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The real story behind Jewish family comedy ‘iMordecai’ and its unusual path to the big screen
(JTA) — The real Mordecai Samel, at the time in his late 70s, really didn’t want an iPhone in 2015.
The Holocaust survivor who had been living in South Florida since 2004 didn’t see a need. His taped-together flip phone worked fine. But his son Marvin insisted.
One thing that helped convince Mordecai to give in: the ability to listen to the klezmer music of his youth that the iPhone provided.
“One day I got off a plane, and I called my dad, and all I could hear was static,” Marvin Samel said.
Soon Mordecai was going to iPhone lessons at a local store six times a week.
“It’s there that I see my father holding court, telling stories,” Marvin said about the lessons, “and I said, this is it. This is the vehicle to tell the story as a screenplay.”
Thus sprung an unusual comedy film that hits theaters Friday inspired directly by first-time director Marvin Samel’s life, centered on a Jewish family that is split by a stark generational divide.
In the film — as in the Samels’ real lives — Marvin (played by Sean Astin) attempts to sell his cigar company while his father’s antics continually get in the way and his mother (Carol Kane), who has Alzheimer’s Disease, sometimes wanders off.
“I had to tone him down for the movie, because no one would believe me if I actually printed the truth. He’s always getting himself into trouble,” Samel said of the real Mordecai, a retired plumber who is played onscreen by Tony and Emmy Award winner Judd Hirsch.
At the same time, Marvin’s wife, who has just given birth to twins, is upset with him about delays in the company sale and the family’s resulting cash crunch. Mordecai agrees to take the iPhone lessons and befriends the instructor (Azia Dinea Hale) who he calls “Einstein Nina,” someone with a surprising family backstory of her own.
Mordecai tells her some stories about his family’s escape from the Nazis when he was a child, showing her family pictures from before the war and noting that he can’t remember his mother’s face. These stories, Marvin Samel said, were inspired more by the stories told by Mordecai’s brother, who was older when the family fled, than by his own. The family left Poland in 1939, when Mordecai was three and his older brother was six. They first went to the Soviet Union and eventually to Brooklyn.
Mordecai’s family was from Janów Podlaski, a small town in Poland at the center of the territory split by Hitler and Stalin in 1939. Some flashback sequences are presented in animation.
Marvin Samel sold his company, Drew Estate Cigars, back in 2014. The film was mostly self-financed, in part from the proceeds of the cigar company’s sale, “all the way through distribution.” While Samel has always loved the movies, even seeing movies like “Taxi Driver” and “Hair” when he was much too young to do so — “my Temple, growing up, was the movie theater,” he said — he had never before set foot on a movie set prior to the first day of filming of “iMordecai.”
Samel taught himself filmmaking, in part, by taking online courses through MasterClass from the likes of Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard and Jodie Foster, and he also had a chance meeting at a dinner with retired basketball star Ray Allen, who had made a novice acting appearance in Spike Lee’s “He Got Game” when he was in his early 20s. Allen’s advice was to spend some time on movie sets to get a feel for things, but not much was filming in South Florida at the time.
Sean Astin, right, plays Marvin Samel’s character. (FeMor Productions)
“iMordecai” was shot in 23 days in late 2019, meaning that Samel filmed a movie that starred Hirsch as a heavily-accented, old-world Jewish immigrant inspired by a relative of the filmmaker at least a year before Steven Spielberg did the same for “The Fabelmans.” Hirsch is nominated for an Oscar for his role in that movie, his first Academy Award nomination since “Ordinary People” more than 40 years earlier.
Samel’s film, which features the city of Miami extensively, has been a hit so far in Florida. It had its world premiere in January 2022 at the Miami Jewish Film Festival, where it won the audience award for best narrative film.
“I think that this film has the capacity to possibly impact and resonate with people of all ages,” said Igor Shteyrenberg, executive director of the festival.
Samel is taking the film on a tour that criss-crossed the Sunshine State this month, including a run of 10 shows at The Villages, the world’s largest retirement community. That tour, in which the real Mordecai has been on stage at times, headed to New York’s Quad Cinemas this week, and a limited theatrical release — also heavy in Florida — starts Friday. Tour dates in such markets as Dallas, Phoenix, Chicago are next, prior to a return to Florida, Samel said.
Perhaps the success with the older Florida crowd has to do with the universality of the film’s subject matter. Even Warren Buffett, the famed investor, turned in his flip phone for an iPhone back in 2020, when he was nearly 90, even though he had bought many billions of dollars in Apple stock by that point.
Yvette Miro, a 99-year-old who lives in Tamarac, Florida, said it’s “hard to remember not having” an iPhone after getting one to replace her flip phone about 10 years ago. A Brooklyn native — she attended Eastern District High School at the same time as Mel Brooks, who was a couple of years younger — Miro has lived in Florida since 1999, and even at her age continues to host weekly Shabbat dinners with her family, including her nine grandchildren and more than 30 great-grandchildren.
