Click here to see today’s countdown, starting with No. 25.

Like any other discussion about the essence of Judaism, trying to settle on the 100 greatest Jewish films of all time is often an exercise in frustration, with more questions than clear criteria and much room for debate. Click here for the full list, which now includes numerous cases of non-Jews passing as Jews, Jews passing as something else, Nazis who sing, and Indians who speak Yiddish. It’s an eclectic lot, which is precisely the point of the list.

Click here to start part four of Tablet Magazine’s list of 100 greatest Jewish films.

Click here to see today’s countdown, starting with No. 50.

Jewish directors, producers, actors, writers, and designers have contributed to shaping the film medium. From Hollywood to Odessa, these creative talents told stories that had universal appeal but also, often, a uniquely Jewish soul. Today’s installment of our list of the 100 greatest Jewish films of all time begins and ends with ships: One brings illegal Jewish immigrants to Palestine, the other carries sailors in revolt against the Czar’s oppressive troops, and between them lie entire worlds of storytelling. Here are numbers 50 to 26.

Click here to start part three of Tablet Magazine’s list of 100 greatest Jewish films.

Click here to see today’s countdown, starting with No. 75.

How do you decide which are the best 100 Jewish movies of all time? Does the subject matter count for much? The director? The stars? Or is there some other, fleeting essence that makes one film feel particularly Jewish? These are the questions at the heart of this list.

Today’s installment offers a wide range of interpretations, from two intellectuals engaged in endless conversation over dinner to three aging rockers trying their best to find the door to the stage and the key to success. Here are numbers 75 to 51.

Click here to start part two of Tablet Magazine’s list of 100 greatest Jewish films.

This year marks the centennial of Goodman’s birth. And while a few of his books have trickled back into print, there will be little fanfare to commemorate the life of one of the 1960s’ most important cultural-political figures. That’s why Paul Goodman Changed My Life, a documentary directed by Jonathan Lee that begins a two-week run at Film Forum in New York on October 19, is a welcome event.

Lee’s film is an attempt to restore Goodman’s place in the public consciousness. Its title reflects the formative influence Goodman had on figures ranging from Grace Paley to Michael Walzer. It also indicates that this film is intellectual history with a human face. Like its subject, Paul Goodman Changed My Life makes little distinction between the personal and the political; rather, it finds that the two can be intimately connected, sometimes with doleful consequences.

Born on Sept. 9, 1911, in Greenwich Village, Paul Goodman was the last of three children. His father had run off to South America with another woman before Paul was born. At home, Goodman’s father was never spoken of—there wasn’t even a photograph—and his departure left the family destitute. Still, Paul proved a good student, attending Hebrew school and later graduating first in his class at Townsend Harris High School. Afterward, he enrolled at City College, then becoming known as the “Proletarian Harvard,” where he memorized the work of Catullus and studied with the pragmatist philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen.

In 1936, following a stint as a counselor at a Jewish summer camp, Goodman enrolled in the doctoral program at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. (The summer-camp experience provided inspiration for his novel The Breakup of Our Camp, which would later be praised by Susan Sontag.) He was kicked out of Chicago three years later, reportedly because of problems with his sexuality. Goodman, openly bisexual in a time when such things were rarely tolerated, much less spoken of, was omnivorous in his sexual appetites. He remained married to his wife, Sally, for many years, but “he made passes at everybody,” as we’re told in Paul Goodman Changed My Life. After Chicago, Goodman was fired from his next two teaching jobs, for similar reasons.

The film is particularly astute on the subject of Goodman’s sexuality. We are given a portrait of Goodman as both sexually liberated and personally flawed. His simultaneous devotion to his wife and his search for fleeting liaisons among working-class men made for a complicated identity. As in other aspects of his life, this defiant individualism—grasping for experience wherever it might be found—left him between two stools.

Goodman wrote in nearly every form—poems, plays, novels, short stories, nonfiction—and on numerous subjects, including sociology, urban planning, psychology, linguistics, education, Jewish theology, and literature. Even his poems were remarkably diverse, ranging from sonnets to haiku, prayers to verse drama. (In the documentary, several noted writers, including Edmund White, read from Goodman poems.) A committed generalist, he liked the title “man of letters” or the loftier “artist-humanist,” and he often devoted himself to wildly divergent projects. In 1947 he published both a volume of literary criticism, Kafka’s Prayer, and a book about urban planning, Communitas, which he co-wrote with his older brother, Percival Goodman, who eventually became perhaps the most prominent architect of synagogues in the United States.

Goodman knew all the New York Intellectuals—though some, owing to his politics or sexuality, resented him—and wrote for their periodicals: Dissent, Commentary, The Nation, Partisan Review, and the like. He socialized with Frank O’Hara and Wilhelm Reich, James Baldwin and Harold Rosenberg. In his later years, he split his time between New York and a farmhouse in New Hampshire.

Despite his prolific output and eminent associations, Goodman, perhaps because he shied away from most universities—he hated bureaucratic, centrally managed organizations—spent most of the 1940s and ’50s in near-poverty, struggling to support his wife and children. For 10 years, he worked as a therapist, founding a new discipline, gestalt therapy, which he developed with Frederick S. Perls, a German-born psychiatrist, in a book that they co-wrote.

Although he wrote and published widely during this time, it wasn’t until 1960 that Goodman found a foothold in popular culture. That was the year that he published Growing Up Absurd, an attack on public education, corporatism, government, and the growing disaffection of American youth, primarily young men. With its subtitle, “Problems of Youth in the Organized System,” and its respectful attitude toward the concerns of young people, Growing Up Absurd became a bible for the nascent hippie generation, a work that was passed around college dorms as a kind of sacrament.

Growing Up Absurd brought Goodman firmly into the public eye—Martin Luther King Jr. was a fan—and back from the brink of impoverished despair. Finally, his ideas began moving from the more cloistered world of intellectual journals and into the wider realm of public discourse. He was in demand as an activist, speaker, and commentator on any number of topics, appearing alongside figures like Stokely Carmichael and Allen Ginsberg.

With U.S. involvement growing in Vietnam, Goodman became a galvanizing presence at rallies and debates. With his son, Matthew, then a student at Cornell, he organized burnings of draft cards. (The documentary shows Matthew holding a sign touting the fact that he had never even registered for the draft.) Goodman eventually earned a reputation as a father of the New Left, although, in reference to his own refusal to be of any clique or party, he called himself “a Dutch uncle to the young.” Still, the SDS and the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley sought him out for counsel. He was, like others of his ilk, a target of FBI surveillance.

