The myriad and inventive ways in which human beings interact with water, the planet’s life-sustaining resource, is the subject of Watermark, which premiered at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. Scheduled to open in Toronto on Sept. 27, Watermark, co-directed by Jennifer Baichwall and Edward Burtynsky, is visually stunning. Cinematographer Nicholas de Pencier uses the […]
Leon Uris, a high school dropout, was 34 when he achieved fame. With the publication of his novel, Exodus, he blazed a path to celebrity. Selling more copies than any other American book since Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, Exodus, published in 1958, was a world-wide sensation, printed in 50 languages. Exodus, transformed into […]
A German official who prosecutes Nazi war crimes has recommended that prosecutors in Germany lay charges against 30 men and women who worked as guards in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, where 1.5 million people, mainly Jews, were ruthlessly killed. “This is really an important milestone in the effort to bring Nazis to justice,” observed Efraim […]
Forty years ago, I saw my first corpse. Or rather corpses. In October of 1973, with the Yom Kippur War raging, I joined an Israeli government press tour of the Golan Heights, captured by Israel during the 1967 Six Day War. I was a freelance journalist in Jaffa and jumped at the opportunity to visit […]
Twenty years ago this month, the Arab-Israeli conflict, one of the most protracted and debilitating disputes in the Middle East, finally seemed on the verge of being resolved through peaceful means. On Sept. 13, 1993, Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister of Israel, hesitantly shook hands with his arch nemesis, Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the […]
Marcel Reich-Ranicki was an anomaly of the first order, a Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor who launched a stellar career as one of the foremost literary critics in Germany. Reich-Ranicki, who died in Frankfurt on Sept. 18 at the age of 93, was a man for all seasons. He wrote for Germany’s most influential newspapers, Die […]
It would be foolhardy to cast aspersions on the recent agreement reached by the United States and Russia to dismantle and destroy Syria’s formidable arsenal of chemical weapons. The accord, hammered out by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva on Sept. 14 and formalized by the United […]
Marek Najbrt’s Protektor takes place in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia as the Holocaust in Europe unfolds. Framed by the assassination of Nazi overlord Reinhard Heydrich, this Czech feature film will be screened by the Toronto Jewish Film Society on Sept. 22 at 4 p.m. and again at 7 p.m. at the Al Green Theatre (750 Spadina Avenue). The […]
As the crisis in Syria intensifies, riveting the world, the United States appears to have painted itself into a corner. A year ago, President Barack Obama explicitly warned Syria that the use of chemical weapons against its citizens would represent an intolerable “red line” for the United States. Yet Washington has done remarkably little since […]
When U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry triumphantly announced on July 19 that Israel and the Palestinian Authority had established “a basis” to resume direct peace talks, he looked at PA President Mahmoud Abbas and said, “Mr. President, you should look happy.” Kerry assumed that the resumption of talks after a three-year hiatus would please […]