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 […]
Spain was supposedly a neutral power during World War II, yet the Spanish government was resolutely in Germany’s camp. In the summer of 1941, Spain dispatched a largely voluntary expeditionary force, known as the Blue Division, to fight alongside Germany in the Soviet Union. Recruited by the Spanish army and the Fascist Party, or the […]
Janina Quint’s informative documentary, Germans & Jews, illustrates the degree to which their relations have radically improved since the Nazi era, yet remain troubled. Seven decades after the collapse of Adolf Hitler’s racist regime, Jews in the Diaspora continue to be suspicious of Germans and often recoil when they hear German, while Germans tend to feel […]
Their stiff body language was unmistakably indicative of their sharp policy differences over the combustible, still unresolved Palestinian issue. As U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken extolled the virtues of a two-state solution during his first trip to Israel following the formation last month of Benjamin Netanyahu’s far right-wing government, the Israeli prime minister archly […]
At a fraught moment when racial tensions in the United States are flaring yet again, Netflix is currently offering viewers You People, a romantic comedy set in Los Angeles that addresses this endemic issue. The central characters are not only white and black, but Jewish and Muslim. Quite a combustible combination, one would think. Ezra […]