Thanks to his diaries, published in two volumes by Indiana University Press in 2007 and 2009, James Grover McDonald has received the recognition he so richly deserves. McDonald (1886-1964), an American who worked tirelessly in the 1930s and 1940s to find a safe haven for Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, was the first U.S. ambassador to […]
An intriguing new documentary, The Day Hitler Died, reveals fresh details about Adolf Hitler’s final hours in his besieged Berlin bunker. It will be screened by the Smithsonian Channel on November 16 at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. and again on November 22 at 10 p.m. Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945 as the […]
In one of its biggest gambles in decades, Russia has plunged headlong into the raging civil war in Syria. The price it is paying for its armed intervention is already staggering and may yet grow worse. On September 30, the Russian Air Force began bombing rebel strongholds in western Syria, its planes taking off from […]
I arrived in Marseille, the atmospheric port in southern France, on a sleek high-speed train from Paris, covering a distance of some 600 kilometres in three hours. Paris in late autumn was typically cloudy and cold. But in Marseille, the weather was gloriously temperate, sunny and almost balmy. As I strolled around the Old Port, […]
If you liked Homeland, you’ll most likely enjoy Fauda. Homeland, now into its fifth season in the United States, was adapted from an Israeli series. Blending post-9/11 national security issues with human interest stories, it was and is immensely popular. Fauda, premiered last February on Israeli television, focuses on Israel’s deadly confrontation with Hamas, the Palestinian […]
Benjamin Netanyahu was on his best behaviour when he met Barack Obama on a fence-mending mission at the White House on November 9. It was an important meeting, given the United States’ status as Israel’s chief ally and benefactor. Netanyahu, who last met Obama more than a year ago, had his work cut out for […]
The battle of Iwo Jima, one of the fiercest of World War II, raged from February 19 to March 26, 1945, claiming the lives of 28,000 Japanese and American soldiers and leaving a legacy of post-traumatic stress among some of the survivors. But since 1995, Iwo Jima has been the world’s only battlefield where former […]
The murderous attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris last January by a French Muslim extremist called attention to a wider problem — the gradual deterioration of relations between Jews and Muslims in France since the 1967 Six Day War. Until this deadly incident, mutual hostility had not usually been the norm in Jewish-Muslim relations […]
The Red Army liberated Nazi extermination camps and freed the greatest number of Holocaust survivors, but its unsurpassed record of liberation loomed as a taboo topic in the now-defunct Soviet Union until the late 1980s, three scholars told an academic forum in Toronto yesterday during Holocaust Education Week. The role played by the Soviet Union […]
October 26, 2015 was a blessed day in the United States. Willis Allison Carto, the most influential American antisemitic propagandist of his generation, died, or should I say croaked. He was 89. By any measure, Carto had a greater impact on public opinion than all his vile contemporaries and predecessors, ranging from George Lincoln Rockwell […]