Waitstill and Martha Sharp were relief workers from the United States who risked their lives to help victims of Nazism. Recruited by the American Unitarian Association, they rescued hundreds of Jews and Christian anti-Nazis from the jaws of death. Their selflessness, dedication and courage, the stuff of legend, is recounted in Defying the Nazis: The […]
Skepticism is the order of the day following an agreement between the United States and Russia to reduce the scale of violence in Syria’s five-year-old civil war and to coordinate American and Russian air attacks on Islamic State and other jihadist groups in Syria. The complex accord, brokered in Geneva on September 9 by U.S. […]
Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s rarely at a loss for words, has come up with a new cynical twist on Israel’s nearly 50-year occupation of the West Bank. In a video message posted on his Facebook page on September 9, the Israeli prime minister rashly equated the removal of Jewish settlers from the West Bank with the spectre […]
When I was five or six years old, my mother — an immigrant from postwar Poland whose appreciation of nature seemed boundless — introduced me to the glories of Montreal’s great urban forest, Mount Royal Park, which is still the most dominant landmark in a city filled with stately landmarks. My love affair with this […]
In the summer of 1979, I stood on a rocky, wind-swept cliff in Samaria several hundred metres above sea level. Beneath, in a narrow valley, lay the historic Palestinian town of Nablus. Behind me were an assortment of caravans, all of which were inhabited by the Jewish settlers of Elon Moreh, a brand new outpost […]
Israel is a flourishing democracy, a nation usually governed by the rule of law. I add the caveat “usually” because perfection is not a quality that can be ascribed to any country, including Israel, in this very imperfect world. Case in point: Sixty eight years ago, as the first Arab-Israeli war raged, the Palestinian residents […]
The summer Olympic Games of 1936 in Berlin set a precedent for future Olympics. In terms of packaging and presentation, they would be a vehicle for slick propaganda — a projection of German national pride and glory. Daniel Kontur’s 44-minute documentary, Hitler’s Olympics, which is now available on the Netflix streaming service, deftly explores this […]
On Sunday, March 1, 1953, Joseph Stalin’s longtime maid, Matryona Petrovna, found him lying on the floor in his library. He was unconscious and his night clothes were drenched in urine. The supreme leader of the Soviet Union had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and was at death’s door. Petrovna quickly alerted his guards, who promptly […]
Terrorism is the scourge of our times. We live in a dangerous and uncertain epoch, when jihadists rake restaurants with gunfire, suicide bombers detonate explosive vests and terrorists plant bombs aboard airplanes. Since the horrific events of September 11, 2001, when 19 Arabs commandeered three American commercial airliners and ruthlessly crashed them into the World Trade […]
In his prime, from the late 1960s to the opening years of the 21st century, Seymour (Sy) Hersh was one of the great investigative reporters of our times. A dogged journalist with a nose for news, he uncovered the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, which earned him the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, […]