Germany’s last election after Adolf Hitler’s accession to power was held on March 5, 1933. The Nazis captured 288 out of 647 seats in the Reichstag, winning 43.9 percent of the vote and establishing the national socialist party as the largest parliamentary bloc. Although 17 million voters were mesmerized by his vision of Germany, most […]
David Fincher’s workmanlike film, Mank, shines a spotlight on one of the most productive collaborative partnerships in the annals of the Hollywood movie industry. Citizen Kane, the enduring 1941 cinematic classic, was the brainchild of Herman Mankiewicz, a seasoned wordsmith who struggled with alcoholism, and Orson Welles, a precocious upstart who basked in self-adulation. Now […]
A tempest with far-reaching ramifications is brewing in Carmiel, a picturesque town of 46,000 in northern Israel. Carmiel was built in 1964 as part of an Israeli government plan to increase the Jewish population in the Galilee, which is inhabited by a slight majority of Muslim and Christian Arabs, the descendants of Palestinians who did […]
Iran is reeling following the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, one of the architects of its covert nuclear program. The audacious strike was a humiliating assault on Iran’s national pride, but not necessarily a crushing blow to its nuclear ambitions. Fakhrizadeh, a physicist and brigadier general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, was gunned down in […]
Otto Ullmann, a 13-year-old Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied Austria, bid his parents farewell in Vienna in 1939, just months before the outbreak of World War II. He was bound for Sweden, where he would live the rest of his life. Ullmann spent a year in a Swedish orphanage and then obtained work as a farm […]
Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, was conquered by Islamic State in June 2014 and recaptured by Iraq in July 2017. Matthew Carnahan’s gritty war drama, Mosul, which is now available on Netflix, focuses on a small Iraqi police squad as it carries out a mopping-up operation on the eve of Mosul’s liberation. He dedicates the […]
Israeli and Lebanese negotiators have met three times since October in a bid to demarcate their maritime border in the Mediterranean Sea, which is rich in gas deposits, among other natural resources. The negotiations, which have unfolded in the southern Lebanese town of Ras Naqoura under U.S. and United Nations auspices, have been blandly described […]
The Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, has urged the UN Security Council to deal with Iran’s flagrant violations of a disengagement agreement that resulted in the creation of a buffer zone along Israel’s border with Syria. The buffer zone, located on the Golan Heights, is 80 kilometres long and 0.5 to 10 […]
The leaders of two major Jewish organizations in Canada, in seamless lockstep with the Israeli government, have condemned Canada’s support of a recent United Nations draft resolution favoring a two-state solution. Passed by the General Assembly’s Third Committee by a lopsided margin of 163 to 5, with 10 abstentions, the motion was opposed by Israel, […]
The specter of fascism haunts Germany. Seventy five years after the ignominious defeat of Adolf Hitler’s racist regime in World War II, far-right extremism remains a gnawing problem in contemporary Germany. Thomas Haldenwang, the director of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency — the Office for the Protection of the Constitution — said recently that right-wing extremism […]