Goodman seemed to be everywhere—in journals and bookstores, in the streets and on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line. (Buckley introduced him as “everything but a basketball player.”) His fans were legion, particularly among the intellectual class: Adrienne Rich admired his poetry; Grace Paley, who met Goodman through the Greenwich Village Peace Center, lauded his short stories; George Steiner called him “brilliant”; for Sontag, he was “hard to classify” but resembled Emerson; John Judis has compared him to Thoreau.

Beside his sheer industry, Goodman’s genius was best represented in his ability to combine a far-sighted utopianism with a concerted pragmatism. He was neither dreamer nor policy wonk but a bracing fusion of the two. He took pride in this amalgamated identity, titling one of his books Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals. When he argued for a radical reformation of New York City’s public schools—he proposed creating hundreds of 25-student schools, each one staffed by four teachers—he showed up at a Board of Education meeting with a detailed budget, including an explanation of how much money would be saved.

The proposal was radically quixotic, but that was the point: to both offer a fantastical re-envisioning of a broken system and to explain how it might be implemented in practice. Similarly, in a 1961 Dissent essay, “Banning Cars From Manhattan,” he and his brother, Percival, proposed just that, almost 50 years before Mayor Michael Bloomberg put forward his plan for congestion pricing. The essay mirrored ideas that the Goodman brothers had laid out 14 years earlier in Communitas.

The unusual dichotomy between the fantastical and the practical is essential to understanding Goodman’s politics. Unlike many of his colleagues, he did not identify as socialist or communist. He preferred the labels “Jeffersonian anarchist” or “community anarchist.” A committed pacifist, he cited the 19th-century Russian anarchist and polymath Pyotr Kropotkin as an important influence, along with Wordsworth, the Tang poet Du Fu, Freud, and Gandhi.

Goodman’s anarchism manifested itself in the promotion of small-scale, direct action. Seeing large organizations as inherently dehumanizing, he also had some of the atavism of classic libertarianism, arguing for policies that would protect and promote the freedom and health of the individual. There is, too, a transcendental strain in his utopianism, a call to envision greatly while working for practical, incremental change.

Despite all this, Goodman believed adamantly in community—in Paul Goodman Changed My Life the concept is cited as his central tenet—but in community divorced from centralized control, bureaucratic interference, or suffocating regimentation. To that end, while he saw education as essential—and wrote in defense of science, technology, philosophy, the whole of the “Western tradition”—most formalized schooling struck him as drastically misconceived, conformist, in thrall to corporations, and bourgeois.

Unlike many Marxists, he didn’t see capitalism as inherently damaging but rather argued that the American brand of capitalism could be reformed. In Goodman’s view, citizens should be asking ourselves how to make work spiritually meaningful and ethically sound, how to make sense of our overwhelming abundance and technological mastery.

Despite his central place in the tumult of 1960s politics, Goodman was no revolutionary, and his idiosyncratic attitudes and gadfly nature made it difficult for him to retain his place as a guru to the student movement. Warning against the seduction of abstractions, he argued for precision and concerted action, not the dreamy prospects of revolution. He also opposed drug use—he was more Tolstoy than Ginsberg—and was disturbed by the student movement’s increasingly violent behavior. Unlike some leftists of the time, he never endorsed Ho Chi Minh’s government, nor did he support Castro’s Cuba.

By the late ’60s, Goodman was being heckled at some events. In 1970, he published a volume of essays titled New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative. Some took its pugnacious title as a deliberate move to distance himself from the movements that had sprung, at least in part, from his own writings but that he could no longer identify with.

But the most consequential event in Goodman’s life during this time had little to do with politics. In 1967, while climbing a mountain in New Hampshire, Matthew Goodman, Paul’s only son, fell and died. Goodman was devastated by his son’s death—the documentary shows them as having a deep bond, if not an overtly emotional one—and he never got over it. His third heart attack killed him in 1972, at the age of 60.

Despite his emphasis on community, Goodman was haunted by feelings of loneliness. For years, he would write in the morning and then go cruising along the Manhattan waterfront—in his words, “looking for love where it cannot be found”—before returning to his family at night. His promiscuity strained his marriage. His outspokenness and refusal to compromise—Jonathan Lee called Goodman “a congenital critic”—pushed away natural allies. Although he had an active social life and knew many prominent writers and activists, he often wrote in his journal of feeling lonely.

Paul Goodman, like Moses, pointed the way to a profoundly envisioned promised land without ever seeing it himself. Although such a varied life cannot be fully represented in 90 minutes, Jonathan Lee’s soulful documentary makes for a fine point of entry. Paul Goodman Changed My Life testifies to the limits of Goodman’s brilliance and to the tragic ease with which our own culture dispenses with such unclassifiable figures.

Steinem’s life has been full of glamour and intrigue and controversy and historical weight. Here, though, she’s reduced to a generic person of interest, someone whose life has yielded anecdotes featuring other notable figures, including Richard Nixon, George Burns, and Helen Gurley Brown, bits of quotable wisdom, and lots of photographic evidence of her presence at important events while wearing era-appropriate outfits. The film covers Steinem’s famous undercover Playboy Bunny piece, her ambivalent relationship with her mother, her feminist “click” when she realized that the abortion she had at 22 was more than just a personal experience, her fierce independence, her breast cancer, and her tap-dancing skills.

Despite this encyclopedic approach, Gloria never alludes to the fairly well-known fact that Steinem—like many other prominent second-wave feminists, including Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, and Andrea Dworkin—is Jewish. The concentration of Jewish women in the movement has been variously attributed to Jewish women’s tendency to embrace progressive causes, our inherent love of arguing, and our relative comfort with being seen as outsiders. As Steinem herself told the Jewish Standard last year, “I think the emphasis on social justice … has probably created a situation where Jewish women may be disproportionately represented in the women’s movement.”

Liberal Judaism and feminism have always seemed obviously wedded to me: Both emphasize asking questions and taking responsibility for the state of the world. In different ways, they both involve having faith. And if you want to be reductive about it, sure, Jews and feminists are stereotypically loud and opinionated. In my experience, they’re identities that complement more than complicate each other. I’d call them inextricable, except that while I can’t imagine being Jewish without being a feminist—or being compelled by a form of Judaism that wasn’t feminist-flavored—it’s less of a stretch to think of things the other way around.

