Two hundred years ago, a crowd of men, women and children assembled at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester, a major British industrial city, to demand political and economic reforms. The ruling elite, falsely but conveniently equating their demands with sedition and insurrection, ordered troops to break up the peaceful gathering. More than a dozen protesters […]
A “white crow” in Russian is a reference to an unusual person or an outsider. This appellation was certainly applicable to the late Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev. A non-conformist, he was brash and outspoken, straddling the thin line between the permissible and the unacceptable. Although he achieved recognition and fame as one of Russia’s […]
Marek Edelman was a fighter. He was the last surviving commander of the doomed but courageous Warsaw ghetto uprising in April 1943 and a participant in the 1944 general uprising in Warsaw. Remaining in Poland after the war, he studied medicine and became one of Poland’s leading cardiologists. During the 1980s, when he was a […]
Long before the late Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson wrote his acclaimed, posthumous trilogy of novels — The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest and The Girl Who Played With Fire — he was preoccupied by the neo-Nazi scene in Sweden. That right-wing extremists were active in this progressive Nordic […]
Billie August’s lush costume drama, A Fortunate Man, speaks to the proverb that pride, one of the seven deadly sins, comes before a fall. The two-and-a-half-hour movie, based on an eight-volume novel by Nobel laureate Henrik Pontoppidan and now available on the Netflix streaming network, is set mainly in late 19th century Denmark and revolves around […]
Mohamed Mod Helmy is a unique individual, having been the only Arab to be honored as a righteous gentile by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. The award was conferred on him posthumously a few years ago, but Helmy’s family, being anti-Israel, declined to accept it on his behalf. Finally, his aged nephew accepted it, […]
Luis Ismael’s feature film, Sefarad, pays Arthur Carlos de Barros Basto the recognition he so richly deserves. Basto, raised in a Catholic household in Portugal, discovered his family’s Jewish ancestry as his grandfather lay dying. Compulsively drawn to these roots, Basto converted to Judaism in Morocco when he was a young man. Later, while serving […]
Amos Oz, the great Israeli writer, died four months ago, before the release of Yonathan and Masha Zur’s biopic, Amos Oz: The Nature of Dreams, which will be screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on May 9. Their vivid and wide-ranging documentary, supplemented by file footage, presents Oz in various modes. He’s a keen […]
Aficionados of Yiddish language and culture will be drawn into Uri Barbash’s affectionate biopic of one of the greatest Yiddish poets of the 20th century, Avraham Sutzkever, who died in Tel Aviv in 2010 at the ripe old age of 96. Black Honey: The Life and Poetry of Avraham Sutzkever, which will be screened at […]
The 1942 Warner Brothers film, Casablanca, is a Hollywood classic. Starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, this romantic drama won Academy Awards for best picture, best adapted screenplay and best director. Michael Curtiz, who directed it, was a Hungarian Jew who had a long list of movies to his credit, from The Adventures of Robin […]