Amichai Lau-Lavie and Sandi DuBowski are in conversation with Lau-Lavie’s longtime friend, journalist and writer Aimee Ginsburg Bikel, author of Theodore Bikel’s The City of Light, about the Sabbath Queen and what it means to be in the “messy middle.”
How the Marienthal brothers’ Mister Kelly’s club changed show business.
Join Hershey Felder for a wide-open conversation about why he is compelled to tell these stories through music, how being Jewish has influenced his work and what Jewish music means to him.
Television historians Walter Podrazik and Harry Castleman discuss the often-overlooked Jewish backgrounds of several of the show’s actors.
Famed ventriloquist and creator of the iconic puppet Lamb Chop, Shari Lewis was one of the few women to run her own television production company at a time when most women were shut out of the industry. Lewis and Lamb Chop entertained generations of children with their many television shows, including specials about Hanukkah and Passover. Mallory Lewis, Emmy Award-winning performer and daughter of Shari, and TV writer-producer Nat Segaloff, join Moment editor Sarah Breger for a conversation about Lewis’ stage and TV career, how Judaism influenced her work, the challenges of being a businesswoman in a male dominated field and how she and her puppet became iconic stars loved by millions. Mallory Lewis and Segaloff are the authors of the forthcoming book Shari Lewis & Lamb Chop: The Team That Changed Children’s Television.
This program is in celebration of Jewish American Heritage Month.
During the Red Scare and Hollywood blacklist period of the late 1950s, thousands of Americans, many of them Jews, were persecuted for their political beliefs, imperiling democracy. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Glenn Frankel, author of three books exploring the making of iconic American movies, including Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic, discusses the role of studio moguls, some of whom were Jewish; the damage done by the blacklist; the period’s eerie similarities to our own troubled era; and more. Frankel is in conversation with Margaret Talbot, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of The Entertainer: Movies, Magic, and My Father’s Twentieth Century. This program is part of a Moment series on antisemitism supported by the Joyce and Irving Goldman Family Foundation.
Asylum City, the critically acclaimed and popular Israeli series starring Israeli-American actress Hani Furstenberg, is set in the underworld of refugees and asylum seekers in Tel Aviv. Based on the bestselling novel by lawyer turned author Liad Shoham, the series follows a young police officer named Anat (played by Furstenberg) who is investigating a murder. While trying to find the assassin, she exposes a complex web of political corruption, organized crime and exploitation. Asylum City was nominated for six Israeli Academy Awards. Furstenberg and Shoham (known in Israel as the Jewish John Grisham) are in conversation with Moment editor Sarah Breger.
At a time when antisemitism is on the rise and the Holocaust is thrown around as a comparison to many of today’s political and social issues, what can movies about the Holocaust teach us? Holocaust scholar and film producer Michael Berenbaum is in conversation with Michael Berlin, screenwriter and founder of the Jewish Film Festival of Orange County, CA, about the impact of the Holocaust on film and how film plays an important role in transmitting knowledge about the Holocaust to new generations. The conversation commences with the 1940 Academy Award nominated film, The Great Dictator, starring Charlie Chaplin and progress through the decades. This program is hosted by Moment Magazine with the support of the Joyce and Irving Goldman Family Foundation.
TV became the preeminent communication force in society from the 1960s onward, with Jews at the creative and business forefront. Walter J. Podrazik and Harry Castleman continue their entertaining survey of the medium’s history with a focus on influential figures such as Fred Silverman, Brandon Tartikoff, Barry Diller and Sumner Redstone and the groundbreaking shows they brought to the screen such as Seinfeld, Happy Days, Charlie’s Angels, Hill Street Blues, The Cosby Show, The Simpsons and The Big Bang Theory plus made-for-TV movies and miniseries such as Roots. Their achievements paved the way for the growth of cable, and eventually streaming.
In an era when a new wave of movies pushed the boundaries of mainstream filmmaking, Midnight Cowboy stands out as the riskiest, most unconventional, and most successful of them all. Glenn Frankel’s new book, Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic, explores the making of the only X-rated film to win a Best Picture Oscar and offers a window onto the creative ferment and social unrest that gripped New York and America in the 1960s: the rise of gay liberation, the treatment of sexual themes in popular culture, and the role of Jewish artists such as director John Schlesinger and star Dustin Hoffman. Glenn, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, in conversation with film historian and scholar Rebecca Prime, managing editor of Film Quarterly.
Fania Oz-Salzberger, Ruby Namdar and Rokhl Kafrissen join in conversation about what it means to adapt Jewish literature for the big screen.
While many Jewish filmmakers choose to write their own material and draft their own stories, others turn to interpretation. This program compares two films that share biographical features, Yentl and A Tale of Love and Darkness. Though released decades apart, both were directed by acclaimed actresses making their directorial debuts, Barbara Streisand and Natalie Portman respectively. These women notably adapted literary works written by men and their star power was critical to getting these films made.
Historian Fania Oz-Salzberger shares personal insights about her father, acclaimed Israeli writer Amos Oz, and his autobiographical novel A Tale of Love and Darkness and author and educator Ruby Namdar considers the film and the legacy of the memoir. Critic and playwright Rokhl Kafrissen explores Yentl, based on a play and short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer.
This program is a collaboration between Moment Magazine and REWIND: The Shenson Retrospective Film Series, a project of Stanford’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies. Both movies can be watched on Amazon Prime.
From the early beginnings of TV in the 1940s, Jews have been at the forefront of shaping the television landscape. Join television historians Walter J. Podrazik and Harry Castleman for a walk down memory lane and learn about the fascinating characters who started CBS, NBC and ABC as well as the creators and actors of some of the most iconic programs such as Your Show of Shows, The Goldbergs [the original series], All in the Family and many more.
