The mail-order bride business in Israel is entertainingly portrayed by Michal Vinik in Valeria Is Getting Married, which will be screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on June 8. Droll yet tense, and set in the Tel Aviv suburb of Bat Yam, this enjoyable movie underscores the intermittent joys and pitfalls of the transactional, […]
Israeli casualty notification officers may well be saddled with the most emotionally draining job in Israel’s armed forces. Their solemn and wrenching duty is to inform next of kin that their loved one has been killed. Since Israel is almost constantly at war, they are often busy. Knock on the Door, an intensely moving Israeli […]
Ofir Raul Graizer’s soulful drama, America, explores the complex friendship of two men who love the same woman. Scheduled to be screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on June 5, this heart-felt Israeli movie unfolds in the United States and Israel over the course of about two years. Eli (Michael Moshonov), a swimming coach […]
Rafi Nelson was a character par excellence, a legendary Israeli entrepreneur whose Red Sea beach resort was synonymous with a bohemian, hedonistic lifestyle. Rafi Nelson’s Holiday Village was located in Taba, a one square kilometer enclave in the northern Sinai Peninsula adjacent to Israel’s border with Egypt. It attracted an eclectic clientele of ordinary and […]
Hebron, with population 250,000, is the largest Palestinian city in the West Bank containing a Jewish community. The 800 Jews of Hebron are religious nationalists and live along the length of Shuhada Street, barely coexisting with their Palestinian neighbors and protected by a phalanx of Israeli soldiers. Their small urban enclave, known as H2 under […]
You’ve probably never heard of Chelly Wilson. I hadn’t until I watched Valerie Kontakos’ intriguing, partly animated documentary, Queen of the Deuce, which will be screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival on June 3. A Greek Jewish woman from the city of Thessaloniki who immigrated to the United States prior to World War II, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]