It was a stunning, horrific and unprecedented event on a scale that will surely be burned into Israel’s consciousness. In the early hours of October 7, under the cover of a massive rocket barrage and less than a day after Israel marked the somber 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, hundreds […]
Israel’s fifth war in 25 years is the subject of Uri Kaufman’s masterful book, Eighteen Days In October: The Yom Kippur War And How It Created The Modern Middle East, published by St. Martin’s Press. Oddly enough, Kaufman is a real estate developer rather than a historian, but readers should not draw hasty and unwarranted […]
Time flies. Incredibly enough, 50 years have elapsed since the eruption of the Yom Kippur War. It broke out on October 6, 1973 and ended 18 days later when Israel, Egypt and Syria agreed to honor a ceasefire. I remember this war vividly, having lived in Israel during this tense and uncertain period, when I […]
If Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau thinks he can move on seamlessly now that House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota has been replaced, he is egregiously mistaken. On October 3, a Liberal Party member of Parliament who represents the Quebec riding of Hull, Greg Fergus, was chosen as Rota’s replacement. He is the first African […]
Several months before the United States entered World War II, following Japan’s destructive bombing raid on Pearl Harbor, the German-American director Ernst Lubitsch started production on a new feature film, To Be Or Not To Be. An unrelentingly dark satire on Nazi Germany recently broadcast on the Turner Classic Movies channel, it was released on […]
Avi Shlaim’s intriguing, ideologically-driven book, Three Worlds: Memoirs Of An Arab Jew (OneWorld), is a bitter-sweet autobiography of an accomplished Iraqi Jew who left his homeland under duress, an impassioned look back at Iraq’s lost Jewish community, and a stinging critique of Zionism and Israel. He acknowledges that this is a “revisionist tract,” a “challenge […]
Four million Jews were murdered in German extermination camps or succumbed to hunger and disease in Nazi ghettos during the Holocaust. A further two million Jews were killed by German firing squads, mainly in the Soviet Union and Poland. The cold-blooded shooters belonged to Einsatzgruppen mobile killing units and some 130 police battalions. Their overarching […]
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau waited nearly a week before releasing a belated apology for the horrendous and avoidable mixup that brought shame to Canada, resulted in the resignation of the Speaker of Parliament, and presumably embarrassed Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s first Jewish head of state and a Jew whose relatives were murdered during […]
The second season of Zeynap Gunay’s melodrama, The Club, which is now available on Netflix, tends to be melancholic. But in the tenth and final episode, the gloom dissipates and the light shines in. The main characters in this Turkish production, set in Istanbul in the late 1950s and 1960, are: Matilda (Gokce Bahadir), an […]
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s recent visit to Canada was terribly marred by a shameful and embarrassing incident that was clearly avoidable and that should never have taken place. During Zelensky’s appearance in the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa, the Speaker of the House of Commons, Anthony Rota, introduced a special guest. He was Yaroslav Hunka, a […]