Late last month, on the eve of his latest meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House, U.S. President Donald Trump issued a bombshell statement. “I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank,” said Trump, whom Netanyahu has often hailed as the most pro-Israel president in American history. “It’s not […]
Nir Baram, an Israeli novelist and journalist, is a peacenik. He is convinced that the protracted conflict between Israelis and Palestinians should be resolved through a two-state solution, which has so far proved to be a pipe dream. Testing his firmly-held belief, he spent two years travelling around the Israeli-occupied West Bank, speaking to Jewish […]
Christophe Lebold’s lyrical biography of the Canadian singer and literary figure, Leonard Cohen: The Man Who Saw The Angels Fall (ECW Press), is definitive in its comprehensiveness. The author, a professor of literature at the University of Strasbourg in France, befriended Cohen, and his admiration of him shines through the pages of this massive book, […]
In a word, the Dead Sea is dying. The world’s lowest body of water, 440 meters below sea level, is drying up at an alarming rate, creating thousands of sinkholes along the shore. The reasons for its decline are clear. It is not being replenished sufficiently by the Jordan River, which itself is dangerously polluted. […]
Two dates in October are seared into the consciousness of Israelis — October 7 and October 13 — in split-screen moments. On October 7, 2023, Israel was suddenly thrown into shock, grief and trauma as thousands of Hamas terrorists from the Gaza Strip broke through the fortified border fence and proceeded to kill about 1,200 […]
The mists of time have obscured the life of Souad Zaki, a largely forgotten Egyptian Jewish entertainer who achieved a measure of fame in her country and the Arab world during the 1940s. Egypt, A Love Story, a bitter-sweet documentary, recounts the trajectory of her relatively short-lived career as an alluring chanteuse and movie actress. […]
There is finally light at the end of the tunnel. Israel’s two-year war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, sparked by Hamas’ invasion of southern Israel on October 7, 2023, appears to have belatedly drawn to a close thanks to a 20-point peace plan devised by U.S. President Donald Trump and his aides. Trump and […]
The Hebrew language documentary, Air Born, delves beneath the surface to examine a little-known facet of the Israeli Air Force, the backbone of Israel’s armed forces. Now available on Izzy, an Israeli streaming platform, this intriguing film looks at the IAF through the eyes of men and women who were raised on its bases between […]
Two years ago today, I was awakened by my wife with the startling news that Israel was at war. Hamas had attacked southern Israel in an unprecedented rampage of murder, rape and pillage that caught Israel unprepared in an intelligence failure of epic proportions. The invasion launched by 3,800 Hamas terrorists led to the deaths […]
This was a terrorist attack that Jews in Britain dreaded. Jews, representing less than one percent of Britain’s population, feared that an antisemitic lunatic would launch a murderous rampage aimed at their 280,000-strong community. On October 2, on the morning of Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, their worst fears materialized when […]