It’s a big “what if” question with sweeping, sickening ramifications. What if Nazi Germany and Japan had won World War II, conquered the United States and divided it among themselves? This scenario, too horrible even to contemplate, is skillfully fleshed out in Amazon Prime’s series, The Man in the High Castle, which ran from 2015 until … Read More
He was a predator whose unquenchable thirst for underage girls classified him as a pervert. Jeffrey Epstein, a financier whose estate was worth $577 million at his death, created what one lawyer aptly described as a pyramid sex trafficking scheme. Epstein, having sated his lust, passed his victims on to friends in high places. Being … Read More
Phil Rosenthal is back for a third, though abbreviated, season in Somebody Feed Phil, a goofy five-part food show currently streaming on the Netflix network. Rosenthal, the creator of the immensely popular sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, is a gourmand rather than a gourmet. Which means he has an instinctive rather than a refined approach to … Read More
The coronavirus pandemic has been with us for about four months, sickening and killing people and disrupting economies around the world. In all probability, years will elapse before it is finally eradicated. An equally deadly virus, which mutates across borders and cultures and has caused the deaths of millions of people, has endured for centuries. … Read More
In what can only be described as a heretical break with the past, the Saudi Arabian-owned MBC channel, the largest private broadcaster in the Arab world, recently broadcast a drama and a comedy that respectively portrays Jews in a positive light and lampoons Arab attitudes to Israel. The shows, Umm Haroun (The Mother of Aaron) … Read More
By all appearances, Barry and Karen Mason were a conventional middle-class Jewish couple defined by their normality and inconspicuousness. Yet the Masons were different, perhaps even subversive. For 30 years, until the summer of 2012, they ran Circus of Books, a gay pornography bookshop in Los Angeles, and distributed hardcore gay movies. The Masons are … Read More
The third season of Fauda, the popular Israeli miniseries developed by Lior Raz and Avi Isaacharoff, is now available on Netflix. Expertly directed by Rotem Shamir, and featuring a first-rate cast of Hebrew and Arabic-speaking Jewish and Arab actors, this thriller transports viewers into the maelstrom of the Arab-Israeli conflict. As in the previous two … Read More
Harvey Weinstein, the former Hollywood mogul, is justly behind bars after having been convicted in February of rape and sexual assault and sentenced to 23 years in prison. But Weinstein’s legal problems are far from over. On April 10, Los Angeles County charged him with one felony count of sexual battery. The scale of his … Read More
When the Islamic State organization reached its peak of power and influence five or six years ago, new starry-eyed recruits poured in from Europe, augmenting its ranks by a fairly significant margin. Some were Muslims and still others were European and Asian Christian converts to Islam, fired up by the messianic notion of creating a … Read More
Alienated from the insular and regimented ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in New York City in which she was raised, Esther (Esty) Shapiro severs her ties with it, leaves her husband and starts a radically new life in Berlin. Esty, 19, is the central character in Maria Schrader’s four-part Netflix series, Unorthodox, which is inspired by Deborah … Read More