Tel Aviv, a cosmopolitan, fun-loving Mediterranean city, has discovered something new but old — cycling. In the past decade, cycling has become all the rage among Tel Avivians. The increasing popularity of cycling here coincides with the introduction of a bike rental program launched by the municipality in 2011. Cycling is now regarded as chic, […]
Last May, following talks with Palestine Authority President Mahmoud Abbas at the White House, U.S. President Donald Trump pledged to resurrect peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians to achieve what he boldly described as the “ultimate deal.” In a sweeping observation, Trump boasted, “It’s something, frankly, maybe not as difficult as people have thought over […]
Three weathered billboards line a lonely stretch of road near an unremarkable town in middle America. They’re grist for Martin McDonagh’s mill in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, a meditative, gloomy and utterly unconventional film about the nature of grief, vengeance and violence. Having driven past these signs countless times, Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand), a […]
To his credit, Polish President Andrej Duda has promised to review an ill-conceived bill that would essentially rewrite history, pander to Holocaust denial and stifle academic research. The legislation, passed by the lower house of Poland’s Parliament on January 26, cast a pall on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which was observed 24 hours later. There are two […]
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 […]