Sheerly Avni is a writer and editor living in Mexico.
Sheerly Avni
By Sheerly Avni
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Film & TV The Jewish Education of an African Cinema Master
The great Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene, who died in 2007 at the age of 84, chose cinema as his primary medium almost by default. A former dock worker who is now affectionately referred to as the “father of African cinema,” Sembene had already published several successful novels when he decided, at the age of 40,…
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Culture 4 Jewiest TV Shows Are Coming Back in 2015
Judaism has never been treated so casually — and by casually I mean as a recognizable and relatable part of American life — as it was last year on American TV. Even though the shows listed below vary in terms of how explicitly “Jewish” they are (“The Americans” is included on the strength of just…
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Culture The Banality of Himmler
Heinrich Himmler: Nazi, anti-Semite, lover, husband, father, workaholic. Mass Murderer. The genius of “The Decent One,” Vanessa Lapa’s disturbing new documentary about the man most directly responsible for the extermination of over six million Europeans, mostly Jews but also gypsies, gays and anyone else deemed unworthy by the Nazi regime, is that she in no…
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Israel News Living in Exile, Sayed Kashua Hits Telluride
The Telluride Film Festival occupies a privileged space in the landscape of contemporary international cinema. Nestled in a picturesque ski town, tastefully programmed, free of stalkers and paparazzi, it’s a filmmaker’s heaven, a place where A-listers walk unmolested down the town’s one main street, and where at any given moment one might find oneself in…
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Culture ‘Ida’ Revisits Poland in the Shadow of the Holocaust
Pawel Pawlikowski left Poland at the age of 14, but his childhood memories of his homeland never left him. It’s no surprise then that “Ida,” a stunning portrait of two very different women whose lives intersect in 1960s Poland, is the director’s most assured and confident narrative feature yet. The film takes place in the…
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Culture Palestine Vies for Oscar With ‘Omar’
Despite Robert Frost’s warnings to the contrary, there seems to be something in the Arab-Israeli conflict that very much loves a wall. The most familiar walls are those built in the name of Israeli national security, which continue to draw international scrutiny, and which Jews and Palestinians view from opposite sides of a decades-long struggle….
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Culture The Best Jewish Film Festivals of 2014
In his classic 1988 account of Hollywood’s Jewish roots, ‘“An Empire of Their Own,” Neal Gabler argued convincingly that Hollywood (and therefore, world cinema as we know it) would not exist today without the contributions of the Jewish pioneers and studio heads who first turned movies into our country’s great popular art form. But if…
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Culture The Best Little (Dysfunctional Jewish) Strip Club in Toronto
It’s one of the most instantly recognizable Jewish narratives of the 20th century: Two high schoolers – one an impoverished immigrant with an Old World accent that 50 years in the New World will be unable to fade, and the other the child of holocaust survivors — meet in the 1970s and fall in love….
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