The launch of a glossy coffee table book on Jewish-Ukrainian relations provided its co-authors with an opportunity to discuss their complicated topic. At a symposium earlier this month at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern — a professor of Jewish Studies at Northwestern University — and Paul Robert Magocsi — the […]
On April 20, 1889, at 6:30 p.m., Klara Polzl gave birth to a boy in Braunau am Inn, a town in Austria adjacent to the German border. The boy’s name is inscribed in crabbed letters in a mouldering registry kept behind lock and key in St. Stephen, Braunau’s preeminent Roman Catholic church. A Gothic pile whose spire […]
Arthur Topham, a notorious Canadian antisemite, is playing fast and loose with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canada’s bill of rights. Topham, convicted last November of willfully promoting hatred against Jews through his vile website, RadicalPress.com, is using the Charter to challenge the constitutional legality of Canadian hate crime laws. What a cynical and […]
I was surprised to read recently that China has cracked down on the minuscule Jewish community of Kaifeng. Historically, China has been a haven for Jews and one of the very few countries that has been free of antisemitism. As part of President Xi Jinping’s campaign against unapproved religious faiths and foreign influence, the Chinese […]
Sadly enough, Israel seems to be the only country in the world where a pre-modern Orthodox rabbinate, in collusion with the government, delegitimizes the Conservative and Reform streams of Judaism. It’s not only scandalous and shameful, but bound to widen the already growing rift between Israel and the Diaspora. In recent years, the government of […]
Ukraine, subjugated and brutalized by communism and fascism, seceded from the Soviet Union in 1991 and finally achieved its independence and freedom. But since then, in its attempts to break with its past as a servile Soviet republic and embrace a modern European identity, Ukraine has embarked on a crooked path and taken to whitewashing its […]
Seventy one years have elapsed since the end of World War II, yet Poland still labors under a dubious distinction. It’s the only country in the former Soviet bloc that has not enacted restitution legislation that would enable Polish Jews and their heirs to reclaim personal properties they lost during the Holocaust and the Communist […]
Police in the Canadian city of London, Ontario, are now in the midst of ascertaining whether an antisemitic article published in an Arabic-language community newspaper recently promoted or incited hatred against Jews, or was simply a manifestation of free speech. In its June/July edition, Al Saraha, distributed in the city’s Middle Eastern grocery stores and […]
As Poles wrestle with the extremely complex legacy of the Holocaust in Poland, where three million Polish Jews perished in six short years, a cabinet minister in Poland’s government has suggested that historical accounts of the 1941 pogrom in the town of Jedwabne may be nothing more than “very biased opinions.” As reported by the […]
The death of Nobel Prize laureate Elie Wiesel recently signified not only the passing of a distinguished novelist but the passing of another Holocaust survivor. Six million European Jews perished during the Holocaust, a meticulously organized and unprecedented campaign of genocide conceived by the Nazi regime and implemented by Germany and its allies and accomplices […]