My Mexican Shivah is quite the hybrid, a feature film that unfolds in Spanish, Yiddish and Hebrew in contemporary Mexico City. Alejandro Springall’s drama/comedy, based on a novel by Ilan Stavans, is now being screened online by the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation. It’s divided into seven segments, each representing a day of a week-long shivah to […]
Lebanese President Michel Aoun is incredibly out of touch with reality. Judging by the comments he made on August 5, following a sudden escalation of tension on Israel’s border with Lebanon, one can only conclude that he inhabits a surreal, topsy-turvy world. On August 4, Palestinian forces in Lebanon fired three rockets at Israel. One […]
Borscht Belt standup comedian Jackie Mason died last month, but he metaphorically returns from the dead in Barry Avrich’s movie, Jackie Mason: The Ultimate Jew, which is being screened online by the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation. Released in 2008, the film portrays the inimitable Mason in his final one-man show on Broadway. Speaking in a heavy […]
On the eve of Passover in 2020, with the coronavirus pandemic raging in Israel, the Israeli government imposed a closure on Bnei Brak. Attempting to curb its spread in this ultra-Orthodox enclave near Tel Aviv, the government had no alternative but to deploy a drastic measure. The manner in which its haredi inhabitants responded to […]
Morris (Moe) Berg was an anomaly in the best sense of the word. Wielding brains and braun, he was an intellectual, a professional athlete and coach, and a spy. Call him a Renaissance Man, if you will. It would not be far-fetched to say he was the most unusual person ever to play Major League […]
Is Russia running out of patience with Israel’s ongoing air campaign in Syria? Is Russia planning to curb them? These questions bubbled to the surface late last month after two related developments. First, the London-based Arabic newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, citing a “well-informed” Russian source, claimed that Russia is planning a shift in its current policy […]
The German word “zeitgeist” denotes the spirit of an era and could easily apply to Nazi Germany’s genocidal project to exterminate European Jews during the Holocaust. In just six short years, from 1939 to 1945, the deranged leaders of what had been a cultured and civilized country embarked on an unprecedented campaign of ethnic cleansing […]
Alfred Ker, the prominent German Jewish theater critic and essayist, was hounded out of Germany after the rise of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime. He never returned, migrating from one country to the next with his family and living out the rest of his life in Britain, his adopted homeland. Ker’s daughter, Judith Kerr, became a […]
Ty Roberts’ 12 Mighty Orphans, which opens in Canada on August 6, is an uplifting account of triumph over adversity. Inspired by true events, and taking place in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1938, it reaffirms the adage that a lot can be wrung from little. A football coach arrives at an orphanage and, against all odds, […]
We’ve reached a critical point in the global battle to obliterate the coronavirus pandemic, which has so far killed about four million people, battered national economies, and upended lives on a monumental and frightening scale. Hundreds of millions of people have done their duty and submitted to vaccinations. But far too many steadfastly refuse to […]