Standing on the cusp of becoming Israel’s first former prime minister to be packed off to jail and stamped with the infamy of a criminal record, Ehud Olmert is making history for entirely the wrong reason. On May 25, a district court in Jerusalem sentenced him to eight months imprisonment on charges of breach of […]
The chicken was nowhere to be seen, but it didn’t matter. Even without it, I was on the cusp of experiencing a different and exhilarating kind of bus ride. Something to be remembered long after it’s ended, a trip on a Guatemalan chicken bus is a giddy dip into local color. Chicken buses, gaudily painted […]
With the six major powers struggling to meet an end-of-June deadline for attaining a comprehensive and historic nuclear deal with Iran, two formidable issues remain to be settled — the timing of sanctions relief and the extent to which international monitors would have unrestricted rights to inspect Iran’s nuclear facilities. Judging by the rhetoric emanating […]
In the spring of 1933, less than four months after Adolf Hitler’s accession to power, four Jewish inmates in the newly opened Dachau concentration camp were killed while supposedly trying to escape. In fact, they were murdered by SS guards, who fired the opening shots of an incremental process which culminated in the Holocaust. The […]
Fifteen years after its unilateral withdrawal from southern Lebanon, this combustible area remains a thorn in Israel’s side and a potential threat to regional peace. Since completing its hasty pullout on May 24, 2000, Israel has fought a war with Hezbollah — the Lebanese Shiite movement aligned with Iran and Syria — and may yet […]
Even as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new Israeli government was sworn in on May 14, the 34th since 1949, he reiterated his interest in enlarging his cabinet and making it more representative of the country. In the general election on March 17, the Likud won 30 seats, more than any other party. In lengthy negotiations […]
Midway through Saint Laurent, Bertrand Bonello’s buoyant biopic, one of Yves Saint Laurent’s world-weary assistants says, “Fashion passes like a train.” It’s a relevant observation. Like the advertising business, fashion is fleeting, susceptible to rapidly changing tastes. The famous French couturier Saint Laurent (1936-2008) was acutely aware of this occupational hazard, but never allowed it […]
Facing increased harassment and persecution, several thousand German Jews still in Berlin after the outbreak of World War II went into hiding. Marie Jalowicz Simon was one of these so-called “submarines.” Living under an assumed name and shuttling between a succession of safe houses, she survived the tyranny of Nazism by the skin of her […]
Historians never tire of reflecting on Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States. Since his assassination 150 years ago, just days after the Civil War had ended, he has been probed and analyzed in an avalanche of some 16,000 books. With all this ink having been spilled in the cause of scrutinizing an […]
Sobibor, in eastern Poland, was a destination from which one did not usually return. This Nazi extermination camp consumed its Jewish victims with rapidity and ferocity. But in 1943, at the height of the Holocaust, a few hundred of its prisoners made a daring, unprecedented break for freedom. This little-known incident is the subject of […]