Surveys suggest that Israel’s popularity in the United States remains strong despite victories by the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement on university campuses. But Israel is losing ground in the Democratic Party, which will nominate Hillary Clinton as its presidential candidate later this month in Philadelphia. The party’s liberal wing has begun to turn away […]
Early on in her revelatory book, Canadian scholar Sarah Phillips Casteel makes an observation about “the strikingly persistent presence of Jewishness in Caribbean writing” and goes on to say that the phenomenon “merits attention.” In Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination (Columbia University Press), Casteel, an associate professor of English at Carleton University, explores this […]
In recent days, one political leader in the Middle East has acknowledged an important truth, while another has mangled it beyond recognition. Shortly after Turkey and Israel signed a reconciliation agreement late last month, ending six years of official estrangement. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blasted the Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH), the Istanbul-based organization which […]
As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepares to visit Africa next week, it’s a good time to recall the ups and downs of the Jewish state’s almost seven decades long relationship with the vast continent it borders to its southwest. His trip to four East African countries, the first to the continent by an Israeli leader […]
Israel’s reconciliation agreement with Turkey, announced on June 27 by the Israeli and Turkish prime ministers, Benjamin Netanyahu and Binali Yildirim, was six years in the making and is a win-win outcome for both sides. At a time of great ferment, instability and uncertainty in the Middle East, Israel’s rapprochement with Turkey, once its closest […]
Splendidly sylvan Vermont is seemingly timeless, a tableaux of gently rolling hills, accessibly high mountains, serene pastures, dense woods, placid lakes, bubbling streams and quaint towns. It’s the kind of a place, I suspect, where the iconic American painter, Norman Rockwell, would have felt at home. Whenever I’ve driven through Vermont, I have never ceased […]
In a speech delivered at the European Parliament in Brussels on June 23, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas set back the cause of peace and tarnished his credentials as a leader by descending into the muck of antisemitism. Abbas claimed that “a number of rabbis in Israel … made a clear announcement demanding that their […]
Claiming that Jews shun military service, antisemitic propagandists have associated Jewish men with physical weakness, cowardice and an unwillingness to lay down their lives for their countries. Nothing could be farther from the truth, writes Derek Penslar in the new paperback edition of Jews and the Military: A History (Princeton University Press). It’s true, as […]
The sad saga of Anthony Weiner is broadly rehashed in Weiner, a fly-on-the-wall documentary by Josh Kreigman and Elyse Steinberg scheduled to open in Toronto on July 8. Scrappy, combative and brash, Weiner — a member of the House of Representatives — was a rising star in the Democratic Party until a sex scandal, in […]
After weeks of fierce fighting, Iraqi troops, backed by U.S. air power, stormed into Falluja on June 17, recapturing parts of the city from Islamic State, which had held it since the end of 2013. Sixty five kilometers west of Baghdad, Falluja was the first major city in Iraq to fall to the jihadists. Having […]