The Middle East has kept Barack Obama extremely busy, if not preoccupied, since he assumed office in 2009. Obama has had to grapple with a multitude of challenges in this turbulent region, from Israel’s perennial struggle with the Palestinians and Iran’s quest for an atomic bomb to the revolutionary Arab Spring rebellions that have toppled […]
The French philosopher Michel Foucault, in his The Order of Things, stated that dominant powers determine discourse and, as a consequence, what is preserved in an archive. With this in mind, I started research into Dutch civil law notaries and their professional behavior during World War II. Their role was almost absent from historical discourse […]
Donato Manduzio, a disabled veteran of World War I, transformed himself into a messianic figure after returning to San Nicandro, his remote ancestral village in southern Italy. As he resumed his trade as a cobbler, he turned to faith healing, and after reading the Old Testament for the first time, he discovered the Hebrew scriptures. With […]
American democracy, its virtues notwithstanding, was deeply flawed for far too long. The stains that grotesquely blemished the United States for at least a century were slavery, segregation and Jim Crow racism, all maliciously directed at African Americans. While whites enjoyed the benefits of freedom and liberty in the land of the free, blacks bore […]
Seventy years ago this month, amid the terror of the Holocaust, the forces of decency prevailed in Nazi-occupied Denmark. At a time when millions of Jews throughout Europe were being systematically murdered in German extermination camps in Poland, the Jews of Denmark were being saved by their fellow citizens, in one of the […]
Matthew Halton, a celebrated Canadian foreign correspondent who worked for the Toronto Star and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, visited Nazi Germany about a dozen times between 1933 and 1939. These were pivotal years in Europe. In 1933, Adolf Hitler assumed power, and in 1939, World War II erupted. Based in London, Halton covered the most important […]
David Kaufman’s photographic exhibit, The Posthumous Landscape: Jewish Sites of Memory in Poland Today, is part of Holocaust Education Week in Toronto. It opened on Oct. 29 at Beth Tzedec’s Reuben and Helene Dennis Museum and runs until Feb. 2, 2014. Kaufman is a Toronto-based photographer and filmmaker whose work focuses on architecture, urban landscape […]
After reading Ray Robertson’s book, Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live, Toronto filmmaker Alan Zweig thought that the complexity of life might be better understood by organizing it into neat and accessible categories. Animated by this idea, he sought out real-life stories that were at once applicable to Robertson’s concept and transportable to the screen. […]
Mountaineers are under no illusions when they embark on a challenging expedition. Having weighed the risks, they know there is always a chance they may never return to their loved ones. These thoughts doubtlessly crossed the minds of 70 climbers from 15 countries who set out to reach the summit of K2, the world’s highest […]
Israel is, technically, not the only official Jewish homeland in the world. Hidden away in the far east of Russian Siberia, 8,361 kilometres east of Moscow, and not that far from the Pacific Ocean, is the Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR) of Birobidzhan. And it’s even bigger than the far more famous Jewish state: Birobidzhan has […]