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 […]
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Wrong-Headed Boycott
It would appear that the American Studies Association is striving to be more Catholic than the pope himself, so to speak. The president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, has publicly rejected a boycott of Israel per se, while supporting a boycott of products made in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. Yet a […]
Greenland, the world’s largest island, is an ice-bound, treeless expanse of raw grandeur and timeless beauty. Although it has been inhabited for about 1,000 years, it’s still sparsely populated, and much of its vast, forbidding terrain remains unexplored. In Expedition to the End of the World, a Danish documentary now playing at the Bloor Hot […]
Israel has mounted a serious diplomatic and public relations campaign to shape the contours of a future comprehensive agreement on Iran’s controversial nuclear program. Having lost the battle to toughen the interim accord — which was signed on Nov. 24 in Geneva and is widely seen as a step in the right direction to resolve […]
A bare microphone in a dimly-lit nightclub gives way to a young, curly-haired folk singer named Llewyn Davis sitting mournfully on a stool. Strumming his guitar, and looking quite rumpled, he belts out a soulful song, the first plaintive line of which is, “Hang me, oh hang me, I’ll be dead and gone.” It’s 1961 and […]
Earlier this month, the 5,000-member American Studies Association (ASA) voted by a ratio of more than two to one to endorse a scholarly boycott against Israeli universities. It asked its members to refuse to “enter formal collaboration with Israeli academic institutions or with scholars who are expressly serving as representatives or ambassadors of those institutions, or on […]
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Istanbul is Exotic and Alluring
Istanbul can be likened to a Turkish delight, the popular candy that Turks and foreigners alike find so hard to resist. Bite into it and you’re hooked. Istanbul, once known as Constantinople, has drawn tourists since time immemorial. Touring it in the 12th century, the traveller Benjamin of Tudela was stunned by its sheer vitality. […]
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A “Decent” Nazi
Udo Klausa regarded himself as a “decent” Nazi. From 1940 to 1942, he was the principal civilian administrator of Bedzin, a mid-sized town in Poland that, in September 1939, was the scene of one of the very first Nazi atrocities against Jews. Klausa was not at his post in Bedzin when these crimes were committed, but […]
On my last visit to Egypt 14 years ago, I could sense that the Jewish community was already a relic of history. Doomed by the Arab-Israeli conflict, in which Egypt was deeply enmeshed by virtue of its pan-Arab foreign policy and its four wars with Israel, Egyptian Jews became the scapegoats of regional politics. The […]
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Nicky’s Family Documents a Heroic Rescue
Nicholas Winton, 104 today, is a hero in the deepest sense of the word. On the eve of World War II, he saved 669 Czech and Slovak Jewish children, who would have been murdered had they remained behind in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Winton, a British stockbroker, facilitated their escape to Britain within the framework of the […]