Evan Jackson Leong’s grim feature film, Snakehead, takes us into the dark, often violent and ugly world of human trafficking. Currently available on VOD platforms, it is set mainly in New York City’s Chinatown. The chief character is a young Chinese migrant whose credo is survival and who ruthlessly transforms herself into a smuggler. Sister Tse […]
Chaim Nachman Bialik is Israel’s national poet, though he was not born in what is now Israel and lived there for only about a decade. A Russian Jew and a fervent Zionist, he played a central role in the revival of the Hebrew language and culture. A street was named after him in Tel Aviv, […]
Shots rang out in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem neighborhood on a winter night in 1986, prompting a resident to call the police. Arriving to investigate, Avi Samuel entered a two-storey building and stumbled upon a nightmarish scene. Nissim Cohen, 44, and his wife, Leah, 40, had been brutally murdered in their bed. Judging by their gruesome […]
Israel has a vital stake in the military coup that shook Sudan a few days ago. On October 25, a little more than a year after the United States announced that Sudan had agreed to forge official relations with Israel, chaos enveloped the capital, Khartoum, placing Israel’s normalization pact with Sudan under a cloud of […]
Francine Pelletier’s 52-minute biopic, Mordecai Richler: The Last Of The Wild Jews, skims over rather than examines the late Canadian writer’s career. Nonetheless, her documentary, now being screened online by the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation, is thought-provoking and never less than interesting. Released nine years after his untimely death in 2001 at the age of 70, […]
Netflix is currently presenting an eclectic selection of Palestinian feature films and shorts under the rubric of Palestinian Stories. It’s a definite sign of the times, underscoring the strides the Palestinian cause has made in recent years. I watched one feature-length movie, Salt Of This Sea, and two shorts, The Crossing and Ave Maria, all of […]
Jews, having been accused of killing Christ, were generally perceived as criminals and murderers in medieval and early modern Europe. Prejudiced Christians claimed they engaged in ritual murder and sought to defraud and impoverish their non-Jewish neighbors. “While these accusations were, for the most part, unfounded, in other cases the accusations were not altogether baseless,” […]
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s first face-to-face meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Black Sea resort town of Sochi on October 22 appears to have been a success. Their talks were scheduled to last two hours, but went on for five hours, an unmistakable sign that matters of mutual importance were discussed on a […]
On April 12, 1934, an exceptionally beautiful spring day, Adolf Hitler arrived in Norway aboard the Deutschland, a new pocket battleship, on a brief and unpublicized vacation. It was his first trip abroad since becoming Germany’s chancellor a year earlier. He was accompanied by Admiral Erich Raeder, the commander of the German navy, and Werner […]
Jair Bolsonaro, the president of Brazil, should be ashamed of himself. Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, he has recklessly ingored the best scientific advice and flouted the soundest public health measures to keep it at bay, thereby exposing Brazilians to the full deadly impact of Covid-19. A right-wing populist, he has minimized the […]