But unlike Mordecai, rather than badgered into getting the iPhone, she got one herself.
“I heard about it, I wanted it. I’m old, but I had to keep up with the times,” she said.
She now uses it for “everything… especially FaceTime, where I can see [the kids]. I use it even more than my regular phone.”
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Antisemitism and ‘The End of History’ That Never Came to Pass
Roses are placed on a sculpture of Mikhail Gorbachev in memory of the final leader of the Soviet Union, at the “Fathers of Unity” memorial in Berlin, Germany August 31, 2022. Photo: REUTERS/Lisi Niesner
In the summer of 1989, a few months before the Berlin Wall fell, a political scientist named Francis Fukuyama published an essay that came to define a new understanding in the West.
Titled simply “The End of History?”, the piece described the defeat of fascism in World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union and its socialist ideology. It appeared that Western liberal democracy and free-market capitalism had won the ultimate battle of ideas — at least for the moment.
Events in recent years have proven this thesis false. History didn’t end — and Fukuyama probably knew it never would. The battle of ideas will always return, and in many ways, it never went away.
During the last 40 years, Western civilization, capitalism, and nationalism have been under attack. Likewise, bigotry against Jewish people never went away. There is nothing new under the sun about Jew hatred except the delivery system. The traditional engines of antisemitism have largely been supplanted by a new engine: the social media algorithm.
The stark, un-sugar coated reality is that the Jewish people have been abandoned, and the illusion of modern safety is quickly eroding.
What stings the most is the profound sense of betrayal from communities that the Jewish people poured their hearts, souls, and resources into elevating.
Over the last century and a half, the Jewish community played an outsized, foundational role in championing civil rights, fighting alongside the African American community, the feminist movement, driving progress within academia and LGBTQ rights.
To watch significant factions of those exact same groups turn their backs, stay silent, or actively fuel hostility today is a heartbreaking reality to reckon with. It sends a crystal-clear message that must be internalized immediately: there ought to be a stricter balance between “fixing the world” and tending to the survival of one’s own community.
One cannot control what is outside one’s control, but one can focus on what is in their control.
The era of relying on the world’s collective conscience is officially over, and the path forward must be primarily inward, focused on self-reliance, self-defense, and resilience. It requires an unrelenting effort to tell our story and win the war for hearts and minds. We must unflinchingly call out the blatant hypocrisy of institutional and communal betrayal, as difficult as that may be.
It is no longer sufficient to excel exclusively in the boardroom or the classroom. True self-preservation demands a willingness to face physical reality. Security cannot be guaranteed by others, and protecting families and institutions means prioritizing physical fitness and the practical readiness to defend oneself on the streets, in schoolyards, and at the workplace.
With traditional institutions increasingly failing to offer protection, self-reliance becomes an absolute necessity. We must look at past fair-weather allies and actively seek new partners who offer mutual respect and reciprocal support. Survival and resilience demand that the Jewish community adapt, unite, and lead from a position of strength.
The peaceful illusion of “The End of History” never arrived; the battle of ideas has returned, and we must be ready for the fight.
Daniel M. Rosen is the chairman and Co-founder of IMPACT, a 501c3 dedicated to organizing, empowering and mobilizing individuals to combat Jew hatred on social media and beyond. He is a regular contributor to The Jerusalem Post, JNS, Times of Israel, Israel National News, The Algemeiner, and other publications. Follow us at @joinimpactnow
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Why Do We Read the Book of Ruth on Shavuot?
Shavuot. Ruth in Boaz’s Field by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, oil on canvas, 1828; National Gallery, London. Photo: Wikipedia.
All Biblical festivals and special days relate to time — whether it is daily, monthly, annually, or seasonally. Awareness of the natural world comes with awareness of oneself, our transience, and the ups and downs of life. Who are we? Where do we belong? All of this is the core of religious life, which helps us to live in the world in the best way that we can.
Shavuot started as a harvest festival. There are three. Pesach is the first, with the earliest barley crop. Shavuot celebrates the beginning of the wheat and fruit harvests. And Sukkot is the culmination of the agricultural year and the celebration of water and rain, which are essential for a successful agricultural year.
But as we became less and less of an agricultural society, other themes emerged to add to the message of Shavuot specifically. The rabbis added the theme of Torah. But why, then, did the rabbis choose the Book of Ruth to be read on Shavuot?
It is set against a background of harvests — and how unpredictable they can be. The failed harvest caused the emigration of Elimelech’s family from Israel. Then the cycle turned, and rich harvests in Israel enabled Naomi to come back. Ruth decides to stay with Naomi and become part of the Israelite people. In Ruth’s magnificent declaration “Where you go, I will go. Where you stay, I will stay. Your people are my people, and your God, my God … only death will separate us.”
The Book of Ruth illustrates the choices people make and their consequences. To leave. To come back. To change one’s religion and nation. To act with love and care. To be charitable and kind. The goodness of a person rather than genealogy or status. It displays the redemptive powers of women. But it also recognizes the drawbacks of societies, class systems, levels of wealth, and the limitations of conventions and rules.
