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 […]
Yair Netanyahu, the eldest son of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, vents his spleen occasionally. When he does so, he reinforces the widespread belief in Israel and abroad that his opinions are not only grotesque, noxious and incendiary, but mired in the swamp of ignorance and malice. Apparently unemployed, he has all the time in […]
At a press conference in Kyiv on February 24, the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, took a question from an Israeli reporter about Israel’s cautious position on the war. Israel has adopted a nuanced stance toward the conflict in Ukraine, with many observers having described it as a […]
One year on, the revanchist war that Russian President Vladimir Putin began in Ukraine last February 24 has degenerated into a protracted struggle of epic proportions with no end in sight. Universally regarded as the deadliest armed conflict in Europe since World War II, it has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Russian and […]
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 […]