As I drove from Toronto to Milton in the Halton Hills, it occurred to me that this was the first time since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic that I was actually going somewhere out of town. Covid-19 had upended all my travel plans, large and small, virtually confining my wife and I to our […]
The second season of Tehran, an Apple TV and Israeli state television co-production, lives up to expectations. Tehran, in its debut season, introduced us to a cast of canny Israeli and Iranian spies trying to outwit each other before and after an Israeli air raid intended to wipe out Iran’s nuclear arsenal. In the latest and […]
Russian President Vladimir Putin has shown his true colors yet again as an imperial aggressor bent on crushing a neighboring state and expanding Russia’s boundaries. Yesterday, nine days after calling up roughly 300,000 reservists in a partial mobilization, he announced that Russia would annex four regions in eastern and southern Ukraine heavily populated by ethnic Russians: […]
From Schindler’s List to The Pianist, feature films about the Holocaust have been ubiquitous. Since 1945, 443 Holocaust movies have been produced for theatrical, video and television release, according to Rich Brownstein, an American writer who has lectured at Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies. Brownstein, in Holocaust Cinema Complete: A History and Analysis […]
Yeshiva University has painted itself into an untenable, unsustainable and unacceptable position. As a secular institution, this flagship university of Modern Orthodoxy in New York City accepts public funding for its graduate programs, yet its undergraduate program is religiously oriented. The inherent tension between these diametrically opposed streams came to a head recently following the […]
Rashida Tlaib, the Palestinian American Democrat who represents the state of Michigan in the U.S. House of Representatives, clearly marches to her own drummer. Although she is not the only Arab American in Congress, she is still its only representative who rejects Israel’s existence as a Jewish state and calls for a binational state in […]
Stephane Freiss’ deeply atmospheric movie, Where Life Begins, unfolds on an idyllic farm in southern Italy divorced from contemporary ills and troubles. Yet it is precisely here, amid gently rolling hills, gnarled olive trees, a lush citron grove and a bleating herd of sheep, that unpleasant truths emerge. This Italian and French co-production, presented by […]
Saul Friedlander, the eminent historian, is a child of the Holocaust whose passage from adolescence to adulthood was marked by enormous turbulence and change. In his lucid, thought-provoking memoirs, When Memory Comes and Where Memory Leads, both published by Other Press in a paperback edition, he recalls pivotal events that shaped him to the core. […]
One can only hope that Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid was sincere when he endorsed a two-state solution in a speech he delivered at the United Nations on September 22. Speaking to the General Assembly, Lapid declared, “An agreement with the Palestinians, based on two states for two peoples, is the right thing for Israel’s […]
Jonathan Hayoun’s four-part documentary about the world’s longest hatred, Anti-Semitism: 2000 Years Of History, is an edifying survey of a mutating pathological phenomenon that shows no signs of abating. Now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform, this nearly four-hour French production, with English subtitles, is panoramic in scope and substance. The narrative is supplemented by […]