In a rare venture into current events, the head of Yad Vashem has spoken out about the urgency of humanitarian disaster in Syria. After the forces backing Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad succeeded in taking the rebel-controlled areas of Aleppo last…
With gratitude and sadness, we share with readers the news that Alex Kliner’s Menschenings column will appear for the last time in this issue of the Jewish Independent. Alex is retiring and, while we are happy that he’s about to…
Last week, an Israeli artist erected a life-sized golden statue of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square. Reminiscent of the golden calf with its connection to forbidden idolatry, artist Itay Zalait said he was making a…
The story of Chanukah is a narrative of the victory of a small group of righteous fighters against a powerful empire. It is a redemptive story of standing for one’s beliefs (and existence) and triumphing in the end. The end…
A recently released study from the graduate School of Education at Stanford University engaged 7,800 middle school, high school and college students to evaluate the information they received on the internet. The report said there was a “stunning and dismaying…
The entire Jewish community was shocked to witness a spike in antisemitic vandalism in November, with incidents reported in Montreal and Toronto, and at three synagogues and a Jewish community centre, as well as at non-Jewish sites, in our nation’s…
The Canadian government has announced that it will resume funding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). The government made the announcement last week, allocating $20 million to UNRWA’s budget and an…
There were fears that, if Donald Trump lost the election last week, his supporters would riot. Fewer people thought the opposite would happen – either that Trump would win or that those who opposed him would riot. Nightly protest marches…
Many of our readers survived the predations of fascism or communism; some endured both. It is probably safe to say these people do not take democracy for granted, as some of us who have been fortunate to live our entire…
Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin spoke strong words at the opening of the Knesset’s winter session this week. The very survival of democracy, he suggested, is on the line. “Against a background of political upheavals occurring in the West, the free…
