Dieudonne M’Bala M’Bala, the French comedian known as Dieudonne, likes to crack “anti-system” jokes that infuriate the politically correct in France. But all too often, his barbed humor veers into antisemitic rants and denigrations of the Holocaust, while the hand gesture he invented, the quenelle, is little more than an inverted Nazi salute intended to offend […]
Author: Sheldon Kirshner
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Lawrence of Arabia, the Movie, Revisited
I normally don’t watch a movie, however good, more than once. But when I read that Peter O’Toole had died, I decided to revisit Lawrence of Arabia, David Lean’s three-hour epic in which O’Toole played the lead role. The recipient of seven Academy Awards, including best picture, Lawrence of Arabia is one of those rare […]
Nearly 20 years after a suicide bomber driving a van detonated a powerful bomb in front of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the worst antisemitic crime since the Holocaust in terms of casualties, it has yet to be solved. The blast, coming shortly on the heels of the bombing of Israel’s […]
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Turkey’s Unique Museum
It’s a one-of-a-kind museum, Turkey’s first and only one devoted exclusively to all things Jewish. Opened 13 years ago to mark the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Spanish Jews to the Ottoman Empire, the Jewish Museum in Istanbul is a unique institution in Turkey. More than a decade on, the museum’s focus is still […]
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 […]
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Charles Dickens’ Invisible Woman
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, […]
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A Journalistic Trust Betrayed
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 […]
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The Wolf of Wall Street
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 […]
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Footprints in Time (II)
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 […]