There’s a cartoon in this week’s New Yorker. A couple—shlumpy, but clearly urban—are seated at a coffee table, reading a newspaper that, judging from its sheer girth, can only be the one of record. The woman looks toward her bald, bespectacled companion with what seems to be a triumphant gasp. “They found the nebbish gene,” reads the caption. Cue the mildly amused titters.

My question to this: Are you sure it’s just the one gene? Surely only some intricate combinations of chromosomal abnormality could result in the entire Nebbish spectrum of the past 40 years: the Hipster Nebbish (crumpled tweed jackets and phobic hand-wringing of early Woody Allen); the Slacker Nebbish (one of Judd Apatow’s sheepish heroes, with bong in one hand and an Xbox controller in the other); the Toxic Nebbish (see George Costanza, the most irately Jewish son of Tuscany ever committed to film). There’s the Nebbish Who Never Gets Laid, the Nebbish Who Screws Up Getting Laid, the Nebbish Who Is Inexplicably Laid by Gorgeous and Understanding Shiksa, also known as Wish Fulfillment Nebbish. (Mattel, if you’re listening, I am available to design action figures.)

Still, all varietals of Nebbish have a few noxious traits in common: fear, helplessness, and overwhelming Jewishness. The Nebbish is always Jewish, even if he’s not actually a Jew, to the point where he’s become synonymous with Jewish manhood itself, embedded, if you will, in his DNA. Which is weird, because in the first half of the 20th century, Jewish men were depicted in popular culture as plucky young strivers eager to leave behind the stultifying Old World for the sexy and welcoming embrace of the New (a la Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer) or scrappy immigrant street kids and shtarkers getting ahead by any means necessary, an image helped along by the real-life exploits of Jewish (or Jew-ish) boxers like Max Baer and Jake LaMotta, and less flatteringly, the rise of Jewish gangsters like Dutch Schultz and Louis Buchalter. As the poverty—and subsequent criminality—of the urban ghetto began to fade, a new archetype of Jewish masculinity began its ascendance. Call the representatives of this last the Kirk Douglas Jews: tough, smart, deeply moral (in Kirk’s iconoclastic way), fiercely (if not unquestioningly) patriotic, equally at home in the cockpit of a fighter plane as in the arms of a pert-nosed blonde or four. This was the Jew as hard-nosed, Hemingway-esque Man of Action of the sort recorded reverently by Norman Mailer and incisively by Saul Bellow, lampooned by Joseph Heller, libidinized—and later, eulogized—by Phillip Roth; men whose response to anti-Semites was moral outrage and/or dignified pummeling, as opposed to imagining themselves cowering across the dinner table.

Then the baby boomers grew up, and suddenly, men whose fathers had been D-Day bombardiers couldn’t figure out how to change the bulbs in the newly installed track lighting. Anti-Semitism was replaced by fretting about anti-Semitism. Anxiety about sex became the new sex (particularly when the ugly specter of AIDS provided the irresistible chance for white heterosexual males to conflate sex and hypochondria, the gift that keeps on giving); the Men of Action became Men of Feelings. (And so many feelings! And are they the right feelings? What does my therapist have to say about my feelings? Just a minute, I need to call him about how my mother is responsible for my feelings. Go ahead, start eating without me.) In the space of two generations, the emblematic symbol of Jewish manhood went from Kirk Douglas to Albert Brooks to that guy from the Apatow movies whose name I can’t remember who was in that one movie where he started dating the lesbian nanny from Sex and the City 2 and all his equally nebbishy and unattractive friends were like, “Dude, she’s so out of your league!” Wait, that’s what it was called: She’s Out of Your League.

I know this is just a New Yorker cartoon, but on behalf of Jewish womanhood, I feel it is incumbent on me to ask: How the hell did this happen? And why?

It’s almost too obvious to mention, but to make sense of the shift in Jewish masculine identity from its prewar to postwar incarnations, we’ve got to look at what happened in the interim. I’ll give you a hint: It’s depressing, it’s German, and it rhymes with “the Schmolocaust.” For the prewar generation of American Jewish men (my grandfather among them), World War II was a transformational event, a chance to unimpeachably cement their American identities by fighting for their country. Their children and grandchildren, however—the future Nebbish Generations—would view the war overwhelmingly through the lens of the Holocaust and its primacy in Jewish education, which in its single-minded focus on Auschwitz as the definitive image of the Jewish wartime experience has virtually drowned any narrative of Jewish heroism in the vast sea of Jewish helplessness. Who wants to hear Grandpa’s stories about Hawaii when you can terrify yourself with eyewitness accounts of Josef Mengele?

It’s precisely this helplessness that I’ve always thought to be the most lasting terror of the Holocaust—and the cause for much of the at times hysterical derangement that surrounds its discussion—on the Jewish psyche. We’re taught to take pride in having stubbornly hung on so long when so many would have destroyed us. How does one make sense of a situation that was virtually impossible to survive?

This existential question is difficult enough for a woman to reckon with. For a man, traditionally entrusted with the physical protection of his family, it is unthinkable. Hence the Nebbish: a person who reclaims, even celebrates, this helplessness and trivializes it beyond the possibility of terror. “How in the hell,” the Nebbish seems to ask, “am I supposed to be part of an international Bolshevist-banking conspiracy to take over the world when I can’t even get my mother off my back about who I’m dating?”

Which brings us to the mother. And the dating.

It’s hardly a secret that Jewish culture has a nasty chauvinistic streak. The Jewish mother and the JAP, two of the greatest figures of fun in secular American-Jewish humor, are also indefensibly misogynistic, often with an ugly double-edge: A Jewish mother joke, for example, ridicules her self-serving martyrdom while not-so-subtly implying that a woman should properly be expected to sacrifice everything for her children, seeking no personal fulfillment outside of them; jokes about the JAP being repelled by sex quietly reinforce the idea that it would be unseemly for her to feel otherwise. When the advent of feminism and the sexual revolution—led, it should be noted, most vociferously by Jewish women—turned this conventional wisdom on its head, the nascent Nebbish Generation fought back with a technique they learned at their long-suffering mothers’ knee: deadly emotional blackmail: “So, you’re coming for my balls? I’ll just cut them off myself and save you the trouble!”

It was a brilliant move. Nothing deflates a righteous warrior like the sudden lack of a worthy adversary. Rather than engage women as equals, the Nebbish takes himself out the equation entirely. He exaggerates his bewilderment at the world to such an extent as to force the woman back into the role of de facto caretaker, while neatly absolving himself of the less savory elements of traditional masculinity, such as “making a living” or “going to war.” Women, then, are left holding the bag, buying the toilet paper, and finding themselves oddly nostalgic for the days of violent assholes like Norman Mailer, who kept his sexism right out where you could see it, on the end of his knife. The war of the sexes will be won with weapons of passive-aggression. Only the Jews could have been so smart. Besides, we’re the only ones who read New Yorker cartoons.

Written and directed by Joseph Cedar, Footnote (Hebrew with English subtitles) deals with father-son rivalry at the highest academic level as Eliezer and Uriel Shkolnik, both professors in Talmudic Studies, compete with each other for the coveted Israel Prize. Other Israeli films have secured the nomination in recent years, including Ajami in 2009, Waltz With Bashir in 2008, and Joseph Cedar’s 2007 film, Beaufort.

Other nominations include Moneyball (best picture), starring Brad Pitt, about how sabermetrics helped reinvent the Oakland A’s. Most notably, Jonah Hill (Jonah Hill!) was nominated as best supporting actor. He’s up against Max von Sydow from the adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, also in the running for best picture.

Woody Allen gets his due for best-film nominee Midnight in Paris, with a nod for both best director and best original screenplay. He’s up against Asghar Farhadi in the screenplay category. In other Oscar news, the JTA Archive points out that the late Oscar-nominated screenwriter (and JTA president) Eleazar Lipsky would have turned 100 today.

Oscars 2012 Nominations: Complete List [Hollywood Reporter]
Footnote [Official Site]
Related: The Joy of Stats [Tablet Magazine]

If you live anywhere near New York City, save the money you might have spent on popcorn and the film rendition of War Horse, which galloped into movie theaters just in time for the predictable Oscar nominations. Race out instead to catch the play, which won five Tony awards in 2011, including best play.

Seeing the play and the film in close proximity reminds us of the magic that great theater can create, as opposed to most expensive, even well-crafted movies. Why are we moved more by the plight of a horse puppet than by a snorting and bucking horse in the flesh? The answer lies in the transformative power of theater, which, like great literature, stirs the imagination.

This Broadway play is everything that the Hollywood movie is not. The play is gritty, clear, nuanced, deeply moving, and intensely anti-war. “Here’s what war did,” wrote the book’s author, Morpurgo. “It burned flesh. It killed my uncle. It made my mother weep.” Its film counterpart allows that war may be noisy and dangerous but remains somehow noble. Good and bad people die in the play. In Spielberg’s saga, almost no one dies. While the play is ambitious and majestic, Spielberg’s War Horse is sentimental schlock—which is what this talented, skilled narrator has increasingly been dishing out of late.

The genius of the play is not the plot. National Velvet, the 1944 Liz Taylor vehicle, had more twists and subtlety. War Horse is, after all, a children’s fable, set in Devon, England, just prior to the outbreak of World War I. The story is fairly straightforward: Boy meets horse as newborn foal; boy falls for horse, whom he names Joey; boy tames and trains horse to pull a plow, something that Joey, a thoroughbred, was not born to do; boy loses horse to World War I conscription; boy goes off to war in search of horse. (You will have to see the play to learn if boy and horse survive and are reunited.)

The stage play is brilliantly adapted from the book by Nick Stafford in association with the Handspring Puppet Company. Its human characters are real. Their cruelty and flaws and the pain they inflict, deliberately and unconsciously, are poignantly evoked by a magnificent cast, directed with finesse and discipline by Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris, with Toby Sedgwick providing what is called “horse choreography.” Particularly memorable is Boris McGiver, as Ted Narracott, the stubbornly proud, often inadvertently cruel father of Seth Numrich, who stars as son Albert. In one of many drunken moments, Ted nearly loses the family farm by buying the thoroughbred colt instead of the plow horse the family needs just to one-up his well-to-do brother. Later on, he sneaks out of his house to sell his son’s beloved horse into cavalry service to stave off having to lose the family farm. The Narracott family’s desperation, of course, is born of Ted’s drinking, his foolish pride, and crushing poverty. Numrich gives a powerful performance as young Albert, whom we see transformed from an innocent boy into an agile young man and then into a somewhat hapless soldier whose devotion to his horse often seems stronger than to his drunken father, his family, or his country. Who can blame him? The British and German soldiers in this play are not archetypes, but complex characters, some of whom love horses and their fellow men, and others who relish brutalizing them.

In a uniformly superb cast, Peter Hermann gives a particularly stirring performance as Friedrich Muller, a German soldier who assumes a dead medical officer’s identity to save himself and Joey from having to go to the front and almost certain death. There is no glory or flag-waving in this play, and virtually no politics, just a desire by man and beast alike to survive. We are reminded that this was the world’s longest and most pointless of conflicts, in which an estimated 17 million soldiers and civilians, not to mention millions of horses, died.

In one particularly vivid scene, Joey confronts the future’s iron horse—the merciless tank, portrayed as lines drawn on a screen, against which the puppet horse rears pathetically, a portent of a century of mechanized wars to come.

Though a child’s story, War Horse is no play for children. Only at its conclusion does the play succumb to a childlike desire for happy endings. Not so the movie version. Spielberg stands the play’s anti-war message on its head. The British countryside has never looked so green or beautiful. There are sweeping panoramic shots of the fields and hills straight out of The Sound of Music and How Green Was My Valley. Spielberg never shows the grinding poverty of the play’s Narracott farm, or the desperate struggle to put food on the table and pay the rent. Even his occasionally arresting depiction of the guts, gore, and gas of trench warfare, the true horrors of World War I, has soft edges. His characters are more caricatures than people; Ted Narracott, for instance, is a sweet, well-intentioned drunken ex war-hero, not the play’s blustering, irresponsible wreck of a man whose alcoholism repeatedly threatens his family with ruin.

Almost no one dies in the movie version. And those who do are such thinly drawn caricatures that it is almost impossible to mourn their passing. Amazingly, all the characters speak marvelous English with country-appropriate accents—the two German boys who are shot rather offhandedly for desertion; a young French girl with an ill-defined illness; her doting, jam-making philosopher grandfather; the Germans who raid their farm. The one death that has dramatic punch is that of Topthorn, a huge black stallion whom Joey befriends at war. Topthorn is literally worked to death, starved and exhausted by pulling ambulances and finally artillery up muddy hills.

The most dramatic moment in both the play and the film is Joey’s frantic bolt for freedom through a bleak, battle-scarred no-man’s land, where he eventually entangles himself in ribbons of barbed wire that drag him down and nearly kill him. This is vintage Spielberg (but once again, more creatively portrayed on stage). But even this moving moment of true pathos is followed by a dud of a scene—an unconvincing truce between Germans and the English as a soldier from each side rises from his mud-filled trench to help free poor Joey from the wire. (In Spielberg’s production, we are quickly assured, the wire was made of rubber so that no horses would be harmed in production. Ditto, the wounds on the horses, which were the work of the film’s makeup artists—or, as they appear in the credits, the film’s “equine hair and make-up” unit.) But such episodes are few and far between in this seemingly endless, 146-minute epic, whose sentimentality is reinforced by John Williams’ sumptuous, omnipresent score, which swells over farms, fields, and battlefields. The play, by contrast, uses folk tunes mainly as punctuation.

