Can Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, given their record of mutual strife, get along? Dror Zahavi, an Israeli filmmaker living in Germany, puts this confounding question to the test in his latest movie, Crescendo, which opens on May 1 in a virtual cinematic release throughout the United States. Zahavi’s impassioned drama is loosely inspired by […]
A year has elapsed since a heavily-armed neo-Nazi thug, John Earnest, burst into a Chabad center in Poway, California, and fatally shot Lori Gilbert-Kaye, 60, as she shielded Rabbi Yisrael Goldstein with her body. The April 27 attack occurred about six months after a white supremacist assailant murdered 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life […]
Israel and the Palestinians are at odds over key issues, but as the coronavirus pandemic develops, the Israeli government has been offering tangible assistance to the ruling Palestinian authorities in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. According to the United Nations, Israel is helping the Palestinian Authority, which is based in the West Bank, […]
My instinctive anti-social impulses are in full flight during these unsettling days of the coronavirus pandemic. The need to maintain social distancing so as to stay safe and curb the spread of COVID-19 means that I’m obliged to avoid even loved ones. I was never much of a social butterfly, even at the best of […]
It would appear that Iran is cynically using the coronavirus crisis to exert pressure on its arch foe, the United States, to suspend or cancel the crippling trade sanctions that have all but throttled its oil-based economy. Iran, the leading Shi’a power in the Middle East, has been devastated by the pandemic, having recorded 87,000 […]
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 […]