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Jewish Stories

Jewish Stories

Yes, there are extraordinary and essential films of remembrance and analysis here, on the Shoah and on Middle East politics (and more of our Israel/Palestine films are gathered here) — but also much much more — JEWISH STORIES encompasses visions of diverse cultures and diasporic communities that define much of our intellectual and cultural life today — from Robert Vas’ classic study of London’s East End THE VANISHING STREET, to Ferenc Toroc’s classic fiction feature film 1945, Chantal Akerman’s dry and compelling Tel Aviv diary DOWN THERE, through to Marcel Ophuls’ Oscar-winning film on Klaus Barbie, HOTEL TERMINUS. In other words, this is a sea of essential stories.

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Jewish Stories
  • Go For Zucker

    Directed by Dani Levy • Drama • With Henry Hübchen, Hannelore Elsner, Udo Samel • 2006 • 91 minutes

    First-class pool shark and all-around hustler Jaeckie Zucker is up to his ears in debt, again. He faces jail, divorce and general ruin. When word comes that his mother has died, leaving an inherit...

  • Free Voice of Labor: The Jewish Anarchists

    Directed by Steven Fischler and Joel Sucher • Documentary • 1980 • 55 minutes

    A dramatic portrait of immigrant life in the U.S. as seen through the eyes of the sweatshop workers who made up the Jewish anarchist movement. Between 1900 and WWI they built trade unions, organized schools, sponsored ...

  • Family Practice

    Directed by Jeshua Dreyfus • Drama • With Dani Levy, Dimitri Stapfer, Sibylle Cano • 2020 • 89 minutes

    Simon has a love-hate relationship with his father. When his parents go on holiday, Simon initiates a seductive game of cat-and-mouse with his father’s mistress and gets disastrously tangled up...

  • I am Secretly an Important Man

    Directed by Peter Sillen • Documentary • With Jesse Bernstein • 2012 • 89 minutes

    'I Am Secretly an Important Man' is a portrait of writer and poet Steven J. Bernstein (aka Jesse Bernstein), one of Seattle's most celebrated and troubled voices. His angry, surprisingly fresh and lyrical writings ...

  • There Are Jews Here

    Directed by Brad Lichtenstein, Morgan Johnson • Documentary • 2016 • 89 minutes

    THERE ARE JEWS HERE takes you on a journey to places where most never imagined Jews existed, following the untold stories of four once thriving American Jewish communities that can now barely hold a minyan. Most Amer...

  • My Fuhrer

    Directed by Dani Levy • Drama • With Ulrich Mühe, Sylvester Groth • 2009 • 92 minutes

    The bastard love child of Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Mel Brooks’ The Producers, My Führer is a wildly provocative and laugh-out-loud satire about Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.

    December 1944: ...

  • From Swastika to Jim Crow

    Directed by Lori Cheatle • Documentary • 2000 • 60 minutes

    In the 1930s Jewish intellectuals who escaped Nazi Germany and immigrated to the U.S. faced an uncertain future. Confronted with anti-Semitism at American universities and a public distrust of foreigners, many sought refuge in an unlikel...

  • Itzhak

    Directed by Alison Chernick • Documentary • With Itzhak Perlman, Toby Perlman, Billy Joel, Alan Alda • 83 minutes

    From Schubert to Strauss, Bach to Brahms, Mozart to…Billy Joel, Itzhak Perlman’s violin playing transcends mere performance to evoke the celebrations and struggles of real life; “pra...

  • Big Sonia

    Directed by Todd Soliday & Leah Warshawski • Documentary • With Sonia Warshawski, SuEllen Fried, Caroline James Kennedy • 2017 • 93 minutes

    For years, Sonia Warshawski (92) has been an inspirational public speaker at schools and prisons, where her stories of surviving the Holocaust as a teenager...

  • When Memory Comes: A Film About Saul Friedlander

    Directed by Frank Diamand • Documentary • 2012 • 65 minutes

    WHEN MEMORY COMES: A FILM ABOUT SAUL FRIEDLANDER is a visually arresting documentary that interweaves leading Holocaust historian Saul Friedlander's personal story of survival with an introduction to his work and thought.

    Originally a ...

  • Ziyara

    Directed by Simone Bitton • Documentary • 2021 • 99 minutes

    Celebrated documentary filmmaker Simone Bitton (Ben Barka, Wall, Rachel) returns with her most personal film to date. Inviting viewers on a cinematic pilgrimage to her homeland of Morocco, Bitton explores her Jewish roots through the sp...