Maybe this is because feminism is the broader of these two worldviews. It’s more flexible, with fewer rules. It’s also an identity that people choose rather than inherit (though there’s undoubtedly a hereditary element—my copy of Steinem’s book Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions was handed down from my bubbe, who along with her sister was involved in a Jewish feminist study group they irreverently called the “Minyan of Crones”).

Though Gloria is not particularly nuanced—nor concerned at all with Judaism—there’s a moment in the documentary that suggests a more subtle parallel between Judaism and feminism is possible. It comes not from Steinem but in her quoting of a non-Jewish icon of an even earlier feminist wave, Susan B. Anthony. Anthony, Steinem paraphrases, “said our job is not to make young women grateful; it’s to make them ungrateful, so they keep going.” It’s a line that distills something essential about feminism and Judaism: their shared commitment to remembering their history, as well as a dedication to moving beyond it.

Anthony was calling for young women to continue the work of their mothers, to push on to accomplish what the older women couldn’t. But the line also points to the fact that feminists’ goal all along has been for their daughters’ lives to look different—less burdened—than they’d had to fight to achieve. Speaking “in her own words,” Steinem is happy to talk about the past, but she looks determinedly to the future. She insists on the importance of trusting younger generations, of passing down knowledge and experience but not resenting your children for not making your experiences the center of their own.

Jews and feminists alike care about remembering because they know there is danger in forgetting. If we don’t take careful stock of why things are different today and how we got here, we risk returning to a past that we worked so hard to get beyond. And yet to never forget, to be constantly remembering and re-remembering, can be a kind of paralysis.

This is not at all the point of Gloria, even though it’s probably one of feminism’s prevailing themes, and it’s admittedly something of a stretch to zero in on it amid what is otherwise a general, well-meaning overview of Steinem’s life and legacy. But without some extrapolating, the film risks putting you to sleep. This is partly due to the filmmaker’s apparent uncertainty about who he thinks will be watching: On one hand, Kunhardt seems to presume a certain familiarity with the basic facts of feminist history, because they are glossed over. At the same time, the film never really moves beyond those basics, failing to capture the urgency of second-wave feminism and the spirit of the women, including Steinem, who helped lead it. It’s a soothing, feel-good portrait that is likely to be celebrated by the same people who celebrate Steinem off screen—who know she’s got more dimensions than she’s allowed to show in this film but will be gratified to see her getting her due.

Given the complexity of all that Steinem represents, that means Gloria is a missed opportunity. But there’s also something honest about it. Steinem is 77 years old, and her legacy is coalescing. Though she’s still vocal and visible and shows no sign of slowing down, the history in which she played such an important role is receding, and this documentary is part of an understandable—and worthwhile—attempt to solidify her significance.

But significance and boilerplate are easily confused. Steinem continues to be relevant despite efforts to pin her down and praise her, to write her eulogy and feminism’s along with it. In recent years, she’s shown a determination to be part of feminist debate without defining it, to let her ideas evolve, and to acknowledge the relevance of feminism beyond her own generation in ways that many of her peers have been unwilling to. In 2004, she cheered the overwhelming turnout by young women at the March for Women’s Lives in Washington, and, to its credit, the film does include a clip of this. During the 2008 presidential election, she weighed in on the blazing debate over whether a white woman or a black man was more “electable.” She contributed an essay to an anthology of women’s writings about getting their first period. Just last week, she called for a boycott of the upcoming NBC drama The Playboy Club—frustrated by the way it romanticizes a job she knows firsthand was anything but glamorous—and published an op-ed about the militarization of Jeju Island, South Korea.

I wish that this standard-issue film about the life of one of our great heroines had been better, juicier, truer to the spirit of the movement she helped lead—and to which she continues to be a model of ingenuity, grace, and perhaps most important, a much-needed provider of perspective. I wish it could have been a rallying cry, something more than a validating if disappointing hour of programming for people who already know how important she is. Luckily, Gloria will not be the last word on Gloria Steinem.

The two-part documentary, airing November 20 and 21 as part of the 25th season of the PBS documentary series American Masters, will include clips of Allen’s comedy performances from the 1960s as well as footage from some of his films with insight from Allen himself.

Spoiler alert: Allen’s favorite film? The Purple Rose of Cairo.

TCA 2011: Woody Allen finally lets down his guard for PBS [LA Times]
New Documentary Reveals Woody Allen Thought Annie Hall Was “Okay,” Manhattan Was “Unreleasable” [Gothamist]

But in the documentary series Big Fat Gypsy Weddings—a mega-hit in Britain set to hit American television screens later this month—the group in question is not the one that regular readers of Tablet might immediately think of when they hear the words “insular” and “endogamous.” Yet certain aspects may feel eerily familiar just the same.

For hundreds of years, the Gypsies of the show’s title, the Irish Travellers—who speak their own language of Shelta, a English dialect with heavy Irish/Gaelic influences—have led a marginalized existence throughout the British Isles. Due to their similarly peripatetic lifestyles, the Travellers are often confused with the Roma, the ethnic group whose deep musical tradition so influenced klezmer, and who are often (but not often enough) mentioned alongside Jews as victims of the Holocaust, but they are separate groups with disparate traditions and origins (although they do begin to crop up in later episodes of the show; for better or for worse, the two communities have similar lifestyles and, therefore, a great deal of overlap in the public imagination).

The documentary purports to shed light for the first time on this notoriously secretive community clustered in portable trailer parks and roadside camps throughout England and Ireland. The Travellers are most likely the descendants of Irish peasants left homeless by Cromwell’s military campaigns and are indigenous to the British Isles, a fact that makes it all the more poignant when Elizabeth, a young Traveller girl profiled in the documentary, speaks of the hostility her community still encounters from “settled” people. They are also called “gorgers,” a term that seems to intimate the same blend of amusement and disdain as another word I know that starts with a “G”): “They call us gyppos, gypsy scum, say ‘go back to where you came from.’ ” Where, precisely, are they supposed to go?

