A new, more positive phase in Christian-Jewish relations was ushered in when the Vatican, in the 1960s, officially modified its public attitude toward Jews. At the Second Vatican Council, which convened from 1962 to 1965, the Roman Catholic church issued its historic Nostra Aetate declaration, which renounced the deicide accusation against Jews, underscored the common […]
In Israel’s most recent general election on November 1, its fifth in three years, right-wing parties triumphed and a left-wing party was all but decimated as Benjamin Netanyahu roared back to power after 18 months in opposition. Netanyahu and his allies — the Religious Zionist Party, United Torah Judaism and Shas — won 64 out […]
A kind of justice prevailed in the recent war crimes trial of Irmgard Furchner, one of the last surviving Germans who worked in a Nazi extermination camp as a civilian employee. Now 97, Furchner was employed in Stutthof, a camp near Gdansk, Poland, where about 65,000 people, 28,000 of whom were Jews, perished by way […]
It was a brief political partnership, yet it was remarkably eventful and predictably disappointing. Naftali Bennett, a rightist, and Yair Lapid, a centrist, formed an expedient alliance after the inconclusive 2021 general election in Israel. They agreed to share power in a rainbow coalition government of right-wing, centrist and left-wing parties whose overarching objective was […]
Leon Prudovsky’s bitter-sweet and appealing romantic drama, Five Hours From Paris, largely unfolds in a drab suburb of Tel Aviv, its title notwithstanding. The protagonists are Yigal (Dror Keren), a divorced and lonely Israeli-born taxi driver, and Lina (Elena Yaralova), a married Russian immigrant and music teacher. The movie is currently being presented online by […]
The taint of antisemitism has besmirched the University of Toronto, Canada’s largest institution of higher learning. In a paper published in the December 5 edition of Canadian Medical Education Journal, Dr. Ayelet Kuper charged that a climate of antisemitism has pervaded the University of Toronto’s Temerity Faculty of Medicine (TFOM) for the past few years, during which […]
Lucy Dawidowicz was one of the eminent historians of the twentieth century. She was the author of three critically-acclaimed books — The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe (1967), The War Against the Jews, 1933-1945 (1975) and From That Place and Time: A Memoir, 1938-1947 (1989). She was also the first recipient […]
Iranian photographer Hassan Sarbakhshian spent two years travelling around Iran documenting its Jewish community, the largest in the Middle East outside Israel. He joined Jews at family gatherings, during holidays and at their workplaces, providing a rare glimpse of an ancient community whose origins can be traced back to the Babylonian exile 2,700 years ago. […]
Loneliness, a soul-crushing phenomenon, is the theme that drives Significant Other, an Israeli TV series now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform. Created by Dana Modan and Assi Cohen, and directed by Ram Nehari, this comedic-infused drama revolves around an unmarried middle-aged woman (Modan) and a newly divorced man (Cohen) in Tel Aviv who yearn […]
China’s global rivalry with the United States has reached Saudi Arabia. Late last week, Chinese leader Xi Jinping spent three days in the desert kingdom in a landmark visit during which he signed a myriad of agreements with his Saudi counterpart, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, a key […]