Tel Aviv, Israel’s lively and exuberant city on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea, has the distinction of possessing the world’s largest concentration of Bauhaus buildings. Bauhaus architecture, the forerunner of the modern International style, emerged in Germany in the 1920s and fell out of favor after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. Driven […]
Lamentably, 2019 will go down in history as a sobering year, judging by the number of known antisemitic incidents reported in the United States by the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL recorded 2,107 incidents of assault, harassment and vandalism, an increase of 12 percent over 2018. It was the worst tally since the ADL began tracking […]
Marthe Hofnung Cohn is quite a lady. During the final weeks of World War II, this French Jewish woman was spy in Nazi Germany, providing France with vital, real-time intelligence about the movement of German army troops. Cohn’s exploits, the stuff of legend, were known only to a select few in 1945, when she courageously sneaked […]
The first known documentary in Hebrew about Israel’s Arab minority, My Name is Ahmad, will be screened online on June 2 at this year’s Toronto Jewish Film Festival. Directed by Avshalom Katz and Ram Loevy, and released in 1966, this 14-minute short is like a time capsule from a bygone era. They focus their attention […]
The notorious antisemitic campaign launched by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union after World War II is chronicled in exacting and chilling detail in Guillaume Ribot’s superb French-language documentary, The Black Book, which will be screened online on June 3 at this year’s Toronto Jewish Film Festival. Guillaume’s 92-minute film revolves around the Black Book, […]
Sara Goralnik, a 12-year-old Polish Jewish girl, survived the Holocaust by adopting the identity of her Ukrainian friend, Manya Romanchuk. Passing as a Christian, she worked on a small farm in eastern Poland from 1942 to 1944, until it was safe to return to her hometown near the Russian border. Sara’s story of survival unfolds in […]
Apart from having claimed the lives of nearly 300,000 persons around the world, the deadly coronavirus pandemic has emboldened xenophobes, white nationalists, white supremacists, racists and antisemites in the United States. The outbreak, which has killed 79,000 Americans so far, has forced a multitude of businesses to close and lay off or furlough millions of […]
In what can only be described as a heretical break with the past, the Saudi Arabian-owned MBC channel, the largest private broadcaster in the Arab world, recently broadcast a drama and a comedy that respectively portrays Jews in a positive light and lampoons Arab attitudes to Israel. The shows, Umm Haroun (The Mother of Aaron) […]
By all appearances, Barry and Karen Mason were a conventional middle-class Jewish couple defined by their normality and inconspicuousness. Yet the Masons were different, perhaps even subversive. For 30 years, until the summer of 2012, they ran Circus of Books, a gay pornography bookshop in Los Angeles, and distributed hardcore gay movies. The Masons are […]
Reports emanating from Israel of late suggest that Iran, Israel’s arch enemy, is gradually withdrawing its forces from Syria and that pro-Iranian militias there are also pulling out. If these reports are true, a major source of tension in the Middle East will have been removed and Israel will have scored a major victory over Iran, […]