Arts & Culture | Film

Magic, L’ Dor-V-Dor

10/10/2012 | George Robinson | Special to the Jewish Week | Film

Once the walls of the ghetto came down, the range of career opportunities for Jews became similar to the one for non-Jews. Even with the burdens of anti-Semitic quota systems, the Jewish people have made a global impact in the physics, medicine, government, literature, the visual arts and — magic.

Magic, you say? Well, there was Harry Houdini, born Erich Weiss, a rabbi’s son but...
Yes, there was Houdini, but he was only the most prominent of many Jewish practitioners of the mysteries of prestidigitation.

From A Haredi Family To Shin Bet Chiefs

10/03/2012 | George Robinson | Special to the Jewish Week | Film

In a recent interview in these pages, Richard Peña, the retiring director of the New York Film Festival, remarked on the explosive growth of the Israeli film industry during his quarter-century in that post. Appropriately enough, this year’s festival, celebrating its 50th anniversary, offers three examples of how the industry has matured.

A Grunt’s-Eye-View Of Modern Combat

09/25/2012 | George Robinson | Special To The Jewish Week | Film

The Holocaust As Family Affair

09/24/2012 | George Robinson | Special to the Jewish Week | Film

The first image one sees in David Fisher’s new documentary “Six Million and One” is a crumbling stone doorway bridged by a spider web. The visual irony is striking, with the rough yellow stone breaking down, the wispy lacework sturdy and undamaged. That irony is, perhaps, at the center of Fisher’s film.

An Activist Voice In The Night

09/11/2012 | George Robinson | Special to the Jewish Week | Film

Bob Fass, who has hosted the pioneering “free-form” radio show “Radio Unnameable” on New York’s WBAI-FM since 1963, is a vivid and living reminder of a certain generation of Jewish radicals both cultural and political. “Radio Unnameable,” the motion picture that opens on Sept. 19, is a loving portrait of Fass and, quite consciously, of that generation.

Despite Matisyahu, ‘The Possession’ Lacks Jewish Soul

09/04/2012 | George Robinson | Special to the Jewish Week | Film

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.