Eighty years ago next month, the St. Louis, a luxury German passenger liner carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees, left the port of Hamburg bound for Havana, Cuba. The passengers, possessing valid Cuban visas, expected to be admitted to Cuba, but their hopes were cruelly dashed. The Cuban government turned them away and the vessel […]
Sami Alkolombris, a Bulgarian Jewish baker from Jaffa, earned a small fortune and achieved a measure of fame in Israel by selling mouth-watering boreks, or bourekas, a flaky Middle Eastern/Balkan pastry made of phyllo dough and filled with stuffings ranging from salty cheese and spinach to potatoes and meat. Sami initially sold his wares from […]
The Arab-Israeli conflict is no laughing matter. But in Tel Aviv On Fire, which will be screened by the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on May 2 and May 4, Sameh Zoabi, a Palestinian director, breaks this mould by means of black humor, using Israel’s long-running dispute with the Palestinians as a source of biting satire. […]
The children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors usually have some kind of an affinity, if only a superficial one, with their parent’s or grandparent’s homeland. This is particularly true in the case of Poland, whose prewar Jewish population of 3.3 million was virtually annihilated by the Nazis and their local collaborators. Elise Otzenberger draws on […]
The Palestinian Arab inhabitants of the Gaza Strip have been consigned to purgatory since the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948. This theme is fleshed out in Gaza, a sad and expressive documentary by Gary Keane and Andrew McConnell scheduled to be screened at the Canadian International Documentary Festival (Hot Docs) in Toronto on April 30, […]
Lea Tsemel, an Israeli criminal lawyer, is a polarizing figure in Israel. Critics vilify her as a devil’s advocate. Admirers describe her as a champion of human rights. Rachel Leah Jones, the director of Advocate, a documentary scheduled to be screened at the Canadian International Documentary Festival (Hot Docs) in Toronto on April 28, April […]
Hungarian filmmaker Laszlo Nemes brought the unimaginable horrors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp uncomfortably close up in Son of Saul, which won the Academy Award for best foreign picture in 2016. Now, three years later in Sunset, which opens in Canada on April 5, Nemes transports us to fin-de-siecle Budapest on the eve of World […]
Steve Bannon, the fire-breathing American conservative ideologue, is bent on creating a global right-wing populist movement. In Alison Klayman’s absorbing documentary, The Brink, which opens in Canada on April 12, she accompanies Donald Trump’s former chief strategist on trips across the United States and Europe to lay the groundwork for this ambitious objective. A fierce […]
The passing of Joseph Stalin in Moscow in 1953 precipitated a power struggle among his grasping associates and potential successors. Armando Iannucci imagines what transpired in his satirical film, The Death of Stalin, which is now available on the Netflix streaming service. Iannucci approaches the topic with an irreverent sense of humor. Nothing is sacred […]
Sobibor was a cog in a chain of Nazi extermination camps in German-occupied Poland built to eradicate the Jews of Europe. Upwards of 225,000 men women and children were murdered there in just over a year. In the autumn of 1943, a group of Red Army prisoners of war who had been sent to Sobibor […]