Nonetheless, there is one aspect of the Harry Potter universe we have seldom talked about. In perhaps the biggest cultural phenomenon of our generation, the actor who played the eponymous character is a Jew.

That’s right, if you didn’t know this by now, Daniel Radcliffe is part of the tribe, and Tuesday marked 20 years since the release of the first installment of the film series–“Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”–in which he was cast to play the lead. The rest is history. 

Despite Rowling’s noble attempt to post-canonically signal representation of Jews at Hogwarts, and then having the Goldstein sisters in the “Fantastic Beasts” prequels, nothing will be as powerful as our Jewish Harry.

Daniel Radcliffe has said he is “very proud to be Jewish,” although he is an atheist. 

With the stardom that came with the Harry Potter movies, Radcliffe became one of the most famous people in the world. Out of everyone, it was someone from our teeny tiny ethno-religious nation. And a very proud one. How fucking cool!

Since Harry Potter, the Jewish star has played both the very famous Jew, poet Allen Ginsburg, and a neo-Nazi, while drawing on his Jewish identity for both parts, as he’s discussed in a few interviews.

Clearly, Daniel Radcliffe is more than just Harry Potter. But for many of us, he’ll always be the boy who lived… and the boy who gave young Jews much needed representation.

We’re excited to see Daniel, along with his co-stars, in the upcoming 20-year reunion of Harry Potter, ‘”Return to Hogwarts” coming to HBO Max on January 1.

The post We Had a Jewish Harry Potter. That Matters. appeared first on Jewcy.

‘Sure,’ I responded, girding myself for something offensive or tone deaf. They looked up at me, trying to figure out how to phrase it. Finally, they let themself speak…

‘Can you explain to me where Jews come from?’ They stared at me expectantly as my mouth betrayed the barest hint of a smile. It’s a simple question, but one that belies a frighteningly common lack of basic understanding of Jewish history, identity, and culture.

Believe it or not, I am asked questions about my Jewishness far more often than I am asked questions about my transness. Perhaps it’s the circles I move in, as most of my friends are queer folks who are either trans themselves, or at least very trans-literate. I’m also a good person to ask. On top of, you know, being a Jew, I wrote my thesis paper, in part, on Jewish ethnogenesis and identity.

While I have of course experienced transphobia in my lifetime, including rather merciless bullying as a child as well as the expected slurs and verbal assaults, I have experienced more extreme and violent antisemitism in my life; bomb threats and suspected arson at local temples, swastika graffiti, being verbally accosted in a restaurant on Christmas, having strangers spot my Hamsa, or the Magen David that was passed down to me by my grandfather and take that as an opening to spew their hatred, and I could go on and on.

People tend to be quite surprised when I express this reality of my life. And I do recognize that I have privileges today that spare me from the worst of transphobic violence; I am often, though not always, white-assumed, and I am typically cis-assumed. These are realities of my life that protect me and cannot be ignored or unaddressed.

However, my larger point is that one of my identities is considered unequivocally marginalized, while many continue to brush over antisemitism as a non-issue despite its meteoric rise over the last decade in the U.S. As David Baddiel so clearly elucidated, it’s the ‘Jews don’t count’ of it all.

This point of view extends to the way we are portrayed in media.

Recently, it was announced that Kathryn Hahn would be playing Joan Rivers in an upcoming biographical series about her life. Quickly, Sarah Silverman waded into the argument over Hahn’s casting, rightly pointing out the clear double standard that in this era where there are greater and greater calls for authenticity, Jews don’t count. Soon after, it was announced that Claire Foy, another non-Jew best known for playing the Queen of England, would be playing Sheryl Sandberg in an upcoming film based on the book An Ugly Truth. 

Hahn and Foy join the ranks of Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Rachel Brosnahan as Midge Maisel, Michael Keaton as Ken Feinberg, Vanessa Kirby and Ellen Burstyn as Martha and Elizabeth Weiss, Helen Mirren as Golda Meir, and the list goes on and on. In fact, it’s almost become a rule that Jews are not played by Jewish actors, which compounds the misunderstanding of who we are.

In my work as a trans media consultant, we often talk about the small percentage of the U.S. population that is trans, and even more importantly, the percentages of cisgender people who personally know a trans person. The reason why these statistics are important to keep in mind is that when people don’t know a trans person personally, and then see inaccurate trans representation on screen, they have no real world baseline to compare it to. This exacerbates transphobia.

