Download or read book Kosher Movies written by Rabbi Herbert J. Cohen and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Film critic Herbert Cohen views films as potential life lessons, and defines a "kosher movie" as one that has something valuable to say about the human condition. In this survey spanning many genres, Cohen presents films as tools for self-discovery and for navigating challenges of life. What do romantic comedies really say about love? What can Cast Away teach us about the value of time? What parenting lessons can we learn from Dead Poets Society? Exploring 120 stand-out movies from the past 30 years, Cohen shares inspiring personal anecdotes about self-growth, relationships, parenting, aging, dealing with adversity, and more.
Download or read book Kosher Movies written by Rabbi Herbert J. Cohen and published by Urim Publications. This book was released on 2015-07-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Film critic Herbert Cohen views films as potential life lessons, and defines a "kosher movie" as one that has something valuable to say about the human condition. In this survey spanning many genres, Cohen presents films as tools for self-discovery and for navigating challenges of life. What do romantic comedies really say about love? What can Cast Away teach us about the value of time? What parenting lessons can we learn from Dead Poets Society? Exploring 120 stand-out movies from the past 30 years, Cohen shares inspiring personal anecdotes about self-growth, relationships, parenting, aging, dealing with adversity, and more.
Download or read book Movie Made Jews written by Helene Meyers and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-17 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Movie-Made Jews focuses on a rich, usable American Jewish cinematic tradition. This tradition includes fiction and documentary films that make Jews through antisemitism, Holocaust indirection, and discontent with assimilation. It prominently features the unapologetic assertion of Jewishness, queerness, and alliances across race and religion. Author Helene Meyers shows that as we go to our local theater, attend a Jewish film festival, play a DVD, watch streaming videos, Jewishness becomes part of the multicultural mosaic rather than collapsing into a generic whiteness or being represented as a life apart. This engagingly-written book demonstrates that a Jewish movie is neither just a movie nor for Jews only. With incisive analysis, Movie-Made Jews challenges the assumption that American Jewish cinema is a cinema of impoverishment and assimilation. While it’s a truism that Jews make movies, this book brings into focus the diverse ways movies make Jews.
Download or read book The 50 Greatest Jewish Movies written by Kathryn Bernheimer and published by Citadel Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to review and rank movies depicting the Jewish experience, "The 50 Greatest Jewish Movies" provides an insightful analysis of the ways in which Hollywood and the film community have handled such issues as anti-Semitism, assimilation, relations with gentiles, the Holocaust and its aftereffects, Zionism, and the Jewish commitment to social justice. Photos.
Download or read book The Grandees written by Stephen Birmingham and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New World’s earliest Jewish immigrants and their unique, little-known history: A New York Times bestseller from the author of Life at the Dakota. In 1654, twenty-three Jewish families arrived in New Amsterdam (now New York) aboard a French privateer. They were the Sephardim, members of a proud orthodox sect that had served as royal advisors and honored professionals under Moorish rule in Spain and Portugal but were then exiled from their homeland by intolerant monarchs. A small, closed, and intensely private community, the Sephardim soon established themselves as businessmen and financiers, earning great wealth. They became powerful forces in society, with some, like banker Haym Salomon, even providing financial support to George Washington’s army during the American Revolution. Yet despite its major role in the birth and growth of America, this extraordinary group has remained virtually impenetrable and unknowable to outsiders. From author of “Our Crowd” Stephen Birmingham, The Grandees delves into the lives of the Sephardim and their historic accomplishments, illuminating the insulated world of these early Americans. Birmingham reveals how these families, with descendants including poet Emma Lazarus, Barnard College founder Annie Nathan Meyer, and Supreme Court Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo, influenced—and continue to influence—American society.
