Uncategorized
A lost film by Israeli B-movie director Sam Firstenberg gets a new life
(JTA) — Sam Firstenberg, the Israeli-raised director behind cult B-movie staples like “American Ninja” and “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo,” is getting an unexpected career revival — thanks to one of his most overlooked films.
“Riverbend,” his little-seen 1989 action drama, will screen for one night at Alama Drafthouse theaters in five cities on April 29, offering a fresh look at a film about a group of Black Vietnam veterans who arrive in a Southern town and liberate it from a racist sheriff.
It could also revive interest in the 25 or so films Firstenberg directed between 1981 and 2002, which fans celebrate for their unironic commitment to over-the-top action, niche cultures, and pure entertainment value. In films such as “American Samurai,” “Cyborg Cop,” “Delta Force 3: The Killing Game,” and “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo,” Firstenberg has been a prolific purveyor of what some critics praise as “earnest shlock.”
It’s a career rooted in the long afternoons a young Firstenberg spent at Smadar, the movie theater in Jerusalem’s German Colony neighborhood. Firstenberg watched the best that midcentury Hollywood had to offer.
Firstenberg, whose given first name was Shmulik, was born to a Jewish family in March of 1950, in Wałbrzych, Poland. His parents had returned to Poland after fleeing east to the Soviet Union during the Nazi invasion.
The family arrived in Jerusalem when Firstenberg was 6 months old. Once in Israel, Firstenberg became immersed in cultures other than his own, which, he says, was key to his versatility behind the camera.
“I grew up in a neighborhood that consists of a lot of immigrants from all over the world,” Firstenberg said in an interview. “So, you know, we came from Poland with a Polish background, but around us, there were Hungarian Jews, Romanian Jews, Jews from Morocco, Jews from Tunisia, from Iraq, from Yemen, from all over the world, Indian Jews.
“So my neighborhood was a melting pot of all kinds of cultures from all over the world. I didn’t understand it. I’m telling you all of this [retrospectively], but I grew up in this, all kinds of different food and cooking and languages, and everybody was talking different languages,” he said. “We grew up in a kind of chaos of listening to 30, 40 different languages and cultures.”
Eventually, this led the future filmmaker to the movies. Smadar, now known as Lev Smadar, began screening films for the public in 1950. Firstenberg would spend afternoons watching double features.
“That’s where we were exposed to cinema. So from a very early age, maybe 7 or 6 years old, I would go, and every week he would change the two movies,” he said.
It was a crash course in genres.
“Those movies were mainly Hollywood movies, mainly Westerns, adventure movies, World War II movies, organized crime, gangster movies. Here and there are some musicals,” he said. The showings ranged from classics like “High Noon” and “Bridge on the River Kwai” to escapist movies like “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.”
“This was the diet of movies that I grew up. And that’s how I was exposed,” he said, adding that Israel didn’t yet have much of a domestic film industry.
By the time he was 18 or 19, Firstenberg realized that he was interested in pursuing a career in cinema.
After finishing his Army service in Israel at age 21 — which included a stint as a projectionist when movies were shown to soldiers — Firstenberg decided to go to Hollywood.
“When I finished the military service, I decided, OK, I want to go and study how to make movies. How do you make cinema?” he said. “Now, I’m not fascinated by European movie-making. I’m not crazy about any of that French, Italian, I don’t know, Swedish movie-making. I like Hollywood. I always liked Hollywood movies. I like bullets. I like James Bond.”
In 1972, he enrolled in film school at the L.A. campus of Columbia College. He still lives in Los Angeles, although he continues to speak with a distinctly Israeli accent. He and his wife both have family back in Israel, and they try to visit annually.
While his connection to Israel remains strong, he also regards the film industry as his people.
“I immediately kind of had this feeling that I arrived at home. I was surrounded by people who all had the same language, we all wanted the same thing: ‘Let’s put a story on the screen,’” he said. He relished getting to know people from all walks of life, from Vietnam veterans to students from Japan to aspiring Black filmmakers from the South.
Eventually, his Israeli connection helped him when he met Menahem Golan, the flamboyant Israeli-born producer who helped pioneer Israel’s film industry in the 1960s and set out to conquer Hollywood in the ’70s. Golan later took over Cannon Films and produced several of Firstenberg’s films, along with Golan’s cousin Yoram Globus.
