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. […]
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) […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
A self-contained universe vanished into cyber space after the last segment of Black Money Love, a marathon Turkish soap opera broadcast on Netflix, ended on an upbeat, if unpredictable, note. My wife and I watched all 164 episodes over a period of more than a month, fixated by the story line, the characters and the […]
Justice is elusive in Argentina. The bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires nearly 26 years ago, the worst antisemitic crime since the Holocaust and the most deadly act of terrorism in Argentina, remains murky to this day. Alberto Nisman, the Jewish Argentinian prosecutor assigned to the case, was found dead in his […]
Should the Allies have bombed the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland and the railway tracks leading to it? This is one of the most burning moral questions of the 20th century, and it’s examined in some depth in Bombing Auschwitz, a taut and absorbing documentary by Tim Dunn due to be broadcast by the PBS […]