The burning question following the United States’ cruise missile strike against the Al Shayrat air force base in Syria on April 6 is whether the Trump administration has fundamentally changed its policy toward the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Less than a week before two U.S. destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean Sea fired 59 […]
Are the neoconservative jingoists in Washington pushing for armed conflict with Russia? Their charge that an April 4 chemical gas attack by air against civilians in the Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun was ordered by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, supported by Moscow, is, very conveniently, giving them further ammunition to create war hysteria. Two days […]
Until quite recently, the student union at Ryerson University in Toronto appeared cool, if not hostile, toward Jewish student concerns. Three years ago this month, the union joined the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, an outfit whose goal is to delegitimize Israel. Last November, at its semi-annual general meeting, two anti-Israel organizations, Students […]
One of the strengths of Israel’s special relationship with the United States is its bipartisan character. Democrats, Republicans and third party politicians regard Israel as a valued ally whose values and pro-Western foreign policy are completely in line with theirs, notwithstanding the disputes arising out of Israel’s extremely controversial settlement project in the West Bank. […]
As turbulent a country as ever, Egypt, in the last six years, has seen an uprising topple a dictator, the election of a Muslim Brotherhood leader to power, and finally a coup that brought a former general/ defence minister into office. When Barack Obama came to Washington in 2009, he promised a “reboot” in relations […]
It’s safe to say that Leipzig’s rich musical tradition cannot be matched by any other city in Germany. This is where Johann Sebastian Bach was employed as a choirmaster and composed the St. Matthew’s Passion, where Robert Schumann wrote the Spring Symphony, where Richard Wagner was born and where Felix Mendelssohn lived and worked. Leipzig, […]
Yossi Sucary calls it the “unspoken Holocaust.” Sucary, an Israeli academic and author, is referring to the little-known fact that the Jews of Libya were among the six million victims of the Holocaust. Jews in Israel and the Diaspora generally assume that only European Jews were caught up in the Holocaust, but this assumption is […]
Francois Ozon’s romantic drama, Frantz, moves between national borders seamlessly. Languidly unfolding in Germany and France in 1919, a year after the end of World War I, it’s based on Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 movie, Broken Lullaby. Scheduled to open in Canadian theatres on April 7, Ozon’s spare and affecting film is at once sweet and bitter. […]
Congratulations, Chrystia Freeland. You’ve won. You and your handlers not only buried a legitimate news story, but convinced a compliant media, a cowed Jewish leadership and a spineless Jewish press to ignore it, as if it never even existed. I’m referring, of course, to the short-lived Freeland affair, which broke in Canada several weeks ago. […]
It was 18 days that shook the Middle East. The autocrat who had ruled Egypt for nearly three decades was gone, ousted by a popular uprising that was part of the larger upheaval in the Middle East known as the Arab Spring. So it appeared at the time. But six years later, it now seems […]