The Toronto International Film Festival is presenting a retrospective from March 10-16 on the late Hollywood movie director Sidney Lumet (1924-2011). Five of his films — 12 Angry Men, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Network and The Prince of the City — will be screened at the TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King West). One of his […]
The horrible things my eyes have seen are indescribable,” Marcel Nadjari, an Auschwitz-Birkenau prisoner, wrote in 1944. Nadjari, a Greek Jew, was a member of the Sonderkommando, a squad of inmates charged with the grisly, inhumane task of herding newly-arrived Jews into the gas chamber, extracting valuables from their corpses, removing their bodies and placing them […]
The Gaza Strip, governed by Hamas since its election victory in 2006, may yet drag Israel into another war. Last month, Israel’s chief of staff, General Gadi Eisenkot, warned the Israeli cabinet that deteriorating humanitarian and economic conditions in Gaza — electricity, water and food shortages — are driving Israel and Hamas toward armed conflict […]
On March 11, 1978, the worst single act of terrorism on Israeli soil since independence, resulted in the deaths of 38 Israelis, including 13 children. Another 71 were wounded. The specific incident, though hardly remembered today, had, as it turned out, long-lasting consequences. A game changer with respect to Israel’s future involvement in Lebanon, it led […]
At long last, a member of the British royal house will visit Israel in an official capacity. The news that Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge, will travel to Israel in the summer to participate in ceremonies marking Israel’s 70th anniversary is long overdue. Better late than never. In addition to Israel, the prince, who’s […]
A 60-year-old subservient wife strikes a blow for women’s rights in Mina Shum’s low-key but forceful film, Meditation Park, which opens in Canada on March 9. The Chinese Canadian woman in question, Maria Wang (Cheng Pei Pei), lives in an immigrant district in Vancouver. An ideal submissive spouse as far as her husband, Bing (Tzi […]
Contemporary Shanghai is a modern, pulsating metropolis of 24 million inhabitants, a microcosm of China’s astonishing ascension to super power status. But from the late 1930s to the mid-1940s, when it was occupied by Japan, this vibrant city was a haven for some 20,000 European Jewish refugees, primarily from Germany and Austria but also from […]
Delivering a lecture in 1979, the German scholar Eberhard Jackel nailed it when he said, “We Germans were liberated from (Adolf) Hitler, but we’ll never shake him off. Hitler will always be with us … He is present — not as a living figure, but as an eternal cautionary monument to what human beings are […]
Niki Caro’s The Zookeeper’s Wife, now available on the Netflix streaming network, is a film that will most likely please the current Polish government, which presents Poland as a model of resistance and a beacon of righteousness during the German occupation from 1939 to 1945. Based on real-life events, it’s the inspirational story of a Polish […]
Israel and its northern neighbor, Lebanon, are embroiled in three disputes that could spill over into violence. On February 12, Lebanese President Michel Aoun warned they could yet trigger a war. Despite the gravity of the situation, major newspapers in North America have virtually ignored the brewing tensions, possibly because they were overshadowed by a sudden […]