Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s minister of propaganda, recognized the importance of movies as the regime’s primary method of communicating with and winning over the masses of Germans. From the moment Adolf Hitler ascended to power, Goebbels calculatingly used the film industry to his and the Nazis’ advantage. During an eventful period of 12 years, he was the […]
Ruth Wisse was one of the lucky ones. As she writes in the first paragraph of her wide-ranging, stimulating book, Free As A Jew: A Personal Memoir Of National Self-Liberation (Wicked Son), “I was four years old when my parents engineered our escape from Europe … Had they not managed our flight in the summer […]
It will come as no surprise to the well-informed class that openly-expressed antisemitism has been on an upward trajectory in the United States for the past few years. Antisemitic incidents, as measured by the Anti-Defamation League, have been steadily on the increase since 2017. Rising Hate: Antisemitism in America, a special report carried by CNN […]
Last year, an outfit in Canada known as the Community Media Advocacy Center received $133,000 from the federal government to build an anti-racism strategy for Canadian broadcasting. The grant, approved by the Housing, Diversity and Inclusion ministry, was channelled to the Department of Canadian Heritage. The funds enabled the center to hire a senior consultant […]
Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer released a morale-boosting film during World War II that has since been recognized as a Hollywood classic. It was recently broadcast by the Turner Classic Movies channel. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, directed by Melvyn LeRoy, with a screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, is based on a book written by Ted Lawson, a pilot who […]
Fred Zinnemann’s 1944 American drama, The Seventh Cross, is a rarity — one of the very few Hollywood movies about German concentration camps that was made during World War II. I saw it on the Turner Classic Movies channel. Adapted from a 1942 novel by the German refugee writer Anna Seghers, it was a commercial hit […]
Yuval Adler’s taut Middle Eastern thriller, Bethlehem, is a microcosm of Israel’s bitter and protracted conflict with the Palestinians. Now available for viewing on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform, Adler’s debut feature film unfolds menacingly in the West Bank Palestinian town of Bethlehem and in nearby Jerusalem during the second Palestinian uprising, which raged from 2000 […]
Blending fact and fiction with exuberant abandon, Avida Livny’s “what-if” Israeli movie, Max Baer’s Last Right Hook, recreates an event that could well have happened. Currently being presented online by the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation, it stars the irrepressible Max Baer (1909-1959), who was the half-Jewish U.S. heavyweight boxing champion from 1934 to 1935. Bending […]
Salman Rushdie, the preeminent novelist who had been living under the threat of an assassination since the publication of his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, is thankfully alive and recovering from a premeditated and frenzied attack on August 12. “The road to recovery has begun,” Andrew Wylie, his agent, said on August 14. “It will be […]
Jason Greenblatt, one of the architects of Donald Trump’s ill fated plan to resolve Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians, has written a comprehensive book about his days as a U.S. diplomat. As its longish title suggests, In The Path of Abraham: How Donald Trump Made Peace In The Middle East — And How To Stop […]