Film
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The Schmooze Can a Polish Priest Be a Jew? Not According to the Law of Return
Courtesy of Go2Films One is tempted to declare that “Torn,” the documentary by Israeli filmmaker Ronit Kertsner making its American debut at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, is about the “Who is a Jew?” question. It is. But it is also about more than that. The film tells the story of Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel,…
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The Schmooze Amy Winehouse and Her Father
Crossposted from Haaretz The only impressive thing about “My Daughter Amy,” the film about the British Grammy-winning singer Amy Winehouse, who died July 23 at age 27, are the photos of her infancy and childhood. The film, first shown on Britain’s Channel 4 about a year ago, is airing tonight and over the weekend on…
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The Schmooze Crusading Editor Who Brought Orthodox Sex Abuse to Light
A courtroom sketch from Yisroel Shapiro’s trial on charges of sexual molestation. Courtesy of Bennett-Robbins Productions. A handshake was all it took to set Scott Rosenfelt, an accomplished filmmaker, on a journey to break the wall of secrecy protecting child sex abusers in the Orthodox Jewish community. The way Rosenfelt tells it, a friend, Phil…
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The Schmooze Friday Film: How To Embrace Your Inner Cat Lady
Crossposted from Midnight East “Mrs. Moskowitz and the Cats,” a film by Jorge Gurvich, opened July 21 in Israeli theaters. I saw the film for the first time at the Jerusalem Film Festival in 2009, when Rita Zohar won an award for her performance as the movie’s protagonist, Yolanda Moskowitz. Seeing the film again, I…
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The Schmooze Captain America: Ironic Nostalgia or American Interventionism?
America Alone: Chris Evans as Captain America, surrounded by extra-evil Hydra soldiers. Image courtesy of Jay Maidment / Marvel Studios. “Don’t win the war without me,” the scrawny Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) pleads to his pal, James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes (Sebastian Stan), in the first sepia-toned reel of Joe Johnston’s excellent “Captain America: The First…
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The Schmooze The Arty Semite Guide to the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, Part One
It’s the rare Jewish community that doesn’t have its own Jewish film festival these days, and major events happen each year in cities like New York, Boston and Atlanta. But the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, founded in 1980, is the granddaddy of them all. Starting today and continuing over the next two-and-a-half weeks, the…
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The Schmooze Etgar Keret and the World’s Skinniest House
“Narrow-minded” isn’t how Etgar Keret normally comes across. But his new project in Warsaw actually has the Israeli author and filmmaker limiting his boundaries. According to the Toronto Star, Keret will become the occupant of the “world’s skinniest house”—a four-story, five-foot-wide modernist structure to be completed by winter. Located in an alleyway between a 1960s…
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The Schmooze How a Ukrainian Refugee Became Germany’s Top Russian Translator
Courtesy of Cinema Guild A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here. It is not by chance that Vadim Jendreyko’s documentary, “The Woman With the 5 Elephants,” about an 87-year-old Russian-to-German translator, opens with the image of a train crossing a bridge. As the lights from the windows of the moving train flicker through…
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