The good name of McGill University, a world-class institution in Montreal, is being ruthlessly and shamelessly besmirched by a cabal of narrow-minded, self-absorbed and myopic ideologues subverting the hallowed principles of fair-minded journalism and free speech. McGill’s student newspaper, The McGill Daily, recently announced it will not publish articles which “promote a Zionist worldview, or […]
Author: Sheldon Kirshner
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Nazi Death Squads
With the launch of Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Holocaust entered a new and much more deadly phase. As the German army conquered vast swaths of territory, coming perilously close to capturing Moscow, mobile killing squads, known as Einsatzgruppen, were set loose to murder communist officials and […]
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Jews In Arab Lands Before Israel
The majority of Arabs regard Jews as enemies because much of the scholarship about pre-1948 Muslim-Jewish relations is refracted through the lens of the Arab-Israeli conflict, says an American scholar who specializes in the topic. Typically, such Arabs have never met a Jew, nor can they imagine a time when Jews were an indigenous and […]
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Iran Versus The Arabs
Shortly before Ban Ki-moon stepped down as secretary-general of the United Nations recently, he received a remarkably blunt and bitter letter from the UN ambassadors of eleven Arab countries. The envoys — representing the predominantly Sunni Muslim nations of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Yemen, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates […]
I spent my last few hours in Vancouver recently in Granville Island Market, one of the city’s greatest attractions, and I enjoyed every bit of it. I’ve always been attracted to food markets. During my travels abroad, I’ve visited markets in Thailand, Laos, China, Vietnam, Brazil, Russia, Ukraine, France, Morocco and Israel, among other countries. […]
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Manchester By The Sea
A heavy pall hangs over Kenneth Lonergan’s serious-minded movie, Manchester By The Sea, which opens in Canadian theaters on November 25. A contemporary family drama set mainly in a New England fishing town, it’s invariably earnest. It’s carried on the capable shoulders of Casey Affleck, who plays Lee Chandler, a janitor who’s summoned back to his […]
By a margin of 58-50, the Knesset on November 16 took the first step to retroactively legalize Jewish settlements and outposts in the West Bank built on privately owned Palestinian lands. The proposed legislation, known as the Regulation Bill, is the brainchild of Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked and Education Minister Naftali Bennett, leaders of the […]
President -elect Donald Trump announced his first top-level appointments on November 12, three days after routing Hillary Clinton in the U.S. presidential election. He chose Reince Priebus, the head of the Republican National Committee, as his chief of staff, and Stephen Bannon, his campaign manager, as his senior counsellor and chief strategist. Bannon’s appointment was […]
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The Spectacular Failure of Birobidzhan
Masha Gessen does not mince words. Birobidzhan, set aside by the Soviet Union in the late 1920s as a national homeland for Jews, was “perhaps the worst good idea ever.” She develops this argument in an absorbing book, Where the Jews Aren’t: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region (Nextbook) For a […]
Sixty years ago last month, Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary and crushed a popular anti-communist revolution. To mark the uprising, the Hungarian consulate in Toronto is presenting the Freedom First — Hungary 1956 Film Festival at TIFF’s Bell Lightbox from November 17-20. Admission is free. One of the movies on tap, Istvan Szabo’s Sunshine (1999), starring […]