In 2004, I co-edited a book, De Facto States: The Quest for Sovereignty, that was to include a chapter on Iraqi Kurdistan. The person asked to write it didn’t come through, though, so it wasn’t included. Today such an article would be an absolute necessity. It’s been a long time coming, but on September 25 […]
The Alternative for Germany, a marginal far right-wing political party founded four years ago, is on the cusp of a historic breakthrough. The AFD, which currently holds 13 seats in German state assemblies and in the European Parliament, is widely expected to win eight to 11 percent of the votes in the September 24 general […]
The Nazi machinery of mass murder is on stark and clinical display at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. The Evidence Room, a chilling and ghostly exhibition of white plaster components of the Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers, examines the central role that architecture played in the construction of this extermination camp in Poland. The Evidence Room, which […]
For two and a half years, Yemen has been torn by a civil war in which its internationally-recognized government of President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, backed by a coalition supported by the United States and Britain, is trying to roll back the Iranian-aligned Houthi rebels who control most of northern Yemen, including the capital Sana’a. […]
In 1975, when Toronto was still considered by some as something of a culinary backwater, I began writing a series of stories about Jewish delicatessens and restaurants in the city for a Canadian Jewish newspaper. My first story was illustrated by a photograph of yours truly sitting contentedly in front of a pastrami sandwich and […]
As Vichy police and German forces rounded up Jews in France, deporting them to Nazi concentration camps in Poland, thousands of desperate Jewish parents placed their children with non-Jewish families or Christian institutions, hoping they would be reunited with them after the war. Thirty thousand children survived the Nazi occupation. One-third of them, having been hidden, […]
The third season of Narcos, the taut crime thriller from Netflix, draws a viewer into its vortex of intrigue, skullduggery and violence. It’s set in Colombia, a South American country where drug cartels loom large and where corruption at the highest levels of government and law enforcement is an endemic and recurring problem. During the […]
Syrian government spokespersons have steadfastly denied deploying chemical weapons in the ongoing civil war, but these claims have always rung hollow. Last spring, as per usual, the Syrian regime shamelessly stuck to its script by denying responsibility for a chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun, a rebel-held town in northern Syria. The strike killed 83 civilians […]
Shlomo Amar, the chief rabbi of Jerusalem and the former chief Sephardic rabbi of Israel, is unfit to hold his position. Last November, following a decision by the Israeli government to establish an egalitarian prayer space at the southern end of the Western Wall, Amar had the gall to brand the Reform branch of Judaism […]
In Myanmar (Burma), Buddhist animosity toward an ethno-religious Bengali Muslim minority, the Rohingya, has led to massive violence. The Rohingya, who number some 1.3 million people, less than five percent of the country’s population, live mainly in Myanmar’s far western Rakhine State, adjacent to neighboring Muslim Bangladesh. Most were stripped of their citizenship under a […]