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, […]
Henry Kissinger, the first Jewish U.S. secretary of state, celebrated his 100th birthday on May 27. The last surviving member of President Richard Nixon’s cabinet, he was among the most influential figures in the American foreign policy establishment during the last half of the 20th century. A refugee from Nazi Germany, he arrived in the […]
Tunisian Jews in Ruggero Gabbai’s bitter-sweet documentary, From TGM to TGV, look back at their lives in Tunisia and abroad with a mixture of nostalgia and angst. To be screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on June 2, it examines the attitudes of Jews who were uprooted from their homeland. Tunisia, an Arab state […]
Last December, in response to a sharp rise of antisemitism in the United States, the federal government created a working group to develop a strategy to combat this ageless, pathological scourge. On May 25, the details were released at a White House ceremony during which U.S. President Joe Biden delivered a videotaped speech. Speaking of […]
Neve Shalom, a utopian Jewish-Arab village in Israel’s Ayalon Valley, is unique in that it is the only place in Israel where Israeli Jews, Muslims and Christians live together in peace and equality. Established in 1970, it is a beacon of amity in a region torn by ethnic and religious conflicts. The inhabitants are idealists […]