Book Interview | Max Brooks
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.
Tell Us: What’s Your Favorite Jewish Movie Scene?
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.
Emotional Ethnography: A Q&A with ‘Menashe’ Director Joshua Weinstein
Director Joshua Weinstein’s camerawork credits include The New York Times, PBS, several Coors Light commercials and a few documentaries. Menashe—which premiered at the Sundance Film...
Book Review | For Two Thousand Years by Mihail Sebastian
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.
Favorite Jewish Movie Scenes of All Time
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.
My Lunch With Woody
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.
Jewish Movie Roles Played by Non-Jewish Actors
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.
Moment staff picks: Jewish Movies to Watch on a Rainy Day
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.
Favorite Movie Rabbis
In Barbra Streisand’s musical Yentl, Nehemiah Persoff, a World War II veteran originally from Jerusalem, plays Rebbe Mendel. Mendel secretly gives Talmud lessons to Yentl (Streisand), a young girl living in a late 19th century Polish shtetl at a time when women are barred from religious study. Yentl ultimately disguises herself as her late brother in order to enter a religious school, where drama ensues.
What We’re Reading | Lucky Broken Girl
It’s not every day that an adult in her mid-80s can read a book meant for fifth-graders (ages 10-11) and be reduced to tears.
Poem: Ninth of Av
The day you left was the Ninth of Av, / a day of grief, the Temple destroyed.
The Kinsey Sicks: ‘Putting the Rage in Outrageous’
The Kinsey Sicks, a dynamite Dragapella Beautyshop Quartet, explode on Theater J’s stage for a limited run of their new politically charged show Things You Shouldn’t Say, saying and singing anything they damn well please.