The Jewish citizens of the Scandinavian nations of Sweden, Norway and Denmark had very different experiences during the Holocaust, as Suzannah Warlick’s documentary, Passage to Sweden, attests. The film will be screened at this year’s Toronto Jewish Film Festival, which runs from June 9-26. As Warlick points out, Sweden enjoyed immunity from the tumult of […]
Jews were among the earliest settlers of the American West, which, as late as the 19th century, was populated mainly by Indian tribes. Most Jewish immigrants arriving in the United States settled in major east coast cities, but a few ventured west, to fast- developing states like California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado. Antisemitism […]
Avi Nesher’s captivating movie, Image of Victory, takes viewers back 74 years to a long-forgotten but important battle during Israel’s War of Independence. It will be screened at this year’s Toronto Jewish Film Festival, which runs from June 9-26. On June 7, 1948, Egypt won its first armed engagement with the newly-formed state of Israel […]
Vengeance was the name of the game for Holocaust survivor Abba Kovner. In postwar Germany, he and a few fellow survivors sought to kill six million Germans to avenge the deaths of six million Jews. The Israeli brothers Doron and Yoav Paz have recreated this little-known incident in their dark and sober movie, Plan A. It […]
Israeli filmmaker Michal Weits untangles her grandfather’s complex past as a state builder in Blue Box, a compelling 82-minute documentary that will be screened at this year’s Toronto Jewish Film Festival, which runs from June 9-26. Joseph Weitz, the father of Israel’s forests, was the director of both the Jewish National Fund’s Department of Lands […]
By Julia Mintz’s estimation, more than 25,000 Jewish partisans fought German troops in the forests of Eastern Europe during World War II. Usually attached to networks of Russian and Polish partisan groups, they came from all walks of life from Poland and Lithuania. Her stirring documentary, Four Winters: A Story of Jewish Partisan Resistance and […]
Monticello is one of the finest public buildings in America. Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States and the author of the Declaration Independence, lived there periodically until his death in 1826. When he died, he was deeply in debt, compelling his daughter, Martha, to sell the estate, which had fallen into disrepair. […]
Wojciech Smarzowski’s unusually strong and emotive Polish-language movie, The Wedding Day, merges past and present, gliding over a ragged landscape torn by ethnocentrism and violence and healed by humanity. It will be screened at this year’s Toronto Jewish Film Festival, which runs online and in-person from June 9-26. Shifting seamlessly between modern-day Soviet-and German-occupied Poland, it […]
During Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs were displaced from their homes and fields in a catastrophe they refer to as the Nakba. Displacements occurred in towns such as Jaffa, Lod and Ramle. Alon Schwartz’s eye-opening movie, Tantura, documents what happened in the Arab fishing village of Tantura, which was […]
Left- wing Labor Zionists in Palestine and Israel attempted to build an egalitarian and socialist society within their web of cooperative settlements. The children they raised in this cloistered milieu from the 1920s to the 1970s were expected to transmit their parents’ and grandparents’ hopes and dreams to future generations, but this would not be […]