As the title would suggest, the five-part series centers on the extravaganza of the Traveller wedding, in all its bedazzled, faintly medieval glory, although its reach is much further than that. The wedding, one of the more conspicuous traditions of the Traveller community, is our way in, so to speak. Our guide and Greek chorus—apart from an omniscient female narrator whose clipped BBC accent carries a faintly elegiac tinge—is Thelma Madine, a Liverpool dressmaker (and non-Traveller) who specializes in the creation of the tulle behemoths favored by Traveller brides, adorned with countless rhinestones, yards of lace, and, in one case, electric lights and mechanical butterflies. As such, Thelma occupies a unique outsider/insider perspective on a society that in her words, “doesn’t want anyone to know anything about them.” Traveller girls typically leave school in their early teens and are married soon thereafter—16- and 17-year-old brides are the norm. The dressmaker Thelma (as she is constantly referred to in the voiceover) is often brought, as prototypes, pictures of Disney princess from Cinderella to Princess Tiana from The Princess and the Frog, as perhaps befitting their age, or in one spectacular incidence, a request for a gown based on the monstrous pink one from the wedding scene in the 1988 Eddie Murphy movie, Coming to America, which is exactly what I would have chosen for my wedding when I was 6 years old, if not 16.

What they wear the rest of the time is another matter. Bare midriffs, bras for shirts, visible thong underwear abound. Thelma observes, “To see them most of the time, you would think they were prostitutes.” But you can’t judge a book by its cover, and you can’t judge a Traveller girl by her cleavage. “They really are the most moral people you ever could meet,” Thelma says. Travelers practice the kind of strict sex segregation rarely seen outside of Saudi Arabia or Satmar Williamsburg. Girls travel in packs; they’re not allowed to date or be briefly alone with a boy. Even after a girl is engaged she must bring a chaperone, usually her mother, on all outings with her intended. While Traveller boys have, if not much education, a relatively free hand in the world, girls are expected to stay at home, clean, cook, and look after younger brothers and sisters—sort of a mandated apprenticeship for their married lives. Drinking is strictly forbidden for girls, as is the use of foul language—16-year-old bride-to-be Josie declares that she’d “rather die than swear in front of a man”—and do I have to tell you how they feel about the importance of virginity? (Let’s just say “strongly.”)

While the attitude of the filmmakers toward the treatment of Traveller women is plagued with more than a hint of patronizing cultural relativism, the show doesn’t shy away from showing the dark side of the society. As in all communities where women are treated as second-classes citizens, domestic violence is rife. (After all, the dehumanization of the Other begins at home.) The difficulties facing a Traveller woman in an abusive situation are compounded by the threat of ostracism from the community if she leaves and her lack of education; the vast majority of Traveller adults (and particularly women) are functionally illiterate. “I mean, I’m not terrible,” says 18-year-old bride Lizzie, in the same tone one might describe one’s limited ability at speaking French or downhill skiing. “But we ain’t going to be doctors, or lawyers, or anything. Housewives, that’s what we’re meant to be.”

And now for the moment you’ve all been waiting for: What does this have to do with the Jews? The blessedly liberating answer, on the surface at least, is that it doesn’t. Despite my tongue-in-cheek opening paragraph, and despite the various superficial similarities (the ambivalence about assimilation! The traditional role of women! The traumatized expression on the face of the mother of the boy who has insisted on marrying a non-Gypsy!), the two groups aren’t really comparable (for example, more alcohol consumed in a single 45-minute Traveller cemetery visit than has been in Crown Heights in the past 15 years—except, obviously, on Purim).

Many Jews, myself included, have been so conditioned to see everything through the (often paranoid) lens of our own experience, which is how you wind up driving yourself crazy thinking that Toy Story 3 is a Holocaust allegory and the goblins in the Harry Potter franchise are meant as some Streicher-esque depiction of Jews (they work in banks and have their own language too).  But watching Big Fat Gypsy Weddings, I found myself in the welcome position of viewing a minority group from the position of the comfortable majority, capable of gawping at a maligned subculture without immediately wondering “what it all meant” (the key to the series’ success, no doubt, is the way the filmmakers have managed to mix outright prurience with earnest concern; they’ve figured out a way for us to have our 8-foot-tall Sleeping Beauty’s Castle wedding cake and eat it too). I felt like one of them (gorgers or goyim, take your pick) watching us, and what I discovered on the other side was surprising: that curiosity is not the same thing as hostility; that incomprehension or even disapproval does not preclude empathy; and, perhaps most clearly, the disturbing symbiosis that often occurs between persecutor and persecuted.

A few examples from the series best illuminate this last phenomenon. One is the instance of John, a Romany Gypsy (one of the few featured in the series) on his way to the Appleby Horse Fair in Yorkshire, an annual meeting place, or “Mecca” as he calls it, for the Gypsy and Traveller communities. On his way, John takes offense to road signs reading “No Stopping,” as well as a notice at a roadside inn advising that its parking lot is reserved solely for its guests. I was perplexed by his anger; I figured the transportation authority just didn’t want people parking on the shoulder of the interstate and the inn management just wanted to save priority for paying customers, but according to John, the sign might as well as read, “‘No Gypsies.’” Wounded, he confronted the bemused parking attendant, and I suddenly remembered the looks of annoyed bafflement on the face of every teacher, Girl Scout leader, and friend’s mother I was compelled to tell that I couldn’t take the test scheduled for Yom Kippur, make the Christmas ornaments, or eat the pepperoni pizza they’d ordered. They didn’t get it, and I had offended them by reflexively taking offense.

Later on, we get to see just how quickly bemusement can turn ugly. In the fifth and final installment of the series, Thelma Madine has been commissioned to create outfits for the bridal party of a Traveller wedding in Northern Ireland. The bride’s mother has been vague and even misleading about the date of the wedding (common enough among Travellers, who fear that churches and hotels will simply cancel bookings if given enough time to discover who they are hosting), but Thelma, who for the most part is hugely sympathetic to their plight, finally suspects she’s being taken for a ride. “I’m not a die-hard Traveller supporter, I’m not saying that. But I have stuck up for them, and this makes me so angry.” In about 30 seconds, the otherwise impeccably well-meaning Thelma has managed to conflate the exasperating behavior of one woman with that of an entire group.

Collective blame—it’s something we Jews know all too well, and we have all too often found ourselves on both sides of it. It is the very essence of prejudice, on which we certainly have no monopoly. Bigotry, persecution, tragedy: This may be the history of the Jewish people, but it’s also the history of the whole world.

