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.

Jon Stewart thrilled and reassured us all year with the Daily Show‘s political coverage, but soon after the election results were in, he appeared on pal Stephen Colbert’s much-hyped special, A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All. The other semi-bold-faced names to make appearances carried out their duties with aplomb, but it was Stewart’s sad-faced Hanukkah song (the holiday is a sensible alternative to Christmas,” he warbled sweetly) that stole the show. —Eryn Loeb

Best Reason to Become a Vegetarian

After years of allegations that it mistreated both animals and humans, Agriprocessors’ kosher slaughterhouse faced its most high-profile challenge yet: the Bush administration’s largest crackdown on illegal workers at a single site. The 54-year-old company eventually filed for bankruptcy, but not before sparking a mainstream debate about the laws and ethics of keeping kosher.

—Alana Newhouse

Best Substitutes for Actually Joining the Israeli Defense Force

Jobnik!, Miriam Libicki’s autobiographical graphic novel, bleakly chronicles her formative years in the IDF during the second Intifada. Against the backdrop of war, Libicki moves through a parade of disappointing relationships, making the grayscale illustrations particularly fitting. Similarly inspired by her years in the IDF, photographer Rachel Papo set out to capture the experiences of young women in the army. Her Serial No. 3817131 is a meditation on the incongruities of military adolescence, juxtaposing classic portraiture and yearbook-style candids to mesmerizing effect. —Rachel Sugar

Best Fictional Taste of Chicago Political Corruption

While the blogosphere parses the Blagosphere, readers greedy for all things Windy City can look to Aleksander Hemon’s novel The Lazarus Project. In following an immigrant from Sarajevo who becomes obsessed with the century-old story of Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish newcomer killed by the city’s chief of police, Hemon weaves together contemporary and historical tales of loneliness and dislocation, showing, despite contextual differences, the unity among immigrant tales. —Sara Ivry

Best Traditional Ladino Wedding Song Most Worthy of Inclusion on the Soundtrack to a Pedro Almodóvar Film

“Shecharchoret” (“Black Beauty”), by 22-year-old London-based Israeli singer Mor Karbasi, is a haunting, epic song; like the other tracks on her debut album The Beauty and the Sea, it conjures a palette of emotions that have imbued my apartment-cleaning and subway-riding rituals with a sense of dramatic Mediterranean grandeur. Karbasi brings to mind a more dignified Shakira with her tragic, timeless, romantic songs. She sings in Hebrew, Spanish, and Ladino, but listeners need not understand the words to be

transported to one of the amber-lit cobblestone corridors depicted in the CD’s liner notes. —Hadara Graubart

Best Revisionist History

Earnest beneath a veneer of irony, Camp Camp aims to capture the essence of so many youthful summers. It’s the Wonder Years of coffee-table books: color war bullies and awkward mixers, athletic humiliation and profound weeklong romances, all seen through the rose-colored glasses that come with distance from adolescence. Camp Camp‘s grainy photos and glib anecdotes are enough to convince you that camp was a formative Jewish-American experience—and that you loved every minute of it. —Rachel Sugar

Best and Least Likely Depiction of Someone Using Tefillin

In Surfwise, Doug Pray’s documentary tracing a family’s beyond-unconventional lifestyle, Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz—the man responsible for bringing surfing to Israel—holds forth variously on the merits of rigorous self-sufficiency, meticulously calculated sexual compatibility, and robust Judaism. His nine kids, the products of an unofficial sociological experiment, also have things to say about growing up as nomadic truants and chasing waves while packed into an RV—some wistful, some resentful, all riveting. —Hadara Graubart

Best Fruitful Obsession

Rafael Goldchain reconstructed his family’s photo album by putting himself at the center of every image, in a host of guises. The self-portraits that comprise I Am My Family are alternately funny and haunting, enriched by their creator’s palpable sense of curiosity about the story behind every character” he embodies. The rich result of Goldchain’s inquiry into his family’s past is as generous as it is personal. —Eryn Loeb

