America in the 1930s seemed like fertile ground for the rise of home-grown fascism. Consider the anecdotal evidence. Increasing numbers of Americans were open to the wholesale transformation of the United States into a fascist dictatorship. Financially and psychologically hobbled by the Depression, they were receptive to authoritarianism and antisemitism. And they were inured to […]
Leopold Tyrmand (1920-1985), the scion of an assimilated Polish Jewish family, escaped into Germany, the lion’s den, as the Nazis carried out the mass murder of Jews in Poland during the Holocaust. After the war, he went back home and earned a living as a journalist. Stymied by the totalitarian nature of the postwar communist […]
Luke Holland’s frank and sober movie, Final Account, deals with two under-documented facets of the Holocaust — the German perpetrators who carried out their crimes and the bystanders who passively watched them happen. Now available on Netflix, it unfolds against the backdrop of mounting antisemitism in Nazi Germany and the eruption of the Kristallnacht pogrom, […]
Nations are sometimes compelled to fight for their very existence. Since the October 7 massacre of 1,400 Israelis and foreigners at the hands of Hamas, Israel has been fighting an existential war against a cruel enemy in the Gaza Strip. It is a war that could change the political landscape of the Middle East. Poland […]
Four million Jews were murdered in German extermination camps or succumbed to hunger and disease in Nazi ghettos during the Holocaust. A further two million Jews were killed by German firing squads, mainly in the Soviet Union and Poland. The cold-blooded shooters belonged to Einsatzgruppen mobile killing units and some 130 police battalions. Their overarching […]
The second season of Zeynap Gunay’s melodrama, The Club, which is now available on Netflix, tends to be melancholic. But in the tenth and final episode, the gloom dissipates and the light shines in. The main characters in this Turkish production, set in Istanbul in the late 1950s and 1960, are: Matilda (Gokce Bahadir), an […]
Tough, smart and resourceful women are at the center of Queens, an Israeli television series starting on September 19 on the MHZ streaming platform. They’re called upon to protect the family turf after Yaakov Malka, an underworld boss of Sephardi origin, is bumped off, along with his son and several associates, while partying aboard his […]
The Bat Mitzvah, a rite of passage in Jewish communities, is lampooned in a Netflix comedy starring Adam Sandler, his two daughters and wife. You Are So Not Invited To My Bat Mitzvah, set in the United States, filmed in the greater Toronto area and directed by Sami Cohen, zeroes in on the Friedmans, an […]
Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust, entered a not guilty plea at his trial in Jerusalem in 1961, claiming he was merely following orders and insisting he was a “nationalist” rather than an “antisemite.” The German-Jewish political scientist Hannah Arendt, who covered the proceedings for The New Yorker, implicitly endorsed his ludicrous […]
The Israeli historical drama, The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, is back for a second season on Netflix, and that’s good news. Based on a novel by Sarit Yishai-Levy, and unfolding in Hebrew, Ladino and English over 16 episodes, it is about the joys, disappointments and travails of a Sephardi family in Jerusalem during the British […]