Bernard Lewis, 98, is one of the greatest historians of the Middle East. Formerly a professor of Middle Eastern history at the School of Oriental and African Studies and Princeton University, he has produced a torrent of well-regarded books, from The Arabs in History and The Emergence of Modern Turkey to What Went Wrong? and […]
As comedies go, Felix Herngren’s The 100-Year-Old-Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared is fantastical and original. Set mainly in Sweden, but also playing out against the backdrop of foreign locales like Djibouti, Spain and Bali, this is a quirky film of imagination and verve adapted from Jonas Jonasson’s best-selling novel, which has been published […]
Dr. Richard Horton, editor of the British medical journal The Lancet, flew to Israel a few days ago to make amends for an egregious lapse of judgment. In July, he published An Open Letter for the People of Gaza, a shamefully biased piece about the recent war in the Gaza Strip accusing Israel of committing […]
Canada, belatedly, is waking up to the homegrown jihadist threat. Eight years have elapsed since the “Toronto 18” terror plot in southern Ontario was uncovered by police, yet Canada has only recently begun to treat the problem with the gravity it deserves. A few days ago, the Canadian government classified Islamic State as a terrorist […]
On Feb. 12, 1942, the assistant superintendent of the Palestine Police Force in Tel Aviv, Geoffrey Morton, burst into a small flat on Mizrachi Bet Street and cornered Avraham (Yair) Stern, a Polish-born fugitive whose militant Zionist group had launched a war of liberation against British colonial rule in Palestine. Within minutes, if not seconds, […]
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in an upbeat mood as he turned up at a press conference in New York City on September 28. One of the topics at hand was his upcoming meeting with India’s newly elected prime minister, Narendra Modi, who’s considered friendly toward Israel. “We are very excited by the prospects of […]
At his show trial in Jerusalem in 1961, Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann coyly described himself as “just a small cog” in Adolf Hitler’s extermination machine. The German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt lent credence to this warped view, claiming in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, published a year after his execution in […]
Tzipi Livni, Israel’s lead negotiator at the failed peace talks with the Palestinian Authority, has issued a warning that Israel should heed. Livni, the minister of justice in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government, said that Israel has two choices: “Either we resume negotiations with the Palestinians to reach a permanent agreement, winning the world’s […]
The ghost of legendary Jewish entrepreneur David Sassoon lingers over Mumbai, India’s commercial center. One hundred and fifty years after his death, several landmarks and synagogues in this pulsating, cosmopolitan city bear either his family name or owe their existence to his philanthropy. Sassoon (1792-1864), the scion of a distinguished Sephardi clan from Iraq, settled […]
The latest phase in the global armed struggle against Islamic State, an Al Qaeda breakaway organization that has wreaked havoc in the Middle East, has begun with a flash of shock and awe. More than a month after bombing Islamic State strongholds in northern Iraq, the United States has opened a new front in the […]