Israel’s forthcoming general election is due to take place in September or October, and if the pollsters are correct Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will fail to capture enough Knesset seats to cobble together yet another right-wing coalition. Public opinion surveys released by the Times of Israel and Channel 12 on June 11 predicted that the […]
Erno “Zvi” Spiegel is an unsung hero of the Holocaust — a nearly forgotten Hungarian Jew who saved young Jewish twins in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland from looming death. An inmate in the camp since May 1944, he worked for Josef Mengele, the German physician who conducted gruesome medical experiments on twins he […]
The summer Olympic Games in Munich in 1972 presented West Germany with a golden opportunity to welcome visitors to the “new” Germany. A quarter of a century after the fall of Adolf Hitler’s genocidal Nazi regime, which persecuted and murdered German and European Jews before and during the Holocaust, Germans could finally try to put […]
The late Bella Abzug aroused strong reactions. “She was loved and definitely hated,” says her daughter, Liz, in a succinct summation. A brash and flamboyant American social activist and politician who served in the House of Representatives in the 1970s, Abzug is the subject of the ironically titled Bella! This Woman’s Place Is In The […]
The third season of Tehran treats viewers to the usual dose of thrills, spills and chills against the backdrop of Israel’s existential conflict with Iran. It has been available on Apple TV in North America since January, but I belatedly caught up with the eight-part series several days ago. Tehran plays out amid bursts of […]
Sweden hewed to a policy of neutrality during World War II, but Swedish industrialists profited from the conflict by selling iron ore and ball bearings to Nazi Germany, thereby enabling it to press on with the war. Sweden, too, allowed German troop trains to pass through its territory, all in the service of placating Germany […]
An Israeli documentary, Deep Inside Iran, adds an additional layer of substance and understanding to Israel’s 12-day war with Iran last June. Now available on Izzy, a streaming platform specializing in Israeli films, this 56-minute movie is constructed around an interview with an Iranian Mossad agent who secretly worked inside Iran during that conflict. The […]
Eli Cohen has been a household name in Israel for decades. Sixty one years after his execution in Damascus, he is remembered as probably the greatest spy who ever worked for the Mossad, Israel’s external intelligence agency. Cohen arrived in Syria, Israel’s virulently hostile neighbor, in 1962 under cover as a Syrian Arab emigre from […]
African and Jewish Americans have been bound together in a deeply intertwined relationship despite their historical, religious and cultural differences and divergent priorities. Since the formation of the American republic more than two centuries ago, they have been mocked and feared as they have tried to tear down the walls of hatred and prejudice, says […]
Elie Wiesel, the late Jewish novelist and human rights activist, was deeply affected by the Holocaust. He was personally traumatized by it and drew on its horrors as a writer. Oren Rudavsky’s documentary, Elie Wiesel: Soul On Fire, which is scheduled to be broadcast by the PBS network on Tuesday, January 27 at 9 p.m. […]