In the film Circumcise Me, lapsed Catholic-turned-Orthodox-Jewish-comedian Yisrael Campbell shares the life story that inspired his hilarious comedy act, but on a recent trip to New York City, Campbell revealed some tidbits about his life that you won’t see in the film.

We caught up with Campbell at his alma mater, the Circle in The Square Drama School, to find out how he went from being a struggling actor named Christopher in Los Angeles to a successful comedian named Yisrael in Jerusalem.
You can also see the video at full size on your television screen as part of the latest episode of the TJC Original Series TJC Movie Talk.
Host Alana Newhouse provides the voice over here.

Her father was actually a Nazi, and she was actually conceived as part of Hitler’s program to propagate the Aryan race.

Her shocking story, as revealed in Cover Up: Norway’s Nazi Secret, brought to you by The Jewish Channel.

Amidst the current revival of Yiddish music and culture in attempts to keep the language from “dying out,” it’s easy to forget that Yiddish has led a tenuous existence through much of the 20th Century. Long seen by the wider world as the Jewish tongue, Yiddish has survived suppression, obsolescence and the extermination of most of its native speakers. Today, its musical torchbearers offer CDs and digital downloads to fans of all religions. But back when opera was the only place to hear the greatest singers of the age, the renowned voice that brought Yiddish songs to non-Jewish ears belonged to Isa Kremer, the subject of the film Isa Kremer: The People’s Diva.

A living reminder of a vanished people, Kremer was born into the world’s largest community of Yiddish speakers, the five-million-strong Jewish “pale of settlement” in 19th-Century Western Russia. Yiddish folksongs she heard within the kitchens and wedding ceremonies of her youth would later be performed in sold-out opera houses around Europe and the Americas. She became renowned for her innovative arrangements and her passionate interpretation of lyrics, with dramatic gestures that would bring Jewish characters to life on the stage.

Always aiming for the broader audience, she made only a single foray onto New York’s famous Second Avenue stretch of Yiddish theaters. Yet the show produced what is arguably the genre’s most popular song of that era, “Mein Shtetale Belz.” Written about Kremer’s Bessarabian hometown, it evoked a way of life obliterated by the Second World War.

On tour, she performed in Russian, Italian, French, German, Polish and English, but things always got dicey when she insisted on singing songs in her native tongue. In 1922, an antisemitic riot broke out in Warsaw because of a Yiddish performance she was to give to a Jewish audience. Elsewhere, resistance came from Jews themselves. At stops in America, Yiddish was looked on by some Jews as the unwanted legacy of Old World poverty and the shtetl. In 1936 Berlin, German-speaking Jews looked down on Yiddish speakers because they believed it reinforced the Nazis’ assertion that Jews were different. While in staunchly-Hebrew-speaking 1948 Israel it was called “the language of exile.” Yet in each instance, Kremer used the leverage of her celebrity to bypass these complaints and perform anyway.

Today, commercial recordings of Kremer’s voice are difficult to come by. But some modern singers have continued her efforts at spreading the word about Yiddish beyond the Jewish realm. A few years back Chava Alberstein, an Israeli musician who performs Yiddish songs, got together with Peter Yarrow and New York band the Klezmatics to tape a live concert special at the Neue Synagogue in Berlin. And for at least one evening, in the musical spirit of Isa Kremer, Germans, Israelis and Americans honored a language which has refused to die.

Carrie Bradshaw and her crew might be a little misguided and materialistic, but Sex and the City can teach us one thing: relationships are an endless topic of eavesdrop-worthy conversation. There’s always more to say about other people’s love lives, and there are always ears eager to listen.

It’s a lesson Israeli director Amos Gitai has clearly learned well. In a city halfway across the world from SATC’s NYC, Gitai also tells a story of friendship, love and sex; but he focuses less on the purses, and more on the emotional baggage, his characters carry.

