Categories
Middle East

Russia Pays A Price for Intervention In Syria

In one of its biggest gambles in decades, Russia has plunged headlong into the raging civil war in Syria. The price it is paying for its armed intervention is already staggering and may yet grow worse. On September 30, the Russian Air Force began bombing rebel strongholds in western Syria, its planes taking off from […]

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Travel

Marseille Exudes A Mediterranean Ambience

I arrived in Marseille, the atmospheric port in southern France, on a sleek high-speed train from Paris, covering a distance of some 600 kilometres in three hours. Paris in late autumn was typically cloudy and cold. But in Marseille, the weather was gloriously temperate, sunny and almost balmy. As I strolled around the Old Port, […]

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Arts

Fauda — A Crackling Israeli TV Series

If you liked Homeland, you’ll most likely enjoy Fauda. Homeland, now into its fifth season in the United States, was adapted from an Israeli series. Blending post-9/11 national security issues with human interest stories, it was and is immensely popular. Fauda, premiered last February on Israeli television, focuses on Israel’s deadly confrontation with Hamas, the Palestinian […]

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Middle East

Netanyahu And Obama Meet To Mend Fences

Benjamin Netanyahu was on his best behaviour when he met Barack Obama on a fence-mending mission at the White House on November 9. It was an important meeting, given the United States’ status as Israel’s chief ally and benefactor. Netanyahu, who last met Obama more than a year ago, had his work cut out for […]

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Arts

Iwo Jima: From Combat To Comrades

The battle of Iwo Jima, one of the fiercest of World War II, raged from February 19 to March 26, 1945, claiming the lives of 28,000 Japanese and American soldiers and leaving a legacy of post-traumatic stress among some of the survivors. But since 1995, Iwo Jima has been the world’s only battlefield where former […]

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Jewish Affairs

A Broken Relationship In France

The murderous attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris last January by a French Muslim extremist called attention to a wider problem — the gradual deterioration of relations between Jews and Muslims in France since the 1967 Six Day War. Until this deadly incident, mutual hostility had not usually been the norm in Jewish-Muslim relations […]

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Jewish Affairs

The Red Army And The Holocaust

The Red Army liberated Nazi extermination camps and freed the greatest number of Holocaust survivors, but its unsurpassed record of liberation loomed as a taboo topic in the now-defunct Soviet Union until the late 1980s, three scholars told an academic forum in Toronto yesterday during Holocaust Education Week. The role played by the Soviet Union […]

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Jewish Affairs

American Antisemite

October 26, 2015 was a blessed day in the United States. Willis Allison Carto, the most influential American antisemitic propagandist of his generation, died, or should I say croaked. He was 89. By any measure, Carto had a greater impact on public opinion than all his vile contemporaries and predecessors, ranging from George Lincoln Rockwell […]

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Middle East

The Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin

I remember that day as clearly as yesterday. Twenty years ago on November 4, on a typically cool autumn afternoon in Toronto, I greeted my Israeli friends, Arie and Ida, at my front door with terrible news. They had been out shopping and hadn’t heard what had happened just hours earlier. Yitzhak Rabin, the prime […]

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Arts

Black Earth

The Holocaust has been explored and analyzed ad infinitum by historians. Is there really anything new to be learned? The short answer is yes, judging by Timothy Snyder’s masterful Black Earth: The Holocaust As History And Warning (Tim Duggan Books). Snyder, a Yale University professor whose last book was Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, identifies, […]