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 […]
When I was a teenager, I would sometimes join my mother on her weekly shopping trips to Steinberg, her favorite supermarket in Montreal. She liked it because it was big, bright and bulging with an amazing variety of reasonably priced food and household goods. If shoppers accumulated a sufficient number of Steinberg pink coupons, which […]
Prodigious and prolific, Irving Layton was one of Canada’s most accomplished poets when Donald Winkler of the National Film Board of Canada was assigned to direct a documentary about him. Fifty two minutes in length and released in 1986, Poet: Irving Layton Observed will be streamed online by the NFB in May during Canadian Jewish Heritage […]
Nineteen years before Mordecai Richler’s death in 2001, the National Film Board of Canada made a short documentary about this prominent Canadian novelist, journalist and screenwriter. Mordecai Richler: The Writer and His Roots, directed by Claire Helman, was released in 1983. This 21-minute film can be accessed online during May, in honor of Canadian Jewish […]