Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) was the national poet of the Palestinians, a man whose lyrical poetry distilled the essence of loss and exemplified the dream of statehood. Ibtisam Mara’ana Menuhin’s empathetic biopic, Write Down, I Am An Arab, will be screened at the Canadian International Documentary Festival (Hot Docs) in Toronto on April 27, April 29 […]
This year’s edition of the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, a major event in the city’s cultural agenda, runs from May 1-11 and lives up to expectations, judging by the roster and quality of the movies. A sampler: If you’ve ever visited the Lower East Side in New York City, you may have come upon a […]
A portrait of the Russian novelist Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) adorned the office of Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916), the renowned Yiddish writer. According to Amelia Glaser, a professor of Russian and comparative literature at the University of California in San Diego, Sholem Aleichem’s attachment to Gogol was anything but surprising. Sholem Aleichem, whose real name was Sholem […]
Homs is one of the flashpoints of the civil war in Syria, which is tearing apart the country. Peaceful protests in Homs, north of Damascus, were met with a brutal response by government forces, forcing rebels to take up arms in a bitter struggle that has degenerated into a military stalemate symptomatic of the war […]
Ravi Patel, 29, is a bachelor, a status his traditional Indo-American parents can no longer abide. Strong believers in arranged marriages, they’re certain they can find their son a suitable Indian girl, someone who shares his values and Hindu religion. Bachelorhood, they assert, is not for a nice Indian boy. Ravi Patel Meet the Patels, […]
The Toronto Jewish Film Festival, the finest cultural event in the city’s Jewish calendar, gets under way on May 1 and runs until May 11. As usual, there are films for every conceivable taste. A sampler: Bernard Natan was one of the founders of the modern film industry in France. A Rumanian Jew whose original […]
Are there second chances in romance? Arie Posen’s beautifully-crafted film, The Face of Love, starring Annette Bening and Ed Harris, delves into that complex and tantalizing question with the persistence and ardour of a long-denied lover. Its premise seems simple-minded at first glance. Nikki (Bening), an attractive widow in her mid-50s still grieving over the […]
Shortly after World War II, the German philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno wrote in their book, The Dialectics of the Enlightenment, that antisemitism was no longer possible after the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust. Six decades on, their thesis appears incredibly foolishly and profoundly naive. What were they thinking? After Auschwitz, antisemitism never vanished, […]
Let’s be realistic. The American-brokered Middle East peace talks, revived late last July by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry amid an aura of cautious optimism, are as good as dead, having crumbled more than three weeks before the April 29 expiry date. The talks had been faltering long before they broke down at […]
The novelist Arnold Zweig succinctly described the old quarter of Erfurt, a city in eastern Germany, as “a picture book of German history.” It was a fair assessment. Martin Luther, the theologian whose ideas gave rise to Lutheranism, studied and worked here as a monk in the 16th century. The Kramerbrucke, the longest covered bridge […]