Before Shtisel there was Kugel. Shtisel, the award-winning Israeli television series that enjoyed a three-year run from 2013 onward, was about the trials, tribulations and joyous interludes of an ultra-Orthodox family in Jerusalem. Although it was laser focused on haredi Jews, a cloistered sect, it exuded universal appeal, drawing in a secular Jewish audience as […]
A new and thoughtful documentary about Jewish resistance to Nazi oppression, Resistance: They Fought Back, will be broadcast on the PBS network on Monday, January 27 at 10 p.m. (check local listings). It coincides with International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 8oth anniversary of the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi extermination camp in […]
The title of Nobody Wants This, a romantic comedy now streaming on Netflix, is ambiguous. It revolves around a liberal American rabbi who falls head-over-heels in love with a secular woman who happens to be a Christian but who is lukewarm toward organized religion. Given the interfaith nature of their relationship, viewers are bound to […]
In the wake of Hamas’ October 7 massacre in southern Israel, pro-Hamas Palestinian demonstrators and their supporters condemned Israel as a “colonial settler state.” This false and outrageous claim runs counter to a glaringly inconvenient fact: Jews are indigenous to the Middle East and lived in the Land of Israel long before the emergence of […]
Toward the end of the 1990s, I interviewed Moshe Katsav, who was then Israel’s minister of tourism in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s first government. Little did I know that he would soon be the president of Israel, a position he held from 2000 to 2007. Born in Iran, Katsav immigrated to Israel, along with his […]
Fashion designer/mogul Diane Von Furstenberg has been around the block more than once. “I’ve had a full life,” she says in a new documentary now streaming on the Hulu platform. “I’m 76. I should be 300.” In Diane Von Furstenberg:Woman in Charge, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Trish Dalton present their subject as a clever, creative, driven […]
Approximately one million Jews from the former Soviet Union have immigrated to Israel in the past 30 years. They have adapted remarkably well to their new environment, but the integration process usually has been bumpy. Sovietzka, a fresh new Israeli comedy with dark undertones, grapples with this topic through the lens of the Goldenberg family […]
A tsunami of newspaper and magazine articles, academic monographs, general interest books and dedicated documentary films have analyzed the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime. Yet there is still an insatiable appetite for more of the same. This unique 12-year interregnum in Germany’s history arouses immense curiosity that journalists, academics and […]
Franz Kafka died 100 years ago today in a sanatorium in Kierling, Austria, the victim of laryngeal tuberculosis. He was just 40 when he passed on June 3, 1924. One of the greatest German-language writers of the last century, this Prague-born Czech Jew left behind an eclectic collection of novels, short stories, diaries and notebooks. […]
The highly-acclaimed Polish television series, Wartime Girls, has reached its fifth and final season. This is regrettable because it has been a stellar production from start to finish in every respect. The concluding 13 episodes, which are available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform from May 8 onward, bring the story to a close. Wartime Girls, […]