Features
Shindico celebrating 50th anniversary this year – the Sandy Shindleman story
By BERNIE BELLAN Anyone who has ever driven through Winnipeg is bound to have noted the very many buildings – including strip malls, shopping centres, office buildings, and apartment buildings, that bear the name “Shindico”.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of Shindico. While its name may be familiar to most Winnipeggers, there’s not a lot that’s been written about how Shindico came to be.
Recently I had the chance to speak with Shindico founder Sandy Shindleman who, now 68, started Shindico when he was only 18.
Anyone who knows Sandy is familiar with his wry wit – and often self-deprecating style. In many ways his story is similar to the stories of many other self-made entrepreneurs within Winnipeg’s Jewish community.
Born in a small town – in this case Portage la Prairie, Sandy was one of three brothers, (the others being Robert and Daniel). The brothers’ parents, Eddie and Claire (née Abells), are both deceased, Eddie having died in 1998, while Claire died in 2019. Eddie’s brother Jack, who worked with Eddie in the grocery store that Eddie owned in Portage (known as Greenberg’s Grocery), passed away in 2020.
Eddie Shindleman’s own father came to Canada in 1912 – from Ukraine (which was then part of Russia, Sandy reminded me.) Claire’s parents were from Belarus. Like many other Jewish immigrants, Sandy’s grandfather went into the cattle business – which Eddie Shindleman remained very much involved in, operating an abattoir (slaughterhouse) in Portage for many years.
Sandy recalls his years growing up in Portage with fondness. There were about “25-35 Jewish families in Portage,” he recalls, many of whom had arrived there after World War II.
The grocery store that his father ran was actually purchased from Eddie Shindleman’s brother-in-law in 1967. Prior to that Eddie had managed the store. As well, Claire and her brother owned a motel in Portage, the “Westgate Inn,” which remained owned by the Shindleman family until this month.
I asked Sandy about the spelling of the name “Shindleman.”
Shouldn’t it be spelled “Shindelman,” I wondered?
His father misspelled it, Sandy said. It should have been “Shindelman,” not “Shindleman.” I asked whether “shindel” meant something in Yiddish. He answered that the family thought it meant “roofer,” but when I checked, the word “shindle” actually means scissors in Yiddish.
While Sandy did work some in the family grocery store, he also had occasion to help his father with the abattoir – which leads to a great story I’d first heard Sandy tell back in 2018, when I had invited him to speak to a group that I had helped start at the Rady JCC (along with Tamar Barr), known as the Jewish Business Network.
The story of the bull and “old man Schweitzer”
When I spoke to Sandy again recently, I invited him to repeat that story because it was both funny – and insightful.
The story goes like this: “I was 14 years old. The store was open till nine o’clock on Friday.” One Friday, on a June evening, after the store had closed Sandy’s father asked Sandy to go out to a farm owned by someone Sandy knew only as “old man Schweitzer.” (He never did find out Schweitzer’s first name, he told me.)
Schweitzer lived on an 80 acreage farm, Sandy continued, but he didn’t grow anything. He didn’t even have any cattle or chickens. All that he had was a bull and he wanted to sell his bull to Eddie Shindleman.
But old man Schweitzer didn’t drive. He didn’t own a truck. All that he owned was a tractor, Sandy said.
“He drove into town and he shopped at my dad’s store on a tractor because you didn’t need a driver’s license to drive a tractor. And as far as I know, you still don’t. But the tractor was open – like it didn’t have a closed cap.”
Now, at the time, Sandy was only 14 years old. Here he was, being asked to drive out to a farm – and pick up a bull. He said that he already knew how to drive a truck (even though he wasn’t legally supposed to be able to do that), so he went to Schweitzer’s farm in a five-ton truck, along with a hired hand who worked in the abattoir.
Eddie had given Sandy a blank cheque to take with him. Eddie had told Sandy to offer Schweitzer a fair price for the bull and not to try and take advantage of him. Sandy said he looked the bull up and down and offered Schweitzer $420 – which Schweitzer accepted.
So, Sandy and the hired hand loaded the bull on to the truck – which was quite a job, since it turned out the bull weighed 1400 pounds.
It was past dark when Sandy got back to Portage. “I drove by the store. My dad came out and climbed up on the truck and looked at the bull. And he said, ‘How much did you pay for it?’ I said ‘$420.’
“And he didn’t say good job, bad job, nothing.”
