One of Hollywood’s last anti-Nazi movies, Hotel Berlin, was released by Warner Bros. on March 17, 1945, less than two months before Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender and the end of World War II in Europe. Recently screened on the Turner Classic Movie channel, it was adapted from Vicki Baum’s eponymous novel. Directed by Peter Godfrey […]
During the last ten months of his tragically abbreviated life, the Czech-Jewish novelist Franz Kafka formed a romantic relationship with Dora Diamant, a Jewish actress originally from Poland. He was 40 and she was 25 when they met at a Baltic Sea beach in Germany in 1923. It was a doomed love affair in light […]
Several years after the release of Ben-Hur, William Wyler’s epic, I finally got to see it. I was not disappointed, being generally impressed by its grandeur and pageantry. In particular, I loved its signature chariot race pitting a Jewish prince against a Roman tribune, a scintillating scene now considered a classic in cinema. I watched […]
Stuart Heisler’s taut drama, Storm Warning, is a rarity, one of the relatively few mainstream Hollywood films that have been critical of the Ku Klux Klan, a notorious racist organization that gained immense popularity, even respectability, in the United States in the first decades of the 20th century. Recently screened on the Turner Classic Movies […]
The abduction and show trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann transfixed Israel in the early 1960s. Captured by a Mossad team in Argentina, where he had fled after World War II, he was one of the major figures in the implementation of the Holocaust. Israelis, particularly survivors of the Shoah, were caught up by […]
A week after Allied armies invaded Nazi-occupied France in the D-Day Normandy landings, which changed the outcome of World War II, Germany launched the first of 10,000 V-1 and V-2 rockets aimed at cities in Britain. These indiscriminate attacks killed thousands of civilians. In 1943, a year before the Nazi regime unleashed its reign of […]
As the Italian provinces gradually coalesced into a single nation from 1859 onwards, a process known as the Risorgimento, the emerging new state was convulsed by a scandal that pitted the Vatican against the forces of secularism and liberalism. In 1858, Edgardo Mortara, the sixth child of Salamone (Momolo) and Marianna, was removed by papal […]
The Catskills, a resort area in upper New York State favored by Jewish Americans from the 1920s to the 1980s, was an earthly paradise of mountains, forests, lakes, rivers and streams redolent of fresh air. With more than 500 hotels and and hundreds of bungalow cottages, the Catskills boasted of having the greatest concentration of […]
Adolf Hitler, though a school dropout, was an avid reader. He maintained libraries in Berlin, Munich and the Berghof, his rustic retreat in the German Alps. When he committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin in the spring of 1945, he owned no less than 16,000 books. Many of them vanished after his death, but […]
Savi Gabizon’s Longing is a remake of his Israeli movie of the same title. A Canada-Israel co-production filmed in the province of Ontario and starring the veteran Hollywood actor Richard Gere, it opens in theaters on June 7. Now in his mid-70s, Gere plays Daniel, a wealthy businessman who reconnects with his former girlfriend, Rachel […]