Bashar Assad, Syria’s embattled but defiant president, will stop at nothing to ensure his survival and that of his Baathist regime. A case in point is the popular uprising that broke out in Syria three years ago this month. The revolt, the bloodiest in Syria’s often violent history, has morphed into a civil war that […]
Thirty eight years after the appearance of Hedrick Smith’s best seller, The Russians, Gregory Feifer’s Russians has been published. While Smith, a New York Times correspondent based in Moscow, explored the Soviet Union, Feifer, a former Moscow correspondent for National Public Radio, focuses on the post-communist period, paying special attention to Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. […]
Yuval Adler’s first feature film, Bethlehem, should catapult him into the upper rungs of Israel’s movie industry. Screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and set to open in Canada on April 4, Bethlehem is strong and explosive. Normally, a visceral thriller of this calibre would have been made by a seasoned director. But in this case, […]
On March 19, the Hungarian government is scheduled to unveil a statue in Budapest’s Freedom Square in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of Germany’s invasion of Hungary, an event that robbed Hungarians of their independence and doomed Hungary’s Jewish community. The stylistic statue, brimming with historic symbolism, portrays a rapacious German imperial eagle attacking the […]
Israel is a complex country that defies simplistic analysis, as Ari Shavit astutely observes in My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, published by Random House. It’s neither the Land of Milk and Honey that blinkered supporters like to think it is nor is it the racist colonial state that enemies imagine it to […]
A few days ago, the United Nations released a grim report concerning the escalating sectarian violence in Iraq, an oil-rich Arab state that has know little peace and quiet since the U.S. invasion 11 years ago this month. By its count, 703 Iraqis — 564 civilians and 139 members of the security forces — were […]
Films infused with the joys of gastronomy have, alas, come in dribs and drabs. Think of Babette’s Feast (1987), Like Water for Chocolate (1992), Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) and Big Night (1996). Tapping into our fascination with food, much less haute cuisine, the Toronto International Film Festival launched the subscription series, Food on Film, three years […]
Are Russia’s actions in the Crimea and elsewhere in Ukraine illegitimate, or did Moscow have cause to intercede? Demography and history suggest that Russian President Vladimir Putin has more of a case than North American media and politicians would like to believe. In his March 4 press conference Putin provided his own interpretation of what […]
Later this year, Europe will mark the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, a cataclysmic conflict that shattered a century of near peace, claimed the lives of 8.5 million soldiers, altered national borders, broke up several empires, spurred the rise of the Bolsheviks in Russia and the Nazis in Germany and sped up the […]
When I encountered my first Yiddish text in the archives of Canadian Jewish Congress, sometime in the early 1980s, I had never heard the language spoken. There it was, written in Hebrew characters, undecipherable. I am not quite certain, but my first brush with the idiom must have been in the form of old yellowed clippings from […]