There is plenty of what film buffs call “homage” in this Spielberg saga. An overhead shot of human and horse corpses littering the battlefield as the camera pans the scene of slaughter seems straight out of Gone With The Wind. Remember the iconic scene of the dead and dying in Atlanta’s railway station? So, too, is Spielberg’s shot of a hill overlooking the Narracott family farm as three main characters embrace in silhouette against a bright orange, Technicolor sky. Oh to be at Tara! Or, back at the Beaumont, or for that matter, just about anyplace else.

Last week, Tablet Magazine published our list of the 100 greatest Jewish films of all time. At the very bottom was Schindler’s List. In a brief blurb, I called it an “astoundingly stupid” movie, which, in turn, inspired some of our readers to call me a “piece of shit” and a “neo-Nazi”—all for casting an aspersion on what, if they are to be believed, is everyone’s favorite Holocaust movie.

Which makes perfect sense: More than just a regrettable film, Schindler’s List neatly reflects the Manichean mindset of many American Jews, for whom mythology trumps memory and nothing lies beyond good and evil. Those who howled at me weren’t expressing a mere aesthetic judgment; they were defending a worldview.

To understand this worldview, we need only look at Schindler’s List. The film’s two main characters are Liam Neeson’s Oskar Schindler and Ralph Fiennes’ Nazi officer, Amon Goeth. The first is a philandering and greedy German who sees a little girl in a red coat and has a nearly instantaneous epiphany, realizing that life is precious and that Jews should be saved. The other is a monster; it’s no coincidence that the American Film Institute ranked Goeth at number 15 in its list of the 100 greatest villains of all time, just one spot below the slimy creature who terrorized Sigourney Weaver in Ridley Scott’s Alien. Goeth, too, is an otherworldly sort. He is not, like the real-life murderer on whom he is based, merely a hateful, opportunistic, and cruel young man who relished the chance to play god. He is impenetrable, predatory, inhuman. We have little reason to fear him more than we fear, say, the Nazis in Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark or the shark from Jaws; all are terrifying, but all are the sort of baddies we’ll only ever see on-screen, not the kind of ordinary and crooked and all-too-human scum living quietly next door and waiting for a stab at power.

Intelligent filmmakers, like Marcel Ophüls or Claude Lanzmann, long ago forged a cinematic language with which to talk about evil. Its two great grammatical principles are the context and the close-up: Cobble together as many sources as is possible to make a mosaic of meaning, then train the camera on one specific detail and demand an explanation. When it works well, we get moments like Lanzmann’s interview in Shoah with Franz Schalling, the Chelmno guard, whose matter-of-factness about the killing process is more terrifying than any imperious expression Fiennes can conjure, particularly as it appears alongside testimonies by victims and bystanders who had lived through radically divergent versions of the same horror. This approach is superior from both ethical and artistic perspectives, giving every player in this brutal human drama a claim to agency and dignity.

Spielberg’s approach, on the other hand, does not. Schindler’s Jews do not matter. They’re abstractions, spiritual currency so that our “hero” can pay his way toward salvation. Like Goeth, Schindler, too, is busy scrubbing away everything that makes him human.

The film’s blunt simplification enraged the Hungarian-Jewish Nobel laureate Imre Kertész, himself a survivor. Schindler’s List, he argued, was kitsch. “I regard as kitsch any representation of the Holocaust that is incapable of understanding or unwilling to understand the organic connection between our own deformed mode of life (whether in the private sphere or on the level of ‘civilization’ as such) and the very possibility of the Holocaust,” he wrote in his 2001 essay, “Who Owns Auschwitz?” “Here I have in mind those representations that seek to establish the Holocaust once and for all as something foreign to human nature; that seek to drive the Holocaust out of the realm of human experience.”

Stanley Kubrick felt the same way. Abandoning his own Holocaust-themed project after Spielberg’s movie became instantly iconic, Kubrick complained that the prince of Hollywood forever simplified one of the most complex occurrences in human history by crafting, in essence, a competing narrative. “Think [Schindler’s List] is about the Holocaust?” he asked the screenwriter Frederic Raphael, a friend. “That was about success, wasn’t it? The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. Schindler’s List is about 600 who don’t.”

One can argue, of course, that there are many Holocaust stories to be told, and that Spielberg merely chose to tell his (adapted, as it was, from Thomas Keneally’s book), and that his merely happened to have a hopeful ending. But that doesn’t absolve him of responsibility. Writing of the moral and aesthetic problems art runs into when it attempts to represent pain and suffering, the 18th-century German philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing theorized that visual artists follow a two-step process when creating their work: First they choose one moment out of an endless sequence of possible moments for visual representation, and then they submit that moment to the strictures of the artistic process. If the choices they make fit together nicely—the perfect moment represented the perfect way—the result is pleasing. If not, it terrifies. In choosing Schindler’s story, and in representing it as a collection of kinetic symbols swirling in succession on-screen, Spielberg turned an infinitely complex reality into something even worse than kitsch: a spectacle. It’s of little wonder that one of Seinfeld’s funniest plots involved Jerry making out with a woman in a screening of Schindler’s List; a similar joke involving Shoah would have come off as intolerably insensitive, but necking as Neeson and Fiennes duke it out is hilarious because it concedes, however implicitly, that Schindler’s List is just a flick, overrated and overblown, best viewed while heavily petting.

But the real problem isn’t Spielberg. He is an endlessly talented filmmaker who has directed a few of the works—from E.T. to A.I.—that I consider to be among the finest ever produced. The real problem is the culture that spawned Spielberg, the culture of so many of us in the American Jewish community.

There’s no way to quantify what I’m about to say next and many ways to dismiss it as inaccurate or subjective or untrue. But consider this: From a community that was, until three or four decades ago, not only emotionally equipped but also eager to hold difficult internal debates, we’ve allowed so many of our communal vistas to become splintered terrains of intolerance and mutual suspicion. Try talking about Israel to someone who sees the country in a very different light. Try bringing up conversion next time you run into someone from a different denomination. Chances are the conversation will soon descend into chaos, with each side claiming absolute moral validity for itself and casting calumnies at the other. Put differently, we used to see the world like Lanzmann, as a nuanced and complex place where even the greatest villains deserved a few quiet moments on camera to speak their mind. We now see it like Spielberg saw the Holocaust, in black and white, all feeling and movement.

It’s an attitude we must do everything in our power to resist in every way, from commemorating the past to debating the future. Our tradition is nothing if not a yarn of complications; as appealing as simple images of victimhood (the little boy in the sewer in Spielberg’s film) and redemption (the Israeli paratroopers at the Western Wall in the iconic photograph from the Six Day War) might be, it’s our moral, aesthetic, and historical obligation to choose the difficult, the subtle, and the obscure. This, if anything, is the life for which we’ve been chosen.

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.

“I really wanted to be a Jew,” Lars von Trier said at the Cannes Film Festival this spring. The film he was promoting then, Melancholia, was released in U.S. theaters this week. “And then I found out that I was really a Nazi. Which also gave me some pleasure. I understand Hitler. I think I understand the man, he’s not what you would call a good guy. But I understand much about him. And I sympathize with him a little bit.”

Maybe “promoting” isn’t quite the mot juste: As the Danish director learned instantly after making his comments, anyone empathizing with Hitler hasn’t much chance of being taken seriously.

It’s a shame. Because Melancholia isn’t only a profound, beautiful, and terrifying film; it’s also a wild and courageous exploration of the same sentiment that got von Trier into so much trouble: the cosmic inevitability of Hitler.

Not that the mustachioed menace is mentioned anywhere in the movie. The closest Melancholia gets to evil is Charlotte Rampling, who—while wonderfully imperious as an abusive mother—is nonetheless a few steps removed from contemplating a final solution. But from the film’s very first notes, the overture to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, we are never far from the same Romantic soil that sprouted the Third Reich.

The plot, as far as it matters, is divided into two chapters. The first follows Justine, a young and depressive bride, on her wedding day. The blinding-white dress and Kirsten Dunst’s vacuous expression combine to create the closest thing cinema can manage to a void, a gaping hole through which we’re invited to look at the friends and family members gathered in celebration. They’re a dubious bunch, greedy and gabby and self-centered, and we have no qualms with Justine’s efforts to escape the ceremony and its confinements, efforts that include a long bath and a quick romp with someone other than her betrothed. There’s also some talk of a star, Melancholia, which was hiding behind the sun and has now emerged to dazzle the skies with its splendid red glow. One of the revelers comments that there’s no chance of Melancholia ever hitting Earth, and because he is portrayed by Kiefer Sutherland we’re inclined to believe him.

It would spoil very little of the pleasure of watching Melancholia to say that the eponymous red star does end up colliding with Earth and that our home planet and everyone living on it ends up perishing in flames. All the while, the theme from Tristan und Isolde plays hauntingly.

Taken at face value, the movie leaves much to be desired. Its operatic opening, complete with a sequence of celestial bodies hanging low and bright, evokes the same madly grandiose aspirations that turned off so many people to Terence Malick’s Tree of Life and its depiction of the world’s creation. And von Trier’s characters do little more than insinuate, ever so careful not to succumb to real representation or sink to needless emotional depths. But read as an allegory, Melancholia is stunning.

An allegory of what? The film’s name might give us a clue. The word’s original meaning is “black bile;” far from mere sadness, it once represented a state of emotional, physical, and spiritual decline. “At the close of the Middle Ages,” Johan Huizinga wrote in his seminal book on that period, “a sombre melancholy weighs on people’s souls.” A similar sensation afflicts everyone in von Trier’s film. Even those who try their best to be nice and helpful end up paralyzed by some unholy mixture of sorrow, rage, and regret, until, quite literally, Melancholia (the star) destroys everything.

As the star approaches Earth, Justine grows calmer and more radiant. Riding horses in the misty countryside and lying naked by the river, she looks like something out of Wagner, a Valkyrie taking one last nap before darting off to Valhalla. Her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), on the other hand, becomes more and more neurotic, scrambling madly in an effort to avert the catastrophe. That one sister is blonde and lithe and the other is Serge Gainsbourg’s daughter is hard to ignore—the more Justine is intoxicated by madness and ruin, the more frantically Claire tries to appeal to the rational and orderly institutions of society for help. Nothing helps. Doom is imminent.

Which is where Hitler comes in.

Given von Trier’s comments in Cannes, his constant use of one of the Nazi dictator’s favorite pieces of music, his choice of actresses, and his clear metaphysical aspirations—you don’t open your film with images of the world coming to an end unless you’re trying to say something about existence at large—it’s not hard to imagine that the destructive red star might have a swastika emblazoned somewhere on its surface, representing the same demonic force that propelled Hitler to power. Both lurk in the shadows of a highly cultivated society, and both consume a universe far too reasonable to believe that total annihilation is possible.

But von Trier seems less interested in the destruction itself than he is in its theological underpinnings. His sympathy for Hitler is rooted not in some juvenile sense of morbidity or prankishness, but in the same impossible question that occupied so many thinkers in the aftermath of Auschwitz: How, in the wake of such monstrosities, can we still have any hope, any faith? We ask the same while watching the world teeter toward its destruction in Melancholia—should we just accept the demise of all these people? Should we just sit there as humanity screeches and burns?

Von Trier thinks so. Black bile, he argues, is likely to consume us every time, but from the ashes a new world, a new morality, a new life will emerge. Far from a nihilistic celebration of the beauty of destruction, von Trier’s film offers us a radical and necessary theodicy that tells us we’re going to suffer but promises us it’s all for a good cause, the cause being the rebirth of the horrifying as the beautiful and the sublime. Terror gives way to reflection. Suffering gains meaning.

A somewhat similar view was expressed by the rabbi and theologian Ignaz Maybaum. Escaping Berlin in 1939, the Vienna-born Maybaum lost his mother, sisters, and other relatives in the Holocaust. In 1965, he published his attempt at understanding what had happened to the Jews. Titled The Face of God After Auschwitz, the book made a radical claim: Hitler, Maybaum argued, was an instrument of God, used “to purify, to punish a sinful world; the six million Jews; they died an innocent death; they died because of the sins of others.” The Jews, in other words, have become the “suffering servants” Isaiah talked about, and their sacrifice cleansed the world of its evils and ushered in a new era of hope and joy.

Maybaum’s remains a controversial argument—the chief reason, perhaps, why this marvelous thinker and writer isn’t very well-known today. It’s also a theory one imagines von Trier happily adopting. In 2005, he gave an interview to the German weekly Die Zeit, revealing his shock at discovering late in life that the man who’d raised him, a Jewish gentleman named Ulf Trier, was not his biological father. “Before she died,” he said, “my mother told me to be happy that I was the son of this other man. She said my foster father had had no goals and no strength. But he was a loving man. And I was very sad about this revelation.” His real father, von Trier learned, was a German with the unimprovable name of Fritz Michael Hartmann, heir to a long line of classical musicians; von Trier’s mother told him that she believed that by becoming pregnant with Hartmann’s child she would produce an artistic genius. “You then feel manipulated when you really do turn out to be creative,” von Trier mused. “If I’d known that my mother had this plan, I would have become something else. I would have shown her. The slut!”

