Ido and Yael Zand’s “fish-out-of-water” documentary, Gut Shabbes Vietnam, is captivatingly intriguing and appealing. Now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform, which specializes in Jewish and Israeli topics, it is mostly set in Ho Chi Minh City, which, until Vietnam’s unification in 1975, was known as Saigon. The film opens in 2006 in Jerusalem as […]
The displacement of some 700,000 Palestinians from their homes in what is now Israel, an event known as the nakba, has been a topic of international concern for more than seven decades now. During and after this upheaval, close to 850,000 Jews in the Arab world and Iran left or were compelled to leave their homes. […]
Carl Laemmle was truly one of the pioneers of the Hollywood movie industry. He founded and managed Universal Studios, which would be the biggest film producer in the United States. And he launched the careers of, among others, the director John Ford and the actress Mary Pickford. This German Jewish immigrant is profiled in James […]
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 […]
Less than three weeks after Israel and Turkey officially restored full diplomatic relations, following an acrimonious break of four years, a Turkish naval vessel docked in Haifa in an unmistakable sign that the normalization process has begun in earnest. The Kemalreis, a frigate, arrived in Haifa on September 3 to participate in a NATO exercise alongside […]
Fabian Nury’s Paris Police 1900 is set against the backdrop of the sensational Dreyfus affair, which split France down the middle in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A moody police procedural and a taut political drama, it will be available in Canada and the United States on the MHz Choice streaming platform on September 20. […]
When he died on August 30 at the age of 91, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, left an indelible legacy as a bold and courageous visionary who upended the stultifying political and economic status quo in his country. Through his innovative policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), he gradually dismantled […]
Nine months after Adolf Hitler assumed power in Germany, a Polish Jewish socialist named Mikhal Astour published an article in a Warsaw Yiddish journal warning of the dark future that awaited Poland’s 3.3 million Jews and the three million Jews of Hungary, Romania, Latvia and Lithuania. “That which has happened in Germany … is only […]
Amid the dark clouds of the Holocaust, there was a remarkable silver lining. Not a single Jewish citizen of Bulgaria, an ally of Nazi Germany, was murdered. Indeed, all 49,000 Bulgarian Jews survived this unfathomable ordeal. Jacky and Lisa Comforty, whose ancestors hail from Bulgaria, explore this asterisk in the annals of the Holocaust. Their […]
Fifty seven years had elapsed since I watched Ship of Fools, and now I had the chance to revisit it thanks to the Turner Classic Movies channel. Would Stanley Kramer’s 2 hour-and-29-minute feature film be as absorbing, perceptive and impressive as it had been in 1965? Or would it be an outdated and kitschy relic best […]