Mothers pamper their children, but the single mom in Netalie Brown’s Israeli feature film wins first prize in this category. Anat (Dana Ivgy) is so protective of her son, Ido (Ben Sultan), that she threatens to emasculate him. Her obsessive actions unfold in Oxygen, a competently-crafted movie due to be screened at the Toronto Jewish […]
Israel’s occupation of the West Bank often interferes with the mobility of its Palestinian inhabitants, especially when they need to travel to Israel. This restriction is one of the sore points of the nearly three million Palestinians in the West Bank, which has been occupied by Israel since the 1967 Six Day War. Shai Carmelli […]
A rubber boom in the vast Amazon rainforest more than a century ago prompted a group of adventurous and courageous Jewish men and boys from Morocco to throw caution to the wind and set off to Brazil with little more than high hopes and suitcases. They ventured deep into the largely unexplored Amazonian basin, determined […]
Silwan, a largely Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem near the Temple Mount and the Western Wall, has emerged as a flashpoint in Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. In the past few years, 28 families, consisting of 160 Palestinians, have been forcibly displaced from their homes in Silwan, according to the United Nations. These displacements, having […]
Inspired by a true story, Elena’s War focuses on a Jewish heroine in fascist Italy. Scheduled to be screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, which runs from June 4-14, Stefano Casertano’s Italian movie revolves around Elena DiPorto (Micaela Ramazotti). Feisty, headstrong and barely literate, she defies all expectations of a woman’s conventional behavior. Divorced, […]
Polish-Jewish relations during the German occupation of Poland were tortuous at best. As the Nazi occupiers ruthlessly exterminated Polish Jews in a methodical campaign of genocide, the vast majority of Polish Christians lay low and reacted with indifference. Still others collaborated with the Nazis, or risked their lives to save Jews. The predominant response of […]
Richard J. Evans, in Hitler’s People: The Faces Of The Third Reich (Penguin Press), focuses on a rogue’s gallery of Nazis who created a fascist dictatorship and drove Germany into war, genocide and defeat in World War II. “Only by examining individual personalities and their stories can we reach an understanding of the perverted morality […]
Much to Israel’s detriment, Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir pulled off an asinine and embarrassing stunt that never should have happened. A video he released on May 20, in which he mocked pro-Palestinian detainees from the Freedom Flotilla Coalition as they were manhandled, handcuffed and pinned down on the deck of a ship […]
Ilse Koch, a symbol of barbarism in the Third Reich, spent almost 24 years in prison, even as Nazi perpetrators who committed far greater crimes during the Holocaust received relatively light sentences or often escaped prosecution altogether. The wife of Karl Koch, the commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp, she acquired notoriety for allegedly having […]
Israel’s relationship with the United Arab Emirates is like no other in the Arab world. Israel has forged peace treaties and normalization accords with several Arab states since it signed a peace treaty with Egypt in 1979. But the bilateral ties Israel has formed with the UAE remain unique, as a recent news story indicated. […]