Movies: Jewish culture

After arriving in 1940 New York, Freddy struggles to find work. His world of refugee acquaintances includes the depressed daughter of a poet/delicatessen owner, an aging surgeon who cannot find work, and a lovable charlatan photographer....

An offbeat, irreverent musical documentary that tells the story of a group of Jewish songwriters, including Irving Berlin, Mel Tormé, Jay Livingston, Ray Evans, Gloria Shayne Baker and Johnny Marks, who wrote the soundtrack to Christianity’s most mus...

Seven months after helping her terminally ill mother during the end of her life in home-hospice, filmmaker Judith Helfand becomes a "new old" single mother at 50. Overnight, she's pushed to deal with her stuff: 63 boxes of her parent's heirlooms over...

After impulsively shaving off his beard and sidelocks, a young Hasidic man experiences a nightmarish transformation that leads him right back to where he started. Over the course of one painful night, Eli Eisenstein will come to realize that it’s muc...

This intimately photographed film offers a peak into the lives of a culturally diverse group of young American Jews....

The convoluted and moving story of Russian writer Vassili Grossman (1905-64) and his novel Life and Fate (1980), a literary masterpiece, a monumental and epic account of life under Stalin's regime of terror, a defiant cry that the KGB tried to suffoc...

OUTREMONT AND THE HASIDIM reveals the challenges of accommodating the “Hasidim” – or ultra-Orthodox Jews – in the affluent Montréal borough of Outremont.​Some 7,000 Hasidim live in or near this choice neighbourhood of Québec’s Francophone elite. Afte...

A magical realist comedy about Mortality, Mysticism and the metaphysics of facial hair in Hasidic Brooklyn...

The birth of modern stand-up comedy began in the Catskill Mountains - a boot camp for the greatest generation of Jewish-American Comedians....

After years as a struggling actor, Daniel was cast to play a part in Conan O'Brien's "human-centipede-menorah." His bizarre experience evolved from one of shame into a deepening connection with his personal heritage, a reckoning with the choices he'd...

In ‘Jew,’ comic Ari Shaffir delivers a raunchy love letter to the religion he says he left behind....

In a small Jewish community in a pre-Revolutionary Russian village, a poor milkman, determined to find good husbands for his five daughters, consults the traditional matchmaker – and also has words with God....

On the way to creating a new future, the New Jewish Filmmaking Project is rediscovering the past. 11 young storytellers, ages 15-25, collaborated with Citizen Film’s team of documentary professionals to create a multimedia exhibit that offers a set o...

The history of Camp Kinderland, founded in the 1920s to provide Jewish children an escape from the hot New York City summers....

A celebration of a great Jewish-American tradition. Beginning as places for Jews from Central and Eastern Europe to eat and meet, they expanded across America and eventually attracted as many non-Jews as Jews. Today, the number of Jewish Delis has sh...

Documentarian Judith Helfand adopts z daughter at the age of 50....

Four 12-year-olds—Sharon, Tom, Moishy, and Sophie—prepare for their bar or bat mitzvot....

A look at the Jewish community in Rădăuți, Romania, from 1974 to 1976....

"People of the Graphic Novel" is a playful introduction to the history of an art form: from the first "funny pages" to seminal artists including Will Eisner and Art Spiegelman....

For their joint Bat Mitzvahs, cousins Panda and Mimi made short films exploring what it means to them to be both Jewish and Chinese....