There are two shining beacons in the bleak darkness of the Holocaust. Amid a miasma of cruelty and violence, a pair of Nazi-occupied countries shielded Jews. Bulgaria, an ally of Germany, passed antisemitic laws and sent 11,000 foreign Jews from Macedonia and Thrace to Nazi extermination camps. Bulgaria, however, resisted German pressure t0 deport its […]
The Holocaust in Poland unfolded in three horrific phases. First, Jews were herded into crowded ghettos and subjected to starvation and disease. Second, in Operation Reinhardt, Jews were annihilated on an industrial scale in German extermination camps like Auschwitz and Sobibor. Third, Jews who had fled into the countryside in the desperate hope of finding […]
Israel is emerging as the most crowded country in the Western world, according to one of its leading environmentalists. “The elephant in the room is over-population,” says Alon Tal, the former chairman of Israel’s Green Party and the founder of the Israeli Union for Environmental Defence and the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies. Tal, the […]
Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood mogul, has taken an indefinite leave of absence from his film company following a front-page expose in The New York Times claiming he had conducted himself horrendously in encounters with actresses and employees over several decades. Weinstein, one of the most powerful figures in the industry, repeatedly invited women to his hotel room for […]
Rio de Janeiro is known as cidade marvailhosa in Portuguese. In English, this translates into marvellous city. The appellation is richly deserved. Rio exhausts superlatives. Famous for its frothy tropical exuberance and joie de vivre, Rio is crammed into several verdant valleys and defined by the Serra da Carioca, a steep green mountain range, and […]
Astonishingly enough, a plaque affixed to Canada’s newly-inaugurated National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa omitted an extremely important and crucial piece of information — namely that the victims of the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Europe were Jews. If your head is spinning in utter disbelief, so is mine. Tens of millions of non-Jewish civilians were killed during […]
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters whose headline stories on the burgeoning Watergate scandal forced Richard Nixon to become the first U.S. president to resign while still in office, obtained their explosive information from an anonymous source known as Deep Throat. For years, Deep Throat’s identity was shrouded in mystery, but in […]
Kurdish independence is long overdue, as U.S. Senator Charles Schumer (New York) declared the other day in hailing the outcome of the September 25th referendum on Kurdish independence in the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq. As he put it, “The historic vote in Iraqi Kurdistan should be recognized and respected by the world, and the Kurdish […]
David Friedman, the new U.S. ambassador to Israel, has been shooting off his mouth again, issuing statements at odds with American policy. An outspoken supporter of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, he recently claimed that “settlements are a part of Israel,” a loaded comment that surely embarrasses the United States. “I think that was […]
Israel has come a long way from the tenuous days when it was habitually short of weapons to defend its vulnerable borders. And while Israel is still dependent on the United States, its chief ally, for its supply of state-of-the-art fighter jets, transport planes and helicopters, the Israeli arms industry has grown tremendously in the […]