I’ve always loved folklore — well, the idea of it anyway. Though it can sometimes be an expression of bigoted hearsay, I am still fascinated by any story that can survive generations of telling and retelling, despite many tellers with differing versions. Moreover, these tall tales often evoke cultures that vanished before cinema, TV and the Internet became modern society’s myth-makers.

Village of Idiots, currently airing on The Jewish Channel, is one such folktale. The product of Canadian animators Eugene Fedorenko and Rose Newlove, this animated short film tells the story of Shmendrik, his mythical town of Chelm, and evokes with humor the hard lives of Old World European Jewry — a subject that’s also influenced several American animators.

Don Bluth’s 1986 film An American Tail is arguably the most widely recognized Jewish-subject animated feature to come out of the U.S. market. Taking place in 19th-century New York City, it features a Jewish family of immigrant mice — a plot point which upset cartoonist Art Spiegelman, because Maus used that same gimmick as a metaphor for Jews in the Holocaust. But while the talking cats of Maus were Nazis, the feline protagonist in Robert Crumb’s classic 1960s comic strip Fritz the Cat was a youthful hedonist. So when Ralph Bakshi animated Crumb’s work for the big screen in 1972, it received an “X” rating and promptly went on to become a smashing financial success. The clout Bakshi earned from this allowed him to direct a series of wide-release adult animated features whose plots draw heavily from the fine art of the folktale.

Though born in Haifa in 1938, Bakshi actually spent his youth stewing in the American cauldron of urban racial integration — the subject of another TJC film, Brownsville: Black & White. His family arrived in Brownsville, Brooklyn in 1939, but moved to the mostly-black Foggy Bottom section of Washington D.C. in 1947. There, all of young Ralph’s friends were black, so he convinced his parents to let him try and attend the local segregated school. In response, the principal called the police, and the family soon moved back to Brownsville — which itself boasted a group of youths whose approach to integration was just as daring as Bakshi’s.

As chronicled in Brownsville: Black & White, the Brownsville Boys Club (BBC) was founded in 1940 by youths barred from using local playing fields. In response, they created a 2,000-strong integrated youth organization which survived until Robert Moses inflicted housing projects on the neighborhood, bringing on a new form of segregation in urban renewal that killed off budding racial unity. We learn that today’s BBC reunions occur along racial lines — much like the composition of Brownsville gangs Murder Incorporated, The Saints and The Gents, who helped bring the neighborhood its dangerous reputation in the 1930’s and 40’s.

Growing up in such a mix sharpened Bakshi’s later animated portrayal of New York City race relations. His memorable 1975 film Coonskin was steeped in the folklore and racist stereotypes found in Disney’s notorious Song of the South. With Coonskin, Bakshi transplanted South brothers Rabbit, Fox and Bear to Harlem, where they became violent gangsters. Like Village of Idiots, this film presented a stylized version of the past, using it as a platform for current social commentary. Bakshi’s fable was distributed by Cinemation Industries four years after the company launched the Blaxploitation genre with Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, a film whose naughty X-rated reputation proved (as with Fritz the Cat) to be a major box office draw. And yet, Coonskin never caught on with audiences, soon disappearing from theaters.

Bakshi had better success with 1981’s American Pop — tracking 90 years in the lineage of one Russian Jewish family whose members are defined by their music. Beginning with the first generation’s flight from 1890’s Russia to New York City, and ending there with the fourth one’s rise to pop stardom, the film’s soundtrack incorporates several songs by Jewish-Americans like George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Bob Dylan and Lou Reed. In addition, Bakshi also throws in versions of people he grew up with back in Brownsville, and never shies away from depicting the effects of crime and drug abuse on their lives.

Looking back, my own introduction to Bakshi’s work came at a younger age than was probably healthy for me. When I first saw his 1977 film Wizards on VHS, I was amazed by visuals and subject matter not seen in the Saturday morning cartoons I was used to. Later, I saw his New York-set films, which convey the filthiness and danger of the city during the 1970’s, but with plots that recall Bakshi’s Brooklyn roots, and with caricatured performances that would resonate with me long after I viewed them.

That resonance is key to any folktale. Otherwise, why would anyone bother retelling the stories of Shmendrik, Chelm or even the BBC — whose integrated existence might seem to many present-day Brownsville residents as no more than a local myth? Yes, as long as people love a good story, folklore will survive.

