Jews, Christians and Muslims in medieval Spain practically invented the concept of multiculturalism. For hundreds of years, long before it crumbled under the weight of the Inquisition, they lived together in comparative harmony and shared a common culture. This golden era of coexistence, known as La Convivencia, took place in what the Muslims called Al-Andulus. […]
Netflix’s ten-part series, Greatest Events of World War II in Color, is comprehensive and sweeping in scope, a definitive treatment of a conflict that revolutionized modern warfare, caused the deaths of millions of soldiers and civilians, and brought with it unparalleled atrocities against the Jewish population of Europe. The expertly restored and colorized footage is graphic, […]
Nazi war criminals have been brought to justice in a succession of trials since the Holocaust. The trial of John Demjanjuk — a naturalized American citizen of Ukrainian descent accused of being the notorious Ivan the Terrible — still resonates three decades later. An infamously brutal guard who worked at the Treblinka and Sobibor extermination camps […]
Chuck Lorre’s Netflix comedy series, The Kominsky Method, is back again. I thoroughly enjoyed the 2018 debut season, and this year’s version is just as comical and satisfying. Starring Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin, and set in Los Angeles, it’s essentially about the pitfalls and perils of aging in America. The themes are topical and […]
Call it, if you will, green gold. The cultivation of avocados has become a massive business in the past few decades, particularly in California, Mexico and Chile. But the industry in these countries faces difficult challenges, according to an intriguing Netflix documentary, The Avocado War. The avocado, once dismissed as fatty and unhealthy, is now […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]