Two American Jewish cousins embark on a road trip in Poland, their ancestral homeland, in the quest to connect with their family roots. This is the alluring theme of Jesse Eisenberg’s enticing feature film, A Real Pain, which is a contender for two Oscars at tonight’s Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood. Their odyssey is facilitated […]
Betty Joan Perske, otherwise known as Lauren Bacall, achieved fame after starring opposite Humphrey Bogart, her future husband, in Howard Hawks’ 1944 romantic thriller, To Have And Have Not. Portraying a sultry seductress in her movie debut, Bacall would appear with Bogart in three more films: The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947) and Key […]
The last movie I saw starring Adrien Brody was The Pianist, which was released in 2002. Directed by Roman Polanski, it related the harrowing story of a Jewish pianist, Wladyslaw Szpilman, who survived the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland. Turning in a brilliant performance as Szpilman, Brody deservedly won the Academy Award for best actor. The […]
The roads of southern Israel were death traps for motorists on October 7, 2023, when roughly 1,200 Israelis and foreigners were murdered by hordes of Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists who had invaded the country. In an unprecedented rampage that summoned up dark and unspeakable memories of the Holocaust, heavily-armed gunmen in pickup trucks and […]
A chilling slogan that was often heard at Palestinian demonstrations this year, “From the river to the sea,” is rife with far-reaching political implications. This euphemism is conveniently downplayed by Palestinians as merely “aspirational.” But what it really means is beyond dispute: The replacement of Israel by a Palestinian state stretching from the Jordan River […]
By the standards of the day, Pinky was quite a daring movie. Released in 1949 by 20th Century Fox, it dealt with two related themes: discrimination based on the yardstick of race and racial passing, the phenomenon of fair-skinned African Americans masquerading as whites. Screened recently on the Turner Classic Movies channel, it revolves around […]
Daniel Robbins’ frenetic comedy, Bad Shabbos, unfolds in a finely- furnished flat in New York City’s Upper West Side, long the abode of secular middle-class Jews. There, during a Friday night sabbath dinner, acrimony and chaos erupt, tarnishing what was supposed to be an intimate family gathering. The central figures in this edgy and sardonically […]
Despite public relations efforts to burnish their image, banks are hard-pressed to refute allegations that they are greedy and heartless. This issue grabbed the headlines in Israel about a decade ago, when a persistent social activist named Barak Cohen launched a “non-violent resistance” campaign to shame major banks into modifying their policy regarding debt payment. […]
I did not discover hummus until my first trip to Israel in the summer of 1967, shortly after the end of the Six Day War. Having been raised in a home where Polish-style food was king, I was oblivious to hummus and the rich assortment of Middle Eastern appetizers I have since come to love. […]
Even a year later, the massacre of October 7 is still difficult to fathom. In just a matter of hours, 3,000 Hamas terrorists from the Gaza Strip penetrated the fortified border and killed about 1,200 civilians and soldiers in southern Israel in the single blackest day in Israel’s history. The Israelis who survived this atrocity […]