Now, Sandy had thought that his father wanted the bull for slaughter, since it was June and Eddie was going to need a lot of ground beef tor the upcoming Portage fair. But when Eddie took a look at the size of the bull, he realized it was too big for him to slaughter. “It would have broken the hoist,” Sandy explained.
Instead, Eddie decided to ship the bull to Burns Meats in Winnipeg.
“We had a special relationship with Burns Meats,” Sandy explained. “We provided a lot of their kill on a weekly basis. And so they treated us well. And we always sold things dressed weight. So it didn’t matter if the thing was full of water, it was dressed weight on the rail.”
Another week went by, and Burns Meats had sent a cheque for the bull. It was for $1,000.
Eddie didn’t say anything immediately when he saw how much the cheque was for.
Sandy said though, that later that day, when “there’s a lull in the store at six o’clock – when everyone’s eating dinner…my dad said, ‘What did you think of the bull sale?’ I said, ‘Well, I think I should quit school. I’ll buy a bull or two a week. And I’ll make more than you’re making standing here in the store.’
“ ‘Yeah.’ he said, ‘Could you have bought it for $350?’ I said, ‘Should I have?’
“He said, ‘no.’ He said, ‘What if old man Schweitzer didn’t take your offer and shipped the bull himself?'”
Eddie did some figuring how much it would have cost Schweitzer to ship the bull and came to the conclusion that Schweitzer would have “got about $780, not $420.”
So he told Sandy to go back to Schweitzer’s and write him another cheque for $400.
Sandy said that when he went back to Schweitzer’s, “I didn’t know that old man Schweitzer had hair because I’d never seen him without” the white hard hat he always wore.
But, he said to Schweitzer: ” ‘Mr. Schweitzer, I made a mistake on the bull. I misjudged the weight. And I have a check here for you.’ And I slid the check across his round table.”
Schweitzer though, said that instead of accepting the cheque he wanted to sign it right back over – and use the money instead as credit for groceries in Sandy’s father’s store.
But when Sandy returned to the store with cheque in hand, as he described it: “My dad is in the corner at the store, leaning over looking out the door, and I see he’s tearing up the check that I gave him. And I said, ‘Why are you doing that? He said, ‘Well, let Trudeau pay for half his groceries.’ “
The moral of the story though – and one that Sandy says has stuck with him throughout his business career, was “I realized that we were succeeding. These were customers. We succeeded by helping others succeed.”
Sandy ventures into real estate at age 18
How Sandy Shindleman came to be involved in real estate is another good story. As he tells it, there was a certain real estate salesman in Portage by the name of Danny Maxwell. According to Sandy, Maxwell told him he had to work only a couple of hours a week in order to make what was a pretty good living, so the idea of venturing into becoming a real estate salesperson had great appeal for someone who was still a teenager.
As he says, “it seemed like an easier way to make a living than what we were doing – standing in the store, carrying bags of flour, sacks of potatoes and cutting meats, et cetera – and kind of being stuck in one place. So, it seemed to me that that was something that should be explored.”
Sandy wrote the real estate licensing exam while he was still in high school. The exam was proctored by the Yellowquill junior high school principal (which was, by the way, not the junior high school Sandy attended).
With real estate license in hand, Sandy decided to make the big move to Winnipeg – on his own.
His first sale, he says, came courtesy of Zivey Chudnow, who owned a building in the Inkster Industrial Park (at 11 Plymouth; it’s now an Amazon warehouse) that he wanted to sell.
Sandy explains that he got to know Zivey when Sandy was only five years old and “used to shag golf balls for him” in Clear Lake.
But, that first successful foray into the real estate business did not lead to a whole series of other successes. As Sandy notes, “after that, I couldn’t make another sale because who’s going to buy anything from an 18-year-old farmer who doesn’t know anything about real estate? In commercial real estate, your buyer knows more than you and the seller knows more than you, but to sell a house, you know, what do I know about a house? I lived in a house. That was about the extent of it.”
So, he thought he might have better luck trying to sell farms. After all, he grew up in Portage and knew a lot about farms. That, too, didn’t pan out: “I wasn’t that successful selling farms. I put an ad in the paper to attract buyers and I tried to sell farms,” but without any success.
Instead, he decided to try his luck at buying some properties himself. “I bought some commercial buildings in Winnipeg and Portage – old buildings, you know, two suites upstairs that shared a bathroom and, you know, old grocery stores that were junk. One of them is still standing, 618 Saskatchewan Avenue West. The other ones aren’t. They fell down, I imagine.”