Download or read book A Kosher Christmas written by Joshua Eli Plaut and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-24 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christmas is not everybody’s favorite holiday. Historically, Jews in America, whether participating in or refraining from recognizing Christmas, have devised a multitude of unique strategies to respond to the holiday season. Their response is a mixed one: do we participate, try to ignore the holiday entirely, or create our own traditions and make the season an enjoyable time? This book, the first on the subject of Jews and Christmas in the United States, portrays how Jews are shaping the public and private character of Christmas by transforming December into a joyous holiday season belonging to all Americans. Creative and innovative in approaching the holiday season, these responses range from composing America’s most beloved Christmas songs, transforming Hanukkah into the Jewish Christmas, creating a national Jewish tradition of patronizing Chinese restaurants and comedy shows on Christmas Eve, volunteering at shelters and soup kitchens on Christmas Day, dressing up as Santa Claus to spread good cheer, campaigning to institute Hanukkah postal stamps, and blending holiday traditions into an interfaith hybrid celebration called “Chrismukkah” or creating a secularized holiday such as Festivus. Through these venerated traditions and alternative Christmastime rituals, Jews publicly assert and proudly proclaim their Jewish and American identities to fashion a universally shared message of joy and hope for the holiday season. See also: http://www.akosherchristmas.org
Download or read book Driven to Darkness written by Vincent Brook and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2009-09-18 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its earliest days, the American film industry has attracted European artists. With the rise of Hitler, filmmakers of conscience in Germany and other countries, particularly those of Jewish origin, found it difficult to survive and fledùfor their work and their livesùto the United States. Some had trouble adapting to Hollywood, but many were celebrated for their cinematic contributions, especially to the dark shadows of film noir. Driven to Darkness explores the influence of Jewish TmigrT directors and the development of this genre. While filmmakers such as Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, and Edward G. Ulmer have been acknowledged as crucial to the noir canon, the impact of their Jewishness on their work has remained largely unexamined until now. Through lively and original analyses of key films, Vincent Brook penetrates the darkness, shedding new light on this popular film form and the artists who helped create it.
Download or read book Chasing Redbird written by Sharon Creech and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Intriguing, delightful, and touching.” —School Library Journal (starred review) “Creech’s best yet.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) It started out as an ordinary summer. But the minute thirteen-year-old Zinny discovered the old, overgrown trail that ran through the woods behind her family’s house, she realized that things were about to change. It was her chance to finally make people notice her, and to have a place she could call her very own. But more than that, Zinny knew that the trail somehow held the key to all kinds of questions. And that the only way to understand her family, her Aunt Jessie’s death, and herself, was to find out where it went. From Newbery Medal-winning author Sharon Creech comes a story of love, loss, and understanding, an intricately woven tale of a young girl who sets out in search of her place in the world—and discovers it in her own backyard. An ALA Best Book for Young Adults
Download or read book Kosher Chinese written by Michael Levy and published by Holt Paperbacks. This book was released on 2011-07-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An irreverent tale of an American Jew serving in the Peace Corps in rural China, which reveals the absurdities, joys, and pathos of a traditional society in flux In September of 2005, the Peace Corps sent Michael Levy to teach English in the heart of China's heartland. His hosts in the city of Guiyang found additional uses for him: resident expert on Judaism, romantic adviser, and provincial basketball star, to name a few. His account of overcoming vast cultural differences to befriend his students and fellow teachers is by turns poignant and laugh-out-loud funny. While reveling in the peculiarities of life in China's interior, the author also discovered that the "other billion" (people living far from the coastal cities covered by the American media) have a complex relationship with both their own traditions and the rapid changes of modernization. Lagging behind in China's economic boom, they experience the darker side of "capitalism with Chinese characteristics," daily facing the schizophrenia of conflicting ideologies. Kosher Chinese is an illuminating account of the lives of the residents of Guiyang, particularly the young people who will soon control the fate of the world.
