Universities are supposed to be havens of civilized discourse where rationality, civility and tolerance prevail, but of late, this hallowed tradition has taken a battering in Britain and the United States. Consider these unsettling developments: Prior to her recent election as president of Britain’s National Union of Students, Malia Bouattia made comments that can only […]
Among the movies to be presented at this year’s Toronto Jewish Film Festival, running from May 5-15, are two films focusing on Israel and an Italian documentary about the former ghetto in Venice. Danae Elon, born in Jerusalem in 1970, left Israel in 1990 and spent the next two decades in New York City, […]
The Jewish Film Festival, which runs from May 5-15 in Toronto, is presenting biopics about the scientist Albert Einstein, the 19th century photographer Solomon Nunes Carvalho and the French politician Leon Blum. Albert Einstein and his wife, Elsa, were invited to Palestine by the Zionist movement in 1923. Noa Ben Hagai’s fascinating film, Einstein […]
He witnessed degradation, starvation and death in the Warsaw ghetto. He clandestinely visited a Nazi transit camp. He warned Western democracies that Jews in Poland were being systematically murdered by the Nazis. He was Jan Karski, the courageous courier from the Polish government-in-exile. The newest documentary about this heroic Polish figure, Karski & The Lords […]
The Toronto Jewish Film Festival runs from May 5-15 this year. On April 18, its lineup was announced at a press conference. The 24th edition is presenting four world premieres and 31 Canadian premieres. Twelve of the films will be seen in Toronto for the first time. Three previews: Edward G. Robinson virtually invented the celluloid […]
An obscure village in a remote corner of southeast Poland, the kind you can drive through in seconds, was in the spotlight recently. On March 17, an array of personalities descended on Markowa, in Poland’s Podkarpacie district, for the official opening of The Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jews in World War II. The ceremony, […]
Tellingly enough, neither the Israeli government nor Austria’s embassy in Tel Aviv were involved in planning Heinz-Christian Strache’s visit to Israel, which took place a few days ago and was organized by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party. One can understand why Strache, the leader of the far-right, xenophobic Austrian Freedom Party, is officially shunned […]
Rzeszow, the largest city in southeastern Poland, is a paradigm for inconsolable loss. Like scores of Polish towns, cities and villages where Jews were demonized, marginalized and murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust, Rzeszow lost an important part of its multicultural heritage with the destruction of its substantial Jewish community. On the eve of […]
When I visited Warsaw in the summer of 2009, the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, a monumental $100 million project, was still a figment of the imagination of its founders and still in the planning stages. When I returned to Poland last month, Warsaw’s newest museum had been opened for more than […]
Appropriately enough, the sky was gray and ominous on my first visit to Majdanek, the former Nazi concentration camp in eastern Poland. Adjacent to the city of Lublin, Majdanek is an eerie tableau of wooden barracks, guard towers, a gas chamber, a crematorium with an uncommonly high chimney and barbed wire fences. Even on a […]