In his sentimental film, Fiddler on the Roof, based on Sholem Aleichem’s beloved stories, Norman Jewison immortalized Anatevka, a shtetl in Russia’s Pale of Settlement steeped in piety and poverty and stricken by pogroms. By the late 19th century, the shtetl, though in a parlous state of decline, was home to 80 percent of East […]
It was historically and morally necessary to publish a critical, annotated version of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (My Struggle), a prominent German historian said recently. The two-volume edition was published by the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich last January with a print run of 4,000 copies and was immediately snapped up by buyers in […]
Ninety eight years ago, on an overcast day on November 11, 1918, the long nightmare of World War I ended with an armistice. Optimists claimed that World War I would be “the war to end all wars.” But in fact, the armistice, signed in a railway carriage in France by the Allied powers and Germany, would […]
The launch of a glossy coffee table book on Jewish-Ukrainian relations provided its co-authors with an opportunity to discuss their complicated topic. At a symposium earlier this month at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern — a professor of Jewish Studies at Northwestern University — and Paul Robert Magocsi — the […]
The ultra-Orthodox Jews of Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighborhood are an island onto themselves. Fanatically observant and utterly disdainful of Israeli secular society, they’re intensely insular and obsessively self-absorbed. To the vast majority of Israelis, these pre-modern Jews are virtually strangers. They may as well be Martians, but they’re Israelis. Shtisel, an Israeli television drama which […]
Deep in the wilds of Mongolia, nomads practice the art of eagle hunting. By tradition, it’s a man’s sport in this hierarchical society. So when a 13-year-old girl sets her sights on following in their footsteps, the grizzled men in her tight-knit community are surprised and even aghast by her ambition. This is the theme […]
One of the longest-simmering conflicts of our time, the Arab-Israeli dispute, has been stubbornly immune to resolution. It has ground on for more than a century, claiming innumerable lives and wasting scarce resources. Stripped to its barest essentials, it pits Zionism against Palestinian nationalism. The piecemeal return of Jews to their ancestral homeland, spurred by […]
At a moment when jihadism is on the rise and Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians has reached a nadir, Princeton University Press’ encyclopedic volume, A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations, is a welcome addition to our fount of knowledge. More than 1,100 pages in length, and lavishly illustrated, this authoritative tome should be required reading for […]
I was fortunate enough to visit Vancouver earlier this month, but there was a problem: I had less than 24 hours to explore this gorgeous city on Canada’s west coast. Unlike my friends who’d recently bought a lovely little condo through Eddie Yan, my time was very limited. What could I possibly see in so […]
Should comedians avoid crossing social and political red lines? Are they bound by society’s taboos? These are the overlapping questions implicitly posed by Ferne Pearlstein in The Last Laugh, a probing documentary that examines the Holocaust from a completely different point of view. Pearlstein’s movie, which will be screened by the Toronto Jewish Film Festival […]