Britain’s embattled and divided Labor Party, led by Jeremy Corbyn since 2015, is heading for an acrimonious showdown whose outcome could well affect its electoral prospects. Early in September, the party will decide whether to fully adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which has been accepted by scores of countries, including Britain, […]
Marc Turtletaub’s highly appealing debut film, Puzzle, which opens in Canada on August 10, bores into the personality of a devoted wife and empathetic mother who feels repressed and longs for self-fulfillment. Agnes (the Scottish actress Kelly Macdonald) shares a house in Bridgeport, Connecticut, with her husband, Louie (David Denman), the owner of an auto […]
It was, as Steven J. Zipperstein writes in his cinematically vivid book, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (Liveright Publishing), “a dreadful moment” burned into the souls of Jews. He is referring to the unbridled anti-Jewish violence that broke out in Kishinev — a provincial Bessarabian city on the edge of the Russian empire — […]
On July 24, just days after the Knesset passed legislation officially defining “the land of Israel” as “the historical homeland of the Jewish people” and “the State of Israel as the national home of the Jewish people,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan went ballistic. Responding to the nation-state bill,” Erdogan warned it would cause “blood, […]
The third movie directed by Orson Welles, The Stranger, is a melodrama about a Nazi who masquerades as a college professor in small-town America. Filmed in the autumn of 1945 and released in the summer of 1946, only a few years after the release of two of his finest films, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent […]
Scotty Bowers provided a service in high demand. From 1946 until the mid-1980s, he procured sexual partners for gays and lesbians in the Hollywood film industry and practised the world’s oldest profession. Six years ago, he wrote a tell-all memoir, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars. Matt […]
There is a good case for keeping the Iraqi Jewish Archive in the United States rather than giving it back to Iraq. Consisting of tens of thousands of religious texts, books, personal items and photographs, this priceless trove contains items ranging from a 16th century Hebrew bible to an 18th century Talmud. Found by American […]
Good- news stories rarely emerge from the Middle East these days. Syria is bogged down in a civil war that has cost the country very dearly, and Israel is bombing Iranian bases there. Israel and Hamas are fighting again and might yet go to war for the fourth time in a decade. Iran, Israel’s chief […]
Mark Zuckerberg, one of the founders of Facebook, needs to rethink his position that Holocaust deniers should be permitted to post their false and scurrilous material on his social networking platform. Several days ago, in an interview with the tech news site Recode, Zuckerberg said that while he would not remove a post denying the Holocaust, […]
Incredulously enough, the Ontario Civil Liberties Association has rushed to the aid of Monika Schaefer, a Canadian Holocaust denier who’s currently on trial in Munich for inciting racial hatred, a criminal offence in Germany. The executive director of the association, Joseph Hickey, has written a letter to Canadian Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould and Foreign Minister […]