With immigrants from all corners of the world pouring into Canada in the decades after World War II, Toronto was in desperate need of new residential housing. The construction industry met the challenge, erecting some 500,000 rental apartment units from 1952 to 1975. Virtually all of them were built by Jewish builders, a few of […]
Peter Mostovoy’s bitter-sweet autobiographical movie, The Red Scarf, exposes the hypocritical pretensions of a society that celebrated egalitarianism and brotherhood but that denied equal opportunities to one of its national minorities. It will be screened online by the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, which runs from June 3-13. Mostovoy, a cinematographer and director, is a distinguished […]
Beverley Stern is gone, and I will miss her. She died earlier this month in Toronto after a battle with cancer. My wife, Etti, and I kept in touch with her by phone in the last year-and-a-half of her life. Regrettably, a face-to-face meeting was impossible due to the coronavirus pandemic. Almost until the day […]
Approximately 200,000 Jews lived in Warsaw’s Muranow district, the hub of Jewish life in Poland, before World War II. Forming the core of the Nazi ghetto after 1940, it served as a conduit from which Jews were deported to the Treblinka extermination camp as the Holocaust unfolded. During the doomed but heroic 1943 uprising, which […]
Israel’s enemies claim they harbor no ill feelings toward Jews despite their hatred of Israel. And while this may be true in some cases, the recent cross-border war in Gaza demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that the line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is very thin and porous. As the war unfolded, Palestinian Arabs and their […]
Marianna Barr’s intriguing Israeli documentary, Private Death, fleshes out a forbidden romance set against the backdrop of rising tensions between Jews and Arabs in 1930s Palestine. It will be screened online at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, which runs from June 3-13. Haya Schreiber, a sixth-generation Jaffa-born Jew from an ultra-Orthodox family, and Tewfik Hanania, […]
Judging by their overblown reaction to the latest cross-border Gaza war, which ended with a truce on May 21, the leaders of Iran may as well be living in an alternate universe. As far as they’re concerned, Hamas won a spectacular victory and Israel was humbled by a crushing defeat after 11 days of fighting, […]
The Jewish Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) is the subject of Jacques Loeuille’s probing documentary, Modigliani And His Secrets. It will be screened online by the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, which starts on June 3 and ends on June 13. Before watching it, I wondered what secrets could possibly emerge. There are basically […]
Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shi’a militia which perceives Israel as its prime enemy, was uncharacteristically mute as the Israeli armed forces and Hamas fought an eleven-day border war in and around the Gaza Strip from May 10 to May 21. Its usually outspoken leader, Hassan Nasrallah, remained deafeningly silent, even after one of its members was […]
For the past five decades, Lebanon, once the jewel of the Middle East, has lost its luster as an oasis of stability, having been engulfed by strife, chaos and bloodshed. In his incisive documentary, Lebanon — Borders of Blood, Duki Dror compares this small nation to an active volcano that explodes periodically, destabilizing everything in […]