In our Modern Jewish Mom Passover Special, still airing on The Jewish Channel, we feature the quirky Barbie-doll-centered seder table centerpieces made by Helen Schwimmer, author and mother of PopJudaica.com creator Sara Schwimmer. Well, as Sara points out, one of the dolls, the one posed as Moses’ sister, Miriam, is not a Barbie but a “Blossom” — from the sitcom of the same name, starring Jewish actress Mayim Bialik, that ran on NBC in the early 1990s (remember Blossom’s best-friend named “Six” and the funny hats they both wore?).

We thought that was just an amusing side tidbit to a fun segment, but the online clip caught the attention of none other than “Blossom” star Mayim Bialik herself! Tickled, Bialik emailed Sara Schwimmer through PopJudaica.com, and, long story short, the two met up recently while Bialik was in New York shooting an episode of the TLC network’s “What Not To Wear,” with the now famous Blossom-cum-Miriam doll that started it all in tow (see picture)!

And Schwimmer was not disappointed by the meeting with her childhood doll’s real-life counterpart. “She’s so great,” Schwimmer told The Docent of Bialik.

So the moral of the story is that while Barbie dolls represent an ideal unattainable by real live women, the real live “Blossom” easily surpasses the doll. (Though we are disappointed by the absence of a silly hat on both doll and human versions.)

The American grande dame of action is Kathryn Bigelow. Back in 1978, while still at Colombia University’s film school, she directed The Set-Up — a deconstruction of film violence in which we hear two professors analyze a fistfight. In 1987, Bigelow earned critical notice for Near Dark, a genre-bending vampire western. Next came films like 1991’s Point Break, about thrill-seeking bank robbers; 1995’s Strange Days, about a near-future murder mystery; and 2002’s K19: The Widowmaker, about the doomed crew of Russia’s first nuclear-powered submarine. Her latest film, The Hurt Locker, tracks an under-fire U.S. Army bomb squad in Iraq.

German filmmaker Lexi Alexander used her experience in professional martial arts to get work as a Hollywood stunt woman — then decided to move behind the camera. In 2002, she directed Johnny Flynton — about a boxer with a violent temper — which was Oscar-nominated for best short film. Her first feature was 2005’s Green Street Hooligans, about a gang of English football fans, while last year’s Punisher: War Zone follows the titular vigilante’s blood feud with a disfigured mob boss.

Karyn Kusama also made a name for herself with a boxing picture. In 2000, she debuted with the critically-acclaimed independent feature Girlfight, launching the career of Michelle Rodriguez. Off that success, Kusama scored a $62 million budget for 2005’s Aeon Flux, about a female assassin (Charlize Theron) in a dystopian future. But that film, an adaptation of animator Peter Chung’s MTV cartoon series, proved a critical and financial disappointment, taking in only $52 million worldwide. Next, Kusama will team with Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody for the horror-comedy Jennifer’s Body, about a possessed cheerleader who targets her male classmates for death.

Some female directors, like Mimi Leder, have used television as their gateway to action films. The first woman to graduate Hollywood’s renowned AFI Conservatory, Leder spent 10 years directing both TV movies and episodes of shows like L.A. Law and China Beach (which she also produced), before being tapped to helm her first feature, 1997’s The Peacemaker. It was the first release by DreamWorks Studios — which banked $50 million on the project and brought in George Clooney & Nicole Kidman to star — and resulted in a $110 million worldwide take. That success earned Leder enough clout to take on 1998’s disaster epic Deep Impact, which earned $350 million worldwide. Currently, she is working on an adaptation of the comic book Mandrake, starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

English director Antonia Bird’s first feature is still her most controversial — at least for Catholics. 1994’s Priest created an international uproar with its tale of one clergyman’s crisis of faith over his homosexuality. But for our purposes, it also marked her first feature collaboration with Scottish actor Robert Carlyle. Having already played a self-mutilating alcoholic in Bird’s 1993 TV film Safe, Carlyle starred in 1997’s Face, about a group of bank robbers who turn on one another. In 1999, Bird tapped Carlyle again to co-star in Ravenous, a horror-thriller pitting the occupants of a lonely military outpost against their own hunger — with macabre results. Their next collaboration appears to be The Meat Trade, with Carlyle and Colin Firth playing a pair of modern-day body snatchers.

Other female directors have only sampled action genres. Betty Thomas, who started as a stage and television actress, had financial success with comedies like 1995’s The Brady Bunch Movie and 1998’s Doctor Dolittle, before helming the $70 million action-comedy I Spy, starring Eddie Murphy, which earned $50 million worldwide.