Golan invited Firstenberg to work on “Lepke,” Cannon’s 1975 film starring Tony Curtis as a Jewish gangster in New York. Firstenberg described his job on the film as a “really nothing, very low job, like bringing and taking and schlepping and nothing serious, whatever, you know, drive the car here, drive the car back.”
He ended up taking the advice of the film’s cinematographer, Andrew Davis — who went on to direct “The Fugitive” in the 1990s — to “get next to the director,” to learn how movie sets really work. So he stayed close to Golan, and “forged a connection” with Golan’s Ameri-Euro Pictures, which specialized in low-budget films. Firstenberg spent five years as assistant director on various films, both in the United States and in Israel.
Quentin Tarantino, at the Jerusalem Film Festival in 2021, described Firstenberg as “my favorite” of Cannon Films’ in-house directors, and listed Firstenberg’s “Ninja 3: The Domination” as one of his favorite Cannon pictures.
In 1979, Firstenberg went back to school to earn a graduate degree at Loyola Marymount. While there, taking advantage of his access to equipment, he set to work on his first feature, the 1981 drama “One More Chance,” which also marked the film debut of actress Kirstie Alley.
Firstenberg soon became a prolific director, churning out “Revenge of the Ninja” in 1983 — which got major distribution and was successful — and “Ninja III: The Domination” in 1984, both for Cannon Films.
In late 1984, Firstenberg directed “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo,” a sequel to the successful break-dancing movie “Breakin.’” The sequel — or its title, anyway — has earned a sort of immortality as a joking reference, in shows like “Family Guy” and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” to any unnecessary or ridiculously named sequel. The film was released just seven months after the arrival of the first “Breakin,’” a film with which Firstenberg had no involvement.
“I had nothing to do with the title of the movie,” Firstenberg said. “It became a big deal through the years.”
Firstenberg kept up a breakneck pace in the 1980s and ‘90s, sometimes completing two or three movies in one calendar year. In 1985, he directed “American Ninja,” which he calls his most popular movie, and its sequel two years later. He continued directing movies until after the turn of the millennium.
“I was busy with other movies. I was still directing. I was getting directorial jobs,” he said. “And then at some point I stopped directing, and I started to look into the movies that I have done, what happened to them.”
Some of them are easy to find. Much of the director’s work, including “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo,” is available on the free streaming service Tubi. But other movies have proven harder to track down.
“Out of 25 movies that I directed, some of them became very famous,” he added. “But some other movies … stuff happened.”
Firstenberg came to direct “Riverbend” after he was approached by a group of private investors from Texas — a pair of married couples, one white and one Black — who weren’t experienced in the movie business. But they were familiar with his previous work, and were hoping to lure actor Steve James, who had starred in Firstenberg’s “American Ninja,” and ended up starring in “Riverbend.”
“Riverbend,” which had a minor theatrical release in 1989 and was later relegated to VHS, has been restored thanks to the efforts of Philadelphia-based archivist Michael J. Dennis. Dennis, who hosts a YouTube channel and film screenings focused on African-American-oriented film, had discovered the film in his days as a video store clerk in the early 1990s, only to find it had almost completely dropped out of sight.
“Riverbend” is “the best movie you’ll see that you never heard of,” Dennis told cinéSPEAK Journal. “One of the things we talk about on my channel is self-reliance and empowerment, and ‘Riverbend’ is a rare film in that it shows Black people standing up for one another. It shows Black people teaching and training one another to fight for their rights.”
Dennis got in touch with Firstenberg and, during the pandemic, tracked down a 35-millimeter copy of the film in South Africa. He eventually obtained the original negative, which led to a crowdfunding campaign and, ultimately, the film’s full restoration. This has led to a series of one-off screenings around the country, hosted by Firstenberg, Dennis, and actors from the film. A Blu-ray release is also planned.
“I feel very comfortable with different cultures,” Firstenberg said. “This is exactly the way I grew up when I was a kid. I grew up with many, many people. So, for me to understand, I believe so: understanding a different culture is easy. It’s no problem for me.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post A lost film by Israeli B-movie director Sam Firstenberg gets a new life appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Jewish Democrats back Michigan AG Dana Nessel’s decision to skip state party convention
(JTA) — Local and national Jewish Democrats say they are sympathetic after Michigan’s Jewish attorney general, Dana Nessel, said she would skip the state Democratic Party’s nominating convention over concerns about antisemitism and harassment.
