It was a week that concentrated minds. On June 27, 1976, a band of Palestinian and German terrorists hijacked Air France flight 139 en route from Tel Aviv to Paris via Athens. After a brief stopover in Benghazi, Libya, the hijackers diverted the plane to Entebbe, Uganda. The Israeli government, led by Prime Minister Yitzhak […]
Japanese diplomat Chiune (Senpo) Sugihara was at the right place at the right time as far as 2,139 Jews and their current 40,000 descendants are concerned. Sugihara was Japan’s consul in Kaunas, Lithuania, from 1939 to 1940. His task was to gather intelligence on the Soviet Union, Japan’s nemesis. He did that assiduously, to the […]
Ada Ushpiz’s biopic, Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt, takes a sweeping look at the life and ideas of a controversial philosopher. Scheduled to be screened at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto from June 10-16, this thoughtful two-hour film portrays Arendt as an independent thinker who was neither a classic liberal nor […]
There has always been a small minority of Jews who regarded Judaism as a burden to be jettisoned. Such Jews usually resolved their problem by means of complete assimilation. This invariably meant conversion to another religion, marriage to a spouse of a different faith or flight into exclusively non-Jewish circles. Over the centuries, this pattern […]
Countries ranging from China and Jordan to India and the United States are experiencing water shortages. Yet strangely enough, Israel — a semi-arid nation whose annual rainfall has dropped by half in recent years — does not face a water crisis. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put it, “Israel doesn’t have a water problem.” […]
Whit Stillman’s romantic comedy, Love and Friendship, stars the divine Kate Beckinsale as a devious man hunter obsessed with finding a suitable husband for herself and her daughter. This drawing room period piece, based on a novella by Jane Austen, opens in Canada on May 27. More farcical than dramatic, it unfolds in a series […]
Michael Solomonov has carved out a gastronomic niche for himself in the United States. He’s the co-owner and executive chef of Zahav, the acclaimed Israeli restaurant in Philadelphia. He and his partner, Steven Cook, are also the owners of Percy Street Barbecue, Federal Donuts, Dizengoff and Abe Fisher, all in the same city. Having established […]
When British philosopher Bertrand Russell observed that “mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty,” he may have been thinking of Srinivasa Ramanujan. A Tamil from southern India, he was a lowly clerk with a gift for numbers when he received a scholarship to Cambridge University. Arriving in Britain in 1914, on the eve […]
Horse racing is a rich man’s sport, and for centuries in Britain, it was the preserve of the landed gentry. So imagine what happens when the working-class inhabitants of a depressed coal mining village in Wales band together, raise a prize-winning steed and break class barriers in the process. In Dark Horse, a spirited documentary […]
Much to my surprise and delight, Netflix, the international streaming network, has acquired Pawn Sacrifice, a movie I missed at its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2014. I had looked forward to seeing Edward Zwick’s biopic about American chess prodigy Bobby Fischer, who, in 1972 in Reykjavik, defeated Soviet grandmaster Boris Spassky for […]