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Turner Classic Movies is airing a ‘Jewish Experience’ series of films this month
(JTA) — Turner Classic Movies admits that capturing the “Jewish experience” in a series of films is a daunting task, but the network is attempting to do so anyway.
Every Thursday night in January, the channel is showing movies spanning from the 1930s through the 1990s on the theme. According to an article on the TCM website, the series aims to show “how filmmakers have attempted to deal with such themes as assimilation, antisemitism, religion, family life and the Holocaust, sometimes with clarity and honesty, other times with varying degrees of distortion and caricature.”
There are a couple of films in the series set during the Holocaust, but notably none involve concentration camp settings. Instead, the general focus seems to be on portraying comedy, romance and the joy of everyday Jewish life.
Antisemitism does come up often in the Jewish experience, and that is reflected in the films, including in “Crossfire,” a film noir from 1947 about the murder of a Jewish man that helped kick off the series last week. The theme is also prominent in “Fiddler on the Roof,” which also aired on the series’ first night.
Here are the remaining movies to look forward to, in the order in which they will air in EST.
“Bye Bye Braverman” (1968), Jan. 12 at 8 p.m.
In this film adapted from the novel “To An Early Grave” by Wallace Markfield, four Jewish writer friends — played by George Segal, Jack Warden, Sorrell Brooke and Joseph Wiseman — travel to the funeral of their other friend after he dies suddenly. Though the film was not as well received as other films directed by Sidney Lumet (who started his career as a child actor in Yiddish theater), it includes a Black-Jewish character, which is still rare in cinema today.
“The Angel Levine” (1970), Jan. 12 at 10 p.m.
Speaking of Jews of color on screen: this movie has a Jewish angel played by Harry Belafonte, whose real-life father was of Jewish descent. The angel visits a poor Jewish tailor, played by Zero Mostel, who starred as the original Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof” on Broadway. It was directed by Hungarian-born Jew Ján Kadár.
“Annie Hall” (1977), Jan. 13 at 12 a.m.
This is the only Woody Allen film in the lineup. Before the scandalous accusations against the director picked up steam again over the past decade, “Annie Hall” was a landmark for American Jews in film, encapsulating the neurotic Jewish New York comedic archetype. Allen plays comedian Alvy Singer who falls in love with the titular character played by Diane Keaton.
“Soup For One” (1982), Jan. 13 at 2 a.m.
This is not a Woody Allen film, but his influence is all over this comedy written and directed by Jonathan Kaufer, in which a New York Jewish television producer played by Saul Rubinek tries to find his perfect woman.
“Set Me Free” (1999), Jan. 13 at 3:45 a.m.
Most of the movies in the series are American, but there are a couple of international films, including this French-Canadian coming-of-age story about a 13-year-old Jewish girl obsessed with the character that Anna Karina plays in Jean-Luc Godard’s film “Vivre sa vie.” Directed by Léa Pool, it’s the most recent film in the lineup, though it is set in 1963. Pool, whose father was a Holocaust survivor from Poland, is one of several women directors represented in the series.
“Crossing Delancey” (1988), Jan. 19 at 8 p.m.
Probably the most famous of the romantic comedies in the series, “Crossing Delancey” was also directed and written by women: Joan Micklin Silver and Susan Sandler, respectively. Amy Irving stars as Isabelle Grossman, a young New Yorker who works for a bookstore and is close with her grandmother — who wants to see her granddaughter settle down. She has a matchmaker set her up with Sam Posner (Peter Riegert), a pickle salesman, and Isabelle is torn between him and the intellectual world. The film also shows the Lower East Side from the era when it was bustling with Jewish immigrant shops and vendors, before gentrification irrevocably changed it.
“Over the Brooklyn Bridge” (1984), Jan. 19 at 10 p.m.
One can never have too many romantic comedies set in New York. In this one, directed by Israeli-born Menahem Golan, Elliott Gould plays Alby Sherman, a business owner whose wealthy uncle will only loan him money if he breaks up with his gentile girlfriend (Margaux Hemingway). The very Jewish cast also includes Sid Caesar, Carol Kane, Shelley Winters and a very young (and uncredited) Sarah Michelle Gellar.
“Girlfriends” (1978), Jan. 20 at 12 a.m.
This pioneering indie film — which according to The New York Times was the first independent American film to be funded primarily by grantmaking organizations — is also is notable for its portrayal of female friendship between Susan Weinblatt (Melanie Mayron), a Jewish photographer, and her ex-roommate Anne Munroe (Anita Skinner), who moves out to get married. Directed by Claudia Weill, who also wrote it along with Vicki Polon, the film is a precursor to so many contemporary indies, including Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s “Frances Ha.”
“The Frisco Kid” (1979), Jan. 20 at 1:45 a.m.
