Television
Undercover In The Jungle
I wish I could have joined Will Benson and his intrepid crew in the Amazon rainforest of Ecuador. They spent almost a month in one of its wildest, most inaccessible areas, installing about 50 remotely-operated cameras to trees, at nesting sites and on animal trails to film its exotic wildlife in real time. Benson’s documentary, Undercover […]
Steal A Pencil For Me
Michele Ohayon’s heart-felt documentary, Steal A Pencil For Me, now available on Netflix, is a highly unusual love story. Jack (Jaap) Polak and Ina Soep, both Holocaust survivors from Holland, met in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam in 1943 and nurtured their relationship in two concentration camps, Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen, before getting married. Due to class differences, they […]
The Spy
Eli Cohen, Israel’s greatest known spy, is the stuff of legends. Fifty four years after his death by hanging in Damascus, he still remains a revered figure in Israel. Gideon Raff’s six-part Netflix miniseries, The Spy, burnishes Cohen’s heroic image. In an inspired but improbable feat of casting, British actor Sacha Baron Cohen plays the […]
Bolivar Is Sweeping In Scope
Flipping through Netflix’s menu, I came upon Bolivar, the 60-part Colombian television series whose logo is illustrated by a heroic image of Simon Bolivar clad in a fancy dress uniform and sitting astride a white horse with its front feet kicked up in mid-air. Being somewhat familiar with his credentials as an ardent Venezuelan nationalist […]
The Red Sea Diving Resort
One of the most daring missions carried out by the Mossad unfolded in Sudan between 1979 and 1984. It was from there, a remote scuba diving resort on the Red Sea managed and run by Mossad agents, that Israel’s external intelligence agency smuggled thousands of Ethiopian Jews to Israel. This little-known operation is dramatized in The […]
Holocaust Escape Tunnel
At the end of 1943, with the Soviet army fast approaching Nazi-occupied Lithuania, the Germans selected 80 able-bodied Jewish prisoners from the Stutthof concentration camp to work in the Ponar forest, where an estimated 100,000 people, including 70,000 Lithuanian Jews, had been murdered in the past three years. Chained by the legs, the prisoners were instructed to […]
Family Business: A French Comedy Series
The legalization of cannabis in Western countries may well have inspired the creation of the six-part French-language comedy series, Family Business, which is now available on the Netflix streaming network. The plot is very current. The Hazans operate a modest kosher butcher shop in the Marais, a once heavily Jewish-populated neighborhood in Paris. It’s a […]
Hitler’s Holocaust Railways
Chris Tarrant, the host of Chris Tarrant: Extreme Railways, embarks on a harrowing journey in his latest episode, Hitler’s Holocaust Railways, which was broadcast on the PBS television network earlier this month. A British train enthusiast, he discusses the role of trains in the Holocaust, travels to places like Terezin (Theresienstadt), Auschwitz-Birkenau and Lodz, and talks […]
Rebel With A Cause
She was a radical revolutionary and a professional agitator. Emma Goldman, a headstrong woman of conviction and resolve, was an advocate of free speech, free love and birth control in an era when such liberties were usually regarded as subversive. Above all else, she was an anarchist, a non-conformist staunchly opposed to capitalism. Her life […]
The Last Survivors
Some survivors of the Holocaust were little more than children when they were subjected to cruelty beyond the imagination. The traumas they experienced are etched into their souls, if not their faces. Several of these individuals turn up in Arthur Cary’s absorbing documentary, The Last Survivors, which will be broadcast by the PBS television network […]
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