Amsterdam’s old Jewish quarter, the Jodenhoek, is but a hollow shell of its former self, having been swept away by the tides of time. The epicenter of the Jewish community from the 17th century until World War II, it was once a congested and atmospheric labyrinth of tenements, factories, open-air stalls, narrow streets and back […]
The impasse in the protracted civil war in Syria is so profound that even the prospect of successful peace talks to end the nearly five-year-old conflict seems outlandish and unrealistic. On February 3, after two days of preliminary discussions in Geneva, United Nations mediator Staffan de Mistura threw up his hands in utter despair and […]
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has tabled a bill that may well stifle, if not delegitimize, a precious gift — political dissent in Israel. The bill, known as the NGO Law, should be permanently shelved for the sake of Israeli democracy. Sponsored by Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, it would require non-governmental organizations in Israel to […]
Germany’s love affair with the seemingly endless numbers of refugees from Syria and other nations entering the country seems to have reached its limits, and Chancellor Angela Merkel has come under mounting criticism for her asylum policies. Opponents of Merkel’s decision last year to allow more than one million asylum seekers into the country have been […]
Grimur Hakonarson’s austere film, Rams, which opens in Canada on February 12, unfolds under a leaden sky in a treeless valley. The bleak Icelandic landscape lends itself to the theme: the discord that keeps two feuding brothers, Gummi (Sigurdur Sigurjonsson) and Kiddi (Theodor Julisson), at loggerheads. Although they live in close proximity to each other, they have […]
Toronto’s York University has not been a particularly hospitable place for Jewish students for the past few years. Many feel that a climate of antisemitism, masquerading as “anti-Zionism,” pervades the university. Some students have feared for their physical safety at times. Things took an even uglier turn last month. A pro-Palestinian acrylic mural that […]
Jewish writers like Irwin Shaw and Norman Mailer created the template of an enormously important and popular literary genre — the American war novel. From Shaw’s The Young Lions to Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, these best-sellers, published between 1948 to 1961, shaped the American public’s perception of World War II, the Holocaust and […]
On the eve of his execution in 1962, Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann brazenly requested a pardon from the state of Israel. In line with the defence strategy his lawyer had mounted at his trial in Jerusalem, Eichmann claimed he had been a minor functionary merely following orders. “There is a need to draw a line […]
Maggie Smith, the British actress who portrays a prim and proper aristocrat in the popular series, Downton Abbey, transforms herself into a homeless person in The Lady in the Van, which opens in Canada on February 5. It’s quite an astonishing makeover. As Margaret Shepherd, a woman whose current circumstance are jarringly at odds with […]
The American ambassador to Israel and the secretary-general of the United Nations have both issued no-nonsense warnings regarding the pitfalls of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Call them inconvenient truths. To no one’s surprise, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has responded harshly to their collective words of wisdom, thereby confirming the widely-held assumption that […]