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, […]
Author: Sheldon Kirshner
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Toronto Jewish Film Festival (1)
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 […]
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The Face of Love Is Beautifully Crafted
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 […]
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The Oldest Hatred
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 […]
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Erfurt — A Picture Book of German History
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 […]
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Happy 100, David
My father, David Kirshner, does not appreciate publicity, though he is increasingly fond of talking about his past as a soldier in the Polish army and a Holocaust survivor who endured the rigors of the Lodz ghetto and the horror of Auschwitz extermination camp. I realize that this short essay may upset or anger him. […]
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A Dark Day For Hungary
In a disturbing development which should set off alarm bells in Europe, nearly one million Hungarians voted for Jobbik, The Movement for a Better Hungary, in Hungary’s April 6 national election. Twenty percent of voters cast their ballots for Jobbik, making it the second largest bloc in parliament. Responding to Jobbik’s electoral success, the president […]
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Trouble in Paradise
Hasn’t nearly everyone, at one time or other, been seized by a fleeting desire to flee civilization and find peace and contentment on an uninhabited tropical island? Friedrich Ritter and Dore Strauch, residents of Berlin, were two such dreamers. In July 1929, they set sail from Amsterdam, bound for the Galapagos Islands, which the British […]
Moshe Yaalon, Israel’s hawkish defence minister, needs a lesson or two in diplomacy, if not common sense. In the past few weeks, Yaalon, one of the most senior officials in the Israeli government, has made disparaging comments about Israel’s chief ally and benefactor, the United States. Yaalon fired off his first fusillade recently when he […]