If it were left to some Israeli generals, Israel and the Palestinians would be closer to bridging their differences and reaching a two-state solution, says American journalist J.J. Goldberg, the former editor-in-chief of the Forward, a major Jewish newspaper and website in the United States. Suggesting they’re far more pragmatic and realistic than Israeli Prime […]
Author: Sheldon Kirshner
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Narcos — A Scintillating Series
The much anticipated second season of Narcos, the taut crime thriller set in Colombia, is now available on the Netflix streaming service. In a word, it’s scintillating. It lives up to expectations. Focusing on the real-life narco-terrorist Pablo Escobar and the Medellin drug cartel he controlled with an iron fist, Narcos has all the elements of […]
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Defying The Nazis
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 […]
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A New Effort To Impose Peace On Syria
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. […]
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Netanyahu’s Disingenuous Exercise
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 […]
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Mount Royal — Montreal’s Majestic Landmark
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 […]
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The Right Of Return
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 […]
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Hitler’s Olympics
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 […]
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The Last Days Of Stalin
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 […]