Film
Back To The Fatherland
Thousands of young Israelis have immigrated to Germany and Austria in the past decade. By some estimates, upwards of 20,000 have made that move. It’s a deeply ironic development, given what happened in these countries during the 12-year Nazi interregnum. In most cases, the Israelis who’ve forsaken their homeland are the grandchildren of German and […]
The World Of The Cairo Geniza
By the end of the 19th century, the venerable Ben Ezra synagogue in Cairo was falling apart and was in dire need of repair. During the restoration, workmen stumbled upon a massive cache of mouldering documents in the dusty attic ranging from the sacred to the mundane. For approximately 1,000 years, the attic had been […]
Photograph: A Poignant Bollywood Movie
Ritesh Batra’s unassuming, poignant and likeable Bollywood film, Photograph, which opens in Canada on May 31, conjures up what might have been a successful romantic relationship in a better world. Rafi (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) ekes out a living as an itinerant photographer in Mumbai’s Gateway to India tourist attraction. He seeks out new customers by promising […]
The Rise And Fall Of John DeLorean
Call him what you will — a con man or a visionary, a winner or a loser. John DeLorean was all these things, a riddle wrapped in an enigma. A brilliant automotive engineer who was on a trajectory to becoming the president of General Motors, the world’s biggest car manufacturer, he was the creator of […]
Ask Dr. Ruth
American sex therapist Ruth Westheimer whimsically asks Alexa, her electronic assistant, to identify Ruth Westheimer. Alexa’s disembodied answer is correct, bringing a smile to Westheimer’s face. “She knows who I am,” she exclaims excitedly. Westheimer, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, is indeed famous. Long a fixture on radio and television, the author of a […]
Peterloo: A Film By Mike Leigh
Two hundred years ago, a crowd of men, women and children assembled at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester, a major British industrial city, to demand political and economic reforms. The ruling elite, falsely but conveniently equating their demands with sedition and insurrection, ordered troops to break up the peaceful gathering. More than a dozen protesters […]
The White Crow
A “white crow” in Russian is a reference to an unusual person or an outsider. This appellation was certainly applicable to the late Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev. A non-conformist, he was brash and outspoken, straddling the thin line between the permissible and the unacceptable. Although he achieved recognition and fame as one of Russia’s […]
Marek Edelman … And There Was Love In The Ghetto
Marek Edelman was a fighter. He was the last surviving commander of the doomed but courageous Warsaw ghetto uprising in April 1943 and a participant in the 1944 general uprising in Warsaw. Remaining in Poland after the war, he studied medicine and became one of Poland’s leading cardiologists. During the 1980s, when he was a […]
The Man Who Played With Fire
Long before the late Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson wrote his acclaimed, posthumous trilogy of novels — The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest and The Girl Who Played With Fire — he was preoccupied by the neo-Nazi scene in Sweden. That right-wing extremists were active in this progressive Nordic […]
A Fortunate Man
Billie August’s lush costume drama, A Fortunate Man, speaks to the proverb that pride, one of the seven deadly sins, comes before a fall. The two-and-a-half-hour movie, based on an eight-volume novel by Nobel laureate Henrik Pontoppidan and now available on the Netflix streaming network, is set mainly in late 19th century Denmark and revolves around […]
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