Steven Zeitchik
By Steven Zeitchik
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Culture Love Iranian-American Style
In “Love Iranian-American Style,” director Tanaz Eshaghian tackles the subject of marriage in the Persian-American community, where she interrogates, challenges and otherwise needles her relatives over their views on coupling. The Eshaghians fled the ayatollah’s brutal regime after the 1979 revolution, but the totalitarians they left behind need not worry; Eshaghian’s questioning might be considered…
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Culture Pork and Milk
Breaks from tradition also weigh on the mind of Valérie Mréjen, director of the pleasingly low-key French documentary “Pork and Milk.” Through a series of interviews, Mréjen throws a light on a number of young Israeli men who also happen to be have left the fold of ultra-Orthodoxy: a chef, a cantor with the radical…
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Culture Close Encounters of the Middle East Kind
The most surprising thing about Steven Spielberg’s “Munich,” a conversation piece long before it even got out of production, is the limpness with which it lands. There’s something trumped-up about the whole enterprise that actually renders it less substantial — scenes milking the extra second before an explosion, assassins debating ethics with improbable gravitas and,…
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Culture A Jewish Family Drama, Minus the Shmaltz
Judaism and parental ambition have been inextricable since the early days — the really early days, back to when old Jacob let his hopes get too high for poor Joseph. (Had Ivy League law schools existed back then, one can only imagine the arguments.) Immigrant tenacity, a tradition of literacy and just plain genetic stubbornness…
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News From a Flatbush Boy Whose Teacher Has Told Him Goodbye
He was a new teacher, not yet 30, and I was a student, barely 17, when we first talked. I never sat in his classroom; we met in the very non-teacherly environment of Model U.N., for which he enthusiastically led our school’s delegation. But from the moment I met him, Rabbi Alan Stadtmauer became one…
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