Jews are not usually associated with Westerns. But in this comedy, Gene Wilder stars as a rabbi from Poland who is set to lead a congregation in San Francisco. He gets stuck en route in the Wild West and befriends a bank robber played by Harrison Ford. Some scenes don’t hold up in contemporary times, especially ones portraying Native Americans, but TCM doesn’t shy away from showing how stereotypes are part of film history.
“Au Revoir, Les Enfants” (1987), Jan. 20 at 4 a.m.
This French film is one of the few in the series that takes place during the years of the Holocaust. Louis Malle’s autobiographical film is based on his time at the Catholic school Petit-College d’Avon, at which the real headmaster Pére Jacques (Pére Jean in the film) attempted to hide Jewish children from the Nazis. The film focuses on the friendship of two fictionalized 12-year-old boys, Julian Quentin (Gaspard Manesse) and Jean Bonnet, whose real name is Jean Kippelstein (Raphael Fejtö).
“Biloxi Blues” (1988), Jan. 26 at 8 p.m.
Neil Simon adapted his own play, the second in his semi-autobiographical trilogy about growing up in Brighton Beach, for the screen. Eugene Jerome (Matthew Broderick), a young Jewish Brooklynite, is drafted into the army during World War II and is sent to bootcamp in Mississippi. The movie is helmed by prolific Jewish film and theater director Mike Nichols, who was born in Germany and immigrated to the United States as a young boy in 1939.
“The Chosen” (1981), Jan. 26 at 10 p.m.
Many of the movies selected for this series unsurprisingly take place in Brooklyn, including this one based on Chaim Potok’s 1967 novel set towards the end of World War II. It shows the conflict between different sects of Judaism by focusing on the friendship of two Jewish teenagers — Reuven Malter (Barry Miller), who is Modern Orthodox, and Danny Saunders (Robby Benson), who is Hasidic.
“Portnoy’s Complaint” (1972), Jan. 27 at 12 a.m.
Richard Benjamin stars in this movie based on Philip Roth’s book, adapted and directed by Ernest Lehman. Though the novel — which is written as a monologue from Alexander Portnoy to his psychoanalyst — turned Roth into a celebrity author, the film adaptation was not critically or commercially successful, especially when compared to another Roth adaptation starring Benjamin: “Goodbye Columbus.”
“The Last Metro” (1980), Jan. 27 at 2 a.m.
The other Holocaust movie in the series is also from France, and is one of director French New Wave pioneer François Truffaut’s most commercially successful films. The manager of a small theater company in Paris (Catherine Deneuve) hides her Jewish husband (Gérard Depardieu) during the Nazi occupation.
“Tevya” (1939), Jan. 27 at 4:15 a.m.
The series closes with another take on Sholem Aleichem’s stories that makes a nice bookend with “Fiddler on the Roof.” Adapted and directed by Maurice Schwartz, who also stars in the titular role, the Yiddish film was thought to be lost until a print was found in 1978. In 1991, it became the first non-English film to be selected for preservation in the library of Congress National Film Registry for its cultural significance.
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The post Turner Classic Movies is airing a ‘Jewish Experience’ series of films this month appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Debating Zionism is good for Jews, actually
A group of Jewish Theological Seminary students were furious with the chancellor’s position on Jewish statehood. In protest, they draped flags around campus before graduation, which the administration removed before the ceremony.
The year was 1948. The flags were Israeli. And the dissenting students were protesting Chancellor Louis Finkelstein’s refusal to make support for Jewish statehood part of academic commencement. Some students even arranged for the bells at nearby Union Theological Seminary to play “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem, after JTS officials declined to include it in commencement.
As a historian of American Zionism, I have been thinking about that episode while reading the many vitriolic reactions to a few JTS undergraduates who spoke out in opposition to the seminary’s decision to welcome Israeli President Isaac Herzog as this year’s graduation speaker. Once again, a JTS commencement has become a battleground over Israel, but the sides are now reversed.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether this was the right moment to extend an invitation to Herzog to speak at commencement. What deserves attention is the outraged reaction to a group of students raising objections, and the speed with which those students’ concerns have been cast as a deviation from the historical contours of mainstream American Jewish politics.
A recent Times of Israel blog post, for example, argued that the mere fact that JTS students raised concerns about Herzog was a rupture with Judaism. “Jewish survival without sovereignty is fragile,” wrote the author, Menachem Creditor, adding that “the founders of JTS did not need to debate the necessity of Jewish self-determination,” and that Herzog “represents the state of Israel and the Jewish people.”
These claims erase JTS’s long and sophisticated engagement with Jewish nationalism and the conception of Jewish peoplehood. Reading American Zionism backward risks collapsing peoplehood and statehood, and creating traditions to ratify present assumptions out of a past that never existed.