Things started to change for the better though when Sandy (who, by this time was joined by his older brother Robert) saw an empty Co-op store at 1068 Henderson Highway. Next to it, he says, were “a library, car wash, a Dairy Queen, and a gas bar.” The Co-op owned everything, and Sandy decided to make an offer to purchase what is now known as Rossmere Plaza from the Co-op, which was accepted.
Shindico begins a long and successful relationship with the Akman family
The purchase was completed with the Akman family, and the project was managed and run by Shindico (Sandy says the development was originally built by the Simkin family in the 1960s.) For Sandy, making that first major acquisition proved to be the beginning of a long relationship with the Akman family – something that eventually ended with Shindico acquiring Akman Management in 2023 from Danny Akman.
It was not long after that Sandy saw another opportunity when an empty Loblaws store on Pembina Highway was also for sale. As he says, it was around 1982, and the market for retail was “dead… There were a lot of experienced people that did office leasing, industrial, land, and apartments But retail – there was no glamour in that, so it wasn’t crowded.”
I asked how he financed those early acquisitions? Sandy explained that there were a lot of trust companies at the time – almost all of which have disappeared, but they were willing to lend him money. His approach, he noted – and it’s been his approach throughout his business career, he said, is to “work backwards. I find out how much rent something could produce. And then how much would I have to spend to get that rent?
“Do I have to build a building? Do I have to renovate the building and buy the building? And would the rent allow me to borrow most of the money? Then I would know how much I could pay for it.”
In addition to the trust companies, there were a lot of other “small lending institutions” around that time, he said. Lending “was a competitive business” and Shindico was forging a reputation as a prudent manager with a sophisticated leasing platform, attractive to market tenants. Sandy noted, for instance, that in the early years a lot of the properties Shindico developed were formerly gas stations because gas stations were “closing at that time. The lots were too small for the kinds of uses that they (service stations) have now.”
Sandy also pointed out that a lot of the over 180 properties that Shindico has owned in Canada and the United States over the years, have had the same tenants, such as Domino’s Pizza and Macs Milk Stores. Shindico still owns and operates over 160 properties in Canada and the United States, he added.
But, as Shindico grew, it began to branch into other areas of real estate beyond strip malls. Later on in its growth, Shindico also began Big Box development with companies, such as Walmart, Best Buy, Costco, Real Canadian Superstore, Ashley Furniture, Sobeys, and Safeway. Shindico has also been active in the Tenant Representation business, finding suitable spaces for business like Sobeys, Starbucks, Boston Pizza, Popeyes Chicken and several more. Examples include Grant Park Festival and Grant Park Pavilions (on Taylor Avenue), which are continually expanding. Shindico’s most recent success has been to bring Costco to its Westport development in Winnipeg. This is a much needed fourth store in Winnipeg and will serve all of Western Manitoba, and bring an exciting mixed use development to the area.
A key milestone for Shindico was diversifying into the acquisition and management of apartment buildings in 1984 when it purchased: Number One Evergreen Place – where Sandy and his wife Diane lived for a time.
More recently Shindico has developed purpose built apartment buildings, starting with the Taylor Claire on Taylor Avenue (named for the Shindleman brothers’ mother), followed soon thereafter by the Taylor Lee (named after their good friend and contractor, Robbie Lee) just down the street. Sandy says there will be more apartment buildings on Taylor Avenue in the future.
I asked him why Shindico waited so long before it began moving into the building of apartment buildings? He answered that “I didn’t have the money. You need a lot of money. You know, you’re not pre-leasing them. I can’t get you to sign a lease for three years from now.”
Always cautious in his ventures, Sandy said that for years he also had wanted to get into the personal storage business. “I wanted to be in personal storage probably for 25 years,” he said, “but I couldn’t figure out how to get the equity to build one because again, you don’t sign a lease three years in advance for your personal storage. You can’t pre-lease it. You have to learn that business and learn the market before you could” get into it. But Shindico now owns two personal storage locations – one in Transcona and one on Waverley.
Shindico’s many generous contributions to Winnipeg…and Portage
If I had wanted to write a story detailing all the many facets of Shindico’s business, however, this already very long story could have gone on for many more pages – and even though I suppose anyone reading it might seem like it’s really just a promotional piece for Shindico, I would argue that Shindico is one of Winnipeg’s truly great success stories that doesn’t seem to get very much recognition in the media.
Shindico and the Shindleman family are proud supporters of the communities in which they live, work, and play. Through generous donations to the Health Sciences Centre Foundation and investment in the Shindleman Aquatic Centre in Portage la Prairie, the Willow Tunnel at Assiniboine Park & Zoo, The Canadian Museum for Human Rights and Edward Shindleman Park in Winnipeg, they continue to support important initiatives that are close to their hearts and provide access to great spaces for all to enjoy.
