John Boehner, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, disengenuously claims he did not commit a grave breach of protocol by inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint meeting of Congress without first gaining advance White House clearance. “I don’t believe I’m poking anyone in the eye,” he said recently. If […]
Thanks to a gift from the Archive of Modern Conflict, the Art Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto, possesses the world’s largest collection of photographs from the Lodz ghetto, the last one in German-occupied Poland to be liquidated by the Nazis. Taken by Henryk Ross (1910-1991), one of the few survivors, they offer a rare and […]
Barbara Stanwyck (1907-1990) was one of Hollywood’s most glamorous actors. Working steadily from the 1930s until the 1950s, she was a star in a constellation of starlets, having been nominated for four Academy Awards between 1937 and 1948. She invariably portrayed tough, feisty, resourceful women who would not be held back by social or economic […]
Madeleine Green’s The Backward Class imparts an inspirational message: hope springs eternal. An empathetic documentary about a small group of teens from India’s “untouchable” caste who strive for upward mobility through education, it opens on Friday, Feb. 6 at the Bloor Hot Doc Cinema. Green’s subjects are 12th grade students at the Shanti Bhavan School in […]
As the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was marked earlier this week, Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, issued a dire warning. Antisemitism, he declared, is on the upswing. Speaking about three weeks after a Muslim jihadist killed four Jews in a kosher supermarket in Paris, Lauder said, “For a […]
Seventy years ago today, January 27, the Red Army liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi concentration camp in southern Poland. Seven decades on, it remains an enduring and searing symbol of unimaginable cruelty and depravity. At the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum on the grounds of the camp, where 1.1 million people perished, the full magnitude of Nazi crimes […]
It’s not necessarily true that the West is engaged in a “clash of civilizations” with the Islamic world, but it’s certainly true that radical Islam is at war with the West. As Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in the wake of the terrorist attack on the editorial offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in […]
Gabe Polsky’s bracing documentary, Red Army, which opens in Canada on Jan. 30, is about a great hockey dynasty, a legendary player and the rivalry between two superpowers. The object of his movie, the Red Army ice hockey team of the 1980s, was one of the finest in the history of the game, winning a […]
Alan Turing, the math genius who spearheaded Britain’s successful wartime campaign to crack Germany’s supposedly unbreakable Enigma code, is the tragic hero of The Imitation Game, ably directed by Morten Tyldum from a workmanlike script by Graham Moore. Turing, portrayed to perfection by Benedict Cumberbatch, was an arrogant eccentric who beat the Germans at their […]
The sordid Alberto Nisman affair currently unfolding in Argentina has all the ingredients of a taut Hollywood thriller: a terrorist attack that levels a building in the heart of Buenos Aires and kills scores of Jews, an Argentinian government investigation that peters out under suspicious circumstances, and the cold-blooded, mysterious murder of a fearless special […]