Hebron, with population 250,000, is the largest Palestinian city in the West Bank containing a Jewish community. The 800 Jews of Hebron are religious nationalists and live along the length of Shuhada Street, barely coexisting with their Palestinian neighbors and protected by a phalanx of Israeli soldiers. Their small urban enclave, known as H2 under […]
Recep Tayyip Erdogan is back in the saddle again after winning his third five-year term as president of Turkey. In a runoff election on May 28, widely regarded as a referendum on his 20-year reign as Turkey’s dominant politician, he handily defeated challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu by a margin of 52.1 percent to 47.9 percent. “We […]
You’ve probably never heard of Chelly Wilson. I hadn’t until I watched Valerie Kontakos’ intriguing, partly animated documentary, Queen of the Deuce, which will be screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on June 3. A Greek Jewish woman from the city of Thessaloniki who immigrated to the United States prior to World War II, […]
Henry Kissinger, the first Jewish U.S. secretary of state, celebrated his 100th birthday on May 27. The last surviving member of President Richard Nixon’s cabinet, he was among the most influential figures in the American foreign policy establishment during the last half of the 20th century. A refugee from Nazi Germany, he arrived in the […]
Tunisian Jews in Ruggero Gabbai’s bitter-sweet documentary, From TGM to TGV, look back at their lives in Tunisia and abroad with a mixture of nostalgia and angst. To be screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on June 2, it examines the attitudes of Jews who were uprooted from their homeland. Tunisia, an Arab state […]
Last December, in response to a sharp rise of antisemitism in the United States, the federal government created a working group to develop a strategy to combat this ageless, pathological scourge. On May 25, the details were released at a White House ceremony during which U.S. President Joe Biden delivered a videotaped speech. Speaking of […]
Neve Shalom, a utopian Jewish-Arab village in Israel’s Ayalon Valley, is unique in that it is the only place in Israel where Israeli Jews, Muslims and Christians live together in peace and equality. Established in 1970, it is a beacon of amity in a region torn by ethnic and religious conflicts. The inhabitants are idealists […]
Holocaust denial, a relatively new form of antisemitism, is at the core of Philippe Le Guay’s sizzling drama, The Man in the Basement, which will be screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on June 1. It all starts innocently enough, but ends violently in a welter of fisticuffs and a cascade of epithets. Simon […]
Thanks, in part, to Roman Vishniac (1897-1990), a towering figure in modern photography, the Jewish communities obliterated by the Nazi hordes during the Holocaust will always be remembered. Vishniac, a Russian Jew, travelled to Eastern Europe and the Balkans from the mid-1930s onward to photograph Jews from all walks of life in Poland, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia […]
Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler were the first known Jewish inmates to escape from the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland, where 1.1 million Jews perished. They escaped in April 1944, nearly one year before the end of World War II. The vital information they conveyed to Jewish communities and Allied powers was timely and explosive. […]