It’s Melancholia all over again: the inevitable destiny, the suffering, the sublimation, and the eventual redemption. Doomed at birth to a life of hardship, dedicated to bearing witness to the world’s ills, reviled but determined to find beauty and meaning in the darkest hours, von Trier is more of a Jew than he might care to admit, and Melancholia is more of a Jewish movie than he might realize. There’s no redemption here, but nor is there despair. Instead, there are human beings with human fears, some panicking and some calm, and a final moment that is preordained but that is nonetheless surprising, saddening, and beautiful enough to send us out of the theater humming Wagner and dedicated to doing whatever we can to make life count before our own world ends, as it inevitably will. There’s little more we can ask a movie to do.

Click here to see the first installment of the list, starting with No. 100.

So, what is a Jewish film?

There’s no scientific algorithm by which to arrive at this answer, and we did not pretend to invent one. Instead, we—the Tablet Magazine staff, along with our pal and contributing editor Jody Rosen—brought to the table our individual notions of Jewishness (and film-ishness). Some choices were based on the identity of their creators, others for their themes, quite a few for their sheer influence on pop culture, and others because of some elusive sensibility that is impossible to define and yet feels instantly familiar. Our answers cut across genre lines: Some stories of robots or ghosts or spies had as much of a Jewish heart as movies focused on more solemn, obvious subject matters. Also, while many of our selections come from Hollywood, others don’t. From neo-realist Italy to postmodern Israel, we did our best to look at filmmaking across nations and across time.

Today we reveal the bottom 25 on our list, Nos. 100 to 76. Over the next four days, we’ll present the rest, and we hope that you’ll share yours, as well. We hope you’ll be delighted, and we trust you’ll be infuriated. This swirl of conflicting emotions is what we have in mind; it’s what makes movies great and, as we found, often what makes them Jewish.

Today’s installment spans from helpless Jews and their Christ-like gentile saviors in Nazi-occupied Warsaw to a magical land somewhere over the rainbow, and includes a classic of Israeli cinema as well as a classic of 1980s New Jersey glam. Here, then, are numbers 100 to 76.

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

In Los Angeles, on the heels of the recently released Sholem Aleichem documentary, actor Matt Chait dramatizes the stories of I.L. Peretz in a self-styled “dramedy” called The Stories of Isaac Lieb Peretz, with musical accompaniment by Lior Kaminetsky, at the Complex (Sept. 10-Oct. 9, starting at $15). For a different comedic interpretation of a young Jewish man’s life, Long Island native and Syracuse University graduate Tyler Gildin performs stand-up comedy tonight at the Brokerage Comedy Club in Bellmore, NY. (10:30 p.m., $12).

Tonight, New York’s Rubin Museum of Art screens Leni Riefenstahl’s 110-minute glorification of Hitler’s propaganda machine, Triumph of the Will—or, as it’s more purely known, Triumph des Willens. A viewing will prepare you for the inevitable chatter about Madonna’s new film, W.E., out Dec. 9, which thanks Reifenstahl and John Galliano in the credits. The event is—aptly, confusingly—free with a $7 bar minimum. Downtown, also tonight, 92Y Tribeca will screen Top Secret!, the 1984 World War II satire featuring the earnestly deadpan (and thin!) Val Kilmer and created by the exclamatory funny guys Abrahams, Zucker, and Zucker, who brought the world Airplane! (10 p.m., $10).

Little Shalimar, a “Lebanese, Jewish, WASP, Kentucky Colonel” musician/dj/instrumentalist from Flatbush opens for fellow Brooklyn musicians Red Baraat at The Mercury Lounge tonight (Sept. 8, 10:30 p.m., $15 in advance, $20 at the door). On Saturday night, SoCalled, a Canadian band once repped by Jdub Records, brings Klezmer rap to Drom, in the East Village, as part of the 7th New York Gypsy Festival (Sept. 9, 8 p.m., $10 in advance, $15 at the door). The festival, which starts tonight, also features Frank London’s Klezmer Brass All-Stars (Sept. 17, Drom) and runs through Sept. 29.

New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage brings together the restaurateurs behind Rosa Mexicana, JoeDoe, Arcadia, and Tocqueville for a discussion a week from Sunday about the book Beyond Borscht and Bourekas: Celebrating Modern Jewish Cuisine, at the museum’s site in Battery Park. The moderator is cookbook author Jayne Cohen; expect a panel that reinvents gefilte fish, as Tablet Magazine has been suggesting for years. (Sept. 18, 2:30 p.m., $12-$15). A week later, a few blocks north, where the original real housewives of New York lived, the Henry Street Settlement reintroduces you to the 1905 version. Resident residence expert Jane Ziegelman, author of 97 Orchard joins historic gastronomist Sarah Lohman and regular historian Suzanne Wasserman for strudel-making and Manischewitz cocktails. Paging Jill Zarin (Sept. 25, 3 p.m., $19.05).

The testimony that didn’t make it into Claude Lanzmann’s nearly 10-hour film Shoah gets an airing Tuesday at the 5th annual Cleveland Jewish FilmFest, sponsored by the Mandel Jewish Community Center (Sept. 13, 7:30 p.m.). Before The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg was just another child actor with Polish immigrant parents. He starred in Holy Rollers—screening Thursday in Cleveland—and is fluent in Polish (Sept. 15, $9). In New York, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, in collaboration with the Polish Cultural Institute and the Polish Film Institute in Warsaw, cobbles together recent polish cinema for a run from Sept. 9 to Sept. 15, at the Walter Reade Theater. Zbigniew Cybulski, “the Polish James Dean,” stars in Night Train (Sept. 9, 4:30 p.m., $13) and Goodbye Until Tomorrow (Sept. 11, 12:15 p.m., $13).

Hamlet inspires New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for the title of “Infinite Jest: Caricature and Satire from Leonardo to Levine,” opening Tuesday and featuring political works by the caricaturist David Levine and artwork by the Broadway illustrator Al Hirschfeld. Bob Dylan—the painter—shows work inspired by his travels through China at Gagosian on the Upper East Side—the first time the musician’s art has ever been featured in New York (Sept. 20-Oct. 22).

New York has Fashion Week; Tel Aviv has Fashion Weekend, starting Thursday at HaTachana (The Station), the former railway station turned hip hub. The Tel Aviv Home and Design Exhibition follows on the coattails, Sept. 20-24, and the 5th annual Beersheeva Wine Festival starts pouring Carmel, Golan Heights Winery, Yaffo, and Tsfat HaAttika, Thursday at the Negev Museum (Sept. 15, 6:30 p.m., $13).

Tips: culture@tabletmag.com

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]

“Are you sad about Elizabeth?”

I had no clue what he was talking about. I racked my brain for all the Elizabeths we know. I wondered if something had happened to the queen. Then I clicked over to the New York Times and realized, horribly, that something had. It just wasn’t the queen I’d had in mind.

Elizabeth Taylor is dead. Just typing the sentence strains credulity. It seems the height of unreality that after all she had survived—tumultuous multiple marriages, widowhood, the death of the studio system, public vilification, alcoholism, pill addiction, the undeserved wrath of Joan Rivers, and a shocking list of health problems including but not limited to brain tumors, dysentery, and countless back and bone surgeries, beginning the age of 12 after an accident on the set of National Velvet left her in chronic and crippling pain—she could ever be felled by something so mundane as congestive heart failure.

It sounds like a cliché to say so, but of everything Elizabeth Taylor suffered from, it was never a failure of the heart.

That she was gorgeous beyond all sense was never in doubt. Elizabeth Taylor in her radiant prime makes Angelina Jolie (the tabloid-appointed pretender to her throne) look like a choleric video-game avatar. For all her glamour, guts, and chutzpah, she never quite captured the drag-queen imagination in the same way as compatriots like Joan Crawford or Liza Minnelli. Her beauty simply defies parody; it’s like trying to make fun of an orchid. As for her tremendous talent, the evidence is right there on screen: Her indelible starring roles in legendary films like Giant, A Place in the Sun, Suddenly Last Summer, and best of all, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (which also happen to be the film versions of the two plays I love—and, for better or worse, identify with—the most in the world). She was undeniably a legend: Over the next few weeks I’m sure we’ll see a litany of think pieces exploring her cultural significance, her status as an icon, the way she almost single-handedly ushered in our current celebrity-driven age. (I may even write some of them.)

But for now, I prefer to celebrate her heart. Elizabeth Taylor was first and foremost a creature of passion (for which she named a perfume). Her passion for love, her passion for jewels, her passion for people, her passion for life. Whatever she did, she did it her way, and her way was big. She married eight times, twice to the similarly extravagantly natured Richard Burton. She threw herself into AIDS charities when the disease was still unmentionable in most respectable circles. She converted to Judaism just 15 years after the liberation of the death camps and remained committed to Israel and Jewish charities throughout her life. (She and Burton regularly got into booze-fueled screaming matches over who was “more Jewish”—him claiming that the Welsh were “the Jews of Britain”; she countering that she was, in fact, literally Jewish. If the essence of being Jewish is the ability to survive and flourish in the face of inestimable odds, I’d say Taylor was the winner in spades.)

When my grandfather died last year at almost exactly this time, the rabbi at his funeral told a story of an old man standing alone by a dock at the harbor, applauding the ships as they came in from the sea. A little boy asked him why. The old man said: “When a ship sets sail, many people celebrate. But we have no idea of what might befall it on its voyage—it could be shipwrecked, overtaken, used for an evil purpose. Better to celebrate now, when the ship, having weathered many storms, returns home with its job well done.”

Elizabeth Taylor, having weathered many storms and shirked from none, has safely returned to port after an incredible journey at sea. She may have been given an extraordinary face and an extraordinary talent, but her extraordinary, inspiring, tragic, joyful, captivating life was something she did all on her own.

And now that the shock has worn off, I’m going to go somewhere and cry.

In fact, on paper (that description) aside, the movie sounded appealing. The plot (the four Meyerowitz siblings prepare for their father’s 70th birthday dinner in the wake of the just-published-by-youngest-son-family-tell-all) seemed new and different enough to sustain a funny, lively narrative. And the cast! Rainn Wilson (of Dwight Schrute fame), Dexter star Michael C. Hall, and sharp-tongued comedian Sarah Silverman play variously troubled siblings dealing with the aftermath of youngest brother Nathan (charming-even-though-his-character-is-a-total-jerk Ben Schwartz)’s bestselling book, Peep World. Sadly, the characters fall flat in four individual, divergent story lines that aren’t fleshed out enough. On the bright side, at least the problem isn’t the Jewish thing!

Sarah Silverman’s character, Cheri Meyerowitz, is the most stereotyped, and “Jewish,” of the ensemble, and she goes all out—as perhaps only she can—to embody middle-child Cheri in all her bratty, obnoxious whininess. It is truly irritating, as I imagine Silverman thoroughly intended, to watch her failed-actress character shriek at her mother and demand back-up her in her libel lawsuit against Nathan. In Cheri’s defense, the film adaptation of Peep World (the film based on the novel within the movie, all with the same name—got that?) is filming outside her window, and the actress playing the film version of Cheri is her father’s new girlfriend. Tough times.

But aside from the stereotyped Cheri (and her inexplicable Jews for Jesus pal, played by Steven Tobolowsky), there is little reference to Judaism throughout the film, and I don’t think any mention at all that the family is Jewish, save for their surname. Cue sigh of relief.

Also worth mentioning is the stellar supporting cast, who play characters more realistic and dimensional than the Meyerowitz siblings. Judy Greer, whose sidekick presence alone makes any film worth seeing, is one of the highlights. Plus, her character is married to Michael C. Hall’s: Awesome couple alert. Taraji P. Henson and Kate Mara shine as Wilson and Schwartz’s unlikely dinner companions.

While I took solace in the fact that not every character in the film (directed by Barry W. Blaustein, who directed The Ringer and wrote Coming to America) was a Jewish stereotype, I wish Peep World had stepped up its narrative game and developed the main characters more fully.

Peep World Trailer

But long before al-Qaida and Sept. 11, long before virgin-seeking suicide bombers began blowing up embassies, U.N. offices, churches, mosques, and weddings, long before beheadings made Islamist terror synonymous with barbarism, long before IEDs and VBIEDs exploded into Western consciousness, and long before the lines of bearded fanatics were injected with tranquilizers and packed off to Guantanamo and CIA black-site prisons, there was Carlos.

“Carlos the Jackal,” as the press fawningly called Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, was the first modern terrorist superstar. For nearly 20 years beginning in the mid-1970s, he staged or masterminded spectacular, made-for-the-media attacks, initially for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a radical splinter of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization. Then, after becoming a radical superhero on a par with Che, he took refuge in the Eastern Bloc and ended his career as a thuggish, bloated egomaniac paid to kill on a fee-for-service basis by some of the Mideast’s most odious regimes.

Now the attention he so fiercely coveted has finally been paid with Carlos, a five-plus hour French film that won acclaim at Cannes last spring. But he is still not satisfied. The film is not accurate, he recently complained in a jailhouse radio broadcast from Poissy high security prison, in France, where he is serving a life sentence for the 1976 murders of two French secret agents and an informer. His commando team, for instance, was not a bunch of “hysterical men waving submachine guns and threatening people,” as the film suggested, he said. They were “professionals,” he declared, “commandos of a very high standard.”

