Approximately 200,000 Jews lived in Warsaw’s Muranow district, the hub of Jewish life in Poland, before World War II. Forming the core of the Nazi ghetto after 1940, it served as a conduit from which Jews were deported to the Treblinka extermination camp as the Holocaust unfolded. During the doomed but heroic 1943 uprising, which […]
Marianna Barr’s intriguing Israeli documentary, Private Death, fleshes out a forbidden romance set against the backdrop of rising tensions between Jews and Arabs in 1930s Palestine. It will be screened online at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, which runs from June 3-13. Haya Schreiber, a sixth-generation Jaffa-born Jew from an ultra-Orthodox family, and Tewfik Hanania, […]
The Jewish Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) is the subject of Jacques Loeuille’s probing documentary, Modigliani And His Secrets. It will be screened online by the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, which starts on June 3 and ends on June 13. Before watching it, I wondered what secrets could possibly emerge. There are basically […]
For the past five decades, Lebanon, once the jewel of the Middle East, has lost its luster as an oasis of stability, having been engulfed by strife, chaos and bloodshed. In his incisive documentary, Lebanon — Borders of Blood, Duki Dror compares this small nation to an active volcano that explodes periodically, destabilizing everything in […]
Ira Glasser led the American Civil Liberties Union from 1978 until 2001, transforming what had been a fairly obscure and somnolent group into a high-profile national organization. Mighty Ira, a documentary directed by Nico Perrino, Chris Maltby and Aaron Reese, sheds light on the dedicated and principled man who directed this process.Their engaging movie will […]
Avi Weissblei’s absorbing documentary, Desert Tested, is the story of a dream that imploded. It will be screened online by the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, which runs from June 3-13. Yitzhak Shabinsky was an ambitious and driven Israeli entrepreneur who dreamed of creating a home-grown car industry in Israel. His company, Autocars, manufactured an eclectic […]
Saul Bellow was in the privileged and enviable position of knowing he was the most acclaimed American novelist of his generation. The winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize for literature, he was the author of critically praised novels that may yet stand the test of time: Seize the Day, Herzog, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Ravelstein and […]
Ansis is a simple sign painter in a small town in Latvia, a Baltic republic that won its independence after World War I, but lost it after being occupied by the Soviet Union and Germany within the space of a few years in the early 1940s. In Viesturs Kairish’s endearing movie, The Sign Painter, which […]
Antisemitism may have been temporarily discredited in post-Holocaust Germany, but in Leo Khasin’s dark and cutting comedy, The Un-Word, it continues to seethe and spread like a deadly virus that no vaccination, however potent, can eradicate. Due to be screened online by the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, which runs from June 3-13, it unfolds in a […]
Shirel Peleg’s enjoyable and well-crafted romantic comedy, Kiss Me Kosher, surveys the wonders and agonies of the oldest and most durable human passion, love, through the prism of German-Jewish relations and Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. It will be presented online by the annual Toronto Jewish Film Festival, which runs from June 3-13. A co-Israeli-German production […]