Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

What Makes Jewish Film Accessible?

On May 15, Speakers’ Lab and the Forward will present a moderated town hall-style event called “Now What? The Future of New Jewish Culture” at the 14th Street Y in downtown New York City. In preparation for the event, each panelist was asked to respond to a question related to his or her work. The Forward will publish one panelist’s response every Tuesday leading up to the event, and a second panelist’s response will be published on Speakers’ Lab’s website that same day.

This week Peter L. Stein, former Executive Director of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, writes about cultivating a wide audience for Jewish film. And on Speakers’ Lab, Dan Sieradski, co-organizer of Occupy Judaism, writes about the lack of support for Jewish innovation.

Speakers’ Lab: The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, which is the oldest and largest Jewish film festival in the world, has made it its mission to draw audiences from other cultures and faiths. People who aren’t Jewish might feel excluded or uninterested, but the festival is managing to draw them in anyway. We’d like to know what you think makes a film interesting to a wide audience. What is the fundamental difference between an insider film and something more accessible?

Peter L. Stein: First let’s make a distinction between a film that feels accessible to all and a film event that feels accessible (say, a screening, a festival, a social gathering centered on a shared experience of cinema). One of the ways the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival has continually succeeded in drawing a wide audience across a whole spectrum — including committed Jews, secular/cultural Jews, and their non-Jewish friends and fellow film lovers — is by providing a welcoming, non-exclusive social experience at the festival, where the explicit common denominator among audiences is their passion for engaging with films and artists, rather than their shared communal identity per se. So when 1,400 diverse audience-members packed the Castro Theatre for Ivy Meeropol’s documentary “Heir to an Execution,” about her grandparents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, they weren’t there only because they were interested in seeing this accessible film — after all, it was about to be accessible on HBO; no, they wanted to experience the irreproducible alchemy of witnessing American history in a communal setting.

That said, there are hallmarks that allow some Jewish-subject films to be experienced more successfully as universal. This has nothing to do with presenting “crossover” content and characters (many of those fall flat and are trying too hard… think fusion cuisine) but rather with the skill of the screenwriter/filmmaker in making even esoteric content resonate at a human level. One example: Joseph Cedar’s latest feature, “Footnote,” couldn’t be (on its surface) a more “Jewish insider” film, focusing on two rival Talmud scholars at the Hebrew University. But it’s actually a film about father-son conflicts and family loyalties. Hence, a terrific film, nominated for an Oscar. To me, the fundamental difference between a film feeling like “inside baseball” vs. universally appealing is a matter of craft: the filmmaker’s success in generating and sustaining empathy for characters and conflicts regardless of one’s prior stake in or knowledge of the content.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.