Apart from prolonging Benjamin Netanyahu’s reign as Israel’s prime minister, the April 9 election reconfirmed the perception that the Israeli left has been marginalized in Israeli politics. On Election Day, the majority of Israelis voted for right-wing and centrist parties, leaving left-of-center and leftist parties in the dust with little more than electoral crumbs. As […]
Israeli voters have spoken loudly and clearly and essentially have opted for the status quo — more of the same from their longtime prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party, which has been in power for the past decade, won 35 Knesset seats in the April 9 general election, as many as Benny Gantz’s […]
Seventy five years ago, as Nazi Germany spiralled toward ignominious defeat and unconditional surrender in World War II, the greatest catastrophe to befall Hungarian Jews unfolded with cruel and ruthless precision. Germany, in complicity with its fascist ally, Hungary, rounded up and deported 425,000 Hungarian Jews to the Auschwitz-Treblinka extermination camp, where they were murdered. […]
On June 27, 2007, Ashraf Marwan, an Egyptian hailed as one of Israel’s greatest spies, was killed when he fell to his death from a fifth-storey apartment balcony in central London. To this day, no one is certain whether he jumped or was pushed. Nor can one be absolutely sure whether he was an Israeli […]
Self- preservation defines Benjamin Netanyahu’s narrow approach to politics. It is what makes him tick as a politician. It is his end game. Four years ago, fearing he might lose the general election, Netanyahu issued a last-minute warning to wavering right-wing voters that “droves” of Israeli Arabs were being bused to polling stations by leftist […]
Germany tried but failed to conquer the British mainland during World War II, but German forces nevertheless occupied a small bit of Britain, the Channel Islands. Lying closer to France than Britain, these predominately rural islands, near the coast of Normandy, were captured by the Germans on June 30, 1940 and held until May 9, […]
Hungarian filmmaker Laszlo Nemes brought the unimaginable horrors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp uncomfortably close up in Son of Saul, which won the Academy Award for best foreign picture in 2016. Now, three years later in Sunset, which opens in Canada on April 5, Nemes transports us to fin-de-siecle Budapest on the eve of World […]
Joseph Pulitzer (1847-1911) was one of the giants of American journalism. The owner and publisher of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The New York World, he was an exemplar of the rags-to-riches saga so beloved by Americans. Arriving in the United States as a penniless Jewish immigrant from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he finagled his way to […]
Steve Bannon, the fire-breathing American conservative ideologue, is bent on creating a global right-wing populist movement. In Alison Klayman’s absorbing documentary, The Brink, which opens in Canada on April 12, she accompanies Donald Trump’s former chief strategist on trips across the United States and Europe to lay the groundwork for this ambitious objective. A fierce […]
Reconstruction, one of the most complex, turbulent and divisive eras in American history, left a legacy of hope and terror that still haunts the United States. Extending from approximately 1865 to 1877, it raised a mountain of contentious racial, social, political and economic issues as Northerners and Southerners grappled with the outcome of the 1861-1865 Civil War. […]