Anatole Litvak’s Confessions of a Nazi Spy, the first anti-Nazi feature film produced by a Hollywood studio, was released by Warner Bros. on May 6, 1939, shortly before the outbreak of World War II. This taut espionage thriller stars the Romanian-born Jewish actor Edward G. Robinson as an FBI agent who breaks up a Nazi […]
Foreign volunteers flocked to kibbutzim before and after the 1967 Six Day War. Hailing primarily from Europe, the United States, Canada and South Africa, they were eager to experience the novelty of collective living. By one estimate, 6,000 foreigners arrived in Israel within a six-week period following the end of hostilities. I was one of […]
Sex trafficking boomed in 19th and 20th century Argentina, and many of its participants were Jewish immigrants from the Russian empire and independent Poland. Daniel Najenson’s disturbing documentary, The Impure, which is now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform, explores this seamy and lucrative trade, which reached a seemingly unstoppable trajectory between the 1880s and […]
Eddie Cantor (1892-1964) was megastar long before the dawn of television and the emergence of the digital era. A standup comedian, film actor, screenwriter, singer and songwriter, his star shone brightly from the 1920s until the 1950s. He starred in a number of light-weight Hollywood movies, and one of them, Thank Your Lucky Stars — […]
Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which I recently had the pleasure of watching, paints a vivid and sympathetic portrait of the brilliant American theoretical physicist whose stellar scientific team created the first nuclear weapon. This 179-minute feature film, the winner of seven Academy Awards in 2023, focuses on Julius Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project. […]
Inspired by a true story, and dedicated to “all who suffered and sacrificed,” Lost Transport fleshes out an intriguing footnote of World War II. Saskia Diesing’s Dutch feature film, which is now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform, is set in Germany in April 1945 as the Third Reich crumbles. In the waning months of […]
Wilm Hosenfeld, a German army officer during World War II, was a silent hero. Once a fervent Nazi, Hosenfeld parted ways with Adolf Hitler’s fascist regime while serving in German-occupied Poland from 1939 to 1945. During this period, he kept a secret diary in which he expressed his rage toward Germany’s mistreatment of Polish Catholics […]
Two American Jewish cousins embark on a road trip in Poland, their ancestral homeland, in the quest to connect with their family roots. This is the alluring theme of Jesse Eisenberg’s enticing feature film, A Real Pain, which is a contender for two Oscars at tonight’s Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood. Their odyssey is facilitated […]
Betty Joan Perske, otherwise known as Lauren Bacall, achieved fame after starring opposite Humphrey Bogart, her future husband, in Howard Hawks’ 1944 romantic thriller, To Have And Have Not. Portraying a sultry seductress in her movie debut, Bacall would appear with Bogart in three more films: The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947) and Key […]
The last movie I saw starring Adrien Brody was The Pianist, which was released in 2002. Directed by Roman Polanski, it related the harrowing story of a Jewish pianist, Wladyslaw Szpilman, who survived the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland. Turning in a brilliant performance as Szpilman, Brody deservedly won the Academy Award for best actor. The […]