Mandel Maven's Nest Lilith Watch:
Guide to Jewish Women in Film
- Simon of Trent in Hartmann Schedel, Weltchronik, or Nuremberg Chronicle (Nuremberg, 1493), 254v
Prof. Magda Teter, through her research for Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth (Harvard U Press, 2020), identified the Jewish woman on the left in the oldest and horrifically most pernicious, yet still influential, antisemitic media since the early printing press. In Trento, then part of Austria, on the 1475 weekend that Passover coincided with Easter, Brunetta and her husband moneylender Samuel of Nuremberg were accused of the ritual exsanguination of a drowned little boy. (In some versions she’s holding a matzoh). Tried by local Catholic Church leaders, all in the small Jewish community were imprisoned, tortured, and many horribly murdered, with the brutal revenge lessened if they confessed and converted. Brunetta maintained her innocence, refused to convert, and was the only woman burned at the stake – a sobering reality backdrop to all the satirical portrayals of Jewish mother martyrdom.
Left - “America for the ‘Americans’!” by Werner Hahmann, 1934, Issue #23 of Berlin’s satirical Kladderadatsch (From Prof. Randall Bytwerk’s German Propaganda Archive at Calvin College). This cartoon promotes a Nazi caricature of a Jewish female (lower left) that still dominates in movies and TV, with her mocking mouth, dark curly hair, immodest dress -- the “impudent behavior of Jewish women” that Nazis objected to in the mid-1930’s. (Quote in Saul Friedlander’s Nazi Germany and the Jews: Vol 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939, 1997, Harper). While the minstrel show images of African-Americans have been discredited as racist “Negrobilia”, so called by Whoopi Goldberg, she culturally appropriated a transgressive stage name and misunderstands the history of antisemitism.
Right - “Frau Ipelmeyer” (portrayed by Inge van der Straaten) in Hans H. Zerlett’s Robert und Bertram (1939), the Nazis’ only musical comedy about Jews – and the image of Jewish matrons hasn’t really changed since. (Still from Kino Lorber’s Hitler’s Hollywood)
”Some Viennese coined an expression to describe the exotic, dark-haired allure of Klimt’s models: la belle Juive or Jewish beauty. They too were promoting a stereotype, but this time it was appreciative. . . Jewish…women [then] were officially referred to by the ugly term Judensau, or Jewish sow.” -- Anne-Marie O’Connor, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, quoting Tobias Natter and Gerbert Frodl in Klimt’s Women, though I can’t find evidence that the Nazis used that medieval antisemitic term towards Jewish women.
#SupportWomenArtistsNow
#InternationalSWANs
#iSWANs
#FF2Media
Since December 2019, my analysis of earlier Israeli films is influenced by Prof. Rachel S. Harris’s Warriors, Witches, Whores: Women in Israeli Cinema (Wayne State University Press, 2017)
The Lilith Watch: Critical Guide to Jewish Women on TV: Reviews and commentary
Jewish Women in (and Missing from) the Flicks
Nora Lee Mandel is a member of New York Film Critics Online. Her reviews are counted in the Rotten Tomatoes TomatoMeter:
A graduate film student next to me at a 2011 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center press screening overheard me describing this page to a colleague who writes for Hadassah Magazine. His immediate connection to Jewish women by and in movies was only Joan Micklin Silver’s Hester Street (1975) (the paradigm of Jewish women immigrants) and Crossing Delancey (1988) (with Amy Irving as the iconic visual representation of contemporary Jewish women) – the equivalent of Seinfeld being cited for TV. When I demurred that I have been looking for images and stereotypes in more recent films, he immediately jumped to The Social Network (2010) because evidently the young woman “Erica Albright” (played by Rooney Mara) arguing with the fictionalized Mark Zuckerberg at the opening of Aaron Sorkin’s script can be perceived as a putative Jew because she went to Boston University and he later was seen at a Jewish fraternity party. Besides that when I was in graduate school everyone always misheard and automatically switched the identifications when we said that I was the one at Harvard and my boyfriend (now husband) was at B.U., there does seem to be the need for me to continue to analyze even putative Jewish women in the movies. (11/11/2011)
At least he didn’t cite Woody Allen films. It would take an academic dissertation beyond the scope of this site for me to detail my opinions of the mixed-leaning-way-to-negative impact of his oeuvre on the cinematic image of Jewish women. Even though his sister, Letty Aronson, is extensively interviewed about his family and biography in PBS’s American Masters 3 ½ hour Woody Allen: A Documentary, the Jewish angle was skirted by only having Diane Keaton’s chuckling explanation that her character’s family’s antisemitic views in Annie Hall came straight from her grandmother.
The Obeidi-Alsultany Test proposes five criteria “to evaluate whether a TV or film project presents Muslim characters in dynamic, nuanced, and intersectional stories and contexts.” I should create The Lilith Test for how Jewish women are portrayed in films/TV, like 
.
As of mid-2014, I am marking my own stricter application than others to fiction features of the Bechdel-Wallace Test
Originally suggested by Allison Bechdel, as inspired by her friend Liz Wallace (so her name was added to the symbol as of 2016), in her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For in 1985 to note a film that features (1) at least two named female characters; (2) who talk to each other; (3) about something besides a man. Symbol first designed by the Swedish chapter of Women in Film and Television; thanks to The Hot Pink Pen for the updated image. But my own criteria consider a substantive interaction about substance for when a film features more than female relationships. (updated 11/15/2020)
Complete Index to Nora Lee Mandel's Movie Reviews and Commentaries
My reviews have appeared on: FF2 Media; Film-Forward; Lilith, FilmFestivalTraveler; and, Alliance of Women Film Journalists. Shorter versions of my older reviews are at IMDb's comments, where non-English-language films are listed by their native titles.
13, a ludodrama about Walter Benjamin - In this very creative, part animated, 13 chapter bio-doc of the German Jewish philosopher, the narrator avoids the negativity between him and his sister Dora (seen in archival photographs), and focuses instead on how she supported him, provided places for him to live (visited in the film), and fled the Nazis with him in France; she made it to Switzerland. His cousin Hannah Arendt saved one of his last manuscripts. (seen at MoMA’s 2018 Documentary Fortnight) (3/3/2018)
15 Minutes of Shame
(10/7/2021)
18 To Party (2020) In debut writer/director Jeff Roda’s profane and nostalgic look back at small town 8th graders in 1984 riven by divorce and suicide, let alone changes in rock ‘n’ roll, one of the many topics the group discusses while waiting to get into a club is how one of them can be simultaneously “half-Jewish”, yet considered full-on Jewish because his mother is Jewish, and does observe such traditions as lighting Hanukkah candles. Another boy is convinced that being Jewish a matter of faith, like his mother believe in playing tennis. (I couldn’t keep the kids straight to tell who was saying what.) (10/22/2020)
24 Days (24 Jours) (5/25/2015)
27 Dresses (As it’s set in NYC, at least one of her friends had to be Jewish, but “Shari Rabinowitz”s wedding is an intermarriage, presumably for extra humor, with a Jewish-Hindu ceremony for which the bridesmaid’s dress is a sari.) (1/21/2008)
36 Righteous Ones (Los 36 Justos) (briefly reviewed at 2011 New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (So, nu Some sources incorrectly translate the original Spanish title as a masculine plural in English, but this traditional Elul pilgrimage through Eastern Europe includes a stop at the grave of a rebbitzin--and her husband. I spent considerable time trying to track down exactly who this female tzaddik was, other than I think she was named Rivka, and where was her grave, to no avail, I'm embarrassed to admit. (1/28/2011)
50 Children: The Rescue Mission of Mr. and Mrs. Kraus (2013, on HBO) – Documentary directed by Steven Pressman about a Philadelphia Jewish couple who brought 50 children out of Vienna in 1939, by convincing the State Department to take advantage of woefully unused visas. (3/17/2024)
51 Birch Street (10/18/2006) (emendations coming after 4/18/2007)
77 Steps (previewed at 2011 Other Israel Film Festival) (So, nu: The Israeli Arab director aggressively debates with a hostess at the kibbutz and provokes her to change from genial to negative about local Arabs, amidst reminisces of the old days. That exchange helps to precipitate the break-up with her Canadian-Jewish boyfriend, who thought she was being rude after the older woman’s hospitality.) (11/26/2011)
93Queen - When feature debut director Paula Eiselt, who identifies in the press notes as an Orthodox Jewish woman, observes over four years of filming the group of Hasidic women who form Ezras Nashim (“women’s help”) the women’s alternative to the politically powerful Hatzolah volunteer ambulance corps in Borough Park, Brooklyn, this is a fascinating look at taking on the biased male authority structure in the community. We can see just how political rabbinical decision-making is, how prohibitions against lashon hara is used against women – but not against men who criticize women, including calling them “feminists”, which is synonymous with being “secular” and challenging “modesty” (as seen in nasty online comments). The diversity of the insistently frum women is also revealing, from the leading “Yocheved”, a single mother long-time professional EMT who has only recently become so observant and quits over the politically compromised issue of banning single women who she can so personally relate to; a divorced woman who loves popular culture; older women who have been marginalized by the increasingly insular community because they only speak English; younger women with medical-related education and aspirations; and, by the way, is childbirth educator Yitty Mandel related to me? But, unfortunately, too much time is spent promoting the singular dynamic powerhouse community organizer Rachel “Ruchie” Freier, who managed to go to college and law school while working and raising her supportive family, and during the filming of the organization’s first year on the ground fulfilled her professional goal of running for civil court judge and became first Hasidic woman elected to office in the United States, despite Hatzolah running an opposition candidate. At least during the campaign, she finally acknowledges she has become a feminist.
Eiselt is rightfully proud of the documentary’s music: “The vocals interlaced into Laura Karpman’s masterful score are sung by Hasidic singer Perl Wolfe. Perl is the former lead singer of the first all-female Hasidic band, Bulletproof Stockings [who I featured onLilith Pop]. The vocals are a combination of traditional Hasidic melodies known as niggunim that are almost always sung by men, as well as an original song built with lyrics from a Jewish prayer that highlights the power of women. Perl’s vocals inherently reclaim another male-dominated space and serve as a “Greek chorus” for our story.” (seen on PBS’s POV) (9/21/2018)
Follow-up: As of late 2019, the traditional ambulance company serving the Orthodox community Hatzolah is challenging the women’s organization’s right to exist, particularly against the founder’s role.
100Up - Director Heddy Honigmann includes two Jewish women Upper West Siders over 100 years old as they walk around their neighborhood:
Mathilda Freund, born in 1916, is seen sellilng tshotkes at a bazaar, attending classes at Fordham Lincoln Center, specifically a talk on the Holocaust documentary A Film Unfinished, and swimming in the JCC pool. With a strong European accent, she eventually reveals her happy, culture-filled childhood in Vienna where she participated in birthday and holiday events with her non-Jewish friends – until “Herr Hitler” entered the city to great acclaim. Her memories become more harrowing as she recalls fleeing with her beloved, musical husband in 1938 to France, first to Paris, then hounded to southern France, where they had to hide in woods outside Lyon, with tragic results. She is convinced her stress as a survivor led to her daughter’s early death from breast cancer: “I don’t wear lipstick since she died.” But she is grateful to America, and enjoys her favorite things, like avocados.
Shirley Zussman, born in 1915, is seen in a flashback to an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, then she explains in detail how she got the idea for her, as a therapist, and her doctor husband to follow the example of the then just-published Masters and Johnson to become sex therapists. She tries to keep the discussion of her expertise on a broad consideration of sexuality, while accepting her age by having to refer her patients to others. In a spirited debate with her sister who refuses to look to the past, she would have liked to share memories of their mother on her birthday. She still enjoys talking to people, particularly strangers who become friends by meeting up in local plazas and coffee shops, and appreciates that her children call her almost daily. (preview at 2021 DOC NYC) (11/13/2021)
100 Voices: A Journey Home (briefly reviewed at 2012 New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (So, nu: While the documentary covers some of the same ground as A Cantor’s Tale (2005), a new element is the several women cantors interviewed, though there is no explanation/discussion of their relatively new role in synagogues, even as the documentary carefully shows them singing in secular concerts, not in the synagogue, as the ones in Poland are presumably Orthodox, though this tour was organized by the Conservative cantors’ association.) (1/21/2012)
200 Meters - Palestinian writer/director Ameen Nayfeh’s debut film creates three-dimensional characters daily faced with how the security wall has put Palestinians in absurd situations when families, like his own for the past 15 years, have been divided by the titular distance. Unlike some integrated films that have faced criticism at film festivals, all the Israelis, including the two female characters, are portrayed by Palestinian-Israelis who are fluent in Hebrew: an overly bureaucratic officer (played by Hanin Tarabeh), who won’t give a procedural break to the central character “Mustafa” (a role created for prominent Palestinian-Israeli actor Ali Suliman, who is suberb here as a dedicated, yet stubborn, family man), and a friendly soldier (played by Rebecca Telhami); in a Q & A, Nayfeh noted that one actress had a Dutch father. With minimal spoilers, she’s friendly because “Anne”, the blonde, pale-skinned female driver of a car with Israeli license plates is ostensibly a feisty German, English-speaking tourist with a video camera (played by German actress Anna Unterberger); the casting plays on both sides’ presumptions of what women in the Middle East look like and what languages they speak, as her Palestinian guide rationalizes her sympathy that she has a convoluted post-1948 family tree with a Lebanese grandfather. As Nayfeh spent his formative years moving between Jordan and Palestine, is a recent graduate of a Jordanian film school, and now lives on the West Bank, where the exteriors were filmed, 200 Meters was selected by Jordan, where the interiors and “checkpoints” were filmed, as its entry for the “International Academy Award.” (streamed at The Wrap International Awards Screenings) (1/20/2021)
306 Hollywood Devoted grandchildren Elan and Jonathan Bogarín delightfully use style over substance in conducting a year-long archaeological investigation into their grandmother’s house in Newark, NJ, where she never threw out anything since buying the house in 1944. In a model that could encourage any family historian to be creative, they find every visual technique, cataloging, and research aid to make up for the fact that while they spent hours interviewing Annette Ontell over her last decade, from age 83 on, they really didn’t ask her very good questions, with no special revelations, other than some more detail on their uncle David’s mental health issues and her long marriage with Herman, an accountant. (“We were in ‘iron and steel’ – I iron, he steals.”) While they neglected to draw out more family history, other than her experiences growing up in what she calls “a Jewish ghetto” (she may be right assuming that as children of a Venezuelan father they know little about Jews or Yiddish), they did bring out her fashion design career, with the help of their mother Marilyn. They interview the Rockefeller archivist and a textile conservator for ideas and guidance. But they go further, including lip synching audio tape scenes, displaying her dresses on the roof and in a fun dance routine with performers in period make-up and lingerie. They recognize this is all part of their grieving process, and they interview experts in death - - but never think to explore if Jewish rituals or traditions could be helpful in connecting with her. (seen courtesy of El Tigre Productions) (12/20/2018)
400 Miles to Freedom (previewed at 2012 New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (The mother of co-director/narrator Avishai Yeganyahu Mekonen has a clear memory and testifies to the faith and terrors of the long trek her observant family took from Ethiopia to Israel, with the special fears of her son kidnapped to be a child soldier and then the difficulties of assimilation.) (1/21/2012)
999: The Forgotten Girls (at 2024 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum/ courtesy of the filmmaker) (2/3/2024)
1341 Frames of Love and War - Through amazing photographs (black-and-white and color), director Ran Tal interviews nonagenarian photographer Micha Bar-Am and his octogenarian wife Orna, his archivist, and sometime subject, who shares his career in Israel for over 60 years. She notated all his contact sheets and other materials, so she argues with him on chronology of events and memories. She actively comments about the context of his photographs, what his state of mind was when he returned from each stint on the front lines of war, etc., on what they censored, and what they chose to share publicly. Her running commentary adds considerably to the documentary, many times amusingly so. Their sons also recall what it was like growing up in an intense household with a mother so involved in their father’s career. (preview at 2022 Other Israel Film Festival)
AA Director/artist Cynthia Madansky pays tribute to the Russian poet, photographer, and multimedia artist Anna Alchuk. While the style reminds me of Bob Dylan’s iconic “Subterranean Homesick Blues” opening segment of D. A. Pennebaker's Dont Look Back with photographs, the content is from Dream Diaries, more like nightmares, that Alchuk’s husband philosopher Mikhail Ryklin published after her 2008 death that was connected to her persecution by religious thugs and authorities, similar to what Pussy Riot experienced. For Madansky, AA is apparently related to her series of short films on Russian feminist performance artists from different locations across the country “that interrogate the relationship between cinematic form and language, specifically looking at texts by international women writers”, (including Simone Veil) “I am always in some ways working with the written word.” (In “Short Films on Creativity” at 2022 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) (1/25/2022)
Abe
- the whole mishpucha (from Level 33 Entertainment –courtesy Blue Fox Entertainment)
This warmly emotional family movie is an international production, directed by Brazilian Fernando Grostein Andrade, whose mixed heritage includes grandparents, he describes, “escaped antisemitism in the 19030s”, and written with Lameece Issaq, who is Artistic Director of a theater that showcase Middle-Eastern artists, and Jacob Kader, who previously partnered with her on the play “Food and Fadwa.” Set in a diverse Brooklyn that would usually be a recipe for stereotypes, an Israeli woman “Rebecca” (played by Polish-born Dagmara Dominczyk) has been married for 15 years to a Palestinian man “Amir” (played by Arian Moayed, American actor of Iranian heritage). However, when the film opens, “Rebecca”s sense of her Jewish identity is heightened when she mourns the passing of her mother, and she bestows her mother’s recipes on their son.
Their son calls himself “Abe” (Noah Schnapp). One side of his family (Mark Margolis plays his immigrant grandfather Benjamin) calls him “Avraham” and the other “Ibrahim” (those grandparents are played by Syrian-American actress Salem Murphy and Armenian-Americn actor Tom Mardirosian). His approaching 13th birthday leads to a crisis of fulfilling both his bar mitzvah and the demands of fasts during Ramadan despite his very atheist father and intellectual Muslim in-laws. But all he wants is to be an Instagram-popular chef whose deliciously lovely creations draw on both traditions, as wisely mentored by Brazilian chef “Chico” (played by popular musician Seu Jorge), and beautiful Brazilian music fills the soundtrack.
The tensions between the parents are very realistically presented and not smoothly solved at a climactic, multi-ethnic Thanksgiving dinner prepared by their chef-in-training son. Since I saw Abe at the 2019 Other Israel Film Festival, I’m delighted that Blue Fox Entertainment is opening the film in theaters/VOD on April 17, 2020. (updated 3/9/2020)
Abe and Phil’s Last Poker Game Written and directed by Harvard Med School neurologist Howard L. Weiner, the focus is mostly on the men, particularly elderly “Dr. Abe Mandelbaum” (Martin Landau, in his last role), who moves into Cliffside Manor Nursing Home because he can no longer manage alone with his wife “Molly” (Ann Marie Shea) with dementia, who I’ll assume is a putative Jew. While “Abe” confesses to a long ago affair with a nurse, all we know about “Molly” is that she’s still randy, despite that he can ony fulfill her now with a hand job, and she fixates on her mink jacket. (12/15/2018)
Above and Beyond (previewed at 2014 DOC NYC Festival) (5/4/2015)
Acts & Intermissions
Abigail Child’s bio-doc of Emma Goldman well uses her autobiography and personal letters to get across the woman behind the anarchist stereotypes, though the style is a bit confusing. (The re-enactments are amateurishly acted like a tour through the Lower East Side Tenement Museum unfortunately, and the first-person voice-over is in an odd accent.) Though there’s several references that her union organizing and other public speeches are especially effective when she spoke in Yiddish, not mentioned is that she was from a Jewish background or that she was therefore reaching Jews. The repetitive intersection of footage of contemporary demonstrations, particularly of The Occupied Movement, helps the audience relate to the historical incidents and movements seen in archival photographs and films, but her views on love, sex, and (too fleetingly mentioned) contraception sound just as contemporary and similarly controversial, though not mentioned is that her Comstock Act violations got her jailed more than for her politics. (seen in the World Premiere at MoMA’s 2017 Documentary Fortnight) (2/18/2017)
Adam The only reason that the family of "Bethany Buchwald" (Rose Byrne) is Jewish seems to be that they are in NYC and the dad "Marty" (Peter Gallagher also played a Jewish dad in The O.C.) is an accountant indicted for financial skullduggery to help an old friend, somewhat similar to the non-Jew in Say Anything. And the daughter has a similar reaction of betrayal, especially to the revelation of an affair, pushing her into the new boyfriend's arms as he prepares to leave town. The dad drops one Yiddish word ("gonif lawyers") and expects her home for Friday night dinner. She's on the rebound from an investment banker boyfriend who her dad liked but who she now rejects as a cheating "dick". But though the film takes place in the fall, there's no reference to the Jewish holidays, no Jewish symbols in her apartment, just a cut-out menorah among the winter holiday decorations in her classroom. Her mother "Rebecca" (Amy Irving), living in Westchester, mostly just stands by her man, recalling "your Grandpa Morris" warned her when she married him that he played the angles and she has no regrets. It's implied at the end that she'll stand by her mom. (8/18/2009)
Adam Resurrected While director Paul Schrader draws on techniques he used in Mishima to faithfully adapt, and even clarify, Yoram Kaniuk's novel of post-Holocaust mental breakdowns, the most prominent Jewish woman is even more quizzical on the screen than in the book. Ayelet Zurer's "Jenny Grey" seems to be more of a sex-starved "Nurse Ratchett" than a sabra who only loves "Adam" when he's a crazy victim. The elderly landlady and women patients brandishing their tattoos are portrayed just as in the book, though missing is the delightfully satirical portrait of the inspired businesswoman/philanthropist who uses her late husband's money to set up in the holy desert the psychiatric clinic for survivors. (1/6/2009)
Adoration (So, nu: Among the angry talking heads on the computer who argue against the son's monologue about empathy towards the child of a terrorist is a woman brandishing her concentration camp tattoo, played by Bathsheba Garnett and identified in the cast listing as "Holocaust Survivor".) (5/8/2009)
Adrienne - Until seeing this memorial documentary by widower Andy Ostroy I had no idea that actress/writer/director Adrienne Shelly was Jewish, though it’s just implied in his film. Her birth name was Adrienne Levine; she took her professional name from her father’s first name, who died when she was 12 – at 40, at the same age she was killed. Her mother Elaine Langbaum, identified by her second husband’s last name and talking with a broad New York accent, says she “looked just like him”. When Ostroy and her mother go to her alma mater Jericho High School, on Long Island, there is a plaque for her as distinguished alumna “Adrienne (Levine) Shelly” and they find her own 1984 graffitti “Adrienne Levine (Shelly)”. When he brings her daughter Sophie into her mother’s childhood bedroom, a menorah is prominently displayed.
Included in the film are clips from her short Lois Lives A Little (1997), that the star Alix Elias remembers “She said it’s really based on my mom.” One clip has her very Long Island mahjong trio coming over for their regular game – including her mother and Judy Gold.
Director Hal Hartley says that when Miramax picked up her first starring role film The Unbelievable Truth (1989), Harvey Weinstein pressed for Adrienne to have nude scenes, but he refused. Ostroy recounts that when her first feature Waitress premiered at Sundance in 2007 (one of the first films I formally reviewed), he was spilling some of Adrienne’s ashes in front of the theater – and Weinstein happened by and one got on his shoulder, in some divine justice. Their friend Paul Rudd calls Adrienne Harley’s “muse”. (at 2021 DOC NYC Festival/ HBO) (12/22/2021)
Adventureland (It may be that Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist proved that yet another nostalgic male coming-of-age movie works better outside the Apatow imprimatur when there's a strong female character – who just happens to be Jewish with cool taste in music (the song selections are terrific). Set in the summer of 1987 in Pittsburgh (though based on writer/director Greg Mottola's memories of Long Island, NY, and I grew up near the very similar Palisades Park), his alter ego is played by Jesse Eisenberg, though "James Brennan" isn't specified as Jewish. But the girl is, and this is one of the few films where the Jewish girl, "Em Lewin" (the very appealing Kristen Stewart just off the virginal vampire hit Twilight), attracts and is having sex with the older, married bad boy (Ryan Reynolds), even if she is an NYU student. Her acting out is explained by the strains with her father the lawyer (Josh Pais) and her new stepmom "Francy" (Mary Birdsong), who, oddly, is bald from a nervous breakdown. The script goes to abrasive lengths to target her grief and anger at anything Jewish because it was at temple where her dad, "he's never been serious about his faith" but seeking solace from her mother's painful last illness met the stepmom and her friends who come visit, including "Mrs. Frigo" (Janine Viola) and "Mrs. Ostrow" (Amy Landis). The latter makes faux pas conversation about the house: I love what you did to the place., then realizes that reflects badly on "Em"s mom, as the girl explodes to her father, setting off the stepmom. While the sweet ending seems a bit too fantasy, "Em" and "James"s growing relationship - You were the only good thing that happened to me this summer.-- from friendship to more is very realistically tender and romantic. (4/13/2009)
Adventures of a Mathematician With the support of the Alfred B. Sloan Foundation to make scientists more visible in films for general audiences, writer/director Thor Klein brings a multi-national production attention to the European Jewish mathematicians who were at Los Alamos, and their families, helping to develop the bombs during World War II and coping with the ethical issues during and after. Based on the titular autobiography of Polish Jew Stanislaw Ulam (that I’ve ordered a used copy to read, because gosh $33 on Kindle!), we hear about and the telephone voice of his sister Stefania back in Lvov, with their mother, but don’t learn too much about her, besides her tragic fate. The only Jewish woman on screen is who Ulam (played by auburn-haired Philippe Tlokinski) would marry, Francoise Aron, played authentically by brunette French actress Esther Garrel – so much so that, frankly, I had trouble understanding her English dialogue!
Francoise’s intelligence and resentment of male academic privilege are established during their courtship. But once they arrive in New Mexico, she unfortunately morphs into a conventional ‘40’s/’50’s housewife, without much of the agency the wives portrayed at the project in the TV series Manhattan over two seasons work out for a more substantive role. (Their daughter Claire Ulam Wiener and family cooperated on the production.) There’s just a brief re-humanizing when she intervenes in his ongoing quarrels about the hydrogen bomb with Edward Teller (Joel Basman) by setting up a tête-à-tête for the two men through his wife Mici (Camille Moutawakil) – and I hadn’t realized before this film that the Tellers were also Jewish. (preview at 2021 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (2/6/2021)
The Adventures of Saul Bellow - Refreshingly, current seasons of PBS American Masters are finally criticizing their subjects. And Jewish women, some as represented through their sons, had plenty to say about this conservative Nobel Prize Winner in Literature, in interviews with Israeli documentarian Asaf Galay. (There was even an opening warning about offensive language, as controversial excerpts of Bellow’s novels were read.) Most incisive was feminist critic Vivian Gornick recalling and re-affirming her criticism of his work, and his defender then and on screen Philip Roth, both in terms of them as Jewish-American male writers. It was not made clear to me which of his five wives (including Anita Goshkin, Alexandra (Sondra) Tschacbasov, Susan Glassman, and Alexandra Bagdasar), were Jewish, including his final widow/former student Janis Freedman. (12/18/2022)
Advocate (Lea Tsemel, Orehet Din)
So nu: The biographical elements on Israeli attorney Lea Tsemel are revealed through interviews with her daughters and female relatives, and friends from her childhood and university protest days. (preview at 2019 Human Rights Watch Film Festival at Film at Lincoln Center/ IFC Center.
At 2019 Other Israel Film Festival - above with ex-Knesset Member Dov Khenin, whose own bio-doc Comrade Dov only mentioned Jewish women, like his mother and daughter, in passing, with a glimpse of an opposing female enscarfed religious Zionist MK wanting to rail vs. government funding of the The Jerusalem Cinematheque rather than his priority of a minimum wage)
Advocate garnered Emmy nominations for directors Rachel Leah Jones and Philippe Bella Bellaiche including Best Documentary and Outstanding Politics and Government Documentary (7/28/2021)
Africa - Debut director Oren Gerner uses his own family to sensitively explore aging in Israel – starring his family playing versions of themselves. So his mother Maya Gerner plays “Maya”, the wife of the 68 year old “Meir”, who is having difficulty coping with not only retirement from work, but from his long-time volunteer activities in their very close-knit community, almost kibbutz-like, as well as adjusting to the physical realities of getting older. However, she is doing well: she has kept up her part-time counselling work in an office space in their house (that her husband and frequently visiting adult children and little grandchildren barge in or sound-wise), actively participates in community activities such as a chorus, while being far more sensitive to relationships within the neighborhood than he is, especially when her husband gets frustrated and saggressive. (courtesy of Strand Releasing) (5/1/2022)
After Auschwitz Director Jon Kean’s joint biography of six women survivors - Eva Beckmann, Rena Drexler, Renee Firestone, Erika Jacoby, Lili Majzner, and Linda Sherman—provides details of the post experiences not usually revealed in such reminiscences. Produced with the The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, their outlook and perspective on the post-war years (with terrific contextual archival footage) is more distinctly Californian than similar post-Holocaust portraits. (preview courtesy) (4/15/2018)
Aftermath (Pokłosie) (So, nu: While all the current and past vengeance is not shown directly on the screen, the violent truth that comes out about what happened in 1941 is as rife with pre-war sexual tensions, between a gentile Polish farmer and the Jewish woman who rebuffed him for a Jewish man, layered on top of antisemitism, though the testimonies about the village that inspired the film don’t admit to that kind of interactions.) (updated 11/3/2013)
Afternoon Delight - Rebecca Soffer’s interview with writer/director Jill Soloway, for Tablet August 19, 2013, usefully provides background to the Jewish aspects of the women characters. (8/21/2013)
After: Poetry Destroys Silence
Accompanying poetry with music and imagery, some archival, some with actors, this project aims for a post-Shoah cinema, unevenly achieved, though the cinematography by Lisa Rinzler and violin by Rachel Evans are haunting. Among the four Jewish women poets reading their poems, Alicia Suskin Ostriker also speaks extensively on the role of poetry.
Janet R. Kirchheimer reads “How I Knew and When”; Ostriker reads “Who Saves A Life: Poem Beginning with a Line By Fitzgerald/Hemingway”, from her collection The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012; Sabrina Orah Mark reads “A Kaddish”, from her collection The Babies, Saturnalia Press, 2004; and Christine Poreba reads “Negative Miracle”, originally published in The Florida Review, 2016. (10/28/2024)
Afterward (So, nu: Describing herself, director/on-screen interviewer/narrator: “Ofra Bloch, a New York-based psychoanalyst specializing in trauma, was born in Jerusalem to a Jewish family that emigrated to Palestine in the 1920s”. She sets up a false equivalence as her premise. She interviews the grand/children of German Nazis and a reformed Neo-Nazi, talks about her childhood around Israel’s independence, then interviews Palestinian activists for their views on Israel and its people, some who are intransigent and some willing to cooperate towards peace and/or communicate. Continuing the primacy of Holocaust-haunted Ashkenazim, she is oblivious that she’s from a different generation, especially since she’s been living in the U.S. for so long. She’s doesn’t take into account the new generations of religious Zionists/settlers on the Israeli side of the wall, let alone of Sephardim/Mizrahi Jews, or of the Palestinian politics of Fatah vs. Hamas, and now the rise of Islamists. (preview at 2018 DOC NYC Festival) (10/29/2018)
Ahead of the Curve Primarily a bio-doc of lesbian magazine Deneuve/Curve publisher/editor Franco (Frank) Stevens, co-directed/written by her wife Jen Rainin (who puts herself on screen too often), her Jewish identity is only visually inferred. Home movie footage shows then Frances participating in a Jewish wedding in 1986, that she now describes sarcastically: “It was an elaborate, amazing day, living the fairy tale, great guy, great with the family. I had no idea I was gay.” Her sister Robin Goldberg explains the family tensions in 1989 as her husband outed her, and then the extreme reaction, amidst home movie footage of the family Passover seder, from her mother Gloria “Nanny” Postal, such that her daughter fled the house with nothing and nowhere to live. In the Q & A, Stevens expands that her mother called her an embarrasement to the family. Surprisingly, Stevens also said that just like being a lesbian and her disability, “just like being Jewish is part of my whole being, who I am.” Because there is zero reference to that in the rest of the film as she goes on to live an authentic life in San Francisco and risked what money she had on founding the magazine in 1990 – leaving the impression that she left the Jewishness behind, including that when she reconciles with her mother the holiday she brings her first girlfriend home to is Thanksgiving. While Latinas and other Women of Color speak extensively of the importance of lesbian publications including their concerns and viewpoints, her own ethnicity is not comparable. Even as her increasing physical disability from a foot injury that developed into complex regional pain syndrome spurs her to contemplate her legacy and what the lesbian community, especially the younger generations, needs going forward. While she comes to the conclusion that her community no longer needs a magazine, so turns to philanthropy instead, I came away convinced of the continuing need for Lilith Magazine including Jewish lesbians in its purview. (streamed at 2021 ReelAbilities Film Festival New York; wider distribution from June 2021) (5/6/2021)
Ahead of Time (briefly reviewed at 2010 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (Ruth Gruber's personal archive is also a treasure trove of her fascinating life before WWII, not just being touted as the youngest PhD in the world, but how she parlayed one connection after another to explore the Arctic from first the Soviet Union side, then to Alaska, with her wonderful photos and film footage. For all the piles of books we see she has published, her story is stopped when she married and had offspring in her '40's, as if her life ended then.) (1/25/2010)
Ahed's Knee (Ha'berech) (at 2021 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ seen at 2021 Other Israel Film Festival courtesy of KinoLorber Films) (10/30/2021)
Aida’s Secrets - though confusingly edited, Israeli filmmakers Alon and Shaul Schwarz track the intriguing family history of their uncle by marriage Izak Szewelwicz, born in a DP camp and adopted in Israel, and who raised family on a kibbutz. While the irony is that the long-lost siblings are not united by a Jewish mother (Israel denied her application for immigration), the interviews and archival footage of what life was like for survivors for two or so years in the biggest DP camp that replaced Bergen-Belsen, especially with the finding of a photo album that matches up. They were young people trying to make up for the horrors and the years of lost time in their lives, images we don’t usually see of women survivors. (11/28/2017)
Ajami (also briefly reviewed at 2010 Annual New York Jewish Film of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (So, nu: All the women are background motivations to their men's actions, including the several Jewish Israelis. One young woman is a party girl dating "the other" who naively thinks she can bridge the divide, even as her boyfriend's Arab friends sneer about her to him in Arabic right in front of her. While the cop's sister tries to keep the family balanced, his mother is, understandably, hysterical with worry for her missing younger son, grasping for the slightest fantastical straws.) (2/3/2010)
Alegría
Debut director Violeta Salama, writing with Isa Sánchez, fondly depicts a colorful mélange of Sephardic Jews (like her paternal family) and their identity choices in a picturesque location not usually seen on screen in a positive context. Her hometown of Melilla, a Spanish outpost in northern Morocco, is known more for the migrants trying to climb over its encircling fence.
Central is “Alegría” (played by Mexican actress Cecilia Suárez), above right on the poster, a very independent prodigal doctor who had fled the traditional Orthodox strictures of this Jewish community to Mexico, where she raised on her own her daughter “Sarah”. Her now estranged daughter, an adult herself with a baby, rebelled by making aliyah to a kibbutz in Israel. (Is “Sarah”s hair scarfed for religious or agricultural purposes?) The extended family is returning for the wedding of her niece “Yael” (Laia Manzanares), the blonde on the poster’s lower left, to a long-haired local guy “Jacobo” (Emilio Palacios), who explains to his friends their brief courtship at a Jewish match-making camp. Arriving days later is her brother “David” whose bedroom-full of Judaica “Alegría” had locked up to ignore after he made aliyah to Jerusalem; his Orthodox wife wears her hair enscarfed, and brings a blonde wig for her nervous daughter to wear after her marriage. (Her father grumbles that she could have found a Jewish husband back home.) “Alegría” resists having to make arrangements for the religious wedding, including coordinating with the synagogue, whose rabbi is now her old schoolmate “Simón” (Leonardo Sbaraglia), supervising kashrut of the refreshments, and reserving the mikveh. Welcoming solutions are worked out around her intransigence, with the help of a few spliffs.
“Alegría” is more comfortable with the other two women seen in the poster - her Muslim cook “Dunia” (Sarah Perles) she mentors for further education, and her Christian BFF “Marian” (Mara Guill), and their families, each with their own music in the soundtrack. In turn, “Yael” and “Dunia” laughingly bond over a hamsa necklace that the Muslim identifies with Fatima and the Jew with Miriam. The lively story, through characters’ interactions, and “Alegría” explicitly, emphasizes that this is an enclave where the people of all three faiths get along. She entertains the women at their “Berber” bachelorette party with her version of a legend. In her telling, the beautiful sorceress “Kandicha” marries a husband of each faith, and stopped war so her sons by each would not get killed. Then “Alegría” has to make peace with her conflicts within her own Jewish family for a satisfyingly happy celebration. (Awarded “Ronit Elkabetz, A”H Rising Star Director” at 2022 New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival/ seen at 2023 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center and The Jewish Museum) (1/13/2023)
Aliyah (also briefly reviewed at 2013 New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (So, nu: While the primary French Jewish woman is an EX girlfriend, she is an attractive teacher at a Jewish school and is warm about helping the French Jewish hunk reconnect with his Jewish ethnic and religious roots, after some she gets over her surprise, even as Israelis at the embassy are officiously discouraging.) (updated 6/21/2013)
All About Nina Barcelona-born debut director Eva Vives seems to have made lead character “Nina Geld” (a terrific Mary Louise Winstead) Jewish because she probably thinks from the movies, or as an NYU student, that so many damaged aspiring stand-up comedians are Jewish. In the small role of her New York mother “Debora”, Camryn Manheim makes credible a woman consumed with guilt for not recognizing her husband’s abuse of her daughter and the continuing damage he caused, such that she’s unsure how to help. Kudos to production designer Kelly Fallon for completely creating an apartment environment that says more about her than the mother gets to say. The joke of naming “Nina”s therapist “Dr. Streisand” (as played by Grace Chen) falls flat. (preview and coda at 2018 Tribeca Film Festival) (4/30/2018)
All Eyes Off Me (Mishehu Yohav Mishehu)
The three chapters of Israeli director Hadas Ben Aroya’s second feature are not specific that the Hebrew-speaking women are Jewish. In the opening Tel Aviv party segment, an attendee advises a woman who has just learned she is pregnant of the process she went through to get an abortion in the country, whether the two-part pills or the D&C procedure, with compliments to the female social worker and Ob-Gyns who eased her through.
While the film’s poster looks like a conventional heavy-kissing romance, the above still, from the more intriguing third section about intimacy, features the main character “Avishag” (played by the director’s friend Elisheva Weil) with “Dror” (played by Yoav Hait), the older client of her dog-walking business, to whom she is more attracted than to the young man (played by the actress’s actual boyfriend Leib Levin) in the middle chapter with whom she has explicit sex. I was surprised that the cinematographer Meidan Arama and editor Or Lee-Tal are both male.
Once she figures out how to play a vinyl record, “Avishag” is influenced by a song from Israeli poet Lea Goldberg, “Somebody Will Love Somebody”. “Dror” has an extensive monologue describing his background in a very religious family (though it’s confusing that he also claims to have grown up on a kibbutz, which, to the contrary, is usually secular and leftist.) We can presume she is Jewish by her tacit familiarity with most of the terms he uses about his very negative experience at a Jerusalem yeshiva. Though he talks of his estrangement from his parents, he takes responsibility for care of his mother when she needs a medical procedure. (courtesy of Film Movement Plus premiere) (9/3/2024)
All God’s Children
Rabbi Rachel Timoner, the sister of filmmaker Ondi Timoner, was glimpsed within the context of their family at the end of her very personal documentary Last Flight Home (2022). Over five years, the director also followed her sister at work as the charismatic Senior Rabbi at Congregation Beth Elohim (CBE), a reformed synagogue which has been in Park Slope, Brooklyn since 1910. Accompanied by Rabbi Stephanie Kolin, a partnership is formed with the 105-year-old Antioch Baptist Church (ABC) and its equally charismatic Rev. Dr. Robert M. Waterman (aka Pastor Rob) to together address racism and antisemitism in Brooklyn. (She cites this project as an achievement in her online bio; he does not include it in his.) A quick montage of recent issues both communities have faced goes by quickly with archival photographs, footage, and news reports.
There are a couple of signs of miscommunication at early meetings of a joint committee. Rabbi Timoner, in explaining the different divisions of American Judaism, talks about the Hasidic Jews in Crown Heights being the mostly visible and unassimilated Jews. The church congregants, who had cited them as prominent among those engaging in dastardly “deed theft”, mumble that they and their church are not in that neighborhood, but in Bedford-Stuyvesant (since 1950). (Slumlord Millionaire in the same film festival uses the same NYS hearing footage about the issue, but carefully avoids identifying Jewish landlords.) While the Black church members are surprised by Timoner’s declaration that “Messianic Jews are no longer Jews”, seeming to be confused by the distinction between ethnicity and religion, she quickly adopts the church members use of “love” for their mutual relationship without exploring what that word means in their Christian context.
The film moves beyond anodyne “National Brotherhood Week”-type pronouncements to inter-faith sharing, which neither had evidently done before. Inclusion is featured at a seder with added symbolic representations of yams and collard greens, as well as olives to show support for Palestinians. (The oranges next to the olives was a surprisingly outdated feminist plaint at a synagogue with two females on the bimah.) The Black choir seemed uncomfortable singing “Go Down Moses” at the seder, which my family includes in our seder. If they had an issue with singing “spirituals” rather than their usual gospel songs, they did not bring that up. The synagogue also invited the church to bring more of their music into their sanctuary with their parade of banners. However, synagogue members were taken aback when the procession climaxed with one dedicated to Jesus Christ, feeling it was like a call for conversion. (The Reverend’s bio touts “each year…100 persons accepted Jesus Christ as their personal Savior”.) More successful was bringing the shofar into a church service, though the rabbis just call the blower “Josh” from their congregation not identifying him as Cantor Josh Breitzer, nor that the “Hallelujah” he was joining in singing is a Hebrew term. Unlike the usual references to “Judeo-Christian heritage”, there is no discussion of the shared “Old Testament”.
But the partnership is riled when the Jews are invited to ABC’s Easter celebration, the Sunday right after the seder. More like centuries of European Catholic tradition than usually seen in Protestant churches, ABC re-enacts Jesus Christ bringing the cross through Jerusalem to his crucifixion, with the addition of a laughing “King Herod” wearing a tallit and rabbinical mitre mocking Jesus as “King of the Jews” and “King of Israel”. (Similar to Handel’s “Messiah”.) The rabbis are so uncomfortable they can barely restrain themselves from walking out, yet want to be respectful to both the church and their own attending congregants. But Rabbi Timoner emotionally unloads at the next committee meeting, angrily detailing how that kind of presentation has enflamed centuries of very violent antisemitism. The Reverend rationalizes that the Christians and Jews were both under the same system of Roman oppression, comparing it to contemporary white supremacy, though the portion of the service seen in the film did not show the Romans as the persecutors. The Black participants resentfully perceive her as “this white lady hammers this Black man. As if ‘I am superior over this’. That’s how we tell our Christian story.” Timoner apologizes, and humbles herself about her “white privilege” allowing her to show her anger whereas Black men and women risk negative stereotyping if they do. They bring in a Christian community organizer from Kansas City as a facilitator, who helps to get the committee back on track to work on non-religious projects, like the deed theft crisis, though she seems to miss the Jews’ concerns. There’s talk that ABC changed their Easter play to be less explicit, but it’s not clear they realized what aspects of the portrayal had antisemitic overtones. Their follow-up discussions of historic vs. current racism seem to go around in uncomfortable circles, with the Reverend reluctant to change.
And then October 7, 2023 happens, and ensuing tensions in Brooklyn that surprise this Black community, with news images shown emphasizing Gaza’s destruction. The Reverend preaches about tolerance to a joint congregation that includes Senator Chuck Schumer. Both congregations take credit for together helping to get deed theft criminalized (as do the community organizers in the other documentary). At their third seder together, the Black choir omits the spiritual and nervously sings a Hebrew song. The rabbis proclaim that “Life changes through relationships.”
For the audiences in the planned outreach, this film might be more of a warning about the difficulties than the claimed “inspiring example of how to foster enduring dialogue and the power of partnership, across all differences - religious, racial, or economic”. (at 2024 DOC NYC) (11/14/2024)
All Good Things (I'm not sure that the audience would perceive the putative Jewish women. The names are changed from the case of the wayward scion of the Durst family, one of the Jewish real estate dynasties in NYC—even into the 1970's the Metropolitan Museum only took these families' money via a separate "Real Estate Board"—with the Dursts here called "the Marks". There's the usual dead mother who was presumably Jewish -- whose suicide that he witnessed is blamed for his unbalance even as Dad finally explains: I thought if she saw you she wouldn't jump.. His good friend is a woman, "Deborah Lehrman" (played by Lily Rabe), comparable in real life to Susan Berman, described in the press notes as "the flamboyant journalist. . .daughter of a notorious Las Vegas gangster", Davey [sic?] Berman, and shown here as his co-conspirator who later shakes him down for money. Despite her "Jewish Mafia princess" sobriquet she was evidently later broke and Berman received two checks from him for $25,000 before she was shot dead in her Hollywood house just after the police were due to question her about his wife's disappearance 18 years earlier, and "Lehrman"s involvement and her murder here are shown as directly instigated by the "Marks" character. But here there's only a hint this long-haired brunette –who doesn't seem to age over time or has a lousy straight wig and bangs--is Jewish, as she calls his "sweet" blonde wife "Catherine McCarthy" a shiksa: Doesn't she know how fucked up you are? She offers to set him up with "a great therapist", then we see him undergo loud scream therapy. (He is fascinated to marry into a ham-eating family, and his dad's threat on the tennis court: She'll never going to be one of us. has multiple meanings.) Even less putative Jewish is the brunette Westchester neighbor who befriends the wife and introduces her to cocaine, "Lauren Fleck", played by Kristen Wiig, or maybe she just talks like a New Yorker.) (11/21/2010)
All The Beauty And The Bloodshed - In their bio-doc, director Laura Poitras and producer Nan Goldin only provide two visual, negative references that the Goldin (or Golden) family were Jewish, that probably go by most viewers. First, Nan recalls her suburban Boston mother sending her off to a foster home at age 14 under the auspices of the Jewish Adoption Agency On Beacon Hill: “The foster mother of the house straightened my hair because she wanted me to be a WASP.” After two explicit hours of detailing Nan’s art work photographing in the demi-monde her subsequent abuse, sex work, addictions, non-binary sexual relationships, and activism against the Sackler family, she gets from her father the documentation of her late sister’s psychiatric issues. Among the reports seen on screen is one from the early 1960s that describes the rebellious teenager as “a 15 year old Jewish girl”. At one point, Nan is almost sympathetic to her non-nurturing mother as herself a victim of sexual abuse by a family member, whose PTSD was set off when her daughters entered puberty. (at 2022 DOC NYC/ courtesy of Neon) (11/27/2022)
Almost Peaceful (Un monde presque paisible) (So, nu: French Jewish women's role in contributing to a return in normality post-war is largely procreative, but having children is seen as a statement against antisemitism and the joy that children bring the survivors is palpable.)
Alone in Berlin Opening in 1940, there is one elderly Jewish woman still hiding in the top floor at 55 Jablonski Street, in this first English-language adaptation of a novelization of a Gestapo file (I haven’t read the book yet to see if the character was in the book). “Frau Rosenthal” (played by Monique Chaumette) is near-senility, and is being protected by the letter carrier “Eva Kluge” (played by Katrin Pollitt), who brings her food (just like the policeman father of a colleague, he claims, brought food from his mother’s grocery store to a neighbor), by the hero wife “Anna Quangel” (Emma Thompson) and “Judge Fromm” (Joachim Bissmeier) on the floors below when her apartment is robbed by the ex-husband of the postal employee. When she protests to her neighbor that she has to stay in her apartment “for when her husband comes home”, the judge sorrowfully tells her that he isn’t. With her pet parakeet distracting the Gestapo when they come to get her and the thief who tried to get her property instead of them, she manages to jump out the hall window – making her own choice. (seen courtesy IFC Films) (2/14/2017)
Alone Together - Directors Maya Tiberman and Kineret Hay-Gillor intimately show us Israelis rarely seen on film, in verité style. The central focus is on Ravit Reichman, a large, chain-smoking retired career soldier about to celebrate her 50th birthday. She volunteers as a cook, supervises the kitchen, and warmly greets the customers, especially on holidays, for an organization [the website looks misleadingly Haredi] that provides free meals for the poor. Then she goes to a hospital nursery to take over from another woman volunteer for First Hug to provide attention, care, and body contact to abandoned infants until late at night. Her maternal warmth overflows, but a health problem left her sterile and she is considered too old and too single to adopt. She looks into being a foster parent, but the orientation makes clear that the child could be placed just temporarily – “They’ll take the child and I’ll be devastated.” So she gets another tattoo and continues her mitzvoth. (preview at 2022 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) (1/25/2022)
America
Israeli writer/director Ofir Raul Graizer creates a tragic romantic triangle as lush as Douglas Sirk and his acolyte Todd Haynes. The appealing characters’ colorful environs reflect their present lives and their families’ pasts that help determine their fates.
First we meet “Eli” (Michael Moshonov) gently coaching at a fluidly blue pool in Chicago, where he fled far away from his violent father. We first hear about his childhood friend “Yotam” (Ofri Biterman) through his kindly father “Moti” (Moni Moshonov), who announces his son’s engagement. The fiancée “Iris” (Oshrat Ingedashet) is first seen enveloped in the greenery of their florist shop, redolent of her parents’ Ethiopian heritage, who have instead adapted to Israel by becoming Ultra-Orthodox. As the central female romantic interest, her past and present are unusual for Israeli films.
Graizer also finds unusual contrasts to set their lives. “Iris” can make the desert bloom. “Yotam” lives in the Tel Aviv “bubble”, but is happiest at home in his bright, sunny kitchen in Jaffa. “Eli”, whose Israeli identity as “Ilai” is too subtle for American audiences who would not be surprised he changed “Greenberg” to “Cross”, prefers taking them beyond Haifa to isolated preserves of the Israel Nature and Parks Authority not usually seen on screen, gorgeously filmed by Graizer’s repeat cinematographer Omri Aloni. These quests to such remote locales Graizer considers a tribute to the friendships in Lord of the Rings. But the context makes “Eli”s self-sacrificing relationship with “Yotam” layered like the Biblical Jonathan and David. (As well as resonating with Graizer’s first film The Cakemaker, one of my faves of its year.) Though his selections of particular Israeli pop songs for each character will go by American audiences for their significance, “Iris” beautifully sings his original song about home to “Yotam” in a poignant scene.
Even with “chapters” that roll the number of (more than nine) months between, the sensitive layers keep the An Affair to Remember-like melodrama from overwhelming the affecting story. (at 2023 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center and The Jewish Museum/ 2023 Israel Film Center Festival/ courtesy of Menemsha Films) (1/23/2023)
American Muslim (at 2019 DOC NYC Festival and seen at 2020 Cinematters: Social Justice Film Festival) (1/31/2020)
American Promise (previewed at 2013 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (So, nu: The attitudes of the Jewish female classmates at Manhattan private school Dalton are implied when one of the then-13-year old African-American boys followed in the school’s diversity experiment from age 6 - 18 mournfully comments that the girls at the many “bar mitzvahs” [sic] he’s invited to won’t dance with him, even with the importuning of the DJs, or chat with him on social media. He and his mother Michèle Stephenson, the film’s co-director, derisively comment on one girl’s invitation as unncecesarily extravagant. While her Ivy League-educated, dark-skinned husband recounts to their son his father’s experience with overt racism, the light-skinned mother vaguely confides about her troubled parents without ever referring to a possible mixed race background as influencing her racial prism. The director/parents’ lack of comparisons presumes racial reasons in dealing with schools where I found similar issues with my kids that was more about gender and being out-of-the-norm, specifically about being gifted or a stutterer.) (updated 10/18/2013)
Amy
(6/29/2015)
Ana Arabia (previewed at 2014 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (So, nu: commentary forthcoming on the Jewish woman)
The Ancestral Sin (Sallah, Po Ze Eretz Yisrael) Director David Deri interviewed his mother extensively about her experiences living first in Morocco, then reluctant emigration to Israel in the 1950’s, and forced placement in the development town of Yeruham in the Negev Desert, as well as many other women. Of particular note, she and another elderly woman chortled that the other woman was a paid collaborator to help get her off the transport into the bleak settlement that was nowhere near or like the location the Jewish Agency has promised – but they had long ago passed forgiveness to be best friends for decades. What they went through on the ground is contrasted with the “smoking gun” trove of documents he amazingly got de-classified from government and Jewish Agency files, though some are still kept confidential, that show the explicit bias of the Ashkenazi Jews in charge against the “Oriental Jews” (even calling them “Arabs”) from North Africa with racist terms, expectations, and disregard to order them around as they wanted to fit security, military, and master planning objectives, by destroying Arab villages to prevent return and covering the borders. In a powerful scene, the primarily female elderly who went through this watch his footage highlighting the memos and reports, including the retaliatory orders against their own protests, with shock, tears, and anger; they will be demanding next steps in apologies, reparations, or more. (NY premiere seen at 2018 New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival also screened at 2018 Other Israel Film Festival) (3/13/2018)
The Angriest Man in Brooklyn Though Daniel Taplitz’s script is based on Assi Dayan’s 1997 Israeli film The 92 Minutes of Mr. Baum (Mar Baum), none of the women appear to be Jewish. The men are explicitly Jewish, particularly the Altmann brothers – “Henry”, with many Yiddishisms thrown in (played by Robin Williams) and “Aaron”, with a kippah for no reason (played by Peter Dinklage), but not the mother “Bette” (Melissa Leo) or “Dr. Sharon Gill” from Wisconsin (Mila Kunis), or the son’s dancing girlfriend “Adela” (Sutton Foster). (5/8/2014)
The Anne Frank Gift Shop
(short) Debut writer-director Mickey Rapkin got a stellar cast, including Ari Graynor (aka Ariel Geltman Graynor) and comedian Mary Beth Barone, for his serious comedy in the debut production of Reboot Studios - as in “Rebooting Jewish Life”. It deals deftly with the iconography of the best-known Jewish female from the Holocaust and a Jewish female role model as victim, as well as feminist issues of men asking women to “Smile!” for photographs, while putting statistics about young people’s ignorance of the Holocaust within a comic marketing situation. Ironically, the story line isn’t so different from a friend of mine’s experience on the board of the parallel Anne Frank Center USA. Years ago, I was struck by the long lines at her Amsterdam house vs. the lack of attendance at the broader, excellent Dutch Resistance Museum (Verzetsmuseum). (courtesy of GQ) (1/3/2024)
#Anne Frank - Parallel Stories (on Netflix) An ongoing angst among Jews is how to keep making the Holocaust relevant to the next generations. Schools the world over depend on The Diary of Anne Frank, to the point of fetishism about one girl, to represent the whole experience. The diary is a taking-off point in this mixed-genre documentary to represent young women of today and within the Nazi maw. To make an old-fashioned diary relevant, a young woman (played by Martina Gatti) texts on screen to Anne in the same way that Anne wrote to “Kitty”, and follows the Frank sisters’ path geographically. Produced in commemoration of what would have been Anne’s 90th birthday, Dame Helen Mirren narrates the bit confusing non-chronological on-screen biography, by tying together Anne’s experiences before, in hiding, and after capture, with the intimate memories of five 90 year old women Holocaust survivors who were at the same places at the same time at the same teen age, including at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany: Arianna Szörenyi, Sarah Lichtsztejn-Montard, Helga Weiss, and sisters Andra and Tatiana Bucci. (One remembers meeting her.) In its determination to reach out to young viewers, the survivors are also proudly interviewed with their children and grandchildren, who discuss their feelings and continuing responsibilities for understanding and educating about what their relative went through. Male historians add additional context and facts. (7/10/2020)
Antarctica (So, nu: In what the director terms a tribute to John Waters and Divine but comes across more like a thwarted transgender character, the gay siblings’ mother is played by drag artist Noam Huberman who performs as Miss Laila Carry. Perhaps that was supposed to make more humorous an extended scene at a hair salon that is full of exaggerated stereotyped exchanges between Jewish mothers trying to match up their gay children in hopes of bringing forth grandchildren.)
Anvil! The Story Of Anvil (So, nu: With the Iraqis in Heavy Metal in Baghdad saying the authorities there were suspicious that head-bangers looked to be davening, praying like Orthodox Jews, one wonders if there's a PhD thesis there about heavy metal's connection to Holocaust victims, as opposed to the stereotyped connections with misappropriation of swastikas. But I have to love a movie where the heroine is a Jewish woman – here "Lips"' older sister Rhonda Kudlow. Not only is it her money that saves the day so they can record an album in England, but clearly her and their siblings' love, loyalty and support to invest in him has grounded the musician, regardless of how totally conventional they look compared to him.) (4/10/2009)
Anyuka (Mother) (short)
Multi-media artist Maya Erdelyi creatively assembled audio and visuals through nine years of developing an experimental animation to reveal what she calls “the hidden history” of her Hungarian Jewish-born grandmother Veronica Földes Frame’s 90 year-long life of re-invention. Her grandmother moved across three continents with tragedy and happiness to Americanization: in my Forest Hills neighborhood, with an address I could recognize from the evidence that flashes by: 
The artist energetically montages her grandmother’s archival photographs, over 60 years of hundreds of typed and handwritten letters (with envelopes), dozens of government documents, almost seven hours of interviews at Yale’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, 40 years of Super 8 home movies, plus her autobiographical novel from her experiences in Hungary (that I bought but haven’t yet read) and 300-page unfinished memoir, adding narration and snapshots by her father and the artist herself. From her grandmother’s passing in 2014, this is a beautifully unique memorial tribute to a remarkably strong woman who seems to have saved, remembered, and bequeathed everything. (at 2024 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum/ courtesy of the filmmaker) (2/16/2024)
Apples From the Desert (Tapoukhim min ha'midbar) (seen at 2015 Israel Film Center Festival) Based on a short story by Savyon Liebrecht, not a novel as described in the promotion, the plot of a young Orthodox woman (Rebecca Abarnabel played by Reymonde Amsallem), meeting a hunky kibbutznik “Dubi” (I can’t figure out the actor) and running off with him was enhanced by seeing it at the JCC of the Upper West Side, in two ways. First, the Festival director actually thought that by scheduling the screening I attended at 5 pm on a Friday in June it would attract local Orthodox attendees who would still have able to get home by the start of Shabbat, was of course unfulfilled; so the audience was very secular in their lives and antipathy for an Orthodox father, who, of course, rigidly restricts his wife and is arranging a marriage against his daughter’s wishes, with the mother torn between the two of them (and her broaching their divide is quite sweet). (The daughter is introduced as rebellious immediately because she works, in the office of a school. And because she gradually gets involved with a secular dance class.) Second, the Q & A with a co-director (I’ll have to find my notes to figure out which one was able to be in NYC) was very helpful, because he explained that the 87 minute version we viewed was in fact an edited, international edition cut from a TV mini-series, and was based on the play adaptation, written by the novelist. Unfortunately, what was missing was the third from the kibbutzniks’ point of view, showing that they were just as rigid in their determined secularism as the Orthodox family was in their observance. There were hints that even though she stays on the farm, “Rivka” finds a middle road, continuing some religious observance and rituals on the kibbutz, and I wonder if that was also cut, so I don’t feel I can formally review such a truncated version. (10/9/2015)
Arabani (previewed at 2013 Other Israel Film Festival) (So, nu: Ironically, the Israeli Jewish woman who caused all these problems is never seen; she’s only at the other end of the phone when her kids call her.) (12/4/2013)
Arabic Friday (short) Director Gal Rosenbluth based the characters “Naomi” and “Marwan” on her and her partner Nayef Hammoud, whose autobiographically-inspired short The Day My Father Dies was also shown, who have attempted to cross-communicate by only speaking his native Arabic that day to improve her language facility, resulting in the only day they don’t get along. (seen at 2019 Other Israel Film Festival) (11/17/2019)
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Writer/director Kelly Fremon Craig expanded on Judy Blume’s YA novel – that I had not read, so didn’t know just how universal are the awful things I went through in Middle School. Benny Safdie is the Jewish father “Herb Simon” and Kathy Bates is the Jewish grandmother “Sylvia Simon”; the religiously confused central character is played by Abby Ryder Fortson. More commentary forthcoming. (Lionsgate/Starz) (12/12/2023)
The Armor Of Light (So, nu: Over halfway through the documentary I felt sucker-punched – turns out when Rev. Rob Schenk, the central figure with the tortured soul about gun control, referred to being converted to evangelism in Buffalo, NY he didn’t mean born again – he was Jewish. His mother was a Catholic convert (which is all he says about her), in order to marry his Jewish father who kept a scrapbook on Holocaust news reports.) (previewed at 2015 Tribeca Film Festival) (5/2/2015)
Arranged (12/14/2007) (emendations coming after 6/14/2008) (So, nu: I do get annoyed at semi-autobiographical indie movies about Orthodox women that posit their choices as being between, here, Ditmas Park and Sodom & Gomorrah. There is a whole world out there from modern-Orthodox to Reformed that could offer them warmth and family etc. etc. within a moral, supportive, Jewish environment.)
The Arrest (Hama’Atzar) (short film at 2015 Tribeca Film Festival) The reverse futuristic premise of occupation is confusingly ineffective because I actually thought the obviously Orthodox settlers were being legitimately arrested by leftist soldiers, as the mother lies to hide her accused terrorist son. (5/2/2015)
Arthur Miller: Writer (So nu: Director Rebecca Miller, who doesn’t seem to have a sense of her Jewish identity, draws out a new revelation about Miller’s Jewish background in talking to him and his brother and sister (actress Joan Copeland) for this long gestating HBO biographical documentary– the influence of his mother Augusta Barnett, seen in a few old fraying photographs. They describe an arranged marriage between a literary, artistically minded force of nature to a barely literate, ambitious businessman. Though his plays are dominated by father/son relationships, the writer fondly recalled days spent with her when she colluded in his playing hooky, and admired how fast she read novels, and remembered what she’d read, and that she got her husband to go to the theater weekly, bringing home the song sheets so the family could sing them together. But he also remembers how she bitterly blamed her husband for his business’s failure from the Depression that seriously declined their standard of living (from a Central Park-view apartment on 110th St. with a chauffeur down to Brooklyn and selling her jewelry), a feeling that does resonate in his plays, though the wives are ultimately loyal. It is pointed out that only The Price has a Jewish cadence he knew well, though not his mother’s. While most analysts characterize his marriages as to schicksas, he enthusiastically identifies as Jewish and sees his Middle Western Catholic first wife literary publisher, his second wife Marilyn Monroe from an abused childhood and paparazzi-tormented Hollywood bait, and his third wife photographer Inge Morath, a German daughter of a Nazi officer, as rebelliously attracted to him as a Jewish intellectual. (previewed at 2017 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (updated 11/29/2017)
The Art of Silence (L’art du silence) (short version) This bio-doc on Marcel Marceau’s life expands beyond his war-time experiences portrayed in Resistance. In addition to archival performance and interview footage, his life story and theatrical philosophy is told by his wife and daughters, who carry on his school and theater work in mime. One daughter also comments on how her son, since he was little, continues her father’s traditions through dance. (courtesy of Seventh Art Releasing) (3/11/2022)
The Art of Spiegelman (Art Spiegelman, Traits de mémoire) (briefly in Reviewed: New York Jewish Film Festival 2013 of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (2/19/2013)
Asia Debut writer/director Ruthy Pribar maturely sets up a very original mother “Asia” (Alena Yiv) and teen daughter “Vika” (Shira Haas) relationship, especially as Russian immigrants in Israel dependent on each other, and the male/female friends they can frankly make and keep. I appreciate that Pribar was inspired by her family’s personal experience with her sister’s illness. But the film sinks into what comes across as maudlin “movie star disease” pathos, even as it makes a strong point about making decisions. However, with all the Tribeca and nine Israeli Ophir awards to women crew (Best Picture, Actress, Supporting Actress, Cinematographer – first female winner, Editing, Casting, Original Score – first female winner, Art Design, and Makeup Artist) it garnered, I’m way in the minority of viewers. (preview at 2020/replay at 2021 Tribeca Film Festival/ at 2021 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (streaming through Menemsha Films) (5/7/2020; updated 3/10/2021)
As I Am: The Life and Times of DJ AM (So, nu: The mother of Adam Goldstein comes across as a New York Jew in an early tight close-up interview, as she twice describes her very complicated relationship with her gay husband and the brief fling with his biological father, about when she told them all the truth, and is portrayed as really clueless when she dumps him into a notorious facility for drug rehab when he was very young. His older sister may be seen as well heard (the audio and visual IDs are erratic, including of all the blonde models he dated so I couldn’t tell if any were Jewish), but it’s quite a ways into the film until an interview is included where he explicitly identifies himself as having been raised Jewish by his by then single mom, including attending Hebrew School, which adds cynicism to his description of a lavish, over-the-top bat mitzvah he DJd as a career highpoint, though his memory that her father was the inventor of the bulletproof vest doesn’t seem to be correct.) (previewed at 2015 Tribeca Film Festival) (5/2/2015)
Ask Dr. Ruth (previewed at 2019 Tribeca Film Festival) – four generations of Jewish women are seen or discussed in this bio-doc – her beloved, indulgent Orthodox grandmother and her mother in photographs before they disappeared into the Holocaust, Dr. Ruth, and her daughter Miriam.
In this PBS interview with Dr. Ruth Westheimer on the 4/3/2019 Amanpour and Company, they well summarize the bio-doc, particularly its Jewishness. (4/6/2019 and updated 12/31/2019)
Ask the Dust (So, nu: The Jewish woman here just comes across as bizarre rather than enhancing the theme about the toll of accepting one's ethnicity within the California Dream. Or something like that.)
As Lilith (previewed at 2011 New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (Director Eytan Harris's camera, somewhat intrusively, captures a feisty woman at a very painful conjunction of gender, religious plurality and motherhood at its most emotional within Israeli media, politics and law. She has antagonized Orthodox Jews because: 1) her daughter committed suicide, 2) she wants to cremate her remains, 3) she is a free-spirited pagan, kinda wiccan, with her own nature-worshiping rituals. (1/28/2011)
As Seen Through These Eyes - Filmmaker Hilary Helstein’s ten year effort to find original art by Holocaust survivors and interview them about how they used their skills during and after as witnesses (including at Nuremberg trials) and for therapy is moving testimony. (She credits historical scholar consultant Sybil Milton, in memoriam before the film opened in 2009, as crucial to these efforts.) While her timing was fortunate in being able to speak with them before it was too late (and after many of their lost works were found), the vividness of their art and their stories behind them are striking testaments to the human spirit even in hell. Among the almost dozen survivors participating are three women, none who were older than 20 in various concentration camps: Ela Weissberger, Trudie Strobel, and Dina Gottliebova-Babbitt (without her follow-up story of trying to get her recovered art back from The Auschwitz Museum). Several of the artists cite the inspiration of Friedl Dicker Brandeis as their art teacher in Theresienstadt, and a selection of children’s art is seen among the 45 images in the documentary, including by Dita Kraus and Netty Vanderpol. (courtesy of Menemsha Films) (updated 1/25/2023)
Assisted Living (So, nu: All the reviewers have identified the lead woman character "Mrs. Pearlman" as being Jewish, though she is played by Maggie Riley. Doubtless this is because of the character's name and that the writer/director is Elliot Greenebaum. However, it was filmed at a Masonic rather than a Jewish facility (in Kentucky) and the religious services and chaplain are clearly Christian, and there are no Yiddishisms or any other Jewish references in the script.)
The Attack (So, nu: Israeli actress Evgenia Dodina plays “Kim” (in the novel, her last name is “Yehuda”, the doctor’s colleague at the hospital, who is embarrassed by the prejudices he has to face, every day and especially after the incident. There’s a hint of her attraction to him, though he’s a shocked widower, and she loyally stands by him and sympathetically tries to help him at work and at home, despite peer pressures.) (6/25/2013)
At the Heart of Gold (So, nu: Olympic Gold Medalist Aly Raisman became a hero to Jewish women when she came forward to forcefully accuse the team doctor of abuse and the complicit leadership of U.S. gymnastics and U.S. Olympics. I’m not sure what other Jewish women were also victims and spokeswomen.) (preview at 2019 Tribeca Film Festival) (4/7/2019)
Author: The JT Leroy Story Though I have no confirmation, it appears that Laura Albert, the woman behind the scandalous creation of this persona/pseudonym and writer in this and other voices is at least a putative Jew – born in Brooklyn to a father named Irwin. (8/25/2016)
Autism In Love (So, nu: The St. Paul family is Jewish, with interviews with Gita when she’s already in hospice, and Stephen’s mother trying to cope with the return of her son as she ages.) (previewed at 2015 Tribeca Film Festival) (4/16/2015)
Autism: The Musical (Missed when it was the talk of Tribeca Film Festival, so I caught it on HBO) (The dynamic centerpiece is Elaine Hall, or "Coach E," the founder of The Miracle Project, mother of Neal, adopted from Russia to connect to her ethnic heritage. Like most of the mothers of the autistic children featured, she becomes more than a bit monomaniacal and single, but unexpectedly finds a man willing to take both of them on, and she remarries. The film spotlights how she draws her son into the Jewish holidays, particularly Hanukkah and Passover, even over the discomfort of her new in-laws. My admiration for our cousin’s strenuous educational efforts with her autistic son many years ago before programs like these were available was reinforced. The deleted scenes available On Demand, and presumably on the DVD, include Shira, another single Jewish mother of an autistic daughter, with more kids and more Jewish observance.) (3/29/2008)
A Woman, A Part I’ve been following Maggie Siff’s career since her stint on Nip/Tuck’s Rachel Ben Natan, as an actress in general, and for playing at least putative Jewish women. She’s a producer and the star of artist’s Elisabeth Subrin writing/directing debut. From the press notes: “Casting Anna [Baskin], the film’s lead…Subrin wanted a very strong, smart Jewish actress who could bring both intensity and intelligence to the difficult role of a woman at a crossroads. ‘I knew I needed an incredibly smart and subtle actor. It’s very challenging to play a complex, shut-down woman in crisis who's also professionally successful and privileged — the 'empathy' card works against her. I saw her character as a metaphor of woman general in a sexist and performative culture, but didn't want her reduced to a mission statement or cliché.’ None of the actresses who Subrin and [producer Scott] Macaulay considered in the early casting process seemed like the right fit for Anna. Then Subrin remembered the department store heiress in the first season of Mad Men played by Maggie Siff, and immediately realized the actress would be perfect. Before they even sent the script to her agent, Subrin by chance signed into a yoga class in Los Angeles while in town for a test shoot, and there, standing next to her at the sign-in desk, was Siff. One yoga class and two coffees later, they were discussing schedule. A year and a half following, the film was made. Says Subrin, ‘Maggie's subtlety and technically very precise and considered work kept the film from becoming histrionic or melodramatic.’”
Ironically, her character “Anna Baskin” is a TV actress in the kind of pedestrian hit show Siff has not been stuck in, and she escapes this stultifying contract in L.A. to revisit her artistic roots with her two 1990’s friends from a downtown experimental theater troupe. She discovers that “Isaac” (played by John Ortiz) has written a new play based on their experiences together (including a confusing romantic triangle), with a character specifically like her: because the character is a Jewish woman from Connecticut, and borrowing from other aspects of her personal life. She yells at him in summarizing the character – in a way every stereotyped Jewish woman on TV I describe in my Lilith Watch: Critical Guide To Jewish Women On TV, though I all could catch to remember was “selfish”. Like in all such references, he defends her as “smart”, the only specific word I can recall, as well other familiar positive stereotypes. Maybe I can get the script sometime to be able to quote this unfortunate scene completely. (3/24/2017)
Aya (seen in Oscar Nominated Short Films 2015 – Live Action) Acclaimed by the promoter as “a first and historic nomination for an Israeli film” in this category, written/directed by Mihal Brezis & Oded Binnun, with Tom Shoval, who are expanding it into a feature film, this is a suggestive Brief Encounter between the titular woman (played by Sarah Adler) and “Thomas” (played by one of my favorite Danish actors, Ulrich Thomsen, of Banshee. It uses the Tel Aviv airport to Jerusalem setting and the context of the The Arthur Rubinstein Piano Competition more than anything particularly revealing about the central woman who is playing out a childhood fantasy.) (2/22/2015)
Babi Yar. Context - Among the extraordinary footage and images that documentarian Sergey Loznitsa found in public and private German, Russian, and Ukrainian archives, produced for the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, were still photographs of Jewish women, with their children, as they first gathered, on the top of the ravine, then were forced to walk through a gauntlet of German soldiers while undressing, to be lined up naked at the rim for execution.
[stills courtesy of Atoms & Void]
I hadn’t seen in a documentary before the explicit “’Witness statement of Dina Promicheva at the trial of Case No 1679 on the atrocities committed by the fascist invaders on the territory of Ukraine SSR’ Kiev Jan 24, 1946”. She doesn’t specifically identify as Jewish, but says she threw away her ID (presumably the ethnically labeled kennkarte though the English subtitle translates as “passport”) and convinced the Ukrainian in a German policeman’s uniform, among the German soldiers, that she was Ukrainian. For the Soviet audience in the packed courtroom, she makes a point of saying she showed him her trade union card and proof of employment. What she saw, even “with my head in my knees all day”, and her testimony of how she bravely survived jumping into the ravine full of bodies, including withstanding soldiers standing on her to be sure she was dead, is as riveting as she is calm and clear spoken. The witness statement of Prof. Vladimir Mikhailovich Artobelevsky at the same trial includes his emotional reaction at seeing the despair of an elderly woman reproaching God in Yiddish. (at 2022 First Look Festival of Museum of the Moving Image) (3/14/2022)
Loznitsa has next put together The Kiev Trial for the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, per Atoms & Void: “The Kiev Trial, also known as the “Kiev Nuremberg”, took place in January of 1946 in the Soviet Union, and was one of the first post-war trials convicting German Nazis and their collaborators. 15 criminals, guilty of atrocities, which were later identified by the Nuremberg trials as “crimes against humanity”, faced justice in case No.1679 “On the atrocities committed by fascist invaders on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR.” Using unique, previously unseen, archive footage, Sergei Loznitsa reconstructs key moments of the proceedings, including statements of the defendants and testimonies of the witnesses, survivors of Auschwitz and Babi Yar among them. The film lays bare the “banality of evil” and is devastatingly relevant today, as Ukrainian people are once again being subjected to the violence of barbarian invaders. 106 min, b/w, 5.1
The Netherlands, Ukraine”.
Bachelor Days Are Over (Pourquoi tu pleures?) (previewed at 2012 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (An annoyingly immature, philandering Jewish groom is at the center, though the film is written and directed by Katia Lewkowicz. It’s not clear if the pretty lover (played by Sarah Adler) who distracts him with sex and singing is Jewish, but the Jewish women are substantial, if inscrutable-- his harried sister (played by Emmanuelle Devos, who frequently play a Jewish character in French movies) keeps bailing him out of trouble amidst her own work, child care and home responsibilities, and his mother (played by Nicole Garcia) who, unstereotypically, doesn’t seem very enthused about his upcoming nuptials. That may be because his somewhat mysteriously independent bride-to-be (played by Valérie Donzelli) is an exotic-looking Sephardi Israeli whose relatives descend on them with no English or French, and almost tribal ethnic habits.) (1/21/2012)
Back to the Fatherland - My cousin Hila Golan’s relevant theater work in Berlin, in partnership with Ariel Nil Levy, includes Schweigeminute, as seen in this trailer, which subsequently won first prize at the 2010 Acco Festival of Alternative Israeli Theater, and discussed in this interview) (preview courtesy First Run Features) (6/28/2019)
Bag of Marbles (Un sac de billes) (So, nu: The parents have small roles in the film (and the memoir). As a Russian Jew, the mother is portrayed with curly brown hair – and does a feisty defense of her fake papers to the Gestapo that she is really related to the Czar’s family. In the memoir, one of the older brothers relates that he was able to get her out of Drancy (the first time) by cashing in various favors to get that story believed there, too. Evidently, that no longer worked later in the war, though she did survive for a long life with her children, though not her husband who was transported and didn’t return. Unlike most such films, the mother does have a separate identity, as a violinist, that figures in her love story with her husband; Joffo went on to write the story of her earlier life from Russia to Paris as a musician in Anna et son orchestra (1976), which does not appear to be available yet in English as Anna and Her Orchestra, and La Vieille dame de Djerba (1984), also not in English, about meeting an old woman in Tunisia who knew his mother and her family. The other Jewish females seen in the film, seen as they are being rounded up, are the most vulnerable and heart-breaking, elderly and mothers with small children. Not mentioned in the film is that their original plan was to join an older sister in Vichy – but she was terrified that their presence would blow her cover to collaborators who would snitch on her, so they only hid there for one night.
An interesting aside, Fanny’s Journey (Le voyage de Fanny) based on a very similar autobiographical novel, is a superior film because the danger the fleeing kids face is palpable, was directed by Lola Doillon, the daughter of the director of the first filmed version of this book. (updated 3/26/2018)
The Balcony Movie (Film Balkonowy) - Among the 2,000 intriguing people who revealed themselves to director Paweł Łoziński when walking by his Warsaw apartment over two and a half years is a shy young woman who sweetly sings “Shalom Aleichem”. Of course, she may not be Jewish, but she is a contrast to the several Catholics, such as the woman with a rosary (who is shocked that he hasn’t been baptized and has never said the prayer; though he says he’s agnostic, he doesn’t tell her he identifies as “a Polish Jew”) and a man who compares the experience of talking into the director’s lowered microphone to being in the confessional. The charming, humanistic film is an extended version of a short commissioned for HBO Poland’s At Home anthology, a project which challenged filmmakers to comment on the pandemic and the isolation it forced upon people. (at 2022 First Look Festival at Museum of the Moving Image) (3/16/2022)
Band Aid - Zoe Lister-Jones frequently plays Jewish women characters, but leaves herself somewhat ambiguous in a film she wrote/directed/produced/co-wrote many of the songs, and starred in – with an all-female crew. The closest “Anna” gets to revealing she is Jewish is when she and her husband “Ben” (Adam Pally) are looking around in their storage garage and find the yarmulkes from their wedding. (She also has a lot of Jewish friends with kids, including a lesbian couple.) But his mother “Shirley” is played by an unusually restrained and finally sympathetic Susie Essman in her most dramatic role, after first being portrayed as an stereotyped domineering mother-of-adult-son, when she gives him advice on coping with marriage after miscarriage. The script also throws in a couple of ironic jokes about the Holocaust, ISIS and 9/11. (12/9/2017)
The Band’s Visit (Bikur Ha-Tizmoret) (12/7/2007)
Bang! The Bert Berns Story The brief interviews with his sister (Sylvia Levine) and her daughter were usual Jewish background interviews on someone who was involved in the early rock ‘n’ roll biz centered around the Brill Building, but –surprise- a central figure in this bio-doc directed by his son Brett and based on the biography Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues by Joel Selvin, is his very Jewish wife Ilene Stuart Berns. The music industry veterans fondly recall her as a hot blonde who was a go-go dancer at Morris Levy’s club The Roundtable! Not the usual intro for a gal who was living on Long Island with her parents, and only happened to go into the city on her day off to give her newly divorced sister a night on the town. Let alone about love at first sight though she was about a dozen years younger than him when she warily agreed to come over to his penthouse apartment. She is a marvelous raconteur, and comes across as a tough broad, in telling how she was involved in the business side of his songwriting and finances, while having kids, and being slow to realize how connected to the mob some of his friends were. Her daughter Cassandra adds a couple of touching anecdotes. Interviews with the late fellow Brill Building Jewish songwriter Ellie Greenwich are also included. (previewed at 2016 DOC NYC Festival) (10/25/2016)
Barbara Rubin and the Exploding New York Underground (at 2018 DOC NYC Festival)
(copyright/preview courtesy of Juno Films)
Concurrent example of how Rubin gets forgotten: In The New York Times obit by Neil Genzlinger of filmmaker Peter Whitebread, 6/21/2019: “[H]e took his camera to a 1965 festival at Royal Albert Hall in London that featured both British and American poets, including Adrian Mitchell, Michael Horovitz and Allen Ginsberg. The resulting film, Wholly Communion, captured what turned out to be a seminal event in the emerging counterculture movement” – Rubin germinated and produced this International Poetry Incarnation. (6/21/2019)
Barbie
(L-R) RHEA PERLMAN as Ruth Handler and MARGOT ROBBIE as Barbie in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “BARBIE,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Lara Cornell 
- part of America Ferrera’s monologue became a popular meme.
In my favorite movie of 2023, co-Writer/Director Greta Gerwig includes marvelous tributes to Ruth Handler (played by a maternally wise Rhea Perlman), the “inventor” of the grown-up looking doll. As the surprise ghost of the sole female executive in this imagined amusing version of the Mattel headquarters, she presides in a homey office with a sewing machine and kitchen to invite the surprised “Barbie” (wonderfully played by Margot Robbie) to really drink tea (transcription is approximate): I created you to not have an ending. I am Mattel – until the IRS got a hold of me…I’m a grandmother with a double mastectomy. Nobody looks like Barbie. “Ruth” returns with advice, including: Being human can be uncomfortable. People make things up – like the patriarchy, and then you die. When “Barbie” asks to become human, “Ruth” tells her that she’s named for her own daughter Barbara: I always knew that Barbie would surprise me…I can’t control you, or my own daughter…My daughter can look back and see how far they’ve come. So when the toy “Barbie” enters the real world, with real women’s body issues, she adopts the daughter’s name – nu now she’s Jewish? (11/30/2023)
Barney’s Version (So, nu: In the wonderfully satiric Mordecai Richler novel that is far more reflective on Jewish Montrealers than the film (one has to strain to hear his blond best friend's full name in the movie to know he's Jewish too), all three of his wives are Jewish. The first turns out to be a self-loathing identity denier due to a horrifically restrictive and unsympathetic Orthodox upbringing. The second is a loquacious, shop-a-holic tied to her rich, doting parents, but he is also sympathetic that she balloons into post-divorce obesity because of his cruel rejection. Not only is the lovely third wife Jewish in the book-- not in the film-- but she participates in raising their kids Jewish, and is comfortable with his roots. She is a cultured intellectual radio DJ/interviewer with a sense of humor and tolerance for hockey, who re-marries to a younger, handsome man. Did the scriptwriter and/or director think only a gentile would be credible?) (12/3/2010)
Jan Lisa Huttner interviewed director Richard Lewis in Chicago on January 19, 2011, who defended the changes: "I didn't want to make the film too parochial. . . I didn't want this idea that Barney was just chasing Jewish girls…I felt like that choice had to do with grounding Miriam, making her a more earthy character…I didn't really want Barney running after, like, “a blonde bombshell. Miriam isn’t 'the monkey woman' Karen Black played in Portnoy’s Complaint. . .[W]e did go out of our way not to make Miriam 'not Jewish'. . . Often I found the greatest 'Jewish American Princesses' that I knew were so bright and so stupid at the same time. And it was wonderful to see that combination, and that kind of emotional immaturity, where that “Daddy's Girl” kicks in. Minnie Driver brought so much hurt and damage to the character of 'The Second Mrs. P.'” (Thanks to Lew Goodman for bringing this citation to my attention.)
Barren - Based on true cases of abuse of pitifully naïve, very young Haredi wives pressured by their community to get pregnant (amidst the required cognizance of a woman’s menstrual cycle for ritual bathing and intercourse regulation), there are too many plot holes in this strained effort to show Israeli Ultra-Orthodox in a mostly positive light of dealing with this situation.
The government film funding agencies in Israel have called for more fiction features about the growing Haredi population (who do not attend such films), and director Rabbi Mordechai Vardi was well-placed to move from TV documentaries (like The Field) to fiction, after his many years as head of the screenwriting department at Jerusalem’s Ma’aleh School of Television, Film, and the Arts “that is devoted to the intersection of Judaism and modern life.” As a bridge for secular audiences, funders have suggested a focus on baalei teshuvah (less-observant Jews who choose to become Ultra-Orthodox, like a large branch of my cousins, many who have “made aliyah” to Israel). Vardi also directed the documentary Reflected Light (2018) on their generation gap with their Haredi-raised children, one of the tensions in Barren that sets his story within such a family.
At 24 years old, ”Feigi” (Milli Eshat) has already lived physically and daily under the thumb of her nosey in-laws for four years. While her rigid husband “Naftali” (Yovat Rothman) spends his days in yeshiva and vacations praying at tzaddiks’ distant tombs with the guys, she seems to have lived an isolated married life, despite working in a Judaica shop where her English skills are useful with tourist customers. Her parents left for the U.S. for work, so perhaps her lack of female friends and confidantes is because she, like her mother-in-law (Ilanit Ben-Yaakov), wasn’t raised Ultra-Orthodox, or because her father-in-law (Nevo Kimchi) chose to leave the Breslav Hasidic community. Though she has heard about fertility tests for couples, her husband and his family prefer the power of prayer and tradition that is more superstition than Talmudic to be sure they are not violating any proscriptions. With the fully-dressed young couple’s insistence on turning off lights in their bedroom, I wondered if they even knew how to make a baby.
When “Feigi”s faith is abused, there are token suggestions of going to the police, without noting that her reluctance would be due to the shame put on the family in a community that is already cruelly gossiping about her. (So much for lashon hara.) A beit din has to be convened to judge her, and it’s a close call if a majority of the old rabbis will be sympathetic. It seems like chance that one is realistic, including in advising her stubborn husband. On the other hand, it’s just as hard to believe that a doctor in Safed, with its large Haredi population, wouldn’t know their customs about bodily functions, let alone not give the audience more explanations of what happened. (at 2023 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center and The Jewish Museum) (1/12/2023)
Battle of the Sexes - From the press notes: “Another outspoken character comes from an entirely different world: the hard-nosed PR and tennis maven Gladys Heldman, played by Sarah Silverman, the gutsy businesswoman who made the Virginia Slims Circuit a major media success just as women’s tennis seemed to be in trouble. “Without Gladys there wouldn’t be women’s tennis as it is now,” states King. “Gladys was eccentric, brilliant, creative and knew how to make things happen. When I heard Sarah was going to portray her I thought it was perfect.”… Silverman was instantly attracted to Gladys. “I really didn’t know anything about her,” admits Silverman. “But when I read the script, I loved it and thought wow, she’s so loud and rat-a-tat-tat. I had to try to wrap my head around what her inner life must have been like -- she was so external. I know some people think I’m loud and external, but it was a challenge. She talks so fast and my brain doesn’t move that quickly! She was a very no-nonsense woman and she didn’t suffer fools.”… As [the costume designer] began to research the character of bold Gladys Heldman, [Mary] Zophres highlighted the generation gap she was bridging. “Gladys was a force to be reckoned with but she was a bit older and from the few photos I saw, she wore a girdle, long-line bra and pantyhose. I pitched to [directors Valerie Faris & Jonathan Dayton] that we should emphasize that she was from another generation -- and that Gladys should be in dresses because being a proponent for women’s lib doesn’t mean you have to wear a pantsuit. I put her in vivid graphic prints, because it felt to me that when Gladys walks into a room, she’s an instant disruption.” Sarah Silverman adored the look. “I really just let the wardrobe, the glasses and the hairdo do all the acting,” she quips. “Really, as soon as I had Mary’s amazing clothes on I felt like Gladys.”
Not mentioned here is how very Jewish Simon Beaufoy’s script portrays Heldman. I didn’t so probably few in the audience knew how key she was as King’s business manager for creating and running the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA). She’s in the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, as well as the International Tennis Hall of Fame. The portrayal is a very positive interpretation of a pushy, very well organized Jewish feminist businesswoman. (12/1/2017)
Bee Season
Before the Revolution (previewed at 2014 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (So, nu: includes Jewish women)
Beginners (So, nu: Writer/director Mike Mills was inspired by the experiences of both his parents. He says "My mom got kicked off the swim team when she was thirteen for being half Jewish, and she really did internalize some American antisemitism and felt some shame about her Jewishness – or at least deep complications. So, my dad had said to me, 'Your mother would disagree with me, but I think that she took off her Jewish badge and I took off my gay badge and we joined the American story.' And when he said that to me, I said, 'I’m writing a movie about this.'” He further explains: "There is sort of villain. . .and to me that is American History. There’s the psychiatrist who says [the father's] gayness is a mental illness, and the way the vice squad is in the film, that’s a real institutional villain. It’s quiet and it’s in the background but it is hugely there. Even the antisemitism that’s in the story with the mom who gets kicked off the swim team for being half-Jewish, it’s that history that they’re all up against.” Deviating from the autobiographical elements, it's the son's French actress girlfriend "Anna" (played by Mélanie Laurent) whose mom has that experience, but it's now only in the context of the Holocaust and the facts and dates don't quite add-up, let alone justifying her growing up in a very secularized Jewish family. The discrimination comparisons just seem heavy-handed as the film zips through the push-to-assimilation-history that each generation has lived through, and the Jewish-American context of antisemitism is lost in the process.) (7/3/2011.)
Being Jewish in France (Comme un Juif en France) (briefly reviewed at 2009 Annual New York Jewish Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (The most interesting women's perspectives are from the new, Sephardic communities --and they are as enthusiastic about coucous as the Muslim immigrants in The Secret of the Grain (La graine et le mulet) scroll down for my capsule review-- who even though clearly more observant are leading schools and community organizations.) (1/18/2009)
Bella
Debut documentarian Bridget Murnane constructs an informative and absorbing bio-doc about the work on stage and off of dancer/choreographer Bella Lewitzky (1916 – 2004). With an amazing array of dance and archival clips, from her earliest performances in the 1930s through her own company’s final curtain call in 1997, the primary voice is hers, from interviews and public appearances.
To emphasize the importance of her political actions to the arts and her life, her story doesn’t unfold chronologically. The film opens with her gutsy stand in 1990 against the National Endowment for the Arts’ requirement for grantees to sign a Congressionally-mandated anti-obscenity pledge. But it’s awhile into the film that we can glean what’s unsaid about this confluence, her distinctively Jewish background. Her immigrant father Joseph Lewitzky (as identified in the Jewish Womens Archive) came. she says, from Ukraine “for a better way of life, where people can live together in peace and harmony” (the shot of the Statue of Liberty is one of the film’s few clichés), and quickly joined the Socialist Party, like writer Abraham Cahan. He traveled with a group of Jewish immigrants to California, met and married Nina Ossman, and in 1914 they joined a Socialist colony in the Mojave Desert, Llano Del Rio, one of many such short-lived experimental settlements around the country that attracted idealistic Jewish leftists in those years (that I researched this past year). The rare photos of the residents, including little Bella, are wonderful. Her artistic sensibility was inspired by her father, an art-for-arts-sake painter who moved the family to Los Angeles during the Depression for WPA employment.
In L.A. Bella started ballet classes, but enthuses about how her life changed in 1934, at just 18, when she discovered her “crazy man” mentor “screaming” in his studio, modern dance originator choreographer Lester Horton: “I nearly fainted with joy. From that moment on I was his body. I was in at the beginning of an aesthetic with him…I was moving as I loved to move.” (While her classmate Carmen de Lavallade briefly praises Bella’s early skills, not mentioned is how rare then that this was an interracial program.) In addition to the rave reviews she was already garnering as early as 1937, the clips of the commercial work they did for the money are revealing, from the nightclub routines she hated to musical numbers in Hollywood movies she says she’s not proud of, like White Savage (1943), and she finally drew the line at the Folies Bergère in Paris. But a fellow dancer was her future husband and architect Newell Taylor Reynolds, who influenced her spatial relations on stage as she created her own more individualistic dances, and built her a home studio for classes and rehearsals.
Her small movie roles were enough to get her art intersected with her politics when she was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Telling them "I'm a dancer, not a singer,” she took the 5th Amendment to their accusations. (While there’s no footage of that confrontation, photographs of her at that time flash by.) Consequently blacklisted (her redacted FBI file is shown), she conveniently stayed home with a new baby for ten years, and began to teach; her daughter “my best friend” Nora Reynolds Daniel is authorized to reconstruct her mother’s dances.
Bella’s flashbacks to her “state of total outrage” with that Congressional “inquisition” drove her to challenge the government’s next attempt to censor her forty years later. Her surprising professional lifeline in the 1950’s was Broadway choreographer Agnes DeMille, who hired her for uncredited assistance on the film version of Oklahoma (1955), glimpsed in a clip. DeMille 25 years later gave Bella’s own work more visibility beyond California, we see, by including “The Innovator of the West” in her nationally broadcast Conversations About the Dance program.
Of all of Bella’s many dances included in the documentary, with commentary by her original dancers and music director, the most striking footage of Bella’s choreography is her collaborations from 1976 with another Horton alum, Jewish fashion designer Rudi Gernreich. To me, their interplays of fabric and motion strikingly imply their Jewish associations.
As a former arts development consultant, it is tragic to watch Bella in the 1980’s fall into the Edifice Complex trap of betting her company’s future on capital fundraising for a permanent home in a new specialized theater for dance. The film provides a good case study in how these efforts fail. While it is heartbreaking to see the impact on her dancers of the financial stress of her legal fight for her First Amendment rights to uncensored grants --“I risk loss of my life’s work” -- she is ultimately triumphal in court. Will her eloquent testimony for artistic freedom keep Bella out of PBS’s American Masters series? Murnane makes a strong case that Bella Lewitzky should be in that pantheon. (at 2023 Dance on Camera Festival of Dance Films Association and Film at Lincoln Center) (2/14/2023) Theatrical release opens in Los Angeles Nov. 10, 2023 by BAM Moves, LLC)
Bella!
Is director Jeff L. Lieberman’s documentary correct that younger generations of political women don’t know about Bella Abzug? Did he ask AOC or any others? We can’t be sure because only people who personally knew her are interviewed – family, friends, assistants, and the many celebrities who helped get “This Woman’s Place Is In The House!” - the U.S. House of Representatives in 1970 from downtown Manhattan, including Marlo Thomas and Barbra Streisand (and hear her campaign song), feminist writers Letty Cottin Pogrebin and Gloria Steinem, activist Ronnie Eldridge. And her sprinkling of campaigning in Yiddish. Family and pre-electoral stories may be new to those who thought they knew her (seen in photographs and home movies and heard in audio diary), including her childhood in the Bronx, resentment at not being allowed to do kaddish in the synagogue at the death of her father (RBG reported the same feminist click after her mother died), her Zionist fundraising on street corners and in subway stations, her choice to go to convenient Columbia Law School when Harvard still wouldn’t take girls, and then setting up her own labor rights firm while being active in the very leftist National Lawyers Guild, which led in the 1950s to her defenses, while pregnant, of a Black man in Mississippi facing the death penalty and accused Communists facing HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee). Plus her assistance to Malcolm X’s widow.
It was not politics, but her legal career that established her signature big hats – to be clearly identified as a lawyer, not a secretary, by opposing counsel. The many TV clips, newspaper headlines, and magazine covers are mostly familiar, though we do get inside explanations about what legislative initiatives of hers merit “firsts” (including child care and gay rights), and internecine NYC politics that lost her seat and subsequent elections. Hilary Clinton is one of several who speak of admiring her post-electoral career training women activists internationally through the U.N. and NGOs. One of the interviewees is her biographer, historian Leandra Ruth Zarnow; I just got a copy of her Battling Bella: The Protest Politics of Bella Abzug (Harvard U Press, 2019), so haven’t read it yet. May Bella’s alleged lack of familiarity to non-New Yorkers lessen when this satisfying bio-doc is broadcast on PBS’s American Masters. (8/14/2023)
After I posted links to my review on social media. An anonymous poster claiming to be “a close friend” of Bella’s daughter Liz Abzug, accused the director of “misogyny” because of how he treated her. While I did think that the director was in self-aggrandizement role on the film’s website posing with celebrities – but even more so if the daughter was the interviewee. While many of her claims are more vague and emotional than factual and specific, I am re-printing in-full her recent public posts (with a few punctuation clarifications):
July 29: “Friends, It has come to my attention that “Bella! This Women’s Place is in the House The documentary” is currently being submitted to some film festivals and will be screening to the public. I worked hard as the Executive Producer of this film to personally secure the majority of the interviews (including all the celebs and personal friends, family, political associates) that are in the film. Among other things, I provided personal family photos, never before seen film footage and gave the filmmaker full access to the Bella Abzug Archives.
I want to let it be known that neither I, nor MY FAMILY nor the Bella Abzug Leadership institute can or does support or endorse the film at this time based on some significant disagreements that took place with the producer/director starting back in 2020 up to this year. I haven’t even seen the current cut that has been submitted to festivals and will be screening to the public. I’m obviously very frustrated, sad and me and my sister are so hurt by this! I have acted with openness, integrity and with complete good faith from the very beginning. I have tried for a long time now in every way possible, to resolve this!!
##The way this entire process unfolded over these last several years runs directly contrary to everything my mother ever stood for!!
August 18: “There are several people who have asked why I haven’t sued this filmmaker jeff lieberman when I am the Executive Producer/ Creative consultant of this documentary and had a mutually agreed upon contract with him.
Let me explain the facts to make it totally clear —
I made two distressingly big mistakes - I allowed this basically unknown documentary filmmaker with limited experience do the film after he came to pitch me when I could have a well-known professional documentary filmmaker do it - he seemed real, authentic committed to wanting to honestly work with me closely on the film and elevate moms legacy. Unfortunately he was not what he presented himself to be based on his behavior during the filmmaking process.
He misrepresented himself to me as authentic, having a sincere genuine interest in making a film to honor Bella’s life and that he was a truly collaborative person/ filmmaker who wanted all of my assistance to produce a film which would have the best content in it and best honor her legacy.
In the beginning I thought he was authentic, sincere and truly committed and wanting my full support; and that he wanted my total and complete help through collaborating with me at all stages of the filmmaking process.
With total good faith I gave him open access to moms archives, personal family photos, and films and other material and personally arranged for and secured all of the interviews in the film. I personally conducted many of the interviews with him on site, that are in the film!
Very sadly he ended up not honoring either legally or ethically, our agreement. he turned out to be anything but honorable as he still tries to portray himself that way and takes complete credit for all aspects of the filmmaking and on top of it all he has shown himself to be someone who I certainly DO NOT believe is a feminist!!!
How could a documentary filmmaker who is supposed to so admire my mother, treat me so poorly as executive producer of the film and as one of daughters and a legacy holder, as well as my sister.
Second, and something equally tragic is I had an incompetent lawyer (from a well-known powerful Ny entertainment firm) who wrote our development agreement which was too weak/ it tied my hands in terms of the action I could take to have stopped this filmmaker early on in when he failed to comply with our contract terms starting several years ago.
The contract only gave me the remedy to sue for financial damages if something like this ever happened rather than providing for the right of preliminary injunctive relief which could have halted this filmmakers actions years ago!!!
Thankfully, I now have a very competent entertainment lawyer!
However Let me be clear…I never wanted to litigate this as of course i want the film that i worked so hard on and where I asked for and secured so many and all of the great interviews that are in the film, and where I provided 80 percent of the original material, to be seen by the public. As we know mom was so powerful and accomplished so much. The story of how she became the great feminist leader and iconic politician she is something I want to be widely told and retold!
As many of you know I personally have in the last many years worked so very hard at bringing moms legacy and her work alive to the current generation through among other things creating the Bella Abzug Leadership Institute (BALI) and asking and convincing Harvey Fierstein to write the great Bella Bella play that he wrote .
As the film opened - in San Francisco, LA and now here in our family’s home town and beloved city, I decided no matter what, the truth must be told as to what transpired during the last five years in the process of making this film and how the filmmaker conducted himself in a way that was contrary to everything mom ever stood for!!
Also it needs to be said that Bella/ mom would have been appalled as to how this filmmaker conducted himself during the process both how he acted directly towards me as the Exec Producer, and my family especially since I was completely collaborative, supportive and generous and worked in absolute good faith with him, fulfilled my contractual obligations to make sure the film would be the best reflection of mom’s life and work!!!
As it opens tonight in our family’s hometown neighborhood/ Greenwich Village - and to show you how awful and classless it is, the filmmaker didn’t even extend an invitation to the Abzug family to attend the opening, and when a proclamation that was made yesterday by our Mayor that today is Bella Abzug Day, how shocking it is that my family wasn’t even been informed!! The height of arrogance here is just Unbelievable. !! ###But the end of this story has yet to be told…hang on to your hats folks !!!
August 22: “Each and every one of the these Amazing wonderful and such talented women, cherished friends of mom’s and mine that are featured here in the pictures below are in the Bella documentary. [She posted photographs of many celebrities, including Shirley MacLaine, Marlo Thomas, Lily Tomlin, Hilary Clinton, Gloria Steinem, Barbra Streisand, Renee Taylor, and Maxine Waters]
I asked for and am proud to have secured their interviews in my capacity as Executive Producer of the film. I was thrilled that they agreed to be interviewed. I love and respect each and all of these women!! I honor them! I want it to be very clear about the work, involvement and my great commitment to this project…I interviewed each one of them on site, jointly with the filmmaker.
August 23: “The NY Times article published today- interview about the Bella Documentary. [“A Filmmaker Honored Bella Abzug. Her Daughter Says He Took Advantage” by Liam Stack]
I really want this to settle now…have the filmmaker do the right thing! I want this important documentary that I gave so much to, to be seen by all those who are so eager to see it and especially want younger people who may not know of her work and impact to learn about her.
It’s so important to me…that’s why I agreed to work on this documentary in the first place!! The legacy of my great mom’s work and barrier breaking accomplishments, is best presented through her words and actions and the great interviews her dearest notable friends, colleagues, and admirers graciously gave, that are in this documentary.
My additional hope is that people young and old of all backgrounds who are not familiar with moms work and life can learn more about her unique, powerful, effective, and dynamic leadership as a civil right[s] lawyer, feminist leader and a progressive Congresswoman. They will see a very smart woman who was passionate, compassionate, driven and had a full life; one who deeply loved her family and friends and no matter what she did throughout her life and career, ALWAYS fought for people…and against injustice and for equality! (Re-posted 8/29/2023)
Belle Épine (briefly reviewed at 2011 New Directors/New Films of Film at Lincoln Center/MoMA) (So, nu: The bereaved teen is uncomfortable with her cousins' Rosh ha Shanah dinner because her parents were never religious. She has to ask what the Days of Awe are, and that reflection hangs over her rebellious actions the next 10 days. Her aunt Nelly Cohen (played by Marina Tomé) is warmly understanding, though does not object to her husband's strict ragging on their son. While her sister "Sonia Cohen" (played by Anaïs Demoustier) does participate, she can't bear to even be in their parents' apartment, and deserts her younger sister to stay with her boyfriend. Prudence’s mother "Arlette"is played by Valérie Schlumberger, who isn’t an actress, but is Léa Seydoux’s mother. When "Prudence" has sex with a biker, his cross very obviously hangs over her chest. (3/25/2011)
Be/longing Directed by Amit Breuer, this short is background to the Women Wage Peace campaign. While focusing mostly on an Israeli Arab woman in Jaffe, also briefly featured is Mika, the founder of a bi-cultural choir, who examines her liberal biases. The singers, who seem majority Israeli Jewish, close each performance, despite loud protests against them with considerable profanity, with the Hebrew version of “Had Ghadya” by Chava Albertstein, banned from Israel State Radio, that adds verses for peace: “When will the madness end?”) (preview at 2018 Other Israel Film Festival) (10/31/2018)
Ben-Gurion: Epilogue As to the Jewish women: his mother and wife are just seen in passing in photographs, perhaps because neither was as connected to Palestine/Israel as he was, his mother in Poland, his wife from his exile in New York City who was never happy then being uprooted to the desert kibbutz with their kids. His strained relationship with Golda Meir is also passed over. (5/11/2017)
Berlin ’36 is an up-close-and-personal look at the emotional toll the notorious Olympics, glorified by Leni Riefenstahl, took on two competitors. Gretel Bergmann, a Jewish champion high jumper (played by blonde, lean, long-legged Karoline Herfurth promoting an unusually confident athletic image of a young Jewish woman), was manipulated on and then off the German team, as the Nazis are seen playing Olympics Committee President Avery Brundage for a willing fool to wink that the team wouldn't discriminate. But another teammate with a much more problematic background, here called Marie Ketteler and very sensitively portrayed by Sebastian Urzendowsky, is even more manipulated (though the film sidesteps transgender issues). Their unexpectedly sympathetic alliance as mutually encouraging outsiders united against their competitors and sports authorities verges on the overly sentimental until the real, elderly Gretel testifies at the end of the film of the truthfulness of its spirit. The facts are in George Roy's 2004 documentary Hitler's Pawn: The Margaret Lambert Story. (seen at 2010 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (1/25/2010)
Berlin I Love You (available in theaters, On VOD and Digital HD) is part of the “Cities I Love” collective series of short films, which began with Paris, Je T'aime. This installment is more about being in love with people than the city. In “Transitions”, written by David Vernon, Edda Reiser, Claus Clausen & Rebecca Rahn, directed by Josef Rusnak, singer-songwriter Sara (Rafaëlle Cohen, with long brown wavy hair) from Tel Aviv (an M.C. introducing her later thinks she comes from Tenerife), busks in Berlin next to Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire-like angel living statue, presumably German native Daniel (Robert Stadlober) and they begin a whirlwind romance around the city that helps geographically connect the 10 short films, as “The Recurrent Characters” in the lexicon of the series. She looks for where her grandmother Estelle Singer lived. When they find the address, he shows her the Stolperstein plaques in front of the old building with the names of other Singers – Rudi, Shula, Selma – who lived there when they were taken away in the Holocaust. But Sara grins – She survived! She’s 95-years-old. She wanted me to take photographs. He: How in the world can you come here with these bad memories? She: I don’t have these bad memories. (This is the only mention I noticed of Berlin’s past, with no other glimpse of the many memorials around the city.) I was reminded of my Israeli theater and artistic cousins, grandchildren of a Holocaust survivor, who frequently live in Berlin, though the many kinds of music clubs (including a magical dance with and to Max Raabe) are seen more than the artsy hang-outs. As Sara, Cohen gets to perform two songs, including one she wrote. (Preview courtesy of Saban Films) (2/8/2019)
I must note that in New York Times on 2/19/2019, Amy Qin reports that the film excludes a commissioned short by dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who is quoted: “When I found out, I was very angry. It was frustrating to see Western creators and institutions collaborating with Chinese censorship in such an obvious way.” The Times describes: “The segment portrayed the separation of a family and featured his 5-year-old son, Ai Lao, who lived in Germany. ‘It’s sweet and has some sadness,’ Mr. Ai said about his segment, which he directed in 2015. ‘Not politically sensitive at all.’”
Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened (previewed at 2016 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) As director Lonny Price interviews his fellow original cast members in Stephen Sondheim and Harold Prince’s collaboration in the 1981 Broadway production of Merrily We Roll Along, several guys drop mention of their Jewishness (let alone what they did with their bar mitzvah money), but even as Abigail Pogrebin talks about being the youngest cast member at 16, and even casually dropping that actor Alan Alda was a friend of her parents, I was thinking – this can’t be the daughter of Ms. and Lilith Magazines co-founder Letty Cottin Pogrebin and sister of writer Robin Pogrebin because she hasn’t said a word about being Jewish. Until she describes her career since leaving this brief but stellar show business experience for a career in broadcast and newspaper journalism was helped by writing the interview collection Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish (a book I use as a reference): “Thank God for the Jews – they buy books!” (my approximate memory) And her latest book appeals to that market, too. (10/8/2016)
Bethlehem - The two Israeli women seen – the Shin Bet/Shabak agent “Maya” (played by Efrat Shnap) who is partner of the central bi-lingual character “Raz” (played by Tsahi Halevy, and his wife “Einat” (played by Michal Shtemler) are very supportive – but they are surprisingly bland in what is otherwise a thrillingly story of complex loyalties.) (3/27/2014)
Betrayed (Den største forbrytelsen)
Photo courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn Films
Another outstanding reckoning with how the Scandinavian countries dealt with the Nazis leading up to and through World War II, after the recent Two Lives (Zwei Leben), Kindertransports to Sweden, The Crossing (Flukten over grensens), and The Good Traitor (Vores mand i Amerika). Based on journalist Marte Michelet’s 2014 book The Greatest Crime: Victims and Perpetrators in the Norwegian Holocaust, that does not appear to be available in English and provides the Norwegian title, script writers Harald Rosenløw Eeg and Lars Gudmestad explain at the very end of the credits: “There are many strong and important stories about the fate of Norwegian Jews during the Second World War, both among the 735 who were killed in German death camps, the survivors, and the approximately 1,200 who managed to escape during the war. Several of the film’s characters are based on people who have lived, others are fictionalized. We chose the Braude Family as the center of our film.” Two Braude women descendants are thanked for their assistance, and Jewish women do get attention in the film.
