Turn off your reality monitor as you watch Eyal Halfo’s The 90 Minute War, which can be viewed on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform. This fanciful Israeli film is built around a wildly implausible plot: The Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority have decided that the logical way to end their conflict is by means of […]
Harry Cohn, the chief executive officer of Columbia Pictures from 1932 until his death in 1958, prided himself on being unique. Regarded as the youngest Hollywood mogul, he was also the only president of a major studio who was head of production. In addition, he had the most diverse background of any of his contemporaries, […]
Please enlighten me. Has a former U.S. president ever invited an antisemite and a Holocaust denier to his home? Correct me if I’m wrong, but no such thing ever happened until Donald Trump, in a horrendous lapse of judgment that normalizes antisemitism, hosted a dinner for two such bigots at his Mar-A-Lago estate in Florida. […]
Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of the far-right Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) Party, demanded the public security ministry in Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet and got it. Yesterday, slightly more than three weeks after Israel’s fifth election in a little more than three years, Netanyahu’s Likud Party and Otzma Yehudit announced that Ben-Gvir would be the national […]
Until quite recently, Holocaust denial was a depressing and unchanging staple of Arab and Muslim political culture, with some public figures hewing to the mantra that recognition of the Shoah bolstered Israel’s claim to sovereignty and statehood. This attitude trickled down to the grassroots level in countries ranging from Syria and Jordan to Iran and […]
Judging by the last few U.S. presidential elections, ultra-Orthodox American Jews are firmly in the Republican Party camp. But of late, some Republican haredim have changed sides and voted for the Democratic Party, says Nathaniel Deutsch, a University of California Jewish studies professor who has closely studied this traditional and insular community. By far the […]
On the last day of the 1967 Six Day War, an Israeli army officer named Menashe comes under fire from enemy positions and his comrade-in-arms is killed on the battlefield. Six years later, Menashe is still struggling with its psychic fallout and is not the man he used to be. Having been traumatized by the […]
Alfred Hitchcock’s second Hollywood movie, Foreign Correspondent, was released in mid-August 1940, a year after he left his native Britain to settle in Los Angeles. A spy thriller in the mould of his iconic 1935 film, The 39 Steps, it stars Joel McCrea as a hardboiled American reporter who’s dispatched to Europe on the eve […]
President Joe Biden has consistently lambasted Saudi Arabia, a major U.S. ally, since his run for the presidency. But in recent days, his administration has had second thoughts and backtracked, underscoring the persistence and importance of Realpolitik in international relations. While campaigning for the presidency, Biden adopted a demonstrably unfriendly position toward Saudi Arabia’s prime […]
Faran Moradi’s Tehranto is premised on his belief that two types of Iranian immigrants live abroad — those who left Iran before the 1979 Islamic revolution and those who emigrated after that momentous upheaval. He applies this definition to two Iranian families at the center of his alluring romantic drama, which opened on VOD platforms […]