Tonje Hessen Schei and Michael Rowley have produced a thoughtful and disturbing documentary examining the beliefs and objectives of American evangelical Christians. Praying for Armageddon will be screened at the Hot Docs film festival in Toronto on May 2 in its North American premiere. There will be additional screenings on May 4 and May 7, […]
Israel is a miracle by any yardstick. Resurrected after two millennia, it was reborn after the Holocaust, the greatest disaster in Jewish history, and in the teeth of bitter Arab hostility. According to the Hebrew calendar, Israel will mark its 75th anniversary on April 25. In terms of the secular Gregorian calendar, Israel reemerged after […]
Reza Pahlavi, the eldest son of Iran’s deposed monarch and an Iranian opposition leader, turned up in Israel on April 17 and became the most high-profile Iranian ever to set foot in the Jewish state on a public visit. Pahlavi, whose father Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi ruled Iran until the 1979 Islamic revolution, arrived in […]
Since returning to power late last December, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made it clear that one of Israel’s major foreign policy objectives is to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia and thereby enlarge the 2020 Abraham accords and reduce the scope and seriousness of the Arab-Israeli conflict. A normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia — a […]
Eighty years ago today, with the arrival of spring and the blooming of yellow daffodils in Poland, a small and resolute band of sparsely-armed Jewish fighters in the Warsaw ghetto rose up defiantly in a courageous, last-ditch stand to confront their genocidal Nazi tormentors. In remarkable feat of bravery that emboldened Catholic Poles to mount […]
Seven years have elapsed since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a burst of good faith, assured Conservative and Reform Jews that a permanent pluralistic prayer space would be established alongside the gender-separated prayer spaces at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Lamentably enough, he has yet to fulfill that promise. Netanyahu’s predecessors, Naftali Bennett and Yair […]
As Israelis celebrated Passover during the first week of April, Iran — Israel’s deadliest enemy — opened a new phase in its protracted struggle against Israel. The Islamic fundamentalist regime in Tehran, having long sought to bring its conflict with Israel to Israel’s borders, has promoted the idea of using Palestinian and Lebanese surrogates to […]
Jews who survived the Holocaust tended to be physically and mentally strong, adept at a certain skill, amazingly resourceful, or simply lucky. David Wisnia, who owes his survival to a fine singing voice, is one such person. Sara Taksler explores his unusual story in How Saba Kept Singing, a PBS documentary. A melange of on-camera […]
Varian Fry, the first American to be designated as a Righteous Gentile by Yad Vashem, is at the core of Transatlantic, a seven-part Netflix series. A Harvard University graduate and a journalist, Fry was one of the founders of the Emergency Rescue Committee. It was founded in New York City in 1940 with the aim […]
Ehud Olmert has the dubious distinction of having been the first Israeli prime minister to be jailed for a criminal offence. Convicted of bribery and obstruction of justice, he was released from prison in 2017 after serving 16 months of a six-year sentence. Now 77, Olmert was named prime minister after his predecessor, Ariel Sharon, […]