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 […]
Six months after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir attended a ceremony in Jerusalem for fallen soldiers. Defence Minister Moshe Dayan delivered a eulogy, but Meir, looking worn down and broken, remained silent and refrained from giving a speech. Having accepted responsibility for the shortcomings of Israel’s performance in the 17-day […]
The Inquisition hounded, marginalized, oppressed and slaughtered Jews in Spain and Portugal and in Spanish and Portuguese overseas colonies in Latin America. Its demonic depth and reach was such that even a remote hamlet in the jungles of Brazil could be directly affected by it. Elza Cataldo’s intriguing Brazilian movie, The Queen’s Orphans, explores this […]
Michael Winterbottom’s absorbing movie, Shoshana, turns on the romantic relationship between the daughter of a Zionist luminary and a British policeman in Mandate Palestine. It is also about the armed struggle that pitted Britain against two right-wing Zionist organizations, the Irgun and its radical offshoot, the Stern Gang. This 119-minute movie will be screened on […]