Catherine Hardwicke, meanwhile, scored big with 2008’s Twilight, about a high school girl who falls for a vegitarian vampire classmate. The film has earned more than $370 million worldwide, but Hardwicke — who made her reputation with dramas like 2000’s Thirteen and 2005’s Lords of Dogtown — has bowed out of doing any sequels.

Mary Harron also passed on doing a follow-up to her most famous work — 2000’s American Psycho. That film, starring Christian Bale as a 1980’s yuppie with a taste for both Huey Lewis and murder, was bookended by two biopics of infamous women: 1996’s I Shot Andy Warhol and 2005’s The Notorious Bettie Page. Yet, neither approached the full-on insanity of this blood-soaked Bret Easton Ellis adaptation.

Say, when did you first learn about sex? How about profanity? What about the very existence of women on this planet? What tipped you off to them?

Well, if you grew up watching feature films produced for the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, then you wouldn’t find any of those subjects addressed on-screen — because none of them make the final cut.

And who’s holding the scissors? That would be filmmakers like Yehuda Grovais and Shalom Eisenbach — who are the subjects of two fascinating documentaries playing on The Jewish Channel.

Personal computers have entered ultra-Orthodox — or, as they’re called by those in the know, “Haredi” — households, and that means a loophole in prohibitions on cinema and television — creating an ever-expanding demand for feature content. But the industry producing those films has courted controversy both inside and outside the Haredi community.

In Kosher Gefilte-Film we meet Eisenbach. He’s a former-star Yeshiva student from Me’a She’arim, Jerusalem, who leads a secular lifestyle as a filmmaker. Yet, despite all appearances, Eisenbach produces a monthly Orthodox news magazine in which all shots of women are meticulously removed — something that doesn’t sit well with fellow filmmaker Avital Davidson.

“This is crazy,” Davidson fumes. “The best shots have girls. Look, this girl, a religious girl that gives birth to religious kids, that lives with a religious man, makes love to a religious man and suddenly she isn’t good for a film!”

Eisenbach replies, “It doesn’t make any difference if she is religious or not — the Orthodox community does not want to see women.”

Meanwhile, in Film Fanatic, we watch Grovais put the brakes on a complicated street-action scene, because he thinks a woman has wandered into the frame — which would render the scene unusable. The reasoning sends one secular actor into a rage.

“Your rabbis jammed your minds thousands of years ago!” he tells the producers.

Actually, we learn that Grovais no longer seeks “kosher” approval from rabbis — part of an effort to broaden the scope and style of his films. Yet, his moratorium on women persists, leading to a heated exchange between two of his female production assistants. Defending the ban, one tries to convince the other of its artistic merits.

“We don’t want [ultra-Orthodox cinema] to deteriorate and look like secular cinema.”

“What does secular cinema look like?” the other responds.

“Bad!”

“Why? Women look bad?”

“Yes.”

“Because they’re sex objects?”

“Yes.”

Despite that sentiment, there have indeed been cases of ultra-Orthodox tradition and secular cinema coming together in a respectful manner. The 2004 film Ushpizin depicted a Haredi couple whose relationship is tested during Succoth. Filmed in Me’a She’arim, it starred Shuli Rand alongside his real-life wife, Mechal Batsheva Rand, who received significant screen time — a fact that meant Ushpizin would probably go unseen by most Haredim, even if it were available on CD.

This clash between religious prohibition and secular media provides an ironic business opportunity for Grovais’s film producer, Avi Greenberg. He notes how in Bnei Brak many Haredim record their marriages on video, but aren’t allowed to own VCRs to watch the final tape. So, he started a tape-to-CD conversion service under the marketing slogan “when was the last time you saw your wedding video?”

Elsewhere, Eisenbach cleverly exploits the no-women policy in his comedic film A Week Without Mother, in which a Hasidic father is left to look after his four children while his wife (who is never seen) takes a vacation.

Still, despite all attempts to be sensitive, neither director can fully escape criticism from the more conservative elements of their community. Eisenbach recalls how a group of men blocked the doors of a Yiddish play he and his brother produced, while Grovais shows off a collection of posters depicting him as both a snake and a corruptor of children.

Yet, in the midst of all this, Haredi cinema has actually expanded in a new direction: films for women, directed by women. A July 2007 Ha’aretz article noted that a few Haredi women were diving into feature filmmaking, filling a vacuum in female-oriented content. Most have grown-up living traditional Haredi lifestyles, and Grovais commented on the unique challenges they face — such as coordinating personal expenses with those required for a proper film shoot.

