Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Like Father, Like Son, poses an excruciatingly difficult question, one that would surely crush any doting mother or father: How do you react to the news that your adorable six-year-old son was switched at birth and that he has to be returned to his biological parents? That’s the appalling predicament a young, upwardly […]
Pardon the expression, but filmmaker Greg Whiteley is like a fly on the wall. He`s been given full and unfettered access to Mitt Romney, the Republican party presidential hopeful, and he makes the best of the opportunity. Over a six-year period, Whiteley follows Romney virtually everywhere and shares private moments with him. He’s the consummate […]
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s two-day visit to Israel this week was intended to demonstrate unwavering friendship with Israel in spite of sharp disagreements over two critical issues — Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Iran’s nuclear program. Upon her arrival in Israel with 15 members of her cabinet in tow, Merkel, eager to defuse tensions […]
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A Classic of Reportage is Reprinted
On June 14, 1940, on the very day German troops marched triumphantly into Paris, a freelance journalist named Rosie Goldschmidt Waldeck checked into the swankiest hotel in Bucharest, the Athene Palace. She remained there for the next six months, watching events unfold in Rumania, a neutral and deeply divided Balkan country whose natural resources were […]
A place of stark and grandeur beauty, the Sinai Peninsula is one of Egypt`s great travel destinations, as I can personally attest. On my first visit in 1967, shortly after Israel’s conquest of Sinai in the Six Day War, I camped out under a brilliant starry sky illuminated by the Milky Way. On my last visit, […]
Havana, Cuba’s capital, has seen better days. A gleaming, modern, hip city more than 60 years ago, Havana fell on hard times following the 1959 revolution, when the new left-wing government, headed by Fidel Castro, deposed the corrupt pro-American Batista regime. Subjected to a U.S. economic embargo after the Cuban government nationalized private property, Cuba […]
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Ukraine Torn Between East and West
If you think the struggle between the ousted pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, and his pro-European opponents has been going on for months, think again. This is actually the second go-around. The first time was during the so-called Orange Revolution in 2004, when then Prime Minister Yanukovych faced off in a presidential election against […]
Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi were not destined to meet, bond, cook together and create a budding restaurant empire. Ottolenghi and Tamimi, both born in Jerusalem in 1968, a few kilometres from each other, were raised in separate societies that could accurately be described as two solitudes. An Israeli Jew, Ottolenghi was from western […]
The grainy and seemingly innocuous photograph on the cover of Jan Tomasz Gross’ disturbing book, Golden Harvest, published by Oxford University Press, shows a group of Polish peasants standing together in a group. One of them, a woman, holds a shovel. The photograph in question, which first appeared in Poland’s largest newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, on […]
Three years after its authoritarian government fell in a violent popular uprising aided and abetted by foreign intervention, Libya has descended into a state of anarchy that bodes ill for its future as a united nation. Torn by tribal rivalries, infighting among competing armed militias and a spate of assassinations and kidnappings, and weakened by the […]