It is debatable whether Canadian labor leader Fred Hahn is an antisemite, but he is certainly grossly insensitive to Jews and undeniably hostile toward Israel. Which makes him a highly divisive leader and an ignoble character who does not belong in his job. On August 21, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) announced it […]
The sons and daughters of Nazi dignitaries were children of privilege in Adolf Hitler’s Germany. But after its defeat in World War II, they were often regarded as lepers tarred by their association with a genocidal regime. Tania Crasnianski, a criminal lawyer of German, French and Russian descent whose grandfather served in the German Air […]
Nathan Silver, in his quirky comedy, Between the Temples, presents viewers with the oddest of couples: a cantor and a music teacher old enough to be his mother. Normally, an age difference on this scale might feel creepy, but here it feels virtually normal. Scheduled to open in theaters in Canada on August 23, this […]
With students scheduled to return to classes next month, universities in the United States have adopted stringent new rules to limit pro-Palestinian protests, which erupted on campuses following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip last October. Under the new regulations, encampments will be banned, protests will be allowed only in designated […]
Even as it is enmeshed in a multi-front war in the Middle East, Israel is busy creating facts on the ground in the West Bank to ensure that a Palestinian state is never established. Several days ago, an Israeli government agency, the Civil Administration, allotted 148 acres of land for Nahal Heletz, which will be […]
One of Hollywood’s last anti-Nazi movies, Hotel Berlin, was released by Warner Bros. on March 17, 1945, less than two months before Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender and the end of World War II in Europe. Recently screened on the Turner Classic Movie channel, it was adapted from Vicki Baum’s eponymous novel. Directed by Peter Godfrey […]
Shortly after his appointment as prime minister in 1940, Winston Churchill ordered the detention of thousands of German and Austrian Jewish refugees who had fled to Britain to escape Nazi persecution. Known as enemy aliens, they were rounded up in the prevailing belief that German spies in the country posed a security threat to Britain. […]
In light of the scandalous Birju Dattani affair, one can only hope that the Canadian federal government will not make the same egregious mistake again in its employment practices. Dattani, selected recently as chief commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, agreed to go on leave last week following a flurry of complaints from the […]
During the last ten months of his tragically abbreviated life, the Czech-Jewish novelist Franz Kafka formed a romantic relationship with Dora Diamant, a Jewish actress originally from Poland. He was 40 and she was 25 when they met at a Baltic Sea beach in Germany in 1923. It was a doomed love affair in light […]
Optics matter, and yesterday, after Israeli aircraft bombed a Hamas command center in Gaza City where displaced Palestinian civilians were sheltering in place, the optics indeed looked bad for Israel. Around 90 or more Palestinians, including women and children, were killed in the air strike, and inevitably, Israel was subjected to a wave of international […]