Land , land! — This is the secret to the solution of the Jewish question, the Zionist ideologue Nathan Birnbaum wrote in 1893. While Zionists like Birnbaum regarded Palestine as a panacea for Jewish homelessness and the threat of antisemitism, territorialists looked elsewhere around the globe to resolve the problems that plagued Jews in the Diaspora. […]
Written and directed by Paul Weitz, Grandma is a modest, low-budget film about a hectic day in the life of a frazzled American grandmother. It opens in Canadian theaters on September 25. Elle Reid(Lily Tomlin), the grandma in question, is a poet and unemployed academic living on the margins in California. In the first scene of […]
With their relationship having sunk to a nadir in the past year, U.S. President Barack Obama hopes to mend ties with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the very near future. Obama has invited Netanyahu for discussions in Washington, D.C. on November 9. It will be their first meeting since the autumn of 2014. The […]
Hollywood, the dream factory and glamour destination, is an endless source of curiosity and fascination. This was particularly the case during Hollywood’s golden era in the 1930s, when the studio system was dominant and mega stars like Greta Garbo and Errol Flynn set hearts aflutter. This incarnation of Lotus Land is resurrected in a lavishly-illustrated […]
The American woman has left the cocoon of her home and entered the work force, thereby enriching herself and society at large. Artificial barriers have fallen or have been stormed, and the United States is better for it. As these words are written, the glass ceiling is being picked apart and dismantled by women who […]
It’s no secret that Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has an authoritarian bent of mind. And that includes his hatred of any criticism. That makes for a very hostile environment for the country’s journalists. One of the country’s preeminent newspapers, Hurriyet, which has a liberal secularist outlook, suffered two attacks on its offices in Istanbul earlier […]
Colombia , in the 1980s and 1990s, was in dire danger of degenerating into a dysfunctional narco state under the thrall of cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar. Netflix’s riveting 10-part series, Narcos, reconstructs Escobar’s rise to notoriety and his blood-soaked confrontations with the Colombian government. The show is narrated in understated tones by a U.S. Drug […]
It may surprise some that the infamous Hollywood blacklist, the subject of Trumbo, was almost single-handedly broken by the director of Exodus, the blockbuster movie about the birth pangs of a new nation, Israel. Trumbo, which premiered at this week’s Toronto International Film Festival, revolves around Dalton Trumbo, the screenwriter whose high-flying career was shattered by the […]
Amos Gitai’s chilling docudrama, Rabin: The Last Day, which will be screened at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 16 and 18, is ostensibly about Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination on November 4, 1995. But on a deeper level, it’s about the politically charged, divisive and poisonous atmosphere that emboldened his assassin, Yigal Amir, to kill […]
Lars Kraume’s German-language movie, The People Versus Fritz Bauer, bores into Germany’s dark past with unflinching intensity, exposing the raw wounds of its preeminent role in the Holocaust. Scheduled to be screened at the 40th Toronto International Film Festival on September 15 and 18, it takes place in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when West […]