On August 8, a day after the conclusion of Operation Breaking Dawn, Israel’s three-day preemptive military campaign against Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip, Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid offered its two million Palestinian inhabitants a viable path to peace. In a television address from the headquarters of the Israeli armed forces in Tel Aviv, Lapid […]
Journalism commands Hollywood’s undying interest and respect. Since the advent of the talkies in the late 1920s, the ink-stained wretches of the fourth estate have been featured in a procession of middling to tremendous movies ranging from The Front Page (1931) and His Girl Friday (1941) to All The President’s Men (1976) and The Paper (1994). […]
Duki Dror’s whimsical documentary, There Are No Lions In Tel Aviv, charts the formation of the first zoo in pre-state Israel and fleshes out the personality of its eccentric founder, Rabbi Mordecai Schornstein. This one-hour film is now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform, which specializes in Jewish and Israeli topics. The zoo was officially […]
It was a case of deja vu all over again. The latest outbreak of cross-border fighting in and around the Gaza Strip petered out in the waning hours of August 7 following a ceasefire brokered by Egypt. The three-day conflict was the most intense round of warfare since the fourth Gaza war in May 2021, which […]
On September 20, 1940, Adam Czerniakow, the chairman of the Nazi-appointed Jewish Council (Judenrat) in the Warsaw ghetto, was summoned to the office of Ludwig Leist, the governor of German-occupied Warsaw. Leist ordered him to establish a Jewish police force. Known as the Jewish Order Service, it was modelled after the Jewish Council’s Security Guard, which […]
Ayman al-Zawahri, a jihadist writ large, lived and died by the sword. After assuming the leadership of Al Qaeda following Osama bin Laden’s assassination in 2011, he promised to “terrify” the United States with a spate of terrorist attacks. “Blood for blood,” he boasted in a theatrical video released about a month after American commandos killed […]
Twitter’s “terms of service” policy on “hateful conduct” forbids users to abuse others with “repeated slurs, tropes or other content” that “dehumanizes” or “degrades” them. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has chronically violated Twitter’s policy, yet his accounts in English and an assortment of other languages remain intact. Over the years, Khamenei has exploited Twitter […]
What’s in a name? An awful lot if you’re a German and living in Germany. Sonke Wortmann’s How About Adolf? deals with this complex issue by lampooning German attitudes toward its Nazi past. A dark and effervescent satire informed by Germany’s greatest demon, Adolf Hitler, it is now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform. The plot is straightforward. Elisabeth […]
Israel’s occupation of the West Bank rests, in part, on a multiplicity of laws. Ra’anan Alexandrowicz examines them in his probing documentary, The Law In These Parts, which is currently being presented online by the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation. The system, drawn up before Israel’s conquest of the West Bank in 1967, is based on […]
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban ventured into dangerous terrain recently when he made the racially-charged argument that Europeans should not become “peoples of mixed race.” Speaking to members of Romania’s Hungarian minority in Transylvania, he lambasted the “flood” of non-European migrants being “forced” on Hungary and assured his listeners he sought to prevent it from […]