Turkey puts four former Israeli military commanders, including the head of the army, on trial in absentia this week for the 2010 killing of nine Turks on a Gaza-bound aid ship. The trial, which begins in Istanbul on Tuesday, will further test relations between the one-time strategic allies and has been dismissed by Israel as…
Selin Rozanes’s family, like most Sephardim in Turkey, likely came to the country in the late 15th century, when Jews were expelled from Spain. Sultan Bayezid II welcomed these exiled Jews into the Ottoman Empire at the time, where they would end up living, and cooking, alongside native Turks. Today, Rozanes helps to preserve the…
Passover in my family has rarely been a formal affair. At one point, when I was a child and my family still observed a few watered-down traditions plucked out of the Jewish canon, we would gather round a makeshift Seder table to read selections from the ShopRite Haggadah. A Seder plate and stack of supermarket…
Like the Holocaust itself, Holocaust denial is a well-known if often misunderstood phenomenon. In its most naked form, it denies the historical fact that during the Nazi period, Germans, helped by many other Europeans such as Ukrainians, sought to kill the Jews of Europe and managed to slaughter roughly 6 million of them. In somewhat…
Last week, the Forward reported that Turkey had selected a young Jewish pop singer as its representative to 2012’s Eurovision music competition — an oblique gesture of musical détente at a time of frosty relations between Israel and Turkey. Now, in a very different kind of cultural milestone, Turkish state television network TRT has announced…
In what seems a pretty clear message to the world (“Hey, guys, we’re still the open democracy you thought we were”), Turkey has chosen a Jewish pop star, Can Bonomo, to represent it at this year’s Eurovision song contest May 22-26 in Baku, Azerbaijan. JTA’s Ron Kampeas reports that the choice has stirred some grumbling…
Turkey’s emissary to this year’s Eurovision Song Contest — the annual multinational music competition showcasing 43 countries and wide-ranging talent levels — is a 24-year-old pop singer from the western metropolis of Izmir named Can Bonomo. Fan site EuroVisionary describes the singer-songwriter’s style as “Istanbulian music that works with tunes from Alaturca to international indie…
Israel is definitely making progress on the subject of the Armenian genocide. In late December, during the Knesset’s first ever open-door debate on the issue, nobody was reported to have questioned whether the deliberate killing of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915-’16 should be called a genocide, nor whether the Ottoman Empire was the guilty party,…
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