One obvious factor is, of course, its length. It is 564 minutes—approximately nine and a half hours—long. Presented in two parts, Lanzmann’s preference was that it be viewed in one day or, at the least, in two subsequent days. Sitting through it can be an exhausting, almost grueling, experience.

Ultimately, however, the power of this documentary is rooted not in what Lanzmann has done but in what he does not do. The film does not contain one moment of archival footage. There is no visual horror in Shoah: no scenes of Jews being loaded onto trains, marched out of ghettoes, or shot by Einsatzgruppen. There are no cadavers being bulldozed by the Allies into mass graves in the immediate aftermath of the “liberation” of the camps. Instead Lanzmann weaves together an intricate web of interviews with survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders. Because there is no representation of the horror, the viewer must imagine what happened, and, as Leah Wolfson of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has put it, “we hear the witnesses in an entirely different way.”

Lanzmann is a patient interviewer who does not fear long silences. However, he can be ruthless—even to a Holocaust survivor. Should one of his subjects try to elide a fact or, in an attempt to avoid a painful memory, offer up some banal platitude, Lanzmann balks. He demands facts. Where did you stand? Were you inside or outside the building? How many Jews did you see transported from the church? Did they say anything? No detail is too “unimportant” to be left out.

One of the most compelling scenes takes place in front of the Chelmno church. It was at Chelmno that the Germans used gas vans to kill over 150,000. Jews were brought to the church and, at the appointed moment, pushed up a ramp right into a gas van that had been backed up to the door. Once the requisite numbers of “pieces,” as the Germans called them, were on board, a hose was attached to the exhaust pipe and the other end was inserted into the van. As the van drove toward the woods, the carbon monoxide asphyxiated the Jews aboard.

Years later, Lanzmann gathered a group of Polish non-Jews from Chelmno and stood them in front of the church. In the center he placed Simon Srebnik, a young boy during the war who was one of the few survivors of the Chelmno operation. The Germans loved his sweet voice and kept him alive so he could sing to them. The town’s people tell Lanzmann how pleased they are to see Srebnik, whom they remember walking through the town in chains. They declare their horror about the murder of the Jews. As Lanzmann begins to probe what they remember, their tone, almost inexplicably, begins to change. One woman declares that the Jews had suitcases filled with gold and pots with false bottoms in which they hid precious jewels. When Lanzmann asks why the Jews were killed another proclaims “because they were the richest.” Then the church organist, whom we have previously seen playing a moving hymn during the Mass, steps forward and insists that the rabbi told his congregants that they were being killed because of what they did to Jesus. “It was God’s will,” he says. “That’s all.” A woman who a few minutes earlier had bemoaned the Jews’ fate, suddenly shouts out, “So Pilate washed his hands and said: ‘Christ is innocent’ and he sent Barabbas. But the Jews cried out: ‘Let his blood fall on our heads!’” After a moment’s pause she adds: “That’s all: now you know.” The Poles gathered around Srebnik nod their heads in assent at this expression of classical anti-Semitism. Lanzmann wisely says nothing.

Lanzmann does not spoonfeed viewers. Watching this film is what my colleague Catherine Dana describes as a “didactic experience.” One has to pay careful attention to fit the pieces of the puzzle together. Though Lanzmann has charted every moment of this film, no voiceovers or commentary explain why one segment follows another. Such is the case in the final moments of the first part, much of which has concerned the Chelmno gas vans. The scene is the contemporary German Autobahn. The camera pans across the traffic on the highway and alights on a large truck. Lanzmann, who is off screen, begins to read a 1942 memo by an SS officer requesting that Sauer, the manufacturer of the vans, make certain adjustments to them. The changes were needed so that “pieces” aboard the van could be packed in more tightly. As Lanzmann reads the memo the camera, which has been following the truck on the Autobahn, focuses on its mud flaps. Emblazoned on them is the name of the manufacturer: Sauer. The company that built the gas vans is still at work in Germany. No commentary is necessary. And none is given.

Lanzmann also finds perpetrators. He secretly films a Nazi guard who worked at the Treblinka gas chamber. The guard, thinking he is speaking with a neo-Nazi, describes the killing process in a straightforward, unemotional manner, leaving no doubt that he is unashamed about what he did. I know of no other video record of a perpetrator precisely describing what he did.

In 1961, the Eichmann trial changed how the world heard the stories of Holocaust survivors. Many had spoken out before but never had they been “heard” as they were in the aftermath of the trial. This attention to them and their stories grew after the 1967 Six-Day War. It intensified after the 1978 airing of the decidedly mediocre, but wildly popular, NBC miniseries Holocaust. It was Shoah, however, that compelled scholars, intellectuals, and thoughtful laypeople to fully grasp that the Holocaust was more than “just” a massive, industrialized, and bureaucratized killing. It was committed by and happened to millions of individuals. We encounter some of them in Lanzmann’s film.

In the 25 years since Shoah first appeared, we have become used to seeing filmed Holocaust testimonies. Too many of these interviews have been conducted by well-meaning amateurs who did not know the topic well enough to produce a document with historical value. (There are, of course, exceptions to this, like the Fortunoff archive at Yale.) Lanzmann prepared himself with as much historical information as he could amass. He knew the history and, consequently, what to ask. More than just that—and this is the reason his interviews have stood the test of time—he triangulates the experience of the victim, perpetrator, and bystander. And it is not just one victim or bystander who speaks about a particular incident. A number do and, as we listen, we begin to grasp some of the enormity of the event. It is remarkable how this film has stood the test of time. In coming years, as fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors are left to tell their stories, its significance will become greater still.

Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah reopens at New York’s at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas today and will begin a national rollout next year.

Deborah Lipstadt, the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, is the author of History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving. Her latest book, The Eichmann Trial, will be published by Nextbook Press in 2011.

Radical Lawyer’s Appeal (and Rebuttal) [NYT]

Emily and Sarah Kunstler, Filmmakers [Gothamist]
Daughters of Infamous Lawyer Assess his Legacy in ‘Kunstler’ [Jweekly]

Promised Lands, which will have a rare screening in Brooklyn on Tuesday. She couldn’t have picked a more dramatic moment: the Yom Kippur War was raging, and everywhere Sontag trained her camera she found a country newly despairing over the future prospect of living in peace with its Arab neighbors. The Israel of 1973, it turns out, is depressingly, and clarifyingly, familiar.

