To say that the late Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera is a divisive and polarizing figure in contemporary Ukraine would be to understate the case. More than five decades after his assassination in West Germany, allegedly at the hands of KGB agents, he inspires both adulation and loathing. Bandera’s ambivalent legacy was on martial display a few […]
Charles Dickens, the great Victorian novelist, was admired and adored by the British public. Through his cast of vivid and eccentric characters, Dickens’ readers were pretty much familiar with his ideas, values and ideals. But Dickens had a secret, and her name was Ellen (Nelly) Ternan. An actress, Ternan was 18 when she met Dickens, […]
Journalism is based on trust. Without it, journalists lose their credibility, if not their readers. Jayson Blair, a talented and driven reporter on the staff of The New York Times, betrayed that trust repeatedly, disgracing himself and besmirching the renowned daily newspaper that published his fabricated and plagiarized stories. The Blair scandal, the biggest to […]
Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is a romp into a Roman circus of excess. The three-hour film, a biting and hugely entertaining satire on the perils of unregulated capitalism and the pitfalls of greedy materialism, is rife with sex, drugs, immorality, conspicuous consumption and profane language. Is it a trenchant commentary on the […]
They died in 2013, leaving a lasting legacy… Saul Kagan, 91, was the founding director of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which was established in 1951 by major Jewish organizations to seek reparations from Germany for the Nazi genocide during World War II. Thanks to Kagan, born in Lithuania, 600,000 Holocaust survivors […]
In the face of deep skepticism from both sides, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry claims that Israel and the Palestinian Authority have made considerable headway since the resumption of bilateral peace talks five months ago. “I believe we are closer than we have been in years to bringing the peace and prosperity that all […]
To Israel’s discredit, Yuli Edelstein, the Speaker of parliament, has formally rejected a request from Christian Arab parliamentarian Hanna Swaid to place a Christmas tree in a prominent place in the Knesset. “I do not believe it appropriate to order the erection of a Christmas tree as you requested,” wrote Edelstein on Dec. 26, […]
The myth persists that Jews do not excel in sports. Why this myth lingers on is beyond understanding. It’s true that Jewish mothers cajole their children to become doctors, lawyers, dentists and accountants rather than baseball or hockey players. But it’s patently untrue that young Jewish men and women are averse to excelling in sports. […]
It would appear that the American Studies Association is striving to be more Catholic than the pope himself, so to speak. The president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, has publicly rejected a boycott of Israel per se, while supporting a boycott of products made in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. Yet a […]
Greenland, the world’s largest island, is an ice-bound, treeless expanse of raw grandeur and timeless beauty. Although it has been inhabited for about 1,000 years, it’s still sparsely populated, and much of its vast, forbidding terrain remains unexplored. In Expedition to the End of the World, a Danish documentary now playing at the Bloor Hot […]