Prodigious and prolific, Irving Layton was one of Canada’s most accomplished poets when Donald Winkler of the National Film Board of Canada was assigned to direct a documentary about him. Fifty two minutes in length and released in 1986, Poet: Irving Layton Observed will be streamed online by the NFB in May during Canadian Jewish Heritage […]
Nineteen years before Mordecai Richler’s death in 2001, the National Film Board of Canada made a short documentary about this prominent Canadian novelist, journalist and screenwriter. Mordecai Richler: The Writer and His Roots, directed by Claire Helman, was released in 1983. This 21-minute film can be accessed online during May, in honor of Canadian Jewish […]
Once bitten, twice shy. Mahmoud Abbas, the 85-year-old president of the Palestinian Authority and the leader of the mainstream Fatah party, was taking no chances. On April 29, he postponed the Palestinian parliamentary election, which was due to be held on May 22. This came as no surprise to observers. Abbas has been wary of […]
Leonard Cohen, the acclaimed Canadian poet and novelist, was only 30 when Donald Brittain and Don Owen of the National Film Board of Canada decided he was worthy of a biopic. Ladies and Gentlemen …. Mr. Leonard Cohen was released in 1965, and in honor of Canadian Jewish Heritage Month, this spare and affecting 44-minute black-and-white […]
Sixty four thousand women and their children are stranded in a bleak refugee camp in an area of northeastern Syria controlled by Kurdish militias. The wives of Islamic State fighters who were either killed in battle or imprisoned after being captured, they yearn to go back to their homes, but their governments have banned them […]
Joe Biden bit the bullet on April 24 and acknowledged what no previous U.S. president had ever dared to boldly state in public: the mass murder of Christian Armenians in the Ottoman Empire about a century ago was nothing less than genocide. Much to Turkey’s chagrin, 30 countries, ranging from Canada and Germany to Argentina […]
Of all the books I’ve read about the ongoing civil war in Syria, Syrian Requiem: The Civil War And Its Aftermath is the best of the lot. Written by the Israeli scholars Itamar Rabinovich and Carmit Valensi and published by Princeton University Press, it is concise yet comprehensive, scholarly yet accessible. The authors are distinguished […]
Misha Defonseca’s Holocaust survival story is incredible, beyond belief. At the age of seven, in Nazi-occupied Belgium, she trudged through a forest and kept herself alive by joining a pack of wolves that protected and provided her with scraps of food. In 1997, Defonseca’s memoirs, Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years, was published and […]
Maya Sarfaty’s absorbing and affecting movie, Love It Was Not, brings to light a singular story from the depths of the Holocaust. Scheduled to be screened online at the forthcoming Canadian International Documentary Festival (Hot Docs), which runs from April 29 to May 9, it sweeps over the landscape of a love affair that crossed all […]
When President George W. Bush launched Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, roughly a month after more than a dozen airborne Al-Qaeda Arab terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., he warned Americans to expect “a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have […]