Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire is a distinctive, one-of-a-kind film. It was the first Hollywood B-movie to be nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award. And it was the first feature film to deal directly with the issue of antisemitism in the United States, edging out the more famous Gentleman’s Agreement by a few months. Premiered in […]
Free speech, a fundamental pillar of democracy, is under fire at American universities. Once a sanctuary of open inquiry, they have become embroiled in a broader cultural war over the boundaries of free expression, a process that is reshaping higher education in the United States in particular and in the West in general. Ric Esther […]
Mashhad, situated in the northeast corner of Iran, is Iran’s second largest city after Tehran. A Muslim place of pilgrimage, with a population of 3.4 million, it attracts 25 million visitors a year. Despite its renown, Mashhad harbors an embarrassing secret, as the short film, Mashhad, points out. On March 26, 1839, a few days […]
A Palestinian terrorist attack in Tel Aviv on June 8, 2016 was a unique event, having been the only one inside Israel recorded in real time by security cameras. Its grainy footage forms the core of Tal Inbar’s unsettling documentary, Closed Circuit, which is now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform. The 52-minute film, an […]
Herbert Heller, a Czech Holocaust survivor, did not talk about his ordeal for 60 years. It was his deep, dark secret. Even his wife and children had no idea what he had gone through as a youth. But one day, he finally recounted his singular tale of strength and resilience. His story is dramatically recreated […]
Frederik Forsyth’s novel, The Odessa File, was an amalgam of fact and fiction. So is Ronald Neame’s eponymous feature film, which was adapted from Forsyth’s best-seller and released in 1974. A hard-hitting thriller, it is driven by several interlocking themes: Israel’s quest for survival. The Holocaust. The attempt by diehard Nazis to evade justice. The […]
Mundek Lukawiecki’s son, Simon, knew nothing about his father’s past until he was an adult. A survivor of the Holocaust in Poland, Lukawiecki did not talk about that horrendous period and acted as if the mass murder of Polish Jews had never even occurred. In 1993, Lukawiecki switched course, telling his story to Yad Vashem, […]
On June 18, 1941, Warner Bros. released Underground, an anti-Nazi propaganda movie designed to whip up animus against the fascist regime in Germany. It appeared in U.S. theatres shortly before the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union and six months before the United States abandoned its status as a neutral power and entered World War II […]
Aaron Sapiro was a Jewish American folk hero who has faded into obscurity. A century ago, he created newspaper headlines when he filed a lawsuit against the American industrialist Henry Ford on the grounds that his notoriously antisemitic newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, had defamed him as a Jew and damaged his reputation as a lawyer. […]
The fog of war inevitably creates human tragedies. This is the way it has been since time immemorial. Neither soldiers nor civilians are safe in a combat zone. The latest war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which ended this past October following a U.S. brokered ceasefire, was not any different. While more […]