Harris Shaw is a curmudgeon par excellence. When the phone in his office rings, he’s coaxing words out of an antiquated typewriter, smoking a cigar and coughing. Reluctantly answering the call, Shaw fumes, “He’s dead, bugger off.” Shaw, a novelist and a widower whose sole companion is a cat, is a hermit and may as […]
Shortly after homegrown Arab terrorists attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris in January 2015, a Danish citizen of Arab descent went on a rampage in Copenhagen, killing two people, including a Jewish man. The incident, which sent shock waves throughout Denmark, is skillfully recreated by Ole Christian Madsen in his Danish-language feature film, […]
Evan Oppenheimer’s The Magnificent Meyersons introduces viewers to an upper middle-class Jewish family in New York City struggling with practical and philosophical questions. It unfolds during the course of a day, at the end of which an important figure from the past emerges, much to everyone’s surprise. The movie has no coherent plot, being composed […]
Rabbi Chaim Bruk is proud to be a missionary. “I’m God’s salesman,” he says jauntily in The Rabbi Goes West, a documentary by Amy Geller and Gerald Peary. “I’m trying to sell Judaism.” Their interesting film will be screened on Zoom by the Uptown Jewish Film Festival in New York City on Sunday, August 15 […]
My Mexican Shivah is quite the hybrid, a feature film that unfolds in Spanish, Yiddish and Hebrew in contemporary Mexico City. Alejandro Springall’s drama/comedy, based on a novel by Ilan Stavans, is now being screened online by the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation. It’s divided into seven segments, each representing a day of a week-long shivah to […]
Borscht Belt standup comedian Jackie Mason died last month, but he metaphorically returns from the dead in Barry Avrich’s movie, Jackie Mason: The Ultimate Jew, which is being screened online by the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation. Released in 2008, the film portrays the inimitable Mason in his final one-man show on Broadway. Speaking in a heavy […]
On the eve of Passover in 2020, with the coronavirus pandemic raging in Israel, the Israeli government imposed a closure on Bnei Brak. Attempting to curb its spread in this ultra-Orthodox enclave near Tel Aviv, the government had no alternative but to deploy a drastic measure. The manner in which its haredi inhabitants responded to […]
Morris (Moe) Berg was an anomaly in the best sense of the word. Wielding brains and braun, he was an intellectual, a professional athlete and coach, and a spy. Call him a Renaissance Man, if you will. It would not be far-fetched to say he was the most unusual person ever to play Major League […]
The German word “zeitgeist” denotes the spirit of an era and could easily apply to Nazi Germany’s genocidal project to exterminate European Jews during the Holocaust. In just six short years, from 1939 to 1945, the deranged leaders of what had been a cultured and civilized country embarked on an unprecedented campaign of ethnic cleansing […]
Alfred Ker, the prominent German Jewish theater critic and essayist, was hounded out of Germany after the rise of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime. He never returned, migrating from one country to the next with his family and living out the rest of his life in Britain, his adopted homeland. Ker’s daughter, Judith Kerr, became a […]