In 1939, the matriarch “Sara Braude” (played by Pia Halvorsen) dominates what seems to be a macho family in Oslo, insisting that the three sons and a daughter come home for a traditional Shabbat dinner, enforcing the reading of the prayers in Hebrew, regardless of their secular beliefs, and the announcement by the boxer son “Charles” (played by Jakob Oftebro) that he wants to marry a non-Jewish woman (a choice that will later save his life). Afterwards, the parents quietly discuss the war news. The mother is adamant that she won’t flee like she had to from Lithuania – did she mean the pogroms in the late 1880s? Her husband “Benzel” (Michalis Koutsogiannakis) is sure they are safe, even as the sons are hearing explicit antisemitism. As soon as the Nazis begin their occupation of the country in April 1940, their daughter “Helene” (Silje Storstein) presciently leaves for Sweden. The family argues over the police requirement that Jews fill out questionnaires for a mandatory ID card, but finally comply. However, the police do keep hassling upstairs neighbor “Maja” (Hanna-Maria Grønneberg), demanding to know where her husband escaped; “Sara” helps her by caring for her two young daughters. In a vivid demonstration of the full scale collaboration of the film’s English title, Jewish males are arrested by the State Police, on October 26, 1942, and sent to build the internment camp Berg, run by the Norwegian fascist NS (Nasjonal Samling) Party of Vidkun Quisling, a consequently infamous name. Again emphasizing betrayal by fellow citizens, the snarling camp commander (Nicolai Cleve Broch) had witnessed “Charles” representing Norway for a boxing victory over Sweden.
Most of the nervous and confused Jewish women stay in Oslo, expecting their innocent family members to be released. Ratcheting up their fears, Jewish stores, like the Braudes, are marked; state auditors inventory their property. When “Sara” tries to hide at least her engagement ring, the auditor carelessly drops her menorah and sneers: See, we aren’t completely heartless, and lets her keep it. Though some women are getting the money together to be smuggled to Sweden, “Sara” waits too long to accept “Charles”s “Aryan” wife’s offer to help. In a precision pre-dawn operation that opens the film and is then re-seen happening on November 26, 1942, the local police chief is instructed to arrest the rest of the Jews, “all of them, no exceptions”, to be loaded into the large German cargo ship SS Donau looming in the harbor. His blonde secretary offers: I’ll give you a hand - we’re finally getting rid of them. A probably fictional Jewish woman is situated to emphasize the Norwegian responsibility of the real police official Knut Rød (coolly played by Anders Danielsen Lie, also starring as an opposite character in The Worst Person in the World (Verdens verste menneske)). She knocks on his door, interrupting his paperwork organizing the roundup, and appeals to him as a neighbor - her husband was arrested, her baby is sick, and she wants confirmation of the rumors that something is happening to Jews tonight. He not only pleasantly denies knowing anything about that, but relishes making a great show of pretending to call headquarters for further confirmation. She finds his bland iciness so distrustful that, luckily, she immediately prepares to flee to Sweden.
Director Eirik Svensson films a very explicit epilogue of where the Norwegians sent their fellow civilian citizens – children, women, and men – to go from that boat: directly by train to Auschwitz. More realistic emphasis on their starvation, exhaustion, threats, and gender separation would have made them seem less as passive victims amidst an improbable reunion within the unsettling spotlights, barking dogs, barked orders, and then the final path.
(seen courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn Films - available on VOD and digital platforms as of December 3, 2021) (12/22/2021)
Between Earth & Sky
Ecologist Nalini Nadkarni is known as “The Queen of the Forest Canopy”, with a one-of-a-kind “TreeTop Barbie” doll from Mattel, complete with a climbing rope, binoculars, boots, notebook, and a helmet for full dark hair that resembles hers. After opening clips from her National Geographic documentaries, award presentations, TV appearances with “Bill Nye the Science Guy” etc., she gives what is her usual introduction of her Bethesda, MD upbringing with her father, a Hindu immigrant from India, and her mother neé Goldie Hema Pechenuk, from a Russian immigrant Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn, seen in many home movies and photographs. (I only quickly traced her mother’s family back to the 1930 Census where her Yiddish-speaking parents’ origins were recorded as “Russian”, but one would have to do further genealogical research of the equivalent quality of her scientific work to be sure of their homeland, let alone her perception they were “Orthodox”.) Amidst climbing trees in Costa Rica and the Pacific Northwest, and unpacking for her new professorship at the University of Utah, her own marriage and two children are indicated by a few photographs.
But because the director Andrew Nadkarni is her nephew, Nalini reveals more about her life. A serious fall from a tree put her in intensive care for months and gave her time for introspection. She realized as a child she climbed the tall maple trees in her yard for a refuge, not just from her four siblings, but from her father’s abuse at night, when his marriage was on the rocks: “Maple trees were dependable and supportive, no harsh words, no expectations.” Convinced that her parents, based she claims surprisingly uninformed, on their heritages, so wanted to have a boy that they didn’t pick a girl’s name for her, she looks at her childhood photograph and switches to third person: “I wish she knew that people loved her. She didn’t know that.” She now sees that as the “root of my journey – if only I could do something important, or fancy, or something worthwhile, then I would be somebody in my family.” The rest of the 25-minute film draws metaphorical parallels between her and people’s reactions to disturbances and trauma, to the trees she studies for the consequences of disturbances in nature. In a subsequent interview, she pointed out that making the film was similarly healing for her artistic nephew, who had been the odd one out in his family of doctors. (PBS POV If/Then Short) (1/7/2024)
Between Fences (Bein gderot/ Entre Les Frontières) (So, nu: Israeli Jewish women turn up towards the end of the film – as peacenik volunteers who follow the African refugees’ directions on how to re-enact the roles of Israeli soldiers at their isolated desert refugee center.) (seen in 2017 First Look Festival at Museum of the Moving Image) (2/4/2017)
Between The Temples
The irrepressible Carol Kane stars with Jason Schwartzman, as “Carla Kessler O’Connor” and “Cantor Ben Gottlieb” in director Nathan Silver’s (co-written with C. Mason Wells) “nods to the films of Joan Micklin Silver including Hester Street”, also starring Kane, and Crossing Delancey, which Silver says “center the lives of women contending with their Jewish communities and identities.” He glides over the irony of a woman filmmaker on this experience, rather than men, by calling this a “romantic traumedy”.
Living in an upstate New York town (like Silver’s Kingston family), the Cantor’s debilitating depression from the accidental death of his erotic-novelist wife, that keeps him from singing, is finally relieved by meeting up with his widowed, laid-off elementary school music teacher who wants him to coach her through an adult bat mitzvah, some 60 years after she originally wished. While everyone around him is trying to fix him up with another Jewish woman, he falls hard for her (a la Harold and Maude), over the objections of her married atheist son, and the other Jewish women in his life – seen in the above still, (left to right): Caroline Aaron as his mother “Meira Gottlieb”, an artist whose portraits of her son fill their house that they again share; Madeline Weinstein as “Gabby”, “Rabbi Bruce”s (Robert Smigel) broken-engagement daughter who is quite turned on by his late wife’s saved phone messages; and Dolly de Leon as “Judith Gottlieb”, his Filipino real estate agent step-mother, who has converted to Judaism, serves on the temple board, and is zealous in enforcing Jewish observance.
Like Silver’s mother, I too am an adult bat mitzvah, and, yes, “Carla”s Judaic lessons are incomplete. (Religious accuracy consultants were Rabbi Mikey Hess Webber and co-producer/b’nai mitzvah tutor Jesse Miller.) But the point of the film is that something else is learned, as revealed in a climactic awkward Shabbat dinner.
Contemporary Jewish songs provide lively interstitial relief from cinematographer Sean Price Williams’ atypically claustrophobic, continual close-up camerawork. Is that to symbolize the suffocating women around the Cantor? (at 2024 Tribeca Film Festival/ courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics) (8/23/2024)
The Bibi Files
- The Trumps and the Netanyahus at the White House, posted on the Prime Minister’s X Feed, 2/15/2017
When producer Alex Gibney received thousands of hours of leaked police interrogation tapes and handed them over to director Alexis Bloom (Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes, 2018) in summer 2023 to make a convincing documentary, it was clear that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, indicted for accepting bribes, fraud, and breach of trust, would be the central antagonist. (While testimony on the tapes has been covered in the Israeli press, privacy laws in the country do not permit broadcast from police investigations unless the participant permits.) Yet, in unfolding the chronology of how his corruption went from petty to central, as framed by producer Raviv Drucker, an Israeli investigative television reporter/analyst and interviews with political and personal insiders, Jewish women are key fascinating figures.
Bibi’s wife Sara (and mother of his right-wing extremist heir apparent wannabe Yair) is his “Lady MacBeth”. Insiders confide: “Sara intervenes in everything – hiring, politics, and media matters…She knows all…They are like a couple who run the country.” In addition to publicly available archival footage and photographs, Sara is explosively seen with accusatory words and threatening body language to the investigators. Bloom said in a Q&A after an online stream that she wished she could have added: “More Sara! Though it’s too easy to blame her, she’s both terrifying but entertaining. She loses her temper in a multitude of ways.” (Evidently, in Israel lawyers are not allowed in during such questioning to stop her.) Her emotional Roy Cohn-like non-denial denials are attacks: “I represent Israel all over the world!..Isn’t it enough that we’re lying down, bleeding, wounded, surrounded by knives? You want us to be run over too? No! With this nonsense you just intend to bring down the Prime Minister!” Though talk about her gets too gossipy, several informants claim Bibi is afraid of his wife, which they trace to a “hot tape” sex scandal” decades ago that is probably unfamiliar to Americans, where he admitted an affair on TV yet she stood by him during that election. While that has Clinton-esque overtones, the couple become more and more Trump-esque, a style Trump is seen developing in The Apprentice, like when a housekeeper reports Sara wanted to emulate them, particularly with gifts, demanded by code-words, of jewelry and large quantities of champagne. (Both third wives, Melania in her spike heels has to bend down considerably to greet her at the White House.) It’s so ironic that all lie against evidence and deny everything, even as they get more religious supporters as they get more corrupt. Left out (for lack of time Bloom said) of the through line of Bibi’s political turn right when centrists got disgusted with his moral vacuum and corruption was how he actively encouraged the extremists who fostered an assassin, as visually seen in Amos Gitai’s Rabin, The Last Day (2015).
One of Bibi’s key nemesis/whistleblowers is Hadas Klein, the former assistant to what I’m calling “Friend of Bibi” because he claimed “A friend can give a gift to a friend” - FOB billionaire, sometime Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan. Klein is seen on those tapes and directly with more detailed information in frank, cynical interviews about “His Majesty”. Though even Bibi thought some jewelry pieces Sara had requested through her were too flashy – turns out it’s not easy to return Tiffany diamonds.
Another billionaire FOB is Miriam Adelson, who is seen gliding in her native Hebrew through her police interrogation (when her husband Sheldon was still alive and also interrogated in English) by ingenuously claiming that as a licensed casino owner she can’t do anything illegal. Oddly, their ownership of the most widely distributed newspaper in Israel is not mentioned, though Sara Netanyahu’s pressure on media owner billionaire FOB Shaul Elovitz for favorable publicity about her becomes a major plot point. His defensive wife Iris gives the police a comically complicated explanation for why they can’t hand over his cell phone for evidence.
A young woman resident of the Hamas-destroyed Kibbutz Be’eri, 20-year old Gili Schwartz, provides a bitter post-October 7, 2023 perspective against the craven politician who told his country and the world he’s the expert on defeating terrorism.
Older political hands look directly in the camera and emphasize that after 30 years in power, Netanyahu survives through a constant state of war. He tells the investigators that he doesn’t remember or know about anything, and his trial is ongoing in court. He is not Israel. (courtesy of Jolt/ “Short List” at 2024 DOC NYC) (11/22/2024)
The Big Short - While I haven’t yet read Michael Lewis’s nonfiction book to check the facts and interpretations, there’s one explicitly Jewish woman – the mother (played by Shauna Rappold) of “Mark Baum” (played by Steve Carell) – and one putative, his wife “Cynthia” (played by Marisa Tomei). In a flashback, his mother is supportive of his questioning the rabbi about possible inconsistencies in the Torah, while his not particularly supportive wife is constantly nagging him to calm down, and even take meds, to stop worrying and getting angry about everything, particularly the banks. (11/29/2015)
Big Sonia - A fond portrait by granddaughter Leah Warshawski with co-director Todd Soliday. Her mother (or aunt?) who accompanies Sonia to presentations at schools and other groups of young people, even prisoners, about her experiences in the Holocaust at three concentration camps, says she’s the last survivor in the Kansas City area. That she was deported at age 13, and the film emphasizes through animation what age she was when taken to each extermination camp, including Auschwitz, really hits home to the kids. Though the editing is uneven, the parallel story of her continuing her husband’s tailor shop at a slowly abandoning shopping mall (and then saved to move to a similar officie building) raises this beyond similar documentaries to add a commentary that compares to their 1950’s suburban home movies. (at 2016 DOC NYC Festival) (11/28/2017)
Big Sister (Ahotcha) (short) (previewed at 2017 Tribeca Film Festival) (6/4/2017)
Black Book (Zwartboek) (So, nu: Some of the most outrageous situations, especially about the Jewish Mata Hari at the center who may be the sexiest Jewish woman portrayed in cinema, is not the director being his usual violent, extreme self, but he insists are based on true incidents --several supported in the book memoir of Steal A Pencil For Me, and as in – spoiler alert-- this interview. Now if only Verhoeven would adapt the Megillah!)
Black Bus (briefly reviewed at 2011 New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (So, nu: Interviewees make clear that the increasing restrictions on observant women are not about halacha, but a political result of competition between ever more conservative rabbis. Daringly bringing the cameras on board brings home that these buses look more like apartheid or Jim Crowe than a protective favor for women, as well as how sadly alienated from their old friends and family are those women who leave the community, even while enjoying their freedoms.) (3/27/2011)
Black On White: The Idan Raichel Project (as seen at the 2008 NY Sephardic Jewish Film Festival, but not only is this the one-hour documentary counterpart to Live And Become (Va, Vis Et Deviens), but the Ethiopian Jewish woman’s viewpoint missing from that film is heard loud and clear here!) (2/18/2008)
Blessed Is The Match: The Life And Death Of Hannah Senesh (1/29/2009) (So, nu: While I do not recommend the film, and I will detail the paper saint superficial stereotypes at some point here, Marilyn Hertz, a member of my synagogue, immediately commented on my review (quoted with permission): "You[r] assessment of this being like a young adult book is correct. I saw the premier[e] last night & was invited to the Q & A with the producer. She wanted this to be shown in schools, and wanted it to be a mother/daughter relationship story. I thought it was quite good & worth seeing.")
Blue Box - The only Jewish woman seen and heard in this documentary is director Michal Weits, great-granddaughter of the central subject Joseph Weits, of the Jewish National Fund’s titular fundraiser, and his diaries, as she sharply questions her grandfather, father, and great-uncles about what she finds in there and other archives on the truth of the acquisition of Palestinian lands for Jews from the 1930’s on – that contradict the claim that all Palestinian land-owners were fairly compensated pre-statehood. (previewed at 2021 Other Israel Film Festival/ DOC NYC) (11/2/2021)
The Blue Room (La chambre bleue) In one of the few differences from the source novel by Georges Simenon, writers/co-stars/domestic partners Mathieu Amalric and Stéphanie Cléau changed her main character’s name from “Andrée” to “Esther”, and that she had shared first communion with him, but strongly left the impression that she’s Jewish by retaining that she was a doctor’s daughter and her taunt that he didn’t kiss brunette girls in school, with a blonde wife (though leaving out the dated background that her father had been in a concentration camp during the war). (10/1/2014)
Blues By The Beach (seen at Cinematek Forest Hills) While most audience members focus on the shock of the terrorist attack in 2003 at an Anglo bar next to the U.S. Embassy, I was fascinated by the beautiful, hip, slash-haired, 23-year-old waitress Dominique Hass, as a symbol of the new kind of young, secular Jews who are attracted to move to Israel. So it was that much more tragic that she was one of the three fatalities from the suicide bomb. (10/9/2016)
Bobbi Jene For a fly-on-the-wall documentary following an American dancer from living in Israel as a featured performer with the Batsheva Dance Company to her return to the U.S., Israeli women are barely seen at all. There’s a brief dinner with her boyfriend’s parents, so there’s an implicit comparison. Her American mother is a conservative Evangelical who is uncomfortable watching her modern dance performances, even clothed, and is just as uncomfortable that she’s living with a Jewish guy. His Jewish mother is a sophisticated liberal who was in the audience for her nude performance, and comfortably welcomes her to their home. (briefly reviewed at 2017 Tribeca Film Festival) (6/3/2017)
Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story Per their press release, ”The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has worked for more than a decade to develop major artistic works that faithfully depict Lamarr's extraordinary story, a trans-continental, war-time tale of a glamorous Hollywood actress who was a groundbreaking inventor and helped shape the world we live in but never got her technological due.” Based on Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World by Richard Rhodes (like the documentary, also supported by Sloan) with newly discovered audio interviews and other material, the detailed biography on Lamarr – neé Hedwig Kiesler – and her Jewish background in Vienna is a revelation, and how her fears of antisemitism in the U.S. haunted her, such that she never told her children she was Jewish. The archival images from her Viennese assimilated Jewish family and early work are fascinating and extensive. (previewed at 2017 Tribeca Film Festival - but sorry I couldn’t get into the accompanying panel) (PBS’s American Masters, plus Diane Kruger is producing and developing to star in a fictionalized mini-series, also with Sloane) (updated 11/4/2017)
Boogie Woogie Would most people just presume that the wives of the two Jewish art collectors are Jewish? (I haven't read writer/director's book of the same name for comparison.) "Bob Maclestone" (played by Stellan Skarsgard) is sneered at for having changed his name from "Macleshtein" or some such, and the best friend of his divorcing wife "Jean" (played by red-haired Gillian Anderson) cautions to grab his collection Or all you will be left with is his grandmama's Shabbat candles. They certainly seem to be inspired by Robert and Ethel Scull. "Alfred Rhinegold" (played by Christopher Lee with a Mittel-European accent) is first seen with a menorah prominently displayed behind him before we even seen his prized Mondrian piece of the title. He is buried in a Jewish cemetery by a rabbi but all we know about his wife "Alfreda" (played by Joanna Lumley) is that she despairs over their finances and is having an affair with the butler. (4/16/2010)
The Books He Didn’t Burn (Die Bücher, Die Hitler Nicht Verbrannte) Based on American historian Timothy W. Ryback’s meticulously researched 2008 book Hitler’s Private Library, German directors Claus Bredenbrock and Jascha Hannover insightfully expand and extend the context around the 1,300 specific books originally purchased by or given directly to, and probably read by Adolf Hitler between 1920 and 1945, now migrated to U.S. special collections at the (repetitively seen) Library of Congress and Brown University. With a lot of archival photographs and footage of Hitler with books and even meeting with some of the authors, specific connections are made with his speeches and writings. In addition to narration of the chronology of National Socialism by Jeremy Irons, with key excerpts read by other actors, diverse German, French, and American historians and political scientists dig further into his translated American, English, German and Swedish tomes and relate their relevance to contemporary right-wing, Christian Nationalist, White Supremacist politicians and other extremists and their deadly terrorism. (Clips of demonstrations and memorials are seen throughout, supporting the theme is that de-Nazification has not been achieved.
Among the experts interviewed, two women identify as Jewish. Parisian Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur researched antisemitism and saw odd caricatures are the images of Jews with long fingers – the better to manipulate and contaminate the whole world in their hands (seen in cartoons). Another repeating motif she has found is the idea that Jews are responsible for whatever are the world’s misfortunes. (On PBS Newshour just before the 2024 Iowa caucuses, a local female Trump voter calmly noted something like “Of course, Soros is funding antifa.”)
From Berlin, political scientist Emilia Roig identified her family background in “trauma” - her father as Jewish, her mother from Martinique. Founder of the Center for Intersectional Justice, she makes the point that it is not just the responsibility of the marginalized to fight oppression. She emphasizes that Hitler was not unique or a monster, that he sprang from a long line of political thinkers and (pseudo)scientists who created, enforced, and reproduce the construct of white supremacy. This documentary traces that construct more substantively than does Ava DuVernay’s Origin.
While the mostly uncommon archival footage includes clearly identified Nazi propaganda films, not mentioned is that Ryback also identified two books in the library from director Leni Riefenstahl, who made the most widely seen films of Nazi glorification. One book was a collection of unseen stills from Olympia, and the other Beauty in the Olympic Games was of the most dramatic moments from the 1936 Berlin Olympics, including behind-the-scenes close-ups of herself working, her Führer, and even Black American Jesse Owens.
Originally produced for German TV, there are some awkward oddities. Two experts claim that Hitler’s own prison-written memoir was a best seller when it was first published, but Ryback’s book says not so. A German author claims there was no resistance to what the Nazis were doing, which is not so. Some American archival footage is unnecessarily colorized, and some U.S. facts aren’t quite correct, but together it is useful to put the American experience from the 1920’s and 1930’s in comparison with the German. (at 2024 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum/ courtesy of Cargo Film & Releasing) (1/25/2024)
[courtesy of New York Film Festival, 2019]
The Booksellers (So, nu: Fran Lebowitz is a frequent and witty commenter, as a customer. She remembers the proprietors of “Book Row” as being old Jewish men. But several of the notable sellers are women, with presumably Jewish names, including: from legendary dealers of the past Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine B. Stern, at a time when only men could be recognized in the profession, and the above sisters Adina Cohen, Naomi Hample and Judith Lowry of Argosy Book Store.) (seen at 2019 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (10/17/2019)
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: In one of the codas to his political satire, co-writer/director Cohen makes sure to provide closure to his titular fake alter-ego’s support of Kazakh’s alleged antisemitism and Holocaust denial. He dresses up as the kind of exaggerated Jew still seen in European culture and visits a synagogue where he is warmly greeted by two women, including a Holocaust survivor who assures him that it really happened – and gives him a hug and kiss. Though I thought it was a sweet moment among the raucous jokes, posted on IMDB as “trivia” was this follow-up information: “The film's creators were sued for fraud after including an interview with Holocaust survivor Judith Dim Evans. Evans died before the film's release, but her heirs brought the lawsuit alleging that she did not consent to the commercial use of her likeness in the film. Sacha Baron Cohen, who dedicated the film to her memory, claimed that he broke character to reveal to Evans that the piece was a bid to reduce her concern about the anti-Semitic comments that Borat makes. The lawsuit was dismissed on October 26.” (streamed on Amazon) (12/29/2020)
Border of Pain – A refreshing antidote to such documentaries as Heart Of Jenin that tout Israel’s superior medical facilities and services over those available to the Palestinians as as a paternalistic, universalistic gift to be granted, or even of the sad and well-meaning Muhi- Temporary that focuses on one patient’s exceptionalism. Rather, the Jewish female nurses and staffs who work with volunteers of various organizations to arrange, transport, and treat Palestinians from Gaza in Israeli hospitals just cheerfully and efficiently consider them regular patients, albeit ones who have to stay for months because their permits do not allow them out and sometimes require a translator. Is it just generosity when a nurse offers the family member of a Russian patient one of the volunteer-prepared take-out meals that are supposed to be for the Palestinians? (at 2019 Other Israel Film Festival) (12/8/2019)
Born in Deir Yassin (Nolad Be’Deir Yassin) – In a very moving and revealing documentary that stresses the macho style of the units that attacked the Palestinian Village of Deir Yassin in April 1948 (Irgun, Lehi, with less sanguine witnesses in the Haganah Youth Battalion and Information Services), three Jewish women’s voices are heard. Director Neta Shoshani is the presumed interrogator of the participants, many of whom bristle at her questions; she is also the client of the lawyer trying to get the IDF Archives to release the photographs of the human damage. Youth Battalion member Sarah Ben-Oz remembered the silence after the bombardment – and then “We had to bury the dead.” Her reaction then was so viscerally horrified, and is still physical for her, that her commander told her to go back to their base. An actress reads the letters of Hanna Nussin, a long-term patient at the Kfar Shaul Mental Health Center built on the haunted ruins of the village, who persistently called the hospital “an evil place”. She gave birth there and the titular on-screen interviewee is her son Dror; her thick medical file is read by voices of doctors and social workers. (at 2017 Other Israel Film Festival)
Born To Be (So, nu: Among the participants in Mt. Sinai’s new Center Transgender Medicine and Surgery, are a couple who met on Birthright Israel, where they had a very positive experience. The documentary follows as one partner completes physical transition to a male, with a very supportive Jewish female partner.) (brief review at FF2 Media) (preview at 2019 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (updated 10/28/2019)
A Borrowed Identity (Dancing Arabs Aka Second Son) (So, nu: The Jewish Israeli women characters are strong and unstereotyped. More commentary coming) (6/28/2015)
A Bottle in the Gaza Sea (Une bouteille à la mer) (previewed at 2012 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (While I haven’t yet read the Valérie Zenatti novel it’s based on, the portrait of a liberal, middle class French teen-age girl “Tal” (played by Agathe Bonitzer) adjusting to aliyah in Israel is sweet and seems naively optimistic, and is overly structured to maximize contrasts with her handsome Palestinian pen pal, amidst IDF attacks on Gaza, as she benefits from a nice high school and home internet access, while he is unemployed, can’t afford school, and has to wangle online time with difficulty (though his encouraging mother, played by the esteemed Palestinian actress Hiam Abbas, is a doctor). While the usual Romeo & Juliet aspect is realistically too difficult to overcome, even as both challenge their friends’ stereotypes of the other side, the positioning of France as an oasis of tolerance for both Jews and Muslims is even harder to swallow.) (1/21/2012)
The Boy Downstairs
While Zosia Mamet’s “Diana” (above) is a putative Jewish millennial woman in brownstone Brooklyn, and most viewers will presume she’s like her Shoshanna Shapiro in six seasons of Girls, the only explicitly Jewish woman is the overprotective mother of her ex-boyfriend “Ben” (Matthew Shear), as seen in flashbacks of their relationship. (briefly reviewed at 2017 Tribeca Film Festival)
Boynton Beach Club (But only the men and dead wives are explicitly Jewish, not the widows or daughters, presume some in the audience would assume some are Jewish women.)
Broken Wings (Knafayim Shvurot)
Women's Docs at DOC NYC) (6/3/2014)
Breaking Bread - In Beth Hawk’s enjoyable and culinarily informative portrait of Dr. Nof Atamna-Ismaeel, the first Palestinian Muslim Arab to win Israel’s Master Chef television competition and the A-sham Festival she founded in Haifa to bring together Jewish and Arab chefs to collaborate and connect through diverse food of “The Levant” (identified clearly through animated maps), it was surprising that not one chef in the competition was a Jewish woman. One did make amusing comments, Efrat Enzel, though not specified in the documentary, her Facebook page identifies her as “Culinary journalist and editor; Television presenter and hostess; Culinary consultant”, so she’s apparently well-known in Israel. Recipes will be posted. (seen at 2019 Other Israel Film Festival/ at 2021 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum/ Cohen Media Group release) (11/17/2019)
Breaking Home Ties (new print previewed at 2012 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (The National Center for Jewish Film their new restoration of this independently made 1922 silent b & w film as noteworthy for countering anti-Semitic images in films promoted by Henry Ford, but it just seemed like a sentimental melodrama of Russian immigrants fleeing to America like from the Yiddish theater to me, complete with devoted mother.) (1/22/2012)
Breaking Upwards (4/16/2010)
Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists - It is exceedingly odd that in the extensive inclusion of Irish Catholic Jimmy Breslin’s long second marriage, from 1982, to prominent activist Ronnie Eldridge née Myers, who is also interviewed, there is no mention that she is Jewish, when he openly wrote about that difference as adding to the complications in their blended family. (HBO) (preview at 2018 DOC NYC Festival) (11/7/2018)
Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds With the many images of Christmas decorations around her mother’s compound, there is not a hint that Carrie identified as Jewish in connection with her father Eddie, even when she cares for him as he’s dying. After mother/daughter death at the end of 2016, the Jewish press covered her as a Jewish woman. (previewed at 2016 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (updated 1/4/2017)
Bride Flight (Bruidsvlucht) (So, nu: The film is unusually sensitive about the young woman whose family did not survive the Holocaust (including war-time loss is what she shares with the hunk). While her Jewish fiancé, who seems to have been more of a family friend she used to get on the flight than a romance, wants to be observant as a memorial to their families, she rejects his darkness for the bright colors of fashion design. But, unusually, she stands up for herself and comes to regret her decision to leave her heritage – I was the only one at my screening who realized she was sentimentally cooking latkes and humming a holiday song at Hanukkah—and becomes obsessed with the only remnant of her family's faith, their menorah (even if that symbol is over-used in movies). While it is a bit too genes-will-tell that the older "Esther" (played by Willeke Van Ammelrooy, known from Marleen Gorris's Antonia’s Line in1995) ends up with a Jewish daughter-in-law and grandchild, it is satisfying for her.) (My additional note.)
Brillo Box (3¢ off) (short) (previewed at 2016 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) In my analyses of Jewish Women on TV, I sometimes resort to categorizing characters as “putative Jews”, and so in this personal documentary, too, where I can only infer they are Jewish. Lisanne Skyler’s description of growing up with New York parents Rita and Martin Skyler who had a collecting interest in contemporary abstract art sound a lot like my parents’ milieu. My father’s dental office, now the locale of the offices of Lilith Magazine which I sometimes write for, was down the block from the Art Students League, so his patients included teachers there and other artists. After my mother wouldn’t let him accept Barnett Newman’s wife’s offer of a color painting in lieu of payment for his extensive dental work, they would do so for other patients, including their friend Lora Civkin, not that any reached such fame. Like Skyler’s father, they would go to galleries and sometimes purchase, though not with the investment goals of her father, but more the enjoyment aim of her mother. My mother still displays (most of?) the works, and my sister the art historian librarian has noted the artists in their collection. As I Tweeted - Mazel Tov for making the Short List for Academy Awards Documentary Short – Skyler tweeted back “Thank you!” (updated 7/15/2017)
Brother’s Shadow (one of my faves at the Tribeca Film Festival)
The Brutalist (courtesy of A24 (12/3/2024)
Burning Land (Adama Boeret) - Though primarily set in 2001, Liran Shitrit’s thoughtful feature debut gives international audiences an updated intimate look at the psychology of Israelis who are marginalized (since Keren Yedaya’s 2004 Or (My Treasure)) and religious extremists (since Joseph Cedar’s 2000 Time of Favor (Ha- Hesder) and Amos Gitai’s 2015 Rabin, The Last Day).
In a run-down Haifa neighborhood, school drop-out “Yair” (played by the magnetic Asaf Hertz) has had run ins with the police due to his angry attacks on a man (men?) that his poor single mother “Limor” (played by Riki Blich) brings back to their house for money. It is close as to whether she kicks him out of the house or he just runs away.
”Yair” takes the first bus that comes along headed far away – to Shomron, the most northern settlement of the Occupied West Bank that the settlers call Samaria. He has the opportunity to be taken in by another maternal figure, “Naomi” (Yael Levental) a vineyard owner employing day laborers, including Palestinians, but he just toils in her fields to take her money. Stealing bottles of her wine enhances his standing with a group of “Hilltop Boys” who call themselves “The Baladim”, as they aggressively usurp hills (with beautiful views) from the Palestinian villagers they harangue – and worse. Camping in a shack that’s like a clubhouse, they seem like Peter Pan’s “Lost Boys”. In a surprising moment of sympathy, their violently rabble-rousing leader “Shimon” (Barak Friedman) is overwhelmed preparing dinner for three younger sisters, who seem otherwise abandoned.
Their zealous yeshiva teacher “Rabbi Grunberg” (Nathan Ravitz) takes “Yair” in at school, but for selective Torah readings on the justice of revenge and land re-possession. His woodwind-playing daughter “Batsheva” (Avigail Roguin), who tries to challenge him that her pieces shouldn’t all be played “forte”, is contrasted to the talented boy “Chico” (played by Lior Mashiach) who has literally hung up his instrument, the guitar, to follow her father’s fanatical idealism.
Mercifully not seen are the vicious harridans against the Palestinians, witnessed in documentaries about Hebron (such as in H2: The Occupation Lab). Including an epilogue, we are left with a more favorable impression of Jewish Israeli women as potential providers of emotional healing. (courtesy of Seventh Art Releasing - which is making the film only available in the U.S. for screenings and educational use by communities, not in theatrical or wider release nor streaming) (3/9/2023)
Brussels Transit (Bruxelles-Transit) (1980/restored 1991 by Cinematek – Royal Film Archive of Belgium) Narrated in Yiddish by the director’s mother Malka, the perspective is uniquely from a woman’s perspective, particularly with domestic travails. (U.S. premiere was first at New Directors/New Films, then at 2019 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum with this description: “In one of the first postwar films in Yiddish, director Samy Szlingerbaum excavates his childhood through his parents’ immigration to the “promised land” of Belgium after World War II and their subsequent failure to adjust. Weaving together haunting footage of postwar Brussels and astounding black and white photography, this film gestures at surrealist and avant-garde cinema to portray his—and his family’s—poignant longing for a sense of home, and, alongside that, European Jewry’s overwhelming isolation after the war.”) (streamed in 2022 courtesy of Jewish Studies at Fordham with an informative and insightful panel discussion by Flora Cassen, Sam Shuman, Eve Sicular, and Shoshana Olidort) (5/12/2022)
The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography - Nu: In advance, I spent an hour trying to confirm my hunch she was Jewish with facts available online to include this documentary in my preview of the New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center). But it just took moments into the film for her to identify herself as a “nice Jewish girl”, and again and another time as “good Jewish girl”, with her husband named Harvey and her son named Isaac, both of whom she has photographed almost as often as herself. Perhaps that commonality helped her first connect with Allen Ginsberg that led to a lifelong friendship? Much like Dorothea Lange and her photographic contemporaries, she focused on family portraiture in a studio convenient to her family, until the stock of Polaroid film finally runs out. (updated 6/30/2017)
The Bubble (Ha-Buah) (So, nu: Yeah, it’s offensive and completely un-PC to say this, but the brassy Jewish woman here is a stereotype (un-PC term) "fag hag", and it makes no sense that she gets seduced by a breeder geek professing that he wants her to have his children.) (9/16/2007)
La Buche
Buddy - Director Heddy Honigmann, Peru-born/Dutch citizen, is always identified in interviews and biographies as “the child of Holocaust survivors”. (Many articles seem to inaccurately say the family reached Peru by 1938.) Asked why she dedicated this documentary profiling the deep relationship between service dogs and their human partners to her grandmother Stefanie, she talked movingly about how her father went back after the war to try to find his mother. She identified his family as from “Austria”, but that may not be the modern boundaries, because she said her grandmother went into hiding “near the Caspian Sea” where her father found her. (Honigmann’s mother is identified in articles as coming from “Poland”, with my similar caveats.) Bringing her to the family’s refuge in Peru, Honigmann remembered her grandmother as being a solitary person, presumably affected by her war experiences, preferring to be accompanied by her dogs and the long walks they took together, even when they had to become shorter walks as she aged. She joked how the dogs would even follow her to the bathroom and wait for her to come out, then sit by her bed as her grandmother spent the rest of her days reading huge piles of crime novels and playing cards. Her love for her grandmother was entwined with love for her dogs. While Honigmann says her grandmother who, she says, taught her to "love and trust dogs", she commented on the irony of her over-protective father giving her a German shepherd which were so identified with Nazi cruelty her father experienced in a concentration camp. One of the subjects of the Dutch film is 86-year-old Edith, who was blinded by the explosion of a German grenade during World War 2. Honigmann’s discussion of her family revealed why so many of her films hint at issues around death. (seen at MoMA’s 2019 Documentary Fortnight - her attendance was facilitated by the wonderful museum I loved visiting in Amsterdam The Eye – Netherlands Film Institute) (3/1/2019)
Budrus (also briefly reviewed in Recommended Documentaries at 2010 Tribeca Film Festival) (So, nu: A major reason this documentary is more fair and thorough in presenting all sides than others about Israelis vs. Palestinians is the extensive and frank interview with a woman Israeli soldier who served during the protests and was a particular target for verbal abuse from the protesters. I don't recall any Israeli female peaceniks interviewed, though the unusually prominent role of Palestinian women is highlighted.) (5/7/2010)
Bully. Coward. Victim: The Roy Cohn Story -brief review at FF2 Media) (seen at 2019 Double Exposure Investigative Film Festival and shown at 2019 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) – note the treatment of Cohn’s mother and Ethel Rosenberg, director Ivy Meeropol’s grandmother, in compare/contrast to Where’s My Roy Cohn?. (updated 10/28/2019)
Burt’s Buzz (So, nu: I think I caught correctly that his original last name was “Ingram”, and it may be that the “Shavitz” he later adopted was his Jewish mother’s maiden name, not that he says too much about her, though she is seen in a few family photos. He did use his Jewish identity to get his first professional photography job, working for a Jewish newspaper and photographing the Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn.) (6/6/2014)
Bye Bye Germany (Es war einmal in Deutschland...) (So, nu: While the film focuses on the male Holocaust survivors --as written by Michel Bergmann based on his novels Die Teilacher and Macholikes, not available in English, and director Sam Garbarski—two Jewish women are included. Special Agent “Sara Simon” in the U.S. Army’s CounterIntelligence Corps (played by German actress Antje Traue, who switches well to an American accent for English dialogue) is beautiful; when she falls for the huckster she is investigating for Nazi collaboration “David Bermann” (played by Moritz Bleibtreu)—even though he “is not my type”, she reveals, when her hair is literally down, that she was born in Germany whose doctor father got the family out when he lost his hospital job in 1933: I didn’t want to come back, but the Army needed German-speaking interrogators. So I thought I might put Nazis through the ringer, my modest contribution. Though their hook-up is not altogether convincing, she quickly moves on to her next assignment at Nuremberg. “Frau Sonya” (Tania Garbarski) is the waitress at the restaurant they frequent, and quick with witty ripostes. “David” explains, while ogling her tuchis: Her father was a cook who beguiled Paris. They say she was hidden with her boyfriend’s goy parents, who died. (preview courtesy of Film Movement) (4/15/2018;7/22/2018)
Café Society (So, nu: In Woody Allen’s most Jewish movie in years, the Jewish women are, in relation to the central character of “Bobby Dorfman” (played by Woody Allen stand-in Jesse Eisenberg): his mother “Rose Dorfman” (played by Jeannie Berlin), who throws in a lot of quizzical Yiddishisms and criticisms of her husband’s and sons’ lack of religious observance; who the press notes describe as his “good-hearted teacher sister Evelyn Dorfman” (brunette Sari Lennick), married to a Communist professor; and blonde “Candy/ShirleyGurfein” (Anna Camp), plus a couple of putative Jewish women, such as his brunette sister-in-law “Karen Stern” (Sheryl Lee). [I am required to hold all reactions and reviews until the week of release July 11, 2016] (6/21/2016)
Calendar Girl - As delightful and informative as this documentary is, not identifying Ruth Finley, creator and editor of Fashion Calendar for some 70 years, as born Ruth Faith Finberg not only misses an important element of her focus on family in raising three sons (of Jewish husbands) as a single mother and her Jewish last boyfriend who was a big macha at Bloomingdales. Female designers mentioned in passing that she championed included Pauline Trigère and Anne Klein, without identifying them as Jewish either. More than the nostalgic Dressing America: Tales From The Garment Center, it is glaring and annoying that fashion historian Natalie Nudell, the co-writer and producer, left this gap of the Jewish angle on the High Fashion shmata trade. (preview at 2020 DOC NYC Festival) (11/9/2020)
Call Your Mother (includes comics Judy Gold and Rachel Feinstein, and the mother of Judah Friedlander) (preview at 2020 Tribeca Film Festival) (5/7/2020)
The Cakemaker (Der Kuchenmacher) - In his debut feature, Israeli-born writer/director in Ofir Raul Graizer was, he says in the press notes, inspired by “a private memory” with “the attempt to put aside definition of nationality, sexuality, and religion”. So I found “Anat” (Sarah Adler) refreshingly realistic: she is a secular widow who only kept kosher at home and at her café because her husband’s Jerusalem family is Orthodox. (In interviews, Graizer says that aspect was inspired by his parents’ relationship). As she gets over her grief, she more and more rebels against their strictures, particularly as they try to control her young son. She is also credible in gradually realizing that the German lover her husband intended to leave her for was a young man, including her action in the ambiguous ending. Also against stereotype is her Orthodox, head-covered, mother-in-law “Hannah” (Sandra Sade) who seems to have either been her son’s confidante about his secret life, or she knew him well enough to figure it out, and warmly welcomes the titular lover “Thomas” (Tim Kalkhof). While early on it seems maybe the husband was bi-sexual, by his mother’s sympathy, she may have finally understood that he only married and had a child at the family’s insistence. (I don’t recall mention of his father, but we can presume he was probably like his martinet brother “Moti”, played by Zohar Strauss.) I read a really nasty review by a gay critic who sneered that this downplays “queer passion” in favor of heterosexual love (though there is an explicit gay love scene), but I saw sensitivity to people caught in-betweens. Graizer posted on Israel’s Oscar-equivalent: “Ophir Awards nominated for: Best Feature, Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Script, Best Editing, Best Costume Design, Best Actress (Sarah Adler), Best Soundtrack & Best Artistic Design” (at 2018 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (preview courtesy of Strand Releasing) (updated 7/2/2018)
Call Her Applebroog (seen at MoMA’s 2016 Documentary Fortnight) (3/31/2016)
Call Me By Your Name - I haven’t yet read André Aciman’s novel if the “Perlman” family was originally Jewish, and the women in any gay male love story are ancillary. The film is set in 1983 in northern Italy at the sumptuous villa the Italian mother “Annella”, a translator, inherited. In the press notes, the actress who plays her, Amira Casar, says of the parents: “although they have a love of tradition and the past—they are also resolutely modern. While they are transmitting a strong taste of the classics to Elio in this Garden of Eden, at the same time they are pushing him out to go and experiment and live his life. Most parents tend to put a rein on their kids, and instead they’re saying, ‘Go out there! Live, life is a gift. Live it to the full.’ I think both Annella and her husband are very ahead of their time, extremely tolerant forward thinking, and permissive.” Actually, I saw her as pimping out her 17 year old pianist son “Elio” (Timothée Chalamet) to the gorgeous hunk graduate student “Oliver” (Armie Hammer), summer research assistant to her American husband/Greco-Roman Classics professor (Michael Stuhlbarg). While the object of desire is from a small New England town and used to being (double meaning) different, proudly wears his large Jewish star outside his shirts, “Elio” says his mother always advised that they are “Jews by discretion”, but starts imitating his crush. [I think that’s the line.] She’s also the kind of Jewish mother who has her local housekeeper light the Hanukkah candles and make their latkes. Throughout, it’s not clear if the local girl “Elio” pops his cheery with and unceremoniously dumps when he revels in his new gay identity, “Marzia” (Esther Garrel, of the Garrels of French cinema, whose mother is Brigitte Sy) is Jewish, but she is made up with a mop of brown, curly hair for a strong, visual implication.
When the student and teacher work together, the professor is constantly trying to seduce the assistant through images of ancient sculptures by erotically describing their artistry, clearly something he has done each year with his male assistants. His closing monologue to his son is considered by the novelist as an enlightened father accepting that his son is gay, but the father is really sadly admitting that he and his middle-aged body were “invisible” to the closeted 20something who somehow finds a scrawny, immature kid’s body (my colleague Laura Blum taught me the word “glabrous” as apt) sexually irresistible, at least in Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s gorgeous cinematography, with no background on any previous gay relationships to explain his preference for such young inexperience. (Supporting my un-PC theory that’s also George Balanchine’s ideal beauty type for ballerinas to emulate.) The father is also clearly saying he regrets not coming out as gay and is telling his son not to deny himself. Director Luca Guadagnino proudly said at the New York Film Festival press conference that he worked on James Ivory’s original script and filming to eliminate the usual young love, including queer romance, cinema clichés – gee, except the usual gay guy infatuated teen’s initiation by an older irresponsibly immature guy who can’t deal with a relationship with a male his own age. The chain-smoking mother even sends her son off with “Oliver” on an obviously romantic weekend with the justification “I think their friendship is good for him” – evidently to keep him away from her husband. While “Oliver” laughs that she is “treating me like a son-in-law” (just as he’s announcing his engagement to a woman he’s been “on and off with for years”), she makes a change in her husband’s annual gay affairs by selecting a “she” to be the “new him” next year. (previewed at 2017 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center)
TV master showrunner Ryan Murphy, in a New Yorker interview with their TV critic Emiy Nussbaum, 5/8/208, talks nostalgically, like so many gay men seem to, of a love affair he had as a 15-year-old with a man in his ‘20’s and finally admits that after his parents threatened the man and cut off the relationship, at least that pushed the family into group therapy: ‘Although Murphy raged for years about his parents’ response, he now has sympathy for their reaction: ‘I would do the same thing, no matter what the sexual orientation of my child. A fifteen-year-old boy dating somebody who was older? I didn’t really understand it until I had kids.’ His heartbreak also led to something positive. To Murphy’s surprise, the therapist listened to him and took his side: ‘He told my parents that I was precocious and that I was smarter than they were, and that if they didn’t leave me alone I’d end up leaving town and never talking to them again.’” (updated 5/8/2018)
Call Me Dancer - Leslie Shampaine and Pip Gilmour’s documentary followed over five years how Israeli ballet teacher Yehuda Maor, formerly with Bat Dor Dance Company, and now in his seventies a fish out of water at a small Mumbai dance studio, as he becomes a guru to hard-working, working-class, hopeful professional dancer Manish Chauhan. When he finagles getting Manish into the Summer Intensive Program of the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company, we see him meet Jewish women as his fellow students, and notes that these Americans can’t eat hot spices without turning red. Manish also gets to audition for the female artistic director of the company: “I’d take him in a heartbeat. I like him, but I have no budget for another dancer now.” Yehuda then gets him an audition with Noa Wertheim, co-founder of the Vertigo Dance Company: “We would fit you, but this is only a project. It’s not enough for a whole year.”, and that’s what Manish really needs. Back home in Israel, Yehuda admits why he needs a substitute family like his best students, as his grandparents, aunt and uncle perished in the Holocaust, while in the kibbutz where he grew up, he was bullied a lot.
The highly fictionalized version that Manish is seen filming in the documentary is Sooni Taraporevala’s 2020 Yeh Ballet, on Netflix. It eliminates his time in Israel. (at 2023 Dance on Camera Festival of Dance Films Association and Film at Lincoln Center/ Film at Lincoln Center/ theatrical release via Abramorama) (2/15/2023/ updated 11/1/2023)
Call Your Mother
Camp Girls (reviewed at 2009 Annual New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (The press screener included an essential interview with photographer Gay Block that explained the background to her initial photographic project and this follow-up documentary, recalling both Jean Bach's A Great Day in Harlem that decades later interviewed subjects of Art Kane's classic jazz photo and Michael Apted's 7 Up etc. longitudinal documentation.) (1/18/2009)
Campfire (Medurat Hashevet)
Carmel (In a stream-of-consciousness rumination to try and understand the differences between his military service and his son's a generation later, Amos Gitai films re-enactments of his family history in Israel, including a dedication to and loving portrait of his late, intellectual mother Efratia, portrayed in her youth by his daughter Keren and when older by Keren Mor, who each read some of her letters to the camera.) (2/10/2010)
Can You Ever Forgive Me? - How could I watch a film based on a real woman writer (and letter forger) living on the Upper West Side named Lee Israel and not realize she was Jewish? Gee, I didn’t see any clues whatsoever, but somehow Jude Dry writing in Indiewire, 11/16/2018, about the gay characters, could identify her specifically as “a Jewish lesbian”. Maybe he read her memoir that specifies? (11/17/2018)
The Cantor’s Last Cantata (short) – The cantor is a female, Suzanne Bernstein, retiring from a merged reformed synagogue in Brooklyn, and she presides over an integrated chorus of men and women, old and young, who enthuse about her in sweet interviews. Director Harvey Wang, a member of the congregation, fondly documents the rehearsals and final performance of her retirement celebration, that revives her 1986 production of Brooklyn Baseball Cantata (music by George Kleinsinger, words by Michael Stratton, written in 1937, most famously recorded in 1948 by Robert Merrill, as heard in the opening montage of the borough and its baseball sights, and put in context by a Brooklyn Dodgers fan historian). The lively cast includes the cantor’s daughter, who takes on the soprano role she had performed decades earlier. (preview at 2021 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) (1/31/2021)
Casino Jack (So, nu: For all the somewhat conflicting references to Abramoff being an observant Jew with a passle of kids, including at least one daughter, his wife, Pamela Alexander, certainly seems to be a shiksa, played as blonde and bland by Kelly Preston. There's a line that she met him at Brandeis, in the College Republicans together, but he reminisces oddly about her "reading Cosmo and mispronouncing the Yiddish words." She warns him not to chase after the Golden Calf, what with their missed mortgage payments.)
Castles In The Sky (short) Director Pearl Gluck lovingly caught actress Lynn Cohen for her final, memorable role as a woman with a complicated life – a past in Auschwitz where her family was killed, a day job advising Hasidic girls, brides, and couples on kosher sex, and freedom at nights across the river at poetry slams where she can express her feelings about it all – as long as it’s secret.
A Life Apart: Hasidism in America (1997) World Premiere of new 4K restoration celebrating 25th anniversary of Oren Rudavsky and Menachem Daum’s documentary that also featured Pearl Gluck. In interviews, she explained why she left the restrictions of her Hasidic community, and expressed her love for her family for continuing visits. The 2022 restoration could use an addended update if she was able to achieve that as the Hasids expanded in locations, political power, nepotistic leadership, and overall rigidity. (both at 2023 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) (1/30/2023)
The Catcher Was A Spy - I haven’t yet read the book that was the basis by Nicholas Dawidoff, so from the Press Notes: “Sienna Miller plays Estella Huni, Berg’s long-term love interest in New York City whom he forsook for his espionage career. Says Rudd of Miller: “She is just in every capacity the greatest version (of Estella) that you could possible hope for.” Sienna considers Moe and Estella’s complicated relationship to be the film’s emotional core. “He's very hidden and covert; she's often wanting more than he is able to give so there's tension between them and frustration. But I did get the sense that there was an awful lot of love.”… The filmmakers also received the full cooperation of the Princeton University Library, which houses The Moe Berg Papers, a remarkably extensive collection of correspondence, notes, photographs, and miscellaneous printed materials covering all aspects of his life and work…This unique collection also includes love letters between Berg and his only known long-term romantic interest, Estella Huni, which provided the filmmakers and actress Sienna Miller, who plays her, with great insight into their relationship and into the two as individuals. Miller notes: “There were beautiful letters between the two of them -- she was obviously very witty and bright and stimulated by his intellect, which was vast." Agrees Levine, “There was a real sense from her that he was not much of a communicator, a reserved man who didn't express himself all that often. You could sense from her correspondence how close they were and how well they understood each other." As to her sexily dramatic dresses by costume designer Joan Bergin, Miller is quoted as finding them “elegant but believable” and her to be “an amazing artist and costume designer. She really approaches costume design with a method acting approach. She feels every character really intensely and wanted Estella to have her moment and be honored.”
While Moe Berg frequently begs off on his identity as being “Jew-ish”, and non-observant (though he does attend synagogue amdist the tension of his overseas mission), and he’s seen as either gay in secret or bi-sexual for appearances, I think those were Shabbat candles she lights for their dinners with red wine, and there appears to be a prayer book on their table, so I’ll consider her a “putative Jewish woman”. She lives alone, supports herself as a piano teacher, and he compliments her classical piano playing. But, as often as he emotes “I love you”, with no response from her, he makes very clear to her “You’re not my wife”, and the closing scroll says she later married a Naval officer. (6/12/2018)
CBGB So, nu - A highly fictionalized version of the sensible Jewish women behind the downtown club, who apparently controlled how they were presented in exchange for the rights to the story. (10/12/2013)
Chagall and Malevich - Bella Rosenfeld (striking debut performance by Kristina Schneidermann) is the most full-bodied character and actor in this beautifully visually evocative Russian magic realism evocation of the source of his art, the village in Vitebsk and the Revolutionary era he nostalgically looked back to in the pieces seen in the recent Jewish Museum exhibition. (Images from over 140 paintings were used in the film.) Loyally waiting for him as he studies in Paris, then defying her conservative parents to marry him (in a lively traditional Jewish wedding), she’s his muse and lover. She’s sensual, intelligent, passionate, supportive -- and it helps that she has a nanny to help with their baby. The Chagalls’ granddaughter artist Meret Meyer-Graber approved her casting, as well as the painting selections and use. The Russian Jewish writer/director Alexander Rabinovich Mitta modeled their relationship on his artist wife Lilya Mayorova. Not quite as believably, she’s also the point of a long-running triangle with an obsessed Red Commissar Naum (Semyon Shkalikov), our “Robespierre”, as she calls him.) (6/12/2015)
Charlotte
Canadian directors Eric Warin & Tahir Rana use animation effectively to tell the dramatic story of German-Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon (1927 – 1943) to appeal to a wide audience of adults, more than many films about Holocaust victims. Much of her life was laced with tragedy even before, and she was only just developing her talents in Berlin as the Nazis came to power. Michelino Bisceglia’s score also echoes how death haunted her family. Scripters Erik Rutherford and David Bezmozgis emphasize the romantic inspirations in her life, more than other interpretations have, albeit with some fictionalizations to fill in gaps beyond her posthumously revealed autobiographical testament in “degenerate” painted images and the words of “Life? Or Theater?”, with the approval of the Charlotte Salomon Foundation.
The filmmakers contrast the increasing darkness over Germany (swastikas saturate in blood red banners) and within her family against her temporary haven on the sunny Côte d'Azur. The script also gives more attention to this eccentric sheltering by American philanthropist Ottilie Moore, who most other interpretations slight, as well as Charlotte’s fraught relationship with her grandfather that her survivor parents reportedly excised from earlier releases of her work. An epilogue is a TV interview with them about three years after discovering her oeuvre in France (clips from it are also included in Charlotte Salomon: Life and the Maiden (Le Jeune Fille et La Vie)). Distributed with both French (poster above) and English dialogue options (I streamed the English version On Demand through Amazon), the animators use the French visual convention of portraying a Jewish woman with auburn hair. I was reminded of Irène Némirovsky, another young creative Jewish woman in France madly trying to express as much of herself as she could until capture stops her, and deprives the world from seeing their full flowering. (1/18/2023)
Charlotte Salomon: Life and the Maiden (Le Jeune Fille et La Vie)
- courtesy of New York Jewish Film Festival
French directors/sisters Delphine and Muriel Coulin first developed a theater production to accomplish Charlotte Salomon’s original plans for her legacy masterwork “Life? Or Theater?” as a songspiel play. While in exile as a German Jewish artist in Vichy France when she realistically suspected her mid-20s could be the last two years of her life, Salomon painted about 1,300 gouaches that she overlaid with sheets of text written on tracing paper, including musical notations, such as for Bach, Schubert, Mahler and the then German anthem, altogether conceptualized as a multimedia semi-autobiography (names were fancifully changed).
Playing on the title of one of her paintings (and Schubert String Quartet) “Death and the Maiden”, the Coulins recreate her work as the basis for an enthralling film that uses her rarely-seen collected pieces, interlaced with period stock footage and archival photographs, and following her musical instructions. Opening with her intense self-portrait (above) and Charlotte’s plea entrusting the package of “her life” with a local doctor in 1943, her German-language text is adapted into a first-person narrative in French, voiced by Luxembourger actress Vicky Krieps. In addition to an unseen narrator, the other, vividly painted people in this version of her life include: the father as “Albert Kann” voiced by Yves Heck; the grandfather as “Mr. Knarre” (Andre Wilms); the grandmother as “Madame Knarre” (Hanna Schygulla); the opera-singing step-mother as “Paulinka Bimbam” (Catherine Ringer); and the music teacher as “Amadeus Daberlohn” (Mathieu Amalric).
While a selection of the gouaches was first exhibited in Amsterdam in 1961, and then exhibited around the world with increasing frequency, as well as published since 1963 in incomplete editions, I was surprised when I visited the Amsterdam Jewish Museum, where Charlotte’s parents donated her magnum opus in 1971 (a few of her drawings are also at Yad Vashem), to see just a rotating five are kept on exhibit, due to their fragile condition. So this film is a wonderful opportunity to even see so many pictures of the luminous paintings in order (segueing into a few of the actual works at the end). With her words and musical cues, the film passionately immerses the audience in her story.
Edited for caustic emphasis, Chapter 1 begins with the tangled family history before this Charlotte was born. The impressions of her family members may or not be literally “true”, such as her step-mother discouraging her art toward a more useful skill like tailoring, and her sexual “experiments” with the teacher as Kristallnacht looms. Her final romantic relationship is given short shrift as with “someone she met”. The black and white epilogue includes what looks like German TV interview clips with her parents, I think a bit more extended than seen in the otherwise animated Charlotte, and family photographs of her. (World Premiere at 2023 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center and The Jewish Museum) (1/19/2023)
Charm Circle - I’ll say straight up that I not only do not share the opinion of film festival judges who acclaim this documentary directed and produced by Nira Burstein, but I’m gobsmacked that this excruciating portrait of a Jewish family in Queens (mostly) is achieving such comments as this from the “Metropolis Section” jury at the 2021 DOC NYC: “Special Mention: The honesty and bravery of the filmmaker are powerfully felt in approaching the subject of family dysfunction in a candid and uncensored way. With strong character development, the narrative patiently/lovingly unfolds with moments of humor and creativity to build compassion for a family’s hopes and dreams as well as a profound sense of loss.” Instead, what I see is yet another filmmaker obsessed by the Maysles’s Grey Gardens (1975), which I still think was an unethical exploitation of siblings with mental problems who has an extensive archive of home movies to draw on to document their family members’ declines. The Burstein father’s problems after a local real estate career are vaguely attributed to a nervous breakdown and the mother’s to various psychiatric diagnoses that landed her at various times in mental hospitals, as early as in her college years, though she was able to finish an education-related master’s degree and hold down teaching jobs for many years. Another recent pointedly Christian example of taking the genre further by mining one’s own family for such exploitation is Angelo Madsen Minax’s North By Current, such that I wonder if festival judges nowadays are especially entranced when at least one of the disapproving family members is gay. The director’s sister is in what would have been called a lesbian ménage à trois, but is now considered a polyamorous family. Or do they find Jews exotic? Yet among other introspective Jewish documentarians, such as Judith Helfand and Alan Berliner, their use of their families and home movie archives as the basis for their films do not seem in any way as exploitative. For the Jewish angle on this family, suspense is built up whether their kippah-wearing father, who throughout rails against his youngest daughter’s planned wedding as against Jewish law, will attend the ceremony on the West Coat with his wife and two East Coast-based daughters, including their eldest who is developmentally disabled. (All the daughters have Hebrew names.) When I recognized an intersection where the couple is arguing as in my neighborhood, I started wondering how my small, messy house would look through such strategically aimed cameras, so I’ve even been doing some straightening up this week. Luckily, neither of my sons, has goals to so aim, and my grandsons are too young yet to try, as I wonder if any family so examined would look so wince-able. (updated 11/19/2021)
Chasing Portraits - Subtitled A Great-Granddaughter’s Quest for Her Lost Art Legacy, Elizabeth Rynecki’s documentary is more about her feelings as the child/grandchild of Holocaust survivors and her great-grandfather artist Moshe Rynecki who insisted on sharing the fate of the Jewish community he had painted for decades into the Warsaw Ghetto then hiding with his family, who survived. She is first obsessed with tracking down more of his work than the 120 paintings her great-grandmother Perla had amazingly tracked down in Poland right after the war (out of his estimated 800 piece oeuvre) or at least their photographs and provenance, art that surrounded Elizabeth as she grew up. Her 2016 book, written as the documentary was developing, has much more background detail.
But an on-screen consultation with Carla Shapreau, Lecturer, Art & Cultural Property Law, U.C. Berkeley, School of Law, convinces her that rather than “legal justice” offered through Holocaust reclamation claims (as was the case in Portrait of Wally and Woman in Gold), she would probably feel more emotionally satisfied with “historical justice”. With that attitude, she can visit collectors and museums that own Moshe’s fulsome not kitschy, lived not nostalgic, and increasingly popular vignettes of inter-war Jewish life in Judeo-philic circles in Poland, document the artwork (from Canada to Poland to Israel), be assured they are cared for and well-maintained, and empathetically connect with the owners, while always hoping more art could still yet surface from descendants of those who found, bought, or were given them. (My old family friend/NYU professor emeritus Daniel Walkowitz in The Remembered and Forgotten Jewish World: Jewish Heritage in Europe and the United States, (2018) Rutgers University Press, raises similar issues, also with POLIN Curator Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, about history and artifacts.) “Portraits” as a word takes on multi-layered meanings.
The audience viscerally shares her whirligig of emotions during her search; she’s especially sensitive in not pushing her father on difficult memories. A reunion with a woman cousin who also has art gifted to her family branch is very moving. Others, like me, who don’t have physical reminders as a heritage, can relate through family genealogy to find living relatives, like the outreach I do with my paternal family, who my father had fondly grown up with, but had lost contact. (at 2019 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (preview courtesy of First Run Features) (4/18/2019)
Children of the Sun (seen at 2008 Israel Film Festival) (In interviews with the founding generation of kibbutzim and their children, there is a focus on the pro’s and con’s for mothers and offspring to communal childraising, with a gamut of reflections. There was no questioning of the continuance of other more conventional gender roles within kibbutz responsibilities. While the children say that they considered those they grew up so intimately with as siblings, it wasn’t made clear that they met dating partners/future spouses within the movement at joint events or high schools with other kibbutzim, my in-laws who I watched the film with added that information from their friends in the movement.) (11/28/2008)
Children Must Laugh (Mir Kumen On)
This 1936 (almost all in Yiddish) international fundraiser for the Medem Sanatorium near Warsaw, Poland demonstrates that it was not just the Zionists who dreamed of a “New Jew” – healthy, athletic, creative, agricultural. So did the Communist General Union of Jewish Workers. While a girl is one of the central children followed from Warsaw to a kind of Fresh Air Fund type makeover and the girls are active and talented, the gender-based work and play assignments betray the limits of their idealism – the girls do the domestic tasks, play with the domestic toys, sing prettily for several numbers, and only get to be recording secretary as boys run for the ruling council. The only way to not watch this in tears at their coming fates is knowing that at least some of the graduates were among the Warsaw Ghetto Uprisers seven years later. (Thanks to Serge Bromberg & Lobster Films for the restoration) (seen at 2016 To Save and Project: MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation of Museum of Modern Art) (11/22/2016)
This film is planned to be included in Kino Lorber’s future box set The Jewish Soul: Classics of Yiddish Cinema, that will up to 10 films, including other restorations by Lobster Films. (5/31/2019)
Christ Stopped At Eboli (Cristo si è fermato a Eboli) (Parts 1 – 4) (1979)
“Interview with director Francesco Rosi (between the editing and the mix: Rome, December 20, 1978, Interviews taped in French by Michel Ciment and published in Positif number 215) Q: There are few women in your films. The sister of Carlo [Levi], [Luisa Levi] played by Lea Massari, has a lot of presence. A: It’s a presence of a rational woman who incarnates, in the film, a sort of rational consciousness; a brother who started in a society which represents rationality and who is beginning to be touched by a society of the irrational.”
Interview by Gian Luigi Rondi in Il Tempo, April 15, 1979: “The scene in which Levi talks to his sister, who came from Turin to see him. What he tells her are the essentials of what he has understood about the problems of the South [Italy], which, in the book, appear in chapters set apart from the story, in the form, precisely, of analytic meditation. In this dialogue, which is a real confrontation, we’ve summed up the arguments which appear throughout the book and we’ve given them dramatic clothing, so that they would become an integral part of the story… I haven’t made a film about Levi, but about an autobiographical book by Levi. I’ve been told that Volontè’s Levi doesn’t resemble the real Carlo Levi. I don’t mind in the least. The film is the book seen by me, and in the film, all in all, I am Carlo Levi.”
The director’s interpretation may explain why the film adaptation never mentions that the Levis’ of Turin in Northern Italy are Jewish – and even their surname doesn’t give any inkling to anyone in the South that they are not Christian/Catholic. (Nor does a concluding scroll mention that even after he was released from another arrest for anti-Fascist activities due to Mussolini’s downfall, he wrote the memoir while he was in hiding from the Nazis in Florence.) His sister is a practicing doctor, and immediately upon seeing the terrible health situation in the area, especially preventable malaria, as she strolls around the village with her brother, she starts helping the peasants and making plans to send medical supplies. They were very distantly related to Primo Levi; the younger latter called Carlo “my illustrious namesake” in anti-Fascist activities. In the memoir itself, the villagers just presume Carlo is Catholic, but a new priest comes into town and seems to know his background because he gets determined to get him converted and baptized. (preview of uncut restoration with new subtitles at Film Forum) (4/9/2019; 9/16/2019)
A Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noël) (Arnaud Desplechin has a signature element in each of his films of including a Jewish character, and here “Faunia” (played by Emmanuelle Devos) may be his first Jewish woman since Esther Kahn. While the matriarch of her lover’s family confusingly teases him for being Jewish, maybe because he might be the only son she had circumcised or because it’s a French slang/idiom poorly translated as I also heard it in Love Songs (Les Chansons D’amour), “Faunia” finally makes clear that she’s had enough of Christmas and happily leaves to celebrate a non-holiday with her saner family.) (11/28/2008)
Chronicle of A Kidnap (Documentary about a wife's against-all-odds efforts to free her soldier husband, recalling A Mighty Heart, even after the war was unsuccesfful. While it is almost too sad to watch (watch through the credits), it is noteworthy seeing how the different women in his life react differently to the very tense, and doomed, situation, the choices they make about how public and political to be, and how that changes the wife as a woman.) (seen at 2010 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (1/25/2010)
Cinema Sabaya - Debut filmmaker Orit Fouks Rotem was inspired by her mother’s experience running a photography workshop for a mixed class of Arab and Jewish women, then ran such classes herself, per this 11/8/2021 interview in Haaretz. Her fictional version is set in Hadera, near Haifa Israel, a mixed community. The Jewish teacher from Tel Aviv “Rona” (Dana Ivgy, the only professional actress in the cast) starts out a bit naïve, and is reluctant to reveal her sexual identity. The eight class members are not all familiar with the experiences of the others, such that they ask about their hair and head coverings. While, unusually for me, I didn’t specifically track what we learn about the Jewish women, the practice footage from each home is revealing to all of them about their different living arrangements. One can tell that the single woman living on a boat with her dog is Jewish, while the mother with at least six kids is an Arab. They each end up apologizing to each other for stereotyping the others. The diversity of age, motherhood and (past and present) marital status seems a bit too pat, as well as how their solidarity helps several make dream changes in their lives, but is certainly gratifying and heartwarming. (previewed at 2021 Other Israel Film Festival/ at 2022 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum/ theatrical release by Kino Lorber) (1/22/2022/ updated 12/20/2022)
Circus of Books So, nu: As her daughter, director Rachel Mason makes much of her gay porn bookstore owning mom Karen’s religious Jewish background. She keeps referring to her synagogue as “Conservative”, but seems to mean politically, not in terms of affiliation or observance. Clearly, her own Jewish education didn’t stick. As they lived near the West Hollywood store, it’s also surprising Mrs. Mason wouldn’t have availed herself of another synagogue, especially once she gets active in PFLAG. The general audience, however, just enjoys the incongruity of Karen saying about her husband and business partner during the Reagan administration’s legal attacks on pornography: “There was a real possibility one of us was going to have to go to jail. And I thought it was going to have to be Barry, because I was very involved in planning our son’s bar mitzvah.” (preview at 2019 Tribeca Film Festival) (5/27/2019)
Citizen Jane: Battle For The City Several of the interviewed “mothers” who successfully protested with Jane Jacobs as friends and neighbors against Robert Moses’ automotive plans for the West Village are Jewish, including Carol Greitzer, who went on to be a New York City Councilwoman from 1975–1991. (review) (previewed at 2016 DOC NYC Festival) (10/31/2016)
The City and the City - While Greek directors Christos Passalis and Syllas Tzoumerkas grew up in Thessaloniki during the 1980’s-1990’s when they say no one talked about what happened to the Sephardic Jewish community there during World War 2 and in its aftermath, the horrific genocide there was not as “unknown” as they claim; I have seen at least three other documentaries and dramas, though not of wide public release. However, from what was originally a multi-media installation exhibit, they have created an astoundingly creative perspective, that includes many Jewish women on screen, several appropriately speaking Ladino, through a hybrid of researched documentary with archival photographs, letters, testimony, and factual information in six chapters on their lives from the 1930’s through 1983, re-enactments, that switch between period-looking black-and-white and in color for contemporary impact, and dramatizations imagining revenge and PTSD. Though the credits are too complicated to match up roles and actresses, the female cast members include: Angeliki Papoulia, Niki Papandreou, Themis Bazaka, Maria Filini, Marisha Triantafyllidou, Zoi Sigalou, Marina Siotou, Danai Primali, and Vasia Bakakou. (at North American premiere in 2022 New Directors/New Films of Film at Lincoln Center/ MoMA) (4/29/2022)
City Dreamers (Rêveuses de villes)- I was surprised to find through post-screening research that at least three of the four doyennes of Canadian – and world—architecture, in their ‘90s are Jewish: Phyllis Lambert, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, Denise Scott Brown. (I couldn’t find detailed enough biographical info on the 4th, Blanche Lemco Van Ginkel, to rule her out.) I already knew about Phyllis Bronfman Lambert, but there are only hints in Joseph Hillel’s documentary. Mentioned in passing is that she was raised in Montreal’s Westmount neighborhood, same as Leonard Cohen, that was known as an upper-class Jewish enclave. With her very distinctive, almost punk, look, she admits that the French she speaks in interviews with the director she learned in Paris, where she stayed on after her 1954 divorce. An archival interviewee laughs that she married quickly in 1949 in order to discard her “Bronfman” family name – the very prominent and wealthy Jewish family in philanthropy and the business of running Seagram’s. Which is how she got her first major success in 1957, supervising the design of its corporate headquarters in Manhattan. And her first sole credit – the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts in Montreal that her family wanted as a tribute to her mother. But the director also doesn’t make clear that she founded, with her share of the family distillery fortune, the Canadian Centre for Architecture.
Not mentioned is that the legendary architect and architectural theorist Denise Scott Brown was born Denise Lakofski, very influenced by her Jewish family who came to what is now Zambia from Lithuania and Latvia, part of the tendency to only see her through the perspective of her 2nd marriage in 1967, to Robert Venturi. I will be submitting her for inclusion in the Jewish Women’s Archive’s Encyclopedia.
While Cornelia Hahn Oberlander’s early years in Berlin are told in relation to her widowed mother getting her children out from war-torn Nazi Germany – which is a misdirection because Cornelia was 18 when they left for England in 1938 and came to New York in 1939. Not mentioned is that she’s Jewish; she and her late husband were active in the Vancouver Jewish community, as members of Or Shalom, a reconstructionist synagogue (according to my cousins, who are friendly with their family). Also not mentioned was her projects in Israel. I also will be submitting her for inclusion in the Jewish Women’s Archive’s Encyclopedia. (U.S. Premiere at 2019 ADFF NY/ seen streaming at 2020 Architecture & Design Film Festival) (4/20/2020)
City Of Gold When Los Angeles Times food critic Jonathan Gold talks about his family and upbringing, childhood photographs are seen of him with his mother – but the edit doesn’t include any mention of her. Are his and his brother’s sarcastic comments about growing up on meals highlighted by Jello desserts reflections on her cooking or striving for American cultural assimilation?
City of Joel - In documenting the tensions over the efforts of the Satmar Hasidic Village of Kiryas Joel, in NY’s Orange County, to expand through annexation into other areas of the town of Monroe, there’s an extensive interview with one woman defending her community and the status of women within it, because the “United Monroe” non-Hasidic group keeps bringing up abuse of women as an issue. The only time she feels more human and less robotic is when she talks about the pressures to have children and says she had to do a lot to achieve that, implying fertility assistance. Director Jesse Sweet is able to hear (secretly) about dissenting views. When one supervised vote is held, 30% vote against their community, but, of course, there’s no way to know how many of those were women. More, he talks to a young woman who lived in the Satmars’ original Brooklyn community – she was kicked out of her home at 17 by her mother for dating, and had to (eventually) re-invent her life as secular. Otherwise, the cameras can only get brief glimpses of girls and women at the fringes of community activities where a few always seem to be watching from the outside. I had to wonder if I have cousins there, or maybe they live in the growing Rockland County ultra-Orthodox enclaves. (preview at 2018 DOC NYC Festival) (10/31/2018)
City of Joy - Eve Ensler is the fundraiser and promoter behind this courageous project to save and renew women brutalized in the wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While she is seen sharing her personal story of rape and abuse to connect with the women, as well her experience around the world, particularly in Bosnia, to help organize such women into community leadership cadres, director Madeleine Gavin’s documentary seems like a commissioned promotion and fundraising tool. (previewed at 2016 DOC NYC Festival) (10/31/2016)
Closed Circuit (Bema’agal Sagoor) - Director Tal Inbar’s tense documentary, with Sharon Yaish’s terrific editing, interviews eyewitnesses to the 2016 terrorist attack in the shopping mall-like Sarona Market in downtown Tel Aviv in relation to the moment-by-moment closed circuit TV footage. Ironically, this is pretty much what The New York Times does after almost each of the too-frequent mass shootings in the U.S. As in those cases, race and military experience are key factors for what the survivors did, as here the Arabs interviewed had traumatic reactions. Two young Jewish Israeli women are interviewed extensively. A waitress who was in the kitchen before, during, and after the shootings, and was very focused on her job responsibilities, no longer makes any plans for her future life. A teenager was eating dinner in the restaurant with her brother, father, and step-mother; she details her relationships with them, and running to pull her bloodied step-mother into the bathroom, until she faces up to her father’s murder in front of her that night as she prepares for her upcoming induction into the military. (at 2022 DOC NYC/ courtesy of Go2 Films) (11/24/2022)
Closeness (Tesnota) - Writer/director Kantemir Balagov opens the film with a statement that this is a true story from 1998 in his home town of Nalchik, North Caucasus, Russia. He provides generalized context in the press notes: “Jews and Kabardians can be as close to each other as they can be apart. Caucasian society is more patriarchal, Jewish society more matriarchal. Jews are more dynamic, more enterprising; the Caucasians are slower, more melancholic in a way. But the propensity to preserve the family, to preserve their roots, is common to both. There were many Jewish people in Kabardino-Balkaria. And during World War 2 and the invasion of the Caucasus by German troops, Jews were often hidden and protected by the Kabardians. They started to learn the Kabardian language and many of them settled after the war, creating a true Jewish community in Nalchik, with a Jewish quarter and a synagogue that is still there today. On the other hand, since Perestroika, there are unfortunately hardly any left: many emigrated to New York and Israel, and some moved to Moscow. . . From the beginning I was adamant that the Jewish characters should be played by Jewish actors, and the Kabardian parts by Kabardians. It was a question of truthfulness. I had a casting director in Saint Petersburg who worked tirelessly. We found Darya Zhovner [who plays the central character Ilana] in Moscow; she had just completed her studies at MKhaT, Moscow Art Theatre. The parents [Olga Dragunova as Adina, and Artem Tsypin as Avi] are theatre actors from Saint Petersburg. The kidnapped brother is a cook, not a professional actor - even though he has appeared in a film by Aleksey German. Jr. Zalim, the Kabardian boyfriend [Zalim], is a professional actor who studied at the famous Shchukin Theatre Institute in Moscow.”
The daughter powerfully portrays: the resentment of her parents’ preference for the son in the family and to sacrifice everything for him; the temptation of the bad boy from the majority, sensual culture compared to the fixed traditions of the close-knit Jewish families, here the Kabardians who seem to spend a lot of time drinking; and insistence on doing what she wants – an auto mechanic along side her father. Her brother’s and his fiancee’s kidnapping (because the criminals thought any Jew was wealthy?) sets off both personal and ethnic tensions, even as Muslim nationalism was just starting to take a terrorist direction in this region. (preview at 2018 New Directors/New Films of Film at Lincoln Center/MoMA (3/14/2018)
Close To Home (Karov La Bayit (previewed at Tribeca Film Festival with a Q & A by the directors.) (See with its non-fiction counterpart To See If I’m Smiling (Lir’ot Im Ani Mehayechet), viewed at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival at Lincoln Center)
Cloudy Sunday (Ouzeri Tsitsanis/Ουζερί Τσιτσάνης)
Manousos Manousakis's 2015 fiction feature, based on a novel by Giorgios Skabardonis that’s not available in English, looks at the experiences of Jews (speaking Ladino), musicians (playing a lot of passionate songs and much lovely music by Vassilis Tsitsanis written during this period, who is here played by Andreas Konstantinou), as referenced in the Greek film’s beautiful poster with a bouzouki above, and resistance/collaboration in Thessaloniki, the second largest city in Greece, under the Nazis in 1942.
The first film showing the decimation of the city’s Sephardic Jewish community from over 50,000 to just over 1,900 survivors (when most Holocaust films only feature Ashkenazi Jews, other than documentaries I’ve seen at the New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival), the extended Beza family is representative. The central story is a Romeo & Juliet one of young Estrea (played by Christina Hilla Fameli), first daring to help the Resistance by typing up transmissions about German military activities in Greece to be sent on to the British, falling in love with the hunky George/Giorgos/Yorgos in the subtitles (played by Haris Fragoulis), the Christian radio operator/carpenter/waiter (in the ouzeria/tavern where Tsitsanis’s band plays with a female singer). Estrea defies her parents’ arrangement to marry David Revah (Abraham Cohen), and cut her off when she confesses her relationship. While their romantic scenes are passionately lovely and sexy, there’s mordant humor when her father announces You’re dead to me! as they’re going to be on the transport to Auschwitz any day. There’s also inadvertent amusement that unlike other European communities, the Jews didn’t stand out for being brunettes with big noses, including the young lovers, so fake identity papers wouldn’t have been as problematic. (A side story about her rebellious, Cassandra-like older brother Alberto, played by Thodoros Antoniadis, is a bit confusing, let alone that Yorgos hides him in yet another brave act on top of being the only surviving member of a compromised, bomb-setting resistance unit.)
While her mother (in agreement with the accommodationist rabbi) is the most fatally intransigent about leaving their long-time home despite hints of the coming disaster, the scenes in the synagogue as community meeting space show that the women restricted to the balcony are forthright and not at all hesitant, even with head veils, in loudly calling down their disagreements on top of his head. I was disappointed in the daughter’s final, foolish act of filial piety because it would have been more effective to have her be a witness to the treatment the Germans and their anti-Semitic supporters meted out (Yorgos’s father is in passive agreement with them) and to the final round-up, instead of inaccurately showing that the whole city watched them shoved into cattle-cars.
Despite the initially uneven acting, Cloudy Sunday is quite moving. (seen at 2017 New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival) (Menemsha Films release) (updated 5/3/2017)
Coco (seen at the 2010 Annual NY Sephardic Jewish Film Festival) (Among the quizzical elements in this broad, slapsticky, very weak satire of ridiculous excess around a son's bar mitzvah is the basic premise that the blonde mother is not Jewish – what's Mizrahi vernacular for a shiksa?—so calling into question the son's Jewish identity. However, it is entertaining to see the affectionate mother reject her son's exaggerated obsessions with flamboyance, wealth and assimilation to return to her own modest neighborhood with Moroccan music and foods. His sister is loud and obnoxious though.) (2/10/2010)
Code: Debugging The Gender Gap (previewed at 2015 Tribeca Film Festival) (So, nu: Though not mentioned in the film, Walter Isaacson notes in passing in The Innovators that two of the original ”Women of ENIAC”, then referred to as “the ENIAC girls”, were Jewish, Marilyn Wescoff (Meltzer) and Ruth Licterman (Teitelbaum), who were recruited to the WW2-era project by Adele Goldstine (and rediscovered by Kathy Kleiman, programmer/lawyer who I’m not sure is Jewish). Their legacy adds history to the several women programmers interviewed in the film who may be Jewish, and if they were so identified would add nuance to the image of Mark Zuckerberg as the the Silicon Valley Jew. Was the Lois Mandel who wrote the prescient “The Computer Girls” article in Cosmopolitan, April 1967, a relative?) (5/1/2015)
A Coffee In Berlin (Oh Boy) (So, nu: In the satirical film-within-a-film, a haggard Jewish woman is seen having been hidden in an attic by her S.S. officer lover. But he comes in to announce his shock at the news of the Reich’s defeat – and immediately whines about the ironic role reversal that she is free and he now needs to hide, much to her surprise. This silliness is quite a contrast to the old man’s seriously haunted childhood, especially of his father’s eager participation in Kristallnacht (November 1938), and urging him on. In other ironies of German resonance, we also had our tickets checked at that same train station -- the one nearest the former Stasi Secret Police headquarters that’s full of murals touting the Socialist state. At the theater after-party, the pretentious writer/choreographer is furious that he and his friend came late and laughed out loud often. Outside are drunken teenagers, but the former victim can now fiercely protect herself.) (6/15/2014)
Colette (seen at 2014 at Czech That Film Tour) (Though Arnošt Lustig’s novel Colette: A Girl From Antwerp that the film is based on does not appear to be in English for comparison (or how that was inspired by his own experience in Auschwitz, or his wife’s, poet Vera Weislitzova), so now I’m getting used copies of his other semi-autobiographical fiction to read in English), the film was intended for international audiences, so a couple weeks before production (according to lead actor Jirí Mádl who participated in a Q & A at the Consulate’s screening I attended), it was decided the international cast would speak English, albeit with their native accents. But so far it has only been picked up in Japan, doubtless because of its frankness on what Jews did anything to survive in concentration camps – particularly women, both as prisoners and capos (though I wasn’t completely sure which of the latter were Jews and which might have been Polish or other non-Jewish inmates). Central is pretty Belgian internee “Colette” (played by French actress Clémence Thioly), as she is followed from arrival with her mother and sisters who are quickly taken to the gas chambers, through liberation and a few months later, then a couple of decades later with her daughter. While the framing device is too much of a coincidence, her, and other women’s, explicit experiences, as the sex obsession of a commandante, assignment to a brothel, and servicing a female supervisor, show how survival could depend on transfer to a less physically rigorous assignment, favors for her Czech lover (the narrator), and possible opportunities for escape. I also hadn’t seen before on film what it really meant for women to work in "Kanada", rigorously sorting the goods abandoned from each transport to the crematoria, like my mother’s first cousin, as I understand from my one conversation with her in Israel, with my reluctant brother-in-law translating.
The limited English press notes describe her: “Colette comes to the concentration camp as a young girl and she affects everybody around by her beauty. It is not just her physical beauty but within her face, her dark eyes, and her alabastre skin one can feel her charisma, inner beauty and nobility. Her eyes show intense lust for life. She bears the same childish naivity and sincerity of Shakespeare´s Juliet. Day by day as the story progresses, she loses her childhood and she becomes a woman, suffering but strong. Her childlike joy and spontaneity appears especially intense during the love scenes with Willie. She is energetic, animal, sensuous, but also vulnerable, suffering.” Director Milan Cieslar also says “With this film I want to close my World War II trilogy”, but I haven’t seen the others for comparison. (6/6/2014)
Colliding Dreams This NEH-funded documentary on the history of the waves of Zionism adds a couple of nuanced perspectives to the usual discussions (that the original concept was a reaction to the rise of nationalism throughout Europe, and that the rise of religious Zionism with the settler movement was based on pre-rabbinic Biblical interpretation of Judaism). But while there are women academics and peace activists interviewed, including the oldest living attendee of a key Zionist assembly along with Chaim Weizmann, the closest to a gendered analysis is a grandson marveling that his grandmother from a wealthy Eastern European family gave it all up to be an early pioneer happily making gravel on a farm, which hints at her dissatisfaction with the life she would have led at home. (3/15/2016)
Come Back, Africa (So, nu: Not mentioned in the original film or in the “making of” documentary, is that one of the sympathetic white characters in the film is presumably a Jewish woman. When the black hotel worker is reluctantly fired by the white manager due to what is an obviously false accusation of a sexual attack by a white woman guest, an elderly white woman shakes her head and says about the accuser: She’s meshugana! I doubt that’s an Afrikaans’ word as well as Yiddish.) (1/29/2012)
Come Closer (at 2024 Tribeca Film Festival) (6/1/2024)
The Comedian (2016) It’s going to take me awhile to detail how much this uneven Sony Classics film, set in NYC and Florida, comes thisclose to the offensive line about Jewish women’s stereotypes, of all ages, vs. how many times it proudly goes over. (12/5/2016)
Comme ton père (from viewing at 2009 NY Sephardic Jewish Film Festival) (While of course debut writer/director Marco Carmel suffuses the film with nostalgia for growing up in a Tunisian Jewish family in France and Israel, the lovely Yaël Abécassis as the mother "Mireille" is a three-dimensional woman who is tender and strong, and much in love with her waywardly entrepreneurial husband.) (2/21/2009)
A Compassionate Spy - In effect, Steve James’s documentary is a follow-up to Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Told primarily through the perspective of a Jewish woman, Joan Krakover Hall, who died at 94, just before the film’s 2023 release, she was the widow of the titular leftist spy Ted Hall (né Theodore Alvin Holtzberg). She knew him from 1947 at the University of Chicago, after his experience as the youngest physicist at Los Alamos, at just 18 years old, from where he let Russian agents know about the work there. (He’s seen in a final taped interview confession with her, as well as in a more circumspect BBC journalist’s interview.) But she takes credit for bucking him up to resist FBI pressure to confess over the following decades, including during the extreme tensions around the Rosenbergs’ trial and sentencing.
She cynically notes that while he and his brother Ed changed their last name from Holtzberg to Hall to deflect antisemitism in jobs, Ted ended up in fields filled with Jews. She dismisses their Jewish background because they were atheists. Somehow, despite what was happening to Jews in the 1940s and 1950s, she ignores ethnicity. But she detailed family stories about his Forest Hills synagogue and 1938 bar mitzvah in this essay. Clearly alienated from her mother Evelyn Winetz Krakover, she claimed that her American-born parents (according to the 1930 US Census, I didn’t search their origins back further) spoke Russian at home in Chicago without teaching her, she felt rebellious, as well as political, in studying Russian when they moved to Cambridge University to get away from the FBI. There, she also finally felt free to indulge her own political activism, including in the burgeoning feminist movement, which she had been afraid to do back at home in case of drawing attention to them. (via Magnolia Pictures) (1/16/2024)
Concerned Citizen (Ezrah Mudag)
- Lena Fraifeld and Uriah Jablonsky in ©Idan-Haguel_Photo©Guy_Sahaf
In writer/director Idan Haguel’s biting burrow into the complications a 30-something male gay couple (real life actor couple Shlomi Bertonov as “Ben” and Ariel Wolf as “Raz”) face from moving into a gentrifying south Tel Aviv neighborhood, Jewish women are for conscience-less juxtaposition. Their BFF straight couple “Rutti” (Lena Fraifeld) and “Roee” (Uriah Jablonsky) visit and break into a provocative choreographed dance, (photo still above) presumably from their wedding, far more explicit than the gay couple even does at the Gay Pride Parade. “Rutti” later blithely tells “Raz” of the four abortions they’ve had, thinks she’s pregnant again, and muses I think I’ll keep it? But I can’t be a mother right now?. While that seems hurtful when she knows the gay couple are spending a lot of money from their parents and ethically ambiguous capital on a surrogate in the Philippines (as assured by a female agent whose promises seem way too good to possibly be true), she pushes on: It would be nice because you’re having one, so they could be in preschool together, we could have family vacations. Maybe I should go with it? “Raz” sighs about her breezy indecision: You have to be ready for [parenthood].
When “Ben” panics about their Eritrean (Christian) refugee neighbors (to whom the Sinai Desert was not the vacation resort the couple enjoyed) and the police brutality against them he witnessed, he tests out selling their apartment. The realtor immediately finds via video link a potential middle-aged buyer in Paris, “Tami” (Flora Bloch), who questions if the neighborhood has Arabs? Blacks? Migrants?...Sounds like a Tower of Babylon…Are there any problems? But she wants to move because Israel is my home., a Zionist perspective compared to the antisemitism she faces in France.
Whatever their identity, everyone is presented as having complex forces on them and compromised decisions to make. (at 2023 Israel Film Center Festival/ VOD) (6/7/2023)
Le Concert (So, nu: The casting of Mélanie Laurent, a non-stereotypical-looking Jewish actress, helps keep the audience guessing about her character's origins, while the portrayal of her mother as both a gifted musician and a political activist surmounts frequent images of passive victims of antisemitism.) (7/27/2010)
Concussion In an interview in Cultural Weekly, 10/10/2013, Sophia Stein asked the writer/director about her debut film she made in her Montclair, NJ home (right near where I grew up) with her own two kids: “Who do you see as the audience for your film, CONCUSSION?” Stacie Passon: “The pragmatic me who made this movie said — the audience will be women experiencing a mid-life crisis. I would love all of them to be exactly like me, Jewish women who are lesbians. Then I came to understand that CONCUSSION is really about the conversation that we are all are having about marriage now. This story doesn’t take the gender identity out of it, it just reframes it from a different angle.” Even though her characters don’t, Passon was comfortable using Yiddish, even that was unfamiliar to both the interviewer and her producer Rose Troche, in another interview, with Melissa Silverstein’s Women and Hollywood 2/1/2013, to describe the film’s genesis: “Basically, I got binged in the head with a baseball. My son hit me and there was this sort of gush of blood on my temple and I just felt not right after that. There was a ton of blood and I remember just going to the hospital, feeling very hazy, kind of getting up, moving around, feeling hurt, you know? And the kids -- yelling at the kids and being just not a very nice person at that point. And I was very hazy and to make a long story short, I got a little "broigus." I got a little cranky, ornery..”
But I only caught one direct reference that the central character of “Abby Ableman” (played by Robin Weigert) is Jewish, let alone her long-time wife, successful divorce lawyer “Kate” (played by Julie Fain Lawrence) or her aggressive client/neighbor “Sam Bennet” and her Goldman Sachs husband “Graham” (played by Maggie Siff and Ben Shenkman who frequently play Jewish characters), when she initially says she couldn’t possibly work as a lesbian prostitute because I’m on the board of my synagogue! Maybe I missed even a menorah around the house – which is usually the cinematic shorthand for religious identity – but at the point after she neglects to pick up their kids at school for the first time due to luxuriating in sex, she comes home to – huh?—read in bed Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. (3/2/2014)
The Conductor (preview at 2021 Tribeca Film Festival) (6/23/2021)
The Conspiracy - Maxim Pozdorovkin’s well-researched for first-person reflections, yet accessible, primarily animated documentary, narrated by Mayim Bialik, traces the specifics of the history of pernicious, inter-connected antisemitic conspiracies, seen as regenerating online, particularly through three Jewish families: the German Warburg, the Russian (in what is now Ukraine) Lev Bronstein, who became Leon Trotsky; and the French Dreyfus.
Sara Warburg (1805-1884) was not only a member of the venerable banking family of Hamburg, but took over their financial institution after her husband/cousin died and ran it from 1856-1865. Their descendant Max speaks to the camera at the end.
Alexandra Lvovna Sokolovskaya (1872-1938) was the dedicated Marxist who converted Bronstein to the cause, led union organizing activities, married him in prison, accompanied him to exile in Siberia with their children, encouraged him to escape, when he adopted the name Trotsky, and was killed in Stalin’s purges (like many in their family). The animation forms into a real person with connections to them: Mexican-American Nora Volkow introduces herself as born in the house where Trotsky (her great-grandfather) was killed. She is emphatic about the family’s legacy of Jewish persecution, and the negative effect of racism, that “are still permeating our civilization.”
In detailing the French army, government, and public antisemitic persecution of Alfred Dreyfus, from 1894 on, the film emphasizes that his wife Lucie (1869 – 1945) unstintingly supported
his cause and “fought for her husband’s innocence”. As a widow, Lucie fled the Nazis and survived by hiding in a convent. Their granddaughter Madeleine Dreyfus Lévy joined the Resistance, and helped thousands of Jews to freedom across the Pyrenees, until she was singled out for arrest in 1943 and deported to Auschwitz. The documentary notes: “Madeleine’s ‘fate was sealed by her name - Dreyfus. The Nazis had her in their sights.” We are given to presume with the appearance of historian Michel Dreyfus, who has written a book on antisemitism in France, that he is a descendant. (preview at 2022 DOC NYC Festival) (11/7/2022)
The Cousin (Ha Ben Dod) - In this satire of how peacenik liberals in Israel behave when having to deal with a real life Palestinian working for them, the females are secondary characters. The wife/mother Yael (Osnat Fishman), a TV producer I think, mostly just reacts nervously as the comedy of errors multiply around her husband and the guy he hired to renovate their house. A teenage girl is attacked, but she’s so traumatized she hides behind her dark curly hair and her mother, before she can trust anyone enough to finally point out who really hurt her.) (preview at 2018 Other Israel Film Festival/also shown at 2018 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (11/1/2018)
Crazy Love (6/1/2007) (Oy, he’s gleeful that they met on Rosh ha Shanah.)
Creating A Character: The Moni Yakim Legacy -
This is almost a joint-bio-doc with his wife Mina – but a bit more information would have been helpful for the curious. I had to look online to find out that she is also from Israel, presumably then Palestine, though he gives fascinating detail about his family, and we get none about hers until the point in Paris when she met him after finishing “a relationship” with her mentor Marcel Marceau. In addition to the terrific clips from their theater days, the new footage of their working together as mimes on a dark stage, proving they are still exquisite performing partners, was directed by Alma Har’el, also Israeli. (preview at 2018 DOC NYC Festival) (10/29/2018)
Crime After Crime (first briefly reviewed at 2011 New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (So, nu: The Orthodox Jewish lawyer only talks vaguely about his abused mother, with no family photographs, so one can only presume that she and her partner were Jewish. He's as purposely vague if the man was his father, step-father, or if they were married, or even if it was an observant home, as his is now. It certainly seems to be an unusual lifting of the veil over domestic violence in the Jewish community.) (7/2/2011)
The Crossing (Flukten over grensens)- Plucky and resourceful ten-year-old blonde Norwegian “Gerda” (played by Anna Sofie Skarholt) obsessed with The Three Musketeers is the primary focus of this lovely and thrilling children-centered, and viewing-appropriate, story of fleeing Nazis across the border to Sweden, directed by Johanne Helgeland and based on co-writer Maja Lunde’s novel not yet in English. But the younger brunette Jewish “Sarah” (played by Bianca Ghilardi-Hellsten) is just smaller, has as much gumption, in the Swedish “Pippi Longstocking” tradition, and enjoys her protector living out an adventure tale, particularly when “Gerda” honors her as a “trainee” in the delightful imagining of the classic tale. Though warned not to trust anyone, “Sarah” is fooled by an old lady offering gingerbread who seems straight out of Hansel and Gretel, in a scene that could be the scariest for children. (preview at 2021 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) (streaming through Menemsha Films) (1/30/2021)
Crossing The River- (short)
Parallel to the documentary Unbroken, director Allan Novak took up the story of three schvesters and a brother – his mother, aunties, and uncle -- when the media noticed that at ages 96 – 101 the Finks of Winnipeg were “the world’s oldest living Holocaust survivor siblings”. Having been casually filming them since the 1970’s, he first compiled his documentary as a 100th birthday present to “the middle one – the peacemaker”, his mother Anne (née Hania), having many past interviews with the oldest Sally (née Salche) “the pisk - the loudmouth” who declares they were “saved by Stalin”, Ruth (née Rivche) who had starred in his local cooking show, and the cherished youngest and only brother Sol (né Zalman) – “the most positive person in the world”.
What comes across more than in any other such film are their individual personalities and good humor within a very close family connection that the viewer can see got them through their travails they each can still detail -- from when the German-Soviet Pact in 1939 landed their integrated Polish city onto the Russian side of the San River (formerly Galicia, near the roots of my maternal family); harshly transported to Siberia into a labor camp, then factory work; back to home communities bereft of their relatives; until their mother’s sister Clara’s petitions for visas were finally successful for the parents and siblings (now with spouses and children) to “Paradise” aka Winnipeg - they were already used to really cold winters, warmed by always living near each other.
Their colorful memories are richly illustrated by many family photographs, maps, and images generated by AI from their descriptions. Adding to the family feelings, producer Debi Wisch is Clara’s granddaughter, and the delightful klezmer score is by Sol's daughter Shayla Fink’s and his son-in-law Kinzey Posen’s band Finjan. (at 2024 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum/ courtesy of filmmakers) (1/26/2024)
Cupcakes (So, nu) (3/27/2015)
The Cut (Notes: While there are no Jews in the film, the visual references of this epic of the Armenian genocide and its aftermath are all taken from Holocaust films, and his survival is much like such miracles reported during the Holocaust, and the nation’s aching indomitability. Though edited out of my review, men with knives are ordered to tie up the weakened Armenian men, but “Mehmet” (Bartu Küçükçağlayan) whispers to “Nazaret” that he’s just a thief who was let out of prison to join the renegades and promises to protect him – leaving “Nazaret” only badly wounded – from the title wound -- and voiceless, weeping over his dying brother. But his benumbed acceptance of his fate is contrasted with the vengeful “Krikor”, played by French-Armenian actor Simon Abkarian, but Charlie Chapln brings out his only smile in the epic. Much like Holocaust survivors, he treasures one faded childhood photograph. Reminiscent of Fred Zinneman’s The Search (1948), he’s relieved to hear that they were sent to an orphanage, and the obsessed “Nazaret” sets off across the Levant to check the scores of children’s homes set up by religious charities to try to cope with the shell-shocked remnant. By 1922, their distinctiveness as twins jogs a headmistress’s memory of them growing there into young women, with only one girl’s limp an identifying mark of their ordeal. Interestingly, it looks like every country it is shown has given the film a different name, and I’d be curious to see them all translated.) (10/9/2015)
Dancing Alfonso (seen at 2008 Israel Film Festival) (11/9/2008)
Dancing in Jaffa (briefly reviewed in 2013 Documentaries at Tribeca Film Festival and at Part 2 Truth & Friction of the 2013 Other Israel Film Festival.) (So, nu: my commentary on the Jewish women.) (So, nu: commentary forthcoming about the Israeli mothers, daughters, and teachers) (6/4/2013)
A Dangerous Method) (So, nu: In what seems to me to be David Cronenberg’s most Jewish movie – he described himself as relating to Freud as “an old Jew” in the press conference following the preview at 2011 New York Film Festival of the Film at Lincoln Center, he puts the rift between Freud and Jung smack in the context of their Jewish vs. Aryan tensions. Sabina Spielrein as the fulcrum between them brings to wider acknowledgment her significance beyond Freud’s crediting her (inaccurately) in a footnote about “the death instinct”. She’s Jung’s patient, whose successful analysis he described in several barely pseudonymous examples (which must have made discussions about masturbation at professional conferences she later attended as a colleague, not shown in the film, more than a bit embarrassing); then she’s Jung’s lover, ego fluffer, and sounding board for his ideas; and then a Freudian theorist on the ego-destruction in sexuality, justifying Cronenberg’s presentation that she was acting out this sado-masochism with Jung even as it strains credulity about her mental health. Ironically, just as Jung’s development of the Elektra complex was parallel to Freud’s central Oedipus Complex, her Siegfried obsession, continuing to be in love with the blond Aryan Jung years later despite the harm to her psychoanalytical credibility with Freud, is intriguingly parallel to the Jewish male fixation on the blonde shiksa. (11/24/2011)
Dare (positive review) (In expanding their short film, director Adam Salky and writer David Brind (who has given various answers about how much of himself is in the character) added a lot of back story to the gay teen boy "Benjamin" (now played by Ashley Springer), including a last name, "Berger", an Is-ro head of curls, a PBS-watching Philly suburban family, and his therapist mother "Ruth" (played very sympathetically by Ana Gasteyer). While there's nothing in the dialogue or in the home that declares her Jewish, I presume most viewers will think she is, what I call "a putative Jewish woman" in my TV commentaries. Though the son rebels against what he perceives as her constant efforts to psychoanalyze him, she is the most maternal figure in the film, the other neglected teen products of divorce instinctively reach out to her, and enjoy an evening of family together-ness that is clearly atypical for them. Her pleasant surprise that he has brought a guy to the house shows she's more comfortable with his heretofore closeted homosexuality than he is. She reassures the conflicted gentile guest hunk (the superb Zach Gilford of Friday Night Lights) that she'll drive him to his doctor's appointment: I'm a mother. It's what I do. (Not an exact quote - I wasn't taking notes and I was more concerned that she was going to turn into a cougar) and encourages him that this doctor is a good choice when she realizes that he's meeting with a therapist colleague "Dr. Serena Mohr" (played by Sandra Bernhard). (11/25/2009)
Dark Inclusion (Diamant noir) While the focus of this unusual tale of familial love and revenge in a Jewish, Flemish-speaking, Antwerp family of diamond cutters and traders is on the fathers/sons/uncle/nephew, the mother and the fiancée are not stereotypes. “Olga Ulmann” (played by Hilde Van Mieghem) warmly welcomes in the prodigal nephew “Pier Ulmann” (played by Niels Schneider) into her home and nuclear family, asking him to keep watch over his epileptic cousin “Gabriel/Gabi” (played by August Diehl), though that unwittingly moves forward schemes. I’ll count “Luisa” (played by Raphaële Godin) as a putative Jewish woman, despite explicit evidence. (I don’t recall seeing her last name and her mother lives in a working-class neighborhood in Rome, but she has curly brunette hair.) We first see her working out as a boxer, and she’s friends with minority boxers. She’s also getting her PhD in Chemistry – albeit specializing in studying the properties of gold. Unlike the usual triangles, she fights off “Pier”s advances, even stoned on marijuana, as he advances to rape. (previewed at 2016 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Film at Lincoln Center) (2/25/2016)
David & Fatima (negative review) (There are only two Jewish women in what is one of the most puerile and amateurish Romeo & Juliet-in-Israel movies. [Far superior is Strangers that I saw at Tribeca Film Festival, albeit it has no Jewish women in it.] From the simultaneous birth labor on, the Israeli mother is fairly bland, as she pleads with her husband to back off from confronting his Palestinian counterpart, even when the Arab oddly throws Jewish mother stereotypes at him to insult his manhood. “David”s sister is apparently one of the few women career soldiers in the IDF, due to her stringent right-wing, Arab--phobic views.) (9/28/2008)
David and Kamal (previewed at 2011 Other Israel Film Festival) (So, nu: “David”s divorced mother is only present through the reactions of his estranged father through unheard phone calls where she just comes across as selfish, what with dumping her son halfway across the world so she could vacation with a new boyfriend. The briefly seen stepmother-girlfriend is sympathetic to both father and son.) (11/21/2011)
David and Layla (The crudely biased and ignorant Jewish mother, as well as the ex-girlfriend, played by Callie Thorne like her sexually aggressive recurring characters on E.R. and Rescue Me, are particularly tasteless and not credible in their wide-eyed acting when compared to the long-suffering Kurdish family of the love of his life.) (2/23/2008)
David Bromberg: Unsung Treasure (briefly reviewed at 2012 DOC NYC Festival) (So, nu: He’s pretty cryptic about his parents, other than describing his father as an Austrian psychiatrist and his “mother the monster” from Brooklyn. There was a hint about possible Holocaust experiences that was left unasked.) (11/4/2012)
David Golder (seen at MoMA's Julien Duvivier retrospective with new English subtitles) I still hope to get to the Museum of Jewish Heritage's exhibition Woman of Letters: Irène Némirovsky and Suite Française, and I haven't yet read her book that was the basis for this 1930 film. But I wonder if the rich, horrifically manipulative, money-grasping, status-conscious, spendthrift, superficial Jewish mother and (blonde) daughter of a Merchant of Paris in the film were the templates that established these stereotypes in the movies/TV.) (5/14/2009)
Dear Santa In a documentary covering Santa’s dedicated “elves” working across the country with the USPS “Operation Santa” that’s very much in the spirit of Miracle on 34th Street, the credits include one family with a menorah – that could be editor Jennifer Steinman Sternin, or possibly director Dana Nachman. Too bad there wasn’t a coda about the program going all-online during the Pandemic. (preview at 2020 DOC NYC) (11/22/2020)
Death In Love (So, nu: While the older son is made neurotic by the repercussions of his mother's passion for her Nazi captor –and testimony in Forgotten Transports: To Estonia (Zapomenuté transporty: Do Estonska): Women's Friendship recalls that as possible-- and many others, the younger is as tortured as the violin virtuoso she tormented to his death in the camp, as she was complicit in the doctor seeking the physical source of his genius. I'm not the only critic who was reminded in a negative comparison to a similar survivor in Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter.) (7/18/2009)
Death of a Poetess (Mot HaMeshoreret) - Written and directed by Dana Goldberg + Efrat Mishori, this narrative film is almost a two-hander of the intersection of two mothers, with Yasmin, an Arab Israeli nurse who lives in Jaffa (Samira Saraya) and Tel Aviv academic Lenny Sadeh (Evgenia Dodina), who reminds me of Jeanne Moreau wandering around Paris in Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (1958), but even more mysterious. That her motivations are so unclear, though, adds to the biased tension of the police investigation’s insistence on an explanation. (preview at 2018 Other Israel Film Festival)
The Death Of My Two Fathers (preview at 2021 Tribeca Film Festival) (6/23/2021)
The Debt (So, nu: comparison to Ha-Hov).)
Defiance (So, nu: The complexity of romantic relationships is overly simplified for sentimentality and almost too discreet -- Alexa Davalos is Tuvia's tolerant forest wife Lilka, Iben Hjejle is Zus's fellow feisty fighter Bella, and Mia Wasikowska is Asael's sweet crush. There actually was more sex going on amongst these young people who thought they'd die at any moment, according to Nechama Tec's book the film was based on, with willing women who figured they'd bargain for protection. And yet these marriages of crisis lasted for decades after.) (12/31/2008) (For more context see Forgotten Transports to Belarus (Zapomenuté transporty: Do Belarus): Men Who Fought)
Defiant Requiem (previewed at 2012 DocuWeeks) (So, nu: on the Jewish women.)
Delegation (Ha’Mishlahat) - Asaf Saban’s second feature empathetically punctures the pomposity of taking crowds of Israeli high-schoolers (like he was) on the ritual tour of Holocaust sites in Europe. Unlike such related projects for American teens, the writer/director notes the significance for most Israelis that this is also the year before their required military service. The nationalistic inculcation is visually linked as they carry Israeli flags and wear flag-like uniform sweatshirts – when they aren’t being warned to be incognito when they have free time in cities.
