Beverley Stern is gone, and I will miss her. She died earlier this month in Toronto after a battle with cancer. My wife, Etti, and I kept in touch with her by phone in the last year-and-a-half of her life. Regrettably, a face-to-face meeting was impossible due to the coronavirus pandemic. Almost until the day […]
Approximately 200,000 Jews lived in Warsaw’s Muranow district, the hub of Jewish life in Poland, before World War II. Forming the core of the Nazi ghetto after 1940, it served as a conduit from which Jews were deported to the Treblinka extermination camp as the Holocaust unfolded. During the doomed but heroic 1943 uprising, which […]
Israel’s enemies claim they harbor no ill feelings toward Jews despite their hatred of Israel. And while this may be true in some cases, the recent cross-border war in Gaza demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that the line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is very thin and porous. As the war unfolded, Palestinian Arabs and their […]
Marianna Barr’s intriguing Israeli documentary, Private Death, fleshes out a forbidden romance set against the backdrop of rising tensions between Jews and Arabs in 1930s Palestine. It will be screened online at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, which runs from June 3-13. Haya Schreiber, a sixth-generation Jaffa-born Jew from an ultra-Orthodox family, and Tewfik Hanania, […]
Judging by their overblown reaction to the latest cross-border Gaza war, which ended with a truce on May 21, the leaders of Iran may as well be living in an alternate universe. As far as they’re concerned, Hamas won a spectacular victory and Israel was humbled by a crushing defeat after 11 days of fighting, […]
The Jewish Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) is the subject of Jacques Loeuille’s probing documentary, Modigliani And His Secrets. It will be screened online by the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, which starts on June 3 and ends on June 13. Before watching it, I wondered what secrets could possibly emerge. There are basically […]
Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shi’a militia which perceives Israel as its prime enemy, was uncharacteristically mute as the Israeli armed forces and Hamas fought an eleven-day border war in and around the Gaza Strip from May 10 to May 21. Its usually outspoken leader, Hassan Nasrallah, remained deafeningly silent, even after one of its members was […]
For the past five decades, Lebanon, once the jewel of the Middle East, has lost its luster as an oasis of stability, having been engulfed by strife, chaos and bloodshed. In his incisive documentary, Lebanon — Borders of Blood, Duki Dror compares this small nation to an active volcano that explodes periodically, destabilizing everything in […]
During the latest cross-border war pitting Israel against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, U.S. President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were in constant communication, taking to each other on the phone at least six times during the course of the eleven-day conflict. Biden was taken completely surprised by the outbreak of hostilities. […]
Ira Glasser led the American Civil Liberties Union from 1978 until 2001, transforming what had been a fairly obscure and somnolent group into a high-profile national organization. Mighty Ira, a documentary directed by Nico Perrino, Chris Maltby and Aaron Reese, sheds light on the dedicated and principled man who directed this process.Their engaging movie will […]