film

The Bible: From One-Reeler to Docu-drama

The History Channel's The Bible is a small epic, with editorial choices that produce predictable results.  But some of this smallness yields unexpected insights.

Israel’s Gatekeepers

The Gatekeepers is not a history of Israel's security service, its operations and directors, but a political plea for the evacuation of the West Bank, the creation of a Palestinian state, and the suppression of Israeli’s religious settler movement.

The Fool and the Assassin

Most movie stars don’t act, they play themselves.  Danny Kaye, the biggest star of all in the 1940s and 1950s, who would have been 100 last month, was different. 

From Reparations to Atonement

Where recognition of the Holocaust was once restricted to the office of the Chancellor, there is a grassroots commitment in today's Germany to take ownership of the past.

Spielberg’s Lincoln and the Jews: An Untold Story

Lincoln represents a missed opportunity to show that Jews didn’t just turn up in America in the wake of Russian pogroms. 

Justice in a Gray World

The Law In These Parts, a new documentary that places the blame for Palestinian woes on Israel's military lawyers, exhibits scant awareness of history—and limited knowledge of law.

Through Night and Fog

My father and I visited Auschwitz for the first time this summer.  It was toward the end of a long trip to Eastern Europe.  We had already gone to the killing fields and forests of Lithuania, and to Warsaw, where my father broke down . . . 

The Last Berber Jews

As a child, the French filmmaker Kamal Hachkar learned the Berber language from his grandparents in Tinghir, a Berber oasis city east of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco.  As an adult he discovered that the now exclusively Muslim town once had a substantial Jewish community.

Hollywood Goes to Auschwitz

Hollywood’s first encounter with the Holocaust came decades before Schindler’s List or any such dramatizations. The footage of genocide and its perpetrators, captured by three iconic American directors, shaped not only how we perceive the Holocaust, but also the subsequent development of American cinema—and the directors themselves.

The Yiddish Silver Screen

Nobody is sure exactly how many movies were ever made in Yiddish. James Hoberman's exhaustive study Bridge of Light (2010) lists some hundred such films, made in the 20th century primarily in America, Germany, Austria, Romania, Poland, and Russia.