Second City Tzivi

Note: This review was originally published in the World Jewish Digest on 4/04: “BROKEN WINGS, an internationally award-winning Israeli film, has just opened in theaters here in the United States. However, even though this film is “new” to us, it was actually made in 2000. This is an enormously important fact that affects what you […]

NOTE: This reivew was originally published in the World Jewish Digest on 5/04: “Who owns Anne Frank?” Cynthia Ozick asked, in a provocative essay she published in the NEW YORKER magazine in 1997. It’s easy to agree with Ozick’s attack on those who strip Anne Frank of her Jewish identity and make her into a […]

Note: This review was originally published by the JUF News on 10/07: “…In the Ashkenazim, Dothan and Meyer focus on a new generation.  These 30-somethings feel compelled to ask their grandparents questions that their own never dared to ask.  Israelis in this “third generation” (the second generation to be born in Israel) are now reaching […]

  Note: This review was originally published in the JUF News on 10/08: “Israeli Arabs make their mark this year both in front of the camera as well as behind it. “Amjad,” the lead character in the TV comedy Arab Labor, works as a journalist in the city, but still lives near his parents in […]

Note: This review was originally published in Jewish Film World on 3/1/08: “When new Israeli films open internationally, viewers bring lots of opinions into the theatre with them. This is inevitable, of course; we carry our mental baggage with us wherever we go. But all too often, when I read reviews of Israeli films (by […]

NOTE: This review was originally published in The World Jewish Digest on 3/1/08: “BERGA is an extremely powerful film, using original footage blended with recreated scenes. The soldiers, filmed as “talking heads,” are seen as old men until the very end, when Guggenheim shows them reunited with their families in post-war photographs. They tell the […]

NOTE: This review was originally published by WomenArts on 6/27/08: “Brick Lane is a beautiful film that could have been even better. Based on a well-regarded novel of the same name by Monica Ali, Sarah Gavron’s film is about a young Bangladeshi woman named ‘Nazneen,’ who’s sent to London as a teenager to marry a […]

NOTE: This reivew was originally published in the World Jewish Digest on 10/01/04: “Is there a more important question facing the worldwide Jewish community right now that the future of the settlements? As Leon Wieseltier, the Literary Editor of THE NEW REPUBLIC said in his recent editorial ‘Extirpation,’ ‘the settlements are not the sole obstacle […]

NOTE: This review was originally posted on Films for Two in 10/06: “The big surprise [of this year’s Chicago International Film Festival]was DAY NIGHT DAY NIGHT by newcomer Julia Loktev, which received the FIPRESCI Prize in the ‘New Directors’ competition. This intensely-compelling film follows a suicide bomber for 48 hours as she prepares to detonate […]

NOTE: This review was originally published in The JUF News on 10/07: “My favorite feature film this year [at the Chicago Festival of Israeli Cinema] is Dear Mr. Waldman, written and directed by Hanan Peled. (This is Peled’s directorial debut; he already is well known in Israel as a screenwriter.) He’s clearly telling a semi-autobiographical story […]