As a week or so in the life of these kids, their relationships are a bit unclear. But as typical as the pop and rock tunes on the soundtrack and in their ears, their personal dramas are much more important to them than the 80-year-old drama around them. Is the long-haired brunette “Nitzan” (played by Neomi Harari) so obnoxious as she experiments with being a performance artist just because of her competitive jealousy with the long-haired, atypical blonde over her childhood friend “Ido” (played by Leib Lev Levin)? (I do remember when I took my first, far more innocuous trip overseas with classmates at the same age when all I could think about was my crush back at school.) But in a literal road movie, I was expecting some revelation beyond hug-interpretations, maybe in relation to her family’s Holocaust story. (at 2024 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum/ courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment) (2/4/2024)
Deli Man (previewed at 2015 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (So, nu: my commentary on the Jewish women.) (So, nu: Surprise: among the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generation running a traditional kosher deli in North American is at least one woman: Jaqueline Canter of Canter’s Deli in Los Angeles, as well as the wives and daughters of others, and a couple of informative female experts on the history of delis. It’s also sweet that the featured guide, David “Ziggy” Gruber of Houston met his future wife, acupuncturist Mary McCaughey, as she began converting to Judaism.) Kudos to including our local classic deli Ben’s Best! (updated 3/6/2015)
Demon (So, nu: “Hana” (played by Maria Debska) is mostly a ghostly apparition walking and kissing the groom (Piotr/Peter/Pyton, played by Itay Tiran, besides what the schoolteacher (played by Wlodzimierz Press), and Yiddish translator between “Hana” and the town, remembers of her as the prettiest girl in town, but in love with a Polish boy, whose identity each audience member may guess differently. Many critics cite different interpretations of the facts: most think this is a Holocaust revenge story; I’m quite sure this references the 1968 anti-Semitic putsch in Poland, including for “Piotr”s grandmother, who also may be Jewish. A side note about the Israeli Tiran: while he is more known for such dramatic roles as in Lebanon (2009) than in physical comedies, his possession by Hana demonstrated the same agility as Steve Martin sharing his body with Lily Tomlin’s soul in Carl Reiner’s All of Me (1984). (previewed at 2016 New Directors/New Films of Film at Lincoln Center/MoMA)
An added bonus about The Dybbuk: In By Sidney Lumet, the director says his father Baruch Lumet, a noted Yiddish actor, performed this favorite play many times. So in tribute, Lumet produced it on live TV in one of his first productions, and starred his father. (updated 10/30/2016)
Defying The Nazis: The Sharps War - Several women interviewed were girls who the Sharps, Righteous Gentiles, saved by getting them out of Prague and Paris just in time. (10/30/2016)
Denial So, nu: While I do not judge Jewish women characters if they are enacted by Jewish actresses, I hadn’t known that Rachel Weisz is of Jewish heritage. Her active academic is stereotype-free. Two women survivors lobby “Prof. Lipstadt”, particularly the passionate “Vera Reich” (played by Harriet Walter). (9/14/2016)
Destination Unknown - Director Claire Ferguson documentary produced in cooperation with the USC Shoah Foundation, the English-speaking Holocaust survivor interviewees include several women, who emphasize the importance of bonding with other “girls”, and the bitterness towards those who did not. They are also insightful about how their horrible experiences affected their lives and their families afterwards. (11/28/2017)
Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge (at 2024 Tribeca Film Festival) (6/4/2024)
Dimona Twist- Michal Aviad provides a fresh, insightful look at the immigrant development towns of the 1950’s- 1960’s by frank and fulsome interviews with seven articulate and sophisticated women from various Francophone countries in North Africa, as well as Poland. Between family photos are marvelous archival footage and photographs, some of whose propaganda value are cynically contradicted by these essential witnesses. (at 2017 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum)
The Disappeared (Hane’elam) (So, nu: The women participants I’ve identified and their careers Noa Aharoni (writer/director), Dr. Dalia Gilboa (chief psychologist at the Health Ministry), Shahar Gonen, Nataly Attiya-Schimmel (lead actress), Anat Schumacher (editor), Liora Schwarz, Inbal Shafir-Leitner (script supervisor)) (seen at 2019 First Look Festival at Museum of the Moving Image) (1/31/2019)
Disengagement (Désengagement) - Amos Gitai has to s-t-r-e-t-c-h his tri-partite story-line a lot to try and make the two Jewish women make any sense as he looks at American/European/Israeli attitudes. Juliette Binoche, in possibly her first role as a Jew, is “Ana”, a sensual secularist faced with the reappearance of her hunky Israeli step-brother as she deals with the death of her American ex-pat father, a prominent Zionist and philanthropist in France, who requires in his will that she reunite with the daughter she gave up at birth on a kibbutz, “Dana” (Dana Ivgy), who somehow became Orthodox, now living in a Gaza settlement being removed by the government. The visuals and acting make more beautiful sense than any of the quizzical dialogue. (previewed at Israel at 60 at Lincoln Center) (6/13/2008)
Disobedience (previewed at 2018 Tribeca Film Festival) The source novel is by Naomi Alderman who has roots growing up in this neighborhood (and that star/producer Rachel Weisz grew up nearby, and now resides in the NYC art and fast sex club scenes where her character lives in the prologue, though in the book she’s a financial analyst and lover of a married man), are reflected in the sensitivity for dealing with the Ultra-Orthodox. Co-writer Rebecca Lenkiewicz was brought in to assure authenticity. (Especially in comparison to the more conventional A Price Above Rubies (1998). From the opening image there’s a glaring difference: the “Dovid” in the book, a dull nephew not the film’s bright protégé, is described as a stereotypical-looking yeshiva bocher, compared to producer Alessandro Nivola, whose sexy appeal can’t be hidden under Haredi garments, and makes visually clear that any heterosexual woman would be attracted to him. Unlike The Secrets (Ha-Sodot), this doesn’t bring up that the Torah does not specifically condemn lesbians as it does male homosexuals, but about rebelling against community mores, such that the reunited, reckless lovers (Weisz and Rachel Mcadams) are tattled on by a married couple. The film kind of waffles on whether they are bi-sexual and just happen to be in love with each other, but the ending emphasizes the surprising strengths they find to relate to the men in their families, dead and living. (5/8/2018)
Disturbing The Peace (So, nu: The press notes on the only Jewish woman participant (of the four Israelis) who gets much screen time, with not near the emotional impact or detail as the Israeli men or the Palestinian woman: “Maia Hascal - Born in Nofit village in northern Israel, Maya is a social worker who volunteered for reserve duty after finishing her mandatory service in the Israeli Defense Forces. Following a traumatic event, as she became increasingly aware of the effects of the Occupation on both the Palestinians and Israeli soldiers needing to enforce it, she realized a different path must be taken. Maia joined Combatants for Peace in an effort to resolve this situation through nonviolence.” Others are glimpsed. (11/13/2016)
Dogs: The Rise and Fall of an All-Girl Bookie Joint (I only discovered this very indie little 1996 movie in 2010, as I prepared to see director Eve Annenberg's latest film that was also in The New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum. I was surprised to find the relationship quite charming, and very much not stereotypical, between the artsy, rebellious daughter "Leila Wascowicz" (played by Pam Columbus) living in the East Village, and the inconvenient ghost of her single mother (played by Lenore Sommerstein) haunting her thoughts and surprisingly being more supportive than a guilty conscience. Amongst the motley ethnic crew of girlfriends, it is "Leila" who comes up with the brainy idea of using their combined skills to run a quite successful franchised bookie operation to pay their rent and expenses, until their consciences get to them all.) (1/3/2011)
Dolphin Boy (previewed at 2011 Other Israel Film Festival) (So, nu: In addition to Jewish women interviewed as his colleagues at the Dolphin Reef, the young Israeli Arab man falls in love with a Jewish woman there and their first romance is sweetly and wistfully covered as an unrealistic emblem of his reinvented life that can’t last. (11/26/2011)
Don’t Blink – Robert Frank [and in Leaving Home, Coming Home: A Portrait Of Robert Frank] - Not only does director Laura Israel not clarify that the subject is Jewish, she doesn’t provide such background [nor does Gerald Fox] on his first wife Eleanore Lockspeiser, whose maternal grandparents, according to Wikipedia, were Gregory and Eugenie Weinstein, and her paintings are included in The Jewish Museum’s permanent collection. The bio-docs do include his photographs of their daughter Andrea from birth on, and her death in a plane accident at age 21. (previewed at 2015 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (9/25/2015; update 1/1/2020)
Dove’s Cry (previewed at 2013 Other Israel Film Festival) (So, nu: even those Israeli Jewish girls and women, both staff and parents, who at first seem welcoming to the Israeli Arab teacher, are revealed to be prejudiced.) (12/8/2013)
Dressing America: Tales From The Garment Center (briefly reviewed at 2012 New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (So, nu: The interviews with the Jewish women are the least interesting, as they are mostly nostalgic daughters recalling visiting their fathers’ and grandfathers’ businesses. Unfortunately, they are not as good storytellers and their memories are not as insightful or informative. While I understand that the directors probably wanted some young faces in the film, I preferred more from, well, the cat’s pajamas. (Ironically, the one woman interviewed from the biz is non-Jewish, similar to how the current view in the HBO series How to Make It in America also features only Jewish male characters.)
Months after seeing this documentary, I discovered my maternal grandfather’s family, and learned that his sister Dorothy was married to noted designer Seymour Jacobson-- but I don’t know if he was mentioned; I’ve heard that female relatives are hunting down his vintage outfits.
Years later I learned that this documentary was part of two larger research efforts: the Gotham Center for NYC History’s Garment Industry History Initiative and Urban Fabric exhibition curated by Andrew S. Dolkart. (updated 10/13/2012 and 2/8/2021)
Driving Men (briefly reviewed at 2009 Annual New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (Like the video artist/director of Flying: Confessions Of A Free Woman, Susan Mogul is determined to edit her apparently continual self portraits into an autobiography, at least in terms of her relationships to men. There's amusing and touching moments, but her exhibitionism overwhelms all else.) (1/18/2009)
Echo (Hed) - The frailty of Israeli masculinity comes through a husband (Yoram Toledano) who can’t cope with a psychologist wife and mother (Yael Abecassis) who is so shook by a patient’s suicide that she can barely continue professionally, until she finds solace in an affair. (at 2019 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum)
Eichmann’s End: Love, Betrayal, Death (Eichmanns Ende) (briefly reviewed at 2011 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (1/17/2011)
Einsatzgruppen: The Death Brigades (Les Commandos De La Mort (briefly reviewed at 2010 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (This is the first I've seen to document with witnesses, rare photographs and footage how amidst the genocide through the Baltics young women were selected out for stripping, ogling and humiliation first, particularly as the volume of mass murders led to increasingly pathological behavior by the soldiers. In one village, a local woman witness later remembered a group of five young women who refused to strip before being led to the death pit, so were instead shot on the spot – one of the few acts of resistance any recalled.) (updated 4/18/2017)
This French-produced, 180 minute documentary was re-packaged in 2017 for American Heroes Channel in the U.S., and National Geographic Channel in Canada into episodes of the docu-series Nazi Death Squads, with English-language narration.
ElDorado: Everything The Nazis Hate (Eldorado - Alles, was die Nazis hassen)
Like a follow-up to Klaus Müller’s Paragraph 175 (2000), who consults in this fascinating documentary, director/co-writer Benjamin Cantu (Budapest-born, German film education) uncovers astonishing newly found or compiled archival material on German trans and gay people, from feeling liberated during the Wiemar Republic, as represented by the titular nightclub, through continuing repression beyond 1945. There is also an extensive interview with a 100-year-old gay Jewish survivor. In History Channel style, dramatized reenactments directed by Matt Lambert vividly imagine their lives. His statement (that Netflix evidently only sent to gay press): "As a queer Jewish filmmaker living and working in Berlin for over a decade, the erased LGBTQ+ history of Berlin has always been a present pulse in my own work as well as in the community events and parties I’ve been throwing here over the years…The opportunity to recreate moments that celebrated queerness in Berlin 1926-1933 was a dream come true — casting from our queer community here in Berlin. Many of the characters appearing in scenes within the ‘Eldorado’ are not just actors, but many are queer performers, artists, and icons that makeup fate fabric of our contemporary Berlin scene.”. But I did question a couple of minor facts: A historian’s ”Facebook Live” presentation by the U.S. Holocaust Museum noted that the pink triangle for homosexuals was only used at Auschwitz. Though the detailed background on SA leader Ernst Röhm is very explanatory, the historian participants’ description of his arrest is far less explicit than what other histories call “The Night of the Long Knives”.
While lesbians are occasionally mentioned in terms of any woman wearing pants during the Nazi reign could be denounced to the authorities, the most notable Jewish woman followed closely in the film is the life of American citizen trans-woman Charlotte Charlaque (played in the recreations by Eli Otto Kappo). She is said to be one of the first people in the world to undergo experimental sex reassignment surgery, under the auspices of gay German-Jewish sexologist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexology/Sexual Research (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft), which also arranged “medical” identification for her as a woman. Trans historian Morgan M. Page, who adds more emotional resonance than factual information, claims Charlotte’s partner, who also underwent the procedures, Toni Ebel (played by Blanka Vay) “converted to Judaism”, illustrated by them both blessing the Shabbat candles together. Happy and proud of finally being able to live together as women, they were photographed publicly and talked to journalists, the evident sources of images used, though it’s not clear if some have been colorized or are part of the re-creation, as all the records of the Institute were destroyed by Nazis in 1933. Though they escaped to Czech territory, Toni was then able to bravely save Charlotte after arrest there by convincing authorities of her partner’s American citizenship, for her deportation to safety in 1942. There’s a brief epilogue about Charlotte living in Brooklyn as an actress, and Toni returning to Berlin as a painter. (On Netflix) (7/3/2023)
Elik and Jimmy aka The Fat Guy (HaShamen) - At least in Gudis Schneider’s otherwise cringe-worthy and predictable rom com, “Elik” (Mey-ran Menkes) is a very modern Jewish woman not usually seen on screen in any country: she’s beautiful, successful in high tech companies with a high income that lets her be independent, casually takes on and discards lovers in Israel and the U.S., so amiable with ex’s that she matches a handsome one up with a girlfriend, and (for 99% of the movie) has no interest in a long-term relationship or children. Oy, until the sappy conclusion of course, when she can not only ignore her friend’s obesity, but his overall sloppiness, lack of ambition, and seeming regular unemployment, and every stereotype associated with “Fat Guys” in movies. At least “Elik” is grateful her mother is alive, and is culturally Jewish, particularly for Purim parties. (at 2023 Israel Film Center Festival) (6/6/2023)
Elusive Justice: The Search for Nazi War Criminals (as seen on PBS) (In Argentina, a concentration camp survivor is one of the Mothers of the Plaza who speaks forcefully against how the military learned from the Nazis, in Germany and those who were given sanctuary in the country, though the links are not made as individually explicit about the torture instruction as in other documentaries, such as in My Enemy’s Enemy.) (11/17/2011)
Emotional Arithmetic (shown on Showtime and released on DVD as Autumn Hearts: A New Beginning) (briefly reviewed at 2009 New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (I haven't read Matt Cohen's novel yet for comparison, but there's a very complicated set of circumstances these folks have to work through in eastern Quebec, despite explanations at the end of what Drancy) was: an American Jewish girl (now Susan Sarandon shaking off her "crazy pills") was there with an Irish boy (now Gabriel Byrne) and a Russian man (now Max Von Sydow) who then ends up in a Soviet prison and psychiatric hospital that she all these years later saves him from through her work with Amnesty International? And Christopher Plummer is her much older husband? The cast infuses this quizzical plot with life, but I kept getting distracted by the sight of La Femme Nikita's Roy Dupuis as her son, so much that I even in a weak moment bought a DVD of a Canadian hockey film he was in so I could qualify for free shipping of the novel.) (updated 5/14/2009)
Empty Nest (El nido vacío) (So, nu: previewed and briefly reviewed at 18th New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (This is unusual for Daniel Burman's work for having such vibrant and independent Jewish women – in contrast to the disgruntled father/husband: the wife/mother "Martha" --a terrifically lively Cecilia Roth-- who enthusiastically moves on from maternal responsibilities to explore her talents and interests, and her only daughter Julia (Inés Efron) who is very comfortable with her decision to have made aliyah with an Israeli husband.) (1/18/2009)
Endless Poetry (Poesía Sin Fin) (2017) - Not having seen Chilean avant-garde artist Alejandro Jodorowsky's first autobiographical film, that he calls his technique of family therapy “Psychomagic” about his childhood The Dance of Reality (La danza de la realidad) (2013) the northern Chilean mining town of Tocopilla, I didn’t realize both his parents were Jewish, as the only obvious Jewish reference was a poker game with a Hassidic man. In the new film about his adolescence when the family moved to Santiago, Pamela Flores replays his mother (ID’d in Wikipedia as Sara Felicidad Prullansky Arcavi, that she and his father were “Jewish immigrants from Yekaterinoslav (now Dnipro), Elisavetgrad (now Kropyvnytskyi) and other cities of the Russian Empire (now Ukraine)”, as well as his first girlfriend “Varín”. Adan, Jodorowsky's youngest son, plays him as a teen, while his eldest son Brontis reprises as his own rigidly strict grandfather. He says in interviews about his father "You cannot believe how much I suffered," and he was evidently mad at his mother for being too passive about the abuse that rained down. But in this second film, she’s portrayed as a frustrated opera singer, who sings all her dialogue and helps inspire him along his artistic ways. In the film’s epilogue, he regrets that he left them and Chile in such anger that he never said goodbye or saw them again. The earlier film, based on his autobiographical novel, portrays his elder sister Raquel as a bully, but I don’t recall her presence here. (7/24/2017)
The End of Love - Director Keren Ben Rafael was inspired by her own experience as an Israeli working wife/mother married to a Frenchman, Damien Dufresne, who is the cinematographer on this and her earlier film Virgins (Vierges/Ein Betulot Bakrayot), to trace modern couple relationships playing out on video calls – made in 2019 before the COVID pandemic. In a sample interview, she recalled much discussion with her co-writer Élise Benroubi about which gender to be where and with the baby. In the film, the working wife/mother “Julie” (played by French actress Judith Chemla) is French, with the baby with her in Paris. The Israeli husband/father is “Yuval” (played by Arieh Worthalter, who actually lives in Belgian and is fluent in both French and Hebrew). His mother and sister are briefly seen trying to involve the wife in Shabbat dinner via Skype, which the sister teases is actually a rare occurrence by their family and is being done for the educational benefit of the gentile wife. (Ironically, Chemla and the actress who plays her estranged mother “Chantal”, Noémie Lvovsky, are both Jewish.) When the baby keeps crying, the grandmother has endless suggestions for what to do, to the mother’s frustration. The director pointed out if they were together in person, she would have probably quickly helped physically, but this shows humorously how distancing video calls are for relationships. I do not include the French title À coeur battant, because the director also said she specifically chose the English title to recall the Leonard Cohen song, and thinks the French distributor’s re-naming is misleading. (preview at 2022 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) (1/23/2022)
Entourage - In tracking the Jewish women through the TV show’s run - "Ari”s wife and "Ari”s daughter “Sarah” into the fourth season, Season 5, Season 6, Season 7, and the final season, I deemed “Mrs. Ari” and “Ari Gold” the most attractively romantic Jewish couple in television ever. In the fairly lame movie finale with no new character development, they are played by the same actors, the credits still list Perrey Reeves’ character as “Mrs. Ari”, but the press notes identified her as “also known as Melissa Gold”. “Ari” (Jeremy Piven) several times makes jokes about being Jewish, including making a Jewish wedding in his backyard for his gay Asian-American former assistant: My house my God -- this after his wife mocks him for praying when he’s in difficult negotiations because he doesn’t believe in God. While he makes a couple of unnecessarily crude jokes about his wife’s anatomy, including while he pumps away in her during sex, they are still sweetly in love. She still makes him go with her to marriage counseling to deal with his anger issues, though he doesn’t seem to discuss financial issues with her when he’s mulling taking risks, as he did before – or I dozed off and missed that conversation. The oldest daughter is nowhere around, but the now 12-year-old son consistently backs up his mother against his dad. (More commentary to come.) (6/1/2015)
Entre Nous - Somehow I didn’t get around to seeing Diane Kurys’ inspired-by-her-family’s-story 1983 French film until the end of 2013, but it stays very fresh. First striking is that auburn-haired Isabelle Huppert playing “Lena Weber” a Jewish woman counters American film stereotypes, as she is rounded up fleeing Belgium into occupied France and escapes German transport. But the penultimate time she seems to have any Jewish identity is when she amusingly recounts their years hiding their Jewish identity in Italy to the bored brunette shiksa who will become her lover (“Madeleine Segara” played by Miou-Miou). The last Jewish reference in her life is her mother’s grave in a Jewish cemetery in Belgium where her husband finds out she was using the headstone as an excuse to visit her lover in Paris. (12/28/2013)
Etgar Keret: Based On A True Story In the humorous joint interview with his wife writer/actress Shira Geffen on how they met, mentioned in passing is their collaboration on Jellyfish (Meduzot) (previewed at New Directors/New Films 2008 at Film at Lincoln Center/MoMA - my commentary on the Jewish woman)) (at 2019 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (1/11/2019)
Every Mother Should Know (Teda Kol Em Ivriya) (briefly reviewed at 2009 New York Jewish Film of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (Only a couple of women are seen, a sister and a wife, who are atypically brought into their men's confidence as they explore their feelings about their military experiences. Both have to resort to written histories to supplement what they can pull out about what happened to them.) (1/18/2009)
Everything Everywhere All At Once - As writer/directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert are satirizing many Chinese-American screen tropes in this terrific sci fi comedy fantasy, I’ll have to assume they intend it as satirically amusing that “Evelyn” (Michelle Yeoh) calls an obnoxious, well-to-do customer of her laundromat “Big Nose”, who is played by Jewish actress Jenny Slate. (12/4/2022)
Everything Is Copy (previewed at 2015 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) In this fond tribute to Nora Ephron by her son Jacob Bernstein (son of Carl), he interviews her three sisters, her childhood and professional best friends (male and female) and delves into the marriage of his grandparents, yet never once mentions his family is Jewish. The closest is showing the cover of the best selling book How to Be A Jewish Mother by her first husband Dan Greenburg, though she and the interviewees gush over her final true love Nicholas Pileggi and almost her final public words here are that one of the things she will miss most in life is their Christmas tree. This after he went through her life spent in Jewish neighborhoods on both coasts and going through her experiences that would indicate a putative Jewish woman if she were a character in a TV show or movie, from therapy to being ambitious to write and controlling to direct. If she rejected any Jewish identity, that would have been noteworthy, and if her parents’ alcoholism affected her. He and the interviewees (his brother is not included) also don’t go beneath her clever witticisms to get to the substance of her thoughts, especially what she really thought of women, let alone other Jewish women. (updated 9/27/2015)
Everything Is Illuminated (So, nu: The Jewish women in the film are mostly plot-movers as keepers of secrets, an extension of what Lewis Mumford anthropologically considered women's "container function." They incidentally save the men in their lives as this is much more about men.) (10/7/2005)
The Everything Pot (at 2024 Tribeca Film Festival) (5/24/2024)
Everything Went Fine (Tout s'est bien passé)
- courtesy of Cohen Media Group
Director François Ozon adapted his late friend, novelist Emmanuèle Bernheim’s memoir of dealing with the last illness of her father and helping him carry out his own planned death. (The book was already adapted into a documentary by Alain Cavalier Living and Knowing You Are Alive (Être vivant et le savoir) (2019), not released in the U.S., but may have been a lot like Ondi Timoner’s very moving, rabbi-in-the-family Last Flight Home, though the Bernheims are a more secular Jewish family.)
Emmanuèle Bernheim is maturely embodied by Sophie Marceau, as the older daughter with primary responsibility. Géraldine Pailhas reflects the mutual affections of younger sister Pascale, a mother of a boy sharing his grandfather’s classical music talent, and a brunette teen girl who shrugs Grandpa only likes boys, cross-referencing his homosexuality. Similarly, the father warmly calls Emmanuèle’s loving husband “son”, while fondly calling his daughters “my girls”. As usual in French films, adult Jewish women are seen with auburn hair. While their mother, artist/sculptor of cement Claude de Soria is probably Jewish (biographies describe her fleeing Paris during World War 2 first for the South of France then joining with Sephardic Jews in Tunis), Charlotte Rampling makes her a powerful physical presence as a gray-haired cynic racked with Parkinson’s and depression, resentfully dependent on a full-time aide. While Pascale’s work running a music festival focuses on rescuing war-damaged instruments, an American cousin survivor Simone (Judith Magre) is still haunted by the human damage of their relatives who died in the camps; in fact, the survivor in the family was even closer, the father’s sister. The father does want kaddish recited at his funeral, and is just as insistent that he not be buried in the plot of his disapproving in-laws.
These already complex familial interactions around their father André (a twinkling and acerbic André Dussollier), emphasized by brief but emotional flashbacks to angry childhood that are sometimes intertwined with dreams, are exacerbated by the tensions around his up-and-down condition, caustic black humor, frayed relationship with a volatile boyfriend, and stubborn insistence on carrying out his death amidst complicated legal and practical hurdles in France to Switzerland. Even as his daughters would prefer to delay implementation in hopes he’ll change his mind (and so they can continue their own busy and fulfilling lives), he is reasonable to want to hurry up while he can meet the necessary criteria of being able to hold and drink the final cup on his own, and being able to prove sound mind, even as he is slipping mentally by letting too many people around him in different hospitals know of his plans. But he’s of enough sound mind that he can have a religious discussion with his reluctant ambulance drivers.
The film impressively eschews schmaltz for the matter-of-fact reality of an intellectual family with a history of complicated feelings. (4/11/2023)
Every Time We Say Goodbye (Thanks to our Cousin Ray Fernandez for bringing this 1986 film to my attention.) (10/23/2009)
Évocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie (briefly reviewed at 2012 Award-Winning Docs at 2012 Tribeca Film Festival) (So, nu: Jewish feminist lawyer Gloria Allred is the only female former guest on his show interviewed, and she gives insightful commentary on her experiences, then and looking back in terms of her career as a media-savvy litigator and TV commentator.) (5/11/2012)
The Exception (Kudos to a sexy Jewish heroine!) (previewed at 2017 Tribeca Film Festival) (6/3/2017)
Exodus 91 - While co-director Aalam-Warqe Davidian’s With No Land (2021) was an excellent, straight-forward documentary about “Operation Solomon” taking over 14,000 of the Beit Israel from the middle of a 1991 civil war in Ethiopia, Micah Smith’s documentary/re-enactment/docu-drama/fiction hybrid allows for composite characters representing Jewish Ethiopian viewpoints that have only been seen and heard in a few fiction films. A child when her family emigrated to Israel in 1984’s “Operation Moses” (as seen in photographs), “Esther Mekonen” (portrayed by Titina Kebede Assefa, identified as “a drama therapist and activist who works with the Ethiopian-Israeli community”) is a dedicated aide and translator to new Ambassador Naim in the Israeli Embassy in Addis Ababa, whose memories are the film’s primary source. She is emphatic that Israel’s Law of Return should respect their generations of oral tradition and stories, without lab tests or such evidence. She speaks with feeling that it took years for Israel to stop demanding conversions or even symbolic circumcisions, as well as accepting the community’s own learned rabbis. Even in her quiet way she confronts the new Ambassador: You don’t know what it’s like to live in Israel as a “Negro”. But coming to Israel was best for me. At first confusing, the actress takes off her straight-hair wig, and reveals tight braids as she breaks the fourth wall to rush with a friend to join one of the many large demonstrations effectively documented in the film that Ethiopian Israelis have organized to protest their treatment by the police and Israeli society.
A white Israeli “Dr. Schwartz” (portrayed by Yaara Faltzig) gets to the breaking point at the medical clinic, as she tries to ascertain the refugees’ conditions: Jerusalem wants us to test them all for AIDS, just to keep them out. They are sick because the government has them live in slums instead of go to Israel. Israel should take them right away or take them back into their villages…Israel shouldn’t give them false hope. The Ambassador runs over to the clinic when the other doctor warns him that “Schwartzie” is upset and packing up to leave: Three babies died in two days! I lost them! We did this to them – we brought them to this filthy city with promises. I won’t take part in this anymore! She apologizes to the Ambassador before she walks out, but “Esther” notes sadly: When Dr. Schwartz left things got really desperate.
”Tesfanesh” (powerfully portrayed by Oshrat Ingedashet) is a local activist full of justified rage at the Israeli government. On crutches, she was crippled by her experience at “hell in Sudan” when she tried to walk to Israel, in a similar trek as captured in co-director Avishai Yeganyahu Mekonen’s 2012 400 Miles to Freedom. In Eitan Anner’s script, she is more eloquent than I can adequately transcribe as she ferociously insists that the Embassy should not have gathered her community to the capital with an unfillable promise of seeing Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, and warns that thousands may die: You are not in charge of us; you are not responsible for us. You decided we were in trouble. They were home, but you convinced them otherwise. They had their own story before you said it was a broken version of your story. You’re not taking anyone to Zion – it’s just an idea. You should have stayed away. You lie to children…You’ve led 15,000 people into a death trap again, and now it’s too late. They can’t go back on dangerous roads. Go home! Close down the embassy. Let the Beit Israel dissolve into the population so the rebels won’t single them out when they come. When the Ambassador tries to get her to flee on the transportation he’s managed to arrange, she refuses: I’m not afraid of the rebels…I don’t want to lose my self-respect. You need to learn to look at us as equals, not a lost primitive tribe you need to help. The film concludes with statistics on more emigration from Ethiopia to Israel, and their successes. (at 2023 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center and The Jewish Museum) (1/15/2023)
Experimenter After seeing it twice, I’m impressed at the sensitive portrayal of Alexandra “Sasha” Menkin (played by Winona Ryder), who did consult on the film, and briefly appears in the epilogue. She is explicitly Jewish, quickly tells him about her European background, is sexy, and as a wife and mother pursues her education and social work profession – even though she’s put down by an arrogant CUNY grad student for enjoying working with her husband Stanley (portrayed by Peter Sarsgaard) on his social science behavioral research. In Uproxx interview with Chloe Schildhause, posted 10/16/2015, she stressed: “I thought that [Almereyda’s] choices of what to show between them were really unusual and thoughtful and quite beautiful. Because she wasn’t just his wife or housewife.” (previewed at 2015 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (updated 10/20/2015)
Eyes Wide Open (Einaym Pkuhot) (2/5/2010) (also briefly reviewed at 2010 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (So, nu: The only woman seen is the wife, played by an actress who calls herself Tinkerbell, who is sweet, understanding and very comfortable with sex while following the rules for sexual contact. How both men glow at the comfortable hearth, home and children around the Shabbat table she has established makes clear why they would not be comfortable in the secular gay community.) (1/25/2010)
The Fabelmans
© 2022 Getty Images
Co-writer Tony Kushner is quoted in the Production Notes: Steven Spielberg and I “both have a very powerful, bone-deep love of being Jewish and Judaism. That was just going to be part of what the story was going to be—a story about a Jewish family. The Fabelmans are who they are, and they live and own it so easily and proudly.” The Jewishness is pretty much: the opening Shabbat candle-lighting with occasional challah seen subsequently, their lack of Christmas lights in their suburban neighborhood with a menorah occasionally seen, older relatives who sprinkle in Yiddish, and the antisemitism of California high school bullies.
The last credits are “For Leah. For Arnold.”, director/co-writer Steven Spielberg’s parents. Kushner says Leah Adler Spielberg was also like his musician mother Sylvia. Spielberg added “Every single piece of classical music played on the piano was among my mom’s favorite classical pieces that she always played on her piano,” including setting the camping trip home movie to “Bach’s Adagio, which my mom loved to play on the piano.” He insists that Michelle Williams as “Mitzi” perfectly embodies his mother in his fictionalized family onscreen (above), especially her pixie haircut. (Yeah, I had a haircut like that in those years.) He’s quoted in the Production Notes: she was “wearing exact replicas of clothes my mom had worn, her favorite clothes.’…Costume designer Mark Bridges noted that she was accessorized with select pieces of Leah’s jewelry, loaned to the production by Spielberg’s sister, Anne. Regardless, Williams seems miscast. Jeannie Berlin as her mother-in-law “Hadassah Fabelman” (above) is marvelously caustic and frank, while frequently quoting her rabbi in New Jersey to reinforce her disapproval of her daughter-in-law. I think Robin Bartlett as Sammy’s maternal grandmother “Tina Schildkraut” is only seen dying.
His younger sisters are barely distinguishable, except for the bespectacled one who argues with his cinematic alter ego “Sammy” and tries to preserve their family. Almost the final credit is “Anne, Sue and Nancy Spielberg an especial thanks”; the last sister is now a documentary film producer and director. The Production Notes expand on their fictionalized version: “Rounding out Sammy’s family are his three younger sisters, Reggie, Natalie and Lisa, representing Spielberg’s sisters Anne, Sue and Nancy. While writing and refining the script, Spielberg sought input from his siblings about how their Fabelman variants should be portrayed. His sisters were also frequent visitors to the set and offered insight and support to the actors playing them. ‘This film brought my sisters Annie, Susie and Nancy closer to me than I ever thought possible, and that was worth making the film for,’ Spielberg says. Julia Butters… plays the oldest Fabelman sister, “Reggie”. (A younger version of Reggie is played by Birdie Borria). ‘Reggie’s very strong but emotional,’ Butters says. “She’s the caretaker of the family. And she’s a real character.’ Butters’ first day on set was shooting a scene in which Reggie, Sammy and Natalie show up for their first day of school in California and are intimidated by a thick throng of very tall kids. Butters established the tone for Reggie on that first day. ‘I took a risk and improvised by pushing all the teenagers away, and when they’re all laughing at me, I yelled, ‘What are you laughing at?’’ Butters says. “I was very proud of myself even though I was slightly terrified to do that on the first day. But Steven loved it, so that was great.’
The Production Notes continue: “The second oldest Fabelman sister, Natalie, is ‘stubborn, opinionated and smart,’ says Keeley Karsten, who makes her film debut in the role. (A younger version of Natalie is played by Alina Brace.) To flesh out the character for herself, Karsten created a diary, written in Natalie’s voice. ‘I decided on all these things about Natalie through little details in the script,’ Karsten says. ’I would research the period for ideas: Natalie’s favorite music, films, candies. I would write about her favorite subjects in school, who her best friends were. While we were filming, Steven would tell memories about his own sister that allowed me to adjust Natalie and discover more.’ At the end of production, Karsten gave the diary to Spielberg as a gift. ‘He was so happy!’ Karsten says. “He said ‘Keeley, I read the whole thing and I loved it.’” (courtesy of Universal) (12/10/2022)
Fading Gigolo: In the middle of diverse Williamsburg, Brooklyn, “Murray” (played by Woody Allen) brings the African-American kids of his friend to “the nit lady” to remove their lice. She’s “Avigal” (played by French actress Vanessa Paradis), a Satmar Chassidic widow who had six children with a much older rabbi: I had trouble getting pregnant. “Murray”, an oddball pimp, senses she could use massage therapy by his male prostitute “Fioravante” (writer/director John Turturro) across the bridge in Manhattan. (Even her name was vetted by a Hassidic consultant..) From the production notes, Paradis spent time with a woman who had left the community as a guide: “She’s a very strong, young, beautiful woman, who was 25, but who seems to have the life of someone who’s 105. She helped me to understand all the rules. Also she comes from Israel, and only learned to speak English three years ago, so she still had an accent which I stole a little bit from. I also used my French accent which I pushed a little bit more. . .My head is strapped under the wig and I have tight stockings on. I found that the physical sensation of wearing those clothes gave me an identity. It really did a lot for me.”. .Avigal is religious, but there’s a curiosity in her character. She’s not supposed to read, but she reads. She is lonely and miserable and wants to have a little taste of life, something different. She has something in her that needs to come alive. . .“She’s at a point in her life when she’s completely fading away, and Murray comes along to tell her she doesn’t have to. She trusts him. . . He pays sincere attention to her, what’s in her head and what’s in her heart. . . There’s a line my character says in the movie that goes We’re alive for just a little while. That means live life while you can. When there’s beauty, when there’s a chance that passes in front of you—don’t watch it, grab it! Everybody deserves a little happiness… if not a lot.” Turturro: “Avigal is oppressed by her religion and her society. . . You feel that Avigal and Fioravante could be together, but they are from different worlds. I think he opens her up to experience life and I think she opens him up too.” But she does have another, quite appealing suitor with peyos, “Dovi” (Liev Schreiber), a neighborhood Shomrim patrol officer who since childhood felt inadequate to court her because he didn’t come from a rabbinic family like hers and her late husband. Turturro: “Fioravante knows how to have emotional intimacy with Avigal, but can’t stay; Dovi doesn’t know how to act around her, but very much wants to stay.” “Avigal”s transgressive behavior continues as she comes down from the women’s section of the synagogue and boldly stands up to a bet din to confess (most of) her broaches of modesty, but she works out a future on her terms that is sweetly not cliché. (updated 8/18/2014)
The Faithful: The King, The Pope, The Princess - While filmmaker Annie Berman somewhat understands how she shares the fandom of images of Elvia Presley and Princess Diana, she never explains her fascination for Pope John Paul over 20 years, particularly for making an annual Easter pilgrimage to the The Vatican: “my family no longer expects me home for Passover”. Yet even as she compares these fascinations with her affection for her Aunt Nora, she finally muses why did she never get on a plane and visit her in Iceland? Instead we see repeating footage of the aunt dancing the hora with the family at a very Jewish Berman family wedding. (streamed at 2021 Camden International Film Festival) (9/29/2021)
Falsch (seen at Film at Lincoln Center's Beyond L’Enfant: The Complete Dardenne Brothers retrospective) (In what I think is the first U.S. showing of this 1987 adaptation of a Belgian play, the complexities of a German Jewish family are revealed through a guilt-ridden émigréé's whole life passing before him in a coulda, woulda, shoulda dying dream, including his mother, aunt/servant, sister and sisters-in-law, all movingly acted. As he recalls their last Shabbat evening together, and their lives before and after, each woman represents very individual and different human emotions and reactions in how their fates were determined by the men they loved.) (5/14/2009)
Family Affair (seen at DocuWeeks) (So, nu: In this disturbing documentary about the filmmaker's extremely dysfunctional family (the first film picked up by Oprah's new network's Documentary Club), Chico David Colvard provides little background on his abused mother, who he identifies as "German-Jewish". (I scribbled down her name as something like Renate Steingeheger; her daughters call her Renee, and have been in some contact with her over the years, unlike their brother, who seems to have zero sense of his Jewish heritage at all.)
His horrifically abused sisters discuss how she announced her abandonment of them via "The Letter" where she explained she'd found Jesus Christ with a new husband and therefore the strength to leave them. Her son, afraid she'll again reject him if he gives her advance notice to see him for the first time in 18 years, tracks her down in Wisconsin, where he's surprised that she greets him, as "a wonderful Christmas present". She shows him one photo of herself with a "J" tag from her youth in Bavaria (a Nazi stronghold), and describes her family's poverty, that they had no home. As a redhead, it's possible she was a hidden child, but he doesn't ask in the film what it was like to go through the Holocaust there, though that was surely a factor in her tolerance of abuse.
She says she fled into a teenage marriage with his African-American soldier father when he was stationed in Germany, who then beat her as “a way of paying back what the white people had done to his people.” (I think I noted correctly that she said her father said she deserved it because of their mixed marriage.) While it is tragically ironic for the pressures on two persecuted groups to come together in an awful synergy, he uses racism as an excuse to his son. She says he also told her that she had no rights as a non-native American citizen while they lived on many Army bases, and therefore couldn't have custody of the kids if she tried to divorce him, and in those days there were no shelters. (The father claims that white soldiers were accused of the same domestic abuse in those days and got off with no jail time – he's probably right.) She explains she left her children when the abuse came to the authorities' attention yet the daughters wouldn't testify against him and welcomed him home, while blaming her. The film is their brother's effort to understand why they did. I did see the director at the IFC Center's Q & A, but didn't get to ask for more clarifications about his mother.) (8/14/2010)
Family in Transition Though done too much like an in-your-face reality show, this couple in coastal Nahariya, surrounded by somewhat religious families, is evidently somewhat notorious in Israeli media – after four children (including three daughters), the father has decided to live as a woman and the mother has decided to continue their relationship together. There is absolutely no discussion about what it means to be a Jewish, let alone Israeli, woman (maybe because director Ofir Trainin is male, though the transitioning partner briefly reveals growing up in an abusive family, and getting wounded during army service as somehow leading to the realization of female identity. The wife stays incredibly loyal through estrogen-injection moodiness, surgery in Thailand, recuperation, and a renewal of vows as two women. Their own mothers do provide some needed insight during the wedding reception, including that they have been together since they are 15. But maybe it’s because they both look so much alike that I had trouble telling who was which, though the original wife eventually has something akin to a nervous breakdown and decides she needs another woman in her life for her own sense of identity (as well as distinguishing blue streaks in her hair). Needless to say, the traditional rabbinical court has a great deal of problems dealing with this unconventional family to grant a divorce, until the transitioned spouse agrees to be legally recognized again as male, to her great humiliation. The youngest daughter says their bickering until the divorce was worse than the transitioning, despite the bullying and mocking she got from classmates. Somehow, the two all-female couples now share happily share custody. At some point either in their notoriety or filming, both parents went very public – the trans woman on the talk/lecture circuit under the title “Blessed to be a woman", the bio-mom publishing two memoirs and a children’s guide to transgenders. (at 2018 DOC NYC Festival/ preview courtesy Abramorama/Go2Films) (12/22/2018)
Famous Nathan - (previewed at 2014 Tribeca Film Festival) The women in the family are somewhat secondary to the entrepreneurs and squabbles – except how Grandma Ida keeps interrupting interviews and insisting they stop talking and eat.) (4/23/2014))
Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn
This unconventional and fascinating portrait of Felix Mendelssohn’s sister is as much a tribute to the musical research skills and determination of feminist musicologists to find hidden female composers. Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel was hidden even at Buckingham Palace in 1842 when Queen Victoria requested Felix to play her favorite song of his, “Italien”, for her to sing with him. Supposedly he did admit that while it was published among his songs, it was really written by his sister Fanny. (Re-played there in 2022, above, with her full credit.)
As director, Fanny's great-great-great granddaughter, Sheila Hayman, who previously examined her family in Mendelssohn, The Nazis And Me (2009), that I haven’t yet seen, narrates Fanny’s history (illustrated by shadows in period rooms). Their banker father Abraham, son of German Jewish Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, was so concerned over socially acceptable appearances that he converted, had his four children baptized when they were young, and added “Bartholdy” to their last name. While the siblings studied music together, it was only acceptable for the son to publish his compositions and perform them on tour. After their father died, their mother Leah did try to get her son to help get her daughter’s work published. Then Fanny privately wrote: “I am as afraid of my brother at age 40 as I was of my father at 14, but I am beginning to publish.”
Hayman also follows the suspenseful story of the feminist academicians who over decades found, translated, and tracked down her almost 500 pieces in European and American archives. All enjoy the anecdote that the brother, who would become universally famous for his “Wedding March”, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1842), was late getting music to his sister for her 1829 wedding to supportive artist Wilhelm Hensell, so after her rehearsal dinner and hosting guests the night before, she wrote her own. The experts are also impressed how Fanny pushed the socially acceptable envelope by organizing private concerts in her family’s (ample) house that included her compositions, and she even conducted her brother’s pieces too.
In an education for viewers about what goes into careful historical research, musicologist Angela Mace Christian re-traces her steps from her PhD research and on for 15 years to definitively attribute the 1828 “Easter Sonata” to Fanny. Her discovery of missing numbered pages in a volume with Fanny’s notations is followed up a bit confusingly with German and French speakers’ interviews that weren’t subtitled in English. I also wasn’t sure what Prof. Marie Rolf at the Eastman School of Music was doing for eight years over a new edition when she had access to the missing document that was in her husband’s private collection the whole time Christian up until recently was searching for it. (Now donated to the Morgan Library music manuscripts collection.) Interspersed throughout the film, young Black British pianist Isata Kanneh- Mason rehearses each movement for October 2022 complete public performance in Birmingham.
Hayman makes the point several times that still all these years after Fanny died in 1847 only age 41 (followed quickly by her grieving younger brother), nearly 90% of classical concerts worldwide contain no music by female composers. The film certainly makes the case to add the works of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel to the performance canon, while implying that more female musicians from the past and present should be added. (at 2023 DOC NYC) (11/13/2023))
Fanny’s Journey (Le voyage de Fanny) - The novelized memoir Le journal de Fanny: Suivi de Les enfants juifs au coeur de la guerre by Fanny Ben-Ami it’s based on is not yet available in English to compare veracity, though the author is seen briefly at the conclusion, living in Israel. In the press notes, writer/director Lola Doillon explains she met with the Ben-Ami in Tel Aviv: “"I needed to immerse myself in her past and her memories of the children's home. Fanny Ben-Ami told me many things, some of which are included in the film and some not. I was also inspired by other secret stories by children that were rescued by different organizations and everyday stories. And I sought the help of archivists and historians in the interests of accuracy. . .I obviously followed the thread of the key historical events which were the framework of this adventure and everything that I changed remains true, inspired by real events that were recounted by other people who lived through that time." Ben-Ami reports: "I wrote to Lola to say that it didn’t happen quite like that. For example, the Resistance and the underground were neither here nor there, though they were nevertheless very important to me. And then, after thinking about it and talking with friends, I realized that a film was not a book and that it was for others, not for me. And that there were aspects of my journey that were important in my eyes but not necessarily for the film. In the end, I think Lola did well and that in her script, the essentials are there and the main points are said." The role of “Madame Forman”, played by Cécile de France, is inspired by Nicole Weil-Salon and Lotte Schwarz, real children’s protectors.
Other than Anaïs Meiringer who plays 16-year-old German Jewish refugee “Diane”, none of the girls or women cast as Jews “look” Jewish by American standards – in the French cinema convention almost all have shades of auburn hair that’s not particularly curly. (seen at Cinematek Forest Hills) (11/19/2017))
Fateless (Sorstalanság) (So, nu: The glimpses we get of Jewish women are problematical: a highly compromised step-mother, an inconsistently affectionate mother, a teen girl overwrought about the wrong things at the wrong time, but welcoming grandmother replacements.) (2/19/2006)
The Feeling That The Time For Doing Something Has Passed
- Joanna Arnow, director of THE FEELING THAT THE TIME FOR DOING SOMETHING HAS PASSED, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures
Interview with Arnow in the Press Notes: “I did know I wanted to play Ann as I wrote this, partly because I’d cast myself in my short films and felt it had worked well. Even though the character is different from me and it’s not autobiographical, the film draws on personal experience and I consider it autofiction, so the casting seemed like the best fit in light of that. The personal experience I draw on always changes in story form, especially since some elements are minimized, and some amplified in the process of creating a narrative (even one that’s minimalist and experimental)… I did not know that [my parents Barbara Weiserbs and David Arnow] would be playing the role of [“Ann”s] parents. However, I did a test shoot to explore the framing and pacing of the film early in the process, and they were so
great in that, I thought they would be right for the role. I rehearsed with them, along with
one of my acting coaches, Hye Yun Park, who is a close friend. The characters my parents play are of course fictional, but in some ways they’ve also been rehearsing to say these lines for quite some time and so we tried to work with that. Directing my parents had its challenges, but it was also exciting - I don’t think they know how good they are as actors (in some ways I hope it stays that way, so I can book them again next time without having to go through their agents). I wanted to cast some non-professional actors like my parents and friends to help give the story authenticity…[Alysia Reiner] struck me for a long time as an actor with an exciting and interesting presence. I was hoping to cast someone who provided a stark contrast to the Ann character, and was so thrilled when she agreed. Alysia has been incredibly supportive and a champion for this film, and brought a lot of dimension and humor to the sister character.”
In most of the film, Arnow is totally naked and participating in various masochistic sexual relationships with a “master”, though she frequently assures her main “master” (played by Scott Cohen) that she’s a Wesleyan graduate. Her mother seems so nasty and controlling that I wondered if the audience is supposed to presume that she conditioned her daughter into masochism. While the Brooklyn parents are old-time leftists (the Dad sings “Solidarity Forever” with the guitar), it’s one of her seemingly non-Jewish “masters” (played by Babak Tafti) who introduces her to jarred herring and she professes that she likes lox (and movie musicals, particularly the socially conscious lyrics of Les Miserables). She asks her sister, who is on the verge of separating from her husband and family, if their parents don’t really want grandchildren because they’ve stopped pressuring her; the sister assures her they’ve just given up because she doesn’t seem to have any relationships. It’s possible that audiences could just presume they are New Yorkers, and not necessarily Jewish. Especially since what the distributor calls a “hilarious comedy” is not particularly funny. (at 2023 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ courtesy of Magnolia Pictures) (4/23/2024)
#FemalePleasure - So, nu:
© X Verleih
The Jewish representative in this cross-cultural survey of how religion represses women’s bodies and sexuality, repeating what Eve Ensler, has been saying since The Vagina Monologues and many others since at least the 1960’s, is Deborah Feldman, repeating what she revealed in her memoir Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, which I downloaded some time ago but haven’t read yet, and her 2014 follow-up Exodus. She is shown about her new life in Berlin and her visual collaboration challenging Jewish gender stereotypes with a gay ex-Hasid photographer, including beautiful, yet modest, poses naked in a tallit on a shore at sunset, like above. However, with the documentary’s emphasis on the physical body, she doesn’t mention the ban on men hearing women’s voices, let alone women reading from the Torah, which is a recurring issue during Rosh Hodesh where Women of the Wall in Jerusalem are harangued monthly by the ultra-Orthodox even violently, and notably including women, as happens in all the profiled societies, but is unexamined. Her memoirs are the fictionalized basis for the Netflix series Unorthodox. (11/26/2019; 4/14/2020)
Felix and Meira - (as previewed at 2015 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) The Canadian film manages to avoid most stereotypes of the life and longings of an ultra-Orthodox woman/wife/mother.) (2/26/2015)
Fiddler: A Miracle Of Miracles - A convincing theme of this informative and emotional documentary is that the 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof is a “female empowerment piece”, pointing out that young women’s rebellion against arranged marriage has been a theatrical theme since before Shakespeare. (The names of the various experts weren’t repeated often enough to always know who is speaking.) Another expert notes that the show was written while Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique was on the best-seller list. My colleague (and editor) Jan Lisa Huttner, author of Tevye's Daughters: No Laughing Matter: The Women behind the Story of Fiddler on the Roof, makes a strong case for the feminist aspect in the portrayal of the individual daughters, calling them “the raw product of Yenta’s business”. (Thanks for her corrections to these comments!) She also points out that Sholom Aleichem was very negative about matchmakers in other stories as well; Nathan Englander, among others, point out matchmakers even assisted a trafficking ring bringing women to Argentina, for prostitution. A recent “daughter” calls the end of “Matchmaker” a “battlecry…We’re going to change things! And they do!”. Gurinder Chadha, director of Bend It Like Bendham (2001), speaks to the universality of the issue.
Alisa Solomon, who was also a consultant on the documentary, points out the sexual importance of Golda’s role, Tevye’s wife, that is demonstrated by seeing “Do You Love Me?” performed around the world, including in Japanese, a song written because of how the original cast actress Maria Karnilova comically delivered her line Do I what?. Other experts describe the song as the most romantic in the show, more than the daughters’. Several actresses who have played these roles, in the past, Jessica Hecht is particularly thoughtful, and in the current Yiddish production, give their analyses.
While several experts interpret Hodel’s song “Far From the Home I Love”, sung by the daughter who leaves home to follow to Siberia her life choice of a revolutionary, as more about their community’s future than about her. Solomon calls Chava an “apostate” for choosing a non-Jewish Russian. Danny Burstein, who has played Tevye frequently, thinks Tevye felt he had a “special relationship” with her, so is particularly hurt by her choice. An actress who recently portrayed Chava sees her as more of a dreamy romantic who doesn’t realize the finality of what she’s doing: “She closed a door she didn’t know locked from the other side.”
I particularly appreciated Fran Lebowitz’s comments: “Its nostalgia for something that never really happened! I think nostalgia is very poisonous in a culture. Never do Jews say ‘Oh I wish I could be back in the Old Country. They hated the Old Country…People my age, Jews who don’t know what the Old Country was. Which country was it?…The Jews came here because they were being killed!” While director Max Lewkowicz claims this as the first in-depth documentary film that chronicles the life and themes of this musical, the creators/original participants have given similar interviews in PBS documentaries on producer Harold Prince, director/choreographer Jerome Robbins, and on the Jewish influence on Broadway theater. (preview courtesy Roadside Attractions & Samuel Goldwyn Films) (revised 9/4/2019)
Fiddler’s Journey To The Big Screen - I am no nostalgist for Norman Jewison’s 1971 movie adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof, but its 50th anniversary in 2021 was the excuse for documentary director Daniel Raim to complete a “making of”. While the actress who played “Golde”, Norma Crane, isn’t mentioned at all, Molly Picon’s “Yente” just in passing, and the costumes designed by Joan Bridge and Elizabeth Haffenden are casually dismissed as just carefully copied from the photographs of pre-war Eastern European Jews by Roman Vishniac, the three actresses who portrayed the elder daughters are interviewed about their backgrounds, auditions, and experiences during filming, emphasizing how young they were: Rosalind Harris as “Tzeitel”, Michele Marsh as “Hodel”, and Neva Small as “Chava”. Harris is the most entertaining, as well as insightful about feeling she had to hide looking Jewish before Barbra Streisand made big noses okay in popular culture, and how Bette Midler, who she was understudying for on Broadway, recommended she audition for the film role. Lyricist Sheldon Harnick explains that Joseph Stein, the writer of the stage and screen play, changed “Chava”s fate from another Sholem Aleicheim story. While John Williams as music director details how he worked with the cast on the rhythms and movement for Jewison, critic Kenneth Turan notes the film was not a launching pad for anyone’s career; I found the casting bland. For film buffs, the details from and about cinematographer Oswald Morris will be the most interesting. Unlike Jewison, I do not think generating a tear from then Israel Prime Minister Golda Meir is the seal of cinematic approval. (courtesy of Zeitgeist Kino Lorber) (4/30/2022)
The Field - Documentary director Rabbi Mordechai Vardi provides an unusually positive image of religious Zionist women settlers in Gush Etzion on the West Bank. Instead of the usually implacable fanatics, here are younger and older Jewish women settlers willing to meet with and talk to the local Palestinians through the Roots Program, even as terrorist attacks increase nearby – as well as settler attacks on Palestinian farms. The Arab and Jewish women’s head scarves are almost indistinguishable. (at 2017 Other Israel Film Festival)
Field Diary (Yoman Sadeh) (30th anniversary screening at 2012 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (The female soldiers and settlers who want cheap housing with nice views on the West Bank are among the more clueless, and apolitical, Israelis director Amos Gitai interviewed.) (10/7/2012)
The Fifth Heaven (Ba-rakia ha-hamishi) - (briefly in Reviewed: New York Jewish Film Festival 2013 of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum): comparison to the novel the film is based on. (2/19/2013)
Fig Tree (Etz Teena) The lead character Mina, based on the director Aäläm-Wärqe Davidian’s life, is alienated from her mother who has settled in Israel. But it is her strong-willed grandmother who has Jewish identity, and is said by the community’s elders to be the daughter of an eminent rabbi from whom she was for some unclear reason estranged. She works hard at getting her family out of Ethiopia and reunite them with her daughter, by any means necessary. The conflicts about emigration are admirable for not having been portrayed in a film before, that I’ve seen, but other than the usual Romeo & Juliet teen romance thing going on, are very confusing. (at 2019 NY Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum / (also shown at 2019 Israel Film Center Festival) (updated 6/7/2019)
Fill the Void (Lemale et ha'halal) (previewed at 2012 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (So, nu: The older sister is seen only briefly, but is quite memorably happy and sensual with her husband. I am very surprised how many viewers, including my professional critic colleagues, presume the set-up situation is a religious mandate or cultural tradition of this sect that they don’t understand is fictional anyway. The director has said she did not have Jane Austen in mind at all in writing and making the film, but has given in to others’ comparisons, so I acceded in also try to expand the context. It seems viewers just don’t want to see this Jewish mother as a bully who is interfering and overpowering because her motivation so much comes out of her sympathetic grief. At the NYFF press conference, I asked why the bride's face wasn't covered here (a la bedeken tradition) with its references to Jacob being fooled into marrying first one sister, then the second. She laughed and said she hadn't thought of that, but might use that as an explanation in the future.) (6/11/2013)
Film About A Father Who
Director Lynne Sachs kindly made a point to thank me for posting on Twitter/FaceBook a photo of her (left) sharing the experimental shorts program “Salute to Barbara Hammer” with her husband Mark Street – the first time they’d presented films together at the Museum of Modern Art in a very long time. (In between them is director Akosua Adoma Owusu.) I was particularly interested in seeing her feature about her family at the same film festival, because I’d been presuming that she and her director brother Ira are Jewish, though in her fascinating, 35-years-in-the-making portrait of her bohemian, much-partnered father Ira Sr. that possible heritage isn’t mentioned.
Yet the domineering (and dominating) image of his wealthy Memphis mother Rose Sachs (known by her nine grandchildren as “Maw Maw”) and their fraught connection until she died at 103 years old, seemed so reminiscent of the presumed Jewish matriarch/son dynamic. In Lynne’s family footage (from 8 mm, 16 mm, VHS, Super 8, MiniDV, to Digital), Rose, with a Southern drawl, so strongly disapproves of her son’s “other women”, even calling him “handicapped”, first during his marriage and then, when Lynne was ten, post-divorce serial partnerships, that he hid subsequent children from her – and the director – for years in order to secure his inheritance. (He is known around Park City, Idaho, since the 1980’s as, according to local coverage, “the eccentric millionaire”.) In personal correspondence, Lynne confirmed: “My father's mother Mawmaw and her second husband converted to Catholicism in the 1950s, but my father never did. While there is not much said about this kind of post Holocaust kind of assimilation, it did happen. We were however raised as Jews, so your hunch was correct.”
Her granddaughter’s intimate film reveals a first abusive marriage to older salesman Harry Richmond, who actually fathered Ira, but she left him when their son was about 13, then left her son with relatives in NJ. I found a newspaper obituary of this Jewish grandmother, as if reflecting another life. Born in 1912 to Ida and Abraham Gold in rural Tennessee, then orphaned, Rose moved with various of her nine siblings to several states, working store sales jobs, until she married Mortimer Sachs in NYC. From 1945, they bought and together managed the tony Via Mizner shopping arcade in Palm Beach, Florida, adding additional property to their portfolio, and living off-season in Monte Carlo, until his death at 83. Ever stylish, as seen in Lynn’s documentation, she was known until her death as a fashion doyenne and philanthropist. (shown at MoMA’s 2020 Documentary Fortnight)
In “My Body, Your Body, Our Bodies: Somatic Cinema at Home and in the World: Films by Lynne Sachs”, she included in her lecture/retrospective an excerpt from her Biography of Lilith (1997), where she showed her detailed familiarity with the Jewish legend in relation to motherhood and children. (streamed at 2020 Ann Arbor Film Festival) (3/4/2020 and 3/25/2020))
A Film Unfinished (Shtikat Haarchion) (So, nu: One clue the director had that the Jewish rituals were staged was that the mikveh was shown inaccurately, with a line of naked women going in to dunk as if it were a swimming pool and not a space for private, prayerful cleansing. Four of the survivors who watch the footage they had seen as it was made in 1942 are women, who speak movingly about how their mothers helped them through the awful experience, including trying to keep shreds of dignity by wearing decent clothes, even as the propaganda film infers a criticism of well-dressed Jews compared to those in rags. Particularly heartbreaking is one woman tearfully realizing how her youthful strategy for survival – shutting out the dead and dying on the street as she looked for food for her family even as she tripped over them – looked to the camera as indifference. The filmmaker doesn't answer, however, why the diaries' testimony about the staged filmings was ignored for all these years.) (8/18/2010)
The Final Hour - Rather than a traditional documentary on the history and current status of Judeo-Espanol, now popularly known as Ladino (my sabra brother-in-law’s native language, as spoken by his Turkish family), the producers recruited attractive, curly-haired Turkish film student Deniz Bensusan to talk to three generations of her family in Istanbul, then go on a beautiful-looking, informative four year journey to track backwards over 500 years to determine why she doesn’t speak it. With no funding, but wanting to capture the elderly generation that still speaks Ladino, the production filmed from Thessaloniki and Auschwitz, to Portugal and Spain, where a grandmother in Córdoba tries to fix her up with her grandson. After the screening, Bensusan reported she is still single. While she interviewed experts along the way (including women, such as archivists, academics, and Renan Koen the composer of the beautiful score who also performs), academics in the audience did amplify some details about the written language. A member of my congregation persistently asks me for films that include Ladino dialogue to show a group at the Sephardic Jewish Center, so I finally have a recommendation for her. (seen at 2020 New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival) (2/27/2020)
Finding Bliss (5/28/2010))
Fioretta - Narrator and subject Randol (Randy) Schoenberg (the lawyer portrayed in Woman in Gold and a Jewish Gen Board member) opens with a joke about those who share his life-long interest in genealogy: “People who know they’re crazy or those who have no idea.” Like him, I know I am, as the family historian for six branches of mine and my husband’s families. None of ours are as famous as his grandfather composer Arnold Schoenberg, nor as richly traceable back over 500 years, despite the Holocaust and earlier persecutions, from scenic California, through historic places and architecture of Vienna, Prague, and Venice. By mining memories, rare documents, and forgotten gravestones in ancient-looking cemeteries, his family reveals an astounding perspective on Jewish history in Central Europe, all while connecting to living descendants for extended family reunions. With re-enactments of the father’s earlier reunions, Israeli-American director Matthew Mishory calls this a “hybrid narrative-documentary”.
I have been trying to do the same. But most of my family reacts much like the amusing yardstick against his obsession through the attitudes of his teen son Joey, who tolerates the trip with flights of fancy when he finds a cousin his age.
As obliquely indicated by the title, the name of the oldest ancestor he can find, Randy is very open to tracing his own and the Schoenberg family’s maternal lines, and gleaning knowledge of his female ancestors – not all amateur Jewish genealogists are so inclined, I’ve found in my own outreach experience. A couple of his history guides are women: Barbara Kintaert, a Belgian living in Vienna who has memorialized the Jewish families that once lived in her building and on her street, and Chiara Petrolina, an Italian scholar studying very old Jewish books housed in the Austrian National Library. It was his cousin artist Serena Nono who first suggested their colorful family story would a good basis for a documentary, as well as portrait paintings. (The possible Sephardic origins of her Venetian branch are not explored.)
But over 127 minutes includes lots of repetitive travel by planes, trains & automobiles, with no maps on screen. As lovely as the cinematography is at the many locations, the actual family tree, with the relevant branches, is not seen. Such charts have been very helpful for viewers of all those TV genealogy programs that I’ve documented when they include celebrities’ heritage of Jewish women (like PBS’s Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., with Barbara Walters, Alanis Morrisette, Gloria Reuben, Maya Rudolph, Larry David, Bernie Sanders, Sheryl Sandberg, and Diane Von Fürstenberg) and the U.S. and BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are (including Jennifer Grey, and Lea Michele). It is too confusing and difficult to retain the relationships over generations as Randy keeps reciting them for his son, like Biblical oral history.
I hope the film will be successful at converting those not already crazy about Jewish genealogy into participants – or at least be relatives who respond to inquiries from distant cousins. (at 2024 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum/ courtesy of 7th Art Releasing) (1/29/2024)
First Position (preview at 2011 DOC NYC Festival) (Amidst the inspiring story of aspiring 14-year-old ballerina Michaela Deprince, who was one of two orphans adopted from war-torn Sierra Leone by an older couple, the camera focuses on a handmade Hanukkah menorah in their living room, leaving the impression that the mother, who also sews her daughter’s tutus, is Jewish. Another aspiring ballerina is the exuberant 11-year-old Israeli Gaya Bommer, whose mother is also her choreographer. Both girls triumph at the regionals and then the finals of the Youth America Grand Prix.) (10/25/2011)
The First Time I Turned 20 (La Première fois que j'ai eu 20 ans) (viewing at the 2007 NY Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum)
Five Years After The War (Cinq ans après la guerre) (short) Mostly through animation, Tim, the cousin of writer/co-director Samuel Albaric, amusingly relates how he coped with finding his sense of identity as he was living with his free-spirited Jewish mother in France, and had almost no contact with his Muslim Arab father, an Iraqi refugee. His mother made sure he went to religious school with a Jewish friend. (seen at MoMA’s 2018 Documentary Fortnight) (3/3/2018)
The Flat (Ha-Dira) (also briefly reviewed in Documentaries at 2012 Tribeca Film Festival) (So, nu: my commentary forthcoming on the dead grandmother who could be in a friendship with Prussian aristocrats who probably looked down on the riff raff Nazis who took over the country from their traditional patriots, his denying mother who many critics think he’s merciless towards, and his apathetic sisters. Key is not just the facts, that are available in archives and histories, but that it was about his own family and that no one talked about it.) (Thanks to Judy Gelman Myers for background on the director.)
Just as the director describes that his grandparents worked and socialized with other yekkes, the Yiddish sobriquet for German Jews who remained distinctively German I have seen a home very much like hers, of a German Jewish woman on the next block in my Forest Hills neighborhood. I ran a very intellectual used book sale for my synagogue for 15 years, and got a call to pick up books from the house of a 90-something year old doctor who had just passed away. She had left Germany when she lost her hospital privileges in 1933 -- yet her 3 story house was filled, and I mean stuffed, with German language books etc., many, many classics, and not all pre-war by any means. Then when we put them up for sale in a separate section there was lots of really negative reaction that we were selling German books in a synagogue! (updated 11/8/2012)
Flawless (Haneshef): This Jerusalem high school is so much like American ones – with Mean Girls, a prom, jocks, physical and cyberbullying, English slang, and social media dominance that I’m not sure there’s anything particularly Jewish or Israeli about the body insecurity, plastic surgery envy, as well as racial (one girl is of Ethiopian heritage, played by Netsanet Mekonen), gender (one is trans, played by by trans Stav Strashko), and class distinctions, except maybe to be surgically scammed in Ukraine (as manipulated convincingly by experienced actress Assi Levy), but with the pat solutions of most teen movies. (preview at 2019 Tribeca Film Festival) updated 5/25/2019)
The Flood (Mabul) - (briefly reviewed at 2012 New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) Ronit Elkabetz is mesmerizing as a very complicated Israeli woman – she’s a creative teacher, leading experiential classes; a sexy lover in a strained marriage; a guilt-ridden mother – all while trying to keep it together when the disabled son appears to rock her back to a very difficult time in her life, set in comparison to the unsympathetic, insensitive (albeit working) mothers of her students. Try not to tear up at the bar mitzvah climax!) (1/16/2012)
Flory’s Flame: The Story of Flory Jagoda (2015) Directors Ellen Friedland and Curt Fissel smoothly integrate the historical biography of the preeminent promulgator of Ladino traditional songs, who added more to the culture (such as the now classic “Ocho Kandelikas/Eight Candles” for Hanukkah), from Yugoslavia through the Holocaust, to American suburbia raising children, then returning home and around the world, with a 90th birthday concert celebration at the Library of Congress accompanied by family and protégés who continue her nonna’s music. How her accordion, talent, resilience, love, and determination first saved her during the Holocaust and then the folk revival inspired her in her ‘50’s to pursue this mission is not only astonishing and moving, but the clearly identified and subtitled songs are a joy to hear. (streamed 2/2021 through in memoriam through Museum of American Jewish History) (2/14/2021)
Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story (previewed at 2012 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (In this ridiculously hagiographic portrait of the hero of the raid on Entebbe Airport in 1976 to rescue hostages, the older brother of politician Benjamin Netanyahu, interviews with the wife he married when they were both too young and then his post-divorce, younger girlfriend are additionally squirm-worthy.) (1/22/2012)
Footnote (Hearat Shulayim) (So, nu (3/16/2012)
For A Good Time, Call… (Sexiest young Jewish women in the movies of this or several years) (8/22/2012)
Forbidden Films (Verbotene Filme) (kudos to Film Forum for free showings) (Seeing Felix Moeller’s documentary intrigued me that there were no Jewish women in the clips shown from the two most notorious explicitly anti-Semitic Nazi films, Jew Süss (Jud Süß) and The Eternal Jew (Der Ewige Jude) (as dealt with by the same director in Harlan: In The Shadow Of Jew Süss (Harlan - Im Schatten Von Jud Süss), with my commentary on the Jewish women.). That got me researching more into what Nazi stereotypes were, but I only got as far as learning about the “Judensau” (for "Jewish sow" or female pig) without being able to find specifically Nazi imagery, only medieval church gargoyles, particularly in Bavaria, with claims that elderly Germans say that Nazis were fond of showing to school groups, and an Iranian anti-Zionist propaganda cartoon. I’m also asking my more academic fellow panelists at the 2015 Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival):
(l to r: moderator Elliot Ratzman, me (which is why this photo is by Harold Shultz), Noah Isenberg, and Thomas Childers).
Seeing Hitler’s Madman, (previewed at Imitations of Life: The Films of Douglas Sirk of Film at Lincoln Center), directed in some combination by German filmmakers Sirk and the uncredited cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan, and the Jewish-Moravian Edgar Ulmer, released in the U.S. in 1943, made me realize how strikingly similar was Allied propaganda by passionate émigrés (albeit with only a one sentence reference to Nazis suggesting Let’s blame it on the Jews. and the stress that women sent to concentration camps were only political prisoners) to the identical style Nazi film producer Goebbels’ promulgated. Thanks to the film for also introducing me to Edna St. Vincent Millay’s contemporaneous poem The Murder of Lidice and the significance of June 10, 1942. (updated 12/10/2015)
The Russians Are Coming (Die Russen kommen) includes extended clips from one of the “forbidden” films, Kolberg, directed by Veit Harlan, 1945. (seen at To Save and Project: The 14th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation of Museum of Modern Art)
The Forgotten Ones (Mizrahim - Les Oubliés de la Terre Promise) - Director Michale Boganim makes the most personal documentary yet on the treatment of the Jews from North Africa and the Middle East, not only when they first immigrated to Israel, but how the discrimination has continued through to the 4th generation. Told as a letter (in French, with very difficult to read subtitles) to her daughter Maayane, her traveling companion as she re-traces her father Charlie’s steps, geographically, politically, and culturally. While the community representatives only include a few women, they are powerful: artist Neta Elkayam talking about her parents coming from Morocco in the 1950s - 60s, walking through, and performing in her home town Netivot; in Elyakhin - Club of Women Retraites Yemenites de’eliahin who tell searing memories of their babies and children being stolen away from them by the local hospital staff in the 1950s. (One elderly participant is emphatic that from then on she only gave birth at home with a Yemeni midwife); in Sderot, Sivan Hanukayev, whose family came from the Caucasus (Kavkazi) In the 1970s, recalls family pressures to change her last name (ironically, my Mandel cousins in Israel are changing their last names to sound less Ashkenazi, like one translating its Yiddish meaning of “almond” into Hebrew); and, Ofir Teboul in Ashdod points out that her town is a model for how Jews from Arab lands can be a model for Israelis getting along with Muslims, like they did in their home countries.
As a road movie through these places where Mizrahim live, the director narrates her own poignant, uprooted autobiography, as her family immigrated, moved, and didn’t fit in anywhere, including their years outside Paris – and the lies she told friends in different places about her lives. Set off by the physical resemblance she says she and her daughter share with her father, most of the time the camera stays on her daughter, who both functions as a flashback, and a flash future to the next generation carrying on the traumas of the past. (preview at 2022 Other Israel Film Festival/ courtesy of Menemsha Films) (11/1/2022)
Forgotten Transports: To Estonia (Zapomenuté transporty: Do Estonska) Women's Friendship (2007): (briefly reviewed at 2009 Annual New York Jewish Film of Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) - In filmmaker Lukáš Přibyl’s superb work, it's unusual enough to have detailed testimony from women survivors of Nazi labor and concentration camps, so not only is this unique in that all the witnesses are women, even within this series, but they always emphasize distinctly women's experiences, of yearning for their mothers, of those who foolishly fell in love with fellow workers or jailers, of clothes, bodies and survival decisions, and female insights on kindness and cruelties. (1/18/2009)
Forgotten Transports: To Latvia (Zapomenuté transporty: Do Latvia) (2007): Family Strength - seen at The Legacy of Shoah Film Festival screening of the Forgotten Transports series with filmmaker Lukáš Přibyl. (The factual background about the emotional and physical travails of women in the Riga ghetto of the inadequate film Miriam, as remembered by their menfolk who tried to protect them by surviving in cruel labor camps just outside.) (4/16/2010/revised 2/2/2020)
The additional documentaries in Lukáš Přibyl’s superb quartet of films, among the best Holocaust documentaries ever made, are: Forgotten Transports to Poland (Zapomenuté transporty do Polska) (2010), referring to Eastern Poland, and Forgotten Transports To Belarus (Zapomenuté transporty: Do Belarus): Men Who Fought (2008). In the Q &A following his own produced screening in Manhattan, he explained his process in his ten years of research. He found and closely interviewed each of the 250 Czech survivors (as I recall), but put no fact on screen unless he could independently confirm the detail. That includes the names of the guards and other Nazi staff. From the information the German-speaking or understanding survivors relayed about the individual Nazis, such as accent and physical description, he searched archives to confirm such a person served at that facility then. Then he searched down the families to confirm their ancestor’s service, even those with the most common names. He also persistently asked the German families for photographic or other identifying evidence. The families were concerned about accusations of war crimes or other public association with what their ancestor did, but with assurance of anonymity and privacy, it turned out that just about all the families had the proverbial “suitcase in the attic” full of such material, that adds both chills and authenticity to the films, and to the validity of the womens’ memories, which were apparently never used for follow-up criminal cases or such. (2/2/2020)
For My Father (Sof Shavua B'tel Aviv) (So, nu: "Keren" (as portrayed by Hili Yalon) is an unusually complicated young woman, which is why she's attracted to a complicated Palestinian. While she left (or was rejected by) her ultra-Orthodox family after having a tragic out-of-wedlock pregnancy (with someone outside the community?), and she resists forceful efforts to make her repent and return, she is fiercely independent but lonely in her secular life and seems to be without friends, despite her bravura. For all her rebellion, she hasn't completely abandoned her upbringing as their night on the beach is suffused with romantic innocence. While it's typical for such stories that her mother secretly keeps in touch and helps her out, most films about the Haredi show the women as too subservient to take such initiative.) (2/9/2010)
For Your Consideration br>
Found – Director Amanda Lipitz follows her niece Chloe and two other teenage girls, who were adopted in China by American families and then discovered through DNA testing that they are cousins. Chloe, however, is the only one among them who was raised Jewish. Her parents include them in their first combined Chris-nukkah celebrations, and at the Passover seder relate her to Moses having two mothers. Though she attended Jewish day school up into high school and had her bat mitzvah in Jerusalem (glimpses of these activities are included in the documentary), she says she frequently gets surprised reactions that she’s Jewish, and outright denials, with claims she’s Asian so can’t be Jewish. (I’m particularly sympathetic as I have cousins in a similar situation.) An incredibly dedicated and committed genealogist in China arranges for them to together visit their home province with their American parents. Though she can’t locate their biological parents, understandably as the odds are slim, she does find where they were abandoned and the “nanny” who took care of each baby in the orphanage, for quite emotional reunions. When they meet a hopeful family disappointed that none of the girls are a match for their daughter lost to China’s “one child policy” (see the impact in All About My Sisters (Jia ting lu xiang)), Chloe has a visceral reaction in understanding what her birth parents went through in giving her up. (Netflix) (1/4/2022)
Four Seasons Lodge - So, nu: I missed the opportunity to see Andrew Jacobs’s early version of the film screen at my synagogue with the participants. The women are unusually frank about relationships, from how the cries of a wife with Alzheimer's uneasily stir up shared nightmares, to shrugs that intelligent people married simple people too short months after liberation, so second marriages for couples who met at the lodge were happier. Several critics have interpreted an emotional, close female friendship as lesbian, but it seemed the intense intimacy of being with someone who had been in the same place at the same time such that no outsider could not feel the same for a friendship. (11/11/2009)
The Four Sisters: Baluty; The Hippocratic Oath; The Merry Flea; Noah’s Ark: Claude Lanzmann continued to issue the full interviews behind his masterpiece Shoah (1985); several were included in Criterion’s box set, others released independently, as these that for the first time give the full story of four women survivors, Pole Paula Biren, Czech Ruth Elias, Pole Ada Lichtman, and Hungarian Hanna Marton as he interviewed and filmed them almost 40 years ago. Each adds distinctly, and essential, women’s points of view that has usually only been seen in extreme fiction, as each sometimes casually describes how women were treated differently, including in rapes and brothels in concentration camps, as well as the importance of female solidarity, even though Lanzmann does not follow-up too much in his interviews.) (preview at 2017 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (10/1/2017; on DVD 5/15/2019)
Four Winters - Filmmaker Julia Mintz does a great service in providing the last testimony from Jewish partisans of the Holocaust. They were barely teenagers when they managed to slip from the Nazi onslaught, trekked into the Eastern European forests, and joined various (Jewish and non-Jewish) partisan groups. Their singular goal was to revenge the deaths they witnessed of their families as they undertook guerrilla attacks on Germans and their local collaborators. Earlier documentaries on the some 30,000 men and women Jewish partisans are either out-of-print or not easily available. Of the eight former partisans interviewed, without narration, in the chronological stories smoothly edited by Peter Heady and Timothy Kuper together with archival, mostly Soviet newsreel footage -- five are women. One of the women, Gertrude Boyarski, from Derechin, Poland (who turned out to be a distant relative of the director) was also briefly included in the short films online of the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation. Of the eight, at least three have written personal memoirs; two are by women - Sara Ginaite, from Kaunas, Lithuania, and Faye Schulman from Lenin, Poland.
Schulman (neé Faigel Lazebnik, though the women’s birth names are not always cited) provides a key visual element to this film – her 100 photographs that, amazingly, she took during the war. Some were not published before or were not in museum collections or exhibits (as of her death last year at 100). She developed photographs that ranged from evidence of the 1942 “genocide by bullets” in her hometown to the partisans’ activities and camaraderie (with she seen in a jaunty leopard-skin coat). I hope all of Schulman’s photographs will now be published together.
The women are all proud of their accomplishments – the other two are Chayelle Porus Palevsky, from Swieciany, Lithuania, and Luba Abramowitz, from Slonim, Belarus. They detail stealing ammunition (“Women have so many more places to hide weapons than men!”), liberating other Jews, learning to shoot, sabotaging trains, eating pork to assuage hunger (“Today I’m kosher” smiles one woman), boiling bandages for basic first aid (with lice-filled underwear), and being haunted by those who died.
Mintz has said that her interviews with each were longer and more intimate than their previous tellings. That may include frank admissions of assisting with primitive abortions, or women banding together to try and keep a newborn baby alive in their forest redoubt, to no avail. (Though eschewing the romanticism in Edward Zwick’s fictionalized Defiance
(2008), at least two of the women did marry fellow fighters.)
All these years later, each woman coolly faces straight on the ethical issues of their actions in killing – or choosing not to kill—the collaborators they personally knew who had let loose their antisemitism with guns or turned Jews over to the Nazis, and any German soldier.
While one recalls not letting herself weep until it was all over, they are committed to assuaging their survivors’ guilt by telling what they saw and they did. These are testaments we must hear to confront stereotypes of Jewish victims, and especially Holocaust deniers. (at 2020 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum/ courtesy of Film Forum - opening September 16, 2022) (9/15/2022)
The Fourth Window (HaChalon HaReviee) - So, nu: The Jewish women in Israeli writer Amos Oz’s life dominate Yair Qedar’s bio-doc: first, the confessional, end-of-life (2018) telephone conversations with his friend and biographer literature professor Nurith Gertz; his mother who committed suicide when he was 12, as told in the book and film adaptation of A Tale of Love and Darkness; his widow Nili Zuckerman, on their life at Kibbutz Hulda and moving away for the health of their asthmatic son; his older daughter Fania on the incongruousness of living on a kibbutz with the name of his mother; and his unseen second daughter Galia, a children’s book author, who leveled abuse accusations against him more than five years before his death, how he struggled to understand and reach out to her and bridge their estrangement. She since wrote a memoir, published February 2021, Something Disguised As Love, publicly detailing the abuse (no plans yet for it be translated into English). (streamed at 2021 Other Israel Film Festival) (11/3/2021)
Foxtrot (So, nu: the mother “Dafna” (Sarah Adler), the sister (Ilia Grosz), the daughter “Alma” (Shira Haas) and the grandmother (Karin Ugowski) of the dead Israeli soldier are all one-dimensional. This is much more a cynical exploration of male expression, bonding, and trust issues in the Israeli military.) (updated 3/3/2018)
Frances Ha (previewed at 2012 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (The key relationship is between 27-year-old female best friends in NYC: the unsettled, unsuccessful, eponymous yet optimistic dancer (star and co-writer Greta Gerwig) and her contrasting, more pessimistic, hugely bespectacled Jewish BFF from Vassar “Sophie” (played by blondish Mickey Sumner), works for Random House, and has a Goldman Sachs boyfriend with a WASPy nickname – and the Tribeca apartment she’s always wanted. About the only time the fast, quirky dialogue mentioned “Sophie”s background was in explaining to surprised acquaintances why she would spend each Christmas with “Frances”s family – because her family didn’t celebrate that holiday. (9/22/2012)
Freaks Out
[Spoiler alert] Amidst director Gabriele Mainetti’s phantasmagoria version of Rome in 1943, with co-writer Nicola Guaglianone, that crosses Fellini and Tarantino, and borrows from films such as The Wizard of Oz, Freaks, and The Producers, young “Matilde” (Aurora Giovinazzo) is the foster daughter of the Jewish proprietor of the Circus Mezzapiotta, the elderly “Israel” (Giorgio Tirabassi), ironically the Nazis’ required Jewish male appellation. With her three “freak” friends on their yellow brick road through Roman ruins, her role in the Circus is as “Electric Girl”, safely showcasing with lightbulbs her “power” to conduct electricity, which she keeps under control offstage by wearing gloves and avoiding touching anyone. As the Nazis cement control of the city, Jews, including many women and girls, are rounded up from a building near the Vatican (documented recently by historian David Kertzer in The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler), to a railroad station, and then pushed into cattle cars, with the camera lingering on their forcibly abandoned luggage. When “Israel” had been caught up in these arrests of Jews while he had been trying to risk joining his Circus with the Nazi PC tribute Berlin Zircus of 12-fingered “freak” pianist “Franz” (Franz Rogowski, in a wild performance), “Matilde” frantically tries to join him by declaring to the Nazi soldiers that she, too, is Jewish, which may be true as he apparently adopted her after she, reluctantly reveals, accidentally electrocuted her mother. When she is taken in by a ragtag group of “freak” partisan resistance fighters in woods outside the city, she is not easily convinced that it is acceptable to again take a human life, and has to be considerably provoked at the climax to explosively use her power to save the train-full of Jews by killing Nazis. Achieving romance, too. She is an unusually appealing Jewish female “superhero” in the fantasy realm, the kind of character that was originally invented by Jewish comic book writers to “fight” Nazis. (preview at 2022 Open Roads: New Italian Cinema at Film at Lincoln Center) (6/9/2022)
Free Angela and All Political Prisoners (So, nu: her most fiercely loyal and articulate friends are Jewish women from her school days, including at Brandeis.) (12/21/2014)
Free Trip To Egypt
- photo courtesy of Tarek Mounib
Surprisingly, there’s a Jewish woman in this genial documentary, directed by Ingrid Serban, that could have just been a lame reality TV show. Tarek Mounib, a Canadian Muslim now living in Switzerland, whose parents are Egyptian immigrants, wanted to offer the titular benefit to Americans who express hesitations about Islam. He recruits across the country in 2017, including at a Trump rally in Kentucky, but has more success when they ask on a Sirius XM talk radio show for interested applicants to send in a video tape. In the tape from school teacher Ellen Decker (above) from Fawngrove, PA (who later moved to Maryland), she confesses that while she used to be liberal: “When 9/11 happened, I lost it. I’m so racist now I can’t stand myself. I even voted for Trump…The only reason I would do this is to make my son Michael living in Saudi Arabia very happy that I was at least exploring the option of accepting Muslims as people, I suppose he would say.” When Mounib matches up she and her husband Terry for 10 days with Ahmed Hassan, a cinematographer and revolutionary seen in The Square (Al Midan), she worries “Does he know I’m Jewish?” She not only really gets into touristing around the Cairo Museum and the pyramids, she also warms to meeting a variety of Muslim families, including a mother in a full burkha, who she bonds with over their goals of teaching children to be good. Mrs. Decker hugs her: “I’m so happy to have a new friend like you. Am I your first Jewish friend? Are we so nice?” She more has to resist the evangelicals among the seven fellow Americans on the trip who are bent on converting souls for Jesus Christ, until they admit to her that others are also children of God: “I didn’t mean to make you cry.” While it’s never explained what the son was doing in the Middle East that his parents barely see him at home once a year, Michael, while reuniting with his parents on their trip, noted it’s wonderful to see her break out of her fears about safety and terrorism, that had made her argue with him about his travels, while his father was a bit xenophobic: “But now he says people are nice, and it’s nice to see the change happening.” Which was the project’s goal. Even if the celebrity-promoted follow-ups “#PledgeToListen Day of Unity” are more schmaltzy. (preview courtesy Kindness Films) (5/29/2019)
Free Zone
Freud’s Last Session
Director Matthew Brown opened-up Mark St. Germain’s play that imagines a not very interesting disputatious meeting in London on September 3rd, 1939 between Sigmund Freud (played by Anthony Hopkins, who for some reason in his 80s is frequently getting cast as a Jew) and Oxford Christian theologian C.S. Lewis, later of Chronicles of Narnia fame (played by Matthew Goode). Their debate about religion is frequently interrupted by Freud’s urgent mouth pains from oral cancer. The only indications of Jews are from the opening radio clip of a Hitler speech about his Final Solution intent, Freud’s quote of a “classic” joke from his not funny book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, and his dream of a menorah next to his “devout” father who then fires his mother-substitute proselytizing Catholic nanny.
Just escaped together from Vienna, Freud’s daughter Anna (seen above, courtesy of Sony Classics Pictures Press Notes, as dramatically played by German actress Liv Lisa Fries, with a much more authentic accent than Hopkins attempts) is seen primarily as a self-sacrificing caregiver. She is paternalistically accused by the psychoanalysts around her of attachment maladjustment, known more now as ”daddy issues”. When an academic flings that at her when she has to suddenly leave a lecture on her father’s work where she was already replacing him despite student complaints that She’s not even a doctor!, she comments sarcastically: Thanks for the analysis. (Unethically, her father was her psychoanalyst.) But she is no different from an adult daughter today running out to try and get her father more “medicine”, i.e. morphine, on a day when all the pharmacies were closing due to panic over the war declaration.
Among the vivid flashbacks/dreams of Lewis and the Freuds, Anna tried to get her father to leave Vienna after the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938. The Gestapo does come to get him, but she blocks them, insisting he’s too ill and she’s the one continuing his work, so take her. They do, and she’s seen left in a prison cell for a week, and released with no explanation. They had considered going to either New York or London, and decided England would be easier to reach quickly. Also revealed is another person in her life who she convinced to accompany her and her parents: her non-Jewish lover Dorothy Trimble Tiffany Burlingham (Jodi Balfour) with her four children, an American who came to Vienna to study with Freud. But with her father’s screwed-up view of lesbians within his now discredited theories of human sexuality, Anna was reluctant to tell him about their relationship, though Dorothy pressures her to do so. As the morphine causes her father to have continued dreams from his childhood to his children, including the early death of his more prized daughter Sophie, he is upset by fantasies of Anna and her lover as, first, classic Greek statues, then very much contemporary and passionate in bed. (The credits do include an Intimacy Coordinator.) With war facing them all, Anna prepares to declare to him her relationship with Dorothy in these three weeks before his death by suicide.
The final biographical scroll documents that during the women’s subsequent 40 years together they were pioneers in child psychology. The influence of Anna (1895 – 1982) is seen in BBC’s The Windermere Children, the 2020 fictionalized drama, with accompanying documentary, of how her new methods helped hundreds of the youngest concentration camp survivors who were brought to England in 1945.
Opens December 22 in NYC and L.A., then a national roll-out. (12/11/2023)
Friedkin Uncut - Unlike in so many conversations with film directors, photographers, critics, etc. I’ve seen in bio-docs, debut director Francesco Zippel lets octogenarian William (Billy) Friedkin talk about his origins. Maybe he liked the irony of Friedkin’s Jewish background vis a vis the Catholic setting of The Exorcist Friedkin identifiese his parents as Jewish immigrants who came from Ukraine in steerage “who quickly assimilated”. He describes growing up poor and happy on the north side of Chicago. “I loved my mother and father. If my mother was Catholic she would be a saint. I never heard her say a bad or negative word about anybody. She was very loving and protective of me.” They insisted he go to Hebrew School, but didn’t absorb much, and only knows some Yiddish slang. He now prefers reading the New Testament. Juno Temple later expresses her gratitude for his casting her in Killer Joe (2011) as her first big dramatic role, and admires that his female characters are so complex. Friedkin makes says nothing if his mother influenced his films at all. (preview courtesy of Ambi Distribution) (8/6/2019)
Friends From France (Les interdits) (previewed at 2014 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum)
Friends With Money (So, nu: There's an odd implication that heiress Joan Cusack's "Franny" is Jewish, as a girl friend derides the "Shabbat Shalom" school her kids go to, let alone that she wants to donate $2 million dollars there -- was that a reference to my cousin's Shalom Alecheim school? We see her and husband "Matt" (played by Greg German) buy a huge amount of toys for their two kids, but don't see any Christmas tree in their house that the other friends have in theirs. Is it bad that while she's the richest she also seems to be the most well-adjusted of the friends, with the most stable marriage, though others make snide comments that she's not really a stay at home mom because she has full time household help.) (4/13/2006)
From the Diary of a Wedding Photographer (Myomano Shel Tzlam Hatonot) In the 40-minute short by Israeli writer/director Nadav Lapid (of The Kindergarten Teacher (Haganenet)), the cynical photographer, in framing several attractive young couples against dramatic oceanfront dunes, mostly convinces the brides that they don’t really want to get married to their grooms, and even takes up with one woman, perhaps instead of the mother of his child. One shocked groom “Hila” justifies their marriage in unusually Jewish terms for this ironic filmmaker (per my approximate transcription): 700 servings and the hall, my uncles from America, my grandmother is waiting, your dress and make-up, the rabbi, tradition, our patriarchs. She is “Ofir”: Enough. He: The matriarchs. We are Jews, not animals. She: Enough. And then it gets weirder. (previewed at 2016 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (10/1/2016)
From Where They Stood (À pas aveugles) - French documentarian Christophe Cognet spent several years researching the few, rare photographs that were taken secretly by prisoners themselves inside concentration camps, and the stories of who and how they took the photographs, and how the images were released. So far, only the French edition of his book is available, as Eclats - Prises de vue clandestines des camps Nazis, though he said the NYJFF Q & A that it has been translated into English.
While most of these gutsy resistors are male non-Jewish political prisoners managing to photograph males, one exception is a Greek Jew Alberto Errera, who, with assistance of others in The Resistance, took “The Sonderkommando Photographs” at Crematorium V at Birkenau about August 1944. This daring set includes a group of Jewish women ordered to strip outside the building, not indoors as in most fictional portrayals. The director and Holocaust historian Tal Bruttmann analyze this photograph with intense detail, even using a magnifiying glass. They note how this image has been used, including by the Memorial Museum in exhibits, in ways that manipulate this photograph, including by cropping, and by touching it up to make the features of faces and bodies more explicit, particularly in the 1950’s, but they feel it’s more important not to be able to recognize individual women in these moments before their deaths. (This caution on how to perceive Holocaust images reminds me of the lessons in A Film Unfinished.) They quote the testimony of survivors about this experience of preparing for “the showers” that they had never seen other naked women before, not even their mothers. Cognet determines where the photograph was surreptitiously taken – inside the gas chamber itself at the inset where the Zkylon B canisters were inserted. (preview at 2022 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) (1/21/2022)
Fugitive Pieces (So, nu: The predominant Jewish women, both in the film and the original book, are both idealized victims, while the romantic interests are non-Jewish, even though the much younger love-of-his-life is played by the gorgeous Israeli actress who was the model for the sexy Laura in Be’ Tipul, the Israeli original of In Treatment. But at least in the film the younger Jew, “Ben”, stays faithful to the lovely, lullaby-collecting “Naomi” (played by curly-haired auburn Rachelle Lefevre), who gently sings the redolent anti-Nazi anthem “Peat Bog Soldiers”.) (5/2/2008)
Funny People - Judd Apatow gets serious so presumably that's why the central male characters, who here have changed their last names to sound less Jewish despite Jewish references in their stand-up comedy, at last have contact with Jewish women. Adam Sandler's "George Simmons" only meets with his estranged sister "Lisa" (played by Nicol Paone) when he thinks he's dying, and she's almost too bitter at his neglect of family to reconcile -- What did we ever do to you? When he apologizes, she brings her husband and son to visit with him again. George's Mom (played by Eleanor Zee) accompanies his anti-religious father whose approval he craved to the awkward reunion, and he appreciates that she laughs at his joke. A friend sets him up for a blind date via JDate (there's running references that he's unfamiliar with any social networking web sites), but "Rachel" (played by Maggie Siff) is an intellectual who doesn't appreciate his self-hating jokes about Jews. For Seth Rogen's "Ira Wright", born "Wiener" and the product of a mother who after a bitter divorce declared his father the devil, Jewish women are only from his past. Several times he brings up his years as a camper and counselor at a Jewish camp, recalling that the first time he fingered a girl was there: "Sharon Mizrahi", who he gives an exaggerated Israeli pronunciation perhaps to either explain her sexual attraction or her aggression as he complains she reached down and grabbed my penis hard like she was trying to murder it. But I did order Super Jew T-shirts for my extended family, which also benefits a couple of Jewish non-profits. (8/7/2009)
The Future (Ha’Atid)
Male writer/director Noam Kaplan stretches credulity a bit in setting up the intense peeling of individual onions in what is almost a two-hander, plus related characters barging in with constant interruptions. “Dr. Nurit Bloch” (Reymonde Amsellem, on the right in the poster) is a psychological futurist, setting up an Orwellian (Phillip Dickian?) predictive analytical system to assure peace in Israel by forecasting terrorism. “Yafa” (Samar Qupty, on the left) is an unpredictable outlier whose motivations and actions the researcher feels she therefore needs to understand.
In probing that is part interrogation, part therapy, the questioner seems to reveal far too much about herself as a way to build trust and confidence to get answers. (And the security guards, the only males seen, give her more leeway than expected, even for this setting sometime in the future.) Unusually, the Occupation is intriguingly seen as straining other issues not usually considered as inter-related: mothers and daughters, nature and fertility, sexism, class, education, language, and prejudice. Even as the country is glued to the TV for news of Israel’s latest technological advance, hope can’t be achieved with IT prowess alone. (at 2023 Tribeca Film Festival/ courtesy of Menemsha Films) (6/11/2023)
Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down - While I remember reading in the news that wounded Arizona legislator Giffords celebrated her adult bat mitzvah, until seeing Julie Cohen & Betsy West’s documentary on CNN, I hadn’t really understood that she is Jewish, and that her study and ritual was such an important part of her amazing and determined rehabilitation. (11/24/2022)
Gainsbourg, Je t'Aime... Moi Non Plus (Gainsbourg - Vie héroïque) (previewed at 2010 Tribeca Film Festival) (While his Jewish identity is heightened during the Nazi Occupation of Paris, his mother seems much less of an influence and presence than his father.) (5/14/2010)
Jane B. Par (By) Agnès V. - in this just restored 1987 cinematic portrait of Jane Birkin, she proudly says she wanted to give her lover Serge Gainsbourg “a Jewish daughter with his Slavic eyes” (though I never thought of their daughter actress Charlotte Gainsbourg as Jewish before.) (10/13/2015)
The Galilee Eskimos (Eskimosim ba Galil) (seen at 2008 Israel Film Festival) (An absolutely delightful look at the founding generation of kibbutzim, as in this fictional fable they get abandoned in old age to capitalism and gradually recreate their youthful zeal and idealism (including one woman who remembers all the old uplifting songs). But now the women are more aware of the gender conventions they took for granted then, as they muse that all their children have left them, whether now gay, secular or orthodox.) (11/28/2008)
The Garden of Eden (previewed at 2013 Other Israel Film Festival) (So, nu: a wide variety of Jewish girls and women in Israel are seen and talked about.) (12/7/2013)
Garden State (So, nu: It's notable for yet another Dead Jewish Mother who is once again the only Jewish woman present, in her guilt-inducing absence, in the life of a male lead character very specifically identified as Jewish, here "Andrew Largeman" as a once a year Jew at Yom Kippur. It is her funeral that starts the film's trajectory. Ironically, his explicitly non-Jewish romantic interest, whose family leaves their Christmas tree up year-round and is unfamiliar with Jewish religious practices, is played by Natalie Portman, the Israeli-born actress who is one of the most prominent, and attractive, young Jewish actresses in films today. (8/8/2004)
Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable An interesting case study in Jewish male artist as proud to be a Male Chauvinist Pig, this street photographer known for his predilection for aiming his camera at women’s tits. (Included are interviews with women art critics who forcefully made this case, then and now.) Sasha Waters Freyer insists in her statement: “In looking at Winogrand in all his multidimensional human complexity, I take aim at the “bad dad” and “bad husband” tropes in artist biography, seeking to undermine these as sources of triumph or artistic necessity. Winogrand was an artist whose rise and fall – from the 1950s to the mid-1980s – in acclaim mirrors not only that of American power and credibility in the second half of the 20th century, but also a vision of American masculinity whose limitations, toxicity and inheritance we still struggle, culturally, to comprehend. The film ultimately invites a deeper consideration of Winogrand not only as a “man of his time,” in the words of MoMA Photography curator Susan Kismaric, but also as a man struggling to define himself simultaneously as an artist and a parent.” She sees her “film that, I hope, explores and explodes the cliché of the undomesticated, self-destructive genius – one who is fundamentally unsuited to family life. This cliché is not exclusively the domain of male artists however, it tends to break along gender lines as a source of pride for men (think Faulkner or Picasso), and a source of pity or confusion where women artists are concerned (from Virginia Woolf to Cindy Sherman). His first wife.” Notice she does not see this analysis in a Jewish context (though he seems very much like Norman Mailer at this same time), though that is obvious in his background, with clues scattered throughout. His first wife Adrienne Lubeau, is interviewed extensively; married young, she may come from his same Bronx Jewish background – and is bitterly nasty about his possessive “Jewish mother”, giving examples of their closeness. However, among the many, excellent interview videos from several TV and other sources, he once wistfully mentions his (ultimately three, also to Judy Teller, no background provided, seen briefly, and Eileen Adele Hale) marriages were unsuccessful because he was looking for a woman as intelligent as his mother, who he greatly admired. There is an emphasis on how he tried to include his children while he was working, particularly his two daughters, including finding shots of them (and their shadows) in photographs, such as taking them to the zoo, and carrying a child on his shoulders while photographing. (preview courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment and Film Forum) (PBS’s American Masters) (9/26/2018)
General Magic at 2018 Tribeca Film Festival So, nu: Joanna Hoffman, past and present, is fully present in this documentary, when she was kind of mysterious in another documentary Steve Jobs: The Man In The Machine (My additional notes) and very fictionalized in Steve Jobs (My additional notes). Co-director Sarah Kerruish filmed Hoffman, along with the rest of “The Magicians” back in 1992, which may be how she got Hoffman to participate here. Now she can be identified beyond her usual descriptor as head of marketing for the Apple Macintosh, and into her current philanthropic involvements. (4/15/2018)
Generation 1.5
- When they left Ukraine for Israel in 1991, mother Mira Geller was 39, and her daughter Alex Rif was 5.
Making the rounds of Jewish film festivals in 2023 and 2024 is this documentary re-edited from Israeli TV on the million-strong emigration from the former USSR in the 1990s, shown in 2022 in three sections: “Part 1: For the sake of the children”, “Part 2: Alone in a new world”, and “Part 3: 30 Years on”. Living surrounded by such Russian immigrants here in Forest Hills/Rego Park, I was always under the impression that the majority went to Israel because of USSR/Russia’s visa requirements – turns out it was Israel’s restrictions, one of many insights I gained from this film. But many Israelis don’t realize that the U.S. is also a country of immigrants and our grandparents/parents went through the same transitions as these first and 1.5 generation immigrants, so we can see that the tensions were similar.
Written and directed by on-screen participants Roman Shumunov, Raya Shuster, and Alex Rif, theirs and others’ interviews emotionally challenge the stereotype of Israel as welcoming and assimilating masses of Jewish immigrants, like the recent films exposing similar issues with the treatment of Mizrahi from Arab countries in the 1950s. Some participants were parents when they emigrated (women adjusted better than men), some were their children. While it was not unusual that the adults with professions at home had to take the most menial jobs available, I was surprised at the prejudice and vitriol the children received in their schools and neighborhoods. (Perhaps related, the English subtitles should be more specific than label that participants came from “Russia”.) The women are particularly bitter that when they reached the age of wanting to marry, the government-funded, ever more rigid rabbinate challenged their Jewishness, such that they have to wed in places like Cyprus to get around this restriction – but there’s no mention of politics. Most moving of all was, as in the still above, seeing on screen assimilated daughters and immigrant mothers together trying to reconcile not only between each other, but between their Russian heritage and Israeli identity, as with the grandchildren they celebrate both holidays. In the U.S. that takes an additional generation. (courtesy of Go2Films) (2/15/2024)
Generation War (Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter) (So, nu: More disappointing than how the German Jewish friend’s mother is pretty much a non-entity, is that the woman stuffed into a cattle car with him on the way to Auschwitz turns out not to be Jewish, but is a Polish Communist patriot, who would not have been rounded up like that with Jews. But she is the one who is knowledgeable about the doom that awaits them, organizes the escape and protects him to hide his identity with the partisans as long as possible – until he reveals himself by freeing other Jewish men and women against orders. The skillful woman Jewish doctor “Lilja” (played by Christiane Paul) who the German nurse exposed for round-up, turned into a bitter, vengeful uniformed soldier after an unexplained escape to join with the Soviet forces, allowing the nurse to work to save her life tending their troops as they head to Berlin.)
A 1/27/2014 panel discussion at NYU’s Deutsches Haus got hijacked by Polish nationalists (including elderly political prisoner survivors), most of whom hadn’t seen the film, furious that Poles, particularly the National Army and some partisans, were depicted as virulent anti-Semites, listing all those listed as Righteous Gentiles at Yad Vashem. But they were all older Poles, those who grew up under the 45 years when the Community Party line blamed everything on the Germans, even as they used antisemitism as a rallying tool. Though one younger woman said the Polish TV audience mocked the lack of facility with the Polish language by the actress portraying the Communist partisan – evidently not that her character was inexplicably arrested with Jews. (updated 1/28/2014)
Generation Wealth (Amazon Studios release) Director/photographer/photojournalist Lauren Greenfield literally dances around identifying as Jewish in this career retrospective of her life and the themes in her work – near the end we glimpse her wedding video where her husband (and co-producer) Frank Evers wore a kippah. She similarly does so in looking back on how she portrayed wealth in the past, and now in follow-up, including her classmates from an elite private school in southern California, but I did not pick up clues if any outside her family were of Jewish ancestry. (Their names are not repeated in the press notes for me to double-check my reaction.) From her past work there’s a brief image of a tasteless bar mitzvah where the parents hired Vegas-style showgirls to entertain the kids. But at no point are American or other Jews particularly pointed out or specifically identifiable for excess or ruing their expenses or lifestyle, let alone the members of her own successful family. Her academic psychologist mother Patricia Marks Greenfield is open about the demographic cohort of her life, but mostly responds to her daughter’s questions like a therapist more than a mother. This may be the first time I’m relieved that Jewish (or even putative Jewish) women aren’t identified! (6/20/2018)
Genius - For this adaptation of A. Scott Berg’s biography Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, which I haven’t yet read, Nicole Kidman says she lobbied to play the role of, as described in the press notes, Mrs. “Aline Bernstein, one of the most renowned theatrical costume designers of her day”, but I think she miscast herself, including that her age seems wrong. The film centers on the intense personal relationship between Perkins (played by Colin Firth) and Thomas Wolfe (Jude Law), whose books I’ve neglected to read all these years. Wolfe here calls his considerably older lover “Mrs. Bernstein” my little Jewess.
The press notes include these reflections on her- Law:“ Wolfe had copious lovers, but Aline was his love, his muse, and his champion.” Kidman: “They were addicted to one another at a certain point. She was a formidable woman – an incredibly strong career woman who was ahead of her time - which is fascinating because she was in this obsessive, dependent love affair with Thomas Wolfe.” Biographer Berg: “Aline was desperate and she was passionate. When Aline loved, she loved 200%. She was anxious to hold onto that, and she was threatened by Wolfe’s relationship with Perkins.” The film is very clear about her success in the theater, and Wolfe’s disinterest (and discomfort) with her artistic, intellectual (not mentioned but probably Jewish) circle, and her frustration with his attitude and lack of support, compared to how she was his mentor and muse before Perkins takes over, and her (surprisingly) hysterical and considerably unstable reaction to being replaced in his life, including threatening suicide and murder in Perkins’ office, and is not seen at Wolfe’s funeral. Mrs. Bernstein is seen as parallel to how Mrs. Perkins’ background as an actress and playwright is similarly denigrated by her husband.
We never hear her maiden name of Frankau (per Wikipedia), and we only find out about her personal background in her confession to Mrs. Perkins (Laura Linney) that she abandoned her weathy stockbroker husband and their two children for Wolfe and, well, she can’t go home again. Wikipedia says Wolfe based his character “Esther Jack” on her in that book, Of Time and the River that Perkins edited, and The Web and the Rock (which, huh, isn’t available on Kindle). As there’s some question about how the “Esther Jack” love story was edited through these novels, I’ve also identified posthumously discovered and published stories, now sitting on my shelf, which deal more with “Esther Jack”s Jewish background, that are based on Aline’s memories, and are used by literary historians as examples of stereotypical attitudes towards Jewish women in the late 1920’s, in The Good Child’s River and The Party at Jack. (I also now have her own versions of her life, in her autobiography An Actor’s Daughter and her novelization of their grand affair The Journey Down, to someday clarify how she saw their relationship.) (updated 6/27/2016)
The German Doctor (Wakolda) (Useful supplements: Director Talk interview and Tablet Magazine visit to Bariloche.) (So, nu: The only clue that “Nora Eldoc” (played by Elena Roger) is Jewish, let alone working for the Mossad, whether as an agent or as an informant, is when she whispers her findings about the school’s connections in Hebrew on the telephone. She is inspired by a real woman who was killed near the German-Argentinian town under mysterious circumstances and whose body was reportedly reviewed by Mossad agents.) (5/2/2014)
Germans & Jews (So, nu: Though there are no specifically gendered analysis proffered, the Jewish interviewees include many women, though not among the Israeli artists, like my cousin in theater in Berlin. Supplements to this very edited review:
Missing here is that the main Jewish pre-war neighborhood “Mitte”, the city center full of Jewish-owned department stores, textile companies, and banks, was located in what became the East German side. The current exhibition at The Leo Baeck Institute-New York Stolen Heart: The Theft of Jewish Property in Berlin’s History City Center, 1933-1945 documents the pre-war community and the lack of reparations from the GDR afterwards
Though the Germans interviewed here grew up not knowing any Jews personally, they don’t express feeling the lack of Jewish cultural or intellectual presence reported by Eastern Europeans in Nurith Aviv’s short film Loss. The raft of recent films about crusading anti-Nazi prosecutor Fritz Brauer well show the post-war silence that persisted until, first, in 1953 he rehabilitated the Hitler assassination plotters by winning a slander suit against calling them traitors, through his instigation of the Verdict On Auschwitz: The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial 1963-1965.
While Dörte Franke’s Stumbling Stone (Stolperstein) (2009) details more on one briefly shown grassroots Holocaust awareness project, I had visited the frank Topography of Terror Documentation Center, built on the rubble of the Gestapo headquarters, without realizing it was not a government effort.
I briefly reviewed the wonderful portrait of Holocaust survivors in Germany Oma & Bella.
Not really explored here is how the Russian émigré/Jewish German community has grown distinctive roots, which can be seen in Dominik Graf’s 2010 noir mini-series In the Face of Crime (Im Angesicht des Verbrechens) (released in the U.S. on DVD through MhZ). (6/10/2016)
Gett: The Trial Of Viviane Amsalem (previewed at 2015 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (So, nu: As written and directed by the so impressive Ronit Elkabetz, with her brother, particularly pointed is the comparison between the women and male witnesses – from a secular neighbor who explodes against the judges that in the next election their jobs would be eliminated to a browbeaten wife who gathers her courage to confess what she’s witnessed about the divorcing couple even as her husband stays in the courtroom to intimidate her.) (2/13/2015) With her death in 2016, this culmination of her trilogy, stands as her masterpiece.
Gevald! (briefly reviewed at 2010 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (So, nu: The anti-Zionist refuses to allow his wife and children to be seen in the documentary, not that this modesty helped his career. But the wife of the Knesset member is a charming political spouse and hostess; if she were Ashkenazi she could be called a balabusta. She genially tours the filmmakers through their apartment and the photographs of their many children and grandchildren. Open about their personal lives, she recounts their love at first arranged sight with delight.) (1/25/2010)
Giado: Holocaust in the Desert - Co-director Sharon Ada Yaish interviews her family about what they knew of the journal and experiences of her grandfather Yosef Dadush about growing up in Benghazi, Libya, marrying, then being taken at age 20 with the rest of the country’s Jews into a primitive desert concentration camp by the Italian military with their German allies. (Co-director Golan Rise’s mother had similar travails in Libya.) While after emigration to Israel Dadush organized survivors to press governments over decades for reparations, Yaish interrogates her mother and other family members about why the diary sat in his “corner” untouched for 70 years, until after his passing. All that time no one talked about what happened, even as the tragedy hung over their large boisterous family, and she learned about her middle name’s namesake.
