Joshua Weinstein has gone where no American movie director has ventured in about 70 years. He has made a film that unfolds almost entirely in Yiddish, with a sprinkling of English and Spanish thrown in. Menashe, which opens in Canadian theatres on August 11, was filmed in Borough Park, a Hassidic neighborhood in New York City. Menashe, […]
When I last visited the sprawling site of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, I knew I had seen one of the most diabolical and depraved places on the planet. The bleak barracks, the barbed wire fences, the guard posts, the gas chambers and the ruins of crematoria reminded me of the lengths Nazi Germany went […]
Some Varsovians call it, caustically, “Stalin’s wedding cake.” Others have wanted it razed to the ground. It sits plopped in the middle of the city, looking like a 1930s-era building, and is now surrounded by modern office towers. In its own way it looks sort of kooky. It was Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s “gift to […]
Thanks to the popularity of the 1993 movie Schindler’s List, as well as the success of the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow, many people assume that the Kazimierz neighborhood, where most of the city’s Jews lived prior to the Holocaust, served as the Jewish ghetto during the war. Elsewhere in Poland, a Jewish district typically […]
Seventy five years ago this month, the collaborationist Vichy regime in France committed its worst single crime. On July 16-17, 1942, French police in Paris rounded up 13,152 stateless Jews — men, women and children — and consigned them to purgatory. Some were taken to a detention camp in Drancy, near Paris. The rest were […]
The left-wing American journalist Lincoln Steffens, after a three-week visit to the new Soviet state in March 1919, famously proclaimed, “I have seen the future and it works.” However, during my visit to the model Polish Communist city of Nowa Huta, created after World War II, I can confidently declare that I have seen the […]
Israel has learned a sobering lesson from the nearly two week standoff at the Temple Mount: Its sovereignty in East Jerusalem, already widely challenged by the international community, is subject to a panoply of constraints and pressures. Israel possesses sweeping powers in the eastern half of the city, conquered by the Israeli army in the […]
The last few months have seen major debates across Canada regarding the cultural appropriation of indigenous art and literature by non-natives. The same issue has also emerged in Poland, especially in the southern city of Krakow, which I’m currently visiting. As most readers know, Krakow is an incredibly beautiful and well-preserved medieval city, and the […]
The new ceasefire in southwestern Syria, brokered recently by the United States, Russia and Jordan, has led to the first public dispute between Israel and the Trump administration. The truce, the culmination of months of negotiations in which Israel was involved, was announced on July 7 following the first meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump […]
I’m writing this from Czestochowa, Poland, where I was born 72 years ago. The city is best known for the Jasna Gora monastery. Visited by around four million pilgrims per year, it is a shrine to the Virgin Mary. The cloister houses the Black Madonna, one of the holiest icons of the Catholic Church. My […]