Download or read book The Matzah Ball written by Jean Meltzer and published by MIRA. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK SELECTED BY * POPSUGAR * BUSTLE * BUZZFEED * BOOKPAGE * GOODREADS MEMBERS "The Matzah Ball had me laughing out loud...an all-around terrific read."—Debbie Macomber, #1 New York Times bestselling author Oy! to the world Rachel Rubenstein-Goldblatt is a nice Jewish girl with a shameful secret: she loves Christmas. For a decade she’s hidden her career as a Christmas romance novelist from her family. Her talent has made her a bestseller even as her chronic illness has always kept the kind of love she writes about out of reach. But when her diversity-conscious publisher insists she write a Hanukkah romance, her well of inspiration suddenly runs dry. Hanukkah’s not magical. It’s not merry. It’s not Christmas. Desperate not to lose her contract, Rachel’s determined to find her muse at the Matzah Ball, a Jewish music celebration on the last night of Hanukkah, even if it means working with her summer camp archenemy—Jacob Greenberg. Though Rachel and Jacob haven’t seen each other since they were kids, their grudge still glows brighter than a menorah. But as they spend more time together, Rachel finds herself drawn to Hanukkah—and Jacob—in a way she never expected. Maybe this holiday of lights will be the spark she needed to set her heart ablaze. "A luminous celebration of all types of love, threaded with the message that everyone is worthy of it.”—Rachel Lynn Solomon, author of The Ex Talk
Download or read book Leopoldstadt written by Tom Stoppard and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: **Winner of the Tony Award for Best Play** Finally making its Broadway debut in a limited engagement run, Tom Stoppard’s humane and heartbreaking Olivier Award-winning play of love, family, and endurance At the beginning of the twentieth century, Leopoldstadt was the old, crowded Jewish quarter of Vienna, a city humming with artistic and intellectual excitement. Stoppard’s epic yet intimate drama centers on Hermann Merz, a manufacturer and baptized Jew married to Catholic Gretl, whose extended family convene at their fashionable apartment on Christmas Day in 1899. Yet by the time the play closes, Austria has passed through the convulsions of war, revolution, impoverishment, annexation by Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust, which stole the lives of 65,000 Austrian Jews alone. From one of today’s most acclaimed playwrights, Leopoldstadt is a human and heartbreaking drama of literary brilliance, historical verisimilitude, and powerful emotion.
Download or read book Funny Man written by Patrick McGilligan and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 772 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A deeply textured and compelling biography of comedy giant Mel Brooks, covering his rags-to-riches life and triumphant career in television, films, and theater, from Patrick McGilligan, the acclaimed author of Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane and Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light. Oscar, Emmy, Tony, and Grammy award–winner Mel Brooks was behind (and sometimes in front the camera too) of some of the most influential comedy hits of our time, including The 2,000 Year Old Man, Get Smart, The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein. But before this actor, writer, director, comedian, and composer entertained the world, his first audience was his family. The fourth and last child of Max and Kitty Kaminsky, Mel Brooks was born on his family’s kitchen table in Brooklyn, New York, in 1926, and was not quite three-years-old when his father died of tuberculosis. Growing up in a household too poor to own a radio, Mel was short and homely, a mischievous child whose birth role was to make the family laugh. Beyond boyhood, after transforming himself into Mel Brooks, the laughs that came easily inside the Kaminsky family proved more elusive. His lifelong crusade to transform himself into a brand name of popular humor is at the center of master biographer Patrick McGilligan’s Funny Man. In this exhaustively researched and wonderfully novelistic look at Brooks’ personal and professional life, McGilligan lays bare the strengths and drawbacks that shaped Brooks’ psychology, his willpower, his persona, and his comedy. McGilligan insightfully navigates the epic ride that has been the famous funnyman’s life story, from Brooks’s childhood in Williamsburg tenements and breakthrough in early television—working alongside Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner—to Hollywood and Broadway peaks (and valleys). His book offers a meditation on the Jewish immigrant culture that influenced Brooks, snapshots of the golden age of comedy, behind the scenes revelations about the celebrated shows and films, and a telling look at the four-decade romantic partnership with actress Anne Bancroft that superseded Brooks’ troubled first marriage. Engrossing, nuanced and ultimately poignant, Funny Man delivers a great man’s unforgettable life story and an anatomy of the American dream of success. Funny Man includes a 16-page black-and-white photo insert.
