Henry Kissinger, the first Jewish U.S. secretary of state, celebrated his 100th birthday on May 27. The last surviving member of President Richard Nixon’s cabinet, he was among the most influential figures in the American foreign policy establishment during the last half of the 20th century. A refugee from Nazi Germany, he arrived in the […]
Tunisian Jews in Ruggero Gabbai’s bitter-sweet documentary, From TGM to TGV, look back at their lives in Tunisia and abroad with a mixture of nostalgia and angst. To be screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on June 2, it examines the attitudes of Jews who were uprooted from their homeland. Tunisia, an Arab state […]
Last December, in response to a sharp rise of antisemitism in the United States, the federal government created a working group to develop a strategy to combat this ageless, pathological scourge. On May 25, the details were released at a White House ceremony during which U.S. President Joe Biden delivered a videotaped speech. Speaking of […]
Neve Shalom, a utopian Jewish-Arab village in Israel’s Ayalon Valley, is unique in that it is the only place in Israel where Israeli Jews, Muslims and Christians live together in peace and equality. Established in 1970, it is a beacon of amity in a region torn by ethnic and religious conflicts. The inhabitants are idealists […]
Holocaust denial, a relatively new form of antisemitism, is at the core of Philippe Le Guay’s sizzling drama, The Man in the Basement, which will be screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on June 1. It all starts innocently enough, but ends violently in a welter of fisticuffs and a cascade of epithets. Simon […]
Thanks, in part, to Roman Vishniac (1897-1990), a towering figure in modern photography, the Jewish communities obliterated by the Nazi hordes during the Holocaust will always be remembered. Vishniac, a Russian Jew, travelled to Eastern Europe and the Balkans from the mid-1930s onward to photograph Jews from all walks of life in Poland, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia […]
Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler were the first known Jewish inmates to escape from the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland, where 1.1 million Jews perished. They escaped in April 1944, nearly one year before the end of World War II. The vital information they conveyed to Jewish communities and Allied powers was timely and explosive. […]
A day after former finance minister Avigdor Liberman warned that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would grant ultra-Orthodox parties in Israel grotesquely excessive subsidies in the interests of keeping his coalition intact, Netanyahu proved his point. On May 21, Liberman charged that Netanyahu was “willing to sell out on all values in exchange for power.” What […]
George Soros arouses strong reactions. Very strong reactions. A financier and backer of progressive causes, he has been praised by liberals and lambasted by conservatives. Donald Trump, the former president of the United States; Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, and Republican Party figures like Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, and Marjorie Taylor […]
Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, distorted reality in an unwise speech he recently delivered at the United Nations marking the 75th anniversary of the nakba, the dispossession of the Palestinians from their lands and homes during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Speaking at the UN’s General Assembly’s first-ever commemoration of this traumatic event, […]