Since Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000, the Shebaa Farms sector of the Golan Heights has turned into a dangerous flashpoint of the Arab-Israeli conflict. For the past 15 years, armed clashes between the Israeli army and Hezbollah have erupted periodically. Last month, in the most serious incident in years, two Israeli […]
Lev Golinkin’s bracing memoir of boyhood in the Soviet Union and manhood in the United States, A Backpack, A Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka (Doubleday), bears a striking resemblance to Gary Shtenyngart’s Little Failure, which I read last year. Like so many Soviet Jews born in the Soviet Union, the two authors share common […]
While the crisis between Russia and Ukraine has been the focus of much of the world’s attention lately, there are simmering brushfires in other areas of the former Soviet Union. In the North Caucasus, still part of the Russian Federation, five Muslim-majority ethnic republics, with a combined area of 97,200 square kilometers and a population […]
If you’re like me, you adore New York City. It’s a wonderful town, as the song goes. New York has it all — great neighborhoods, world-class museums, theaters, restaurants and cafes, and a grand assortment of sylvan parks, the finest of which is Central Park. Unless you’ve been there many times and know the city […]
It was called the “captain of death.” Tuberculosis, until a few decades ago, had killed one in seven people who had ever lived on the planet, and there was no cure in sight. Popularly known as consumption, it ravaged the United States in 19th century, spreading fear, uncertainty and mass deaths. The effort to contain […]
Katka Reszke is a member of Poland’s “unexpected” generation — a Catholic Pole who converted to Judaism before discovering she was halachically Jewish. After the fall of communism in 1989, thousands of Poles who had been brought up as Christians learned that one or several of their ancestors had been Jewish. This process unfolded as […]
Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon warned recently that Israel will not tolerate attempts by its enemies to destabilize its northern border. But that’s exactly what Hezbollah and its ally, Iran, claim they will do following an upsurge of violence on the Golan Heights, where the borders of Israel, Lebanon and Syria converge. With Syria embroiled […]
The Hollywood director Michael Mann is renowned for edgy crime thrillers. In his stylish police procedurals, he creates milieus brimming with violence, intrigue and betrayal. Mann’s body of work will be showcased by the Toronto International Film Festival in a retrospective, Neon Nights: The Films of Michael Mann, at the TIFF Bell Lightbox from February 5 […]
As 2014 wound down, North Korea bared its teeth, promising massive retaliation if North American movie theaters released The Interview, directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. A farce about clownish North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un, it had demonstrably touched a raw nerve in the nuclear-armed hermit kingdom. Bowing to North Korea’s pressure, Sony […]
John Boehner, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, disengenuously claims he did not commit a grave breach of protocol by inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint meeting of Congress without first gaining advance White House clearance. “I don’t believe I’m poking anyone in the eye,” he said recently. If […]