Download or read book Unorthodox written by Deborah Feldman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The instant New York Times bestselling memoir of a young Jewish woman's escape from a religious sect, in the tradition of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel and Carolyn Jessop's Escape, featuring a new epilogue by the author. As a member of the strictly religious Satmar sect of Hasidic Judaism, Deborah Feldman grew up under a code of relentlessly enforced customs governing everything from what she could wear and to whom she could speak to what she was allowed to read. It was stolen moments spent with the empowered literary characters of Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott that helped her to imagine an alternative way of life. Trapped as a teenager in a sexually and emotionally dysfunctional marriage to a man she barely knew, the tension between Deborah's desires and her responsibilities as a good Satmar girl grew more explosive until she gave birth at nineteen and realized that, for the sake of herself and her son, she had to escape.
Download or read book Something Ain t Kosher Here written by Vincent Brook and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this humorous work, Brook explores the cultural significance of the recentunprecedented explosion in "Jewish" sitcoms.
Download or read book Woody on Rye written by Vincent Brook and published by Brandeis University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-03 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Woody AllenÕs films have received extensive attention from scholars and critics, no book has focused exclusively on Jewishness in his work, particularly that of the late 1990s and beyond. In this anthology, a distinguished group of contributorsÑwhose work is richly contextualized in the fields of literature, philosophy, film, theater, and comedyÑexamine the schlemiel, Allen and women, the Jewish take on the Òmorality of murder,Ó AllenÕs take on Hebrew scripture and Greek tragedy, his stage work, his cinematic treatment of food and dining, and what happens to ÒJew YorkÓ when Woody takes his films out of New York City. Considered together, these essays delineate the intellectual, artistic, and moral development of one of cinemaÕs most durable and controversial directors.
Download or read book Kosher Nation written by Sue Fishkoff and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2010-10-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kosher? That means the rabbi blessed it, right? Not exactly. In this captivating account of a Bible-based practice that has grown into a multibillions-dollar industry, journalist Sue Fishkoff travels throughout America and to Shanghai, China, to find out who eats kosher food, who produces it, who is responsible for its certification, and how this fascinating world continues to evolve. She explains why 86 percent of the 11.2 million Americans who regularly buy kosher food are not observant Jews—they are Muslims, Seventh-day Adventists, vegetarians, people with food allergies, and consumers who pay top dollar for food they believe “answers to a higher authority.” Fishkoff interviews food manufacturers, rabbinic supervisors, and ritual slaughterers; meets with eco-kosher adherents who go beyond traditional requirements to produce organic chicken and pasture-raised beef; sips boutique kosher wine in Napa Valley; talks to shoppers at an upscale kosher supermarket in Brooklyn; and marches with unemployed workers at the nation’s largest kosher meatpacking plant. She talks to Reform Jews who are rediscovering the spiritual benefits of kashrut, and to Conservative and Orthodox Jews who are demanding that kosher food production adhere to ethical and environmental values. And she chronicles the corruption, price-fixing, and strong arm tactics of early-twentieth-century kosher meat production, against which contemporary kashrut standards pale by comparison. A revelatory look at the current state of kosher in America, this book will appeal to anyone interested in food, religion, Jewish identity, or big business.
Download or read book Steven Spielberg written by Molly Haskell and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-03 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A film-centric portrait of the extraordinarily gifted movie director whose decades-long influence on American popular culture is unprecedented Everything about me is in my films, Steven Spielberg has said. Taking this as a key to understanding the hugely successful moviemaker, Molly Haskell explores the full range of Spielberg s works for the light they shine upon the man himself. Through such powerhouse hits as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Jurassic Park, and Indiana Jones, to lesser-known masterworks like A.I. and Empire of the Sun, to the haunting Schindler s List, Haskell shows how Spielberg s uniquely evocative filmmaking and story-telling reveal the many ways in which his life, work, and times are entwined. Organizing chapters around specific films, the distinguished critic discusses how Spielberg s childhood in non-Jewish suburbs, his parents traumatic divorce, his return to Judaism upon his son s birth, and other events echo in his work. She offers a brilliant portrait of the extraordinary director a fearful boy living through his imagination who grew into a man whose openness, generosity of spirit, and creativity have enchanted audiences for more than 40 years.