Approximately 2.5% of the U.S. population is Jewish. It’s ironic that oftentimes our population is vastly overestimated. I have my theories as to why. There is, of course, the reality of Jewish contribution to American culture. However, because of the adoption of Jewish texts in Christianity and the development of Islam being closely tied to the history of the Jewish diaspora in the Arabian Peninsula, Jews become narrative characters in two of the world’s largest universalist religions (as opposed to Judaism, a particularist spiritual movement that is only concerned with the Jewish people as an ethnic and national identity).

People are comfortable with Jews as a parable. I mean, a whole religion was developed on this foundation. Non-Jews enjoy when we are a mirror for society to hold itself up to, to understand and see its ills. Oftentimes, as Dara Horn pointed out in her book People Love Dead Jews, this functions best when we are dead; a relic. Because then we can be whoever the world wants us to be.

In fact, I see it all the time. Every Christmas season, I see a litany of posts saying ‘Jesus was…’ and nearly universally the words that complete this sentence are not, ‘a Jew’… the only ethnic identity that Jesus indisputably was. What I find interesting is that I often see it posted by the same people who are dead-set on the concept of universal Jewish whiteness. This in turn is often an argument only conveniently invoked by non-Jews when they want to argue that they don’t need to care about antisemitism. Ironically, it’s another role we get cast in to make non-Jews feel better about their own world-view: Jews as a mirror. And when the representation they see is Vanessa Kirby in a large manor house pretending to be the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, it’s no wonder people feel this way.

These are prime examples of this dynamic. And it creates a disconnection point in popular imagination between ‘the literary Jew,’ who teaches the world a lesson about themselves, and real live living Jews who are currently experiencing the highest levels of antisemitism in this country since the first half of the 20th century. And confronting this antisemitism in the here and now, which would need to start with a basic understanding of who we actually are, would upset the balance of whatever morality play we’ve been cast in by others. Then this silence helps perpetuate the hatred and allows it to flourish.

Add socially ingrained casual antisemitism into the mix, as opposed to overt antisemitism like the white-supremacists marching in Charlottesville chanting ‘Jews will not replace us’, and it’s a toxic stew. For example, a person I know well was sued by a man for ‘wrongful termination’ after he fired him for stealing a lot of money from his business. Of course, firing someone for stealing from you is hardly wrongful. This person I know counter-sued. After depositions were filed, it was decided that it would be a jury trial. This person was then advised by his lawyers to settle, because the man who stole from him was a white Christian, and the jury was ‘unlikely to trust the word of a Jewish doctor.’ No wonder we’re rarely trusted to tell our own story. 

But herein lies the problem. And it’s the same problem that I spoke of when it comes to trans representation. Because we are such a small percentage of the population, most people’s first encounters with us are either in biblical stories, or they are in media. Stories have a unique power, as does accurate representation. We’ve seen massive shifts in perceptions of LGBTQ people thanks to shifts in how we are portrayed in film and television. But when it comes to my other identity, we barely register in the discourse.

And so the problem that Sarah Silverman brought into the spotlight stretches beyond the disparity in opportunity, which is certainly a problem. When Jews are misrepresented in media by non-Jews doing their best caricatures of us, it enshrines us as a character in someone else’s passion play rather than human beings and a living culture that is still here. It perpetuates misunderstanding of who we are. And when our population is so small, it becomes impossible for many people to have real life living breathing Jews that they know to hold these representations against.

This isn’t just problematic. It helps to perpetuate antisemitism in all of its mutations.

So I sit across from my friend and I say, “Well, to answer that question, I need to go back to about 1600 B.C.” I watch as their mind explodes a little bit. 

I tell them about the various historically-based theories of our ethnogenesis. I explain the consolidation of Jewish national identity at the dawn of the 1000s B.C. I talk about the Romans, and Bar Kokhba. I talk about Beta Yisrael. I talk about Shammai and Hillel and the origins of rabbinical Judaism. I talk about The Crusades, The Inquisition, and Sephardi Pirates; Sabbatai, Chassidism, and Haskalah; Pogroms, the Dreyfuss Affair, and of course The Holocaust; Farhud, Operation Magic Carpet, and Operation Solomon. I talk about the diversity of the American Jewish experience, where intermixture with other ethnic groups has often strengthened our community and made it better. 

But most of all, I talk about Jewish pride and Jewish resilience, and the fact that while people still try to tell us who we are, we refuse to be defined by others.

Media matters. It especially matters for marginalized people. And we are marginalized people. One only needs to look at the last few years; we’ve had multiple deadly shootings, stabbings, arsons, physical assaults, car attacks, and murders motivated by antisemitism. The claim that we’ve assimilated to the point that hatred of our community is a non-issue falls apart with the barest interrogation. Jews deserve all of the same consideration and care that any other marginalized group does.

