I remember that day as clearly as yesterday. Twenty years ago on November 4, on a typically cool autumn afternoon in Toronto, I greeted my Israeli friends, Arie and Ida, at my front door with terrible news. They had been out shopping and hadn’t heard what had happened just hours earlier. Yitzhak Rabin, the prime […]
The Holocaust has been explored and analyzed ad infinitum by historians. Is there really anything new to be learned? The short answer is yes, judging by Timothy Snyder’s masterful Black Earth: The Holocaust As History And Warning (Tim Duggan Books). Snyder, a Yale University professor whose last book was Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, identifies, […]
Giraffes, the beloved icons of the wild, have roamed the earth for about one million years, yet they’re now in danger of disappearing. This is the takeaway from Mark Johnston’s impassioned documentary, Giraffes — The Forgotten Giants, which will be broadcast on CBC TV’s splendid program, The Nature of Things, on Thursday, November 5 at […]
Mark Rosenblum, the founder of Americans for Peace Now, used to be cautiously optimistic about the prospect of peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The Olso peace accords in 1993 and 1995 gave him reason to be hopeful. But yesterday in Toronto, Rosenblum sounded a pessimistic note. Speaking at a Canadian Friends of Peace Now […]
The British government recently announced plans to blunt the allure of Islamic extremism in Britain. The announcement came not a moment too soon. By all accounts, more than 700 radicalized British citizens have travelled to Syria and Iraq to join jihadist organizations at war with the Syrian and Iraqi governments. Islamic State, that barbaric Sunni outfit […]
Richard Feynman, the brilliant American physicist, was one of the most captivating communicators in the history of science. That’s how he’s portrayed in Christopher Riley’s The Fantastic Mr, Feyman, an engaging BBC documentary now available on the Netflix streaming network. Feynman was a Nobel Prize recipient who endowed physics with a human face, says one of […]
My mother turned 100 today. It’s an auspicious moment leavened by sadness. By any yardstick, she has beaten the odds. She might have been a victim of the Holocaust, like nine out of 10 Polish Jews. She has battled health problems all her life. And now her body and mind have succumbed to the frailties […]
Muslims from the Caucasus, not Jews, are the chief targets of race-based hate crimes in Russia, according to a researcher who studies right-wing extremist and vigilante groups in the Russian Federation. From the czarist era to the last gasp of communism, xenophobic Russians tended to turn their racial animus on Jews. But since the collapse […]
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his energy minister, Yuval Steinitz, have both mangled the fundamental facts of the Holocaust for cynical political ends. Shame on them. Netanyahu, in a speech to the Zionist Congress in Jerusalem on October 20, claimed that Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, persuaded Adolf Hitler to exterminate the […]
Marina Rustow belongs to a fairly new school of historians/sleuths who’ve revolutionized the field of medieval Middle Eastern Jewish history. A Princeton University professor, and one of the recipients of this year’s prestigious MacArthur fellowship, she’s a social historian who’s played a leading role in modernizing Cairo Geniza research. During the Fatimid caliphate, which stretched across […]