Donald Trump, the twice-impeached, politically divisive ex-president of the United States, threw his hat into the ring on November 15. In a rambling, self-serving speech riddled with falsehoods, half-truths and exaggerations, he announced he would seek the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination. It is far from certain whether he will prevail. His moment in history […]
As Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu observes very early on in his lengthy, intensely interesting autobiography, Bibi: My Story (Simon & Schuster), he owes his political career to his older brother, Yoni, who was killed in 1976 during Israel’s Entebbe raid to free Israeli and foreign airline passengers held hostage by Palestinian and German hijackers in Uganda. […]
Like Jews, Mennonites are a people of the diaspora. Reclusive, peaceful and pacifist in outlook, they are a Protestant sect that emerged in Dutch and Germanic lands during the Reformation. Scattered throughout dozens of countries, Mennonites outside Germany were often opposed to nationalism and rarely regarded themselves as Germans per se, despite their affinity to the […]
The lives of Palestinian Arabs under Israel’s occupation of the West Bank can be circumscribed, given the presence of Israeli checkpoints and the closures that restrict their movements. Ameen Nayfeh’s feature film, 200 Meters, which opens in New York City theatres on November 18 and on digital platforms on December 6, delves into this troubling issue. The […]
If these were normal times, the United States and its allies would surely have endorsed a recent United Nations resolution condemning Nazism and all forms of racial hatred and xenophobia. But since we live in the shadow of the unnecessary and protracted war in Ukraine initiated by Russia on the flimsy pretext of “de-Nazifying” its […]
Sergei Loznitsa’s understated yet compelling movie, Babi Yar: Context, documents the monstrous German occupation of Ukraine, a province of the Soviet Union until its independence in 1991. To be screened online by the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation from November 10-13, it puts the Babi Yar massacre of 33,771 Ukrainian Jews in September 1941 into perspective. […]
Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of Israel’s far-right Religious Zionism Party, is an extremist by any reasonable yardstick, yet the incoming prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, will likely appoint him to a senior position in his cabinet. Netanyahu, a secular nationalist, could not have reclaimed his old job without the 14 Knesset seats amassed by Smotrich and […]
Shortly after the billionaire rapper Kanye West was exposed as an ignorant, boorish and unrepentant antisemite, forcing the sportswear behemoth Adidas to cancel his lucrative contract, another African American celebrity crashed and burned. Late last month, a day after Brooklyn Nets’ basketball star Kyrie Irving tweeted a link to Ronald Dalton’s film, Hebrew to Negroes: […]
The Lancaster heavy bomber was probably the most feared British airplane during World War II. Swift and responsive, this iconic aircraft bombed military and civilian targets in Nazi Germany, helping the Allies turn the tide of the war and defeat Adolf Hitler’s despicable Nazi regime. Lancaster, a stirring documentary by David Fairhead and Anthony Palmer, […]
Shortly after Germany’s defeat in World War I, a Munich-based Jewish socialist/journalist named Kurt Eisner toppled the venerable Wittelsbach dynasty, formed the short-lived Free State of Bavaria, and became the first Jew ever to govern a German state. On February 21, 1919, three months after his accession to power, he was assassinated by an antisemitic […]