Film
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The Schmooze Friday Film: Behind Friendly Lines
It takes a midnight downpour to force a mutiny and forge a temporary unit from the misfits on Israel Defence Force Training Base 4, nearly three-quarters of the way through Georgian-Israeli director Dover Kosashvili’s new film. “Where did they find such a group of losers?” mutters the troop commander, as they stubbornly shuffle together like…
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Books Making a Mess of Comedy
Comedy, explained Aristotle, has a vague history, because at first no one took it seriously. We cannot know for certain if Aristotle was deadpanning, but his observation would amuse Saul Austerlitz. According to Austerlitz, American film comedy has not been taken seriously, either. In fact, the author quips, it is American film’s “bastard stepchild.” With…
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The Schmooze Friday Film: Sex and Subversion in Communist Poland
In the aftermath of Israel’s victory over Egypt and Syria — key Soviet allies — in the 1967 Six Day War, the Soviet Politburo, which had already barred Jews from positions in the Communist Party, seized on the war as a way to weaken Poland’s opposition movement and purge what they labeled the Jewish “fifth…
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Life ‘To Pee or Not To Pee’ and Other Womanly Dilemmas
A critically wounded woman’s decision to become a single mother; a grandmother’s Holocaust-era story told through live action and animation; and an Incan family’s conversion to Judaism and subsequent move to Israel are among the subjects of this year’s Jewish Women’s Film Festival selections. The one-day event, organized by the National Council of Jewish Women…
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The Schmooze Friday Film: ‘Rafting to Bombay’
When Israeli filmmaker Erez Laufer set off for Mumbai in November of 2008, he had a comparatively simple plan: make a documentary about his father’s return to his childhood home in India, where his family found refuge after escaping from Nazi-occupied Poland. Their flight, the basis for “Rafting to Bombay,” was a remarkable story of…
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The Schmooze Bringing Cantorial Music Back to Its Birthplace
“For me, this was not about a film. This was about our using our gifts as cantors to create dialogue,” said Cantor Nathan Lam of “100 Voices: A Journey Home,” which will be shown in a one-night event in over 75 theaters nationwide on November 11. The feature-length documentary chronicles the journey in June 2009…
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The Schmooze Making Home Movies in Interwar Poland
When the anti-immigration laws of the early 1920s effectively sealed the gates of the United States to would-be immigrants, the Jews of Eastern Europe who had arrived en masse between 1880 and 1920 could no longer hope to see their loved ones join them in America. Instead, those who could afford to traveled abroad, visiting…
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The Schmooze The Shaming of Eliot Spitzer
Is there anything more reprehensible than white-collar crime? Certainly, there are any number of moral offenses that may trump the impulses of rich white men to make themselves even richer. But even the most egregious of these can be rationalized (rightly or wrongly) through psychological profiling and the ascription of some mental disorder or social…
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