If I didn’t know any better, I’d think Jews are a bunch of insufferable narcissists who need not only to keep telling themselves they’re as good as everyone else but also forever and loudly assert it in pop culture. How else to explain something like So Jewtastic, VH1’s vapid appreciation of Natalie Portman, Jon Stewart ...

Here’s a puzzle for Amos Gitai, currently feted with “Hard Questions,” a Lincoln Center retrospective: Why is your new film so tedious?
It was with great hopes that I went to a screening of the Israeli director’s latest project, Free Zone, about three women—an Israeli, an American, and a Palestinian—wrestling over a business deal. One of ...

Moses Maimonides was a Renaissance man before there was a Renaissance. A physician in Saladin’s court, a dazzling Torah scholar, a community leader, a daring philosopher whose greatest work—The Guide of the Perplexed—attempted to reconcile scientific knowledge with faith in God. He was a Jew living in a Muslim world, a rationalist living in a ...

Late in Ushpizin, an Israeli film about the penury, barrenness, and public humiliation endured by a Breslov Hasidic couple in Jerusalem during the holiday of Sukkot, Moshe Bellanga runs to a forested area and beseeches, “Master of the Universe: I don’t want to be angry!” His plea for grace recalls the impish prostitute in Fellini’s ...

In 1970, Hillel Halkin moved to Zichron Ya’akov, a small farming village near Haifa, and swiftly became intrigued by its early history. The transplanted New Yorker befriended older residents, including a Virgilian guide named Yanko Epstein, who offered competing versions of the settlement’s beginnings. Halkin began to piece together the embellished recollections with fragments of ...

Unwittingly assuming the role of simple son, Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider takes a stab at pronouncing charoset in VH1 Classic’s Matzo & Metal. He mimics Scott Ian, the Anthrax guitarist, whose equanimity and beard confer what passes here for rabbinical authority. Ian may not know what charoset signifies, but in an unadorned room outfitted ...

Peopled by Todd Solondz’s usual bestiary of the dispossessed, Palindromes begins at a funeral for Dawn Wiener, the unhappy antiheroine of Welcome to the Dollhouse, with a camera trained on a star of David on the menorah behind her coffin. From there, we meet his new antiheroine, cousin Aviva, a 13-year-old who gets pregnant by ...

Shalom Auslander began entertaining doubts about religion as a young boy in upstate New York. Stifled by his Orthodox family and community, he relocated to New York City where he shed his yarmulke and took a job writing advertising copy. A frequent contributor to This American Life, Auslander began Beware of God two years ago. ...

Wagging a finger—naughty, naughty!—at Nathan Englander, Tova Mirvis, and my colleague, Jonathan Rosen, Wendy Shalit rebukes writers who portray “deeply observant Jews in an unflattering or ridiculous light.” The young scold went to Israel, found God, and now opines that fiction’s purpose is not art or even mere entertainment, but P.R. It should depict a ...

On an ordinary day, it’s unlikely that the New York Times‘ placement of an article about Israeli land seizures in East Jerusalem next to one on the U.N. remembrance of the liberation of Auschwitz would have caught my eye. But I had just watched an advance copy of Walk on Water, an Israeli film opening ...