January 16, 2025

Gaza, Israel, and Entertainment

After the Hollywood strikes pushed back the 2023-2024 TV season, NBC’s Law and Order devoted the first possible episode (1-18-24) to the spread of anti-Israel university protests following the horrific October 7, 2023 attack on Israel...

September 12, 2024

The True Meaning of 'Nakba'

As war continues in Israel and Gaza accompanied by anti-Israel protests on college campuses, the “settler colonialism” smear against Israel is amped up by the hard Left, the academic industry, and, especially, by “organizers” ...

April 5, 2024

Why I Will Not Watch for The Solar Eclipse

Hype is building around the solar eclipse that will be visible in the United States on April 8, especially for those who live along the “path of totality.” Many people intend to make a pilgrimage to take the “total” look, and ...

March 11, 2024

Of ‘Teen Takeovers’ and Television News

On Sunday evening, July 30, at around 8:00, I was in a supermarket near Roosevelt and Canal in Chicago’s South Loop, an upscale shopping, health club and movie hub on the edge of downtown. The area has been regarded as safe and on the upswing s...

November 19, 2023

Progressive Pastors on the War in Israel and Gaza

After the constant Hamas missile attacks on Israel and the unspeakable October 7 massacres there, and Israel’s subsequent military incursion into Gaza to destroy terrorist tunnels and launch sites, I was interested to learn, via archived livest...

January 29, 2023

Neo-Hasidic New Age Necromancy

In The Offering, earnest and well-meaning Jewish filmmakers Hank Hoffman and Jonathan Yunger conjure up a demon in order to show that Hasidic communities are more relatable than most Jews and non-Jews think. Director Oliver Park offers pred...

January 15, 2023

Shady Jewelry Jews in the Current TV Season

For some reason, two Law and Order franchise series and two police series, one fledgling and one long-running, are obsessing on Jews and jewelry. Their Jewish personages were all far from gems in character, if not outright murderers or enab...

January 1, 2023

CNN’S 2022 take on antisemitism

Amidst milestone changes in leadership and reshuffling of anchors, CNN offered in late summer a “Special Report” on Rising Hate: Antisemitism in America, which was, by and large, a fair and well-conceived effort. Given all ...

December 30, 2021

‘Ex-Mossad’ is Network Crime Dramas’ New Symbol of Ruthless Villainy

Crime dramas on CBS and NBC opened the current TV season with blatant emphasis on Israeli “ex-Mossad” agents as villains, a trend that began last spring. CBS’s FBI: Most Wanted, a relatively new link in the Law and Orde...

March 14, 2021

When Kenosha Might Have Burned Again, Local TV News Coverage Calmed the Flames their Broadcast Networks Fanned

On January 5th, Michael D.  Graveley, District Attorney of the County of Kenosha, Wisconsin, called a news conference to explain why charges would not be brought against Officer Rusten Sheskey for shooting Jacob Blake on August 23, 2020.  D...

September 16, 2020

An Apology is Owed in Chicago

On June 11, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot held a news conference with new Chief of Police David Brown. She was livid. She announced that she had been contacted by the office of Congressman Bobby Rush and presented with videos recorded on a night of ri...

July 26, 2020

Sitcom Politics

With TV writers on hiatus during the Corona Virus pandemic and the criteria for acceptable political opinions changing day by day even as an election approaches, it is worthwhile to pause and to look back at a few recent short-lived sitcoms.  Su...

July 19, 2020

CBS’s God Friended Me: TV’s Latest New Age Sign-Off

While purporting to be religion-friendly, CBS’s recently canceled God Friended Me glorified New Age notions, particularly a form of transhumanism. A Silicon Valley religion based on eugenics, transhumanism would improve humans by prol...

May 22, 2020

Tel Aviv on Fire

Palestinian director Sameh Zoabi and Israeli co-writer Dan Kleinman have created a deliciously dry-humored film, Tel Aviv on Fire, included in an Amazon Prime subscriptions.  Set in 2017, the film is about a nostalgic soap opera, with ...

May 20, 2020

Israel and the Palestinians in the time of coronavirus

In 2016, the ex-head of the Palestinian Monetary Authority charged that "global Judaism is a virus, a plague" that led to the financial crisis in 2008.  Four years later, the Palestinian Authority's Health Ministry has been, a...

April 12, 2020

Of Viruses and Choices

Two thousand years ago, the Talmudic Sages speculated about sickness. Is there a moral cause? Can we avoid illness by controlling our actions? Do illness and recovery really depend on our deeds?      Some Sages specul...

March 22, 2020

Should A Coyote Be Indicted?

One of Chicago’s most notorious criminals was recently captured: the limping coyote. A six-year-old boy was attacked and bitten by a coyote while walking with his caretaker. A concerned citizen chased away the coyote with a tree branch. Th...

March 1, 2020

Uncut Gems: Loopholes for Depicting Jews (and Others)?

It doesn’t take long to realize that Howard Ratner, the jeweler in Uncut Gems, a movie written by Benjamin and Joshua Safdie and Ronald Bronstein, is one flawed Jew. Howard (rivetingly played by Adam Sandler) is an accepted figure in...

February 7, 2020

Game Show Heaven / Game Show Hell

The latest television triumph, according to ratings and critics alike, was ABC’s four-part Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time contest in January, which attracted fourteen and then fifteen million people, just beyond the Golden Gl...