  • When Jews Were Funny

    Directed by Alan Zweig • Documentary • With Shecky Green, Howie Mandel, Shelley Berman, Gilbert Gottfried, David Steinberg, David Brenner, Marc Maron • 2013 • 89 minutes

    Insightful and often hilarious, When Jews Were Funny surveys the history of Jewish comedy, from the early days of Borsht belt ...

  • Tinghir Jerusalem

    Directed by Kamal Hachkar • Documentary • 2011 • 86 minutes

    In TINGHIR-JERUSALEM, filmmaker and historian Kamal Hachkar goes in search of a community that has vanished - and confronts fundamental questions of his own identity in the process. A Berber Muslim born in Tinghir, Morocco and raised in...

  • Nowhere in Africa

    Directed by Caroline Link • Drama • With Juliane Köhler • 2002 • 141 minutes

    Winner of the 2002 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, as well as five 2002 German Film Awards (Golden Lolas), including best film, director and cinematography, Nowhere in Africa is based on the best-selling autobiographi...

  • Aimee and Jaguar

    Directed by Max Färberböck • Drama • With Juliane Köhler, Maria Schrader • 1999 • 125 minutes

    In 1943, while the Allies are bombing Berlin and the Gestapo is purging the capital of Jews, a dangerous love affair blossoms between two women. One of them, Lilly Wust (NOWHERE IN AFRICA’s Juliane Köhl...

  • 1945

    Directed by Ferenc Török • Drama • With Peter Rudolf, Bence Tasnadi, Tamas Szabo Kimmel, Dora Sztarkenki • 2017 • 91 minutes

    On a summer day in 1945, an Orthodox man and his grown son return to a village in Hungary while the villagers prepare for the wedding of the town clerk's son. The townspeo...

  • Mountain

    Directed by Yaelle Kayam • Drama • With Shani Klein, Avshalom Polak, Haitham Omri, Orly Pearl • 2015 • 81 minutes

    In 'Mountain,' a young Orthodox Jewish woman becomes involved with a nocturnal community of prostitutes and drug dealers. Tzvia lives with her family in the Jewish cemetery on Jerusa...

  • The Rape of Europa

    Directed by Richard Berge, Nicole Newnham & Bonni Cohen • Documentary • With Joan Allen • 2006 • 117 minutes

    The Rape of Europa tells the epic story of the systematic theft, deliberate destruction and miraculous survival of Europe’s art treasures during the Third Reich and World War II.

    In a jo...

  • Egg Cream

    Directed by Nora Claire Miller, Peter Miller & Amy Linton • Documentary • 2020 • 15 minutes

    EGG CREAM is a short film about the enduring meaning of a beloved chocolate soda drink born on the Jewish Lower East Side. The egg cream contained neither eggs nor cream – it was a product of necessity an...

  • In Search of Memory

    Directed by Petra Seeger • Documentary • With Eric Kandel • 2008 • 95 minutes

    'Memory is everything. Without it we are nothing,' says neuroscientist Eric Kandel, winner of the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking research on the physiology of the brain's storage of memories. As he explains, memory...

  • The Children of 209 Saint-Maur Street

    Directed by Ruth Zylberman • Documentary • 2020 • 100 minutes

    209 rue St. Maur is a classic Parisian apartment building in the 10th arrondissement: Stone, built around a courtyard, shops on the bottom floor. In the first decades of the 20th century, it was home to some 300 working class people, ...

  • Antisemitism

    Directed by Ilan Ziv • Documentary • 2022 • 120 minutes

    This documentary masterfully traces the history of anti-Semitism and its effects, from cartoon-like medieval church iconography showing Jews with funnels on their heads, to WWII propaganda comparing Jews to rats and neo-Nazis marching in th...

  • Golda Maria

    Directed by Patrick Sobelman, Hugo Sobelman • Documentary • 2022 • 116 minutes

    Before us sits an 84-year-old grandmother, positioned in her Parisian lounge opposite the amateur camera of her grandson Patrick Sobelman. It’s October 29, 1994 and over the course of three days, this woman will tell ...

  • Mina's Recipe Book

    Directed by Anne Georget • Documentary • 2007 • 45 minutes

    More than 40 years ago, the phone rang in Anny Stern's New York City home. It was a man she didn't know, calling to giver her a notebook. Covered in brown paper, its pages hand-sewn together, this was no ordinary notebook. It was one in ...