Two Palestinian uprisings in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have broken out in the past 36 years, the first in 1987 and the second in 2000. A third intifada is looming in light of a significant upsurge of Palestinian violence, Israeli retaliatory raids, and the absence of any movement toward resolving the century-old […]
Fiona Murphy’s bitter-sweet documentary, Remember Baghdad, is a cinematic ode to a lost, once glorious Jewish community. Now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform, it looks back to an era when the possibilities for Jews in Iraq seemed promising and limitless. This golden period lasted for slightly less than 25 years, from approximately 1917 to 1940, […]
Seventy five years ago this month, two Polish Jewish refugees and their infant son arrived in Canada, a distant nation of peace, tranquility and stability and their future place in the sun. David and Genia Kirschner, my parents, were Holocaust survivors in their early thirties when they set foot in the new world in the […]
Spain was supposedly a neutral power during World War II, yet the Spanish government was resolutely in Germany’s camp. In the summer of 1941, Spain dispatched a largely voluntary expeditionary force, known as the Blue Division, to fight alongside Germany in the Soviet Union. Recruited by the Spanish army and the Fascist Party, or the […]
Janina Quint’s informative documentary, Germans & Jews, illustrates the degree to which their relations have radically improved since the Nazi era, yet remain troubled. Seven decades after the collapse of Adolf Hitler’s racist regime, Jews in the Diaspora continue to be suspicious of Germans and often recoil when they hear German, while Germans tend to feel […]
Their stiff body language was unmistakably indicative of their sharp policy differences over the combustible, still unresolved Palestinian issue. As U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken extolled the virtues of a two-state solution during his first trip to Israel following the formation last month of Benjamin Netanyahu’s far right-wing government, the Israeli prime minister archly […]
At a fraught moment when racial tensions in the United States are flaring yet again, Netflix is currently offering viewers You People, a romantic comedy set in Los Angeles that addresses this endemic issue. The central characters are not only white and black, but Jewish and Muslim. Quite a combustible combination, one would think. Ezra […]
The fourth season of Fauda is back on Netflix, and that’s good news. Until now, this scintillating Middle Eastern thriller pitted an Israeli special forces team against Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip affiliated with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, both of which reject Israel’s existence. The latest installment, which is partially set in […]
The release of Kjell Grede’s feature film, Good Evening, Mr. Wallenberg, was unfortunately timed, having come out in the same year as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. Which meant, in hindsight, that it was drowned out by the sheer power and popularity of Spielberg’s epic movie, the recipient of seven Academy Awards, including best picture. Both films […]
Sunday, July 23, 1944 was the blackest of days for the Jews of Rhodes, a mountainous island in the Aegean Sea eighteen kilometres off the coast of Turkey. On that catastrophic day, during the final ten months of World War II, the German occupiers set off air raid sirens to keep its residents indoors so […]