Shindico has produced a very slick four-minute video, which can be viewed on YouTube and the Shindico website, that highlights the tremendous growth that the company has undergone in its 50 years of existence, but my interest in writing stories that have a business component is to try and shy away from analyzing financial aspects that might make one business more successful than another. Instead, I’ve always been more interested in individuals’ personal stories – and what made them tick.
Sandy’s trip to Russia in 1991 – when Russia was in total upheaval
Since Sandy Shindleman is such a great story teller (which I first learned when I heard him at that Jewish Business Network meeting eight years ago), when I spoke to him for this story I asked him to repeat a story he had told about a trip he took to Russia back in 1991.
Sandy has often been called upon to give lectures about commercial real estate in a great many different cities, but it was that trip to Russia which might be the most memorable of any of his many trips.
Readers might recall that 1991 was one of the most turbulent years in Russian history. Mikhael Gorbachev, who was Soviet President and General Secretary of the Communist Party at the time, had announced that there were was to be a free election in what was then still the Soviet Union, but chaos was descending upon Russia as old-line Communists were reluctant to cede power and the pro-democracy forces, led by Boris Yeltsin, were anxious to democratize the country.
Sandy had been invited to give a lecture on commercial real estate by someone from within what was by then known as the Russian Federation (although he says he’s not really clear where the invitation came from). He recalls taking a flight from Montreal to Paris, then on to Moscow, where he was joined by two other guys who were also supposed to be giving lectures on real estate.
But, as Sandy describes it, “I landed and the other two men were there. And I didn’t realize that they were both former CIA guys, because they spoke Russian.”
All hell was breaking loose in Moscow at the time, but Sandy says he was totally oblivious to what was happening. “I didn’t know what was going on. There’s no television, there’s no Tom Brokaw explaining to us what’s going on. Bernie Bellan isn’t writing about it. There’s just a bunch of people running around, and we really didn’t know what we were looking at.”
I asked him whether he ended up giving a lecture? Sandy says he did, but “we were supposed to have simultaneous translation, which we didn’t. We had a guy – Vladimir, who was supposed to help,” but Sandy says he doesn’t really know what Vladimir’s role was.
Shindico moves into the construction business
Getting back to the current moment though, given Shindico’s tremendous growth, I wondered what might lie ahead for Sandy Shindleman. He says that the management of the company is in excellent hands, with Alex Akman now Chief Operating Officer, Leanne Fontaine, Chief Financial Officer, and Justin Zarnowski, In-House Legal Counsel.
That brought me back to asking about Shindico’s acquisition of Akman Management in 2023. According to a press release issued at the time, Akman Management portfolio consisted of “1,200,000 square feet of property across 1,000 multifamily units and 18 commercial assets.” The integration of Akman Management resulted in “a 42% increase in staff at the Shindico Group of companies”, and Sandy says “it was great to acquire a like-minded family style company made up of folks that you would want to have lunch with”.
The year 2023 was also an exciting one for Shindico in that it marked the founding of SNR Construction Ltd, a general contracting division in the Shindico Group of Companies. SNR recently completed an 84,000 square foot warehouse for Shindico in the St. Boniface Industrial Park, and is working on a wide array of multi family and retail projects across the Shindico portfolio.
Considering how successful Shindico has been, I wondered whether Sandy ever thought of taking Shindico public and allowing investors to buy stock in it?
Sandy says he’s not interested in going public, saying “we’re a family office, family business – Alex, Justin and Leanne and others. We’ve got a, a kind of a management group of at least a dozen… We’re just a small company…we can have the leverage of running real estate.”
By the way, Sandy’s brother Robert, Executive Vice President of the Shindico Group of Companies, is an important part of the organization, overseeing property development, operations, and management. Sandy’s wife, Diane, is also very involved in the businessm- as Executive Vice President, Finance. Their daughter, Annie, a graduate of Gray Academy, is currently enrolled in the Asper School of Business. “Perhaps, one day, my daughter might join us,” Sandy said, but in the meantime, as he says in the 50th anniversary Shindico video on YouTube, his goal for Shindico “for the next 50 years is supporting and leading all our professional management to grow.”
Features
The Jewish Federation isn’t evolving on Israel. So it’s losing young Jews like me
By Lahav ZakenAugust 8, 2025
This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.
