The fourth season of Fauda is back on Netflix, and that’s good news. Until now, this scintillating Middle Eastern thriller pitted an Israeli special forces team against Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip affiliated with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, both of which reject Israel’s existence. The latest installment, which is partially set in […]
Conspiracy theories have spanned the centuries, feeding human impulses like jealousy, anger, insecurity and fear and often causing needless death and destruction. This explosive topic is explored in “Conspiracy,” the first episode of Lewis Cohen’s Truth & Lies, a six-part television series on TVO and tvo.org that starts on January 17 at 9 p.m. and runs […]
Warsaw 1942. The third season of Wartime Girls, an atmospheric and suspenseful Polish television series that will be available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform starting on January 12, takes place in that fateful year. It unfolds in Polish, German and English and revolves around three young Polish women from different socio-economic and religious backgrounds. Ewa […]
Bernard (Bernie) Madoff was the ultimate fraudster, a revered Wall Street trader and investment advisor who bilked his clients to the tune of $64 billion. Madoff’s epic Ponzi scheme, which went bust during the great financial crisis of 2008, is the subject of Joe Berlinger’s fascinating four-part Netflix series, Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street. […]
Loneliness, a soul-crushing phenomenon, is the theme that drives Significant Other, an Israeli TV series now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform. Created by Dana Modan and Assi Cohen, and directed by Ram Nehari, this comedic-infused drama revolves around an unmarried middle-aged woman (Modan) and a newly divorced man (Cohen) in Tel Aviv who yearn […]
Julia Haart, the central character in the Netflix reality series My Unorthodox Life, finds herself at loose ends in the first of nine episodes of the second season. Haart, in the first season, reinvented herself when she filed for divorce and abruptly abandoned her ultra-Orthodox lifestyle in the Jewish enclave of Monsey, New York. Eight […]
Israeli women whose recalcitrant husbands refuse to grant them a divorce, or gett, are known in Hebrew as agunot. Tragically, they are figuratively chained to their husbands, unable to live normally, or restart their lives. This egregious and unjust system, presided over by Orthodox rabbis and tolerated by the Israeli government, has been in existence […]
The second season of Tehran, an Apple TV and Israeli state television co-production, lives up to expectations. Tehran, in its debut season, introduced us to a cast of canny Israeli and Iranian spies trying to outwit each other before and after an Israeli air raid intended to wipe out Iran’s nuclear arsenal. In the latest and […]
From 1933 until 1945, a momentous 12-year period encompassing the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime and the onset of the Holocaust, the United States admitted 225,000 European Jewish refugees. This was more than any other country, but only a fraction of the Jews in jeopardy who clamored to find a safe haven in […]
Netflix’s new, mildly entertaining eight-part series, Mo, comically focuses on the trials and tribulations of a displaced Palestinian refugee family in Texas. It could very well be the first American television production exclusively about Palestinian migrants in the United States. The American standup comedian Mohammed Amer plays the central character, Mohammed Najjar, who lives in Houston […]