Just minutes before killing 22 people, mostly Hispanics, at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, Patrick Crusius, a 21-year-old right-wing extremist, posted a racist and anti-immigrant manifesto online in which he expressed fear of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas” and warned that Caucasians in the United States were being replaced by foreigners. Crusius’ murderous […]
Germany’s preeminent newsmagazine, Der Spiegel, carried a story on the Jewish community of Germany in one of its latest special editions. On its cover was a vintage photograph of two elderly ultra-Orthodox Jews clad in traditional caftans. The Central Council of Jews in Germany, in a tweet, objected to the illustration, saying it perpetrated antisemitic […]
It could be one of the shortest political comebacks in Israel’s history. Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel, has returned to politics after a seven-year hiatus. He hopes to play a starring role in unseating Benjamin Netanyahu, the current Israeli premier and his former boss, in the September 17 general election. It’s questionable, […]
At the height of his 40-year career at 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace was probably the most feared interviewer in the business. Hard as nails, with a no-nonsense style, he was a “rough boy,” as one of his many interviewees, Hollywood actor Kirk Douglas, said of him with a mixture of awe and annoyance. Wallace, a reporter on […]
One of the most daring missions carried out by the Mossad unfolded in Sudan between 1979 and 1984. It was from there, a remote scuba diving resort on the Red Sea managed and run by Mossad agents, that Israel’s external intelligence agency smuggled thousands of Ethiopian Jews to Israel. This little-known operation is dramatized in The […]
On September 6, 2007, the Israeli Air Force destroyed the still unfinished al-Kibar nuclear reactor in northeastern Syria being built by North Korea under a tight veil of secrecy. Yaakov Katz’s absorbing book, Shadow Strike: Inside Israel’s Secret Mission To Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Power (St. Martin’s Press), tells the story of this daring mission from […]
Israeli settlements in the West Bank are known to engage in a deceptive practice under which their exported products are affixed with misleading “made in Israel” labels. Of course, Jewish settlers believe that the West Bank, conquered by Israel during the Six Day War and populated in the main by Palestinian Arabs, is an integral […]
The Israeli municipality of Ramat Gan recently passed a resolution permitting public bus service on the Sabbath. It’s a long overdue and welcome development, to say the least. Common sense prevailed when Carmel Shama-Hacohen, the mayor of Ramat Gan — a suburb of Tel Aviv — succeeded in convincing city council to approve a resolution allowing two bus lines […]
Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of Britain’s Labor Party, is finally getting really serious about the scourge of antisemitism within its ranks. Several days ago, while claiming that this volatile issue has been exaggerated by the media and by his opponents, he belatedly admitted that his left-of-center party has a “real problem” with antisemitism and that it must […]
It comes as no surprise that home-grown fascists in Western Europe collaborated with the German occupation of their respective countries during World War II. Philip Morgan, in Hitler’s Collaborators: Choosing Between Bad and Worse in Nazi-Occupied Europe (Oxford University Press), mentions them in his wide-ranging book, of course. But what really interests him are not […]