Though her mother is very reluctant to finally read the diary, Yaish makes it very accessible to the audience. Through ghostly animation, supplemented with newsreels, archival footage, and interviews with survivors, including her grandmother Bruria and four other women who tell of terrible cruelty, the pages and vivid words move like the desert wind around a model of the bare landscape and barracks. (56 minute version at 2024 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum/ courtesy of Go2Films, which is producing an international cut of 75 minutes) (2/12/2024)
The Girl on the Train (La Fille du RER) (previewed at 2009 Rendez-Vous with French Film at Film at Lincoln Center) (Ronit Elkabetz has an atypical role (let alone in French) as the daughter of a prominent Jewish lawyer who has spoken out against anti-Semitic violence. While she gives the viewpoint of the harm that a false accusation can make on the community, as a wife with a troubled marriage and a rebellious teenage son, she is not a one-note activist, but sympathetic to the very human pressures that can lead a girl to make a mistake.) (3/9/2009)
Girl With Black Balloons (previewed at 2011 DOC NYC Festival) The little biographical background that Dutch filmmaker Corinne van der Borch is able to elicit from artist cum tragic hoarder Bettina, somehow living and dedicating herself to working in the Chelsea Hotel since the 1960s, is that her last name is Grossman and she rebelled against what she only describes as “a quite Orthodox family”. Even dreaming about her, the director then describes her as a “Jewish girl”, as if that adds to the mystery of her life we only glimpse: portraits of her as a beautiful young woman in European locales, no regrets over an abortion, and trauma from a fire in a Brooklyn apartment that destroyed any other evidence of her past and may explain some of her behavior. (Though she’s surrounded by stacks of boxes, she’s not agoraphobic as she enjoys watching the ships along the Hudson River and scooting around outside looking like a bag lady on wheels.) A young, Nordic-looking, long-haired neighbor seems to use her as his muse and may also be making a competing film about her, but does clean out her apartment, as promised, to set up the “museum” to see all her work in continuous context together that she claims she’d always wanted for her beautiful sculptures, photographs, word drawings, and amazingly much more, seen individually in a lovely concluding montage. She directs the director and mentally improves enough to pass a sanity test that forestalls guardianship and eviction, but soon sinks back into sad paranoia about what he’s done. Ironically, when she suffers a fracture from a fall, and has to go into rehab, it’s a Jewish facility in Brooklyn that takes her in, though she snorts at the Shabbat restrictions. After watching the film, it was almost as unsettling that a young colleague at the screening thought she was only in her late ‘60’s, not her actual ‘80’s. (10/22/2011)
Give Me Liberty - If I hadn’t seen that many Jewish film festivals are scheduling Kirill Mikhanovsky’s everything-that-can-go-wrong in the day of a medical transport driver in Milwaukee, I would not have presumed that all the Russian immigrants portrayed reflected his memories of being a Soviet Jewish émigré there with his family. One of the amusing elements in the chaotic story of the van driver Vic (played by the charming first-timer Chris Galust, discovered in a Brooklyn bakery while appropriately enough buying a cake to celebrate his Russian grandfather’s emigration to the U.S.) is how he ends up helping friends of his grandfather (Arkady Basin), a group of elderly Russians, including an accordion player, to take them to a cemetery for the funeral of their friend Lilya. While I did spot a menorah in her apartment when they can get in afterwards, it was not a Jewish cemetery, nor did they attempt a Jewish service. I only saw that one woman (I will guess she was the player with the presumably Jewish name Rimma Lifschitz) drops in Yiddish terms – like asking Vic to do a mitzvah and to be a mensch. The group has a continuing argument about what songs to sing at the gravesite. One woman insists that Lilya wanted to honor the time when Belurassians, Russians, and Jews all got along, so she wanted each ofs their songs represented. But the one woman keeps insisting only Yiddish songs would be appropriate. Besides singing “Go Down Moses” in alliance with Paul Robeson’s support for freedom, they do sing several others, on and off the van, that I couldn’t document. In the credits, I caught a chorale name that included “Freylikh” and “Wisconsin” that may have been the casting or sheet music source, but my searches for more information turned up nothing. (7/19/2019)
Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts (previewed at DocuWeek) (Was it because director Scott Hicks is Australian or was it in order to stress, over and over, Philip’s pan-religious spirituality that he avoided identifying his Baltimore family in any way as Jewish, particularly his older sister Sheppie who is extensively interviewed, even as she recalls the influence of their mother in encouraging a bright child? Certainly, most viewers seeing her very Jewish sounding married name and hearing her manner of speaking will perceive her as Jewish.) (8/16/2008)
Gloria: In Her Own Words (HBO documentary) (While Ms. Steinem makes a point of identifying her colleague Flo Kennedy as African-American, which is obvious from the old photographs and footage, she speaks movingly, both in the new interview and in footage of her funeral eulogy, of Bella Abzug as a mentor and substitute mother – but never as Jewish. On the other hand, she also doesn’t identity Betty Friedan as Jewish in detailing their disagreements.) (8/27/2011)
The Glorias - Julie Taymor tracks Gloria Steinem at four different points in her life, with four actresses, but her childhood vaguely implies that her mother was Jewish. Though the film is based on Steinem’s memoir My Life on the Road, she says she doesn’t’ need to talk about her mother, instead she “wrote a long essay about her called ‘Ruth’s Song: Because She Could Not Sing It.’ I mourned her unlived life.” When her mother Ruth (played by Enid Graham) has some kind of breakdown, she has nightmares that German soldiers are coming to get her; the memoir refers to her mother’s “fear of a threatening” universe, and that she grew up in a hostile world, but it was her beloved father (played by Timothy Hutton) who was Jewish. Steinem recently learned that his mother Pauline Perlmutter Steinem was an active suffragist and Jewish women’s leader in Toledo, OH. The friendship and alliance between Steinem and Bella Abzug is wonderfully portrayed by Julianne Moore and Bette Midler, respectively. In the script by Taymor and Sarah Ruhl, Abzug proudly proclaims herself Jewish and loud. (Amazon) (12/30/2020)
Glorious (Comme T’Y Es Belle!) (2006)
Thanks to the 2019 New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival for introducing me to the French director Lisa Azuelos, with this look back to her debut directorial feature! She’s just released her 6th film in France - - so now I have five more to catch up, including one just opened. This film has very much a period Sex and the City vibe, though the women are older with children and/or husbands, and all the women are within an extended Sephardi French family, specifically from Morocco, so they share Arabic languge, customs, and food with their Muslim nannies and household help. In the Q &A, Azuelos regretted that she would not be able to portray such closeness in a film set today. She described her background as her first 12 years with her French Catholic mother, then moved in with her Sephardi Moroccan father. She noted that each of her films has an autobiographical element of what state in life she is going through; with this film, she was in the midst of getting a divorce.
Azuelos cast women who mostly did not fit American stereotypes of Jewish women, if I got all the characters and actresses correctly. Blonde Isa (Michèle Laroque) is an unhappily married mother of two school age kids entrepreneurially developing a face cream (or some such), and separates from her crass Jewish husband for a non-Jewish father of friends of her daughter. Léa (Aure Atika) is wealthy, divorced, scatter-brained, dressing too young for their age, and regrets her cool relationship with her pre-teen daughter. Alice (Valérie Benguigui, Azuelos’ best friend who died in 2013, which made it bittersweet for the director to re-watch this for the first time in years.) Nina (Géraldine Nakache) runs a large salon where they hang out, and allows for amusing interactions with clients, goes ahead with a civil union with her nanny in order to keep her legally in the country, even as she ditches one-night stands for a satisfying affair with a hunky Jewish British tax attorney (played by Andrew Lincoln). I’m missing the single friend who has the hots for one of the women’s brother, Simon., who the older women, cooking relatives are constantly insisting date Jewish men, including an aunt of Azuelos, who died earlier this year, though she was again glad to see her so vibrant in the film. (3/19/2019)
Go for Zucker! (Alles auf Zucker!)
God’s Messengers (Shlechei Ha El) - (2015) Director Itzik Lerner’s observational cinema documentary approach (supplemented with archival footage) is useful for being up-close-and-personal with the denizens of then illegal Havat Gilad outposts on the West Bank, near Nablus. They are led by the entrepreneurial farmer Itay Zar, carrying out his settler parents’ revenge for the murder of his brother in 2001, and whose family background is the only one presented. (His still-grieving mother is implacable.)
This lacunae is particularly frustrating in viewing the two most prominent women in the film, Itay’s wife Bat-Tzion and sister-in-law Ilana. (No still was provided by the distributor that included any of the women.) Ironically, they seem indistinguishable from the Palestinian women they push aside – their bodies and heads are wrapped in long skirts, blouses, and scarves; they are constantly pregnant and schlepping babies and toddlers; and spend a lot of time with lawyers, and waiting outside courts and prisons. (Sometimes their maternal responsibilities lean them to waver about staying put, before they re-commit to staying.) While Bat-Tzion disingenuously denies they carry out “price tag attacks” on Palestinians and Israeli security forces as retribution for actions against the settlers, Ilana, however, is more political and ideological. She is seen trying to force her way up to the podium at a huge settler rally to represent “the youth settlement movement” (and so many of them are strikingly young). But she is rebuffed by the older, male, more conventional event organizers: “You should have asked before.” (courtesy of Seventh Art Releasing- which is making the film only available in the U.S. for screenings and educational use by communities, not in theatrical or wider release nor streaming) (3/10/2023)
Golda - With the emphasis in Sagi Bornstein, Udi Nir, and Shani Rozanes’s 2019 documentary on why Golda Meir’s legacy reputation in Israel is so sour, it is very frank about her Ashkenazi prejudices against Arabs and Mizrahi Jews from Arab countries. I don’t recall seeing even in other docs on this issue a Pesach hunger strike by young Mizrahis that forced a meeting with her and revealed her biases to them. A professor of gender studies and former Foreign Ministry/Knesset member Colette Avital point out how she used her unattractive, grandmotherly image, and she did not encourage other women in government. Her former spokesman notes she hid from the public what she was dealing with I private: her cancer treatment – even as she continued to smoke - -and her sister’s illness and death, that coincided with the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. (previewed at 2019 DOC NYC Festival) (10/25/2019)
Golda’s War Diaries - Based on Hagai Tzoref and Meir Boumfeld’s A Day Will Come and The Archives Will Be Opened: Golda Meir’s Government and Yom Kippur War, that doesn’t seem to be available in the U.S., director Yariv Mozer takes on a determinedly revisionist view of Meir’s actions immediately before, during, and after the 1973 war. Claiming she always insisted that the view of her would change once classified documents could be released, he puts on screen documents that Israel’s National Archive released to mark the 50th anniversary of the war, particularly contemporaneous notes of cabinet meetings, plus revealing she already was being treated for blood cancer. The material is reinforced by interviews with aides who were present, as well as historians and scholars, including female experts, with TV footage. Much is made of her quoting Yiddish aphorisms.
Much of the analysis emphasizes her position as the only woman in the cabinet and leadership. In advance of the war, she couldn’t go against all her military advisors, particularly the much-admired but easily deflated Moshe Dayan, even as the Mossad was telling her its confidential contacts, and even King Hussein, warned of the coming war. A wounded soldier recalls Golda as a Jewish mother grieving for her children, and troops cheering at her visit to the front see her as a grandmother. Blame is sorted out. (at 2024 Jewish film festivals/ courtesy of Go2Films) (2/16/2024)
Golden Voices (Kolot Reka'a) - A positive of Israeli government funding stressing diversity has been the release of more films featuring the immigrant experience from the Soviet Union. Director/co-writer Evgeny Ruman and co-writer Ziv Berkovich dedicate their lovely film “to our parents”, who brought them as children to Israel in the big wave of emigration about September 1990, when their film is set. Played by Russian-born actors who came around the same time, the central married, childless couple is the Frenkels: “Raya” (the expressive Maria Belkin) and “Victor” (Vladimir Friedman), whose career specialty was dubbing films into Russian. Only the husband mentions even any awareness of his Jewish heritage: My parents spoke Yiddish at home and we ate matzoh at Passover, so it’s possible his wife is not. The first Jewish Israeli woman we see on screen is their Ulpan Hebrew teacher, presumably religious with her hair covered, wearing long sleeves and skirt. At 62 years old, “Raya” is at first intimidated by the tough Israeli women she meets. “ Dvora” (Evelin Hagoel) is the shrewd proprietor of the phone sex call center where “Raya” begins to blossom by using her vocal skills to play the role of young “Margarita” for lonely Russian men, especially one with a stutter. We see such a surprising softer side to her boss, that I wasn’t sure she was the same character who lets “Raya” crash at her apartment for awhile, telling about her son at college in Boston. Unusually, “Dvora”s sense of Jewish identity is indicated by Shabbat candlesticks on a shelf, rather than the more cinematically typical menorah. The other female entrepreneur she has business dealings with, blonde like her, is “Irina” (Nadia Kucher), who operates a black-market video store that illegally copies popular American movies in theaters and quickly dubs them into Russian. The director explains in the Press Notes: “Going to the cinema was too expensive for new immigrants. Also, it was subtitled in Hebrew, a language we didn’t process well enough for several years. Our love for movies was born then, watching the bleak, shaky copies poorly filmed from a cinema screen and extremely poorly dubbed.” Making more money than he does, “Raya” finds the wherewithal to finally rebel against her husband, who was even directing her in casual photos: You are a good man. But I’m tired of you after all these years, you have no idea. Always has to be the way you like it. We had a chance for a family but you didn’t want that: ‘Children will harm our careers, so wait’. [I agreed] for you. They do re-bond and re-kindle, by changing jobs and apartment location of her choosing. (courtesy of Music Box Films) (12/18/2021)
The Goldman Case (Le procès Goldman)
- Jerzy Radziwilowicz (left) as Alter Goldman [with unidentified actress as Alter’s second wife Ruth] Courtesy of Menemsha Films/Moonshaker
In French director Cédric Kahn’s fascinating re-enactment (co-written with Nathalie Hertzberg) of the 1976, highly political murder trial of Pierre Goldman (charismatically played by Arieh Worthalter), Jewish women are not heard, but haunt proceedings that tensely echo today’s frictions of antisemitism, racism, police misconduct, left vs. right, and the role of courts to produce justice in liberal democracy.
As the defendant, Goldman is stubbornly unsympathetic, protesting I am innocent because I am innocent. He published a plea for a retrial of his 1975 conviction of the murders of two women during a robbery, Souvenirs obscurs d' un juif polonais ne en France; the English translation as Dim Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France is out-of-print. The film reconstructs his retrial in Amiens, in northern France. Both the prosecution and defense quote his book to show how his biography explains his motivations to be a “Jewish warrior” inspired by his parents.
Polish Jewish shtetl refugees from the Holocaust in France, both his parents, Alter, portrayed above, and his mother Janine Sochaczewska were active in the Communist Resistance. In court testimony, his father explains that his wife’s family in Poland had been very religious, but she rebelled against them and was arrested for being a Communist. Her mother brought her matzoh in prison she refused, and upon her release, her Torah-studying father threw her out. She fled to France, where they met and fell in love. Pierre was born in 1944; his father says having a child was a way to defy death and to continue the fight for the oppressed. While his father is lauded as a hero and patriot, his mother is described as such a devoted Communist that she was declared a Soviet spy and deported back to Poland after the war. Amidst this fraught separation, his father was determined he be raised away from the shadows of the Shoah. (Wikipedia claims it was a kidnapping; the lawyers say friends refer to “a disturbed childhood”.) His step-mother Ruth (portrayed above) brought him up fondly with his half-siblings, including a sister, who are seen during the trial as his young silent supporters; his Jewish lawyer praises her as a “model of integration – like my family.” (Americans would probably use the term “assimilation”.)
After descriptions of his rebellions at schools that were attributed to various mental illnesses, Pierre testifies that he avoided conscription by reuniting with his mother in Poland in 1959: I made up for lost time to discover my parents’ country. He was impressed by her Communist dedication and their talk about her Resistance actions (she was the cell’s secretary in Lyon), as they together visited Auschwitz and related historical sites. There’s no mention of the official antisemitism in Poland then, but the court is told she was not able to get a visa to attend the trial. Goldman proudly recalls: My mother introduced me to the Cuban Revolution. I insisted she arrange a meeting for me in Havana.
His lawyers point to his second-generation trauma, “the fruit of a real tragedy,” to explain his restless revolutionary ardor: We never recover from our childhoods. He traveled to Venezuela, returned to Paris under suspicious circumstances, and wrote a manual for urban guerrillas. When the tanks ending the Prague Spring deflated his Communist ardor, he had no real goal or income besides small time robberies.
Though Goldman is too prickly to be the new Alfred Dreyfus as a symbol of French institutional antisemitism, film critic J Hoberman quotes from Goldman’s writings: “that his first trial precipitated intense solidarity among religious, nonreligious, communist, conservative, Zionist, anti-Zionist, and non-Zionist Jews. ‘All of them, during the trial, had felt that they were Jewish . . .I was a criminal, a thief, but falsely accused of murder, unjustly condemned. I had, for a moment, represented the Jews before the Justice of the goyim.’” While he seems like an inchoate leftist 1970s rebel, he became a sensation with Jewish and non-Jewish celebrities like Simone Signoret and Régis Debray, seen attending the raucous trial.
Goldman angrily yells that the police are racists, as the witnesses, including aggressive police officers, use stereotypical terms for his appearance. The prosecution emphasizes his foreignness, and Goldman asserts his solidarity with minorities: Jews and Blacks are the same!; his dignified wife, friends, and comrades are seen to be from the Caribbean. Goldman erupts: They were all abused and intimidated by the police because they’re Black! His final statement to the court is defiant: I don’t want anyone to say I acted like a Jew who implied a non-Jew has no right to think a Jew can kill, and those who do are antisemitic.
Especially for Americans unfamiliar with the case, this engrossing courtroom drama certainly feels like the French, but even more Jewish, equivalent of the Chicago 10 trial, with a conspiratorial coda. (at 2024 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum/ courtesy of Menemsha Films) (9/12/2024)
The Golem (2019 - Available on all streaming platforms) Cheers to The Paz Brothers, and writer Ariel Cohen, for a feminist take on the traditional tale! So many mystical-oriented TV shows and movies are based on New Testament apocalypses (for example, CW’s long-running Supernatural and other mythologies) not only is it is a real pleasure to see one coming out of Kabbalah and gematria, that its brother directors Doron Paz & Yoav Paz (Jeruzalem) call “Jewish Horror” – but it’s also feminist. In this English-language film, the first voice-over heard is a woman’s: the healer Perla (Brynie Furstenberg), then it’s auburn-haired Hanna (Hani Furstenberg) who wants to study Kabbalah, at first with the assistance of her husband Benjamin (Ishay Golan), who sneaks her the tomes from his father the rabbi. The couple is still grieving the accidental death of their young son seven years before. But she’s the one who wants to take the studies further to produce a Golem when the Christians blame the shtetl for the plague and threaten revenge; the Golem she creates is (Stephen King-like) in the shape of a boy, like their son, and she reacts to him as if he is her son, which is a new angle towards a Golem, as well that its creation releases her sexually, too. This image then makes it more powerful that the Golem reacts to her emotions (including jealousy of her neighbor’s flirtation with Benjamin), as he gets more out of control in interpreting protection of her specifically more than the community defense against raging gentiles as she thought she intended, while the blood and body count rise. (Preview courtesy of Epic Pictures)
For comparison, in 2007, I saw Golem (1920) Paul Wegener’s German expressionist silent film performed live with Tom Nazziola's musical score by The BQE Project, which sticks closer to the original legend of The Golem of Prague. (updated 2/9/2019)
Goodbye Momo (A Dios Momo) (4/20/2007) (So, nu: Refreshingly not stereotyped that the best friend’s Jewish mother is so warm to the Afro-Uruguayan boy, and that both families are struggling with poverty.)
The Good Person (Ha'Nefesh Ha'Tova) - Eitan Anner describes his script as a satire. What can go wrong when a bankrupt divorced feminist art-house producer (Moran Rosenblatt as “Sharon” with even more personal crises, including no time to spend with her teenage daughter) has to adapt "Samuel Chapters 18 – 31" into a low-budget film with Haredi stars (Rami Hoiberger as “Uzi Silver”, a popular director turned Rabbi, and his wife “Leah” who gave up acting to follow him into the Ultra-Orthodox community in Jerusalem)? The black-and-white cinematography emphasizes her former aesthetic, while her current project in color symbolizes her constant compromises, on her way to becoming the stereotype of the “Producer as SOB”, let alone a crook like Zero Mostel in The Producers. With the Israel Film Fund featured prominently in the story as the Biblical movie’s backers, a target of the satire may be their increasing priority, in the real world, of insisting on more representation of the Haredi, with more films resulting about baalei teshuvah (Jews who choose to become Ultra-Orthodox). I guess it’s supposed to be ironic when the female head of the fund is annoyed when she discovers the film crew is all male. (at 2023 Israel Film Center Festival)
Goon (How does it come to be that a Canadian romantic comedy about hockey opens up outside a synagogue? The script by Jay Baruchel and Evan Goldberg changes their inspiration of the real Doug Smith (inspired by his memoir Goon: The True Story of an Unlikely Journey Into a Minor Hockey League, written with Adam Frattasio) into “Doug Glatt” (played by Seann William Scott). Baruchel explained in the press notes that his father had played hockey in his youth on the Bethel Wings, an all-Jewish hockey team: “All of my knowledge or interest in hockey comes from my father. I was raised in a household where the Montreal Canadians were effectively our religion: Jewish on Dad’s side, Catholic on Mum’s, all Habs fans. And Dad’s favorite players were always the tough ones, the enforcers - or the goons for lack of a better term. . .I coupled that with this real hockey player named Mike Bajurny who’s not Jewish, but played on the Laval Chiefs which is part of the North American Hockey League. Both Bajurny's father and his grandfather are doctors, his brother’s a filmmaker and he’s the guy who gets paid to fight and skate for a living.”, who was profiled in his brother’s documentary Le Chiefs. In the opening, the “Glatt” parents try to fix their son up with a nice young woman at the synagogue, but it’s more his mother (played by Ellen David) who is stereotypically upset that he’s choosing a violent career in hockey, unlike his brother the doctor, though “Doug” teases her by outing the brother as gay.) (11/25/2012)
Le Grand Rôle is an amusing updated French Jewish take on O. Henry's "The Last Leaf." Based on a book by Daniel Goldenberg that doesn't appear to be available in English, it gently pokes fun at just about everything it touches, including actors, theaters, directors, and religious, ethnic and generational divisions within the Jewish community.
It sets as a satirical premise the notion that Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice is the problem and opportunity for Jewish actors that Othello is for black actors, with references as well to Ronald Colman in A Double Life and the Al Pacino adaptation that must have been in production at the same time as this film.
In an amusing satire of Steven Spielberg exploring his Jewish identity through Schindler's List, Peter Coyote plays a big Hollywood director who comes to Paris to direct a Yiddish version of Merchant (scenes with him are mostly in English), setting off more than a frisson of hope and anxiety among a close group of unemployed Jewish actor friends as they position themselves for the role, including amusing efforts to gain credibility with the director in and out of the humiliating auditions, such as politicking at temple services most don't otherwise attend and searching out elderly relatives for Yiddish lessons. Their comfort with each other amidst their diversity is also unusual in films with Jewish characters, as they range from married with children, to divorced, to a womanizer, one is observant, another passionately Sephardic who insists that an authentic production of Merchant should be in Ladino (the Judeo-Iberic language of Jews who fled Spain).
But the humor is centered by one of the most unusual sights ever in films - an attractive, young Jewish, married couple's stable, loving relationship. Their devotion puts the actors' egos into poignant perspective as the marriage is tested by the ultimate challenge, showing that even the most self-centered seeming people can have a heart in the face of personal tragedy. Stéphane Freiss as the husband can move from funny to sad sack to poignant on a dime. Bérénice Bejo as his wife creates a real, intelligent woman to care about; I was particularly impressed that she found the only copy in Paris of the play in Yiddish.
The English subtitles are inadequate and it is particularly frustrating as none of the pop songs on the soundtrack are translated as they seem to have some significance in commenting on the story, particularly at the end. (5/30/2005)
Grace Paley: Collected Shorts (briefly reviewed at 2011 New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (So, nu commentary on the Jewish women forthcoming.)
The Great New Wonderful (I'm not sure if some of what we see Olympia Dukakis's "Judie" doing is fantasy or not.) (7/10/2006)
The Green Perfume (Le Parfum vert)
@bizibi
Somehow inspired by Hergé’s “Tintin” and Hitchcock, director Nicolas Pariser intends this to be a comic spoof of spy thrillers, so presumably all the Jewish references by the two main characters are meant to be spoofs too. The French press notes are not yet available in English, but he explained: “En fait, pour Hergé c’est un peu inexact et surtout très accablant : il y a des Juifs dans ses albums mais ce sont presque toujours des caricatures antisémites. Chez Hitchcock, à ma connaissance, il n’y a pas de Juifs du tout…Il fallait dévier vers le motif central, qui est l’angoisse physique des Juifs en Europe, encore présente aujourd’hui. Filmer l’Europe c’est filmer un territoire plus que jamais hanté par le fascisme et l’antisémitisme.” Amid the unevenly paced, convoluted plot about stopping a neo-Nazi Pan-European plot, that feels like clarifying points have been edited out, Comédie-Française actor “Martin Remi” (Vincent Lacoste) keeps intersecting with auburn-haired comic book writer “Claire Cahan” (Sandrine Kiberlain). Particularly on trains across Europe, they spend long scenes talking about aspects of being Jewish – for her it’s mostly about avoiding her nagging mother after coming back to France after 20 years in Israel that’s to explain their difficulties sustaining relationships. (at 2023 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Film at Lincoln Center) (2/26/2023)
Guilt Trip (I didn’t want to bother seeing it in a theater)
H2: The Occupation Lab - Directed by Idit Avrahami and Noam Sheizaf, both have said in interviews they have personal connections to the city of Hebron. Sheizaf served there when he was an officer in the Israeli military in the 1990s, while Avrahami comes from a family that had lived in Hebron for generations. As the history of Hebron, even since 1929, and of how it became a tinderbox and then a model of how the Israeli Army treats other towns on the West Bank, the archival images of Jewish Israeli women are the negative ones Palestinians see: as soldier and as settler.
At least in the archival footage shown the female soldier really tries to patiently listen and be helpful to Palestinians just trying to get on with their daily movements, even though obviously not speaking or understanding Arabic, which should be a prerequisite for all soldiers serving in the Occupied Territories.
However, the female settler seen close-up in archival footage is despicable, horrid, and hateful. She taunts a Palestinian woman in her caged apartment by repeatedly calling her “whore” in her face. Another female settler is seen striking a Palestinian woman for no reason while shopping, as the tensions between the adjacent but highly segregated residents mount over the years.
Amidst the layers of irony is that a viewer is hard-pressed to tell the communities of women apart, with both cultures obsessive about making women cover their hair and every inch of their bodies in very similar traditional styles. (preview at 2022 Other Israel Film Festival) (10/31/2022)
HALLELUJAH: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song - As in Marianne & Leonard, Jewish women aren’t heard from much in filmmakers Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine latest bio-doc, though his Los Angeles rabbi Rabbi Mordecai Finley of Ohr HaTorah Synagogue, provides textual analysis. As described in the Press Notes, I’ll presume this prominent interviewee is Jewish because she was from the same Westmount, Montreal neighborhood: “Nancy Bacal – Writer, journalist and editor of Leonard Cohen’s 1994 anthology, Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs. Bacal and Cohen shared a lifelong friendship that began during their school days in Montreal and lasted through the end of Leonard’s life.” She describes the conventional life expectations when growing up there. A very brief interview is with “Regina Spektor – Russian-born singer/songwriter who first performed “Hallelujah” in a concert for the Jewish Heritage Festival.” However, the documentary reveals yet another blonde lover in Cohen’s life, French photographer Dominique Issermann, who he met on the same Greek island featured in the earlier documentary.
Drawing on Alan Light’s The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of "Hallelujah", we do learn that the song was first de-Judaized, as John Cale felt uncomfortable with the Biblical references for his cover version, and then Shrek co-director Vicky Jenson bowdlerized the lyrics by “taking out the naughty bits”, which became the standard. (courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics) (12/9/2022)
The Hangover - There is nothing to particularly identify as Jewish the nasty, controlling, cold, can only be described as rhymes-with-rich "Melissa" (played by comedienne Rachael Harris as a brunette rather than her usual blonde). But then there's nothing particularly Jewish about her dentist boyfriend "Dr. Stu Price" (played by Ed Helms) until he shows his guy friends the engagement ring he's planning to give her and announces that it's the only thing his grandmother saved from the Holocaust. He keeps calling it "his Holocaust ring" throughout the movie, leading the groom's not-playing-with-a-full-deck future-brother-in-law "Alan" (Zach Galifianakis) to ponder: I didn't know they gave out diamond rings at the Holocaust. Consequently, I’m betting that the majority of movie viewers will then presume "Melissa" is Jewish. On her only plus side, while "Stu" goes on about her negative habits, such as an abhorrence of physical contact with semen, she did sleep with a bartender on a cruise so she's not completely frigid. While this bachelor party bromance comedy isn't completely misogynistic (there's a stripper with a heart of gold and the other two guys return to their wives declaring their love), its most venomous ire is aimed at the one woman most will identify as Jewish, and audiences will doubtless cheer when "Stu" disrupts the wedding reception with his liberation.) (6/2/2009)
Hannah Arendt (So, nu: Other than a couple of faculty wives who barely get any lines or personality, Hannah is very much the alpha-woman here, though with little sense of Jewish identity of any kind. But rare on screen is the portrayal of her close, supportive, mature, long-running friendship with Mary McCarthy is unusual (who helps American audiences by getting the German intellectuals to speak English around her). She almost gets to show a potential maternal side in how warmly she treats her Israeli friend’s sabra daughter. A colleague reported to me that the secretary Lotte Köhler (played by Julia Jentsch) is actually a composite of a couple of women, though it wasn’t clear if she, too, was Jewish. Reviewing this bio pic gave me the opportunity to read her controversial book, and I was fascinated. Ironically, the historian who most effectively counterered her facts was another Jewish woman, Lucy Dawidowicz with her devastating The War Against the Jews, published in 1975. A non-Jewish colleague told me her impression from the film was that Arendt was being objective; when I told her I thought she was, instead, being German, and that the whole film was a German perspective, she didn’t quite get what I meant. (updated 7/12/2013)
Hannah Einbinder: Everything Must Go
Did Tribeca Film Festival categorize the actress’s first cable stand-up special as “narrative” because she’s talking fiction? Certainly, her audience took her reminisces as true. About half-way through she announced she is bi-sexual, to cheers. I don’t know if her “Ava Daniels” on HBO’s Hacks is identifiably Jewish, so that the young audience already assumed she is Jewish. (She said she’s 28.) Only in her last bit did the thin redhead describe her Jewish family.
She started a routine about her grandmother’s funeral, by claiming that “Bi-sexuals are the Jews of the LGBTQ community.” Later, she put that in the context of her family and her grandmother’s Jewish funeral service (my transcription is as accurate as possible, though missing a few facts): “My grandmother came out of the closet in 1962, coming from Philadelphia to California on her own with two little boys; she advocated for herself… I come from a very queer family, with two trans siblings. My grandmother was an out and proud lesbian…My father is straight, but he cries during Sound of Music – call him a man you can trust.” She quietly defines “a word in my culture – hello, peace, bye – shalom. That is all the Hebrew I know. I’m a bad Jew.”
She talked about the funeral director objecting that she and her sister insisted on being pallbearers because women can’t possibly be strong enough, so men should do this. She claims she retorted: “We can handle the weight. I was captain of my cheerleading team. This is hardly the first time I’ve carried a lesbian who has gone limp…I carried her and thought about the legacy of her life - would she have been proud?”
She recalled the female rabbi asking all to join for a final prayer: “I panicked because I don’t know any prayers. But the clouds parted, God shone his knowledge upon me, and I began to sing.” The stage darkened, and she went into the audience singing, putting her hands on individuals’ heads. “So how could I possibly know this prayer?... I looked back at the sky – and realized this is the last song in Schindler’s List.” Cheers. She closed with an ironic joke that may or not be fiction. (at 2024 Tribeca Film Festival) (6/30/2024)
Hanna’s Journey (Hanna’s Reise) So, nu - Though based on Munich and Tel Aviv-based author Theresa Bauerlein’s novel Das War Der Gute Teil Des Tages (That was the good part of the day!) (not yet available in English), the Jewish woman character “Gertraud Nussbaum” (played by Leah Koenig), the main hard-driving business student “Hanna Eggert” (played by Karoline Schuch) assigned Holocaust survivor, is not in the novel, which may explain how undeveloped her character is. More than her more cynical women friend survivors at the old age home, she seems she’s an experienced Holocaust educator, particularly with young Germans, including going back to her mother “Uta” (played by Suzanne von Borsody) who since has been running an NGO to foster German/Israeli interactions. I was struck by the authenticity of the Israelis, particularly artists and young people, fascinated with Berlin, and similar interactions I’ve seen in documentaries. While the romance is a bit much, heck, Doron Ami as social worker “Itay” is a pretty irresistible hunk. (previewed at 2014 Kino!) (6/16/2014)
Happiness
Happy Endings (So, nu: Lisa Kudrow's character "Mamie" is nee "Miriam" and says she's Jewish when she's explaining at her job as a patient representative at an abortion clinic that she's pro-choice, but she lies about other things in the same sentence, so who knows? Writer/director Donald Roos comically covers some of the same issues around religious views of abortion and families that Todd Solondz handles dramatically in Palindromes) (7/25/2005)
Harlan: In The Shadow Of Jew Süss (Harlan - Im Schatten Von Jud Süss) (So, nu: The granddaughter who is the daughter of Harlan's tragic daughter whose marriage to an older Holocaust survivor and conversion to Judaism didn't assuage her inherited guilt is the most bitter about his work. Jessica Jacoby also did a Q & A with a showing at Film Forum. She's the only one interviewed who is convinced that a motivation to make such a powerfully antisemitic film is related to resentments towards his first wife, a Jew.) (3/7/2010)
Harley (preview at 2020/replay at 2021 Tribeca Film Festival)
Harmonia (2016) Writer/Director Ori Sivan contemporization of the Rosh ha Shanah Torah portions on Abraham, Sarah and Hagar, and how their complicated relationships play into the next generation of Ismail and Isaac (the silented, though the Akedah is glossed over), transposed to a classical music orchestra in Jerusalem, and then to the mutual liberation of rock ‘n’ roll, helped by Yaniv Fridel’s culturally integrated score. Having seen so many schmaltzy TV movies inspired by the first generation’s story, I was surprised how effective this works with Abraham (Alon Aboutboul) as a charismatic conductor, Sarah (Tali Sharon) as a harpist, and Hagar (Yana Yossef) a horn player, though I didn’t realize she was Arab until she meets with her oud master father (played by Ali Suliman). (seen courtesy of Film Movement) (10/25/2019)
Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story - In this entertaining and informative joint biographical portrait of married couple storyboard artist Harold Michelson and film researcher Lillian Michelson, Harold is remembered as Jewish, and Lillian remembers how his snobby Jewish mother and aunt disliked her as a penniless orphan in Florida, even meeting with her in person to forcefully try to dissuade her from marrying him. So they eloped. Consequently, there’s no sense that Harold maintained his Jewish identity or passed that on to their three children. (at 2015 DOC NYC Festival) (11/28/2017)
Harrison’s Flowers The story of the Newsweek photojournalist’s wife is a fictional overlay to show the horrors of the ethnic cleansing war in the former Yugoslavia, I’m not sure why plucky, devoted “Sarah Lloyd” in NJ, played by Andie MacDowall, is Jewish, as she refuses to sit shiva for her beloved husband who was reported killed on the job so she goes off to look for him, except that the director/adapter Elie Chouraqui is Jewish. I’ll have to read the original French book by Isabel Ellsen, if it’s available in English, to see if the lead character is Jewish there too.) (10/12/2007)
Haute Couture - There are only brief indications that “Esther” (Nathalie Baye) is Jewish, because of her treasured gold necklace star that thieves call “a Jewish cross”, and the long-fingered pickpocket turned protégé “Jade” (Lyna Khoudri) is Arab, because her Muslim best friend “Souad” (Soumaye Bocoum) in their banlieue claims she is. Regardless of their confusingly presented personal and family complexities, co-writer/director Sylvie Ohayon, with co-writer Sylvie Verheyde, create a marvelous tribute to the craftsmanship involved in the titular traditional French industry and the importance of passing these skills down from past generations (“Esther” became the Head Dressmaker in the Dior Avenue Montaigne workshop by apprenticing to her mother) to the now more diverse generation. (The Deputy Head “Catherine”, played by Pascale Arbillot, greets “Jade” that she originally came from her neighborhood – but doesn’t live there any more, even as “Jade” realizes “Esther” is not rich and commutes to work by train.)
Almost none of the plethora of fawning documentaries on clothing designers gives their seamstresses enough attention or credit. The presentation of this intense female-dominant environment is wonderful, from their discussions of materials, care and sewing techniques, to the girl-ish interplay of personalities, including the models. (As sweet as is the romance between gay-friendly “Jade” and design-trainee “Abdel”, played by Adam Bessa, his heterosexuality strains more credulity about this atelier.) (at 2023 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center and The Jewish Museum/ courtesy of Menemsha Films) (5/27/2022)
Hava Nagila (The Movie) (Also briefly in Reviewed: New York Jewish Film Festival 2013 of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (My additional notes.)
Heading Home: The Tale Of Team Israel I didn’t expect the documentary about Israel’s team’s improbable rise in the 2017 World Baseball Classic, directed by Jeremy Newberger, Daniel A. Miller and Seth Kramer, to have significant Jewish female presence, but it does. The Assistant General Manager Margo Sugarman is interviewed throughout. She noted when the team went to Korea: “I’m the unofficial team mother. For some of the players, it’s nice to have an older female presence around.” She notes that the players got particularly emotional when they went to Israel after qualifying; there, more players are moved to talk about their Jewish grandmothers – those they knew and those they had heard died in the Holocaust. Their emotions in Israel got more heightened when three female soldiers were killed in a terrorist attack. Their fans, from Brooklyn to Israel, were not just boys, but plenty of girls, too; many were Jewish day school students. I’ll confess that I still wear my Ike Davis Mets shirt to CitiField games because I decided I’ll only buy shirts of Jewish players since Shawn Green and there haven’t been a lot of Mets picks, so I appreciated learning more about his background with a Southern Baptist father and “hippiesh” Jewish mother (see in a young photo playing guitar); he shrugs that they predictably divorced. He recalls, I presume, a childhood experience: “I was doing a family tree. On Dad’s side I have five - seven generations. On my mother’s side I have three people, and then it was over. I asked: ‘What is this?’ She said: ‘That’s what happened during the Holocaust - most of the family didn’t make it.” I don’t think any of the men, whatever their Jewish background, were married to Jewish women. They did plant the flag for baseball in Israel. (preview courtesy Menemsha Films) (8/15/2019)
Heart of Auschwitz (Le coeur d'Auschwitz) - (seen at MoMA's 2012 Canadian Front, and reportedly rights issues will keep it from being shown elsewhere in the U.S.) Not only does this story exemplify the power of women’s friendships to help endure the Holocaust, but documentarian Carl Leblanc gives back to the survivors as much as he takes in information by providing a tremendous catharsis, as well as a reunion, for them – quite a step from their daughters relating that all they had communicated about their experiences previously had been screams in the night.) (3/21/2012)
The Hebrew Lesson (Ha’Ulpan) (seen at the 2008 NY Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (It wasn’t clear to me that the woman in the class from Lima, Peru is Jewish, but the film deals insightfully with issues of being Jewish vs. being Israeli for women.) (12/28/2007)
Heimat Is A Space In Time (Heimat Ist Ein Raum Aus Zeit) (So, nu: In this almost four-hour, “slow cinema” look at 20th century German history through his family, Thomas Heise dispassionately reads letters between his grandfather Wilhelm and Edith Hirschhorn, the Jewish woman who will become his wife. Her letters include talk of her studies in Vienna to be a sculptor, as well as student debates about Judaism. (In interviews, the filmmaker says she always cooked Viennese-style.) Edith’s parents, Max Hirschhorn and Elsa Kraus, also write to Wilhelm, and the first emotional heart of the documentary are the family’s increasingly depressing letters in the early 1940’s describing in unusual detail how they are more and more restricted - while a Nazi archival list of the thousands of Viennese Jews deported goes by for over 20 minutes on screen. Edith’s sister Perl wrote a hopeful letter before her turn: “Dad is undoubtedly in an old folks home, and Elsa somewhere busy.” Then the list of the last transport scrolls by with the red-underlined name of Perl Finkel, and the screen fades out. Wilhelm’s responses to the Reich bureaucrats foretell the issues his son Wolfgang will have with the East German Stasi due to his wife, even as a colleague later philosophizes that the dead are dead, regardless of which ideology was the cause. As the spouse and children of a mixed-marriage, Wilhelm and two sons were sent to the Zerbst forced labor camp, whose experiences the director first covered in his 2001 film Vaterland, that I haven’t seen and is not available in U.S.; the song that follows the transport list is from a Nazi film Die Frau meiner Träume that his father said they had to watch at the camp, as sung by Marika Rökk.) (at 2019 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (10/17/2019)
Heir to An Execution (First shown on HBO in 2004, director and on-screen interviewer Ivy Meeropol takes a very personal look at her grandparents Ethel and Julius Rosenberg through the perspective of her family and their close friends. Those closest to them remember a very Jewish, non-Orthodox, wedding and that they were very Jewishly identified. There’s lots of photos when Ethel tried to show she was a housewife and mother, and the oldest friends remember her beautiful voice and dreams of being an opera singer – and her pain in sacrificing her children. Though they also remember a witch of her mother, Tessie, it’s still shocking to find out they had many siblings and all had rejected them and refused to take in their sons – and refused to talk to the director. One cousin, whose grandfather was her grandfather’s brother, cries in apology and blames his mother, who visited them in Sing Sing and rejected Ethel’s personal appeal to adopt her sons. There’s a clip of Julius’s mother, with a thick accent, asking for and getting temporary custody, because the Catholic judge was impressed how Jewish she was. Ivy finds their graves and places stones on their plain gravestones.) (3/26/2015)
Herb & Dorothy/Herb & Dorothy 50x50 - The first movie mentions in passing that Dorothy Vogel comes from a Jewish family, but the only contextual reference in the sequel is that Herb’s funeral is at a Jewish cemetery. But her career as a public librarian and commitment to wide access to cultural literacy resonates Jewish values. (10/4/2013)
Here We Are (Hine Anachnu) - Writer Dana Idisis goes beyond her autistic brother’s story, as in her 2013 documentary Turning Thirteen, and TV series On The Spectrum to create an unusual and intensely compassionate father/son experience, that defies the stereotypical dynamics of most non/fiction portrayals of a family coping with an autistic child. While the Israeli parents are divorced from the stress, as usual, it is the father “Aharon” (an all-consuming performance by Shai Avivi, emphasized by director Nir Bergman’s claustrophobic close-ups) obsessively caring for a son who has become an adult (Noam Imber as “Uri” is completely convincing). Idisis has said this is something she worries about within her own family. But the mother “Tamara” (Smadar Wolfman) is not the typical shrew, or bossy, or controlling; she is, instead, frantically trying to do what is best for her son and ex-husband as they both age and have to face the future. Even as the father flees the legal, financial, emotional, and practical roadblocks that she has had to set up, she is always a caring mother and person, which is a difficult balance to portray, and is successfully achieved in this very moving film. (preview at 2021 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (1/30/2021)
Herskovits At the Heart of Blackness parses how Jewish anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits became the leading expert on African culture. But while probably for the first time in a documentary, the academics proffer the context of their own racial/ethnic identity and biases (sometimes in overly cutesy animations and annoying recreations) in evaluating his legacy, only one Jewish woman expert is heard from. His daughter Jean Herskovits not only personally reminisces about her father (the footage from his anthropological field work in the 1930's is fascinating), but is professionally proud that she introduced African history to the curriculum at a public university and recounts her experiences teaching his work to black students. (Seen at 2010 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (1/23/2010)
Hester Street (1975)
Restoration (2020)
The classic film has been restored in 4K from the 35mm original negative by Cohen Film Collection at DuArt Media Services, with the help of the daughter Marisa Silver of the director/writer Joan Micklin Silver, who died 12/31/2020. Theatrical release premieres October 1, 2021 in NYC and L.A.; Blu-Ray release and streaming acess followed.
Carol Kane’s (Oscar-nominated) “Gitl” is still one of my all-time favorite portrayals of a Jewish woman in film!
I hadn’t remembered that Silver based the story on Abraham Cahan’s 1897 novella Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, which I finally read. I was surprised how faithful to the original portrait of new immigrants on the Lower East Side is her adaptation. Minus Cahan’s overly melodramatic female histrionics and hysteria, this has more realism than the rose-glasses nostalgia such period films have shown since. Now in crisp black & white, from the opening “dance academy” scene that brings us inside a silent movie, using William Bolcomb’s Sousa-like music, until the characters speak in language that alternates from Yiddish (with clearly legible subtitles), to Yinglish, and authentically accented English, like my grandmother who arrived there in 1905. The low-budget ($400,000) of Silver’s debut feature doesn’t show with the evocative costumes, hair stylings, and mise en scène, such that each represents a stage in secularization and Americanization.
Through the performances of Kane and her defender in Doris Roberts’s nosy neighbor “Mrs. Kavarsky”, the audience sympathies switch away from the husband “Yossel/Jake” (played by Steven Keats) whose ambitions in work and leisure fill the first scenes. The two concluding scenes brilliantly capture the Old World in the New, and the power of women within the patriarchy. ”The Parting”, as the highly choreographed divorce chapter is titled in the novel, is portrayed like the ceremony is probably still done - with the emphasis on the women really having the power. The rebbetzin, wearing a sheitel just like the one “Gitl” had on at arrival that “Jake” ridiculed, collects the intermediary lawyer’s payments, courtesy of “Mamie Fein” (Dorrie Kavanaugh) “the Polish whore”, as the wife called her. She organizes the mechanics – arranging the Orthodox witnesses and scribe, and distributing their fees. The elderly rabbi goes through the ritual formula, including dropping the get into the ex-wife’s cupped hands – of “Gitl” now completely outfitted, to her ex-husband’s shock, like a Gibson Girl “Yankee” in a shirtwaist and piled-up natural hair -- with the warning that while he can re-marry today, she has to wait 91 days to marry again (i.e. to be sure she’s not pregnant). “Mrs. Kavarsky” assures the rebbetzin there will be another fee coming from a couple under a chupah.
The final, wintry scene, that Cahan ironically termed “A Defeated Victor”, is an overview of the titular location (filmed on Morton Street), with each new couple going in opposite directions, and the women in full control. “Mamie” schleps “Jake” to City Hall by foot to save her nickels. The newly clear voice of “Gitl” is heard assuring the scholarly boarder “Mr. Bernstein” (Mel Howard) he will be able to continue his religious studies, while tutoring her son she now insists be called “Joey” not “Yossele”, behind the grocery store she’ll pay for with the divorce settlement she cannily negotiated with an expressive raised eyebrow.
The realism is a wonderful lesson for those who a century later are tracing their Jewish genealogy with the complicated marriages and names that were changed by their ancestors themselves. In this beautiful restoration, Hester Street is even more vital and timeless now than in 1975. (previewed at 2021 New York Film Festival (updated 10/1/2021)
For my talk on this revival in “Hester Street ReVisited” for the Forest Hills Jewish Center’s Adult Education Program “Shabbaton”, I dived into Cahan and his source novella, the actual history, and all the informative extras on the newly released Blu-Ray: recorded via Zoom, on video and audio only. However, this June 20, 2022 recording accidentally begins about a quarter into my presentation, so here’s the opening section as written with visuals. Thanks to my husband Harold Shultz for his image searches and IT assistance.
Hey, Hey It’s Esther Blueburger (5/22/2010)
Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes
- Posted with permission - “Still from, Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes Gertrude Stein’s correspondence with a young George Platt Lynes. Left: George Platt Lynes, Gertrude Stein,1929. From travel album, courtesy, Philadelphia Museum of Art. Right: George Platt Lynes scrapbook page, courtesy Beinecke Library, Yale University.”
In Sam Shahid’s debut bio-doc, richly illustrated with archival footage and images, the eponymous subject (1907 -1955) starts his artistic career among the 1920s Paris avant-garde in Gertrude Stein’s salon. Though it is unclear how his Episcopalian minister father and “high society” mother from Englewood, NJ knew how to get him introduced to her at age 18, she referred to him as “Baby George” in her The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and she at first urged him to stay in college when he returned to the U.S., as in the letter above. But he came back to her Paris salon (warning her in following correspondence to stop calling him “Baby”). There, Lynes started teaching himself to be a photographer, including taking portraits of Stein; her favorite was used in promotion for her libretto of Four Saints in Three Acts. She wrote him: “You would now be my official photographer. I do hereby appoint you to this dignified post. Being a little fed up with Man Ray’s airs and graces.”, who ironically was originally the Jewish Emmanuel Radnitzky, also from the NJ area. The documentary includes many other of his early portraits of their associates and his artist lovers, from travel albums Lynes maintained with the now luminaries of the cosmopolitan Jazz Age. (Sarah Lynch’s score well evokes the periods of his life.)
Back in the U.S. in a long-term three-some, the other Jews in Lynes’ homosexual circle of artists, models, dancers, and writers, were male, patron Lincoln Kirstein, who was a classmate from boarding school and got him appointed as the nascent New York City Ballet’s official photographer, and friend social realist painter long-lived Bernard Perlin, seen in interview clips, who he appointed his artistic executor such that a wealthy collector purchased from him in 1985 20,000 of Lynes’ prints to end up “in the closet” among unopened boxes. Several now elderly friends joke that he could literally charm the pants off men to photograph them nude, including macho sailors he’d meet down on the docks when the fleet came in. (Portraits with tattooed torsos are included.) Though Lynes destroyed much of his early work, many others he sent to Alfred Kinsey, a voyeur at his gay parties, for permanent safe-keeping, some still labelled “private”, none listed by the Kinsey Institute as in its collection.
From his fashion lay-outs of the 1930s – 1940s to his unpublished male nudes, Lynes’ photographs in the film are as breath-taking as classic Greek and Michelangelo sculptures in their appreciation of the human body at its most perfect. (Even the sole female model he seems to have photographed nude, Laurie Douglas, had the slight figure of a pre-adolescent male, like the ballerinas Kirstein and Balanchine favored.) While female curator types comment about the double standard in museums towards acceptable female nudes vs. unacceptable male ones, I was reminded of a balletomane girl in my college dorm who would eagerly grab the latest editions at a Manhattan newsstand of a dance magazine for images of her fave male dancers until one day she realized she was the only straight woman purchaser.
Honesty about Lynes’ life and work are included too; once he went through multiple bankruptcies from his extravagant life style and was losing his own beauty, his photographs became more cruel in their eroticism. None of the expert curator, gallerist, and academic interviewees can quite figure out why his work was forgotten, especially as a progenitor for Mapplethorpe, including their use of inter-racial subjects. This fascinating and beautiful looking documentary, with theatrical distribution anticipated after the film festival circuit run, helps assure George Platt Lynes will now be remembered. (at 2023 New York LGBTQ Film Festival of NewFest/ 2024 theatrical release by Greenwich Entertainment) (10/4/2023; updated 10/18/2024)
High Tide (at 2024 New York LGBTQ Film Festival of NewFest) (10/18/2024)
Histoires d’Amérique: Food, Family and Philosophy (1989) I have to do more research on this Chantal Ackerman film from her NYC sojourn before I can comment, but the accounts by the Jewish women immigrants were very moving. (SRO screening at 2019 To Save and Project: MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation of Museum of Modern Art) (1/29/2019)
A History of Israeli Cinema (Raphaël Nadjari's useful primer includes many women academics in "Part I: 1933-1978", especially in parsing the macho images. "Part II: 1978-2005" deals more with the images of women and includes Gila Almagor's significance first as an actress, then as the writer of, and playing her mother, in The Summer of Aviya and an interview with actress Ronit Elkabetz about her writing and directing.) (Seen at 2010 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (1/25/2010)
Hitler’s Hollywood: German Cinema In The Age Of Propaganda: 1933 - 1945 - Director Rüdiger Suchsland describes this 100 minute film clip essay as his follow-up to From Caligari to Hitler: German Cinema in the Age of the Masses (2014), in what will be a trilogy on the history of German films. But it more serves as an expansion on Felix Moeller’s Forbidden Films (Verbotene Filme) (2014). Both are about the UFA films made under the supervision of Goebbels’ propaganda unit, though, though only about 40 films are on a “verboten” screening list. While much of this documentary seems to repeat the images and subjects from those films, this exploration of all these period films now kept by the Murnau Foundation for educational uses only, goes beyond revealing the familiar seriously vicious Nazi stereotypes of Jewish men. Suchsland’s narration, voiced by Udo Kier in Kino Lorber’s English language version, explains: “Anti-Semitic incitement also took the form of burlesque comedies and historical dramas” for the clip from the only Nazi musical comedy on this theme, which included enduring stereotypes of Jewish women, Hans Heinz Zerlett’s Robert and Bertram (1939). [See the still at the top of this page.]
Based on the 1856 play by Gustav Räder and set in 1839, Suchsland’s selection features the hefty, bourgeois, brunette and curly-coiffed “Frau Ipelmeyer” (portrayed by Inge van der Straaten) entering for a costume party, stuffed into an overly-bejeweled gown, and twirling for an expected compliment: Nu?. (David Stewart Hull in Film in the Third Reich: A Study of the German Cinema, 1933-1945 (Touchstone, 1973) describes her as “grotesque”, though, ironically, she reminded me of the very gentile dowager Margaret Dumont playing the Jewish Marx Brothers’ foil in evergreen Hollywood comedies; Suchsland glaringly ignores such aesthetic, stylistic, or thematic comparisons to British and American movies during this same time period.) The shyster “Robert” (Rudi Godden) responds: From the front you look like Catherine the Great. And from behind, as fit as Napoleon. Frau: Don’t mention Napoleon. He was anti-Semitic. “Robert”: That’s why he went broke in Moscow. (Suchsland doesn’t explicate how that joke fits next to such propaganda historical dramas he includes that were heavily anti-Napoleon, i.e. anti-France, such as Veit Harlan’s Kolberg (1945), as Napoleon emancipated the Jews of France and the countries he conquered.)
I found references to two other fiction films in this Nazi genre of anti-Semitic light entertainment not excerpted in either documentary that included Jewish women characters: Viktor de Kowa’s Wibbel the Tailor (Schneider Wibbel) (1939) and Heinz Helbig’s Linen from Ireland (Leinen aus Irland) (1939). Both documentaries excerpted the same inflammatory Elders of Zion-like scene from Erich Waschneck’s notorious The Rothschilds (1940), but so far I can only wonder if anti-Semitic images of Rothschild wives or daughters were also portrayed.
While Suchsland very usefully includes brief comments by such incisive observers of the Nazis’ use of propaganda as Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, and, especially, Siegfried Kracauer in From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film and Theory of Film, he does not provide the current context Moeller does about the continuing potential impact of these films. The notion that The Third Reich was itself a cinematic self-delusion is intriguing, but mostly he keeps repeating the obvious point that cinema of the past feeds the ongoing national cultural unconscious, including for gender too. (4/8/2018) (preview courtesy of Film Forum, where the US theatrical premiere run begins April 11th.)
Hit So Hard: The Life and Near-Death Story of Drummer Patty Schemel (briefly reviewed at 2011 New Directors/New Films of Film at Lincoln Center/MoMA) (So, nu: One of the most insightful interviewees is Jewish lesbian singer/songwriter Phranc, including her insights on how grunge rock adopted and popularized lesbians' look. Schemel admiringly cites her as a particular influence.) (3/25/2011)
Holy Air In this delightful satire of Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Jerusalem from the point of view of Christian Arab writer/director/star Shady Srour, the only Jewish women are the two on the three-person termination committee that the central Christian Arab couple have to go when they are afraid of having their baby due to both political conditions externally and her 50% risk of normal birth. The women, one an extreme feminist and the other a religious traditionalist, get into such a heated argument in disagreeing whether to approve the couple’s request that they storm out without making a decision. (previewed at 2017 Tribeca Film Festival) (3/31/2017)
Holy Holocaust Israeli Noa Berman-Herzberg, an unaware granddaughter of survivors, writes and narrates an animated short that reflects her experience at feeling used by black German friend Jenny to symbolize “Jewish justice” when the adopted Jennifer writes a successful memoir about her biological family’s notorious Nazi history to become a “Holocaust celebrity”. (Streaming at the New Yorker) (12/9/2022)
Holy Rollers
House of Z In the press notes, director Sandy Chronopoulos describes a prepatory interview she did for the documentary about fashion designer Zac Posen (who I knew nothing about and whose Jewish background is only mentioned in passing in the beginning): Zac’s sister Alexandra Posen “stopped me and said, ‘Don't forget that Zac's story involves his family. We are part of the journey as well.’…At the end of what I thought was my final interview with Zac, I asked him about the distancing of his family from the company. As you will see, it was a very uncomfortable moment for Zac. He was conflicted. And it's now one of the most poignant and honest moments in the film. Even his silence is revealing.” It was striking not only how supportive his family had been since he was a teenager in encouraging his talent, but how his mother Susan Posen, as his business manager, and his sister, as his production manager, were crucial to his rise. Then he dumped them when the business soured, and the second half of the documentary wasn’t interesting to me at all without them. And I couldn’t find a still from the film with either woman. (briefly reviewed at 2017 Tribeca Film Festival) (6/4/2017)
Howard - While it seemed pretty obvious to me that the family of the late lyricist/librettist Howard Ashman was Jewish, his sister Sarah Ashman Gillespie never refers to that in her wonderful memories of being his kid sister in a Baltimore County rowhouse, where he put on stories and plays for her by decorating their quotidian toys, as seen in re-constructed visuals. Until she tells of a significant seder at his Manhattan apartment when she stresses that he allowed a vert unusual interruption to take a phone call – from then Disney animation head Jeffrey Katzenberg confirming Little Mermaid was a go. She also refers to being surprised that he acted “like a nice Jewish man” when Howard finally told him about his illness – “How is your mother dealing with it?” (preview at 2018 Tribeca Film Festival) (4/5/2018)
How To Come Alive…With Norman Mailer - Subtitled “A Cautionary Tale”, the interview excerpts selected by director Jeff Zimbalist of/by the handful of Jewish women in the life of a major Jewish American 20th century writer are surprisingly stereotyped. Particularly in Part I “Don’t Be A Nice Jewish Boy”, his sister Barbara Wasserman (who presumably supplied the many childhood photos) recalled about their mother Fanny Schneider: “We both felt we had to be good…Reading was very important. We read everything…At seven years old he took an IQ test and scored 170, higher than ever at the school. Our mother told everyone he was genius. He always felt he was very important.” Mailer himself is heard about his mother: “She admired intelligence, she wanted me to go far…We lived in a ghetto of good manners, being Jewish was a state of mind for perceiving and evaluating life.” His sister notes: “But we had a sense that the world out there was strange and hostile – there was a lot of antisemitism that challenged him.” Not until almost the end of the documentary is it revealed that his accountant father had a “secret life” as a compulsive gambler that led to embezzlement, cheating, and getting fired. Not mentioned is that she worked, and probably had to. So rather than a stereotyped view of an overprotective, overly encouraging mother, she was actually shielding her children from serious problems at home.
Of his six wives, only one, his first Beatrice Silverman, is explicitly described as Jewish. Mailer: “She was liberated. As a Jewish college girl, she knew more than I did.” Their daughter Susan (who has written a memoir In Another Place: With and Without My Father Normal Mailer) describes: “She fell for him right away. She knew he was different. She taught him politics and about psychoanalysis. They read Marx together. They were very much intellectual couple. She knew he would be great writer.”
While Gloria Steinem is frequently mentioned as a friend (Mailer says she encouraged him to run for Mayor of NYC) and debate opponent (“He tries all the American Dreams”) on feminism, I identified the only Jewish woman literary commentator interviewed is Daphne Merkin, who claims, “He was rebelling against his Jewish raising.” (previewed at 2023 DOC NYC/ Showtime) (11/7/2023)
How To Make Challah (short) – Director Sarah Rosen re-purposes a 1975 black-and-white video of her Aunt Jane filming her Grandmother Ida preparing challah as she did on innumerable Fridays. In parallel, she films her now 80-year-old Aunt Jane making challah for the first time. Foregoing the usual nostalgia, Sarah seems to be a lot more fond of her aunt than the aunt was of her butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth grandmother. (“Did she ever hug me?”) Both lived in downtown Manhattan, but the grandmother had no interest in reminiscences (archival photographs supplement), while her aunt surveys the neighborhood changes during the sixty years she has lived three blocks from where the Triangle Factory fire happened. (That event and the subsequent trial of the owners were seared into my grandfather’s memory.)
I think this is a clever idea for others to follow for their own “from generation to generation” project with home movies. (at 2024 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) (2/16/2024)
How To Re-establish A Vodka Empire (briefly in Reviewed: New York Jewish Film Festival 2013 of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) (2/19/2013)
The Human Resources Manager (Shlichuto Shel Hamemune Al Mashabei Enosh) (also briefly reviewed at 2011 New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (My additional note.) (So, nu: For a change, the adaptation is far warmer to Israeli Jewish women than the original book. The rich Owner is here The Owner's Widow and she is imperious, but a fair manager who is definitely in charge. While there is less amusing detail about the secretary as empowerng mother to her boss as much as her infant, the much less nasty and more potentially affectionate Wife here is still in a trial separation, not divorce, for a marriage that will benefit from the Manager's experiences on this trip. Even the Daughter is less an obligation and more an enjoyable companion to hear his tale. The worker's lodging, though, is here with nuns rather than with the subservient brood of Hassidic sisters.) (3/5/2011)
The Human Turbine (Ha Turbina ha Enosheet) (previewed at 2011 Other Israel Film Festival) (More than the Israeli Jewish men who offer specific technical skills to help the Israeli Arab villagers, the well-meaning Jewish women do seem like condescending Lady Bountifuls who interpret the villagers’ desperate gratitude for political interventions, with such bureaucracies as hospitals and the police, plus funds, as genuine friendship. But at least the women are breaching a divide.) (11/26/2011)
Hummus! The Movie - The only Jews in the documentary are b’aal t’schuvah ex-hippie couple who were “converted” to the Breslov Hasidism by a musical guru. From a glimpse at her photographed in an off-the shoulder wedding dress, we now see her with enscarfed head and holding young children as she helps her Rasti-looking husband Eliyahu Shmueli run his successful chain of huumus stands. When I included this film in my presentation on diverse contemporary Israeli films at FHJC, an Israeli ex-pat strongly protested that the film primarily featured Arabs, while she considered huumus Israeli food. (at 2017 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum; then at Forest Hills Jewish Center Cinematek)
Hysterical Girl (short) (NY Times Op Doc) Kate Novack updates Freud’s case “Dora”: Analysis of a Hysterical Woman” to show how his denial of her accusation of sexual abuse by a friend of the family (who Freud knew) by blaming it on her “hysteria” has fed a century of debasement of women who protest their treatment and control by men, especially when they come forward to accuse their abusers. The clips of art, movies, images, testimony and more are compelling, while the women have to flee in animation. “Dora”, as portrayed by red-headed first-time actress, 16-year-old Tommy Vines, only mentions in passing she is Jewish, and that she was in reality named “Ida”.
Her German-born great-granddaughter Katharina Adler, after years of family and archival research, wrote a novel Ida in 2018 about Ida Bauer, that’s not yet fully available in English, only translated excerpts (pages 9 – 66). The New York Times “Op-Docs Team” email blasted an interview between the filmmaker and the author, who explained: “When I started writing my novel, I was very determined to tell Ida’s entire life. It was a project to give my great-grandmother a voice and show that she may have been a victim, but she was also strong-willed and lived a rich life. What was also important to me, was to tell her story in the 1940s when she had to flee Austria, first to France and then to the U.S. All of this was very important to me, but I have to say that everything seemed pretty historic to me. Only when the #MeToo movement started did I have a kind of awakening and realize, wait a minute …The story of her youth, that’s a #MeToo case… I think Ida could have thrived with the same education her brother received. But she was not educated the same way and even had to take care of her father.” The director described to her the research she did: “The first thing I did was try to understand Ida — not through the eyes of Freud. I read the transcripts of interviews that had been conducted with her (and your!) family members in the 1950s at the Library of Congress. Her cousin Elsa in particular helped paint a very different portrait of Ida than Freud did. I read your wonderful and lyrical novel about your great-grandmother. Your story of her arrival in the U.S. and her escape from Austria, her strained relationship with her son, your grandfather, was incredibly helpful, even though those parts took place when she was a grown woman. My sense from the research is that Ida was a curious, smart and sharp girl who wanted more education and more knowledge. But there were so few outlets for that in Vienna 1900.”
Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing: Documentary (2/17/2021/ 4/21/2021/ 7/28/2021)
I Am Not - Documentarian Tomer Heymann not only reveals the rarely seen difficulties a teenage boy film student adopted as an infant in Guatemala has in Israel with racism and a possible diagnosis of Asperger’s. Heymann also movingly captures the hopes and heartbreak of his mother Dvora Levy through home movies and frank interviews, as well as the son filming intense close-ups. We can witness her smiling joy at finally becoming a mother at age 40, considered too old to adopt in her home country, turn to guilt, stress, and the pain from a son who can’t comfortably hug her or return affection. When the filmmaker joins she and her husband accompanying their adopted son and daughter to Guatemala to meet their biological parents, Dvora’s warmth to her son’s birth mother is palpable. She so feels the woman’s distress at remembering another son’s death in an accident that she spontaneously offers that they all visit his grave, a greatly appreciated gesture that further cements their bond as mothers, beyond their son’s emotional capability.
In contrast, the adopted sister Michal did make an effort to learn some Spanish to communicate, and greets her birth mother and siblings with weeping hugs. She was also better able to express why they wanted to meet their birth families, due to their frustrations in Israel that go against the myth of the country as welcoming diversity: You don’t understand why I’m preoccupied with how I look because I don’t look Israeli. Do people speak to you in English or think you come from Philippines? They call me a shiksa! While her parents beg her not to cry, her retorts include, in what I could quickly transcribe: I can’t say I was born on a kibbutz and my name is Miriam, that I am Israeli! (at 2023 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center and The Jewish Museum) (1/16/2023)
The Iconoclast - Among the tales Dutch art smuggler/fraudster turned snitch Michel van Rijn tells is that his mother was famous in the Dutch Resistance during World War 2, and remained bitter that the Dutch didn’t do more to save the Jews, adding to her depression for losing so many friends. But I couldn’t catch or find her maiden name to check this “fact”. He does credit her for first introducing him to art connoisseurship, and his sense of Jewish identity extends, he claims, to helping the Mossad. (previewed at 2017 DOC NYC Festival) (11/1/2017)
Ida (previewed at 2014 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (So, nu: “Wanda Gruz” (played by the terrific Agata Kulesza) and “Sister Anna -Ida Lebenstein” (played by Agata Trzebuchowska) are Polish Jewish women maybe never seen on screen before, as impacted by local jealousies let loose by the Holocaust, in the Resistance, amnesia of both Communism and the Catholic Church, who make difficult choices specific to the Polish Jewish experience.) (updated 5/3/2014)
Idina Menzel: Which Way To The Stage? In director Anne McCabe’s surprisingly intimate and personal concert tour documentary, the Broadway, animated film voice-over, and recordings star does finally bring up her Jewish identity when her 16-concert tour gets to Pittsburg soon after the horrible gun attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue, with news clips about the 11 dead and six wounded inserted. She wears a “Stronger Than Hate” shirt with a big, glittery Jewish star, and dedicates a song from Rent to the still reeling city “because this show was all about tolerance. Here I am a Jewish girl from Long Island. In the Jewish religion we light candles, choosing light over darkness”, and holds up a yarzheit candle on stage. In response, the audience stands and holds up cell phone lights, and she invites them to sing along to “No Day But Today.” She laughs at her 2nd husband Aaron’s insistence they get married by a rabbi in her backyard. She frequently refers to her early career, even from high school, performing at bar mitzvahs on Long Island, seen in home video clips, and even revisits one venue – with a negative association with divorce in her family – while calling out “all those girls who were mean to me in [Syosset] High School”. Friends of her parents recall that they “wanted her name to start with an “I” [presumably the Jewish tradition of naming for a respected family member], so they stuck an “I” in front of “Dina” – then there’s jokes about the publicity she gets for mispronunciations. (preview at 2022 DOC NYC Festival/ Disney+) (11/9/2022)
I Do Not Care If We Go Down In History As Barbarians (Îmi este indiferent daca în istorie vom intra ca barbari) Scanning through all the reviews/interviews online with writer/director Radu Jude about why and how he made such a pointed film about his country’s determined Holocaust denial (even after the country had to investigate and confirm their collusion with the Nazis in order to gain entry into the European Union), none raised the obvious possibility that the brilliant, charismatic woman at the center of this film is Jewish. But I consider “Mariana Marin” (Ioana Iacob in a terrific film debut) at least a “putative Jew”, though her name is borrowed from a famous poet. (I can’t find anything personal on producer Ada Solomon to determine if she is Jewish either). She’s obsessed with Romania’s persistent twisting of history about the Summer of 1941 in Odessa (through what was then called Besserabia and Bukovina, sent to Transnistria) when a national hero Marshal Antonescu began ethnic cleansing of Jews and Roma (proclaiming the titular quote – and whose statues up throughout the country also had to be removed for EU approval). Planning a huge re-enactment of the Fascist events in the city square, she conducts thorough research in the archives (using imagery from the Einsatzgruppen as inspiration and checking uniforms’ authenticity in the National Military Museum,); she reads Jewish philosophers Hannah Arendt, Isaac Babel, and Walter Benjamin about the Holocaust perpetrators to her adulterous lover; she holds her own in intensive intellectual debates about the past vs. the present with him and a local official “Movilă” (Alexandru Dabija) – his debate on the relative definition of “massacre” is as funny as it is serious-- as well as with prejudiced and defensive actors and extras. While I’m of course dependent on the English subtitles, to me the specific clue that she could be Jewish (or of Jewish heritage because there are few Jews left in Romania) is when the official mocks her would she prefer if the Germans won – “But you would have been in a soap dish.” When she actually pulls off the complicated production, she’s disgusted that the audience applauds the words of the Marshal’s actual anti-Semitic speech and the immolation and hanging of the victims.
Radu Jude’s background historical research first resulted in his documentary essay The Dead Nation - Fragments of Parallel Lives (Țara moartă) - He reads the 1937 – 1948 year-by-year journals of small town Jewish doctor Dr. Emil Dorian marking the horrific rise of antisemitism in the country is visually contrasted with happy, proud photographs of normal life and soldiers taken by a professional studio in the town of Slobozia, in southeast Romania, accompanied by actual political speeches and nationalistic anti-Semitic anthems. The doctor mentions his daughters and family just in passing, then he goes to Bucharest, as he talks of whole families killed by Romanian Legionnaires, and women and girls raped on the deportations; even a politician reports on 200,000 women and girls assassinated, set on fire, children shot. He tells of all the restrictive laws and atrocities he’s heard about, on the street or on the radio. “Some of the murdering monsters were women.” He reports on a malnourished girl in 1944 who “somehow survived” to be shipped to Palestine after witnessing years of death; another survivor girl refuses to speak in Romanian like the Christians. The historian consultant on both was Adrian Cioflâncă. (both films at 2018 Making Waves: New Romanian Cinema) (12/24/2018)
I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman While in these interviews with Marianne Lambert about her oeuvre, Akerman insists she would not let her work be segregated into either women’s or Jewish film festival, her Jewishness comes through in the life-long impact of her parents’ experiences during the Holocaust, fleeing Poland only to be rounded-up in Belgium into concentration camps, that literally marked her as a wandering Jew, restlessly living from Brussels, to Paris, to New York City, to Israel. (previewed at Film Forum) (3/15/2016)
I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life And Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal (Included are brief interviews with his wife and daughter, as well as a tribute to his sacrificing mother.)
iMordecai
In this semi-autobiographical, amusing love letter to his Holocaust survivor, married in Brooklyn, retired to Boca Raton, Florida parents, co-writer/director Marvin Samel, with co-writer Dahlia Heyman, focuses on his father-son relationship, as portrayed by a wise-cracking Judd Hirsch and a stressed Sean Astin. (The father’s narrated flashbacks to the good and the terrible in the Old Country are in terrific animation.) As the supportive, long-suffering Jewish women, Carol Kane (left above) plays his jealous, affable mother “Fela” (I get a reparations check because I suffered more than you!) as she is first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and Stephanie J. Block (right above) plays his wife “Netta”, mother of their newborn twin daughters (I can’t take care of your mother tonight – it’s my monthly mommy and me dinner!) My mom’s comments: “Great technique – and poignant surprises.”
There is also attendance at regular survivors’ gatherings at the local JCC, that culminate with a lovely speech by a suddenly spry 100th birthday celebrant “Ida Brown” – until she surprisingly calls for forgiveness to smoothe a complicated plot point, that I thought sounded oddly Christian amidst mostly menorahs decorations as if it were Hanukkah. (courtesy of Femor Productions) (2/19/2023)
In A World… - The father changing his last name from “Solomon” to “Sotto” reminded me of a cousin who changed the family’s name from “Lefkowitz” to “Lefferts” – but here the daughter “Carol” (played by writer/director/producer Lake Bell) and her sister “Danielle” (played by Michaele Watkins) kept their Jewish name.) (8/1/2013)
Incessant Visions: Letters From An Architect (briefly reviewed at 2012 New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) (So, nu: This is almost a joint biography of Eric Mendelsohn, who I had never heard of before in my history of architecture studies/travels, and his wife Louise. She is seen briefly at the end in a TV interview, which makes clear how odd it is that the readings from her memoir, which, despite the title, is another basis of the film, are oddly done inauthentically without her heavy German accent. Their female descendants are seen at the end, where the Mendelsohns settled in San Francisco, with a shed full of their documents, without saying that that their papers are now archived at the Getty Library in California.) (1/21/2012)
Incitement (Yamim Noraim) (at 2020 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) (2/5/2020)
In Darkness (W Ciemnosci) (So, nu: The complex women show just how difficult it was to take quick chances to escape the Holocaust based not just on physical violence (there’s background scenes of naked women being shot into ditches just outside the city) to pre-existing emotional predilections, including personal jealousies and fears, and motherhood, including a birth in the sewers. The script conflates two women, making a resented refugee a pregnant lover instead of a wife, but a hysterical wife did choose above ground penalties, with her daughter, over being alongside a husband she didn’t trust, even once she was in a concentration camp, and a nervous sister couldn’t bring herself to go down into the stinky unknown. Factually, for love of the sister he pushed down the hole, “the Corsair” really did sneak above ground to try a daring rescue of the one left behind – yes, dear reader, they later married. While the sewer worker’s search for lost children through the sewers is fictional, the emotional heart of his realization that saving “my Jews” is his redemption, while his wife helps with their laundry and convinces him that Jesus was also a Jew, is through his relationship with the girl and her younger brother, movingly visualized when he lifts her up to daylight (hence the title of her memoir), and, finally, leads her and the other ghostly remnants, to a miraculous liberation that only witnesses would later believe. The film is dedicated to Marek Edelman, a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Thanks to my sister the Library Dean for getting me one of only 2 circulating copies in NYC of the out-of-print source book, at NYU’s Bobst Library, as there was a long waiting list at NYPL, for Robert Marshall's In the Sewers of Lvov. Until I read Krystyna Chiger’s memoir The Girl in the Green Sweater: A Life in Holocaust's Shadow, the other basis, where she describes refusing an adoption because her brother couldn’t go, I didn’t realize that it was, relatively, easier to place Jewish girls with gentile families than circumcised boys.) (2/12/2012)
Indignation (after I read Philip Roth’s novel) Kudos to Linda Emond’s portrayal of “Esther Messner” as one of the most sensitive portrayals of a 1950’s Jewish mother I’ve seen in film, including her slight Yiddish inflection, especially considering the source author and that the central character is her son “Marcus” (played by Logan Lerman) (7/7/2016)
Inglourious Basterds (There's probably hundreds of interviews with motormouth director Quentin Tarantino about his revisionist image of Jewish women. Here's quotes from one with Ella Taylor, who implies she is Jewish, in the 8/18/2009 Village Voice: Taylor says critics will "have a hard time calling him a hater of women on the basis of the movie's vengeful Jewish protagonist, Shosanna Dreyfus (played by French-Jewish actress Mélanie Laurent)." QT: "My original conception of Shosanna was of a real badass, a Joan of Arc of the Jews, killing Nazis, sniping them off roofs, pulling Molotov cocktails. Then I thought, no, that's too much like the Bride. [from Kill Bill, Volume 1 and Kill Bill, Volume 2] So I made her more realistic, more of a survivor, and then a situation happens that she can take advantage of. Then comes my favorite sequence, a Romeo and Juliet shootout at a movie premiere." He decided not to put background on "Shoshanna" and her survival through cinema onto the DVD. On Charlie Rose 8/21/09 he explained that he saw her more like Jackie Brown in how she kept herself together with poise. (updated 2/15/2010)
In Heaven, Underground The Weissensee Jewish Cemetery (Im Himmel, unter der Erde - Der jüdische Friedhof Weißensee) - A woman’s very detailed memories and photographic documentation of her wealthy family and their key decision to leave it all to flee to Switzerland in time opens the documentary and puts the history of the Berlin Jewish community in context. Her surprise and shock to discover that her family crypt survived all these years parallels the viewer’s. Particularly touching is the emotional reactions of those who discover the graves of their grandmothers with the instant recall of cooking and love that erupts. (12/2/2011)
Inheritance (previewed at 2013 Other Israel Film Festival) (So, nu: “Moshe”’s blonde wife – I can’t ID her name or the actress playing her – at first seems like a stereotype of a libertine Israeli compared to the chastity of Arab women, but her adultery with the Palestinian politician, who I think is “Ahmad” but I can’t ID the actor, is a genuine love affair they both want to acknowledge to their spouses, that has even more meaning for him because he was manipulated into his marriage, brutally resents his wife, and sees the Israeli woman as representing freedom.) (12/4/2013)
In Her Shoes
In Search of the Bene Israel (briefly reviewed at 2009 New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (In addition to glimpses and remembrances of director Sadia Shepard's Jewish Indian grandmother, some time is spent with a bride before her wedding and emigration to Israel, and her future mother-in-law who is thrilled that her émigré son trusted her to find a local bride for him. While it is delightful to see their customs, little is really revealed about these women as individuals.) (1/18/2009)
Inside Hana’s Suitcase (New Hampshire Jewish Film Buzz on p. 15 – N/A) (So, nu In an ironic addendum, the Auschwitz Museum admits that the suitcase that inspired Japanese children to emotionally connect the Holocaust with their history was a reconstruction of the original burned in a neo-Nazi-set arson. But that cast-off found meaning in a new setting. Unlike this film, another Canadian director has refused to make available his touching documentary Heart of Auschwitz (Le coeur d'Auschwitz), which similarly tracks a girl’s object at the Montreal Holocaust Memorial, to Jewish film festivals because he feels it shouldn’t be “ghettoized”. (7/3/2012)
In Between (Bar Bahar) - For a gloriously feminist film set mostly in Tel Aviv about a trio of Israeli-Palestinian women, Israeli-Jewish women are barely seen. A sales clerk in a dress boutique rudely glares at two of the shopping women when she overhears them speaking Arabic to each other. It’s possible that there’s a couple of non-Arab women among the diverse-looking, dancing/imbibing partiers in their apartment. (seen in 2017 Film Movement 15th Anniversary Celebration at Museum of the Moving Image) (6/9/2017)
In Jackson Heights (previewed at 2015 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (So, nu: An emotional elderly woman gives the keynote eulogy at the Yom ha Shoah observance.) (11/4/2015)
Inside Llewyn Davis (previewed at 2013 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (So, nu: In addition that the counselors at Camp Regis in the Adirondacks my sister and I went to with Bonnie Raitt in 1959 and 1960 were the types who were hanging around Washington Square digging these musicians and introducing us campers to their songs, “Lillian Gorfein” (as portrayed by Robin Bartlett) reminded me a lot of the creative, lefty earth mother kindergarten teacher I apprenticed with at the Ethical Culture Society in Teaneck for 10th grade Sunday School. Kudos to production designer Jess Gonchor for her Upper West Side apartment, including artisanal menorahs. With this release, a member of my history reading group) recalled how she introduced the Coens’ parents when they were all Yale grad students, and they invited her to their wedding in the Coen family Riverside Drive apartment that sounds like it could have inspired this one. But when her son met one of the Coens and relayed the family connection he didn’t believe him – a very Coen-ish story line. I correct that Nancy Blake is portraying a version of Jean Ritchie performing a Maybelle Carter song. But Dave Van Ronk’s ex-wife objects to the way the folk scene is portrayed.) (updated 12/19/2013)
Inside Man (So, nu: It's part of the cleverness of the plot that it's the Jewish grandmother who seems to defy the bank robbers in a story that's rife with Jewish references.)
In The Land Of Pomegranates (So, nu: Of the Israeli participants in the German dialogue program, one is a young a woman, red-haired Ayana from Galilee, granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor who studies Jewish scripture in Jerusalem’s at Hebrew University. As she struggles to understand the Palestinians’ viewpoint, she uses their attitudes to the Holocaust as a point of comparison, and is taken aback at how they also see themselves as similar victims, but of today. But she also thinks any empathy she intently look for is a momentary bubble. She is very annoyed that they don’t separate individual Israelis from the decisions of the government, when she tries to explain she has no such control. Cut from my review were descriptions of the Israelis who are interviewed in detail about their personal experiences with terrorism. Nira is the wife of a man injured in a suicide bomb attack on a Tel Aviv bus, whose continual PTSD breaks up their family, even after she gets him into therapy and then suggests they move up to the Galilee to be in a more serene environment. Ofra, the other mother, moved with her four children to a house near the security wall by the Gaza border, who since 1980 chose to live in a moshav there. She muses ironically that she thought her location was going to be safe for her children, but instead there were many breaches, with bombs and attacks through tunnels, and plaintively asks “Where do I go?” Putative Israeli Jewish women are also seen as nurses (not doctors) helping the Palestinian parents from Gaza who are followed accepting the medical charity of the Save A Child’s Heart organization in an Israeli, Hebrew-speaking only hospital for an operation to save her son’s life, the kind of cross-the-border, high-tech (somewhat patronizing) assistance covered in Leon Geller and Marcus Vetter’s Heart Of Jenin (2008) and last year in Rina Castelnuovo-Hollander and Tamir Elterman’s Muhi - Generally Temporary. (updated 1/12/2018)
In the Name of the Temple - In a TV magazine format, with blaring music score and ominous voice-over narration, this history of religious Zionists is full of familiar archival footage, with a few updated interviews by right-wing extremists and liberal scholars, including the only woman, sociologist Prof. Tamar Hermann reporting on opinion polls. Briefly seen is an Ultra-Orthodox female tour guide to the fantasy plan exhibit that “justifies” taking over the whole Temple Mount – which is ironically similar to Christian Evangelical supporters of Israel belief that both Jews and Muslims will be disappeared there with the Second Coming. More extended background can be read in Yossi Klein Halevi’s Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation (2013). (courtesy of Seventh Art Releasing- which is making the film only available in the U.S. for screenings and educational use by communities, not in theatrical or wider release nor streaming) (3/11/2023)
Intimate Stranger - Unusual look at a 20th century Jewish family from Alexandria, Egypt to Brooklyn to Japan, and back. Though it’s a portrait of a grandfather, the perspectives on his daughter and wife are quite insightful and poignant.) (9/6/2012)
The Invisibles (Die Unsichtbaren - Wir wollen leben) (two of the four survivors portrayed are women) (Docu-Drama) (at 2018 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (1/7/2019)
Ira & Abby (So, nu: While it’s not 100% clear that the nebbish’s Mother (played by Judith Light) is Jewish, his patient ex is, and she’s portrayed much less stereotyped than usual in such romantic triangles.) (9/16/2007)
Iraq ‘N’ Roll (briefly reviewed at 2012 New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) Rocker Dudu Tassa interviews his mother extensively about her father and uncle, and how her dreams of being a singer were quashed by their disillusion with Israel. So it is very moving when her son invites her up on stage for the first time in her life. I haven’t gotten a hold of the album, as an import, yet to hear if he recorded her as well.) (1/21/2012)
Irena Sendler: In The Name of Their Mothers - While I also haven’t yet reviewed the Hallmark Hall of Fame version of her story, The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler starring Anna Paquin, I was struck in the documentary by the nonagenarian Righteous Gentile’s frank admission that she could only save blond Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto, both in terms of getting Poles to take them in and hiding them from the Nazis. She related the one time she gave in to a desperate mother by taking in a brown-haired girl—with a not small nose-- who “looked Jewish”, and had to wrap her in bandages to conceal her identity. I couldn’t help but think my red-headed siblings or my sandy-haired children could have been saved in such circumstances– but not me. There but for fortune. . .Albeit, until I read Krystyna Chiger’s memoir The Girl in the Green Sweater: A Life in Holocaust's Shadow (one of the basis for In Darkness (W Ciemnosci)) where she describes refusing such an adoption because her brother couldn’t go, I didn’t realize that it was, relatively, easier to place Jewish girls with gentile families than circumcised boys.) (updated 2/29/2012)
Irena’s Vow (2/14/2024)
Iris (previewed at 2014 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (So, nu: There is not a single mention or implication that Iris Apfel is Jewish, and I didn’t spot any Judaica among her amazing collections, though with her thick New York accent, entrepreneurship, and sharp shopping and negotiation skills all audiences will assume she is Jewish, and these aspects of her all come together in a positive and stylish outfit. In the Ladies Room afterwards, we were commenting that we expected Joan Rivers to cross paths with her, and there are similarities in their lives and their documentaries.) (10/12/2014)
Irmi - A surprisingly quiet choice to spotlight for “Closing Film” in the Festival, this documentary is a model for how almost any Jewish woman’s life that intersects with history could be made into a memoir film, co-directed by Susan Fanshel and subject’s daughter/interviewee Veronica Selver, as long as one has a tremendous eye and resources for archival footage and photographs, plus home movies, including interviews with the subject and her family and friends. Let alone getting actress Hanna Schygulla to read the memoir German émigré Irmagard Selver wrote late in life for her grandchildren. (preview at 2021 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (2/1/2021)
Ismael's Ghosts (Les fantômes d'Ismaël) (“Carlotta Bloom” (played by Marion Cotillard), the daughter of the mentor (Lázló Szabó) of central character “Ismaël Vuillard” (played by Mathieu Amalric), and his disappeared then re-appeared wife, as non-Jewish director Arnaud Desplechin almost always includes a Jew in his films) (at 2017 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (3/2/2018)
Israel: A Home Movie (Kakh Ra'nu) (So, nu: While memories of women soldiers are notably missing, the vociferous commentary by the women, who are seen in Palestine from the beginning, adds more than the images of post-wars’ family reunions, romantic jaunts, weddings, and babies.) (7/13/2013)
An Israeli Love Story (Sipur Ahava Eretz-Israeli) (2017) Director Dan Wolman adapted this from Pnina Gary's solo autobiographical play, “based on a true story” of what the publicists’ describe as “A Pasionate [sic] Romance Between A Theater Director And The Son Of Israel's Second President”. But to me it reeked of every cliché of the pioneer generation of the post-World War 2 set, with stiff acting that had wincible chemistry between characters, exacerbated by the naiveté of the talent-less wannabe actress/director “Margalit” (played by Adi Bielski). She was particularly naïve about the role of the arts in a Socialist kibbutz facing Arab assaults. Just the kind of movie that appeals to audiences at small, suburban Jewish Film Festivals. (seen courtesy of Film Movement) (10/25/2019)
Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy? (briefly reviewed at 2013 DOC NYC Round-up Part 1: Bio Docs) Other Israel Film Festival) (So, nu: Chomsky talks at length about the influence of his mother and wife.) (1/13/2014)
Is That You? This is a typical road movie of the find-yourself kind popular with young folks at indie film festivals and the nostalgic sentimentality popular with old folks at Jewish film festivals. Israeli director Dani Menkin, story by Dani Menkin & Rod Bar, script by Eshkol Nevo & Menkin, largely depends on the shambolic appeal of central actor Alon Aboutboul as “Ronnie” as a projectionist who loses his job in Israel and sets out to find the young love of his life “Rachel Golan” after his brother the car dealer in the U.S. claims to have seen her – by her upcoming 60th birthday. (I presume the flashbacks to their youthful hippie-ish days were on a Tel Aviv beach.) Not only is the geography unclear throughout (filmed around Syracuse, NY) and the opportunities for diverse cross-cultural mis/understandings mostly squandered, other than a Tex Mex country music fan, (none of which would matter to an Israeli audience, though most of the film is in English), the Jewish connections of all the women he meets are very confusing, starting with his sister-in-law “Melanie” (Rita Worlock). Her Israeli husband Yakov/Jacob (Rani Bleier) complains about the busty Israeli their non-Hebrew-speaking son “Michael” (Patrick Michael Kelly) fell in love with while on a Birthright trip, who has lingerie photos of her all over his room and goes on about her body. (These naïve jokes, including about his claim to want to join the elite Golani Brigade, are presumably aimed at the Israeli audience.) The clearest conversation on a sense of identity is with the student documentarian “Myla” (Naruna De-Macedo Kaplan). She gives him a ride in her big (borrowed) SUV and insists on stopping to visit her Eastern-European-accented grandmother on the way, who clearly seems Jewish (Amy Dourghty). “Ronnie” asks the young filmmaker: I didn’t know you were Jewish. “Myla”: Don’t worry - she is, I’m not. By the time “Ronnie” improbably finds the woman everyone along the way admires, “Rachel” (Suzanne Sadler) in her native Canada (!), she does not seem at all like a woman who at any time lived in Israel.
As expected with Menkin’s background as a noted documentarian himself (Dolphin Boy), the best parts of the film are the presumably? real “interviews” around the theme The Road Not Taken, asking older people if they have regrets. While the grandmother insists: My generation has no regrets., many others do, and many of the older women come across as Jewish; one listed participant is Muriel Shapiro. Of the several women living where “Rachel” use to as he tracks her down is a lesbian couple, possibly one who is Jewish, whose testimony is presumably scripted. (8/19/2016)
It Always Rains On Sunday (3/7/2008) (So, nu: East Side/East End: Eastern European Jews in London and New York, 1870-1920 by the late history professor Selma Berrol of my history reading group confirms how much Bethnal Green is like the Lower East Side. But I haven’t seen another old British movie with two feisty Jewish women, the gangster’s social worker sister working with a priest at the local community center, and the wife of the jazzman who lets him know in no uncertain terms what she thinks of his cheating with shikses, even if they are secondary characters.)
It’s What Each Person Needs
- star Becca Willow Moss by cinematographer Maya Bankovic
(short) – An apt docu-fiction hybrid for the pandemic, “actor-artist, sex worker, and caregiver”, as the synopsis describes Becca Willow Moss, video chats with a range of people who are lonely and need companionship that really connects to them. Toronto-based filmmaker Sophy Romvari reinforces the French stereotype of a Jewish woman with curly auburn hair as it quickly becomes clear from how she interacts with her many contacts that she’s Jewish, including dropping in Yiddish words and phrases, and singing soothing Hebrew songs to elderly ladies who appreciate her as if she was the daughter they perhaps never had, especially as she promises to bring ruggelach on her next visit. Her warm reassuring tone encourages her callers to talk about themselves. Playing a version of herself as she plays along with men’s fantasies of domination, she is every bit the hippie shaman shrink, with fingers and arms full of spiritually resonant rings and bracelets. (at 2023 First Look Festival at Museum of the Moving Image) (3/17/2023)
Itzhak - Itzhak Perlman’s wife Toby is a co-star. From clips of an earlier documentary, it’s clear that many of her reports on their lives together, since teen friendship at music school where she also studied violin such that she can knowledgeably evaluate his performances, are standard comments she is used to providing to interviewers, including about being baseball fans (was she also a Mets fan?) and their agreement on their degree of Jewish observance, such as keeping kosher and observing Sabbath dinner, with their children and grandchildren. (One young girl, he proudly notes, plays the flute). There are only hints about his mother Shoshana, who was clearly an overwhelming influence. Not only did she supervise his daily practice in Israel, when he studied with Rivka Goldgart, who he does not describe fondly, but his mother brought him at age 13 to New York when neither knew English, living together in one room for years as he studied at Juilliard under the one woman who could see his talent beyond his polio handicap. As he is about to talk more about his mother, his wife, as usual, interrupts with sympathy for what her mother-in-law’s generation faced, from difficult circumstances in Poland originally and then emigrating to Israel, and on to the NYC, that she had to always be emotionally restrained. (seen at 2017 DOC NYC Festival) (PBS’s American Masters) (11/17/2017)
Jaffa (briefly reviewed at 2009 Other Israel Film Festival in New York) (That both families are working class is unusual enough in films about star-crossed lovers, albeit the Jewish family is the Arab family's employer. But Ronit Elkabetz is once again unafraid to portray an unsympathetic mother, one who would rather think her daughter is seduced and abandoned than engaged to an Arab. Dana Ivgy heartbreakingly conveys the complex emotions of a teenager under intense pressures – of love, family, and loyalty. I don't recall another film showing the difficulties inter-faith couples face in Israel of even trying to legally wed, as laborious arrangements need to be made to go to Cyprus, let alone the social opprobrium.) (11/14/2009)
Janet Planet - In writer/director Annie Baker’s debut film, the titular mother (played by Julianne Nicholson) mentions in conversation with her troubled friend that her father was a Holocaust survivor. But there’s more Buddhist imagery and references than anything Jewish around her house. (courtesy of A24) (12/11/2024)
The Jazz Baroness (Baroness Pannonica “Nica” Rothschild de Konigswarter startlingly reinvented herself from an heiress of one of the most famous Jewish families in European history, and mother of five, to become the cool cat patron of be-bop in 1950's New York. While a couple of her more conventional, elderly cohort female relatives are interviewed for comparison, in such large baronial rooms that their echoing words are hard to hear, the director, her grandniece Hannah Rothschild, annoyingly and moodily hogs the screen about her search to connect as a family rogue. Helen Mirren gets to speak too few of Nica's jaunty words. The same photos and footage of her with Thelonius Monk are repeated, yet the trove of her letters and more in her friend Mary Lou Williams' Collection at Rutgers is only glimpsed. (I missed the premiere on HBO, catching it at 2010 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (1/23/2010)
J. Edgar (It was very noticeable that when Hoover recalls the good old days of deporting real Bolsheviks, he flashes back to Emma Goldman (played by Jessica Hecht). But Dustin Lance Black’s script carefully never has him refer to her as Jewish, let alone derogatorily in that context. The reason seems to be because late in life he’s seen favorably compared to Richard Nixon’s pettiness and biases.) (11/19/2011)
Jellyfish (Meduzot) (So, nu: Despite the Lady Bountiful Mom, there are no stereotypes of Israeli let alone Jewish women here, as each passes something of themselves to the other.) (previewed at the New Directors/New Films Series at Lincoln Center/MoMA) ((4/4/2008)
Jeruzalem
Jews of the Wild West - In Amanda Kinsey’s superficial and historically haphazard overview of Jewish immigrants who went west of the Mississippi, several Jewish women are featured, including Wyatt Earp’s wife Josephine, and Golda [Mabovitch Meyerson] Meir’s experiences from Milwaukee to Denver. While Ray Frank in Oakland, CA was covered as the first woman to preach at a synagogue, the other women heard about are matriarchs in family histories, from Texas, to New Mexico, to Colorado. Only three of the Jewish agricultural colonization experiments are mentioned (Galveston, Cotopaxi, and Petaluma), though there were more in the west; credit is only given to Jacob Schiff as a sponsor. (at 2023 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) (1/17/2023)
Joan Rivers- A Piece of Work
Joann Sfar Draws From Memory - (briefly reviewed at 2012 New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) He talks a lot about how his mother and grandmother inspired the women in his The Rabbi’s Cat and Klezmer series – and they are very beautiful, bold, clever, and sexy, without being the ridiculous superwomen of most graphic novels. In an Afterword in the edition I got of Klezmer of Part 1, he goes more into his feelings and attitudes about Jews and being Jewish, while at the end of the film he casually considers what it means for his children that his wife isn’t Jewish.) (1/21/2012)
Jojo Rabbit - Writer/director/co-star Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Christine Leunens’s Caging Skies, that I haven’t yet read. The Jewish girl “Elsa”, played with charming aplomb by Thomasin McKenzie, is central to ground in reality this lovely satire of Fascist society in the 1940’s where a German boy has his version of Adolf Hitler as an imaginary friend. While the very creative New Zealander Waititi usually identifies publicly with his father’s Māori of Te Whānau-ā-Apanui heritage, as in his wonderful, somewhat autobiographical Boy, he has said this film is his tribute to his mother’s Russian-Jewish heritage, with reminders that earlier in his film and writing career he had used her birth name of "Cohen". (11/17/2019)
Joy - Melissa Rivers portrays in a beautiful tribute her mother’s innovative use of early QVC to sell her jewelry on TV. Anyone else would have turned her into a caricature. With, of course, perfect nasal New York accent and body language, she lovingly shows the affectionate nature of her mother’s fashion suggestions to the titular character and the script emphasizes her mother’s phenomenal success (not mentioning that it was a time when she couldn’t get other jobs.) (12/1/2015)
Le Juif de Lascaux - In a very creative biography, filmmaker/critic Louis Skorecki, who was born in the Vichy Gurs internment camp in 1943, imagines finally talking to his parents about his Jewish heritage (and glaring lack of relatives) that they always avoided; he says returning French Jews were embarrassed to pass on their Jewish identity. While remembering foods such as borscht and cakes, he particularly imagines asking his “Polish Jewish” mother (portrayed by at least two caustic women), as a child, teen, and young man, about the foods she made and the Yiddish terms she used to describe these redolent foods. He treats stuffed chicken neck skin (“helzel”) like a sausage version of Proust’s madeleine, as tasting it brings back memories of her kitchen, here theatrically represented outdoors like a food truck, reducing him to childish demands. (My mother talks about a similar memory of my grandmother, similarly from what is now Ukraine: “Not the neck itself - that would just end up in the soup. But she’d take off the skin of that neck, and stuff it with a very tasty combination - so sort of stuffed kishka, but much better.” Mocking his lack of background, he comically refers to himself as “The First Jew” (hence the metaphorical reference to the caves of Lascaux, like those Werner Herzog plumbed in Cave of Forgotten Dreams). Resisting an admonishment from his remembered father to study Torah, he instead imagines several amusingly diverse couples as Adam and Eve -- and one woman in the garden is the Biblically accurate portrayal of Adam’s first wife: I love you Lilith, but you annoy me. Unfortunately, in a long post-Snowzilla marathon day of viewing selections from FID Film Festival Marseille, I dozed to miss the conclusion of how his relationship with his dismissive mother was resolved, compared to his father’s constant belittling and criticism, let alone I forgot to pick up the explanatory hand-out. (seen in First Look at Museum of the Moving Image) (1/26/2016)
Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait (previewed at 2017 Tribeca Film Festival) Schnabel’s parents are remembered as Brooklyn Jews by an old school friend and his very New York Jewish-sounding aunt, but once his story leaves Brownsville, Texas, none of the other women in his life seem to acknowledge that.) (5/5/2017)
Junction ‘48 While the lead Palestinian rapper considers it revolutionary to appropriate Bronx hip hop attitude, swagger, and everything else, the Jewish Israeli women in this feature, as written by Oren Moverman and Tamer Nafar based on Nafar’s experience, are condescending (a TV show host insists on calling him “Israeli Arab” not Palestinian because he lives in Lod) or sluts. (previewed at 2016 Tribeca Film Festival) (3/25/2016)
June Zero - American co-writer/director Jake Paltrow’s look at an ensemble of Israelis affected by the 1962 Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem is primarily male. The two briefly seen Jewish women are there to argue mainstream points of view against men defending their perspectives as witnesses to history. Well-known Israeli actress Joy Rieger plays “Ada”, a Jewish Agency employee leading the first American tourist group visiting Holocaust sites in Poland. She flirts with young handsome survivor “Shula Spiegel” (Idit Teperson) in order to separate him from the group to vehemently warn him that his vivid testimony about his brutal treatment in the Warsaw Ghetto is going to be repeatedly used by the Agency that will make him frequently re-live his horrors. To her surprise, he is willing to do so, because of its finale that he served as a uniformed investigator for the prosecutor at the Eichmann Trial (and is afterwards seen disposing of the ashes). His other point was the basis of the 1974 Israeli documentary The 81st Blow (Ha-Makah Hashmonim V'Echad), which from the IMDb description I probably saw the edited by one-third version shown on PBS in 1977, that may have been the first Holocaust documentary I remember seeing. “Ada” so much can’t take hearing the repetition of the sufferings that she asks to be transferred from this assignment to instead assist refugees from Switzerland. She offers to bring him along with her to the next destination on the tour, but he wryly responds: I’ve already been to Auschwitz.
After the film spent much amusing time on the machinations of the 12-year-old Libyan Jewish “David” working off-the-books at the factory that made the crematorium for Eichmann’s body (otherwise illegal in Israel as a rabbinical consultant tells the prison authorities that Judaism doesn’t permit cremation), decades later the adult “David” somehow (improbably) goes to Wikipedia (which I don’t think has a physical headquarters) to protest that his actions are not included. But staffer “Shira Donir” (Noa Koler) (does it have a formal staff?) insists that the last living employees have not confirmed his work. He retorts: Building the oven was the most important thing in my life…What’s wrong with asking for recognition? Based on the evidence she recognizes, she refuses – implying he was treated the opposite of Holocaust survivors. (Though Israel had turned away from listening to them until the Eichmann Trial.) The film emphasizes that while non-Ashkenazi Jews were used at the prison and for any contact with Eichmann to prevent the appearance of a revenge killing, they were not being treated well by the government and Israeli society. (at 2023 Israel Film Center Festival/ courtesy of Cohen Media Group) (6/6/2023)
Kadosh
Kaddim Wind: Moroccan Chronicles (Ruah Kaddim – Chronika Marokait) (seen at Israel at 60 at Lincoln Center) - A documentary that blows away every preconception about Israel’s welcoming in of Diaspora Jews with a frank look at the treatment of Mizrahi Jews from Morocco, and North Africa in general, and provides incisive insight on Israeli politics and racism. Unfortunately, the focus is only on the experiences of six male leaders, with women barely heard from or seen briefly. When they are included in group discussions, they are passionate and articulate about discrimination and the necessity for change. (6/15/2008)
Kaddish (1984) – Filmmaker Steve Brand’s documentation of the relationship between a Hungarian Holocaust survivor father Zoltan Klein and his rebellious activist son in Borough Park, Brooklyn, has taken on added significance as the son later became known as Yossi Klein Halevi, whose lectures, journalism, and other writings have become widely known in the U.S. and Israel, as he helps communicate between each Jewish community to the other. (He was “Scholar-in-Residence”, via Zoom, at my synagogue the same week as this film was at NYJFF.) His works include an autobiography Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist: The Story of a Transformation, originally released in 1995 when Rabin was assassinated by a more violent more extremist, and was re-issued in 2014 by Harper Perennial, with a new introduction. Though it covers the same period in his life as this documentary with a different insight into his life and motivations than the director’s interpretation, he never references the film. He mentions his mother and sister even less than Brand shows them; both just cite them as being far more conventional in their aspirations, wanting to be married and have children, albeit supportive of him. Ironically, that became his goals too. (preview of world premiere of IndieCollect’s 4K restoration, that “contains sequences re-edited by the filmmaker”, to be distributed by Kino Lorber, at 2022 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) (1/23/2022)
A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff - Like the artist Alicia Jo Rabins, creator of the original one-woman show from which this film, directed by Alicia Jo Rose, is adapted and expanded, I, too, have been obsessed with Madoff and his relationship to the Jewish community, particularly Jewish women, and have reviewed several films related to him, both documentaries: Chasing Madoff and In God We Trust, and fictionalizations: The Wizard of Lies and Madoff. (A Netflix docu-series is still coming.) While Rose shows herself, in a lengthy prologue, as a multi-media artist-in-residence embedded on Wall Street at the 2008 financial crisis, I was inspired by having laid the ground-work for an ethics center at a business school once known for teaching accounting with a conscience. Unlike my fantasy of focusing on the most diabolical people in the greed – the international feeder fund of the patriarch, daughters and sons-in-laws behind the Fairfield Group, Rabins appropriately focuses on the victims as a betrayed affinity group in the Ponzi scheme.
She found colorful representatives, channeled most of their words and cadences from interviews into character-driven songs, creatively interpreted through music-videos by Rose (with use of klezmer music by Golem and animation by Zack Margolis). The through concept is to symbolically excommunicate Madoff from the Jewish community, within historical context she explains as a Jewish educator. Though some songs are stronger than others, she portrays, in costumes, each character directly or indirectly impacted who she managed to contact, including: a bank credit risk officer, Palm Beach country club ladies, a Buddhist monk, a quant, FBI agent, therapist, lawyer, and even a happy investor. While the finale is a united kaddish chorus, the delightful climax is a synchronized swimming routine (by a real troupe), with a drone capturing Busby Berkeley-like choreography from above. Unique Jewish film! (preview at 2022 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) (1/25/2022)
Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (So, nu: the diversity of selected animators also extends to including the (secular) Jewish woman animator Nina Paley, whose work I have followed since seeing the North American premiere of her Sita Sings the Blues at 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, and whose video gave the title to This Is Your Land in Human Rights Watch Film Fest 2015. Her “Children” section builds on the resonant Hebrew phrase “L'dor va'dor” (“From generation to generaton”) that is sung at Shabbat services, as well as ancient Middle Eastern religious symbols, including the hamsa with the winking eye, she’s been researching for her next feature-length piece Seder-Masochism, which will be something of an animated Haggadah/Exodus.) (8/10/2015)
Karaoke - Israeli writer/director Moshe Rosenthal is well- meaning in centering his film around a 60-something couple living in a nice high-rise apartment - “Meir” (Sasson Gabay), a retired teacher, and “Tova” (Rita Shukrun), who have been together for 46 years. The film mocks “Tova” for constantly shopping and being a clothes horse, though the director has noted in interviews that most of what she wears, including a key pair of shoes, are from his own mother’s closet, and “Tova” owns a boutique in the mall so she has turned her interest in fashion into a business. Their relationship and their lives are turned upside-down when they get too friendly with the new buyer of the Penthouse Miami talent agent “Itzhik” (an unusually blowzy comic Lior Ashkenazi), with a Turkish transwoman guest. “Tova” tells him: Our kids bring us joy, their two daughters, the oldest is 36 and married, and I think there were references to babysitting grandchildren, but they can tell right away he’s gay. Foolishly “Tova” tries to set “Itzik” up with shy “Bella” who works in her store. [I can’t yet identify these three actresses.] Along with “Meir”s attempt to follow “Itzik”s lead, this all gets dragged out slowly, and goes on way too long, making the film feel longer than 100 minutes.
