For five years, until 2018, the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad besieged Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus populated in the main by Syrians opposed to his totalitarian regime. Following the outbreak of the civil war in Syria in 2011, Eastern Ghouta was regularly pummelled by forces loyal to Assad. In the summer of […]
Israel’s increasingly close economic ties with China, its third largest trading partner, pose a problem for its chief ally, the United States. The Trump administration, currently locked in a trade war with China, has warned Israel in recent months that its pivotal relationship with the United States could be adversely affected unless it scales back […]
In his semi-autobiographical film, Pain and Glory, the 70-year-old Spanish director Pedro Almodovar conducts a critical examination of himself. In this respect, the title of the movie is appropriate. Salvador (Antonio Bandaras), the aging character who portrays him, has amassed acclaim in his industry, but now he suffers from a rash of debilitating ailments and […]
Adam Zucker’s American Muslim leaves a viewer with a nuanced portrait of Muslims in the United States in the age of Donald Trump. It will be screened at New York City’s DOC NYC, the country’s largest documentary film festival, on November 10 and 12. This impassioned and informative movie tells us that Muslims, comprising one percent of […]
The 20th century brought calamity and renewal to Germany, transforming it from a military aggressor into a pillar of European democracy. Germany suffered territorial losses and hyperinflation following its defeat in World War I. The Weimar Republic was a time of hope, but the Depression paved the way for Adolf Hitler’s racist regime, which persecuted its […]
Soufi’s, a Syrian restaurant in Toronto, shut down on October 8 after receiving a barrage of hate mail and threatening phone calls. On October 11, the popular restaurant reopened and its nine employees were back at work, serving up Syrian food like Maneesh, a savory flatbread slathered with various toppings; Knaffeh a shredded phylo pastry […]
President Donald Trump’s momentous decision to pull more U.S. forces out of Syria has unleashed a chaotic and confusing roller-coaster of events in the Middle East that could well be detrimental to American interests in the region. Trump, after phoning Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last week, withdrew some 50 U.S. troops from outposts in […]
The reconstituted Jewish community in Germany is rightly shocked and appalled by the news that a heavily-armed neo-Nazi terrorist almost succeeded in murdering scores of Jews in the eastern city of Halle on Yom Kippur. In what could have been the most heinous assault against Jews in Germany since the nation-wide Kristallnacht pogrom of November […]
Anne Frank, the inspirational Dutch Jewish diarist, would have been 90 this year had she lived through the Holocaust. Anne, of course, was not the only Jewish adolescent whose precious life was snuffed out by the Nazis and their collaborators. Lest we forget, one million Jewish children were murdered during the Shoah, a tragedy that […]
I wish I could have joined Will Benson and his intrepid crew in the Amazon rainforest of Ecuador. They spent almost a month in one of its wildest, most inaccessible areas, installing about 50 remotely-operated cameras to trees, at nesting sites and on animal trails to film its exotic wildlife in real time. Benson’s documentary, Undercover […]