Jacob Burns Celebrates Annual Jewish Film Festival

The is preparing for its 10^th consecutive Jewish Film Festival.

The festival will feature films about the Holocaust, but the 30 films showcased during the festival will touch upon many more aspects of Jewish culture.

“I think people have a misconception that Jewish film festivals are overwhelmingly about the Holocaust and there are some that are but this one is not,” said Jacob Burns’ Programming Director Brian Ackerman.

In fact, pain and suffering aren’t a prerequisite either. A comedy called The Infidel serves as the primary example. Centered around a man raised in a Muslim family, the film explores the man’s discovery that he is actually adopted and was born Jewish. It’s very sweet, very funny and a genuine laugh out loud movie, Ackerman said.

A little less amusing, and certainly a departure from the traditional narrative is a film called Stalin Thought of You. The film is about Boris Efimov, who was the leading political cartoonist in the Soviet Union and navigated a perilous journey through the upper echelons of the Stalinist era.

“Being at the top of the food chain was not such a wonderful thing because the closer you got to Stalin, the more dangerous your life was,” Ackerman said.  

Not only did Efimov outlast Stalin and the Soviet Union itself, his narration of the film at the age of 106 stands as a testament. In accompaniment with rare archival footage, the Russian Jew tells his story with incredible flair, Ackerman said.  

The film festival won’t just be focused on movies like Stalin Thought of You.

“There are guest speakers for almost every night,” Ackerman said.  

Pleasantville author and baseball enthusiast Joseph Wallace will doing a Q&A on April 3 for the presentation of Peter Miller’s, Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story. Chronicling the careers of stars such as Hank Greenburg, Al Rosen and Kevin Youkilis, the movie depicts how their struggle to gain acceptance falls within a journey that is common to the American experience.  

“The truth is they’ve always faced being looked upon as being different because Jews aren’t supposed to be ballplayers; they’re supposed to be professors and doctors,” said Wallace, who’s latest book, Diamond Ruby, was inspired by a minor league teenage girl who struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game.

Wallace said that the Jewish baseball players weren’t trying to be role models for their community, but it was inevitable that they would be viewed in that light.

“They understood as time went on that they had no choice to do that because so many people were seeing them that way,” Wallace said.  

Other films tackle more touchy subjects. Eichmann’s End: Love Betrayal, Death depicts a series of interviews between Adolf Eichmann, a German Nazi and one of the primary architects of the Holocaust, and an Argentinean journalist.

 “It’s really riveting,” Ackerman said of the film.

Eichmann’s End also sheds light on the operation to capture the Nazi war criminal. 

“People know he was spirited out of Argentina but they don’t know the specifics of the story,” Ackerman said.  

All told, there are two more Holocaust films in the festival, documentaries on Norman Mailer and Vidal Sassoon, and several films that delve into the complexities of the Arab-Israeli conflict. 

Ackerman said though these films are part of a festival that celebrates Jewish culture, so many of them would stand alone as films that could be shown at any other time of the year.

“This is the strongest lineup we’ve ever had at the Jewish Film Festival.”