Religious Minorities

Bollywood has long played a significant nation-building role in India. But over the past decade, both onscreen and off, it has increasingly fed into Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s particular brand of nation-building, by both reinforcing anti-Muslim sentiment and engaging in Hindu-nationalist revisionist history.

Despite denials of a clampdown on press freedoms from the Hindu nationalist government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a growing number of journalists face harassment and threats of violence. Nowhere is this more evident than among the reporters who cover religion and communal violence, which is on the rise in India today.

Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, was dissolved last Thursday, triggering new elections in November that will be the country’s fifth in four years. The elections, which extend an unprecedented streak of instability in Israel’s electoral politics, became inevitable after the coalition government of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett lost its razor-thin majority a little over a year after it took office. Billed as the “government of change,” the unwieldy coalition that Bennett helmed comprised parties from across the political spectrum, held together only by the common interest of unseating Bennett’s predecessor, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Netanyahu was a decisive figure [...]