18-year-old Meredith Hunter was pronounced dead at 6:20 PM Pacific Time on December 6, 1969. His killing defined the legacy of the Altamont Free Concert in Tracy, California — which had aspired to be a Woodstock for the west coast — partially because the jarring moments that preceded it were caught on film. Charlotte Zwerin…
For the first time in years, a key component of the Academy Awards ceremony was missing on Sunday night — a person without whom, it was widely believed, the night could hardly function. I am referring, of course, to Natalie Portman, whose life-of-a-pop-star movie “Vox Lux” was unjustly snubbed by Academy voters (she sang, people!)…
Raoul Peck’s latest film, “The Young Karl Marx”, is above all a story of clashing ideas. The film follows adversaries-turned-best-buds Marx and Friedrich Engels as they attempt to both understand and subvert the capitalist system. Inevitably, the film traces the conflicts that arise when radical thinkers try to change the world. The material may sound…
The documentary “RBG,” a chronicle of the life and career of the United States’ most pop culture-prominent Supreme Court Justice, appears to have made a decisive impact at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, speaking with NPR’s Nina Totenberg after the film’s premiere, presented opinions on Kate McKinnon and the #MeToo movement; as…
For more than 25 years, we had been trying to make a feature documentary titled “The Last Laugh,” which asks whether there is any place at all for humor in approaching the horrific topic of the Holocaust. The idea began with a 1990 visit to Miami’s Holocaust Memorial, then newly opened, where a friend of…
The vagaries of international film distribution may produce the impression that the French have created a more significant body of work examining their nation’s moral failings under Nazi Occupation than any other European country. We have, for example, feature films like Louis Malle’s “Au revoir, les enfants,” Truffaut’s “Le Dernier Metro,” or Rose Bosch’s recent…
Photo courtesy Cohen Media Group A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here. Like many other aspects of Ashkenazi Jewish culture, old-time Jewish delicacies are becoming harder and harder to find. In 1931 there were more than 2,500 delis and 150 kosher dairy restaurants in New York City alone; today there are only 21…
There’s no doubt that J Street has shaken up American Jewry. Since its inception in 2008 as a lobby, political action committee, educational group and student movement, the organization has disrupted the debate about what it means to be pro-Israel. Now a new documentary, “J Street: The Art of the Possible,” produced and directed by…
במשך פֿון זיבן יאָר האָט דזשעף לויִס אַוועקגעגעבן צען טויזנט שפּײַזקאַרטלעך.
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