The relationship between Zionism and JTS was nuanced from the start. Both founding president Sabato Morais and the seminary’s third chancellor, Cyrus Adler, opposed Zionism on religious grounds. Morais believed the restoration of Jewish sovereignty could only come through divine intervention at the dawn of a messianic era. Adler thought of the growth of a non-religious community in the land of Israel “as the greatest misfortune that has happened to the Jews in modern times.”
Solomon Schechter, as chancellor, brought a measure of support for the Zionist movement to JTS; shaped by the cultural Zionism of Ahad Ha-am, Schechter insisted that Zionism transcended statehood. Its primary aim, he argued, was the national regeneration of global Judaism, not the creation of a secular state that would hollow out Jewish life from within.
And the controversies over the 1948 graduation exercises revealed how far Louis Finkelstein stood from political Zionism, even after the establishment of Israel. Where some Zionists celebrated sovereignty, Finkelstein remained focused on the Jewish character of the land and its people. That orientation drew him toward Judah Magnes’s binational vision — that of a federated framework in which Jews and Arabs would each hold recognized rights and a measure of national autonomy within a single shared political entity.
This reticence to conflate Judaism, Zionism and Jewish sovereignty was not limited to the seminary’s chancellors.
Henrietta Szold, JTS’s first female student, a central figure in its intellectual orbit, and the founder of Hadassah, similarly supported a binational vision from her new home in Jerusalem. Mordecai Kaplan — a longtime JTS faculty member, committed Zionist, and one of the most influential American Jewish thinkers of the 20th century — expressed concern throughout his career about the mistake of equating Jewish nationhood with Jewish statehood. In Judaism as a Civilization, he called for a “more ethical conception of nationhood fundamentally as a cultural rather than as a political relationship.”
After Israel’s founding, Kaplan went further, arguing to David Ben-Gurion in 1958 that “the basic assumption that the state of Israel is a Jewish state is itself open to question.” The Israeli government’s task, he insisted, was to establish “a modern state, not a Jewish state, an Israeli state, not a Jewish state.”
These questions did not disappear even as JTS evolved under new leadership.
Gerson Cohen, whose chancellorship beginning in 1972 marked a shift toward a more pro-statist posture, embraced the state’s significance for Jewish life and identity in ways his predecessors had not. Yet even Cohen insisted that commitment to Judaism must rest “not on political statehood or upon geography but solely on the idea of covenant and commitment to ethos.” He argued that a flourishing diaspora was a necessity for Jewish civilization as a whole, not adjunct to Israeli interests.
His successor, Chancellor Emeritus Ismar Schorsch, was more direct, saying in a recent warning that Jews must ensure that “Judaism qua religion is not submerged and shredded by the power of the Jewish state.”
One can disagree with any of these perspectives. In fact, the disagreement itself is the point.
The leaders who built JTS debated Jewish self-determination, Zionism and statehood while living through the Holocaust, the collapse of European Jewish life, existential danger in Palestine, and the precarious birth of the state of Israel. They were not naïve about antisemitism, indifferent to Jewish survival, or ignorant of Jewish sources. Nor were they unsophisticated about Zionism.
Instead, they offered a more demanding account of Zionism: one that affirmed a Jewish homeland and insisted that Jewish power remain answerable to Jewish ethics, all without diminishing Jewish life in the diaspora.
This is precisely the perspective that has been crowded out of our contemporary discourse, not because these questions were answered, but because the space to ask them has collapsed. As the boundaries of acceptable Zionist discourse have narrowed, issues that arose from within Zionism itself — the potential dangers of equating the Israeli state with the Jewish people, the risks of elevating political statehood above other ethical and communal commitments, and the need to have diaspora Jewish life be seen as carrying independent religious and moral weight — have come to be treated as anti-Zionist rather than part of a living internal debate.
The furor over the JTS undergraduates’ letter objecting to Herzog is a troubling sign that, across American Jewish life, it has become harder to think honestly about the risks of treating support for the state of Israel not merely as a Jewish commitment, but as one that takes precedence over other all other Jewish commitments. When the past is rewritten so that the equation of peoplehood and statehood appears inevitable, American Jews are left with a false choice: either embrace the state as an unquestioned and unquestionable expression of Jewish identity, or abandon Jewish life altogether.
JTS has offered its students a richer education because, in its halls, the relationship between the Jewish people and the Jewish state has been debated and contested. That discourse is not a failure of Jewish commitment, but an expression of it. The sustained engagement with the hardest questions of Zionism is one of the best things JTS has given American Jewish life, and one of the most important gifts it still has to offer.
The post Debating Zionism is good for Jews, actually appeared first on The Forward.
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ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan Sidesteps ‘Genocide’ Accusations Against Israel
International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan speaks during an interview with Reuters in The Hague, Netherlands, Feb. 12, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw
Karim Khan, the embattled chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), has cast fresh doubt on accusations that Israel committed “genocide” in Gaza, arguing in a new interview that no legal conclusion has yet been reached in the ongoing legal battle.
