A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here. The first words in the trailer for the new Yiddish-language film “The Pin” are “Ikh ken nit khapn dem otem” — “I can’t catch my breath.” The movie, currently playing in New York, takes place primarily in a barn in an unknown location during the Second…
Filmmaker Jessie Kahnweiler, known for her comic spiritual YouTube adventure “Dude, Where’s My Chutzpah?” has a new video out, and viewers don’t know quite what to make of it. It’s called “Meet My Rapist.” The short satirical film is a response to Kahnweiler’s own rape, which occurred almost eight years ago, when she was 20…
Believe it or not, there is something worse than being trapped in a friend’s living room while he unspools a year’s worth of home movies. What is that? Going to a theater and paying to watch home movies. That’s the prospect facing audiences at “Israel: A Home Movie,” an Israeli film by Eliav Lilti that…
A Jewish mother gives her son two ties on the first night of Hanukkah. The following morning, when he comes down for breakfast, he is wearing one of them. The mom says, “What’s the matter — you didn’t like the other one?” — Sheldon Kimmelman in “Old Jews Telling Jokes” Even while guffawing at old…
Sarah Silverman has been making humorous political videos for a while, but in her latest one she has some very A-list friends helping her out. Everyone with blue-leaning inclinations, it seemed, posted her “Great Schlep” video on their Facebook walls in 2008, spreading the word about her effort to get young Jews to convince their…
Secular Israeli documentary filmmaker Efrat Shalom Danon made “The Dreamers” as a way to better understand her sister and a close friend — both of whom are artists who became Haredi. She wanted to better grasp the conflicts these women live with in trying to express themselves creatively while operating within the strict confines of…
My mom handed me a copy of “Jane Eyre” when I was 10, after she had finished re-reading it herself. Despite some rough going at first, I pushed my way through it and have a distinct memory of finishing it behind my prayerbook in the women’s section of an Orthodox synagogue in Rochester, N.Y. At…
While we have been busy looking at women in magazines, Martha Lauzen, executive director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University has been tracking the rather sluggish growth of women in Hollywood. The Center just released its annual report, “The Celluloid Ceiling: Behind-the-Scenes Employment of…
Take a barefoot American hippie clad in a rabbit-skin jacket and a bowler hat, trying to run away from the traumatic memories of the Vietnam War by traveling to Israel, of all places; a sexy redheaded vixen who can’t seem to keep her shirt on for longer than a few minutes, and a naive flower…
In preparation for his upcoming film, “Holy Rollers,” based on actual events in the late 1990s, when members of the Hasidic community were recruited as drug mules, actor Jesse Eisenberg, 26, became a bar mitzvah. The Queens native spent time at the Lubavitch headquarters in Brooklyn. “They asked me if I’d been bar mitzvahed,” he…
Would you shut up? I’m trying to atone!” That line comes in the opening scene of “Kissing Jessica Stein” delivered by the titular character, as she sits in the pews on Yom Kippur and tries to fend off her relatives’ too-eager advice about snagging a man before next year’s Book of Life is shut. Jessica,…
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