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 […]
The “Fourth Reich” is an emotive slogan that conjures up diametrically different meanings. Originally a rallying cry for anti-Nazi resistance following the emergence of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, the Fourth Reich was a progressive slogan promising a hopeful post-Nazi future. German Jewish refugees who had fled Germany after Hitler’s accession to power in 1933 were […]
Pounded relentlessly by a dizzying array of adversaries in the past few years, Islamic State is nonetheless back with a vengeance. The Easter Sunday suicide attacks in Sri Lanka, which claimed the lives of about 250 locals and foreigners, was the work of a local cell that had pledged allegiance to Islamic State. They were […]
The worms are coming out of the woodwork with ever-increasing frequency. Antisemitism is and has always been a staple of the far-right in the United States, a nation where Jews have found an unprecedented degree of safety and acceptance. But in the past two years, American antisemites have grown increasingly confident, bold and assertive. In […]