Nimisha Mukerji’s intriguing documentary, Tempest Storm, is a profile of a temptress from a bygone era. The voluptuous lady who fits this description is Annie Banks, a “hurricane of seduction” who goes by the name of Tempest Storm. A sultry stripper who’s been dubbed the Queen of Exotic Dancing, she performs at burlesque festivals and […]
The latest edition of Outlook magazine, dated Spring 2016, arrived in my mailbox on June 6, and much to my surprise, a headline at the bottom of the catchy cover blared, “Farewell Issue.” I needn’t have been surprised. Outlook, which billed itself as Canada’s only progressive Jewish magazine and which I read for some 30 […]
It was a week that concentrated minds. On June 27, 1976, a band of Palestinian and German terrorists hijacked Air France flight 139 en route from Tel Aviv to Paris via Athens. After a brief stopover in Benghazi, Libya, the hijackers diverted the plane to Entebbe, Uganda. The Israeli government, led by Prime Minister Yitzhak […]
Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir has a point. The Arab peace initiative, proposed by Saudi Arabia in 2002, endorsed by the Arab League shortly afterwards and revised a few years later, is the best way forward to resolve the protracted Arab-Israeli conflict. On June 3, in Paris, Jubeir declared that the Arab League peace […]
Egypt is synonymous with the pyramids, the tombs of the pharoahs, the ruins of ancient temples and the artifacts of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. But even discerning travellers often overlook one of Egypt’s most unforgettable attractions — the remote oases of the Western Desert, the eastern extension of the Sahara Desert. Far from Egypt’s […]
In a precedent-setting decision which may yet have ramifications in parts of Europe with a significant Muslim population, Holland’s Ministry of Education recently rejected a request by a Muslim school in The Hague to open a branch in Amsterdam. The undersecretary of the ministry, Sander Dekker, cited Islamic radicalization within the Association of Islamic Studies […]
Japanese diplomat Chiune (Senpo) Sugihara was at the right place at the right time as far as 2,139 Jews and their current 40,000 descendants are concerned. Sugihara was Japan’s consul in Kaunas, Lithuania, from 1939 to 1940. His task was to gather intelligence on the Soviet Union, Japan’s nemesis. He did that assiduously, to the […]
The tortured history of Jewish-Ukrainian relations has again come to the fore. On May 25, Ukraine observed a minute of silence in memory of Symon Petliura, a nationalist leader blamed for the murder of some 50,000 Ukrainian Jews during the chaos of World War I and the Russian Revolution. The commemorative event marked the […]
Ada Ushpiz’s biopic, Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt, takes a sweeping look at the life and ideas of a controversial philosopher. Scheduled to be screened at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto from June 10-16, this thoughtful two-hour film portrays Arendt as an independent thinker who was neither a classic liberal nor […]
There has always been a small minority of Jews who regarded Judaism as a burden to be jettisoned. Such Jews usually resolved their problem by means of complete assimilation. This invariably meant conversion to another religion, marriage to a spouse of a different faith or flight into exclusively non-Jewish circles. Over the centuries, this pattern […]