Polish journalist Ksawery Pruszynski visited Mandate Palestine in 1933 at the suggestion of his Jewish friend, Mojzesz Pomeranz, a Zionist who would settle in Tel Aviv toward the end of that decade. Pruszynski, a conservative Pole from an aristocratic family hailing from what is now Ukraine, met Pomeranz when they were both studying law at […]
Philip Roth, the great American novelist, was 77 when he agreed to be interviewed for Roth on Roth, a nearly one hour documentary by William Karel and Livia Manera in which he bares his soul. Speaking candidly, he discusses a wide range of issues. Roth on Roth, currently being screened online by the Toronto Jewish Film […]
Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky was one of the titans of the Zionist movement, yet his residency in Palestine, the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, was extremely brief. A cosmopolitan Russian Jew fluent in nine languages, he was both a political theoretician and organizer, as well as a man of letters. During his life, he oscillated […]
Evan Jackson Leong’s grim feature film, Snakehead, takes us into the dark, often violent and ugly world of human trafficking. Currently available on VOD platforms, it is set mainly in New York City’s Chinatown. The chief character is a young Chinese migrant whose credo is survival and who ruthlessly transforms herself into a smuggler. Sister Tse […]
Chaim Nachman Bialik is Israel’s national poet, though he was not born in what is now Israel and lived there for only about a decade. A Russian Jew and a fervent Zionist, he played a central role in the revival of the Hebrew language and culture. A street was named after him in Tel Aviv, […]
Shots rang out in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem neighborhood on a winter night in 1986, prompting a resident to call the police. Arriving to investigate, Avi Samuel entered a two-storey building and stumbled upon a nightmarish scene. Nissim Cohen, 44, and his wife, Leah, 40, had been brutally murdered in their bed. Judging by their gruesome […]
Israel has a vital stake in the military coup that shook Sudan a few days ago. On October 25, a little more than a year after the United States announced that Sudan had agreed to forge official relations with Israel, chaos enveloped the capital, Khartoum, placing Israel’s normalization pact with Sudan under a cloud of […]
Francine Pelletier’s 52-minute biopic, Mordecai Richler: The Last Of The Wild Jews, skims over rather than examines the late Canadian writer’s career. Nonetheless, her documentary, now being screened online by the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation, is thought-provoking and never less than interesting. Released nine years after his untimely death in 2001 at the age of 70, […]
Netflix is currently presenting an eclectic selection of Palestinian feature films and shorts under the rubric of Palestinian Stories. It’s a definite sign of the times, underscoring the strides the Palestinian cause has made in recent years. I watched one feature-length movie, Salt Of This Sea, and two shorts, The Crossing and Ave Maria, all of […]
Jews, having been accused of killing Christ, were generally perceived as criminals and murderers in medieval and early modern Europe. Prejudiced Christians claimed they engaged in ritual murder and sought to defraud and impoverish their non-Jewish neighbors. “While these accusations were, for the most part, unfounded, in other cases the accusations were not altogether baseless,” […]