Given what happened in Germany and German-occupied Europe from 1933 to 1945, the 12-year interregnum during which German Jews were persecuted and murdered and Germany orchestrated the industrial-scale killing of European Jews in the Holocaust, Germans must be particularly vigilant in combating the scourge of antisemitism. No one knows this better than German Chancellor Angela Merkel. […]
Sherry Lansing broke the glass ceiling in Hollywood. The first woman to head a major movie studio, she was president of 20th Century Fox and chair of Paramount Pictures. As Stephen Galloway writes in the paperback edition of Leading Lady: Sherry Lansing and the Making of a Hollywood Groundbreaker (Three Rivers Press), she came of […]
American sex therapist Ruth Westheimer whimsically asks Alexa, her electronic assistant, to identify Ruth Westheimer. Alexa’s disembodied answer is correct, bringing a smile to Westheimer’s face. “She knows who I am,” she exclaims excitedly. Westheimer, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, is indeed famous. Long a fixture on radio and television, the author of a […]
Two hundred years ago, a crowd of men, women and children assembled at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester, a major British industrial city, to demand political and economic reforms. The ruling elite, falsely but conveniently equating their demands with sedition and insurrection, ordered troops to break up the peaceful gathering. More than a dozen protesters […]
A “white crow” in Russian is a reference to an unusual person or an outsider. This appellation was certainly applicable to the late Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev. A non-conformist, he was brash and outspoken, straddling the thin line between the permissible and the unacceptable. Although he achieved recognition and fame as one of Russia’s […]
Fed up with Toronto’s bitterly cold winter this year, I was more than ready for a warm-weather vacation down south. Nicaragua beckoned, but I passed because it was torn by political instability yet again. Having already been to Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Panama, I pivoted toward El Salvador, the smallest, most densely populated and […]
Marek Edelman was a fighter. He was the last surviving commander of the doomed but courageous Warsaw ghetto uprising in April 1943 and a participant in the 1944 general uprising in Warsaw. Remaining in Poland after the war, he studied medicine and became one of Poland’s leading cardiologists. During the 1980s, when he was a […]
Long before the late Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson wrote his acclaimed, posthumous trilogy of novels — The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest and The Girl Who Played With Fire — he was preoccupied by the neo-Nazi scene in Sweden. That right-wing extremists were active in this progressive Nordic […]
Facebook, the social media leviathan, has taken one step forward but another step backward with its dual decision to evict several extremists from its platform while permitting Holocaust deniers to carry on as usual. Facebook’s schizophrenic position is senseless and maddening. On May 2, in accordance with its policy of banning “dangerous individuals and organizations” […]
Billie August’s lush costume drama, A Fortunate Man, speaks to the proverb that pride, one of the seven deadly sins, comes before a fall. The two-and-a-half-hour movie, based on an eight-volume novel by Nobel laureate Henrik Pontoppidan and now available on the Netflix streaming network, is set mainly in late 19th century Denmark and revolves around […]