But Naomi and Ruth are destitute. Biblical laws required redemption. When a family fell on hard times, and sold their property, the relatives had a legal obligation to redeem the loss and try to reinstate them. The poor also had legal rights to glean fields as they were being harvested, and landowners had to leave corners of fields to the poor, all the poor, even foreigners.
The Torah set the tone for a just society, one that guaranteed that the weakest and most disadvantaged would be helped. If the Torah imposed commandments that connected humanity with God, it also required, just as much, that humans connect with each other. As the Prophet Yeshayah said repeatedly, God wants kindness more than sacrifices or hypocritical prayers.
The most popular explanation of the link between Shavuot and Ruth is that Ruth actually chose to live a life according to Naomi’s Israelite customs and ideals. She made the commitment that the Israelites made at Sinai. As Boaz said to her when he met her, “May the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to trust, reward you.”
It does not matter where you come from as much as who you are. And this challenges us to think about what our commitments are today, and what we value and spend our time on.
Ruth’s story is of how life is unpredictable and often tragic. And yet, through human kindness — which the Bible stresses — we can find redemption and build a better world.
That’s true no matter what is happening around us; the Torah’s messages for us and our people are as important today as ever.
Happy Shavuot and Chag Sameach.
The author is a writer and rabbi, currently based in New York.
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The Limits of Campus Solidarity: Why Are Some Issues Seemingly Ignored By Campus Activists ?
University of East Anglia in Norwich.. Photo Credit: .Martin./ Flickr
Student activism on university campuses often presents itself as part of a broader global struggle for human rights and liberation. Students organize campaigns and protests under the belief that they are standing on the side of justice. Universities themselves have also long been spaces where political movements grow, and where students engage with wider global issues.
But if campus activism is truly rooted in the goal of human rights, it is worth asking why some movements receive enormous attention while others receive little to none.
Activist movements often present themselves as universal movements for justice, but in practice they are shaped by ideology and institutional campaigns. This does not necessarily invalidate these movements, but it does challenge the idea that campus activism is merely a neutral response to injustice.
An example of this contrast can be seen through the differences between campus mobilization around Gaza, and the relative absence of sustained activism in support of issues like the situation in places like Sudan — and also in Iran, including supporting Iranian students who actively protest their own government.
At the University of East Anglia (UEA), as at campuses across the UK, the past number of years has brought visible and sustained pro-Palestine organizing with protests, encampments, and marches of more than 400 students calling for divestment. It also involves motions brought before the Students’ Union resulting in a longstanding institutional boycott policy against Israel.
Over the same period, Iranian students and civilians have protested against the political repression and government-sponsored violence in Iran, most noticeably during the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement. This past January, it’s reported that tens of thousands of innocent protestors were murdered by the regime, and many more were jailed.
Yet at UEA, as at most British universities, this did not translate into encampments, sustained protest weeks, or motions to the Students’ Union. The same is true for many other conflict areas around the world — and the contrast is difficult to ignore.
The point here is not that students should protest every global issue equally. That would be unrealistic. Student movements naturally focus on certain causes more than others. But this contrast does raise an important question: what determines which global issues become campus movements and which do not?
I believe part of the answer lies in activist infrastructure. Some causes already have established student organizations and national campaigns with clear institutional mechanisms. At UEA, campaigns related to Palestine, for example, often involve established movements such as Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), which provide students with clear actions to take, such as lobbying student government and hosting annual protest weeks where official language is promoted. There are funding networks and experienced organizers behind the scenes who help translate political concerns into sustained campus activism.
By contrast, Iranian dissident movements do not have the same level of organized support. There are fewer established student campaigns, fewer institutional demands directed at universities and fewer organized networks translating concern into campus activism. A student at UEA who wanted to organize meaningfully around Iran would find considerably less infrastructure available to them than one organizing around the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Another factor may be related to how students interpret global politics more broadly. On many campuses, political activism tends to be framed through narrow ideas like decolonial theory and the history of Western imperialism. Within this framework student activists tend to focus on issues where Western powers are seen as solely responsible for global injustice. Whether this is introduced or sustained in classrooms or in college group meetings is a subject for another piece, but in this context it doesn’t really matter.
What this contrast suggests is that campus activism is not guided by moral principles alone, but is instead shaped in large part by the existing political frameworks.
Recognizing this does not require assuming bad intentions on the part of student activists. Many student movements are motivated by genuine concern. But like all political movements, individuals must be wary of manipulation and groupthink.
Individual action and anger become tools for someone else’s ideas, so it’s important that we are all responsible with what we choose to put our energy towards. If campus activists at UEA claim to stand for universal human rights, then they must also be willing to ask the difficult question of why some struggles seem more important than others.
Skye Phillips is a final year International Relations and Modern History student at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. She is a 2025/6 fellow for CAMERA. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CAMERA.