“Make your life where you are,” Elise Roumani told her children. They tentatively watched the Italian fascist regime arrive in Libya, survived the Nazi invasion, welcomed the British, and lived at uneasy peace with the Arabs until coming to the United States. After World War II, there were 36,000 Sephardic Jews living in Libya. Today there are none.  The Roumani family is among the dwindling remnants of this Jewish population   Full Description…

Free Screening Israeli singer Chava Alberstein joins the audience for discussion following the film Too Early to Be Quiet, Too Late to Sing. Released in 1995, the work is the result of interviews with elderly poets and writers who survived WWII and continued to write in Yiddish, and is interlaced with folk songs. Chava Alberstein's work on this film inspired The Well, her 1998 collaboration with The Klezmatics, for which she wrote music for 15   Full Description…

If you’ve ever strolled through the aisles of Whole Foods,Trader Joe's, or any health food store, chances are you’ve walked past the all-natural, peppermint-infused, multi-purpose organic soap that carries Bronner’s name. From afar the label may appear to be covered with warnings, but upon further inspection one finds a manifesto of thousands of words, referencing everyone from Hillel to Spinoza to Mark Spitz. A Jew who   Full Description…

Every Saturday, at approximately ten in the morning, you’ll find a group of elderly men and women shlepping plastic lawn chairs across the Mount Herzl National Cemetery in Jerusalem. They set up in the shade of a large pine tree, sit down, and have long, animated and thoughtful discussions about larger issues. This group of oldsters has held meetings of the “Mt. Herzl Academy” for over two decades, debating and discussing   Full Description…

Part of the current vanguard of award-winning Israeli filmmakers, Joseph Cedar’s Beaufort dramatically depicts the complex moral and tactical dilemmas facing the young commander of a crusader-era fortress in Southern Lebanon during the Israeli Army’s unilateral 2000 withdrawal.  Liraz Liberti is the 22-year-old commander of the highest ground in the 18-year-old Lebanon War.  This ground he has sworn to defend is also ground   Full Description…

Butch and Sundance. Oscar and Felix. Thelma and Louise. Multi-award winning Argentinean film On Probation adds a worthy pair to this classic list: Díaz and Silverstein. Rule-bending policeman Díaz lives alone in a hotel room, in despair, in the aftermath of leaving his cheating wife. He is allowed to return to work on the condition that he works with therapist Silverstein. Although the two are distrustful of one another at the   Full Description…