Imad Mughniyeh, a founder and principal of Hezbollah, lived and died by the sword. A notorious terrorist, he masterminded a string of suicide bombing attacks in the 1980s and 1990s that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Americans, Israelis and Argentinian Jews and the kidnapping of Westerners in Lebanon. Before the September 11, 2001 […]
Israel is riven by profound political fault lines pitting Jewish liberals and moderates against conservatives and ultra-nationalists and secular Jews against haredim. Israelis are a fractious lot, though they tend to be united in times of emergencies and wars. These tensions emerge in The Lesson, a thoughtful, jolting and disturbing six-part Israeli drama directed by […]
Much to its dishonor, the Polish government recently conducted an orchestrated campaign against a respected Polish scholar who disagrees with its skewed nationalistic narrative of the Holocaust. The object of its wrath, Barbara Engelking, is the director of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw and the author […]
Matchmaker and dating coach Aleeza Ben-Shalom offers sound advice to her Orthodox, Conservative and Reform clients: “Date them until you hate them,” “Never give up,” and abide by the golden rule that “too much analysis leads to paralysis.” Ben-Shalom, an American who lives in the Israeli town of Pardes Hanna with her husband and five […]
Antwerp, the world’s diamond capital, looms large in Netflix’s crime thriller, Rough Diamonds, a joint production from Israel and Belgium. The diamond trade in rough and polished stones in Antwerp is dominated by ultra-Orthodox Jews. The Wolfsons, a fictitious haredi family, are at the center of this intriguing, mostly satisfying eight-part series, which unfolds in […]
Trips by two high-ranking Republican politicians to Israel in the past week add credence to a recent Gallup survey that Republicans in the United States are more likely to support Israel than Democrats. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida and a likely contender […]
The appointment of Rosalie Abella to Canada’s Supreme Court in 2004 shattered two records. In one fell swoop, she became the first Jewish woman and the first immigrant to land that coveted position. “People like me were not exactly being appointed to the Supreme Court in droves,” she says in a droll understatement at the […]
Nathan Hilu, a visual artist from New York City, refers to himself as a “memory man.” It is a fair description of an eccentric, complex person. Hilu spent decades drawing sketches of Nazi war criminals who faced justice at the Nuremberg trial in postwar western Germany. His drawings, in crayon and ink, are detailed and […]
Evan Gershkovich, a 31-year-old Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent in Russia, faces the horrendous prospect of spending up to 20 years in a Russian penal colony should he be convicted of espionage. The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants living in the United States, he was detained in Yekaterinburg on March 29 while gathering material for a […]
It was, as author Lucy Adlington aptly observes, a “hideous anomaly.” Tucked into a building at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland was the Upper Tailoring Studio. Established by Hedwig Hoss, the camp commandant’s wife, and staffed mainly by European Jewish women who had been deported there, it catered exclusively to the wives of SS officers […]