What makes the film of some interest, and the reason that the script won the Weil Bloch Award for “outstanding films on the subject of shared society, racism and immigration” and garnered support from the Gesher Multicultural Film Fund, is that the couple is Sephardic, and discover that “Itzhik” is too, sharing a few lines in Ladino and a traditional song. For “Tova”, her pride in her cultural heritage is particularly expressed through the Greek dance the rebetiko, and her husband has videos of her dancing at family celebrations. But when she returns to party in the Penthouse, “Itzhik" mocks that her interpretation is not, in fact, accurate: You’re dancing the “Tovatiko”. I should hook you up with a friend who does authentic Rembetiko. Mortified, she flees back downstairs to her computer (not something she usually does) to intensely watch videos of dancers that confirm the truth. Her petty revenge turns the whole building against his loud music. Until she and her husband decide to dance, together, their way. (at 2022 Tribeca Film Festival/ 2023 Israel Film Center Festival) (6/30/2022)
Keep Quiet While it was international news when Csanád Szegedi, a youthful leader of the rabidly right-wing, anti-Semitic Jobbik Party in Hungary was outed as Jewish, there was no focus on his mother and grandmother, a survivor of Auschwitz. In this documentary, he finally confronts them about the secret they kept from him, even hiding her tattoo for all these decades. What comes through is the degree of fear that they constantly lived in, convinced that it could happen again and they both wanted to protect him, even saying nothing as he espoused an exaggerated take on his (possibly late) father’s views. (Evidently, Hungarian, and probably European, culture can’t nuance religion and ethnicity, as the U.S. may uniquely do.) It is a vivid example of all the women survivors who never told anyone what they went through. As his grandmother anticipated, he doesn’t believe her when she calmly, for the first time in 70 years, tells of her and her relatives’ round-up, deaths, and imprisonment, he only after her death can tour Auschwitz with a grandmother-replacement survivor, Eva 'Bobby' Neumann who only started telling people her experiences 10 years ago, right from the station arrival through to the crematoria where she worked – and that finally gets through to him, or anyone watching I would think, to stop minimizing the Holocaust. (Though he didn’t yet understand why the two women were sent to Auschwitz “about the same time” – not full understanding the chronology of the Final Solution for Jews from Budapest – but he also had never bothered to understand the memorial of empty shoes on the bank of the Danube until he goes with his rabbi mentor.) While it’s touching that he restores his great-grandmother’s gravestone in the Jewish cemetery, he does not replace the Hebrew lettering. Journalist Anne Applebaum provides contextual narration of life in Hungary from Fascism to Communism to democracy. (previewed at 2016 Tribeca Film Festival) (3/25/2016)
Keep The Change (So, nu: - Writer/director Rachel Israel worked on this unique rom com with members of The Adaptations Group at the Jewish Community Center (JCC) of Manhattan, quite a bit of the film is set there, and many of the women characters are Jewish. I was disappointed this delightful film didn’t win Tribeca Film Festival’s Nora Ephron Award last year, especially as her work was clearly a model. While it’s three-dimensionally appealing that “Sarah”s grandmother is an oblivious alcoholic and her mother somehow out of the picture, “David”s rich mother is the glaringly weakest part of the film as an annoying stereotype, bordering on offensive, especially as his mother doesn’t get the moment of enlightenment that his father does. Certainly “David”s plan to have his girlfriend stay with his aunt in Boca Raton while they are in Florida is unrealistic, but so is her insisting on bringing him along on a retired person’s schedule. I was kinder in overlooking this wrong note than I usually am in reviews and ratings because the rest of the Jewish women, and the film, are so strong. (previewed at 2017 Tribeca Film Festival) (updated 3/22/2018)
Keeping Up With The Steins
Kenny Scharf: When Worlds Collide - Begun and co-directed by the artist’s daughter Malia Scharf, she briefly interviews her good-humored grandmother Rose: “I don’t know where he got the talent. I never thought he’d be a professional artist.” (Rose is also memorialized in the closing credits.) While the information is Google-able, with his personal anecdotes, nowhere does Malia refer that they are Jewish, even when late in the bio-doc friends and colleagues refer to the importance of family in his life and he’s seen playing with two grandchildren, who are identified by name but not which of his daughters is their mother. Yet, could this strength be a reason why he seems to be the only artist of the drug-fueled, AIDS-decimated Downtown 1980’s visual art scene to survive? (preview at 2020 DOC NYC/ Greenwich Entertainment theatrical release) (11/7/2020)
Kidnapped (Rapito) (courtesy of Cohen Media Group) (5/20/2024)
Kill Your Darlings- Yet another portrayal of young “Allen Ginsberg” that is more fascinated by his being gay than Jewish. The gentile characters around him in his freshman year at Columbia keep identifying him as Jewish only by his name– plus the mop of dark curls stuck on the head of Daniel Radcliffe, like the gray wig stuck on Jennifer Jason Leigh (who I was surprised to learn on Wikipedia is Jewish, and here fleetingly uses her father’s native Bronx accent) as his mentally ill mother “Naomi”. His father’s girlfriend “Edith Cohen” (played by Leslie Meisel) convincingly looks Jewish – and young “Allen” furiously blames her for why his father institutionalized his mother, while the script by writer/director John Krokidas and Austin Bunn emphasizes the guilt trip his mother lays on him for not taking care of her to keep her home. I am disappointed that it seems that gay script writers continue to ignore the Jewish context of a woman who inspired the great poem Kaddish, even as “Allen”s infatuation with “Lucien Carr” (played by Dane DeHaan) seems as much the fascination with the beautiful blonde shiksa, as in the heterosexual work of post-war American Jewish writers Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, etc., as he beds a look-alike pick-up at a gay bar, though “Jack Kerouac” is represented less in that mode than usual by Jack Huston. (8/21/2013)
Killing Kasztner: The Jew Who Dealt With Nazis (So, nu) (10/23/2009)
In Noah’s Ark of Claude Lanzmann’s The Four Sisters interviews, a train survivor provides a differing participant account. (preview at 2017 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (5/15/2019)
The Kindergarten Teacher (Haganenet) (So, nu: While the Israeli context heightens the tensions with Ashkenazi vs Sephardim, working class vs. nouveau riche, the intense focus stays on an insightful woman/wife/mother Nira (played by Sarit Larry of the mesmerizing eyes) who is overwhelmed by her conviction that she has discovered a poetry prodigy whose gift needs to be nurtured instead of stultified by popular culture. She’s so convinced of his exceptional gift that she proudly plans to reveal his authorship at the public poetry performance where she had originally agreed to read his poems she’d been fronting. She is excited to reveal his talent publicly, but the public, as is so often true with the arts, isn’t ready. The reaction is overwhelming and disastrous for her, and the film becomes more about her extreme obsession over a child who is not always passive. Her high school age daughter is barely seen, but in her home, her son parties hard with his army buddies to celebrate his promotion to officer, a career choice her engineer husband disparages as “for morons or the poor”. But he also thinks a kid interested in poetry “needs help”. She tries to inspire him first with nature -- the sun, an ant, water, the rain, and then the ocean, then argues to his uncle the writer: “Being a poet in our world is opposing the nature of the world.” The nanny is dark-skinned, but I couldn’t pick up the subtleties if she’s an Ethiopian Jew or a non-Jewish African.) (previewed at 2015 New Directors/New Films of Film at Lincoln Center/ MoMA) (3/18/2015)
The Kind Words (Ha'milim ha'tovot) (preview for the 2016 Israel Film Center Festival courtesy Strand Releasing) Within a comic family story are surprisingly fresh representations of Jewish women, as Israelis and as exiles from Arab countries: the Algerian-born mother in Jerusalem “Yona Baruch” (Levana Finkelstein); her middle child, 35-year-old, fertility-struggling (like Biblical women) daughter Dorona Cohen (Rotem Zisman-Cohen); her drama queen sister in Paris Rosa (Florence Boche); and even her Orthodox daughter-in-law Razilya from Brooklyn and her husband’s new sexy younger wife, singer Osnat (Magi Azarzar). (6/24/2016)
Kindertransports to Sweden (Dem Leben entgegen – Kindertransporte nach Schweden) Reflecting on her Kurdish background, German-Swedish director Gülseren Şengezer says, “on account of my own personal history, with the massacre of many relatives, the long history of persecution of the Jews has always touched me. I am also interested in how political circumstances affect the life of individuals”. Beyond any other documentary, or exhibition, I’ve seen on kindertransports that saved 10,000 Jewish children from 1938 – 1940 when countries refused to help their families, Şengezer is able to draw out of her four “witnesses” of the 500 Sweden permitted entry (three of whom are women - Herta Lichtenstein, Elise Reifeisen-Hallin, and Gertraud Fietzberger - confusingly they are only identified once) revelatory emotional reflections. While other testimonies have focused on facts and pressed participants to be grateful for being saved and their parents’ sacrifice, here with minimal photographs, letters, and archival footage, each seems to be asked about each chapter (such as: “Homeless”, “Parting”, “Into the Unknown”, “A New Beginning”, “Once Again”, “Those Who Remain”, “The Self”, “Burden”, and “Catharsis”) in their geographical and maturation journey: “And how did that make you feel?”
Interspersed between beautiful scenes of sunrises/sunsets of the Swedish seasons, set to quietly aching violin and piano, we hear how they had begun to absorb the antisemitism around them, in Germany, Austria, and Sweden, so that they were always wrestling with their Jewish identity. One woman painfully recalls how her older brother beat her so viciously that, ironically, she had to hide away from him; then decades later he weeped for forgiveness. Another woman recalls finding a mirror to stare at her body trying to discern what made her different – was she a Negro? Şengezer uses the word “trauma” to describe their experiences, a confession they probably weren’t able to make for decades in comparison to other Holocaust survivors; the male participant recalls that others were less resilient, especially at learning of their families’ fates, and committed suicide. (A Holocaust survivor in our congregation shrugged the same way to me about his sister; another congregant who was one of the ten thousand sent to England, had different experiences because she was part of a large group where there was a large welcoming Jewish community.)
Regardless of the poignant insights into their emotional health at this point, it is very frustrating not to get the usual final factual scroll about them. (preview at 2021 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (streaming through Menemsha Films) (2/4/2021)
King Cohen While director Steve Mitchell thoroughly looks at Larry Cohen’s career, there’s very little on his personal life, including zilch about his sense of Jewish identity. There’s one briefly seen photo of his mother and his bitter comment that he could spend his childhood days at the local movie theater because no one missed him amidst the chaos at home, though that seemed more directed at his father and siblings. (Only from Wikipedia did I learn that his sister was the renowned publicist Ronni Chasen.) Wife #1 (Janelle Webb m. 1964–1987, actress, producer and mother), and Wife #2 (Cynthia Costas, actress and artist) give very supportive interviews, but one can’t tell anything else about them or his children, other than a few still photographs of them younger. (preview at 2017 DOC NYC Festival) (7/13/2018)
Kings of Capitol Hill (HaLobby) - Not only is it obvious from Israeli director Mor Loushy’s extensive interviews with past leaders and staff of AIPAC that it was a boys’ club for influencing other boys, but most of the younger people she interviews who object to their swallowing whole the right-wing direction of Israeli policies are female, including a former Board member. (preview at 2020 DOC NYC)
See with ‘Til Kingdom Come (seen at 2020 Double Exposure Investigative Film Festival) (10/30/2020)
Kisses To The Children (Filia eis ta pedia/Φιλιά εις τα παιδιά) (So, nu: (Three of the five moving storytellers of their hidden child experiences in Greece during the Holocaust are women -- Rosina Asser-Pardo, Eftyhia Nachman-Nachmia, and Shelly Kounio-Cohen, who re-live their childhood memories and re-visit the locales for the first time, including reading from a journal one kept at the time, which is now in the collection of the Jewish Museum in Greece, whose 2003 exhibition “Hidden Children in Occupied Greece” inspired director Vassilis Loules. At the screening, the Greek Consul General spoke tearfully that one was his mother, who had never told her children about these years of her life.) (seen at American Sephardi Federation) (6/21/2013)
Kissing Jessica Stein
The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground (briefly reviewed at 2011 New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) (So, nu: women have come and gone in the group.)
Kiss Me Kosher
Romantic screwball comedy is one of the most difficult genres to pull off successfully. Writer/director Shirel Peleg took it on in her debut feature film because she saw the humor in her experience as a lesbian growing up in Israel and moving to Germany with her partner. Her effort would have seemed groundbreaking as a sitcom in the 1970s era of Norman Lear, and she occasionally hits his kind of socially satirical notes for today.
Her premise is “commitment phobe” Jewish Israeli owner of the “Jewish Princess” bar “Shira Shalev” (charismatic Israeli actress Moran Rosenblatt) falls quickly head-over-heels in love with German botanist PhD candidate, red-haired “Maria Müller” (German actress Luise Wolfram). “Maria” is so pale I worried about her hanging out with “Shira”s lesbian friends on a Tel Aviv beach. While they are constantly kissing on screen, there is really zero chemistry between them. “Maria” is legitimately worried when sparks fly as any of “Shira”s many exes pass by, including meter maid “Neta” (Noa Biron) and her bar manager/long-time friend “Adi Schnieder-Yarkoni” (Naama Amit).
”Shira”s strongest family relationship is with her “Safta”, a chain-smoking, bitter Holocaust-survivor, as a hidden child, “Berta Posnansky” (Rivka Michaeli, who is a very lively octogenarian with pointed dialogue) – and is the investor in “Shira”s bar that is dominated by a painted portrait of her Safta. This grandmother enjoys keeping company with a Palestinian doctor neighbor “Ibrahim Hamati” (Salim Dau) who studied in Germany.
“Shira” limits her time with her immediate family because they live “beyond the Green Line” in a settlement on the West Bank, per her religious Zionist American immigrant father “Ron Shalev” (American actor John Carroll Lynch), who was inspired by Lear’s “Archie Bunker” and is a not usually seen comic character. (His reaction to her engagement announcement is relief this is the last time he has to meet yet another of her girlfriends for Shabbat dinner.) Her Israeli mother “Ora” (Irit Kaplan) is a stereotyped Jewish mother. Her younger sister “Ella” (Aviv Pinkas) is both a girly-girl and serving soldier (like already seen in the wonderful Zero Motivation), who, when she’s not excited about planning her sister’s wedding, gets in a good line about the benefits of wearing her uniform in civilian places.
Every cliché clash possible comes out when the German peace-nik parents (played by German actors Bernhard Schütz and Eva Marie Saint look-alike Julianne Köhler) impulsively come to Israel to meet the fiancée and family. The visual trick near the end is about as surprising as the rest of this tired comedy. (After its long Jewish film festival run, release was delayed by current events from which audiences may want silly relief, in theaters April 12, 2024 and Digital On Demand/ courtesy of Menemsha Films) (4/22/2024)
The Klezmer Project (Adentro Mío Estoy Bailando) -Argentinian debut directors Leandro Koch and Paloma Schachmann set off on an unconventional and amusing search for their Ashkenazi Jewish identity through fictional and documentary traces of klezmer music, Yiddish language, and their relationship.
In the romantic layer, the Leandro in the film feigns an interest in the roots of klezmer when he meets clarinetist Paloma, just before she is about to leave for a research trip in Romania. So he invents a documentary development excuse to meet up with her. His Jewish identity had only been represented by his grandmother. He needs to catch up on the history of Yiddish culture, and quotes an expert whose name I couldn’t catch: “Cultures and languages never die naturally. They are assassinated.” Those ideas about the lost working-class Bundist, non-Zionist ethos of Yiddish seem to be similar to those of historian Daniel Walkowitz in The Remembered and Forgotten Jewish World: Jewish Heritage in Europe and the United States.
Ironically, while the Leandro in the film is bored by his job as a wedding videographer, he learns, through the film’s factual layer in his travels around rural Eastern Europe, that it is non-Jewish wedding entertainers who have handed down klezmer music, even since their Jewish neighbors were gone from both emigration and the Holocaust. Paloma’s mentor in the film is the brilliant Budapest-based ethnomusicologist Bob Cohen, a founder of the band Di Naye Kapelye that plays Carpathian klezmer music in its most authentic form, and has dedicated his life to identifying the traces of klezmer traditions. They travel through TransCarpathia, the same area captured in photographs and footage by Vishniac in the 1930s. When the on screen Paloma leaves for gigs, this Leandro travels further into his grandmother’s past in Bessarabia, through what is now Moldova, the road movie aspect of his search reminded me of Everything Is Illuminated.
Fictionally presented as Paloma’s gravelly-voiced Yiddish teacher is Dr. Perla Sneh, Argentinian psychologist, poet, and historian of Yiddish and the Shoah. Through most of the film, she narrates a third story layer, a captivating I.B. Singer-like “The Devil’s Tale” about a shtetl with Yankel the gravedigger and Teibele the rabbi’s daughter that the directors wrote to encapsulate their themes.
While weddings open and close the film, I still don’t know if the real Leandro and Paloma are actually a couple. (at 2024 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum/ courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment) (2/9/2024)
Knots: A Forced Marriage Story - There have been several documentaries about the marriage restrictions on Hasidic/Ultra-Orthodox women, particularly One of Us, and films based on memoirs, particularly a section of #FemalePleasure and its fictionalized TV series Unorthodox (that I still haven’t watched). Director Kate Brewer’s documentary puts frum women within the context of all girls/women in the U.S. facing no choices, with no social or legal recourse within their communities/families. While at least in the U.S. the Hasidism appear to wait until the female turns 18, activist and former Borough Park resident Fraidy Reiss, one of the three women intimately profiled, makes a strong case that the matchmaker process and family pressure constitute “forced marriage”. The other two women are a Californian who at age 15 was forced by her father and his religious cult to marry an older man, then taken to Nevada to make it civilly legal when she was 16 and pregnant, and a home-schooled Michigan woman in a closed-off Christian community pushed at age 19 to marry an older man she didn’t know. In addition, choreographer Bella Waru beautifully symbolizes the points they make by dancing entangled in red strings throughout the film.
Not mentioned in Reiss’s experiences, but what I’ve observed among my Ultra-Orthodox relatives, is that the marriages seem to take place as quickly as possible after her 18th birthday. The extent of the huge celebrations among the extended family and whatever sect (Reiss doesn’t specify hers or distinguish among those in Borough Park or Lakewood, NJ) borders on the bizarre, with exaggerated celebrations of the match between two young people who barely know each other. One wedding documented recently in the NYC press attracted tens of thousands of Hasidic men, in contravention of pandemic restrictions, because the two young people were uniting rabbinic dynasties, like something out of medieval royal histories. The bride was barely noticeable. Reiss calls this out as “grooming”, with the choice presented as “Say ‘yes’ or the repercussions will be terrible”. With such relationships usually unsurprisingly resulting in immediate pregnancies, all three women stress the difficulties of leaving with their children. A Baal Teshuva (adult convert) friend of a friend described having thee children in quick succession when she was within a Hasidic sect: “Then I woke up.”
The film makes the strongest points about underage marriage, with startling statistics on not only the numbers in the U.S., but both the lack of any restrictions on age in over a dozen states and the flexible exemptions in more states that make such restrictions irrelevant. Let alone that such trapped girls are in a limbo where they cannot then claim help from either child protection agencies or women’s shelters. These numbers make a mockery of the U.S. foreign policy stance against child marriages and the rights of girls in such places as Afghanistan. Most objections, including a legislator and governor quoted in the film, turn on either religious freedom or parental rights – with no consideration for female rights, wishes, or alternative opportunities, including education. One academic historian participating in the film, though, claims that the 1950’s (illustrated with excellent archival footage) had a higher marriage age than previously, while I’ve seen the opposite trend lines, what with the post-war natalist push and moral insistence on “shotgun marriages” – part of what the MAGA crowd misses. I remember two such in my small NJ high school graduating class alone. (Facebook reunions confirmed they both ended in divorce.)
The film cites its two secular partners for advocacy, including organizing the attention-grabbing demonstrations of young women dressed in bridal gowns and chains seen, and assistance, Unchained At Last and Tahirih Justice Center, especially to help girls. Within the Jewish community Yaffed and Footsteps can provide some help, especially for young people seeking of broader educational opportunities. (screened courtesy of Global Digital Releasing) (5/31/2021)
Koch (So, nu: While there’s only bare mention of his mother, his sister warmly humanizes impressions of him, including hosting family holiday gatherings at her home.) (2/1/2013)
Kol Nidre (restored) (briefly in Reviewed: New York Jewish Film Festival 2013 of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) (2/19/2013)
Kredens (briefly reviewed at 2009 New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) While notable for its perspectives about the expulsions of Jews from Poland in 1968, this does seem like a student filmmaker flaying his mother and her memories, even if she had the good sense not to appear on camera and only be heard on the phone pleading with her Danish son over and over to give up trying to trace their roots through a piece of furniture. (1/18/2009)
Kululush (at the 2007 NY Sephardic Jewish Film Festival)
Labyrinth Of Lies (Im Labyrinth Des Schweigens) (So, nu: For a film that’s about about obtaining German justice for Nazi crimes against the Jews, it’s a bit disappointing that the only Jewish women are undifferentiated as they are brought in to the prosecutor’s office to give testimony, with the music rising over their voices and the focus on the young German lawyers’ shocked faces. (10/29/2015)
Labyrinths of Memory (Laberintos de la memoria) (viewed at the 17h Annual NY Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) Guita Schyfter labors a bit to find parallels for her Everything Is Illuminated-like search for her Eastern European Jewish roots from Costa Rica and Mexico and that of a Mexican adoptee raised in Cuba, but she pulls it off, from very much a woman’s POV.) (1/24/2008)
Lady Amar - Orly Tobali gives a charismatic performance as a woman living in two worlds – her fantasy life as an upper class Ashkenazi society matron, “Pauline Weiss” who has been kidnapped, and the life her adult children try to shake her back to at home as a Mizrahi mother who has been through the traumas of immigration from Morocco, discrimination, unemployment, and the death of a son to a terrorist attack. While I’m sure some of the language of Noam Gil’s adaptation of his play are lost in the subtitles and class and ethnic references that a non-Israeli misses, Tobali’s body language and voice intonations communicate much. The child who is almost able to reach through the fog in her mother’s mind is her unmarried daughter Yardan (Jordan, played by Liz Rabian), and their interactions are especially poignant. (preview at 2022 Other Israel Film Festival) (11/2/2022)
The Lady in Number 6 (seen with Oscar Nominated Shorts) Inspired by Caroline Stoessinger’s book A Century of Wisdom: Lessons from the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer, the World's Oldest Living Holocaust Survivor, too bad her exceptional life story is told so conventionally in this documentary) that’s basically in the style of a TV news magazine feature. An interesting side note is that even as she outlived her son, she is accompanied in friendship by two other women survivors who share her experiences, one a cellist who played in the macabre Auschwitz women’s orchestra (portrayed in Playing for Time), the other an artist, though it wasn’t clear where/when she met them. (2/17/2014)
Landline- Coming from the same team and star as Obvious Child, I’m giving it some leeway, but it was disappointing. This Upper West Side family in 1994 (the film is dripping with nostalgia) has an Italian mother “Pat” (played by Edie Falco) and a Jewish father frustrated playwright turned ad copywriter “Alan Jacobs”. Their daughters, who are the center of the film, certainly “look” Jewish with masses of dark, curly hair and are very verbal: the always wonderful Jenny Slate as 30-something graphic designer “Dana”, engaged to no-profession-specified nice guy “Ben” (played by Jay Duplass), and turning 17 “Ali” (played by charismatic newcomer Abby Quinn). The Jewish references are mostly playing off episodes of Seinfeld, such as a make-out session at a Holocaust-themed movie with college infatuation now adulterous lover “Nate” (Finn Wittrock), that “Dana” regrets because her fiancé “really like Nazi movies”. (More details forthcoming) (6/23/2017)
Land Mine: The Other Side Of Silence For her debut feature, video artist Tirtza Even returned to the three-story apartment building 14 Tchernichovsky Street (named for a doctor and acclaimed Hebrew poet) in Jerusalem where she grew up in the mid 1960’s with eight other families (with 20 kids), now crumbling and mostly empty. Insightfully, she realizes it’s haunted by deaths and grief that are symbolic of Israel’s issues. Because the men in the families mostly died first “unnaturally” – of accidents, of war (“the first night of the 1982 Lebanon War”), murder, and from unsuccessful surgery, she interviews the women (and the daughter of the widow with Alzheimer’s) who are left with the memories, from the Holocaust to now, in chapters and seasons. (seen at MoMA’s 2019 Documentary Fortnight) (2/25/2019)
Landscape After Battle (Krajobraz po bitwie) In preparation for reviewing Katyn, I discovered this 1970 Andrzej Wajda film after its 2003 DVD release, which only made it to NYC screens 8 years after it debuted at Cannes. So I was very surprised to see one of the most vibrant Jewish women characters in a European film. The director comments on the DVD extra that she was the liveliest actress at auditions, even as her co-star laughingly notes how non-Jewish Stanislawa Celinska's blonde "Nina" looks. Set in 1945 at the minute the war ends, "Nina" explodes on the screen with youthful exuberance, and wants to get on with her life. Led into a temporary Displaced Persons camp, after being in hiding and enduring 28 near-misses from the Gestapo, she realizes she no longer has to pretend to be someone she isn't when handsome, intellectual Daniel Olbrychski's "Tadeusz", just released as a political prisoner from Auschwitz, gives her a communal wafer at a liberating mass. She leads him out of the camp and into lovely romance and joyous sexual initiation in a beautiful field. She knows she will never feel free back in Poland and wants him to leave with her for Paris. But while she as a Jew sees no future in Poland, he can't separate his Polish nationalism from his country.) (2/21/2009)
The Last (preview courtesy of CAVU) (3/16/2019)
The Last Chance (Die Letzte Chance) Made in Switzerland in 1945 to burnish the Swiss image of helping during the Holocaust, the many multi-national refugees thrillingly fleeing Italy in 1943 to get to the Swiss border include several explicit Jewish females (a girl “Chanele” (Berthe Sakhnowsky sole IMDb credit) whose elderly uncle is “Hillel Sokolowski”; the middle-aged “Frau Wittels” (played by Therese Giehse, a Jewish actress who fled from German to Switzerland) who impresses the British and American soldiers by trying to keep her husband from being herded onto a cattle car when the Germans invade) and I’m not sure if the Dutch, French (“Mme. Monnier” played by Germaine Tournier), or others (including the woman whose bourgeois fur coat becomes practical in the Alps) are Jewish or are fleeing Nazis for political reasons. (seen at 2016 To Save and Project: MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation of Museum of Modern Art) (11/20/2016)
Last Flight Home - I’ve seen several documentaries following terminally ill people who have chosen how and when to end their lives, from Switzerland to various U.S. states, and those planning “green burials”. But I don’t recall any being as suffused with Jewishness as Ondi Timoner's intimate, cinema verité countdown while her family helps their 92-year-old father Eli fulfill his desire to control his death through the California End of Life Option Act, with the necessary aid of hospice doctors and nurses (masked and through tele-medicine calls during the pandemic).
His first marriage wrecked by the death of an infant child is described in the Press Notes, but not referenced in the film. Flurries of flashbacks are happy home movies and archival photographs with Eli’s second wife Lisa supporting his career as a very successful serial entrepreneur (including founding an airline, hence the title) and Jewish community philanthropist in Florida. She recalls being the talk of their suburban neighborhood for her 27 months straight of pregnancies, with their three children.
Slowly revealed is how that positivity came to a horrific halt with Eli’s paralyzing accident at age 53, and he lost his executive positions due to his disability. While his wife recalls how the family pulled together as “The Team”, from when the kids were just 11, 9, and 8, the burden was on her for 40 years, plus fond caregivers, until his weakening heart led to more falls than she could handle. While she expected him to be transferred to a care facility, he determined, as the documentary opens, that he couldn’t go on anymore. She is relieved and grateful that “The Team reunites!”
Though one grandchild (of the confusing many teens) assures Eli that he’s “the star” of Ondi’s film despite his daughter’s wiring up his bed and all visitors for microphones and cameras, the director is too much at the center, and the available stills are with her. She does helpfully organize the final Zoom good-byes, group photos, and ingestion rehearsals. Even when he looks asleep, she is able to tell that he is still lucid and can be very articulate.
A significant and very moving change happens on screen when her charismatic older sister Rachel, Senior Rabbi at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn, is able to join the family at her father’s bedside. While she is sometimes torn between the roles of his daughter or his rabbi, she is able to take charge of communication with their father in a special way, so he finally feels free to bare his soul and be visibly at peace to continue with the end process. That does give him the strength to undertake the physical requirements of self-administration.
Their very personal exchanges are steeped in the Jewish context. The Epilogue is an excerpt from the Rabbi’s very meaningful Yom Kippur sermon reflecting the family’s experiences.
While the film is an inspiration and guide for any family facing the same decisions in the 10 states and D.C. that permit this choice, implicit is the tragedy of all those families during the pandemic who were not able to be with their loved ones through their final days. (106 minutes. Released by MTV Documentary Film; in theaters beginning October 7, 2022 in NYC, October 14 in L.A., then other cities) (10/7/2022)
The Last Laugh (So, nu: Though there’s no specific focus on what could be gendered differences in dealing with jokes about Nazis and the Holocaust, including missing an opportunity to answer Mel Brooks’ surprise that Anne Frank is now fodder, there is a generous inclusion of Jewish women comics, including clips of and debates about Joan Rivers and clips and extended interviews with Sarah Silverman, and one brief clip of Amy Schumer pushing another boundary. (The descriptions of the interviewees don’t quite match their clips, such as “Judy Gold: Jewish--‐American lesbian comedian who is a self-proclaimed obsessive on the subject of the Holocaust.”) Also included are clips of women cabaret singers in the Holocaust, but does not make clear that this was only in the show concentration camp of Theresienstadt, and only lasted as long as needed for Nazi propaganda, including notoriously fooling the Red Cross. But is it just editing that only at the end does Renee Firestone, the Holocaust survivor who throughout denied there was any humor in the camps -- and dismisses most of the exampled jokes as “not funny”, finally admits there was a woman in her barracks who mimed and brought them a smile.) However, she is seen as more at peace with life than another (humorless) survivor Elly Gross at their reunion improbably set in the Las Vegas Venetian Hotel who reminded me of an interchange I had with an elderly neighbor with a thick Eastern European accent: When I was loaning him my copy of Adam Resurrected (Adam ben kelev) by Yoram Kaniuk for our synagogue’s Hebrew-in-Translation Literature Reading Group, I warned him it can be difficult to deal with the satirical presentation of Holocaust survivors who can’t cope afterwards, he shrugged: “My sister couldn’t either.” (previewed at 2016 Tribeca Film Festival) (updated 4/12/2016)
The Last Mimzy It was a bit odd that the palm-reading, mandala–interpreting, Nepal-visiting fiancée of the science teacher is named “Naomi Schwartz”, played by Kathryn Hahn. The film, credited to four writers, retained only some bare plot concepts from mid-20th century original short story Mimsy Were the Borogoves by “Lewis Padgett”, the pseudonym for science-fiction authors and spouses Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, which had zero Jewish characters.
The Last Resort
It is unusual for a documentary to change my own impressions and memories. All those times I went to Miami to visit relatives (me in the 1960’s, though my grandfather and parents resisted either migrating or becoming regular snow birds; and my husband from the mid-50’s to early ‘70’s – above in 1957 with his mom and sister, at a hotel, on a main street, and at Pumpernick’s Deli). But we did not see the overwhelming settlement of elderly Jews there as positive from their perspective. Two young local photographers saw more than we did at a similar age to make a gorgeous visual documentation over ten years: Andy Sweet and Gary Monroe, the former with startlingly bright candy color shots, often taken with a Hassalblad, and the latter in moodier black and white.
Returning from art school in 1977 to their neighborhood haunts, they captured some of the first joyously beautiful images I’ve seen of elderly Jewish women (and men) on vacation or in relaxing retirement from tough lives in Europe or Up North, who welcomed them like grandsons into their daily activities and celebrations. (So many of the Catskills hotels documentations have an anti-bourgeoisie bias.) The film’s emphasis is on the biographies of the two men and how they worked, how one photographic archive was lost and is now revived by his family. Though the archival research is impressive, the photographs are sometimes overshadowed by unidentified interview film and video footage, that is very similar to those in Four Seasons Lodge.
For additional context, directors Dennis Scholl and Kareem Tabsch also include interviews with Jewish Museum of Florida Executive Director Susan Gladstone, Pulitzer Prize winning crime writer Edna Buchanan, and (surprisingly) Miami native filmmaker Kelly Reichardt. The documentary stretches from the start of the Jewish migration to southern Florida, through the development of Miami Beach as an entertainment supplement to Las Vegas (more cynically and fictionally chronicled in Miami native Mitch Glazer’s TV series Magic City), then how the South Beach neighborhood flourished and declined. (Rising rents are cited, but our matriarch lamented about why her money wasn’t lasting to keep up her lifestyle: “I never thought I’d live this long.”) I wish editor Tabsch allowed a little more lingering over each photo instead of on the interviewees, as these are more artistic than just family memorabilia; some of the photographs included in the film are on the photographers’ personal websites for longer perusal.
I was inspired to finally start reading historian Deborah Dash Moore’s 1994 book To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A.. She is more aware of the neighborhoods’ class and generational boundaries than these two photographers as they picked up their cameras and had the foresight to document a Jewish community that didn’t last longer than this reluctant visitor’s memories. Now this film helps younger people get a more positive glimpse back. (at 2018 DOC NYC Festival/preview pre 12/21/2019 theatrical run courtesy of Kino Lorber) (updated 12/15/2018)
The Last Sentence (Dom Över Död Man) (So, nu: The beautiful-looking black-and-white blends in both the reality of the rise of the Nazis in newsreels and the ghostly apparitions the anti-Nazi editor consults, as each of his women die. The publisher’s Jewish wife Maja Forssman is a formidable businesswoman and mistress. While she is sensitive to the rising explicit antisemitism in the high society around her, she even chooses to deal with her fatal cancer under her own control. Ironically, his journalist daughter acceded to censorship at his former newspaper: At least they still publish me.) (more commentary forthcoming) (6/23/2014)
The Last Suit (El Último Traje) - In Pablo Solarz‘s Jewish/Argentinean take on King Lear, octogenarian Abraham Burzstein (Miguel Angel Sola) is disrupted from his home by his two feisty daughters in Buenos Aires, Shoshana (Noemi Frenkel) and Sara ( Nora Brozynski), has to apologize to his favorite daughter, in exile in Madrid, Claudia (Natalia Verbeke), while meeting for the first time her daughter Abril (Arlen Germade Lopez de las Hazas). Claudia does get him onto a cross-Europe train to start fulfilling his pilgrimage back to Lodz, but instead several non-Jewish women respect his quest and provide him the key assistance to find his old Polish friend. Otherwise, he is haunted in dreams and theater pieces by the image and memories of his little sister he couldn’t save from the Nazis. (seen courtesy of Strand Releasing) (12/16/2018)
Late Marriage (Hatuna Meuheret)
Late Summer Blues (Blues Lahofesh Hagadol) I appreciated director Renen Schorr and writer Doron Nesher post-Six-Day War classic to see how non-Socialist, Zionist or revolutionary were the relationships between the sexes, where military service had little impact on the female teenagers, compared to their boyfriends, and both earlier and alter Israeli films. (U.S. Premiere of the restoration at 2018 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum)
Lea and Darija (briefly reviewed at 2012 New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) While I don’t know how much of the “based on a true story” is factual, it’s unusual for a film to make the Jewish/Aryan stereotype differences of the Holocaust era so vividly visual, yet so touching. In one telling scene, the banned Jewish singing-and-dancing child star “Lea” sneaks into the now forbidden to her theater in a blonde wig in order to watch her bruntette friend perform her role with the company she used to lead – but her fans recognize her in the balcony, grab the wig off and chase her out. While I was pleasantly surprised that the child entertainers were not annoying like pageant competitors are, the Jewish mother is portrayed as warmly supportive of encouraging her talented daughter to happily participate in the family’s creative traditions, the Aryan mother contrasts as ambitiously pushy. Perhaps it was clearer to the original Croatian audience if the blonde mother, who apparently uses Nazi connections to get her daughter an audition with a noted German film studio, fled the country from anti-collaborator wrath or Communism, or both.) (1/21/2012)
Leap of Faith (After the wives of directors Stephen Z. Friedman and Antony Benjamin went through Orthodox conversion to Judaism, the only kind recognized in Israel and the only American Jewish option seen on screen, they made the first documentary about the process. (While a recent Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life survey found that "half of American adults have changed religious affiliation at least once in their lives", it excluded any affiliation that constituted less than 4% of the population so Jews were automatically out.) Women are in all the four units followed. Two from Christian Evangelical backgrounds, an elderly couple who look Amish in their Ultra-Orthodox garb after their dalliance with Messianic Judaism, and parents with young and teen children in the heart of the new burned-over-district, as it were, of Colorado who submit to uprooting requirements and suspicion from their new neighbors. A single mother is so distraught about her life and finances that it seems what she's really seeking is some kind of stability in her life, and is not treated well by the rabbis, particularly about her military service, so no wonder she flees. The young black woman from Trinidad and her male Brooklyn friend are very carefully circumspect on camera to avoid any implication that she is converting just to marry him so as not to scotch the deal with the judgmental rabbis (if he hadn't wed her by the closing of the credits after all she went through for him. . .And I don't know if any of the rabbis interviewed or supervising these converts are involved in this scandal.) The intimate women's perspective that is sometimes missing here was provided at the festival in Miri Shapiro's lovely British short Kallah.) (seen at 2010 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (1/25/2010)
Leaves of Grass (So, nu: Tim Blake Nelson noted in an interview about the Jews in the film: "I’m a Tulsa Jew and have a religious upbringing. . .It’s what I grew up around. . .Even my wife and two of my children are in it as actors." (as the family of Jewish orthodontist Ken Feinman, played by Josh Pais). He has proudly noted the influence on him of his mother, Ruth Kaiser Nelson, an active member of the city's Jewish community, so that could be why family-oriented "Rabbi Zimmerman" (played by the ubiquitous Maggie Siff) is a quietly noble advisor for the pot-growing, revenge-seeking brother, warning him that without rules of civilization we are all animals breaking the world, so one has to repair it. The film goes out of its way to find ways for the twin brothers to bump into Jews wherever they go, from New England to Oklahoma, starting with the classics professor aggressively sexually harassed by a poetry-writing, breast-baring "Anne Greenstein" (played by Lucy Devito), who then accuses him of inappropriate behavior. I can't read my notes for exact quotes.) (9/17/2010)
Left Luggage
Lemon In what may be the worst, failed satirical comedy of the year, the family of co-writer and star Brett Gelman is described as “outrageous” in the press notes, but they are very specifically Jewish. His wife/director Janicza Bravo is also a co-writer, and they were inspired by their own families. Gelman plays underemployed actor “Isaac Lachman”. Shiri Appleby is his sister “Ruthie”, pregnant and constantly on the phone planning events – but I wasn’t sure if that was for herself or a job as a party planner. His parents are “Esther” (Rhea Perlman) and “Howard” (Fred Melamed) – and they all join in a post-dinner singing of “A Million Matzoh balls” by Dean Friedman. They are all unrelievedly obnoxious! No one at my press screening even chuckled at any of it; one colleague shrugged with an explanation: “Maybe it was L.A. humor?” (6/23/2017)
Lemon Tree - So, nu: The moving story would have seemed less didactic, though, if the Jewish wife of the Israeli Defense Minister was played by an actress who could more hold the screen with the magnetic Hiam Abbass. But an actress like Ronit Elkabetz would have been less credible to having gotten into such a dependent marriage as Rona Lipaz-Michael making her film debut as "Mira Navon", who hesitatingly tries to figure out how to reach out to her Palestinian neighbor, and in her own way manages to assert some independence within an untenable situation for both of them. There are a couple of other problematical Israeli women – an intrepid TV reporter, a sexy army assistant who flaunts her affair with the husband, and a daughter studying politics in Washington, D.C. (previewed during but not part of the 2009 NY Jewish Film Festival at Film at Lincoln Center -- because it was critical of Israeli policies?) (updated 4/20/2009)
Leona Mexican director Isaac Cherem, with co-writer and star González Norvind, subverts most of the clichés of a Jewish rom com from the non-Jewish boyfriend to the variety of nerdy Jewish options matched by her family to create a very sexy portrait of a free-thinking street artist who turns into a confident “lioness”. Playing nationally through virtual cinema February 12, 2021. (preview at 2020 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum and shown at 2020 New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival) (2/25/2020/ 2/6/2021)
Let It Be Morning There is one Jewish Israeli woman who is heard/talked about among the Palistinian Israelis: the main character “Sami” (played by Alex Bakri) is having an affair with “Leah”, a colleague from a previous job in Jerusalem, and keeps trying to call her when he can get reception on the West Bank. His Mother asks: How is it with the mistress?..A Jew? He: Amazing. (previewed at 2021 Other Israel Film Festival) (10/28/2021)
Let’s Dance (briefly in Reviewed: New York Jewish Film Festival 2013 of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (updated 2/19/2013)
Let’s Dance! (Faut que ça danse!) (seen at the 2008 Rendez-Vous with French Film at Film at Lincoln Center) (Noémie Lvovsky’s very creative, and yes funny, view of an adult daughter dealing with a tap dancing dad who as a Holocaust survivor figures he’s immortal, which keeps her from dealing with her feelings about life and death as well. While her crazy mother doesn’t appear to be Jewish, the daughter is very conscious of her family and communal responsibilities, and her husband seems to be Jewish.) (2/23/2008)
Letter to a Pig - Israeli animator Tal Kantor brings to life and beyond her memory of a visit to her school of a Holocaust survivor with the dream his story provoked, into the confused symbolism that kids perceive. Preternaturally, her exploration of treating people like animals and revenge takes on exceptional meanings after October 7, 2023. (”Short of the Week”) (1/4/2024)
Letters From Baghdad: The True Story of Gertrude Bell and Iraq e While directors Sabine Krayenbühl and Zeva Oelbaum have worked on Jewish-related documentaries in the past, they avoid most Jewish issues in looking at Bell’s travels and career through the Ottoman Empire and Mesopotamia, including Jerusalem – particularly in mentioning her views on the Balfour Declaration. Letters read by Tilda Swinton do mention in passing putative Jewish women she knew, such as visiting the Dead Sea with a Nina Rosen in 1900. By 1917 the Jews she was meeting as an official liaison to the British government seemed to have been men. After the war, working for the Oriental Secretary in Baghdad, she made an effort to reach out to both Muslim and Jewish women for private, women’s-only tea parties, including showing them movies. In 1921, she knew of prominent Jewish families in Baghdad. (at 2016 DOC NYC Festival) (12/17/2017)
Letters Home (previewed at 2012 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) (In just a nine-minute short, director Melissa Hacker provides a unique perspective on the fall of the Third Reich. I’ve seen and heard many (true and fictionalized) accounts, including from a cousin, of Jewish GI’s coming across Europe and discovering the extent of the Holocaust and what happened to their own families. But this is the first time I’ve seen, beautifully filmed as postcards, and heard it through the eyes of a Jewish woman, the director’s great-aunt Freda who traveled through Germany and Austria in 1945 in service with the Women’s Army Corps, and finds the remnants of their family. (1/22/2012)
Letter to a Father (Carta a un padre) (previewed at 2015 Art of the Real of Film at Lincoln Center (3/27/2015)
A Letter to Mother (A Brivele der Mamen) (Yiddish/Polish transliteration spellings vary) Co-director Joseph Green, lionized as the greatest in the golden age of Yiddish cinema, made this one of the last pre-WW2 Yiddish films in Poland, co-directed with Leon Trystan, from a script co-written in NYC with Mendel Osherwitz. Fislmed in 1938, it is also known as The Eternal Song, inspired by S. Shmulewitz’s titular song. In a New York Times interview with Richard F. Shepard, published Sept. 10, 1989, the Polish-born, NY-living Green described his context: “I had performed with the Vilna Troupe and with Rudolf Schildkraut in Europe and with Maurice Schwartz's Yiddish Art Theater in New York…I was interested in making films on Jewish life in Poland. It was so photographic, different from the general life with its own culture and language. The producers, characteristically all Jewish, argued that this would only produce anti-Semitism…There was so much to make and the people were so colorful.”
Taking place in Lubov then, Lviv now, Ukraine 1912 to post World War I in Warsaw, the central character is the usual long-suffering, unappreciated-until-the-end Yiddishe mama, albeit supporting the family with a struggling fabric shop due to her unemployed musician husband. Green provided additional background: “I directed my films and I trained the actors, who all were living then in Poland. I explained that in theater their voice has to reach three flights up; and here, just for the camera, they had to reduce their voice, keep the emotion down. Lucy Gehrman, who starred in A Brivele der Maman [as “Dobrish”] was a good actress but melodramatic. There was a scene when she is told her husband has died. She wanted to do it her way, not mine. I knew I had a problem, so I said, try it your way. She screamed it, and, when she saw it, she said, 'That's terrible.' I said, 'That's right.' ''It was a perfect scene for melodrama, but I told her to just let her head fall to the table. It worked. It's a question of taste. I can't stand mediocrity.''
Her daughter “Miriam Berdyczewska” (Gertrude Bulman) seems more unusual, and shows that not every Jewish woman in pre-WW1 Ukraine was living an Orthodox life, though she does participate in the family’s saddest seder ever. (Eric Goldman in Visions, Images, and Dreams: Yiddish Film Past and Present says each of Green’s Yiddish films featured one Jewish custom.) Her first scene is almost identical to the opening in Hester Street, and in its source novella: at a modern dance school with a flirtatious dance teacher. She rebels from marriage to a childhood sweetheart studying to be an engineer, and elopes with the flirt. To save hers and the family’s honor, the mother spreads the lie that her daughter is staying with an aunt. So when the chastened Prodigal Daughter returns, she accedes to the planned marriage – even though she keeps being tempted to tell the groom the truth before they leave to settle in Odessa. Did she? (World Premiere of 35mm film restoration by the National Center for Jewish Film at 2023 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) (1/20/2023)
Liberty Heights
Licorice Pizza
- Alana Haim
(preview courtesy MGM/UA) (12/10/2021)
Life According to Agfa (Ha-Chayim Al-Pi Agfa) (1992) (restoration at 2019 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) Great to see another facet of the work of actress Gila Almagor, as written/directed by Assi Dayan, amidst a wide cast of characters full of biases against each other.
The Life Ahead (La Vita davanti a Sé) Edoardo Ponti’s 2020 Italian-set re-make, starring his mother Sophia Loren in a return to cinema after a decade, of Moshé Mizrahi’s award-winning Madame Rosa (La vie devant soi) (1977), starring Simone Signoret, both based on Romain Gary’s aka Émile Ajarnow out–of-print in English 1975 Paris-set novel MoMo (The Life Before Us) While the premise of the elderly Holocaust victim caring for prostitutes’ children is the same in all, in this version, the young orphan boy is a Senegalese immigrant who has to be told by the Muslim merchant she brings him to for guidance that she’s Jewish and learn that the numbers on her arm have something to do with a place Auschwitz he’s never heard of. “Momo” (short for Muhammad) does not know that her fear of hospitals as places for evil experimentation comes from her experiences there, only that he promises to get her out. He also befriends and helps a Romanian boy left in Rosa’s care who she insists learn Hebrew for his eventual bar mitzvah. (Netflix) (1/1/2021)
Life During Wartime (at 47th New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center)
Life In Stills (briefly reviewed in Reviewed: New York Jewish Film Festival 2013 of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) (2/19/2013)
Life? Or Theatre? (briefly reviewed in Reviewed: New York Jewish Film Festival 2013 of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) (2/19/2013)
The Light Ahead (Fishke der Krumer) (1939) I was unaware of Edgar G. Ulmer’s four 1930’s shtetl films in Yiddish. Nor of “the grandfather of Yiddish literature” known as Mendele Mokher Sforim. So I expected more stereotypes of women in Edgar and Shirley Ulmer’s adaptation, with dialogue by Chaver Paver (pen name) from his own unproduced play, of Fishke the Lame (Fishke der krumer) (1868 story/1888 novel). Set in the fictional town of fools Glupsk near Odessa (filmed in N.J.), the women characters, played by members of New York’s Artef and Yiddish Art Theater, are: “Hodel” (Helen Beverley, an active leftist), a blind orphan a bit older than the flower girl in City Lights in love with the title character (played touchingly by David Opatoshu), making them the poorest couple in town; “Gitel” (Anna Gushkin, also Assistant Director), her rebellious best friend who defies Shabbos rules to swim in the polluted river and is in effect punished by dying of cholera; “Drabke” (Rosetta Bialis) a bitter, nasty widow who took in the orphan years ago for unrewarded expectation that this chintzy town would help support them; “Dube” (Jenny Cashier), a snarling, hunchback beggar fixated on “Fishke” and craftily lies to make sweet, loyal “Hodel” jealous; a middle-aged, childless, illiterate woman (I think played by Helena Benda, various spellings) who asks the bookseller for an appropriate book of prayers – not to buy, but to hear him daven them; and a wailing “Sexton’s wife”, “Hiah” I think (played by Celia Budkin), who fills the screen like Munch’s “The Scream”.
This virulent yenta prefigures Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in how the virago spies, calls out the teens’ religious violation, and whips the town into a frenzy of superstition over science for blame of spreading cholera. Embodying the traditional distaff side of the conflict between the corrupt hidebound theocracy vs. modernizing forces, she pushes the Orthodox town fathers to reject the literate booksellers’ and enlightened citizens’ effort to recruit a doctor and build a hospital. (Ulmer’s father died in the flu epidemic, and he at this time made a series of public health PSA films for various sponsors, aimed at minority communities, on hygiene and the proper control of TB contagion.) The harpy insists the community organize a ”plague wedding” in the cemetery to expiate the problem. (Opatoshu’s father wrote a story on such an event; the original footage of the ritual has been cut over time). Ironically, the disadvantaged yet dignified young lovers turn this embarrassing sacrifice to their advantage for a dowry and escape to the big city, where they may even find medical experts to cure their disabilities that have made them outcasts, at least hers. (4K digital restoration by The National Center for Jewish Film) (premiere at 2021 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (3/5/2021)
Listen Up Philip- (In this verbose satire of Jewish male novelists’ self-involved kvetching, Jonathan Pryce plays a version of Philip Roth called “Ike Zimmerman”. So presumably, his bitter daughter “Melanie” (played by Krysten Ritter) is Jewish, though all she tells about her mother is their resentment over his frequent affairs, so in return he calls her bitch and finally makes her unwelcome at his upstate country home, fleeing in tears. She flirts with his protégé “Philip Lewis Friedman (played by Jason Schwartzman), but he, of course, prefers his shiksa girlfriends, though I wasn’t 100% sure about his first ex, as I missed the first few minutes. Though there’s lots of close-up silent shots of her enraged mouth yelling at him while the cynically weary narrator takes over, the daughter gets her revenge along side the closing credits – after the covers of all his books is the cover of her expose memoir. (previewed at 2014 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (11/5/2014)
Little Men Too bad a stereotyped portrayal of a putative Jewish woman mars an otherwise lovely slice-of-life film. Though director Ira Sachs was inspired to write the script based on the experiences of his writing partner Mauricio Zacharias’s family in Brazil, this is very much a New York movie. The opening scenes seem to establish a Jewish family on the Upper West Side, when the surprised “Jacob “Jake” Jardine” (the extraordinarily expressive young Theo Taplitz) gets a phone call, the caller with a thick New York Jewish accent says he was an old friend of his grandfather “Max”, had heard he died, and asked where the service would be. With the grandfather’s son, “Jake”s dad, “Brian”, an actor in nonprofit theater, is played by Greg Kinnear, and his mother “Kathy” a psychotherapist played by Jennifer Ehle, any other hints of putative Jewish identity seemed missing – until the dad’s sister “Audrey” (played by Talia Balsam) started pressing her brother over money issues, for a wincible stereotype, despite her appearance: You got the house – what did I get? [as I remember her plaint] The press notes try to sugar coat her single-mindedness: “Brian’s sister Audrey is depending on the rental income for the store, which is worth far more than what Leonor is paying.”, that’s the Chilean immigrant dressmaker, played by Paulina García. “Kathy” tries to present her related perspective to “Paulina”: You think we’re rich – but I work hard! [My recall of her statement.] “Paulina”s strikes out against the more easygoing brother: Your father always said your sister inherited his brains. He hated going to your place because everything there was bought by your wife. You weren’t even man enough to support your family. [That’s based on my memory of her bitter diatribe.] “Brian” pleads that “Audrey” also has a family to support and needs the income. Though “Brian” weakly protested to his wife that the sister hired a lawyer to draw up a commercial lease commensurate with a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood, even the dressmaker’s family friend has to admit it is all legal and reasonable to ask for three times the rent or a penalty if she’s not out in a week. But with “Leonor” stressing her friendship with “Max”, such that she was more family to him than his children ever were, “Audrey” is definitely the rapacious villain of the piece, evicting the dressmaker and breaking up a beautiful friendship between “Jake” and her son “Antonio” (played winningly by Michael Barbieri). (previewed for BAMcinemaFest 2016) (6/3/2016)
The Little Traitor (Seen at 2008 Israel Film Festival) (11/9/2009)
Live And Become (Va, Vis Et Deviens) (Warning: white on white subtitles!) (So, nu: The most diverse, beautiful and non-stereotypical set of Jewish women characters that I’ve ever seen in one film! The Ethiopian Jewish mother, the Israeli adoptive mother, the sister and the teen-age and adult girlfriend, all with strong, independent personalities, points of view and passion.) (2/1/2008)
Lives Well Lived - Of the 40 Californians aged 75 to 100 interviewed who are providing anodyne pearls of wisdom, I could only identify Marion Wolff, age 84, of San Luis Obispo, CA, as Jewish, because she detailed her experiences on the first Kindertransport, from Vienna, now a grandmother and Holocaust educator. (preview courtesy Shadow Distribution (4/15/2018)
Looking for Zion Director Tamara Erde is the on-screen protagonist throughout the documentary, in tracking the locales of her grandfather’s archival photographs from 1930’s Palestine. The primary other Israeli Jewish woman heard/seen is her mother – and their bickering, fraught relationship as her mother refuses to talk about her parents. (preview at 2018 Other Israel Film Festival) (10/26/2018)
Loss (Vaters Land) (short) (An interview with Hannah Arendt begins the documentary.) (12/8/2010)
The Lost Crown (HaKeter HaAvud)
The panel of Israeli experts that director Avi Dabach, great-grandson of the original keeper of the Aleppo (Syria) Codex, assembles to gather all the clues on what happened to the missing pages of this most complete version of the Bible, as approved by Maimonides, includes a woman investigative journalist Yifat Erlich, above. (She is also a West Bank-living religious Zionist and erstwhile Knesset candidate. Times of Israel also describes her: “Over the years, she has conducted many high-profile investigations centering around the religious and ultra-Orthodox communities and focusing on sensitive topics like abortions, religious cults, corruption in religious courts and child molestation.) Women also provide other useful bits of information, including Sarina Faham, the widow of the cheese merchant who wrapped up the Codex for smuggling from Aleppo into Israel in 1957, and his elderly sister-in-law in Deal, NJ, where the Halabi families vacation every summer, who remembers when he emigrated to the U.S. for more opportunities. Producer Judith Manassen-Ramon has further developed the story into a VR website to continue to bring attention to the condescending and detrimental attitude of the Ashkenazi establishment elite of Israel in the 1950’s treated the Aleppo and other Jews from Arab countries and their patrimony. (at 2019 New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival /seen at Forest Hills Jewish Center Cinematek) (11/10/2019)
Lost & Found - In writer/director Liam O’Mochain’s concatenation of seven intersecting, inspired-by-true-stories, “The Tent” features a putative Jewish woman, as he says in the Production Notes: “I had heard about 100 children that lived in a farm in the North of Ireland in 1939. They have travelled there as part of the kindertransport from Germany and Eastern Europe. After I heard this story, I decided to do some researching on both lost treasure of the Second World War and children who had been sent from their homeland by their families to the UK and Ireland. I relocated the Czech Republic part of the story to an area in Poland and I created a character who had come to Ireland as part of kindertransport, settling here after the war had ended.” Does he really think that a child who was just of Polish identity was sent? Certainly as a grandson Daniel, he knows nothing. His Gran (Barbara Adair) is haunted on her death bed by her kindertransport experience as a 7-year-old in about 1939 —but she’s buried in a Catholic cemetery. Richie Buckley’s score for this episode was full of fiddle and accordion, but more Irish than klezmer.) (Preview courtesy of Gravitas Ventures) (3/15/2019)
Lost Embrace (El Abrazo partido)
Lost Love Diaries (Yomanei Haahava Haavudim) (preview at 2012 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) (A moving and involving documentary that illustrates many strains of women’s Holocaust survival and how memories surface decades after. A daughter helps a mother re-trace her pre-war life as a carefree adolescent in Holland with a beloved boyfriend she was making plans with for their future, but in fleeing the Nazis they separated and hid wherever they could, planning to meet at war’s end. Only his diary appears -- mysteriously sent to her on her wedding day just before her departure to Palestine, and as a widow 65 years later, finally able to deal with her survivors’ guilt, she tries to find what happened to him, and who sent it to her. The complicated, quixotic, emotionally draining, suspenseful research they undertake, the people they meet and manage to convince them to help, who will admit to what during the war, how they find photographs and documentation to support her memories, and the kibitzing between mother and daughter, are very much womens’ stories that should be re-made into a feature film.) (1/22/2012)
Louder Than A Bomb (previewed at 2010 DocuWeeks) (So, nu: One of the four teens followed through the Chicago poetry slam competition is a Jewish guy, Adam Gottlieb, with proud, loving, supportive parents, who the reviewers all identify as suburban, though they do live in the city of Chicago. While he only specifies his father as Jewish, his wonderful poem "Maxwell Street" cites his grandmother as a role model for living with tolerance and peace in the ever-changing city. We took a similar tour with our machatunim of her father's natal neighborhood.) (8/5/2010/5/18/2011)
Love & Mercy (So, nu: In the 1980’s, Brian Wilson suddenly announces to Melinda Ledbetter that he wants matzoh ball soup, that his first wife was Jewish and he first tasted it at her parents’ house, but they could get some at Canter’s (as seen in Deli Man). In the 1960’s sections, there’s no other indication that his first wife Marilyn (played by Erin Darkeis) is Jewish, other than that she’s brunette. He also tells Melinda he has two daughters who live with their mother, but back in the 1960’s we only hear Marilyn tell him she’s pregnant once. While the brief couple of scenes we see with them together are affectionate and supportive amidst pool parties and LSD trips, he later tells Melinda that they were married much too young.) (6/5/2015)
Love and Other Catastrophes
Love & Stuff Judith Helfand’s emotionally intimate documentary of motherhood first ranges over 25 years of her living, dying, and dead mother Florence and her house, then apartment full of stuff (particularly Judaica items like Shabbat candlesticks, Hanukiah, and the same style tools for chopped liver that I saved from my grandmother’s Brooklyn apartment). Then she reels from the absence of her mother when she adopts a baby girl (from a Jewish mother). Using footage from her A Healthy Baby Girl (1997) covering the inter-generational trauma of being a DES-daughter having a hysterectomy at age 25, and other home documentation of family simchas and ritual meals, particularly of seders, she learns to cope with being a 50-year-old, first-time mother, of a newborn through running toddler to kindergartener, without a mother. (Odetta’s niece becomes a paid substitute.) Helfand credits the editing by Marina Katz and David Cohen for focusing the hundreds of hours of footage into a time-traveling thematic whole. (preview at 2020 DOC NYC/ at 2021 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum, shown with her prequel short Absolutely No Spitting where Helfand compared the results of their spit DNA tests – she almost all Ashkenazi and her adopted daughter’s rainbow “pan-global heritage of New York City” – and how they’ll celebrate all.) (11/17/2020; 3/13/2021)
Love, Antosha Within this bio-doc of the late, young actor Anton Yelchin is one of the most loving tributes to a Jewish mother. Though his father Viktor Yelchin is more explicitly identified as Jewish, in reacting to the upswing in antisemitism in the USSR in the 1980’s when he and his wife/skating partner Irina Korina couldn’t compete as ice dancers abroad so moved his family as refugees to the U.S. with little of their inheritances and earnings, and is seen wearing a yarmulke in family photos, at their wedding and another family event, so his mother is putatively Jewish. Through interviews with her, friends, and Anton with the media, she’s described as a hard-working immigrant to California, giving ice dancing lessons and choreographing skaters’ routines, who is the force who encouraged his artistic tendencies, as seen in many photos and home movies of them together. Irina took him to youth theater groups and acting classes, then to auditions and shoots of commercials, TV shows, and his early movies, around her work schedule. His emails, video tapes, songs, and hand-drawn cards, in English and Russian, declare his constant love for her, and gratitude for her support. With her cropped silver hair, thick Russian accent, and black eye frames, she is very dramatic looking. When he was cast in the remakes of Star Trek as the young “Chekhov”, as originally played by Walter Koenig the accent was so in-authentic he found he cound’t use hers as a model, but said he could use his grandfather’s, seen in a couple of photos without specifying maternal or paternal. His friend and co-star Jennifer Lawrence remembered surprise that he was looking forward to his mother’s visit at their filming location, in contrast to her: “My mother coming always brings on a pre-migraine.” His mother also helped him manage his cystic fibrosis, even keeping his diagnosis from him until its flare-up at puberty could also interfere with his film and music performance ambitions. She set up a foundation to help young people with similar struggles “to empower and support young people engaged in creative arts who face career challenges due to debilitating disease or disability”. (7/26/2019)
Love Comes Lately (So, nu: The Jewish women are strong individuals in this film, certainly the most refreshing American Jewish women on screen in this decade. Rhea Perlman, known more for playing an Italian-American waitress in TV’s Cheers, is in a dramatic role but still delightfully crusty in her jealousy and legitimate suspicions. Inspired by Singer’s complicated relationship with his second wife Alma, she gives her old lover a guilty reminder to carry around about how organized and helpful she is to him. Barbara Hershey is both sensual and intellectually convincing while explaining why he is no longer the subject of her thesis (particularly compared to her various lovers in Israel, where she decided to focus on modern Israeli literature instead). Tovah Feldshuh and Caroline Aaron, the latter playing a character not in the stories, portray the warmest, cliché-free Miami Jewish widows on film.). (6/15/2008)
Love During Wartime (briefly reviewed at 2011 Tribeca Film Festival) While the Jewish mother and the German government are equally upset about finding her archived Nazi birth certificate that hid her Jewish identity then, the Jewish family falls into the common Israeli habit of giving Osama a paternalistic Hebraic nickname, "Assi", that he quickly sheds in Germany, despite anti-Muslim discrimination.) (4/22/2011)
Love, Gilda (preview at 2018 Tribeca Film Festival) (11/10/2018)
Love It Was Not (Ahava Zot Lo Hayta)
Israeli director Maya Sarfaty created one of the best of the few Holocaust documentaries that’s almost completely from women’s points of view. Based on her 2016 Student Academy Award-winning short The Most Beautiful Woman (that I don’t remember seeing, which focused on the second generation), she explains she was led to the story of the Auschwitz and pre/post-war experiences of Helena Citron (who became Tzipora Tahori), her sister Roza Citron (who became Shoshanna Orenstein): “As a child, my first theatre teacher [for over a decade] was Helena Citron’s niece [Miki Marin]. She entrusted me with the story of the two sisters with the understanding that one day, I would become a voice and share these events.” While Dagmar, the daughter of SS Officer Franz Wunsch made available his private writings and family home movies and memorabilia to present his point-of-view of falling in love with a Jewish prisoner under his supervision, crucial to the film’s uniqueness is the participation of those whom Sarfaty calls “The Chorus of A Thousand Women” - - the first female transport in 1942 to what became Auschwitz, who were forced to help build it and survived to liberation in 1945. While finding many testimonies in Yad Vashem that included memories about the protagonists, she was able to find and interview seven, including a childhood friend (two have since died) – not only do their memories not always agree, their key emotional reactions to what they observed and experienced also richly varies, from envy to anger to understanding that no one who wasn’t in Helena’s position can judge. None even agree what song Helena sang that first attracted Wunsch’s attention. (Women survivors in the Forgotten Transports interviews recalled a love story between an SS Officer and one of the female prisoners, but I think that was a different couple in a different camp.) The film adds a complex dimension to their lives by looking at the choices they made after the war, particularly when Wunsch’s wife reached out to Helena asking her to be a defense witness in his 1972 trial in Vienna; his case was one of only four the Austrian government prosecuted, though Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld gave the government a list of over sixty former SS officers living openly in their country. (Austrian director Thomas Roth’s Schächten—A Retribution, fictionalizes another of these few prosecutions.) The protagonists’ actions challenge stereotypes of “good” vs. “evil”, “perpetrator” vs. “victim”, within extreme circumstances and moral responsibilities.
Beyond the testimonies, Sarfaty adds vivid visual context, inspired by Wunsch’s own manipulation of his disconcerting photograph of a beautiful, healthy-looking Helena in the striped prisoner’s uniform into places he dreamed of being with her: “Reconstructions of key scenes take the form of multi-layered photomontages using only historical photos and archival images from the time and place where it all happened… into a kind of a 3D stage…Merged into new compositions and shot meticulously in a black studio, a fashion usually kept for special FX and commercials. This creative process is being exposed to the audience throughout the film, as if the pictures declare themselves like fictional illustrations, as opposed to factual historical documents.” The artwork is attributed to Shlomit Gopher and Ayelet Albenda. (Winter Journey employed a somewhat similar technique, albeit by placing actors within archival settings.) (courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment) (11/5/2021; 1/27/2023)
The Love Letter (Michtav Ahava Lam ‘em Sheli) (short) (preview at 2018 Tribeca Film Festival) As a student director, Atara Frisch picked an unstereotyped image of an Israeli Jewish woman for her central character in Gili Beit Halachmi as “Noa”, with long red curly hair. (Though that’s how French movies portray Jewish women.) “Noa” is also not the usual brown-nose martinet of Israeli women military bosses, but genuinely trying to shape up the new recruits. While her sergeant “Sapir” (Shir Abramov) is more surprised at the lesbian implication of the titular note, “Sapir” is also more wily to check the soldier’s Facebook page for relationship status to prove to her perhaps more naïve commander she’s being played, pushing “Noa” into a challenging confrontation that may fluster the commander more than the coolly smug soldier. (5/17/2018)
Low Life (Les Amants de Low Life) (2/29/2012)
Ma’Abarot - While not the first eye-opening documentary about the titular “temporary transit camps” for immigrants in Israel in the late ‘40’s/50’s, the angry, tearful interviews with those who lived in them as children, including many women, are supported by racist, paternalist documents from Israeli government and Jewish agency files. The interviewees include Ashkenazim and Romanians, to point out the differences in the treatment of the Mizrahim, particularly the Yemeni. (As awful as was the brutal drive against an alleged outbreak of ringworm, the U.S. did the same to Appalachian and other poor kids, so perhaps effective medications weren’t known.) Directed by Dina Zvi-Riklis, this 90 minute version distributed in the U.S. is edited down from a four-episode public TV docu-series, so I wonder what was left out? (at 2020 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum and seen at 2020 New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival) (2/25/2020)
Maestro- While Leonard Bernstein’s sister Shirley, as portrayed by Sarah Silverman, is perceived as Jewish, his wife Felicia Montealegre-Cohen, as portrayed by Carey Mulligan, is more problematic about her Jewish father, and their two daughters, so I need to check the script and do more research and consideration. (courtesy of Netflix)
For context about their milieu, here’s an oral history with my husband’s mother’s first cousin’s wife’s sister Rose Tobias-Shaw who knew the friends as a dancer with Jerome Robbins. (12/6/2023)
The Maestro - Ostensibly a bio-pic of 1940’s/50’s Hollywood unheralded composer and important mentor Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, the primary focus, as directed by Adam Cushman, written by C.V. Herst (who cameos as Igor Stravinsky), is on his student Jerry Herst (Leo Marks); both their compositions are in the soundtrack. With continuing inferences that Jerry is Jewish, his voice-over describes that after Pearl Harbor he had to leave the Navy “on my way to Corregidor” in 1942 to care for his terminally ill mother, so credits her with saving his life from the Japanese death march. Early in his time at a Los Angeles rooming house in 1945, he calls his girlfriend back home and strings her along. His fellow veteran roommates remind him when she calls, and they warn him to return her calls, which he evidently does not. He gets surprise visits from first his father Abe (William Russ) and then his younger, conventionally married suburban brother Sam (Mackenzie Astin) who repeat the same point: Your girl has dinner with us at least once a week. She’s a great gal…You’re losing her. They do everything but say she’s a nice Jewish girl as they imply she comes for Shabbat dinner. But I didn’t catch that either putatively Jewish woman, presumably related to the scripter, is heard from directly or seen, though judging from the credits they may have been edited out. (preview courtesy of Freestyle Digital Media) (2/12/2019)
A Magical Substance Flows Into Me
Palestinian artist Jumana Manna tracked down contemporary exemplars of the “Oriental Music” recorded in 1937 by at the German-Jewish Hebrew University ethnomusicologist Robert Lachmann for the Palestine Broadcasting Service, filmed in their homes and usually in their kitchens, so any women seen are invariably cooking. Featuring musicians from the Moroccan, Kurdish, and Yemenite Jewish, communities, as well as the Samaritans, urban and rural Palestinians, Bedouins, and Coptic Christians, none of the coverage I’ve seen have focused on the Jews. While many reviews include Manna’s above still of singer Neta Elkayam, without identifying her – I posted on Facebook to confirm her accompanist there as Amit Hai Cohen and she responded: “Hello Nora, send Hello to Jumana, her film is a magic! and yes, its Amit playing the banjo.” (By saving all the musical credits of the past and present to the end of the hour-long documentary (the version at the Berlinale was evidently 10 minutes longer, so I wonder what was cut), the director made it that much more difficult for reviewers to note the performers’ past and present’s names). The beautiful and richly-voiced Elkayam is the only female performer in the film and the only one who learned her musical tradition from her grandmother. She speaks passionately about her Jewish grandmother from the Maghreb who felt more comfortable speaking in the Arabic dialect Darija than Hebrew, isolating herself into her house that became Morocco for her granddaughter, even welcoming in passing-by Arabs. (previewed at 2016 Art of the Real of Film at Lincoln Center) (updated 3/27/2016)
The Magnificent Meyersons - Terrific cast, including Kate Mulgrew, Richard Kind, Shoshannah Stern, Neal Huff, Daniel Eric Gold, Melissa Errico, Lauren Ridloff, and Barbara Barrie, with cinematographer Derek McKane’s lively verité use of the blocks around NYC’s Union Square and 14th Street, can’t lift writer/director Evan Oppenheimer’s fairly boring story of a middle-class Jewish family in Manhattan, dealing in the past and present with the repercussions from the father who left them. I track five branches of mine and my husband’s families and there are stories like this in each one. (8/20/2021)
Mahler on the Couch (Mahler auf der Couch) (briefly reviewed at 2011 New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (So, nu: via the English subtitles, there's only a brief reference that all the principals are Jewish, when Mahler's affronted sister Justine testifies to the camera about Alma's family's uncultured use of Yiddish. But she's really annoyed that Alma has rescued management of his business affairs so that he can concentrate on composing in peace. (Alma's mother similarly defends her.) Alma's frustration that she does this, and much more in assistance very well, while fending off his soprano ex-lover and devotedly raising their two daughters, at the expense of her own musical career rises above didactic feminist clichés, like Alma weeping: He wants a wife, not a colleague. Her passionate embodiment by Barbara Romaner, an actress known previously more for her theater work, makes this one of the loveliest, and most credible, portrayals of a romance between an older, successful mentor and a young, beautiful protégé I've seen on film, bolstered by the montage of her tutelage and competing courtships by other talented men, based on her actual diaries and their love letters, and her very sensual affair with Walter Gropius that foreshadows her future relationships with other leading Viennese artists. Instrument by instrument, in 49 pieces, the 1st, , adagio, movement of his 10th symphony that he wrote amidst their strife (as well as the adagietto from the 5th he gave her when they fell in love), plus her own compositions, are matched to her feelings, that Freud's probing is imagined to have made Mahler finally understand. Several of us left the screening singing Tom Lehrer's tribute, "Alma". (1/27/2011)
Maid in Manhattan
Making Trouble (Review forthcoming, as seen at the 2008 NY Jewish Film Festival at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (Produced by the Jewish Women’s Archive, a feminist answer to Broadway Danny Rose, let alone Woody Allen and his ilk, as Jackie Hoffman and other Jewish women comediennes sit around Katz’s to kibbitz, interspersed with expert interviews for archival and biographical looks at Molly Picon, Sophie Tucker, Fanny Brice, Joan Rivers, Gilda Radnor and Wendy Wasserstein.) (1/24/2008)
Mama Weed (La Daronne) - A clever French caper movie that’s female-centered, with multi-ethnic solidarity among middle-aged women willing to run circles around the system that is usually against them. Co-written by lawyer/filmmaker Hannelore Cayre based on her 2017 French novel (published in English as The Godmother), with director Jean-Paul Salomé. When the titular character “Patience Portefeux” (played by Isabelle Huppert), a French-Arabic translator/interpreter for the police department (Huppert memorized quite a lot of Arabic dialogue), tries to feed her mother (played by Liliane Rovère), who is slipping into dementia in an expensive assisted living facility that she’s behind on paying the fees, the mother complains: I didn’t survive death camps to eat this crap! The first-person book, in the English translation by Stephanie Smee, provides more background on “Patience”s parents: “They had lost everything, it must be said, including their country. Nothing was left of my [pied-noir] father’s French Tunisia, nothing of my mother’s Jewish Vienna. Nobody for him to talk to in his patouète dialect, nor for her in Yiddish. Not even corpses in the cemetery. Nothing. It had all been erased from the map, like Atlantis. So they bonded in their solitude, putting roots down in the no man’s land….two vulgar foreigners who found each other in post-war, post-colonial France.”
The mother’s background and her financial burden on her daughter was inspired by Cayre’s own; here’s her descriptions combined from a couple of Google-translated interviews: "My mother had survived the deportation, so she was indestructible. Living in Camp des Milles with a simple summer dress in any season, when everyone would die of typhoid, tuberculosis, hunger, and cold… she was interned throughout 1942, [and] systematically escaped deportation thanks to her maiden name, Wilker. The trains were filled in alphabetical order, and always crowded when it came time to her turn…Then her family managed to reach Switzerland, a fate not easy for everyone to assume; seeing no way out of his existence, my grandfather ended up hanging himself in the middle of the day in a park in Geneva…My mother opted for a radical choice of life: in 1954, she found my father, her first love of the 1940s, in the back of a bus. That day, she did not return home, immediately abandoning her first husband and their daughter… But I forgive her, because it's so awful, what she went through. She couldn't give love… But she was terrible, she should never have had children… After her stroke, she was paralyzed in the left hemisphere: she turned into a 4 year old girl devoid of any notion of reality, she spoke to nonexistent people, she told nonexistent facts, she spoke a word of Yiddish out of two, I didn't understand anything, she also had hallucinations… and as soon as I left, she screamed, it was horrible. [The Press Notes say the mother’s character also speaks occasionally in Yiddish, but I didn’t notice.]… All of the baby-boom generation has aging parents, dying at 3,200 euros per month in a retirement home. They wonder how they are going to be able to pay for their children's school as well. It's a real generational choice: the age pyramid is bulging, society will not be able to absorb." What with her father’s and husband’s shady backgrounds, this context makes credible “Patience” throwing herself into a very smart criminal plan with her Moroccan health aide “Khadidja” (Farida Ouchani) and Chinese landlady “Mrs. Fo” (Jade Nadja Nguyen). (preview courtesy of Music Box Films) (7/16/2021)
Chapter 3 in the novel focuses on the mother: ”Where there’s a will, the intrepid Jewish woman will find a way” – now when she’s ill, and during the lead character’s childhood, when she was in PTSD from her camp experiences: “She would read novels that were an infinitely repetitive variation on the same theme: Jewish woman leaves Austria, Poland or Russia, disembarking, bare foot, at the base of the Statue of Liberty on Ellis Island, and thank to cunning nature, her ass, her good fortune, becomes a famous publisher, a renowned fashion designer, a feared lawyer…This Jewish female bulldozer crushes everything in her path, men in particular.”
Mank: Even without factual accuracy about writer Herman J. Mankiewicz (played by Gary Oldman), in Jack Fincher’s script, directed by his son David Fincher, his wife Sarah Mankiewicz (attractively portrayed by Tuppence Middleton) seems to be the only Jewish woman in 1930’s and 1940’s Hollywood. While they are clearly fond of each other, and she’s involved with his career by importuning his brother Joseph to help him, he only occasionally brings her along to parties, explaining she’s home with the offspring. Near the end she gets a rebellious speech (transcribable approximately because it’s available on Netflix): I raised your children kosher by myself, put up with drinking, gambling, platonic affairs. I made nice with Louis B. Mayer to have your job back…Herman, I’m never bored, exhausted, exasperated so much I have to stick around to see how it all turns out. Whatever you do, be mindful of those who care for you most. Nobody call me ‘Poor Sarah’ any more! I’ve downloaded the recent well-reviewed bio of the brothers, which may have additional insight on her to compare to her fictional representation. (12/25/2020)
The Man Who Stole Banksy (So, nu: For a film that focuses on the graffiti protest art on the security wall between Israel and the West Bank, there’s very little reference to Jews. But the first person who initially guides the film crew to a checkpoint is a Jewish woman friend who made aliyah many years earlier, Jaffa gallerist Monique Har-El. The camera focuses on her ring with a prominent Jewish star.) (preview at 2018 Tribeca Film Festival) (5/2/2018)
March (Marzec) ’68
-Marzec ’68 - photo by Miguel Nieto
Director Krzysztof Lang opens on a primary school class photo, probably like his own. Then when children like this grew up to go to college in 1968 (he was just a couple of years behind), who in this attractive young Polish couple (above) is Jewish? The young man with curly brown locks “Janek” (played by Ignacy Liss)? Or the blonde “Hania” (Vanessa Alexander)? They fall in love surrounded by Polish culture and Christmas decorations – but their fathers have different secrets that will impact their romance. One father has old identification papers that marked him as Jewish. As the couple keeps dating, the other father calls his Ministry of the Interior office to get background on the parents.
While the political rebellion first shown through a theatrical performance in March is a bit dense for an American audience to understand its symbolic significance against Soviet control, the subsequent rallies for “Democracy!” and “Freedom from Censorship!” that draw in the idealistic couple are clear. The different sets of thugs beating up them and other protesters are a bit confusing, but the tear gas and arrests are a universal warning.
Integrating archival footage and recordings into both sides of the involving romantic story, Lang, with co-writer Andrzej Golda, intensely builds up how anti-Zionism and antisemitism were fomented to make Jews scapegoats for the political power plays within the Communist government. First a father, then a mother are dismissed from their professional jobs as no longer politically correct. Their child’s arrest leaves the family no choice but to emigrate quickly, under humiliating circumstances – along with 15,000 other Jews stripped of their Polish citizenship. While Lang lost childhood friends in March 1968, this poignant film is also a sober lesson on what happens again and again, with different victims. (at 2023 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center and The Jewish Museum/ courtesy of Menemsha Films) (1/25/2023)
Margaret (1/6/2012)
Marianne & Leonard: Words Of Love - Exhibition and Documentary
When I submitted this piece to Lilith editor, I got an expected query: “Seems to me that your use of "blond" is in most case here a proxy for "non-Jewish woman". And I do think we want to be careful not to stigmatize a whole category of women because of the color of their hair, whether real or artificial (or bleached by the Greek sun).” No and no. Here’s why I’ve noticed the irony of Jewish men’s attraction to blondes:
Rabbi Susan Schnur’s Fall 1991 (subscriber-accessible) article in Lilith “Notes from Underground: A Gathering of Children Hidden During the Holocaust” on the first hidden children’s conference in 1991 made the point vivid and has stuck with me: “The first thing that strikes me is how good-looking everyone is...The second thing what strikes me—also in the looks department—is how blond the room is. There are real blonds and fake blonds, but still, many more blonds per capita than one would find at a Hadassah convention or a CAJE CAJE [Coalition for the Advancement of Jewish Education] conference. Every real blond, of course, means an Aryan-looking child, one who was more easily passed off as a Gentile’s “orphaned niece” or a Catholic convent child. One woman says, ‘To this day, I walk down a busy street and see waves of hair—blond, black, blond, black, and what I am saying to myself is ‘life’, ‘death’, ‘life,’ ‘death.’…To get back to the blondness in the room. . . the fake blonds were of interest, too. What does it mean—to a 2 year old, or 4 year old, or 8 year old—to be blond? It means to be safe. It means to be ‘one of the strong ones’ as one woman puts it…blondness means safety.” In an interview, probably in the documentary Irena Sendler: In The Name of Their Mothers (2011), the Righteous Gentile said she could only save blond children from the Warsaw Ghetto. Looking at my own kids, I thought they would only have qualified until their hair turned darker at age three. In the nonfiction The Zookeeper’s Wife, the Righteous Gentile Antonina Zabinski devised a wartime dye so the Jews she smuggled to safety could dye their hair blonde.
Liv Ullman took on her last acting role, in Two Lives (Zwei Leben), to showcase a lesser known war crime. As part of Himmler’s Lebensborn program that saw Nordic women as the ideal Aryans, he directed SS and other German officers to fraternize with blonde, blue-eyed women of “Viking blood” in occupied countries, arranged for special homes for them to live and to give birth in special clinics, then sent up to 12,000 Norwegian children, for example, to Germany for adoption.
In contrast, my own work monitoring the image of Jewish women in movies and TV documents that we are usually shown with dark curly hair – and almost never appear as blondes. (The French, exceptionally, stereotype Jewish women with auburn hair.)
So I find Jewish men’s, particularly artists who set popular images, fascination for blondes as their sexual/erotic/whatever ideals, to be particularly ironic – including documentary director Nick Broomfield. In interviews up through this film, he found it amusing when interview subjects, such as Afrikaners for his film The Leader, His Driver, and the Driver’s Wife (1991), thought he was Jewish, and he only talked about his Quaker pacifist father Maurice. But later in 2019 he made My Father and Me, which includes the information that he only found out in his ‘20’s that his refugee mother was Jewish, so he had more in common with Cohen than a lover. So Broomfield’s obsession with Marianne, let alone that his first partner/co-director/cinematographer Joan Churchill is a blonde, and supports my cynical point that he, too, is a quintessential Jewish man cliché. (Thanks to Donna Schulman for her help!) (9/5/2019; 10/7/2019)
Marvin Hamlisch: What He Did for Love (briefly reviewed at 2013 DOC NYC Round-up Part 1: Bio Docs) (Why is every interviewee so surprised that a Jewish mother would be OK with a son wanting to write for Broadway, or think that it was unusual for Jews to write Broadway musicals or the Great American Songbook?) (1/16/2014)
Mary Lou (Tamid oto chalom) (briefly reviewed at 2012 New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (So, nu: Perhaps because the writer is female, the usual gay story stereotypes of mother-obsession, narcissism, a best girl friend --to avoid a certain non-PC term-- and drag queens, let alone closeted bullies, are softened by genuinely appealing characters. Because the music-obsessed, Monroe-esque mother is seen through the son’s eyes as he creates fantasy memories, she seems sympathetic as a show business wannabe rather than irresponsible, even as the truth about why she left him is quite touching. I was a bit surprised that just as the BFF conveniently turns 18, she falls in love with her –cringe--30-year-old, widowed boss. While the son channels Mom in the performance piece he creates about her, the drag queens are fun entertainers who are not women-mockers and have real, sometimes sad, lives when they take off their wigs. The boss even brings his young daughter to their show to demonstrate its wholesomeness.) (1/15/2012)
Mary Magdalene
My interest was in how she would be portrayed as a Jew, before Jesus converts her to his new cult – as well as that my mother, poet Charlotte Mandel wrote the related spoem novella The Life Of Mary.
Here’s the film’s intentions, as directed by Garth Davis, from the Press Notes: “Producer Iain Canning in the press notes described the genesis as ‘The initial script was written by acclaimed playwright Helen Edmundson who came up with the blueprint and drew together all the relevant texts into a narrative. Philippa Goslett subsequently worked on the script to bring a filmic edge and a little bit more dynamic between the disciples and Mary herself to really bring it to life.’ Goslett’s research took her on a journey into biblical history which presented further complications but also underlined the importance of the story at the heart of the film. “We had a multitude of conversations with rabbis, priests, Jewish historians, biblical scholars and archeologists and everyone we talked to disagreed with each other! They each had a distinct take on the Jesus movement and what it meant, so that was fascinating. But what was even more fascinating was that they all agreed, without exception, that Mary of Magdala should be considered as a disciple and an apostle.’… Producer Liz Watts continues the story: ‘The screenplay and the production were influenced by lots of different theological and historical texts, and we had a number of biblical and historical consultants - Jewish, Greek Orthodox, Catholic - on the film, who were really fantastic but who also offered totally different viewpoints - from the Jewish idea of the 1st Century, to the Christian writing and rewriting of the 1st Century, from the Gospel of Mark, primarily, to the Gospel of Mary.’…As she’s presented in the film even before she meets Jesus, Mary is a very strong, independent and, in some ways, a modern woman - still unmarried despite being in her early 20s and working with her family of fishermen. As [actress Rooney] Mara explains, "We first meet Mary while she's living in Magdala with her family and she is very different to everyone in her family. Her family are pushing her to get married and have children, as she’s already considered old, and to do what a woman is expected to do. She’s really resistant to that. I think she really loves the fishing work and she feels very connected to God in a way that she can't really understand and that she wants to explore more. She's always felt very different to everyone else and feels she’s never been listened to, so when Jesus comes along he's the first person who understands what she's feeling. She’s brave enough to leave her family behind and follow him.’”
So much for their intentions. Here’s what I actually saw in the film. In 33 CE under Herod, her community when Jesus comes to preach in her neighborhood is never called “Jewish” or in the “Kingdom of Judah” or “Hebrews”, though he is referred to as a “rabbi”. After services, where men sit on one side, and women on the other, including her fecund sister-in-law Rachel (Ariane Labed), her father Aaron (Jules Struk) and her brother Daniel (Denis Ménochet) arrange a marriage for her with a widower who has two kids needing a mother. She demurs that she wouldn’t feel comfortable because she was friends with their mother, who she probably helped in childbirth as she’s a midwife-in-training. But she goes outside to fervently pray for what decision to make, and the rabbi Ephraim (Tsahi Halevi) watches her unusual behavior. Interestingly, this plays out much like Hannah in the biblical Book of Samuel, whose fervent prayers for a child made Eli the High Priest suspicious that she was drunk. Daniel has a more conventional, patriarchal view: You pray at services with the other women; you pray at home with family, not outside like some wandering lunatic. You want to shave your head and pray whenever you want like a man?…You have brought shame on the family. When she makes clear that she refuses to marry, however, the family goes in an oddly non-Jewish direction when the rabbi decides she is possessed by a demon and insists on an exorcism. So no wonder she leaves them and becomes an equal disciple with “The Baptists”, in this interpretation.
More Jewish-sounding were the haunting arrangments by Sophia Brous sung in Hebrew by the women cast members and psalms, sung with the vaguely identified Temple Beth Israel Choir. (preview courtesy of IFC Films) (4/6/2019)
Masel Tov Cocktail - A funny, visually entertaining short, co-written by Merle Teresa Kirchhoff, explains the wrought historical and contemporary political context in the life of the Russian-Jewish community in Germany, from the perspective of a high school senior guy dating a non-Jewish girl. Too bad his mother (played by Liudmyla Vasylieva) is not given any sense of identity or personality. (seen at 2021 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (3/5/2021)
The Matchmaker (Paam Hayiti) (So, nu: commentary forthcoming) (8/22/2012)
A Matter of Size (Sipur Gadol) (briefly reviewed at Part 1 Recommendations of 2009 Tribeca Film Festival) (While the dieting coach is a controlling bitch, the other Jewish-Israeli women have refreshing elements. While the mother is Sephardic and observant enough to host Shabbat dinner, her cutting comments perfectly capture the mixed messages an overweight child gets about food, that it's both about love and criticism. And she too gets a romance. The plump girlfriend is a bit too understanding, but she's no pushover for anyone in her life.) (5/17/2009)
Max Minsky and Me (Max Minsky und ich) (briefly reviewed at 2009 Annual New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (I haven't yet read Prince William, Maximilian Minsky, and Me that it is adapted from, but now I'm also curious about the other novels by transplanted Queens native Holly-Jane Rahlens (Becky Bernstein Goes Berlin, Mazel Tov in Las Vegas). She explained the female characters in the press notes: "I made my protagonist's mother a Jewish-American as myself, and though I'm not much of a practicing Jew, I know a bunch of American women in Berlin who are. They became for me Nelly's mother, Lucy Bloom-Edelmeister. . . [I]t struck me that there were few books about Jewish children in today's Germany. . . Using Nelly's bat mitzvah as a vehicle, Jewish culture could be conveyed in a simple and realistic fashion to a young audience that knew little about it. . .As in all 'fairy tales' you need a 'fair godmother', so I created Risa Ginsberg, a wise and reverent Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust, and her wacky friends Frau Goldfarb and Frau Levy. . .Risa. . originally a 75-year-old friend of the family, became a somewhat younger great aunt." Played by Monica Bleibtreu, she is explained in the film as having been a hidden child, while Nelly's grandmother escaped with their parents. The earthy elderly women are wonderfully supportive friends for Nelly, of her dreams and reconciling her heritage with her intellect. "Nelly" herself is one of the liveliest and believable portrayals of a Jewish girl I've seen in film, where she's also seen dealing with mean girls, dull Hebrew School, and unglossed family problems, as her beleaguered mom is sympathetic in her insistence on her daughter's American-style bat mitzvah. The author continues: "It's a world in which we can put our faith in the laws of science, yet still embrace our religious roots,. It's a world in which a city like Berlin with a dark past can become a haven of light." Director Anna Justice also related to the Jewish women through her paternal grandmother.) (1/18/2009)
Max Raabe in Israel (briefly in Reviewed: New York Jewish Film Festival 2013 of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (So, nu) (2/19/2013)
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl - I haven’t yet read the novel to see how author Jesse Andrews changed his portrayal of leukemia-struck high schooler “Rachel Kushner” (played by blondish Olivia Cooke) and her still-bitter-over-her-philandering-ex-husband, worry-wart, single mother “Denise” (played by comedienne Molly Shannon). Other than several mentions that she’s Jewish, mostly for a, well, deadpan punch line, there was nothing I could see around their Pittsburgh house or in their conversations or activities that reflected their heritage, until a brief glimpse of her funeral. (11/29/2015)
The Meaning of Hitler - So, nu: Filmmaking couple German Petra Epperlein and American Michael Tucker do include Jewish women interviewees among the experts who discuss different aspects of the title, as framed by Sebastian Haffner’s 1978 titular book. Most prominent is Prof. Deborah Lipstadt, per the Holocaust denier’s lawsuit against her, as fictionalized inDenial (and he is interviewed in Poland as the only country that welcomes him to tour sites), and her 2019 book Antisemitism: Here and Now. Also included is Francine Prose, who has been described as growing up in a secularized Jewish milieu and has won Jewish Book Council awards, but is cited here as the author of her 2009 Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife. The Nazi-hunting Klarsfelds are interviewed, but she is not Jewish. (preview at 2020 DOC NYC/ IFC Films theatrical release) (11/2/2020)
Meet the Fockers and Little Fockers In this otherwise unfunny sit com movie series, the relaxed interplay between Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand is the prime reason to watch. It's at least creditable that she plays a Jewish woman who is a younger, hippie version of the sprightly sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer than the usual image of the uptight Jewish mother, who has a successful self-help TV show with the catch phrase of "Sexpress Yourself", in a Miami Beach nod to Madonna, is admired by her daughter-in-law and gets hit on by her son's best friend. Otherwise, her Jewish bona fides are mostly established by dropping a couple of Yiddish words here and there, along with a couple of Jewish star decorations around her grandchildren's Christmas tree. But I can't read a word of my notes to quote specifics. (updated 1/4/2011)
Megiddo - Director Itzik Lerner explained that his documentary about Israel’s high-security jail for male political prisoners convicted of terrorism was originally shown on Israeli TV in three parts (one that focused on the minors), so the editing into one 90-minute feature may have lost useful details. Israeli women are seen as guards whose role primarily seems to be dealing with the women and families at visiting hours. While the rush of the wives (in traditional Muslim modest style, even two in complete chador) with children is a powerful rush of emotion with the prisoners, and for the audience to suddenly see them as family men, when their families leave, the men are riven to accuse the guards of extreme insensitivity to their wives. Angrily, they say their wives were forced to immodestly raise their skirts for a thorough search. A supervisor tries to find out if this happened to all the wives, and tries to explain that only those who set off a beep on the screening machine would have been searched more than others. Evidently after an investigation, amidst tensions in the prison over contraband cell phones, the women are asked in front of the other guards what happened. With either a different explanation or from a different situation, the woman explains she “had a feeling” about the women – and found illegal SIM cards being smuggled in their bras. The supervisor proudly gives her a commendation certificate. (seen at 2018 Other Israel Film Festival) (11/5/2018)
Memoir of War (La douleur) - There’s only one Jewish woman in the film. Just when Marguerite Duras (Mélanie Thierry) can no longer cope with waiting for her Communist husband Robert Antelme to return from a German labor camp (his experience of Buchenwald/Dachau society detailed in L'Espèce humaine (The Human Race)), her older friend Madame Katz (Shulamit Adar) shows up from Vichy France to remind her of a promise to stay at her apartment, and to symbolize that the Jews as the target of genocide had it even worse than the political prisoners. Even as the mother starts hearing that her crippled deported daughter would have been murdered immediately at an extermination facility, she keeps washing and ironing her daughter’s clothes in hopes that the horrible stories could be wrong.) (at 2018 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Film at Lincoln Center) (7/26/2018)
The Memory Thief (So, nu: The Jewish woman med student “Mira” (played by Rachel Miner) is refreshingly stereotype-free, professional and level-headed, charming and family-oriented as she sympathetically deals with the cuckoo in their nest.)
Memories of the Eichmann Trial (seen at To Save and Project: The 12th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation of Museum of Modern Art In addition to the fascinating perspectives of such Israeli women interviewed as one who testified at the trial and daughters of survivors, a unique interview is the wife of the brave photographer Henryk Ross who documented the liquidation of the Lodz Ghetto, and is not usually included in tributes to the photography unit. He frequently cites that she made his actions possible, and, as they both lapse from Hebrew back into their native Polish when the memories get emotional, director David Perlov gradually focuses more on her as she details, while chain-smoking, how she dressed him to be able to hide the camera, cautioned him when it would be too risky at what times both for him and the workers who were covering for him, figured out how to wrap up the film canisters and bury them for post-war retrieval, and then, chillingly, that she realized when Eichmann came there were larger round-ups, and details first the men, then women, then children she knew taken away.
Menashe - So nu: In this fictional portrait of a Hasidic widower father in Brooklyn (played by Menashe Lustig) who just wants to be a bit individualistic within the community, there are glimpses of women who are either complete conformists (who are appalled by his slight unconventionality) or rebels. While Lustig himself is Skver, there are discussions that different rabbis have different directives to their flock. Women (I couldn’t identify actresses by particular roles) are overheard discussing pro or con the ones who prohibit women from driving, or going to college, or will kick the children out of yeshiva for having a single parent or parent whose behavior is disapproved. All insist on marriage no later than the early ‘20’s – he laments being forced into an arranged marriage with the 18-year-old Israeli “Leah” who suffered from infertility and IVF (who paid for that?) for only one child, then suffered from a tumor, cared by her brother and sister-in-law through failing treatments. One potential bride for the titular character is described as having an eight-year-old and three-year-old twins but was finally able to get a divorce because her husband beat her. A young, very pregnant wife sits miserably with his neighbor “Mrs. Shimanovich” (played by Rose Gershkovich) helping to bake, who shrugs about her brood of eight: With a large family comes large tsouris., and gives him recipes he’s too incompetent to make. The film opens with a young, overwhelmed mother trying to control her kids at the supermarket she shops at three times a week – the camera pans from a baby to a toddler to four more climbing all around the shelves. (previewed at 2017 New Directors/New Films of Film at Lincoln Center/ MoMA) (updated 7/28/2017)
The surprising impact that making this film in Borough Park had on one young woman in the neighborhood. (added 5/27/2021)
Mendy: A Question of Faith (DVD review – scroll down) (The useful DVD commentary includes the director’s thoughts about the only Jewish woman character, “Mendy”s sister.)
Merchant of Venice
Merchant Ivory- In director Stephen Soucy’s documentary about the extraordinary cinematic work of the independent film producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory, a key to the quality of much of their work is writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Among many photographs, an interview with her daughter Ava Wood reveals to most fans of her mother’s films, novels, and stories, that her mother was a German Jew, a nick-of-time émigré to England. Among the reasons her background is less known, besides her wearing of elegant saris, is that she preferred not to attend award ceremonies or film festival screenings. In addition to writing award-winning screenplay adaptations of classically English novels (says Ivory - “improving on the books”, especially Maurice in 1987; quoted Merchant - “with a foreigner’s point of view”), she also advised the partners on the selection of other works, and on other scripts when she was busy with her own work (she felt books had longer lives than films). On screen, a letter of hers is seen criticizing “too perfect characters”.
In her 2nd adopted home of her husband’s India, her friend Catherine Freeman recalls moving in next door when inside her house came: “I am Ruth. I’m your neighbor. Have you brought any books? When assured “yes”, she complained: “But I’ve already got all these!” The film details that once she then moved to the Merchant Ivory base in New York in 1975 (writing in a room of Ivory’s house in Claverack), she became an even closer collaborator, including making more cast recommendations from among her friends and extended acquaintances, as she had back to Shakespeare Wallah (1965). However, the director’s emphasis is on the romantic relationships among Merchant, composer Richard Robbins, and the surviving nonagenarian Ivory who has now become a gay icon, so Ruth is secondary. (courtesy of Cohen Media Group) (8/23/2024)
The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)- While none of the male characters are explicitly Jewish, as so well portrayed by Dustin Hoffman, Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller and Judd Hirsch, every audience member will presume they are, including their highly stylized NY Jew dialogue in decibel, emotion, and one-up-man-ship. But none of the women seem like even what I call “putative Jews”, whether the sister “Jean” as played as the humorless straight man by Elizabeth Marvel, the 18-year-old daughter “Eliza” played sensually by Grace Van Patten, let alone any of the patriarch’s decidedly goyish-seeming current and ex-wives, played by Candice Bergen as “Julia” and Emma Thompson as “Maureen” – so notice a pattern? The males in the family are played by actors who the audience will identify as Jews, but none of the females are. The possible ironic exception, both as actress and character, is Rebecca Miller, daughter of Arthur Miller, playing Hirsch’s curly-haired brunette daughter “Loretta Shapiro”. (previewed at 2017 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (updated 9/28/2017)
Midnight in Paris: Is the portrayal of Gertrude Stein the most positive portrayal of a Jewish woman in a Woody Allen film? The Woody-stand in character respects her opinion as an editor and facilitator, even for romantic advice. However, Holland Cotter, in "Modern Is Modern Is ...", The New York Times, 6/2/2011, notes: "For better and for worse the pop-star Stein — the one played by Kathy Bates in the new Woody Allen movie, Midnight in Paris — is the one people have an easy time loving: the funny, feisty, bohemian mover and shaker who looks like a butch Buddha and is good for a quotation or two. But if we accept that Stein as our hero, what do lose? We lose Stein the great writer. And we lose the truth about the history of which she was a part." (6/6/2011)
Mighty Fine
Minyan - Eric Steel’s directed/co-written (with Daniel Pearle) bifurcated coming-of-age young/old gay love stories in Brooklyn’s oceanfront Brighton Beach in the late 1980s combines for a poignant story marred by too many stereotypes.
My neighborhood around Rego Park, Queens had the same mix. There were re-settled, now elderly Holocaust survivors (including the father of Maus’s Art Spiegelman), where yizkor memorial services were so palpably filled with grief that us younger congregants fled the raw emotion. In the 1970s-1980s, the neighborhood filled with Soviet refugees who had less Jewish identity than those who went to Israel, but evidently with far less Yiddish than these in Brighton Beach. The Russian Jews were seen as proselytizing opportunities for Ultra-Orthodox sects who sold them their old country authenticity, with free yeshiva tuition, before the new immigrants were even aware of the diversity of Judaism in the U.S.
The “old” story is very faithfully based on David Bezmozgis’s Toronto-set short story, with whole dialogue lifted, though in neither did I catch the gossips’ drift about the relationship between two elderly male roommates in a subsidized housing complex (an ex-soldier cab-owner, played effectively by Mark Margolis) and a Holocaust survivor intellectual). In both stories, no one even thinks to question or challenge the Orthodox requirement of a minyan consisting only of men, or that the building even has to have an Orthodox synagogue. The women congregants only function is to make refreshments for kiddush after services. These Russian immigrants accept that the Jewish women are literally blurry behind the shule curtain. Otherwise, the film presents women as annoyingly aggressive at seduction.
In the “young” hinge connector, high-schooler “David” (Samuel H. Levine) has, of course, a very annoying mother. “Rachel” (Brooke Blum) is stuck on her experiences with persistent antisemitism in the USSR that prevented her from getting Jewish and medical educations, and where she became an unhappy secular dentist married to a violent boxing coach, so she is insistent her son stay in the yeshiva he hates, where he is bullied. His best friend across the street (“Nathan”, played by Zane Pais) has to wait out in the street at night until his mother the prostitute signals from the window that she has finished off her last client. After “David” gets himself expelled, he has his first experience with public co-education that includes smart, attractive girls like “Alicia” (Carson Meyer). His oblivious mother is so thrilled he’s apparently dating a female, let alone one whose father is a successful car dealer on Long Island, that I couldn’t tell if the girl was Jewish or not; I may have heard the mother mutter about a shiksa. A dental office receptionist by day, his mother even lets the two have fun sharing her laughing-gas where she’s an unlicensed, after-hours dentist. Meanwhile, in the linked stories of “old” and “young”, his widower grandfather “Josef” (played by Ron Rifkin) is pushed into a sexual relationship by the widowed “Mrs Greenberg” (played by Eleanor Reissa), to the point of literally shutting out the grandson. His other daughter “Rivka” (Zuzanna Szadkowski) was already nagging about his financial problems at his wife’s shiva.
While it isn’t clear why “David” doesn’t ally with the local boys who are not hanging around with girls, he instead goes off to get sexually initiated, and schooled in the AIDS Holocaust, by a gay bartender across the bridge in Manhattan’s Village, who uses James Baldwin’s Giovanni's Room as an inducement. Like in all such movies, he is far too old to be hooking up with a minor. The beautiful score by David Krakauer and Kathleen Tagg turns from klezmer-ish in Brooklyn to jazzy in Manhattan.
As Steel’s first fiction feature after the involving documentaries The Bridge (2006) and Kiss The Water (2013), he is better at creating the period mise en scènes than three-dimensional people in them. (at 2021 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum/ seen courtesy of Strand Releasing) (10/23/2021)
Miral (4/3/2010)
Miriam (6/8/2007)
Misha and The Wolves - Many of the commentators and researchers director Sam Hobkinson interviewed about Belgian-born, suburban Massachusetts Misha Defonseca were women. Of the local American women who knew her, the Jewish ones heard her speak at Yom ha-Shoa observances at their synagogue, where she evidently first spoke in public in the early 1990’s about her experiences as a child during the Holocaust. The people who are the most effective at debunking her story are Jewish women. The director leaves for almost the end the opinion of historian Debórah Dwork. She succinctly notes that she told the publisher back in late 1996 that the manuscript memoir “narrative just didn’t work”, concludes that “greed powered” the publication, and such false stories “puts genuine survivors at risk” of not being believed, and the whole historical reality. Very impressive is Evelyne Haendel, the woman who was a real survivor as a hidden child who had tracked down the truth about her own family, and conducted the definitive research in Belgium on the memoirist. Unlike others who are suspicious, Haendel most creatively, finishes looking for a Jewish child, and instead searches for a Catholic girl, and follows up on name clues. She methodically goes through city directories and school registers to find definitive proof of where Misha was during the war. Haendel, who at the end of the credits is memorialized 1937 – 2021, is the most eloquent in her anger at the hoax: “Somebody stole a very painful part of my life,” and so on.
What is disconcerting, on a meta level, is having an actress portray Misha, who understandably refused to participate in the film, when elsewhere is shown that there is a lot of archival footage and photographs available of her, especially from France.(Netflix) (1/2/2022)
Mission Hebron (short) So, nu - Though Israeli director Rona Segal does not interview a female IDF soldier about serving in Hebron, footage of one is included in the archival material that illustrates the men’s experiences (some footage comes from The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories B’Tselem). She is seen enforcing to a Palestinian what the soldiers term “sterilization” close to the settlers: “Are you Arab? From this point on, Jews only.” While the soldiers chuckle about the “amazing” cakes, cookies, and other goodies brought to a relief station by the settlers, doubtless prepared by women, the footage includes examples of such women hurling invective and insults at both the Palestinians and the soldiers when they try to restrain the settlers in any way: “May all your homes burn down, God willing! You’re worse than the Nazis!” One soldier gives a very specific example, though the subtitles weren’t exact to what I think he was saying: “All the officers in the company were called to the Beit Hadassah. The Education Director came in and said to us ‘Listen, you are so sweet for coming, and I’m so lucky to meet you, because I wanted to tell you something: It’s really stressful being a Jewish child in Hebron. So if you see them doing all kinds of nonsense, don’t take them to the police. Bring them to me and I’ll educate them.’ Now this is a woman with countless videos showing her hitting activists and Palestinians, and spitting on people and journalists. But she’s in charge of the education in Hebron! And when she says ‘see them doing nonsense’ what she means is when they throw rocks into the Palestinian market, attack Palestinians, use pepper spray on Palestinians on streets open to both Jews and Arabs.” I was taken aback that the soldiers explicitly use the term “Jews”, but that’s what the not-always-full subtitles translated. One very young-looking soldier is embarrassed for his mother to watch this and find out what he actually did during his military service, but when the director presses him if he’s concerned she would be less proud of him, he rallies that of course she’s proud of him. (New York Times Op Doc) (previewed at 2021 Other Israel Film Festival) (11/17/2021)
Mixed Feelings (In Guy Davidi’s documentary, at least half of acting teacher Amir Orian’s students in an about to be demolished old Tel Aviv Bauhaus-style building in a gentrifying area, including for a bare-bones production of Sartre’s No Exit, are women – and during the Gaza War they challenge his liberal attitudes by getting just as emotionally caught up in the country’s fervor as the men, including one whose husband had been called up from the reserves.) (seen at 2017 SR Socially Relevant Film Festival) (3/18/2017)
Momma’s Man (Review forthcoming, as seen at the 2008 New Directors/New Films Series at Lincoln Center/MoMA) (Is writer/director Azazel Jacobs intending for the titular refuge to be The Jewish Mother by casting his mother Flo with his filmmaker father Ken Jacobs as the father? Is this yet another Philip Roth-ian rant on constantly being offered food and infantilization? But, to refer to yet another Jewish filmmaker with mother issues, wouldn’t a Jewish Mother press an obviously severely depressed adult son into therapy? Besides that she takes atypically little interest in her granddaughter, his defense will be that there wasn’t any Judaica in the apartment or Yiddishkeit spoken. I’ll take the odds that the majority of critics and viewers will assume the artsy, intellectual New Yorker is Jewish.) (3/15/2008)
Moon in the 12th House (Yareach BeBayit 12) As a debut, female director, Dorit Hakim presents two atypical Israeli Jewish sisters, played with real sororial chemistry: “Lenny” (Yaara Pelzig) devoted to their ill father at their house in a rural area while seducing their 16-year-old skateboarding neighbor, and “Mira” (Yuval Scharf) a party girl on the club scene with a drug-dealing boyfriend. (previewed at 2017 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum)
Moonlight Mile (I caught up with this film on DVD as background for reviewing The Greatest, and was surprised that the grieving family here was ostensibly Jewish – though the only reference is to a rabbi officiating at the funeral. Jojo Floss (played by Susan Sarandon) instructs that the only reference to God in her daughter's service can be as "Yahweh", and apparently it is because she's Jewish that she deals with grief through humor.) (4/3/2010)
Mortgage (Mashkanta) (Review forthcoming, as seen at the 2008 NY Sephardic Jewish Film Festival, an hour-long, delightful, very Israeli but stereotype-free take on O. Henry’s Gift of the Magi) (2/18/2008)
Mothers of Bedford The specifics of the featured prison parenting programs were vague, but the benefit of allowing babies born in prison to stay with their mothers for 18 months was clear – and that the young woman participating while serving two years in the maximum security facility was Jewish. She was a drug addict who had resorted to robbery to feed her habit. Unlike the other prisoners featured, she has two parents, who seem nervously supportive, and the very heavyset Queens mother showed off a closet full of bargain-hunted, pink outfits in waiting for the arrival of her granddaughter and plans for Hanukkah gifts. While Melissa works very hard to get and stay healthy while in prison, once home it is striking how she and her mother become morbidly obese over several years after her release. Even as the daughter seems to be successfully working part-time and reenrolled in college, her wistful expression of never being able to talk to her mother hints at suppressions that are driving both to overeat.) (previewed at 2011 DOC NYC Festival) (11/9/2011)
Mothers of Today (Hayntige Mames)
[from the Esther-Rachel Kaminska Theater Museum Archive of YIVO at the Center for Jewish History]
Film historians disagree on the facts, significance, and description of this 1939 Yiddish film made in the Bronx in just five days, directed by Henry Lynn, story by co-star Simon Wolf (who plays the feminized father “Getzel Boxer”). All agree it fits in the shund genre, sentimental, low-budget melodramas whose broadly-drawn stories reflected the daily life and Yiddishkeit culture of working-class Jewish American immigrants. However, Eric A. Goldman, in Visions, Images, and Dreams: Yiddish Film Past and Present (1979), says this film was a financial failure at the end of that era, because “it failed to take into account the growing sophistication of [this] audience.”
Tradition is represented with the inclusion of cantorial renditions (by Max Rosenblatt as “Solmon Waldman”) of Shabbat kiddush and the Kol Nidre prayer, with what seems like an atypical choir of boys and men (reminding me how my paternal grandmother enjoyed listening to a neighbor substitute cantor rehearse for the High Holy Days). The force behind this continuity is, of course, the widowed, shopkeeper mother, “Esther Waldman”, portrayed by Esther Field, who was primarily known for singing “The Yiddishe Mamma” (see the ads above) on radio and in theater, as represented by the opening views of 2nd Avenue. (Wasn’t that Sophie Tucker’s signature song?) Field gets to really belt out several heartfelt songs; the music is by Leon Field.
