Benjamin Brown left an extraordinary legacy. One of the first practising Jewish architects in Canada, he designed several of the most distinctive buildings in Toronto, Canada’s biggest city. He succeeded in spite of the endemic antisemitism that held Canada in its grip before World War II and that placed obstacles in front of talented Jews […]
Approximately one million Muslims have flooded into Europe in the past year, the majority having been admitted by Germany in a grand humanitarian gesture. Haunted by visions of its Nazi past and its central role in the Holocaust, Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, has urged Europeans to emulate her example. Merkel’s openness to the migrants, many […]
It is sickening and disheartening that European governments and individuals collaborated with Nazi Germany in the mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust. But it is downright revolting that collaborators with blood on their hands are still being honored by their native lands. This adds insult to injury. The problem is exemplified by two recent incidents. […]
Why is Canada Post, a Canadian government agency, delivering a newspaper that defames Jews and denies the Holocaust? I asked myself that troubling question yesterday after the postman delivered a batch of mail. Among the letters and flyers stuffed into my mailbox was Your Ward News, a quarterly which claims to be “the world’s largest […]
Though generally supportive of Israel, Jews in the United States are distancing themselves from it, claims American scholar Michael Barnett. “American Jews are losing their love for Israel,” he said in a speech yesterday at the University of Toronto’s Monk School of Global Affairs. “It’s palpable and everybody is talking about it.” As American Jews […]
University professors enjoy the benefits of academic freedom and free speech. These cherished concepts are essential ingredients in the unhindered exchange and flow of ideas. Joy Karega, a non-tenured assistant professor of rhetoric and composition at Oberlin College, a liberal arts institution in the state of Ohio, made an utter mockery of these hallowed principles […]
The Jewish-run tavern was an iconic feature of rural Poland for hundreds of years. “It was etched into the Polish landscape,” American scholar Glenn Dynner says. These taverns, which existed until the late 19th century, were centers of leisure, business and life-cycle events, even after Poland lost its independence and was reduced to a partitioned entity […]
The name of the game in Auschwitz-Birkenau today is preservation, preservation, preservation. “I want to preserve its authenticity and humanity,” Piotr Cywinski, the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oswiecim, Poland, said in Toronto yesterday. Cywinski, who has been leading conservation efforts at the infamous Nazi camp since his appointment a decade ago, was […]
On the eve of his execution in 1962, Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann brazenly requested a pardon from the state of Israel. In line with the defence strategy his lawyer had mounted at his trial in Jerusalem, Eichmann claimed he had been a minor functionary merely following orders. “There is a need to draw a line […]
David Kirshner, my loud, lively, gregarious, boisterous and unforgettable father, departed from this vale of tears in the early hours of January 20 as I slept soundly. The shattering news was conveyed to me, in the dead of winter, by my younger sister, Shirley, whose frantic message awoke me with a start. I was thus […]