Harry Frank Guggenheim was an American capitalist titan who guided his immensely wealthy family into modernity. He was also a visionary who foresaw that aviation would be fundamental to the transportation infrastructure of the United States and a financial backer of the father of modern rocketry, Robert Goddard. In addition, he was instrumental in the […]
Two strangers meet in a compartment of a train bound from Moscow to Murmansk in the dead of winter. Laura (Seidi Haarla) is a Finnish student. Ljoha (Yuriy Boris) is a Russian miner. They do not like each other at first sight and dread the countless hours they will have to spend together in cramped […]
Amnesty International’s controversial report labelling Israel as an “apartheid” state did not surprise the Israeli government in the least. On January 3, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said, “We think that in the coming year, there will be a debate that is unprecedented in its venom and in its radioactivity around the words ‘Israel as an […]
I cringed after reading Whoopi Goldberg’s recent remarks about the Holocaust, but I also felt sorry and embarrassed for her. Appearing on the ABC talk show The View on January 31, the American actress and comedian claimed the Holocaust was about “man’s inhumanity to man” and “not about race.” Goldberg made these utterly inane observations […]
Jeffery Robinson, the writer and narrator of Who Are We: A Chronicle of Racism in America, does not mince words. “America is one of the most racist countries on earth,” he says in the first few minutes of this hard-hitting documentary, which opens in Toronto on February 4. Elaborating on this claim, he contends that the […]
My Best Friend Anne Frank, a Dutch film being streamed on Netflix, offers insights into the best-known victim of the Holocaust. Hannah Goslar was Anne’s closest friend. Like Anne, she was a German Jew whose family had been forced out of Nazi Germany and had resettled in Holland. In Ben Sombogaart’s one-hour-and-forty-three minute film, which […]
Shanghai in the late 1930s and early 1940s was the only place on earth that did not require entry visas from visitors. Nearly 20,000 Jewish refugees, mainly from Germany and Austria, poured into this frenetic and cosmopolitan Chinese port during this period to escape Nazi persecution. The story of their immigration to this unlikely destination […]
The Freedom Convoy — a motley coalition of disaffected truckers, hardcore conservatives and neo-Nazi malcontents vying for headlines on these freezing days in January — is a misguided exercise in futility. Hordes of truck drivers from Alberta and points westward have descended on Parliament Hill in Ottawa in the past few days to protest a […]
The U.S. bookstore chain Barnes & Noble recently removed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion — a noxious antisemitic tract fabricated by czarist Russia — from its online site following a flood of complaints. The book, an outright forgery describing a diabolical plan by a Jewish cabal to take over the world, was designed to […]
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s former prime minister, regarded Donald Trump’s Middle East peace plan as little more than an opportunity to annex a chunk of the West Bank, says Barak Ravid, an Israeli journalist whose book, Trump’s Peace, was published in Hebrew last month. The Trump administration released its proposal, Peace to Prosperity, on January 28, […]