JTA
The real story behind ‘The Spy,’ Sacha Baron Cohen’s new Netflix series
by Josefin Dolsten
September 6, 2019

For “Borat,” his 2006 film, Sacha Baron Cohen went undercover as a made-up Kazakh journalist who travels America and gets unwitting targets to share his boorish and sometimes bigoted opinions. In his television series “Who Is America,” the Jewish actor creates a variety of characters who manage to get prominent Americans to say shockingly offensive things. In “The Spy,” he once again goes undercover, but in a very different way. The actor and filmmaker portrays the real-life Eli Cohen, a daring Israeli agent who embedded himself in the upper echelons of Syrian society in the 1960s and provided crucial intelligence to the Jewish state. READ MORE