Until his resignation from Israel’s Knesset last year, Dov Khenin was the only Jewish member of the Joint List, an amalgamation of four diverse Arab political parties. Khenin was affiliated with the Hadash faction, the successor of the Israeli Communist Party. A lawyer with a PhD in political science, and an idealist in an era […]
Tel Aviv, Israel’s lively and exuberant city on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea, has the distinction of possessing the world’s largest concentration of Bauhaus buildings. Bauhaus architecture, the forerunner of the modern International style, emerged in Germany in the 1920s and fell out of favor after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. Driven […]
Marthe Hofnung Cohn is quite a lady. During the final weeks of World War II, this French Jewish woman was spy in Nazi Germany, providing France with vital, real-time intelligence about the movement of German army troops. Cohn’s exploits, the stuff of legend, were known only to a select few in 1945, when she courageously sneaked […]
The first known documentary in Hebrew about Israel’s Arab minority, My Name is Ahmad, will be screened online on June 2 at this year’s Toronto Jewish Film Festival. Directed by Avshalom Katz and Ram Loevy, and released in 1966, this 14-minute short is like a time capsule from a bygone era. They focus their attention […]
The notorious antisemitic campaign launched by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union after World War II is chronicled in exacting and chilling detail in Guillaume Ribot’s superb French-language documentary, The Black Book, which will be screened online on June 3 at this year’s Toronto Jewish Film Festival. Guillaume’s 92-minute film revolves around the Black Book, […]
Sara Goralnik, a 12-year-old Polish Jewish girl, survived the Holocaust by adopting the identity of her Ukrainian friend, Manya Romanchuk. Passing as a Christian, she worked on a small farm in eastern Poland from 1942 to 1944, until it was safe to return to her hometown near the Russian border. Sara’s story of survival unfolds in […]
Before the current coronavirus pandemic walloped the world, the opioid epidemic loomed large, claiming lives on a fairly significant scale. Joey Klein’s movie, Castle in the Ground, delves into that particular facet of the destructive drug abuse problem. Scheduled to open on the Bell, Rogers, Shaw, Telus, Cineplex Store, Apple and Googleplay platforms on May 15, […]
One of the most intriguing footnotes of World War II comes to light in Shadows of Freedom, a vivid documentary by Canadian filmmakers Amos Carlen and Aline Robichaud now available on VOD/Digital platforms. On November 8, 1942, in Operation Torch, a flotilla of more than 100,000 American and British troops landed in Algeria and Morocco, […]
Can Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, given their record of mutual strife, get along? Dror Zahavi, an Israeli filmmaker living in Germany, puts this confounding question to the test in his latest movie, Crescendo, which opens on May 1 in a virtual cinematic release throughout the United States. Zahavi’s impassioned drama is loosely inspired by […]
Michael Winterbottom’s biting satire, Greed, which opens in Canadian theatres on March 6, is a caustic portrait of a fictional self-made British billionaire and a blistering commentary on the fast fashion industry whose downtrodden workers he exploits mercilessly. Retail mogul Sir Richard (Greedy) McCreadie (Steve Coogan) has decamped to the Greek island of Mykonos to […]