Some survivors of the Holocaust were little more than children when they were subjected to cruelty beyond the imagination. The traumas they experienced are etched into their souls, if not their faces. Several of these individuals turn up in Arthur Cary’s absorbing documentary, The Last Survivors, which will be broadcast by the PBS television network […]
One of the wonders of the world, the Dead Sea, is dying a slow death. A horrible thought, but depressingly true. Rich in medicinal minerals, like magnesium, the world’s saltiest, lowest-lying body of water has shrunk by about one-third and its depth has fallen by 65 feet. The Dead Sea has receded because it has […]
On June 27, 2007, Ashraf Marwan, an Egyptian hailed as one of Israel’s greatest spies, was killed when he fell to his death from a fifth-storey apartment balcony in central London. To this day, no one is certain whether he jumped or was pushed. Nor can one be absolutely sure whether he was an Israeli […]
Joseph Pulitzer (1847-1911) was one of the giants of American journalism. The owner and publisher of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The New York World, he was an exemplar of the rags-to-riches saga so beloved by Americans. Arriving in the United States as a penniless Jewish immigrant from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he finagled his way to […]
Reconstruction, one of the most complex, turbulent and divisive eras in American history, left a legacy of hope and terror that still haunts the United States. Extending from approximately 1865 to 1877, it raised a mountain of contentious racial, social, political and economic issues as Northerners and Southerners grappled with the outcome of the 1861-1865 Civil War. […]
As a fringe movement, the alt-right in the United States had its “15 minutes of fame” in August 2017, when it organized a Unite the Right rally in the quaint town of Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the scheduled removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, the commander of Confederate forces during the American Civil […]
Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, is widely admired and feared. Its fearsome reputation, the stuff of legends, informs Inside the Mossad, a four-part Israeli series now available on the Netflix streaming network. In the first few moments, Rafi Eitan, the Mossad’s chief of operations from 1950 to 1981, tells a story about an Israeli […]
The Israeli adventure drama, When Heroes Fly, has arrived at the Netflix streaming network. The 10-part series, set in Israel and Colombia, unfolds in Hebrew, Spanish and English. Four Israeli buddies, who fought together in the 2006 war in Lebanon, team up in a daring mission to find an Israeli woman supposedly killed nearly a decade ago. […]
The emergence of right-wing populist fringe groups in Europe today could well owe its origins to one man — Benito Mussolini, who ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943. Some have dismissed him as a buffoon, but this would be a false and misleading appraisal of the architect of fascism, which plunged continental Europe into darkness. A […]
Ultra- Orthodox Jews in Israel, known as haredim in Hebrew, live in almost total seclusion, their everyday lives an enduring mystery to most Israelis. Shtisel, a popular Israeli television series which ran from 2013 to 2014, shines a spotlight on these reclusive Jews through the Shtisels, a middle-class family in western Jerusalem. Rather than regarding […]