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Arts

Paris Can Wait

A two-day road trip which showcases the magnificent scenery and delectable gastronomic delights of southern France perks up Eleanor Coppola’s Paris Can Wait, which was screened at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival. This an old-school 1950s movie, and Coppola has resurrected it in style. Starring Diane Lane as the wife of a busy, penny-pinching […]

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Arts

Denial Exposes British Holocaust Denier

To put it bluntly, Holocaust denial is the stock-in-trade of antisemites. In their zeal to defame Jews, defend Nazi Germany and rehabilitate Adolf Hitler, they dredge up factually baseless arguments. Their claims are absurd: The number of Jewish victims was drastically inflated to benefit Jews and Israel. Jews succumbed to disease and were not murdered […]

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Middle East

Israeli Generals Seek Peace, Says Journalist

If it were left to some Israeli generals, Israel and the Palestinians would be closer to bridging their differences and reaching a two-state solution, says American journalist J.J. Goldberg, the former editor-in-chief of the Forward, a major Jewish newspaper and website in the United States. Suggesting they’re far more pragmatic and realistic than Israeli Prime […]

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Television

Narcos — A Scintillating Series

The much anticipated second season of Narcos, the taut crime thriller set in Colombia, is now available on the Netflix streaming service. In a word, it’s scintillating. It lives up to expectations. Focusing on the real-life narco-terrorist Pablo Escobar and the Medellin drug cartel he controlled with an iron fist, Narcos has all the elements of […]

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Television

Defying The Nazis

Waitstill and Martha Sharp were relief workers from the United States who risked their lives to help victims of Nazism. Recruited by the American Unitarian Association, they rescued hundreds of Jews and Christian anti-Nazis from the jaws of death. Their selflessness, dedication and courage, the stuff of legend, is recounted in Defying the Nazis: The […]

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Middle East

A New Effort To Impose Peace On Syria

Skepticism is the order of the day following an agreement between the United States and Russia to reduce the scale of violence in Syria’s five-year-old civil war and to coordinate American and Russian air attacks on Islamic State and other jihadist groups in Syria. The complex accord, brokered in Geneva on September 9 by U.S. […]

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Guest Voices

9/11 — 15 Years Later

It’s become de rigueur: every September 11 since 2001, Americans commemorate the most devastating foreign attack on American soil since the bombing of Pearl Harbor in World War II. All told, more than 3,000 Americans died that Tuesday. In anniversary years such as 2006, 2011, and now 2016, remembrance ceremonies have been more extensive. The […]

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Middle East

Netanyahu’s Disingenuous Exercise

Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s rarely at a loss for words, has come up with a new cynical twist on Israel’s nearly 50-year occupation of the West Bank. In a video message posted on his Facebook page on September 9, the Israeli prime minister rashly equated the removal of Jewish settlers from the West Bank with the spectre […]

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Travel

Mount Royal — Montreal’s Majestic Landmark

When I was five or six years old, my mother — an immigrant from postwar Poland whose appreciation of nature seemed boundless — introduced me to the glories of Montreal’s great urban forest, Mount Royal Park, which is still the most dominant landmark in a city filled with stately landmarks. My love affair with this […]

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Middle East

Israel Tolerates Illegal Outposts In West Bank

In the summer of 1979, I stood on a rocky, wind-swept cliff in Samaria several hundred metres above sea level. Beneath, in a narrow valley, lay the historic Palestinian town of Nablus. Behind me were an assortment of caravans, all of which were inhabited by the Jewish settlers of Elon Moreh, a brand new outpost […]