A three-part KAN documentary series called Lansky – The Zionist Gangster, about the Jewish American mobster Meyer Lansky, is airing on KAN 11 and KAN BOX.
Part one of the series, created and directed by Avi Maor-Marzuk, has already aired and is available to stream for free at kan.org.il. The other episodes will be shown on August 22 and 29.
The first episode opens with Lansky’s sojourn in Israel in the early 1970s, when he was fleeing federal tax evasion charges in the US, but makes a convincing case that the gangster truly loved Israel.
The episode features clips from an interview Lansky gave forIsraeli television, reportedly the only interview he ever gave in his life, in which he discusses how he likes living in Israel and how he spends his days reading history books and walking his dog.
He seems like a nice, mild-mannered Jewish grandfather, and people who remember him from that period, including a waitress with whom he had an affair, recall him as quiet and calm.
But the episode goes into detail about the crime empire he built, especially his bootlegging liquor during Prohibition, his failed attempt to build a nightclub empire in Havana, and his success in establishing Las Vegas as a gambling mecca.
Journalists and historians, including the late Oren Nahari, reveal details of his criminal activity, as well as giving a history of Jewish gangsters in the US. They note that there is a tendency today to want to play down the role that Jews played in organized crime.
Several historians argue convincingly that it is important to examine the Jewish role in the organized-crime world, saying that there is no shame in looking at how these Jewish immigrants used their cunning and intelligence to found organized crime gangs.
Subsequent episodes will look at how Lansky helped found Israel, both by contributing money and using his influence over the longshoreman’s union on the docks in the US to help smuggle arms to Palestine during the 1940s – a fascinating story.
Interviewees include Lansky’s grandchildren and other relatives, some of whom have never been interviewed before.
If you prefer seeing Jewish gangsters in feature films, you can watch Bugsy on Netflix, Warren Beatty’s 1991 movie about Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, an associate of Lansky’s.
Ben Kingsley played Lansky in this film and was nominated for an Oscar. Harvey Keitel (who played Lansky in a recent biopic) and Elliott Gould also play mobsters.
DISNEY+, which is always filled with great programming for kids and tweens, just added a few movies your whole family might enjoy watching together. One is the classic Steven Spielberg Film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which is worth rewatching every few years.
Although the main character is a child, I think that parents should use their judgment when showing the movie to little kids, because towards the end, the intense chase scenes and the government agents can be pretty scary.
Disney+ has also added all three Back to the Future movies. I always liked Back to the Future II, which shows the world in 2015 with the flying cars that everyone wishes we really had now, but most people like the first one best.
Michael J. Fox was perfectly charming as Marty McFly.
Although he has spent much of the intervening decades battling Parkinson’s disease and raising money for research, he still acts occasionally. He can also be seen in the new season of Shrinking on Apple TV+.
He portrays a patient who strikes up a friendship with the psychiatrist portrayed by Harrison Ford, whose character also has Parkinson’s.
Fox played a memorable character on The Good Wife and The Good Fight series, the unscrupulous lawyer Louis Canning, who used his medical issues to sway juries, and was one of the highlights of that great ensemble cast.
Sometimes, when you see a documentary or read an article about a great writer, you really wish you could have gotten to know him or her, but that isn’t the case with the documentary Ian Fleming: The Curse of James Bond, which is available on Yes VOD.
Fleming was a prickly character who will be remembered for creating the British superspy 007, about whom he wrote 12 novels and some short-story collections. This documentary is weakest when it tries to put the James Bond character into a contemporary context.
Yes, Bond was a classic male fantasy, and the books were sexist and racist, but people still enjoy them as well as the movies based on them. It’s also a stretch when it tries to show, as the title suggests, that the books’ success was something of a curse to Fleming.
While the documentary shows that Fleming claims he felt no joy in writing, and was constantly worried that he wouldn’t be able to come up with a new novel each year, anyone who reads the books or sees the movies will sense that while it may not have been easy for him, Fleming must have enjoyed some aspects of the success of James Bond.
Although he grew up wealthy and married a rich woman, he certainly did not mind the money, and the movie dwells on his high life in Jamaica, where he wrote the books, enjoyed scuba diving, and spent time in his gorgeous home, which was called Goldeneye.
Goldeneye is a significant name from another part of Fleming’s life: the code name of an operation he was in charge of in the 1940s when he was a creative, high-level officer in military intelligence.
Fleming planned and took part in some daring operations, and he said that Bond was a combination of many intelligence agents he met during the war.
The story of his wartime work is the highlight of this uneven documentary, which goes on to show that despite his success, he drank and smoked at a level that was high even by the standards of male British writers, and died at the age of 56, at the height of his success.
