Eirik Svensson’s spare, hard-hitting feature film, Betrayed, boldly exposes Norway’s heartless and callous betrayal of its Jewish community during the Holocaust. Norway was occupied by Germany in April 1940, seven months after the outbreak of World War II. Norwegian collaborators, headed by Vidkun Quisling, cooperated with the invaders, even as underground fighters fought Germany’s occupation. […]
Much to Israel’s consternation, international talks to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement resumed in Vienna on November 29 after a five-month hiatus. The accord, hailed by U.S. President Barack Obama as a landmark achievement but greeted by Israel with apprehension, disappointment and scorn, granted Iran relief from crippling economic sanctions. In exchange for this […]
Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 20, 1981, U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig said the Reagan administration was trying to build a “strategic consensus” to counter the influence of the Soviet Union, its chief global adversary, in a region encompassing countries from Pakistan to Egypt. Claiming that the Soviet Union was […]
My first sustained exposure to Jaffa, a quaint and somewhat rundown neighborhood of Tel Aviv, occurred toward the end of 1971, shortly after I met my wife-to-be, Etti, a student at Tel Aviv University finishing an MA degree in English literature. We met at the British Council Reading Room in one of the university’s libraries. […]
Something was missing from A. Alan Scott’s life. It turned out to be Judaism. A Mormon from Kirkwood, Missouri, he was drawn to it in his 20s and never looked back. Aliza Rosen’s endearing documentary, Latter Day Jew, partially traces his journey from Christianity to Judaism. It will be screened during the Hannukah Film Festival, which […]
During Germany’s occupation of Norway from 1940 onward, Jews were singled out for persecution. Shorn of their rights, they were maligned and marginalized. But the worst was yet to come. Within two years of the German invasion, 773 Jews were deported to extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Poland. More than 1,000 Jews managed to escape to […]
Nazis in Germany and neo-Nazis throughout the world have exploited music and song as instruments of unity, camaraderie and aggression, panelists at an online seminar said recently. During the forum, sponsored by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City, two academics, a former white supremacist and a journalist from Italy spoke of […]
Morris Dees, an American civil rights litigation lawyer and the co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, has been fighting hate organizations in the United States for some 50 years now. In what he describes as an epiphany, he decided that the most effective way of bringing down neo-Nazis and their ilk was to hit them […]
Scattered throughout Poland are synagogues in various architectural styles that once served a large and venerable Jewish community. Found in towns ranging from Zamosc and Orla to Krasnik and Lancut, they remind Poles and foreign visitors alike that Poland was home to one of the most vibrant and important Jewish centers in the Diaspora before the […]
The Club, a six-part Turkish Netflix drama set in Istanbul during the 1940s and 1950s, portrays Turkey’s Jewish minority soberly and frankly. It highlights the positive and exposes the negative, providing viewers with a reasonably nuanced picture of Jews in a Muslim society. Matilda Aseo (Gokce Bahadir), the main character, is a Sephardi Jew whose […]