The days are cooler and shorter and the nights are colder and longer. There is a nip and a chill in the air. The clouds are leaden and the sun emits relatively little heat. The rains come down more frequently. Autumn has arrived in Toronto in earnest. It’s not my favorite season. I’m a summer […]
In his sentimental film, Fiddler on the Roof, based on Sholem Aleichem’s beloved stories, Norman Jewison immortalized Anatevka, a shtetl in Russia’s Pale of Settlement steeped in piety and poverty and stricken by pogroms. By the late 19th century, the shtetl, though in a parlous state of decline, was home to 80 percent of East […]
It was historically and morally necessary to publish a critical, annotated version of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (My Struggle), a prominent German historian said recently. The two-volume edition was published by the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich last January with a print run of 4,000 copies and was immediately snapped up by buyers in […]
Ninety eight years ago, on an overcast day on November 11, 1918, the long nightmare of World War I ended with an armistice. Optimists claimed that World War I would be “the war to end all wars.” But in fact, the armistice, signed in a railway carriage in France by the Allied powers and Germany, would […]
On October 26, at the request of his family, Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat credited with saving thousands of Hungarian Jews during World War II, was formally declared dead, almost 72 years after he disappeared in January 1945. Few positive stories emerged from the Holocaust. For every Oskar Schindler, the subject of the 1993 movie Schindler’s […]
The launch of a glossy coffee table book on Jewish-Ukrainian relations provided its co-authors with an opportunity to discuss their complicated topic. At a symposium earlier this month at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern — a professor of Jewish Studies at Northwestern University — and Paul Robert Magocsi — the […]
The ultra-Orthodox Jews of Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighborhood are an island onto themselves. Fanatically observant and utterly disdainful of Israeli secular society, they’re intensely insular and obsessively self-absorbed. To the vast majority of Israelis, these pre-modern Jews are virtually strangers. They may as well be Martians, but they’re Israelis. Shtisel, an Israeli television drama which […]
Deep in the wilds of Mongolia, nomads practice the art of eagle hunting. By tradition, it’s a man’s sport in this hierarchical society. So when a 13-year-old girl sets her sights on following in their footsteps, the grizzled men in her tight-knit community are surprised and even aghast by her ambition. This is the theme […]
One of the longest-simmering conflicts of our time, the Arab-Israeli dispute, has been stubbornly immune to resolution. It has ground on for more than a century, claiming innumerable lives and wasting scarce resources. Stripped to its barest essentials, it pits Zionism against Palestinian nationalism. The piecemeal return of Jews to their ancestral homeland, spurred by […]
At a moment when jihadism is on the rise and Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians has reached a nadir, Princeton University Press’ encyclopedic volume, A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations, is a welcome addition to our fount of knowledge. More than 1,100 pages in length, and lavishly illustrated, this authoritative tome should be required reading for […]