It is high time that we are allowed to wrestle ourselves out of someone else’s narrative, and instead, with clarity, honesty, and the lived experience that only Jewish artists can bring to our own stories, have the chance to tell our own. After all, our histories live in our blood, from generation to generation. 

The post The Jewish (Casting) Question appeared first on Jewcy.

Mourning is a subject frequently featured in Israeli cinema partly due to the number of Jews in the country and the way in which even those who are secular are familiar with the basics of what happens ritually after a person’s death. The period of mourning allows for transition from an unthinkable loss to a new reality, providing a system of healing that isn’t offered in the same way in other religions. Recent films like Longing, Foxtrot, and One Week and a Day have dealt with complicated instances in which the process of sitting shiva is affected by specific circumstances. The latest Israeli film to be released in the United States adds considerably to the grief with its own portrayal of an unusual loss.

Thomas (Tim Kalkhof) is a baker living in Berlin who begins an affair with a visiting Israeli businessman named Oren (Roy Miller). Whenever he comes to town, Oren stops by Thomas’ shop for a delectable treat, making sure to pick one up each time to bring home to his wife, Anat (Sarah Adler), and his son Itai (Tamir Ben Yehuda). When Thomas learns that Oren has been killed in a car accident back home, he travels to Jerusalem and visits Anat’s café, keeping his relationship with Oren a secret. After Anat hires him as a dishwasher, Thomas begins to make some of the delicacies he used to create on a daily basis in Germany, building a relationship with Anat in the process that can somehow help him feel closer to the love that they’ve both lost.

As usual, English is the universal language in this German-Israeli coproduction, with only the late Oren speaking both German and Hebrew fluently. Thomas is a man of few words to begin with, and he’s someone who listens carefully, taking his time to heed the instructions of those around him and say nothing he doesn’t need to. In the course of his acclimation to Israel, however, he does experience an unexpected obstacle as a result of his accidental violation of kashrut laws. When he first bakes cookies as a birthday surprise for Itai, he is admonished since his unsupervised utilization of the oven jeopardizes the kosher status of the café.

Anat repeatedly states throughout the film that she is not religious and doesn’t want to be religious, fighting back against her friend Moti (Zohar Shtrauss) for questioning her hiring of a German employee and her willingness to let him keep cooking. When she invites Thomas to come to her home for Shabbat dinner and he quickly offers not to bring anything homemade, she responds that her home isn’t kosher. Subtle commentaries about the kashrut industry in Israel rightfully take a backseat to this sweet story of searching for solace in unexpected ways.

The food in this film takes a supporting role, but it still occasionally reaches the level of a film like Chef. Watching Thomas make pastries is a delight, and it’s clear that all who taste them are experiencing the same sensation that visual montages of pies and cakes create for viewers of the film. Either the food portrayed on screen really was that good, or this film’s stars are incredible actors for making each bite seem truly and incomparably delicious.

Sarah Adler may be familiar to American cinephiles for her starring role in Aya, the Oscar-nominated short film about an unplanned car ride from Ben-Gurion Airport, or her performance in the well-regarded Israeli film Jellyfish. She and German actor Tim Kalkhof make a great pair, demonstrating a chemistry that isn’t quite romantic but rather based on a shared sensitivity and positive expression towards the world.

Though this film is rooted in loss, it’s a sentimental, lovely story that feels particularly wonderful at this moment in time. At its purest, it’s a film about two people brought together by a love cut short which just happens to be the same for both of them. The lack of a proscribed end point or typical romantic arc makes it a particularly wondrous experience, equally melancholy and hopeful, and plentifully appetizing at all times.

The Cakemaker opens in New York and Los Angeles this Friday, June 29th, with more cities to follow in July.

Still from The Cakemaker

The post Jewcy Review: ‘The Cakemaker’ appeared first on Jewcy.

The opening titles of the new film The Catcher Was a Spy set the scene in 1938, when the Nazis tapped physicist Werner Heisenberg to build an atomic bomb. “In response, the U.S. government sent a Jewish baseball player to assassinate him,” reads the subsequent cue card.

That premise conjures up two well-known—and extremely different—Jewish action films in relatively recent memory. The first is The Hebrew Hammer, the absurd send-up about a Jewish superhero saving Hanukkah from the son of Santa Claus, best remembered for its protagonist’s signature catchphrase, “Shabbat Shalom, motherfucker!” The second is the Oscar-winning Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino’s violent and entirely fictionalized tale of a group of American soldiers, including one nicknamed The Bear Jew, who operated during World War II hunting and brutally executing Nazis.