I’m a Jewish Israeli American teenager and North Carolina resident, and I was delighted to see that the North Carolina Democratic party recently approved new platform resolutions that called for an arms embargo against Israel, a ceasefire, and the release of the hostages. Very few people and organizations have managed to articulate my views of both Oct. 7 and the subsequent genocide as well as my state party’s resolutions did. Unfortunately, it seems that my perspective is not very welcome at my local Jewish Federation.
I was particularly gratified by how balanced the resolutions were. They directly condemned the deliberate killing of innocent civilians by both parties and called for the end of the war. The resolutions also condemned antisemitism and Islamophobia, condemned Hamas and the Oct. 7 terrorist attack and decried both Hamas and Israel’s human rights violations. They advocated for basic human rights, dignity and peace for all Israelis and Palestinians.
Yet somehow, this language advocating for peace was objectionable to the Jewish Federation. The CEOs of the Jewish Federations of Raleigh, Durham, Charlotte and Greensboro released a statement attacking the resolutions. Their biggest objection was to the resolutions’ use of the terms “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing,” which they specifically singled out as “radical and inflammatory.” They argued that the resolutions ignored Oct. 7 and undermined Israel’s right to self-defense. They even went so far as to accuse the Democratic Party of devaluing the “safety, identity, and lived experiences” of Jewish Americans.
I strongly disagree with the Jewish Federations and believe the statement they released was deeply harmful and inaccurate. While the federations may still be a hub of Jewish institutional power and influence, their perspectives on Israel and Gaza and continuing unconditional support of Israel’s actions do not represent many American Jews.
This statement is not an isolated incident, but an example of the ongoing silencing of the perspectives of an increasing number of American Jews by Jewish Federations across the country and Jewish institutions and youth groups more broadly.
I am just about as Jewish as you can get. I was born in Israel and lived in Jerusalem until I was 4, when my family moved to Greensboro, North Carolina. I did not visit Israel for most of my childhood, but I still felt an extremely strong connection to my home country. Growing up, I ate Israeli food, listened to Israeli music and watched Israeli shows. I attended Jewish day school, I volunteer with my local synagogue and know most Jewish services by heart. In 2023, I traveled back to Israel on a school trip led by the Jewish National Fund. I genuinely loved getting to see my home city and country for the first time that I could vividly remember.
However, my connection to my country of birth has almost completely eroded following almost two years of non-stop war and aggression in Gaza. I am enraged and heartbroken that Jewish Institutions will not recognize or acknowledge that pain.
Like most Jews and Israelis, my gut reaction after Oct. 7 was to stand strong with Israel. I was horrified by the atrocities Hamas committed that day. I wanted to wave the flag of my birth country more strongly, to support Israel’s right to defend its civilians and demand the hostages be freed.
However, after months of seeing satellite images of the complete devastation of Gaza and reading testimonials from doctors and journalists describing the humanitarian crisis, my perspective has shifted. I couldn’t help changing my mind when I saw hostage families being beaten by police in the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem for calling for a ceasefire, or when I read statements from Israeli leaders making it clear that their goals were to destroy the entire population of Gaza. I do not hold Israel to a different standard than any other country, no matter my love and connection to it. It is precisely my Jewish values that have pushed me to speak out so strongly against Israel’s unjustifiable actions in Gaza.
I believe two wrongs do not make a right. What Hamas did was immoral. And the genocidal war of aggression that Israel has waged on the people of Gaza is also immoral. I am horrified and ashamed to see tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians killed, including the deliberate targeting of aid seekers at distribution sites. If I, as an Israeli-born teenager, can acknowledge the atrocities committed by Israel and that multiple things can be true at the same time, why can’t Jewish institutions?
For those reasons, along with the sheer brutality and immorality of the war, more and more American Jews oppose Israel’s government and their war on the people of Gaza. Unfortunately, those who dare to express opposition are being isolated and alienated from their Federations, synagogues and youth groups. All of these institutions explicitly and implicitly manufacture total support for the Israeli government and its actions.
The North Carolina Federations’ statement not only blatantly misrepresents the state Democratic party’s resolutions by falsely implying that they are apologists for Hamas, but also misleadingly implies they speak for all or most Jewish North Carolinians. A November 2024 J Street poll of Jewish Americans found 61% support an arms embargo against Israel. As of June 2024, according to a poll conducted by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 30% of Jewish Americans believe that Israel is committing genocide, a number that has undoubtedly risen since then.
