The third season of Fauda, the popular Israeli miniseries developed by Lior Raz and Avi Isaacharoff, is now available on Netflix. Expertly directed by Rotem Shamir, and featuring a first-rate cast of Hebrew and Arabic-speaking Jewish and Arab actors, this thriller transports viewers into the maelstrom of the Arab-Israeli conflict. As in the previous two […]
Israel’s worst political crisis since the advent of statehood in 1948 was defused on April 20 when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his chief rival, Blue and White Party leader Benny Gantz, broke a year-long impasse and agreed to form an emergency government for the next 36 months. A day later, the leader of the […]
Once again, Hamas has displayed a blatant disregard for the basic fundamentals of democracy. Hamas, the undisputed ruling authority in the Gaza Strip since its violent coup in 2007, recently arrested seven peace activists who participated in a video conference with their counterparts in Israel. The Palestinian detainees were members of Skype With Your Enemy, […]
New Jewish immigrants arriving in the United States in the first years of the 20th century usually settled in big northern cities like New York, Philadelphia and Boston or in nearby smaller towns. Scarcely any went to, say, Mississippi, an antebellum southern state defined by the strictures of segregation and populated by a very small […]
My eldest daughter called with the news around bedtime on April 2. The Canadian Jewish News, the weekly newspaper of record where I worked as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist from 1974 until 2013, was ceasing all operations with the publication of the April 9 edition. My first reaction was one of surprise and […]
Harvey Weinstein, the former Hollywood mogul, is justly behind bars after having been convicted in February of rape and sexual assault and sentenced to 23 years in prison. But Weinstein’s legal problems are far from over. On April 10, Los Angeles County charged him with one felony count of sexual battery. The scale of his […]
In the face of the life-threatening coronavirus pandemic raging around the world, some ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel chose to defy government directives to remain at home in quarantine so as to stem the spread of the deadly outbreak. This was not only astonishingly selfish, but unacceptably reckless. By their actions they risked exacerbating an unprecedented, […]
Israel has been hit hard by the novel coronavirus, which has so far killed 79 Israelis, infected nearly 10,000 and virtually shut down the country, in the worst natural disaster to befall it since its creation 72 years ago. The group most affected by this deadly pandemic has been Israel’s insular ultra-Orthodox community of 1.1 […]
The immortal words of Emma Lazarus’ poem, The New Colossus, are cast on a bronze plaque on the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my […]
When the Islamic State organization reached its peak of power and influence five or six years ago, new starry-eyed recruits poured in from Europe, augmenting its ranks by a fairly significant margin. Some were Muslims and still others were European and Asian Christian converts to Islam, fired up by the messianic notion of creating a […]