It all started in an elevator in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on May 31, 1921. On that fateful day a century ago, a local newspaper published an unsubstantiated story claiming that a black man had attacked a white woman in an elevator. In short order, a white mob ransacked Greenwood, the city’s African American neighborhood, in a […]
Much to its discredit, Rutgers University — New Jersey’s flagship public university — stands accused of having swept antisemitism under the rug, as if it is a benign and harmless phenomenon of no concern to anyone. In what can only be described as an ominous sign of the times, Rutgers took this step recently in response to […]
The Human Rights Council, a United Nations body that has proven to be notoriously anti-Israel over the years, plans to appoint a commission of inquiry to investigate Israel’s conduct in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip. Its mandate is to determine whether Israel committed war crimes during the recent Gaza war and whether […]
Francois Ozon’s languorous coming-of-age French movie, Summer of ’85, has a very familiar ring to it. In every respect, it resembles Call Me By Your Name, released a few years ago. If I were to go one step further, I would say it could be classified as a credible knockoff of Call Me By Your […]
Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Republican congresswoman from the U.S. state of Georgia, has been mouthing her usual nonsense again. Last week, she stirred understandable outrage when she likened public health regulations enacted since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic to the Nazi treatment of European Jews during the Holocaust. Several months ago, shortly after being […]
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 […]