Ebola, that terrible disease ravaging western Africa and threatening the United States, inspires dread, but it’s nothing compared to the natural disaster looming large in Zac Hilditch’s science fiction thriller, These Final Hours, which opens in Canada on Oct. 17. Set in the suburbs of Perth, Australia, as a cataclysmic force devours cities and continents in […]
Jean-Pierre Filiu, a professor of Middle East Studies at Sciences Po in Paris, is absolutely right. “The word ‘Gaza,”‘ he writes in Gaza: A History (Oxford University Press), “arouses passions and emotions whenever it is uttered.” Last July and August, when Israel and Hamas clashed in a 50-day war, their third in six years, Gaza […]
Several days before five Arab armies attacked the new-born state of Israel on May 15, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s future prime minister, asked his generals if Israel could win the war. Fifty/fifty, he was told. One of the reasons for the uncertainty was that Israel lacked one of the basics of a modern fighting machine […]
Odessa, the Ukrainian port on the northwestern shore of the Black Sea, lives on its reputation as an infamous city. A den of iniquity in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it attracted adventurers seeking wealth and pleasures. Much like storied Shanghai and New Orleans, it was a haven for criminals, smugglers, pimps and prostitutes. […]
Mosab Hassan Yousef may be the most hated Palestinian in the world. From 1997 to 2007, he worked undercover for Israel’s internal security agency, Shin Bet, exposing suicide bombing plots before they could explode into fruition. He was a prize catch, being the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, one of the founders of Hamas, Israel’s […]
Bernard Lewis, 98, is one of the greatest historians of the Middle East. Formerly a professor of Middle Eastern history at the School of Oriental and African Studies and Princeton University, he has produced a torrent of well-regarded books, from The Arabs in History and The Emergence of Modern Turkey to What Went Wrong? and […]
As comedies go, Felix Herngren’s The 100-Year-Old-Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared is fantastical and original. Set mainly in Sweden, but also playing out against the backdrop of foreign locales like Djibouti, Spain and Bali, this is a quirky film of imagination and verve adapted from Jonas Jonasson’s best-selling novel, which has been published […]
On Feb. 12, 1942, the assistant superintendent of the Palestine Police Force in Tel Aviv, Geoffrey Morton, burst into a small flat on Mizrachi Bet Street and cornered Avraham (Yair) Stern, a Polish-born fugitive whose militant Zionist group had launched a war of liberation against British colonial rule in Palestine. Within minutes, if not seconds, […]
At his show trial in Jerusalem in 1961, Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann coyly described himself as “just a small cog” in Adolf Hitler’s extermination machine. The German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt lent credence to this warped view, claiming in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, published a year after his execution in […]
The village of Le Chambon-sur-Lievre is extremely remote. High in the mountains of southern France, it’s protected by a shield of escarpments and rivers. During the winter months from October to April, heavy snow drifts cut it off from the world for weeks at a time. Thanks in part to its location, Le Chambon was […]