Giuseppe Piccioni’s appealing Italian-language movie, The Shadow of the Day, unfolds in a small town in late-1930s fascist Italy against the backdrop of a highly improbable love affair. It will be screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on June 10. Luciano (Riccardo Scamarcio), the middle-aged manager of a fine restaurant in Ascoli Piceno, is […]
The mail-order bride business in Israel is entertainingly portrayed by Michal Vinik in Valeria Is Getting Married, which will be screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on June 8. Droll yet tense, and set in the Tel Aviv suburb of Bat Yam, this enjoyable movie underscores the intermittent joys and pitfalls of the transactional, […]
Israeli casualty notification officers may well be saddled with the most emotionally draining job in Israel’s armed forces. Their solemn and wrenching duty is to inform next of kin that their loved one has been killed. Since Israel is almost constantly at war, they are often busy. Knock on the Door, an intensely moving Israeli […]
Nearly five years after murdering eleven Jewish congregants at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, in the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history, Robert Bowers has finally gone on trial. Bowers, 50, perpetrated his atrocity on October 27, 2018. A neo-Nazi who had blasted Jews in a litany of loathsome social media posts, he […]
Ofir Raul Graizer’s soulful drama, America, explores the complex friendship of two men who love the same woman. Scheduled to be screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on June 5, this heart-felt Israeli movie unfolds in the United States and Israel over the course of about two years. Eli (Michael Moshonov), a swimming coach […]
Rafi Nelson was a character par excellence, a legendary Israeli entrepreneur whose Red Sea beach resort was synonymous with a bohemian, hedonistic lifestyle. Rafi Nelson’s Holiday Village was located in Taba, a one square kilometer enclave in the northern Sinai Peninsula adjacent to Israel’s border with Egypt. It attracted an eclectic clientele of ordinary and […]
Stewart Rhodes, the founder and leader of the far right-wing Oath Keepers militia, was recently sentenced to 18 years in prison for his participation in the storming of Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021. It was the harshest sentence handed down so far in the more than one thousand criminal cases related […]
Hebron, with population 250,000, is the largest Palestinian city in the West Bank containing a Jewish community. The 800 Jews of Hebron are religious nationalists and live along the length of Shuhada Street, barely coexisting with their Palestinian neighbors and protected by a phalanx of Israeli soldiers. Their small urban enclave, known as H2 under […]
Recep Tayyip Erdogan is back in the saddle again after winning his third five-year term as president of Turkey. In a runoff election on May 28, widely regarded as a referendum on his 20-year reign as Turkey’s dominant politician, he handily defeated challenger Kemal Kilicdaroglu by a margin of 52.1 percent to 47.9 percent. “We […]
You’ve probably never heard of Chelly Wilson. I hadn’t until I watched Valerie Kontakos’ intriguing, partly animated documentary, Queen of the Deuce, which will be screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on June 3. A Greek Jewish woman from the city of Thessaloniki who immigrated to the United States prior to World War II, […]