The Jewish people have a long tradition of interest in the occult and the supernatural — not that you’d know it from Hollywood’s version. Wonder-working rabbis animated the inanimate; the souls of the newly dead took over the bodies of the living. We did werewolves and demons — the whole haunted nine yards. (OK, Jewish tales are a little weak on vampires, although it’s not a stretch to read the Dracula story as anti-Semitic — another subject for another movie review.) From the legends of Lilith to the short fiction of I.B.

Zionism and the Holocaust are, obviously, the two central facts of 20^th-century Jewish history. Each is, in its way, intimately linked with the history of cinema. Theodor Herzl’s awakening as a Jew is usually dated to his covering the Dreyfus Trial in 1894-’95, the year in which the Lumière brothers offered the first public screening of motion pictures. Both the Nazis and their opponents used film as a key element in their propaganda; film footage of the death camps has always been one of the most powerful forms of testimony to the Shoah’s horrors.