In a lengthy interview with anti-Israel journalist Medhi Hasan this week, Khan refused to engage in the popularized rhetoric labeling Israel’s military campaign against Hamas terrorists in Gaza as genocidal, even as pressure mounts on the ICC by activists to pursue more sweeping charges against Israeli officials.
When asked directly whether Israel’s conduct amounted to genocide, Khan emphasized the need for sufficient evidence to level charges against Israeli officials and that prosecutors must follow evidence and legal standards rather than political narratives.
“So, you’re not ruling out that there could be a warrant in the future?” Hasan asked.
“Everything is a function of evidence,” Khan responded, arguing that accusing Israel of genocide for political purposes would be “reckless.”
“You’re saying in the past three years there hasn’t been evidence of genocide in Gaza?” Hasan asked, visibly flummoxed.
Khan lamented the “suffering” in Gaza but reaffirmed that the ICC could not proceed in making final judgements about the nature of Israel’s military operations in Gaza without sufficient evidence. He asserted that officials within the ICC are vigorously analyzing the case and that he cannot reveal more about the nature of the investigation.
“So, genocide is not off limits?” Hasan pressed.
“No crime is off limits if the evidence is there,” Khan responded.
Khan has come under fire for making his initial surprise demand for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, on the same day in May 2024 that he suddenly canceled a long-planned visit to both Gaza and Israel to collect evidence of alleged war crimes. The last-second cancellation reportedly infuriated US and British leaders, as the trip would have offered Israeli leaders a first opportunity to present their position and outline any action they were taking to respond to the war crime allegations.
Nonetheless, Khan’s latest remarks are likely to reverberate through international legal and diplomatic circles, where the genocide accusation has become one of the most contentious aspects of the war between Israel and Hamas. Over the past two years, an array of humanitarian organizations and human rights experts have accused Israel of “genocide” in Gaza. These accusations have been controversial and widely contested, with critics alleging these groups and individuals lack sufficient evidence.
Khan’s comments come as the ICC faces intense scrutiny over its investigation into the conflict. In November, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and now-deceased Hamas terror leader Ibrahim al-Masri (better known as Mohammed Deif) for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict. The ICC said there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant were criminally responsible for starvation in Gaza and the persecution of Palestinians — charges vehemently denied by Israel, which has provided significant humanitarian aid into the war-torn enclave throughout the war.
US and Israeli officials issued blistering condemnations of the ICC move, decrying the court for drawing a moral equivalence between Israel’s democratically elected leaders and the heads of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that launched the war in Gaza with its massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Israel says it has gone to unprecedented lengths to try and avoid civilian casualties, noting its efforts to evacuate areas before it targets them and to warn residents of impending military operations with leaflets, text messages, and other forms of communication.
Another challenge for Israel is Hamas’s widely recognized military strategy of embedding its terrorists within Gaza’s civilian population and commandeering civilian facilities like hospitals, schools, and mosques to run operations and direct attacks.
The ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel as it is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, which established the court. Other countries including the US have similarly not signed the ICC charter. However, the ICC has asserted jurisdiction by accepting “Palestine” as a signatory in 2015, despite no such state being recognized under international law.
Genocide is among the most difficult crimes to prove under international law because prosecutors must establish specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
Hasan, one of the most prominent anti-Israel critics in media, has spent the past two years unleashing an unrelenting barrage of criticism against the Jewish state, repeatedly accusing the Israeli military of pursuing a “genocide” in Gaza.
In the interview, Khan also forcefully denied allegations of sexual misconduct that have engulfed his office in recent months, accusing critics of politicizing the claims amid the ICC’s high-profile investigations into Israel, Russia, and other global conflicts. He dismissed suggestions that his pursuit of Israeli leaders was intended to distract from the allegations against him, saying that he did not have evidence to substantiate the claim.
Khan further alleged that senior Western officials attempted to pressure the ICC over its investigation, including what he described as warnings from prominent American and British political figures about the geopolitical consequences of targeting Israeli officials.
The ICC’s investigation has placed the court at the center of an increasingly bitter international divide over the Gaza war. Khan’s comments won’t settle the debate, but the ICC prosecutor appeared to signal a more cautious legal approach than some of Israel’s fiercest critics have demanded.
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UK Police Charge Two Men in Connection with Filming Antisemitic TikTok Videos
The TikTok logo is pictured outside the company’s US head office in Culver City, California, US, Sep. 15, 2020. Photo: REUTERS
British police have charged two men with religiously aggravated harassment offenses after they were alleged to have traveled to a Jewish area of north London to film antisemitic social media videos.
The two men, Adam Bedoui, 20, and Abdelkader Amir Bousloub, 21, are due to appear at Thames Magistrates’ Court, a statement from the Crown Prosecution Service said on Saturday.