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 […]
Israel has mounted a serious diplomatic and public relations campaign to shape the contours of a future comprehensive agreement on Iran’s controversial nuclear program. Having lost the battle to toughen the interim accord — which was signed on Nov. 24 in Geneva and is widely seen as a step in the right direction to resolve […]
A bare microphone in a dimly-lit nightclub gives way to a young, curly-haired folk singer named Llewyn Davis sitting mournfully on a stool. Strumming his guitar, and looking quite rumpled, he belts out a soulful song, the first plaintive line of which is, “Hang me, oh hang me, I’ll be dead and gone.” It’s 1961 and […]
Istanbul can be likened to a Turkish delight, the popular candy that Turks and foreigners alike find so hard to resist. Bite into it and you’re hooked. Istanbul, once known as Constantinople, has drawn tourists since time immemorial. Touring it in the 12th century, the traveller Benjamin of Tudela was stunned by its sheer vitality. […]
Udo Klausa regarded himself as a “decent” Nazi. From 1940 to 1942, he was the principal civilian administrator of Bedzin, a mid-sized town in Poland that, in September 1939, was the scene of one of the very first Nazi atrocities against Jews. Klausa was not at his post in Bedzin when these crimes were committed, but […]
On my last visit to Egypt 14 years ago, I could sense that the Jewish community was already a relic of history. Doomed by the Arab-Israeli conflict, in which Egypt was deeply enmeshed by virtue of its pan-Arab foreign policy and its four wars with Israel, Egyptian Jews became the scapegoats of regional politics. The […]
Nicholas Winton, 104 today, is a hero in the deepest sense of the word. On the eve of World War II, he saved 669 Czech and Slovak Jewish children, who would have been murdered had they remained behind in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Winton, a British stockbroker, facilitated their escape to Britain within the framework of the […]