French filmmaker Olivier Assayas evidently disagrees. His bio-epic of the life and times of the Venezuelan-born revolutionary—brilliantly portrayed by Edgar Ramirez, another Venezuelan who is not related to his namesake—depicts Carlos as a brutal, charismatic narcissist who pleasures himself through violence. Members of his band of international revolutionaries are portrayed as vicious, fanatical amateurs.

Filling three DVDs at a running time of 5 hours and 19 minutes, Assayas’ film requires stamina and a strong stomach for violence and talk about political violence. But the film is far from hagiography—and it is, in its own way, a masterpiece that not only provides a riveting portrait of a celebrity-seeking killer but indicts the intellectuals and media promoters who helped transform a vain thug into a romantic figure, helping perpetuate the leftist myth of the terrorist as freedom fighter.

Though al-Qaida is never directly mentioned in the film, Assayas clearly sees a connection between the leftist assaults of the ’70s and the religiously inspired terrorism that would supplant it 30 years later. Although I haven’t seen the two-and-a-half-hour-long condensed version prepared for commercial distribution, the longer, uncut film is a nuanced portrayal of the descent from alleged revolutionary fervor into self-satisfied, self-serving violence justified in language long-stripped of meaning or relevance. Carlos may talk the talk, but he knows all too well that his ideological justifications for revolutionary terrorism are a simply a pretext for doing what comes naturally to him—killing.

Carlos has flaws. But it is hard to think of a better recent film about the nature of modern terrorism or its practitioners. In December, the New York Film Critics Circle awarded Carlos its prize for the best foreign-language film.

The movie, divided roughly into three parts, opens curiously, with Israel’s assassination of Mohammed Boudia, a leader of the militant Palestinian Black September group, in June 1973. The car-bomb murder outrages the brash young Carlos and prompts him to try to advance his fledgling career by asking to succeed the murdered martyr as the Popular Front’s London terror chief. No mention is made, however, of the massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich the year before—an outrage that stunned the world and led Israel to dispatch a hit team to kill Boudia and others who planned or conducted the operation.

Waddi Haddad, then the Popular Front’s Beirut-based leader, quickly senses possibilities in this brash young Westerner. Carlos is given membership in the Front, a small pistol, and only five bullets—yet another suggestion that this Palestinian terror group, which ran very profitable extortion and protection rackets in the Persian Gulf and received large subsidies from various Arab governments, was made up of desperate and impoverished fedayeen.

The film quickly shifts to “new left” London, where Ilich, the son of a Communist-sympathizing Venezuelan lawyer, has just chosen “Carlos” as his nom de guerre. In a posh restaurant, he argues revolutionary doctrine with his gorgeous girlfriend, a fellow leftist. Chiding Carlos for not having attended a protest against Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, she says the Chilean people need his support. Demonstrations bore him, he replies. They serve no purpose. Chile’s generals and the CIA don’t care about their protests. War demands action. She must commit to the revolution, which means supporting his new group and its as yet unspecified actions against the imperialists.

Guerrilla action against well-armed states is doomed to failure, she tells him. The balance of power is against the terrorists. But Carlos insists that the under-armed Viet Cong had crushed the “gringos.” His path, too, will lead to glory.

“Is that what you want?” she shoots back, accusing him of “petit bourgeois arrogance.”

True glory, he replies, is acting without credit on behalf of the revolution.

Anyone politically active in the late ’60s and ’70s will recall such heated discussions, which Assayas recreates with such perfect pitch that one feels the director’s own sense of nostalgia, if not for the violence that such conversations justified then for the rhythms of the talk. The heady counter-culture is faithfully depicted—the free, guiltless sex, the pounding strains of rock and seductive South American ballads. Carlos’ sideburns are neatly trimmed; his cream-colored suit, with no tie, exquisitely cut, his black leather jacket is well worn with a pistol shoved into his skin-tight jeans. The Belmondo of terror sports a black “Che” beret and trademark sunglasses. It’s all a far cry from the caves in Tora Bora.

Yet the idea of a more perfect form of human existence is equally alive to these amoral hedonists as it is to their dour successors. No TV sets are to be seen in Assayas’ version of the radical underground. Revolutionaries prefer playing guitar, dancing, and singing together as equals. Friends and fellow killers drink, talk, and chain smoke before and after sex and their terrorist attacks, which are portrayed in the film with equal demonic fervor. There are lengthy static shots of Carlos nude, basking in his own virility. The alternation of narcissism, white-walled art-gallery-like spaces, and sudden violence sucks the viewer into a cold place that destroys any romantic illusions about political violence that the art direction of the movie might nourish.

The second part of the film is a highlight reel of Carlos’ terrorist career, in which the achievement of deadly spectacles requires the intricate manipulation of—and finally, manipulation by—cynical Middle Eastern regimes, the former Soviet Union, its Eastern European satellites, and Palestinian revolutionary groups. The linchpin of this segment is Carlos’ notorious attack on OPEC headquarters in Vienna and his kidnapping of several dozen oil ministers in 1975. The attack is brutal, but this is a more innocent time—an era before concrete Jersey barriers surrounded official buildings and private security guards manned the entrances to company headquarters and wealthy homes. Carlos and his multinational crew of fanatics simply barge into the building and quickly seize control. (KSM, eat your heart out.)

After three guards are killed, Carlos flies his hostages to the Middle East in a borrowed jet. But he’s outmaneuvered by duplicitous Algerians and loses control of his operation. Cornered, he accepts a lucrative deal to release the hostages, and he is exiled to a popular Front terror camp in Yemen, where he is ousted by Haddad for insubordination.

Carlos and his mostly German comrades then go freelance and focus increasingly on finding work and well-funded patrons. Syria pays the tab for a while, helping Carlos create arms-shipment routes through eastern Europe in exchange for attacks on designated targets. For a brief time in Budapest and Damascus, Carlos lives what seems a semi-normal life—marrying Magdalena Kopp, his beautiful German-revolutionary companion, and fathering a child. He dotes on his daughter when he is not busy killing on demand and philandering in the name of revolution. While Carlos and his pals continue espousing their commitment to “fighting for socialism” and utter such slogans as “the only struggle that matters is between the oppressed and imperialists,” the words ring hollow. A sense of desperation builds.

The film’s turning point is the destruction of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union. Suddenly Carlos and his not-so-merry mercenaries are a risky embarrassment to their patrons. The world has changed, a cynical Syrian paymaster tells them coolly, ousting Carlos and his group’s German co-founder from their villas. Even the CIA considers him a “historical curiosity,” a “Communist windbag.” Carlos and his gang are forced to live by their wits and their not inconsiderable linguistic resources: English, German, French, Spanish, and Arabic are all spoken convincingly by Ramirez and the other actors.

The last third of the film depicts the betrayal and capture of an aging, paunchy Lothario, still sufficiently vain to undergo liposuction on his love handles in a Khartoum hospital. Magdalena has gone—taking their child to live with Carlos’ wealthy brother, Lenin, in Venezuela. Another younger revolutionary tends lovingly to his needs. He tells visiting Iranian agents that their struggle against American imperialism is his fight too, and that he and his new wife have become Muslims, a conversion of obvious convenience that fails to impress his polite but indifferent new patrons.

Carlos still pretends that he is the cock of the walk, but visions of feather-dusters now surround him. The era of leftist revolutionary terror has ended. Counter-terrorism is rising along with the new world order, which is closing in on him.

In fact, Carlos has long become indistinguishable from the prostitutes who pleasure him, all in the same business. The film deftly makes the point in Europe, when a prostitute he has struck for daring to demand more money turns out to be a confidential informer for a security service.

Sudan’s Islamic government, led by the suave, crafty Hassan al-Turabi, offers Carlos protection but then sells him out to France. In 1994, acting on an American tip, French police employ Sudanese soldiers to kidnap him from a Sudanese government guest house as he recovers from surgery. Bound and drugged, Carlos is bundled onto a private jet and flown to France, where he has been incarcerated since.

Although the movie ends with a scroll of the deaths, disappearances, and incarcerations of the various members of Carlos’ gang, France has permitted the Jackal, now 60, to operate his theater of the absurd from his cell. Earlier last year, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, his latest wife and also his lawyer, sued the film’s producers to block its release because he had not been given the right to vet or edit it. The judge sided with the film’s producers. But Carlos would not relent. He didn’t give “a damn” about the “myth of Carlos,” he told his radio audience. But he did care about historical accuracy. It was Muammar Qaddafi, Libya’s erratic autocrat, and not Saddam Hussein who had ordered the OPEC attack, he insisted. And he didn’t smoke cigarettes. “I have smoked cigars since 1969,” he said in the radio interview. “Everyone knows that.”

A scene from Carlos, showing the 1974 bombing of the drugstore Saint Germain in Paris:

In Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment, a documentary film-in-progress, Toby Perl Freilich looks at the evolution of the kibbutz from its inception to the present, drawing on the memories and reflections of members from five kibbutzim. Perl Freilich spoke to Vox Tablet’s Sara Ivry about the kibbutz movement’s ability to cultivate leaders even as it alienated women, non-Ashkenazim, and, ultimately, its own offspring.

Throughout August, to commemorate the kibbutz movement, Tablet Magazine will post a weekly clip from Perl Freilich’s film, beginning today.

TO WATCH THE FIRST INSTALLMENT, CLICK HERE.

All of these elements do appear in Holy Rollers, but their colors are muted and their interactions are half-hearted. Director Kevin Asch chose to go the gentle-coming-of-age story route, focusing on the journey of Jesse Eisenberg’s Sam Gold, a (fictional) 20-year-old straight outta Brooklyn who journeys from restless yeshiva bocher to naïve-but-eager smuggler to minor-league gangsta, until his own soul brings him down (well, and then the cops do). Eisenberg is totally cute in payes, but he basically plays the role as though Sam were any sweet, angsty white kid instead of one from a very specific cultural location.

I’m not objecting to Asch’s decision (which he acknowledged in a Q-and-A after a recent screening of the film in New York) to invent his own hybrid ultra-Orthodox sect, although others have. That seems within the realm of poetic license to me. The problem is that the sect he made up is not particularly convincing. Sam and his friends speak a stereotyped New-York-Jewish-ese with a few extra Yiddish words ostentatiously thrown in, not the complex varieties of Yinglish that are actually spoken in Brooklyn’s Hasidic enclaves. And interactions in his community, from a meeting with a reproachful rabbi to an awkward parentally-supervised date, similarly feel like they were lifted out of the secular world and airbrushed with Hasid dust.

Things feel a little sharper once Sam enters the underworld: Justin Bartha as Yosef, the neighborhood’s bad apple, and Danny Abeckaser as the operation’s mastermind do a good job at capturing the film’s most interesting insight: That staffing a crime ring with extraordinarily sheltered kids is a brilliant tactic that contains the seeds of its own destruction, because once those kids get good at their jobs, they’ll lose the artless innocence that made them such good patsies to begin with.

“Relax, and act Jewish,” Yosef tells Sam the first time he prepares to get on a plane with thousands of “medicine” pills under his hat. But when is Sam acting Jewish? When he bumbles past airport security in black hat and black coat, as unaware of just what he is carrying as the federal agents were? Or is it later, when he emerges as a brilliant young businessman who knows exactly what he is doing?

Are preoccupied with human dynamics far more than political or social ones; if issues like military policy and economic inequality are present at all, it’s simply as part of the cinematic furniture.

That would be unremarkable in many places. But in the political-minded precincts of the Middle East, it reflects a substantial change.

And it’s a change you can see throughout the spectrum of Israeli cinema, according to the article. The two biggest Israeli-produced movies of 2009 are about “an overweight man who takes up sumo wrestling to deal with his insecurity” and “a coming-of-age love triangle involving twins and set in the 1980s.”

This is a positive development. Zionism was supposed to mean that Jews could live normal lives as Jews, no longer constantly haunted by history. So if Israelis are making crappy movies (and good ones!), like everyone else, then surely that’s a sign of success.

Recent Israeli Films Are Less Political [LAT]
Related: Family Matters [Tablet Magazine]

Jewish-Arab Crime Film Captures Tensions [BBC]

Lebanese Critics Blast Israeli Director’s ‘Lebanon’ [AFP]

In fairness, there are other reasons for Germans to particularly like the movie: most notably, as anyone who saw the film over the weekend (and, according to box office numbers, quite a few did) can attest, nominal star Brad Pitt watches helplessly as the film is utterly stolen from him by Austrian actor Christoph Waltz, who plays a delightfully evil SS colonel. Still, the positive German reaction brings home an often-overlooked, and seemingly counterintuitive, point: Germans today have special cause to loathe the Nazis, since they carried out untold atrocities in the name of a people and culture that contemporary Germany rightly holds dear. You could even argue that modern-day Germans have the biggest beef with the Nazis of any group.

Well, perhaps the second-biggest beef.

Tarantino’s ‘Kosher Porno’ Thrills Germany [The Local]
Previously: You Basterds!

