Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas met Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, in New York City a few days ago, and predictably enough, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vociferously condemned their meeting as “shameful” and “disgraceful.” For Netanyahu, Olmert and Abbas were convenient targets. Twelve years ago, they came tantalizingly close to reaching a peace […]
Two separate stories in the February 11 edition of the Times of Israel speak volumes about the diversity of opinion in Iran regarding its arch enemy, Israel. The headline of the first story was blood-curdling: “Top Iranian official: We’re looking for a pretext to raze Tel Aviv to the ground.” The headline over the second story was […]
It’s essentially an irrational, delusional and absurd phenomenon, but it’s been around for ages and has gotten stronger of late. This corrosive and destructive conspiracy theory, otherwise known as antisemitism, is the world’s oldest form of hatred. Deborah E. Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University, casts a practiced […]
Far from being original, Jojo Rabbit, which won this year’s Academy Award for best adapted screenplay, is the latest film in the past seven decades to poke fun at Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Lest it be forgotten, Nazi Germany was satirized by Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator, Ernst Lubitsch in To Be […]
Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met the leaders of Uganda and Sudan, two African countries embedded in the lore of the Zionist movement for better or worse. Visiting Kampala, the capital of Uganda, Netanyahu said that Israel is intent on upgrading its mercurial relationship with the countries of the African continent. “Israel is coming […]
A self-contained universe vanished into cyber space after the last segment of Black Money Love, a marathon Turkish soap opera broadcast on Netflix, ended on an upbeat, if unpredictable, note. My wife and I watched all 164 episodes over a period of more than a month, fixated by the story line, the characters and the […]
Barnabas Toth’s richly-textured Hungarian-language feature film, Those Who Remained, echoes with the grief and pain of the Holocaust in Hungary, where more than 400,000 Jews were murdered during Nazi Germany’s occupation. Two of the traumatized survivors, Aladad (Aldo) Korner and Klara (Sunny) Wiener, meet by chance and provide each other with warmth, empathy, comfort and […]
An appeals court in Germany has handed down a very disappointing verdict. In a ruling on February 4, a state court in the town of Naumburg rejected a Jewish man’s complaint that a 700-year-old antisemitic sculpture should be removed from the Stadtkirche (City Church) in Wittenberg, the home of the Protestant Reformation. Michael Duellmann, the […]
Before Donald Trump finally released his much-vaunted and anticipated peace plan on January 28, he reportedly told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Arab states would support it and play a helpful role in implementing it. Trump’s sanguine calculation was misguided, a case of wishful thinking, as was his assumption that the Palestinians would climb […]
Marco Belloccio’s fast-paced crime drama, The Traitor, hums with raw energy. Focusing on Tommaso Buscetta (Pierfrancesco Favino), a top-ranking Cosa Nostra mobster who turned on his colleagues in a series of sensational trials in Italy in the 1980s and 1990s, it is reminiscent of some of the finest movies of its genre. Richly steeped in Italianate […]