Seventy five years ago this month, two Polish Jewish refugees and their infant son arrived in Canada, a distant nation of peace, tranquility and stability and their future place in the sun. David and Genia Kirschner, my parents, were Holocaust survivors in their early thirties when they set foot in the new world in the […]
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is at it again in a feeble attempt to justify Russia’s unwarranted and unacceptable invasion of Ukraine. Several days ago, he compared Western support of Ukraine in its defensive war against Russia to Nazi Germany’s plan to exterminate Jews in Europe. Lavrov’s appalling comparison reminded observers of an outrageous remark […]
Among the distinguished historians of the Holocaust, Michael Marrus was the sole Canadian in that exalted group. A University of Toronto professor for close to 50 years, he was the author of eight books, at least two of which are standards in the field, and a panoply of monographs. It would be fair to say […]
A kind of justice prevailed in the recent war crimes trial of Irmgard Furchner, one of the last surviving Germans who worked in a Nazi extermination camp as a civilian employee. Now 97, Furchner was employed in Stutthof, a camp near Gdansk, Poland, where about 65,000 people, 28,000 of whom were Jews, perished by way […]
The taint of antisemitism has besmirched the University of Toronto, Canada’s largest institution of higher learning. In a paper published in the December 5 edition of Canadian Medical Education Journal, Dr. Ayelet Kuper charged that a climate of antisemitism has pervaded the University of Toronto’s Temerity Faculty of Medicine (TFOM) for the past few years, during which […]
Kanye West, the malicious and ignorant American rapper/provocateur known as Ye, thrives on exposure and publicity. Without it, he’s like a fish out of water, bereft of oxygen. In the past few weeks, he has maligned Jews with a series of vile and crude outpourings of antisemitic insults and conspiracy theories. Instead of coming to his […]
Please enlighten me. Has a former U.S. president ever invited an antisemite and a Holocaust denier to his home? Correct me if I’m wrong, but no such thing ever happened until Donald Trump, in a horrendous lapse of judgment that normalizes antisemitism, hosted a dinner for two such bigots at his Mar-A-Lago estate in Florida. […]
Donald Trump, the twice-impeached, politically divisive ex-president of the United States, threw his hat into the ring on November 15. In a rambling, self-serving speech riddled with falsehoods, half-truths and exaggerations, he announced he would seek the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination. It is far from certain whether he will prevail. His moment in history […]
If these were normal times, the United States and its allies would surely have endorsed a recent United Nations resolution condemning Nazism and all forms of racial hatred and xenophobia. But since we live in the shadow of the unnecessary and protracted war in Ukraine initiated by Russia on the flimsy pretext of “de-Nazifying” its […]
Shortly after the billionaire rapper Kanye West was exposed as an ignorant, boorish and unrepentant antisemite, forcing the sportswear behemoth Adidas to cancel his lucrative contract, another African American celebrity crashed and burned. Late last month, a day after Brooklyn Nets’ basketball star Kyrie Irving tweeted a link to Ronald Dalton’s film, Hebrew to Negroes: […]