Lewis plays a German-Jewish clown named Helmut Doork—suffice to say that we’re making absolutely none of this up—who is sent to Auschwitz, where his job is to entertain the children as they are marched to the gas chambers. So picture Jerry, complete with slicked-back hair but dressed as a clown, doing his schtick, while Jewish children—who all look suspiciously Scandinavian; the film was made in Sweden—are joyfully, laughingly walking unwittingly to their brutal slaughter. Life is Completely, Totally Tasteless. At the end, the clown, having led yet another group of kids to the “showers,” decides to enter with them. Fin.

According to The New Yorker, Lewis—who was battling a Percodan addiction during the film’s production—insists the film will never see the light of day (even as he also insists it is a masterpiece). So we have to rely on those unlucky few who have borne witness. “This was a perfect object,” comedian Harry Shearer told Spy. “This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is.” “I was appalled,” concurs journalist Lynn Hirschberg. “I couldn’t understand it. It’s beyond normal computation.” No word on how the French felt about it.

Jerry Lewis Goes To Death Camp [Spy]
Previously: Inglorious Indeed

In a way, creating Nation’s Pride, the faux-propaganda mini-film, offered Roth his own chance at renegade justice. He says of Tarantino, “it was perfect that he had the Jewish guy do it, because I knew that the more authentic the movie was, the more ridiculous it would make Hitler and Goebbels look. So I was saying, ‘More swastikas, more swastikas.’” And while he wasn’t quite prepared for the feeling he would get after having birthed such a monstrosity (“the first time we showed it to the audience with 300 extras, when they started screaming ‘Heil Hitler’ and ‘Kill the Jews,’ my stomach turned”), like the horror-directing pro he is, Roth quickly assuaged his nausea with self-congratulation: “You know what? I would have been a great Nazi propaganda filmmaker.”

Eli Roth [A.V. Club]
Previously: You Basterds!

To watch the scene, fast-forward to the 1:50 mark:

Terrorist Threat to Sacha Baron Cohen over Brüno Ridicule [Times]
Previously: Of Hamas and Hummus

The new horror flick The Orphan depicts a young couple’s decision to adopt a young girl gone seriously, supernaturally, and fatally awry. Ubiquitous posters spookily inform passersby, “THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG WITH ESTHER.” Er, you mean, besides her name? We haven’t seen the movie—it opens today—but a few ideas of what else could be wrong with Esther occurred to us:

• The popular girls in Esther’s Girl Scout troop, enjoying their trayf at McDonald’s, mock the falafel Esther brought from home, evoking its resemblance to charred testicles.
• Esther’s adoptive parents dress her exclusively in ‘80s polyester hand-me-downs from their Hillel friends, despite Esther’s protestations that just because she’s descended from Eastern Europeans doesn’t mean she has to dress like she raided the bargain receptacle at a Bulgarian flea market.
• Esther’s grandmother refuses to invite Esther’s new Irish Catholic boyfriend to the first night of Hanukkah. Doesn’t bubbe know what his ancestors would’ve done for a latke during the potato famine?
• Given her penchant for decapitation, Esther wonders if she should have been named Judith.
• Esther develops an appetite for blood, which in turn leads her to (horror of horrors) the Church—transubstantiation sounds delicious!

We haven’t seen the film, but according to the website for the Tribeca Film Festival, the film adheres to the guidelines of the International Solidarity Movement, to which Corrie belonged: “to state only objective and concrete details without placing judgment.” Of course, in choosing to subscribe to Corrie’s group’s own premises, perhaps the film has tipped its decidedly non-objective hand. Still, it reportedly features interviews both with ISM members and “current and former personnel” in the Israeli military. Frankly, it’s a shame that this controversy must play out only as a select few see the film in a couple screenings scattered across the country. If it is indeed so good, we hope that it will enjoy a wider release, so that the curious can make up their own minds.

S.F. Festival Under Fire Over Plan To Screen Rachel Corrie Film [JTA]
Tribeca Film Festival entry
Previously: Chick Flicks

The kvetching about Woody Allen’s newest, Whatever Works, starring Larry David, Evan Rachel Wood, and Patricia Clarkson, is just a bit more tempered. J. Hoberman at The Village Voice calls it “an exercise in Woody Allen nostalgia” that “goes out of its way to mock It’s a Wonderful Life [but] winds up even more lazily pandering.” Entertainment Weekly concedes that the script was written in the 1970s, “but still, the guy couldn’t maybe come up with some new spritz of nu?” The New Yorker says that Clarkson “just about rescues” the film, while blurb-machine Peter Travers of Rolling Stone says that while “not everything works,” fans won’t be able to resist “the comic mind–meld” of Allen and David, “On that level, at least,” he says, “there’s no need to curb your enthusiasm.”

Film director Ed Zwick and New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier’s friendship spans three decades, and has been animated by passionate exchanges about their lives and their work. When Zwick was shooting his latest feature, Defiance, in the forests of Lithuania, Wieseltier came to visit. Wieseltier even landed a part in the film about the Bielski brothers, who organized a rescue effort of Jews during World War II, though ultimately his role got cut.

Nextbook invited Zwick and Wieseltier into a studio so we could eavesdrop on their continuing conversation about the making of the film, about the Bielskis post-war life in America, and about what a film celebrating resistance might or might not be saying about those who did not fight back.

Defiance opens nationwide today.

Earlier this month, lines of girls in dark, sober dresses shuffled into the auditorium of the Jewish Children’s Museum in Brooklyn for a screening of A Light for Greytowers, a film produced by Kol Neshama, an all-female performing arts conservatory in Los Angeles. As soon as the crowd settled into their seats, Robin Garbose, the founder of Kol Neshama, walked onto the stage and took the mic. “Raise your hand if there’s an empty space by you!” She called. “We need more chairs!” Garbose, who directed, wrote, and produced the film, is a petite woman with a large, flashy smile and a brown wig falling just past her shoulders.

“I am absolutely thrilled that you all could make it today. The girls of Kol Neshama and I put our heart and soul into this film and I know you’re going to love it!” Garbose enthused before taking her seat in the theater. The lights dimmed. For the following ninety minutes, the three hundred girls in the audience—and their mothers—sat rapt before the screen. A Light for Greytowers is a kind of Annie for the Orthodox set, complete with a plucky heroine, a scratchy-voiced headmistress, and a series of catchy dance numbers that are less about dancing than about picturesque orphans scrubbing and sweeping to the command of a whistle.

Anya Aronowitch (played by Rivka Siegel) and her baby Miriam fleeing Czarist Russia

Despite the clichés, A Light for Greytowers covers some serious historical ground. Set at the turn of the century, the film follows the prepubescent Miriam Aronowitch from Russia to England, where she and her mother seek refuge from the pogroms. When her mother falls ill, Miriam is bundled off to an orphanage, where the evil Miss Grimshaw prohibits religious observance. Abby Shapiro, who plays Miriam, has a lush, transcendent voice, and when she sings, “Hashem will guide us through the night,” you can’t help but believe her. Of course, it turns out that Hashem does indeed have Miriam’s back. She quickly discovers that all the girls in the orphanage are Jewish and persuades them to pick up the shreds of their faith. Soon, they’re refusing to eat non-kosher foods or work on the Sabbath, and endlessly breaking into religious song. The movie ends with the expected miracle: Miriam’s parents saunter into the orphanage and save their daughter from doom.

After the screening, a flock of mothers rushed towards Garbose, asking how they could enroll their daughters in Kol Neshama. Back in 2000, when Garbose launched the project, parents within the religious community were not quite so eager to sign their daughters up, fearing they would be lured into the glitzy world of showbiz—or, at the very least, be exposed to some racy material. Garbose responded to this skepticism by signing on a rabbi to guide the conservatory’s singing, dancing, and acting classes (which she teaches), as well as the films and live stage productions, and only offers screenings of the films to all-female audiences.

Another face-off between Miss Grimshaw and Miriam

Now approaching its ninth summer, the conservatory has produced eight original plays (also for all-female audiences), three musical DVDs (a series of after-school-special-style videos exploring female adolescence at the fictional summer camp Bnos Yisrael), two CDs (the soundtrack to the film and to the DVD series) and, of course, a motion picture. Garbose selects her Kol Neshama participants based less on raw talent than on “how badly they want it, how enthusiastic they are.” For Garbose, the conservatory is about bringing art to a community that is thirsty for it. “The religious Jewish art scene was ruined after the Holocaust and I want to bring it back,” she says.

From a very young age, Garbose found herself searching for God—or at for least a deeper spiritual engagement than she could find at her Conservative synagogue in Holyoke, Massachusetts. During her teen years, she binge-read Holocaust books. “I was very frightened by death. I saw it as this big black abyss beyond! I was on a certain quest to find meaning. And as I got older, I became more conscious of this quest.”

She studied theater at Brown, then moved to New York, where she spent her days assisting the artistic director of the Phoenix Theatre Ensemble and her nights on the party circuit with John F. Kennedy, Jr. and Laura Linney. After teaching acting at Juilliard and NYU, she moved to Los Angeles to work on Head of the Class, as a director.

Still suffering from spiritual malaise, she joined a kabbalah class run by the local Breslov Chassidus chapter. The teacher, she says, told mystical tales “that really spoke to the soul.” Garbose began growing more religious, and within a few months she became Hasidic. “It was challenging to my parents at first,” she says. “They saw this world as lacking a certain beauty, a certain glamour. To them, it was old-fashioned.”

Garbose’s faith was also a liability to her career, with the Head of the Class crew—like most of the television world—working well into Shabbat hours. Unfazed, Garbose quit and took a job with America’s Most Wanted, which had a more flexible production schedule. She spent her Friday nights attending Shabbat dinners in Los Angeles’s Hasidic community, where she met young girls whose eyes would brighten when she waxed nostalgic about her theater days. In early 2000, Garbose applied to the Los Angeles Jewish Community Foundation for funds to start Kol Neshama, and in the summer of 2001 the conservatory opened its doors in a rented studio space in the heart of Los Angeles’s Orthodox community, between the Hancock Park and Pico Robertson neighborhoods.

Robin Garbose with four young actresses from ‘A Light for Greytowers’ at the LA premiere. Left to right: Nili Gross, Tirza Gross, Robin Garbose, Sara Malka Kravitz, Elisheva Marquis

Today, the conservatory offers Sunday and after-school classes throughout the year where girls prepare for Hanukkah plays and Purimspiels, as well as a summer program, which draws about thirty-five girls between the ages of eight and eighteen. Since A Light for Greytowers, however, far more girls have shown interest than Garbose has room to accommodate. She hopes, in the next year or two, to move the conservatory to a campus or camp setting (currently, out-of-town students are housed with families), which could accommodate two hundred girls per session. Money for the expansion would come from the private sector, Garbose explains. “We have a lot of investors who see Kol Neshama—especially the film—as a financially viable niche market.”

In marketing the film, Garbose has so far concentrated on her niche market: the religious communities of New York, New Jersey, and Los Angeles. But she plans to corner the secular world as well, while still screening to all-female audiences (she is, she says, in the midst of negotiations with a distributor undaunted by the restriction).

Since there are few pockets of the secular showbiz world hospitable to frum actresses, the stars of A Light for Greytowers—now in their teens—have not tried their luck in Hollywood, but many have become celebrities in the frum world, and are recognized on the street in religious neighborhoods. Some of the program’s alumni are bringing what they’ve learned at Kol Neshama to their own communities. Hadas Gross, who played one of the orphans in the film, is now teaching a drama program in her hometown of Lakeview, New Jersey. And Judy Winegard, who played the headmistress, will be starring in a one-woman show, produced by Garbose, in Crown Heights in November.

“There is an emerging movement in the Orthodox world of female performing arts,” says Garbose, though it’s not clear, outside of Kol Neshama, how this movement is manifesting itself. For now, the Orthodox theater world seems to be a one-woman show of its own, with Garbose as writer, director, producer, and lead. The story of her own life, in a way, offers precisely the right message for a Kol Neshama production: a coming of age story, with a clean, religious ending.

A Light for Greytowers will be shown on June 23 and June 24, at different locations in the New York area. For more information and ticketing go to www.kolneshama.org.

Toward the end of Then She Found Me—Helen Hunt’s impressive directorial debut, which opened to largely positive reviews this spring—the preternaturally calm heroine, April Epner (Hunt), has what amounts to a spiritual crisis. As she waits in her gynecologist’s examination room to be implanted with eggs fertilized by a sperm donor, her biological mother, Bernice—the “she” of the title, played by Better Midler, in full diva mode—aggressively suggests that April say a prayer before the procedure. “No,” April intones, staring dolefully down at the front of her hospital gown. “You pray before you eat a bowl of spaghetti,” Bernice wheedles. “You’re about to do the most important thing of your life and suddenly you’re not interested!” Uncharacteristically, April gets furious and jumps up from the examining table. “I don’t want to give this wish to some higher power who’s supposed to be . . . loving,” she shouts, before collapsing in Bernice’s arms, sobbing, “I thought God was good.”

