When the 22-year-old Italian Jewish artist Amedeo Modigliani arrived in Paris in 1906, his health was already compromised. He had suffered childhood bouts of pleurisy, had nearly died of typhoid fever at age 11 and had been diagnosed with tuberculosis at 16. In his first years in the City of Light, which was rife with anti-Semitism in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair…
We asked our readers: What’s the best Jewish movie scene of all time?
One Shabbat, toward the end of the morning service, Tova Mirvis was stricken by a debilitating headache, in which “the pain concentrated along the line where my hat met my head.”
In three of her novels thus far, Nicole Krauss inhabits multiple points of view, exploring the almost mystical ways in which lives that seem separate can intertwine.
Max Brooks, the only child of Mel Brooks and the late Anne Bancroft, is best known as the world’s foremost zombie expert. “He’s a zombie laureate,” The New York Times once described him.
In our latest symposium, we asked directors, actors and experts: What’s your favorite Jewish scene from a film? Now, we want to hear from you.
Iosef’s version of a “safe space” is a filthy, unheated Jewish dorm where students occasionally die of tuberculosis, or a lecture on a random topic in a hall where he can duck in and hide while running from his attackers—for a full five minutes, until they find him and drag him out. As Iosef puts it one afternoon, “I received two punches during today’s lectures and I took eight pages of notes. Good value, for two punches.” Microaggressions, indeed.
The wedding scene in Fiddler on the Roof is one of my favorite Jewish moments on film. The scene is drenched in family, nostalgia and an aching foreknowledge of the Holocaust.
On a bright September day, an unlikely trio met for lunch to discuss art, politics and culture. Having published an unauthorized biography of Woody Allen last year, I couldn’t wait to have lunch with him for the first time.
Film icon Charlie Chaplin starred as the Jewish barber in The Great Dictator, a 1940 political satire that Chaplin wrote, produced and directed. The film, including Chaplin’s parody of Hitler, was a direct response to the Nazi Party’s false assertion that Chaplin was Jewish—and the banning of all of his films.
For pure cheesy pleasure, I’d go with The Ten Commandments, which frightened me so much as a child that I was actually taken out of the movie theater. I’m tougher now and, besides ever since taking my own kids on the Paramount Pictures tour that explained how the filmmakers used pre-CGI techniques to part the Red Sea, I’ve wanted to watch the thing through properly with lots of use of the pause button.
