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, […]
Tom Ripley, the cunning villain in Patricia Highsmith’s novel, is the quintessential con artist, always poised to pounce on his latest victim. Matt Damon portrayed him with aplomb in The Talented Mr. Ripley in 1999. Andrew Scott plays him with crafty coolness in Ripley, which currently unfolds in eight episodes on the Netflix streaming platform. […]
Beverly Hills, a bucolic suburb of Los Angeles, is synonymous with ostentatious wealth and materialism. Multimillionaires, billionaires and celebrities are at home here. The luxurious mansions in which they live are beyond the reach of 99 percent of Americans. They are reserved for the super-rich, the pampered and self-centred individuals who are blithely immune to […]
Albert Einstein, the most brilliant theoretical physicist of his generation, was torn by an abiding sense of responsibility and guilt after the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the summer of 1945. The enormous blasts killed tens of thousands of people, but hastened Japan’s surrender and the […]
Israel was irretrievably traumatized and changed by Hamas’ murderous rampage on October 7, 2023. Israelis are still grieving and taking stock, but in the meantime, they can look back in reflection. Times of War, a series of very short stand-alone documentaries by the Times of Israel about this unprecedented massacre, delves into that reflective process. It […]
The present-day borders of the Middle East were formed a century ago as Britain and France redrew its map. With the collapse of the far-flung Ottoman Empire, these colonial powers established League of Nations mandates in Palestine (Israel), Trans-Jordan (Jordan), Syria, Lebanon and Mesopotamia (Iraq), paving the way for the emergence of sovereign independent states. […]