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 […]
Less than two decades after Nazi Germany went down to defeat in World War II, the National Socialist Movement, a British neo-Nazi party headquartered in London, garnered notoriety through rallies, marches and antisemitic attacks. Ridley Road, a four-part BBC Masterpiece series being presented by the PBS network every Sunday until May 22, skillfully resurrects this […]
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov bit off more than he could chew recently when he lamely tried to justify Russia’s unjustified invasion of Ukraine on the grounds of fighting Nazism in that former Soviet province. Moscow’s wildly unsubstantiated claim that its naked aggression was aimed at “de-Nazifying” Ukraine was, to put it mildly, a huge […]
The five momentous days from December 7 to December 11, 1941 were game changers, starting with Japan’s surprise attack on the U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor and ending with Germany’s reckless and self-defeating declaration of war against the United States. These events transformed World War II into a truly international conflict, write Brendan Simms […]
Israel was dealt a stunning indirect blow on April 29 when the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper at Harvard University, endorsed the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. Responding to pressure from the university’s Palestine Solidarity Committee, free speech rights groups and a campus visit from anti-Zionist activist Noam Chomsky, the editorial board of the oldest […]