Krzysztof Lang, the director of March 1968, dedicates his empathetic and powerful film to old Jewish school friends who were compelled to leave Poland after the Polish communist regime launched an anti-Zionist campaign reeking of antisemitism. At least 15,000 Poles of Jewish descent emigrated in 1967 and 1968, having been falsely tarred as rootless cosmopolitans […]
Ady Walter’s cinematic portrayal of a shtetl in Ukraine before the Nazis and their collaborators murdered its Jewish inhabitants is heartwarming and heartbreaking. Shttl, a mostly black-and-white movie written and directed by Walter, is due to be screened on January 16 and 17 in its North American premiere at the New York Jewish Film Festival. Haunting […]
Alain Sauma’s satirical short film, Blue Line, focuses on a flashpoint in the Middle East, Israel’s sometimes volatile border with Lebanon. Currently being presented online by the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation, this movie turns on a beefy Lebanese cow that strays into Israel, setting off a burst of excitement and anxiety on both sides of the […]
Warsaw 1942. The third season of Wartime Girls, an atmospheric and suspenseful Polish television series that will be available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform starting on January 12, takes place in that fateful year. It unfolds in Polish, German and English and revolves around three young Polish women from different socio-economic and religious backgrounds. Ewa […]
Bernard (Bernie) Madoff was the ultimate fraudster, a revered Wall Street trader and investment advisor who bilked his clients to the tune of $64 billion. Madoff’s epic Ponzi scheme, which went bust during the great financial crisis of 2008, is the subject of Joe Berlinger’s fascinating four-part Netflix series, Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street. […]
Paul Gruninger was the Oskar Schindler of Switzerland. Instrumental in saving the lives of 3,60o Austrian Jews from 1938 to 1939, he was the police commander of the St. Gallen district, near Austria and Germany. Alain Gsponer’s absorbing movie, The Gruninger File: One Step To Freedom, is based on real events. Now available on the ChaiFlicks […]
Kiryas Joel, a New York town in the Catskill Mountains 80 kilometres northwest of New York City, is a quintessential European-style shtetl designed to evoke a traditional East European past. KJ, as it is often called, is inhabited mostly by ultra-Orthodox Jews from the Satmar sect, which was founded by Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum (1887-1979) in […]
The first historians to conduct research on the Holocaust in Poland were its Jewish survivors. “They pioneered the study of the Holocaust from the perspective of the Jewish experience,” writes Mark L. Smith in The Yiddish Historians And The Struggle For A Jewish History Of The Holocaust, published by Wayne State University Press. As he […]
Toward the end of Tarzan Triumphs, the seventh of twelve Tarzan movies starring Johnny Weissmuller as the fictitious ape man, he exclaims, “Nazis bring trouble.” What an understatement! Tarzan should have reached this conclusion much sooner in this wartime film, but what do you expect from a primitive man cut off from the world and […]
Israel’s new government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yet again, was sworn in on December 29, nearly two months after he and his allies won a parliamentary majority in the November 1 general election, the fifth since 2019. By any yardstick, this is the most right-wing, religiously conservative government in Israel’s history. Critics, lambasting […]