Beyond the blindingly white Sikh temples and sleek highrises of Vancouver, voracious gangsters sporting hip clothes, spiffy shoes and menacing revolvers strut their stuff in broad daylight and in the darkness of night. In Deepa Mehta’s bouncy and buoyant new feature film, Beeba Boys, which opens in Canada on October 16, this violent nether world […]
Is the two-state solution dead? One might think so, judging by the latest violence convulsing the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Padraig O’Malley, a professor of peace and reconciliation at the University of Massachusetts, believes that the two-state solution has had its day in the sun and has been overtaken by events on the ground. […]
Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta wades into the quagmire of human emotion and conflict in her atmospheric, multilingual movies. Boldly taking on controversial issues, she sheds light on such topics as sectarian violence and same-sex love. A retrospective of her work, Heaven on Earth: The Films of Deepa Mehta, will be presented by the Toronto International […]
Speaking at yesterday’s funeral of Eitam and Naama Henkin, the young Israeli couple fatally shot by Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank on October 1, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin delivered a speech that seriously calls into question yet again Israel’s commitment to a two-state solution. In eulogizing the Henkins, Rivlin made a troubling reference to […]
Jews in the United States have embraced a liberal political ethos since the 18th century, claims an American scholar. This ethos, developed and nurtured by German Jews, was challenged by new immigrants from Eastern Europe after the great migrations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but their challenge was handily rebuffed, University of […]
Judging by the major speeches delivered at this week’s new session of the United Nations’ General Assembly in New York City, the raging civil war in Syria has displaced the Arab-Israeli conflict as the focal point of interest and concern among delegates. Syria concentrated the minds of world leaders primarily because the bloodshed there has […]
Opposition has arisen to a sensible proposal by American businessman/philanthropist Sigmund Rolat to build a memorial in Warsaw to honor Polish Christians who risked their lives to rescue Jews during the Holocaust. Rolat, a Holocaust survivor from Poland, hopes it can be built in Warsaw’s former Nazi ghetto, next to the new Museum of the […]
Zakaria Amara, the jihadist mastermind of a plot to terrorize Canada, has been stripped of his Canadian citizenship by the federal government. In announcing this decision on September 26, Defence Minister Jason Kenney said, “This man hated Canada so much, he planned on murdering hundreds of Canadians.” Canada should be commended for acting so decisively […]
As I strolled along Ocean Drive, in the heart of Miami Beach’s gentrified Art Deco Historic District, I was struck by the sheer beauty of its pastel-colored buildings. They’re in South Beach, the first neighborhood in Miami Beach to be developed. Stretching for 18 blocks, the district is listed in the U.S. National Register of […]
There are 50,000 wild horses, or mustangs, in the western United States. Originally brought to America by the Spanish conquistadors 500 years ago, they roamed freely for centuries. But due to the scarcity of publicly-owned grazing lands in states like Nevada and Utah, where most of them are found, these noble creatures are now kept […]