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. […]
On July 28, 1959, thieves in Bucharest committed an audacious crime. In broad daylight, they ambushed a truck from the National Bank carrying the equivalent of several hundred thousand dollars in Romanian currency. The theft shocked the Communist leadership and led to the arrest of hundreds of suspects and the production of a unique film. […]
The first ever Hollywood movie about Israel’s struggle for statehood, Sword in the Desert, was released in the United States in 1949, a year after Israel achieved sovereignty and independence. Directed by George Sherman, and based on a short story by Robert Buckner, it appeared eleven years before Otto Preminger’s Exodus. Filmed in California, and starring […]
Leonard Cohen’s signature song, the rich and resonant Hallelujah, has morphed into an anthem beloved by millions of his fans. Yet strangely enough, his record label, Columbia Records, categorically rejected it when it was submitted in 1984, puzzling and crushing Cohen. To this day, it remains unclear why this happened. Not even Clive Davis, a former […]
Menachem Begin, Israel’s sixth prime minister, was a man of peace and war. In his six years and three months in office, from 1977 to 1983, he signed a peace treaty with Egypt, for which he won a Nobel Prize, and ordered the invasion of Lebanon, for which he was widely condemned. Levi Zini’s absorbing […]