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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Abdellatif Kechiche’s three-hour coming-of-age movie, Blue is the Warmest Color, unfolds over a period of three years and boils over with ardor and passion, signifying love and lust. The protagonists are two young women who meet by chance in a disco in a mid-sized town in France. Sexual sparks fly as their eyes meet, but […]
As part of Holocaust Education Week in Toronto, Beth Tzedec Congregation’s Reuben and Helene Dennis Museum is hosting an exhibit by Canadian photographer David Kaufman called The Posthumous Landscape: Jewish Sites of Memory in Poland Today. Officially opened on Oct. 29, it runs until Feb. 2, 2014. Kaufman’s visually remarkable photographs, all in luminous color, […]
Gerard Jugnot’s Monsieur Batignole recreates the period in Nazi-occupied France when French collaboration with the German occupiers was not an unusual phenomenon. Many French men and women risked life and limb to resist the Germans. But some chose the path of least resistance and preyed on Jews, the objects of demonization and persecution, to gain […]
In early 2011, I read The Jews of San Nicandro, a book written by a professor, John Davis. It’s about a group of Italian Roman Catholics in a small village who underwent a mass conversion to Judaism in fascist Italy, and who, over a period of 20 years of observing Jewish practices, left Italy and […]
Films reflect historical reality, registering the feelings and attitudes of an epoch. As the American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote,”The fact that film has been the most potent vehicle of the American imagination suggests all the more strongly that movies have something to tell us not just about the surfaces but about the mysteries of […]
He rocketed to earth from a dying planet and grew up with supernatural powers. Faster than a speeding bullet, he masqueraded as a mild-mannered newspaper reporter named Clark Kent. When called upon to perform a good deed or save the planet from nefarious enemies, he changed into the Man of Steel, wearing a blue costume […]