Jewish Studies

The Miss Holocaust Survivor Beauty Pageant takes place every year to the delight of its participants and audience. To take part in this unique contest, sponsored by an Evangelical Christian organization, the female survivors have to retell their traumatic stories one more time. The Pageant is a fascinating and important documentary about how memory, politics and spectacle are interconnected.

ZIVA POSTEC: The Woman Who Edited Shoah

In 1985, Claude Lanzmann debuted Shoah, one of the most monumental cinematic works of all time. Ziva Postec was an indispensable part of the project. In this fascinating documentary, Postec recalls this gargantuan, painful and necessary experience which consumed six years of her life. With previously unseen footage from the making of Shoah, it's a moving portrait of an artist who for a long time has largely gone unnoticed, eclipsed by the towering presence of her male colleague.

BLUE NOTE RECORDS: Beyond the Notes

One of the most important record labels in the history of jazz — and, by extension, that of American music — Blue Note Records has been home to such groundbreaking artists as Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and Art Blakey. Through rare archival footage, current recording sessions and conversations with jazz icons and today’s groundbreaking musicians, this thrilling documentary reveals a powerful mission and illuminates the vital connections between jazz and hip hop.

THE DEAD NATION

A work of startling power and originality, acclaimed director Radu Jude’s documentary-essay examines the rise of anti-Semitism in Romania prior to and during World War II almost entirely through the diary of a Jewish doctor in Bucharest juxtaposed with recently unearthed photographs of provincial life in Romania between the years of 1937 and 1944.

INGELORE

Combining first person accounts, archival footage, and simple recreations, Ingelore is a mesmerizing documentary about a remarkable woman, Ingelore Herz Honigstein, who, born in 1924, narrates her heartbreaking and inspiring story of living as an outcast in Nazi Germany not only as a Jew, but also as a deaf woman.

MY COFFEE WITH JEWISH FRIENDS

A new film from veteran filmmaker Manfred Kirchheimer is always a cause for celebration; with My Coffee, Kirchheimer uses a simple, humorous title as a screen to ask serious questions, from gender inequality to secularism to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, for a deeply thoughtful exploration of contemporary Jewish identity.

INTRODUCTION TO ARNOLD SCHOENBERG'S "ACCOMPANIMENT TO A CINEMATOGRAPHIC SCENE"

A fierce condemnation of anti-Semitism and the barbaric war machine of capitalism, inspired by a letter written in 1923 by composer Arnold Schoenberg to painter Wassily Kandinsky.

MOSES AND AARON

One of Straub-Huillet's major films, this adaptation of Schoenberg’s unfinished opera is a thrilling and rigorous consideration of Biblical and archaeological history; set almost entirely within a Roman amphitheater whose history lends every precise line-reading and gesture, every startling camera move and cut, a totalizing force.

FORTINI/CANI

An elegiac and damning meditation on abuses of power and historical amnesia, this film records communist critic Franco Fortini reading excerpts of his book The Dogs of Sinai, which condemns capitalism and the state of Israel in the aftermath of the Six Day War while reflecting on his own Jewish heritage.

THE DREAMED ONES

The tormented romance between celebrated poets Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann – a Holocaust survivor and a daughter of a Nazi party member – is the subject of this innovative documentary in which two actors read from their nearly two decades worth of correspondence.

A MAGICAL SUBSTANCE FLOWS INTO ME

Drawing on the work of German-Jewish ethnomusicologist Robert Lachmann (1892-1939), filmmaker Jumana Manna sets out in search of the musical diversity of historical Palestine in this magical documentary.

DON'T BLINK - ROBERT FRANK

One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, a documentary about Robert Frank, the legendary photographer and filmmaker behind the seminal book “The Americans” and landmark films like Pull My Daisy.

HERB AND DOROTHY 50x50

An ordinary couple who amassed a world class art collection on their modest salaries and then gave it all away – donating fifty works of art to one museum in each state.

HERB AND DOROTHY

The extraordinary story of an ordinary couple who managed to build one of the most important contemporary art collections in history.