Set in Tel Aviv, Alila follows a bob-haired sexpot named Gabi who’s taken a strong, but emotionally unavailable man for a lover. Like the women in “Sex in the City,” Gabi goes shoe-shopping with her best friend, but Gabi and Mali’s conversations forgo the zingers to focus on candid soul searching. The questions the women raise are just as riveting as the brunch discussions found in SATC, but they handle the topics a little less flippantly. Gabi’s flaky love life, we realize, is a result of her own insecurities: deep down, she’s not the vixen she makes herself out to be.

(Imagine if Samantha Jones turned soft!)

It’s been said that the fifth friend in Sex and the City is the city itself. Similarly, Alila is full of careful cinematic decisions that showcase Tel Aviv as one of the many characters in Gitai’s panorama.

Just as Sex and the City teaches audiences the nuances of New York City culture — from what it means to live on Park Avenue to the necessity of looking down on Los Angeles — Alila captures the nuances of Tel Aviv life. The illegal Asian laborers, the Holocaust survivor living next door, and the drama surrounding the adolescent boy who’s afraid to serve in the army are unique to Israel’s social climate. And, as a backdrop to the plot’s twists and turns, subtle details, such as reports of violence playing on the radio in the background and the bustling colorful streets full of vendors seen from a car window, convey a sense of the general atmosphere of the city that shapes the lives of its characters.

Bottom line: If you’re in the mood for a movie about love, sex and friends in a dynamic city — that focuses a little less on looking fabulous and offers a little more Jewish than a convert named Charlotte — check out Alila.

The hilarious film Circumcise Me: The Comedy of Yisrael Campbell is making its World Television Premiere on The Jewish Channel this month. Orthodox-convert comedian Yisrael Campbell shares his stand-up routine and the wild life story that inspired it.
Watch the trailer above, read more about the film here, and watch the whole thing, in all its side-splitting, knee-slapping hilarity, on TJC this month!

Violence stemming from land disputes between Arabs and Jews is a primary concern within the country. So, in his landmark documentary series Land of the Settlers, Israeli newsman Chaim Yavin starts taking sides in the complicated debate over the withdrawal of Jewish settlements from Gaza and the West Bank, visiting the homes of both Arabs and Jews living in the disputed territories.

The origins of these settlement communities stretch back to decisions made by political figures like Moshe Dayan. In Slaves of the Sword: Moshe Dayan, we get an up-close and personal look at the flamboyant and controversial Israeli Defense Minister. With testimony from both supporters and critics, the legacy of Dayan’s decisions are painted in vivid color.

But for today’s ground-level IDF soldier, the only shade that really matters is green. Among the young conscripts who choose to break their silence in At The Green Line, the politics of protecting Israel’s borders are not always clear-cut. Some refuse to serve, while others try to change the system from inside.

Israel’s not only inhabited by Jews and Arabs, though. Amongst the country’s diverse population is a small group of African-American immigrants who practice Old Testament tradition and call themselves African Hebrews. The revival of polygamous marriage practices among this community is explored in Sister Wife. And while embracing a new spouse may make a husband happy, we see how it can also make a wife feel like a second fiddle.

Issues of sexual needs vs. family acceptance are not restricted to new immigrants either. The travails of being both Orthodox and secretly gay in modern Israel are captured with emotional detail in Say Amen. Within a close-knit Moroccan-Israeli family where producing children is a paramount value, one man struggles to confess his homosexuality to those closest to him.

To see these and more films focusing on the promised land, head over to TJC’s Israel category for a current slate of provocative and engaging titles.

One of the most shocking Holocaust stories is that of Ilse Stein. The Jewess and the Captain reveals how Ilse, a beautiful young Jewish girl, fell in love with a Nazi officer, who went on to save her life — and the lives of several other Jews from the Minsk ghetto. The documentary shares an interview with Ilse just before her death, shocking archival photographs, and KGB secret documents in order to reexamine her strange romance that blossomed in the middle of the ghetto.

