Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi were not destined to meet, bond, cook together and create a budding restaurant empire. Ottolenghi and Tamimi, both born in Jerusalem in 1968, a few kilometres from each other, were raised in separate societies that could accurately be described as two solitudes. An Israeli Jew, Ottolenghi was from western […]
Author: Sheldon Kirshner
The grainy and seemingly innocuous photograph on the cover of Jan Tomasz Gross’ disturbing book, Golden Harvest, published by Oxford University Press, shows a group of Polish peasants standing together in a group. One of them, a woman, holds a shovel. The photograph in question, which first appeared in Poland’s largest newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, on […]
Three years after its authoritarian government fell in a violent popular uprising aided and abetted by foreign intervention, Libya has descended into a state of anarchy that bodes ill for its future as a united nation. Torn by tribal rivalries, infighting among competing armed militias and a spate of assassinations and kidnappings, and weakened by the […]
I admit it: I’m addicted to House of Cards, Netflix’s polished political drama. Now in its second season, this is American television as it should be rather than the dismal wasteland it so often tends to be. I came late to House of Cards, which is smart, literate and brimming with surprising and even shocking […]
I‘ve visited Israel numerous times since the summer of 1967, both in a private and professional capacity. As a wag once quipped, Israel has too much history and not enough geography, which is precisely why it’s so interesting and accessible Even seasoned travellers who know what the Jewish state has to offer usually discover something […]
The Human Rights Watch Film Festival, an annual fixture of the Toronto International Film Festival, opens at the TIFF Lightbox on Feb. 27 with The Square and closes on March 6 with Highway of Tears. In all, eight movies will be screened. Jehane Noujaim’s The Square, which is available on Netflix, charts the zig-zag course of […]
On Feb.7, the Spanish government announced it will offer citizenship to Sephardi Jews around the world whose ancestors were expelled from Spain during the Inquisition. Spain’s justice minister, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardon, disclosed that legislation enshrining this historic decision will be passed within months, if not weeks. More than 500 years after tens of thousands of Jews […]
The embattled president of Syria, Bashar Assad, claims the uprising destroying his nation is really an existential battle between the forces of secular nationalism and global jihadism. He has a point. The rebellion, which broke out three years ago come March, began as a peaceful protest movement demanding an end to arbitrary one-party Baathist rule, […]
Laura Z. Hobson’s claim to fame is Gentleman’s Agreement, a disturbing novel about antisemitism in postwar America. Serialized in Cosmopolitan in 1946 and published in 1947 in book form, it was a blockbuster, selling 1.6 million copies. Adapted for the screen by the playwright Moss Hart and directed by Elia Kazan, it starred Gregory Peck […]
Hany Abu-Assad’s taut thriller, Omar, gives a viewer a bird’s eye view of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, now in its 47th year, and the Palestinians’ resistance to it. An Academy Award nominee for best foreign picture, Omar unfolds in a Palestinian village that has been divided by a high, ugly concrete wall. Part […]