council of Jews in Germany, in a tweet, objected to the illustration, saying it perpetrated antisemitic […]
It could be one of the shortest political comebacks in Israel’s history. Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel, has returned to politics after a seven-year hiatus. He hopes to play a starring role in unseating Benjamin Netanyahu, the current Israeli premier and his former boss, in the September 17 general election. It’s questionable, […]
At the height of his 40-year career at 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace was probably the most feared interviewer in the business. Hard as nails, with a no-nonsense style, he was a “rough boy,” as one of his many interviewees, Hollywood actor Kirk Douglas, said of him with a mixture of awe and annoyance. Wallace, a reporter on […]