Canadian human rights champion Irwin Cotler believes that one man can make a difference. As an example, he cites Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat/humanitarian who saved the lives of approximately 100,000 Hungarian Jews during the Nazi occupation of Hungary. Cotler — a former McGill University law professor, a onetime federal justice minister, and the Canadian […]
Keren Yedaya’s movie, Jaffa, is stunningly impactful and remarkably realistic. Now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform, this raw, gritty and tragic Israeli drama takes place in Jaffa, a mixed Jewish-Arab neighborhood in greater Tel Aviv. Given its locale, the main characters are Jews and Arabs. Reuven (Moni Moshonov), a middle-aged Jew, employs his two […]
A meandering but satisfying melange of drama, romance, sex, politics, intrigue and violence, The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem is set in Turkish and British Mandate Palestine from 1917 to 1942. Now available on the Netflix streaming platform, this 20-part Israeli series is based on a novel by Sarit Yishai Levi. It gets off to a slow […]
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ill-conceived and potentially disastrous scheme to weaken the Supreme Court by means of radical judicial legislation has dominated the news cycle in Israel of late. It has also drowned out his provocative and dangerous plan to tighten Israel’s control of the West Bank at the expense of the Palestinians. In recent […]
Hal Wallis, the prolific American producer whose movies ran the gamut from Casablanca and The Life of Emile Zola to The Adventures of Robin Hood and True Grit, was an accidental Hollywood luminary, as we learn in Bernard F. Dick’s thorough biography, Hal Wallis: Producer to the Stars, published by University Press of Kentucky. Wallis, […]
Joseph Morder’s French feature film, The Duchess of Warsaw, now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform, is a pleasing yet unsettling melange of harsh reality and whimsical fantasy. Crafted like a play and featuring only two actors, it is visually original and impressive. In Morder’s vivid imagination, Paris is a fantastical city of bright water […]
He wants to be “here” and “there,” and therein lies the problem. Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel can’t be Catholic and Jewish at the same time, as far as Israel is concerned. Born to Polish Jewish parents in 1943, at the height of the Holocaust in Poland, he was adopted by a Catholic family when he was […]
Two Palestinian uprisings in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have broken out in the past 36 years, the first in 1987 and the second in 2000. A third intifada is looming in light of a significant upsurge of Palestinian violence, Israeli retaliatory raids, and the absence of any movement toward resolving the century-old […]
Fiona Murphy’s bitter-sweet documentary, Remember Baghdad, is a cinematic ode to a lost, once glorious Jewish community. Now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform, it looks back to an era when the possibilities for Jews in Iraq seemed promising and limitless. This golden period lasted for slightly less than 25 years, from approximately 1917 to 1940, […]
Seventy five years ago this month, two Polish Jewish refugees and their infant son arrived in Canada, a distant nation of peace, tranquility and stability and their future place in the sun. David and Genia Kirschner, my parents, were Holocaust survivors in their early thirties when they set foot in the new world in the […]