Italian novelist Primo Levi theorized that ordinary people are more likely to commit atrocities than supposed monsters. As Levi, a Holocaust survivor, aptly observed, “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” Martin […]
One survey after another confirms that most married Jews in the United States are in mixed marriages partnered with non-Jews. This trend emerged in the 1960s and has become an unstoppable force as America grows more diverse and complex in terms of its multiracial composition. It goes without saying that a mixed marriage is at […]
They are a minority-within-a-minority. Regardless of where they live, Hasidic Jews dwell on the periphery of societies, hewing to changeless values and norms and uncompromisingly refusing to blend into their surroundings. Hasidim are the subject of A Life Apart, an intriguing documentary by Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform. […]
Rising to stardom in the early 1940s, Leonard Bernstein fulfilled his ambition of becoming the first great American conductor of a major symphony orchestra. He filled these big shoes in 1943, when, in a last-minute switch, he replaced the revered Bruno Walter as conductor of the New York Philharmonic in Carnegie Hall. He was only […]
Fred Cavaye’s Farewell Mr. Haffmann is a searing morality tale on the fickleness of human nature under duress. Scheduled to be released in south Florida theaters on December 22 after appearing at Jewish film festivals in the United States, this absorbing movie unfolds in Nazi-occupied Paris between May 1941 and July 1942. This was an incredibly […]
Driven out of Germany in 1937, movie director Detlef Sierck settled in Los Angeles, hoping to restart his career in Hollywood. He could have avoided exile had his wife not been Jewish and had he been a fascist devoted to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime. In America, he anglicized his name to Douglas Sirk, and within […]
The eighty fifth anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom in Germany that signified a prelude to the Holocaust, was marked yesterday. Anders Ostergaard’s documentary, Winter Journey, a heart-wrenching account of Jewish displacement in Nazi Germany, touches on this castrophic event within the context of a German Jew’s flight from marginalization, torment and persecution in his […]
Guy Nattiv’s absorbing feature film, Golda, unfolds during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, but the issues that define it are related to Israel’s current conflict with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli government was surprised by the coordinated offensives launched by Egypt and Syria in the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights on October […]
Several months before the United States entered World War II, following Japan’s destructive bombing raid on Pearl Harbor, the German-American director Ernst Lubitsch started production on a new feature film, To Be Or Not To Be. An unrelentingly dark satire on Nazi Germany recently broadcast on the Turner Classic Movies channel, it was released on […]
Randol (Randy) Schoenberg’s obsessive quest to plumb the depths of his family’s history led him and his son on a journey of discovery in Europe. Their eye-opening trip is the subject of Matthew Mishory’s absorbing documentary, Fioretta, which will be screened in its world premiere at the Woodstock Film Festival on September 30. Shortly afterward, […]