“film”

Though this film squarely fits into the growing genre of films about the return of Jews to Poland, its engine is character, not history.

Jan 13, 2025

Jan 10, 2025

Yiddish Cinema: The Drama of Troubled Communication suggests innovative and fruitful ways that scholarship in media studies can be applied to Yiddish cinema.

Apr 25, 2024

Whether or not The Zone of Interest is a good film does not hinge on the usage of a minute-long melody. But I do believe its employment tells us the film was impeccably researched by a Jewish director with a clear vision for who ought to say what, and when.

Apr 16, 2024

In this recently-published study, Senderovich challenges this fixed notion of the Soviet Jew, and recounts a complex prehistory of the Soviet Jew in the immediate context of interwar Soviet culture.

Feb 27, 2023

Eve Sicular offers an exegesis of Samy Szlingerbaum's recently restored autobiographical cinematic masterpiece, which depicts a Jewish family’s displacement in the aftermath of World War II.

Jul 08, 2022

The multilingual and international scope of this list of documentaries produced since 2015 is a testament to the contemporary vibrancy of Yiddish culture across the globe.

Nov 08, 2021

Is there a Jewish way of not saying things? In facing crises in language during the immediate post-Holocaust years, filmmakers in English and Yiddish made choices about how to balance repair and critique.

Jun 30, 2020

Sarah Zarrow discusses and reflects on her course "Representing Jewish Eastern Europe in Film" in which she asks students to think historically about the images of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, using films as primary sources that speak not only to a historical reality of their subject matter, but that also to the ideology and historical circumstances of the filmmaker and of Jewish life in the time and place the film was made.

Nov 20, 2019

William Pimlott reviews Gill Tofell's Jews, Cinema and Public Life in Interwar Britain and Alan Dein's Music is the most beautiful language in the World: Yiddisher Jazz in London’s East End 1920s-1950s.

May 23, 2019

Using a short scene from the 1938 film Mamele (dir. Joseph Green, Konrad Tom), Rebecca Margolis demonstrates how short excerpts of Yiddish films can be used to address specific aspects of Yiddish dialect, grammar and idiom, and translation in the Yiddish language classroom. 

Sep 24, 2018

Shayna Weiss reviews One of Us, a Netfix documentary directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady that follows the lives of three ex-Hasidim. 

Jan 05, 2018

Mar 22, 2017

Menashe offers an intimate glimpse inside Hasidic Borough Park. 

Feb 27, 2017

An interview with the director and lead actor of the new Yiddish film, Menashe.

Feb 27, 2017

The study of Yiddish cinema gets updated for the twenty-first century, Margolis explores how the language is being used in film in the last decade. 

Dec 18, 2016

A discussion of how Feygi Zylberman, a middle school History and Jewish Studies teacher at a Progressive Jewish community day school in Melbourne, Australia, employs Yiddish in her classroom, with a worksheet to use alongside the divorce scene in the film Hester Street (1975).

Nov 14, 2016