Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice: A Play For All Time? By Steve Frank Every year brings new productions of Shakespeare’s controversial play “The Merchant of Venice.” Is it time to rethink this problematic play? Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice” was one of the smash hits of the 1999 theatre season. Washington, D.C.'s...
By Aylin Kocaman "It is necessary that we must consider -- just like Zionism, or anti-Semitism, or fascism -- Islamophobia as a crime against humanity." --- Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan Following Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s statement about Zionism, I have received a great many messages from my...
Books in Brief: Senior editor Eileen Lavine reviews new and forthcoming titles A Grain of Truth by Zygmunt Miloszewski (translated from the Polish) is an unusual crime story starring a Warsaw prosecutor, Teodor Szacki, who has been exiled to the historic city of Sandomierz where he confronts an...
Supporters of Women of the Wall are planning solidarity prayer groups in major cities in the US and elsewhere next week, as the group heads to the Western Wall for services to mark Rosh Chodesh, the new moon. Women of the Wall, headed by controversial Israeli...
A wide-ranging research project aiming to document the number of Nazi ghettos and camps has uncovered an estimated 42,500 Nazi facilitates, in a figure that has shocked even the most seasoned Holocaust historians and could have implications for restitution claims. The camps were interspersed throughout Europe,...
By Patrick Mascoe It’s that time of year again (March 4th – 8th), when our institutions of higher learning take a week out of their busy schedules to collectively confuse the right to free speech with hate speech in order to promote and celebrate anti-Semitism week. ...
Support for Iran has declined among Arabs and Muslims, a new poll of 20 countries in North Africa and the Middle East has found. Iran's favorability ratings fell from about 90 percent to about 40 percent in Egypt, while ratings fell even more dramatically in Saudi...
Taqiyya: A Concept Used to Divide Muslims, Christians and Jews By Aylin Kocaman I was talking to the head of a Christian group a few years ago about the importance of love and affection in Islam. He was listening with interest and nodded in agreement. I thought...
A visionary to some, a troublemaker to others, Anat Hoffman is leading the charge for women to be allowed to read the Torah at the Western Wall. The executive director of the Israel Reform Action Committee and spokesperson for Women of the Wall has become...
Kaskel’s Chutzpah By Gary Stein “Your people must leave all the villages,” the government official barked. “The district must be emptied. I have an order here!” With that command begins the expulsion of the Jews from the town of Anatefka in The Fiddler on the Roof. This...