Christophe Lebold’s lyrical biography of the Canadian singer and literary figure, Leonard Cohen: The Man Who Saw The Angels Fall (ECW Press), is definitive in its comprehensiveness. The author, a professor of literature at the University of Strasbourg in France, befriended Cohen, and his admiration of him shines through the pages of this massive book, […]
In a word, the Dead Sea is dying. The world’s lowest body of water, 440 meters below sea level, is drying up at an alarming rate, creating thousands of sinkholes along the shore. The reasons for its decline are clear. It is not being replenished sufficiently by the Jordan River, which itself is dangerously polluted. […]
Two dates in October are seared into the consciousness of Israelis — October 7 and October 13 — in split-screen moments. On October 7, 2023, Israel was suddenly thrown into shock, grief and trauma as thousands of Hamas terrorists from the Gaza Strip broke through the fortified border fence and proceeded to kill about 1,200 […]
The mists of time have obscured the life of Souad Zaki, a largely forgotten Egyptian Jewish entertainer who achieved a measure of fame in her country and the Arab world during the 1940s. Egypt, A Love Story, a bitter-sweet documentary, recounts the trajectory of her relatively short-lived career as an alluring chanteuse and movie actress. […]
There is finally light at the end of the tunnel. Israel’s two-year war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, sparked by Hamas’ invasion of southern Israel on October 7, 2023, appears to have belatedly drawn to a close thanks to a 20-point peace plan devised by U.S. President Donald Trump and his aides. Trump and […]
The Hebrew language documentary, Air Born, delves beneath the surface to examine a little-known facet of the Israeli Air Force, the backbone of Israel’s armed forces. Now available on Izzy, an Israeli streaming platform, this intriguing film looks at the IAF through the eyes of men and women who were raised on its bases between […]
Two years ago today, I was awakened by my wife with the startling news that Israel was at war. Hamas had attacked southern Israel in an unprecedented rampage of murder, rape and pillage that caught Israel unprepared in an intelligence failure of epic proportions. The invasion launched by 3,800 Hamas terrorists led to the deaths […]
This was a terrorist attack that Jews in Britain dreaded. Jews, representing less than one percent of Britain’s population, feared that an antisemitic lunatic would launch a murderous rampage aimed at their 280,000-strong community. On October 2, on the morning of Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, their worst fears materialized when […]
Stella Goldschlag was both a victim and a perpetrator in Nazi Germany. As a Jew, she was constantly persecuted and in danger of being deported to a concentration camp in Poland. Yet because she turned in Jews to the Gestapo to save herself and her parents, she became a Nazi collaborator and an infamous traitor. […]
Donald Trump’s ambitious 20-point peace plan to end the nearly two-year-old war in the Gaza Strip is broadly in line with Israel’s interests and brings Hamas one step closer to defeat on the battlefield. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has endorsed the proposal, which, he acknowledged, “achieves our war aims.” Hamas is reviewing the plan, but […]