The Alternative for Germany, the second largest political party in the Bundestag, is growing stronger, according to a sober and disturbing PBS documentary broadcast last week. In The Rise of Germany’s New Right, correspondent Evan Williams takes a hard look at this ultra right-wing populist party twelve years after its founding and suggests it is […]
The Palmach, the elite fighting unit of the Haganah self-defence force in British Mandate Palestine, is at the core of Palmach Rising, a 95-part Israeli television series now available on the Izzy streaming platform. Described as a teen drama, each episode is about 20 minutes in length. Judging by the first five, they are likely […]
The first season of House of Promises, a bright and atmospheric German-language period piece which takes place in Berlin from the late 1920s until the Nazi takeover in the 1930s, is now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform. The opening scene is captivating and original, hinting of much more to come. Arthur Grunberg (Alexander Scheer), […]
Beth Lane’s Netflix documentary, Unbroken, tells what is perhaps a unique story of survival during the Holocaust. By a stroke of good fortune, all seven siblings in a Jewish family in Nazi Germany managed to surmount adversity. At a time when being Jewish or even half-Jewish was tantamount to a virtual death sentence in Adolf […]
A new television series from Argentina, Family Therapy, an appealing melange of comedy and drama, is now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform. Set in contemporary Buenos Aires, and revolving around a secular Jewish family caught up in a crisis caused by the passing of a beloved relative, it is consistently entertaining. The central characters, […]
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 […]