Politicians tend to be very mindful and careful in public settings. Being on their best behavior, they strive for political correctness, avoiding comments or gestures that might be deemed offensive or inappropriate. Germany’s vice chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, a Social Democrat, dispensed with these weighty calculations during a recent election campaign event in Lower Saxony as about […]
Weimar, a pleasant city in the eastern state of Thuringia, is where the tangled and irreconcilable strands of Germany’s history meet abruptly. Although Weimar was the birthplace of the short-lived Weimar Republic, Thuringia was a bastion of the Nazi movement, having been the first state in Germany where two Nazi officials, Wilhelm Frick and Fritz […]
Islamic State, the jihadist organization which has cut a swath of death and destruction across the Middle East and Europe, fully exploits social media to recruit new recruits. Thousands of Muslims and Muslim converts from around the world have been brainwashed by its postings on the Internet. Having been seduced by its radical Islamic message, they’ve […]
I was disappointed, though not really surprised, by the news that the 19th century villa of Yechezkel Sasson, in central Baghdad, was recently demolished. Sasson, who was usually known as Sir Sassoon Eskell, was the scion of a distinguished Iraqi Jewish family and one of the founders of modern Iraq. Along with T.E. Lawrence, Gertrude […]
Ever since the ancient Olympic Games were revived in 1896 by Baron Pierre de Coubertin of France, they’ve been organized around the exemplary principles of mutual understanding, tolerance, friendship and fair play. As 11,000 athletes from around the world converged on Rio de Janeiro for this summer’s games, I gamely hoped that these hallowed principles […]
The place Israel occupies in the consciousness of the American Jewish community has, alas, become a contentious issue. It is not exactly what early Zionist ideologues had in mind when they dreamed of a Jewish state in Palestine, the ancestral home of the Jewish people. Dov Waxman, an American academic, advances this thesis in his […]
Sadly enough, Israel seems to be the only country in the world where a pre-modern Orthodox rabbinate, in collusion with the government, delegitimizes the Conservative and Reform streams of Judaism. It’s not only scandalous and shameful, but bound to widen the already growing rift between Israel and the Diaspora. In recent years, the government of […]
Zosa Szajkowski was one of the strangest, most tragic figures in the annals of academia. A devoted collector of French Judaica and a pioneer in the field of French Jewish history, he moonlighted as a thief, stealing priceless documents from state archives, synagogues and private Jewish libraries and selling them to institutions such as Columbia […]
Allegations by Israel that the manager of a Christian aid organization in the Gaza Strip funnelled millions of dollars to the military wing of Hamas are extremely serious. This flagrant misuse of charitable funds raises hard and uncomfortable questions whether World Vision — an international Christian aid group with headquarters in the United States and […]
The Green Party of Canada set a disturbing precedent at its biennial convention in Ottawa on August 7 when it voted to adopt the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) platform. Seven months after the Canadian parliament strongly condemned the BDS movement, the Greens became the first political party in Canada to embrace it. It’s a somber […]