But women are also the threat of assimilation that is presented as synonymous with low morals. The Widow’s son is drawn away from using his singing talents for religion by their neighbor’s silky daughter “Evelyn Boxer” (possibly played by Paula Lubelska), who is in cahoots with her gonif older brother “Hymie” and gambling mother “Briendl”, who insists on now being called “Beatrice” (perhaps played by Vera Lebedoff/Lubow). I got a kick out of seeing sexy Jewish temptresses in a Yiddish film. The proto-gangster seduces the Widow’s innocent daughter “Anna” (played by Gertrude/Gertie Krause) away from the good Jewish boy “Izzie” (Arthur Winters) with stolen jewelry and promises about the purpose of a trip together upstate. The Widow is so shocked how her children push her and tradition away, she goes blind and her hair turns white. But after terrible crimes are committed, most see the error of their ways and return to her hearth. (U.S. Premiere of 35mm film restoration by the National Center for Jewish Film at 2024 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) (1/28/2024)
Mountain (Ha'har): The Haredi woman (“Zvia” played by Shani Klein), and the whole film is a headscratcher, let alone for all the awards its garnered. (previewed at 2016 New Directors/New Films of Film at Lincoln Center/MoMA) (3/10/2016) (3/10/2016)
Mr. Bernstein: Directed by Francine Zuckerman, this charming and touching short is produced and co-written by Deb Filler, based on her memory of her 1974 encounter with “Lenny” (very miscast here) in New Zealand, with a message and challah from her survivor father. (previewed at 2017 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum)
Mr. Klein (1976): Directed by Joseph Losey, who left the U.S. for Europe under McCarthy-ite pressure, this original script by Marxist writer Franco Solinas, emphasizes the ghoulishness of the antisemitism that infects Paris under the Nazi Occupation, as the majority is apathetic. A presumably Jewish woman is featured in the explicit opening scene as a naked woman (played by Isabelle Sadoyan) is examined by “Le professeur Montandon” (Jacques Maury) using Nazi pseudo-anthropological criteria for categorizing the parts of the face, head, and body to determine if a subject is Jewish. She is anonymous but obviously terrified in hoping that the officious academic will clear her (he decides she could just as well be Armenian), then meets up with a man in the hall outside the examination room, possibly her husband, whispering in shadows. The image of her haunts the film as the titular art collector character (played by Alain Delon), who negotiates the price down from Jews desperate for ready cash to flee, then finds himself trying to prove he is not Jewish, even as there is a doppelganger around him who presumably is – and is active in the Resistance. As he tries to track down this other “Klein” in order to clear his own name, his intersections with that life lead him to other women who may be Jewish, including Jeanne Moreau as “Florence”, the other Klein’s older mistress, a wealthy, bored wife and mother ensconced in a snowy chateau, with a formal garden, servants, and art-covered walls with glaring gaps where some pieces were obviously sold off. By the end of this Kafka-esque mystery that takes place during in 1942 while the French gendarmes and the Gestapo are meticulously preparing for the round-up of Jews to the Vel’ d’Hiv and onto cattle cars, I was wondering if the other nervous women were also hiding that they were Jewish, including his sexy, flighty young mistress “Jeanine” (Juliet Berto), “la concierge” (Suzanne Flon), and his co-conspirator with many aliases who may work at a munitions factory. Standing on the bus, “Mr. Klein” is queried by a nervous Jewish woman as to what will happen to them, because there’s rumors of being sent to work in Germany, but surely the French police wouldn’t let that happen to them. He doesn’t want to hear about such things. Throughout the film, the Jewish men seem more resigned than scared, as they all end up at the stadium. (preview of restoration with new subtitles at Film Forum) (8/14/2019)
In an interview with Michel Ciment, Losey explained including the drag cabaret act that featured a Jewish woman in a mourning veil being mocked to the bourgeois audience’s, including a couple of young Nazi officers attending with attractive French men, great amusement: “if [Frantz Salieri with La Grande Eugène] would do the anti-Semitic show, the fact that they were men created a certain distancing thing. He had the brilliant idea of using Mahler’s music. The strangeness of this man, a widow, singing the Mahler song [“Kindertotenlieder - Nun Will Die Sonn' So Hell Aufgehn”], and the ugliness of the antisemitism, were such that the worst anti-Semite would not want to identify with it. For me that’s one of the most successful sequences in the picture. And there was nothing in the script that corresponded to that. This was entirely planned with me and Salieri.”
Mr. Rakowski (briefly reviewed at 2009 New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) The Mrs. is only seem in a few photographs in this documentary, but this dead Jewish mother has a palpable presence, as the son and estranged father each show their devotion to her in startlingly different ways, the son in sobs, the father in loyalty. (1/18/2009)
Muhi - Generally Temporary and additional review Nu - Over the boy’s seven years stuck in medical and political limbo at Sheeba Medical Center - Tel HaShomer Hospital in Ramat Gan, Israel, east of Tel Aviv, (and its children’s hospital), a consistent caretaker and primary maternal figure for the Palestinian boy Muhi (who his Gaza family calls by his given name Muhammad) has been volunteer Tamar Baneth, who showers him with love, kisses, and attention when his mother and grandmother can’t get through checkpoints to visit him. Even his devoted grandfather completely trusts him with her when he has to leave. At least as seen on screen, she hasn’t seemed to make an effort to learn Arabic to help him be bi-lingual, even as his mother weeps that she can’t communicate with him because she doesn’t understand what he’s saying in Hebrew. (previewed at 2017 Human Rights Watch Film Festival at Film at Lincoln Center and IFC Center) (updated 7/30/2017)
Munich
Munich: The Edge of War - In yet another fictional “what if” about stopping Hitler, based on the Robert Harris novel that I haven’t yet read, the Jewish woman in the story ominously stands in for the Final Solution. There are flashbacks to something of a ménage à trois at Oxford University among the Brit (“Hugh Legat” played by George MacKay) and two Germans (Jannis Niewöhne as “Paul von Hartman”) with “Lenya” (Liv Lisa Fries, a star of Babylon Berlin that I also have not yet seen or read). When the two men are with their respective diplomatic envoys at the 1938 titular meeting, the German shows the Brit that the woman was permanently broken from being tortured after participating in a 1935 protest against the Nazis, that was particularly vicious because the thugs learned, as we suddenly did, that she was Jewish. I thought it was convenient they hadn’t killed her. (Netflix) (1/22/2022)
Murder of a Hatmaker (Assassinat d'une modiste) (preview at the 2008 NY Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (Catherine Bernstein’s step by step biography of her great-aunt through her career as a high fashion milliner to the Final Solution is not just meticulous research – you can’t help but gasp at what she finds-- especially into the complicity of the French government, but a vivid portrait of a spirited Jewish woman entrepreneur up against first difficult and then impossible odds. Plus I was a bit freaked out when amongst the government documents shown on camera are the names of the dozen people arrested with her and a female “Mandel” is on the list. This is a useful contextual complement to Irène Némirovsky’s posthumously published novel Suite Française and Philippe Grimbert’s novelistic memoir Memory that is the basis for the feature film A Secret (Un Secret).) (1/9/2008)
The Muses of Isaac Bashevis Singer (previewed at 2015 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) What a terrific parade of interviews with the Jewish women translators around the world from the Yiddish of the randy Nobel laureate. The biggest surprise is how few of them know Yiddish, yet how closely they worked with him.) (2/26/2015)
My Australia (Moja Australia) (previewed at 2012 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (There has been a spate of documentaries (at this fest alone were Torn and The Moon is Jewish) and features about Eastern European men, particularly Poles, discovering that their mothers were Jewish, who either hid it to save their children during the Holocaust or to protect them from continuing antisemitism. They then have to ironically reconcile with the negative attitudes towards Jews they had assimilated into. But this film, inspired by the filmmaker, Ami Drozd, experience, is unusually sympathetic to the mother “Halina” (played by Aleksandra Poplawska). Misleading at least the younger son that they will be going to Australia, she manages to make aliyah to flee the rising difficulties for Jews in mid-1960’s Poland, then has to struggle with the language, culture, and finances in Israel, to the point where she has to give up her very resentful sons to have them raised in a kibbutz away from her, even as she tries to have a romantic life as well (though that might be for potential financial security as well), leaving them to deal with their lack of Jewish education, let alone circumcision. She also has an uneasy, unexplained encounter with an older man she recognizes as a leader in the ghetto, which brings up some upsetting memory of her Holocaust childhood.) (1/21/2012)
My Father And The Man In Black (So, nu: For all the director’s angst about his father, his mother remains a cipher, particularly about how much she knew, but I just presume she’s Jewish.) (9/19/2013)
My Father and Me
[courtesy of New York Film Festival, 2019]
So, nu: Commissioned by the Victoria and Albert Museum to accompany an October 2020 exhibition of the photographs from the acquired archive of Maurice (pronounced “Morris”) Broomfield as the top visual documenter of British factories and industy, his son documentarian Nick made this retrospective of the relationship of the three generations, including Nick’s son Barney. I had found Maurice’s first wife identified in his obituary as Sonja Lagusova (her brother Charles, David Attenborough’s first cameraman on his nature documentaries, changed his last name to Lagus), but as Nick only referred to her as a “Slovak refugee”, I did not presume she was Jewish – but maybe those were from before he knew she was Jewish. He attributes the secret to her and her father’s reaction to the rest of their family’s deaths in the Holocaust (though their experiences and the date they fled to safety is not given) – let alone Maurice’s mother’s virulent antisemitism, which in the film he mildly forgives as “fear of foreigners” typical of her rural farming community that alienated her son. But their Jewish identity didn’t even come up when he interviewed his beloved grandfather he called “Gogo” about his British army service that included liberating Bergen-Belsen, seen in clips. Several times Nick refers to his mother as “a Jewish intellectual”, in comparison to his father’s working-class background, and that she and her father were leftists (elsewhere he has referred to her as a politically engaged, assertive and confrontational Communist, but none of that comes through here); his grandfather worked on a socialist film as the art director, seen in clips. While there are many of his father’s photographs of his mother (above, one of the film’s promotional stills), Nick frequently generalizes that he could talk more easily about his hopes and plans for his activist films with his supportive mother, but with no specific examples or sense of her, so she remains vague. (preview at 2019 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (updated 10/15/2019)
My Father Evgeni (briefly reviewed at 2012 New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (So, nu: I appreciated seeing a film I had missed at the 2011 DOC NYC Festival, but it took awhile to reveal, in passing, that the filmmaker’s mother only confessed to him she was Jewish once the Soviet Union opened up a bit, which I then presumed was how he was able to emigrate early to New York.) (1/21/2012)
My Father My Lord (Hofshat Kaits) (emendations coming after 11/16/2008) (So, nu: The role of the mother is a bit problematical until the end. She gently nags the husband throughout to have a talk with the son – but about what – some kind of illness? Some other kind of problem? Another pregnancy? Her very moving rebellion and grief-stricken anger would make the climax more organic if we knew more about her. As it is, she is very atypically isolated from other women in her community, which is one thing that Haredic women usually stress as an advantage to their lifestyle, the intimate sharing of children and daily chores with other women. While the director comes from a family of 20, his best friend was an only child and he drew on his memories of his friend and his mother for her portrayal.) (5/16/2008)
My Führer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler (Mein Führer - Die Wirklich Wahrste Wahrheit Über Adolf Hitler) (So, nu (10/21/2009)
My Golden Days (Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse) (This is Arnaud Desplechin prequel of his 1996 My Sex Life... Or How I Got Into An Argument (Comment je me suis disputé... ma vie sexuelle), that I saw in a scratchy print at at 2006 retrospective of his work before I was so closely monitoring Jewish women characters in films, “Esther”, was played as an adult by Emmanuelle Devos, who is frequently cast as a Jewess. Here she is strikingly played as a teenager by Lou Roy-Lecollinet. If she is Jewish (and the director frequently includes Jewish female characters), and it’s not explicit, the auburn haired, sensuous-mouthed actress would be, by far, the sexiest Jewish girl ever seen in cinema. (previewed at 2015 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (10/2/2015)
My Italian Secret: The Forgotten Heroes (So, nu) (3/27/2015)
My Mexican Shiva (Morirse está en Hebreo) (previewed at 2007 NY Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum)
My Name Is Sara (7/15/2022)
My Neighbor Adolf In this amusing Polish/Israeli co-production, co-writer/director Leon Prudovsky imagines another angle to Nazi history (represented by the always entertaining as much as he’s unrecognizable Udo Kier) or a male survivor (embodied by David Hayman) in South America, the Jewish Israeli woman is a chain-smoking Senior Intelligence Officer (Kineret Peledat) at the Embassy in the unnamed country. She has no patience for yet another claimant that Hitler is alive, and even yells at the survivor, something we don’t see on screen, though she does bring in for help the staff psychologist who runs a weekly survivors’ group. (at 2023 Israel Film Center Festival/ courtesy of Cohen Media Group) (6/7/2023)
My So-Called Enemy (briefly reviewed at 2011 New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (So, nu)
My Week With Marilyn (The press notes explain the Jewish woman character: “When Miller returns to the United States following a misunderstanding with his new bride, Monroe is left without any real friends apart from her acting coach and Method advocate Paula Strasberg, played by Zoë Wanamaker. ‘Paula was married to Lee Strasberg, who was the leading light of the Method school in New York,’ says Wanamaker. ‘She worked with Marilyn and I don’t think Olivier liked her being around that much. And I don’t think Arthur Miller liked her in the end, either. I didn‟t want her to be a monster, though. I wanted to try and give some warmth and reality to her, a genuine concern and love.’ Strasberg acts with her client‟s best interests at heart.” But one of the odd notes in an otherwise excellent production is that all the Americans around this “Marilyn” are played by Brits, whose accents only hit the mark erratically. So it was a bit startling when “Strasberg” in comforting her nervous client breaks out in a Yiddishism, calling her “bubbelah”, she hasn’t even had a New York accent, let alone any Yiddish inflection, or any other use of Yiddish or Jewish reference, yet implying that one of her roles is as a substitute Jewish mother.) (11/2/2011)
My Wife is an Actress (Ma femme est une actrice)
Naila and the Uprising - recounts the untold leadership role of women in the 1st Intifada of the late 1980’s. Produced under the auspices of Just Vision - “Comprised of an award-winning team of Palestinian, Israeli, North and South American journalists, human rights advocates and filmmakers, Just Vision documents and disseminates the stories of Palestinians and Israelis working to end the occupation and build a future of freedom, dignity and equality for everyone in the region.” When Naila was first imprisoned, the husband of his titular wife had reached out for help to the most prominent Israeli Jewish woman interviewed, from the press notes: “Roni Ben Efrat – Jerusalem - As a journalist and activist during the First Intifada, Roni Ben Efrat reported on human rights violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. She was one of the founding members of the Israeli human rights group, Women in Black, in 1987. She wrote for a Hebrew biweekly, Derech- Hanitzatz, which was shut down under administrative law during the uprising. Roni spent 9 months in jail for her involvement with the publication.” This documentary will be included in Women War & Peace 2 on PBS in 2018. (preview at 2017 DOC NYC Festival) (brief review at 2018 Human Rights Watch Film Festival at Film at Lincoln Center and IFC Center) (updated 7/3/2018)
The Names of Love (Le nom des gens) Director Michel Leclerc declares Woody Allen as his prime stylistic influence, but at least not in his portrayal of a Jewish woman as he uses a romantic comedy to deal with French issues of discrimination past and present. Instead, "Annette Martin neé Cohen" (played by Michèle Moretti) is a dyed-blonde denier of her family history as a rescued child from the French government round-ups of Jews that led directly to Auschwitz. Grateful for adoption from an orphanage into a mainstream French family and an avid adopter of technologies of the future that invariably fail, she has been so silent and in denial about her past (including avoiding TV documentaries and movies about the Holocaust), that her son vaguely imagines his grandparents "David and Sarah Cohen" to have been Greek. When he finally tries to confront her about her Jewish past, she pretty much drops dead. (7/2/2011)
Nan Goldin - I Remember Your Face (previewed at 2014 Kino!) (So, nu: While she only mentions Jewishness of her family once, her memories of her older sister are quite moving. She’s an unusual image for a Jewish woman artist – flirting with younger men who want the career boost of being her assistants, trying to seduce gay men and women, looking back at how the sexual and substance ingestion freedom of her 1980’s lifestyle led to so many deaths, her drug addictions, and how her long artist residencies in Germany nourished her photography and exhibition styles.) (6/16/2014)
Nana Unusually, director Serena Dykman documents how the Holocaust impacts three generations of women in her family: her Polish-born, Auschwitz-survivor grandmother Maryla Michalowski-Dyamant, her Brussels-born mother Alice, and her own re-tracing their steps, by reading her grandmother’s memoir (not available yet in English), frequently to the camera, and interviewing her friends and colleagues through her decades of Holocaust education. (Now 25, Dykman was 11 when her “Nana” died.) Dykman’s long blonde tresses are like her grandmother’s blonde hair – a characteristic that won her favorable attention from a SS officer on her first arrival, one of many lucky chances that helped keep her out of the gas chamber and alive. Dykman well edits together the many, many interviews her grandmother did for archives, journalists, TV, and radio, for an amazingly detailed description of her experiences from the German invasion through post-war years, that emphasizes the importance of female friendships for her survival, plus of her decades of outreach efforts with students of all ages. (preview courtesy of First Run Features) 4/13/2018)
Naomi (Hitpartzut X) (previewed at 2011 Other Israel Film Festival) (So, nu: To an American viewer it’s not clear if the flame-haired titular adulterous wife (played by Melanie Peres) is an Israeli Jew or not, in the novel she had been the mother’s housecleaner, while in the film it seems presumed she’s a former student, like the student who fixates on him in the book. But the key is how the portrayal of the mother twists around every cinematic stereotype that doubtless would probably slip into cliché in an American version. “Ketty” roughly admits to having been a lousy wife and parent, and is so cynical about her son’s foolish infatuation to have married late in life a younger, cheating wife that she doesn’t bat an eye to help him cover up her murder, let alone to do so by disturbing the grave of another Jewish woman, his former kindergarten teacher. Faithful to the novel, despite dropping the astronomical metaphor of an X-ray burst, about a dying neutron star destroying a quieter paired star, which could apply as much to the marriage as the mother/son bond, she goes even further to take on a Jewish mother’s guilt with shockingly unscrupulous redemption beyond the grave that manages to spookily go beyond caricature. (11/26/2011)
The Narrow Bridge - This documentary by debut filmmaker Esther Takac grew out of her work as a child and adult trauma psychologist in Jerusalem. Over several years she followed four people, including an Israeli Jewish woman, who are involved in the organization Israeli and Palestinian Bereaved Families. This grassroots, people-to-people group conducts workshops for adults who have suffered the grief they have, talks to Israeli and Palestinian high school students, and an annual Memorial for Victims of Conflict, all briefly seen on screen, the last held amidst vitriolic protests. Most of the film is each recounting the death of their loved one due to the conflict, and how reaching out across the border helped them transform their grief into hope and activism. While the other, older participants grieve a child, Meytal lost the father she had just reconciled with from a brutal attack. She first tried to mourn through her expressive paper art, then as the one-on-one violence escalated on both sides, she was moved into direct activism. Through the years shown on film, we see her become a mother, determined that her children should refuse to serve in the military. Another older Israeli Jewish woman, mourning her child, is introduced only as Ruby and is briefly shown as a mentor to the Palestinian mother. I’m sure I’ve seen several similar films about similar groups over the years at the Other Israel Film Festival, but I can’t remember those tri-lingual titles. (at 2023 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum/ courtesy of Menemsha Films) (1/26/2023)
A Nazi Legacy: What Our Fathers Did (previewed at 2015 Tribeca Film Festival) (So, nu: Jewish women are palpably absent from these memories – other than their furs in the Krakow ghetto and in pre-war graves, reflecting the grandfather’s silence about his past.) (4/29/2015)
Necktie Youth (After barely sitting through this dystopian view of over-privileged black and white youth drinking and drugging, and sometimes depressively killing themselves, in the expensive northern suburbs of Johannesburg, South Africa, what the writer/director Sibs Shongwe-La Mer describes as “the wealthiest square mile of the African continent”, I was surprised at his identification in the press notes of two young long-haired white women who end up languidly lounging in a cuddly, fireside threesome with black “Jabz” (played by Bonko Khoza) as “the home (and the arms) of beautiful bikini-clad Jewish twins Tali [played by Giovanna Winetzki] and Rafi” [played by Ricci-Lee Kalish] – when there is zero indication from them or in their as-expensive-as-any-other-house that they’re Jewish -- unless that flashed by when I dozed off, so that I wasn’t even aware they had names, though, in fairness, the print I previewed at 2015 Tribeca Film Festival didn’t have subtitles that were added later, so maybe I missed something? (4/10/2015)
Never Again Is Now - As a lesbian and Jewish daughter of Holocaust survivors, Evelyn Marcus adds her personal angle to the familiar story direct experience of antisemitism in Europe from the Holocaust through the influx of Muslim immigration and mostly well-documented attacks on Jews in Holland, and she interviews those with strongly anti-Muslim immigrant positions. She and her partner Rosa felt so unsafe that they moved to the U.S. Available free on You Tube. (10/26/2019)
Neighbours - Kurdish writer/director Mano Khalil had to recreate his filmmaking career as a refugee in Switzerland to make his dream film of recreating, in authentic Kurdistan locale with local dialects, his 1980’s childhood living on the border of Syria and Turkey. Those become the very moving memories of “Sero”, now a father in a refugee camp, through his seven-year-old eyes forty years ago, when Syrian Muslims, Kurds, and Jews were friends living side-by-side. (All the adorable children come from that actual refugee camp.) Then the governments established guard towers manned by jittery soldiers overlooking family-separating barbed wire fences, and Assad’s fascist Baathist Party regime imposed pan-Arabism with a virulently antisemitic, anti-Zionist ideology, and both countries suppressed Kurdish culture and ethnic identity. The boy lights the Shabbat lamp next door for the last Jewish family in the village – bazaar shopkeeper “Nahum” (played by Syrian regime critic/refugee to the U.S. Jay Abdo) and his wife “Roza” (played by Tuna Dwek, the Brazilian daughter of Jewish-Syrian refugees), while his devoted uncle “Aram” (Ismail Zagros, a Kurd who acted in an earlier Khalil film) is in love with their 30-year-old daughter “Hannah” (Turkish actress Uygurlar Derya). The extended families’ vicissitudes due to the hateful and oppressive politics are tragic, humorous, evocative, tense, revealing, and, above all, human, heightened when the mother and daughter have to make a very difficult request, with I.O.U. All exceptionally well-acted, as Khalil described his complicated casting in a Jewish Film Festival interview, their lives play out within the lovely cinematography of Stéphane Kuthy in a rarely seen Iraqi Kurdistan landscape (plus colorful balloons!). (preview at 2022 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) (1/26/2022)
Next To Her (At Li Layla) (seen at 2015 Israel Film Center Festival) (Liron Ben-Shlush not only co-stars as “Rachel/Chellie”, but she co-wrote the script inspired by her personal experiences with her mentally challenged sister. Dana Ivgy as her sister “Gabby”, goes well beyond just a Hollywood Rain Man, with even her eyes. The frankness is not just in the sexuality of both sisters and their partners, but in showing the harried life of a caregiver, and everyone in their circle, from teachers, classmates to neighbors. You feel the exhaustion and frustration!) (10/9/2015)
Next Year in Jerusalem (A good concept of following way over 80 year old nursing home residents in preparation and on a trip to Israel is filmed with only the most superfluous insights and almost no background on the women beyond their current obvious frailties serves mostly to be just be a promotion for the sponsoring Jewish Home for the Elderly in Fairfield County, CT, now known as Jewish Senior Services, like a senior citizen version of the young-oriented Birthright Israel that my son participated in, though it turns out that most of the Jewish participants had been to Israel before, and seems of more significance to the non-Jews with them. Director/cameraman David Gaynes’s failure to learn much about them is glaring with the woman who has a thick French accent who emotionally, but only obliquely, reveals on the visit to Yad Vashem that she lived in Belgium during the war.) (5/15/2014)
New York, I Love You
Even though the elderly couple in Brighton Beach seemed startlingly like my grandparents as they would go along practically the same streets to the boardwalk from a very similar apartment building, I hesitated to presume that "Mitzie" and "Abe" in Joshua Marston's vignette were necessarily Jewish until I read his comments in the press notes: "[A] memory of my own grandparents contributed to the creation of this piece. . .At 82, Cloris Leachman . . . was completely committed to creating a character, which meant spending time with a Jewish family in Brooklyn, working on an accent, developing a hair style. She truly formed her on-screen character."
Though at first seeming too much like Renée Zellweger in A Price Above Rubies, Natalie Portman beautifully went with the surprising twist in Mira Nair's cross-cultural Diamond District-to-Hasidic-wedding vignette. Portman was quoted in the press notes: “Although I’m Jewish, I am not very religious, so this was a whole new world for me to investigate. . .It was very intriguing to me how Orthodox Jews have created their own cultural bubble inside the city and I admire that kind of self-stewardship. But I think the piece also reflects the unexpected paths that cross in the city. For example, my great- grandfather was a Ukrainian-Jewish immigrant living in Brooklyn at the turn-of-the-century and yet, he spoke Mandarin because he did door-to-door sales in Chinatown. [My grandfather had a similar experience, going to elementary school in Chinatown.] New York is astonishing in that way, and this story captures that special quality of connection.” Co-star Irrfan Khan, playing a Jain diamond cutter, also commented: “When my character sees this Hasidic bride’s shaved head for the first time, he sees an innocent diamond. He is taken most of all with her vulnerability.” (updated 10/14/2009)
Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (I haven’t yet read the book it was based on by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan) Newsweek’s David Ansen in “Love Me, Love My Mix Tape”, 10/6/2008, described the titular young woman as : “smart, brunette and Jewish, with impeccable taste in indie rock bands. As the critic Ruby Rich whispered to me during the screening: ‘At last a movie that makes being Jewish sexy!’”; Stuart Klawans kvells even more about her as a new Jewish icon. The blonde Mean Girl taunts “Norah Silverberg” (played more than winningly by Kat Dennings née the Jewishly exposed Katherine Litwack) with the stereotype of Jewish women’s frigidity - Word on the street is you can’t have an orgasm, but “Norah” finds that “Nick O’Leary” shares more than her musical values: I don’t drink alcohol. Are you straight-edged like I am? and helps her decide to accept her admission into Brown U., While she confusingly goes to Sacred Heart High School in Englewood, NJ, which doesn’t seem quite as Christian as the school of the Jewish girl in Saved!, she is comfortable in her Jewish identity, including celebrating Hanukkah over Christmas, and she expresses it in this very sweet, climactic (literally) exchange: “Norah”: There's this part of Judaism that I like. Tikkun Olam. It says that the world is broken into pieces and everyone has to find it “Nick”: Maybe we don't have to find it. Maybe we are the pieces. “Norah”: Nick? I'm coming in... (metaphorically and literally) Too bad that her sometime-boyfriend “Tal” (played by Jay Baruchel, who frequently portrays Jewish geeks, playing on his father’s heritage) has such pushy Jewish, swaggering pseudo-Israeli identity markers, from referring to the Jewish camp they attended together and his self-designed CD with a big Star of David embossed over the words “Irony and Zionism”. He is even more obnoxious when it’s revealed that he’s dating her because she’s “Ira Silverberg’s daughter”, a music biz honcho, a connection that breezily gets her into all the cool venues. Even worse, he condescendingly sees her in the most un-sexy put-down in teen culture: You’re going to be an amazing mother someday. (10/24/2008)
Nicky’s Family - Another film about the Kindertransport, this one aimed at young people, with a lot of women participants telling their experiences, several who have already testified in other films. I am sympathetic as an elderly member of our synagogue was a grateful child saved on such a train, but the effort to aim at children by encouraging any kind of “pay it forward” charitable efforts, such as sending toys to poor kids in Cambodia and an uncomfortable little kid donating her hair to Locks of Love, as being the equivalent of saving Jewish children is insulting and demeaning to altruism. Wouldn’t at least anti-bully efforts, say, or against prejudice be more relevant? (courtesy of Menemsha Films) (updated 8/15/2013)
Neirud - Brazilian (now Queens-based) director Fernanda Roth Faya explores hidden secrets in her colorful paternal Romani matriarchal circus heritage. But she points out that her mother is Jewish, and both families fled persecution in Europe. Her Brazilian-born parents are both psychologists. (at 2023 DOC NYC) (11/21/2023)
Nina’s Home (La Maison de Nina) (viewed at the 2007 NY Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum, but I’m ashamed to say that I read the start time wrong so came in late.)
Nina's Tragedies (Ha-Asonot Shel Nina)
Noah - For all the Christian brouhaha as if the Book of Genesis is theirs and not of Jewish origin, Darren Aronofsky’s (with co-writer Ari Handel) moral climate-fi interpretation gives unusual, and textually justifiable, central emphasis to the women’s roles in this apocalypse, as Pentateuchal matriarchs par excellence who will do anything to have and protect their children, Noah’s wife, given the scholar’s appellation of “Naameh” (played by Jennifer Connelly) and her adopted/daughter-in-law “Il-La” (played by Emma Watson). He explained in the press notes: “What we did was to start with the actual text of Genesis, then expand that into a family drama.” (6/6/2014)
Nobody’s Business (While mostly focusing on the filmmaker’s father, his blonde mother is frank about how her foreign, Sephardic background made her seem exotic to her future husband, and how she married to get away from her strict Egyptian-born father, but how the cultural differences doomed the marriage, with her interest in performing. “I waited 17 years, but I just had to get out of that marriage.” She discusses what in their personalities she thinks she gave to him and his sister: “To smile readily is not a Berliner trait.” His sister talks about looking out for her parents, and her brother, while the father bitterly blames the wife for the divorce and that he has no one now to care for him. The father, the 10th of 11 surviving children, has very fond memories of his loving mother.) (9/6/2012)
No Home Movie - (ignore negative commentary by 1) the young; 2) those with male sensibilities; 3) most gentiles) No - go Skype your mother! (Well, show her a few times how to do online video chats.) Belgian director Chantal Akerman’s disparate video chats with her mother Natalia include delving into memories around the Holocaust. (previewed at 2015 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (9/26/2015)
No Man’s Land (Terra de Ninguém) - Towards the end of Paulo de Figueiredo’s calm, detailed, if finally questionable, recall directly to the camera of Salomé Lamas about the Portuguese military and mercenary assignments he carried out in Africa, Europe, and Central and South America, including assassinations, he smilingly recalls his happy childhood in colonial Angola—with his German-Jewish mother, in a technically bigamist marriage as his father’s first marriage had been in a Catholic Church in Portugal. (seen at MoMA’s 2013 Documentary Fortnight) (2/24/2013)
No Place On Earth (So, nu: The women’s perspectives on the Holocaust, as children and the credit given the matriarch, are especially moving in this documentary.) Also reviewed on page 14 of New Hampshire Jewish Film Buzz) (updated 1/3/2014)
Norman Lear: Just Another Version Of You Directors Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing made a fond episode of PBS’s American Masters, with the usual encomiums and visual flare. While he speaks movingly of his first childhood exposure to antisemitism in catching on the radio a speech by Father Coughlin, there is only passing mention of Jewish women in his life. Oddly lacking much overlap with the family research revealed earlier in 2016 on PBS’s Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., where he spoke emotionally about the “Bubbe” who raised him, his mother is seen in a few photographs and mentioned in passing (recording the audio version of his recent autobiography) as warning his father against his shadey business partners and dismissing his plaint of a lack of childhood memories of her because he was farmed out to uncles and his grandparents when she couldn’t afford to care for him. She’s also briefly seen shocked at his twin babies in his very late years. (With his 3rd wife Lyn, with no implication if she’s Jewish.) More time is spent on who Wikipedia says was actually his second wife Frances, including an old interview with her where she clarifies how she was similar to the titular character of one of his groundbreaking sitcoms Maude, specifically citing that both are Jewish. Her prominent activism in the women’s rights movement, including working for the passing of the Equal Rights Amendment, is implied as a precursor for his own liberal campaigns. One of his older daughters shares a few memories, particularly of her mother, and her increasing absences from the family, which her father tearfully attributes to manic depression that wasn’t diagnosed until she was in her ‘50’s. As to any other Jewish women heard, Lena Dunham (creator of Girls) is excited to meet him and present him with an award. (6/29/2016)
Norman: The Moderate Rise And Tragic Fall Of A New York Fixer So, nu: Writer/director Joseph Cedar fills our his very Jewish, as well as very New York and Israeli, story with secondary women – though they are mostly on the sidelines, and with little screen time, until one brings down “Norman”. The politician’s curly-haired gatekeeper/assistant “Hanna” (Neta Riskin) and his wife “Naomi Eshel” (played by Tali Sharon) find “Norman”s constant phone calls annoying and try to block him – until they want help get his son into Harvard (which he does, amidst the closing montage of favors completed). The wives of the rich just glowered at him until the AIPAC-like conference when charity fundraisers turn obsequious. But most significant for the “tragic fall” of the plot is pretty and smart “Alex Green” as an attorney in the Israeli Embassy (Consul?) who first tries to ignore him, then flatters him to keep charting out his back-room political deals, then back in New York boxes him in to threaten his and the prime minister’s career (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg in what I think is her first putative Jewish role, which I thought of as a tribute to her father Serge, as seen in Gainsbourg, Je t'Aime... Moi Non Plus (Gainsbourg - Vie héroïque). (5/12/2017)
No Strings Attached (my commentary forthcoming)
Carina Chocano did not describe the lead character as Jewish in her piece “’Tough, Cold, Terse, Taciturn and Prone to Not Saying Goodbye When They Hang Up the Phone’”, in The New York Times Magazine, 7/1/2011, but. . .: “’Strong female character’” is one of those shorthand memes that has leached into the cultural groundwater and spawned all kinds of cinematic clichés: alpha professionals whose laserlike focus on career advancement has turned them into grim, celibate automatons . . . It has resulted in characters like Natalie Portman’s in No Strings Attached. . .”
Vs. the almost identical Friends With Benefits: While Natalie Portman’s “Emma”, in the first, is given an explicitly Jewish scene with her family, Mila Kunis’ “Jamie” is much more ambiguous, with a hippie mother (played by Patricia Clarkson) who vaguely recalls various lovers as her possible birth father as “olive-skinned”. She bluffs her way into a models’ photo shoot by listing how photoshopable she is, including: My nose will look more Christian. Probably more a New York reference than Jewish, her L.A. boyfriend muses that his family will think she’s a carny because of her fast talking. But in a Q and A in New York Magazine’s Vulture with Bennett Marcus, 7/19/2011, two of the writers, David Newman and Keith Merryman, in talking about being inspired by their “straight, single girlfriends and what they were going through”, explain how she began more Jewish: “Newman: We had started with characters. We had a woman with a fear of abandonment [which doesn’t come through, as she seems more gay guy than credible woman] and a man with a fear of committment. . .We also had this theory about Jewish romantic comedies and Christian romantic comedies; in Christian romantic comedies, all the barriers are external, like you make a bet that in ten days you can fall in love. We wanted to do a Jewish romantic comedy, where the barriers were internal, and so Friends With Benefits, when we thought of it, was a big enough premise to make a movie, but small enough where they could still be real humans. . . Q: That's interesting. But then you didn't cast Jews. Newman: Oh, you know, we tried. (Laughs) (Ed note: Actually, Mila Kunis counts herself among the chosen people.)” (updated 7/24/2011)
Notre Musique
November (So, nu: It's a bit odd that writer Benjamin Brand wrote the lead character to be "Sophie Jacobs" as there's barely anything Jewish about her. Perhaps she's only Jewish in order to have an annoying Jewish mother, who first comes across as selfish and aggressive, until mellowing into maternal care.) (7/30/2005)
Nowhere in Africa (Nirgendwo in Afrika) (So, nu: sort of Mom as Queen Esther -- the WWII equivalent of a Valley Girl grows up emotionally in Africa, with a very frank look at her conflicted marriage, while her daughter grows up chronologically) (updated 7/24/2011)
Numbered (reviewed briefly in Reviewed: New York Jewish Film Festival 2013 of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (2/9/2013)
Obvious Child (previewed at 2014 New Directors/New Films of Film at Lincoln Center/ MoMA) Very non-stereotypical Jewish mother and daughter, but first I have to see the 2009 short film by the same writer/director and some of the cast for comparison. (3/21/2014)
Occasional Spies (Spioni de ocazie)
- Libra Film Productions
Pieces of the story of the Jewish parachutists from Mandate Palestine who served in England’s MI9 behind WW2 enemy lines in Eastern Europe have been made into separate documentaries/docudramas. But they lacked the useful international and military context that Romanian writer/director Oana Bujgoi Giurgiu provides in her 2021 documentary, even as she’s clear-eyed about the politics, then and later. The film specifies that the Jewish Agency agreed to send volunteers originally from the target countries for training as spies to help POWs/stranded pilots because they would also serve Zionist –not British-- goals of saving Jews and helping them get to Palestine. While movies like Blessed Is The Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh lionize the native Hungarian’s martyred involvement, this documentary gives worthy time detailing the accomplishments of her colleagues, Romanian-native Surika (Sara) Braverman, who survived the longest, and Slovakian-born Haviva Reik, pictured above as portrayed by Claudia Droc in the film’s effective re-enactment style in still photographs, by Alex Gâlmeanu, edited by Letiția Ștefănescu. The non-Jewish filmmaker’s research to provide testimonial-like voice-overs is impressive because so many of the academic sources are in Hebrew; I’m planning to soon read one of the few studies available in English: Judith Tydor Baumel Schwartz’s Perfect Heroes: The World War II Parachutists and the Making of Israeli Collective Memory, U of WI Press, 2010, to get more insight on the women participants. (New York premiere at 2024 Making Waves: New Romanian Cinema Festival) (3/24/2024)
Occupied City - With 35mm visuals directed by Londoner Steve McQueen (from “an un-occupied city”), with Dutch cinematographer Lennert Hillege, the text (spoken by British Jew Melanie Hyams) is written by Dutch historian and filmmaker Bianca Stigter. (Her 2021 Three Minutes - A Lengthening is fascinating and informative.) For over two decades, she has been continuing research for an expanded edition of her originally 2005 book Amsterdam 1940-1945 (Atlas van een bezette stad), expanded in 2019 and not yet available in English; perhaps as an “atlas” there’s more of a useful mapping than in the film. For her home city, still full of 17th and 18th century architecture, her goal is to determine the fates of the 800,000 residents from 1940, when Germany invaded, to full liberation in 1945, that her mother lived through. She so far has confirmed over 2,000 addressees.
Distributor A24’s Press Notes reiterate background facts in the text that helped motivate her research: “In July 1942, mass deportations began as Germans dispatched, little by little, nearly the entire Jewish population to transit camp Westerbork...[then] sent on weekly trains to killing centers. Of the more than 100,000 Jews who passed through Westerbork…around 5,000 survived…By the end of the war, the Netherlands would suffer the highest death rate of Jewish people in Western Europe, with three-quarters of the populace perishing, including more than 60,000 from Amsterdam.” This facility is rare to have footage of such a transport, seen in other documentaries. But this film uses no archival images. Stigter adds: “I remember my friends and I would play on the Women of Ravensbrück memorial on Museum Square [not seen in the film], running around between the pillars when we were 7 or 8, because we had no clue what it was for…because those stories weren’t activated. Even though there are a lot of monuments, plaques, and commemorations of the war in Amsterdam, it can become just background, like the trees. I think what Occupied City does, by letting you see people using the city now while you hear what went on 80 years ago, re-activates these stories, so they’re present again.”
Partners with Stigter in his adopted city for over 25 years, McQueen filmed in or around all the sites in the book, then with Dutch editor Xander Nijsten, winnowed hundreds of hours of current footage, through the eeriness of the pandemic and demonstrations protesting shutdowns, fossil fuels, colonialism and the Dutch role in the slave trade. The focus is on 130 addresses in the city, noting Nazi street name changes and where were prisons, Dutch Nazi collaborators’ offices, Gestapo headquarters, round-up locations, and execution sites. Some residential and educational uses are similar enough to entertain ghosts.
The final four-hour film does include memorials, including installation of one family set of Stumbling Stone (Stolperstein) of the more than 1,000 such brass plates in Amsterdam sidewalks, noting the residences of those deported and murdered by the Nazis, and other 2021 ceremonies attended by the King, including the new National Holocaust Names Memorial, that moved aside the 1947 Monument of Jewish Gratitude, an early remembrance of The Resistance, when silence was more typical.
The narration emphasizes those who did hide and feed some 25,000 Jews and other persecuted minorities, forged documents, rescued Jewish foundlings left by desperate mothers – I recall her saying blondes were brought to the north, brunettes to the south – as well as the names of those who betrayed them (a third of the hidden, like the Frank family, were caught); some traitors faced post-war retribution. Included in the book, but not in the film, Anne Frank’s annex has become the most visited (even fetishized) “memorial” in the city (she is quoted). I saw the long lines there when we were in the city, while the stirring Resistance (Verzets) Museum was empty. Joan Rater’s and Tony Phelan’s recent mini-series A Small Light dramatized many of the chronicled efforts of this Resistance.
While the narration about the families taken and the location of their murders includes, of course, Jewish mothers, wives, and daughters, there was at least one Jewish woman who betrayed others, probably in the hope of saving herself. I also think I heard the narrator describe others saved by being married to an Aryan, then sterilized in a special clinic.
Countering the cynicism the film could rouse, the most hopeful scene is the chance finale of a happy mixed-race family (friends of the filmmakers) celebrating their older son’s bar mitzvah in a modern Amsterdam synagogue. (seen at Film Forum) (2/7/2024)
Off and Running (also briefly reviewed at Part 1 Recommendations of 2009 Tribeca Film Festival) (51/29/2009) (So, nu: Though the director said in Q & A after a screening that she was interested in the mothers, one American-born, the other Israeli, as fellow lesbians, she met them when their adopted, multi-racial children attended the Hannah Senesh Community Day School in Brooklyn where she taught. It is not clear by the end of the documentary if the kids have rejected their sense of Jewish identity when they drew closer to their birth identities, or if they were pushed away by the sense of unwelcoming they felt from the Jewish community, though the whole family is shown marking various Jewish holidays, including Hanukkah and Rosh ha Shanah. Notably, the lighter-skinned brother reacts very differently. The daughter, who did not bring any Jewish friends with her to several fest screenings, reported that the mothers were very uncomfortable at the premiere Q & A and left the city during the rest of the fest.) (5/17/2009) (To be broadcast on PBS's POV in 2010.)
O Jerusalem (So, nu: I felt awful that I nearly broke out laughing when one girlfriend – I can’t tell apart any of them, let alone the Jewish from the non-Jewish ones -- goes on about being raped by SS officers in the camps, sorry but it's that kind of melodrama that each character is a Job combination of so many individuals that they are unbelievable stick figures, even if these separate incidents did happen as vividly described in the non-fiction book. Just not to these people. If one more person cried and dropped to their knees that a loved one had just been killed in battle. . .) (10/17/2007)
Oliver Sacks: His Own Life (PBS’s American Masters) While Dr. Sacks didn’t publicly reveal he was gay and Jewish until the last year or so of his life, his description here of his Orthodox mother, Muriel Elsie Landau Sacks, seems stuck in the stereotypical “blame game” of the 1940s/1950s of his youth – of a cold mother who a man was smotheringly close to and dominated his need for approval. (Of course, typical of this series of bio-docs, there is no criticism.) Though that simplistic analysis was usually attributed to the mother’s frustration at being a repressed housewife, he describes Mrs. Sacks as the most prominent ob-gyn surgeon in England, who encouraged him to be a doctor by bringing home undeveloped fetuses for them to dissect together. So he was devastated when his father betrayed his confidence before he left for college and told her of his attraction to males, reading from his memoir: “She came down with a face of thunder I’d never seen before. ‘You are an abomination! I wish you had never been born!” My mother was speaking out of anguish and accusation, feeling she had lost one son to schizophrenia, now the other to homosexuality. She did not speak to me for days. When she did, she did not refer to that, or ever refer to that again. Something had become between us. Her words haunted me for my life, inhibiting and adding guilt to my sexuality.” In later years, they worked together on developing his case history writing style: “She would listen intently without emotion, with sharp critical judgment, one honed by her own sense of clinical reality…That summer [of 1972] was privileged time, a special time consecreated to creation.” He felt he had to finish Awakenings they’d worked on together as a tribute to her, published in 1973; his editor Kate Edgar thinks she functioned as a replacement after his mother died. (at 2019 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ seen at 2020 ReelAbilities Film Festival New York) (4/3/2020)
Oma and Bella (previewed at 2012 DOC NYC Festival) (briefly in Reviewed: New York Jewish Film Festival 2013 of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) The director/granddaughter filmed while a student at the School of Visual Arts, during a summer that was the hottest in Berlin until the following summer when I visited the city, so the heat limited their concentration and her questions. I had wanted to see this documentary when it was showing there then, but without English subtitles. The perspectives of these two women survivors, originally from Lithuania and Poland, about liberation by the Russians and D.P. odyssey before ending up having to learn and live with the language of their captors is unique. At the screening, I bought a copy of their cookbook. While Oscilloscope Laboratories has picked up the film, oddly only for distribution at festivals and various on demand formats.) (11/17/2012)
Once I Entered a Garden (Nichnasti pa'am lagan) (seen at MoMA’s 2013 Documentary Fortnight) (Mizrahi director Avi Mograbi and his friend/Arabic teacher Ali El Azhar just mention in passing that the latter’s ex-wife is a Jewish Israeli, who is not seen in the film. His feisty young daughter Yasmine is proud that she’s the best one in her Arabic class at school, but reports getting taunted by her classmates when they find out her father is an Israeli Arab. Mograbi shows photos from his grandparents and great-grandparents’ origins in Damascus and Beirut, and, in interspersed fictional letters voiced-over in French by Israeli Arab actress Hiam Abbass, imagines the lonely, difficult, and finally exiled life of a Jewish lover left behind when the family moved to Tel Aviv in the 1930’s.) (2/25/2013)
One Day You’ll Understand (Plus Tard, Tu Comprendras) (So, nu: This is screen legend Jeanne Moreau’s 2nd film for Gitai, though I’m not sure if the earlier, lawyer role was a Jewish one. It was a touching that her “Rivka” confesses her Jewish identity to her young grandchildren, and ironic that she carefully gives them long-hidden souvenirs that they can’t comprehend their significance at the same time her son is madly searching for such evidence. But her son recognizes that she should have a Jewish funeral, even if he is very awkward at following the rabbi’s instructions to his Catholic family. The scene in the archives is virtually taken in look and sound from Catherine Bernstein’s Murder of a Hatmaker (Assassinat d'une modiste).) (10/31/2008)
One Life (at 2024 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum (3/15/2024)
One Night With The King -Fairly ridiculous re-telling of the Megillah as a love story
One of Us - So, nu: The mother Etty’s experience is not unique; the wife of a baal teshuva second cousin once removed of mine went through the same quagmire, losing up through a state’s highest court, and then took extreme and illegal action with their four children in order to leave Hasidism and what she also claimed was abuse. (previewed for 2017 Double Exposure Investigative Film Festival) (10/22/2017/updated 12/30/2019)
In January 2018, the mother Etty publicly came out as gay. She later told journalists that the filmmakers were aware of her lesbian identification, and that distributor Netflix requested that information be deleted from the documentary.
One Week and a Day (Shavua ve Yom) Debut Israeli director Asaph Polonsky is ostensibly focusing on a middle-aged couple the Spivaks on the day after they finished sitting shiva for their adult son, who died in a hospice of an unspecified illness, but it’s more about the at loose ends husband “Eyal” (Shai Aviv), than the more practical wife “Vicky” (Evgenia Dodina). The husband has various run ins with his neighbor’s wife, with whom he’s had a strained relationship, and neglects to follow-up on his wife’s instructions regarding details with the hospice and cemetery, and is more moved by a stranger’s eulogy for his sister in the adjoining grave than anything his wife has said. The wife wants to go back to her teaching job already, but she was still being replaced by a young man, who isn’t following her curriculum. A student she is tutoring is spooked about shiva, but does come. (seen courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories) (12/1/2017)
Only Human (Seres queridos) (So, nu: Norma Aleandro is so marvelous as the beleaguered mother of adult children each with their own mishagas that I'll forgive the usual older woman jokes about sexual frustration, and anyway they are funny.) (7/12/2006)
On The Basis Of Sex - So, nu - While the warm script was written by Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s nephew Daniel Stiepleman, with her extensive input of background interviews, like in the documentary RBG only once in passing is it mentioned that she is Jewish. But that actually makes it kind of funny when someone says she's being discriminated against as Jewish - and there's been zero indication until then that she is. The documentary also only mentioned once in passing that she's Jewish. However, the working and family relationships with her husband and children are more faithful to her biographical writings and speeches than the documentary. While in the documentary, Justice Ginsburg credited her students at Rutgers Law School for urging her towards sex discrimination law, this film gives considerable attention to her rebellious (startlingly blonde) daughter Jane, played by Cailee Spaeny, for not only pushing her towards second wave feminism, but also assisting her with research on her first case (Moritz vs IRS), central to the film that she later called “the grandparent brief” on gender discrimination, the only time she and her husband were co-counsels – with Marty incongruously played by WASPy-looking hunk Armie Hammer. (The final scroll notes Jane went on to be a professor at Columbia Law School.) Though a dialect coach is listed in the credits, the British rose Felicity Jones only occasionally makes an effort to sound like the Justice’s Brooklyn accent; ironically Natalie Portman, who was originally set for the role, uses a broad New York accent in Vox Lux. (My additional note on the inclusion of the real African-American lawyer Pauli Murray.)
I didn't expect my review of the delightful Ruth Bader & Marty Ginsburg bio-pic to be controversial! But commenters are finding this website to send me personal complaints, all worded almost the same: "Self-described ‘half Jewish’ Armie Hammer is (obviously) the great-grandson of Jewish oil mogul Armand Hammer. This Armie Hammer gaslighting must stop." [Actually, he’s the great-great-grandson of Julius Hammer, who did identify as Jewish.] But I didn't, certainly not compared to Jewish outlets which have been amusingly pointed. My rather tame review comment that I thought non-controversial, incontrovertible, is: "So what if Felicity Jones and Armie Hammer do not look or sound at all like Brooklyn Jews Ruth and Marty Ginsburg." While there’s more consternation on social media like Twitter, Hey Alma’s coverage of the issue included reference to a W Magazine interview with Hammer: “I’m half Jewish, but no one believes me because my looks lean a little WASP-y,” said the blond, blue-eyed, six-foot-five great-grandson of oil tycoon Armand Hammer. “It’s sometimes hard for me to get the roles I’m drawn to.” An example of the criticism of the female lead: Hey Alma also posted Anna Miriam’s piece against Jones’s portrayal, which makes good points about Jewish visual representation on screen.
Variety, 12/12/2018, quoted Ginsburg at the National Archives D.C. screening Q & A with NPR’s Nina Totenberg: “When Dan came to me with this idea [for the movie], I said, ‘Well, if you want to spend years of your life, it is your choice, if you want to do it,'” Ginsburg told the audience. “And I asked why did he pick the Moritz case? Why did you pick that case instead of one of the Supreme Court cases? And Dan’s answer was, ‘I want this film to be as much story of a marriage as the development of a legal strategy.'… Ginsburg said that she reviewed three renditions of the script before handing off the reading duties to her daughter Jane. “And she and she read script four, five, six and I don’t know how many more, till it was done,” she said. Totenberg noted that Ginsburg “argued” with her nephew about a scene at the beginning of the movie in which she is shown wearing heels as she entered Harvard. She didn’t wear them. But she didn’t object to a how the final climatic final oral argument was portrayed, in which Ginsburg at first freezes up before the three judge appellate panel and then recovers in her rebuttal. Totenburg said that she asked Stiepleman, “Is that true? Did she freeze up in the beginning of the argument?’ And he said, ‘Ruth Ginsburg never flubbed an argument in her life.'” “There was no rebuttal,” Ginsburg responded. “Marty had the first 12 minutes, and I had the rest. I think questions continued beyond the half hour allotted to the two of us, but there was no rebuttal time.” But she doesn’t mind the sequence. “It fits in very well the way it is portrayed in the film,” she said. Totenberg also asked her what she thought of one scene in the movie, which she called the “sex scene,” showing Ginsburg and her husband having intimate relations. “My response to that is, ‘Marty would have loved it,'” Ginsburg said, to great laughs in the audience.” (updated 1/1/2019)
The Operative Written/directed by Yuval Adler, based on the novel The English Teacher by Yiftach Reicher Atir, a former intelligence general, the Mossad, including female officers, is portrayed as manipulating a woman with attenuated Jewish identity to spy for them in 2010 Iran, which was not how the character was portrayed in the book. Her handler “Martin” (played by Martin Freeman) asks: Do you consider yourself Jewish? “Rachel” (played by Diane Kruger) explains her complicated background: My father was half-Jewish. He: You were adopted? She: Is that relevant? I was brought up Christian Baptist, by my mother to some extent…She was born in Leipzig, died when I was 12…We lived in London, Boston, Canada, my mother had chemo there. I only felt at home in Israel. My mother talked about it – she volunteered on a kibbutz in the ‘70’s. That was a big thing for Germans to do then. He encourages her to use all these elements in her cover story, including what she’s to tell her father. She proceeds to spy in Iran, but the Mossad keeps asking her to do more dangerous missions, including involvement in a bombing. She falls in love with the Iranian engineer “Farhad” (played by Cas Anvar) who gets her access (there’s a lovely scene when she meets all his female relatives- evidently played by Israeli actresses with last names like “Cohen” and “Ari”) and then ruins his life. She has to escape, but least she gets to apologize to him in Germany before she gets away from the Mossad. She gets back to England in time to bury her father, after a long illness: He was such a British liberal, a stuffy historian, he hated Israel, the idea of it. When they’re all after her – Mossad, Iranians, and whoever – she changes her name from Rachel to Anne, and threatens to go public unless she’s paid off. The director, who researched with a lot of anonymous agents, in the press notes: “When [Kruger] was in Israel we had her train with ex-professionals in the field and she learned and rehearsed actual tradecraft. It was quite remarkable…Those were the years of stuxnet - the malware that Israel and the US developed to damage the centrifuges of the Iranian nuclear program. The malware had to be installed in local servers and I read that Mossad took care of that. That someone they had on the ground in Iran did that job. But who? What kind of assets does Mossad has in Tehran who can do that? How do they get there? How do they stay? What is their story?”
While her background is less ambiguous in the book, including relatives who had died in the Holocaust, he film improves on the Mossad macho-ness of the book, which emphasized that her handler was in love with her, by giving her more agency, personal credibility, and risks to her lover. However, in the book she was comfortable living in Israel and speaking Hebrew, and had over her time there two Israeli lovers, including one who died in military action she mourned on Memorial Day. (8/2/2019/added to 9/9/2019)
Operator Lior Zalmanson’s short re-plays themes done with more sturm und drang in recent features, particularly Good Kill and Eye in the Sky, to treat the life and death decisions of a single-mother civilian drone pilot contractor for the military (played by Noa Biron) as just doing her job. As usual, her teen son is shown doing similar attacks on his computer games, I think I missed another ironic plot point, even watching it twice. (seen at 2016 Tribeca Film Festival) (5/2/2016)
The Optimists (So, nu: The unrelievedly idealistic leadership and staff at Kibbutz Ketura in the southern Israel desert include evidently American women who seem like determined sales people/fundraisers. (details forthcoming) (preview at 2018 Other Israel Film Festival) (10/26/2018)
Ordinary Miracles: The Photo League’s New York (So, nu: I haven’t yet catalogued all the Jewish women members of the Photo League in general, or who are featured in this documentary.) (6/23/2012)
Or (My Treasure) (seen at Israel at 60 at Lincoln Center) The first Prime Minister of Israel David Ben-Gurion is reputed to have said: “We will know we have become a normal country when Jewish thieves and Jewish prostitutes conduct their business in Hebrew." Or it’s variously attributed that Chaim Nachman Bialik, the poet of the Hebrew renaissance, wrote, in various translation claims, something like ''We will be a normal state when we have the first Hebrew [-speaking? Sometimes translated as Jewish] prostitute, the first Hebrew thief and the first Hebrew policeman guarding the first Hebrew jail.'' I can’t verify the accuracy or original source of any version of either statement. But this moving study of co-dependence between a desperate mother and daughter is a frank portrait of the result. Another fearless, stunning performance by Ronit Elkabetz, matched by the very poignant up and comer Dana Ivgy. I look forward to the future work of director Keren Yedaya and co-writer Sari Ezouz since this 2004 heart-wrencher. (updated 6/20/2008)
Origin - In writer/director Ava DuVernay’s adaptation of journalist Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 nonfiction book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, no additional historical consultant is listed in the credits. While I haven’t yet read the book, the film reinforced my impression from promotional interviews that Wilkerson’s shallowly researched view of the Holocaust was naïve and incomplete for comparison to the treatment of African-Americans in the United States, even of well-known evidence that would have bolstered her thesis that “race” was an artificial construct in extreme discrimination, while ignoring “The Final Solution” of genocide. (I also haven’t yet read: Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School James Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, 2017, Princeton University Press).
The film only focuses on one Jewish woman, as the supposed motivator for the man seen in one of the most moving archival photographs in the (unidentified) Topography of Terror exhibition in Berlin, on the former site of Gestapo Headquarters. A version of the 1936 photograph opens the film during the conclusion of a lecture by the fictionalized representation of Wilkerson (played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor). While efforts have attempted identification of the sole worker (here: “August Landmesser”, played by Finn Wittrock) in a huge shipyard who refused to join in the Nazi salute, this goes further, to his involvement with a Jewish woman (here: “Irma Eckler”, played by Victoria Pedretti). Not mentioned directly are “The Nuremberg Laws” of that year that criminalized their relationship, though Wilkerson emphasizes enforcement of endogamy in making her case here. The touching re-enactment scenes of their lives go from their meeting, through to their arrest and her imprisonment at a concentration camp – though not explicitly to her death. (courtesy of Neon)
(12/5/2023)
OSS 117 – Lost in Rio (Rio ne répond plus) (previewed at 2010 Rendez-Vous with French Film at Film at Lincoln Center) (Another in the ongoing French series of James Bond spoofs, this 1967-set one is even more in the Austin Powers vein. Louise Monot looks very much like Jill St. John as the sexy, red-headed Mossad agent "Lt. Col. Dolorès Koulechov" who challenges OSS's stereotypes about Jews and about women on their joint Nazi-hunting mission. She isn't won over by 117's old-school charms until the end. Director/co-writer Michel Hazanavicius described the actress and character: "She had to bring the right amount of seriouisness, and yet leave enough room for comedy; she stands as a counterbalance to OSS's stupidity, yet at the same time, she cannot be seen to be systematically casting judgment in order for the audience to maintain its sympathy for the couple. I think she perfectly succeeded in attaining that equilibrium, between, seductress, woman of action and whiteface clown." In the bit awkwardly-translated press notes, the actress described the character: "The main stake was not to make Dolores too harsh and too serious for the simple reason she is a Mossad agent. That would have made her unpleasant. . .The style, the make-up, the hair color and also the long orange nails helped me build Dorores' character. . .But Dolores with her masculine side and her strong personality, does not quite resemble the girls from that time. That does not prevent her from being sexy. . .Dolores is the very voice of modernity. She speaks the truth. She is the only one who has a bit of distance from all the insanity, and I like all of my lines. . . In the beginning, I would often start with too high-pitched of a voice and Michel would ask me to make it deeper. A deep voice is more imposing and sexier at the same time." As an aside here, the Nazi version of Shylock's speech from Merchant of Venice was a real giggle.) (2/20/2010)
Otherhood
Directed by Cindy Chupack (who helped turn Sex and the City from dialogue sounding like gay men into episodes that actually seemed like women), written by Chupack and Mark Andrus, who has written other grown-up rom coms, based on a British novel originally published as Whatever Makes You Happy by William Sutcliffe that I haven’t read yet (and now re-released under the Netflix movie title) – Spoiler Alerts. Of the three suburban mothers forlorn that their NYC-living, 30something sons didn’t come to see them on Mother’s Day, one is “Gillian Lieberman” (blonde Patricia Arquette, but a convert isn’t usually portrayed in films, let alone so sympathetically). Her failing fiction writer son Daniel (played by Jake Hoffman) have some of the best mother/son dialogue in the film, with insight about their Jewish identity. In their opening confrontation when she surprises him at his Long Island City apartment, that’s them on its supposed stoop above. (My not exact transcriptions): You are the point of my life. Don’t make me question my existence. You didn’t call me on Mother’s Day…I found you a Nice Jewish Girl! Son: You’re not even Jewish. Mom: I converted. For you. Son: You converted for Dad., who was Joel. Mom: Yes, so we could raise our children as Jews. So stop dating shiksas. Son: You never gave Erin a chance. Mom, after mocking her name: You are an intellectual she’s a hair stylist….Don’t procreate with her. Son: That’s classist and offensive. It’s over, move on. Mom, making sure he remember family friends: They have a nephew in Yonkers. He gave me the number of this brilliant woman from his temple, She’s just been through a painful divorce which apparently was not her fault at all… I saw her social media. She’s smart! She did a beach clean-up! [I know my kids don’t approve of that kind of Facebook stalking that I do.] Son: You never even met her, did you? Mom: She’s thinking of dating again. . Her name is Allison, She graduated from Brown. She does something in TV. Son: Just leave it. Mom: I’m not leaving NY until you call her. Son: You can’t force me to date someone! Mom: I’ll be back! And he does! [My sons wouldn’t have – let alone one not telling me when he was seriously dating The Perfect Woman.] He meets “Allison” (Molly Bernard, from Younger) at a small restaurant, downing his schlumpily dressed sorrows in mimosas. To the film’s credit, she’s mostly nice, in business skirt and blouse, not dismayed that his mother has exaggerated his New Yorker resume, and compliments his mother for setting them up. Her comic element is that she goes overboard on a very extended metaphor about falling out of love with her ex by showing how relationships are like eggs. He gets so lost in that he flashes back to the night he proposed to Erin (played by Heidi Gardner), who seemed to be unnecessarily in her underwear, and proffered his love and an engagement ring, to no avail, though she was the one who cheated on him, I think. “Daniel” summarizes to her: I’m here to get rid of my mother and you’re here to get rid of your ex, so why don’t we call it over easy. “Allison” sizes him up as hopeless and exits, leaving the cash to pay half the check. Meanwhile Mom has found an unlocked window to get into his ground-floor apartment. Nosing around, she finds his lap top full of photos enjoying life with “Erin”. When “Daniel” comes home, Mom shrugs: Sometimes it’s the second date where the magic happens. And she leaves him cooked food. But the next day, she takes her similarly forlorn friends to “Erin”s hair salon, for makeovers – and she can even work on the black hair of Angela Bassett. Mom: The perfect stylist…I remember you mentioned the salon when we had breakfast that time. “Erin”: And you asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. Mom: Sorry, did I say that? “Erin”Three times. She has a nice talk with the young woman, who reveals that she’s so broken-hearted over “Daniel” she’s moving to L.A. next week. Mom tells her friends: The problem isn’t that I meddled, but that I should have meddled sooner. . . I could be hijacking Erin’s moving van right now. It’s not a great plan but it’s a plan. But the friends have gotten drunk and hungover and start fighting over each having kept secrets about the others’ husbands or sons. To “Helen Holston” (Felicity Huffman): Mom I don’t have to explain why I forgave Joel. “Helen” hits back about “Daniel”: You sabotaged his chance of happiness. He had a ring. You planted so many doubts so he caught Erin shtupping his trainer. You hated Erin until 10 minutes ago. Mom goes back to his apartment. Son: I’m writing. I got inspired. It’s about an overbearing mother. [Is that a Portnoy’s Complaint reference?] Mom: Do you still have the ring? Son: You never liked her anyway. Mom: What do I know? I’m just a weird internet stalker. She’s a lovely woman and you’re a lovely man. If she’s the love of your life. For all you know she might be packing her bags and leaving town. I love you. You’re a grown man. I just hope you do what’s best for your life and your future. Son: Do you know something? Did you break into her place too? Mom: She waited a long time for you. Son: It’s not you and dad’s perfect story. Mom: Not perfect. Dad did do infidelity…You were 16. Son: How’d you forgive him? Mom, using her only Yiddish in the movie: It wasn’t easy. I went crazy for awhile. I went on a fakakta egg diet…I still wanted your dad. I decided to do the harder thing instead. What really made it possible to forgive him, was he never fully forgave himself. Son: I really admire you and get why you’re sharing the story with me, but I don’t think I’m built like that. Mom: It’s your life, I’m not going to tell you what to do. Son: Since when? Mom: Since today. You’ve been underwater a long time. You need to decide what life you want. You got this. I love you. She leaves. [Theatrics a la The Graduate aren’t quite needed to win back “Erin”.] “One Year Later”: Mom helps pregnant “Erin” with her mini-dress and veil. Son jokes good humoredly: My mother is at semi-Jewish wedding and she’s still compaining. Thanks for everything. Mom and son hug. She and her girlfriends finally make up too: Now we’re considering that trip a success? As the camera pulls away from the post-ceremony dancing, we see that a rabbi in tallit is in attendance. (8/6/2019)
The Other Son (Le Fils De L’autre) (Nu: At the screening I attended, a Very Left Wing Colleague loudly complained that she found the casting not credible, that the switched kids "didn't look Jewish", or did the Israeli family for that matter. When I tried to politely point out that perhaps her frame of reference is NYC Ashkenazi Jews and not the Middle Eastern diversity that is the Israeli population, she got furious at me. Particularly with the red-haired French Jewish mother –looking like my siblings--and her swarthy sabra husband, I thought the casting subtly got across the sibling heritage of Ishmael/Isaac, even as everybody is just too gosh-darned nice.) (10/28/2012)
The Other Story (Sipur Acher)- Nesher hit on a clever way to fulfill the Culture Minister’s mandate to focus more on the Orthodox in government-supported films, while not turning off the larger secular audience who actually goes to the movies: by featuring baalei teshuva (secular Jews who become Orthodox) and the panic that causes in their families. Amusingly, several of the characters seem to be suffering from “Jerusalem syndrome”, usually described as the mental phenomena of religiously-themed obsessive ideas, delusions or other psychosis-like experiences that are triggered by a visit to the city”, such that it could be worse on those who live there. The hard-driving real estate agent divorced mother “Tali Abadi” (played by Maya Dagan) is frantic that her daughter “Anat Abadi” (Joy Rieger of Virgins (Vierges/Ein Betulot Bakrayot)) and long-time boyfriend, from their wilder days, are approaching their traditional marriage: They won’t see [her grandfather]. It’ll end with total rift, even with me. And when she’ll have kids -real soon – she won’t let me see them. Heaven forbid I don’t lead them astray! She gets the estranged father to return from his messed up U.S. business deals to spy on the ex-pop star boyfriend “Shahar Elkayam” (singer-songwriter Nathan Goshen). The substance at the female seminary the daughter attends is only briefly heard, when a female teacher defends the combination of polygamist Biblical wives: Rachel is in the role of the loved one; Leah is in the role of the mother. The sages say they are like two beams holding up mankind.
The grandfather psychologist Shlomo Abadi (the estimable Sasson Gabai) also manipulates to gets the son involved in a divorce case where the wife “Sari Alter” (Avigail Harari) is on the opposite trajectory: from growing up in a restrictive, patriarchal Orthodox home she is now in “a pagan cult”, with women who worship Asherah as the symbol of the empowered female, that is specifically condemned in the Torah. Supporting that the husband keep calling her “crazy”, she hysterically protests how she was raised: I’m a maid at home and at work. You promised me a new life. I wanted to work and make my own money! I didn’t want to be like my mother. You knew that!
By the end, “Anat” is doing more than throwing eye daggers at her parents, and Rieger finally gets to show her flare for ironic humor. There’s an earlier touch when the fiancé reminds her to attend the counseling session about the “marriage night” and “Anat” retorts: I think I could teach her a thing or two. Nesher leaves everyone open-ended so there can be no direct criticism of anyone’s religious or lifestyle choices, which is similar to how he concluded the very popular Turn Left At The End Of The World. [theatrical release 6/28/2019] (Culmination of “Ari Nesher Retrospective” at 2019 Israel Film Center Festival) (preview courtesy of Strand Releasing) (6/8/2019)
The Other Widow (Pilegesh)
Director Ma’ayan Rypp’s debut feature is a stunningly empathetic dive inside the feelings of a woman many of us may have known at some point – the girlfriend having an affair with a married man – at her most vulnerable time. As the last to know of his sudden, unexpected death, her story cleverly unfolds within the timing and structure of Jewish ritual, from the next day funeral, to post-funeral reception, to the seven days that the family sits shiva at home welcoming guests to remember the deceased while snacking.
In the primarily female cast, Dana Ivgy holds attention as “Ella”, the mousy, downtrodden costumer for a theater company who for four years was involved with (I would say let herself be taken advantage of) the resident playwright with his claims of love amidst furtive couplings backstage. Her parents and sister are thrilled to hear her lover has died, so she can move on with her personal and professional development. Amidst rehearsals for the playwright’s adaptation of “Medea” (that presumably included the revenge of the rejected lover), the condescending theater company members are complicit in not letting her know about his death and funeral, and (unsuccessfully) try to physically and socially keep her away from the legally recognized widow “Natasha” (Ania Bukstein), a cellist with the icy look of a “bun head”.
But “Ella” keeps being drawn back to the open house of mourning, to re-connect with her lover and where it is acceptable to show at least some grief. In addition to using her sewing skills to manipulate frequent contact with the legal widow, she meets his other relatives, including his younger but look-alike brother (Itamar Rotschild) and his elderly mother (or aunt?) “Yehudit” (Irit Gidron), who the family keeps handing off to “Ella” due to her dementia they find annoying, so “Ella” thinks she can confide in her.
From her perspective as an experienced art director, Rypp is very visually attuned. Sudden nose bleeds are “Ellas”s “Scarlet Letter” amidst her lover’s family. “Ella”s costume designs are striking – see her teary dress design for “Medea” above. Hallucinatory images keep the audience – and “Ella”-- guessing how much is real, dreams, or part of the theatrical performance as she moves into center stage. (at 2023 Israel Film Center Festival) (6/8/2023)
The Other Woman : (So, nu : Author Ayelet Waldman is known for writing about Jewish women and mothers (though I admit I have to catch up with her "Mommy-Track" mystery series), but through Don Roos' adaptation of her Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, there is a jarring transformation – the sympathetic Jewish characters become just New Yorkers and the bitter shiksa becomes Jewish! In the book, which the author credits Natalie Portman's executive producing partner Abby Wolf-Weis for championing, the prestigious nursery school at the center of the story is at the 92nd St YM-YWHA, and the central woman constantly justifies her adulterous love for the husband as beshert, the destined love of her life. The husband's Sephardic Syrian family is richly described in their looks and his mother's sympathy and cuisine, and contrasted with the Ashkenazic dishes the younger woman grew up cooking. When the young son (and it's odd that most critics don't realize he's in nursery school) reports the first wife's callous interpretation of Jewish law pertaining to dead infants, her ignorant rigidity, that a newborn isn't really a person, is attributed to her not being Jewish (and the second wife tartly rejoins to the boy he's technically not even Jewish). But the same interchange is turned around in the film – that claim is the only reference to any cultural or religious aspect of Judaism, or even Jewishness, so the shrew is therefore presumed to be Jewish, and therefore knowledgeable. This image reinforces intermarriage stereotypes in the movies-- that a handsome, successful Jewish man would reject his older, frigid Jewish wife for the younger, beautiful, sexy non-Jew – when the book actually presented the opposite case! (2/4/2011)
Other Israel Film Festival in 2008 in New York (So, nu : Jewish women are only glimpsed in two of the documentaries I screened that focus on Israeli Arabs. They seem to be friendly and encouraging co-participants in the Miss Israel contest in Lady Kul el Arab (shown on PBS's Wide Angle as Contestant No. 2). But a Jewish woman is less benign in Heart of Jenin (Das Herz von Jenin), where the Orthodox mother of the little girl saved by an organ donation from a Palestinian boy killed by Israeli troops is restricted in expressing her gratitude to the father by the strict gender restrictions of both their cultures, though her husband and the Israeli-resident uncle aggravate an already awkward situation that she isn’t allowed to help ameliorate.
Other Israel Film Festival in 2009 in New York (So, nu : commentary forthcoming on the Jewish women in the documentaries The Invisible, SAZ–The Palestinian Rapper for Change and Voices from El Sayed.) (11/12/2009)
Other People’s Children (Les Enfants des autres)
- 
- - Virginie Efira in OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN. Courtesy of Music Box Films; Yamée Couture separately; Director, Rebecca Zlotowski. Courtesy of Music Box Films.
Inspired by Romain Gary’s Your Ticket Is No Longer Valid (that I have yet to read), writer/director Rebecca Zlotowski expressively reverses that story of a man plagued by impotence, to a 40-year-old Parisienne facing infertility. Though she claimed not to be aware of the Biblical resonances around women seeking fertility, the protagonist’s family is explicitly Jewish. All reflect her experiences when she was writing the script.
The film opens with the close “Friedman” family gathering for a traditional Rosh ha Shanah celebration; Zlotowski’s own father Michel plays the father, who leads their prayers at holidays and at her own mother’s grave. “Rachel” (Virginie Efira), a caring and appreciated school teacher at an alternative high school (with a flirtatious younger colleague), embarks on a passionate affair with hunky French-Moroccan car designer “Ali Ben Attia” (Roschdy Zem), who is definitely viewed with the female gaze. Amidst a lot of great sex together, left unsaid is how his visible ethnicity adds yet another Biblical layer when “Rachel” realizes that “Ali” has a child, a 4-year-old daughter with his ex-wife. She pushes him into a more three-dimensional relationship to navigate fond involvement with the girl, with a few rom-com touches, and even happily identifies herself as the step-mother to another woman at their children’s class. In a moving interchange with his apologetic ex-wife “Alice” (Chiara Mastroianni), “Rachel” is emphatic: Ali’s the one who made me suffer. Don’t make excuses for men.
While blonde “Rachel” keeps hearing in annual visits to her gynecologist (played by aged documentarian Frederick Wiseman) that her chances of conceiving are considerably diminished, her sister, auburn-haired “Louana” (Yamée Couture), announces her “happy accident” of being pregnant. Zlotowski claims to be unaware of the tensions between the Biblical “Rachel” and “Leah” over fertility, but was determined to show not jealousy between the sisters, but ambivalent happiness. Unfortunately, the distributor did not supply a still of the two sisters together, so I substituted another, inappropriate poster of Couture to demonstrate that Zlotowski continues the French tradition of portraying Jewish women as blonde and auburn-haired. In contrast, she appears publicly to be a brunette with straight hair. And just as she started filming, she found out she was pregnant, which must have added another layer on-set. (at 2023 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema of Film at Lincoln Center/ courtesy of Music Box Films; U.S. release planned for April 2023) (2/28/2023)
Our City Dreams Though her ethnic identity is never referenced, among the five women artists featured is Nancy Spero. (2/4/2009)
Our Disappeared (Nuestros desaparecidos) (briefly reviewed at 2009 Annual New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (It's a mother who makes the link between the Argentine military dictatorship and the Nazis when she remembers that when a torturer cruelly brought her child home for a last visit he playfully asked her to play a Wagner record for him.) (See more background from its PBS broadcast.) (1/18/2009)
Out In The Dark (Alata) (Dhalam) (So, nu: The lawyer’s mother “Rina Schaefer” (played by Cheli Goldenberg) complains that her son is throwing his sexual orientation “in her face” by bringing his boyfriend over for Shabbat dinner, even as she claims to her son that she’s accepted him as he is. The Palestinian psych grad student has to insist on empathy from the Israeli female social workers/psychologists for a Palestinian patient who is struggling with the stress of an imprisoned husband, among other difficulties.) (10/11/2013)
Out of Sight (Lemarit Ain) (2006) – Written by Noa Greenberg, this is noteworthy as one of the first Israeli films dealing with domestic abuse, as teenagers face adults around them who don’t see what’s going on (even as one of the children is physically blind) and don’t believe the girls until the crisis point.
The Outrageous Sophie Tucker (previewed through 2014 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (So, nu: There’s surprisingly few references to her Jewish identity – her observant parents (her mother is seen in photographs), singing in their restaurant, reaching out to Jewish vaudeville performers, her popular recording of “Yiddishe Momme”, and then her support of Israel and Brandeis. If I remember correctly from her brief bio in Making Trouble, which instead emphasized her ribald humor, the movie theaters where she started singing entr’acte were Yiddish. Also included are her close personal friendships with non-Jewish women, including a Chinese doctor (which seems like the Eleanor Roosevelt in the Cook biographies). While virtually all histories of the Jewish influence on male singers and songwriters of the American Popular Songbook invariably point to a father who was a cantor and the bluesy minor keys of prayer services, I could find tantalizing evidence that her influences might have been crossing paths with great Southern women blues belters on vaudeville tours that extended into the Midwest – that I hope can be researched in the future.) (7/25/2015)
Over Your Cities The Grass Will Grow (So, nu: German artist Anselm Kiefer’s fascination with Judaic symbols, particularly female ones, isn’t explained, though he does check usage of Hebrew terms with an Israeli assistant. (Nowhere is it said in this documentary that in earlier work he’s played on images of Nazis and the Holocaust as haunting his country’s landscape.) His references to shekhinah and the mythic destructive power of Lilith as a source for this work, let alone the Biblical allusion in the title, are so elusive that many reviewers cite them inaccurately. Maybe if his labels had been translated in the subtitles that would be clearer. The concrete towers cast from shipping containers reminded me of Paolo Soleri’s unfinished “Arcosanti” city in the Arizona desert, that I had intended to work on in Summer 1971 – until I started dating my husband instead.) (8/10/2011)
Palindromes (So, nu: While the first name of the central 13-year-old conveniently represents the title, writer/director Todd Solondz in his production notes only identifies "Aviva Victor" as coming from a "secular liberal" family, but they are clearly Jewish as well as pro-abortion and materialistic, as in his film Welcome to the Dollhouse whose "Dawn Wiener" has a morbid return here, to contrast them with a Pentecostal, and equally hypocritical, anti-abortion family.)
Paper Dolls
Papirosen (briefly reviewed in Reviewed: New York Jewish Film Festival 2013 of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (So, nu
Parental Guidance (review forthcoming from watching the DVD I got cheap on sale because I didn’t bother seeing it in a theater)
Paris Calligrammes - In German artist/photographer/filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger’s memories of her post-war German exiles, intellectuals and artists communities in Paris, Jews are mostly ghosts, the original owners of the pre-1933 German-language books in her favorite antiquarian shop. But of the many names that fly by among her circle, I identified two Jewish women. German-Jewish artist Lou Albert-Lazard is known here by her sketches of fellow inmates at the French Vichy detention camp Gurs. Later, Ottinger recalls a highlight of the thriving Paris nightlife of the early 1960’s was seeing performances by the German/French chanteuse whose stage name was Barbara (Monique Andrée Serf). While Ottinger’s favorite song of hers was about German-French reconciliation "Göttingen", the black-and-white performance clip is of her singing “Dis, quand reviendras-tu?” (preview at 2020 DOC NYC) (11/10/2020)
Partly Private (briefly reviewed at Part 3 Family Ties Around The World of 2009 Tribeca Film Festival) (How superficial to not check what was actually said in Sex and the City about non and circumcised members when interviewing women fans of the show, let alone not including any health stats. But the director clearly got more and more rigidly (ha ha) anti-circumcision by the end of the film, like her father, as she seemed to think giving in to her husband's preference to follow tradition would make her less of a feminist. See it for comparison of the same issues, but with a gay man's perspective in Quest for the Missing Piece) (5/17/2009)
Passion & Power: The Technology of Orgasm (2007)
Panel on 2/22/2017 at MoMA: historian Rachel Maines, sexologist Betty Dodson, co-directors Wendy Slick and Emiko Omori
In this documentary history of the vibrator, based on Rachel Maines’s The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” Vibrators and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction (Johns Hopkins U Press, 1999), the second wave women’s movement is conspicuously identified with clips of Jewish women at demonstrations: Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem, as well as including extensive interviews with Eve’s Garden founder Dell Zetlin Williams. Too bad the panelists were so out of touch with current movies and TV which frequently feature vibrators, and I didn’t pick-up any references to lesbians. (seen in the Emiko Omori Retrospective at MoMA’s 2017 Documentary Fortnight) (2/23/2017)
Past Life (Ha'khata'im) Regardless that writer/director Avi Nesher was inspired by a true story of coincidences between 1977 and the Holocaust, music and journalism, Warsaw and Jerusalem, Righteous Gentiles and Jews, guilt and denial, and excellent performances by Joy Rieger and Nelly Tagar as very different sisters, I just didn’t find the very talky explanations as convincing and emotional. (at 2017 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum)
Paternal Rites The curator’s description at MoMA’s 2018 Documentary Fortnight was provocatively misleading: “The first-person essay film examines the aftereffects of physical and sexual abuse in a contemporary Jewish-American family, with the filmmaker’s queer and transgender identity at its core”, though the film’s website synopsis includes that specification. The ethnicity is barely mentioned in a fade-out biographical introduction by Marilyn the mother of filmmaker/film professor at U of MD/Baltimore Jules Rosskam, as she’s faintly heard in passing describing herself as “Midwest Jewish girl”. The father Skip may be Jewish, but there’s no such reference by him or anyone else. There is nothing else Jewish indicated in their lives, through vacation audio diaries, suburban home movies, photographs, or the filmmaker’s hectoring interviews. With the film dominated by therapists, including the mother, the filmmaker’s experimental animated take on personal sessions, and then endless parsing of parental relationships with Alex the partner, I asked in the Q & A why not provide social context for the mother’s childraising attitudes, such as for not letting the child in their room when not sleeping through the night. (I could also have added the lack of empathy for her not understanding the abuse her children suffered from her husband’s father, or her husband’s alcoholism). The filmmaker explained that in going through many edits, including ones with that material, it was decided the film was “really about me” and it was sufficient to narrate that the parents expected a Leave It To Beaver kind of life. (3/3/2018)
Pawn Sacrifice (the two Jewish women – Bobby Fischer’s mother Regina, played by Robin Weigert, and his sister Joan, played by Lily Rabe) (8/19/2015)
The Peacemaker - Over the several years that the titular Padraig O’Malley is seen presiding over The Forum for Cities in Transition, the Israeli Jewish representatives of West Jerusalem hoping to work positively with (male) Palestinian representatives of East Jerusalem seem to always include women. While one woman insists on saying she represents both East and West Jerusalem,
Tal Kligman is more experienced in this methodology to de-escalate problems with the Palestinians, and calls this forum “as a support group where you’re not unique – Horrors Anonymous”. While O’Malley reports on one successful effort to get Arabic language name on streets to help for mail delivery, the any (male) Palestinian representative brings up issues O’Malley warns is out-of-bound as “politics”. (2/1/2018)
Peep World (4/3/2010)
Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict - Though missing the context of what New York’s Jewish Museum marvelously documented in a 2005 exhibition “The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and Their Salons”, the emphasis on her as a (secularized) Jewish art collector, gallerist, and patron from London to NYC to Venice, professionally, and personally as a lover of artists is refreshing (including her coterie of other daughters of Jewish NY elite who strove for acceptance, including through elocution lesions). Even just the risks she took in Paris saving Louvre-scorned (let alone her uncle Solomon’s mistress/curator-scorned) modern art as the Germans bore down on the studios would make a terrific bio-pic.) (previewed at 2015 Tribeca Film Festival) (5/2/2015)
The Peretzniks - In extensive interviews alumni who as orphans or children of survivors stayed in Poland after the war and found intellectual, cultural, emotional, and social shelter in the I. L. Peretz School in Lodz, who now reunion as far as Canada, New York and Ashkelon, Israel (seen in the accompanying short film Happy Jews). There are many women and much joshing about childhood romances, but no sense of any different experiences for women. (seen at 2010 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (1/25/2010)
Periphery (short) With repeating images of dance and animation in a labyrinth, director Sara Yacobi-Harris, who describes herself as Black and Jewish, introduces us to the identity struggles of Jewish women and their mothers and daughters in Canada whose heritage is African-American, and from Ethiopia, India (including Bene Israel), Iraq, Japan, and Korea, as well as men who are gay and from elsewhere. They all argue for inclusion to answer “Who is a Jew?” (at 2024 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum/ courtesy of ”No Silence On Race Project”) (2/16/2024)
La Petite Jerusalem (Little Jerusalem)
Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune (So, nu: Somehow I hadn't known that his father was Jewish, though a neighbor says he knew because he went to school with an Ochs' cousin, but his mother is only ID'd as typically Scottish. Phil's sisters are on screen less than his brother who was also his manager, but their very personal insights into his psychology are quite revealing. Too bad no mention is made of Sonny Ochs' Song Nights that have helped so much to keep his songs remembered.) (1/7/2011)
Phnom Penh Lullaby (The Israeli wanderer who landed in Cambodia in this portrait is consumed with guilt for his mother, seen in a few photos, who was left destitute by his father’s death. Even though one reason he left was to not be a burden to her, he still has to ask her to send him money as he hits rock bottom in scraping together a life on the streets in a problematic replacement family.) (seen at 2011 DocuWeeks) (8/31/2011)
Phoenix - So, nu: The central woman, from the novel, 1st British adaptation and this German version, admits frankness about women’s concentration camp survival I’ve only otherwise seen in the Czech film Colette, as well as her slow PTSD recovery. (In the book and earlier film, her malaise is viscerally shown by her indifference to a child accidentally falling off her train back to Paris while the other passengers are in turmoil.) The husband sneers like the amoral Harry Lime in The Third Man (I haven’t seen the new restoration yet), especially when he wants to gash her arm as an excuse to disguise a lack of tattoo, which she manages to hide from him with excuses. In the novel and first adaptation, one way she takes more control of her resurrection is to tell the husband she’s already gotten fake numbers on her arm to make him think she’s really playing along with this role. Instead, in this version, the unveiling of her tattoo to the husband (to a symbolically redolent Kurt Weill song from One Touch of Venus) has tremendous emotional power. She comes out into the sunlight to her last hiding place and neighborhood where she’s recognize as a ghost risen from the dead – much as other survivors describe, and found so uncomfortable they rarely stayed in their hometowns. Symbolically returning by train, she gradually – and compellingly-- turns a reunion with friends into a comeback.
Instead of the non-Jewish step-daughter of the novel/daughter in the British version who somehow successfully fled to Vichy-controlled France with no sense of Jewish identity, the new Jewish woman character of “Lene” seems to be an obsessed pre-war fan who fell in love with the singer from afar and wants her all to herself with a renewed sense of Jewishness in sunny Palestine. But the rejection, on top of her assignment from some Jewish agency to find and help survivors that instead turns up mostly death, overwhelms her.)
Thanks to Dr. Gary Rombough for letting me know what facts in the movie concurred with a comment about my review – and what didn’t. Interesting that in my head I first perceived her as being blonde to please her non-Jewish lover, rather than the dark brown she dyed. (updated 9/3/2015)
A Photographic Memory
Director Rachel Seed delved for almost a decade to find the voice and images of her mother who died before she was two years old. Digging through boxes at her photographer father’s home he had never revealed, she found her mother’s personal journals and family home movies that she reads and excerpts. Using her mother’s old address book, she hunts down colleagues and friends who tell her details of the career her mother Rachel Turner developed as a journalist and photographer, starting at Scholastic Magazine, where the director later interned, and CEO Dick Robinson became her mentor as he had mentored her mother.
As Cornell Capa, founder of the International Center for Photography had co-produced a unique audio-visual series her mother conducted, Images of Man, where she interviewed iconic photographers in the U.S. and Europe about their philosophy of their art, including Lisette Model, with illustrative photographs, the director discovered boxes in the ICP archives of the raw interviews from the 1970s. There was even an interview with her mother about the series. From the original reel-to-reel tapes, for the first time in her memory, the director was able to hear her mother’s voice and see her as she spoke. (The credits cite “recreations”, including the director as her mother, so I’m not sure what is archival and what is not.)
The director tracks down several of the same photographers for memories of these encounters, including in Paris Henri Cartier-Bresson’s partner/photographer Martine Franck. All in the film have the same reaction when they open the door to her – like they’ve seen a ghost, she looks that much like her mother. Sometimes she can even sit in the same seats as the original interview. The director uses this similarity to try to understand her, and even meld with her, as indicated in the film’s poster, with a few digital tricks.
The director learns what a woman struggling to be a professional photo-journalist went through from the 1950’s – 1970’s. Even as her mother became friends with interview subject Gordon Parks, their only published collaboration was “for her body”, a nude photograph, face obscured by her dark hair, a shot that took the director a very long time through archives and much research assistance to locate that she has “a color double truck spread” in A Star for Noon: An Homage to Women, specified in her 4/2/2022 Instagram post.
Her mother’s journal and friends lead her to the ex-boyfriends and other relationships her mother had before her British photographer husband Brian Seed, the director’s father. A frequent theme was the tensions with her parents, who wanted her to marry “a good Jewish boy”. While her mother’s immigrant father is included in the film, oddly her mother is not. So I’m including what the director did post about her on Instagram, 9/6/2023 (photo above by Sheila Turner-Seed): “Going through my mother’s 200K negatives - a collection ranging from 1967-1975 that covers five continents as she traveled far and wide for work and pleasure. It’s all worth it when you come across something you’ve never seen before, which, in a lifetime of looking at images, doesn’t happen that often. This picture, for me, was one of those treasures. This is my Nana Libby [Turner], my mother’s mother. She was truly an angel on earth. Her family emigrated from Belarus to escape Jewish persecution. Since my mother was gone from the physical plane, I credit her with teaching me what it means to love and be loved. Her memory is a blessing.” In the film, she remembers that the family always had cameras in their hands, home movies of seders and other Jewish holiday gatherings flash by. The director can barely look at her 18-month-old self in 1979 at her mother’s Jewish funeral and grave. (It was at her suddenly bereft grandmother’s insistence that her father moved her near them in Chicago.) She returns now to lay flowers at the gravestone inscribed: “She was a lovely and talented woman, the warmest and most generous to friends.” Seed identifies herself as a “Wandering Jew -NYC. LA. London”.
Before this debut feature film, the director embarked for several years on The Motherless Project, photographing other women who had lost their mothers at a young age. But few would have such a wealth of fascinating material and the diligence to uncover, digitize, and edit together such a touching and insightful tribute to fill in the gaps of personal memory. (at 2024 DOC NYC/ theatrical release at DCTV NY) (11/22/2024)
Phyllis and Harold (So, nu: With key differences, there are so many parallels on the screen with my own family: My mother and Phyllis went to Brooklyn College about the same time. My father was at dental school about the same time as Harold, and also spent his military service as a lieutenant down south during WWII. My parents travelled quite a bit around the world, for his dental conferences. My in-law's Long Island house looked identical to their's in a neighboring town, with a sibling's family in the Rockaways. The director re-discovered her Jewish identity around age 40, me around age 30, albeit not through a celebrity Kabbalist. That her family story is on screen and not mine may have something to do with the filmmaker being married to Andre Gregory, as in My Dinner With Andre. But that connection makes it even more surprising how oblivious she seems to the insights of Kushner's Caroline, Or Change on her relationship with her childhood caregiver.) (2/20/2010)
Pieces of A Woman
- stills from Netflix
Hungarian-born writer Kata Wéber first wrote a play inspired by her own experience with losing a baby (through miscarriage), then directed by her life and filmmaking partner Kornél Mundruczo at Warsaw’s TR Warszawa theater in 2018. Maybe because it was originally set in Poland and consisted of only two scenes – the tragic birth and the confrontational family dinner - Wéber’s intentional theme to relate her own life within a Holocaust survival family to how continuing generations deal with trauma made more sense. But here in their first English-language film, set in Boston, the mother’s explosive monologue connecting fighting for survival then to now is near the end of the film, after we’ve spent a long time with Vanessa Kirby as “Martha Weiss”, Iliza Shlesinger as her sister “Anita”, Ellen Burstyn as her mother “Elizabeth”, and Sarah Snook as her cousin “Suzanne”, as seen above. Not only are all portrayed as blondes, I picked up no visual or dialogue clues that this is a Jewish family. After the mother’s explicit peroration on the horror of her own birth and infancy during the Holocaust, the husband “Sean” (played by Shia LaBeouf), who had earlier mentioned his Hungarian mother, accuses his mother-in-law of never approving of him because he wasn’t intellectual, I don’t use big words. I’m rough. Other than the cousin lawyer, there also wasn’t any indication that the bereft wife, her sister or her mother were particularly intellectual. So the insertion of the assertion they are Jewish women just seemed jarring and inexplicable. (1/1/2021)
The Pin (previewed at The Anne Frank Center USA) (So, nu: Kudos to Canadian writer/director Naomi Jaye for casting auburn-haired Milda Gecaite as an gutsy, non-victimized Eastern-European Jewish woman hiding out.) (10/23/2013)
Pineapple Express (While a signature focus of the Judd Apatow funny factory is usually a Jewish nebbish as hero, Jewish women are rarely seen, so it’s at least a positive that “Faye Belogus” (played by Connie Sawyer) is the beloved “Bubbe” of the sweet dumb pot dealer “Saul Silver” (James Franco). The purpose of his entrepreneurship is to support her living in a nice retirement residence that is specifically not a nursing home, as she is lively enough to win at cards and rescue him in the clinch.) (8/18/2008)
A Place Of Her Own (previewed at 2011 Other Israel Film Festival) (So, nu: This confusing but still revealing portrait of Jerusalem’s underworld of runaway, druggie teenagers is like a nonfiction version of David Grossman’s Someone to Run With (Mishehu la-ruts ito). I hadn’t known that Orthodox Jews control social services in Israel as much as they do the educational bureaucracy, and was more shocked by those Jewish women’s manipulative efforts against the troubled “Reit” than that she ended up endangered in a Palestinian neighborhood. The Orthodox social worker wants to set her on the straight (and very narrow) through an arranged marriage, possibly in the U.S. Her first baby is immediately taken away to a family of zealots in a settlement community in what seems a political move to increase the Jewish population there, and that mother is not above any deception to keep the young woman from exercising her maternal rights, including false promises to take her in, too, with strict behavioral conditions she can’t possibly meet, such that after years of pressing a law suit to get him back, she gives in to the pressure and signs him over. The ultimate irony is that her two younger children end up being cared for by the childless first wife of her Palestinian husband. (11/26/2011)
Plan A
- Vitka Kempner-Kovner (1920 – 2012) courtesy of Global Screen/ Menemsha Films
Sabra brother directors Doron and Yoav Paz (The Golem) knew little about the story of Holocaust survivors exacting revenge until a friend told them of his grandfather’s late-in-life confession of his personal execution of the neighbor who snitched on his (murdered) family to the Nazis. Then they consulted extensively with historian Dina Porat of Yad Vashem as she interviewed participants and researched her 2022 book about this militant organization of survivors Nakam: The Holocaust Survivors Who Sought Full-Scale Revenge (Stanford University Press). But the sub-title on the promotional poster of “The Un-Told Story of Jewish Revenge” is misleading; the post-war story already had been followed over a decade ago by writer Rich Cohen in The Avengers: A Jewish War Story (2000, Knopf).
In the Paz’s suspenseful English-language fictionalized dramatization, that aims at a wide audience with a (mostly) well-acted international cast (especially the galvanic German actor August Diehl as the central fictional “Max”), “Anna” (fiercely played by Dutch actress Sylvia Hoeks) may combine the two leading women of the resistance Ruzka Korchak and Vitka Kempner (who later settled in Israel and married leader Abba Kovner, the originator of exacting a Biblical “eye for an eye” toll on the Germans - Kovner is also portrayed as having a fanatically negative role in Israel’s founding years in Image of Victory). I haven’t read yet Cohen’s whole book to see if a specific woman shares her guilty memory of a lost child that haunts “Anna”. Vitka is the only woman included in the epilogue showing footage of the actual participants (above). Her obituaries all called her “the legendary partisan". (The documentary Four Winters features testimony from other women partisans.)
So it’s annoying there is no direct response given to “Michael” (played by Israeli TV hunk Michael Aloni whose wooden performance, in a role written for him, may be due to his inexplicable American accent here), as the head of the British “Palestina” (Jewish) Brigade which when finally sent to the European theater is seen instigating its own Nazi hunt with its own identification and justice criteria for execution of any SS member and genocide participant, asks the usual query of sabras, including the filmmakers: There were so many of you in ghettos and camps – how many guarded you? There were thousands of you, why didn’t you do anything? Just walking in long lines to your death? Why didn’t you resist? You did nothing while they took your families and kids? Why didn’t you fight back? Much later, “Max” wonders why didn’t he tell the Jews he guided off the cattle cars at Auschwitz to run - gee, maybe the dogs and guns pointed at them all? (at 2022 Toronto Jewish Film Festival/ seen courtesy of Menemsha Films) - opens in NYC October 7, 2022, in select theaters nationwide October 14, 2022. (5/27/2022/ updated 9/30/2022)
The Polgár Variant - I was aware of only one Polgár, so didn’t realize there were three daughters raised to be chess prodigies, or that they were Jewish. Living near Bucharest during the Cold War, their father László’s experiment to home school them to be chess champions also shielded them from Communist propaganda, nationalism, and sexism that he had to fight against for them. The father’s voluminous archive is the basis for this informative and good-humored documentary, as well as extensive interviews with each female Polgár: their mother Klara briefly, the elder Susan, middle Sofia, and youngest Yudit, who seem happy and stable living in three countries after achieving Hungarian and international chess heights. (at 2015 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum)
Policeman (Ha-shoter) (previewed at 2011 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center)
While most reviewers emphasize writer/director’s Nadav Lapid’s caustic view of Israeli preening, bonding alpha males, the portrait of women, during a time of street demonstrations against inequalities in what started as a socialist state, also caricature the image of the founding pioneer women. The title character’s wife “Nili” (Meital Barda) mostly lies supine and increasingly naked, about to burst with a baby girl, on the couch on doctor’s orders, sexily danced to and massaged by her hunky husband “Yaron” (Yiftach Klein) like the stereotype of an ancient Middle Eastern servant (even as he complains to his comrades that the doctor says he can’t fuck her now). While he warns her that it will be bad luck if she tells anyone she is due to give birth any day, he blabbers it to everyone, like a gossipy girl. When she heavily struggles to get up the stairs to his mother’s apartment, he manfully carries her as if he’s a sedan chair with only a slight panting. At his mother’s birthday party, he insists she be lifted in a chair so her menfolk can ritually show off they intend for her to have a long life. A cute teenage waitress with flowing curly hair flirts with him over double entendres about his gun.
Red-haired, freckled 20-something "Shira" (Yaara Pelzig) is first seen in shocked, helpless frustration as a gang of punk, Mohawked kids rampage over her car. (A contemporary version of Kristallnacht?) But next she’s in her parents’ expensive, ocean view Tel Aviv apartment intensely writing the manifesto for a violent revolutionary act by her would-be The Baader Meinhof Complex, though her rhetoric is really all about impressing the hunky leader “Nathanael” (Michael Aloni), such that she ignores another young guy in the group who pines to impress her. She’s also willing to experiment at a lesbian bar, but gets just as much of a thrill by having a gun in her purse in the night club, even as the security guard shrugs at it (in another commentary on acceptance of violence in Israeli society). Incognito in a tight black cocktail dress at a wedding, she brandishes her gun to initiate the kidnapping of rich guys to bring attention to their protests against capitalism, and she’s the one blathering solidarity on the megaphone to the policemen before they charge in, but she hides her face from the photographers. She confronts the bride “Hila” (played by Shaul Mizrahi, and I think a point is being made that the bride’s family appears to be darker-skinned a Mizrahi for additional ethnic conflict), sneering about how she perceives her stereotyped life to be. At the climax, it’s only her death that rattles the title guy – because this terrorist isn’t Arab. (1/6/2013)
Politics Is A Mother, Raising Hell Is Part Of The Job
- NJ State Senator Loretta Weinberg, with (L to R) US Senator Cory Booker, President Barack Obama, and NJ Governor Jon Corzine, during her 2009 run for Lieutenant Governor
Francine Weinberg Graff follows the daughters Alexandra Pelosi and Donna (Ferraro) Zaccaro in directing and narrating a documentary about their Mothers the Democratic Legislators, blending views of their family life with up close and personal reflections on their political careers. Only Loretta Weinberg is referred to (again and again) as a “Jewish grandmother”. (There is a glimpse of her own grandchild towards the end.)
That’s the sole reference to her Jewish heritage. In a bit disjointed fashion, Weinberg’s life before her marriage to Irwin (who Graff touchingly interviews) is seen in short order through a couple of photographs of her politically active father Murray Isaacs in the Bronx, at a time when NYC’s Democratic machine was still dominated by Tammany Hall. (Punctuated with a repeated family joke.)
Weinberg’s activism before running for office is briefly seen through a photograph (cutely updated at the conclusion) of little Francine accompanying her mother in the 1960s at a supermarket protest urging the boycott of grapes. The first electoral politics Weinberg was involved with was for “underdog” Henry Helstoski’s win as an anti-Vietnam War Congressional candidate in 1965. (As a Jersey Girl, I remember my mother was also pro-Helstoski, when she was active with NJ’s WILPF.)
While her mother served on the Teaneck Town Council in the 1990s before going on to the State Assembly, Graff first documented Weinberg’s own political campaigns when at 63 years old in 1998 she debated her Republican opponent for Bergen County Executive on TV. (Her determined support then for nurses at the county’s only public hospital is recalled when her husband is later seriously ill.) In the bullying world of New Jersey political bosses, colorfully described by several local journalists who I kept confusing (the insights of WNYC’s Nancy Solomon are missing), that opponent, and another Republican who she had cooperated with across the aisle, feature in a key story-line that brought her national attention. Illustrated with media coverage, press conference and testimony clips, and the only Springsteen mention via a Jimmy Fallon parody is her relentless pursuit of the Port Authority of NY/NJ and Presidential-hopeful Republican Governor Chris Christie for the truth about the mysterious traffic jams on the George Washington Bridge that roiled her constituents to become known as “Bridgegate”.
A marriage equality advocate admires Weinberg’s passionate efforts as “a tough as nails powerhouse” to try to get legislation passed assuring gay rights when she was Majority Leader. Women’s reproductive health figures prominently, from her speeches (and retorts to Republicans) on the Senate floor and at Planned Parenthood rallies to her vocal support of the #MeToo movement based on her own late-revealed childhood experience. Her activism has continued since her retirement from the NJ legislature in 2022 – at age 87.
As fond and proud as the daughter is of her mother, the director makes clear that this absorbing portrait of a Jersey “Jewish grandmother” challenges any stereotypes with national resonance for the rough yet rewarding realm of politics. (World Premiere at 2024 Montclair Film Festival) (10/7/2024)
Portrait of Wally (previewed at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival) So, nu: with Jewish women (5/11/2012)
The Post (So, nu: Though Kay Graham was raised in her mother’s Protestant religion with no sense of Jewish identity from her father Eugene Meyer, Washington, D.C. society perceived her as Jewish. The film makes a point to spotlight the involvement in the Pentagon Papers editing effort by Meg Greenfield, who Graham first mentored, then became a close friend.) (1/18/2018)
Pray The Devil Back To Hell (previewed at DocuWeek) (The leader of Liberia’s peace activists says she searched the Bible for how to stop their civil war and was inspired to organize Christian women through the story of Esther, which also brought in the Muslim women to join with them, not only an unusual Jewish reference for Africans, but also an unusual citation of the Megillah.) (8/12/2008)
A Price Above Rubies - Oy, I only finally watched this on DVD 7/10/2009 as background research on Boaz Yakin's latest film. It took me hours because I kept falling asleep!
Prime
The Prime Ministers: The Pioneers In this dreadful documentary of Yehuda Avner talking through an illustrated version of his memoir about working in the Israeli diplomatic and government service for decades, Golda Meir, uncredibly voiced by Sandra Bullock, gets the superficial hagiographic treatment they all do, from her youthful biography, including divorce resulting from her Zionist commitment, through her casually talking to Sukkot-celebrating soldiers in the desert, to the criticisms after the Yom Kippur War (a highlight is Christoph Waltz voicing Begin’s public excoriation of her), with lots of glory for negotiating the emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel. The only other woman Avner seems to notice, besides his wife, is how lovely Leah Rubin was when he first met her as the Ambassador’s wife in Washington D.C.) (10/18/2013)
Prince of Egypt
Promise of Dawn (La promesse de l'aube) - Restores the image of the Jewish Mother! (at 2019 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (1/11/2019)
Promised Lands (Petah Tikva/Kinder der Hoffnung) - Director Yael Reuveny is like a baby boomer in assuming that of course her generation, seen from home movies to her interviews now, is the most important to be a documentary subject, here Israelis just turned 40, her primary school classmates. Coming from diverse immigrant backgrounds, they do not look like American stereotypes of Jews. Almost all the women have stayed near their origins, even if they lived abroad for awhile, and almost all have two to four children, regardless of their levels of higher education. One is single, one is divorcing, and another is an interior designer for diaspora Jews buying/renting seasonal housing in Israel. None are like her – an artist living as an immigrant in Berlin for almost two decades, replacing her distant family with a German one, including a step-daughter. (preview at 2022 Israel Film Center Festival) (6/1/2022)
Protector (briefly reviewed at 2010 New York Jewish Film Festival, of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum, and in New Hampshire Jewish Film Buzz, at page 21 – N/A) (So, nu: Even as others opting for collaboration or facing far more hardships sneer at the rising emotional toll on the marriage of the gentile collaborator and his hidden Jewish wife, the power of the media and images are particularly suggestive when the slinky, sexy wife sneeks out of their apartment to let an enamored young projectionist take furtive, erotic photos of her outside posing defiantly next to restrictive signs against Jews. Her attitude towards her Jewish identity is symbolized throughout by putting on and off a blonde wig.) (updated 12/9/2011)
The Promise (Part 1 previewed at 2011 Other Israel Film Festival) (a 4-part TV mini-seriesstreaming in the U.S. as of Fall 2012 on Hulu) (So, nu -, in the first episode, the Jewish women were used to negatively leverage the two generations of young Brit protagonists. In the present time, the central young woman decides to accompany her best friend “Eliza Meyer” (played by Perdita Weeks) who is returning to Israel from years at boarding school to fulfill her military service. “Eliza” barely soothes her trepidation by going on a name-brand shopping spree at a mall by day and clubbing at night. The wealthy parents (her liberal mother “Leah Meyer” is played by Smadar Wolfman) live in pool-side luxury in a private Caesarea development, overlooking the Mediterranean. Back in Haifa in 1945, the grandfather dates “Clara Rosenbaum” (played by Katharina Schüttler) because they are both are assigned to spy on each other’s activities. She meets him at an official hospitality center where she was taught English in order to generate support among British soldiers for the Jewish homeland cause. In helping him see her father sympathetically for his underground political activities, she apologizes to him if the Jews seem ungrateful since the soldier helped liberate the concentration camps – where her mother took up with another man, which didn’t quite make sense in the family history, let alone cheapen their experiences.)
