Saudi Arabia is a schizophrenic state oscillating between pragmatism and extremism. Supposedly “moderate,” Saudi Arabia helps keep oil prices in check and expresses a readiness to sign a peace accord with Israel if the Israeli government fully accepts the Arab League peace plan, which was unveiled in 2002 and again in 2007. As the price […]
The three days of terror in Paris are over. The gunmen who murdered 12 people at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, French citizens of Algerian Muslim descent, have been killed by the French police. The victims, mostly journalists, included the Jewish caricaturist Georges Wolinski and two police officers. A second suspect, Amedy […]
Aomar Boum, a Moroccan ethnographer, has written a rigorous, refreshingly candid account of one of the oldest Jewish communities in the Arab world. Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco, published by Stanford University Press, is something of a rarity in this field. As he writes in the introduction,“Although a few scholars have […]
Bolshevik troops seized the Belorussian city of Minsk — a historic Jewish center — in July 1920, ending successive Polish and German occupations and liberating its Jewish population from czarist oppression. By the same token, the new Soviet order banned Jewish political and cultural organizations outside the Communist party, including Zionist groups, and began closing […]
As Two Days, One Night gets under way, Sandra (Marion Cotillard), a mother of two young children, is resting peacefully, her eyes shut. It will be one of her last moments of tranquility for a while. Minutes later, as she removes a hot tart from the oven, she takes a telephone call that will upend her […]
Natchez, which overlooks the mighty Mississippi River and the flatlands of Louisiana, had more millionaires per capita than any other town in the United States before the Civil War. Prosperous due to its network of cotton plantations, worked by the descendants of African slaves, Natchez showed off its wealth through stunning architecture. Landowners who […]
The rise and fall of a major American racist is the subject of Klansville, U.S.A, a searing documentary to be broadcast by the PBS television network on Tuesday, Jan. 13 at 9 p.m as part of its American Experience series. It’s the story of Bob Jones, the grand dragon, or leader, of the United Klans of America, […]
The Western-led war against the Taliban in Afghanistan has, we are told, come to an end. It began on Oct 7, 2001, a month after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, and was initially aimed at degrading Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organization, which had found a home in the country, then ruled largely […]
Woody Allen will be 80 next December and is still going strong. Indeed, he’s probably finishing his latest film script or movie as I write these words. For about the past four decades, he’s turned out one movie per year, and like the old-school craftsmen he is, Allen composes his scripts on a yellow pad […]
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s 196-minute-long film, Winter Sleep, which opens in Toronto on January 9, focuses on fraying and broken personal relationships. Amid the lunar landscape of Cappodoccia, a rugged region in Anatolia replete with eerie caves and strange rock formations, a wealthy, good-looking man in his fifties struggles to understand the two most important women in his […]