U.S. President Donald Trump is not a person who minces words, yet he was strangely mute in identifying the motley gang of neo-Nazis, white supremacists and Ku Klux Klan members who incited bloody demonstrations at a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend which resulted in the death of a 32-year woman. In […]
Overtly Muslim and covertly Jewish, and blending Jewish, Christian and Islamic beliefs and rituals, the Donmes were one of the most secretive sects in the Ottoman Empire and its successor state, the republic of Turkey. A closed, tight-knit community bound by the Eighteen Commandments — a set of strict social and religious guidelines — they […]
Egypt’s crushing defeat at the hands of Israel in the Six Day War created a crisis of confidence in the Egyptian government. Bouncing back from the depths of despair, President Gamal Abdul Nasser reacted to Israel’s victory by political and military means. In Nasser’s Peace: Egypt’s Response to the 1967 War With Israel (Transaction Publishers), […]
There is no place like it, at least architecturally speaking. The green campus of Florida Southern College, in Lakeland, Florida, houses the largest single collection of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings in the United States. Known collectively as the Child of the Sun, these geometric structures rise organically from the earth into the rays of the sun. […]
Matt Spicer’s deliciously biting comedy, Ingrid Goes West, which opens in Canada on August 18, pokes gleeful fun at the Instagram generation fixated by the allure of social media and who are only concerned with how to get more followers on instagram. It’s set in Venice, California, a supposedly hip place, and revolves around an […]
As Holocaust deniers go, Ernst Zundel was by far one of the most notorious ones, easily in the same slimy league as David Irving, Robert Faurisson, Arthur Butz and Ditlieb Felderer. A German national who lived most of his adult life in Canada, Zundel died on August 5 at his home in Germany. He was […]
Islam is supposedly a religion of peace and friendship, but if you’re Jewish, you may be excluded from its friendly embrace. Sermons delivered by two imams in California recently prove this point yet again. At the Davis Islamic Center, Ammar Shahin prayed for the Al Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem to be freed “from the […]
Is a synagogue a security risk? The question inspires derision, but unbelievably enough, a municipal council in Australia recently banned the construction of a Chabad-affiliated synagogue, Congregation of Friends of Refugees of Eastern Europe, on precisely these specious grounds. The decision, taken in the Sydney suburb of Bondi, was upheld by a land use court, […]
Joshua Weinstein has gone where no American movie director has ventured in about 70 years. He has made a film that unfolds almost entirely in Yiddish, with a sprinkling of English and Spanish thrown in. Menashe, which opens in Canadian theatres on August 11, was filmed in Borough Park, a Hassidic neighborhood in New York City. Menashe, […]
When I last visited the sprawling site of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, I knew I had seen one of the most diabolical and depraved places on the planet. The bleak barracks, the barbed wire fences, the guard posts, the gas chambers and the ruins of crematoria reminded me of the lengths Nazi Germany went […]