The forthcoming Toronto Jewish Film Festival is presenting two documentaries about former Jewish communities in the Arab world. Remember Baghdad and Libya: The Last Exodus will be respectively screened on May 9 and 11 and on May 7, 8 and 9. Iraq, a nation torn by strife and violence, once had one of the most distinguished Jewish […]
The South Beach enclave of Miami Beach was home to a vibrant community of Jewish retirees and Holocaust survivors from the 1960s to the 1970s. Resembling a transplanted shtetl, it was mainly populated by former garment workers from New York City who were lured there by the warm weather and the relatively low cost of […]
Stephane Benhamou’s intriguing documentary, The No. 5 War, scheduled to be screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on May 6 and May 8, is centered around Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel, the Parisian fashion designer whose name is synonymous with Chanel No. 5, which, for a while after its debut in 1921, was the world’s most popular […]
At the risk of sounding monotonous, I return once more to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s hasty decision to allow more than one million Muslim migrants to flood into Germany since 2015. Much to her probable astonishment and disappointment, it has had unintended consequences. The majority of the newcomers are from Syria, an Arab police state whose […]
As Israel celebrated its 7oth anniversary on April 19 by the Hebrew calendar — the day the doomed but heroic Warsaw ghetto uprising erupted in 1943 — it grappled with a paradox. Never has Israel been as militarily strong, yet so insecure. Israel is the only nuclear power in the Middle East, with a humming […]
Oskar Groning, a functionary at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp in Poland, was charged with being an accessory to mass murder and put on trial in Germany in 2015, when he was 93 years old. Assigned to the camp as a bookkeeper, he spent much of his time there as a collector of valuables expropriated […]
In the summer 1992, a small group of Israelis and Palestinians met secretly in Oslo to discuss the prospects of peace. Their talks were sanctioned neither by the Israeli government nor by the Palestine Liberation Organization. These informal negotiations gave way to formal discussions that climaxed with the signing of the Declaration of Principles in […]
The United States is torn by indecision in Syria, and recent events illustrate this pattern of confusion. On April 7, Syrian government forces launched a chemical attack in Douma, a suburb of Damascus, and it immediately placed the United States on the horns of a dilemma. President Donald Trump was reluctant to intervene, in line with his […]
Mission Accomplished, U.S. President Donald Trump boasted in a triumphant Twitter post on April 14, resorting to a discredited phrase appropriated by President George W. Bush in May 2003 to declare victory in Iraq after the controversial American invasion. Trump, hardly concerned by the negative comparison it would inevitably evoke, trotted it out less than […]
Cynically portrayed by Nazi Germany as a “reeducation center,” the Sachsenhausen concentration camp was a synonym for unbridled state-sponsored terror. Although it was not an extermination camp, like Treblinka, it consumed the lives of about 50,000 people from 1936 to 1945. Now a memorial and museum, Sachsenhausen was not the first concentration camp built on […]