I did not discover hummus until my first trip to Israel in the summer of 1967, shortly after the end of the Six Day War. Having been raised in a home where Polish-style food was king, I was oblivious to hummus and the rich assortment of Middle Eastern appetizers I have since come to love. […]
Even a year later, the massacre of October 7 is still difficult to fathom. In just a matter of hours, 3,000 Hamas terrorists from the Gaza Strip penetrated the fortified border and killed about 1,200 civilians and soldiers in southern Israel in the single blackest day in Israel’s history. The Israelis who survived this atrocity […]
Donald Trump will no doubt dislike Ali Abbasi’s movie, The Apprentice, with a passion. Scheduled to open in Canadian theaters on October 11, this is a searingly scalding and compelling portrait of an egotistical and relentlessly ambitious New York City real estate tycoon reaching for the top. Focusing exclusively on his career before his foray […]
Krzysztof Lang’s stand-alone movie, March 1968, has been lengthened and converted into The End of Innocence, a powerful four-part series that starts on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform on September 12. It focuses on an exceedingly dark chapter in contemporary Polish history during which upwards of 30,000 highly assimilated secular Jews were forced to flee the […]
Pierre Goldman was a throwback to the past, a fervent left-wing Jewish revolutionary who sought to upend the existing social and political order and who was prepared to accept the consequences. Accused of armed robbery and murder, he attempted to prove his innocence through two sensational trials in the mid-1970s that touched on issues such […]
Nathan Silver, in his quirky comedy, Between the Temples, presents viewers with the oddest of couples: a cantor and a music teacher old enough to be his mother. Normally, an age difference on this scale might feel creepy, but here it feels virtually normal. Scheduled to open in theaters in Canada on August 23, this […]
One of Hollywood’s last anti-Nazi movies, Hotel Berlin, was released by Warner Bros. on March 17, 1945, less than two months before Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender and the end of World War II in Europe. Recently screened on the Turner Classic Movie channel, it was adapted from Vicki Baum’s eponymous novel. Directed by Peter Godfrey […]
During the last ten months of his tragically abbreviated life, the Czech-Jewish novelist Franz Kafka formed a romantic relationship with Dora Diamant, a Jewish actress originally from Poland. He was 40 and she was 25 when they met at a Baltic Sea beach in Germany in 1923. It was a doomed love affair in light […]
Several years after the release of Ben-Hur, William Wyler’s epic, I finally got to see it. I was not disappointed, being generally impressed by its grandeur and pageantry. In particular, I loved its signature chariot race pitting a Jewish prince against a Roman tribune, a scintillating scene now considered a classic in cinema. I watched […]
Stuart Heisler’s taut drama, Storm Warning, is a rarity, one of the relatively few mainstream Hollywood films that have been critical of the Ku Klux Klan, a notorious racist organization that gained immense popularity, even respectability, in the United States in the first decades of the 20th century. Recently screened on the Turner Classic Movies […]