The yawning divisions between secular and religious Jewish Israelis run deep and may even be unbridgeable. This unsettling schism manifests itself in practically every nook and cranny of Israeli life, as Avi Nesher suggests in his newest movie, The Other Story, which is now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform. The film is centered around […]
More than a month after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government announced a series of measures to strengthen the ineffectual Palestinian Authority, they have yet to be implemented. Israel’s inaction leads critics to conclude that the measures are mostly declarative or symbolic in nature and are mainly intended to mollify the United States and the […]
By any standard, this was not just another humdrum arms deal. It was, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu correctly noted a few days ago, “a historic turning point” in Israel’s bilateral relations with Germany. He was referring to an announcement by Israel’s Ministry of Defence on August 17 disclosing that the United States had approved […]
The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the most consequential American foreign policy decision of the 21st century, is scrutinized in minute detail by the historian Melvyn Leffler in Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq (Oxford University Press). Leffler, an emeritus professor of American history at the University of Virginia, […]
When Fred Zinnemann’s murder mystery, Eyes in the Night, was released early in 1942, the United States had already entered World War II as a combatant and fears about the presence of Nazi spies on American soil were on the uptick. Zinnemann was well into his illustrious career when he directed this black-and-white feature film, […]
Nation-wide protests in Israel condemning the government’s plan to overhaul the judiciary have been going on ceaselessly for the past seven months. The protesters’ zeal and commitment has been unflagging. Two days ago, they demonstrated in front of Ramot, a moshav near the Sea of Galilee where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his family were […]
Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust, entered a not guilty plea at his trial in Jerusalem in 1961, claiming he was merely following orders and insisting he was a “nationalist” rather than an “antisemite.” The German-Jewish political scientist Hannah Arendt, who covered the proceedings for The New Yorker, implicitly endorsed his ludicrous […]
Decades ago, explicit racism in public places was a common and acceptable phenomenon in the Canadian province of Ontario. Jews, in particular, were impacted by this odious practice, which affected employment, housing and recreational facilities. Impacted by this variant of antisemitism, Jews created their own ecosystem of neighborhoods, jobs and resorts. The Monteith Inn, situated […]
With its unilateral withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative last month, Russia has launched what U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has correctly described as an “assault on the global food system.” The Russian government pulled out of the agreement, brokered by Turkey and the United Nations last summer, after Ukraine damaged a vital […]
From 1947 until 1950, Canada admitted just over 98,000 European refugees, of whom 11,064, or 11 percent, were Holocaust survivors who had spent the previous postwar years in displaced persons camps in Germany. My late parents, David and Genia Kirshner, who barely survived the war in the Lodz ghetto, the last Nazi ghetto in occupied […]