The Federation leaders are completely right to be concerned about the extreme rise in antisemitism since Oct. 7. I have had multiple personal run-ins with antisemitism since Oct. 7. Someone close to me experienced identity-based discrimination in a local progressive organization we are both a part of because they are Israeli-American and worked as a journalist in Israel. I have repeatedly been subjected to antisemitic comments online, and was once told that I should join the Israel Defense Force after I condemned the killing of innocent civilians on Oct. 7, implying that being Israeli and opposing the killing of innocent Israeli civilians meant that I somehow enjoyed killing Palestinian civilians.
Many Jews in America have had similar experiences, and I have no doubt that Jewish Federation and Jewish institutional leaders care deeply about fighting antisemitism and keeping their Jewish communities safe. However, statements like the North Carolina Federation heads made do not keep us safe.
When a local Jewish Federation, synagogue or youth movement chapter releases statements claiming that they stand fully with Israel in the conflict, they are isolating and ignoring those of us who offer critiques of Israel’s actions and policies. If these actions continue, millions of American Jews across the country will be pushed out of Jewish institutions, excluded from Jewish spaces and have their Jewishness questioned over their stance against Israel’s actions in Gaza. This is, unfortunately, already happening.
The reality is that in 2025, most American Jews do not stand unconditionally with Israel anymore. If Jewish federations and other institutions want to be the inclusive spaces for all Jews that they claim to be, then they must adapt to this reality.
If groups such as the Jewish Federations cannot reflect American Jewish opinion in 2025 or acknowledge the isolation from Israel that more and more American Jews feel, then millions of Jewish Americans with perspectives such as mine will be erased from the institutions designed to make us feel most at home.
Lahav Zaken is a junior at New Garden Friends School and a local progressive organizer in Greensboro, North Carolina.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward. Discover more perspectives in Opinion. To contact Opinion authors, email opinion@forward.com.
This story was originally published on the Forward.
Features
Will Former Soviet States Join the Abraham Accords?
By HENRY SREBRNIK President Donald Trump’s administration has been discussing with Azerbaijan the possibility of bringing that nation and some Central Asian allies into the Abraham Accords. During his first term in office, four Muslim-majority countries agreed to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel. It is now closer to fruition.
The Abraham Accords, signed in 2020, were a historic step and are considered a breakthrough in Israel’s relations with Arab states. On the surface, these agreements with Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates, heralded not only diplomatic engagement but also the normalization of ties in every field, including technology, economy, tourism, security, and agriculture.
While the original Accords were centered on diplomatic ties, Azerbaijan and every country in Central Asia already has relations with Israel, meaning that an expansion of the Accords to include them would largely be symbolic, focusing on strengthening ties in areas like trade and military cooperation.
Although the Abraham Accords were initially agreements over Israeli-Arab normalization, the pacts have since transcended Arab borders into a high-profile forum that can incorporate Muslim countries committed to shared values of tolerance, peace, and prosperity.
Wedged between Russia to the north and Iran to the south, Azerbaijan occupies a critical link in trade flows between Central Asia and the West. The Caucasus and Central Asia are also rich in natural resources, including oil and gas, prompting various major powers to compete for influence in the region.
Azerbaijan normalized relations and trade with the Jewish state in the early 1990s, shortly after gaining independence from the Soviet Union. Since then, ties have quietly flourished under the stewardship first of Heydar Aliyev and subsequently that of his son, Ilham.
Last year, trade between the two countries reached nearly one billion dollars, mainly in the energy and defence sectors. Azerbaijan has become Israel’s critical energy partner, supplying more than 60 per cent of its gasoline needs. It has also become Israel’s second-largest defence customer, accounting for nearly a tenth of all Israeli defence exports between 2018 and 2022.
Russia, Azerbaijan’s Soviet-era political master, is currently preoccupied with its war in Ukraine, leaving it with little ability to interfere in the South Caucasus. Meanwhile, Iran, Azerbaijan’s southern neighbor and ideological challenger, is now at its weakest political point in decades, with minimal influence in the country’s internal affairs through religious appeal or sectarian outreach, as it has tried to do in previous years.
Kazakhstan also enjoys strong ties with Israel, and Astana benefits from advanced Israeli agriculture, medical, water, and security technology. The Abraham Accords provide an opportunity to further deepen security and economic cooperation and could help the country reduce its economic dependence on Russia and China at a time when such dependence is proving to be a liability.
