People in Nazi-occupied Holland generally greeted the maltreatment of Jews with indignation, but local authorities cooperated with the Germans in the persecution of Jews in the Netherlands, says a Dutch historian. Wichert ten Have, chair of the Academic Working Group at the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in Amsterdam, made these comments in a lecture in Toronto on Nov. […]
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The Role of Jewish Food in My Life
I’ve been trying to pare down my cookbook collection, but couldn’t resist buying a copy of Crazy Good Kugel on a recent visit to Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim, a historic synagogue in Charleston, South Carolina. The slim, coil-bound volume comprises 32 recipes for sweet and savory kugels – the entries in the congregation’s “Great KKBE […]
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Escape from Sobibor
Philip (Fiszel) Bialowitz was one of the lucky few. He survived the hell of Sobibor — a Nazi extermination camp in Poland where about 250,000 Jews were murdered in less than two years– and better still, he managed to escape from this purgatory, in the largest prisoner revolt of the Holocaust. Now an American citizen, […]
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World War I and its Impact on Hitler
Adolf Schicklgruber, otherwise known as Adolf Hitler, was a dispatch runner in the German army on the Western front during World War I. A private in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, or the List Regiment, he later claimed the war radicalized him and constituted the most formative years of his life in terms of […]
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Panama’s Idyllic San Blas Islands
The isle of Tuba Senika is the next best thing to paradise. This is the thought that raced through my mind as the motor boat in which I sat closed in on the tiny, palm-fringed island. Little more than a speck in Panama’s Gulf of San Blas, Tuba Senika is roughly 200 metres long by about […]
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David Cronenberg Retrospective at TIFF
David Cronenberg, the Toronto-born movie director, is the subject of a retrospective mounted by the Toronto International Film Festival. From Within: The Films of David Cronenberg runs until Jan. 19, 2014 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West). Cronenberg launched his career with Stereo in 1969, and has made such films as Shivers, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, The Fly, M. Butterfly and Eastern […]
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Islamic Radicalism in Germany
Radical Islamists from Germany have been pouring into Syria to fight in the civil war, the German newsmagazine Focus reported recently. Disquietingly enough, some of the Islamic fundamentalist fighters who’ve joined the rebel movement trying to unseat Syrian President Bashar Assad are German Christian converts to Islam. This may come as news to most people, […]
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Africa’s Protracted Conflict
One of most protracted conflicts in Africa today concerns the former Spanish colony of Spanish Sahara, situated in the northwestern corner of the continent, adjacent to Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania. By the 20th century, Spain’s once-grand empire consisted of a few small bits and pieces, all in Africa: Ifni and the protectorate of Spanish Morocco […]
Several months ago, as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry shuttled one from one Middle East capital to another in an attempt to restart peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, he urged the Israeli government to seriously consider a revamped Arab League peace plan as a basis for resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. As […]
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Building a Modern City
More and more people are living in cities, and within 45 years, 80% of the world’s population will be city dwellers, compared to 50% today. But due to insufficient planning, modern cities — the growth engines of national economies — are increasingly becoming cold and bleak. Danish architect Jan Gehl believes that contemporary cities, like […]