April is an observant Jew, a rarity on screens big or small (though, of course, Jews of the secular, self-mocking, Judd Apatow type abound). She does indeed pray before eating, as well as light Shabbat candles (bringing them to her ailing adoptive mother in the hospital), and generally goes about her days attempting to be kind, dutiful, and good. The film opens with her wedding, which involves a rabbi, a chuppah, her mother nagging her to put on a sweater, and multiple shots of yarmulke-topped old men, all set to the strains of klezmer. But until April’s breakdown in the doctor’s office, these scenes could be read simply as color, rather than indications of a deep, abiding, and defining faith, a faith so rare in the United States (particularly among the country’s most assimilated ethnicity) that it’s almost shocking to see portrayed onscreen. Do people really believe in this day and age, outside of cloistered fundamentalist communities? Not just practice, but actually believe? Especially a Brooklyn schoolteacher like April Epner, with her carefully highlighted hair and au courant empire waist dresses? Even one of my rabbi friends recently confessed that he takes a “liberal approach” to conceptualizing God, an admission I found both a relief and a disappointment—something akin to my response to April’s doubt.

All but one or two of the reviews of the film have described it as a romantic comedy, a categorization more inadequate than incorrect. Reviewers dutifully log April’s quick abandonment by her childish husband, Ben (Matthew Broderick), and even quicker romance with Frank (Colin Firth), the churlish father of one of her students, complicated by her discovery that she’s pregnant with Ben’s child. Largely omitted are any mentions of the heroine’s ethnic and religious identity, never mind that the film’s denouement consists of a moment of spiritual anguish, rather than, say, a montage of breakup scenes. The odd silence on these matters can perhaps be attributed to discomfort or bafflement that the blonde,

sharp-nosed Hunt is playing a devout Jew (though Hunt, like Broderick, is half-Jewish), but more likely it’s because narrative features about faith, particularly about Jewish faith, are so rare that critics don’t quite know what to make of them. The only recent antecedents of Then She Found Me—American features truly grappling with issues of belief—are Ed Norton’s underrated 2000 comedy Keeping the Faith, in which Ben Stiller and Norton play childhood friends who grow up to be, respectively, a rabbi and a priest, and Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s Bee Season, the uneven 2005 adaptation of Myla Goldberg’s 2000 bestseller about a little girl, Eliza Naumann, who becomes a spelling champion by mastering the techniques of thirteenth-century kabbalist Abraham Abulafia.

If Keeping the Faith lapses too far into intellectualizing the characters’ beliefs (it’s set on the Upper West Side, after all), Bee Season veers too far in the opposite direction, earnestly striving to capture the depth of Eliza’s religious ecstasies in perhaps a more extreme manner than does Goldberg, a writer of great reserve and restraint. But the Jewish characters in Keeping the Faith feel authentically Jewish in a way that those in Bee Season do not. Part of this is casting—Ben Stiller and Eli Wallach versus Richard Gere and Juliette Binoche—but it has more to do with the latter film’s approach to Jewishness: Bee Season seems to define it largely in religious terms. Stripped of any sense of Jewish culture or community—it’s telling that in the novel Eliza’s father is a cantor, while in the film he’s a religion professor—Eliza’s mystic turn lacks the terrifying poignancy that drives the novel.

Similarly, in Then She Found Me, Hunt (who wrote the screenplay with Alice Arlen and Victor Levin) has prioritized religion over culture, a sharp departure from Elinor Lipman’s 1990 novel, on which the film is based. In the novel, April’s adoptive parents, Trude and Julius, are refugees. “She was twenty-five, Viennese; he, twenty-nine, from Munich. Their fathers had both been furriers. He had a brother in Palestine, and she had no one she knew of. Neither had been married or religious. Belsen and Auschwitz.” They meet on a train to Boston, spend the afternoon together, “whispering in the German they hadn’t spoken aloud for . . . months,” and eat dinner at Woolworth’s, thrilled for a respite from the “dull kosher food” their American sponsors feed them. “Both ordered BLTs.”

Clearly, these are secular, assimilated Jews, as was the norm in Austria and Germany before the war. And they raise April—who teaches Latin at an exclusive school, and has degrees from Radcliffe and Wellesley—in a like manner, though they’re adamant about her marrying a Jew. So adamant that April gives up her one serious boyfriend, because Trude and Julius object to his Polish background. “They were worse than the Nazis,” Trude tells April. “They loved killing Jews. They’d point to Jews who passed as Gentiles to save their lives and say, ‘There’s one. Get her.’”

Hunt’s film has eliminated the Holocaust backstory, which is in a way the crux of the novel, the source of April’s discomfort with the world, her sense of herself as an outsider in the most extreme way (it’s no accident that she teaches a dead language, a vocation that baffles everyone she meets). It’s the nature of film to streamline the chronology and complicated character histories of its source material, to avoid tiresome flashbacks and expository speeches (“My mother was a refugee from Vienna”), but it’s also Hunt’s choice to make a film about faith, rather than culture. It’s an admirable choice, but it would be more admirable—or more acutely effective—if the film paid more attention to the particulars of that faith.

For April is a sort of Jew that doesn’t actually exist in this day and age—and perhaps never did. Her practice and lifestyle appear to be an odd amalgam of denominations. She’s assimilated and secular in appearance, and she doesn’t appear to keep kosher. Yet she prays loudly before diving into the bread basket in non-kosher restaurants (a sight that would certainly garner stares in the Upper East Side establishments she frequents with Bernice). And while she strictly observes the Sabbath—at least, the Friday night portion of it—she doesn’t appear to belong to a synagogue, or even to drop in on services, nor does she think twice about dating a non-Jew, or about being impregnated with sperm from a non-Jewish donor. Nor is there evidence of the sort of Jewish community to which someone of April’s faith would certainly belong: no Sisterhood officers coming by with brownies after Ben’s departure; no aunts and uncles crowing about her aging ovaries—no texture, in other words, of Jewish life in middle-class Brooklyn.

But Hunt, it seems, is less interested in the particulars of Jewish experience—religious or cultural—than in thorny questions of belief. Certainly, from a director’s standpoint, there are great dramatic possibilities in a character who, in this godless age, truly and deeply believes in a higher power, and is thrust into a torrent of pain and confusion when she begins to doubt. What’s most interesting, ultimately, about Then She Found Me is not its portrayal of a rich and vivid Jewish spiritual life—as striking and effective as this is, despite its inauthenticity. It’s that April begins to question her faith not because of the injustices that have been heaped upon her—Ben’s abandonment, her mother’s death, and other small tragedies that if mentioned would qualify as spoilers—but because of her own very human failures. Her continued and inexplicable attraction to Ben, which threatens to erode her relationship with Frank. Her lack, in certain instances, of compassion for her mother, for Frank, for Bernice. Her inability to forgive. Her ability to manipulate and betray. In other words, her realization that God is not good stems from her realization that she is not good. “Maybe God is complicated . . . difficult,” suggests Bernice, as April weeps. “Like me,” April acquiesces. It’s a decidedly modern take on God, and one that—as evidenced by strong box office sales, two months after the film’s opening—secular America, Jewish or otherwise, can certainly understand.

My wife was skeptical. “Another documentary,” she moaned.

“Whaddya mean another?”

“Please don’t tell me this one is about Hitler’s secretary.”

“It’s not,” I said. “It’s about a fundamentalist summer camp.”

My wife made a skeptical noise.

She remained skeptical until we actually watched the film, at which point her attitude changed.

Jesus Camp, directed by New York City documentarians Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, tells the story of a peppy evangelical preacher named Becky Fischer and the camp she runs for kids in Devils Lake, North Dakota. (Why would a peppy fundamentalist evangelical preacher choose Devils Lake as a locale? I’m assuming she got a deal on rent.)

A third-generation Pentecostal, Fischer is a stout, blond woman with an unabashed sense of her religious mission. “Where should we be putting our focus? I tell you where our enemies are putting it—they’re putting it on the kids,” she says. “You go to Palestine and they’re taking their kids to camp like we take our kids to Bible camp and putting hand grenades in their hands.”

Fischer is undeniably inspiring. With no children of her own, she devotes her life to those in the North Dakota youth ministry she founded, the Kids in Ministry International. Her rhetoric from the pulpit is fire and brimstone. But elsewhere, she comes off more like a passionate elementary school teacher. She exhorts her young congregants to view themselves as the rescuers of what she calls “this sick old world.”

As should be obvious from my wife’s attitude, I am something of a documentary slut. I’ve always admired the documentary form because it combines the best aspects of journalism and short stories. That is, you can assume (usually) that a documentary is true. At the same time, documentarians—at least the good ones—cherry-pick the best moments, the ones that reveal the characters most nakedly. Just like a good storyteller.

Becky Fischer in Jesus Camp

Jesus Camp does that and more. (It was an Oscar nominee last year for Best Documentary, but it got steamrolled by that trendy Al Gore movie.) It focuses on a single session of Fischer’s Kids on Fire camp, which she founded in 2002. In one scene, campers (there are about 100 of them, from all across the country) are encouraged to bless a cardboard cutout of George W. Bush. A guest preacher trumpets the evils of abortion and hands out tiny, intricate fetus dolls. The kids are coached to feel the spirit, and speak in tongues. Many weep hysterically at revival-style sermons.

All this may sound brainwashy to those of us who don’t share Fischer’s eschatological mindset, but Jesus Camp steadfastly refuses to pass judgment on its subjects. Instead, it illustrates why kids choose to become true believers. The basic message of fundamentalism, as delivered by Fischer, is this: God has known you since before you were born. He loves you, and He has a plan for your life.

The film focuses on three eloquent young campers, including a twelve-year-old aspiring preacher named Levi, who informs Fischer that he got saved at the age of five “because I just wanted more of life.” He later declares, “We’re being trained to be in God’s army.”

The intention isn’t to make him an object of ridicule. On the contrary, the film stresses his earnest devotion. At one point, Levi has a brief audience with Ted Haggard, who was then head of the National Association of Evangelicals. Haggard’s cynicism is striking. Levi approaches him with a genuine sense of wonder and a passion to spread the Gospel. Haggard—looking like a lizard in a three-piece suit—says nothing to Levi about his sense of mission. Instead, he advises Levi to find the right gimmick so he can build a following. (And yes, this is the same Haggard who stepped down from his post a short time later, after admitting that he had bought crystal meth from a male prostitute.)

Jesus Camp is one of those remarkable films in which all the characters reveal themselves with a terrifying candor. Parents blithely instruct their kids to disregard the scientific evidence of evolution. Smiling moppets cheer at the chance to die for Jesus. Most haunting of all, Fischer watches a video of her campers weeping during one of her sermons, beaming with pride. There’s something disturbing—even unsavory—about the scene. Fischer sees the children as experiencing religious ecstasy. The emotions pouring from them, she believes, are evidence of their devotion to her holy crusade. But it’s hard to fight the notion that the inconsolable crying and shrieking of these children might also constitute a kind of trauma play.

Though Jesus Camp won raves from major critics, Christian groups accused Ewing and Grady of misrepresenting evangelism by focusing on what Mark Moring, an editor at the website Christianitytoday.com, called “a very charismatic and rather unusual slice of the Pentecostal church in America.” Fischer herself had no problem with the portrayal of her camp. She even used the film as a promotional tool for a time. That changed in the fall of 2006, when vandals caused some $1,500 in damages to the campground Fischer rents, and in response Fischer closed the camp. In fact, Fischer told Christianitytoday.com, she had decided to shut the camp down anyway, over fears that outsiders who object to her mission would disrupt it.

So, clearly, I got a little obsessed. I watched Jesus Camp twice in a row, then a third and fourth time, using the excuse that I wanted friends to see the movie. And as so often happens when I start crushing on a piece of art, I became convinced that I needed to speak with the artists—in this case, Grady and Ewing.

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, directors of Jesus Camp

It took a few weeks, but I eventually managed to get Grady, who I’d learned was Jewish, on the phone. Right off the bat, I wanted to know how a nice Jewish girl from Washington, D.C., had gotten into something as disreputable as documentary filmmaking.

It all started, Grady said, back in middle school, when she saw the legendary 1984 documentary Streetwise, about a group of homeless kids in Seattle. “After that I was hooked,” she told me. “I started watching documentaries all the time.”

Grady wound up with a journalism degree from Columbia, then spent a few years working at a detective agency. (Her mother is a private dick, so she had connections in the business.) She eventually admitted to herself that what she really wanted was to make documentary films.

Rather than go to film school or, G-d forbid, head out to L.A., she landed a job working on The Farm, an astonishingly sad and beautiful film that documents the lives of half a dozen inmates at Louisiana State Penitentiary. (I’ve seen it multiple times.) She met Ewing on that shoot, and they eventually formed their own company, Loki Films. In 2005, they released The Boys of Baraka, about the rise and fall of an innovative educational program that sent African American kids from Baltimore to a special school in Kenya.

One of their subjects was an aspiring pastor, and their interest in him led them to Becky Fischer. “That’s really when you know you have a film,” Grady said. “If you have a strong main character where there are some stakes.”

In Fischer’s case, the stakes were nothing less than the salvation of mankind from the threat of eternal damnation.

The one thing I’d wondered as I watched and rewatched Jesus Camp was how a couple of secular filmmakers from New York City were able to win the trust of these Midwestern evangelicals. The key, Grady said, was that she and Ewing didn’t come in with an agenda. “I really experienced what I saw more through an anthropological lens. We wanted to come to a better understanding of fundamentalism and why it exists all over the world, and why someone would turn to it, regardless of belief system. We felt we had a responsibility to share this information with other American citizens.”

“Fair enough,” I said, “but didn’t some of the stuff you saw freak you out?”

