Seventy years ago today, January 27, the Red Army liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi concentration camp in southern Poland. Seven decades on, it remains an enduring and searing symbol of unimaginable cruelty and depravity. At the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum on the grounds of the camp, where 1.1 million people perished, the full magnitude of Nazi crimes […]
The sordid Alberto Nisman affair currently unfolding in Argentina has all the ingredients of a taut Hollywood thriller: a terrorist attack that levels a building in the heart of Buenos Aires and kills scores of Jews, an Argentinian government investigation that peters out under suspicious circumstances, and the cold-blooded, mysterious murder of a fearless special […]
France has taken another step forward in acknowledging its role in the Holocaust. On Dec. 5, it announced it had established a fund to compensate Jews who had been deported to German concentration camps on French trains belonging to the state railway company, SNCF. By all estimates, SNCF, under pressure from Germany, sent some 76,000 […]
It’s a nasty world out there. Even peaceniks who believe that Israel can resolve its differences with the Arabs realize, sadly enough, that their pleas for peace and amity may well fall on deaf ears in the Arab world and that Arab governments aside from Egypt and Jordan, which already have peace treaties with Israel, […]
The Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland should be congratulated for having established a set of commendable guidelines to deal with the issue of Nazi looted art. Several days ago, the museum announced that experts had been hired to ascertain whether a fabulous collection of paintings, drawings and lithographs inherited from the son of a German art […]
Forty five years ago, the then Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, myopically dismissed the notion that the Palestinians are a distinct and recognizable people. As she claimed, “It was not as if there was a Palestinian people in Palestine and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did […]
When I was last in Warsaw in the summer of 2009, the site of the future Museum of the History of Polish Jews was cordoned off to the public, and it wasn’t clear when construction would begin, much less end. The project to build a museum in honor of what had been one of the […]
Has there ever been a Toronto mayor in recent history like Rob Ford? I doubt it. Ford was a drunkard, a drug addict, a racist and an antisemite who besmirched and disgraced our fair cosmopolitan city. He was not even fit to be a dog catcher. After yesterday’s municipal election, during which Ford’s equally unpalatable […]
Dr. Richard Horton, editor of the British medical journal The Lancet, flew to Israel a few days ago to make amends for an egregious lapse of judgment. In July, he published An Open Letter for the People of Gaza, a shamefully biased piece about the recent war in the Gaza Strip accusing Israel of committing […]
German Chancellor Angela Merkel is a mensch, which, in Yiddish, means a decent and upright person. She proved it yet again on Sept. 14 at a rally in Berlin where she praised the Jewish community and condemned antisemitism. “That far more than 100,000 Jews are now living in Germany is something of a miracle,” […]