By a margin of 58-50, the Knesset on November 16 took the first step to retroactively legalize Jewish settlements and outposts in the West Bank built on privately owned Palestinian lands. The proposed legislation, known as the Regulation Bill, is the brainchild of Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked and Education Minister Naftali Bennett, leaders of the […]
Maybe the astounding result in the 2016 American presidential election, which saw the most improbable of candidates, Donald Trump, beat the seasoned pro, Hillary Clinton, should not have been the shock it was. A system that had completely failed tens of millions of people for decades, and especially after 2008, needed a rude awakening. The […]
Yotam Ottolenghi, the internationally renowned chef and James Beard award winner, has written cookbooks that have put him and his co-author, Sami Tamimi, on the culinary map. His latest book, Plenty More (Random House), is dedicated to vegetarian food. Plenty More is richly illustrated, with 150 innovative yet simple recipes. It’s divided into several chapters — cooking […]
President -elect Donald Trump announced his first top-level appointments on November 12, three days after routing Hillary Clinton in the U.S. presidential election. He chose Reince Priebus, the head of the Republican National Committee, as his chief of staff, and Stephen Bannon, his campaign manager, as his senior counsellor and chief strategist. Bannon’s appointment was […]
Masha Gessen does not mince words. Birobidzhan, set aside by the Soviet Union in the late 1920s as a national homeland for Jews, was “perhaps the worst good idea ever.” She develops this argument in an absorbing book, Where the Jews Aren’t: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region (Nextbook) For a […]
I‘m angry. Just like you, I’m angry. I’m angry that Hillary Rodham Clinton won the popular vote in the U.S. presidential election, yet due to an outdated electoral college system, Donald Trump is now president-elect of the United States. I never believed that someone like Trump would be elected. I always thought he was a […]
The war in Syria, nuclear proliferation, trade and the Israeli-Palestinian issue were on the agenda during a November 9-11 tour of Israel and the Palestinian territories by Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. He began his trip, to mark 25 years of diplomatic ties between Israel and Russia, with a visit to the Western Wall in […]
Sixty years ago last month, Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary and crushed a popular anti-communist revolution. To mark the uprising, the Hungarian consulate in Toronto is presenting the Freedom First — Hungary 1956 Film Festival at TIFF’s Bell Lightbox from November 17-20. Admission is free. One of the movies on tap, Istvan Szabo’s Sunshine (1999), starring […]
Several days before the bombastic and unpredictable Donald Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States, soundly defeating the overly confident front-runner Hillary Clinton, I had a sinking feeling he would beat the odds and prevail. Trump, a real estate mogul and a former reality TV show host, is manifestly one of the […]
Paul Verhoeven’s first French language film, Elle, which opens in Canada on November 18, simmers with sexual perversity, betrayal and deception. This taut psychological thriller, set in contemporary Paris, pits a successful businesswoman against a home invader who assaults her and then proceeds to bombard her with a series of suggestive and taunting text messages […]