Neither of those is a good barometer for what this film is, and it’s not just because this one is based on a true story. Nicholas Dawidoff’s 1994 book The Catcher Was a Spy profiled Moe Berg, a popular baseball player known for his intellect, knowledge of world events, and mastery of multiple languages. In addition to his fifteen-season career as a catcher, Berg was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services, which would later become the CIA, to use his considerable skills off the field to combat the threat of a Nazi victory during World War II. Popular Jewish actor and comedian Paul Rudd portrays Berg in what may well be the most straight-laced performance of his career.

There’s really no signature moment in which Berg gets to execute some sort of symbolic Jewish revenge on his Nazi targets, and his Judaism, while referenced as the hook of the film, doesn’t come up much. Instead, it’s his sexual orientation that gets more attention, with Berg not conforming to societal expectations of a nuclear family and pursuing men, even if his era can’t acknowledge or respect that. What’s most interesting about Berg’s undercover operations is that he goes in without hiding his celebrity status since no one would possibly suspect that a baseball catcher would be serving as a spy for the American government, gathering crucial intelligence while in town for a highly-publicized sports visit.

The best source of comparison for this film is The Monuments Men, George Clooney’s light-hearted ensemble piece about a group of Allied soldiers sent to save precious art during World War II. Like Clooney’s film, this one seems to take place within its own little bubble in which its characters seem to be impervious to harm and to events happening around them, narrowly pursuing their aims without much interference from enemy troops or other focal points of the war. The notion of a team dedicated to protecting artwork when so many humans lost their lives during the Holocaust didn’t go over so well with some Jewish audiences, and The Catcher Was a Spy at least presents a more serious mission. Berg’s objective is an important one, since his actions may directly prevent the Nazis from a devastating accomplishment that could change the course of the war.

Those expecting Rudd to transform into Ant-Man and punch a Nazi scientist in the face will be sorely disappointed with this film, but they will find a nuanced and straightforward drama about an unexpected spy who was very good at his job. Rudd is joined by a number of prominent actors, including Paul Giamatti, Connie Nielsen, Sienna Miller, Guy Pearce, Tom Wilkinson, Giancarlo Giannini, and the film’s comedic standout, Jeff Daniels, in this slow-burn period thriller from director Ben Lewin, whose previous credits include The Sessions.

The Catcher Was a Spy opens in theaters and on demand this Friday, June 22.

Image: Paul Rudd as Moe Berg, in Ben Lewin’s THE CATCHER WAS A SPY.  Courtesy of IFC Films. An IFC Films Release.

The post Jewcy Review: ‘The Catcher Was a Spy’ appeared first on Jewcy.

The 6th Annual Israel Film Center Festival at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan concludes today, after a week of showcasing some of the best recent Israeli cinema and television. Here’s a look at what you should keep an eye out for wherever, and whenever they return to the big screen.

The opening night film was Shelter, which played theatrically in Los Angeles back in April. This thriller, which features Israeli superstar Lior Ashkenazi in a supporting role, spotlights tremendous lead performances from Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani as a Lebanese Mossad informant recovering from plastic surgery to protect her identity and Israeli actress Neta Riskin as the Mossad agent sent to protect her. Director Eran Riklis is known in Israel for The Syrian Bride, Lemon Tree, and The Human Resources Manager, and this film is an excellent addition to that resumé. Riskin, who earned an Ophir Israeli Academy Award nomination for her performance, is quickly becoming as prominent as Ashkenazi or the late Ronit Elkabetz. Riskin stars in two other Israel Film Center Festival selections this year—Longing and Saving Neta.

Those two films are both about men whose impact on other people’s lives is felt most strongly once they are gone. Longing, an Ophir nominee for Best Picture, follows a man who learns that he was the father of a nineteen-year-old boy only after his son has died in a car accident, leading him on a mildly comedic journey to get to know his son. It’s an affecting drama with its own peculiarities that work well. Saving Neta weaves together four seemingly unconnected stories, all of which include the title character, whose impact on four different woman going through difficult times becomes clearest when all of its scenes have been presented.

