On July 28, 1959, thieves in Bucharest committed an audacious crime. In broad daylight, they ambushed a truck from the National Bank carrying the equivalent of several hundred thousand dollars in Romanian currency. The theft shocked the Communist leadership and led to the arrest of hundreds of suspects and the production of a unique film. […]
The first ever Hollywood movie about Israel’s struggle for statehood, Sword in the Desert, was released in the United States in 1949, a year after Israel achieved sovereignty and independence. Directed by George Sherman, and based on a short story by Robert Buckner, it appeared eleven years before Otto Preminger’s Exodus. Filmed in California, and starring […]
Cecil B. DeMille was a major force in the Hollywood movie industry for decades. From 1913 until the late 1950s, he directed more than 70 silent movies and talkies and worked with the leading actors of the day. More than 60 years after his death, he is probably best remembered for, among other pictures, The Squaw […]
U.S. President Joe Biden will confront a daunting array of issues during his whirlwind visit to the Middle East from July 13-16. Biden will spend the first leg of his trip in Israel. There he will meet the caretaker prime minister, Yair Lapid, and his predecessor, Naftali Bennett, who met Biden at the White House […]
Jewish gangsters and homegrown Nazis fought in brawls in the United States in the late 1930s. As Michael Benson writes in his informative book, Gangsters Vs Nazis: How Jewish Mobsters Battled Nazis in Wartime America (Citadel Press), the gangsters were the “good guys.” Their targets were fascists from the German American Bund and the Silver […]
Before the creation of the state of Israel, American Jews immigrated to Palestine — a League of Nations mandate administered by Britain from 1922 to 1948 — in extremely small numbers But as Joseph B. Glass suggests in his deeply-researched and revealing book, From New Zion To Old Zion: American Jewish Immigration and Settlement In […]
Irving Abella left an indelible mark as a scholar, particularly after the publication of his landmark book, None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933-1948, in 1982. From that point onward, he and his co-author, Harold Troper, were recognized as two of the most preeminent Canadian historians of their generation. A stinging […]
Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, Andriy Melnyk, needlessly waded into a cesspool of controversy recently when he glibly denied the historically-proven fact that the late Ukrainian nationalist icon, Stepan Bandera, was a “mass murderer of Poles and Jews.” During an interview on German television, Melnyk fancifully described Bandera as a “freedom fighter” who personified Ukraine’s struggle […]
Diplomatic efforts to reboot the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement appear to be at an impasse once again following unsuccessful indirect talks between the United States and Iran in Qatar late last month. European Union mediators conducted the negotiations, which ended in a deadlock after two days and left the agreement, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of […]
Bolesław Prus, a central figure in Polish literature and journalism in the second half of the 19th century and the first years of the last century, was drawn into the complexity of the “Jewish question” in Congress Poland, or the Kingdom of Poland. In his essays and novels, he addressed this issue fleetingly or in […]