Appearing in his final movie before his death in 2021, Ed Asner plays a Holocaust survivor in the poignant drama Tiger Within, which opens in U.S. theaters on July 7. He portrays Samuel, a frail and lonely widower who lives alone in Los Angeles. He befriends Casey (Margot Josefsohn), a coarse but attractive down-and-out young […]
Israel’s brief offensive in Jenin, its biggest military intervention in the West Bank since Operation Defensive Shield in March 2002, was months in the making. Jenin and its adjacent Palestinian refugee camp, one of 19 such camps in the West Bank, were targeted because they are bastions of armed resistance to the Israeli occupation of […]
Jozef Klemens Pilsudski, the dominant personality in Polish politics from 1918 to 1935, was surely one of the most remarkable figures of the 20th century. Revered as the creator of a reborn Poland in the wake of World War I, he was loved and admired by most Poles, particularly Polish Jews. During the communist interregnum, […]
Benjamin Netanyahu has said that his chief foreign policy objective in the Middle East is to normalize bilateral relations with Saudi Arabia and thereby expand the membership of the 2020 Abraham Accords, which currently consists of the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. The Israeli prime minister claims that Saudi Arabia’s inclusion would effectively […]
The brief rebellion staged by Wagner mercenary warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin in Russia on June 24 has probably weakened Russian President Vladimir Putin and tarnished his reputation as a paragon of stability and continuity. But it will probably have no discernible effect on Russia’s foreign policy, particularly its rapidly expanding relations with Iran, Israel’s chief enemy. […]
Hollywood’s relationship with Israel is deep and wide-ranging and reaches back to the days when Zionists sought to establish a sovereign state in Palestine. Historians Tony Shaw and Giora Goodman examine this topic in Hollywood and Israel: A History, published by Columbia University Press. Their comprehensive and readable volume touches every conceivable angle. “It is […]
Olive trees, a major component of the Palestinian agrarian economy in the West Bank, have figured prominently in Israel’s perennial conflict with the Palestinians. Since Israel’s occupation of the West Bank during the 1967 Six Day War, some 800,000 olive trees have been destroyed and damaged by the Israeli armed forces and Jewish settlers, affecting […]
As eye-catching symbols go, the swastika has been extremely problematic and highly offensive to many people for about a century. An ancient religious and cultural sign of good fortune and prosperity among Hindus, Jains and Zoroastrians, it was brazenly appropriated by the Nazi Party in Germany and willfully converted into a striking symbol of race […]
Years ago, the United Jewish Appeal attempted to popularize the catchy slogan, “We Are One,” by promoting the facile notion that Jews in the United States and Israel share common values and interests and are separated only by physical distance and nothing else. This slogan was superficial and misleading because it ignored the very real […]
China’s supreme leader, Xi Jinping, believes that the balance of power is changing in its geopolitical favor. Convinced that “time and momentum” are on China’s side and that its rival, the United States, is losing stature and influence, Xi is expanding its footprint in the Middle East, a region still largely under the sway of […]