There are two films that deal with being a teenager and approach the topic in extremely different ways. Scaffolding, another Ophir nominee for Best Picture, follows Asher, a temperamental student who is torn between the masculine work ethic championed by his construction worker father and the gentler and more unexpected teaching style of his literature teacher. Almost Famous (not the Cameron Crowe movie where they sing “Tiny Dancer”) is an overt comedy about reality-competition television and the allure of fame matched perfectly with the present-day society in which every kid (and many adults) are permanently attached to their cell phones at every moment. Both films are effective and pair well together despite their differences–picture a much less aggressive and less destructive version of Thirteen and a more subdued take on Mean Girls, respectively.

There’s action and intrigue to be found, as well, with Azimuth and The Testament. The former is best described as a cat-and-mouse thriller in which two soldiers, one Egyptian and one Israeli, end up in a battle to survive at the end of the Six-Day War, still exhibiting hatred for each other despite the war having already officially ended. It’s far from the most memorable film from the festival, but it’s always good to see an exploration of how those on opposite sides of a conflict have more in common than they might think. The Testament is a modern-day drama featuring an Orthodox Israeli historian focused on finding a mass grave from the Holocaust who realizes through his research that his mother may have lied and might not actually be Jewish, forcing him to confront enormous questions about his identity and to determine how much the truth really matters. It’s definitely the most Jewish of the films presented in a festival that features Israeli cinema with mostly secular characters.

The closing night selection, which is screening tonight at 7pm at the JCC, is Outdoors, a look at the decay of a couple’s relationship when their plans to leave the city and build a house in the Galilee become so overwhelming that they can no longer find common ground. Though it features Noa Koler, who took home an Ophir award in 2016 for Rama Burshtein’s superb comedy The Wedding Plan and netted another nomination for this film, it’s hardly the glue that holds this festival together. It does, however, present an interesting bookend with Shelter, telling a story about two people whose situation is universally relatable, entirely unspecific to their Israeli identities or any cultural conflict.

The festival also included a filmmaker panel about the future of Israeli cinema, selected television episodes, and short films from Tel Aviv University. Jewcy will be taking a longer look at another one of the films presented, The Cakemaker, in a few weeks ahead of its June 29th theatrical release.

There’s clearly great cinema coming out of Israel, and if the films featured here are any indication, the 7th Annual Israel Film Center Festival will present an equally diverse and appealing slate next year.

Image from Azimuth via YouTube

The post Israel Film Center Festival appeared first on Jewcy.

There’s a new thriller coming in the fall, and it’s the true story of a team of Nazi-hunting Israelis.

A new heart-pounding trailer introduces us to Operation Finale, a film about the 1960 extradition (OK, illegal kidnapping) of Adolf Eichmann, the Third Reich official who was a key figure in implementing the Final Solution. Its director is Chris Weitz, whose previous credits include producing American Pie, directing a Twilight movie, and co-writing Rogue One— so a bit of a weird pedigree. But if you’re uneasy, know that the cast is top-notch:

First of all, Oscar Isaac both is both a producer of the film, and its star—as Peter Malkin, a Mossad agent on the group that captured Eichmann. Isaac recently backed out of plans to play the Mortara father in a Spielberg film about the kidnapping of an Italian Jewish child by the Catholic Church, so if you had your heart set on him playing a historical Jewish figure, you can still scratch that itch.

Nick Kroll (yep, that Nick Kroll) plays Rafi Eitan, who led the operation… OK. Listen, Kroll is a perfectly capable actor who can do both comedy and drama. But does anyone else feel they’ve been Pavlovian-ly conditioned to laugh any time they see him? Admit it—you snickered when he showed up in Loving.

Mélanie Laurent is also in the film, because can you really go Nazi-hunting without her? Israeli actors in the cast include Lior Raz of Fauda.

And the villain of the piece? Ben Kingsley is uncanny as Eichmann, not only because of the prosthetics to make him look younger in flashbacks (trigger warning: the trailer features Eichmann ordering the mass shooting of a group of Jews), but because of the evenness of his appearance as an old man laying low in Argentina years after the war.

The trailer emphasizes the pressure put on the team to bring Eichmann to justice, though—spoiler alert if you missed history—Eichmann stood trial in Jerusalem, was the only person on whom the Israeli government has carried out capital punishment.

The film is out on September 21st, and in the meantime, check out the trailer for Operation Finale yourself below:

Image via YouTube

The post Nick Kroll and Oscar Isaac Take Down Eichmann appeared first on Jewcy.

