I was fortunate enough to visit Vancouver earlier this month, but there was a problem: I had less than 24 hours to explore this gorgeous city on Canada’s west coast. Unlike my friends who’d recently bought a lovely little condo through Eddie Yan, my time was very limited. What could I possibly see in so […]
A war that started 60 years ago provided Canada with its now familiar role as a peacekeeping force on behalf of the United Nations. On October 29, 1956, Israeli forces invaded the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt. In a swift, sweeping operation of 100 hours, under the leadership of then chief of the General Staff, Moshe […]
Should comedians avoid crossing social and political red lines? Are they bound by society’s taboos? These are the overlapping questions implicitly posed by Ferne Pearlstein in The Last Laugh, a probing documentary that examines the Holocaust from a completely different point of view. Pearlstein’s movie, which will be screened by the Toronto Jewish Film Festival […]
Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden, adapted from Sarah Waters’ bestseller, Fingersmith, is a highly stylized erotic thriller which takes place in Japanese-occupied Korea in the 1930s. Scheduled to open in Canada on October 28, this two-and-a-half hour Korean and Japanese-language film is at once prim and carnal, unfolding in an opulent mansion set deep in a forest. With one striking exception, the […]
On April 20, 1889, at 6:30 p.m., Klara Polzl gave birth to a boy in Braunau am Inn, a town in Austria adjacent to the German border. The boy’s name is inscribed in crabbed letters in a mouldering registry kept behind lock and key in St. Stephen, Braunau’s preeminent Roman Catholic church. A Gothic pile whose spire […]
October 23 marks the 60th anniversary of the start of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, a nationwide revolt against the Soviet-imposed government of the Hungarian People’s Republic. It lasted until November 10, when it was crushed by Soviet tanks. At least 30,000 people were killed and some 200,000 others fled to the west. Imre Nagy had […]
The face of intermarriage in the United States has changed significantly since the Supreme Court, in the 1967 landmark Loving v. Virginia case, ruled that race-based legal restrictions on marriage are unconstitutional. Since then, mixed marriages between Americans of different racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds have risen dramatically, especially in ten states: California, Texas, New […]
Adolf Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, committed suicide in their Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945 as the Red Army advanced into the German capital. Hitler’s ignominious death was confirmed by German radio and by Marshall Georgy Zhukov, the commander of Soviet forces in Germany. Since then, the circumstances surrounding Hitler’s demise have […]
The small, remote Italian island of Lampedusa, 70 kilometers off the coast of Africa, has borne the brunt of the migrant crisis afflicting Europe. In the past 20 years, 400,000 migrants have landed there on their way to the European mainland, while 15,000 have drowned en route. Gianfranco Rosi’s spare but affecting documentary, Fire at […]
The draft resolution adopted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) on October 14 is so ahistorical and unjust that its director-general, Irina Bokova, was compelled to disavow it. By a 24-6 margin, with 26 abstentions, the UN agency passed a motion that essentially tries to sever the historical link between Judaism […]