One can readily understand why American Jews were rattled by the hostage incident at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, last Saturday. Although the four Jewish hostages escaped unharmed after 11 hours of captivity, and Muslim attacker Malik Faisal Akram was killed, the standoff left a bitter aftertaste in the mouths of Jews. In a […]
The Holocaust was set in motion not by one single momentous decision, but by several key events. The Wannsee conference of January 20, 1942 was one of those pivotal moments, or turning points, in Nazi Germany’s inexorable march toward genocide. Eighty years on, British historian Peter Longerich has written Wannsee: The Road to the Final […]
Karol Modzelewski was an iconoclast writ large, one of Poland’s leading dissidents during the communist era. A dyed-in-the-wool contrarian, he was Jewish by birth, yet identified as a Pole. He belonged to the Communist Party, yet openly criticized it. His fearlessness cost him dearly. During the 1960s and 1980s, he languished in prison for a […]
Several years before the Israeli television drama Shtisel took Israel by storm, Srugim was drawing in a multitude of viewers. Shtisel and Srugim ran from 2013 until 2021 and from 2008 until 2012 respectively. They unfolded in Jerusalem and were about the everyday lives of religiously observant Israelis. While Shtisel’s main characters were ultra-Orthodox Jews, Srugim […]
Justice has finally caught up with Anwar Raslan, a former colonel in Syria’s intelligence service. On January 13, a court in Koblenz, Germany, convicted him of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Now 58, he supervised the murder, the torture and the sexual abuse of dozens of prisoners. Though only a cog […]
Last May, as Israel fought its fourth cross-border Gaza war with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, deadly ethnic violence between Jews and Arabs erupted in a string of cities, shocking and disheartening Israelis. Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, compared it to a “civil war,” while an Arab member of the Knesset, Aida Touma-Sliman, likened it to the […]
Israel’s strategic alliance with the United States took shape between the 1967 Six Day War and the 1975 Sinai II disengagement agreement. This historic process was pushed forward on the American side by politicians in the House of Representatives and the Senate, Kenneth Kolander argues persuasively in America’s Israel: The U.S. Congress and American-Israeli Relations […]
Four new episodes have been added to The Club, the Turkish telenovela currently streaming on Netflix. There has been no word as yet whether additional ones are in the works. The first few minutes of the newest episode unfold in 1942, when the Turkish government imposed a demonstrably unfair wealth tax on Christians and Jews. […]
World War II was a titanic struggle that raged on land, the high seas and in the air. Its battles unfolded in Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific. They were voluminously documented by an armada of expert cinematographers, judging by World War II in Color: Road To Victory, which is currently being streamed on Netflix. […]
On January 5, an American high-tech entrepreneur named Dave Bateman sent an inflammatory e-mail to 50 friends and acquaintances during which he blasted coronavirus vaccines. An anti-vaxxer, Bateman acknowledged that his message “sounds bonkers.” Little did he realize how crazy and deranged it really was. The pathologically twisted missive would cost him his job. In his […]