Raoul Wallenberg, the Swede who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust, was officially declared dead by Sweden in 2016. But 72 years after he vanished into thin air, the circumstances of his disappearance and the precise date of his death are still a mystery, much to his family’s anguish and frustration. Wallenberg […]
The trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel in 1961 was an historic event. For the first and only time, a major Nazi war criminal would face justice in the Jewish state. Recognizing its importance, the international media sent correspondents to cover it. Israel considered the possibility of filming the trial for posterity, but there was one […]
The Vietnam War was my war, so to speak. Let me explain. As it inexorably escalated from an insurgency in the 1950s into a full-blown conflict in the 1960s, prompting anti-war protests in the United States and other countries, I watched it unfold from the safety of my home in Montreal. I read David Halberstam’s […]
The Iran nuclear agreement, the object of Donald Trump’s withering wrath, could well be in jeopardy. The U.S. president has denigrated the accord, signed by Iran and six major powers in Geneva in the summer of 2015, as “one of the worst deals I’ve ever seen.” Furthermore, he has threatened to abandon it unless it is […]
Draft- dodging seems to come naturally to the ultra-Orthodox, or haredi, community in Israel. While tens of thousands of new recruits are called up annually to do their national service, risking life and limb to protect their fellow citizens, the vast majority of able-bodied haredi men shamelessly shirk their duty, claiming that their Torah studies […]
The Alternative for Germany, a marginal far right-wing political party founded four years ago, is on the cusp of a historic breakthrough. The AFD, which currently holds 13 seats in German state assemblies and in the European Parliament, is widely expected to win eight to 11 percent of the votes in the September 24 general […]
The Nazi machinery of mass murder is on stark and clinical display at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. The Evidence Room, a chilling and ghostly exhibition of white plaster components of the Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers, examines the central role that architecture played in the construction of this extermination camp in Poland. The Evidence Room, which […]
In 1975, when Toronto was still considered by some as something of a culinary backwater, I began writing a series of stories about Jewish delicatessens and restaurants in the city for a Canadian Jewish newspaper. My first story was illustrated by a photograph of yours truly sitting contentedly in front of a pastrami sandwich and […]
As Vichy police and German forces rounded up Jews in France, deporting them to Nazi concentration camps in Poland, thousands of desperate Jewish parents placed their children with non-Jewish families or Christian institutions, hoping they would be reunited with them after the war. Thirty thousand children survived the Nazi occupation. One-third of them, having been hidden, […]
The third season of Narcos, the taut crime thriller from Netflix, draws a viewer into its vortex of intrigue, skullduggery and violence. It’s set in Colombia, a South American country where drug cartels loom large and where corruption at the highest levels of government and law enforcement is an endemic and recurring problem. During the […]