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 […]
Regrettably, Russia has stepped up its criticism of Israel of late, with the Russian embassy in Cairo and Russia’s Foreign Ministry having issued hypocritical critiques of Israel in the past week. Most recently, Russia’s embassy in Cairo posted a screenshot of a tweet Yair Lapid, the Israeli prime minister and foreign minister, posted in April bemoaning […]
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 […]