A court in Karachi, Pakistan, has overturned the murder conviction and death sentence of a terrorist and three of his accomplices who kidnapped and murdered the American Jewish journalist Daniel Pearl in January 2002. What a travesty of justice! What a shame! These murderers killed Pearl in cold blood just months after Al Qaeda terrorists […]
Conspiracy theories, which are always grounded in malicious lies and overblown fantasies, are the bread and butter of antisemites. Usually, their half-baked, slimy suppositions rear their ugly heads during a crisis. Jews were blamed for the Black Death, which decimated one-third of Europe’s population. And in the infamous blood libel canard, Jews were accused of […]
Alienated from the insular and regimented ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in New York City in which she was raised, Esther (Esty) Shapiro severs her ties with it, leaves her husband and starts a radically new life in Berlin. Esty, 19, is the central character in Maria Schrader’s four-part Netflix series, Unorthodox, which is inspired by Deborah […]
Israel’s canny caretaker prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, can thank the coronavirus and a weary, beaten-down opponent for having saved his political skin. Netanyahu’s dominance of Israel politics seemed to have ended in mid-March as Blue and White Party leader Benny Gantz moved closer to forming a coalition government. But in a stunning 180 degree reversal on March […]
The roller coaster process during which Jews in Germany were emancipated in the 19th century, only to be deprived of all their rights during the Nazi era and then murdered in the Holocaust, is the subject of Jay Howard Geller’s superb book, The Scholems: A Story of the German-Jewish Bourgeoise From Emancipation To Destruction, published […]
The coronavirus is relentlessly sweeping around the world, but in Israel and the Palestinian territories one can discern the sliver of a silver lining amid the gathering dark clouds. Israel’s intractable conflict with the Palestinians, which has caused so much grief and heartache over the decades, is temporarily on hold as both sides pause to […]
Amazon, America’s biggest retail book seller, is grappling with a conundrum it seems incapable of resolving once and for all, leaving it open to justifiable criticism. The multi-billion dollar company has complied with requests to remove Nazi, neo-Nazi and antisemitic books from its bookstore, only to reinstate some of them shortly afterward. Amazon’s contradictory policy […]
Iran is having a very bad year. Call it Iran’s annus horribilis. Three days into 2020, a U.S. drone strike killed General Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards Corps and one of the most charismatic and revered figures in the country. Soleimani was in charge of forging alliances with regional countries such as […]
Two natural disasters of unimaginable proportions, the 1918 influenza pandemic and the 14th century Black Death plague, come to mind as I try to come to grips with the enormity of the coronavirus, which has upended all our lives. The current outbreak, having started in China this past December, has mutated and crossed international borders […]
The Office for the Protection of the Constitution, a domestic intelligence agency whose mandate is to safeguard German democracy, recently classified a faction of the right-wing Alternative for Germany Party (AfD) as extremist and placed it under official surveillance. In explaining the rationale for taking this drastic but necessary step, Thomas Haldenwang, the president of that […]