German Jews found a “spiritual home” in German culture, philosophy, literature and music after their emancipation in 1871. During this period, when Germany was on the ascendancy as a great power, Germans generally related to Jews with a mixture of hospitality and hostility. In plain language, the tentative acceptance of Jews into German society was […]
Phil Rosenthal, the creator of the phenomenally successful TV sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, indulges his passion for travel and food in a new six-part Netflix series, Somebody Feed Phil. A voracious gourmand rather than an astute gourmet, he eats his way through six cities — Bangkok, Saigon, Tel Aviv, Lisbon, Mexico City and New Orleans. […]
Greta Gerwig’s quirky coming-of-age drama, Lady Bird, showcases the manifold talents of Saoirse Rowan, an Irish American actress who turned in an impressive performance in her last movie, Brooklyn, in which she played a winsome Irish immigrant adjusting to a new milieu in the United States. In Lady Bird — which is set in Sacramento, California, […]
Gloria Grahame is a figure from the past, an almost forgotten Hollywood star who won the Academy Award for best supporting actress in 1953 for her fleeting seven-minute appearance in The Bad and the Beautiful. A femme fatale, she made her film debut in Blonde Fever in 1944 and went on to appear in such […]
Britain was in the throes of a crisis in May 1940. The prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, had stepped aside, Parliament having lost confidence in his leadership. Germany was on the ascendancy, having annexed Austria and the Sudetenland, recaptured Memmel, occupied Poland and invaded Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, Holland and France. At that fraught moment, when the fate […]
In a fire-and-brimstone speech to the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Council in Ramallah recently, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas claimed that Zionism and Judaism are unrelated and that Jews imperilled by genocide had no interest in leaving wartime Europe. Abbas, who wrote his PhD on the Holocaust, should have known better than to make such […]
Disguised as an Arab, the Swiss adventurer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt discovered Petra in 1812, long after it had been abandoned and left to the elements and the bedouins. Since then, droves of visitors from far and wide have descended on this Nabatean city carved out of the spectacular sandstone cliffs of southern Jordan. Tourists are […]
The Ottoman era in the Middle East has been resurrected thanks to the creation of a popular tourist attraction in Tel Aviv near Jaffa. HaTachana, known in English as The Station, is a charming complex of shops, boutiques, cafes and restaurants in the southern part of this lively Israeli city. Originally an Ottoman Turkish railway station, […]
Amid the sun-drenched sylvan splendor of a summer in northern Italy, two young men form a special bond. Their friendship unfolds in 1983 against the bucolic backdrop of a sunny garden, a Roman-style pool whose cool waters reflect the blissful rays of a southern European sun, an aquamarine sea and a starry sky. All this takes […]
Donald Trump rarely fails to disappoint critics who consider him temperamentally inappropriate and patently unpresidential. Revealing his true colors yet again last week, the U.S. president embarrassed himself and the American people by issuing vulgar remarks that speak to his unsuitability as the occupant of the highest office in the land. In a discussion at the White […]