Jewish Canadians are integrated into the mosaic of Canadian society, but as Allan Levine reminds a reader in Seeking The Fabled City: The Canadian Jewish Experience, published by McClelland & Stewart, this was not always the case, a theme that frames his reflective and thoughtful work. As he points out in the introduction, “the multicultural […]
Robert Riskin and his wife, Fay Wray, were a Hollywood celebrity couple in the 1940s, when the popularity of movies in American culture reached record heights. Riskin was a master screenwriter, cranking out scripts for classic films that helped define the United States to itself and the world: It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes To […]
Spain’s complex, convoluted and tragic relationship with Jews is the theme of Maite Ojeda-Mata’s comprehensive and nuanced work, Modern Spain and the Sephardim, published by Lexington Books. Beginning her inquiry in the 12th century, when Spain launched its campaign of persecution and expulsion against its Jewish citizens, she then focuses on the 19th and 20th […]
The 20th century brought calamity and renewal to Germany, transforming it from a military aggressor into a pillar of European democracy. Germany suffered territorial losses and hyperinflation following its defeat in World War I. The Weimar Republic was a time of hope, but the Depression paved the way for Adolf Hitler’s racist regime, which persecuted its […]
During a tumultuous six-week period in the summer of 1941, following Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union and the retreat of Soviet forces from Poland’s eastern borderlands, a wave of pogroms swept over hundreds of cities, towns and villages in a vast region stretching from the Baltic states in the north to Romania in the […]
Fearing a German invasion of Palestine during the early years of World War II, Britain, in conjunction with the Jewish community, formed a special spy unit to gather intelligence on the looming threat. This unit would become the embryo of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency. Subsequently, it would focus its attention on the Arab […]
Jerold S. Auerbach began reading The New York Times, one of America’s preeminent daily newspapers, way back in 1945. He has since started his day with the broadsheet, but claims it has a “Jewish problem.” A professor emeritus of history at Wellesley College, he sets out his argument in Print to Fit — The New York Times, […]
Saudi Arabia was mired in the medieval past when American prospectors discovered oil deposits beneath its desert sands in 1938. Prior to this seismic event, the Arabian peninsula had hardly changed in centuries, its deeply conservative inhabitants still dependent on traditional ways of earning a livelihood –raising livestock, working in agriculture, fishing and pearl diving, […]
Fascist Italy under Benito Mussolini persecuted its Jewish citizens and played an integral role in deporting thousands of them to German extermination camps. Italy, nevertheless, has tried to distance itself from this shameful period, attempting to leave the misleading impression that Italians had only positive feelings for Jews and blaming Germany, its former ally, for […]
Three months before Japan attacked the U.S. fleet in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Charles Lindbergh addressed a crowd in Des Moines, Iowa, to rail against the prospect of American intervention in World War II. Speaking as a member of the American First Committee, a non-profit isolationist organization that was officially incorporated in September […]