Visitors to Israel usually spend their time touring cities such as Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Nazareth and tend to overlook off-the-beaten-track destinations further afield. I didn’t want to make that mistake. So on one of my trips to Israel, I made a point of visiting several of the natural wonders in the Galilee: Mount […]
Seventy one years have elapsed since the end of World War II, yet Poland still labors under a dubious distinction. It’s the only country in the former Soviet bloc that has not enacted restitution legislation that would enable Polish Jews and their heirs to reclaim personal properties they lost during the Holocaust and the Communist […]
It has been a bad month for Germany. A very bad month. Since July 18, Muslim terrorists of Afghan, Iranian and Syrian descent have carried out attacks in four German cities — Wuerzburg, Munich, Ansbach and Reutlingen — and killed 10 people and injured nearly two dozen. Two of the attackers were Syrians who had […]
We live in a fraught era when Jewish-Muslim tensions are flaring, not only in the Middle East but in European countries such as France. Has this always been the case? Historically, how tolerant of Jews have Muslims been since the birth of Islam in the Arabian peninsula? Bernard Lewis, the distinguished scholar of Middle Eastern […]
What will it take to jolt Israel into the realization that peace with the Arab world cannot be achieved unless the gnawing Palestinian problem is satisfactorily resolved? This important point was underscored by Anwar Eshki, an emissary from Saudi Arabia who visited Jerusalem last week. A retired general and advisor to the Saudi government, he […]
Police in the Canadian city of London, Ontario, are now in the midst of ascertaining whether an antisemitic article published in an Arabic-language community newspaper recently promoted or incited hatred against Jews, or was simply a manifestation of free speech. In its June/July edition, Al Saraha, distributed in the city’s Middle Eastern grocery stores and […]
They were idealistic left-wing Jews whose overarching objective was to build a “shenere un besere velt,” a more beautiful, better world. Secular in orientation, steeped in socialism, dedicated to the Yiddish language, committed to the Soviet Union as their ideological fatherland and determined to improve the lot of the Jewish working class, they were members […]
Nir Barkat, the mayor of Jerusalem, should hang his head in shame. Caving in to pressure from the city’s ultra-Orthodox and national religious camp, he announced he would not attend today’s gay pride parade. “It is their right to march,” he said of the people to plan to participate in the annual event. “The city […]
Woody Allen’s 47th film, Cafe Society, which opens in Canada on July 29, is a valentine to the bittersweet nature of love and romance and a barb about Hollywood glamour. A workmanlike movie narrated by Allen and infused with the velvety sounds of pre-war jazz, it’s set in the late 1930s as a nice Jewish […]
The reclusive Turkish cleric who heads Turkey’s influential Hizmet (Service) movement has become front-page news since the recent abortive coup in Turkey. Fethullah Gulen, who lives in semi-seclusion in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, has been accused by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of masterminding the July 15 attempt to overthrow him. Erdogan called the failed military coup […]