To say that the late Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera is a divisive and polarizing figure in contemporary Ukraine would be to understate the case. More than five decades after his assassination in West Germany, allegedly at the hands of KGB agents, he inspires both adulation and loathing. Bandera’s ambivalent legacy was on martial display a few […]
Charles Dickens, the great Victorian novelist, was admired and adored by the British public. Through his cast of vivid and eccentric characters, Dickens’ readers were pretty much familiar with his ideas, values and ideals. But Dickens had a secret, and her name was Ellen (Nelly) Ternan. An actress, Ternan was 18 when she met Dickens, […]
Journalism is based on trust. Without it, journalists lose their credibility, if not their readers. Jayson Blair, a talented and driven reporter on the staff of The New York Times, betrayed that trust repeatedly, disgracing himself and besmirching the renowned daily newspaper that published his fabricated and plagiarized stories. The Blair scandal, the biggest to […]
Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is a romp into a Roman circus of excess. The three-hour film, a biting and hugely entertaining satire on the perils of unregulated capitalism and the pitfalls of greedy materialism, is rife with sex, drugs, immorality, conspicuous consumption and profane language. Is it a trenchant commentary on the […]
They died in 2013, leaving a lasting legacy… Saul Kagan, 91, was the founding director of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which was established in 1951 by major Jewish organizations to seek reparations from Germany for the Nazi genocide during World War II. Thanks to Kagan, born in Lithuania, 600,000 Holocaust survivors […]
Earlier this week, suicide bombers were responsible for the deaths of at least 34 people in the southern Russian city of Volgograd, in attacks on a railway station and a trolley bus. In October, a woman from Dagestan killed seven people in a suicide bus blast in the city. The bombings raise fears of further […]
In the face of deep skepticism from both sides, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry claims that Israel and the Palestinian Authority have made considerable headway since the resumption of bilateral peace talks five months ago. “I believe we are closer than we have been in years to bringing the peace and prosperity that all […]
To Israel’s discredit, Yuli Edelstein, the Speaker of parliament, has formally rejected a request from Christian Arab parliamentarian Hanna Swaid to place a Christmas tree in a prominent place in the Knesset. “I do not believe it appropriate to order the erection of a Christmas tree as you requested,” wrote Edelstein on Dec. 26, […]
The myth persists that Jews do not excel in sports. Why this myth lingers on is beyond understanding. It’s true that Jewish mothers cajole their children to become doctors, lawyers, dentists and accountants rather than baseball or hockey players. But it’s patently untrue that young Jewish men and women are averse to excelling in sports. […]
The historical relationship between Jews and other Canadians, particularly with French Canadians, is not merely fundamentally important, it is also quite controversial. Phyllis Senese wrote in 1977 that “the history of antisemitism in Quebec remains to be written” and that, further, “a great deal of superficial and shallow writing on antisemitism in Quebec is in […]