Paul O’Brien, the director of Amnesty International’s branch in the United States, has belatedly come clean, though some will sharply question his sincerity. In a letter a few days ago, he issued an apology to 25 Jewish Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives who had rightfully condemned his patronizing and willfully malicious comment suggesting […]
When Pearl (Polly) Adler disembarked at Ellis Island in 1913, she was among 13,588 “unaccompanied Jewish girls” from Eastern Europe who had landed in New York City in that year, according to the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society. On the day she left her home in Yanow — a sleepy and changeless village of […]
Eva Husson’s languid British romantic drama, Mothering Sunday, which opens in Canadian theatres on April 8, primarily unfolds during a single day in the spring or summer of 1924, but constantly oscillates between the present, the past and the future. Its chief character, Jane Fairchild (Odessa Young), works as a maid in the stately country […]
The first feature-length movie about the French mime Marcel Marceau, The Art of Silence, will be screened at the Hot Docs documentary film festival in Toronto, which runs from April 28 to May 8. It was written and directed by the Swiss filmmaker Maurizius Staerkle Drux. Marceau (1923-2007) subscribed to the theory that he did […]
A fresh wave of deadly terrorist attacks have washed over Israel this month, in the most serious outbreak of terrorism in more than a decade. Several of the perpetrators have been Arab citizens of Israel, in what should be seen as a worrisome sign of their dissatisfaction with their lot in Israeli society. The other […]
A budding strategic alignment aimed at countering and containing Iran and its allies is emerging in the Middle East. At the historic two-day Negev summit in Israel, which ended on March 28 after 18 hours of deliberations, the U.S. secretary of state and the foreign ministers of four Sunni Arab countries discussed the formation of […]
Herbert Gildin was one of the lucky ones. He slipped out of Nazi Germany by the skin of his teeth, finding refuge in neutral Sweden and then the United States. Whether or not he was a Holocaust survivor in the strictest sense of the word is debatable, but Gildin certainly experienced the savagery of a […]
Russian President Vladimir Putin expected a cakewalk when he launched his misbegotten invasion of Ukraine on February 24. He assumed that his modernized armed forces would sweep across the country in a blitzkrieg, seize Kyiv, the capital, and other major cities, and declare victory. Putin was dead wrong. He and his closest associates miscalculated, thinking […]
Before Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shot to international stardom as the charismatic leader of a besieged nation invaded by its Russian neighbor, he was a comedian who starred in Servant of the People, a popular television series in Ukraine made by his production company. Currently available on Netflix, this amusing sitcom is a remarkable case […]
When World War I ended in 1918, a wave of antisemitic violence erupted in about 500 cities, towns and villages in territory contested by Ukrainians, Russians and Poles. During the course of this blood-soaked era, which coincided with the outbreak of a civil war in the newly-created Soviet Union, almost two-thirds of all Jewish homes […]