Before we can talk about the film, though, it’s helpful to consider the filmmaker: Susan Sontag, director? She is famous for her essays, of course, and for her glamorous, engagée intellectual activism. She was also one of the first American writers to take cinema seriously, an early champion of foreign auteurs like Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman, and particularly Jean-Luc Godard.

Promised Lands, released in 1974, was her third film, and first documentary. Both her inexperience and her influences show in the frequently tedious movie, which seems like the work of someone who is a little too obsessed with Bresson’s viscously slow films. More problematic are the film’s meandering, structureless form and its utter refusal to aid the viewer: so radical is Sontag in her cinematic purity, that the film’s interviewees are not even identified. Unsurprisingly, The New York Times panned it at the time of its release; The New Republic’s Stanley Kauffmann was only a little more encouraging.

Despite its flaws, however, and despite the fact that the reality Promised Lands depicts undoubtedly reflects Sontag’s deliberate and somewhat politicized choices, the film provides a valuable document of a traumatized society. Consisting largely of interviews with prominent Israelis, accompanied by regional music that is periodically juxtaposed with what sounds like artillery fire, Sontag’s camera takes its time, lingering for minutes on a ceremony at Jerusalem’s War Cemetery, empty tanks and dead bodies on the battlefield, a funeral for a fallen solider, a center for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, and, always, the gorgeous hilly landscape that everyone in the region seems to be constantly fighting and dying over.

“We have this pogrom complex here,” explains Yoram Kaniuk, the leftist Israeli writer, who is Promised Lands’ conscience and main voice. He adds, “And this time, in this war, it was almost so.” Speaking into a microphone in a nondescript hotel room, smoking a pipe, Kaniuk looks worried and sad. He and others like him are the film’s greatest asset, allowing viewers an unmitigated glance at the distraught consciousness of those days.

Watching the film from a distance of three decades, viewers—especially ones vaguely familiar with Sontag’s intellectual commitments—may wonder what interest she found in the topic, especially as she had rarely, before or since, seriously explored Israel or even her own Jewish heritage. Sontag seems to have wondered as well: in a brief essay in Vogue, published around the time of the film’s release, she insisted on her subject matter’s “uncanny fit with themes in my writings and other films.” The fit isn’t immediately apparent, though, and the film’s numerous declarations of sympathy for Israel are surprising coming from the staunchly leftist Sontag.

But one element of the film that does seem to jibe with Sontag’s other preoccupations is its tragic element. “Being rather tuned into sadness, to the tears in things, I put a lot of that in Promised Lands,” she wrote in Vogue. “Alas, it’s not just in my head. It’s what Israel does seem to me, at this moment, to be about.” The film presents, in a subtly polemical fashion, a tragic trajectory for the Israeli experience, consisting of three distinct, non-overlapping epochs.

The first, spanning from Zionism’s fin de siècle beginnings to June 1967, features the pure land of Labor Zionism, during which, as Kaniuk puts it, the Jews “took a lot of beautiful things out of Judaism and merged it with Tolstoy and song and dance.” This Israel is the star of the film’s most powerful segment. Sontag, the famed analyst of campiness, films a Tel Aviv wax museum that depicts great moments in Israel’s history, from Theodor Herzl orating to David Ben-Gurion feeding milk to a lamb with a baby bottle. That the scenes, despite their kitschiness, manage to inspire suggests just how invigorating the Zionist project had been at its inception.

The final wax diorama is of a Jewish soldier weeping at the Western Wall: perhaps the iconic image of the 1967 war, it was the moment that both culminated and, as the film goes on to explain, killed that first epoch. For after Israel’s stunningly lopsided victory, it became an incredibly confident modern consumer society—“Like America in the ’50s,” Kaniuk sighs. “Socialism went out the window. In Kaniuk’s analysis (and by extension Sontag’s), post-’67 Israel made a gargantuan error in overconfidently failing to extend magnanimity to its foes, justly vanquished though they were. And what does pride come before? Kaniuk reminds us, in what could serve as the film’s epigraph: “The Jews never understood tragedy. That is why the Greeks invented tragedy, and we invented, kind of, drama. In the Bible, there is no tragedy. Because tragedy is where a right is opposed to another right. And here is two rights opposing each other. The Palestinians have a full right to Palestine, and the Jews have a full right to Palestine.” He adds, “Do you have any solution to a tragedy? Of course you don’t.”

And so Promised Lands concludes by depositing us squarely in Israel’s third epoch, where the imperative is not to reclaim and restore the land, nor to build a modern, successful state that also happens to be Jewish, but merely to keep on keepin’ on. Now, viewed 35 years later, the tragedy articulated by Sontag’s movie is not that Israel failed to survive. The tragedy, rather, is that survival remains Israel’s most ambitious goal.

Blumenthal—a lightning-rod figure whose Republican enemies still call him by the nickname Sid Vicious—was never bound to be an easy sell to the drama-averse Obama crowd, but these days he comes with a new potential liability: his son, Max, a 31-year-old journalist who has carved out a role for himself as a kind of YouTube Michael Moore, infiltrating conservative conventions to capture confrontations with the likes of Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin. But recently, he turned his attention to a new target.

“The whole time I was writing about the right, I was following the Israeli-Palestinian conflict closely,” Max Blumenthal said in an interview with Tablet this week. “But I wanted to establish a modicum of credibility before I pulled the trigger.”

In early June, the day before Obama’s landmark address to the Muslim world from a Cairo stage, Blumenthal went into central Jerusalem armed with a shotgun mike and a cameraman to interview college-aged—and very likely drunk—Americans, who, with remarkably little prompting, spewed racist vitriol about the president while asserting a strikingly meatheaded brand of Jewish pride. The video went viral, garnering more than 400,000 views before YouTube pulled it down, citing unspecified terms-of-use violations.

Blumenthal comes across as an insider’s outsider; he veers from earnest, serious condemnations of the Israeli left or Sacha Baron Cohen’s portrayal of Kazakhs to cracks about Shabak interrogations, and frets about being passed over in “hot or not” discussions among interns at The Nation. He describes himself as a “non-Zionist” liberal, though he describes the identification of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism as a “cynical ploy by the Israel lobby.”

