The appointment of Rosalie Abella to Canada’s Supreme Court in 2004 shattered two records. In one fell swoop, she became the first Jewish woman and the first immigrant to land that coveted position. “People like me were not exactly being appointed to the Supreme Court in droves,” she says in a droll understatement at the […]
Nathan Hilu, a visual artist from New York City, refers to himself as a “memory man.” It is a fair description of an eccentric, complex person. Hilu spent decades drawing sketches of Nazi war criminals who faced justice at the Nuremberg trial in postwar western Germany. His drawings, in crayon and ink, are detailed and […]
Evan Gershkovich, a 31-year-old Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent in Russia, faces the horrendous prospect of spending up to 20 years in a Russian penal colony should he be convicted of espionage. The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants living in the United States, he was detained in Yekaterinburg on March 29 while gathering material for a […]
It was, as author Lucy Adlington aptly observes, a “hideous anomaly.” Tucked into a building at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland was the Upper Tailoring Studio. Established by Hedwig Hoss, the camp commandant’s wife, and staffed mainly by European Jewish women who had been deported there, it catered exclusively to the wives of SS officers […]
Tonje Hessen Schei and Michael Rowley have produced a thoughtful and disturbing documentary examining the beliefs and objectives of American evangelical Christians. Praying for Armageddon will be screened at the Hot Docs film festival in Toronto on May 2 in its North American premiere. There will be additional screenings on May 4 and May 7, […]
Israel is a miracle by any yardstick. Resurrected after two millennia, it was reborn after the Holocaust, the greatest disaster in Jewish history, and in the teeth of bitter Arab hostility. According to the Hebrew calendar, Israel will mark its 75th anniversary on April 25. In terms of the secular Gregorian calendar, Israel reemerged after […]
Reza Pahlavi, the eldest son of Iran’s deposed monarch and an Iranian opposition leader, turned up in Israel on April 17 and became the most high-profile Iranian ever to set foot in the Jewish state on a public visit. Pahlavi, whose father Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi ruled Iran until the 1979 Islamic revolution, arrived in […]
Since returning to power late last December, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made it clear that one of Israel’s major foreign policy objectives is to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia and thereby enlarge the 2020 Abraham accords and reduce the scope and seriousness of the Arab-Israeli conflict. A normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia — a […]
Eighty years ago today, with the arrival of spring and the blooming of yellow daffodils in Poland, a small and resolute band of sparsely-armed Jewish fighters in the Warsaw ghetto rose up defiantly in a courageous, last-ditch stand to confront their genocidal Nazi tormentors. In remarkable feat of bravery that emboldened Catholic Poles to mount […]
Seven years have elapsed since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a burst of good faith, assured Conservative and Reform Jews that a permanent pluralistic prayer space would be established alongside the gender-separated prayer spaces at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Lamentably enough, he has yet to fulfill that promise. Netanyahu’s predecessors, Naftali Bennett and Yair […]