Trump’s special envoy for peace missions, Steve Witkoff, traveled to Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, in March to meet with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. As part of the discussions, Azerbaijani officials contacted officials in Central Asian nations, including in nearby Kazakhstan, to gauge their interest in a broader Abraham Accords expansion. For Azerbaijan, the Accords could provide a path to expanded security cooperation against Iranian threats and, if pursued in coordination with Kazakhstan, progress towards its goal of becoming a bridge to Central Asia
Joseph Epstein of the Turan Research Center at the New York-based Yorktown Institute, a non-partisan program dedicated to exploring modern-day developments in the Turkic and Persian worlds, argues that bringing Azerbaijan into the Abraham Accords would signal to Muslim majority states in Central Asia that open cooperation with Israel is both possible and worthwhile. It would also squeeze Tehran which sees a secular Shia state aligned with Israel and Turkey as a strategic problem.
“When President Donald Trump shared a clip of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s speech at the Shusha Global Media Forum on Truth Social, it wasn’t just a friendly gesture,” Epstein explained. “It signaled that Azerbaijan’s partnership with Israel and the United States is now firmly on his radar.”
At a time when the United States was trying to get the Abraham Accords back on track, all of this was certainly encouraging. But a sticking point remained: Azerbaijan’s conflict with its neighbor Armenia. The Trump administration considered a peace deal between the two Caucasus nations as a precondition to join the Abraham Accords. The breakthrough came on Aug. 8, when Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan signed a joint letter officially indicating their willingness to end their conflict.
The pact also gives the U.S. exclusive rights to develop a transit route through a mountainous stretch of Armenian territory between Azerbaijan known as the Zangezur corridor. It will connect Azerbaijan proper with its Nakhchivan region, which borders Baku’s ally Turkey via Armenian territory. The new transit corridor will allow unimpeded connectivity between the two countries while respecting Armenia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and its people. The securing of that route also marks a significant setback for Russia and Iran in the South Caucasus. Restrictions were also lifted on defence co-operation between Azerbaijan and the United States.
Trump framed the agreement as a “peace deal,” writing on Truth Social that “Many Leaders have tried to end the War, with no success, until now.” This is another feather in a potential Trump Nobel Peace Prize cap.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
Features
Roman Polanski’s take on the Dreyfus Affair is perfect for 2025. That’s the problem
By Talya ZaxAugust 8, 2025
(Ed. note: An Officer and a Spy is not yet available for streaming in Canada. It is available for streaming on Prime Video in the U.S.)
This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.
In the opening scene of Roman Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy, a retelling of the infamous Dreyfus Affair — in which Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish officer, was falsely accused of treason at the turn of the 20th century — Dreyfus, played by Louis Garrel, is paraded past a silent crowd of his peers to suffer a punishment known as degradation.
That is historically accurate. In 1895, after his conviction, Dreyfus underwent the public humiliation of having the adornments of his rank ripped off his person, and his sword broken, all while he vainly protested his innocence.
But for anyone familiar with Polanski’s own history — or the history of this film, which was released in Europe in 2019, but is only now getting its U.S. theatrical premiere — the double meaning is clear.
Because Polanski, who in 1977 pleaded guilty to “unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor,” is one of the legions of Hollywood men to face public disgrace over sexual misbehavior. (He fled to Europe after learning that a judge planned to issue him a harsher sentence than was agreed in his plea deal.) When An Officer and a Spy first came out, Polanski said that his attraction to the Dreyfus story was in part attached to his own case: “I can see the same determination to deny the facts and condemn me for things I have not done,” he said.
What a difference six years makes. In 2019, only two years after the #MeToo movement rocketed to public prominence, Polanski’s film couldn’t secure distribution in the United States. In 2023, the next movie he made, a poorly reviewed comedy called The Palace, suffered the same fate.
But in 2025, the backlash against #MeToo has reached an apogee, and allegations of rampant antisemitism have come to define much of American political life. Now, An Officer and a Spy‘s long-delayed American premiere — a two-week run at Manhattan’s Film Forum, beginning on Friday — suggests that Polanski’s barely-veiled “J’accuse” against his detractors may be newly relevant.
A scapegoat in search of a savior
Dreyfus is not the hero of An Officer and a Spy. Instead, he’s a foil for the rest of the action: a convenient martyr, whom Garrel bestows with a kind of drippy intensity. No one, including the film’s real subject — Georges Picquart, the antisemitic army official who trained Dreyfus and reluctantly comes to campaign against his conviction — has much attention to spare for him.
Even Polanski seems bored by Dreyfus’ suffering; when his camera visits the desert island to which Dreyfus is banished, it’s more fascinated by the desolate landscape than the lonely Jew wasting away within it. And as Picquart, played by Jean Dujardin, pieces together the conspiracy that framed his formal pupil, he doesn’t appear to feel any real compulsion to reconsider his general distaste for the man himself.
