An Israeli cabinet minister and a member of Israel’s parliament both acted inappropriately and impudently when they lambasted a recent interfaith marriage between an Israeli Jewish man and an Israeli Muslim woman. Tzachi Halevy, an actor, and Lucy Aharish, a television news anchor, had been in a romantic relationship for four years when they got married […]
Forty one years ago, I visited Poland, my parents’ birthplace, for the first time. My friend Henry Srebrnik, whose father and mother were born and raised in Poland as well, was my travelling companion. In accordance with our plan, we spent several days in Lodz and Czestochowa, the cities from which our parents’ hailed. In […]
Should a genocidal killer be held in esteem? Should a school be named after him? Should a plaque in his honor be permitted to remain in the library of a major educational institution? Of course not! And yet this is precisely what happened in Lithuania when Jonas Noreika — a Nazi collaborator and an arch […]
Stocked on the shelves of souvenir shops throughout Poland are wooden or plastic figurines of ultra-Orthodox Jews. Some, evoking the long lost shtetl, exude a certain nostalgic charm. Still others, portraying stereotypical Jews clasping a coin in one hand and clutching a bag of coins in another hand, pander to deeply-entrenched notions of money-grubbing Polish […]
One of the last surviving perpetrators of the Holocaust was finally brought to justice on August 21 when Jakiw Palij, a former guard at the Trawniki labor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, was deported to Germany from his home in New York City. It was a unique event in post-Holocaust annals because Palij, 95, was the […]
Britain’s embattled and divided Labor Party, led by Jeremy Corbyn since 2015, is heading for an acrimonious showdown whose outcome could well affect its electoral prospects. Early in September, the party will decide whether to fully adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which has been accepted by scores of countries, including Britain, […]
There is a good case for keeping the Iraqi Jewish Archive in the United States rather than giving it back to Iraq. Consisting of tens of thousands of religious texts, books, personal items and photographs, this priceless trove contains items ranging from a 16th century Hebrew bible to an 18th century Talmud. Found by American […]
Late last month, just minutes after Poland’s parliament enacted legislation removing a troublesome clause from its controversial Holocaust law, ratified by President Anderzej Duda last February, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Polish counterpart, Mateusz Morawiecki, issued a joint declaration intended to defuse tensions between Israel and Poland. In at least two respects, the […]
The Alberto Nisman case in Argentina remains shrouded in mystery. Three and a half years after Nisman’s untimely death, the Argentine government is still grappling with its fallout, with no end in sight. Nisman, a 51-year-old special prosecutor appointed in 2004 to investigate the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, […]
Should Jews in Germany wear kippas in public? Or should they, as recently advised by the chairman of Germany’s leading Jewish organization, leave them at home, tuck them into their pockets or don less identifiably Jewish head coverings? The issue arose after a 19-year-old Syrian asylum seeker in Berlin attacked a young Israeli man wearing […]