Staff Picks: Medieval Jews in England, National Lampoon and Poland’s B-Day
What we’re reading—and watching—this week
Staff Picks: Weimar Berlin, Jewish Jazz and Ben Gurion’s Rice
What we’re reading—and watching—this week.
Julius Rosenwald: Building Schools in the Jim Crow South
When Rosenwald decided to give away hundreds of thousands of dollars to mark his fiftieth birthday, Booker T. Washington encouraged him to donate a portion of the money to build schools for African American children in the segregated south.
Staff Picks: Lebanon’s First Oscar Nod, Mobula Rays and Gaby Hoffman
What we’re reading—and watching—this week.
Book Review | Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio
Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack. The Warner Brothers. Theirs was a family show, one for all and all for one.
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...
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.
