| Sep 18, 2013 | Peace / SecurityBy divine intervention, Saul Landau entered my life 12 years ago and taught me how to write, film, and live with dignity. We instantly bonded over having fathers from the “old country” — his father from Ukraine, mine from Syria — and being Semites with...
| Jul 31, 2013 | Food / FarmingIn a 1968 comedy called The Secret War of Harry Frigg, Paul Newman is captured during World War II in Italy. After the prisoner of war spends several weeks trying to escape, his captor tells him some great news: The guards now have bullets in their guns. The Food and...
| Feb 6, 2013 | Peace / SecurityZero Dark Thirty is a movie the CIA wants you to see. It tells a tale of the search for Osama bin Laden wherein the key lead comes from a man softened up by waterboarding, sleep deprivation, confinement in a coffin-like box and other forms of pain and humiliation. It...
| Dec 26, 2012 | Peace / SecurityThe box-office hit Argo brings back long-faded memories of the Iran hostage crisis for many Americans. News in November 1979 that U.S. diplomats had been taken hostage in Tehran shocked the United States. Students stormed the U.S. embassy, blindfolding 52 Americans...
| Sep 24, 2012 | Rights / DemocracyGosh, I feel so much safer now that teenage ticket takers at the Regal chain of movie theaters have been directed by corporate chieftains to search the purses of their female customers. Responding to that horrible mass murder in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater, the...