Best Scandal with a Cantor in a Starring Role

In April, news broke that Naftali Hershtik—one of the most famous and well-respected cantors in the world—was the target of a bizarre entrapment scheme allegedly orchestrated by one of his former students. Sex! Rivalry! Hazzanut! We’ll wait years for another story like this one. —Alana Newhouse

Best Movie Experience That’s Akin to Torture

In My Father My Lord, the debut feature from Israeli writer-director David Volach, the young child of an ultra-Orthodox couple grows resistant to their beliefs—and since his father’s a rabbi, it’s a problem. Volach, who grew up ultra-Orthodox, portrays the boy (Ilan Griff) with sensitivity, and takes theology seriously. But a film this schematic can end only one way, and when it does—when it goes from incisive to mawkish—you’ll want to scream. —Lawrence Levi

Best Thrill-Ride Primer on the Siege of Leningrad

It’s hard to keep up with global brutalities—this year alone we’ve had massacres in the Congo, terror in Mumbai, and aggression in Georgia. And yet violence of the past, at least in Leningrad’s case, holds a rightful place on the podium of extreme malevolence. What David Benioff achieves in his fast-paced novel City of Thieves is nothing short of a coup—offering a primer on the German occupation of that Russian city in 1941, as well as a riveting buddies-on-the-run thriller that is long on pathos and entertainment. War may be hell, but reading about it doesn’t have to be. —Sara Ivry

Best Revenge of the Nerds

As part of its 60th-anniversary celebrations, Israel sent the band Oy Division to entertain at its embassies in southeast Asia. The irony, as frontman Noam Inbar is quick to point out, is that Oy Division, virtually the only klezmer band in Israel, passionately embraces the shtetl culture Israel’s founders were so determined to eradicate. While the host ambassadors looked on with some measure of discomfort, Inbar and company performed manic, unmanly songs in Yiddish, Russian, and Romanian. —Julie Subrin

Best Result of Growing up Jewish in Nebraska

In her collection of autobiographical essays, Have You No Shame, Rachel Shukert walks us through the rites of passage in her precocious girl-to-womanhood—from Holocaust obsession, to stealthy youth-group hook-ups, to losing a grandparent. As she points out the uncomfortable details in all-too-familiar situations, Shukert’s frenzied voice is honest and, moreover, hilarious. —Eryn Loeb

Best Foreplay

Paul Schrader’s movie adaptation of Yoram Kaniuk’s novel Adam Resurrected is far from perfect, but it does have two things going for it: Jeff Goldblum, who plays Adam Stein, a

onetime Weimar cabaret performer who survives the Holocaust by pretending to be a dog (long story) and winds up in an experimental Israeli asylum, and Ayelet Zurer, who plays the asylum’s head nurse and carries on a steamy affair with Adam. How does she turn him on? Arf! —Lawrence Levi

Best Cautionary Tale

Janice Erlbaum’s wrenching memoir Have You Found Her recounts her all-consuming relationship with a homeless teenage girl who turned out to be more messed up than anyone

could have imagined. The story’s concluding twist is probably also the year’s Best Surprise Ending—or would be, if it hadn’t broken real people’s hearts. —Eryn Loeb

Best Reason to Wonder if Contender for First Jewish President” Might Be Some Sort of Curse

In March, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer resigned after it was revealed that he had engaged the services of a high-priced prostitution ring. This was widely considered a shoo-in for Shande of the Year…until Bernard Madoff came along. —Alana Newhouse

In Adam Resurrected, opening today in New York City, Jeff Goldblum delivers an Oscar-worthy performance as Adam Stein, a Weimar-era cabaret star who in the 1960s is relegated to an Israeli insane asylum specifically for Holocaust survivors. As we learn in flashbacks, he survived a concentration camp by submitting to the perverse whim of a Nazi commandant (Willem Dafoe): behaving like a dog at all times. In the asylum, Stein—wily, charismatic, and devilishly witty—carries on an affair with a sultry nurse (Ayelet Zurer) and falters only when he encounters a new patient, a boy who thinks he’s a dog. The film, directed by the provocateur Paul Schrader, was adapted by Noah Stollman from the 1968 novel by the Israeli writer Yoram Kaniuk.

