A potential breakthrough in Israel’s relations with the Arab world degenerated into a diplomatic fiasco after Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen rashly disclosed he had secretly conferred with his Libyan counterpart, Najila el-Mangoush, in Rome on August 26 in a meeting hosted by the Italian foreign minister. In the wake of his impromptu announcement, which […]
Bruno Schulz, the great graphic artist and luminous writer, was a displaced and uprooted person par excellence. He was born an Austrian during the Austro-Hungarian empire. He held Ukrainian and Polish citizenship during the duration of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic and the Second Polish Republic. And he died as a persecuted Jew during the […]
Meta, the U.S. company that owns the social media sites Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter), claims it has taken “significant action” to remove “harmful stereotypes about Jewish people” and to eliminate content that distorts or denies the Holocaust. “We’ve made progress in fighting antisemitism on our platforms,” Meta claimed recently while acknowledging that “our […]
The Bat Mitzvah, a rite of passage in Jewish communities, is lampooned in a Netflix comedy starring Adam Sandler, his two daughters and wife. You Are So Not Invited To My Bat Mitzvah, set in the United States, filmed in the greater Toronto area and directed by Sami Cohen, zeroes in on the Friedmans, an […]
Israel was once inextricably associated with the kibbutz, a collective farming commune based on egalitarian values and dedicated to the proposition that Israel should be a Jewish socialist state. For decades, this model worked harmoniously, but in the last few decades it has gradually broken down, radically changing the complexion of the kibbutz. Toby Perl […]
The yawning divisions between secular and religious Jewish Israelis run deep and may even be unbridgeable. This unsettling schism manifests itself in practically every nook and cranny of Israeli life, as Avi Nesher suggests in his newest movie, The Other Story, which is now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform. The film is centered around […]
More than a month after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government announced a series of measures to strengthen the ineffectual Palestinian Authority, they have yet to be implemented. Israel’s inaction leads critics to conclude that the measures are mostly declarative or symbolic in nature and are mainly intended to mollify the United States and the […]
By any standard, this was not just another humdrum arms deal. It was, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu correctly noted a few days ago, “a historic turning point” in Israel’s bilateral relations with Germany. He was referring to an announcement by Israel’s Ministry of Defence on August 17 disclosing that the United States had approved […]
The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the most consequential American foreign policy decision of the 21st century, is scrutinized in minute detail by the historian Melvyn Leffler in Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq (Oxford University Press). Leffler, an emeritus professor of American history at the University of Virginia, […]
When Fred Zinnemann’s murder mystery, Eyes in the Night, was released early in 1942, the United States had already entered World War II as a combatant and fears about the presence of Nazi spies on American soil were on the uptick. Zinnemann was well into his illustrious career when he directed this black-and-white feature film, […]