Yasser Arafat once insisted on cutting up Dennis Ross’s chicken during a dinner; Ross was then head of the American effort to arbitrate peace between Israel and Palestine. At the time, it seemed like a sign of hospitality and hope — Ross joked that Arafat had “a Jewish mother syndrome.” These days, after the Human…
Benjamin Rosloff, an aspiring Jewish filmmaker living with autism, was filming a bar mitzvah in Port Washington, NY. But the young boy getting bar mitzvahed didn’t say the prayers or read the Torah with his own voice. He also had autism, and relied on an augmentative speech device to communicate. “I couldn’t tell whether the…
In March of 1968, in the throes of the American Civil Rights movement, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. attended the conservative movement’s annual Rabbinical Assembly convention in the Catskills to honor one of his closest friends and collaborators, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Upon arrival, King and Heschel were greeted by hundreds of rabbis lining the…
Can any one film begin to answer the question of what, exactly, Hitler means? That’s the goal of the new documentary “The Meaning of Hitler,” named for and based on the 1978 Sebastian Haffner book of the same name. From the outset, its ambition proves problematic: Directors Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker chronicle various talking…
Evgeny Afineevsky celebrated his 48th birthday with a very special person: Pope Francis, the most significant figure in the Catholic world. Afineevsky had just finished filming “Francesco,” a documentary on the pontiff’s teachings. Ahead of its premiere at the Rome Film Festival, Afineevsky brought some friends to a private meeting with the pope, who greeted…
In 2017, a Texan governmental body voted to secede from the United States. No, it wasn’t the state’s legislature. It was a group of rebellious participants in Boys State, a summer program founded in 1935 by the American Legion that aims to inculcate the values of civil discourse in a population not known for that…
Two of the first words ever uttered by Miriam Revesz were, “Mimi fraid.” Now 30 years old, Revesz is still “fraid.” But she is also determined to add her voice to a growing movement in the Jewish and secular world to shed light on the often-ignored realities of living with multiple invisible disabilities and mental…
Moshe Dayan was an icon with an eyepatch. He commanded the Jerusalem front in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, marched victorious through the Lions’ Gate in the 1967 Six Day War and served six prime ministers in matters of war and state. But he wasn’t alone either in his achievements or his eventual decline. The Dayans,…
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