A Wide Open Conversation with Ken Burns and Michael Krasny

Filmmaker Ken Burns joins award-winning journalist Michael Krasny, retired public radio host of KQED Forum, for a wide open conversation about Burn’s just released book Our America: A Photographic History and the new three-part series The U.S. and the Holocaust. 

This program is part of a Moment series on antisemitism supported by the Joyce and Irving Goldman Family Foundation.

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Documentary ‘Who Will Write Our History?’ Tells Stunning, Little-Known Holocaust Story

Documentary filmmaker Roberta Grossman is obsessed with the Holocaust, always has been. Its ever-present evil—the ultimate “rift in humanity,” she says—just won’t let go. “It’s not that I can’t pull away from it, but rather why others can.” So she asserts on the phone from her home in Los Angeles. Producer Nancy Spielberg (yes, Steven’s sister), with whom Grossman collaborated on the Holocaust documentary Who Will Write Our History, is participating in the conversation from her New York home. Their film, which has already been screened at various festivals worldwide, will make its television debut on the Discovery Channel on January 26 at 3 p.m. The telecast is part of Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorations. It’s also the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

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Yoo-hoo, Ms. Rivers!

by Amanda Walgrove As she’d be the first to joke about, Joan Rivers has tough skin. While her 2010 documentary, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, received mostly shining reviews, the film was snubbed during award season because it wasn’t “significantly relevant.” Rivers told the New York Times, “I thought it was about age, I thought it was about perseverance, I thought it was about courage, about getting up again, about women’s place in the world, and I think they’re wrong. I’m angry. Next time I’ll carry around a baby.” Since the ‘50’s when Rivers emerged in show business, she has found numerous ways to reapply herself and remain relevant. Even though the 77 year-old broad will not be added to this year’s list of Jewish Oscar nominees, retirement has never been a discussion. The powerhouse comedienne...

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What’s In a Name?

By Gabriel Weinstein For hundreds of years, Ethiopian Jews dreamed of strolling through Jerusalem’s supposed golden streets and celebrating the Sigd festival in its hills. By the late 1970’s, Ethiopians decided that dreaming of Israel no longer sufficed, and embarked on foot to the Promised Land. Scores of Ethiopian Jews fulfilled their dream of reaching Israel through Operation Moses in 1984 after trekking through deserts, skirting Ethiopian border authorities and toiling in unsanitary Sudanese refugee camps. But Ethiopians never dreamed that in Israel, their utopia, they would abandon their Amharic names. Journalist Ruth Mason explores how Ethiopian immigrants traded their Amharic names, and ultimately a sense of identity, for new Israeli-sounding Hebrew names in her documentary These Are My Names.  The film, which premiered last week at the Jewish Eye World Film Festival in Ashkelon, Israel, expresses...

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