Parts 2 – 4 commentary forthcoming (while I didn’t know the fest was screening the rest of the series as well, to some controversy within the Jewish community, it streamed in the U.S. as of Fall 2012 on Hulu) (updated 1/4/2013)
The Promised Band- In this strained, shambolic, randomly constructed and edited documentary, director Jan Heck tries to use her reality show experience to make political points about Israelis and Palestinians by arbitrarily bringing together women friends on both sides to get to know each other by ostensibly forming a band to justify their travel through checkpoints. Moshav-born blonde Shlomit Ravid is curious and nervous to surreptitiously see life on the West Bank accompanied by her new Palestinian friend Lina Quadri: “I’m counting on the fact I don’t look Israeli…I’m probably supposed to feel scared, but I trusted her.” Viki Auslender, whose parents came from the former USSR in 1975, is a professor of international relations at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and leads her class in a discussion of Israel’s demands on Germany to apologize after the Holocaust. Identifying as “pretty Zionist…I love this country and I want it to exist,” she had mixed feelings about her military service, and at the end of the film we’re told that she’s declined to serve again in order not to have to repeat her intrusions on West Bank families. The director misses an opportunity to expand on connections when short-haired Noa Bassel, who seems to live in a Tel Aviv neighborhood filled with Haredi (maybe why she resents pro-natalist pressure), mentions her family is originally from Syria, presumably Mizrahi. (at 2017 Other Israel Film Festival)
P.S. Jerusalem (previewed at 2015 DOC NYC Festival) (reviewed at Human Rights Watch Film Festival 2016 at Film at Lincoln Center and at IFC Center) (So, nu: Director Danae Elon is barely glimpsed, and the only other Jewish women seen on screen briefly are her mother and the Israeli Jewish teachers in her sons’ bi-lingual/bi-cultural school. But the whole, wrenching documentary is a sensitive exploration of a leftist, sabra daughter/wife/mother’s feelings about the Jerusalem of her childhood vs. the present situation, including during the Gaza War, after she dragged her two New York-born and French-Algerian-Jewish husband there, and gave birth to a third son.) (updated 1/4/2017)
Putzel (I only found out about this Upper West Side- set 2012 film when it played on WNET/Channel 13’s indie showcase and only watched some scenes so far, but I was surprised that Melanie Lynskey was the shiksa temptress, and the Jewish women were kvetchy old ladies.) (10/21/2014)
The Queen Has No Crown - This documentary by gay filmmaker Tomer Heymann comes very close to fulfilling stereotypes of misogyny, let alone only equating heterosexuality with domesticity. When he obsessively turned his camera on his own family over several years, he focuses relentlessly on his mother, badgering her to admit she’s bothered by his homosexuality, even as she warmly welcomes his young lover and their friends to her dinner and seder table. As more of her sons, with her grandchildren, leave Israel for job and educational opportunities in North America, the closest he gets her to say is that she should have had daughters. Even though the hammered theme is family, in relationships and in procreation, he never interviews his sisters-in-law, and is taken aback when his oldest niece matures into puberty. (previewed at 2012 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (1/21/2012)
Queen of The Deuce - Athens and NYC-based director Valerie Kontakos brings back the lives of a distinctive and unconventional female entrepreneur from her rebellious youth with extended Orthodox family and gentile friends in the pre-WW2 Sephardic community of Salonika to her unusual success in showing and distributing porn films in the U.S. through the 1970s. Interviews with her daughters and granddaughters, along with their archival images, are prominent and insightful. Will New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival have the guts to also show it? (at 2022 DOC NYC Festival) (11/24/2022)
Queen (HaMalka) Shoshana - Directors Kobi Farag and Morris Ben-Mayor’s bio-documentary of Shoshana Damari, known from almost Israel’s founding as the “Queen of Hebrew Music”, focuses more on her tangled personal life than her music, as many of the people in her life granted interviews, or access to private archival material, for the first time. I found more interesting how she moved from her native Yemeni Jewish music to a sentimentalized blend with Western pop songs, as influenced first by her husband Shlomo Bosmi, then ones written, ironically, by a Polish Jew, her accompanist Moshe Wilensky, that were projected to the world as the new nation of Israel’s “folk music”. Even more ironic, both men seemed to have first thought they could be Svengalis to the short-statured woman, but she ended up dominating them, personally and professionally, as well as other musicians in her orbit. She is seen over the years less and less in world-wide performance wearing embroidered gowns and elaborate earrings that reflected her original heritage (all now, oddly, in the Rishon Lezion Museum). As she lived to age 80 in 2006, she would have heard the albums of Ofra Haza who won global acclaim for using her Yemeni heritage to inspire “world music” that did not descend into such period schmaltz. Her last collaborations with Idan Raichel may have reflected a progressive development, but even in almost two hours of a lot of archival performances (including patronizing and misogynist interviews), the film frustratingly mostly lets us hear just repeating opening lines or a chorus, particularly of her first hit in 1948, and most famous song, “Kalaniyot (Anemones)”, so that we can hear her distinctively deep, throbbing voice.
A tragic side story is her impact on her daughter Nava. Even as Nava’s youthful letters begging for her mother’s return from her extensive tours and life overseas are read on screen, along with examples of Nava’s own musical talents, her decision to live away from her mother in Canada for two decades, only returning to sing at her funeral, are very poignant. (preview at 2022 Israel Film Center Festival) (6/5/2022)
The Rabbi’s Cat (Le chat du rabbin) (briefly reviewed at 2012 New Directors/New Films of Film at Lincoln Center/MoMA) (So, nu: One of the charms of Sfar’s graphic novels in this series and in his adaptation is how sexy and independent the Algerian-Jewish Rabbi’s Daughter is.) (3/24/2012)
Rabies (Kalevet) (briefly reviewed at 2011 Tribeca Film Festival) (So, nu - maybe because it's satirizing a foreign – U.S./Asian—genre and plays on those paradigms, several of the women characters are not usually seen in Israeli films released in the U.S., including incestuous siblings and spoiled rich girls in short tennis outfits. The amorous forest ranger does amusingly play on the sexy uniformed soldier stereotype.) (5/5/2011)
Rabin, The Last Day (So, nu - That the documentary is intended as a contextual corrective, is set by being introduced by a TV interviewer portrayed by Yael Abecassis, recently seen in A Borrowed Identity (Dancing Arabs Aka Second Son), turning from an interview with Shimon Peres, who was Rabin’s Foreign Minister, to the camera. Gitai symbolizes that he got authorization from Justice Shamgar to use parts of the hearing transcripts not made public in the final 1996 report by having his version of the panel and witnesses meet within the national archives. Testimony here is from a photographer, Rabin’s personal security agents, bodyguard, and driver, police officers and officials, and hospital doctors. There is additional testimony from an Orthodox woman that I found a bit confusing as she clarifies that the assassin’s students – I think—were not “girls”, but “young women”, and therefore credible about being alarmed by his extremist views. It is also noteworthy that only a woman is willing (and concerned) to come forth about the notorious “din rodef” ruling.) (previewed at 2016 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum)
Rachel (10/10/2010) (also briefly reviewed at Part 1 Recommendations of 2009 Tribeca Film Festival) (So, nu - The only Jewish woman seen in the documentary is a spokeswoman for the Israel Defense Forces who is made to look like a bureaucratic tool.) (5/17/2009)
A Radiant Girl (Une jeune fille qui va bien) (Missed due to a full DVR) (via Film Movement) (7/21/2024)
Radical Wolfe Based on Michael Lewis’s Vanity Fair article, perhaps because director Richard Dewey stresses that the Southern-born satirical writer Tom Wolfe compartmentalized his life, this bio doc only mentions his wife Sheila Berger briefly. Wolfe describes being struck by her sexy outfit when he first saw her in the graphics department of a magazine he was writing for (she later would design covers), while an interviewee, perhaps his agent, describes them as opposites, with her as “a nice Jewish girl from Long Island”, and his loyalty to her. Several photographs are shown of them looking quite elegant together on the town in New York City. His daughter Alexandra’s comments about the importance of family to her father are included several times, she does not mention her mother or their long marriage. (courtesy of Kino Lorber) (12/30/2023)
La Rafle (The Round Up) (So, nu - commentary coming soon on the mothers and girls) (Thanks to Judy Gelman Myers for background on the fireman.)
Rage and Glory (1984) Not knowing the accuracy (two historical consultants are listed), I was impressed how women were portrayed as very involved, without just being sexy Mata Hari-types, in the Stern Gang (AKA Lehi, which stands for “Fighters for the Freedom of Israel” during the British control over Palestine during the Holocaust, a group considered terrorists by even the Haganah and the Irgun. (The British, especially the CID agents, are portrayed as quite anti-Semitic and only operations against them are shown.) I was also not familiar with the (then) young cast, who are (mostly) strong. Two serious women – “Dafna” (played by Hanna Azulai) and Krakow-native “Niva” played by Yael Dar-- are fully involved as scouts and look-outs in disguises, able to throw a grenade when the enemy shoots back. “Yael” (played by Sigal Cohen) compulsively knits, but does maintain a safe house for a bomb maker she falls in love with, and becomes very protective of him. There’s a bit of Jewish diversity with Rona Fried playing “Angela Sasson”, daughter of a wealthy Sephardic family intending to emigrate; while her lover she secretly marries is portrayed as a real survivor of British torture “Noah Kaplan” (played by Roni Pinkovitch), there’s no follow-up provided on her. (2017 restoration by the Israel film Archive – Jersusalem Cinemateque’s Digitization Lab) (shown in “Ari Nesher Retrospective” at 2019 Israel Film Center Festival) (6/7/2019)
Ralph Breaks the Internet
- “Selfie” - Vanellope von Schweetz hits the internet where she encounters and then befriends the Disney princesses. ©2018 Disney
While I adored that Sarah Silverman’s “Vanellope von Schweetz” literally and hilariously crashes into the Disney Princess Canon, it did not occur to me as it did to Arielle Kaplan, writing in Kveller that she’s “The first Jewish Disney princess”. Her source was Silverman’s interview on Yahoo Entertainment, when asked by Will Lerner “Is Vannelope Jewish?”, Silverman responded: “I say she is. Nobody has said no. So, yeah, we have the same coloring. We talk, she’s feisty, she says what’s on her mind, she’s a little pushy.’ Ralph Breaks the Internet directors Rich Moore and Phil Johnston agreed that she’s Jewish. ‘I think that very much so,’ said Moore. ‘A Jewish animated princess, absolutely,’ agreed Johnston with a smile.” So where did the “von” come from? Is it gone now? Silverman doesn’t mention the significance of “Vanellope”s role model “Shank” being voiced by Israeli Wonder Woman actress Gal Gadot. (updated 11/26/2018)
The Rashevski Tango (So, nu
RBG - Wonderful bio-doc of the most influential Jewish woman in the country! Oddly, directors Betsy West and Julie Cohen do not include explicit mention that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is Jewish! The closest are her reference to the antisemitism her father faced in the Old Country and her warm, voluble, recent Harvard Law School graduate granddaughter Clara Spera explaining why they all call her “Bubbe”: It’s Yiddish for grandmother. (My mother would object that the name of their mutual James Madison High School alma mater was not named.) Other putative/Jewish women interviewed include: her daughter Jane Ginsburg, two old school friends, NPR’s legal expert Nina Totenberg, authors/bloggers/Tumbler creators Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik of Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (2015), and Gloria Steinem.
Only the son of the late Justice Antonin Scalia identifies her as Jewish to emphasize their contrasts in their friendship, my colleague Jan Lisa Huttner pointed out to me. To Josefin Dolsten for JTA (4/30/2018), co-director Betsy West explained that Judaism “seems to be an undercurrent in her life, [but it’s] something that we didn’t deal with overtly”. Elsewhere they have said they didn’t want to press her, though she has many times spoken to Jewish organizations, award acceptances, and written for Jewish publications about her feelings towards her Jewish identity – including being turned off of religious observance by not being ablet to do kaddish for her mother. (updated 7/9/2018)
Raymonde El Bidaouia - With her directorial debut, actress Yaël Abecassis (Rabin, The Last Day) produces a marvelously intimate and informative portrait of her mother’s unique career as an iconic Mizrahi singer. Full of photographs, home movies, archival TV appearances and the sounds and looks of countless albums, the verité footage is as peripatetic as her life. When they aren’t driving to exhausting performances in front of worshipful fans for whatever third generation family event she’s invited to in Israel, or flying to Paris, or returning to her roots in Morocco (her nickname “ El Bidaouia” means “from Casablanca”), her mother is cooking and bringing forth many memories – of her grandmother and her beloved husband, even as she is full of emotional regrets over who she sacrificed for her career of preserving Moroccan Arabic dialect in folkloric songs. A loquacious, tri-lingual diva, she shows off closets full of performance dresses, including ones by famous designers, and duets with other musical legends of Arabic music. While she admits “I started living when I was fifty,” unbelievably, she’s almost an octogenarian. (preview at 2022 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) (1/21/2022)
The Reader (So, nu: Lena Olin plays the only Jewish woman characters seen in a film about the reverberations of the Holocaust – first she's the aging survivor who testifies against the prison guards. Then she plays the woman's daughter years later, in an oddly luxurious Manhattan apartment, refusing to accept a token contribution of contrition – is the implication that she got handsome royalties from the memoir she wrote about her mother's experiences in the concentration camp that seemed to have spurred the trial? At least her scenes are not the usual noble victim providing either anger or forgiveness to the oppressor.) (12/10/2008)
A Real Pain
- “Jennifer Gray [sic] in A REAL PAIN, photo by Agata_Grzybowska Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures (c) 2024 Searchlight Pictures, All Rights Reserved”
Written, directed, starring Jesse Eisenberg as stable “David” who brings his volatile cousin “Benji” (played by Kieran Culkin) on a tour of Poland (the film is co-funded and co-produced by Polish entities), culminating at their recently deceased, beloved Holocaust survivor grandmother’s original home, the only Jewish women seen on screen are two other older tour participants: recently divorced “Marsha” (played by Jennifer Grey), and Liza Sadovy as “Diane” (no still available for her role) who is accompanying her husband for his family history. (courtesy of Searchlight Pictures) (12/14/2024)
Red Cow (Para Aduma) - Avigayil Kovary sure looks like a natural auburn-hair Jewish woman, which is an interesting choice by director Tsivia Barkai Yacov to play the teenage daughter of a fanatic religious Zionist. While the Culture Minister has pushed for more inclusion of conservative voter-types in government-supported films, this lesbian-discovery portrait certainly is not a positive one. (Shades of The Secrets (Ha-Sodot).) But there were three surprises: first, in showing a young Orthodox woman doing her national service by teaching in this extremist outpost; her father is disapproving, but not naïve; and, third, instead of hopelessness or despair she seems to discover a community in the Tel Aviv bubble where she can have an opportunity to find herself. And “Red Calf” would be a better English title.
A woman behind me complained she wouldn’t have come if she knew there was “such explicit sex”. Maybe she was just offended by lesbians? (at 2019 Israel Film Center Festival) (updated 6/13/2019)
Redemption, a Downtown Docs/HBO production nominated for the 2013 Best Short Documentary, features “Susan”, a senior citizen can and bottle redeemer on the streets of New York, who is frequently questioned by competing “canners” why a Jewish woman would be doing this. Very articulate (she’s also accompanying directors Jon Alpert & Matt O'Neill with press promotion), as well as aggressive about enforcing informal rules of the streets, she cheerfully explains she used to work for IBM, garnering a marketing achievement award, but Social Security just isn’t enough to live on anymore. (2/14/2013)
Redemption (Geula) Females in this Israeli fiction are secondary, but the dissatisfied wife and beloved daughter are apparently victims of an inherited cancer gene; the young babysitter is under the thumb of her Orthodox mother who disapproves of her being seen with the widower; and a bandmate’s 40-year-old girlfriend despairs of ever getting him to settle down and be willing to be a father. (seen at 2019 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum / also shown at 2019 Israel Film Center Festival and Forest Hills Jewish Center Cinematek) (1/11/2019)
Red Fields (Mamy) Director Keren Yedaya introduced the film as “a surreal musical” based on “a rock opera” that was very popular among young Sephardim 30 years ago rebellious against the Ashkenazim establishment. With singer Neta Elkayam terrific in the starring role, the first half is a Job-like parable of all the horrible things that happen to poor Sephardim at the mercy of every sector. The second act is a satire of Israeli politics that feels surprisingly fresh in its criticism of all the political parties, even if being Prime Minister won’t be enough. Winner of the Ophir for soundtrack, Dudu Tassa sings like a Greek chorus in the desert with a band of mixed Middle Eastern and Western instruments; he also added more Sephardic elements to the score, that was originally written by an Ashkenazi. (seen at 2020 New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival) (2/25/2020)
Red Leaves (previewed in 2015 New York African Film Festival at Film at Lincoln Center) (A unique portrait of multi-generations of an immigrant Ethiopian-Israeli family. After the funeral of the matriarch, the King Lear-like grandfather visits each of his sons, and their relationship with the women in their lives is a source of friction. The credits weren’t in English so I’m not sure which roles Shula Mola and Hanna Haiela play. But one daughter-in-law resents that he just shows up at their crowded apartment and her overheard complaint to a friend on the phone causes a big fight when he accuses her of putting a curse on him. Worse, he’s furious that she lets her teenage daughter go out on Shabbat night with a non-Ethiopian even as she insists she’s in love with him. He pretty much calls his granddaughter a whore: You prefer that lowlife to your family? Don’t come back to this house! I’m done with you! When the brother teases her she wants to be a model, another sister teases that his girlfriend has deep black skin compared to their brown skin. At the other son’s prosperous house, the daughter-in-law, with dyed blonde curls, is welcoming and caring – but she shrugs that her husband is out all hours and blows up when the father sees that he’s having an affair with a woman at his work.) (5/31/2015)
Red Joan With a screenplay by Lindsay Shapero from Jennie Rooney’s novel, this femme take on the Cambridge Spy Ring was inspired by the true story of Melita Norwood, a British scientist and civil servant, who gave secrets to Russia while working as a secretary at the top-secret Tube Alloys Project, researching the potential development of the atom bomb from World War II on, and wasn’t caught until 2000. A primary reference for Rooney about Norwood was David Burke’s The Spy Who Came In From the Co-op (2013 reprint, Boydell Press) that I haven’t read yet.
In the novel and film, “Joan” is first recruited in 1938 at the women’s division of Cambridge, Newnham College (where they could only get a “certificate” not a degree), by a woman. Sonya Galich (Tereza Srbova) first reveals she’s Russian, then that she’s Jewish; when orphaned from the Russian Revolution she went to live with relatives in Leipzig, Germany, then came to England to study literature with her cousin Leo (Tom Hughes). To the naïve Joan (played by Sophie Cookson), the cigarette-smoking older woman is exotic and daring. Srbova describes her as: “very spontaneous, very exciting for Joan. She’s a glamorous, fashionable character. There’s something devilish about her, ambiguous. She is kind of a citizen of the world.” Sonya sets up Joan for a passionate first love affair with the dedicated Communist Leo (and is even more manipulative in Joan’s life in the book): What are you waiting for…you silly goose! If you wait until he says I love you, you’ll die a virgin!, seeding sympathy by telling her the Nazis beat him and threw him over a bridge, but the two Jews turn out to be like the British version of the spying couple in The Americans. After he’s released from arrest as a German alien, she resists his pressuring to spy for Russia before he leaves for Canada, and refuses to revive their affair when she’s in Montreal on a scientific visit. (In the book she continues with him back in Cambridge.)
As a physicist, though, Joan is shocked by Hiroshima into wanting to help balance the atomic arms race, so reaches out to Sonya, returned from spending the war in Switzerland as married and pregnant, who becomes her very efficient handler: They’ll never suspect us because we’re female. Sonya is very professional in her instructions on how to copy files, drawings, and diagrams, and handing them over: Behave normally, don’t be nervous. We should always meet in public places. It’s too dangerous to come to my house. Make copies. Hide anything in plain sight. If you think you are being followed, go into a ‘ladies shop’. Joan slips the items into Sonya’s baby carriage. When MI-5 starts closing in, her aristocratic British contact reveals what happened earlier in the novel’s chronology as a consequence of the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939 and Stalin’s misleading 5-Year-Plan data, but tangled up with jealousy: Sonya thinks Leo lost his way, questioning Stalin and the whole system…I can’t stop Sonya doing anything. I didn’t know she’d denounce him until it was too late. Sonya was always in charge. A notation on a baby picture makes Joan realize that the cousins were also a couple. (preview courtesy of IFC Films)
Rooney cites the inspiration for Sonya was Polish-Jewish Ursula Ruth Kuczynski, aka Ruth Werner, Ursula Beurton, Sonja Schultz and Ursula Hamburger (raised in Germany, some name changes were from marriages to other spies) and code-named Sonja, who was Norwood’s (and the much more known and notorious Klaus Fuchs) controller, as one of the very few female controllers during the Cold War, and one of the most effective. She did live in a farmhouse with her husband, where they operated a radio system, and there are other details from her autobiography Sonya’s Report, that I haven’t read in any version (including Chatto & Windus, 1991), and more about her life that the novelist took to create the fictional Sonya. There’s also a biography of her leftist Jewish family (her parents joined her and were buried in England) that I haven’t read yet: John Green, The Kuczynskis: Fascism, Espionage and The Cold War (2017, Routledge Studies in Radical History and Politics). She returned to East Germany and Russia as a long-lived hero. (updated 4/13/2019)
The Red Orchestra (Die Rote Kapelle) - In a fascinating, complex documentary, the complete story of resistance spy cells against the Nazis, loosely affiliated while operating in Berlin, Brussels and Paris, the involvement of Jewish women almost gets lost, even the core participants were recruited from the Ihud Communist front organization in Palestine in the 1920’s and kicked out by the British colonials. Because these spies were affiliated with the Soviet Union, the Cold War retrospectively masked their daring, achievements, and sacrifices – especially when it was ex-Gestapos or Nazi intelligence agents, who had named the units as one operation, and were facilitating their de-Nazification by helping West Germany and allies root out Communists (including the father of a German colleague.) German director Carl-Ludwig Rettinger comments on the extensive clips of two contrasting 1970’s East and West German TV films on the spies. Most moving are the findings of writers who have focused on specific individuals, and the personal views of descendants, who even became historians to track down truths. Recognized by Israel belatedly, they considerably change the victimization image of Jews during the Holocaust, especially the women who each could be featured in a bio-pic:
Israeli writer Yehudit Kafri estimates that a quarter of the approximately 300 conspirators were Jewish. Author of the somewhat fictionalized Codename Zosha: A Woman Fighter Against the Nazis aka From the Jezreel Valley to the Red Orchestra, [downloaded, just skimmed] provides background on screen about Polish-born Sophia Poznańska, nicknamed Zosha, whose cover name was "Anna Verlinden” as she worked at a gas mask factory. She became the cipher expert to/from Moscow for the radio operator in the important Brussels cell run by Leopold Trepper. The documentary goes to the house where they operated (as did the TV films), and where Zosha was arrested December 1941. She was then brutally tortured in Breendonk prison (seen on screen and explicitly described), and committed suicide in September, without revealing names or codes – intones the narrator “Saving the lives of many of her comrades”. In addition, Kafri’s book identifies the youngest agent in the network Sara Goldberg, who I don’t think was mentioned in the film, as well as other Jewish women participants, such as Malvina Gruber, a Czech Jew who was a courier and escorted agents through border crossings, plus elderly survivors she was able to meet up with in Israel.
Trepper’s grandniece Lital Levin also discusses his wife Luba, who was with him as a Communist activist and liaison in Palestine, Moscow, and Brussels, such that their growing family helped his cover as a businessman. Despite imprisonment and under great difficult political situations, amidst recurrent antisemitism in Poland and USSR, they were able to eventually re-unite after the war.
Margarete Barcza, who Kafri describes in her book as “the tall and striking blond Czech Jewess”, passionately partnered with the Soviet agent Anatoly Gurewitsch she only knew as “Kent”, and in her ignorance and wealthy upbringing was effective at promoting his cover as a rich businessman, even while dealing with Nazis. Their grandson Sacha Barcza tells of the sorrow at their separation after arrest in Marseille in 1942; she only learned that “Kent” was a Soviet spy from the Nazi interrogations. Their grandson was able to meet his grandfather in Russia late in his life. (preview at 2021 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (3/13/2021)
Red Sea Diving Resort (Netflix) While Prof. Rachel S. Harris in her book dismisses “the Spy” as a type of Jewish woman in films, I find that “the Mossad Agent” is a key trope. As “Ari Levinson” (Chris Evans) gathers his international-looking and talking Mossad team in 1979 to start sneaking hundreds of Ethiopian Jews out of the civil war-torn country into Israel through a chutzpahdik cover story of a hotel, he hand-picks one female colleague “Rachel Reiter” (played by Haley Bennett). She’s first seen being a very aggressive German flight attendant, not putting up with any shit from a male passenger; when she’s undercover managing the hotel she and leading exercise classes; in action, but she is able to strangle a soldier who threatens to discover the true nature of their operation, and bullies her way into a government prison to rescue her co-workers by insisting on their cover operation. She and Levinson share experiences as Jews who grew up in the diaspora, and then felt the pull to live in and serve Israel: We’re all just refugees aren’t we. Thankfully, writer/director Gideon Raff eschewed a fictional romance in this based-on-a-true-story.
Red Shirley (briefly reviewed at 2011 New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (So, nu: Though I asked for some casual remembrances, how I wish I had interviewed our elderly leftist relatives at the PHAIR Family Circle meetings more in-depth like Lou Reed interviewed his colorful cousin! I’ve since learned that the Mandel/Brody Family had a woman Communist activist, too, but expelled for years until a late reconciliation that I now continue with her descendants as a tribute to my father. We so forget when we see these little old ladies and men what firebrands they were. A (non-Jewish male) colleague was at the public screening, and here's his account of the Q & A with Lou Reed.)
In his widow’s autobiographical essay Heart of a Dog, she references the embrace of a Jewish grandmother amidst memories of her very Midwestern family, which she presumably experienced through his family) (She also references 9/11.) (previewed at 2015 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (updated 10/23/2015)
Red Trees - A visual and literary memory essay centered around the experiences of the filmmaker’s scientist father Alfred Willer, who was married to a gentile woman and was one of the only 12 Jewish families to survie the Holocaust living in Prague, there’s little mention of Jewish women. First was his grandmother Teresa, who moved in with them in 1941 and deported in 1942 to the Terezín concentration camp (a visit is included in the documentary) where she died of typhus; one loving photograph of her with her grandson is included. (I think the film is dedicated to her.) The director is seen visiting a Holocaust memorial in Prague that lists all the residents killed during the Holocaust; the director reports: “Seeing my great-great-grandmother's [sic] name there was heart-breaking”. His memories include his childhood playmate/girlfriend Lisa, who their families thought were “adorable” together, seen in two photographs, who was sent to England on a Kindertransport, and, despite his research, “She’s lost to me forever.” (previewed courtesy of Cohen Media Group) (9/8/2017)
Refrain (Rengaine) (briefly reviewed at 2013 New Directors/New Films of Film at Lincoln Center/MoMA) (Unlike the stereotyped opinions the groom’s Christian family holds, and the inevitable cabbies as inter-community connectors, the eldest Muslim brother is genuinely in love with a very non-stereotyped blonde, sexy Jewish woman, who is up front about her ethnic identity and her love for him. Their romantic chemistry makes up for the additional coincidental complexity she provides to the roundelay.) (3/26/2013)
A Refusenik’s Mother (Ima Shel Shimri) (briefly reviewed at 2009 Annual New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (One of the most sensitive documentaries I've seen about a mother of an adult son, let alone a Jew and an Israeli woman.) (1/18/2009)
Regarding Susan Sontag (briefly reviewed at 2014 Tribeca Film Festival) (My additional note about her 9/11 controversy.) (So, nu: There’s quite a bit of reflection on her conflicted views on her Jewish heritage from her younger sister Judith Sontag Cohen, including her Rosenblatt birth name, and her relationship with Eva Kollisch, a German Jewish refugee, who adds the Jewish angle to her many lesbian affairs.) (updated 8/4/2014)
Religulous - Maybe more regular viewers/attenders of Bill Maher's shows knew his mother is Jewish. While he doesn't really get her to explain in this documentary why she let her husband raise their kids as Catholic, and just as suddenly stop, it's clear that his cynical tone and intonations come from her. (12/17/2008)
Remembrance (Die verlorene Zeit) - There are no shortage of amazing stories of surviving the Holocaust through luck or love, and this touching German film tells of one that is both, as written by Pamela Katz, directed by Anna Justice, and the (bit overly) romantic cinematography of Sebastian Edschmid. The first part is a thriller, as a Polish political prisoner plots to help his pregnant Jewish lover “Hanna Silberstein” (played by Alice Dwyer) daringly escape a concentration camp in 1944 (possibly Auschwitz, if his food and other support kept her alive so long). As they with great difficulty make it back to his hometown, his mother and sister-in-law are as antisemitic as they are afraid of, first, the Nazis, then the Russians who are after Polish partisans like him and his brother. There would be some irony if the real “Hannah” cited them for Yad Vashem anyway, as the resentful family lies about the couple’s (difficult) survival to each of them, and she embarks on a harrowing journey across wintry Europe as a refugee. In the second part, intercut as flashbacks with the first, she is in 1976 the married, sophisticated “Hannah Levine” (played by Dagmar Menzel), with a well-to-do New York intellectual husband and grown daughter “Rebecca” (played by Shantel Van Santen). She has never told her new, Jewish family about her Holocaust experiences and is thrown into a post-traumatic stress reaction when she gets a clue that her lover is still alive – and becomes consumed with tracking him down. The film certainly wants love across time to trump Jewish identity. (previewed at 2012 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (1/22/2012)
Renée (briefly reviewed at 2011 Tribeca Film Festival) (4/22/2011) (My additional note.) (So, nu: My strict standards to considering a fictional character in a feature film, or a real person in a documentary, as Jewish is either an explicit or implicit ethnic or religious reference, particularly with New Yorkers who could be assumed by out-of-towners as Jewish. So I was surprised to see Kirk Honeycutt's comment in "A faulty documentary on transsexual tennis star" from Hollywood Reporter, 6/21/2011, from a viewing at the Los Angeles Film Festival, that seems to refer to information in Richards' two autobiographies, so I wasn't aware of: "There are other gaps. No mention is made of Richards' Jewishness, which apparently made him feel like an outsider in the WASPY Ivy League schools he attended." Which makes the perception of Renée as a Jewish woman even more complicated. But none of Richards' extensively interviewed female relatives or long-time friends are identified as Jewish either.)
Reporting on The Times: The New York Times and The Holocaust (short film) (short) (briefly reviewed in Shout Out for Quiet Documentaries at Tribeca ‘13 at Tribeca Film Festival) (So, nu: Though NYU college student director Emily Harrold isn’t Jewish as she looked to the past to understand contemporary attitudes to genocides around the world, she identified all the right experts to talk to about this controversial issue, especially Hasia Diner and Laurel Leff, whose book inspired her film, and including the perspective of a woman survivor.) (5/6/2013)
The Reports on Sarah and Saleem (7/14/2019)
Resistance - Unlike the French mini-series Résistance, writer/director Jonathan Jakubowicz felt passionately about showing the Jews active in the French underground. The film centers around Marcel Marceau (Jesse Eisenberg), his brother Alain (Félix Moati), and the Jewish Boy Scouts of France, whose network, founded by their cousin Georges Loinger (played by Géza Röhrig) and his wife Flora (played by Czech Martha Issová) saved more than ten thousand Jewish children during the war, with Save the Children, and were made possible by the efforts of the Baroness Batsheba Rothchild, who said, according to the director, that "Himmler charged her a fortune for their lives". She also provided the castle, before the Occupation, and money for the scouts to take care of the children. The filmmaker interviewed Loinger when he was 106, two years before his death in 2018: per the press notes: “He was the most direct source imaginable for the script and a lot of the movie is based on his testimony. I also met with Loinger’s son and his niece, a wonderful family who cares so much about this story. A lot of what you see in the movie came from him and his family… He said the reason that they were able to save so many Jews in France was because as residents of the border town of Strasbourg they not only spoke French but also Yiddish and German. He told me, ‘We had been listening to Hitler for years, so we knew what was coming.’”
With all the interviews and research he did, I’ll accept the prominence of two Jewish women in the film as accurate as a fictional drama can be, showing them with exceptional agency. Emma (played by Clémence Poésy, who told the filmmaker her grandmother was in the French Resistance) is young Marcel’s love interest, while her sister “Mila” (played by Hungarian/Slovakian (Vica Kerekes) falls for her brother. Both are cruelly killed by the Gestapo head in France Klaus Barbie (played by Matthias Schweighöfer). In the first group of children is the young Jewish girl played by Bella Ramsay; the filmmaker explained: “The story of Elsbeth was based on a combination of testimonies I read from the children in the castle, and it was also inspired by the story of my aunt Elsbeth.” (Her parents are briefly seen in a Kristallnacht prologue, as played by Edgar Ramirez (in his first role to reflect his Sephardic Jewish heritage) and Klara Issova. (3/6/2020)
Resistance: They Fought Back
Directors Kirk Wolfinger and Paula S. Apsell present a well-made overview of familiar acts of Jewish resistance against the Nazis and their collaborators during the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. They emphasize the insightful theme that the stereotyped images of Jews going to their deaths “like sheep to the slaughter” were generated by Third Reich propaganda.
Almost all of these daring endeavors (and other similar acts that risked collective punishment onto fellow Jews) have already had one or more documentaries or fictionalizations made about their heroism, including ones involving Jewish women that I’ve reviewed*, and the production team’s own “Holocaust Escape Tunnel” in Belarus episode of PBS’s Nova. (Even the poster, including one woman, is too similar to the one for the excellent portrait of Jewish women partisans Four Winters.) Voice-overs by actors, including actresses known for playing Jewish characters -- Maggie Siff (as Warsaw Ghetto courier Vladka Meed), Dianna Agron (as Bela Hazan who worked undercover at Gestapo headquarters in Grodno), Lisa Loeb (as Vilna ghetto fighter Ruzka Korchak), and Julie Benko (as saboteur Vitka Kempner who learned bomb-making from a smuggled library book)-- speak from the individuals’ own writings. Illustrated with black-and-white drawings, animation and colorful maps, the film has interviews with a few survivors or their descendants, images now of Eastern Europe sites that effectively segue into a plethora of archival footage and photographs, supplemented by context provided by less familiar international historians and museum researchers.
Beyond “Armed Resistance” and “Resistance in the Camps”, the opening chapter expands the definition for their purview with “Amidah – Resistance By Another Name”. They count as anti-genocide the maintenance of Jewish education, religious observance, care of the sick and poor, and a cultural life of music, art, and theater (without resorting to the Nazis’ Czech showcase of Theresienstadt), as well as forgeries of documents, escape from sudden deportations, and documentation of German war crimes. The documentary emphasizes the roles of Jewish women, particularly outside the ghettoes portraying gentiles – and not going as sheep. (courtesy of Abramorama/ Dates and theaters)
* For background by the film’s chronology, that I remember (many available on Prime or Chai Flicks): fate of Greek Jews – Kisses To The Children (Filia eis ta pedia/Φιλιά εις τα παιδιά); Trezoros: The Lost Jews Of Kastoria; hybrid: The City and the City and fictionalization: Cloudy Sunday (Ouzeri Tsitsanis/Ουζερί Τσιτσάνης); Jewish spies: The Red Orchestra (Die Rote Kapelle); Holocaust by bullets - Babi Yar. Context; Einsatzgruppen: The Death Brigades; use of the arts - As Seen Through These Eyes; Defiant Requiem and hybrid fictionalization Winter Journey; conditions of the Warsaw Ghetto and Nazi propaganda use of it: A Film Unfinished; the organized Jews who became Ghetto fighters - Children Must Laugh (Mir Kumen On); the archivists in the Warsaw Ghetto: Who Will Write Our History; children who could be smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto: Irena Sendler: In The Name of Their Mothers; fictionalization of adults smuggled out - The Zookeeper’s Wife; pre-war rescues of children by British and American Jews: Nicky’s Family; 50 Children: The Rescue Mission of Mr. and Mrs. Kraus; fictionalization: One Life; fictionalization of Abba & Vitka Kovner and their compatriots - Plan A and Image of Victory; the Riga Ghetto conditions -- Forgotten Transports: To Latvia (Zapomenuté transporty: Do Latvia): Family Strength; on hiding in Poland/Ukraine: No Place On Earth and fictionalization In Darkness (W Ciemnosci); more on Jewish partisans - Occasional Spies (Spioni de ocazie) and fictionalization of the Belski brothers: Defiance; Russian view of the revolt at Sobibor; the fate of Hungarian Jews: Son of Saul (Saul Fia); Remember Us: The Hungarian Hidden Children; Killing Kasztner: The Jew Who Dealt With Nazis; the Auschwitz revolt: 999: The Forgotten Girls; Sabotage; From Where They Stood (À pas aveugles); fictionalization: The Grey Zone; survival skills: Love It Was Not (Ahava Zot Lo Hayta); fictionalization of survival skills: Colette; The Survivor; Righteous Gentiles: Unbroken; Crossing the River; fictionalizations: Irena’s Vow; Saviors In The Night (Unter Bauern) (4/18/2024)
Restoration (Boker tov adon Fidelman): Though the men are the central focus in father/son triangles and the Jewish women are types who add to the tensions, they don’t come across as stereotypes: the Russian, I think, prostitutes with hearts of gold, and the pregnant theater costumer daughter-in-law “Hava” (played by the sweetly appealing Sarah Adler) who blossoms sensually under the attentions of a young lover and his quest for a piano. (briefly reviewed at 2012 New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (1/21/2012)
A Revolution On Canvas – re: Iranian-American artist Nahid Haghighat, wife of artist Nikzad (Nicky) Nodjoumi, and their daughter, seen on screen, co-director Sara Nodjoumi (at 2023 Tribeca Film Festival/ HBO Max) (4/28/2024)
Rewind - previewed at 2019 Tribeca Film Festival In this shockingly intimate excavation of a Jewish family’s history of abuse laid bare, Jewish women are prominent in all the extremes. The director’s mother Jacqui Neulinger is wracked with guilt that she didn’t see the abuse happening under her roof, but she was sensitive to his childhood behavioral changes and worked on getting him a sensitive psychiatrist. It was the abuse of the director’s younger sister Bekah Neulinger that prompted the truth to come out, and gave them all the strength to go through the criminal justice system. As the pattern of abusers having been abused themselves is vividly demonstrated, all fingers point to his paternal grandmother as the instigator, with her son pretty much describing her as a viciously cold monster who probably abused his two older brothers. As damning it is for the Jewish community that the worst abuser “Uncle Howard” was the long-time, influential cantor at the posh Temple Emanu-el whose congregants paid for obstructionist lawyers, the young Sasha got strength to face them through memories of his loving maternal grandfather, holding throughout his judicial ordeal his yarmulke and then his name Joseph Neulinger. Kudos to the several Jewish film festivals that have shown this unflinching documentary; the Atlanta Jewish Film Fest accompanied their screening with an experienced clinical panel on child abuse and trauma. (updated 3/7/2020)
Rita Mahtoubian is Not a Terrorist (short film at 2015 Tribeca Film Festival, written & directed by Roja Gashtili and Julia Lerman) The neighbor Feinstein family, including the mother (played by Kelie McIver) and daughter (played by Sydney Meyer) is portrayed quite warmly in hosting the titular, shy Iranian-American for Rosh Hashanah dinner. (5/2/2015)
Rock in the Red Zone (While the documentary is as much a first-person account by American director Laura Bialis of her relationship to Israel and the primarily Mizrahi rock musicians of Sederot, she only includes one woman musician, pop singer Hagit Yaso, of Ethiopian heritage, who, after being in the local children’s chorus with her sisters, went on to win Israel’s equivalent of American Idol. (seen at 2018 New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival because I missed the NY premiere at 2015 Other Israel Film Festival) (3/13/2018)
Romaniotes: The Greek Jews of Ioannina - The emotional heart of Agnes Skylavou and Stelios Tatakis’s documentary is a tearful elderly woman, one of the very few Holocaust survivors of the community, who returned and remained there. In contrast, this film was paired with Drey Kleanthous’s short Life Will Smile about how all the Jews of the Greek island of Zakynthos were saved by the courage of the Mayor and Bishop and the villagers who hid 100% of the Jews. (seen at 2020 New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival) (2/26/2020)
Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish (also briefly reviewed at 2011 New York Jewish Film Festival reviewed at 2011 New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (So, nu: Director Eve Annenberg marvelously plays levels of roles: as a lapsed Hasid who can barely speak Yiddish any more, an E.R. nurse so saddened by dealing with so many drug O.D.s from such kids that she helps such teenage rebel outcasts, a struggling English lit scholar and teacher of Shakespeare to these kids, and even The Nurse in the play-within-a-movie. While she spends more time with the roguish guys and we learn far less about the experiences of young women “leavers" from the Hasidic community, she does not presume, as so many films about Orthodox Jews do, that a non-Jewish woman is the seductive reason to leave or the solution to find chosen love and happiness. Melissa Weisz in the dual role of “Faigy” playing “Juliet” is quite captivating and risks more personally as an actress. The press notes included in her biography: “Melissa’s last roommate killed herself in 2010 unable to adjust to ‘American’ life and unwilling to go back to the ‘Community’. Melissa has only been 'out' for two years.” The contrasts between the two Brooklyns has gotten more heightened with the influx of hipsters into what they call ‘Billyburg.) (3/27/2011; updated 7/10/2011)
Room 514 (Heder 514) (previewed at 2012 Tribeca Film Festival (So, nu: the most intriguing Israeli women soldier I recall ever seeing on screen.) (4/30/2012)
Rose - For over a decade from 2008, French chanteuse Aurélie Saada directed all the music videos for the six albums of her indie pop duo Brigitte, as well as write the songs. She was moved by changes in her and her mother’s lives towards independence from men, and their friends’ inspiring models, to write a screenplay, with Yaël Langmann. She directs this lovely, lively first film to also warmly reflect her parents’ Tunisian roots, and her love of music from both Yiddish and Maghreb cultures. Algerian-born, French New Wave 1960s sensation Françoise Fabian reminds of Simone Signoret in Madame Rosa as the nearly octogenarian “Rose Goldberg”. More than gathering at Shabbat dinners and family events, her three adult children keep close: “Sarah” (Aure Atika), a single mother still hopes to reconnect with her partner; “Pierre” (Grégory Montel) followed his wife “Tsilla” (Deborah Saïag) into Orthodoxy; and “Léon” (Damien Chapelle) lives with her, yet still manages to get in trouble. Beyond her comfort zone, a stimulating dinner with their friends (a recreation of the one that set Saada to scripting), has her taking step by step to first gingerly, then emphatically, on the road to self-empowerment and fulfillment. While the audience will cheer her progress in dropping her Jewish mother guilt, stay through the credits to get “her”/Aurélie’s signature recipe for makrouds, Tunisian pastries stuffed with dates. (preview at 2022 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum/ Cohen Media Group release) (1/27/2022)
Rosenstrasse (The emphasis on the nobility of intermarriage is a bit disconcerting.)
Rothko: Pictures Must Be Miraculous (PBS American Masters (S33, Ep11) – Interviews with several female relatives, including cousins and a daughter, are explicitly about his and their Jewish background and closeness, even though his siblings and older generations didn’t not understand or appreciate his abstract expressionist, and resented he wasn’t helping them support his widowed mother. There’s very little reference to his wives, let alone if they’re Jewish, jewelry designer Edith Sachar, then Mary Alice "Mell" Beistle, mother of his children (Wiki claims their daughter was named for his mother, and says the wife was an alcoholic). (10/26/2019)
The Ruins Of Lifta (So, nu: There was really no reason to involve the elderly woman survivor in this project, or at least so extensively. Rather than focusing on the pain of losing her family in the Holocaust, maybe there’s an irony that there are no graves for her family, while the Lifta ex-residents can see their family graves but can’t get to them, and this film spends a lot of time at graves. Then why the heck bring her to Lifta? Daphna Golan, a Jewish co-founder of the Coalition to Save Lifta and a peace activist, is earnest about helping with the court case. The interviews with his aunt and cousin about the uncle’s possible complicity in forcing out Palestinians are unilluminating. (9/23/2016)
Run This Town In writer/director Ricky Tollman’s fictionalized original and updated take on the journalist/political scandal genre for the millennial generation (set around Toronto Mayor Rob Ford in 2013), he says in the press notes that he was inspired by larger economic and corporate transformations pressuring the jobs and goals of his generation to not achieve what their parents did. (As someone who was a special assistant to a corrupt politician, I also found his naivete about baby boomers having it easy another issue.) I sympathize, from an interview on the Canadian radio program Q, that Tollman is already very defensive over attacks (including on his “sweet” mother’s FaceBook wall accusing her of raising a misogynist) because he changed the experienced woman reporter who actually found the damning cocaine use video tape into the inexperienced lead character “Bram Shriver” (Ben Platt) in order to get his debut film made. But while the Canadian Jewish family is admirably not brunette and/or curly-haired, Tollman, unfortunately, sinks to stereotypes of their women. In angry monologues I don’t have time to try to transcribe, he blames his mother (actress to be determined) for her pushy Jewish mother expectations since he was in utero and her constant praise; his friend accurately predicts she’ll keep pressuring him to go to law school even, as her son says, she’s been researching “Jewish journalists”, and references Wolf Blitzer and Carl Bernstein. He resents his sister (actress to be determined) when her pregnancy and child distract from any professional success he tries to let them know. (preview courtesy of Oscilloscope Films) (updated 3/7/2020)
Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage (briefly reviewed in Recommended Documentaries: There's No Business Like the Celebrity Business at 2010 Tribeca Film Festival) (So, nu: Geddy Lee's mother, a Holocaust survivor, is interviewed, and she is as proud that he fulfilled the full obligation of saying kaddish for his father in his youth as all his subsequent success. But the profound sadness from his family spurred him to seek a contrast through rock 'n' roll. My bad that I didn't notice the documentary also included "Red Sector A" from Grace Under Pressure with its lyric: "I hear the sound of gunfire at the prison gate/Are the liberators here?/Do I hope or do I fear?/For my father and my brother, it’s too late/But I must help my mother stand up straight".) (5/14/2010) But either I missed, or the doc didn’t mention, other politics associated with the band: Per this quote in “Rand Paul’s Mixed Inheritance” by Sam Tanenhaus and Jim Rutenberg, The New York Times, 1/26/2014, “And he followed the rock band Rush, some of whose lyrics had libertarian themes.” Though that is probably why that’s the only band a libertarian cousin of ours is a fan of, that was debunked in this Daily Kos piece by biolife, 6/22/2012 “Rush (the Band) on Rush, Politics, and Michael Moore”.
Sabbath Queen
Director/Co-Writer Sandi DuBowski spent over 20 years documenting gay subject Amichai Lau-Lavie, 38th or so generation in family of rabbis, and drag queen, both with tallit, in the persona of “Hadassah Gross” with a large blonde wig, who reflects shekhinah, the female in the divine, now father/co-parent of three (to his mother’s joy). While his father, as a former Chief Rabbi in Israel, looks Ultra-Orthodox, his brother appears Modern Orthodox, and by the end is seen to be influenced enough by his boundary-breaking brother (who spent four years qualifying as a Conservative rabbi “to make change from the inside”, but still can’t fit in) to find a way to involve a woman (who looks Ultra-Orthodox) at his prominent synagogue in some unexplained rabbi-adjacent role. Their father’s and uncle’s closing Holocaust testimonies are moving testaments to fraternal love that seem to be followed by their next generation.
Synopsis and Credits
Co-Cinematographers: Nadia Hallgren, Kirsten Johnson, and Laela Kilbourn (U.S.) World Premiere in Documentary Competition (at 2024 Tribeca Film Festival) (6/16/2024)
Sabotage - Director Noa Aharoni emotionally and tightly combines Holocaust survivor testimonies from the 1990s, with animation, archival footage and photographs to provide the most complete account I’ve seen of the women’s underground at Auschwitz. Many historians (and storytellers) have featured the October 7, 1944 “revolt” of the Sonderkommandos. While there is usually mention of the crucial assistance of gunpowder smuggled by women workers in the Birkenau munitions factory, beyond the inclusion in 999: The Forgotten Girls, I haven’t seen elsewhere the intimate reconstruction of how the women prisoners did it, literally painstakingly, by working in resistance together over months, and then kept each other alive afterwards. Aharoni revives the lives and gives repeated tribute to the four gutsy women -- Ella Gartner, Estusia Wajblum, Regina Safirsztain, and Rozas Robota – who were martyred for the action, just days before liberation. Unusually specific is how much the women hoped the Allied airplanes overhead scaring the guard “bullies” would bomb the camp. (in 2023 shown at Jewish film festivals around the world courtesy of Go2 Films) (2/15/2024)
Sacred - In this survey of religious Initiation, Practice, and Passage experiences around the world by over 40 filmmakers, Jews are primarily represented by men, and Hassidic or Orthodox men particularly, such as the pilgrimage to Rabbi Nachman’s grave in the Ukraine. Jewish women are spotted nervously observing the brit of their sons, and then one Israeli woman is briefly interviewed probably a West Bank settler (I think by an Israeli woman director), musing about the decision to have a child despite the uncertainty in that area and in her country, when what she wants is peace. (previewed at 2016 DOC NYC Festival) (10/31/2016)
Salt Of This Sea (Milh Hadha Al-Bahr) (also briefly reviewed in Part 3 Family Ties Around The World at 2009 Tribeca Film Festival) ( So, nu: The only Jewish-Israeli woman the central Palestinian-American woman obsessed with her grandfather's house in Jaffa encounters is the current owner, who turns out to be used to seeing curious returnees in the neighborhood and is a left-wing peacenik. But even her patience runs out when her visitor refuses to accept 60 years of history and insists that the property should be returned, making her look like a hypocrite.) (5/17/2009) (My additional note.)
Samaritan As Abdallah Cohen, the grandson of the small community’s high priest, uses his dual Israeli-Palestinian nationality to explore both sides as he ponders his marital future to avoid the genetic diseases that the in-bred population are exhibiting. On the Israeli side with his best friend, he enjoys flirting with a very secular young waitress as he tries to explain his legal status and traditions; she clearly has never heard of his group. In a glimpse of women at a conversion class, as they do try to bring in a larger genetic pool, it looks like the willing women are Muslim, whatever country they are from originally. Though it’s not made clear, it seems like the cultural restrictions on females are more like those on fairly strict Muslims. (seen at 2019 Other Israel Film Festival)
Sarah’s Key (Elle S'appelait Sarah) ( So, nu: Blonde “Sarah” is a reminder that the few Jewish children saved by sympathetic police and hidden throughout rural Europe during the Holocaust tended to be towheaded, here finally pitied by farmer Jules Dufaure (Niels Arestrup) and his wife. The film flashes back from the present to show the haunted, bitter “Sarah” growing into a beautiful woman (Charlotte Poutrel), who continues to hide her identity, and her feelings of guilt. Even more intransigent about the non-Jewish American woman journalist’s search than her husband (the novel more explores his very French patrician family’s culpability of living with the knowledge of “Sarah”) is the man she hunts down who she believes is “Sarah”s son “William Rainsferd” (Aidan Quinn). Her efforts to convince him of his Jewish heritage and to understand “Sarah”s life help her face the changes in her own life. His situation could seem too fictionalized if there weren’t similar stories in my own family that I’ve discovered doing living family tree research.) (My additional notes.) (updated 8/20/2011)
Saved!
Save the Date (IFC Film)
Saviors In The Night (Unter Bauern) (New Hampshire Jewish Film Buzz on p. 16 – N/A) (also briefly reviewed at 2010 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (For all the considerable courage the Righteous Gentiles showed, this does support that folks were more likely to hide Aryan-looking Jews; here the wife (played by Veronica Ferres) is beautiful and blonde and her daughter adorably auburn. How she recklessly used her appearance to brazenly seek an Aryan ID is a suspenseful scene, and based on fact (though her memoir is not yet available in English) – and then how difficult it was to convince the American liberators that the shell of a man who had been hidden in isolation on another farm was her husband.) (Thanks to Judy Gelman Myers for background on the director.) (updated 10/12/2012)
Schächten—A Retribution (at 2023 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center and The Jewish Museum/ courtesy of Menemsha Films) (1/28/2023)
Screwdriver (Mafak) - In Bassam Jarbawi’s docu-drama/thriller, filmed on the West Bank with a Palestinian cast, “Ziad” (Ziad Bakri) in 2002 takes the fall for a friend’s mistaken shooting of a fellow Palestinian. Over his years in prison, he is interrogated by an Israeli woman officer (played by Amira Habash) in an unbuttoned blouse who symbolizes every possible stereotype. But as she switches between Hebrew and Arabic, she could also be a hallucinatory exaggeration that he suffers from too much time in solitary confinement. The director comments: “Solitary prisoners’ reliance on fantasy as a technique for survival captured my attention, and largely influenced the story. Ziad’s audio-visual distortions become key for establishing emotional escalation, and play a major role in placing the viewer in his point of view.” (preview at 2019 Human Rights Watch Film Festival at Film at Lincoln Center/ IFC Center and at 2019 Other Israel Film Festival) (6/29/2019)
Sealed With Blood In what may be their first interview for a film, Shirley and Art Sotloff discuss their son Steven, who was taken hostage in Syria 2013, then murdered by ISIS in 2014. Shirley stresses that her mother’s strength and experience as a Holocaust survivor inspired his Jewish education and his passion for journalism to lead to justice. They share photos, home movies, letters, and family background with director Sofian Khan. But the film’s emphasis is on the U.S.’s short-sighted, flippant policy on no negotiation or ransom for kidnapped Americans, which leads to them being killed while other nations’ victims get released. (short) (World Premiere at 2022 Double Exposure Investigative Film Festival) (10/15/2022)
A Secret (Un Secret) (previewed at 2008 Annual NY Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (So, nu: Significant for raising the issue of Jewish women who can “pass”, in American vernacular, as gentiles because as a blonde, played by sexy Cécile De France, and a redhead, played by pretty Ludivine Sagnier, they don’t look stereotypically Jewish, particularly fraught in occupied, 1940’s France. A (fictional) Jewish lesbian masseuse neighbor is thrown in too, played by pretty Julie Depardieu.) (1/10/2008)
The Secrets (Ha-Sodot) (Intriguingly --just barely-- avoids clichés about Orthodox women and feminists to create appealing, individualized, thinking women characters, genuinely seeking spiritual, intellectual and sensual fulfillment as they struggle against rigid proscriptions, such as when the sage “Naomi” argues literal interpretation of scripture to her advantage as not applying to women lying with women. Also portrayed sympathetically is the headmistress of the women’s classes at the Safed seminary who dreams of the day a woman rabbi will be recognized.) (11/28/2008)
Seeing Allred - This mostly chronological bio-doc, directed by Roberta Grossman and Sophie Sartain, only indirectly brings up feminist attorney Gloria Allred’s Jewish background. After a montage of her media highlights, particularly recently in representing the women who accuse Bill Cosby of sexual assault, Allred brings the crew to her home town: “I grew up in Philadelphia segregated by religion – this was the Catholic neighborhood; I lived in the Jewish neighbood.” Folks who haven’t read her memoir wouldn’t know she grew up in a family scraping for money, that her father managed to save to put her through University of Pennsylvania. Or that not only was she raped by an affable doctor date when she was on vacation in Mexico, but her resulting illegal pre-Roe v. Wade abortion nearly killed her, with a nurse chiding: “That will teach you.” Her daughter, now also a women’s rights attorney, is interviewed frequently and identified as Lisa Bloom, without saying that was her mother’s birth last name, though there is a discussion about Gloria keeping her second husband’s last name due to career recognizability, despite a difficult marriage and bitter divorce. I was struck that the epithets against her in the TV clips for being pushy and loud are the usual criticisms aimed at Jewish women generally. Other Jewish feminists are also interviewed about Allred, including Gloria Steinem and Laurie Levenson, professor at her alma mater Loyola Law School, plus her public high school best friend Fern. Following Allred through the 2017 Womens March and just up to #MetToo movement that makes this documentary particularly relevant to her long-time specialty in women’s employment and labor issues, as the film shows she has bringing cases on these issues for decades, she sums up her life: “I went from victim to survivor to fighter for change…My work is my life, it’s my identity, not just what I do, it’s my life. I’m fighting in justice. It’s not a sacrifice. It’s a commitment that I made many, many years ago.” (Seen on Netflix) (2/9/2018)
Sefarad - In this docu-drama credited to the Oporto Jewish Historical Society in Portugal, most of the women are relegated to wives serving at the Shabbat dinner table, etc. and sitting up in the balcony of the Orthodox Kadoorie Mekor Haim Synagogue – whose final construction funds are seen being contributed in memory of family matriarch Laura Kadoorie, who died in Hong Kong, but was of Portuguese descent. Interestingly, the most significant woman is “Raquel Mendes” (Filomena Gigante), the leader of the “crypto-Jewish” community in the northern mountains that the hero Captain Artur Barros Basto (played stirringly by Rodrigo Santos) strives mightily to find and then connect to modern Judaism in Porto. Though that effort eventually fails, her leading of their handed-down Jewish-like prayers is very moving. (seen at 2020 New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival) (2/26/2020)
Sembène! (So, nu: Not only does the co-director leave out the surviving male Jewish French Communists he interviewed for the biography, but he leaves out the key Jewish women in the Senegalese filmmaker’s transition from dock worker and union leader to writer: particularly Odette Arouh, to whom he was as close as “a sister”, dedicated to her his first novel Black Docker, and made her the godmother of his Marseilles-born son Alain; Ginette Constantin, whose house he used to hang out in the Jewish neighborhood ; Ros Schwartz, his first translator into English; Janine Libermann, whose parents died in deportation, and her husband Michel. Together, they all demonstrated in support of Ethel & Julius Rosenberg, and were active in organizations against antisemitism, racism, and colonialism.) (11/6/2015)
A Serious Man (posted on 2/5/2010) (So, nu: The Coens' attitude towards Jewish women is less negative than Woody Allen's, among his cinematic portrayals they knock in a film that they both emphasized “It’s about Jews." Though they both emphasize in interviews that see Jewishness as an ethnicity, not as religion, the influence of their mother was cited in an interview with the AP's David Germain (posted under various headlines and dates in October 2009), per Joel Coen: "Our mother was a very observant Jew, and we knew the academic world from our parents. . .The New York Times ,"Biblical Adversity in a ’60s Suburb" by Franz Lidz, 9/27/2009, drew out that "Their mother, Rena, came from an Orthodox family and kept a kosher house. . . in their childhood in St. Louis Park, a heavily Jewish enclave that borders south Minneapolis. . . 'She toed the line in terms of party dogma,' said Joel. 'My father, Ed, just went along for the ride.'" In the film it is wives who are religious, first in the folk culture of the shtetl (the wife is played by Yelena Shmulenson) and then in the American suburbs, where Judith Gopnik (played by Sari Lennick) insists on following the rules for Jewish divorce. In the press notes, Ethan Coen says: “Everybody in the Gopnik family has an agenda. . .[The daughter] Sarah [played by Jessica McManus] wants to get a nose job. The wife and mother, Judith, wants to run off with another man, Sy Ableman, whom she sees as ‘a serious man,’ unlike her husband.”
The Sarah character is the younger brothers' revenge on their older sister, Debbie. “'Debbie spent her entire adolescence washing her hair in the bathroom,' Ethan recalled" to the The Times. The actresses added their view of their characters in the press notes: McManus perceived Sarah as a bit of a bully: “Sarah wants what she wants, her way, and now. That’s admirable – to a certain degree. Playing her, it was fun to yell at people and not get any backlash." Lennick: “She’s a parent who has food on the table promptly every evening. But her relationship with Sy offers Judith something that she’s not getting with her husband Larry. To Judith, Sy is ‘a serious man,’ engaged and very engaging – while she feels that Larry is not serious about the right things; physics, mostly.” The costume designer Mary Zophres explained that "Judith Gopnik’s look was fashioned after the Jewish Cultural Foundation [sic- I think she meant the Jewish Historical Society of the Upper Midwest] photographs . . .we were going to dye [her hair] brown to match the other Gopniks’. . .Her hair was cut and styled to match a specific photo that we had found from 1967. . .Then we put on the clothes. Low shoes. Skirts at the most unflattering length ever, right in the middle of the calf. Plaid blouses. It was quite a ‘before and after’ transformation. . .The women were all costumed in the darker ends of our palette – black, chocolate brown, or deep deep green. . .All of the women in the movie wore the appropriate undergarments. Blouses had darts in them then, so if you didn’t wear the right bra, the shirt didn’t fit the right way.”
I would feel more positive about their view of Jewish women if the woman who Ethan Coen describes in the press notes as "the sexy, mysterious Mrs. Samsky" (played by Amy Landecker) was clearly ID'd as Jewish, but the neighborhood isn't all Jewish. Apparently childless with an ever-traveling husband and the only neighbor oblivious to the son's upcoming bar mitzvah, she brings hippie culture to the up tight neighborhood with sun bathing nude, smoking pot and seducing her neighbors into the pleasures of free love.
In the press notes, Ethan explained their context for these women as “the whole incongruity of Jews in the Midwest. We wanted to cast real Jews as opposed to the Hollywood ethnic type. They are Jews on the plains – that’s we wanted to get across. It is a subculture, and a feeling, that is different from Jewish communities in New York or Los Angeles. . . Occasionally people would ask, ‘You’re not making fun of the Jews, are you?’ We are not, but some will take anything that isn’t flattering as an indication that we think the whole community or ethnicity is flawed.” Joel added, “People can get a little uptight when you’re being specific with a subject matter. From our point of view, A Serious Man is a very affectionate look at the community and is a movie that will show aspects of Judaism which are not usually seen.”
Amusingly, a Jewish woman character, Rabbi Marshak's secretary (played by Claudia Wilkens), is seen very briefly in the movie, but she achieved longer-lasting impact through the trailer that was cut by Mark Woollen. In the press notes, casting director Rachel Tenner explained how she found the woman who coughs in the office––she was a grandmother volunteering at the local JCC talent show. (2/10/2010)
The Sessions (The sex therapist is “Cheryl Cohen-Greene” (played by blonde Helen Hunt), in a strained marriage with stay-at-home husband “Josh” (played by Adam Arkin), and she identifies religion as a prime cause for her disabled patient’s sexual fears. In the script by Ben Lewin, “Mark” (played by John Hawkes) asks about her religion: I grew up in Salem, brought up Catholic, like you, but the church didn’t appreciate my attitude towards sex. . .Yes, I liked it. They like to think they threw me out, but I threw them out. So for years I didn’t believe in anything, and now I’m converting to Judaism. . .My husband asked me to do it before his grandmother dies. The idea is, if it makes her happy and him happy, then it will do the same for me. Our son is neutral on the subject, but theoretically, if it looks like it makes me happy, it’ll make him happy too. That’s the way my husband’s family talks, and thinks. The fact that I’m happy already, doesn’t seem to be relevant. . When she can’t sleep at night, thinking about her patient, she excuses: I’ve been thinking about the whole conversation thing. Her sloth of a husband doesn’t believe her. After she has finished her sessions, she goes to the mikveh, whose manager is played by Rhea Perlman, who asks if it’s her first time: Yes, I’m converting., but she lies about her profession: I don’t think you’d understand. But the Mikvah Lady is not dumb: I see you’re very comfortable being naked. “Cheryl”: That has never been one of my problems. The lady explains her context: Sometimes new brides come with their mothers. Do I have to take this off? Can I please leave this on? They’ve never been naked before. No, honey, it all has to come off. “Cheryl”: And it does? Mikvah Lady: And it does. They stand on the edge of that pool without anything to cling to but themselves. Nothing to hide behind. This is your body. This is the body that God crafted for you. She gives instructions: Immerse completely. Go completely under the water, without touching the walls or anything. as “Cheryl” dunks, and she is quite moved by the experience. This is one of the most positive portrayals I’ve seen in a film of the mikvah experience, and makes her grudging conversion seem more positive. In Mark O’Brian’s original essay, “On Seeing A Sex Therapist” (in the May 1990 issue, #174, of The Sun, there is no mention of the brown-haired “Cheryl”s back story, so I presume this female spirituality was added to balance the patient’s series of somewhat titillating confessions to a priest. (11/29/2012)
The Settlers (Ha'mitnakhalim) Commentary on the Jewish women: Director Shimon Dotan was inspired to make this film about radicalized Israeli Jews in parallel to having interviewed radicalized Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons for Hot House (2007). The press notes spotlight two Jewish women who are prominently interviewed by Dotan in the documentary about the legal and illegal settlers on the West Bank:
”SARAH NACHSHON: Nachshon played a seminal role in establishing the Jewish settlement in Hebron proper. Her son, Avraham Yedidiah, was the first child to be circumcised in the Cave of the Patriarch. When the child died of SIDS five months later, she insisted that he be buried in the old Jewish cemetery in the city. When her request was denied, she carried the corpse there on foot, while Israeli troops looked on aghast. Finally, Defense Minister Shimon Peres gave the order allowing her to bury her child there.”
”DANIELLA WEISS: One of the first Jewish settlers in Samaria, Weiss assumed a leadership role in the formal settler movement, even serving as mayor of the West Bank town of Kedumim. She later broke with the movement over its willingness to compromise with the government over settlement activity and helped found Nahala, which supports a more active settlement approach, including the seizure of land for outposts. She is known as the ‘Grandmother of the Hilltop Youth’.”
The one Jewish woman “expert” interviewed is: “TALIA SASSON: A former Deputy State Attorney, a report she published revealed how the government was acting illegally by diverting state funds to support settlements, including illegal outposts in the West Bank. Having left her government position, she is active in the peace movement.”
He also interviews an apolitical hippie who enjoys feeling free off the grid with seemingly no awareness of the conflict with the Palestinians around her, who doesn’t sound much different than the Messianic Christian from Tennessee who has evidently just read the Old Testament (and reminded me of the fundamentalists in Davis, Heilbroner & Sacchi’s Waiting For Armageddon (2009) who cheerfully looked forward to when the Rapture will wipe out all the Jews in the Holy Land.) At the other extreme, a young religious woman is also seen spitting on and hitting a Palestinian woman in a market, as I recall, in Hebron. While so many of the demonstrations and celebrations feature so many men, grinning young women with head scarves are always seen on the fringes holding babies. (previewed at 2016 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (9/22/2016; 3/4/2017)
The Seven Days (Shiva) (review forthcoming from a tired, late night viewing at the 2009 NY Sephardic Jewish Film Festival) (Part 2 of a trilogy of family films co-written and directed by Ronit Elkabetz with her brother, as well as dominating the screen with Yael, the film is more visually striking than revealing in its dialogue. But the images of the shrouded women from grave to bomb shelters to bedrooms, living room and kitchen as Moroccan matriarch and siblings confined during mourning are presented as powerfully as Martha Graham portrays the Greek myths on a proscenium stage.) (2/21/2009)
Seven Minutes in Heaven (Sheva Dakot Be’gan Eden) (briefly reviewed at Part 3: Family Ties Around the World of 2009 Tribeca Film Festival and briefly reviewed in New Hampshire Jewish Film Buzz, at page 21 – N/A) (Until the last few minutes that take a surprisingly conventional turn, "Galia" is a complicated romantic figure, as she's guiltily torn between two gorgeous guys in her past and present.) (5/17/2009)
Sex and the City - While the opening “previously on” the last season of the TV series opening montage makes a point of saying that “Charlotte” converted to Judaism for love, that seems to have led to her losing her brains, as Kristin Davis primarily plays her mincing around with wide-eyes. The only other Jewish reference is when she beams that their baby girl is named Rose, for Harry’s bubbe. (6/12/2008)
Sexy Baby (briefly reviewed in Award-Winning Docs at 2012 Tribeca Film Festival) (So, nu: commentary on the Jewish mother and girls) (5/9/2012)
Shadows From My Past (commentary/review forthcoming on the powerful story, unevenly made documentary Gita Weinrauch Kaufman built around revisiting the sites behind her family’s trove of letters as the last Jews out of Vienna and their lives in America) (seen at 2013 Art of the Real of Film at Lincoln Center) (updated 1/22/2014)
A Reel War (Shalal) - In looking through the archive from the PLO that was “looted” by the Israeli Army, the IDF, during the 1982 war in Lebanon, two Israeli Jewish women’s voices are heard on the telephone: the director/visual researcher Karnit Mandel (no relation that I know of) pursuing access to all of the archive and the very busy archivist “Ilana” who is either trying to prevent her access or is convinced that the IDF no longer has the material that shows Palestinian life from before 1948 and on. This film reminded me of Palestinian director Mohanad Yaqubi’s 2016 documentary Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory. (preview at 2022 Other Israel Film Festival)
The Soldier's Opinion, shown at the same Film Fest, revealed additional Palestinian historical materials in IDF archives. (updated 10/31/2022)
Shalom Bollywood: The Untold Story of Indian Cinema - Fascinating to learn that the first big film stars in the country were Jewish women, of various backgrounds as Baghdadi Jews and Bene Israel of Kolkata, as Christian and Muslim women would not, until later in the 20th century. The enjoyable documentary with insufferably cliché narration focus on four: Sulocahana aka Ruby Myer; Miss Rose aka Rose Musleah (her daughter Cynthia, and granddaughter/film editor Rachel Reuben are interviewees); Pramila aka Esther Victoria Abraham; and, Nadira aka Farhat Ezekiel. I would have liked more clips, and more about the “Miss Rose”’s life as an “American housewife”. Director Danny Ben-Moshe also cites additional Jewish female stars: Arati Devi aka Rachel Sofaer and Ramola aka Rachel Cohen. (2017, but seen at 2020 Forest Hills Jewish Center Cinematek) (3/2/2020)
Shari and Lamb Chop
Though produced with the full involvement of Shari Lewis’s family (including her cousin “family historian” Ely Hurwitz, her younger sister Barbara, and her daughter Mallory), director Lisa D'Apolito’s well-researched, visually informative, frank, and entertaining bio-doc, only mentions twice that Shari was Jewish. (I don’t think her birth name, per Wiki, of Phyllis Naomi Hurwitz is mentioned even in passing.) First, in her early biography she’s described as a Jewish girl in Parkchester, the Bronx, active with her temple. Insightful, too, is that not only was her father Abe “the official magician of the City of New York” when he wasn’t teaching at Yeshiva University, and, among her other vaudeville training, took her to learn ventriloquism from an elderly African-American master John W. Cooper; her mother Ann, who refused to read her fairy tales with passive princesses, was the coordinator of music for the Bronx public schools “teaching teachers how to teach music.”
About her Jewish TV legacy, writer Sarah Sherman, identified with Saturday Night Live, recalls “It was the only show with a Chanukah special, not just a Christmas special, and that meant a lot to me as a child.” (Not mentioned are her book versions at a time when there weren’t so many popular culture-related Jewish holiday books for kids.) While I was unaware of her welcome return to children’s television on PBS in the 1990’s, I hope this documentary gets added to PBS’s American Masters canon. (at 2023 DOC NYC) (11/17/2023)
Shelter - Writer/director Eran Riklis loosely based the film on a short story “The Link” by the late Shulamith Hareven, who published the story in 1986 under the pseudonym Tal Yaeri, in a collection with two other thriller stories that I can’t find in English. “Director’s Statement: Two women. NAOMI [played by Tel Aviv-born Neta Riskin]. She’s Israeli. She’s tough. She’s fragile. She’s trying to have a baby. She’s a Mossad agent. MONA [played by Golshifteh Farahani.] She’s Lebanese. She’s tough. She’s fragile. She works for the Mossad. She has to pay the price. Naomi is like a Japanese Haiku. Mona is like a Muslim Hafiz. Two women take us into a complex, multi-dimensional labyrinth of trust and mistrust, of honesty and deception, of loyalty and betrayal. I love them both...These are women who are the emotional core, the emotional force, the emotional drive that take me and my audience on and in to their journey. This is a meeting between my long term and continued attempts to further represent, understand, investigate and face the complexities of the Middle East, each time with a fresh view and now with a touch of mystery, a framework of a thriller wrapping an intimate story set in a safehouse. A safe house [in Hamburg, with sidewalk Stolperstein marking former residence of Holocaust victims]. Nothing is safe. Nobody is secure. No one is immune. Everyone is searching for SHELTER.” Amidst a tangled story (whose resolution I wasn’t completely sure) of male Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon and Germany, watched by both the Mossad and German intelligence, both women are very modern, complicated characters living by their wits, though “Naomi” does depend on her Mossad-issued gun. Educated from the age of 12 in a Catholic school in Germany, and still visibly affected by the ringing of church bells, the cross-wearing Israeli was recently widowed when her husband “Mickey” was killed in a Mossad mission. She is brought back from leave by her handler Gad (played by Lior Ashkenazi), who knows how to push her buttons for instinctive revenge. (7/14/2019)
Shem
Shepherd: The Story Of A Jewish Dog (5/18/2021)
She Said - In scripter Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s adaptation of the account by New York Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor of investigating Harvey Weinstein and the Hollywood system that perpetuated his abuse of women (the subtitle of their book is Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement), one difference is emphasized between the two working mothers. Kantor (as portrayed by Zoe Kazan) is specifically Jewish, seen doing Shabbat candle-lighting with her husband and two young daughters, to using her experience in the Catskills with her Holocaust-survivor grandmother to gain the cooperation of a crucial source, Weinstein’s long-time accountant. (courtesy of Universal Pictures) (12/4/2022)
Shoah: The Unseen Interviews (an hour’s compilation from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum) (previewed at 2012 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) continues the release of more of Claude Lanzmann’s complete interviews, such as the ones I briefly reviewed at 2011 Film Comments Selects of Film at Lincoln Center. Feminist historians had criticized Shoah (1985) for not including more women’s stories, as epic as it was, and this full testimony by Ruth Elias, compared to the very few minutes she was allotted, is an explicit and vivid description not only of the round-ups and Auschwitz experiences, but specifically of the crimes against humanity by Dr. Mengele, that justifies every accusation of extreme evil made against him in factual (such as in Robert Jay Lifton: Nazi Doctors) or fictionalized accounts. Hers is very much a woman’s perspective on extreme brutality and how women helped each other through the horror.) (1/22/2012)
Shiva (short previewed in New Online Work (N.O.W.) Showcase at 2017 Tribeca Film Festival) In this improvisation, the male mourners are buffoons bordering on offensive in their ignorance and mocking about Judaism and Jewish customs, as co-directed by Jeff Seal, Chris Roberti, and Chris Manley, while co-star/director Shaina Feinberg, along with her older women relatives and her friends, are humanistic and making sure everyone is OK and eating. (4/21/2017)
Shiva Baby Director Emma Seligman (seen on HBO) (12/10/2021)
Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness (briefly reviewed at 2011 New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (So, nu: the Jewish women.)
Shooting Life (HaSusita Shel Herzl) (Set in the near-Gaza community, frequently rocket-targeted Sderot, with a visual reference to the documentary Rock in the Red Zone, director David Kreiner, writers Shlomi Elkabetz and Michal Vinik (latter the writer/director of the superb Working Woman), inspired-by-a-true-story does a good job of convincing restless teenagers that their lives in what they see as the boring boondocks do have stories to tell.
The only teen girl focused on is “Libi” (portrayed by Noa Astanjelove) who really wants to be a singer in a rock band. Her observant, but not Haredi, parents, however, want her to be religious and marry her cousin “Yuli” (the English subtitles identify the family as “Caucasian”, but I think what is meant is they are from some part of Russia), particularly to get out of military service – a cynical application I haven’t seen referred to in fiction or the news. The teacher “Yigal” (played by Mickey Leon), who is desperately trying to re-connect with his estranged bat mitzvah age daughter “Maya” after his bitter divorce, convinces the singer to rebel, renounce her religious identification, apply for the military and audition for an IDF band, a perhaps unique example of how military service can give to the religious skills and help them integrate into Israeli life. The teacher is also reluctantly having an affair with the aggressive principal “Amalia” (played by Evelin Hagoel, the star of The Women’s Balcony (Ismach Hatani)). Playing on the Culture Minister’s recent directives, the principal insists that the students’ films have to be Zionist, and the kids put together a satirical tribute to Herzl (hence the Israeli title).
Both teen boy camera-obsessives are filming their mothers. (I only have incomplete credits so far.) “Ohad” (played by Matan Lax) is trying to help her cope with his father’s dying. “Tal” (played by Eyal Shikratzi, who has a lot of IMDb credits for his age) sweetly captures his beautician mom’s guilty flirtation with hunky “Yossi”, a policeman who was his runaway father’s best friend. All of the characters are stressed out by the constant sirens and rushes to shelters due to incoming threats. (seen at 2019 Israel Film Center Festival) (6/7/2019)
Shoot to Marry - I sent director and protagonist Steve Markle an email to confirm this was a real documentary, not a mockumentary. His search as a photographer for a serious relationship is sweetly inspired by his Jewish parents’ solid marriage. However, he dangles an implication that the woman of his dreams might even be Jewish when he sees a menorah in her apartment on their first date. But he let me know while it in fact belonged to her roommate, he felt it considered that an good indicator she was used to being comfortable around Jewish families. (preview courtesy of Northern Banner at Slamdance) (3/3/2020)
Shtetl - PBS’s Frontline made available again for streaming Season 14, Episode 8, first broadcast 4/17/1996, on the occasion of the 75th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz on Yom ha Shoah 2020, almost 3 hours long, created by Marian Marzynski, a child survivor. (Many of the resources listed on the website no longer link, particularly about the criticism and controversy the very personal documentary raised in the Polish-American community about Polish antisemitism and complicity before, during, and after the Holocaust, except for an excerpt from Eva Hoffman’s introduction to Shtetl: The Life and Death of A Small Town and the World of Polish Jews.) While this was the most fascinating film I’ve seen on this topic, with the very personal confrontations about collaboration in small town Poland, besides the fictionalized Aftermath (Pokłosie), the Polish Jewish women expatriates are the keepers of memories in special ways not seen elsewhere in the film. The core is Marzynski connecting with a young Polish man, Zbyszek Romaniuk, who took it on himself to preserve the esoterica of the lost history of Jews in his village of Brańsk.
One woman living in the U.S. (in a NJ high-rise that Marzynski jokes is now a vertical shtetl of Jews) recounts in detail how hers was the only Jewish family to presciently leave before the Holocaust, in 1939, a farewell that was treated with sorrowful fanfare as a very unusual occurrence, taking with them religious artifacts and photo albums full of documentation of her family’s and neighbors’ long residence there, to the astonishment of the Polish historian who had only been able to collect scraps of evidence amidst the town’s silence about their missing Jews (other than gravestones turned into sidewalks, walls, and worse that he had carefully re-planted into the abandoned Jewish cemetery). She emphatically has no interest in returning to the village, preferring that it live on in her memories as it was.
In Brooklyn, he is astounded by the literally towering scholarly work of Yaffa Eliach before its installation in the D.C. Holocaust Museum. After she relates her horrifying childhood memory of the murder of her family by their Polish neighbors when they had come out of being hidden by a sympathetic farmer who was as fearful of the townfolk as the Nazis, he presses her on the actual numbers of Poles she knew committed murders. She’s bewildered: “I’ve only counted the victims, not the killers.”
When the filmmaker further takes the Pole to Israel to meet religious Jews more like the ones who had earlier lived in his village, he is also confronted by a class of Haredi girls just returned from a Holocaust study visit to Poland who unexpectedly challenge him with specific facts about Polish complicity, even as he forcefully insists that the Nazis made helping Jews a death penalty offense. Marzynski is careful to note that five Poles from the village are certified as Righteous Gentiles in Yad Vashem. (1/28/2020)
Shtetlers - Debut director Katya Ustinova [pre-Stalin family name originally “Goldstein”] traveled through rural Ukraine and Moldova to find the last Jews and non-Jews who remembered them in the shtetls that survived post-WW2 and through the Soviet era, until more emigration became possible in the 1990’s, by the busload. The non-Jews living there, then and now, fondly remember their Jewish neighbors, particularly the cooking of the Jewish women, who shared recipes for such traditional foods as babka, borscht, gefilte fish, challah, and matzoh brei that they still enjoy eating. One remembers that on Shabbat, his mother would milk her neighbor’s cow, and on Sundays her Jewish neighbor would milk their cow. In Moldova, Slava Farber, a traveling Yiddish singer, returns to his parents’ house and points out the oven where 50 years previous his mother made knishes, cakes, and other traditional baked goods.
One Jewish woman is featured: Emilia Kessler was born in 1917 in the small Jewish town Khmelnik in Soviet Ukraine. Helped by her “hair like gold” to claim to the Germans not to be Jewish, she was saved with her little child from the mass murder on January 9, 1942 by a neighbor woman – a sister of a policeman who joined in the executions brought her food; she lives just short of 100 years old on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and calls a descendant of her rescuer “As long as I’m alive I’ll send you $300 every three months.” Fondly recalling her learning violin and mandolin from an excellent teacher in her childhood Jewish school orchestra, she is seen singing and playing Russian and Yiddish songs on the mandolin at Jewish centers.
As Ustinova notes that three-quarters of Ashkenazi Jews in the U.S. came from this area at the turn of the 20th century, one town she visits is where one of my grandmothers was born, but without maps and clarity on screen of the original and Russian name of each shtetl, I couldn’t tell if we had any connections to the others. (preview at 2022 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum/ Film Movement release) (1/25/2022)
Shttl
Taking us to a Yiddish Brigadoon, debut French director Ady Walter brilliantly immerses the audience into what was once Galicia on June 21, 1941. Where black-and-white is the present and flashbacks are in color, this last day for the town of Sokal is a place and culture that no longer exists in western Ukraine, just about 150 miles from where my relatives would also disappear in Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa. In a language frequently pronounced dead, the multi-national cast speaks Yiddish with such excellent diction I could understand the dialogue (co-written with Samuel Fischler) when the white-on-white subtitles were hard to read.
Introduced by coming out of a thick forest with a familiar fable, “Mendele” (Brooklyn Hasid-born Moshe Lobel) returns to reunite with his love “Yuna” (Ukrainian Anisia Stasevich) from the secular life in Kyiv she had encouraged him to explore. Now they can both be great filmmakers! Ukrainian cinematographer Vladimir Ivanov follows in a single take, and his camera is constantly moving, as “Mendele” and his best friend “Demyan” (French actor Daniel Kenigsberg) walk through a vivid crowd of pressures and antagonisms, before and after Shabbos services, as not usually seen in more typical schmaltzy remembrances. A Communist soldier offers full citizenship in Comrade Stalin’s freedom from American profiteers. Hasidic thugs led by “Folya” (French actor Antoine Millet), who has arranged to marry the very spirited “Yuna”, tell shopkeepers in the busy market to close for Shabbos, while the Soviet officer orders them to stay open. A Socialist curses them both, warning against capitalists and Fascists. When the religious teacher decries that all the young men would be put to work instead of studying, the feminist proclaims that women should be allowed to learn Hebrew and study Torah – and is warned she’ll go “crazy”, like “Mendele”s mother “Belke” (Israeli Emily Karpel). A religious Zionist advocates going to Palestine, as my doomed uncle dreamed. Superstition fills the center of town when the butcher frantically calls out that his knife is lost - It’s a sign that I’ve killed enough!
”Mendele”s ill father, his elderly teacher, and “Rebbe Weistenzang” (Canadian Saul Rubinek, whose father was a Yiddish theater actor and Holocaust survivor), all remember him as the brightest student. But one after the other they insist on the primacy of faith, while ”Mendele” eloquently argues for being open to different opinions and telling other moral stories through films (like this one). He concludes that the worst is apathy – when battling evil unity is the only thing that matters. The jealous Hasid violently tries to prevent a brief idyll with “Yuna” (above), even before the new Amalek appears in the distance to destroy them all. Does one run or warn the others to run?
In sad irony, the acre film set, built to look like archival photographs, including the replica of a typical wooden synagogue, was intended to be left as a museum. But filming finished just before the 21st century Russian invasion, so it, too, has been destroyed by war.
Ady leaves out the “e” “shetl” in the title to symbolize the missing. His varied (some clear, some not) influences he thanks in the closing credits include: 18th century Hasidic mystic Baal Shem Tov (who is frequently cited in the dialogue); Israeli novelist and survivor of the Holocaust in this part of Ukraine Aharon Appelfeld; Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, who grew up witnessing pogroms near Kyiv; Yiddish writers I.B. and I.J. Singer; Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan; and French Shoah documentarian Claude Lanzmann. (I’ve seen mis-quotes in articles, but I’m confident in my detailed notes, though I would like to identify more of the fine actors.)
For a similar memorial approach of The Day Before The End, see Tamar Rogoff’s lovely site-specific dance piece in Belarus Summer in Ivye (2001). (at 2023 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center and The Jewish Museum/ courtesy of Menemsha Films) (1/31/2023)
Siege (Matzor) (1969) Great to see Gila Almagor in her prime as she virtually creates the trope of “The Widow” and single mother in Israeli film, as “Tamar” trying to move past the death of her husband in the Six Day War, hounded by his buddies to remain a shrine to their friendship, making a new relationship that much more difficult. (U.S. Premiere of the restoration at 2018 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum)
Silent (HaShtika) - After a confusing introduction that sets the stage with a noisy Israeli TV political pundit program and imagined complicated election campaign (that portended reality), it is one elderly audience member who writer/director Shemi Zarhin focuses on and is the thematic anchor for the film – “Sarah” (Levana Finkelstein). It was the actress’s quietly intense dedication on the set of his Aviva, My Love (2006) that inspired his script.
The ostensible protagonists are male. Her son is the argumentative, full-bearded “Avihu” (Moris Cohen) TV anchor, who is constantly sneered at for being Mizrahi. When he’s labelled Moroccan, he corrects that he’s Algerian, that he relates to his violent father, who he was estranged from, as he is from his sister “Kochi” (Esti Zakheim), so he was unaware of her weight and financial issues. His narcissism keeps complicating his fraught negotiations for an exclusive interview with another alpha male with father issues - young political candidate “Aviv” (Oshri Cohen) positioning himself as free from the corruption reputation under the flowing white locks of the former prime minister “Noah” (Eli Danker).
But “Sarah” succeeds in ruffling all of the family with her determined titular protest. (She is also apparently “silent” during meals shared with her gentleman friend, an Arabic teacher.) Her talky, caustic, traditionally-turbaned sister “Lily Mezuman” (also played by Finkelstein) is the full-time caregiver for her disabled, wheelchair-bound husband “Baruch” (I’m his Filipina. For two years now… I raised five kids. Once a year they do me a favor and bring bonbons - because I talk.) She gives the explicit explanation about the effectiveness of the protest as she rants about all that “Sarah” suffered and did for her husband and children. Her disputation of ”Woman of Valor (Eishet Chayil)”, from Proverbs, is a wonderful feminist sermon, and inspires the son how to cleverly deal with his ethical dilemma at work with the wily politicians. (at 2023 Israel Film Center Festival) (6/5/2023)
Simon and the Oaks (Simon och ekarna) (While the book it’s based on, by Marianne Fredriksson, is full of even more Jewish stereotypes, positive and negative, the two Jewish women in wartime and post-war Sweden are portrayed as driven to irreparable mental illness by Germans’ actions during the Holocaust, which causes them to abuse the Jewish men in their lives.) (10/22/2012)
Simone: Woman of the Century (le voyage du siècle) (8/18/2023)
Sister of the Groom (2020) Writer/director Amy Miller Gross brings a fresh take on the Jewish wedding rom-com, inspired by incidents in her own family. For once, a (formerly) well-to-do Jewish family, the groom’s side, on the East End of Long Island is the accepted base, with the deflating humor directed at the chanteuse bride’s French Jewish family. Alicia Silverstone, as the titular “Audrey” who also signed on as a producer, is wonderful as an insecure wife and mother coping with the complexities of turning 40, still grieving her domineering mother’s death two years previous, the frustrations of trying to return to her career as an architect after the gap and physical toll of birthing and raising two children (who are, of course, away at summer camp), while facing her new slender sister-in-law’s youth, beauty, talent, sensuality, and European arrogance. (Perfect casting of Ronald Guttman as the French father.) The Jewish elements fit together well, from the date change to ”the Jewish Valentine’s Day” (Tu B’Av, on the 15th Day of Av), the pre-wedding Shabbat dinner, bragging rights on who baked the challah and desserts, to the angling of who will be standing under the chuppah with the bride and groom.
The film was brought to my attention (so I did pay to see it on VOD) by the Alliance for Women in Film Journalism’s Best of the Year ballot in the category of “Outstanding Achievement by A Woman in The Film Industry All indie female writers and directors who normalized [sic – I disagree] abortion as a vital element in the cultural conversation in films such as Saint Frances, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Sister of the Groom, Once Upon A River, The Gloriasand others.” Even in this film, for example, there’s still some guilt attached: “Audrey”s youthful abortion is attributed to pressure from her mother to not have the baby of her goy boyfriend (attending the wedding as a very successful architect commissioned by her brother), and the bride’s recent abortion becomes a cause célèbre among the family members and to the groom, who questions if she ever wants children> (She said: Not before I’m 30. When I’ll be almost 50.) Meanwhile, her loyal husband “Ethan” (played by Tom Everett Scott) blurts out his resentment if he had just been “the nice Jewish boy” his mother wanted her to marry instead. (1/2/2021)
S#x/Six Acts (Shesh peamim) (briefly reviewed in Youth in Rebellion at Tribeca 2013 at Tribeca Film Festival) (So, nu: Israeli teen girls and their mothers.) (6/5/2013)
The Sign Painter (Pilsēta pie upes) - One outcome of the democratization of Eastern Europe and ex-USSR republics has been films that take fresh, previously forbidden looks at their populations’ involvement in World War 2 and the Holocaust. Based on a novel not available in English by writer-in-exile Gunars Janovskis, Latvian director Viestur Kairish hones in on his native, eastern-most region of Latgale, with the mostly non-professional cast speaking the local Latgalian dialect. Through the metaphorical activities of the titular artist manqué young man in a small town “Ansis” (Davis Suharevskis), the film emphasizes that until the Holocaust Jews were a continuing presence in the community, despite antisemitism. (The director cites the influence on the colorful and musical film’s look and feel of Chagall, whose hometown isn’t too far away.) The painter manages to continually make himself useful because signs and party symbols have to get painted first in green for the pre-war dictator, then red for invading Soviets, then blended into brown for the Nazis as they recruit locals into their ranks to help carry out their orders.
- still from EastWest Film Distribution
In contrast, the pretty and spirited young Jewish woman “Zisele” (Brigita Cmuntová) (above) adapts to the times on her terms. First she’s rebelling against the restraints of her Orthodox father, store owner “Bernstein” (Gundars Abolins), by flirting with the gentile painter and reading revolutionary texts, including one on free love. She runs off to join the Communists, though she’s uncomfortable with how realpolitik doesn’t match her ideals when they roll over the town, let alone their bureaucratic sexism. When the Nazis take over and Jews are rounded up, she first hides in an attic, until the stress gets too great on the household, and she turns into a revengeful resistance fighter who knows just who to target. While I probably missed satiric or dramatic references to local history and politics, the yearning for personal freedom is universal and we know it will be too hard to just wait for it until 1989. (preview at 2021 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (3/13/2021)
Sin La Habana - Debut narrative director/co-writer/composer Kaveh Nabatian doesn’t reveal for a long time much about the “white woman” sex tourist in Cuba “Nasim” (Aki Yaghoubi). Once she brings her younger ballet dancer Afro-Cuban lover “Leonardo” (Yonah Acosta) to Montreal, we see that her close-knit family, with her sister “Shireen” as her confidante, is Iranian-Canadian-Jewish. At her nephew’s brit, her protective father is deeply racist, and furious that she divorced the wealthy, albeit abusive, man he had selected. But “Nasim” is an artist and very clever at calling out “Leo” on his immigrant games. (preview at 2022 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) (1/21/2022)
Six Million And One (Shisha million ve'ehad) (So, nu: the mother, a Holocaust survivor, and the elder sister who felt she bore the brunt.) (10/26/2012)
Sixty Six (Of all the clichés in this British coming-of-age via bar mitzvah film, the Jewish mothers are not, starting with the unconventional casting of Helena Bonham Carter as “Esther Rubens” and Catherine Tate as her sister-in-law “Lila” (even if their Yiddish phrases don’t exactly roll off their tongues). Their lousy, over-boiled cooking is just like my Grandma Shirley’s. Dressed perfectly in garish period (1966) polyester, they are supportive of their idiosyncratic husbands, while distracted by financial pressures to dilute sibling rivalries, they are loving towards their sons.) (8/9/2008)
Skills Like This (Writer/star Spencer Berger surrounds his Isro-haired "Max Solomon" with a supportive family, encouraging and loyal regardless of his comic artistic, romantic or even criminal ventures, including his grandmother and his mother (played by Marian Rothschild), who calmly offers him whitefish for lunch even as they hold vigil around his grandfather's hospital bed and queries his new girlfriend on her astrological sign.) (3/28/2009)
Sleeping Beauty (for the Biblical allusions)
Slums of Beverly Hills
Sobibor - While based on a memoir by the central Soviet Jewish POW turned death camp prisoner Alexander “Sasha” Pechersky (portrayed by the director Konstantin Khabensky), the Jewish women characters may be somewhat fictionalized, but there are basic accuracies. (As the production notes on the cast are skimpy, I’ve had to make the best guess who portrayed what roles in this multi-national Russian production.) Brunette Hanna (played by Polish actress Michalina Olszanska) is only seen for a few minutes when she gets off the cattle car to the extermination camp with her jeweler husband, the older, bearded Jacob (Dutch actor Joshua Rubin). He holds up her wedding ring to the Nazis to prove his artisanship – and when he later finds it amidst the sorted possessions of the dead he finally breaks down and yells at a guard: Give me my wife back!, and is brutally murdered. Pretty and well-dressed before she has to strip for the fatal “shower” (the nudity and suffocation are explicit), she seems kind of snotty when she complains this place looks boring, and I wasn’t even sure if she was with Jacob or a younger, handsome man. (I thought I remembered witness accounts of a brothel at the camp, and I had thought she was going to be selected for that.)
Auburn-haired, Dutch Selma Wijnberg (played by Russian actress Mariya Kozhevnikova) is saved by a bespectacled prisoner Chaim Engel (played by Polish Fabian Kociecki) who sidles up to her before the selection and warns Take any work to stay alive! Shocked, she raises her hand and comes forward when there’s a call for seamstresses and dressmakers. Working in the sorting room, she has to watch in horror, but supportively, as he is mocked and continually beaten by a drunken Nazi guard, but when he holds up his bloody hands after killing the guard before the escape, they hold hands as they run out together. They really did survive and hide together for the rest of the war, married, and, after she hid him in Holland, emigrated to Israel, then to the U.S.
Light-brown haired Luca, variously spelled Lyuvka in the subtitles (played by Swedish actress Felice Jankell), also a sorter, falls in love with Sasha, as she seems to have free range around the carpentry workshop where he works, and they get to be romantic, as she encourages him to lead the revolt, and something about “having faith”. (She seemed to know more than the audience is told about whatever happened in Minsk that troubled him – To the Russian civilians? To the Jewish ghetto? To the POW’s?) Shot in the fusillade of the escape, she’s carried by him to the illusion of freedom, but she may be a fictional character, though she’s also the subject of some famous Russian poem that I could not find in English translation. While the production notes brag about the accuracy of the production design, I have considerable doubts about the full heads of hair and decent clothes these two women prisoners retained, though one is apparently raped by a guard. (at 2018 Russian Film Week) (preview courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn Films) (updated 3/29/2019)
In The Merry Flea of Claude Lanzmann’s The Four Sisters interviews, a Sobibor survivor provides a differing female witness account. (preview at 2017 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (5/15/2019)
So Late So Soon - I first guessed that long-married elderly Chicago artists Jackie and Don Seiden are Jewish from their names. The only clue in Daniel Hymanson’s years-living-with-them verité documentary, integrating their own past video footage, is when Jackie describes their wedding 50 or so years ago, searches her memory for the City Hall officiant, and first calls him “rabbi”. The only biographical information about them, as they cope with the physical aging process that slows them down and interferes with navigation of their colorfully eccentric, Rogers Park house that is their continuing creation, is that she was the director’s early and continuing teacher at the School of the Chicago Institute of Arts, and Don sketches expressive portraits and sculpts lifesize animals. Archival search confirmed she was originally Jackie Weintraub; his obituary confirmed a Jewish funeral, with a surprisingly large family never mentioned in the film, hinted when Jackie complains “You never wanted a child with me.” (Also not mentioned is that he was a noted art therapist.) The title comes from a clipping Don saved of a poem attributed to Dr. Seuss, but I can’t find the provenance: “How did it get so late so soon?/Its night before its afternoon./December is here before its June./My goodness how the time has flewn./How did it get so late so soon?” (preview courtesy of Oscilloscope at 2020 DOC NYC) (11/17/2020)
The Soldier's Opinion - Assaf Banitt’s documentary brings to life the archival discoveries of Shay Hazkani when he was an investigative reporter on the security beat, then as an academic with a lawyer’s help: there were Israeli Army (IDF) reports on letters by soldiers from 1948 – 1998, produced bi-weekly by the mostly female Military Postal Censorship Unit, a division inherited from the British Mandate authorities. Hazkani’s analysis in Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War (2021, Stanford University Press), that I haven’t yet read, goes beyond that unit to the expansion by other intelligence units that reviewed civilian and Arab/Palestinian military and refugee letters appropriated from seized postal sources during various wars. The very revealing and absorbing documentary focuses on the Israeli soldier’s unit, through the experiences of the primarily career officers (English subtitles use “standing army”) women who read, cut, then excerpted, and reported to all the military and security top brass what the soldiers were thinking and feeling.
In on-screen interviews on a production set that looks like their bureaucratic office, the censors’ names and positions are identified, originally facilitated by Hazkani, with their tenures that ranged from 1968 – 1994, 1972 – 1997, to 1991 – 1993 and 1992 – 1994. Left unsaid, it seemed to me, was that the women were good at these jobs because of their sensitivity and empathy, even as they were also required to report on references to drug use (“Every unit was stoned!”), suicidal tendencies, political opinions, any irregularities that could affect a soldier’s ability to function, including sexual proclivities, particularly homosexuality. They tallied up accounts of diarrhea and food poisoning as well as complaints about the morality of the Army’s actions. The censors developed vicarious relationships with the soldiers in the divisions whose letters they kept reading over time in order to monitor changes, and surreptitiously saved copies of particularly moving letters to share with their co-workers. Somehow, Banitt’s team was able to match up one censor with a soldier whose letters she regularly reviewed. Another censor proudly says she did hear that a 1989 report she prepared about the soldiers’ views of service on the West Bank influenced Minister of Defense Yitzhak Rabin.
While there are re-enactments of opening letters, visual researcher Lily Yudinsky found illustrative photographs and footage of soldiers writing letters, and deliveries of bags of mail. She exulted on social media that she was also able to find “a special field security film that had a wonderful scene of the Censorship Unit and Letter Readers in action!” (preview at 2022 Other Israel Film Festival) (10/30/2022)
Something New (So, nu: A Jewish friend of the black/white interracial couple introduces them and keeps them in contact as we follow the friend and her mother through engagement, shower and wedding. A line from that initial blind date has been widely quoted when the woman explains to the white guy that she'd rather date black men: "It's not a prejudice. It's a preference." He replies "Yes, you prefer to be prejudiced." The official Production Notes awkwardly describe debut director Sanaa Hamri as the daughter of a "Russian-Jewish American" mother, but she's usually identified through her father's heritage, as he was a prominent Muslim-North African artist, and she grew up in Morocco.)
Song Searcher: The Times and Toils of Moyshe Beregovsky
- photo from the film’s FaceBook page, at its Russian premier, June 1, 2021
While the subject of this fascinating documentary is the incredible work of the male collector of Yiddish and Jewish folklore and songs from the 1920s to 1947, primarily in Ukraine, Jewish women were his sources for many songs, and who tell his story, including a neighbor, survivors, and people who had met him: his granddaughter émigré translator Elena Baevskaya (seen above), who emotionally reunions with, and provides anecdotes about, objects and sites associated with him, including his grave, the Kyiv apartment they shared when she was a child, where his letters to his wife Sarah were directed, and his ancestral shtetl, and where her great-grandparents were murdered in the “Holocaust of bullets”.; Lyudmila Sholokhova, now Curator at NYPL’s Dorot Jewish Division is featured from when she was at YIVO, though I’m confused as to where she was physically when she opened the box of wax cylinders and realized what rarity was found in a forgotten store room - “I knew the handwriting, the kind of paper, the particular typewriter he used”; Anna Shternshis, Yiddish scholar and producer of the Grammy-nominated album ”Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs Of World War II” culled from his collection (clips of Russian-born Jewish Canadian Sophie Milman performing with the project are included); and Irina Sergeeva, the archivist of the collection as the white-gloved Director of the Judaica Division of the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine in Kyiv.
Beregovsky #136 - So now I understand the meaning of the title of Yoav Potash’s lovely performance plus archival short of a recent live, outdoor performance by Saul Goodman’s Klezmer band in Berkeley, California: (seen at 2022 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum)
Watching the film in the midst of the horrific war of aggression Russia initiated, on February 24, 2022, against Ukraine adds complications for a viewer, as complex as Ukraine’s Jewish history: the producer Victorina Petrossiants and director Yelena Yakovich are Russian Jews born, raised, and still living in Moscow; the major donor who made the film possible is a philanthropic Russian Jewish oligarch who has been sanctioned; the bombings have included the destruction of unique cultural resources in Ukraine, and again threaten the future of Beregovsky’s fragile collection in disturbing parallels to his life; the interviews are primarily in Russian, with an overlay of English translation for foreign audiences. (streamed courtesy of Jewish Studies at Fordham and now with English subtitles via 7th Art Releasing) (4/29/2022)
Son of Saul (Saul Fia) (My edited capsule “Best of 2015” review) (Very impressive how scripters László Nemes and Clara Royer incorporated women in the immediacy of Auschwitz survival. At the NYFF press conference, the director appreciated participating in the Jerusalem Film Festival story development to get input from experts in developing the story. Admidst the male society of the Sonderkommando, a door suddenly opens up to the lights of “Kanada” where Jewish women prisoners had to sort through the belongings of the dead (and where my mother’s first cousin survived). Not only is a woman a crucial ally in the attempted sabotage rebellion, but she’s just about the only prisoner who is allowed a full name “Ella Fried” (played by Juli Jakab) who takes a great risk in sneaking “Saul” explosive powder, when other women conspire to distract their Nazi guard. She is based on a real woman Ella Gartner, one of four hung for their participation in the rebellion. (previewed at 2015 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (updated 12/20/2015)
Soros - Director Jesse Dylan (who has made films for the Open Society Foundations) emphasizes George Soros’s identity as Jewish, there is very little reference to Jewish women. With the emphasis on the father as George’s idol, his Hungarian mother Erzsébet Schwartz is pretty much referred to once, and shockingly: in a taped audio interview she describes being gang-raped by liberating Russian soldiers. One divorce, of the two to Jewish women, is mentioned, while several children of unidentified motherhood, are interviewed, including his only daughter Andrea who describes his bedtime stories of living under Soviet occupation and tries to clear up misunderstandings of his philanthropy. (preview courtesy of Abramorama) (11/22/2020)
Space Land Time: Underground Adventures with Ant Farm (2011) Watching in 2020, Elizabeth Federici and Laura Harrison’s documentary about an avant-garde/counter-culture group of architects/conceptual artists from the late 1960’s/early 1970’s, the interview with their first patron, for “The House of the Century” aka “Penis House” (1973) in Houston, since ruined in a flood, struck me with a familiar name. Marilyn Oshman, noted businesswoman and arts philanthropist who claims she became friends with the artists during the design and construction of the folly her husband (soon to be ex) disliked, is almost never identified as Jewish in articles and materials about her, but she is the daughter of Jake Oshman, who is in my family oral history. Jake’s brother-in-law Harry Aronowitz (through Yetta) was also the brother-in-law of my paternal grandmother’s brother Abraham Blankstein (through Gussie Aronowitz), left Brooklyn to work at the Oshmans’ growing retail business in Houston, and settled there. Reminds me to reach out to them as I continue to build out our Family Tree. (seen at 2020 Architecture & Design Film Festival online) (5/19/2020)
Speer Goes To Hollywood- With director Vanessa Lapa astonishing find of 400 hours of 1971 interview tapes with Albert Speer, the Third Reich’s former Architect, then Minister of Armaments and War Production, for development of a planned screenplay, she conducted deep research for context, with almost unique archival visual illustration, all superbly digitally restored and edited into a fascinating documentary. The interviewer/scripter was Andrew Birkin, who as brother of Jane Birkin doesn’t mention that his brother-in-law Serge Gainsbourg was Jewish. Jewish women only come up indirectly, either in the discussions or in the footage. Birkin mentions considering Donald Pleasance to play Speer in the fiction film, but notes that his wife – presumably his then third wife Meira Shore -- is Jewish, whose mother and father had been in concentration camps, “so it will be difficult to make a film with him when he gets emotional.” Speer notes sardonically: “We wouldn’t want to offend the feeling of Jewish people”. Speer denies ever seeing Jewish families broken up, or children separated from their parents. (10/28/2021)
Spider in the Web - How sad that Israeli writer/director Eran Riklis’s portrait of generational change in Mossad barely features any Jewish woman – a female Mossad agent, with long curly brunette hair, is glimpsed silently staking out Ben Kingsley’s distrusted agent “Adereth” on his way out. In fairness, his other Mossad-related film released in the U.S. in 2019, Shelter, primarily featured women. (preview courtesy of A HREF="https://www.vert-ent.com/copy-of-the-operative">Vertical Entertainment) (9/16/2019)
Spielberg - So nu: I have issues with how the Jewish women and their Jewish context are presented, such that I would subtitle this documentary: “A Gentile’s Guide to His Life and Films”. In a mostly chronological presentation over 147 minutes (pared down from over 30 hours of interviews the director Susan Wagner Lacy, my intern supervisor back at the National Endowment for the Arts in 1975, conducted with him plus with family, colleagues, and stars), Spielberg immediately cites the significance of his exuberant mother Leah Posner Adler and his three sisters in encouraging and participating in his creative efforts, especially his early “scary” movies, delightfully included. All are warmly interviewed, but Nancy Spielberg is never identified as a film producer in her own right, of documentaries including Above and Beyond, nor that his sister Anne is a writer and producer, including an Oscar-nomination for co-writing Big. (Thanks to Jack Gattanella for reminding of the latter.) In the Q & A after the premiere at the 2017 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center, Lacy explained she had to delicately handle his “brief” – four-years-long and a son -- first marriage to actress Amy Irving, and his after “love at first sight” and her conversion to Judaism just before their wedding second wife Kate Capshaw, who is very private and declined to be interviewed, with the few, sweet family photos “clawed from her hands”. With Lacy’s heavy emphasis on the recurring theme in his films of the seeking of a father/son relationship due to his parents’ divorce and his father’s agreement to take the blame for the marriage wreck though his mother and sisters admit that what happened was his unhappy mother fell joyously in love with his father’s best friend who they called “Uncle” and his father left their lives for over a decade. There has since been a happy ending reunification, but maternal or sibling cinematic themes or expressions are not explored.
Only when Lacy gets to Schindler’s List does she finally plunge into Steven’s, and his whole family’s, Jewish identity, and segregates their Jewishness completely within the context of this film. Suddenly, all their talk of growing up “feeling different” in the Phoenix suburbs (images that are so resonant in so many of his movies) is repeated but now with the sisters’ complete sentences “because we were Jewish”, as Steven describes growing up observant, with photos at least through his bar mitzvah, and a grandfather who called him by his Hebrew name Schmuel. That he was bullied -- because he was Jewish. Now is inserted his mother recounting anti-Semitic incidents they faced in the neighborhood. Now Sidney Shainberg’s mentorship of his young protégé can be seen with a basis for how they made a connection on the Universal lot. Now his wistful talk of “never fitting in” is seen as because he was Jewish—even more glaring, yet unsaid, as seen in his marvelous home movies with his crew of young peer directors as to why he felt such joy at finally fitting in with a group, even as the only Jew (which I had never noticed before about this Hollywood-shaking generation). Tony Kushner, a frequent collaborator as his screenwriter, ruminates on their work together on Munich as something like “our great Jewish American film director taking on the issues of the Middle East” – but this documentary does not see him like that. Not only did Lacy regret that she had to cut a telling anecdote about Spielberg conducting a seder with the German actors during the filming of Schindler’s List (doubtless to be on an extra on the DVD version), and that the HBO premiere had to be delayed for a year in order to schedule time for him to participate in the promotion. Doubtless there are many academic essays about “Jewish themes in other Spielberg films”, but the singularly glaring myopia keeps this from being anything close to a definitive bio-doc. (Thanks to Steve Kopian for the ticket.) (updated 12/3/2017)
Spinoza: Six Reasons for the Excommunication of the Philosopher - Jewish women participate in director David Ofek’s informative documentary in two ways. As part of the biographical story, we meet a female descendant, Rita Mendes-Flohr in Jerusalem, nine generations apart. The philosophers who explain Spinoza’s radical theories include: Prof. Irene Zweip, of the University of Amsterdam, and Prof. Noa Naaman-Zauderer, of Tel Aviv University, as well as possible guides and archivists in Holland and NYC. (at 2024 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum/ courtesy of Go2 Films) (2/12/2024)
Standing Silent It is noteworthy that two of the Orthodox victims to courageously come forward about rabbinical sexual abuse are women – one who speaks all covered with a voice disguise, and another, openly despite her mother’s objections, who has made aliyah, married with children, and is active in victims’ advocacy organizations. Rabbi Yosef Blau, Yeshiva University spiritual advisor, noted in the Q & A following the screening I attended that he sees in his work on this issue, the therapists are usually female. So it is that much more significant that Rabbi Abraham Twerski, M.D. notes in the film that the Biblical condemnation of gossip -lashon hara, which is frequently wielded condescendingly against women, is immediately followed by the requirement to not stand by silently when someone is being harmed, hence the title. (previewed at 2011 DOC NYC Festival) (11/11/2011)
Starter for 10 (The character of “Rebecca Epstein”, played by Rebecca Hall in the film, is a completely faithful adaptation from the novel A Question of Attraction by David Nicholls, who also wrote the screenplay. “Rebecca” has the usual Jewish movie attributes of brainy lefty political activist brunette, but her finally requited pining for the conflicted, repentant working-class hero as he gets his comeuppance is charming.)
Starting Over Again
While many women who grew up in Egypt and became refugees around the world, from the U.S. to Israel, relate their memories, commissioned director Ruggero Gabbai does not include any uniquely female experiences.
