At his show trial in Jerusalem in 1961, Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann coyly described himself as “just a small cog” in Adolf Hitler’s extermination machine. The German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt lent credence to this warped view, claiming in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, published a year after his execution in […]
Tzipi Livni, Israel’s lead negotiator at the failed peace talks with the Palestinian Authority, has issued a warning that Israel should heed. Livni, the minister of justice in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government, said that Israel has two choices: “Either we resume negotiations with the Palestinians to reach a permanent agreement, winning the world’s […]
They are usually small in area and population, ethnically and religiously homogenous, well-off and situated in a peaceful part of the world, alongside neighbours who have no designs on them. What are they? Countries which go virtually unnoticed internationally. Yet they can be quite interesting. The quintessential example? Uruguay. A settler state like its big […]
The ghost of legendary Jewish entrepreneur David Sassoon lingers over Mumbai, India’s commercial center. One hundred and fifty years after his death, several landmarks and synagogues in this pulsating, cosmopolitan city bear either his family name or owe their existence to his philanthropy. Sassoon (1792-1864), the scion of a distinguished Sephardi clan from Iraq, settled […]
The latest phase in the global armed struggle against Islamic State, an Al Qaeda breakaway organization that has wreaked havoc in the Middle East, has begun with a flash of shock and awe. More than a month after bombing Islamic State strongholds in northern Iraq, the United States has opened a new front in the […]
In a landmark court verdict whose ramifications may be of seminal importance in the battle against terrorism, a federal jury in New York City has concluded that a major financial institution in the Middle East, Arab Bank, supported terrorism. The judgment, handed down on Sept. 22, is significant. It’s said to be the first civil […]
On Sept. 20, for the first time in history, two Chinese warships docked at Iran’s principal naval port of Bandar Abbas, in the strategic Strait of Hormuz, the gateway for at least 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas shipments. The ships are taking part in four days of joint naval exercises. One of […]
The village of Le Chambon-sur-Lievre is extremely remote. High in the mountains of southern France, it’s protected by a shield of escarpments and rivers. During the winter months from October to April, heavy snow drifts cut it off from the world for weeks at a time. Thanks in part to its location, Le Chambon was […]
In The Notebook, which opens in Toronto and Montreal on Sept. 26, Hungarian film director Janos Szasz transports a viewer into a Darwinian world where only the fittest survive. It’s August 1944 and Hungary is at war. A soldier returns from the front and is reunited with his wife and two pre-pubescent twin sons. He […]
How did Canada respond, publicly and institutionally, to the rise of Nazism in Germany? Part of the answer is found in Nazi Germany, Canadian Responses: Confronting Antisemitism in the Shadow of War (McGill-Queen’s University Press). A book of essays by Canadian academics, it explores a number of overlapping issues — Canada’s reaction to Nazism, Canada’s […]