Far from being original, Jojo Rabbit, which won this year’s Academy Award for best adapted screenplay, is the latest film in the past seven decades to poke fun at Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Lest it be forgotten, Nazi Germany was satirized by Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator, Ernst Lubitsch in To Be […]
Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met the leaders of Uganda and Sudan, two African countries embedded in the lore of the Zionist movement for better or worse. Visiting Kampala, the capital of Uganda, Netanyahu said that Israel is intent on upgrading its mercurial relationship with the countries of the African continent. “Israel is coming […]
A self-contained universe vanished into cyber space after the last segment of Black Money Love, a marathon Turkish soap opera broadcast on Netflix, ended on an upbeat, if unpredictable, note. My wife and I watched all 164 episodes over a period of more than a month, fixated by the story line, the characters and the […]
Barnabas Toth’s richly-textured Hungarian-language feature film, Those Who Remained, echoes with the grief and pain of the Holocaust in Hungary, where more than 400,000 Jews were murdered during Nazi Germany’s occupation. Two of the traumatized survivors, Aladad (Aldo) Korner and Klara (Sunny) Wiener, meet by chance and provide each other with warmth, empathy, comfort and […]
An appeals court in Germany has handed down a very disappointing verdict. In a ruling on February 4, a state court in the town of Naumburg rejected a Jewish man’s complaint that a 700-year-old antisemitic sculpture should be removed from the Stadtkirche (City Church) in Wittenberg, the home of the Protestant Reformation. Michael Duellmann, the […]
Before Donald Trump finally released his much-vaunted and anticipated peace plan on January 28, he reportedly told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Arab states would support it and play a helpful role in implementing it. Trump’s sanguine calculation was misguided, a case of wishful thinking, as was his assumption that the Palestinians would climb […]
Marco Belloccio’s fast-paced crime drama, The Traitor, hums with raw energy. Focusing on Tommaso Buscetta (Pierfrancesco Favino), a top-ranking Cosa Nostra mobster who turned on his colleagues in a series of sensational trials in Italy in the 1980s and 1990s, it is reminiscent of some of the finest movies of its genre. Richly steeped in Italianate […]
Why is Donald Trump’s White House providing press credentials to a website that disseminates blatantly antisemitic tropes? It’s a question that should be answered now. It can’t be dismissed or ignored. TruNews, a staunchly conservative website based in Florida that circulates outlandish conspiracy theories, was granted press passes for five of its employees to cover […]
President Donald Trump has repeatedly said he wants to withdraw American forces from the “endless wars” in the Middle East, yet he resists calls by Iraqi nationalists demanding a pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq. Trump’s position is not exactly contradictory. Although he has drastically reduced the size of the U.S. force in Syria, he […]
It was the understatement of the new year. Benjamin Netanyahu described U.S. President Donald Trump’s long-awaited peace proposal, unveiled in Washington, D.C. on January 28, as a “great plan for Israel.” As he sang its praises, he called Trump “the greatest friend that Israel has ever had in the White House.” Netanyahu, the caretaker Israeli […]