August 4, 2019

Bernie Sanders, Jack Benny, and Anti-Semitism

Is there such a thing as a flash-in-the-pan accusation of anti-Semitism? It would seem that in the case of Bernie Sanders, there is, or was.  While being interviewed on Young Turks in early June, Sanders dismissed a piece about him in...

April 14, 2019

Psychology Scuttles Spirituality in Two New Movies

Two unpleasant but fascinating recent films allow psychology to scuttle alternative spiritualities, even as monotheistic faiths are not consulted. Birds of Passage, directed by Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego, is the epic tale of a family of Colo...

March 31, 2019

Three Recent Movies Speak Truths About the Middle East that ‘Activists’ and Solons Ignore

A new member of Congress and self-proclaimed “activists” could benefit from the perspective of three films about the Middle East, released in 2018 and currently screening on cable television or Amazon Prime. Beirut, available to Amazon...

December 23, 2018

Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas

Filmmaker Larry Weinstein is not the first to pay tribute to Jewish composers of popular Christmas songs, but his Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas, recently broadcast on PBS, may be the most disappointing and even obnoxious of such efforts. A simple in...

September 7, 2018

Spike Lee's BlacKKKlansman undermines its own message

While Spike Lee's BlacKKKlansman purports to expose both the subtle and the blatant aspects of racism in American life, it ends up compromising its characters and its message, beginning with a silly superscription at the start of this m...

May 13, 2018

The Bible and Clergy According to CBS

In a recent, short-lived series, Living Biblically, the CBS Network took a stab at religion -- literally though unintentionally. It focused on Chip Curry, played by Jay R. Ferguson, a newspaper columnist who is married to Leslie (Lindsey Kr...

January 15, 2017

The Convent and the Strip Club: A Jewish Perspective

The Missionary Sisters of Saint Charles Borromeo are in the news again. They have complained that the rights of their convent in Stone Park/MelrosePark, Illinois are being violated by a strip club built next door. The convent contains a retirement ho...

September 4, 2016

Indignation: Defying Philip Roth?

James Schamus’s film Indignation is a memorable, thought-provoking and haunting adaptation of Philip Roth’s noteworthy novel. He manages to preserve Roth’s engrossing mix of campus humor with looming death and conflict. The film is ...

August 26, 2016

Child Terrorists on NCIS: Los Angeles

On March 21, 2016, NCIS: Los Angeles aired a significant episode on the theme of Islamic terrorism on American soil, “The Seventh Child,” written by Frank Military. It begins with twin boys chased by some swarthy men while trying to rid t...

July 31, 2016

X-Men: Apocalypse

The latest X-Men cinema installment purports to deal with “false gods.” It all starts in ancient Egypt (what better place for a confrontation with false gods to begin?), with mutant pharaoh En Sabah Nur (“Apocalypse”) abu...

June 27, 2016

Quantico: ABC’s FBI and Israel

ABC’s Quantico is TV’s most multicultural and multiethnic soap opera, and its formula is a nod to ABC’s lucrative Thursday night Shonda Rhimes dramas. Created by Joshua Safran, Quantico focuses on FBI recruits and their instructo...

May 27, 2016

An NCIS Finale (and Israel)

The season finale of NCIS, TV’s most watched series, drew massive viewership, attracting three and half times the ratings of Megyn Kelly’s much-hyped prime time interview with Donald Trump on the Fox Network, with which it competed i...

May 1, 2016

Spiritual Realism In Recent Movies

 An engaging spiritual realism characterizes recent films on the themes of morality and spirituality, right and wrong, life and death. These movies all offer fine performances and compelling story lines.  It started with Woody Allen...

May 24, 2015

<em>Mad Men</em>'s Religion

At the close of the AMC TV series Mad Men, antihero Don Draper (John Hamm), an aloof and morally ambiguous mid-century Manhattan ad man interested only in captivating corporations and women, who leads a double, maybe triple life, hears and responds t...

February 1, 2015

The New Age Theology of <em>Selma</em>

The film, Selma, points to injustice in local government, human cruelty and violence, and the redemptive power of a non-violent movement for which many people were willing to sacrifice livelihood, life and limb, all within the context of 1965 marches...

January 4, 2015

God, Man, and Partying: The Seth Rogen Trilogy

Seth Rogen’s last three films, The Interview (2014), Neighbors (2014) and This Is the End (2013), are best taken as a trilogy, with Neighbors as the key. In Neighbors, new parents Mac and Kelly Radner (Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne) find themsel...

December 28, 2014

The Politics of Ridley Scott's <em>Exodus</em>

Breathtaking in its panorama of ancient Egypt and unrelenting in its depiction of Israelite slavery and ten plagues alike, Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings is an epic film intent on deflating social and political -- and religious – i...

November 2, 2014

No Peace, at Best Truce Talks with Hamas and Fatah

Was Hamas -- or a Hamas/Fatah team -- behind a suicide car bombing that killed over 30 Egyptian soldiers at a Sinai checkpoint? Egypt reportedly plans to clear peaceful civilians out of Sinai and to pursue the terrorists with Apache attack helicopter...

August 3, 2014

Kerry's Destructive Deadlines

A magazine article and a television interview provide insights into what Israel and any would-be peacemakers need to know about Hamas-Fatah and the United Nations. In the July 20 issue of The New Republic, Ben Birnbaum and Amir Tibon offer their t...

January 28, 2013

TV's NCIS on those Sinister Israelis

Israelis portrayed on CBS's long running series NCIS -- the Israelis who are not "Americanized," anyway -- are becoming become more and more sinister. Since NCIS is one of the top-rated television programs in America, anyone concerned about Middle Ea...