Prora, a Nazi resort in northeastern Germany, was intended to be the world’s largest vacation playground. Consisting of eight functional buildings stretching 4.5 kilometers along the sandy shore of the Baltic Sea, it was designed to accommodate 20,000 vacationers. Construction was halted when World War II broke out in September 1939, dooming Prora to oblivion […]
Musical drama Less Than Kosher skillfully charts a young Jewish woman’s awakening to her cultural, artistic and religious roots. Divided into seven short segments, this zesty and exuberant Canadian production is currently available on Highball TV, and can be viewed on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform from June 12 onward. Created by Shaina Silver-Baird and Michael […]
To no one’s surprise, Israel has stepped up its efforts to consolidate its occupation of the West Bank, thereby undercutting the already slim prospect of a two-state solution and thumbing its nose at its chief ally, the United States. Israel has been building settlements and roads in the West Bank, populated in the main by […]
Despite an upsurge of anti-Christian incidents in Israel of late, Israel’s Foreign Ministry reportedly intends to boycott an academic conference on that topic scheduled to take place in Jerusalem on June 16. The conference, to which clerics, foreign diplomats and scholars have been invited, is the brainchild of Yisca Harani, an expert on Christianity who […]
Leon Prudovsky’s My Neighbor Adolf, which was screened at this year’s Toronto Jewish Film Festival, is a dark, corrosive comedy on the lingering effects of Nazism and the Holocaust. It is set mainly in rural Colombia in 1960, the year Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was kidnapped by the Mossad in Buenos Aires and secretly […]
It is a rite of passage for some senior Israeli high school students. In brief trips to Poland designed to heighten their awareness of the Holocaust, they visit museums, open and closed synagogues, and former Nazi concentration camps. Asaf Saban’s The Delegation focuses on a group of Israeli teenagers who participate on such a trip. […]
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 […]