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Film

Tunisian Jews Look Back Ambivalently

Tunisian Jews in Ruggero Gabbai’s bitter-sweet documentary, From TGM to TGV, look back at their lives in Tunisia and abroad with a mixture of nostalgia and angst. To be screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on June 2, it examines the attitudes of Jews who were uprooted from their homeland. Tunisia, an Arab state […]

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Film

Children Of Peace

Neve Shalom, a utopian Jewish-Arab village in Israel’s Ayalon Valley, is unique in that it is the only place in Israel where Israeli Jews, Muslims and Christians live together in peace and equality. Established in 1970, it is a beacon of amity in a region torn by ethnic and religious conflicts. The inhabitants are idealists […]

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Film

The Man In The Basement

Holocaust denial, a relatively new form of antisemitism, is at the core of Philippe Le Guay’s sizzling drama, The Man in the Basement, which will be screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on June 1. It all starts innocently enough, but ends violently in a welter of fisticuffs and a cascade of epithets. Simon […]

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Film

Vishniac Photographed What Would Be A Lost World

Thanks, in part, to Roman Vishniac (1897-1990), a towering figure in modern photography, the Jewish communities obliterated by the Nazi hordes during the Holocaust will always be remembered. Vishniac, a Russian Jew, travelled to Eastern Europe and the Balkans from the mid-1930s onward to photograph Jews from all walks of life in Poland, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia […]

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Film

What’s Love Got To Do With It?

Arranged marriages, a common occurrence among ultra-Orthodox Jews and traditional Muslims, apparently rarely break up. As one of the chief characters in Skekhar Kapur’s appealing romantic comedy, What’s Love Got To Do With It?, points out, only six percent of these unions fail. “You grow to love the person you’re with,” he says. The person […]

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Film

Without Precedent: The Supreme Life Of Rosalie Abella

The appointment of Rosalie Abella to Canada’s Supreme Court in 2004 shattered two records. In one fell swoop, she became the first Jewish woman and the first immigrant to land that coveted position. “People like me were not exactly being appointed to the Supreme Court in droves,” she says in a droll understatement at the […]

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Film

Natahan-Ism: Portrait Of A Unique Artist

Nathan Hilu, a visual artist from New York City, refers to himself as a “memory man.” It is a fair description of an eccentric, complex person. Hilu spent decades drawing sketches of Nazi war criminals who faced justice at the Nuremberg trial in postwar western Germany. His drawings, in crayon and ink, are detailed and […]

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Film

Praying For Armageddon

Tonje Hessen Schei and Michael Rowley have produced a thoughtful and disturbing documentary examining the beliefs and objectives of American evangelical Christians. Praying for Armageddon will be screened at the Hot Docs film festival in Toronto on May 2 in its North American premiere. There will be additional screenings on May 4 and May 7, […]

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Film

Honorable Men: The Rise And Fall Of Ehud Olmert

Ehud Olmert has the dubious distinction of having been the first Israeli prime minister to be jailed for a criminal offence. Convicted of bribery and obstruction of justice, he was released from prison in 2017 after serving 16 months of a six-year sentence. Now 77, Olmert was named prime minister after his predecessor, Ariel Sharon, […]

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Film

Israel Swings For Gold

Baseball is not exactly a popular sport in Israel, and few Israelis have embraced it. But when the Israeli baseball team qualified for the summer Olympic Games in Tokyo in 2021, some Israelis tuned in and cheered on its players, most of whom were Americans with dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship. Their quest for a medal — […]