Tony Bernard’s thoughtful and absorbing book, The Ghost Tattoo (Citadel Press), is dedicated to his late father, Henry Bierzynski Bernard, a Polish survivor of the Holocaust who was traumatized by it. At the very least, his memoir is intensely personal. As he writes, “It is also a part of my long journey to get closer […]
Justice has been served at last. In a unanimous, long overdue and important decision handed down on June 25, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that the decades-long exemption enabling ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students to evade compulsory military service and receive government subsidies rests on no legal basis, and that the Israeli armed forces are free to draft […]
Joe Biden, the president of the United States, recently delivered an impassioned speech at a Holocaust memorial event during which he strongly condemned antisemitism and described American support for Israel’s security as “ironclad.” Yet the following day, he threatened to withhold certain weapons from Israel if it launched a major ground offensive in Rafah, Hamas’ […]
The distinguished American food writer Joan Nathan began writing her latest book, My Life In Recipes: Food, Family And Memories (Alfred A. Knopf), at a sad but portentous time. Her husband of 42 years, Allan Gerson, had just died, and she had reached the golden age of 80. In this, her twelfth book, she covers […]
Israel’s low-intensity war of attrition with Hezbollah is heating up to the boiling point as the prospect of a full-scale war grows dangerously possible. In the past few weeks, the fighting along and near Israel’s border with Lebanon has escalated ominously as the United States and France have attempted to head off an all-out war. […]
Eleven Israeli soldiers were killed in two separate incidents over the weekend in the Gaza Strip, underscoring Israel’s difficulty in destroying Hamas’ military capabilities and thereby achieving its primary goal of the current war. In Rafah, Hamas’ last urban stronghold, eight soldiers from the Combat Engineering Corps died when their Namer armored vehicle exploded after […]
A tsunami of newspaper and magazine articles, academic monographs, general interest books and dedicated documentary films have analyzed the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime. Yet there is still an insatiable appetite for more of the same. This unique 12-year interregnum in Germany’s history arouses immense curiosity that journalists, academics and […]
Saudi Arabia, once one of the most reactionary countries in the Arab world, is buffing and improving its international image, judging by the manner in which Israel and Jews are portrayed in its newest school textbooks. A recent study by the Institute For Monitoring Peace And Cultural Tolerance In School Education reports that antisemitic references […]
As the Italian provinces gradually coalesced into a single nation from 1859 onwards, a process known as the Risorgimento, the emerging new state was convulsed by a scandal that pitted the Vatican against the forces of secularism and liberalism. In 1858, Edgardo Mortara, the sixth child of Salamone (Momolo) and Marianna, was removed by papal […]
Weighed down by the inordinate length and human cost of the Israel-Hamas war, Israelis had good reason to be euphoric on June 8. This was the day when Israeli commandos, disguised as Hamas operatives and Palestinian civilians, rescued four Israeli hostages — Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrei Kozlov and Shlomi Ziv — who had […]