Molly Stuart’s 75-minute documentary, Objector, kicks off the ninth annual Human Rights Film Festival in Toronto, which runs online from December 3-10. Atalya Ben-Abba, a 19-year-old Israeli conscientious objector from Jerusalem, is at the center of this film, which begins six months before she’s due to be inducted into the army. Atalya grew up thinking […]
The Jonathan Jay Pollard affair, a highly contentious episode in Israel’s bilateral relationship with the United States, has reached one of its final chapters after 35 years of acrimony. On November 20, the U.S. Justice Department allowed Pollard’s parole restrictions to expire, enabling him to remove the wrist monitor that tracked his movements and permitting […]
Hugh Llewelyn Glyn Hughes, a British army doctor, and Rachel (Ruth) Genuth, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, never met, but their paths crossed in the Nazi concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in the spring of 1945. Hughes was one of the first British officers to enter Bergen-Belsen. “I have been a doctor for 30 years and seen all […]
Mike Pompeo paid a supposedly “private” visit to the West Bank on November 19, thereby becoming the first U.S. secretary of state to set foot in the West Bank since it was captured by Israel during the 1967 Six Day War. Pompeo went to Psagot, a Jewish settlement near Ramallah built on privately-owned Palestinian land […]
The Yom Kippur War, which unfolded over a period of three weeks starting on October 6, 1973, traumatized Israel. During the course of the hostilities, some 2,600 Israeli soldiers were killed and 11,000 were wounded, a horrendous casualty toll for a country of Israel’s size. Israel had grown cocky since its dazzling victory in the […]
Kippenheim, a village in Germany’s southwestern Baden region, is nestled in the foothills of the picturesque Black Forest. On the eve of World II, Kippenheim’s population was 1,800. Fifty eight percent of its residents were Catholics and 33 percent were Protestant Lutherans. Only 144 of its inhabitants were Jewish. Jews arrived in Kippenheim in the […]
Foreign affairs analyst Christiane Amanpour stumbled into a minefield by comparing Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom in Germany, to the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump. Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, was orchestrated by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime. A moment of infamy, it erupted on November 9, 1938. The nation-wide violence lasted for two days […]
Israel and Lebanon have been locked in an official state of war since 1948, but in the past month they have engaged in three rounds of maritime border talks that may well defuse regional tensions. The talks are likely to be difficult. As a Lebanese spokesman said, the opening round was the “first step in […]
I watched Papillon, Michael Noer’s usually gripping 2017 film, on Netflix the other night. It’s based on an international bestseller published in the late 1960s. The author, a petty thief from Paris named Henri Charriere, was wrongfully convicted of murder in 1931. For the next 14 years, he languished in a remote and hellish prison in […]
Romain Gary’s novel, The Life Before Us, has been converted into a warm-hearted feature film, The Life Ahead. Now available on the Netflix streaming network, it stars the legendary Italian actress Sophia Loren, and is directed by her son, Edoardo Ponti. Loren, 86, plays Madame Rosa, a Holocaust survivor and former prostitute who earns a living babysitting […]