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 […]
The Jewish community in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia was virtually decimated during the Holocaust, with 85 percent of its members having perished during the German occupation. Nitza Gonen’s documentary, The Forgotten Ones, now available on the Izzy streaming platform, is billed as the first film to document this tragedy. The narrator, identified only as Stella, was a […]
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 […]