Instead, he’s driven by his commitment to the ideals that have informed his career in the French army, chief among them orderliness and an adherence to proper procedure. To the extent that Picquart is radicalized by his adventures as a political outcast — a natural consequence of his insistence on airing the truth — it’s by becoming skeptical of the official structures in which he once put faith, not skeptical of his own inclination toward bigotry.
In other words, this is the story of a crusader so committed to justice that he sees his personal feelings as unimportant. If Polanski thinks of himself as Dreyfus — polarizing and perhaps unlikable, but the victim of a moral panic nonetheless — he is, in an Officer and a Spy, putting out a call for some powerful party to serve as his Picquart. Which brave soul, the film wonders, will take a similar stand against the social furor that made Polanski a cultural outcast — albeit one who won multiple César Awards, the French equivalent to the Oscars, for this film — not because they like him, but because they can see that what he’s suffered is wrong?
That framing is a bold choice. The men who have attempted post-#MeToo comebacks have generally done so from a stance of bashful victimhood. When Kevin Spacey, whom more than 30 men have accused of sexual assault or inappropriate behavior, received an award at a gala hosted during this year’s Cannes Film Festival, he portrayed himself as a wrongly outcast golden boy now receiving his just rewards. “I feel surrounded by so much affection and love,” he said.
Polanski is doing something different. He’s not suggesting that he’s too nice and gentle to be responsible for all the things of which he’s been accused. Instead, he’s arguing that no matter how much his viewers might hate his guts, they should turn a gimlet eye upon the processes that led to his banishment from Hollywood, the U.S., and even many institutions of European cinema. (A French woman accused Polanski of rape shortly before An Officer and a Spy‘s French release; amid an outcry over French accolades for the film, Polanski didn’t attend that year’s César Awards, and when he was announced as Best Director, several attendees walked out in protest.)
The allegory of antisemitism
After Dreyfus is carted away to exile, in An Officer and a Spy, Picquart, who watched his degradation, is summoned by a superior who asks how the crowd reacted. The feeling, Picquart says, was that of a body that had rid itself of a pestilence.
Polanski is examining how the establishment reacts to what it perceives as the will of the public — how its self-protective mechanisms lead it to be in a constant race to anticipate the people’s prejudices, and fulfill them.
In his vision, the parties complicit in framing Dreyfus appear to be driven not by personal antisemitism so much as the sense that, because Jews have come to be widely held in suspicion by France’s citizenry, acting against Jews is a sure way to maintain their own hold on power. The generals who eventually perjure themselves in an attempt to prevent Picquart’s success know that if they admit that Dreyfus was innocent, the public won’t see them as noble and brave. They’ll see them, instead, as having joined with nefarious forces for personal gain.
Polanski, in making An Officer and a Spy, accurately anticipated a cultural turn that would see all kinds of people beginning to perceive themselves as “the Jews” in situations of societal discord: victims of a witch hunt, based on an ambient cultural sense that someone should be held accountable for all the things that are wrong in all our lives, while authorities tacitly encourage the scapegoating.
It happened during the COVID-19 pandemic, as some who were resistant to public health measures began comparing themselves to Jews in Nazi Germany. It’s happening now, as some Republicans have tried to turn Jews into avatars for conservatives, with the argument being that both groups have been persecuted by promoters of “wokeness.”
There is a natural parallel, as well, in the story of #MeToo. In the movement’s heyday, the locus of power in the sexual realm seemed to have shifted. The time in which successful men could basically do as they pleased was over. A new power structure had been adopted; adherents of the old one began to see themselves as victims of a shadowy new elite.
What happens when people begin to see a real historical conspiracy as an analogy for every development they dislike? Do they find a harmless outlet for their grievances, or do they simply risk becoming more suspicious, and more conspiratorial? In a U.S. where the president owns a social media outlet called Truth, any number of people going to see An Officer and a Spy might see something of their own plight in that of Dreyfus. And any number of them might idolize Picquart as a vigilante uncovering deep governmental rot.
They may or may not be right. After all, there’s much injustice in the world, today as at the turn of the century. But I fear that while An Officer and a Spy might be trying to investigate the kind of conspiratorial mindset that gave rise to the Dreyfus Affair, what it’s really doing is reinforcing it.
Talya Zax is the Forward’s opinion editor. Contact her at zax@forward.com or on Twitter, @TalyaZax.
This story was originally published on the Forward.