Tory in Jesus Camp

“It was somewhat disconcerting initially to see the kids so emotional,” Grady said. “But the parents were all there when this was going on, and—I don’t want to make this sound like they weren’t sincere, but we got to see the whole context. After the services, they’d go back to dorms and hang out and gossip.”

I asked Grady if she told her subjects she was Jewish.

“Oh yeah, absolutely,” she said. “Before I made the film, I didn’t know the relationship between right-wing evangelicals and Israel. They’re sort of obsessed with Jewish people and Israel and the Old Testament, but they don’t know many Jewish people. So they thought it was great I was Jewish. I saw Israeli flags in people’s homes and in churches. They’re Zionists, basically. There were even a couple of times that they had me lay hands on Israeli flags.”

At this point I heard Ewing yell in the background, “That was awesome!”

“What was having you lay hands on an Israeli flag supposed to do?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Grady said. “It legitimized it, I guess, like it had been blessed by a Jew. It certainly wasn’t offensive to me.”

Before I hung up, I had to ask Grady what her dream project would be.

“We want to make a film about Muammar Qaddafi,” she said.

“You mean the Libyan leader? Why?”

“He’s been a world leader for longer than anybody alive, besides Castro, and he has a fascinating relationship with this country. The State Department recently took Libya off the list of states supporting terror. And Libya is sitting on the biggest oil reserves in Africa.”

Grady sounded positively smitten. “Yeah,” she said, “we’ve started reaching out to every contact we have. If you know his people, let them know.”

Sadly, I do not know Muammar Qaddafi. Nor do I know his people. But I hope Grady and Ewing do get their man. If and when they do, I’m sure they’ll present him in a way we’re not used to seeing him: as an actual human being.

Balagan means “total chaos.” But this word is unique, because contrary to the implied negative value the concept has in other languages, the subtext of balagan is positive. True, that positiveness is not overt—a bit like a proud parent trying to hide a smile from his mischief-making son—but it is completely there. But chaos for a society that is itself full of balagan is nothing less than proof of vitality and passion. In a place where people push and shove in line, where children insist on drawing on walls and not on paper, where a briefcase holds stained income tax reports

lying between a pastrami sandwich and a piece of graph paper with the beginnings of a poem on it, that’s where you’ll find human liberty, the liberty that both Yiddish and Hebrew have always held sacred.

The second word that came to mind was dugree, a word taken from Arabic that means “direct, honest talk.” Just like chaos, directness is a valued attribute in Israeli society. So dugree people will always tell you that you’ve gotten fat, that your wife is ugly, that the film you made is so-so, and—come to think of it—they never did manage to get through any of your books. They don’t do it because they have a need to enlighten you, but because for them saying anything else would be hypocritical. Of course, they know they could just smile and save you from some of that honesty, but then they wouldn’t be completely dugree. And so, genuinely dugree people will call you two hours after you’ve said goodbye and add that in all the excitement, they forgot to mention that your son seems underdeveloped for his age and your skin looks terrible.

If the concept of balagan only slightly aroused the intellectual curiosity of the visitors from LA, the concept of dugree managed to get their full attention. They tried to think of a time when someone came up to them after a screening with a negative comment and couldn’t. “Maybe your movies were simply great,” one of the Israeli hosts said, trying to pay an extremely non-dugree compliment.

“No,” said the director, “that’s not it. It’s just that in LA, when a film isn’t good, your colleagues come over and say things like, ‘It was so brave of you to do this film,’ or ‘I really liked the dog.’”

“And if the film is really terrible?” I asked. “If someone suffered through every frame of it?”

“Oh,” said a producer. “In that case, chances are he’ll come over wearing a big, toothy smile and say, ‘Good for you.’”

In the taxi on the way back from dinner, I pictured the toothy smiles of all the people who said how much they loved my book during that fabulous book tour on the West Coast in 2001. Now, when I think about it, many of them did tell me how brave I was to write that book, and there’d been a tall, thin woman from Berkeley who shook my hand warmly and said that she really loved the dog. In retrospect—to be dugree with myself—that should have made me suspicious right then because there was no dog in the book. On a more positive note, it may have taken me six years, but I did finally get it. Good for me.

Translated by Sondra Silverstone.

In the 1930s, Daniel Fuchs made a name for himself with a trio of novels about the slums of his native Brooklyn, which earned him raves from critics but little income. Seeking his fortune—or, at least, a comfortable life for his family—he headed out to Hollywood to write screenplays, largely abandoning his literary aspirations.

Over the years, as he penned popular noir films like Crisscross, Fuchs grew to feel that the lives portrayed in his novels were inconsequential. His fans begged to differ. In the 1960s, Irving Howe sparked a Fuchs revival. And more recently, both John Updike and Jonathan Lethem have championed Fuchs’s prose, which has just been reissued in two volumes, The Golden West and The Brooklyn Novels.

Nextbook talks with Daniel Fuchs’s son, Jake Fuchs, also a writer and a retired professor of English, about his father’s life and career.

Quite a daunting mandate, particularly for such high camp. It transported me straight back to The Ten Commandments. Regrettably, there’s no Anne Baxter-like vixen to thrice coo Ahasuerus. On the brighter side, there is an imposing royal eunuch who looks for all the world like a tunic-wearing pirate who’s lost his hat on palace grounds and suffers from a speech impediment, poor lad.

Beyond the inconsistent accents, inane dialogue, and absurd production values—the entire thing appears to have been filmed on a bare set with blurry backdrops added in during post-production—the movie troubled me for other reasons. On its own, the Esther story is pretty high drama. It’s got vengeance, sex, violence, fear—everything you need to keep the action moving. But the filmmakers, producers Matthew and Laurie Crouch and director Michael Sajbel, it seems, found the source material wanting and amped it up for contemporary viewers. So we have backstories galore, including one in which a young Esther receives from her parents a necklace with a prism on it, which, in certain lights, refracts images of stars of David on the walls. We learn in a flashback that her folks were killed in an anti-Jewish riot, but orphanhood doesn’t get her down, no sir! She’s got Uncle Mordechai, played by John Rhys-Davies, with his comforting, Welsh brogue. There’s also a stab at modern reference, with a Bachelor-esque scene, in which the king’s competing prospective brides twitter in glee at the jewels they’re allowed to choose from for their night-time auditions with hunky Ahasuerus, played by Luke Goss. Doth the true text need such adornment?

More unfortunate, though, are the interpretations of Esther’s story that this particular movie gins up. While I don’t question Esther’s star power, with her ambivalent heroism, I’ve always been a fan too of Vashti, Ahasuerus’s first queen. She refuses, according to the original text, to parade herself before the king and his court. She will not serve as her husband’s arm candy. I’d guess that feminism is a tricky biz when it comes to the Christian right. And, in this film, when Vashti (Jyoti Dogra) adamantly refuses to go to the king’s feast it’s not because she takes issue with being sexually objectified, it’s because she’s protesting a war Ahasuerus is waging to avenge his father’s death, anti-war feeling being, apparently, a less divisive force among the faithful.

While the actual book of Esther is a story of palace intrigue, the filmmakers flipped the script and made it all about romance. “Is not love the greatest commandment, no matter what God one serves?” asketh the pixie-ish Esther (Tiffany DuPont). From what I know, the only commandment to do with love that a gal like Esther might have known is love of God. But she’s a romantic, that one, and in 2006 what female viewer doesn’t want romance? (I submit, again, The Bachelor.) In any case, the film, it turns out, is based not on the actual Book of Esther, but on a “novelization” of it—which I guess means a dose of Harlequin, minus heavy breathing.

Most troubling, but least surprising, is the spectre of Jesus throughout this wild venture. Characters speak of the “glory of God” and what an honor it is to search that out. Late in the film, Esther prays to a deity (God himself is famously absent in the original text) and uses the word “father” in seeking guidance about how to obey Mordechai’s instructions to out Haman as a mortal danger to the Jews. True, Jewish liturgy makes references to “our father,” but given the engine behind this production, such invocations here feel decidedly Christian. So do the messianic overtones which utterly pervert the story at hand. For those who need a moral, it is a story of hope, that a handful of people can change history. But never from the original have I inferred, as this movie suggests, that the outcome is due to divine intervention or some supernatural destiny. That, along with the film’s extensive narrative liberties, is a distortion of epic proportion. Certainly there are family-friendly lessons everyone can learn from Esther, but such perversion ought not be among them.

Some things were reassuringly familiar. There was a seder plate, cups of syrupy Manischewitz, and boxes of matzah. Then the seder began. We read from Xeroxed copies of the Love and Justice in Times of War Haggadah. The first item was a social action blessing: “Blessed is the Source, who shows us paths to holiness, and commands us to pursue justice.”

The Haggadah recommended that everyone introduce themselves with their name and preferred pronoun, in order to create a friendlier space for transgender people. The first cup of wine was dedicated to those around the world who have risen up in protest against “unjust, racist and classist wars.” The traditional recitation of the ten plagues was recast as the “ten plagues of the occupation of Palestine.” Dipping fingers into wine, they were mourned: blockades and checkpoints, destruction of villages and homes, the security wall, war crimes.

Clockwise from top left: Co-director Konnie Chameides; Jews for Racial & Economic Justice; Micah Bazant, author of the Love and Justice Haggadah; and “Haddassah Ladies for Homos” perform for Purim.

Agree with its ideology or not, this was clearly not your old Maxwell House Haggadah, leaving you bored to tears and counting down the pages until the meal. In Young, Jewish and Left, an earnest and engaging if somewhat formless documentary by Irit Reinheimer and Konnie Chameides (the latter of whom—full disclosure—was at that upstate seder, and who I met briefly), there’s a scene with one of the co-creators of the Love and Justice Haggadah, an activist named Micah Bazant.

“There is a very old tradition, as old as any Jewish tradition, of reinterpreting… especially Passover and haggadot,” Bazant says, nodding to Jewish activists who preceded him, particularly Rabbi Arthur Waskow, who wrote the 1969 “Freedom Seder,” a civil rights-influenced alternative Haggadah. About his own motivation to create a new social justice Haggadah, Bazant gushes: “It was just love.”

In fact, it seems to be just love that motivates the dozens of young activists featured in Young, Jewish and Left, which functions as a kind of sprawling introduction to the new Jewish lefty scene. Occasional hints of brattiness, moments of condescension, and fuzzily articulated ideas are more than compensated for with humility, heart, and a basic human acknowledgment that we’re all in the same boat. (“We” being not just Jews.) The young people depicted here seem to collectively affirm Che Guevara’s famous statement that “the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.”

So, good, it begins with love. Then what? For the most part, you get the feeling that this movement (if it can be called a movement) is occupied primarily with opposing Israel, or with queer and transgender issues, or both at once, as in the case of a group called “Faygelehs for a Free Palestine.” There are times when it feels like the movie could have narrowed its narrative lens just slightly and been renamed “Young, Jewish and Anti-Occupation” or “Young, Jewish and Queer.”

Both of which are important issues better left for parsing elsewhere. In the context of this film, however, it’s striking to notice how much the enemy has shifted. Once, it was the pharaohs, the Cossacks, the czars, the Nazis, the sweatshop bosses, the union busters. Now, we are told, young Jewish leftists find themselves allied against other Jews—either the heterosexist ones who laugh trannies and queers out of shul, or the Zionist ones with their undying support for Israel.

The identification of “mainstream” Jews as the oppressor by the young leftists profiled in the film is so lacking in nuance that it’s sort of a relief when Loolwa Khazzoom, an Iraqi-Jewish writer, explodes while recalling her experience at a young Jewish lefty conference. “It was very clear that the root of everything was that Jews are white European oppressors and Palestinians are indigenous people of color and the Jews have done terrible things to Palestinians, end of story,” Khazoom says. “And I had it! My family was kicked out of Iraq. My family is Jewish refugees absorbed by the state of Israel. I have been told that my family history is completely irrelevant.”

It’s one of the film’s few moments of tension. Because Reinheimer and Chameides didn’t really set out to posit or defend any particular point, there are plenty of contradictions. The film has the aura of being held together punk-style with duct tape and staples and twine.

“Young, Jewish and Left” is most interesting from a purely anthropological perspective, when the film just saunters along, introducing us to people like Jonna Shelomith, an anarchist revolutionary who traveled to Germany with her “comrades” after the Berlin Wall fell and had an unexpectedly moving experience at Auschwitz, and And A. Lusia, a spunky young woman with dreadlocked pigtails who took advantage of Birthright Israel‘s free trip offer to go to Israel and confront Ariel Sharon. There is also a ticking off of subcultural ephemera like the Jewcrew Cookbook (motto: “Food for Thought, Recipes for Destruction”), the Suck My Treyf Gender party, a “queer, anti-imperialist Purim cabaret,” and the drag queens of Hadassah Ladies for Homos.

For those who wonder about the rightward political drift that seems to have gone hand in hand with the upward class drift of Jews in America, this film proves that the legacy of Jewish socialists, anarchists, feminists, Yippies, hippies, organizers, and agitators of the past century lives on in some form. Here, after all, are their progeny.

I’ve spent most of my life in show business, and I never have walked through the stage door, or onto a movie set without the thrill of belonging. On the stage or set, one is surrounded by like-minded people speaking a common language, having a common goal. This group is not opposed to the world but a world-within-the-world—small, contained, cohesive, mutually responsible.

I never served in the military, and regret it. Dr. Johnson wrote that every man thinks more meanly of himself for not having been a soldier. I attest to his observation, but have always felt graced in the other hermetic groups to which I have belonged.

