Shimon Peres, Israel’s three-time prime minister and ninth president, was a dreamer who fused idealism with practicality. A hawk who was instrumental in building the Israeli armed forces in the late 1940s and 1950s, he was also a dove who strove for peace with the Palestinians and Israel’s Arab neighbors in the 1990s. Peres, who […]
The Polish TV series Wartime Girls is back for a second season on the ChaiFlicks Jewish streaming platform. This is good news because Michal Rogalski’s drama, set during the German occupation of Poland from 1939 to 1945, is compelling and entertaining, judging by the first four of 13 episodes. Three characters, all young women from completely […]
In one of the most audacious deception operations of World War II, Britain tricked Nazi Germany into thinking that Allied armies would invade Greece rather than Sicily. The Germans fell for the ruse, thereby saving thousands of soldiers’ lives and bringing Germany and the Axis powers one step closer to ignominious defeat. John Madden’s competently-crafted […]
Magen David Adom, an Israeli paramedic organization, is busy day and night tending to the sick and wounded. Its staff of 25,000 medics and 29,000 volunteers respond to a wide assortment of emergencies ranging from traffic accidents to terrorist attacks. Martin Himel, a Canadian journalist based in Israel, has been one of its volunteers for the […]
Less than two decades after Nazi Germany went down to defeat in World War II, the National Socialist Movement, a British neo-Nazi party headquartered in London, garnered notoriety through rallies, marches and antisemitic attacks. Ridley Road, a four-part BBC Masterpiece series being presented by the PBS network every Sunday until May 22, skillfully resurrects this […]
Before Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shot to international stardom as the charismatic leader of a besieged nation invaded by its Russian neighbor, he was a comedian who starred in Servant of the People, a popular television series in Ukraine made by his production company. Currently available on Netflix, this amusing sitcom is a remarkable case […]
Shimon Hayut, alias Simon Leviev and David Sharon, is a notorious swindler. Posing as the son of a prominent Israeli diamond dealer, he wormed himself into the lives of guillable single European women and cheated them out of millions of dollars in what can only be described as a romantic Ponzi scheme. Hayut’s career as […]
My Best Friend Anne Frank, a Dutch film being streamed on Netflix, offers insights into the best-known victim of the Holocaust. Hannah Goslar was Anne’s closest friend. Like Anne, she was a German Jew whose family had been forced out of Nazi Germany and had resettled in Holland. In Ben Sombogaart’s one-hour-and-forty-three minute film, which […]
Munich: The Edge of War transports viewers into the realm of the imagination, asking them to imagine two “what if” moments in European history. What if Britain and France had steadfastly resisted German aggression and refused to hand over the Sudetenland on a silver platter to Adolf Hitler? And what might have happened in Europe had […]
Several years before the Israeli television drama Shtisel took Israel by storm, Srugim was drawing in a multitude of viewers. Shtisel and Srugim ran from 2013 until 2021 and from 2008 until 2012 respectively. They unfolded in Jerusalem and were about the everyday lives of religiously observant Israelis. While Shtisel’s main characters were ultra-Orthodox Jews, Srugim […]