After the showing, educator Vivianne Levy (left) and writer Lucette Lagnado, author of memoirs The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit and The Arrogant Years: One Girl's Search for Her Lost Youth, from Cairo to Brooklyn who said she could write 800 more pages about Jewish life in Egypt, were challenged that their rosy memories of “the Golden Age” conveniently left out the antisemitism in the country since an alliance with Hitler and the differences for those Jews who were not bourgeoisie. They countered that the majority of the Jews were of at least middle class, and that anti-Semites were a small minority who were castigated by the supportive majority, pointing out that the Muslim Brotherhood at that time were even outlawed and imprisoned. (seen at 2018 New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival) (3/13/2018)
State 194 (So, nu: While the Jewish women peace activists aren’t profiled as closely as the men, they are seen as leaders in demonstrations and in negotiations with determined and sometimes quite nasty male and female settlers.)
Steal A Pencil For Me (emendations coming after 5/9/2008)
Stefan Zweig: Farewell To Europe (Vor Der Morgenröte - Stefan Zweig In Amerika) (We are only left at the end with his suicide note, and not his younger wife’s voice or reasons.) (at 2017 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum)
Stella (briefly reviewed at 2009 Rendez-Vous With French Cinema of Film at Lincoln Center) (The titular new, working class girl in school is befriended by a redheaded Jewish girl "Gladys" (played by Mélissa Rodriguez), whose parents are political exiles from Argentina. She and her warm extended family play a key role in opening up "Stella"s world to books, reading, intellectual discussions, and parental attention to school and love.)
Steve Jobs (So, nu: The Joanna Hoffman here, as played by Kate Winslet with an occasional trace of mastering Hoffman's “unique” accent (she is reported to have grown up in Poland, with her Jewish father, and in Armenia, her mother’s native country, before moving to the U.S. as a teen), when she sarcastically retorts I’m not from the shtetl., and Jobs (as played by Michael Fassbender) teases her as either a “Yenta” or “Yentl”, or some such until I ever see the script. Several times he mocks her as “too European”. As written by Aaron Sorkin, she acts like his idealized Jewish mother, constantly nagging him to take parental responsibility for his out-of-wedlock daughter, and in general to be more of a mensch, without using that term. The real person objects to the line referring to her as his “work wife”. But very little is revealed about her life or how it changed over the years covered in the film (when in real life she married co-worker Alain Rossmann, who I don’t know yet if he’s Jewish but he has has a European background (French), and they have two kids). As I recall, her role as marketing chief and long-time friend/colleague was barely covered in Alex Gibney’s documentary Steve Jobs: The Man In The Machine (with my additional notes), and only a few times noted as a close friend in Walter Isaacson’s biography, which was the inspiration for the script, then supplemented by extensive interviews with the principals including her – so little is known about her, or even available about her online, my colleagues were surprised to learn Winslet is portraying one real person, not a fictional composite. (previewed at 2015 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (updated 10/24/2015)
Still Life in Lodz - Amidst confusing editing, chronology of discoveries, and repetition, director Slawomir Grünberg follows Lilka Rozenbaum Elbaum around the Polish city and apartment building her family lived in from 1945 to 1968. Some truths come out about the still-life painting that was over her bed and is the focus of her obsession more than mere nostalgia.
Like granddaughter Elizabeth Rynecki in Chasing Portraits, Elbaum goes to a big local flea market to seek out more by the artist who signed “Tolpin”; if that was her token effort to find out more, how did she know the painter was Russian? But unlike Jacob Dammas’s family in Kredens, there is no on-screen mystery because she already knows where the painting is. Unusually, she has kept in touch with the Righteous Gentiles who hid her desperate mother for over two years during the Holocaust after her gutsy escape from the Ghetto, and a visit with them led to a reconnection with family friend who had bought the apartment furnishings, including the painting that they won’t sell.
Then there’s revelations about the work’s true ownership, evoked through dream-like animation by Marcin Podolec and Yellow Tapir Films. Research by Monika Kucner, of the Institute of German Studies at University of Lodz, clarifies a family memory that the art was already in the apartment when the “Volksdeutsche who signed the Volksliste” (not explained that means he was an out-of-town ethnic German) carpenter who was re-settled into the apartment. The painting had actually belonged to the previous Jewish resident: Pola Erlich, a dentist with two sons – so few films about female Holocaust victims identify ones who were professional women. (That caught my interest, too, because my father was a dentist.) I was touched when Elbaum finds a period dental chair in an antiques shop across the street from her apartment, and thoughtfully wonders if it’s more than a coincidence: 
She sees Dr. Erlich listed in the 1938 telephone directory, which explained how her parents were able to have a rare phone. The research traces that Dr. Erlich was first forced into the Lodz Ghetto, then in May 1942, she was “ABGANG” – asphyxiated in Chelmo. But Kucner also tracks that Erlich’s sons survived Auschwitz, and the dentist has an extensive family of descendants in the United States and Israel -- all of whom would have more claim on the painting than Elbaum. She has shared with them the research about their ancestor.
There is poignant aural and visual context. Wojciech Lemański’s sad, klezmerish score beautifully links past and present. Strikingly effective are Stefan Brajter’s “rephotography” that combines old and new photographs taken at the same Lodz locations. Ironically in terms of Elbaum’s repeated focus, David Friedmann, the creator of the plaintive drawings from his experiences in the Lodz Ghetto, should have been identified on screen as they are seen. Grünberg finds an amazing array of archival still photography and moving images, but by not identifying his sources as seen, I was troubled that some seemed to be from Nazi propaganda, as Yael Hersonski warned about in A Film Unfinished, let alone that not all may be from Lodz.
Two additional participants seeking to touch family roots history add little to the film and barely avoid thano-tourism. American Paul Celler visits local Holocaust memorials to try to better understand his survivor parents’ trauma. Photographer Roni Halpern Ben Ari, whose family emigrated about 1926 to what is now Israel, repeats her father’s return to their same Lodz apartment building that repeatedly anchors this documentary that is moving and informative despite some frustrations. (4/2/2021)
Stitching History From The Holocaust - documentary about the Milwaukee Art Museum exhibition that created a tribute to Czech artistic dressmaker Hedwig Strnad as a memorial to the creative talents lost in the Holocaust – an unusual focus on the work of a Jewish woman, as well as the sad epistolary evidence they tried to get a U.S. visa years before deportation to Thierenstadt. (11/16/2014)
Stop (briefly reviewed at 2012 New York Film Festival of the Film at Lincoln Center) (10/14/2012)
Stories We Tell (So, nu: When Polley interviews Harry Gulkin, the producer of, what here seems the ironically titled, Jewish-Canadian classic Lies My Father Told Me, as her mother’s friend, his Jewishness is a colorful and emotional counterpart to all the staid WASPs in her family. When she meets her biological sister, there’s a startling moment of genetic connection with identical smiles, especially when they welcome her and her own daughter to their first seder.) (preview at 2013 New Directors/New Films of Film at Lincoln Center/MoMA) (5/16/2013)
Stranger of the Dunes (short) (So, nu: Director Tamar Baruch was able to cast, as the longing memory of the Eritrean refugee played by Michael Tesfahans, the mesmerizing and beautiful singer Ester Rada, of the Beta Israel community of Ethiopian Jews in Israel. In sort of reenacting something of his own cross-Sahara walk to Israel, he also cooperated on the music to reflect his heritage. (seen at 2018 Other Israel Film Festival) (11/6/2018)
Stress Positions
Director/Writer/Editor/Composer/and Co-Star as flirtatious trans-woman “Karla” Theda Hammel brings hilarious Marx Brothers style to a gay “party house” Brooklyn brownstone during the 2020 COVID Pandemic. Her satirical barbs include obsessive virus protection (represented by comedian/producer John Early), Orientalism, Middle East ignorance, gay marriage, religion, families, ogling of beautiful young men, to self-mocking of trans-women. A few jokes extend to the lone Jewish-identified woman. “Vanessa” (played by Amy Zimmer, with long curly locks, as seen in the far left of the cartoon poster, above) is the lesbian lover of “Karla” who continually keeps trumpeting that “fiction is freedom” and accuses her of basing her book on “Karla”s life, not her own. When “Karla” considers the cabbie’s family’s life as tragic in Yemen she has no idea where that is, “Vanessa” is furious about the contrast with something “Karla” said about my growing up with my family in Larchmont. “Karla” airily makes assumptions about their lifestyle: Are they playing shuffleboard?.. I’ve never been invited. You don’t want to bring me home! “Vanessa” ripostes: You think I had an easy life growing up with blondes? (She makes a blondes reference a couple of times.)
“Vanessa” reacts with horror when approached by the local unhinged homeless guy, quickly puts up her COVID mask for the first time, and drops her phone he’d wanted to borrow. At the July 4th backyard party, “Vanessa” expands: I thought he’d rape and kill me! But I’m from Larchmont and I live in terror, and rushes to take a shower when home. “Karla” rescues that phone from the front stoop. But “Vanessa” justifies checking who she has been texting: I pay your phone bills. At the party, she is convinced that the hot dog she ate is not vegan and spends the rest of the time there vomiting in the toilet. In a final voice-over, “Karla” sadly describes their break-up, and claims “Vanessa”s new lover became the basis of her second book. Meanwhile, the voice-over by the host’s Moroccan-American nephew “Bahlul” (Qaher Harhash) rues his hypocritical globe-trotting NJ mother: She’d say the world is full of freaks and deviants, and you can’t trust anyone. But isn’t that the world we were trying to see? - and he too leaves. (“Closing Night at 2024 New Directors/New Films of Film at Lincoln Center/ MoMA) (4/24/2024)
Sublet - In Israeli director Eytan Fox’s gay twist on the 1970s-genre film of older, straight-laced guy (here “Michael”, American actor John Benjamin Hickey) emotionally revived by a free-love young hippie, now a hunky millennial in Tel Aviv, Jewish women are the drama queens. (“Michael” recalls being last in Israel for his bar mitzvah where his parents argued the whole time and divorced soon after.) The hunky student filmmaker “Tomer” (Niv Nissim, in his film debut) has a BFF/star of his soft-core horror films in “Daria” (Lihi Kornowski), a volatile dancer who brings him her constant turmoil with her Palestinian-Israeli partner, that he teases always ends up in make-up sex, til she falls asleep in his arms. The temporary apartment-mates attend their sexy performance piece before the partners head off to Berlin. She mocks “Tomer” that he won’t come with them: He’ll never leave his mother.
Pointing out where he had his first kiss with a girl, “Tomer” takes “Michael” to dinner with his very atypical kibbutznik mother “Malka” (Miki Kam), with long straight auburn hair and a house. (Both seen in the still above.) Let alone that she became a single mother via sperm bank: That was not traditional on the kibbutz! People said it wasn’t right! But a child just needs love. “Malka” intrusively keeps pressing “Michael” about his parents who should want to be grandparents, while shrugging at her son, until “Michael” notes that his mother died a few years ago, and his attempt to have a baby, ended sadly. By the end, it seems what “Tomer” really needs and wants is a father more than a grateful older lover, whatever the psychological term is for such a complex relationship. (at 2020Tribeca Film Festival/ 2021 Israel Film Center Festival/seen courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment) (6/13/2021)
Suite Française (2016) (Not released in theaters, seen on DVD) (Directed and co-written by Paul Dibb) Based on “Dolce”, the second section of the novel by Irène Némirovsky, the Jews in the small town of Bussy (inspired by Issy-l’Eveque, in the Burgundy region of France) are only seen incidentally, in particular when “Lucille Angellier” (played by Michelle Williams) sees a bewildered Jewish woman taken away by the Gestapo. But this incident makes clear that she knows what is going on, even as she falls in love with a German officer. In an interview with The Daily Mail, Dibb explained that this character, a refugee, is not in the novel, but was added as a tribute to Némirovsky, who was similarly rounded-up: “We wanted to have a reference to what happened to Irene, but in a subtle way.” (referenced in my review of The Exception) (6/23/2017)
Suited (HBO documentary previewed at Human Rights Watch Film Fest 2016 at Film at Lincoln Center and of IFC Center) At least one of the trans-men coming for custom suit fittings in Brooklyn is explicitly Jewish. As described in the press notes: “Aidan Star Jones is a transgender teenage boy whose Bar Mitzvah is approaching. His grandmother contacts Bindle & Keep after their family is unable to find him a suit that fits his needs in their hometown of Tucson, Arizona.” But that makes this sound like some conventional family. The grandmother, Mimi Lester, seems like a free spirt, and when the father Bob “Papa” Jones comes to see the final fitting, he looks like an old hippie. The much tattooed Aidan explains (my approximate transcription): “A year and a half ago I realized I’m trans. My sisters are accepting. Mom is. But dad doesn’t accept me because he thinks I’m not old enough to know who I am. My grandmother’s wife is the cantor at my temple. When I came out to her, she explained to the rabbi that I wanted a bar mitzvah. I don’t want to become a woman. My grandma Mimi always worries and is protective.” Grandma Mimi, tearfully: “I’m afraid of him being hurt. He takes more hurts. He suffers pain from homophobic kids in class. It’s hard to watch that, that he’ll feel hurt.” While most of the clients shown are trans-men, another Jew is not, as described in the press notes: “Dr. Jillian T. Weiss is an attorney and professor in New York who focuses on transgender issues in the workplace. She is a transgender woman who approaches Bindle & Keep for suits that will make her look and feel her best as she argues an important discrimination case in federal court.” She describes why she became a lawyer (my approximate transcription): “My mother insisted! I wanted to be a rabbi! She said ‘What kind of job is rabbi for a nice Jewish boy?’ But I loved law school! I fell in love with it. I did corporate litigation, married, and had a son. I thought I was a sick freak and hoped it would go away. I learned more, read books and realized that’s me! It was frightening and shocking. The turning point was when I thought maybe it was better if I wasn’t here. I scared myself. I told myself: ‘You need to address this. In 1998, I transitioned male to female. The day after. I felt let out of prison, breathing free air. It was amazing!” When she explains to the tailors that she needs a respectably conservative suit to argue a trans-gender discrimination case in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit (covering Georgia, Florida and Alabama), the tailor is impressed: “We need to make the best suit we’ve ever made!” Weiss won her case for her client. (updated 8/4/2016)
Summer of 85 (Été 85) French writer/director François Ozon adapted Aidan Chambers’s British Young Adult novel Dance on My Grave, which I haven’t yet read for comparison, so I hadn’t anticipated who may be the first Jewish mother in an Ozon film. He explained in the Press Notes a surprisingly stereotyped interpretation of Jews and a Jewish mother: “Q: Why did you decide to make David’s family Jewish? A: The family in Aidan Chambers’ book is Jewish, and I kept it. When I asked him about it, he explained that the town of Southend-on-Sea (where the novel is set) has a large Jewish community. It therefore seemed natural for David [Gorman, played by Benjamin Voisin] to be Jewish, and at the same time set him apart from Alex [played by Félix Lefebvre] with respect to their social and cultural backgrounds. I like the fact that it is never an issue. Just like being gay, it belongs to the narrative just like its other parts. There is also a narrative reason, which has to do with Jewish postmortem and funeral rituals. In Judaism, the body should be buried as soon as possible, the funeral usually taking place within one or two days after the death. Alex could not mourn with the body, nor could he be among the mourners. These restrictions increased his emotional trauma and fueled his psychological need to dance on David's grave. It was the only way for Alex to express his profound sorrow and let everything out. If David had been Christian, Alex would not have had to endure the same torments following David’s death. [sic] Everything would have been simpler, more straightforward, and thus less interesting to me…Valeria [Bruni Tedeschi] was the ideal person to bring some humor and a pinch of craziness to this extroverted [widowed] mother; she’s able to make us accept her more dramatic transformation. For this character, I thought about the monstrous and conniving mother in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer [1959] played by Katharine Hepburn in [Joseph L.] Mankiewicz’ film – a mother who lures boys and reels them in for her son, and whose possessive, devouring, incestuous nature is later revealed.” [This sounds like the old canard about how mothers cause their sons to be gay.] Benjamin Voisin continued on this theme in his interview in the Press Notes: “Q: David and his mother can also form a toxic pair. A: David pushes Alex into his mother’s arms – and she undresses him in the bathroom. [I thought she was noticing Alex wasn’t circumcised.] There’s a moment when we see this mother and son together in a shot, both with a tiger’s piercing and predatory look in their eyes: “We’re going to eat him up!” I loved working with Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. You have to learn how to live with all her energy, but we laughed so much on set.”
”David” continually says negative things about his mother, almost exulting in how her supposed incompetence makes her dependent on him. ”Mrs. Gorman” is first too welcoming of “Alex”; she’s delighted that her son will no longer be “running with a bad crowd [like] after his father died”. Despite “Alex”s hesitations, she immediately wants him working with them at the family marine shop, for good pay, and for him to look at that as a career path, so that her husband’s dream can be continued. But then in her grief she is too quick to blame “Alex” for her son’s death, either directly or indirectly, besides accusing him of harassment and grave desecration. (at 2021 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema of Film at Lincoln Center/ courtesy Music Box Films) (12/19/2021)
Summer of Blood (previewed at 2014 Tribeca Film Festival) (So, nu: The Jewish woman co-worker “Penelope” (played by Dakota Goldhor) is primarily there for the Turkish writer/director/star/editor Onur Tukel to play off the irony. She does get a speech about her high IQ, SAT scores, and Ivy League college education that has landed her in a boring marketing job in Brooklyn, and she does resist any of his obnoxious romantic gestures until he’s turned into a vampire.) (4/1/2014)
Sunshine
Super Girl (So, nu (While of course purists will argue that Naomi Kutin and her mother (a convert from an unusual background that could be explored more in contrast to her daughter’s) aren’t strictly following Orthodox Jewish practice in how she participates in powerlifting competitions on Shabbat, or participating in this sport at all for challenging gender norms. But their suburban New Jersey yeshiva and synagogue seem OK with it, and the family works very hard at integrating their observance with their daughter’s empowerment and mother’s sensitive involvement.) (previewed at 2016 DOC NYC Festival)
Supermensch: The Legend Of Shep Gordon (So, nu: In the film, he is reluctant to talk about growing up because of his mother: Mom pushed. She was a tough Jewish lady. . .Mom made sure I was bar mitzvahed., though his sister has nothing negative to say about her. (While I can’t read more of my notes to be sure I’m quoting him precisely, he broke off that part of the interview.) He must have felt guilty about talking negatively about her, because in his subsequent interview with Sheila Roberts, 6/3/2014, he was more indirect: “I was lucky with my parents, for my mom and my dad particularly, much more than my mom, who was very compassionate and loving to everyone.” (6/11/2014)
Surfwise (emendations coming after 11/8/2008) (So, nu: The patriarch credits “a Jewish girl named Ellen taught me to eat pussy” in Israel, awakening him to the realization that his two marriages failed due to lousy sex. Which provides a new twist on Deuteronomy 26:5 we recite at the seder: "My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down to Egypt and sojourned there, few in number; but there he became a great, mighty and populous nation." Only his daughter Navah retains a Jewish identity and is passing it on to her children.)
The Survivor - Most of the reaction to this poignant film directed by Barry Levinson focuses on producer/star Ben Foster’s powerful performance. Foster embodies Harry Haft by losing then adding some 60 pounds to portray him (in black and white flashbacks) in a concentration camp in 1943 entertaining SS guards with weekly to-the-death boxing matches, to 1949 and on in color as the real boxer billed as “Survivor of Auschwitz”, and in 1963 a tormented husband/father working through his haunted PTSD. While this psychological and morality arc is revelatory in an American-made commercial movie, books such as Maus and many documentaries and European films have featured such guilt-stricken, tormented fictional and real/”based on a true story” characters.
But I found particularly sensitive the women’s roles – starting with the screenplay by Australian Justine Juel Gillmer, whose manager brought her the book by Harry’s son Alan Scott Heft, Harry Haft: Survivor of Auschwitz, Challenger of Rocky Marciano, 2006, Syracuse University Press, (and the 2014, SelfMade Hero graphic novel adaptation by Reinhard Kleist The Boxer: The True Story of Holocaust Survivor Harry Haft). Because, in the only interview I could find with her: ”Boxing was my main sport, I’d done it for years and years. It was the Holocaust plus boxing, so felt right.”: 
(photo from Gillmer’s FaceBook page).
Gillmer’s spec script made it to “The Black List” of best unproduced scripts, then to producer Matti Leshem, son of a Holocaust survivor, who got it to Levinson. The story stirred Levinson’s childhood memory, that was briefly shown in his Avalon (1990), of a man visiting his family, similarly beset with nightmares, sharing his bedroom in the late 1940s, who years later, his mother mentioned, was his grandmother’s brother come to the U.S. from being in concentration camps. Gillmer did change Haft’s life for dramatic effect, including creating a composite SS nemesis and fictional sports journalist who made connections for him. His experiences described in the biography were actually worse, and less coincidental, but more aggressively entrepreneurial. Gillmer was subsequently selected by Gal Gadot to write her bio-pic on Righteous Gentile, savior of (blonde) children from the Warsaw ghetto Irena Sendler.
With the caveat that the continuing flashbacks to the camp are “based on the memories of Harry Haft”, the USC Shoah Foundation provided extensive resources and consultation on production authenticity about the Jaworzno (Neudachs) labor sub-camp where Haft was enslaved, as well as access to his and many testimonies. Harry was public when it was a shanda to do so. Survivors are seen accusing him of being a traitor, and his brother Peretz (German actor Saro Emirze) insists he should not talk about the past and just live. However, the real situation, as described in his son’s book is different: while an article by “prominent sports writer” Leonard Cohen in The New York Post, excerpted in a promotional flyer for a fight, is not as specific about Auschwitz as the film makes his fictional sobriquet, only mentioning “concentration camps”, other survivors did consequently reach out to him. But not his former girlfriend, who he finally located when a group formed of survivors from their hometown were informed she had applied for reparations from Germany.
Harry’s opening memory in Belchatow, Poland is of his teen summer romance with Leah Krichinsky (Israeli actress Dar Zuzovsky).
(Ben Foster and Dar Zuzovsky in “The Survivor” photo by Leo Pinter HBO)
Her pleas for him to help her when she is arrested ring through his head, and motivate him to survive no matter what he has to do. His search for her continues at the camp in a frank scene I’ve only seen in European Holocaust films. Harry’s SS controller “Schneider” (played by American actor Billy Magnussen) not only lets him take a bath, but brings him a forced prostitute –To the victor goes the spoils. (I’m not sure if she was “Else” (Sonya Cullingford) or Katia Bokor as “Ronit”). Harry just wants to ask her if she knows Leah Krichinsky. As the domineering “Schneider” watches them through the door, she whispers I’m not allowed to mix with the women’s camp, but I can get a message out. Even as she undresses and helps him from the bath, he whispers: Tell Leah to survive. Tell her Hertzka will find her.
Another situation I’ve only seen in European films is where the desperately seeking Harry meets formerly-affianced Miriam Wofsoniker (played by Belgian actress Vicky Krieps).
(Vicky Krieps in “The Survivor” photo by Jessica Kourkounis/HBO)
She works at an unidentified Jewish organization that is overwhelmed helping find people lost in the Holocaust, when the Jewish and Yiddish press was full of lists of names of people seeking people. I’m not sure the Jewish Agency had such an office in New York, when they contacted my grandmother in Brooklyn, very near where Harry lives, that her niece survived, the only one in their family. Miriam’s work here is fictional; they actually met as neighbors in the same Brooklyn apartment building. But the fictional Miriam assures Harry: We’ll keep looking for [Leah]…Every survivor passes through my office. I’ve heard every imaginable awful thing. Harry challenges that’s not suffering, and she retorts: Don’t talk to me like that! You earned that? Because you survived, so you can be an asshole to people trying to help you? However, a scene of her leading him into a synagogue seems unnecessary and heavy-handed to make a religious point. His difficulty from not coping with his past, and not talking about the impossible choices he had to face, continues throughout their relationship. Krieps noted in an interview that her grandfather was also in the camps, and could only expiate his misery about survival to a diary, while lashing out at her grandmother; so she wanted to show the multi-layered strength of such women. Foster has said in interviews that he was inspired by his “nana”s frequent telling of fleeing a pogrom to reach Ellis Island with her newborn brother hidden in a basket. Gillmer recalled that after the screening for the Haft family: “One of the greatest moments of my life as a writer was when Harry’s daughter [Sarah] turned to me and she said, ‘I don’t know how you did it. You’d never met him, but you got him’. That was incredibly touching.”
While his brother had already wed in Europe, a woman also gets Levinson’s insertion of the last highly symbolic image and sound: Svetlana Kundish, as a bride, sings Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” – in Yiddish. (on HBO/Max after pandemic delayed distribution for two years, premiered on Yom ha Shoah) (8/22/2022/ additions on 9/21/2022)
Sword in the Desert - Directed by George Sherman, the first filmed-in-Hollywood movie set in 1947 Palestine, released in 1949, pre-dated the similar story of the 1960 film based on Leon Uris’s best-selling novel Exodus. The American point-of-view here is through “Mike Dillon” (Dana Andrews) as a “Han Solo”-type freighter captain, who for the money agrees to bring Holocaust refugees to Palestine illegally against the British blockade (like my mother’s first cousin arrived from a Displaced Persons camp). An anti-British Irish volunteer “Jerry McCarthy” (Liam Redmond), among 100 he claims, mocks “Dillon” as the wrong kind of Irish-American for not supporting the Jewish effort. Writer/Producer Robert Buckner based his screenplay on his original short story “How Still We See” from his own experience at Christmas Eve in Jerusalem in the 1930s; in the film it is the sight of Bethlehem that lights the cynic’s faith. Jeff Chandler, born Ira Grossel, got to play his only Jewish role, as “Asvan Kurta”, the fighter leader, possibly with the unidentified Haganah. Though the film’s showings in England were disrupted by Owen Mosley’s fascists (the antisemitic group portrayed in Ridley Road), one of the clever plot twists has a former British officer who fought in significant World War 2 battles as “both British and Jewish” so can pass as “Major Sorrell” (Hugh French) within the enemy camp.
In addition to young and old women and girls among the survivors stirring the ship captain’s sympathy, Swedish actress Märta Torén (one of many promoted as “the next Garbo”), is the co-lead Jewish female “Sabra”, the radio voice of the Jewish underground. A sultry, spiritedly anti-British cellist who came to Palestine with her parents from Warsaw in the late 1920s, the TCM featured publicity still of her with a rifle on a dune is not from an actual scene. She is in love with “Dovid Vogel” (Stephen McNally), who has been away for three months organizing the boat lifts. It takes awhile until their longing gazes melt into passionate kisses. (seen on TCM, not available on DVD) (9/25/2023)
The Sweetest Sound - In Alan Berliner’s continued drawing on his family for documentary essays, his mother comments how she would have preferred a more Sephardic version of his name, and he interviewed his sister Lynn, and their parents, about her name and her selection of her daughters’ somewhat unconventional names, Jade and Starr. (9/7/2012)
Sweetheart Deal
Co-Director Elisa Levine (with her late co-director Gabriel Miller) sought for years to do an in-depth close-up of the habitués of Seattle’s notorious Aurora Avenue, like grungy ones on the outskirts of most cities, with neon-flashing hot sheets motels, drug dealers, and women on the dangerous streets waiting for tricks and riskily getting into strangers’ cars, filmed to look beautiful sunset to sunrise. When a regular introduced the filmmakers to women he gives respite to in his RV prominently parked on the street, they were able to gain the trust of four women who are a cross-section of the “girls” who work to pay for their heroin habits. The hand-held camera documentation of their lives and casual conversations are firsthand and frank.
While all four women are white, two have a casual conversation about their backgrounds and one is working to support her elderly, albeit disapproving parents, it is not until the end that one is shown to be Jewish - Sara. In this determinedly cinema verité-styled longitudinal documentary, filmed mostly from 2011 to 2018, I had trouble keeping track of the four separately, though each woman’s trajectory is intimately followed.
Sara (seen in the above still from Sweetheart Deal), who goes by the nickname “Sexy Sara” to her clients, is seen on the phone begging her dealer: “Can you front me a ‘dime’? One ‘hit’? I’ll call back when I have money.” She immediately sets up with a client. Later she moans she wants to kick the habit– “I’m sick of being sick. I’m sick of the search [for drugs]. I want my kids back.” She explains she was married, then went through a “nasty divorce” – “I thought I would take one year off, but it’s been 12 years getting my shit together.” (The other women have backgrounds in abuse or trauma.) Sara later comments positively: “My parents have come around a lot and show support. They see me trying.” The only mother among the women profiled, her three children – two girls and a boy – are with her family. She keeps old photos of them with her, but she has a sadly unrealistic goal: “I’m hoping my daughter will stay with me part of the summer. I’m nervous to see her, but I get excited to see her.”
At one point, she tries to go through detox in the RV. After two weeks the man there thinks she’s “disappeared”, but she calls a close friend to take her away from him. (One of the first clues that something is amiss with him, his mis-use of the desperate women’s trust is later exposed, though it’s not clear how that behavior was first revealed.) The director cites Mary Ellen Mark and Martin Bell’s Streetwise (1984) about Seattle runaways as an inspiration, that I haven’t seen. But the generational impact of addiction in comparable classes reminds me of Halle Adelman and Sean King O’Grady’s immersion in Philadelphia’s Our American Family (2021), though theirs was rooted from opioid prescriptions.
Soon Sara is on her way to the ER from a pain she hasn’t felt before. Surprisingly, she is still in touch with her family. She calls her father to alert him she’s on the way to the hospital: “I don’t know what’s wrong. I’ll let you know.” Even more surprising, she also calls her daughter: “So I can’t come to your thing tomorrow. Grandma doesn’t want me to go. She was hard to talk to and I don’t want you in the middle of it. But I just want you to hear my side. I love you.”
In the hospital, Sara unexpectedly faces dialysis due to kidney failure caused by her prolonged use of heroin. Yet she brightens: “My daughter Maddie is mad at me. But once she found out I was here, she came to see me with my parents. She let me hug her. I couldn’t ask for a better kid. I thought she would treat me like I treated my parents - unforgiving. I’m grateful.”
The epilogue says her daughter Maddie now “has a two-year-old son and another on the way. She works with people in recovery from opiate addiction.” In an interview, director Levine before a festival screening followed-up further: “Sara’s daughter Maddie is going to be there, and this film just means so much for her because she was largely estranged from her mom and just came back to getting to know her, so it’s like a way of her mom speaking to her through this film. As you could see in the film, that was so important to Sara, getting to get back with her kids [was] what she wanted and at least she got to reconnect with Maddie.”
However, in googling the family’s rabbi who is seen in the film, and the Seattle-area synagogue he was affiliated with for over 50 years, I see no effort to use Sara’s and her family’s experiences or the heartrending film as an educational opportunity to discuss or help congregants dealing with addiction, or adding addiction issues or a related NGO to their many social justice outreach activities. Sara’s family is certainly not alone among Jewish families, or many other families, reeling from this overwhelming tragedy. (seen courtesy of Abramorama) (9/17/2024)
The Swimmer (HaSahyan) - The kibbutz girlfriend of the title character may not be oblivious to “Erez”’s (played by Omer Perelman Striks) gay identity, as they seem more fraternal together than sexual. There is one Jewish woman in his world who does seem understanding of his steps to come out, the former Russian gymnast champion “Paloma” (played by Nadia Kucher) who is now the caretaker of “The Institute” in the desert where teenagers stressfully train to become Olympians. I was impressed that “Erez” recognized the symptoms of potential anorexia in the gymnast girlfriend of a fellow swimmer, based on having seen a kibbutz girl need hospitalization for the condition, even if he had mixed motives for separating the couple. (preview at 2022 Israel Film Center Festival/ courtesy of Strand Releasing) (6/3/2022)
Swinging Safari - In Stephan Elliott’s nostalgically riotous satire of three sexually adventurous families in suburban coastal Australia in December 1975 or so, originally titled Flammable Children, one of them has a menorah prominently displayed in the living room. There is no other Jewish reference, so I could not tell if it belonged to the “Jones”, “Hall”, or “Marsh” family to make any other analysis. Writer/director Elliott has said in interviews that pretty much all the cast and crew input incidents from their childhoods, so perhaps someone I could not identify remembered celebrating Hanukkah. (Blue Fox Entertainment) (6/21/2019)
Tahara - White Jewish writer Jess Zeidman and Black non-Jewish director Olivia Peace proudly think their debut feature teen dramedy set in (Zeidman’s hometown) Rochester synagogue (primarily the Ladies Lounge) is groundbreaking because the two best girlfriends’ intense day includes revelation of lesbian feelings not returned. But that plot line has been included in every CW and FreeForm TV teen series and recent high school movie, though in these mainstream shows they manage to stay friends. In this story about Jewish kids who have been going to Hebrew school classes together for a long time attending the funeral, hence the ritual purification title, of one of their own’s suicide (with incompetent grief counseling), the filmmakers did ratchet up the inclusion factor by having one of the BFFs “Carrie Lowstein” as an accepted Jew of Color (JOC) (played by Madeline Grey DeFreece). But what I found most appealing was how perfectly the dialogue, pacing, and fantasy animations capture post bar/bat mitzvah adolescents, including how scary manipulative Mean Girls are around each other, with Rachel Sennott as Queen Bee “Hannah Rosen”, let alone how clueless the boys and adults around them are. A writer with less intimate familiarity of Jewish girls would probably not make them as sympathetic and three-dimensional, even as I reject the feminist mantra that “Mean Girls” are a misogynist myth. (preview at 2021 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (3/13/2021)
Take This Waltz (previewed at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival) (So, nu: the women playing gentile “Margot” (played by Michelle Williams)’s husband“Lou Rubin” (Seth Rogen)’s sister “Geraldine” (played by Sarah Silverman) and mother “Harriet” (played by Diane D'Aquila) are never explicitly identified as Jewish, just that it’s a close-knit, intellectual, loud-mouth family with no Christmas tree who look like the Toronto version of Upper West Siders – and both Rogen and Silverman are more known for comedy with a Jewish shtick than for dramatic acting. Writer/director Sarah Polley tiptoes around stereotypes by making the frank sister an alcoholic who tells it like it is when she’s drunk. In the press notes, Polley describes her character: “That state of ‘needing, wanting and ‘won’t survive unless you have it’ is something that an addict is very familiar with, and they understand what a trap it can be, what an illusion. The rest of us struggle to understand this in increments. As a result, Geraldine recognizes in Margot the qualities of needing a drug, except in Margot’s case love and filling emptiness are more organic to her life. Geraldine tried in vain to fill the emptiness as well, she just does it with something else.” (4/22/2012)
Taking Woodstock -- Imelda Staunton's "Sonia Teichberg" is a brusque, tight-fisted, guilt-inducing battle-ax of an unaffectionate mother, but she is a formidable manager of a failing Catskills motel, finding ever more ways to squeeze money out of a hippie invasion. Her daughter has fled from her to Manhattan and marriage. When her son "Elliot" justifies to his sister why he's going back to help her despite no words of thanks: She loves me more than you., his sister retorts: That must be a great consolation to you. In addition to "Sonia"s tendency to watch only bad news on TV, including about wars in Viet Nam and the Middle East, the most insight we get into her grim outlook is her autobiographal tirade to the bank manager in what is clearly a frequently repeated, and presumably embroidered (and hilariously re-told) tale: We didn't come here begging. . .I'm an old woman. I suffered. I walked here from Russia. She rants about Russia, the Tsar, pogroms and everything now leading to: Persecution!. . . There goes the gas! When her hapless son asks his father to have her "lay off the Nazi stuff", Dad shrugs: You think I can tell Mom what to do? and later defends his love for her. Her toughness comes in handy when she chases off gangsters with a broom – but she also chases off the nudist theater troupe members that way. While it is a very funny scene when she gets "groovy" on "special brownies" and dances around the yard, it is inexplicable when her son and husband find her asleep amongst her cache of cash: It's my savings for 20 years. Don't come around you two! She comes close to an apologetic explanation: Elli, I was scared. I've got to fix your father his lunch. Viewers are left to vaguely presume that her thick immigrant accent indicates she is a PTSD-suffering Holocaust survivor, but that's not what she says, and her incantations against evil spirits are just delightfully typical Yiddishms. I kept expecting the Woodstock experience to change their relationship by him coming out to her, but that is avoided. Maybe Elliot Tiber's memoir (written with Tom Monte) that was the basis for the film has more insight. Antonia_I posted on the IMDb forum with info on his sisters from the book: "Goldie was twelve years Elliot's senior (plus, in the book, Rachelle was nine years senior, Renee was four years his junior)". There's passing implications amongst the townspeople's anti-Semitic rumblings that Max Yasgur and therefore his amenable, cookie-proffering wife "Miriam" (played by Pippa Pearthree) are Jewish. (1/2/2010)
A Tale of Love and Darkness - Best Woman-Directed Foreign-Language Film 2016 (So, nu: In Portman, the sabra, as Amos Oz’s mother, the portrait of “Fania” is a very unusual, frankly sympathetic look at a woman with survivor guilt just before/during/after Israel’s independence in Jerusalem, where it was filmed, who uses her gifts of a vivid memory through storytelling as a fraught heritage to bestow on her son. So many other films of this period and place either show the Noble Pioneers or the PTSD-haunted survivors, and few show the divisions of Zionist opinion among those who constituted the different Waves of Aliyah. Her mother-in-law is a perfectionist European whose standards she can never meet, while her two sisters, who disapprove of her cheating husband, have completely adapted to secular Tel Aviv. The emphasis on women thankfully slices out much of the memoir’s heavy repetition of discussions of literary and Zionist theory.) (previewed at 2016 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (updated 8/19/2016)
The Talent Given Us
Tel Aviv On Fire (Tel Aviv Al HaEsh)) (So, nu: One of the main jokes in this broad, cross-checkpoint comedy, co-written by an Israeli Arab and an American men, is that Palestinian women on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem have the same taste in locally produced telenovelas, regardless of pro or anti Zionist propaganda value. The only genuine Jewish women are the Israeli checkpoint commander’s (played by Yaniv Biton) mother and wife, who is very impressed when his plots, let alone more, get on TV. Otherwise, another joke is that in the soap opera an Arab actress (played by Lubna Azabal, who is known more for dramas) from France plays an Arab spy disguised as the Jewish woman “Rachel”, and may be falling in love with the Israeli soldier.) (preview at 2019 Israel Film Center Festival)
Tantura -- Alon Schwarz’s documentary is primarily focused on male egos and Zionist machismo during the 1948 “War of Independence”/”Nakba” and since. Jewish Israeli women appear briefly in three contexts as witnesses, though no pre-war biographical context is given for them or the soldiers. Near the beginning of the film, three nonagenarian women face the camera in a line seated at a table to represent the original Jewish settlers of Kibbutz Nahsholim. They recall settling among the ruins of the Palestinian village of Tantura soon after the brutal activities of the Israeli Army’s (not identified in the film as the Haganah) Alexandroni Brigade that are the controversial focus of the film, and subsequently meeting Palestinians from the friendly nearby village Fureidis who told them what they saw when they were required to bury the bodies. While at least one senior seems empathetic, at their return late in the film she is the one opposed to a memorial being constructed. Surprisingly, an earlier unempathetic woman notes how moved she was to see Holocaust memorials in Warsaw, and a vigorous debate ensues among them, including “They have a right to remember” vs “Let them remember quietly”.
Another female witness, on another kibbutz, is Shushu Katz, the supportive and protective wife of the whistleblower Teddy Katz, whose 1998 MA thesis for Haifa University, based on taped interviews with participants, set off a storm of negative reaction from the press in 2000, including a defamation suit that led to his strokes and other health problems. One of the instruments of their stress and ire is Judge Drora Pilpe of Tel Aviv District Court who dismissed the case and whose decision was upheld by the Supreme Court, after Katz caved into intense pressure to sign an apology, though he quickly tried to rescind it. On screen, Judge Pilpe admits to never hearing the interviews Katz taped, listens to Schwarz’s digitized versions on her lap top, and expresses “It’s a shame”, comforting the dog on her lap “It happened a long time ago.” (preview at 2022 Other Israel Film Festival/ courtesy of Reel Peak Films) Opens in U.S. theaters 12/2/2022. (11/3/2022)
Teaches of Peaches
How did Jewish college student Merrill Beth Nisker in Toronto develop, hone, and expand into her aggressive punk persona “Peaches”? She now calls herself “an iconic feminist musician, producer, director, and performance artist” who spent “two decades pushing boundaries” Berlin-based with her, Austrian documentarian co-directors Philipp Fussenegger and Judy Landkammer astutely edit together her private archival footage and interviews with the 20th anniversary tour of her germinal titular album.
Archival footage shows her starting out as an acoustic folkie in 1994 playing guitar for kids at a daycare center “so they could be who they wanted to be.” Restless to perform as who she wanted to be, she played with short-lived rock ‘n’ roll bands, picking out female musicians for cohorts, and she continues to interact with her bandmates on stage. Her younger roommate in Toronto, who became known as singer/songwriter Feist, describes their goals in a grungy apartment: “Let’s have fun, tell the truth, live in the present, and don’t give a f*** about judgments outside.” [There are no bleeps or blurring in the film.] Peaches only cites rocker Pat Benatar as an influence (does Madonna credit Peaches?), but was determined to make raw songs for empowerment like women really talk, with profanity, and slang for female body parts and processes: “Shake your clits/ Shake your bits” makes for a raucous sing-along.
Peaches also wanted looks that let it all hang out from underwear, in exaggerated make-up and outfits. (At one point on the latest tour she dons a hat that looks like a vagina.) As she took on a stage name from a powerful Nina Simone song, she would play off her friend Chilly Gonsalves on stage, who wryly notes: “People are opposite to how they are on stage.” She acknowledges that even for punk, performance has to be about entertainment, as when she points the microphone at her groin, shakes her body parts, and any other attachments. She also adds gymnastic young back-up dancers who get mostly nude. (I wondered that she did not mention the cellist Charlotte Moorman as a stylistic influence.) But body hair is one of her signature elements. Charlie Le Mindu enjoys showing how the theatrical hair styles and colors he creates for Peaches’ performances also become costumes. At age 56, she still performs in pink hot pants.
While albums of Peaches have been nominated for GLAAD awards and other honors for queer artists, this documentary, that won the Teddy Award for Best LGBTQ Documentary at the Berlin International Film Festival, does not categorize her. Her current boyfriend (and considerable helpmate throughout the tour) Ellison Renee Glen, known as artist Black Cracker, who is interviewed extensively, notes that fans confused by his presence admonish her “I thought you were a lesbian.” He shrugs: “We love each other. Our genitalia don’t define us.” From her earliest days as a performer she has been open about sex and what she sarcastically calls “dirty” and “nasty” combinations, particularly when she had control of her music videos and short films she projects on stage.
Her artistic development is further traced from when she learned to operate the technology of electronic music on stage, and, after floating around European cities, was finally able to get a work visa for Berlin around 2000 to plunge into the city’s artistic experiments. The most fascinating use of editing with archival footage shows the evolution of her lyrics and tunes from early tapes through to when packed-in fans sing the graphic female anthems with her: “F*** the pain away!” Her boyfriend describes the concerts’ climax when she surfs her thrilled audience: “Jesus Christ walked on water and Peaches walks on you.”
She is not just loud and political on stage, where she wore pro-abortion shirts. Since this documentary was shown in Summer 2024 at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, she has been outspoken as a Jew in Berlin against Germans’ tendency to associate criticism of the government of Israel’s actions with antisemitism. Teaches of Peaches provides insightful context of her decades of support and musical declarations for what she calls “progressive” causes. (streamed at 2024 New York LGBTQ Film Festival of NewFest) (10/19/2024)
Tel Aviv Stories (Sipurei Tel-Aviv) (not a stereotype amongst the trio of short films)
The Tenth Man (El Rey Del Once)) (So, nu: As a fan of the oeuvre of Argentine Jewish Daniel Burman since his first films available in the U.S., I’ve always appreciated his sensitivity to Jewish women, even when he’s drawing on autobiographical male life changes. Here, “Eva” (played by Julieta Zylberberg) doesn’t make 100% sense as a young supposedly Orthodox-observant woman who works at Pele Yoetz (Fundación Pele Ioetz), a real Jewish aid foundation in Buenos Aires run by the real Usher Barilka, here playing a version of himself, alongside real volunteers and an actress playing the down-to-earth aunt. While some of the rituals “Eva” follows are familiar, such as lighting the Shabbat candles and not touching men, her silence is a puzzle as some kind of rite. The more she develops a relationship with the central character of “Ariel” (played by Alan Sabbagh), a Jewish actor portraying Usher’s son (who has family in the neighborhood), the more three-dimensional she becomes with a complicated back-story of rebellion against her father and a brief fling. That she naively thought she couldn’t get pregnant in the mikveh could be due to the holy water or holy environment. There’s a brief hint that his mother ran away for some other reason than a similar rebellion. “Ariel” demonstrates the lessons he’s learned from his father, adding his contemporary sensibility, when a mourner, born a boy, wants to fulfill a mother’s wish for a religious ceremony but still insists on wearing a dress for a girl’s bat mitzvah, a demand that the father had refused. While one old employee mutters fagela, “Ariel” doesn’t bat an eye: What rabbi owes us a favor? His aunt immediately remembers one whose mortgage they managed to relieve. The bat mitzvah’s happy tenor voice at the ceremony echoes through the community as a finale.) (previewed at 2016 Tribeca Film Festival) (updated 8/7/2016)
Thelma (courtesy of Magnolia Pictures) (12/2/2024)
Then She Found Me In the book by Elinor Lipman, it is clearer that “Bernice Graves” as the biological mother is Jewish, and the luminous and lively Bette Midler was perfectly cast from the book’s character. It is poignant how “April Epner” [played by director Helen Hunt, who Jewish obsessives claim that while she is not halachically Jewish, her paternal grandmother was Jewish] retains the Jewish traditions of her adoptive mother, “Trudy”, played by Lisa Cohen, who in the book is a Holocaust survivor. The daughter is touchingly shown regularly holding Friday night Shabbat dinner with her family (and frustratingly comments that “Bernice” can stalk her then because she’ll be home), and struggling to find appropriate blessings for the complicated romantic, procreative and biographical stresses in her life. While both Jewish mothers have much larger roles in the book, as the movie is half again a a different story, the novelist herself commented: “A nice touch: Most of the characters are Jewish, and their traditions clearly mean much to them.") (updated 6/25/2008)
There Was Once… (So, nu: Jewish women.)
Thieves By Law The gangsters mention in passing that they married Israeli women, sometimes they were Russians who were already their mistresses, to get citizenship, but then dumped them, in order to use Israel as a money laundering center. (previewed at 2010 Tribeca Film Festival) (5/14/2010)
This Is My Land… Hebron (briefly reviewed at 2011 Human Rights Watch Film Festival, dedicated in memory to my activist dad) (So, nu: The calmly fanatic ultra-Orthodox women interviewed have American accents, and they could be the distant cousins I've been tracking down in my Mandel/Brody family tree research the past year who made aliyah, as they insist they are on the front line for the world against Islamic terrorists in defending their Biblical rights. It is their daughters and sons who are seen with faces distorted by hate writing anti-Arab graffititti, throwing profanity and worse at Palestinian families, and who then serve in the military garrison as their security service. A Rebbitzin is seen leading the taunting charge like a general, though I wasn't sure if she was Rabbi Levinger's wife Miriam who, according to the press notes, "in 1979, led 40 Jewish women and children from Kiryat Arba back into the old city to take over the former Hadassah Hospital which became the first Jewish settlement in downtown Hebron".) (6/21/2011)
This is Where I Leave You (couldn’t bring myself to spend money to see shiva sitting clichés) (9/30/2014)
Those Who Remained (Akik maradtak) - Sensitively set among survivors in Hungary 1948 – 1953, co-writer/director Barnabás Tóth, with co-writer Klára Muhi, based on a 2004 novel by Zsuzsa F. Várkonyi (that I haven’t read yet), the emphasis is on their loneliness as they try to assimilate their grief/guilt and yearn for the emotional and physical warmth of family connections, particularly the usually ignored father/daughter relationship. I was impressed by the inclusion of the complexity of Jewish women’s roles. Spoilers ahead!
16-year-old Klára “Sunny” Wiener (the terrifically volatile Abigél Szőke) was housed at the Israelite Community Orphanage until her great-aunt “Olgi” (Mari Nagy) found her, the daughter of her nephew while searching for my sister’s grandchildren. Writing letters to parents she’s convinced are still alive somewhere, perhaps in hospitals, rebellious “Klára” has flashbacks to her happy childhood with her mother and her younger sister. After being a patient for delayed puberty of a gynecologist, the depressed Dr. Aládar “Aldó” Kőrner (Károly Hajduk) (who has kept the clothes and photos of his late wife and sons, but can’t look at them), she tries to convince him to be her guardian. But with her elderly aunt tearful from dealing with a difficult teenager, he works out an unusual shared arrangement, because If she loses you, it would be horrible.
“Klára” becomes comfortable enough with her replacement father to confess that she was “left behind”, but watched her sister die, that recurs as a nightmare: In the ghetto, a soldier led Jutka to a tree so she’d starve and then they’d let me untie her. Mama told me in parting to take care of Jutka because she’s still small and scared. But I couldn’t take care of her. While he assures her that she couldn’t have, most of her teachers are insensitive to how the trauma she’s been through affects her school work, even as she’s showing signs of anorexia (which has happened within the family of my survivor cousin). An older colleague of the doctor re-connects and updates about he and his wife: We were alone for awhile, but now we have two girls, age 7 and 13., so we can infer they and their daughters are also survivors. At a joint family dinner we learn they, too, have PTSD; the adoptive mother encourages the older daughter, with curly auburn hair, to go play with the other girls, and tells the doctor: She needs her childhood back. Her husband beams that the younger girl is our light, but she doesn’t talk yet.
After “Erzsi” (Katalin Simkó), a sad single survivor about his age, comes to the doctor as a patient, he stirs himself away from any temptation with young “Klára” to invite her out on a date. When he reveals I have a foster daughter since last year. and shyly but proudly talks about her, his date expresses regret: I would have liked a little Klára, after my mother. I feel empty without children. When foster father and daughter are safely seen paired-up with others in 1953, at a birthday party for “Olgi” that turns into a celebration of Stalin’s death, as announced on the radio, the camera rests at the challah on their formally set dining room table, to show that now that family is re-established, they can again connect to their Jewish identity. (at 2020 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum/ courtesy of Menemsha Films) (5/23/2022)
The Three of Us (שלושתנו)
Israeli filmmaker and subject Henya Brodbeker bravely and intimately picked up a camera to cope in cinema verité a shanda in Haredi/Ultra-Orthodox society – the lack of support for children with intellectual disabilities. The hypocrisy is laid bare: the pressure is to wed young (through arranged marriage), have many children to be educated in the community’s religious schools, and follow rigorous daily requirements of life - but do not expose any problems that could even hint at genetic or social problems that could endanger matchmaking. Having and hiding a difficult child stresses the filmmaker’s marriage and her mental health.
While the medical and psychological experts advise she and her supportive husband to integrate their son into regular school from kindergarten on for his maximum social and educational development opportunity (which is ostensibly required by law), the Orthodox schools do not provide services to fit those with deficits into their structure. We watch as religious school after government-funded school they call turns down accepting their autistic son, even suggesting they just keep him home, i.e. out of sight. (One school only responds in Yiddish, indicating they haven’t even integrated into Israel.)
This negative reaction, in addition to just the difficulty of carrying out prayers and rituals alongside an autistic little boy, leads the parents to question their spiritual loyalty to the Haredim commitment. To the discomfiture of both sets of grandparents, they decide to move out of the Bnei Barak enclave near Tel Aviv, to a town whose diversity, including some Orthodox families, they think will include a welcome of a child who is different. Even as they try to fit in by clothes and hair yet don’t make friends easily, we watch as the public schools repeat the same awkward negativity – even as they pressure the municipal and educational bureaucracy. They keep mulling if they should go back to the community that rejected them, despite their anger and disappointment in authorities they used to respect.
The final resolution is a bit confusing as to specifics of geography and educational solution - spoiler alert, we do get to see happiness, albeit that has to ignore the political aspects. Regardless, the family’s struggle is a model for other parents and a passionate lesson for any restricted community and educational system. (previewed at 2023 DOC NYC Festival (11/5/2023)
Three Identical Strangers -- Not invited to a press screening and with no press notes available, I was quite surprised to discover how Jewish the documentary’s story is: the triplets (and the twin women identified who apparently made their own film, as well as possibly all the twins participating unbeknownst to them in the psychological study) were adopted from a Jewish agency that sought out Jewish parents. Many of the photographs and home movies, particularly in the repeated flashbacks, are at Jewish family events such as seders, bar mitzvahs, and weddings (though one wife specifically identifies herself as from an Irish Catholic family.) One thoughtful aunt with an Eastern European accent, (and the women relatives seem much more willing to talk to the director on screen then the male relatives) emphasizes that the use of people for a scientific study has terrible resonance with the Nazis, especially hurtful for her family so decimated in the Holocaust. Maybe because of reluctance to give out spoilers, I saw only The Times of Israel identified them all as Jewish, but none went in to the larger ethics or raison d’etre for this Jewish priority. My husband shrugs that it was chance that the head research psychologist happened to have a connection with this agency, but there’s mention of a “family foundation” behind the study, which could have helped set criteria, including identifying class differences within the New York metropolitan area Jewish community. Their Jewishness, support of psychology, and hints that parental mental illness could have been a selection criteria adds even more maddening frustration if the findings indicated anything about nurture vs. nature.
Director Tim Wardle followed up with Two Identical Strangers - a short film about the reunion of two Jewish women, one in NJ and the other in California, who saw the film, had been adopted through the same agency, and found through DNA tests that they were identical twins separated at five months old. Documenting for The Atlantic, Wardle commented to Emily Buder: “I’ve been struck by how instinctive, magical, and moving genetic reunions can be. There’s something extraordinary and almost transcendent about observing the interaction between two people who have never met before but share the same DNA. It defies rational explanation.” To Wardle’s knowledge, Michele and Allison are the first twin pair to be reunited as a result of seeing the film. “I always knew that there were likely other separated Louise Wise twins out there, but I never imagined another pair would find themselves so quickly after the release of the film, or that I would know about them finding each other before they met in person.” (updated 1/5/2019)
Three Minutes - A Lengthening - Director Bianca Stigter’s documentary is a visual complement and educational guide to Glenn Kurtz’s book Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film, analyzing frame by frame his grandfather’s 16mm, 1938 footage from his trip, with friends and relatives, back to their hometown of Nasielsk, Poland, 30 miles north of Warsaw, now preserved and digitized - less than 18 months before this community would be gone. (The analysis is similar to that of the Warsaw ghetto propaganda footage in A Film Unfinished.) From the images and the interviews with survivors, we see and hear glimpses of females’ lives in a Jewish neighborhood, where half the town was Jewish. A survivor who was a young boy in the footage admits he doesn’t know any of the girls filmed because religious boys and girls were educated separately. Many of the girls and women appear quite secular in appearance, while a few women and girls coming out of the synagogue wear head scarfs. A woman Polish researcher explains how she figured out that the grocery store at the center of the town square was owned by a woman. A survivor tells how a German officer helped him save his girlfriend. But while different voices are heard, and archival documents read, the images on screen are always from the original footage, particularly the lively faces. (at 2021 DOC NYC/ courtesy of Neon – Super Ltd.) (1/8/2023)
Three Mothers (Shalosh Ima’ot) (missed it at the NY Sephardic Jewish Film Festival so I appreciated catching it at Israel at 60 at Film at Lincoln Center)
Three Promises (previewed at 2012 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (In just 19 minutes, the story of how a mother and her two daughters were saved illustrates the Sephardic Jewish community in Serbia before, during, and after the Holocaust, through family photographs enlivened by animation, personal testimonies, and empathy for conversion in tribute to the heroic priest who saved them.) (1/22/2012)
Tickling Leo (So, nu: The only Jewish woman is the feisty Hungarian mother, seen in flashbacks. The climactic revelation is that she objected to negotiating with the Nazis to save her family, not the financial cost per se, but at the expense of not warning the Jewish community about the death camps so they could be encouraged to flee. But another viewer and I differed on plot specifics of who did what to her, though that was crucial to her husband's and son's estrangement, and another family's rescue.) (For background clarification see Killing Kasztner: The Jew Who Dealt With Nazis.) (8/30/2009)
Tikkun (So, nu: There’s a conventional Haredi mother trying to cope with death and its defiance, a prostitute in a Jerusalem brothel with a big sense of humor, and a secular woman whose sympathy to the risen may doom her in the climax when the fleeing protagonist witnesses a young woman driver’s car crash on a dark misty highway.) (previewed at 2016 New Directors/New Films of Film at Lincoln Center/MoMA) (3/10/2016/6/10/2016)
- Director Maya Zinshtein
‘Til Kingdom Come - So, nu: I think a big reason why director Maya Zinshtein, whose interview questions are heard but she’s not seen, is greeted so affably by Christian Evangelicals in Kentucky, at Christian broadcasting in Virginia, and as they lobby in Washington, D.C. is because she does not look like their American stereotype of a Jewish woman, with her straight Auburn hair and, to them, exotic accent. She also interviews two Jewish women, Yael Epstein, daughter of the founder of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ), who dresses like an observant wife and mother in Israel, and literally lets down her hair in the U.S. where she has no problem taking contributions from poor people in the apparently full belief that giving to Israel blesses them for success. In Israel, Zinshtein follows Ultra-Orthodox settler Sondra Oster Baraz, founder of Christian Friends of Israeli Communities (CFOIC), as she tours an evangelical group around the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) settlement of Karnei Shomron and promotes her domestic political agenda. (10/26/2020)
See with: Kings of Capitol Hill
Time for Ilhan (So, nu: it’s unusual to see an American documentary where the older Jewish woman incumbent politican, in the Minnesota House Representative race for District 60B, is the antagonist – where the protagonist is a young, Somali-born, Muslim immigrant, Ilhan Omar. In following the insurgent’s campaign, the film is careful to and is fair to include interviews with the older woman and a scene where the insurgent’s staff stresses to volunteers to avoid any hints of antisemitism. But they also keep assuming that all older white [i.e. Jewish] voters will vote for the incumbent – who came in 3rd in the primary, behind the two Somali Muslim immigrant candidates.)
(preview at 2018 Tribeca Film Festival)
Director/producer Norah Shapiro’s press notes describe her: “Phyllis Kahn, a trailblazer in her own right, is tied for the longest-serving legislator in Minnesota state history, serving her 22nd term in office. Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., Kahn known for her pugnacious style came into office as part of a feminist wave in the 1970s. As one of the few scientists serving in state legislatures throughout the country, as a biophysicist, she sponsored the Minnesota Clean Indoor Air Act in 1975 making Minnesota the first in the nation to restrict smoking in public places. Over her 44 years in office, she has fended off multiple challengers to her seat.”
Shapiro describes herself: “I also recognized that in following Ilhan’s attempt to unseat her 43 year incumbent opponent and defeat her male challenger, I would be able to delve into themes about what representative democracy could really look like, while also exploring dynamics of race, gender, and Islamophobia, all issues that I connect to personally as a white, Jewish, American woman.” (updated 5/3/2018)
From the point of view of early 2019, after Ilhan’s swearing-in, the documentary’s exclusion of issues of antisemitism now seems naïve, including that the incumbent didn’t bring it up. The discovery of a 9:15 AM - 16 Nov 2012 tweet set off a furious reaction: “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel. #Gaza #Palestine #Israel” While this was made worse by a 2019 tweet about Jewish lobbying money that she apologized for under pressure from Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, why wasn’t the earlier comment considered in this film or her attitudes towards Jews and Israel?
In The New York Times on 3/6/2018 Thomas Friedman noted in his column what he has in common with her: “The first thing we have in common is that I was raised in the Fifth District of Minnesota, specifically the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park. I lived there until I was 20. It was a freaky place — a crazy mix of Minnesota Jews (we called ourselves “the Frozen Chosen’’) and Scandinavians that produced a uniquely tolerant civic culture and an interesting group of neighbors: Al Franken, the Coen brothers, Peggy Orenstein, Norm Ornstein, Michael Sandel, Sharon Isbin, Marc Trestman and lots of others… Our little town was immortalized in the Coen brothers’ 2009 movie A Serious Man. I still feel very close to the community there and go home often. St. Louis Park welcomed Jews who wanted to get out of the inner city of Minneapolis back in the 1950s — when other suburbs still had restrictions on selling homes to “Hebrews.’’ So I was proud to see St. Louis Park also welcome Muslim Somali refugees like Omar a half-century later, and then elect her to Congress…Ilhan Omar represents, among other neighborhoods, a significant and liberal Jewish community — my hometown. I can tell you that a vast majority of Jews there would be proud if their congresswoman used her links to American Jews and Muslims to be a bridge builder for peace in the Middle East and America, not just another Aipac/Israel basher. She is young and very new to the national spotlight. Friends of mine back home tell me her humanistic instincts are impressive and authentic. I don’t know if it’s her or her advisers, but she’s gotten herself into a bad place — a huge missed leadership opportunity.”(updated 3/7/2019)
Time of Favor (Ha- Hesder) (review forthcoming, but the sultry, frustrated daughter of a fanatical West Bank settler Orthodox rabbi is certainly unusual on film, though that has been lampooned by Gina Gershon in Curb Your Enthusiasm as Anna.)
Tiny Shoulders: Rethinking Barbie - Andrea Nevins’ documentary clearly and extensively credits the late Ruth Hendler for the Barbie doll idea, development, and growth, over the objections of men (as well as her post-Barbie career of breast prosthetics), and identifies her as Jewish. Several of the prominent women critics interviewed are also Jewish, including Gloria Steinem, Amanda Foreman, and Peggy Orenstein. (preview at 2018 Tribeca Film Festival) (5/3/2018)
Tiny Tim: King For A Day - While Swedish director Johan von Sydow, and his enterprising archival and animation team, were unaware of the 1960’s phenom they document sensitively and thoroughly, I was familiar with his pop culture presence, so was surprised that biographer Justin A. Martell, author of Eternal Troubadour: The Improbable Life Of Tiny Tim (2016), had discovered that Herbert Butros Khaury’s mother Tillie was a Russian Jew. (A manifest for the S.S. Germania is shown, but Martell identifies that 20-year-old Toiba Staff sailed with her Yiddish-speaking, Orthodox Jewish mother and four sisters from Brest-Litovsk, Belarus on the SS Kroonland in 1913.) Her family rejected her for taking up with a Lebanese Catholic, and Herbie had both of his parents buried in a Christian cemetery under an image of Jesus Christ, as seen. The documentary details that both his parents were abusive, but he would return to his mother when he was down on his luck, and there are many photographs of her, including on an album cover, and clips of interviews with her in the film, including in the audience at The Ed Sullivan Show. A couple of cousins are interviewed who are apparently from his maternal side, as well as women identified as “friends”, perhaps from his old Washington Heights neighborhood, with Jewish last names. (preview at 2020 DOC NYC Festival) (2021 theatrical release via Juno Films) (11/13/2020)
Tip of My Tongue
In her 50th year, Lynne Sachs gathered together friends and strangers born in her same birth year of 1958 to reflect on the intersection of their personal lives and the wider world, through talk, poetry, archival and memory images. The only reference to her Jewish heritage is an opening Super 8 home movie of her family’s annual “Jewish Christmas”, from the year their formally dressed guests included a Negro couple. The timeline events include 9/11. (seen in the World Premiere at MoMA’s 2017 Documentary Fortnight) (2/26/2017)
To Dust - As written by director Shawn Snyder with Jason Begue, the Jewish women are secondary to the two male leads, particularly Rockland County area Hassidic cantor “Shmuel” (the mesmerizing Géza Röhrig). But at least they are three-dimensional characters: his beloved dead wife “Rivkah” (Leanne Michelle Watson); his traditional mother (to be identified) with covered hair who has evidently cared for his two sons since his wife took ill; and the very sympathetic, grief-understanding, childless widow “Shprintzel” (Isabelle Phillips) she matchmakes. (preview at 2018 Tribeca Film Festival) (4/11/2018)
To Kid or Not To Kid - Among the few people 40-something director Maxine Trump interviews about attitudes towards choosing or not to have children are two presumably Jewish baby boomer women friends, one with children, one not. The mother, I think named Marcia, remembers how the pro-natalist pressure started at her wedding reception, but that’s all the reflection, with no ethnic or religious insight. (at 2018 DOC NYC Festival) (11/24/2019)
To See If I’m Smiling (Lir’ot Im Ani Mehayechet) (review forthcoming - previewed at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival at Lincoln Center) A gripping non-fiction take on Close To Home (Karov La Bayit that is more than about women in different services of the Israeli military, but provides additional insight into attitudes that have been explored in less explanatory films about the Iraq/Afghanistan Wars, particularly about Abu Ghraib. Women prove to be more thoughtful and honest about their feelings than interviews with the usual macho men. The title refers to a photograph that haunts a woman soldier, much like the ones Errol Morris resorts to recreating in S.O.P., and leads me to wonder if research has been done as to if it was just the invention of the Brownie camera that led everyday people to stop freezing/grimacing at cameras and instead freezing/smiling. (6/15/2008)
The Tollbooth
To Take A Wife (Ve'Lakhta Lehe Isha) (review forthcoming from DVD) (Part 2 of a trilogy of family films co-written and directed by star Ronit Elkabetz with her brother, the couple’s strife at the center of the Moroccan immigrant story is more subtle than the usual stereotype of a rigid Orthodox husband repressing a modern-seeking wife, as it’s much more about her frustrations dealing with four kids (infant through sullen teen), while weary of keeping to religious rules. As each fight naturally and slowly builds (one climaxes with her spiteful lighting up a cigarette on Shabbat), the reverberations onto the children is heart-breaking, while the extended family’s aggressive interference is literally suffocating her. Not that the alternative of a faithfully adulterous lover is a realistic temptation.) (12/21/2014)
Le Train (While I haven’t yet read Georges Simenon’s 1958 novel this is based on, seeing this 1973 film in 2012, at Film Forum, makes for an intriguing comparison to how French Jewish women have been portrayed in films since President Jacques Chirac’s apology in 1995 for government collusion with the Nazis. The 1940 setting itself is fraught, with most of the film on a cattle car, not of Jews to their doom, but of scared southbound refugees fleeing the Germans and their strafing planes, passing the crowded roads seen in such films as Strayed (Les Égarés) and posthumously revealed to have been mordantly captured by Irène Némirovsky in Suite Française, intercut with real archival footage of the traumatic trek. Here, the beautiful and very sexy Romy Schneider is first shunned for her German accent that the other refugees assume is Alsatian (a bias incisively described in Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story). But after she slowly seduces the bespectacled, mild-mannered, married, expectant father from the Belgian border (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant), patching then taking off first her nylons from her long legs then her lacey silk underpants (yet somehow her tight bun never unravels), she gradually reveals that her family was well-traveled and well-to-do, then much later says that she was fleeing a transit camp in Belgium, then that she’s German, then that she’s Jewish, then that her mother’s Jewish, then that her father was arrested for their marriage, then her (presumably non-Jewish) husband taken for his journalist activities for “liberty”, then her name “Anna Kupfer”. But her lover is completely oblivious to the Germans’ persecution of the Jews to the point of clueless naiveté, even though in the opening scene he’s seen as a radio repairman who avidly listens to the war news. When they reach the end of the train line, he gives her cover of his wife’s identity, which comes back to haunt them two years later in an epilogue (I think that’s made more confusing than necessary in the English subtitles) in the police station (misidentified by many reviewers as the Gestapo), past two weeping women with yellow stars, that both tests their still smoldering passion and the police’s perception that she’s his mistress and a German (not clear Jewish) spy in the Resistance. (12/14/2012 )
A Tramway in Jerusalem - In Amos Gitai’s portrait of the transit crossing the Old City, and new, there are few Israeli Jewish women, and they have auburn hair and they’re usually talking about sex. (Guess he’s picked up that stereotype from his exile in France). (at 2019 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum)
Transamerica (Technically, only the lead character's father turns out to be Jewish, so the loud-mouthed, obnoxious mother must not be a Jewish stereotype.)
Transit Anna Seghers’s novel was written in 1942 before the Holocaust was clear to her as a German who chose Communism over her Jewish heritage in leaving in 1934 after her arrest. So the book just makes passing reference to Jews in hopeless ghettoes and brief glimpses of Jewish women who can’t bring themselves to leave the continent and mention of ones who were able to leave in time. While the book cynically sees the entrance and exit role of Marseille as ongoing for centuries, the emphasis on “Georg” (played by the magnetic Franz Rogowski) as an escapee from political prison with a stolen identity among various misfits fleeing fascism more than Nazism explicitly enables director Christian Petzold to adapt the period book much more chillingly for the rise of fascism in Europe again amidst a refugee crisis. Petzold does make one not particularly appealing woman Jewish and at least gives her agency over her fate, compared to many others. (My commentary at the preview at 2018 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (9/27/2018)
Treasure
- Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry in TREASURE Credit: Bleecker Street and FilmNation - (seen at 2024 Tribeca Film Festival/ courtesy of Bleecker Street Films)
Treasure is director/co-writer Julia Von Heinz’s “third part of my Aftermath trilogy, which deals with the effects of the Holocaust on subsequent generations”, since Hanna’s Journey (Hannas Reise) (2014) and And Tomorrow The Entire World (Und morgen die ganze Welt) (2020, on Netflix).
Heinz describes her mother as “the daughter of a Jewish survivor and part of that ‘2nd generation’” – like the author of the source material Lily Brett (who has written other books related to this theme that I mean to read), and the female character in this adaptation. Most audiences won’t be aware that the story also resonates from the lead actors’ families: Stephen Fry explored his Jewish family’s fate in Europe on the British genealogy show Who Do You Think You Are (his episode runs in 7+ clips); Lena Dunham learned of hers on PBS’s Finding Your Roots.
While the film opens with “Inspired by a True Story”, Lily Brett’s book Too Many Men is not a memoir; it is an autobiographical novel, though there is a photo of the author and her father before the final credits. The adaptation covers just a sliver of the 666-page book, which is full of rage against Nazis, Poles, and the commercialization of the vanished, murdered Jews and the Holocaust, and calls that out as anti-Semitic. The daughter constantly corrects Poles who call Auschwitz a “museum” to say “death camp”. Jen Benstock’s short The Holocaust Tourist (2005) and Sergei Loznitsa’s documentary Austerlitz (2016), also make that point about Auschwitz, to the extent that Loznitsa will only let his film be shown in non-profit settings. Jake Paltrow’s June Zero, set in 1962, notes the beginnings here of what a colleague of mine calls “Thano Tourism”. I wonder what the author and her surrogate would say about Krakow expanding its fake philo-semitism with a popular Festival of Jewish Culture, including contemporary klezmer bands, while Warsaw now has Polin, a legitimate museum of the history of Polish Jews of the past.
As the daughter of two survivors, Dunham’s character has the inherited trauma known to be experienced by “the second generation”. Through the father’s constant fears for his daughter if she goes out alone, the film is also haunted by stories of how Poles treated the few returning Jews after the war, as tensely portrayed in Aftermath (Pokłosie) and 1945, and the Polish government forcing out any remaining Jews in 1968, seen in such films as My Australia (Moja Australia) and Kredens. (7/6/2024)
The Tree Of Life (So, nu: The woman director, and her aunt, never seem to question that they can’t seem to find out anything about their female progenitors, or at least the only women mentioned are the gentiles their eminent ancestors fancied. That the aunt is a puppeteer is what inspired the director to have these ancestors be played by marvelously costumed marionettes by Beata Ihnatowicz.) (9/12/2008)
Trezoros: The Lost Jews Of Kastoria The detailed story of the rise and fall of the Jewish community in this Greek town is equally, and movingly, told by male and female survivors, and an extraordinary array of photographic and (home movie?) archival footage. Lena Elias notes the reaction of the women in her barracks when they arrived in Auschwitz who couldn’t believe they were Jews because they didn’t speak Yiddish, and vice versa because they spoke Ladino. She chanted The Schma to convince them – reminding us that there are fewer documentations of the experiences of Sephardic Jews than Ashkenazis. She also provides more background on her post-war travels as a Displaced Person than most such documentaries do, with two other women briefly add what it was like walking home: “We were the last ones so nobody believed it was us.” (10/30/2016)
The Trials of Alan Dershowitz - Filmmaker John Curtin follows the notorious criminal defense litigator’s lead in this defensive bio-doc. As in all “Let Us All Praise Famous Jewish Men” style films, there’s the usual reference to his mother, while he was first living in Williamsburg, then grew up in Borough Park, Brooklyn as “brilliant. She was ambitious for me and my brother.” He crows an anecdote of his allegedly rambunctious days at yeshiva where she was called into the principal’s office after his altercation with another student, and she had prepared a detailed forensic chart demonstrating that he could not have been responsible for the other’s injury. He later jumps to when he helped the ACLU’s 1977 case for a notorious march in Skokie, Il: “My mother called me on the phone- why are you defending the Nazis. I’m your mother - pick your side -Nazis or Jews. I believe absolutely in the First Amendment.” One of the Jewish women heard from is Nadine Strassen, who was Director of the ACLU at that time, and her favorable comments on him are included throughout the documentary. While I’ll infer that his second wife Carolyn Cohen, who is frequently seen and heard including about joining her husband at Jeffrey Epstein events “in all of his homes”, is Jewish, a more caustic Jewish woman commentator is Gloria Allred. His example of a client he “despised” was a Jewish woman - the tax-avoiding “Queen of Mean” Leona (Rosenthal) Helmsley; he says that after witnessing her abrasive treatment of an employee he told her he would not be seen in public with her outside of court. (at 2023 DOC NYC) (11/10/2023)
The Trotsky (The stepmother tries very hard to make a Jewish home, even as her militant stepson constantly ridicules her for being a gentile, so it's unclear if she's formally converted.) (previewed at 2010 Tribeca Film Festival) (My colleague James Van Maanen followed up on my recommendation to enjoy it On Demand.) (updated 1/3/2011)
Tsili - I haven’t yet read Romanian-Israeli writer and survivor Aharon Appelfeld’s 1982 novel Tsili: The Story of a Life, who said in an interview: “When I wrote Tsili I was interested in the possibilities of naïveness in art” – about a girl just a bit older than he was then. With mostly spoken Yiddish, this is almost a non-verbal portrait of a Jewish girl growing into womanhood while hiding in the Ukrainian forests south of Chernivitsi during the Holocaust, played expressively by frequent Amos Gitai star Sara Adler, with voice-over readings by Lea Koenig. (at 2015 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum)
Turn Every Page: The Adventures Of Robert Caro & Robert Gottlieb - Directed over five years by Lizzie Gottlieb, Robert’s daughter, she includes many references and photographs of each of their mothers, who I presume were Jewish, as each are described as “Jewish boys”. Both sons adored these mothers who encouraged their education and intellectualism, and both mothers died when their sons were young. Ina Sloshberg Caro, Robert’s wife and sole researcher, is interviewed extensively; her own books are not mentioned, though her specialty in French history is implied with an amusing anecdote. (at 2022 Tribeca Film Festival/ courtesy of Sony Classics) (12/9/2022)
Turn Left At The End Of The World (Sof Ha'Olam Smola) (2004) Set just after the Six Day War in 1968, when revolution is in the air elsewhere in the world, the unusual focus are Jewish immigrants from India and Morocco. They are thrown together in a desert moshav where none of the Jewish Agency’s promises for their new lives are being fulfilled. (The “based on a true story” inspiration wasn’t in the subtitles, so at some point I’ll listen to the director’s DVD commentary for an explanation.) Central are two teenage girls who befriend each other, at first in broken English and Hebrew: the Moroccan “Nicole Shushan” (played by Neta Garty) and from India “Sarah Talkar” (played by Liraz Charhi). Their female role models are problematical: “Nicole”s mother is dying, while her sister is obsessed with her upcoming marriage and her weight. So her mentor is the sexually aggressive widow “Simone Toledano” (played by Aure Atika). Even with that direction, I just am no longer comfortable with the all-too-common story line of high school girls initiating affairs with a male teacher, let alone with brief nudity. “Sarah”s sari-wearing mother “Rachel” (played by Kruttika Desai) is traditional and fearful, not wanting her to serve in the military, compounded by her husband’s affair with “Simone”. Both generations seem to be surrounded by nasty mean girls in this small community where everyone knows everyone else’s business. (in “Ari Nesher Retrospective” at 2019 Israel Film Center Festival) (6/8/2019)
Two Lives Plus One (Deux vies... plus une) (briefly reviewed at 2009 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (It took me awhile to figure out the relationships as I couldn't believe the central woman was really married to such an older man and the teenager was not her sister but her daughter. But the warmth of the family's Shabbat dinners at her Yiddishe mother's apartment, her care for her husband and friends (including the director in a cameo as a mentor), as well as her frustrations with her daughter and fairly innocent flirtation with her editor make her rebellion and journey of self-discovery much less strident than Jewish women are usually portrayed. I can't find biographical confirmation other than her marriage to a Cohen for why Emmanuelle Devos is so often cast as a Jew, though, not, ironically, in the Holocaust-themed One Day You’ll Understand (Plus Tard, Tu Comprendras) where she was the gentile wife.) (1/18/2009)
Two Lovers - Writer/director James Gray continues his exploration of NY outer borough angst with Joaquin Phoenix (whose sister also reflected her Jewish heritage in Esther Kahn). This time he is "Leonard Kraditor" who is facing the kind of romantic choice that recalls A Place in the Sun, The Heartbreak Kid and The Way We Were, but with far more sympathy for Jewish women. Posted 2/11/2009, Stuart Klawans discussed with the director how this is his most Jewish movie to date. Yes, he's torn between a woman in the image of the director's wife, a blonde shiksa "Michelle" (Gwyneth Paltrow, who had challenged the director to write a nonviolent movie for her to do with him), longing for her as if he were in Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love (Fa yeung nin wa):, and the brunette "Sandra Cohen" (Vinessa Shaw née Schwartz). But the lovely "Sandy" is neither a milquetoast nor a clingy whiner. Close to her family but also working independently, she is forthright and sexy. So optimistic that her fave film is The Sound of Music, she is emotionally protective of "Lenny" as a depressed guy whose previous romance with a Jewish woman was poisoned by genetics; that his epiphany about her comes through visually via a glove she gave him is nicely symbolic. While in contrast Paltrow brings a touch of gentrified Hoboken and working in "the city" to "the nowhere" of the Brighton Beach boardwalk, she's a druggie mistress of a successful lawyer who has moved out of the old neighborhood (he's installed her near his mother for a convenient alibi).
Steve Erickson further asked the director in 2/13/2009 SpoutBlog interview: "Do you see it as important or incidental that Leonard is torn between a blonde WASP and a woman who’s also Jewish?" Answer: "I did not do that by accident. What I was trying to do there was use a cultural convention to emphasize the fickle, almost immature nature of desire. Our desire is based so clearly on superficial elements outside what a person really is. Leonard’s lack of attraction to Sandra is probably connected to the fact that her parents are pushing her on him and that she comes from the same community. His attraction to Michelle is based on equally superficial elements. So I was trying to say that the nature of desire leaves us grappling with our projections of other people." I interpreted the ending as a lovely romance of realism over fantasy, even as 2nd choice – in what might be the first time the romantic choice of a Jewish woman is presented in an American film as positive, even if ambiguously. Gray interpreted the ending to Ryan Stewart in a 2/26/2009 Slant Magazine interview: "[Y]ou know the last line of Visconti's White Nights, which was loose source material for this—I'm paraphrasing—he talks about how wonderful it was to have loved a person even though he didn't get her. What I intended was for it to be ambiguous, frankly. The facts of the story would be clear—you wouldn't be watching and not comprehending—but the point would be ambiguous. You could watch and see it as a happy ending or think that it's quite sad and have a bittersweet quality. I wanted both readings to be possible. . ."
I haven't found interviewers who have asked him about the portrayal of "Leonard"s mother "Ruth" (as played by Isabella Rossellini, not her first Jewish portrayal in films), who seemed naturally concerned for an adult son who is on anti-suicide medications while still living at home, but whom some critics interpreted as a Rothian smotherer. Even "Sandy"s mother "Carol" (played by singer Julie Budd) is portrayed as a nice lady, who puts on a warm, loving bar mitzvah and commissions "Leonard" to do artsy black-and-white photographs. (2/21/2009)
Tzeva Adom: Color Red (short) (So, nu: (seen at 2018 Other Israel Film Festival) The Los Angeles-based director Michael Horwitz sought out an Israeli to play “Ronit”, a soldier who runs into boys from Gaza on patrol and ends up communicating with them via social media amidst renewed rocket attacks. Actress Shani Atias completed her army service before coming to the U.S. to be an actress, and helped add appropriate military terms to the script. The story includes a younger sister “Noa” (Kenzie Laurel Mintz Caplan) who first discovers her sister’s confrontation has gone viral on YouTube. Despite efforts to make the language authentic, the script, co-written by C. Ashleigh Caldwell, feels like an American attitude about seeing more potential in social media for cross-Israeli/Palestinian communication. (11/5/2018)
Ultimatum (seen at 2010 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (So, nu: the emphasis for the Jewish women in this crisis situation is mostly on the powerful mother/daughter connections – from France over phone lines, from Haifa onto dangerous roads, from a maternity ward to having to put the baby in a separate plastic-wrapped crib during an air raid – and all gain in strength to stay in Israel. The Holocaust survivor who was shorn of her mother can't cope.) (1/25/2010)
Unbroken
The Webers’ experiences during the Holocaust in Germany were so unusual that they made headlines as the only seven Jewish siblings to survive together. In the years that debut feature director Beth Lane determined to make a documentary about her mother’s family, she creatively and insightfully combined a multiplicity of research, archival photographs and footage/home movies, oral history, “road trip” site visits, interviews, and animation techniques to plunge us into their extended relationships pre/during/immediate and decades post the Holocaust, while throughout she contemporizes its relevance, per her original title “Would You Hide Me”. [I researched more background to yet include.] (at 2023 DOC NYC) (11/14/2023)
Uncertain Terms (seen in 2014 Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You at MoMA) (So, nu: While I haven’t seen writer/director Nathan Silver’s earlier films, and he plays the son here, that also starred his mother Cindy Silver to know if she was explicitly identified as Jewish in those, her presence here, in a story inspired by her own past as an unwed mother awaiting the birth of her child in a special home on Staten Island, seems definitely Jewish. (Like the character she improvised here, my aunt was the house mother, or administrator, in such a residence in South Jersey.) I was impressed that her character insists the girls work on completing their GEDs, learn baby care, and realistically plan for the future – notably unlike the didactic, weepy Christian screed Gimme Shelter earlier the same year that focused on some renowned nun whose work is deemed a success just by stopping abortions. She is also firmly against abusive boyfriends. At the Q & A, she noted that it had taken her decades to be open about her experience 48 years ago, and she’s been surprised and gratified that the film has touched women to tearfully reveal their secret pregnancies from the past, and their children put up for adoption. (12/15/2014)
Uncle Howard So, nu: While I’ve seen personal documentaries before to rediscover the life and achievements of a relative who died of AIDS during the epidemic (such as Memories Of A Penitent Heart), none were this Jewish. Most people will care about this portrait due to the involvement of executive producer Jim Jarmusch, and the clips of the likes of William S. Burroughs, Robert Wilson, Madonna, and the downtown demi-monde of the 1980’s, But I thought director Aaron Brookner is very sensitive in his extensive interviews with his grandmother about her changing attitude over the years towards her gay son, his lover, and the disease that killed him, with a well-chosen diversity of home movies and photographs to show the genuine love between the uncle and his mother and his grandmother, as well as his brother’s very young sons, including the director. The mother gives a more nuanced, and not unfounded, concern: “I thought he would never have children. I was crying. . . I met Brad after he told me about him happy they made each other, walking and holding hands some place in Village. Garndpa and I were going on trip. We were going on a trip and needed someone to stay with the dogs, so Howard and Brad were. I was very nervous meeting Brad – I thought he was going to be an older man taking advantage of my young son, and then Brad steps off the plane looking so young and gorgeous!” The surviving lover Brad Gooch, who I don’t think is Jewish, has a more jaundiced view of her and Howard’s attitude, dismissing that evidently oft-told tale. (previewed at 2016 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (9/30/2016)
Uncut Gems - Unfortunately, writer/directors Josh and Benny Safdie created “Howard Ratner” (Adam Sandler)’s aggrieved wife “Dina” (Idina Menzil) as a stereotypical Long Island Jewish spouse, proud that she still fits into the dress she wore to her teenage daughter’s bat mitzvah. Her father (played by Judd Hirsch) apparently gave her husband a leg up in the jewelry business, and continues to do him business favors. A bit unconventionally, his mistress/girlfriend “Julia” (Julia Fox, who has had several careers since moving from Catholic School in Italy to NYC’s Upper East Side then to the East Village) is not a blonde bimbo, but looks like a younger, sexier, urban version of his suburban wife, and will probably be perceived by audiences as a putative Jew, as a brunette with a thick Long Island-sounding accent. Working with her lover on 47th Street, she is a full partner in his various gambling shenanigans and keeps declaring her love for him; Josh Safdie in the press notes says they were inspired by a real person’s “kind of toxic, very, very hyper-romantic relationship.” (12/1/2019)
Under the Domim Tree (Etz Hadomim Tafus) (co-written, produced and co-starring Gila Almagor, based on her memoir)
Under The Same Sun (previewed at 2013 Other Israel Film Festival) (So, nu: In my recent exploration of my father’s family, I’ve discovered that I have cousins who are settlers and look on FaceBook just like the resentful in-laws of the Israeli businessman, bringing home to me just how personally difficult future peace will be.) (12/4/2013)
The Unorthodox (Ha-Bilti Rishmi'im)
(photo: Yaron Scharf); 
The Q & A with director Eliran Malka at the 2019 New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival helped explain the background of Israeli politics and the role of women in his debut feature. Malka identifies with what would be called in the U.S. “Modern Orthodox” and is a graduate of Ma’aleh School, the Jerusalem film school that accomodates observant students, whose productions will probably now be favored more by Israel’s Culture Minister. He is already the creator of the acclaimed TV series Shababnikim, slang for Haredi bad boys, that I haven’t yet been able to watch with English subtitles.
Malka was inspired by a little-known interview he discovered with Shas (Sephardic Torah Education Party)’s Mizrahi founder Ya’acov Cohen, and the story follows Cohen’s point of view. Set in 1983 Jerusalem, the opening scene is in an Ashkenazi-run, women’s yeshiva (the apparent high school is called a “seminary” in the English subtitles I was dependent on). Cohen (played out of retirement by the charismatic Shuli Rand who had turned down all films since Ha Ushpizin) is furious that his daughter (played by Or Lumbrozo) was expelled. When he goes in to protest, it’s apparent that one teacher after another can’t identify her or confuses her with other students (though his teenage daughter also can’t tell one Ashkenazi name of the teachers from another – and with their wigs, covered heads, long sleeves and skirts, they do all look and sound alike.) The principal finally claims that they “have heard from reliable sources” i.e. gossip (so much for lashon ha-ra!) that the daughter has a denim skirt with a slit, and she has a TV. An observant “traditionalist” (is what Malka calls him, like the protestors in The Women’s Balcony (Ismach Hatani)), her father gets angrier and angrier at these accusations.
Cohen is convinced the solution for such discrimination is a political party that will represent Sephardi interests, particularly with the government-funded religious schools in Jerusalem. As he runs an ever mushrooming political campaign with more and more negotiations with rabbis based on real people (for legal reasons, the other names are changed and some characters are combinations), his daughter fades more and more into the background, just helping him get the slate votes in first the municipal, then the Knesset election. A questioner in the audience challenged that to the writer/director, and he responded that he had to cut ancillary scenes with her.
In order to cast Rand who would not appear in a film as a husband with a woman who is not his actual wife, Malka modified the script so Cohen is widowed and the leading woman is not his wife, but his sister (played by Shifi Aloni), who has had primary child care responsibilities for the daughter, as well as bringing meals to her brother at his print shop and dinners at home. In strictly Orthodox attire, she is constantly hectoring Cohen to deal with the Ashkenazim, like she talks the yeshiva into taking back the daughter – though she discovers that he has spent her mother’s inheritance which was paying her tuition, on his campaign. He retorts with a nasty comment about her being childless. Like the gender issues that fade away in the film, Malka noted he intends the party’s winning trajectory as an indirect criticism of Shas since it moved beyond Cohen to become more Haredi and more corrupt. (The Hebrew title translates more literally to “Not Official”.)
Malka claimed to have re-discovered Cohen, such that after the film opened to great success in Israel Shas leaders staged an apology session at his grave for forgetting him – though the director said Cohen’s daughter hadn’t seen the film. But I remember from David Benchetrit’s ground-breaking doc-series Kaddim Wind: Moroccan Chronicles (Ruah Kaddim – Chronika Marokait) (2003), which also lacked a gender focus, an interview with a frustrated Mizrahi leader vowing that he would “out-Ashkenazi the Ashkenazim” by becoming ultra-Orthodox, like Agudath Israel Party, a phrase repeated here.
Though Malka doesn’t quite achieve his goal of “making it feel like an American movie”, Ophir Leibovitch’s delightfully unstereotyped score includes a funny musical dream sequence. A film that can make more secular me not just empathize with folks like my cousins, but also be entertained by the Ultra-Orthodox is unusually successful. (Thanks to distributor Go2 Films for additional information.) (also at 2019 Israel Film Center Festival) (updated 3/25/2019)
Unsettled (So, nu: Very unusual range of articulate young Israeli women and mothers of sons are interviewed.)
Unsettling (So, nu: Director Iris Zaki is the on-screen protagonist throughout this not very successful documentary. She sets herself up outside a café in a typically mixed secular/religious West Bank settlement, announces she’s a leftist and hopes to talk. Only a minimal variety of people do, including a couple of women. (details forthcoming) (An 18-minute version called “Natural Born Settlers” is streaming at New York Times “Op-Docs as of 3/19/2019) (preview at 2018 Other Israel Film Festival) (10/26/2018-6/1/2019)
Untitled (Tania Project) -- Filmmaker Rima Yamazaki was given access to the complete archives of the muralist Tatiana Lewin by her husband. Known as “Tania”, her striking geometric designs in Lower Manhattan turned flat brick walls into op-art illusions. The director’s eerily deadpan voice-over goes through Tania’s biography, with photographs and writings, from pre-war Europe, to Montreal, to New York, where her artistic goals slammed into conventional thinking: “My paintings were too large for a woman, said The New York Times…I painted like a man…My dealer tried not to reveal my sexual identity to collectors.” Seen in models and in-progress photographs, her work became more sculptural, including the ark at the Tribeca Synagogue. She was just developing the potential for using the roofs of Manhattan as alternative art spaces when she died at 62 years old in 1982. I hope those famliar murals aren’t anonymous any more, but are clearly attributed to her by name. (in “Short Films on Creativity” at 2022 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/ The Jewish Museum) (1/25/2022)
Untogether - (previewed at 2018 Tribeca Film Festival) British-American Writer/Director Emma Forrest has blogged and written about feeling and looking “Jewey” (and even attracting nasty anti-Semitic attacks on her essays and memoirs, which I haven’t read yet), through her American maternal roots. So it’s notable she features actresses The Kirke Sisters (Jemima and Lola, in their first sororal time together on screen) when Jemima, in particular, has had a similar image in and out of Girls. While both fictional sisters have daddy issues with their Jewish father, the younger Lola’s “Tara” seeks to get in touch with her Jewish identity in a very L.A. way – by getting drawn into the synagogue led by Billy Crystal’s “Rabbi David”, who has been particularly reaching out to millennials with hip-sounding sermons and musical shabbatons. (This is in the tradition of Shlomo Carlebach, and the shule band Distant Cousins does a Carlebach version of “Lecha Dodi”.) “Tara”, a massage therapist, enthusiastically goes all in and, not too credibly, can’t separate her quest for her Jewish identity from her need for a father replacement romantic figure (her older boyfriend is played by Forrest’s separating husband Ben Mendelsohn, who connected to his paternal Jewish roots on the Australian version of the genealogical series Who Do You Think You Are). Forrest in an interview explained the rabbi “was written to be this sort of female fantasy [of] morality and goodness” – but the press notes also describe him as charismatic, and Crystal is not. It is unusual for an indie romantic film to show such synagogue in-reach efforts in a positive light that a young woman could find so appealing. Forrest also described Jemima’s “Andrea”, a one-hit wonder novelist with serious writer’s block, with Jewish implication: “for a woman in her 30s that’s considered beautiful but interesting looking and seems intellectual”, and that she put more of herself into this sister. (5/7/2018)
Upheaval: The Journey of Menachem Begin - In Jonathan Gruber’s predictably dully favorable bio-doc of Israel’s Prime Minister, aimed at the American audience, a few Jewish women acolytes add to the adoring chorus of interviewees: elder historian Anna/Anita Shapira, young conservative columnist Caroline Glick, Yona Klimovitski, Begin's personal secretary, and a very grateful Avital Sharansky (also seen in archival footage when trying to free her husband from USSR). There are also archival praises from female minority Jews in Israel, including Ethiopian and Mizrahi. Begin’s devotion to his wife Aliza Arnold, from before their emigration to Palestine, is stressed repeatedly. (preview courtesy of Abramorama) (6/10/2021)
Ha Ushpizin is like a cross between Isaac Bashevis Singer and O. Henry stories brought to life in contemporary Jerusalem.
Set just before and during the fall harvest festival of Succoth, it is a modern retelling of the story from Genesis and its accompanying Midrash (extra-Biblical story) of Abraham encouraging guests (the title in Aramaic) to his house, that has become a mitzvah (obligation) for holidays.
It is a thoroughly charming story of faith and love - and how maintaining both is a daily struggle requiring patience and humor and can even replace therapy. What makes the film so involving emotionally is the superb acting. In Q & A at the Tribeca Film Festival the Orthodox writer/star and secular director explained they came up with the film, which was inspired by an actual incident that is used as a plot point, and worked diligently to get rabbinical approval by meeting certain restrictions, in order to put a human face behind the head coverings and beards of the Ultra Orthodox in Israel to help ease the tensions between their community ("the Hats" as they are called in short hand) and the majority secular citizens of Israel.
Shuli Rand was a leading film and theater actor before he gave up a secular life for a religious one, much as his character has only been religious for a few years after a somewhat shady past that in the film literally comes back to haunt him. His wife and co-star Michal Bat-Sheva Rand had been a theater director in her past and only agreed to act in this film as that was one of the rabbi's requirements for approval; a story about a couple had to be portrayed by an actual married pair. Practically swaddled burkha-like and almost as wide as she is tall, she charismatically dominates the screen and takes it above any other more anthropological films about traditional families from any part of the world.
The modern sociological examinations are limited to having the only secular characters in the film be somewhat stereotyped; the kindliest one can say about them is that they are like citizens of Chelm or descendants of Vladimir and Estragon when they are comic relief or a menacing Laurel and Hardy. There is some gentle clear-eyed look at the Ultra Orthodox as not serving in the Army and living only on charity that they mostly collect like Hare Krishnas in the street or from guilt-ridden Modern Orthodox businessmen that is then distributed based on the internal politics of their affiliated yeshiva.
I also have qualms about prayer being used for such personal propitiation as the couple do here, but that aspect is directed so delightfully and heartwarmingly magic realism-like that it's Scrooge-like to complain.
The visuals of the community of Mea Shearim, the Ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem neighborhood where the film is set, with the temporary Succoth (booths for outdoor eating) set up throughout of various materials, are marvelous views that outsiders rarely get to see.
When it is released in Fall 2005 in the U.S. (with special screenings set up for the Hassidic communities that cannot attend secular theaters with mixed audiences) I doubt viewers will get to participate in the kind of lively and colorful audience I did at the
Museum of Jewish Heritage which included almost every possible age and affiliation of New York Jews, particularly from Brooklyn, and some non-Jewish out-of-towners in for the Festival.
But all the Orthodox attendees wanted to know was how the secular director could not be inspired to take the pledge, as it were, after making such a film? He pointed out that his sound designer was so inspired - who stood up to much cheering from many in the crowd. (5/25/2005)
Valentina’s Mother (briefly reviewed at 2010 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (So, nu: It's the entanglements of women that tragically set the old lady off, with the feel of a Twilight Zone episode. First, that her son divorced his wife to take up with his young, now pregnant secretary, and she rejects his proffered Asian aide. Then her Polish-speaking friend links her up with the Catholic Church, setting off memories of her childhood best friend. Shown at the festival with another film, Avishag Leibovich's cute short Point Of View is a much more light-hearted take on the dependence between a young woman and an elderly one.) (1/25/2010)
Vasermil (briefly reviewed in New Hampshire Jewish Film Buzz, at page 21 – N/A) (Additional commentary forthcoming, but it is noteworthy for realistically showing beleaguered, working-class Israeli mothers –sabra, Russian, Ethiopian—coping with drinking, abuse or financial problems.) (12/9/2011)
Vidal Sassoon: The Movie (2/11/2011) (My additional note.) (also briefly reviewed in Recommended Documentaries: There's No Business Like the Celebrity Business at 2010 Tribeca Film Festival) (So, nu: the only Jewish woman he ever refers to is his beleaguered mother, who had to put him in an orphanage as a young child, yet who also had a dream that he should be a hairdresser and took him out of the home in order to apprentice.) (5/7/2010)
The Viewing Booth - College student Maia Levi really puts director Ra'anan Alexandrowicz in his place as a millennial, a female, and an American Jew --- not at all what he thinks he’s demonstrating about Zionist bias toward film footage from the West Bank. She has a much more contemporary view of media and media manipulation than he does. (preview at 2020 DOC NYC Festival/ (showing at 2021 First Look Festival of Museum of the Moving Image) (11/8/2020; 7/3/2021)
Villa Jasmin (viewed at the 2008 NY Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (A somewhat stiff and talky French TV movie based on Serge Moati’s fictionalized memoir of his family, it’s noteworthy for revealing Tunisian Jews, including the beautiful wife who is from the poor Arabic-speaking community settled there for thousands of years, and her snobby mother-in-law from the elitist Italian Jews who had been there hundreds of years and settled into French-speaking colonial life, as they dealt with the global forces of World War II and independence.) (1/28/2008)
Virgins (Vierges/Ein Betulot Bakrayot) In Israeli director Keren Ben Rafael’s fiction feature debut (which may be eligible for the unique Nora Ephron Award for women writer/directors), she spotlights Israeli Jewish women and girls not usually seen in Israeli films available in the U.S. – working class Russian immigrants in small towns. While Joy Rieger is terrific as restless, sensual daughter “Lena” aka “Lana”, her character should have been at least 17, not 18, both in terms of the casting and the situations (as co-written with Elise Benroubi). Evgenia Dodina is marvelous in the dual role of her mother “Irena”, frustrated by having left her sophisticated home in Russia to land in Kiryat Yam, a poor northern beach town, and “Erika”, a mysterious popular singer in French. Also refreshing is young, fantasy-believing, Princess-dressing “Tamar” (portrayed by Manuel Elkaslassi Vardi). FYI: “mermaid” in Hebrew literally means “virgin-of-the-sea”. (preview at 2018 Tribeca Film Festival) (full review forthcoming after Festival Premiere on 4/19 7:00pm (4/8/2018)
Vita Activa: The Spirit Of Hannah Arendt (So, nu: The film does not clarify how she made it out of France to the U.S. and should credit Varian Fry’s “Emergency Rescue Committee” and the New School’s “University in Exile” for employing her, and other refugees. While the readings of her diaries and private letters humanize her way beyond usual presentations, as well as her works emphasizing her seriousness, they are jarringly read by an actress here in unaccented English that The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College says are mistranslated. Her feminine side comes out in surprisingly sweet diary entries and letters, with photos of their student apartments, about her newlywed life with her first, Jewish husband. But private footage of Heidigger enjoying a vacation retreat with his wife is shown twice, even repeated in slo-mo, to emphasize his and Arendt’s adultery; that his love letters to Arendt (which is what I meant as the most revealing in the film) call her with various affectionate Jewish adjectives is even more ironic when she goes to Germany as soon as possible after the war to see if she can talk to him. She admits in an in-depth radio interview that she never even thought about politics until November 9, 1938, Kristallnacht; Jewish statelessness was her own reluctant justification for accepting a pluralistic Zionism, a nationalist solution to an increasingly nationalistic European re-organization was described in detail in Joseph Dorman and Oren Rudavsky’s recent documentary Colliding Dreams. (updated 5/4/2016)
Viral Antisemitism In Four Mutations - In each segment, Jewish women speak up: as experts (including Deborah Lipstadt), victims (a French widow, a British MP), and witnesses (Hungarians disgusted by their Prime Minister) in four countries: the American right; in Hungary; Labor Party and Far Left in England; and Muslim Islamists and radicals in France. The anti-Semitic trope that journalist/filmmaker Andrew Goldberg shows as directed specifically at Jewish women is sexualized obscenities about their support of Israel. (preview courtesy of So Much Film) (3/2/2020)
Vishniac (at 2024 New York Jewish Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum/ courtesy of Abramorama Films) (1/19/2024)
The Wackness So, nu: The mother of the central teen is “Mrs. Shapiro”, played by Talia Balsam. She wears a Jewish star and spends most of the movie arguing and yelling at her husband, who has gotten the just-barely-Upper-East-Side family into dire financial circumstances. The very Jewish grandmother in New Jersey who takes them in lives in an overstuffed suburban house, but her warm welcome seems to be a relieving touch of normality for the drug-dealing, heart-broken kid just before he goes to college. (7/6/2008)
Waiting for Anya (2/5/2020)
The Waldheim Waltz (Waldheims Walzer) (preview and FF2 summary at 2018 New York Film Festival of Film at Lincoln Center) (So, nu: That Austrian director Ruth Beckermann is the daughter of Holocaust survivors, who has struggled with her own sense of her national and Jewish identities, suffuses this entire documentary. That motivated her participation in 1986 protests against Waldheim in Stephansplatz in the center of Vienna that she documented the anti-Semitic reaction on two hours of four VHS tapes, then a new technology, even as she had to consider when it was appropriate to be a documentarian and when to be an activist. It was her son and his friends who convinced her how unique this footage was to use as a basis for a film because they had never seen anything about that before. Though Wikipedia mis-states that her oeuvre is available in the U.S., I’ve only been able to see two of her earlier films (which were just screened here at specialty film festivals), each that touches on the difficult position of Jews in Austria during and after the Nazi era. Hopefully the attention to this documentary will spur Region 1 release of her 8-DVD, 10 film box set, including her work that directly relates to the Austrian amnesia of their complicity and continuing antisemitism. FYI, the fiery old woman rousing the crowd is Rosa Jochmann, not Jewish, but a socialist political prisoner survivor of Ravensbrück who spoke out against antisemitism and the far-right her whole life, to age 92 in 1994.) (updated 10/26/2018)
A Walk on the Moon
Walk on Water (So, nu: Jewish women barely appear in this Israeli film--as usual they are dead avatars of guilt-- but I've listed it here because of one image that is so beautifully striking it haunts the film, just as she haunts the lead character. Plus we find out how much more beautiful the name "Iris" sounds in Hebrew -- the "i"s sound like long "e"s.) (3/25/2005)
Wall - In this animated version of David Hare’s play about the attitudes of Israelis and Palestinians to the security separation “fence”, Hare talks to only one Jewish woman, identified as “Tel Aviv Friend” (voiced by Sara Kestelman), among his theater ssociates at a beachfront café. Too bad she doesn’t mention participating in such activities as Women Wage Peace to counter a Palestinian man’s broad claim that there is no “hippie” peace movement in Israel any more. The Tel Aviv discussion centers on why should Israel feel so weak, when it’s actually strong – without any reference to the reality that the Palestinian Authority and surrounding countries still formally call for its destruction. (preview at Film Forum) (3/21/2019)
War of the Buttons (A Nouvelle Guerre des Boutons) (the novel it’s based on is not yet available in English, and I haven’t yet seen the 1994 British film adaptation) (10/17/2012)
The Wedding Day (Wesele) - Polish writer/director Wojciech Smarzowski (whose previous stabs at his country’s society past and present I’ve somehow missed) creates an epic satire where the 20th century is literally not past in the 21st century. Inspired by historian Jan T. Gross’s 2001 book Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, (as was Aftermath (Pokłosie)), “Grandpa” Antoni Wilk (Ryszard Ronczewski, in his last role, with some reports are that he died during the two plus months filming a fictional 1941 Polish town in Latvia) vividly remembers what happened then because two Israelis show up at his house as the wedding is about to begin. One is from the Israeli Embassy to award him as Righteous Among The Nations, while the other is “Lew Zuckerman” who explains, in English that the granddaughter translates, he’s the grandson of “Lea Fish”, who told him on her death bed of who had saved her, at least temporarily. But “Lew” then asks: If you know where the rest of my family may be buried? He shows an old photo he found among her belongings and asks: Is this you?, which, plus the love letter, sends him into the past like a Vonnegut time traveler.
Interspersed throughout the traditional wedding rituals and today’s wild party, young “Antoni Wilk” (Mateusz Wieclawek) is re-lived in black-and-white, archival images, and subdued colors how despite the explicit antisemitism from the priest and his family, among others, he falls in love with a feisty young Jewish woman “Lea” (Agata Turkot), and follows her (and her sisters) whenever he can, from spying on their nude bathing in the river, hanging around the Jewish quarter with its lively businesses, like her father the tailor, that brown-shirts like his brother are trying to close down, to an outdoor Jewish (arranged) wedding (of one of her unhappy sisters I think, but with the film’s large ensemble and frenetic pace details are confusing).
When the Nazis (today the family has to remember not to refer to them as “The Germans” because Grandpa’s corrupt pig-slaughtering businessman son “Rysiek”, played by Robert Więckiewicz (who is getting his own revelation about his possible Jewish mother) is negotiating a big deal with a German company, arrived to stir up the town into violence, his young self had to participate in some of their genocidal actions to deflect from his hiding of “Lea” and her family in “the other barn”, as opposed to the one that his neighbors herded in 500 Jews and burned down. The young couple have a lovely hayloft idyll before her father collects her and warns him: Now we’re even.
His brother casually invites him: Tomorrow they’re going to get on with the Jews of Jedwabne., though these Nazis apparently didn’t want witnesses. There are more explicit press stills of what is found in the exhumations on the pig farm than seem to be included in the two-and-quarter-hour film (that are being done cheaply by a bused-in group of alleged “Ukrainians”, though they look like Uzbeks). (at 2022 Toronto Jewish Film Festival/ courtesy of Menemsha Films) (5/25/2022)
The Wedding Plan (Laavor et hakir) (So, nu: on the Jewish women: The central, unconventional observant character is “Michal Dreamer” uses the director’s maiden name. “Michal”s mother (played by Irit Sheleg) is more conventional than her daughter and her friends, but the matchmaker she consults, the mother of “Shimi”, played by Amos Tamam, is a more interesting character.) (New York premiere preview at 2017 Tribeca Film Festival) (updated 6/3/2017)
The Wedding Song (Le chant des mariées) (briefly reviewed at 2009 New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (Maybe it's because I've seen several period films about young Jewish women growing up in North Africa or maybe this just tried to pack too much into the story, with the Tunisian girl here with a Muslim best friend, Nazis, arranged marriage to an older rich man, and more, in intimate detail, especially a depilation scene definitely not done for the laughs of the male in The 40 Year Old Virgin.) (1/19/2009)
Weekend in Galilee (Sof Shavua Bagalil) (briefly reviewed at 2009 New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (I should re-read Uncle Vanya before commenting on this adaptation, but despite the excellent acting – especially by the women though I don't have cast listings to be sure who Sharon Alexander, Shiri Gdani and Marina Shoef were playing-- the characters seemed more like types than real individuals, so that even though they were all Israelis my heart was already hardened by the set up of yet another younger woman with yet another older professor and her hunky ex the love object of yet another dutiful daughter of an aged mother.) (1/18/2009)
We Might As Well Be Dead (Wir könnten genauso gut tot sein)
- Fortissimo Films
Director Natalia Sineinkova explains her social satire in the film’s production notes: “Born in a high-rise housing estate on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, I immigrated to Germany with my family as Russian Jewish quota refugees in 1996. My parents wanted their kids to grow up in a safe country, away from corrupt governments, mafia-like structures, Anti-Semitism and above all - free from fear…Although we now lived in a country that was supposed to give us security, safety and a home, my fear grew. The fear of not belonging, of being excluded and threatened. The same fear that my parents had fled from. …Reflecting on a world that could be ours, [her feature debut] seeks to bring visibility to patterns and structures in our society, give visibility to Jewish culture and self-representation, while inviting us to critically consider our own role…”
With a marvelous play on Jewish grandmother’s traditional folkloric efforts to avert “The Evil Eye” from children and a family’s house, teenager “Iris Wilczynska” (Pola Geiger) is so convinced that she has “The Evil Eye” to make bad things happen that she won’t come out of the bathroom. Her mother “Anna” (impressive Romanian actress Ioana), the security guard at their highly selective, isolated by a spooky forest high-rise apartment, is determined to prove her daughter didn’t cause any such events, and more, that they didn’t actually happen at all. (Both above) But as the only Polish Jews in the building (singing Yiddish songs, referring to Jewish holidays) suspicion for anything going wrong falls on them, even as “Anna” desperately finds a scapegoat. This social satirical allegory cuts very close to the bone of truth. (via Fortissimo Films ) (at 2022