He said he was less surprised by what the subjects said than by the reaction after the video posted, on June 5. Commentators from across the political spectrum went nuts; those on the left objected to letting hate speech against the president go unchecked, but the most vocal criticism, which Blumenthal claims included death threats, came from those who felt it was wrong to portray Jews in such a negative light, either for fear of fomenting anti-Semitism or because of the implicit moral equivalence with everyone from garden-variety America-haters to actual anti-Israel terrorists.

Blumenthal said he didn’t think that concern was sufficient to merit quashing the video, which he said he’d hoped would prompt “soul-searching” in the American Jewish community and become a teaching tool for people engaging with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“It may not reflect the reality, but they reflect a reality,” Blumenthal said, dismissing the concern that the video might be “bad for the Jews.” “So why not show it?”

This impulse, he said, came from his father’s advice on being a journalist. “He urges me to be cautious in my methodology and how I express myself, and to be clinical in my writing—to not be strident, to let the facts speak for themselves,” Blumenthal said. But when asked whether the brouhaha over the video had anything to do with the White House blocking his father’s appointment, the younger Blumenthal rose in filial defense, rejecting the idea that his work had anything to do with his father’s career. (He declined to say what his father thinks of his work; Sidney Blumenthal did not respond to email requests for comment.)

Growing up, Blumenthal said, Zionism was never discussed; engaging with Jewishness meant cheering when Kevin Youkilis, a Jewish player, made it to the Boston Red Sox. He made his first trip to Israel in 2001, before the Sept. 11 attacks but after the launch of the Second Intifada, and said seeing the circumstances of the Palestinians living in Israel and the occupied territories prompted him to question Israel’s role in the conflict. After President Bush launched the War on Terror, Blumenthal said, he was upset to hear rabbis at High Holiday services drawing parallels between Israel’s fight against Palestinian militants and America’s war on al-Qaida terrorists.

“I wanted to describe myself as a liberal Zionist, but there was no way—the liberal values I’d been raised on were not compatible with Zionism,” he said.

He returned to Israel for the first time this spring after turning in the manuscript for his book, Republican Gomorrah, which will be published in September. Once there, he began collecting his own footage, which led to the recent videos.

Editors at the Huffington Post refused to post the original video on the grounds that it was insufficiently newsworthy, and the site earlier this week posted and then quickly removed its sequel, which captured apparently sober Israelis in Tel Aviv saying similarly impolitic things about Obama and Palestinians. The videos wound up on the left-wing blog Mondoweiss, whose founder, Philip Weiss, focuses on the Israel-Palestine conflict from a self-described non-Zionist perspective. “The videos are enormously important,” Weiss told Tablet. “The suppression of the videos strikes me as lamentable and predictable and ostrich-like.”

In September 1982, Christian supporters of President Bashir Gemayel, enraged by his assassination, massacred hundreds of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in West Beirut while Israeli soldiers surrounding the camps did nothing to stop the brutality. Director Ari Folman was among them, but found, years later, that he had no recollection of the events he’d witnessed.

That realization sent Folman on an investigation, interviewing friends and peers about what they did and saw during the war in an effort to jog his own memory.

The breathtaking result of Folman’s exploration is Waltz With Bashir, a vibrantly animated, wrenching film—part memoir, part documentary—that has thrilled audiences around the world since its debut at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. It has already started racking up awards and has been nominated for a Golden Globe for best foreign film.

We spoke with Ari Folman in his hotel in New York where he was promoting Waltz With Bashir about the challenges of making this film, his favorite scenes, and the cinematic legacy he hopes to leave his children.

The orchard scene:

“The Airport”:

The waltz:

Film stills and clips from Waltz with Bashir courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

Zack, who is thirty-two, studied art at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. She lives in Tel Aviv and teaches at Tel Aviv University. Her work has been exhibited at the Israel Museum, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Artneuland Gallery in Berlin, and elsewhere. Zack co-wrote and co-produced Mother Economy with Yitzchak Roth; earlier this year it took Germany’s Celeste Art Prize and is on view at the Jewish Museum in New York through October 23.

How do you explain this film to viewers?

It’s about the calculus of every day life, of objects, of emotions, of spaces, of relationships inside a family, things that we usually don’t consider quantifiable. The mother in the film is a feminine figure, we don’t know whether it’s the mother or the maid or it’s one of the daughters, but we expect this woman to be compassionate and endlessly loving. And actually what we see her doing is executing economic procedures. She becomes like a scientist, and all of a sudden we see what is behind the scenes of this traditional role of mother or woman. The film is about exposing this, and maybe showing how creative, or responsible, or strong and full of control and influence are the actions that women have been doing throughout the years.

This woman has a little notebook, she’s tracing and measuring everything meticulously. Her actions, her decisiveness, subvert the idea of the mother as a warm, “let me embrace you” type.

Mama. Yeah, that’s why I chose this rather thin, maybe tough-looking character, so she would seem a bit like a teacher. Or a clerk. At the same time, there is a lot of sexuality and juiciness in the actions, in the materials and sounds. She has fallen in love with those actions—passing papers, tracing. So it’s about tension between cold bureaucratic things that you cannot relate to emotionally. But, in the deeper sense it’s about showing how even such things actually express human needs—obsessions and desires and passions about objects. It’s a duality of science and art, of objectivity and subjectivity.

Sometimes people look at something they valued, a photograph, a locket, and suddenly don’t care about it. It’s lost its sentimental value. What is the significance of objects—books, pencils, pocket-change—to this woman?

That’s my major interest, to think about objects as signs that we give meaning to, or how we use objects to create meaning, to construct our world. In the film, she is navigating through this domestic space, and she finds objects that obviously relate to family members. For example, she finds a man’s shoes on the floor next to the table. She traces them and then copies it in her notepad. We ask ourselves, “Whose shoes are these? What are they doing there? Is it good that they are there? Is it bad? I mean, how would she calculate it? What does it mean to her? And where is this man? If it’s a man at all.” It’s like a crime scene. She finds cigarette ash on the floor, and we make the same thinking process. She finds this tennis racket and ball, which she falls over. This is a surprise for her, but it could also be that it’s not surprising, because she might have arranged the whole thing, so maybe she’s creating her own surprises, imagining the whole thing, building up this family.

When I saw this film, it occurred to me that I was not supposed to think of the woman as a character but as a put-on, as a person explicitly playing dress-up, an impostor who’s consciously assuming the role of matriarch in this particular make-believe household.

