LOS ANGELES — Some 65 years after a band of foreign volunteers took to the skies to ensure Israel’s birth and survival, filmmakers are racing to bring their exploits to the screen before the last of the breed passes away.
Among the competing producers and their financial backers are such famous names as Spielberg and Lansky. Although their budgets fall well short of Hollywood blockbuster standards, their competitive spirits are just as intense.
Nancy Spielberg, the youngest of Steven Spielberg’s three sisters, is the producer of “Above and Beyond: The Creation of the Israeli Air Force.”
Her main challenger is Mike Flint with his “Angels in the Sky: The Birth of Israel.” His father, Mitchell, battled the Japanese in the skies of WW II before joining Israel’s famous 101st Squadron in 1948.
Ofer Ben-Amots was just six when he dared touch the new piano in his Haifa home. It was love at first sound — and they’ve been married ever since. Fifty-two years later, the world famous composer marvels at the relationship between accident, design and G-d in human destiny.
“The story of how that piano arrived at our house is an interesting one,” Ben-Amots explains in the IJN conference room. “My grandfather was Bulgarian and spent three years in an internment camp there during the Ho...
FOR a long time, Israeli wines — like those of California — suffered from what could be called the Rodney Dangerfield syndrome: They didn’t get any respect.
Wine connoisseurs considered the handful of Israeli wines made in the years before and after the Jewish state gained independence in 1948 to be syrupy, unsophisticated, “unexciting.”
Not worthy, in other words, of serious consideration.
Sixty-five years later, even the most high-browed, nose-in-the-air sommeliers, oenologists an...
UNTIL his family emigrated to Israel in 1958, 10 years after the Jewish state’s improbable birth, Alexander Maller suffocated under a tyranny of pernicious silence in Communist Romania.
When he was 15, his parents grabbed a small window of opportunity and fled to an economically depressed yet exotic land that promised something far sweeter.
It took a while, but Maller found his voice in the fledgling Jewish nation. He decided to become an architect and construct a country from the ground up....
SO just how is Israel doing as it approaches its 64th birthday?
Is it, like the Beatles once lamented in singing about that particular number, “losing its hair” and “sincerely wasting away?”
While in mere human terms, 64 might well qualify for senior status, in national terms — especially when you’re talking about a nation that was actually born thousands of years ago — 64 is barely toddler stage.
But such a toddler!
While much of the world, when it comes to Israel, routinely f...