The launch of a glossy coffee table book on Jewish-Ukrainian relations provided its co-authors with an opportunity to discuss their complicated topic. At a symposium earlier this month at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern — a professor of Jewish Studies at Northwestern University — and Paul Robert Magocsi — the […]
The ultra-Orthodox Jews of Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighborhood are an island onto themselves. Fanatically observant and utterly disdainful of Israeli secular society, they’re intensely insular and obsessively self-absorbed. To the vast majority of Israelis, these pre-modern Jews are virtually strangers. They may as well be Martians, but they’re Israelis. Shtisel, an Israeli television drama which […]
Deep in the wilds of Mongolia, nomads practice the art of eagle hunting. By tradition, it’s a man’s sport in this hierarchical society. So when a 13-year-old girl sets her sights on following in their footsteps, the grizzled men in her tight-knit community are surprised and even aghast by her ambition. This is the theme […]
One of the longest-simmering conflicts of our time, the Arab-Israeli dispute, has been stubbornly immune to resolution. It has ground on for more than a century, claiming innumerable lives and wasting scarce resources. Stripped to its barest essentials, it pits Zionism against Palestinian nationalism. The piecemeal return of Jews to their ancestral homeland, spurred by […]
At a moment when jihadism is on the rise and Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians has reached a nadir, Princeton University Press’ encyclopedic volume, A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations, is a welcome addition to our fount of knowledge. More than 1,100 pages in length, and lavishly illustrated, this authoritative tome should be required reading for […]
I was fortunate enough to visit Vancouver earlier this month, but there was a problem: I had less than 24 hours to explore this gorgeous city on Canada’s west coast. Unlike my friends who’d recently bought a lovely little condo through Eddie Yan, my time was very limited. What could I possibly see in so […]
Should comedians avoid crossing social and political red lines? Are they bound by society’s taboos? These are the overlapping questions implicitly posed by Ferne Pearlstein in The Last Laugh, a probing documentary that examines the Holocaust from a completely different point of view. Pearlstein’s movie, which will be screened by the Toronto Jewish Film Festival […]
Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden, adapted from Sarah Waters’ bestseller, Fingersmith, is a highly stylized erotic thriller which takes place in Japanese-occupied Korea in the 1930s. Scheduled to open in Canada on October 28, this two-and-a-half hour Korean and Japanese-language film is at once prim and carnal, unfolding in an opulent mansion set deep in a forest. With one striking exception, the […]
On April 20, 1889, at 6:30 p.m., Klara Polzl gave birth to a boy in Braunau am Inn, a town in Austria adjacent to the German border. The boy’s name is inscribed in crabbed letters in a mouldering registry kept behind lock and key in St. Stephen, Braunau’s preeminent Roman Catholic church. A Gothic pile whose spire […]
The face of intermarriage in the United States has changed significantly since the Supreme Court, in the 1967 landmark Loving v. Virginia case, ruled that race-based legal restrictions on marriage are unconstitutional. Since then, mixed marriages between Americans of different racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds have risen dramatically, especially in ten states: California, Texas, New […]