The latest edition of Outlook magazine, dated Spring 2016, arrived in my mailbox on June 6, and much to my surprise, a headline at the bottom of the catchy cover blared, “Farewell Issue.” I needn’t have been surprised. Outlook, which billed itself as Canada’s only progressive Jewish magazine and which I read for some 30 […]
Category: Jewish Affairs
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My Yiddishe Mama
Genya Kirshner, my beloved mother, ended her long and arduous journey on Friday, May 27 at about 1:30 p.m. on a hospital bed in Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada. She was 100, five months short of her 101st birthday. As my old friend Henry Srebrnik wrote today, I was fortunate to have had her for so […]
Poland has experienced a Jewish revival since the end of the Communist era and the advent of democracy in 1989. And there is no better symbol of that remarkable phenomenon than the Lauder Morasha Middle School in Warsaw, which is marking its 22nd anniversary this year. Although it’s generously supported by grants from the Ronald […]
Sadiq Khan, the first Muslim mayor of London, can be a role model to his fellow Muslims if he continues to preach the virtues of tolerance and coexistence. At a time when radical Islam is making disturbing inroads in western European Muslim communities, Khan is setting an example by standing up to this destructive phenomenon […]
Few of the countries invaded and plundered by Germany during World War II endured a fate as terrible as that of Poland. Six million of its inhabitants — three million Christians and an equal number of Jews — perished during the course of the Nazi occupation. They were murdered, felled by starvation and disease, and killed […]
Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party constitutes one of the most astonishing and seismic events in modern American history. Trump, a property billionaire and reality TV celebrity, was regarded as the one of the least likely candidates to secure his party’s nomination when he entered the race as an underdog last June. Pundits […]
Poland was a charnel house during World War II, a place of death for Jews and Christians alike. Three million Christians and an equal number of Jews perished during Nazi Germany’s inhumane occupation of Poland. Amid the darkness, a small minority of decent, courageous Polish Christians risked their lives to help Jews, a crime punishable […]
The Labor Party in Britain is mired in the muck of antisemitism, but it’s a self-inflicted wound. In the past few days, two of its members have been suspended for having brought the party into “disrepute.” Naseem Shah, an MP of Pakistani descent who represents the riding of Bradford West, stirred outrage following the disclosure […]
Universities are supposed to be havens of civilized discourse where rationality, civility and tolerance prevail, but of late, this hallowed tradition has taken a battering in Britain and the United States. Consider these unsettling developments: Prior to her recent election as president of Britain’s National Union of Students, Malia Bouattia made comments that can only […]
An obscure village in a remote corner of southeast Poland, the kind you can drive through in seconds, was in the spotlight recently. On March 17, an array of personalities descended on Markowa, in Poland’s Podkarpacie district, for the official opening of The Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jews in World War II. The ceremony, […]