Film is a powerful tool in mobilizing public opinion in support of a cause or idea. Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s rabidly antisemitic propaganda minister, instinctively understood this principle as he launched campaigns to marginalize and demonize German Jews. As commissar of the German movie industry, Goebbels had the authority to commission films. Three of them […]
In a jab at Israel, and in an ignorant and insulting assault on the historical record, Ecuador’s ambassador to the United Nations, Horacio Sevilla Borja, recently equated Zionism with Nazism. He dredged up this shameful analogy in a speech at the General Assembly to mark International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. “We repudiate […]
As he ends his tenure as U.S secretary of state, John Kerry has fired parting shots at Israel. At a forum in Washington, D.C. on December 4, he made two important points that Israel’s short-sighted leadership would be well advised to heed. He reiterated Washington’s long-held view that Jewish settlements in the West Bank are […]
Since the 1980s, Chinese people have displayed “unprecedented levels” of interest in Jews and Israel, says Zhou Xun, a scholar at the University of Essex. This phenomenon has manifested itself in the proliferation of Jewish studies programs and the publication of books on Jewish history. Xun’s essay appears in The Image of Jews in Contemporary China, […]
Images of Pablo flood my mind, and a smile creases my face, whenever I spy a Maltese. No, I’m not talking about people from the Mediterranean island of Malta. I’m referring to that special breed of canine that so touches my heart. Until Pablo came along, I had no special affinity or particular affection for […]
Call it, if you like, a fantastic fluke. The 2,000-year-old Army of Terracotta Warriors, one of the most astonishing finds of the 20th century, might never have been excavated had it not been for a natural disaster that ravaged the central Chinese province of Shaanxi in 1974. The chain of events that culminated with this […]
In the spring of 1944, when Germany was sending hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to Nazi extermination camps in Poland, a major Hollywood movie studio, Columbia Pictures, released None Shall Escape. Although it was of middling quality, it occupies a special place in the pantheon of American cinema, apparently having been the first to […]
A just foreign policy in the Middle East must recognize the necessity of a two-state solution, says internationally renowned human rights lawyer Irwin Cotler. Cotler, the former Canadian minister of justice and attorney general, endorsed this concept on November 29 at Holy Blossom Temple at the annual general meeting of JSpace Canada, a progressive Jewish organization. […]
The wildfires that have ravaged Israel of late have consumed approximately 13,000 hectares of forest and brush, an area far larger than the island of Manhattan. This is a catastrophic event from an ecological point of view because Israel is not a country rich in forests, like Canada or the United States. Forests in Middle Eastern […]
Although Christians have never represented more than about 11 percent of the Palestinian population in the Middle East, they’ve played a significant role in the Palestinians’ national movement. Despite this fact, Arab Christians have been “largely overlooked in modern Palestinian history,” says Noah Haiduc-Dale in Arab Christians in British Mandate Palestine: Communalism and Nationalism, 1917-1948, […]