This year being the centenary of his birth, many articles are appearing about one of the 20th century’s most eminent historians, Eric Hobsbawm. The accolades are coming particularly from the left, as Hobsbawm was a lifelong member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and chair of its Historians’ Group. As he himself stated, the […]
Jose Arturo Castellanos was one of the unassuming heroes of the Holocaust, an army colonel and diplomat from the small Central American country of El Salvador who rescued thousands of European Jews from the clutches of the Nazis. Honored by Yad Vashem in 2010 as a Righteous Gentile, he issued more than 12,000 Salvadoran citizenship certificates […]
If Israel is ever to make peace with the Palestinians, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will have to display a lot more courage and backbone. In recent days, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has reported that Netanyahu was prepared to restart peace talks with the Palestinians, broken off three years ago, in the hope of negotiating a comprehensive […]
Acre, a historic port in northern Israel, sits on the remnants of the world’s only fully preserved Crusader city. Visitors who spend a few hours in its old quarter, designated as a World Heritage site by the United Nations, can feast their eyes on subterranean Crusader ruins that were uncovered by archaeologists in the 1950s and […]
It’s hard being anything but a particular kind of Sunni Muslim in Pakistan these days. Christians, Hindus, Shia Muslims and members of the Ahmadiyya sect — considered heretical by many other Muslims — are wise to remain circumspect. Even adherents of Sufi orders, most of them Sunnis, are considered idolaters by Salafist fundamentalists. All these […]
It probably will come as no surprise that American Jews formed a binding relationship with Israel through culture and food rather than through politics. During the first two decades of Israel’s existence, they bonded with the new state by reading books about it, buying Israeli crafts, paintings and apparel, attending concerts by Israeli musicians and […]
One of the busiest thoroughfares in Tel Aviv, Kaplan Street, leads to a host of nearby destinations — the Azrieli towers, the Arlozoroff railway station, the Ayalon expressway, the Israeli government media center and one of the city’s newest and most historically interesting attractions, the Sarona market, an upscale complex of more than 90 shops, […]
There has arguably never been a president like Rodrigo Duterte, even in a country used to sometimes outrageous political personalities. To call him undiplomatic is putting it mildly. He is uncouth, goes into tirades, and breaks all the rules of statecraft, even using profanity to criticize other world leaders, as he did in 2016, when […]
With Britain having been bloodied by three terrorist incidents in the past two-and-a-half months, British Prime Minister Theresa May may be finally coming to grips with a problem that has been festering for years. Speaking less than a day after Muslim terrorists rammed their van into a crowd of pedestrians on London Bridge and then […]
Denying the undeniable, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed on May 30 that the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad had nothing whatsoever to do with the recent spate of deadly chemical weapon attacks in Syria. “According to our information, there is no proof that chemical weapons were used by Assad,” Putin told the French newspaper Le […]