From the end of the 18th century to the second decade of the 20th century, virtually every Jewish person in the Russian empire was required by law to live in the Pale of Settlement, a vast region comprised of modern-day Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Latvia and Lithuania. Starting in the 19th century, liberalization set in as […]
Israel’s complex and protracted conflict with the Palestinians often seems like a stubborn political and armed struggle defying resolution. Indeed, it may well continue to fester and explode for decades to come. Tangled Roots, a six-part Israeli television series now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform, delves into this messy imbroglio with honestly, clarity and […]
Joseph Joffo, a French Holocaust survivor, published a best-selling memoir in 1973, but more than four decades elapsed before it was converted into a movie. Christian Duguay’s absorbing feature film, A Bag of Marbles, a joint French-Canada production, will be available on DVD, iTunes and Amazon on March 14. The Joffos, a Russian Jewish family from […]
The 7.8-magnitude earthquake that devastated Turkey and Syria exactly a month ago, killing some 50,000 people and levelling thousands of residential and commercial buildings, appears to have worked to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s advantage. Syria, one of Israel’s prime enemies, was relegated to the political wilderness following the outbreak of its civil war in 2011. […]
Call it a beacon of peace and coexistence in the Middle East. The Abrahamic Family House, a multi-faith sanctuary of worship in Abu Dhabi encompassing a mosque, a synagogue and a church, was inaugurated on February 16 and opened to the public on March 1. Consisting of the Imam al-Tayeb mosque, the Moses Ben-Maimon synagogue […]
The award-winning columnist of The New York Times, Thomas Friedman, fears that Israel’s future as a liberal democratic state may be imperilled by the radical judicial reforms Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far right-wing government wants to phase in. Friedman, the newspaper’s former bureau chief in Israel and Lebanon, told an Americans for Peace Now webinar […]
Yehuda Fuchs, the Israeli major-general in charge of the army’s Central Command, was absolutely correct to brand the murderous rampage by Jewish settlers in the West Bank town of Huwara on February 26 as a “pogrom.” “What happened in Huwara was a pogrom carried out by law-breakers,” he said after hundreds of vigilante settlers killed […]
A three-part series on some of the issues of the day in Israel, titled Into the Land and presented by the Times of Israel website, is now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform. These concise and probing documentaries deal with the lamentable state of the Dead Sea, the market in ancient archeological artifacts, and the […]
Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government is unequivocally committed to expanding Israel’s web of settlements in the West Bank as much as it is bent on thwarting Palestinian statehood there. This much is evidently clear in the wake of two events in the past few days. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a champion of Israeli settlers in the […]
At a press conference in Kyiv on February 24, the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, took a question from an Israeli reporter about Israel’s cautious position on the war. Israel has adopted a nuanced stance toward the conflict in Ukraine, with many observers having described it as a […]