While The Jewess and the Captain explores the Holocaust from a Jew’s perspective, Shadows Of Memory looks at WWII through the rarely-explored eyes of ordinary German citizens. People often ask, “How could the Holocaust have happened? How could so many good people not see what was going on?” This documentary tries to answer the daunting question through conversations with three generations of German women, including the filmmaker’s mother, a woman who lived through the war but didn’t see the atrocities—or chose not to.

With the overwhelming number of horror stories the Holocaust produced, it is easy to close our eyes to the most disturbing facts and tales, but Leo’s Journey: The Story Of The Mengele Twins (which premieres tomorrow) confronts the story of Dr. Joseph Mengele head on. Following a rare survivor of the notorious doctor’s “medical” experiments, on his journey back to Auschwitz for the first time since the war, the film explores what Mengele — often referred to as the Angel of Death — was doing with Jewish twins at Auschwitz. What was he researching and why did only 258 of 3,000 twins survive?

Clearly, Leo’s Journey is meant for an adult audience, but A Story About a Bad Dream is a Holocaust film geared towards children. It tells the story of a little girl’s Holocaust experience through the gentle voice of a naïve child, with colorful reenactments that make the story digestible for younger viewers, who, in decades to come, will be responsible for keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive.

These are just a few of the excellent and eye-opening documentaries showing in TJC’s History and Remembrance category, where you’ll find new and provocative titles sharing stories from the Jewish past every month.

The documentary Divine Food: 100 Years in the Kosher Delicatessen Trade tells the story of the Oscherwitz family and their passion for making kosher corned beef, pastrami and other classic deli fare. But tasting is believing. So we hit up New York City’s most famous kosher and kosher-style delis to find out why this food is held so close to Jewish hearts…and stomachs!

Check out TJC Movie Talk — hosted by Forward Arts and Culture Editor Alana Newhouse — in the TJC Original Series category for an inside look at some of the other delicious film selections playing on The Jewish Channel.

For the Magav, Israel’s border guard, keeping terrorists out of the country is a major concern, but not the only one. Far away from heavily patrolled border crossings with Gaza and the West Bank, and out in the hinterlands of the Sinai and Negev deserts, police strive to rebuff entrance to another unwanted immigrant group: Russian prostitutes.

Bringing foreign sex workers to cities like Tel Aviv means easy profits for their handlers. When legal transport isn’t possible, smuggling networks enlist rural cash-poor Bedouinsto facilitate border jumpings from nearby Egypt. Police respond by relying on calculated surveillance and night vision equipment to intercept crossings. Despite these efforts, illegal immigrants with futures in prostitution still make it through.

These cat-and-mouse games are similar to those being played out along America’s desert border with Mexico. Like the Magav, U.S. patrols employ advanced military technologies to guard a massive stretch of territory that far outstrips their manpower.

For illegal aliens who dodge capture, the reward is finding agricultural and service work with dollar wages exceeding anything to be found back home. For Russian prostitutes who find a way into Israel, the payoff is often a life of sexual slavery.

The film Women For Sale recounts this harsh lifestyle from the point of view of the prostitutes themselves. Their illegal immigrant status keeps them firmly under the psychological control of gangs who literally own their bodies, and pimps who ensure they turn a profit.

In Israel, trafficking for sexual exploitation was only made a crime in 2000. Before that, smuggling prostitutes was a safer alternative to running drugs, weapons and terrorists. That industry’s continuing legacy has given Israel prominent mention in annual U.S. and U.N. human trafficking reports.

But the bad press has had an effect. As NYU Professor Rakefet Zalashik tells the Forward’s Alana Newhouse on the latest episode of TJC Movie Talk, Israeli authorities have recently made a more concentrated effort to fight human traffickers and protect former-Soviet immigrants. As for the Magavnikim who watch the dusty border with Egypt, each night’s work is another opportunity to keep terrorists out — and to further block up the prostitute pipeline.