Seven hundred thousand Jewish immigrants poured into Israel during its first years statehood, straining its relatively limited absorption capacity. Yet immigration was one of the key priorities of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, after the 1948 War of Liberation. Approximately one-third of the newcomers were sent to abandoned British army bases. These rudimentary transit camps, […]
Outremont, a sedate and generally affluent neighborhood in the center of Montreal, is embroiled in a running dispute regarding its willingness to accommodate its tight-knit, insular ultra-Orthodox population. This divisive issue has stamped Outremont as a place of conflict, laments its mayor, Philipe Tomlinson. The majority of Outremont’s French and English residents do not appear to […]
Mark Zuckerberg finally got it right. At long last the chief executive officer of Facebook has cracked down hard on the scourge of Holocaust denial. On October 12, he announced that Facebook will ban posts that deny or distort the Holocaust and will direct users to reliable sources, rather than antisemitic sites, dealing with this […]
Mauro Mancini’s Italian-language feature film, Thou Shalt Not Hate, is driven by moralistic fervor. Scheduled to be screened online at the autumn edition of the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, which runs from October 22 to November 1, it pits a middle-aged Jewish doctor against a young neo-Nazi thug. The first scene establishes its tone and […]
Jorge Weller’s entertaining Israeli romantic comedy, Love in Suspenders, is awash in geriatric romance. Set in contemporary Tel Aviv, it will be screened online by the Toronto Jewish Festival, which runs from October 22 to November 1. Beno (Yehuda Barkan) and Tami (Nitza Saul) meet under inauspicious circumstances when she bumps into him with her car. […]
For a long time after the Arab terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, which brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, damaged the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and killed close to 3,000 people, Islamic radicalism was regarded as the number one enemy. In recent years, however, […]
The world’s oldest, most persistent hatred is expertly surveyed in a two-hour documentary by Ilan Ziv. His movie, Antisemitism, will be screened online by the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, which runs from October 22 to November 1. Ziv’s substantive film covers a wide swath of ground, but focuses on France, whose treatment of Jews has […]
Ultra- Orthodox Jews in New York City have displayed fierce resistance to government lockdown restrictions aimed at controlling the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic. Like their counterparts in Israel, they have been reluctant to accept, much less obey, temporary measures to contain the deadly contagion, even as some of their rabbinical leaders have professed […]
Dalit Kimor’s intriguing biopic, Mrs. G, which will be screened at the forthcoming online Toronto Jewish Film Festival, is a portrait of Lea Gottlieb, who was probably the world’s finest swimwear designer. Known far and wide as Mrs. G or Mrs. Gottlieb, she was a Hungarian Holocaust survivor whose stylish, brightly colored bathing suits and […]
At his peak in the 1930 and 1940s, syndicated columnist and radio personality Walter Winchell commanded an audience of an estimated 50 million American readers and listeners. Blending news and entertainment, he single-handedly created the gossip-driven, politically-charged media culture of the United States. “Winchell is the architect of modern American media,” says his biographer, Neal […]