Masha Gessen does not mince words. Birobidzhan, set aside by the Soviet Union in the late 1920s as a national homeland for Jews, was “perhaps the worst good idea ever.” She develops this argument in an absorbing book, Where the Jews Aren’t: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region (Nextbook) For a […]
I‘m angry. Just like you, I’m angry. I’m angry that Hillary Rodham Clinton won the popular vote in the U.S. presidential election, yet due to an outdated electoral college system, Donald Trump is now president-elect of the United States. I never believed that someone like Trump would be elected. I always thought he was a […]
The war in Syria, nuclear proliferation, trade and the Israeli-Palestinian issue were on the agenda during a November 9-11 tour of Israel and the Palestinian territories by Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. He began his trip, to mark 25 years of diplomatic ties between Israel and Russia, with a visit to the Western Wall in […]
Sixty years ago last month, Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary and crushed a popular anti-communist revolution. To mark the uprising, the Hungarian consulate in Toronto is presenting the Freedom First — Hungary 1956 Film Festival at TIFF’s Bell Lightbox from November 17-20. Admission is free. One of the movies on tap, Istvan Szabo’s Sunshine (1999), starring […]
Several days before the bombastic and unpredictable Donald Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States, soundly defeating the overly confident front-runner Hillary Clinton, I had a sinking feeling he would beat the odds and prevail. Trump, a real estate mogul and a former reality TV show host, is manifestly one of the […]
Paul Verhoeven’s first French language film, Elle, which opens in Canada on November 18, simmers with sexual perversity, betrayal and deception. This taut psychological thriller, set in contemporary Paris, pits a successful businesswoman against a home invader who assaults her and then proceeds to bombard her with a series of suggestive and taunting text messages […]
An acrimonious debate is raging in Poland and the Jewish Diaspora concerning the attitude of Poles toward Jews during Nazi Germany’s brutal occupation of Poland in World War II. The debate, which has drawn in the right-wing government of Poland, turns on Polish-Jewish relations, a sensitive subject even in the best of times. Poland is currently […]
The days are cooler and shorter and the nights are colder and longer. There is a nip and a chill in the air. The clouds are leaden and the sun emits relatively little heat. The rains come down more frequently. Autumn has arrived in Toronto in earnest. It’s not my favorite season. I’m a summer […]
In his sentimental film, Fiddler on the Roof, based on Sholem Aleichem’s beloved stories, Norman Jewison immortalized Anatevka, a shtetl in Russia’s Pale of Settlement steeped in piety and poverty and stricken by pogroms. By the late 19th century, the shtetl, though in a parlous state of decline, was home to 80 percent of East […]
It was historically and morally necessary to publish a critical, annotated version of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (My Struggle), a prominent German historian said recently. The two-volume edition was published by the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich last January with a print run of 4,000 copies and was immediately snapped up by buyers in […]