Ayman al-Zawahri, a jihadist writ large, lived and died by the sword. After assuming the leadership of Al Qaeda following Osama bin Laden’s assassination in 2011, he promised to “terrify” the United States with a spate of terrorist attacks. “Blood for blood,” he boasted in a theatrical video released about a month after American commandos killed […]
Twitter’s “terms of service” policy on “hateful conduct” forbids users to abuse others with “repeated slurs, tropes or other content” that “dehumanizes” or “degrades” them. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has chronically violated Twitter’s policy, yet his accounts in English and an assortment of other languages remain intact. Over the years, Khamenei has exploited Twitter […]
What’s in a name? An awful lot if you’re a German and living in Germany. Sonke Wortmann’s How About Adolf? deals with this complex issue by lampooning German attitudes toward its Nazi past. A dark and effervescent satire informed by Germany’s greatest demon, Adolf Hitler, it is now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform. The plot is straightforward. Elisabeth […]
Israel’s occupation of the West Bank rests, in part, on a multiplicity of laws. Ra’anan Alexandrowicz examines them in his probing documentary, The Law In These Parts, which is currently being presented online by the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation. The system, drawn up before Israel’s conquest of the West Bank in 1967, is based on […]
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban ventured into dangerous terrain recently when he made the racially-charged argument that Europeans should not become “peoples of mixed race.” Speaking to members of Romania’s Hungarian minority in Transylvania, he lambasted the “flood” of non-European migrants being “forced” on Hungary and assured his listeners he sought to prevent it from […]
White supremacist movements in the United States have been on the ascendancy since the toxic Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the summer of 2017. As Cynthia Miller-Idriss writes in her trenchant book, Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right (Princeton University Press), this sickening assemblage of white supremacists and […]
Walter Tejblum’s Shalom Taiwan, an Argentinian movie set in Buenos Aires, New York City and Taipei, conforms to the claim that a rabbi with no debts is a rabbi without projects. This curious motto is the brainchild of Rabbi Aaron (Fabian Rosenthal), the young spiritual leader of a synagogue/community center in Buenos Aires deeply in […]
Israel’s bilateral relations with Russia have been on a downward spiral since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24. Amid this somber development, Russia has upgraded its relationship with Iran, Israel’s greatest enemy. Annoyed by Israel’s condemnation of its aggression and Israel’s shipment of humanitarian and non-lethal military supplies to Ukraine, Russia has exerted pressure […]
Shimon Peres, Israel’s three-time prime minister and ninth president, was a dreamer who fused idealism with practicality. A hawk who was instrumental in building the Israeli armed forces in the late 1940s and 1950s, he was also a dove who strove for peace with the Palestinians and Israel’s Arab neighbors in the 1990s. Peres, who […]
Latvia and Lithuania, which are among the newest members of NATO, have been hailed by some as Western bastions of democracy and bulwarks against Russian expansionism. But both Baltic republics were complicit in the mass murder of their Jewish citizens during the Holocaust. Baltic Truth, a revealing and troubling documentary by Eugene Levin and Andrejs […]