Years ago, I visited Marrakesh, a city in Morocco on the edge of the great Sahara Desert. I found it picturesque and exotic, a pleasant tourist destination of narrow cobblestone streets, gated residential homes, sandstone fortresses, and a central square brimming with snake charmers, hawkers and hustlers. While passing through its old quarter of crumbling […]
Scandar Copti’s Happy Holidays seethes with potentially explosive family secrets. Unfolding in Arabic and Hebrew, and set in the northern Israeli city of Haifa, this subtle feature film explores unsettling corners of relationships and the manner in which Israeli Jews and Arab Israelis try to manage them. It opens in theaters in the United States […]
When the Israeli filmmaker Ofer Freiman met Cleofas (Cleo), his wife Anita and their brood of 15 children, they were living on an isolated farm in the southern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. The descendants of Sephardi Jews who had been forced to convert to Christianity hundreds of years ago, they were drawn back to […]
Jonathan Jakubowicz’s Soul Of A Nation leaves viewers with a depressing impression of contemporary Israel. Now available on digital platforms, his somber, thought-provoking documentary can be seen as a wakeup call of the dangers of polarization in this deeply divided nation. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s divisive plan in 2023 to reform the judiciary by weakening […]
James Vanderbilt revisits the 1946 Nuremberg war crimes trial mainly through the perspective of two men on opposite sides of the aisle: Hermann Goring, who was Adolf Hitler’s second-in-command, and Douglas Kelley, the American army psychiatrist who was assigned to evaluate his personality and ascertain whether he was mentally fit to stand trial. Vanderbilt’s movie, […]
Portraying the illustrious Jewish American lyricist Lorenz Hart in Blue Moon, Ethan Hawke dominates Richard Linklater’s movie, which opens in Canadian theaters on October 24. Appearing in virtually every scene, Hawke delivers a virtuoso performance as the Broadway legend whose untimely death at 48 robbed America of a great talent far too soon. For 24 […]
Nir Baram, an Israeli novelist and journalist, is a peacenik. He is convinced that the protracted conflict between Israelis and Palestinians should be resolved through a two-state solution, which has so far proved to be a pipe dream. Testing his firmly-held belief, he spent two years travelling around the Israeli-occupied West Bank, speaking to Jewish […]
In a word, the Dead Sea is dying. The world’s lowest body of water, 440 meters below sea level, is drying up at an alarming rate, creating thousands of sinkholes along the shore. The reasons for its decline are clear. It is not being replenished sufficiently by the Jordan River, which itself is dangerously polluted. […]
The mists of time have obscured the life of Souad Zaki, a largely forgotten Egyptian Jewish entertainer who achieved a measure of fame in her country and the Arab world during the 1940s. Egypt, A Love Story, a bitter-sweet documentary, recounts the trajectory of her relatively short-lived career as an alluring chanteuse and movie actress. […]
The Hebrew language documentary, Air Born, delves beneath the surface to examine a little-known facet of the Israeli Air Force, the backbone of Israel’s armed forces. Now available on Izzy, an Israeli streaming platform, this intriguing film looks at the IAF through the eyes of men and women who were raised on its bases between […]