Syria has crumbled into the maelstrom of civil war, but its descent into violence, anarchy and despair doesn’t deter two young Syrian activists from striving to create a secular democratic republic out of the smouldering rubble. Mouaz Moustafa, the executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, and Razan Shalab al-Sham, his assistant, are consumed […]
Canada’s first Jewish federal cabinet minister, Herb Gray, has died at the age of 82. In a way, his career is the story of the coming of age of the Canadian Jewish community in the political life of the country. Many Jewish politicians have been more exciting and flamboyant – David Lewis, the long time […]
On April 22, The New York Times reported that Mark Fields, the 53-year-old chief operating officer of Ford Motor, the second-largest car manufacturer in the United States after General Motors, known for working with smaller dealerships such as Wichita Ford, had been chosen to be its next chief executive, succeeding Alan Mulally. If you want […]
This year’s edition of the Toronto Jewish Film Festival runs from May 1-11 and features a wide assortment of feature-length movies, shorts and documentaries from around the world. A sampler: Lucia Puenzo’s Argentinian feature film, The German Doctor, focuses on Josef Mengele, the Nazi war criminal who found a haven in South America after the […]
Long after his nine-hour documentary on the Holocaust, Shoah, was released in 1985, the French filmmaker, Claude Lanzmann, reviewed footage he had been forced to cut. He was probably flabbergasted by what he had left out, particularly an intriguing interview with Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein, the last living “elder” of a Nazi ghetto. Murmelstein, who died […]
Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) was the national poet of the Palestinians, a man whose lyrical poetry distilled the essence of loss and exemplified the dream of statehood. Ibtisam Mara’ana Menuhin’s empathetic biopic, Write Down, I Am An Arab, will be screened at the Canadian International Documentary Festival (Hot Docs) in Toronto on April 27, April 29 […]
This year’s edition of the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, a major event in the city’s cultural agenda, runs from May 1-11 and lives up to expectations, judging by the roster and quality of the movies. A sampler: If you’ve ever visited the Lower East Side in New York City, you may have come upon a […]
It had no fewer than three official themes, “Man’s Achievements on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe,” “Peace Through Understanding,” and “A Millennium of Progress.” Its symbol was a 12-story high, stainless-steel model of the earth, the Unisphere, which still can be seen in Queens, New York, where it was held. The New York World’s Fair […]
A portrait of the Russian novelist Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) adorned the office of Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916), the renowned Yiddish writer. According to Amelia Glaser, a professor of Russian and comparative literature at the University of California in San Diego, Sholem Aleichem’s attachment to Gogol was anything but surprising. Sholem Aleichem, whose real name was Sholem […]
Homs is one of the flashpoints of the civil war in Syria, which is tearing apart the country. Peaceful protests in Homs, north of Damascus, were met with a brutal response by government forces, forcing rebels to take up arms in a bitter struggle that has degenerated into a military stalemate symptomatic of the war […]