In 1975, when Toronto was still considered by some as something of a culinary backwater, I began writing a series of stories about Jewish delicatessens and restaurants in the city for a Canadian Jewish newspaper. My first story was illustrated by a photograph of yours truly sitting contentedly in front of a pastrami sandwich and […]
When I last visited the sprawling site of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, I knew I had seen one of the most diabolical and depraved places on the planet. The bleak barracks, the barbed wire fences, the guard posts, the gas chambers and the ruins of crematoria reminded me of the lengths Nazi Germany went […]
In a courageous and searingly candid acknowledgment of France’s complicity in the Holocaust, President Emmanuel Macron said yesterday that France had played a central role in one of its darkest chapters. Commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Velodrome d’Hiver (Vel d’hiv) roundup of Jews in Paris in the summer of 1942, and speaking in the […]
Simone Veil, one of the greatest figures in modern France, died recently in Paris at the age of 89. Some years ago, I had the good fortune of interviewing her. This is what I wrote: There is no other political figure in Europe like Simone Veil. One of France’s first female cabinet ministers, and the […]
Has Benjamin Netanyahu no principles? This would appear to be the case following his spineless decision on June 25 to freeze a plan to create a non-Orthodox prayer section at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Finalized a year-and-a-half ago by the Israeli government, the Jewish Agency, the Reform and Conservative movements and the Women of […]
In the early hours of April 4, an African Muslim drug dealer/lowlife named Kobili Traore broke into the Paris apartment of a 66-year-old Jewish woman, Sarah Halimi, and proceeded to assault her. As he viciously beat Halimi, he cried out, “Allah hu akbar.” He then threw Halimi to her death from her third-storey balcony. The horrific […]
Jose Arturo Castellanos was one of the unassuming heroes of the Holocaust, an army colonel and diplomat from the small Central American country of El Salvador who rescued thousands of European Jews from the clutches of the Nazis. Honored by Yad Vashem in 2010 as a Righteous Gentile, he issued more than 12,000 Salvadoran citizenship certificates […]
Exposed as a forgery by the Times of London 96 years ago, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has proven to be a remarkably resilient and influential antisemitic text. Outlining a diabolical Jewish plot to achieve global hegemony by means of subversion and manipulation, it validates the wild and unregulated fantasies of antisemites and conspiracy theorists. First […]
Yossi Sucary calls it the “unspoken Holocaust.” Sucary, an Israeli academic and author, is referring to the little-known fact that the Jews of Libya were among the six million victims of the Holocaust. Jews in Israel and the Diaspora generally assume that only European Jews were caught up in the Holocaust, but this assumption is […]
Since the start of the new year, an ominous wave of antisemitism has roared across the length and breadth of the United States. Jewish community centres, schools and institutions have received about 150 bomb threats, while two Jewish cemeteries have been vandalized. These incidents, unprecedented in scale, have caused anxiety and alarm around the country. President […]