The 21st Annual Brooklyn Film Festival began this past Friday, June 1st, subtitled THRESHOLD. Brooklyn Film Festival Executive Director Marco Ursino sums up its lineup with this great quote: “In the middle of this undeniably appalling time in American history, Brooklyn Film Festival aims to amplify the voices of its films and filmmakers by shedding light, spreading love and celebrating diversity.” It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that, with 125 films featured, at least a few would have substantial Jewish content. Jewcy got a sneak peek at three memorable–but very different–animated shorts that fit that bill.

My Yiddish Papi, from Franco-Canadian filmmaker Éléonore Goldberg, is a sobering and powerful seven-minute exploration of a young woman’s thoughts and feelings after missing the last phone call from her grandfather before his death. Remembering moments spent together at a bistro hoping to be more fit at his age pale in comparison to the sorrow and seriousness she feels when she recalls the harrowing journey he took to survive the Holocaust. This film does exactly what its late protagonist views as most important: continuing to tell his story so that others will not forget what happened.

Niggun, from Tel Aviv-based animator Yoni Salmon, is a considerably odder production. The twelve-minute film finds two men traveling through space in a distant future looking for the long-lost Earth. One is a space archaeologist and the other is a very frum-looking rabbi. As they arrive to a planet that has fallen apart and seems completely abandoned, audiences are treated to some extremely familiar religious sites that don’t appear to have the same effect on the rabbi as one might expect for a modern-day Earth dweller. It’s a film reminiscent of the equally strange The Rabbi’s Cat, offering a mildly amusing take on Judaism coming out in a way that hardly feels realistic or relatable yet is still fascinating to watch.

Tasteful, from Israeli-born filmmaker Morr Meroz, is the shortest of the three, clocking in at just two minutes. The one-line synopsis for the film describes “a not-so-friendly competition between two food vendors quickly turns violent, as the dishes they serve get less and less Kosher.” Its Judaism may not be particularly overt, but this is the latest clever take in the vein of Finding Nemo and Zootopia on what animals as talking beings in a society that resembles our own might say and feel. It’s easy to understand that a pig would be offended at the idea of being sold bacon by a pig, and naturally his basest instincts would compel him to offer up sushi in plain view of his newfound competitor. This is simple fun that makes the most of its premise.

My Yiddish Papi and Tasteful are screening together at the NY Media Center on Wednesday and Saturday night, while Niggun can be seen at Windmill Studios on Friday night and Sunday afternoon. Purchase tickets and check out the full lineup of the Brooklyn Film Festival, which runs through June 10th.

Image from Niggun courtesy the Brooklyn Film Festival

The post Brooklyn Film Festival Spotlight: Animated Jewish Shorts appeared first on Jewcy.

Netflix taketh away, but surely Netflix giveth again.

While a number of films will leave the streaming service come June (bye, Men in Black!), there’s a whole new roster of movies set to take their place, from Star Wars: The Last Jedi to Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (get you some early Kat Dennings). Plus, a couple of the films, both foreign, are explicitly Jewish. Here’s what you should keep an eye out for:

Maktub debuts on June 15th. The 2017 film is a dark comedy out of Israel. It starts with parallels to Pulp Fiction—a couple of thugs survive violence (a terrorist bombing) when out to eat after a job. Shaken from their experiences, they decide to take another path. The pair steals notes from the Kotel, and decide to make the prayers of supplicants come true, using the skills from their old job (strong-arming). Shenanigans ensue, especially because when the criminals exited their old life, they took the boss’s cash with them.

Maktub stars Israeli TV superstar duo Guy Amir and Hanan Savyon. As of January, the film was even slated for an American remake. So now’s your chance to say that you watched the original before everyone was talking about the English-language version, and that you liked the Hebrew one better.

To Each, Her Own (originally Les Goûts et les couleurs) drops towards the end of the month, June 24th. There’s not much information about the recent French film online, but Netflix describes it thusly: “Just as Simone works up the courage to tell her conservative Jewish family she’s a lesbian, she finds herself attracted to a male Senegalese chef.”

So, not much there, but it’s definitely an LGBTQ flick. The film’s director is Myriam Aziza, who has also done documentary work that touches on her own conflicted Jewish identity.

(Of course, this is only the new stuff. Netflix already has lots of Israeli and/or Jewish movies and TV.)

But if you’ve gotten through everything and need to wait for these movies, in the meantime, you can check out the trailer for Maktub below:

Still from Maktub via YouTube

The post Check Out Two Jewish Films Coming to Netflix appeared first on Jewcy.

