In Roots, the new film by Pavel Lounguine, a Ukrainian conman named Edik lures several wealthy North Americans on a heritage tour to their ancestral shtetl of Golutvin. The film, which will screen at the New York Jewish Film Festival opening today, could have been paired with last fall’s adaptation of Everything Is Illuminated. But ...

In the late 1980s, klezmer music was making a comeback in the United States, but also on the festival circuit in Europe. It even caught on in Italy, which struck Francesco Spagnolo as strange; klezmer had nothing to do with Italian Jewish culture, a venerable and singular blend of Ashkenazic and Sephardic influences.
Back in Italy, ...

The first thing one notices about Richard Gere in his otherwise sensitive performance as Saul Naumann, the domineering patriarch of a Jewish family in existential tailspin in Bee Season, is that he doesn’t seem very Jewish. Neither, for that matter, does Juliette Binoche, the magnificent French actress who plays Miriam, Saul’s silently suffering wife with ...

The clever subversion of Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2002 novel Everything Is Illuminated, which described a young American Jew’s search through Ukraine for a woman who may have saved his grandfather’s life during the Holocaust, was that the American’s “self-discovery” tour was actually more revealing for his Ukrainian guides: young Alex confronts Ukraine’s legacy of anti-Semitism ...

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Audio excerpt of “One Night Less”
In 1907, a 23-year-old writer from Kiev named Dovid Bergelson decided to send fragments of his latest work, an impressionistic account of shtetl life titled At the Depot,” to I.L. Peretz, the eminence grise of Yiddish letters. Peretz did not respond, so Bergelson boarded ...

The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life tells the story of Lev Nussimbaum, born in 1905 in Baku, then a cosmopolitan boomtown in the Caucasus. The Bolshevik Revolution rendered Nussimbaum—who became enchanted by the region’s inclusive approach to Islam and would soon restyle himself Essad Bey—a penniless refugee, and he carried ...