“I don’t blame AG Nessel for not wanting to go and basically put herself in situations that feel untenable in this moment of time and don’t add any value politically, personally,” Jessica “Decky” Alexander, the Michigan Jewish Democratic caucus chair, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday.
Alexander’s comment came a day after Nessel announced during a televised antisemitism roundtable that she would be skipping the convention next month, where party leaders will finalize the state’s Democratic candidate for Senate following a divisive primary that has focused in part on Israel and antisemitism.
“I don’t feel safe going. I feel like my presence isn’t going to be welcome. I don’t want to get chased around. I don’t want to get harassed. I don’t want to get yelled and screamed at. I don’t want to get booed off the stage, irrespective of what I’m saying,” Nessel said during the roundtable. “And I believe that if I go, that is what will happen because it’s been happening to me.”
She said she had filed a formal complaint within the party about a party official who had called her a neo-Nazi because of her beliefs. “Why is this person more accepted in our party than me?” she asked without naming the official. Her office responded to a request for comment by referring to the recorded livestream of the antisemitism roundtable.
Nessel’s declaration comes in the final days of the primary between Rep. Haley Stevens, a pro-Israel stalwart, and Abdul El-Sayed, a democratic socialist who is deeply critical of Israel. El-Sayed is surging in polls despite a reported $30 million spent against him by AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, and its supporters, whom he has made a target of criticism from the campaign trail.
Nessel’s comments also follow turmoil at the Michigan Democratic Party’s endorsement convention in April, where Stevens was booed by attendees. A third primary candidate who later dropped out of the race, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, said a convention attendee had targeted her Jewish husband with an antisemitic slur.
The incident has fueled alarm among Jewish Democrats, according to Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America.
“She’s not alone,” Soifer told JTA about Nessel on Friday. “We’ve heard from other Jewish Democrats who attended the Democratic Party convention earlier this year in Michigan, and there was a sense of discomfort amid what felt like a pro-Palestinian protest [that] may have even blurred the line for some into antisemitic sentiment — and it’s really concerning.”
Nessel has raised the alarm about antisemitism within the party for years, alleging in 2024 that Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a prominent pro-Palestinian voice, had been antisemitic when criticizing charges Nessel filed against pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of Michigan.
For her part, Alexander said she would be participating in the nominating convention and said she believed the chair of the state Democratic Party, Curtis Hertel, had been “very accessible and very open to making sure that we, including our Jewish elected officials, feel safe in that space.” But she said she understood why Nessel was staying away.
“It would never even occur to me, but I’m not an elected official,” Alexander said. “It’s a different stake for me than it is for Dana. I understand her completely.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Jewish Democrats back Michigan AG Dana Nessel’s decision to skip state party convention appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Maine rabbis call for peace, urge politicians to stop calling Gaza war a ‘genocide’
(JTA) — Every congregational rabbi in Maine has signed onto a statement calling for peace and urging the state’s political leaders to stop using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s war in Gaza, following a Democratic primary in which several candidates used the label for the first time.
But the rabbis also indicated that they, too, were unsatisfied with conditions in the Middle East and called on Israeli and Palestinian leaders to work toward a peaceful future.
“We call upon Maine’s leaders, and particularly its political leaders, to reject the irresponsible usage of the term in describing the Israel-Hamas War,” said the statement released on Friday. “We also call upon Israeli and Palestinian leaders to end the cycle of violence and to create a better world for both Palestinian and Israeli children.”
The statement, titled “A Call for Peace and Responsible Rhetoric,” argues that using the term as a “political slogan does not advance peace in the Middle East.” The term “erases essential moral and legal distinctions, diminishes the meaning of genocide, and inflames hatred for the local Jewish community,” the rabbis say.
“Compassion for Palestinians does not require the adoption of hateful and misleading language,” they continue. “Advocating for peace does not require participation in a ‘Holocaust inversion’ against the Jewish community. And political leadership does not require demonizing one community in the service of another.”
