Arts & Culture | Film

The Jewish Side Of Judy (Cohen) Chicago

08/24/2010 | Eric Herschthal | Staff Writer | Film

In 1984, the artist Judy Chicago was at party where a poet read a piece about the Holocaust.

Being The Safdie Brothers

08/17/2010 | George Robinson | Special To The Jewish Week | Film

What makes a filmmaker’s work Jewish?

Benny Safdie, at 24 the younger half of a filmmaking duo with his brother Josh, earnestly asserts that the Jewishness of the two pervades their work, and this critic tends to agree with him. That work is the subject of a current program at BAMCinemathek that includes not only their two features and many shorts but also films that influenced them.

Safdie also readily admits that he’d be hard put to identify Jewishy specifics from their small but significant output.

Mississippi’s Burning Questions

08/10/2010 | George Robinson | Special to the Jewish Week | Film

In 1964 when she was only 17, Micki Dickoff asked her father if she could go to Mississippi to work with the volunteers of Freedom Summer, registering black voters. Her father, a Mississippi native, refused to allow her to go. His was the only Jewish family in a small Mississippi town, and he feared what she would find there. Not long after, his worst fears were confirmed when three of the volunteers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were murdered by local Klansmen, all of them deputy sheriffs of Neshoba County.

New Holocaust Film: Recycling History

08/10/2010 | George Robinson | Special to the Jewish Week | Film

It’s a rather odd admission for a director whose first feature film is a ground-breaking documentary about the Holocaust, but growing up in Israel, Yael Hersonski avoided films about the Shoah and memorial sites like Yad Vashem. She had a much more vivid reminder of the events at home.

Hate-Group Members In Love

08/04/2010 | George Robinson | Special To The Jewish Week | Film

There have been many films that explore the pathology and sociology of fascist movements. It’s a subject perhaps better suited to documentary than to fiction simply because the issues are a bit too complex, the strands of race, ethnicity, class and “tribal” allegiance too densely interwoven for dramatization within the allotted time of a conventional feature film.

Samuel Maoz’s 20 Years’ War

08/03/2010 | George Robinson | Special To The Jewish Week | Film

Samuel Maoz was only 20 years old when the first Lebanon War broke out. He was a gunner in a tank crew and at 6:15 a.m. on the morning of June 6, 1982, he killed a man for the first time in his life.