Nation-wide protests in Israel condemning the government’s plan to overhaul the judiciary have been going on ceaselessly for the past seven months. The protesters’ zeal and commitment has been unflagging. Two days ago, they demonstrated in front of Ramot, a moshav near the Sea of Galilee where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his family were […]
Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust, entered a not guilty plea at his trial in Jerusalem in 1961, claiming he was merely following orders and insisting he was a “nationalist” rather than an “antisemite.” The German-Jewish political scientist Hannah Arendt, who covered the proceedings for The New Yorker, implicitly endorsed his ludicrous […]
Decades ago, explicit racism in public places was a common and acceptable phenomenon in the Canadian province of Ontario. Jews, in particular, were impacted by this odious practice, which affected employment, housing and recreational facilities. Impacted by this variant of antisemitism, Jews created their own ecosystem of neighborhoods, jobs and resorts. The Monteith Inn, situated […]
With its unilateral withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative last month, Russia has launched what U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has correctly described as an “assault on the global food system.” The Russian government pulled out of the agreement, brokered by Turkey and the United Nations last summer, after Ukraine damaged a vital […]
From 1947 until 1950, Canada admitted just over 98,000 European refugees, of whom 11,064, or 11 percent, were Holocaust survivors who had spent the previous postwar years in displaced persons camps in Germany. My late parents, David and Genia Kirshner, who barely survived the war in the Lodz ghetto, the last Nazi ghetto in occupied […]
Three years to the month after a massive explosion wrecked the densely-populated neighborhood around the port of Beirut, the weak and ineffectual government of Lebanon has yet to hold anyone accountable for one of the biggest non-nuclear blasts in history. On the evening of August 4, 2020, a fire broke out in hangar 12, a […]
Justice has been served at the trial of Robert Bowers, the neo-Nazi maniac who murdered eleven Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018. A few days ago, a federal jury convicted the 50-year old truck driver on 63 criminal counts and recommended that he be executed for having perpetrated […]
Donald Trump, the disgraced former president of the United States, is on the campaign trail to become the Republican Party’s nominee in the 2024 presidential election. As he travels around the country, he vehemently denies that he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which, contrary to his absurd assertion, was handily […]
Known as the Black Death, the bubonic plague was probably the most devastating pandemic in history, far more deadly than the most recent coronavirus virus outbreak. It began in 1345 and lasted for more than 300 years. Consisting of 30 major epidemics, it killed upwards of one-third of Europe’s population and depopulated much of the […]
The United States, Israel’s chief ally, has launched a campaign that could realign the political landscape of the Middle East. In what could be a diplomatic coup as significant as the United States’ successful drive to end Israel’s state of war with Egypt in 1979, Washington is making a concerted effort to normalize Israel’s relations […]