The statement comes days after Troy Jackson, a former logger and state Senate president, secured the Maine Democratic U.S. Senate nomination Saturday at the party’s nominating convention to replace Graham Platner, a staunch Israel critic who dropped out of the race earlier this month. Platner faced a sexual assault allegation, which he denies. Jackson now faces Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins in November’s general election.
Platner’s romp to the primary victory featured routine use of “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions. And ahead of the convention to replace him, Jackson and several other Democratic hopefuls who later exited the race began using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s war in Gaza for the first time, a shift that drew scrutiny from some Jewish leaders and voters in the state.
The use of the term has become a “currency for acquiring power and position in Maine’s Democratic party,” Rabbi Rachel Isaacs, the leader of Beth Israel Congregation in Waterville, who also signed the statement, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“Too many Maine Democrats are cynically willing to trade in that currency at the expense of our safety and dignity,” she said in an emailed statement. “We decided we needed to say something collectively, both about the specious and dangerous nature of the claim, and about how much damage has been done to our families and congregants.”
The statement Friday was spearheaded by the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine and signed by every congregational rabbi in the state, including Rabbi Bill Siemers of the Conservative Congregation Beth Israel in Bangor and Rabbi Erica Asch of the Reform Temple Beth El in Augusta. (Rabbis affiliated with the Chabad movement in Maine did not appear on the signatory list.)
Zach Schwartz, the director of the Jewish Community Relations Council at the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine, said the federation hoped the “unity displayed here in Maine can inspire Jewish communities across the US to also unite against the extremist rhetoric harming our community and our children.”
Rabbi Josh Stanton, the associate vice president of interfaith and intergroup initiatives for Jewish Federations of North America, also hailed the joint statement.
“Maine’s Jewish clergy are setting an important example with their call to put aside inflammatory rhetoric and look to the common good,” Stanton said in an emailed statement. “At a time of rising polarization and declining civil discourse, the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine’s efforts to unify the community around this important message are a mark of true leadership.”
Isaacs told JTA that she hoped Jackson would “support, understand, and advocate for all of Maine’s citizens, including the totality of Maine’s diverse Jewish community.”
“Work with us to figure out how to express outrage and legitimate critique of Israel’s government without succumbing to language that you might not know is an ancient antisemitic trope, or dismissing the security needs of Israel’s citizens,” Isaacs said of her message to Jackson. “Please have the courage to forge your own path, and not follow in the footsteps of Graham Platner, a man who should have never been normalized, endorsed, or empowered.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Maine rabbis call for peace, urge politicians to stop calling Gaza war a ‘genocide’ appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Boy George cedes role of King Herod in ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ production after releasing pro-Israel song
(JTA) — Boy George has withdrawn from his run as King Herod in London’s West End revival of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” days before he was due to take the stage and 24 hours after releasing “We Will Dance Again,” dedicated to the victims of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on the Nova music festival in Israel.
The 80’s pop star was scheduled to appear at London’s Palladium starting Monday as part of the production’s rotating cast playing King Herod, the Judean king who is best known by Jews for his expansion of the Second Temple and to Christians for his efforts to stave off the arrival of a challenger — the story of which is reflected in the rock opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.
Boy George will be replaced by actor Richard Armitage in the London production.
In announcing the cast change, Paul Kelmsley, the singer’s manager, did not directly mention the blowback the former Culture Club frontman was receiving for releasing a pro-Israel song but alluded to it.
“George has never been afraid to stand by his personal convictions, and I have always respected him for that,” he said. ”In this instance, I felt it was right to step aside, allowing the production to remain the focus, while ensuring everyone involved can move forward with mutual respect and goodwill.”
Boy George is defending his decision to release the song, saying he believes artists should be free to express their views even when they are unpopular. In “We Will Dance Again,” the singer rejects claims of genocide against Israel and proclaims, “If you’re ever confused, I stand with the Jews.”
Earlier Friday, Boy George lashed back at the vitriol he was getting online. “What is most shocking is the amount of gay folk attacking me, ” he posted on X. “If you support terrorism you can in the words of Divine ‘Take your toolkit and go f—_ a garage,’” he said, referring to a quote attributed to the taboo-breaking transgender artist.
“When I say ‘they want to kill every last one of us’ I am also talking about us queers, not just the Jewish community,” Boy George said. “When will you wake up?”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Boy George cedes role of King Herod in ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ production after releasing pro-Israel song appeared first on The Forward.