I really like this idea of pretending. I’m interested in mental constructions, or arbitrary conventions. After the opening scene, she’s turning on the radio, and there is a sentence in German that means, “she’s a very miserable housewife, but a very good actress.”

It’s a sentence I found in recordings of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, actors reading their letters, it takes out the authenticity of being a “hausfrau.” All this is make-believe, she’s an actress in a set, the house has artificiality in it—in authentic houses people also design and display things.

It brings me to the link between housewife and artist, the way artists, or production designers, officially design spaces. They have to prepare the set for a shot, and they know every object, where it was before. They have to consider the continuity; they have pictures and documentations of every object, and how it was seen through the camera, and after months, when they go for extra shooting, they have to reconstruct the same space. So, I’m pointing to housewives, how they design the house, how it’s their kingdom that they control.

In addition to Weill and Lenya, you have archival radio in the film, locating what’s going on at a specific point in history—World War II Germany. What was your thinking in referencing a specific historical moment rather than leaving the time and place ambiguous?

I wanted to describe a situation of isolation—a cultural, economical, emotional, psychological situation detached from the outside world. This time and place, this connotation of the war and Holocaust, emphasize it very well. But the more I was thinking about it, I realized how deep it is in relation to my family history, my grandmother’s house in Slovakia. I wanted to see the house, had expectations to go and see the space. I couldn’t get in, but it stimulated my imagination to imagine life in this house, and the situation for the Jewish people in this area.

They survived till almost the very end of the war, in this situation of isolation. A certain autonomy was kept. My grandmother left to Israel before the war. One sister also went. But the rest of her sisters, brothers, aunts, parents, grandmothers, and cousins were all sent to Auschwitz. There are notations at Yad Vashem, names and dates of deaths. So, the film also relates to trying to keep away the outside world by executing rituals and calculations, and obsessively trying to maintain a certain order.

There’s a kugel that figures prominently in this film, and the woman attends to it with the precision befitting a brain surgeon. I wasn’t expecting to see a kugel, especially being cut using a protractor.

I was thinking about the Jewish economic system in terms of saving and being efficient, so I was thinking of Eastern European cuisine, simple and made of cheap things, potato or noodle kugel. It’s not fancy. The kugel becomes an economic pie chart. The economic pie chart encapsulates both food and money as the basic measures of living. Here it becomes a kugel cake, which is funny, and that pie chart is the most abstract equation that expresses the situation in the house. She was translating the whole house into this kugel calculation and the recipe expresses the division of resources in the home—the ash, the shoes, the spaces, the coins—all her conclusions are translated into the kugel. It’s the overall matrix of the house.

Her meticulousness echoes that of the Nazis.

More maybe the German-Jewish connection, the deep bonding that was between Jews and German culture in general. But it also relates to Jewish daily life of thinking about every action, blessing it, and being aware of every action and object and what it means. Things that are part of this spiritual system but actually come down to simple materials, you know—if your shirt is made out of silk together with cotton, it’s shaatnez, so you can’t wear it. Also, there is this thinking about the fact that there is no Jewish art, the Jewish people are only spiritual, we’re the nation of the book, of the word, and we disregard objects and the materialistic world. And all of a sudden it comes down to all those very simple things—these very small details.

At the same time, the question of dispossession that the film alludes to also has contemporary implications in Israel.

I was thinking about the Jewish situation in general, and it reflects Israel. But thinking that you are hunted, you are under threat and you have to be alert, to always keep certain distance, to be a Jew and to have your own things, your own habits—kosher—which are different, in order to keep this separation, it’s also what the film is about. It’s taking this extreme situation to show this Jewish existential situation, but it also reflects the way Israel as a state is behaving.

Since you mentioned your grandmother’s history, I wonder has your family background been a part of all your work?

It’s always hard to define how much we absorb or appropriate personal things. Every child in Israel studies about the Holocaust and Jewish history, but not everybody takes it so personally. Not everybody’s interested in it.

I think a lot about immigration. My mother was born in Venezuela to a mother who was a native Venezuelan woman who grew up in a coffee plantation. [My grandmother] met my grandfather, a Jewish Russian immigrant, at the beginning of the twentieth century. He became Zionist. Their children were already in Jewish schools, but they decided to bring the kids to Israel, and go back, so they left the kids in boarding schools in Israel. It was very hard, I think, traumatic for my mother. I absorbed those things that she was telling me about, these difficult experiences that she had coming to Israel. She didn’t know the language, and so, in a way, I always felt that I also belonged to other places and that I have to make the other places, the other cultures alive in me.

The second part of the series examines the legacy of the Holocaust for children of survivors (including Engle herself) in the U.K., and the third part profiles Jonathan Faith, a philanthropist of vast wealth who has given himself over to the task of guiding secular Jews toward living a more religious life.

In these intimate portraits, Engle captures the essential qualities of Jewish life in Britain today. She speaks with Nextbook about what drew her to this subject, and about what she learned in the process (including a deeper understanding of the complex dietary laws that inform the making of a Kosher biscuit).

Stills from Jews

The pioneers of the kibbutz movement in the 1920s and ’30s were passionate adherents of prevailing socialist ideals and applied them as faithfully as possible. In practice, that meant privileging physical labor over intellectual activity, and the group over the individual. Perhaps most radically, it meant all but eradicating the family unit as we know it. Children were placed in a nursery virtually at birth, and were raised by nannies, amid their peers, spending at most an hour or two a day with their parents.

Filmmaker Ran Tal’s grandparents were among those pioneers, and their children—his parents—were products of the social experiment they launched. For his documentary Children of the Sun, Tal interviewed several dozen kibbutzniks of his parents’ generation, mining their memories for details about everything from bedtime rituals to calisthenic drills. Their words, alternately matter-of-fact, proud, bemused, and bitter, serve as accompaniment to archival footage taken from amateur films shot on kibbutzim between 1930 and 1970.

Nextbook talks to Tal in Tel Aviv about how and why he made the film, and about the conversations it has prompted among the thirty thousand Israelis who have seen the film since its release.

Children of the Sun will screen at Jewish film festivals in St. Petersburg, Russia and Rochester, New York this summer. In addition, it is slated to air on the Sundance Channel, date to be determined.

Stills from Children of the Sun

Photos courtesy of Ran Tal.