On October 26, at the request of his family, Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat credited with saving thousands of Hungarian Jews during World War II, was formally declared dead, almost 72 years after he disappeared in January 1945. Few positive stories emerged from the Holocaust. For every Oskar Schindler, the subject of the 1993 movie Schindler’s […]
The launch of a glossy coffee table book on Jewish-Ukrainian relations provided its co-authors with an opportunity to discuss their complicated topic. At a symposium earlier this month at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern — a professor of Jewish Studies at Northwestern University — and Paul Robert Magocsi — the […]
The ultra-Orthodox Jews of Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighborhood are an island onto themselves. Fanatically observant and utterly disdainful of Israeli secular society, they’re intensely insular and obsessively self-absorbed. To the vast majority of Israelis, these pre-modern Jews are virtually strangers. They may as well be Martians, but they’re Israelis. Shtisel, an Israeli television drama which […]
Deep in the wilds of Mongolia, nomads practice the art of eagle hunting. By tradition, it’s a man’s sport in this hierarchical society. So when a 13-year-old girl sets her sights on following in their footsteps, the grizzled men in her tight-knit community are surprised and even aghast by her ambition. This is the theme […]
One of the longest-simmering conflicts of our time, the Arab-Israeli dispute, has been stubbornly immune to resolution. It has ground on for more than a century, claiming innumerable lives and wasting scarce resources. Stripped to its barest essentials, it pits Zionism against Palestinian nationalism. The piecemeal return of Jews to their ancestral homeland, spurred by […]
At a moment when jihadism is on the rise and Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians has reached a nadir, Princeton University Press’ encyclopedic volume, A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations, is a welcome addition to our fount of knowledge. More than 1,100 pages in length, and lavishly illustrated, this authoritative tome should be required reading for […]
I was fortunate enough to visit Vancouver earlier this month, but there was a problem: I had less than 24 hours to explore this gorgeous city on Canada’s west coast. Unlike my friends who’d recently bought a lovely little condo through Eddie Yan, my time was very limited. What could I possibly see in so […]
A war that started 60 years ago provided Canada with its now familiar role as a peacekeeping force on behalf of the United Nations. On October 29, 1956, Israeli forces invaded the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. In a swift, sweeping operation of 100 hours, under the leadership of then chief of the General Staff, Moshe […]
Should comedians avoid crossing social and political red lines? Are they bound by society’s taboos? These are the overlapping questions implicitly posed by Ferne Pearlstein in The Last Laugh, a probing documentary that examines the Holocaust from a completely different point of view. Pearlstein’s movie, which will be screened by the Toronto Jewish Film Festival […]
Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden, adapted from Sarah Waters’ bestseller, Fingersmith, is a highly stylized erotic thriller which takes place in Japanese-occupied Korea in the 1930s. Scheduled to open in Canada on October 28, this two-and-a-half hour Korean and Japanese-language film is at once prim and carnal, unfolding in an opulent mansion set deep in a forest. With one striking exception, the […]