The eighty fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom in Germany that signified a prelude to the Holocaust, was marked yesterday. Anders Ostergaard’s documentary, Winter Journey, a heart-wrenching account of Jewish displacement in Nazi Germany, touches on this castrophic event within the context of a German Jew’s flight from marginalization, torment and persecution in his […]
Guy Nattiv’s absorbing feature film, Golda, unfolds during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, but the issues that define it are related to Israel’s current conflict with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli government was surprised by the coordinated offensives launched by Egypt and Syria in the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights on October […]
Several months before the United States entered World War II, following Japan’s destructive bombing raid on Pearl Harbor, the German-American director Ernst Lubitsch started production on a new feature film, To Be Or Not To Be. An unrelentingly dark satire on Nazi Germany recently broadcast on the Turner Classic Movies channel, it was released on […]
Randol (Randy) Schoenberg’s obsessive quest to plumb the depths of his family’s history led him and his son on a journey of discovery in Europe. Their eye-opening trip is the subject of Matthew Mishory’s absorbing documentary, Fioretta, which will be screened in its world premiere at the Woodstock Film Festival on September 30. Shortly afterward, […]
Ruth Gruber was an amazing and accomplished person who blazed new paths at a time when women were expected to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. A photojournalist, author and humanitarian, she is the subject of Bob Richman’s documentary, The Extraordinary Journey Of Ruth Gruber, which will be re-released on VOD and leading digital […]
Exactly a year after World War II ended with Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender, a major Hollywood studio released Berlin Express, a a fairly competent thriller set in Frankfurt and Berlin. Distributed by RKO Radio Pictures, and directed by Jacques Tourneur, it was the first movie filmed on location in postwar Berlin. With only a year […]
Women comprise slightly more than 50 percent of Israel’s population, yet they have been woefully underrepresented in the Knesset and in senior civil service positions. Full gender equality is something that women in Israel still aspire to after 75 years of Israeli statehood, according to The Elected, a three-part series that starts on the ChaiFlicks […]
Israel was once inextricably associated with the kibbutz, a collective farming commune based on egalitarian values and dedicated to the proposition that Israel should be a Jewish socialist state. For decades, this model worked harmoniously, but in the last few decades it has gradually broken down, radically changing the complexion of the kibbutz. Toby Perl […]
The yawning divisions between secular and religious Jewish Israelis run deep and may even be unbridgeable. This unsettling schism manifests itself in practically every nook and cranny of Israeli life, as Avi Nesher suggests in his newest movie, The Other Story, which is now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform. The film is centered around […]
When Fred Zinnemann’s murder mystery, Eyes in the Night, was released early in 1942, the United States had already entered World War II as a combatant and fears about the presence of Nazi spies on American soil were on the uptick. Zinnemann was well into his illustrious career when he directed this black-and-white feature film, […]