Fresh off an Oscar win for Best Foreign Film for A Fantastic Woman, starring transgender actress Daniela Vega, director Sebastián Lelio is moving over to English-language cinema. His latest film, Disobedience, stars Rachel Weisz as Ronit, who returns home to the London Orthodox community she left behind at a young age when her father, a prominent rabbi, dies. She finds herself shunned by many but welcomed by her childhood friend Dovid (Alessandro Nivola), now himself an esteemed rabbi, and his wife Esti (Rachel McAdams), with whom Ronit shared a forbidden relationship that bubbles back up to the surface when they are reunited. Jewcy sat down with Lelio to discuss the making of this immersive deep dive into a reclusive community.

Jewcy: Congratulations on winning an Oscar for A Fantastic Woman. How do you feel that these films connect to each other?

They are both taking female characters that are on the fringes of either society or narrative and putting them in the absolute center. They are creating these cubist portraits where they are observed from every possible angle and the stories make them go through an entire emotional spectrum.

Jewcy: How familiar were you with the book by Naomi Alderman and what inspired you to get involved with the project?

I didn’t know about the book, but one of the producers of the film, Frida Torresblanco, pitched the story to me and I knew that she was partnered with Rachel Weisz. They had both seen my film Gloria and somehow they thought I could be the right person for it. I liked the idea of this very particular love triangle, these confused, vibrating human beings that are trying to do their best, in flux, operating in front of a backdrop that is more or less made of fixed conceptions and ideas. I found that very fascinating, even though I’m not British and I’m not Jewish.

Jewcy: How familiar were you with Orthodox Judaism before making this film?

Not very. I had some notions but it was fascinating to write about this world. It was like writing about an unknown world, one that is completely created already that has aesthetics. It has a God. It has a set of rules, a moral code, a tradition, music. It was really interesting to dive into that mysterious planet. The dynamics of the rituals, how Shabbat works, how that somehow glues everything together and has survived for many centuries. That was something that I didn’t know very well and I was quite surprised to learn about. It’s there in the film.

Jewcy: There are a lot of very intensive Jewish practices and expressions that are in the film that probably aren’t familiar to casually Jewish viewers and definitely not to those who aren’t Jewish. Did you feel any pressure to explain some of those things rather than just presenting them as something that they are living and makes sense to them?

I didn’t want to fall into the “manual” trap because I don’t think that’s interesting. I became quite obsessed with getting the cultural part of it right, so we had a few consultants for the writing process. Naomi Alderman was helping also throughout this, talking to our co-writer Rebecca Lenkiewicz about the details of what life was like inside that very secretive neighborhood. Later on, during pre-production, we increased the number of consultants to twelve. We really wanted to get it right and then forget about it, to be able to concentrate on what was really important, which is the three main characters.

Jewcy: Can you talk about the three main actors and how they approached their roles?

It was great fun to discover who needed to be part of that triangle. I knew that we needed two very strong counterparts. I always felt that Rachel McAdams was going to be great as Esti. The fact that she has so much joy inside was going to be interesting in a role like this where joy is really repressed, wearing unflattering costumes and all that. I was convinced that they were going to have great chemistry – the two Rachels. For the character of Dovid, I really wanted to cast someone who could reunite a great masculinity, even a sexual presence, with the ability to transmit that he is a spiritual person. I think Alessandro brought all of that to the equation. It was quite amazing to see him transform.

Jewcy: In the film, you combine orchestral music with ritual Jewish chanting. How did you put that together?

I love using music in films. There was a great opportunity to use this beautiful, ancestral music that has thousands of years behind it and use it grammatically in a way that belongs to this world. It’s so particular and has so much identity, so painful and so charged, and I didn’t want to miss that opportunity. At the same time, we combined it with Matthew Herbert’s score, which is operating in a very different direction. It’s a score that is almost like a sci-fi score. I was trying to create this feeling of strangeness through music.

Jewcy: For your next project, you’re adapting your 2013 Chilean film Gloria into an English-language version?

Yes, I’m finishing the cut. I’m about to start post-production. It’s an idea that has been brewing for a few years. I met Julianne Moore before shooting A Fantastic Woman and Disobedience. We agreed that I would make these two films first, which was a good thing because after making them I felt that it was okay to revisit my previous material and be in a place where I could find a way to make it vital and vibrant again. In the meantime, the world changed. Trump got elected and the entire landscape changed, and suddenly a film about a woman that doesn’t want to throw in the towel became urgent. It was a luxury to work with her and John Turturro. We had fun.

Jewcy: Is there anything else you’d like readers to know about making Disobedience?

