A year ago, on December 8, President Bashar al-Assad’s Baathist regime in Syria fell like a house of cards and was immediately replaced by an Islamist government led by Ahmed al-Shara, a former jihadist affiliated with Al Qaeda. It was a defining moment in Syria, an Arab state misruled by the Assad family for more […]
At its general assembly meeting in Geneva last week, the European Broadcasting Union judiciously came down on the side of fairness and justice. It allowed Israel to continue participating in the Eurovision Song Contest, the next one of which takes place in Vienna in May. Some members, having denounced Israel’s conduct of the war in […]
The Ku Klux Klan, the most powerful far-right American movement during the 1920s, was far more potent than its white supremacist forebearer, which emerged following the U.S. civil war. With a membership of over one million within a few years of its founding, it amassed more political power than any Klan before or since. Its […]
Scandar Copti’s Happy Holidays seethes with potentially explosive family secrets. Unfolding in Arabic and Hebrew, and set in the northern Israeli city of Haifa, this subtle feature film explores unsettling corners of relationships and the manner in which Israeli Jews and Arab Israelis try to manage them. It opens in theaters in the United States […]
In an unprecedented request, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has asked President Isaac Herzog for a pardon. If granted, it would absolve him of criminal charges of fraud, bribery and breach of trust in three separate but related cases. Netanyahu claims that a positive response from Herzog would have a beneficial effect on healing divisions in […]
The Palestinian Authority hopes to supplant Hamas as the governing power in the Gaza Strip and play a central role in the second phase of U.S. President Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan. This may be a bridge too far as matters stand today. The Israeli government opposes the participation of the PA in the future […]
It was unlike any day in Israel’s history. On October 7, 2023, thousands of Hamas terrorists from the Gaza Strip stormed into southern Israel, unleashing an atrocity on a scale that Jews thought was no longer possible after Israel’s creation in 1948. Israel was caught “completely by surprise,” write Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot in […]
When the Israeli filmmaker Ofer Freiman met Cleofas (Cleo), his wife Anita and their brood of 15 children, they were living on an isolated farm in the southern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. The descendants of Sephardi Jews who had been forced to convert to Christianity hundreds of years ago, they were drawn back to […]
The second and last season of House of Promises, a fine German television series about the Jewish proprietor of a department store in a working-class district of Berlin, gets under way as Germany lurches toward the abominable Nazi era. In the first six episodes of the debut season, which appeared on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform, […]
The ceasefire that was supposed to end the war in Lebanon has effectively broken down as Israel continues to attack Hezbollah operatives and military infrastructure on almost a daily basis. In its latest operation, on November 23, Israel killed Hezbollah’s chief of staff, Haytham Ali Tabatabai, the former commander of the Radwan Force, a special […]