Fred Zinnemann’s 1944 American drama, The Seventh Cross, is a rarity — one of the very few Hollywood movies about German concentration camps that was made during World War II. I saw it on the Turner Classic Movies channel. Adapted from a 1942 novel by the German refugee writer Anna Seghers, it was a commercial hit […]
Yuval Adler’s taut Middle Eastern thriller, Bethlehem, is a microcosm of Israel’s bitter and protracted conflict with the Palestinians. Now available for viewing on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform, Adler’s debut feature film unfolds menacingly in the West Bank Palestinian town of Bethlehem and in nearby Jerusalem during the second Palestinian uprising, which raged from 2000 […]
Blending fact and fiction with exuberant abandon, Avida Livny’s “what-if” Israeli movie, Max Baer’s Last Right Hook, recreates an event that could well have happened. Currently being presented online by the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation, it stars the irrepressible Max Baer (1909-1959), who was the half-Jewish U.S. heavyweight boxing champion from 1934 to 1935. Bending […]
Journalism commands Hollywood’s undying interest and respect. Since the advent of the talkies in the late 1920s, the ink-stained wretches of the fourth estate have been featured in a procession of middling to tremendous movies ranging from The Front Page (1931) and His Girl Friday (1941) to All The President’s Men (1976) and The Paper (1994). […]
Duki Dror’s whimsical documentary, There Are No Lions In Tel Aviv, charts the formation of the first zoo in pre-state Israel and fleshes out the personality of its eccentric founder, Rabbi Mordecai Schornstein. This one-hour film is now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform, which specializes in Jewish and Israeli topics. The zoo was officially […]
What’s in a name? An awful lot if you’re a German and living in Germany. Sonke Wortmann’s How About Adolf? deals with this complex issue by lampooning German attitudes toward its Nazi past. A dark and effervescent satire informed by Germany’s greatest demon, Adolf Hitler, it is now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform. The plot is straightforward. Elisabeth […]
Israel’s occupation of the West Bank rests, in part, on a multiplicity of laws. Ra’anan Alexandrowicz examines them in his probing documentary, The Law In These Parts, which is currently being presented online by the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation. The system, drawn up before Israel’s conquest of the West Bank in 1967, is based on […]
Walter Tejblum’s Shalom Taiwan, an Argentinian movie set in Buenos Aires, New York City and Taipei, conforms to the claim that a rabbi with no debts is a rabbi without projects. This curious motto is the brainchild of Rabbi Aaron (Fabian Rosenthal), the young spiritual leader of a synagogue/community center in Buenos Aires deeply in […]
Latvia and Lithuania, which are among the newest members of NATO, have been hailed by some as Western bastions of democracy and bulwarks against Russian expansionism. But both Baltic republics were complicit in the mass murder of their Jewish citizens during the Holocaust. Baltic Truth, a revealing and troubling documentary by Eugene Levin and Andrejs […]
Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu’s astonishing rise to power from furniture company marketing director to prime minister is the subject of Dan Shadur’s absorbing biopic, King Bibi: The Life and Performances of Benjamin Netanyahu, which will be available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform from July 27 onward. Shadur delivers an incisive and balanced portrait of Israel’s longest-serving premier. […]