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,…
Brazil is not only home to the Jules Rimet trophy, Copacabana beach, Carnaval and the frighteningly militarized favelas portrayed in “City of God,” it’s also the location of an old and respected Yiddish community. Now Jose de Abreu is making a Yiddish-speaking film — “Where Pigs Eat Oranges” — about Jewish immigration from Czarist Russia…
Released in June from Oscilloscope Distribution, the documentary “Unmistaken Child” by Jerusalem-born Nati Baratz, a graduate of Tel-Aviv University’s Film School, continues its triumphal march across America, with scheduled screenings in Honolulu (Sept. 9); Cleveland (Sept. 11); Great Barrington, MA (Sept. 11); Key West (Sept. 11); and San Francisco (Sept. 13), and further showings into…
Comedian Chris Rock has made a documentary that delves into the roots of the painful politics surrounding black women’s hair. Inspired by Rock’s young daughter, who asked him why she didn’t have “good” hair, the film looks like it’s going to be a fascinating and hilarious take on the way race and gender issues are…
If you’re Orthodox and female and live on the Upper West Side, how old do you have to be to qualify as “over the hill”? “If you’re not married, let’s say, by the age of 24, 25, there’s something wrong with you,” explained one of the talking heads featured in the trailer of J.J. Adler’s…
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