For decades now, Israeli politicians have spoken of the pressing need to pass legislation mandating military service on a compulsory and equitable basis. This would mean that the vast majority of ultra-Orthodox Jews would no longer qualify for draft exemptions and would have to share the burden of defending the homeland along with secular and […]
Family dynamics can be confusing and confounding. Almog Avidan Antonir’s feature film, Trust, which will be available on ChaiFlicks and streaming platforms such as iTunes, Amazon Prime and Google Play from February 27 onward, makes this point abundantly and painfully clear. The Abelmans, a splintered Jewish family, are brought together in Los Angeles for the […]
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu finally released a plan for post-war Gaza on February 23, but it was like old wine in a new bottle. Nearly four months after Israel launched a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, following Hamas’ massacre of 1,200 Israelis and foreigners in southern Israel on October 7, Netanyahu belatedly laid out […]
Justice was served in London, Ontario, on February 22 when Nathaniel Veltman was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for 25 years in a case that revolved around pure, unadulterated racism. Veltman, 23, was convicted of first-degree murder and attempted murder after deliberately ramming his pickup truck into four total strangers out […]
Deborah Lyons, Canada’s special envoy on Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism and its former ambassador to Israel, did not mince words. After learning that Leah Goldstein — a Canadian Jewish athlete who had been a professional cyclist — had been disinvited as the keynote speaker at an International Women’s Day event in Peterborough, Ontario, on […]
Iran has reportedly warned its chief proxy in the Middle East, Hezbollah, not to escalate its low-intensity war with Israel along the Lebanese border. According to The Washington Post, Iran told its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, that an escalation would play into Israel’s hands and nullify the gains that Iran’s Axis of Resistance has made since […]
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva owes the Jewish people and the state of Israel an unreserved apology after likening Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip to Nazi Germany’s diabolical plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Silva’s flippant and blinkered comparison, steeped in appalling ignorance and boundless maliciousness, prompted Israeli Foreign Minister […]
Aleksei Navalny, the Russian dissident who died in a Siberian penal colony on February 16 at the age of 47, signed his death warrant when he returned to Russia from Germany after recovering from a botched assassination attempt. A gadfly who was a thorn in the side of Russia’s authoritarian government, he was probably the […]
Albert Einstein, the most brilliant theoretical physicist of his generation, was torn by an abiding sense of responsibility and guilt after the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the summer of 1945. The enormous blasts killed tens of thousands of people, but hastened Japan’s surrender and the […]
Israel is facing tremendous international pressure to cancel a pending military campaign in Rafah, a Hamas stronghold and the last city in the Gaza Strip yet to conquered and occupied by the Israeli army. Having stormed Gaza City and Khan Younis, and having bombed several Palestinian refugee camps in central Gaza, Israel appears to be […]