Jasmine French, an attractive and pretentious middle-aged woman with a taste for Hermes accessories, Chanel jackets and Louis Vuitton luggage, is down on her luck. Her husband, Hal, a shady businessman in the mould of Bernard Madoff, is serving a prison sentence for fraud and who knows what else. The federal government has seized their […]
Author: Sheldon Kirshner
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The Cruellest Conflict
World War II was not just another destructive conflict between warring nations, but a nationalist crusade on the part of Germany to acquire territory, attain hegemony, disseminate Nazi ideology and murder Jews on a massive industrial scale. When Germany attacked Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, touching off an international conflagration that dragged on for six […]
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An Eco Trip to Costa Rica
My younger daughter was due to start a new job and wanted a vacation before getting down to work. I decided to join her, and we agreed on Costa Rica, which turned out to be a wise choice. In less than a week, Lauren and I visited an active volcano, rode a horse to a […]
A little more than a month before his inauguration as president of the United States in January 1969, Richard Nixon dispatched William Scranton, the former Republican governor of Pennsylvania, to the Middle East on a fact-finding tour of five Arab nations and Israel. His mandate was to assess the current state of the Arab-Israeli conflict […]
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The Attack
The Attack is a most unusual movie, unfolding against the backdrop of a Palestinian suicide bombing in Israel and grappling with the complexities of its messy aftermath. Premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, and now playing in theatres in Canada and the United States, The Attack is unconventional because its main protagonists […]
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A Bite of the Big Apple
I wanted to “wake up in that city that doesn’t sleep,” to paraphrase Frank Sinatra in the song New York, New York. The opportunity to do so presented itself in mid-summer, when my wife Etti and I decided to spend several days in New York City. As a couple, we hadn’t been in the […]
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Footprints in time
They died in the last little while, leaving a lasting legacy … Robert Fogel, 86, a University of Chicago economist, shared the Nobel Prize in economic science in 1993 for his work in explaining the role of railways and slavery in the development of the American economy. His books on these topics, Railroads and American […]
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The Apostle of Islamic Radicalism
Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) was the apostle of modern Islamic fundamentalism, arguably the most influential advocate of jihad in the 20th century. Qutb, an Egyptian and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, influenced followers by virtue of his belief that the greatest threat to Islam originated not from European colonialism or Zionism but from corrupt, venal […]
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Hate Rhetoric in the Middle East
The vile rhetoric of antisemitism pervades the Muslim world. Malicious myths and unfounded assumptions about Jews have become all too commonplace. No where else in the world today are Jews so openly maligned and excoriated. Two examples will suffice. On the eve of leaving office, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in a brazen admission that […]
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The Accidental Nazi
Even within the loathsome Nazi hierarchy, Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich (1904-1942) was one of the most appalling figures. Hailed by Adolf Hitler as “one of the best National Socialists,” Heydrich was indeed an iconic villain. As head of the political and criminal police apparatus, as exemplified by the Gestapo and the SS, he was directly […]