One of the things that was very revealing in the writing process was discovering that the antagonistic force wasn’t really coming from the community but the characters themselves. They are the main obstacle to overcome. That helped with escaping the cliché idea that the community is bad and that these are just victims of their environment. It’s much more complex than that. I think the fact that I’m not Jewish or British helped me to connect with whatever is universal in that story.

Disobedience is now playing in New York and Los Angeles.

Image from Disobedience

The post Jewcy Interviews: ‘Disobedience’ appeared first on Jewcy.

The Hasidic population is portrayed occasionally in film and television, usually as a way of demonstrating extremism, or exploring how someone is grappling with breaking the fundamental rules of observant Judaism. It’s not too common to find a self-described “dark buddy comedy” where one buddy is a Hasidic cantor and the other is Matthew Broderick, but that’s exactly what one film showing at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival features.

Shmuel, played by Géza Röhrig, who starred as the title character in the Oscar-winning Son of Saul, has just lost his wife to cancer and doesn’t know what to do next. He consults his rabbi after having dreams about how her body will break down in the earth, and nothing he hears makes him feel any better. Realizing that he needs to know exactly how her body is decaying so that her neshama can safely leave, he wanders outside his community to find a scientist. Though Albert, a community college professor, is hardly the expert in such things, Shmuel refuses to relent, and the two ultimately begin a lengthy experiment that involves burying a pig to track its decomposition process.

Would a Hasidic man ever go to a non-Kosher Chinese restaurant to purchase a dead pig, then transport it in his car before burying it in the ground himself? Probably not. Asked at a Q & A following a Tribeca screening, director Shawn Snyder said that he frequented “Hasidic speakeasys” where those who have either left or have one foot out of the community gather, and that the film had both a Hasidic advisor who consulted on the script and another on set. Röhrig, who is observant, joked, “Kids, don’t try this at home,” explaining that this is not an educational movie but rather one that takes certain artistic liberties for the sake of art, fictionalizing elements but disciplined enough to never approach blasphemy.

Shmuel and Albert definitely don’t become fast friends, and it’s clear how different the worlds they come from are. Shmuel stumbles into the closest college he can find looking for a scientist, asking the female receptionist if he can speak instead with a man, and he guilts Albert into helping him by angrily explaining how much he has sinned by even coming to such a place. Albert, seeing Shmuel’s garb, repeatedly refers to him as “Rabbi,” and when he does learn his name, he calls him “Shmel” for half the film. It’s among the wildest, unlikeliest friendships ever concocted on screen, and, however far-fetched it may be, there are glimpses of reality to be found within it.

Shmuel is the one who can’t move on from his wife’s untimely death, but his two sons, Noam and Naftali, are also featured in a subplot that finds them trying to dispel the rumor that their father has been possessed by a dybbuk. Naturally, this involves breaking into the principal’s office at their yeshiva in a scene reminiscent of A Serious Man to steal a copy of the old black-and-white film The Dybbuk and then blowing a shofar at their father’s feet while he is sleeping to urge the spirit of their mother to let him go. At one point, when Shmuel takes his sons out on the water to tell their mother that he loves them, one protests, “this isn’t Jewish.” Much in this film may not seem to be, but it’s all about grappling with loss as people.

Snyder shared his own story that inspired the making of this film. Nine years ago, he lost his mother, and though he comes from a Reform background, there are still specific mourning rituals in place that he described as “psychologically profound.” He still found his own grief “spilling outside the bounds of that requirement” and, nine years later, he still mourns. He had difficulty with the fact that he never felt comfort at her grave, and compared the Jewish timeline for grief with wondering what his mother’s body looks like after seven days, or after a month. He notes that he is very squeamish, and that this film, which involves some grisly imagery, is the least likely product he could have imagined.

Röhrig, who said that he could relate to the character of Shmuel because, sooner or later, everyone goes through this process, cited the aninut period between death and burial as especially holy, explaining that, for Shmuel, it spills over beyond twenty-four or forty-eight hours. He fielded one particularly interesting question from an audience member who shared her experience of being Christian and having her mother’s body on display during the wake. He responded that it is forbidden in Judaism to show the body, likely because the rabbis wanted to “keep it real”— make facing the death of a loved one not a visual experience, but an inner struggle.

This is an indisputably unique, creative interpretation of what it means to grapple with loss, one that turns out to be quite entertaining thanks to the pairing of Röhrig and Broderick. It hasn’t been picked up for distribution just yet, but you can catch it again tonight or this Saturday night at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Image via the Tribeca Film Festival

The post Jewcy Reviews: ‘To Dust’ appeared first on Jewcy.