In 1939, Joseph Goebbels commissioned his favorite film director, Veit Harlan, to make an entertainment suitable for wartime. The result was Jew Süss, a historical drama about the Jewish banker Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, who was hanged in 1738 on charges of treason against a German duchy. The choice of subject matter was a retort to ...

The Emails of Zion is a collection of messages from Jewish parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and others who are eager—often way too eager—to inform their children about issues of pressing concern to the Jewish community. Some of these emails may sound crazy, paranoid, ethnocentric, and/or racist, while others are disturbingly sane. These are the voices ...

Over the course of the coming month, as members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences cast their votes for one of the five titles nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, they’ll be called on to assess more than just cinematic merit. Comparing two of the nominees—Israel’s Ajami and Germany’s The White Ribbon—requires ...

Life isn’t easy for Jeanne Fabre, the character at the center of the new French film The Girl on the Train. She’s a flighty airhead stuck in the Parisian suburbs with no job, a boyfriend who’s caught up in some shady business, and an overbearing mother pretty enough to be played by Catherine Deneuve. One ...

Opening night for Avatar was also the last night of Hanukkah, but when I was offered a free ticket to the blockbuster action flick, I put on my 3-D glasses and didn’t give the Festival of Lights a second thought. Then, while the big blue subalterns scampered across the screen, the damnedest thing happened: I ...

Trailing praise and controversy as it comes off the festival circuit onto neighborhood screens, Yoav Shamir’s documentary Defamation offers viewers a first-person excursion into the subject of anti-Semitism: a phenomenon that the filmmaker often hears about, he says, but doesn’t quite know why, since as an Israeli he’s never experienced it. From this teasing premise, ...

Even viewers who are ignorant of Haim Yavin’s prominent place in the world of Israeli culture are likely to recognize, within a moment or two of watching his new television series—which will be screened at three Manhattan locations in the coming week—that the man they see on the screen is a figure of authority. Nicknamed ...