Goldblum, who is 56, grew up in Pittsburgh. Over the past 35 years he has worked with directors such as Robert Altman, Philip Kaufman, David Cronenberg, and Steven Spielberg. When I met with him yesterday to talk about Adam Resurrected, he said, “This morning I was on Martha Stewart making menorahs,” and added, “She’s very Jewish.”

Paul Schrader says that the Holocaust “is a subject that in many ways has been exhausted cinematically.” How does Adam Resurrected differ from other Holocaust films?

Well, I’ve never seen anything like it. And like Paul, I was struck, in the first reading of the script—the central event of this movie that he describes as being “about a man who was once a dog who meets a dog who was once a boy”—we thought that was a knockout of a metaphor, and worth doing. And if you read Yoram Kaniuk’s book, which is just now being reissued—I love the movie, but the book of course is different and more complicated and more elaborate and spectacular. We tried to stay devoted to the sensibility and voice and spirit of the book. I met with Kaniuk in Israel. He’s like the character and like the book—snarky and unconventional and surprising and contradictory and brilliant and provocative and wonderful and kind and funny. When the book first came out in Israel there was an uproar—they were like, “Irreverent about this material? Nothing like we’ve seen before.” But since, it’s been translated and became an international treasure, and Susan Sontag compared him to Márquez.

Do you agree with Schrader that cinematically the Holocaust genre is played out?

He knows. He’s a cinematic historian, I’m not. While we were filming in Israel I asked him, “What movies shouldn’t I have missed out on by this point?” He said, “Here are the 20 movies I recommend“—many of which I hadn’t seen. I watched them all.

In preparation for the role, you visited former concentration camps and spoke at length with survivors. What did you learn from those experiences?

A greater feeling for those events. Many survivors were very generous with me, welcomed me into their homes, told me their stories, showed me their artifacts. I felt a greater empathy for, understanding of, what it must have been like. Café Europa in Los Angeles is an organization that serves survivors. One of the women who was running Café Europa—I said I’d never been to a concentration camp, and she said, “The one I recommend that’s most intact of any is Majdenek, in Poland, outside Lublin.” So I went to Germany, spent a month there, went to Sachsenhausen, and figured out a way to do this side trip to Poland, and it was an amazing experience. Amazing. Reading all about it, immersing myself in it—you can only scratch the surface in a year. But going there and seeing Germany and seeing the concentration camp and standing next to the gas chamber and seeing a room full of shoes—it was life-changing, it was very emotional, devastating.

I’ve read that you grew up attending an Orthodox synagogue and went to Hebrew school.

I did!

Did being Jewish have any connection to your choosing the role of Adam?

Yes, possibly so. Well, I had a feeling about it anyway. My dad served in World War II, volunteered in the service, and his brother—who was a pilot, went down, killed, in World War II—looked kind of exactly like me, he was my height exactly. So I always had a connection to, was intrigued by—arrested, disturbed, haunted, and was interested in those events, but not until this year did I really get more fully into it. And yes, when it came to me, I had a predisposition to be interested.

I couldn’t help thinking of your role in Independence Day, which was a fairly stereotyped Jew opposite a fairly stereotyped black guy played by Will Smith, and I wondered if in playing Jews you’re ever concerned about the impression you may make.

Yes, that occurs to me.

Have you ever refashioned a role or spoken to a director about those feelings?

I may not have mentioned Jewishness along with it, that may not have been my only or primary concern, but yes, I’ve steered and contributed and otherwise lobbied for adjustment in one aspect or another that would add negative stereotype. And I like to avoid cliché anyway—generally.

Is there anything you learned in Hebrew school that stays with you today?

I was telling somebody today I like that Passover song “Dayenu.” “It would be sufficient…” If nothing else occurred—talking about what I wish I had done, what else I could have done, what I’d like to do now. I have more appetite than ever, looking forward to whatever comes, and have strong feelings, but—having said that, if nothing else would occur from the huge abundance that I’ve been gifted with, it would certainly be more than sufficient. And I’d be eternally grateful.