The latest edition of Outlook magazine, dated Spring 2016, arrived in my mailbox on June 6, and much to my surprise, a headline at the bottom of the catchy cover blared, “Farewell Issue.” I needn’t have been surprised. Outlook, which billed itself as Canada’s only progressive Jewish magazine and which I read for some 30 […]
Author: Sheldon Kirshner
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Operation Thunderbolt: Israel’s Entebbe Raid
It was a week that concentrated minds. On June 27, 1976, a band of Palestinian and German terrorists hijacked Air France flight 139 en route from Tel Aviv to Paris via Athens. After a brief stopover in Benghazi, Libya, the hijackers diverted the plane to Entebbe, Uganda. The Israeli government, led by Prime Minister Yitzhak […]
Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir has a point. The Arab peace initiative, proposed by Saudi Arabia in 2002, endorsed by the Arab League shortly afterwards and revised a few years later, is the best way forward to resolve the protracted Arab-Israeli conflict. On June 3, in Paris, Jubeir declared that the Arab League peace […]
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The Remote Oases Of Egypt’s Western Desert
Egypt is synonymous with the pyramids, the tombs of the pharoahs, the ruins of ancient temples and the artifacts of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. But even discerning travellers often overlook one of Egypt’s most unforgettable attractions — the remote oases of the Western Desert, the eastern extension of the Sahara Desert. Far from Egypt’s […]
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Holland Sets An Example
In a precedent-setting decision which may yet have ramifications in parts of Europe with a significant Muslim population, Holland’s Ministry of Education recently rejected a request by a Muslim school in The Hague to open a branch in Amsterdam. The undersecretary of the ministry, Sander Dekker, cited Islamic radicalization within the Association of Islamic Studies […]
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The Japanese Diplomat Who Saved Jews
Japanese diplomat Chiune (Senpo) Sugihara was at the right place at the right time as far as 2,139 Jews and their current 40,000 descendants are concerned. Sugihara was Japan’s consul in Kaunas, Lithuania, from 1939 to 1940. His task was to gather intelligence on the Soviet Union, Japan’s nemesis. He did that assiduously, to the […]
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A Cinematic Portrait Of Hannah Arendt
Ada Ushpiz’s biopic, Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt, takes a sweeping look at the life and ideas of a controversial philosopher. Scheduled to be screened at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto from June 10-16, this thoughtful two-hour film portrays Arendt as an independent thinker who was neither a classic liberal nor […]
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Leaving The Jewish Fold
There has always been a small minority of Jews who regarded Judaism as a burden to be jettisoned. Such Jews usually resolved their problem by means of complete assimilation. This invariably meant conversion to another religion, marriage to a spouse of a different faith or flight into exclusively non-Jewish circles. Over the centuries, this pattern […]
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My Yiddishe Mama
Genya Kirshner, my beloved mother, ended her long and arduous journey on Friday, May 27 at about 1:30 p.m. on a hospital bed in Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada. She was 100, five months short of her 101st birthday. As my old friend Henry Srebrnik wrote today, I was fortunate to have had her for so […]
Israeli opposition leader Isaac Herzog was right to mock Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent assertion that he’s ready to take “brave steps” to achieve peace with the Palestinians. Netanyahu made this claim in a speech to the Knesset on the eve of appointing Avigdor Liberman, a hawk, as Israel’s new defence minister. Commenting on this […]