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 […]
While Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies won 64 seats in the 120-seat Knesset in last November’s election, breaking the impasse that had paralyzed Israeli politics through four elections since 2019, he has been unable to form a government and present it to parliament for approval. On December 9, Israeli President Isaac Herzog granted him an […]
At the beginning of World War II, the Ministry of Propaganda in Britain asked the movie director Michael Powell whether he would be interested in making a documentary about minesweepers. He offered a counter-proposal — a feature film that might inspire the United States to abandon its neutrality policy and enter the war against Nazi […]
The United States has been a safe haven for Jews since its inception as a nation more than two hundred years ago. And since World War II, American Jews have made tremendous strides in breaking down discriminatory barriers that once were taken for granted with a shrug of the shoulders. But of late, in the […]
Julia Haart, the central character in the Netflix reality series My Unorthodox Life, finds herself at loose ends in the first of nine episodes of the second season. Haart, in the first season, reinvented herself when she filed for divorce and abruptly abandoned her ultra-Orthodox lifestyle in the Jewish enclave of Monsey, New York. Eight […]
When the Israeli government announced that its citizens would be permitted to fly to Qatar to attend the World Cup and that a team of Israeli diplomats would offer them consular services for the duration of the competition, there was a fleeting moment of euphoria in Israel. Israel basically negotiated the arrangement with the International […]
Helene Jawhara Piner’s cookbook, Sephardi: Cooking the History, is unique. “It is not based on family recipes but on the history of the Jewish people from Spain, and by extension the Sephardim, from the thirteenth century to the present,” she writes. Published by Cherry Orchard Books, an imprint of Academic Studies Press, this is a […]
On January 8, 2020, Hamed Esmaeilion’s life was torn asunder. Since then, he has struggled with loss, pain and agony. On that catastrophic day, Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 bound from Tehran to Kyiv was shot down by an Iranian missile. All 176 passengers and crew were killed, including his wife Parisa and nine-year-old daughter, […]
Kanye West, the malicious and ignorant American rapper/provocateur known as Ye, thrives on exposure and publicity. Without it, he’s like a fish out of water, bereft of oxygen. In the past few weeks, he has maligned Jews with a series of vile and crude outpourings of antisemitic insults and conspiracy theories. Instead of coming to his […]
As Netflix began streaming Farha, a restrained Palestinian feature film that presents the Nakba in microcosm, the United Nations General Assembly voted to adopt a resolution to commemorate the seventy fifth anniversary of this event come next May. The resolution, sponsored by Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Yemen, the Palestinian Authority and Senegal, was passed on December […]