The late Bella Abzug aroused strong reactions. “She was loved and definitely hated,” says her daughter, Liz, in a succinct summation. A brash and flamboyant American social activist and politician who served in the House of Representatives in the 1970s, Abzug is the subject of the ironically titled Bella! This Woman’s Place Is In The […]
The third season of Tehran treats viewers to the usual dose of thrills, spills and chills against the backdrop of Israel’s existential conflict with Iran. It has been available on Apple TV in North America since January, but I belatedly caught up with the eight-part series several days ago. Tehran plays out amid bursts of […]
Sweden hewed to a policy of neutrality during World War II, but Swedish industrialists profited from the conflict by selling iron ore and ball bearings to Nazi Germany, thereby enabling it to press on with the war. Sweden, too, allowed German troop trains to pass through its territory, all in the service of placating Germany […]
An Israeli documentary, Deep Inside Iran, adds an additional layer of substance and understanding to Israel’s 12-day war with Iran last June. Now available on Izzy, a streaming platform specializing in Israeli films, this 56-minute movie is constructed around an interview with an Iranian Mossad agent who secretly worked inside Iran during that conflict. The […]
Eli Cohen has been a household name in Israel for decades. Sixty one years after his execution in Damascus, he is remembered as probably the greatest spy who ever worked for the Mossad, Israel’s external intelligence agency. Cohen arrived in Syria, Israel’s virulently hostile neighbor, in 1962 under cover as a Syrian Arab emigre from […]
African and Jewish Americans have been bound together in a deeply intertwined relationship despite their historical, religious and cultural differences and divergent priorities. Since the formation of the American republic more than two centuries ago, they have been mocked and feared as they have tried to tear down the walls of hatred and prejudice, says […]
Elie Wiesel, the late Jewish novelist and human rights activist, was deeply affected by the Holocaust. He was personally traumatized by it and drew on its horrors as a writer. Oren Rudavsky’s documentary, Elie Wiesel: Soul On Fire, which is scheduled to be broadcast by the PBS network on Tuesday, January 27 at 9 p.m. […]
The second and last season of House of Promises, a fine German television series about the Jewish proprietor of a department store in a working-class district of Berlin, gets under way as Germany lurches toward the abominable Nazi era. In the first six episodes of the debut season, which appeared on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform, […]
The Alternative for Germany, the second largest political party in the Bundestag, is growing stronger, according to a sober and disturbing PBS documentary broadcast last week. In The Rise of Germany’s New Right, correspondent Evan Williams takes a hard look at this ultra right-wing populist party twelve years after its founding and suggests it is […]
The Palmach, the elite fighting unit of the Haganah self-defence force in British Mandate Palestine, is at the core of Palmach Rising, a 95-part Israeli television series now available on the Izzy streaming platform. Described as a teen drama, each episode is about 20 minutes in length. Judging by the first five, they are likely […]