A few days ago, Israel took yet another step to consolidate its problematic occupation of the West Bank. On May 12, the Ministry of Defence advanced plans to build 4,427 new homes in Jewish settlements there. In addition, the ministry retroactively legalized two unauthorized outposts, Mitzpeh Dani and Oz V’gaon. It also approved a plan to […]
Payton Gendron’s murderous rampage in Buffalo, New York, is yet another jolting and disturbing reminder of the deadly dangers of white supremacy in contemporary America. Gendron, an 18-year-old from a small town in central New York state, drove 300 kilometres to kill 10 shoppers at a Tops Friendly Market store on May 14. Eight of […]
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, having purchased the giant social media company Twitter for a cool $44 billion, has said he would be receptive to welcoming back former U.S. president Donald Trump to the platform. I can live with Trump’s reappearance on Twitter, his blatant and dangerous lies and half-truths about the last U.S. presidential election […]
Left- wing Labor Zionists in Palestine and Israel attempted to build an egalitarian and socialist society within their web of cooperative settlements. The children they raised in this cloistered milieu from the 1920s to the 1970s were expected to transmit their parents’ and grandparents’ hopes and dreams to future generations, but this would not be […]
Holocaust memory lies at the core of Tacheles — The Heart of the Matter, a documentary film by Jana Matthes and Andrea Schramm. It will be presented in Toronto by the 19th annual Human Rights Watch Canada Film Festival on Sunday, May 29 at 3 p.m. at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema. From May 30 to […]
Magen David Adom, an Israeli paramedic organization, is busy day and night tending to the sick and wounded. Its staff of 25,000 medics and 29,000 volunteers respond to a wide assortment of emergencies ranging from traffic accidents to terrorist attacks. Martin Himel, a Canadian journalist based in Israel, has been one of its volunteers for the […]
With no end in sight to the nearly three-month-old war in Ukraine, the United States has doubled down on its commitment to help the Ukrainian armed forces beat back or defeat Russia. This has been an incremental process. Soon after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, he issued a […]
Hamas, the governing authority in the Gaza Strip for the past 16 years, has escalated its bitter conflict with Israel beyond Gaza’s borders. This is a provocative and potentially dangerous development that bodes well neither for Israel nor Hamas. Since last May’s cross-border war in and around Gaza, the fourth in 13 years, Hamas has […]
Jews in the Diaspora have successfully adopted to local environments while keeping faith with Jewish traditions. This pattern of accommodation looms large in The People of the Book, a 28-minute documentary by Felix Lazarus which focuses on three towns in the Canadian province of Ontario — Sudbury, Sault Ste. Marie and North Bay. Released in 1973, […]
Winnipeg, in my imagination, is virtually terra incognita, a Canadian city on the prairies known for its bitterly cold winters and sweltering summers. What I actually know about Winnipeg is factual. Three decades ago, I found myself in Winnipeg in January, the coldest month of the year. What I mostly remember now is the extreme […]