Countries ranging from China and Jordan to India and the United States are experiencing water shortages. Yet strangely enough, Israel — a semi-arid nation whose annual rainfall has dropped by half in recent years — does not face a water crisis. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put it, “Israel doesn’t have a water problem.” […]
Whit Stillman’s romantic comedy, Love and Friendship, stars the divine Kate Beckinsale as a devious man hunter obsessed with finding a suitable husband for herself and her daughter. This drawing room period piece, based on a novella by Jane Austen, opens in Canada on May 27. More farcical than dramatic, it unfolds in a series […]
Improbably enough, one of the world’s most impressive 19th century opera houses, the Teatro Amazonas, is in Manaus, right in the middle of the great Amazon rainforest. The elegant pink and white neo-classical building, sporting an iridescent dome sprinkled with a dusting of colors, lies in old quarter of Manaus, the commercial capital of the […]
Sadiq Khan, the first Muslim mayor of London, can be a role model to his fellow Muslims if he continues to preach the virtues of tolerance and coexistence. At a time when radical Islam is making disturbing inroads in western European Muslim communities, Khan is setting an example by standing up to this destructive phenomenon […]
Canada is a calm and placid country, an idyllic place to live and bring up a family, but when it comes to the weather, Canada can be maddeningly fickle and disappointing. Spring in this country is a cruel tease. It comes and goes as it wishes, dashing hopes and expectations. When spring officially arrived in […]
Michael Solomonov has carved out a gastronomic niche for himself in the United States. He’s the co-owner and executive chef of Zahav, the acclaimed Israeli restaurant in Philadelphia. He and his partner, Steven Cook, are also the owners of Percy Street Barbecue, Federal Donuts, Dizengoff and Abe Fisher, all in the same city. Having established […]
When British philosopher Bertrand Russell observed that “mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty,” he may have been thinking of Srinivasa Ramanujan. A Tamil from southern India, he was a lowly clerk with a gift for numbers when he received a scholarship to Cambridge University. Arriving in Britain in 1914, on the eve […]
Horse racing is a rich man’s sport, and for centuries in Britain, it was the preserve of the landed gentry. So imagine what happens when the working-class inhabitants of a depressed coal mining village in Wales band together, raise a prize-winning steed and break class barriers in the process. In Dark Horse, a spirited documentary […]
Israel is haunted by the specter of Palestinian attack tunnels. During Operation Protective Edge, the 50-day Gaza war in the summer of 2014, the Israeli army found and destroyed 34 such tunnels, which the Palestinians regard as a strategic weapon in the face of Israel’s overwhelming military superiority. Israel’s search-and-destroy mission took place after the Israeli […]
Much to my surprise and delight, Netflix, the international streaming network, has acquired Pawn Sacrifice, a movie I missed at its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2014. I had looked forward to seeing Edward Zwick’s biopic about American chess prodigy Bobby Fischer, who, in 1972 in Reykjavik, defeated Soviet grandmaster Boris Spassky for […]