What have I found in them? Filial piety, humor, language, a responsibility to learn and to instruct, a sense of timelessness and history: “so-and-so’s father was one of the key grips on Love in the Afternoon, his father worked for D.W. Griffith—do you know what happened on the set yesterday?” (this introduction followed by an anecdote which may or may not have happened yesterday, and equally, could have been set—as it was equally likely—in the silent era).

This vertical and horizontal community creates incredible solidarity. On the shoot everything is taken away or is about to be taken away: sleep, health, family, comfort—everything except a sense of shared purpose.

Show business people share a soft pity for those who would like to join but cannot or have not. For we have, in the dream of the ten-year-old child, run away to the circus, and the poor wistful souls on the outside stayed home.

The Talmud compares the love of the Torah to that of a “wife with a narrow womb” —a fairly graphic description.

Life on the set eschews wealth and position as beside the point. The powerful may, mistakenly and unfortunately, exercise prerogatives, but those actually involved in moviemaking understand that such behavior deprives the offender of the chiefest joy of participation, which is immersion in the community.

Knowledge, courtesy, good-will, stoicism, wit, these moral acts and observances enlighten and spiritualize the set. Each day, the involved, which is to say, observant, goes home having learned a lesson. It may be in mechanics, it is, at least as often, in ethics: how to behave in a difficult situation, how to control fear, anger, sloth—indeed, lust or greed. These lessons—in the larger world, difficult—are made salutary by the respect and approval bestowed by the group on their mastery. Small acts of helpfulness, forbearance, or even silence, are endorsed.

It is, to me, that tribe of which one dreams, which many seek in this or that confected enterprise: sports bar, sports rooting, paintball, “bonding” expeditions. The opposite of this tribal life is a life of anxiety, loneliness, and loss.

Analgesics include consumption, power and the quest for power, envy, grievance, hatred, as we, in each case, compare ourselves and our state to that of others, and end the comparison either in arrogance or loathing. Or in grief.

This love of belonging, as the wife with the narrow womb, impels one to service, attention, and consistency. It prompts one to greater understanding. How wonderful to have such an object of devotion.

When I was a child I played the piano. How good, I thought, to know all one could know about the instrument: how to play it, how to write for it, how to repair it, how to build it. And some, in life, are lucky to have such a love. One fellow collects pocketknives. He finds romance in collector’s magazines which are mere columns of figures: “Case, 6265/1.” Ah, he says.

Gun collectors, stamp collectors, aviation enthusiasts, gardeners, golfers, these know the meaning of zeal. Collectors see each other at a swap meet, looking for that missing piece. And as we search we are drawn, we are awakened to other possibilities, vertically, across the spectrum of interests, and horizontally, back through time, and forward to the similarly devoted. As our collection takes shape, we muse on or plan a completion, a bequeathal, and rejoice at the discovery or induction of an acolyte.

And yet, what is it? The stoics say, “Of what is it made?” The collector’s object of love is only a bent piece of steel, a stamp, a scrap of shaped wood, a colored plate. Ah, but, we say, the romance is not even limited to the actual object. Are we not moved to a similar state of bliss by mere contemplation of its ideal, its description, model number, recipe.

It is said there are three happy states of the collector: discovery, possession, and dispersal, each of which, during its period of sway, is supreme: to thirst after, to enjoy, to share; until the burning desire, in the perfected state, is clear of attachment either to the thing itself, or to its contemplation—devotion, over time, having been blessed with a repletion of gratitude, sufficient unto itself.

And yet. This love of community, this love of knowledge, this joy of immersion in history, this thirst for group approval, for moral perfection, this endless variety of vertical and horizontal connection, these are all open to the Jew, both his right and his responsibility, and Judaism goes begging.

“Can you get this thing to open up?”

I press the “open/close” button and out pops the Johnny Ray disc Rachelle wants to lend me. Rachelle, who looks closer to 56 than 66, doesn’t carry a cell phone or use the Internet either. Luckily, his business doesn’t call for a lot of gadgets, just a lot of patience. After four decades, Rachelle, an actor, is finally getting his big break in Spike Lee’s, Inside Man, a hostage drama starring Jodie Foster, Denzel Washington, and Clive Owen that opens Friday.

Rachelle’s co-stars weren’t even born when he heard his sister playing one of Johnny Ray’s records and asked, “Who’s the girl singing?”

“It’s a guy,” she informed him. “He cries.”

“Well, I can relate to that,” he replied.

Growing up in Washington Heights, in the 1940s and 1950s, Rachelle dreamed of performing. His father, a Polish immigrant, didn’t want to hear about it, but Rachelle resembled the slim, jittery Ray and quickly established himself as an impersonator of the now-forgotten crooner. He juggled his act, which often took him to Catskills resorts, with serious acting, studying under William Hickey and Uta Hagen. At 20, after touring Israel as a singer, he landed a part opposite Topol in an Israeli film called I Like Mike.

Back in the States, his career faltered. To support his family, Rachelle taught English and theater. In the early 1980s he landed bit parts in a few Hollywood pictures—the John Travolta vehicle Blow Out, a Jane Fonda movie—and a recurring role as sleazy pornographer Stu Samuels on All My Children. But the phone calls for bigger and better parts never came. And in 1991, when Ray died of liver cancer after years as an alcoholic, Rachelle went through a bout of depression.

Last spring, his wife Judy saw a posting online: Spike Lee was looking for someone to play an Orthodox rabbi and Columbia University law professor. Rachelle auditioned and Lee quickly called him back to read with Washington.

“In the scene, Denzel, a very tough, threatening character, says to me, ‘You’re not a rabbi, you’re a lawyer.’ And so I taunt him back and say, ‘Sure. Go ahead. Go nuts. Go meshuga, ‘” Rachelle laughs. “That word—meshuga—wasn’t in the script. But Spike loved it, told me to do that line again.”

After the callback, Rachelle told his agent, Barbara Andreadis, he’d nailed it. But in the days that followed, he heard the same sound he’d heard on and off for decade: silence.

“What does it take? I thought.”

After a dark week, Rachelle trudged over to Andreadis’ office. She somehow thought he’d already heard the good news. Within weeks he was improvising another scene with Washington, in which the Oscar-winning actor tries to play rough.

“‘What do you mean you can’t hear me?’ Denzel says. Then he notices my hearing aids and yells: ‘Why’s this one brown and the other one’s red?’ ‘Well,’ I say, ‘It has to do with the ear canal…and then I go on and on about the hearing aids; Spike loved it!” Rachelle says with a huge smile, but then his eyes sadden, and he starts to tear up. “You know, I kept pinching myself then. It was like a dream. This is where I was hoping I’d be someday.”

Of course, waking up from a good dream can be disappointing, and Rachelle admits to feeling a huge crash after the film was shot.

“In acting everything ends,” he says. “You’re always waiting for the next part.”

His next role, he hopes, will be in a revival of Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy. He’s already been in readings of the Holocaust drama with Richard Dreyfuss. If they secure the rights from the Miller estate Rachelle’s next big break may come—this time playing a waiter.

Golutvin, like Everything‘s Trachimbrod, no longer exists, having been wiped out by the Nazis. In a nod to his countryman Gogol, the enterprising Edik fixes the problem by recruiting residents from nearby Golotvin to play relatives who supposedly survived. This cow is less sacred to those who lived through the tragedy, and the low register permits Lounguine, who was born in Moscow but now lives mainly in France, to go higher as well. He has the restraint to depict the vanished Golutvin as just that: an empty field. (Apparently unable to bear the implications, Liev Schreiber, the director of Everything, gave us ex-Trachimbrod as a beatific field of sunflowers.)

Lounguine’s forged reunions cleverly recall the Soviet government’s designation of Jewish immigration to Israel in the 1970s and 1980s as “family reunions” to rationalize this embarrassing flight from the socialist utopia. Similarly, the locals’ invention of Jewish roots subtly evokes the rush by Soviet gentiles to discover even a trace of Jewish blood in order to qualify for an emigration permit. Otherwise, the film offers a fairly clichéd picture of post-Soviet provincial life, both Jewish and gentile—lots of shouting and unnecessary violence, and the Jewish grandmother only wants you to finish your food.

More regrettably, the tantalizing implication that the sacred cow has turned into a cash cow—that, in newly capitalist Ukraine, Jewishness has passed from stigma to marketable commodity—remains unexplored. The Ukrainian hosts are so grateful to have a profit opportunity that they happily fabricate the past that Grandfather, a gentile wartime collaborator who guided the narrator through Everything, wished to suppress. In that film, the young but righteous narrator, Jonathan Safran Foer, teaches the savage Ukrainians to value the difficult truth about their history. In Roots, Lounguine shows up the promise of the West; his heritage tourists—a Russian-Jewish émigré who lives in Israel, a gentile Ukrainian-Canadian—nurse clandestine agendas that put Edik’s fabrications to shame. One wants to reconnect with a certain “relative” only to murder him, for a wartime betrayal.

But the East’s promise may be empty as well, certainly more than Everything was willing to acknowledge. For Lounguine, the truth is only sometimes desirable, if only because it’s quite easy to invent. This is the greater truth, in fact. This isn’t to suggest that expatriates and their descendants have no business going home. But as Lounguine himself has suggested, they return in deference to an implacable, quasi-physiological impulse, not from any hope of making things better, for anyone.

Tiffany Shlain’s film The Tribe asks how the daughter of Polish-Jewish immigrants, a woman named Ruth Handler, came to invent the Barbie doll in 1959. It answers this question by sifting through thousands of years of Jewish history in 15 image- and fact-filled minutes.

The film falls somewhere between avant-garde video and public service announcement, drawing on 1960s archival footage, spoken-word poetry, and dry but clever narration from actor Peter Coyote. The Tribe will be in competition next month at Sundance.

It was with great hopes that I went to a screening of the Israeli director’s latest project, Free Zone, about three women—an Israeli, an American, and a Palestinian—wrestling over a business deal. One of its stars, Hanna Laslo, picked up the Best Actress prize at Cannes for her somewhat gruff, can-do performance as a questionably Orthodox matron, the best of the lot. Another is Natalie Portman. That alone guarantees fanfare, and yet star power cannot eradicate the carsick feeling that this film induces.

It is a road movie, after all. There are long tracking shots of highways, most of the action takes place in a taxi, the interactions center around the sales of armored vehicles, and, toward the end, Gitai gives us the trio twirling their wrists and bobbing their heads to a song on the radio in a kind of vehicular camaraderie.

Unless you count a close shot of Portman’s Rebecca crying through Chava Alberstein’s politicized rendition of Had Gadya, nothing much else happens though much is aspired to. That’s the key problem here, admirable though it may be.

Characters offer mini-monologues on their personal tragedies. The Palestinian, played by Hiam Abbass, was dispossessed from Israel and admonishes that it’s good to know the language of the enemy. The Israeli snarks, “Before? Before, my parents came from Auschwitz,” in response to a question of where her parents were located before immigrating. And the American sweetheart seems bathed in a kind of milky mixture of curiosity and dislocation; her mother is not a Jew and she consequently feels rejected by the place she had hoped to consider home.

The lesson—persecution is owned by no one and everyone—is important and quite dear to Gitai, who has built his career examining regional tensions. He started in 1982 with Field Diary, a documentary of his tour through the country, interviewing Israelis and Palestinians about their future, and followed it up three years later with Esther, his first feature. Gitai’s version of the Biblical tale wraps up with shots of the actors silently walking, each narrating their own biographies. A Palestinian plays Mordechai, a Hungarian refugee plays an advisor to King Ahasuerus, portrayed in turn by an actor of Armenian descent. The moving revelation that it’s a colors-of-the-world production compensates but only slightly for enduring the rest of the film.

Certainly, the world can be a cruel place—the Bible shows us that, and lest you need modern evidence, pick up a newspaper. Free Zone is similarly discouraging, and viewers will surely be affirmed in their lamentation over the seeming intractability of the tensions and suffering in the Middle East. After the screening, Gitai said a few words, notably that his hope for the region is that warring people will become so bored by quarreling that they’ll ultimately make peace. Attrition may indeed be a solution, but Gitai’s lack of imagination and well-meaning moralizing do little more than elicit a collective yawn.

The signifiers of identity are squirmworthy. The younger characters lack nuance and seem to imply some kind of link between being a loser and being a Jew. The older ones—Aviva’s mother, for example, played by Ellen Barkin—cloak their forcefulness behind supposed good intention and seem hard-pressed to show the barest hint of compassion.

But for all their sullenness, Solondz’s Jews are less offensively farcical than the folks he depicts on the opposite extreme, who have compassion in spades. Mama Sunshine, a jumper-wearing children’s advocate who takes in a variously-disabled bunch of unwanteds, feeds her charges “Jesus’ Tears” cookies and oversees a musical number that tips its hat to School of Rock and The Partridge Family. Those occasional jokes, though, don’t alleviate the film’s unsettling feeling. Somewhere between glib and disdainful, it serves up extraordinary, brutal material as part of one long gag.

While Solondz never really posits that one system is better than another, he shows a stark dichotomy—despair in the prototypical Jewish home and suspended doubt in the Christian one. It’s a vision without complexity, which may mirror literal understandings of religion, but bears no likeness to reality.