“A woman making her first movie must finance production from her household budget,” he said, “instead of a new kitchen or enlarging a room.”

But all of this might be changing, and in a more progressive direction. In the final shot of Film Fanatic, we see Grovais directing a scene with actresses, testament to his evolving beliefs. Going forward, other Haredi directors will have to consider a question put to Grovais by one of his female production assistants.

“Aren’t films supposed to reflect society?”

It’s a question these filmmakers must answer. Otherwise, they will go on reflecting a mixed message.

The film is in the tradition of 1967’s The Dirty Dozen, 1968’s Where Eagles Dare and (of course) 1978’s Inglorious Bastards — all three of which set their story in the midst of World War II, and where the focus was more on rip-roaring action than on what happened when the bullets stopped flying.

That kind of emphasis on the aftermath occurs in the final episode of Band of Brothers, the 2001 TV miniseries centered on the real-life U.S. 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment. Stationed in post-war Austria, Cpl. Joseph Liebgott — who is tormented by the atrocities inflicted on fellow Jews — gets tipped to the whereabouts of a former Nazi camp commandant. So, taking two comrades and a jeep, Liebgott sets out for vengeance.

The moral stakes of Liebgott’s actions were previously explored in executive producer Steven Spielberg’s films Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan. In the latter, Jewish Pvt. Stanley Mellish also thirsts for vengeance, but expresses it with a devastatingly simple message…

Still, as with last year’s Defiance, Inglourious Basterds will be that rare — and in this case, fictional — World War II film that depicts Jews taking up arms against Hitler’s agents, instead of being herded into cattle cars and concentration camps. The collective legacy of those latter images has played a powerful role in the moral conflicts inherent in being part of today’s paradigm of Jewish soldiery: The Israel Defense Forces.

Among the slew of recent films examining life in Israeli units is Amos Gitai’s 2002 feature Kedma, currently showing on The Jewish Channel. Playing out like a kind of prehistory of the IDF — by way of the Palmach and Haganah which spawned it — the film follows a group of Jewish refugees from war-ravaged Europe who fight their way into British Mandate Palestine. The fight to found the State of Israel sharpens these irregulars into a proper military force, but Gitai also asserts that it led them to reconsider the role of God and religion in a post-Holocaust Jewish nation.

Kedma is a far grittier look at the 1948 Arab-Israel War than previous depictions like 1960’s Exodus — based on the acclaimed Leon Uris novel — or 1966’s Cast a Giant Shadow. This is due to the modern sensibilities of a director who was heavily influenced by his own time in the IDF. During 1973’s Yom Kippur War, Gitai’s helicopter was shot down over the Golan Heights — an event which is the basis for his 2000 film Kippur…

The legacy of World War II rears up again in a memorable scene from 2008’s Waltz with Bashir, when director Ari Folman recalls how IDF forces allowed Lebanese Phalangist militia to enter the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila during the 1982 Lebanon War — resulting in a spree of reprisal killings over the assassination of Lebanon’s president-elect Bashir Gemayel.

Folman’s own parents are Holocaust survivors, but an old comrade explains to the director of his nights shooting flares above Sabra and Shatila — and thus providing Phalangists with enough light to complete their massacre — “we were the Nazis.”

Joseph Cedar — also a veteran of the 1982 Lebanon War — returned there with his 2007 film Beaufort. Setting the scene in 2000, at the very end of the South Lebanon conflict, Cedar focused on the emotional effects of an army in retreat.

In Beaufort, Liraz Librati commands an IDF unit stationed in an ancient mountaintop castle — a place where the only enemies to be seen are incoming mortars. Stuck with orders to wait on their go-ahead for withdrawal, Librati and his men pass the time by revealing their hopes and fears of life after soldiering…

Which brings us back to the subject of vengeance. Cedar’s 2000 feature debut, Time of Favor, revolves around a group of West Bank Jewish settlers led by the eloquent but mercurial Rabbi Meltzer.

Here, martial duty and personal conviction are one and the same — a combustible mixture which the rabbi stirs by militarizing his students. Among them are soldiers Manachem and Pini, who each vie for Meltzer’s daughter. But when the affections of one are spurned, he chooses to interpret Meltzer’s words as reason to commit a terrible act of reprisal…

Schindler’s new celebrity status came almost 20 years after his death, but his brave actions were already long known. In 1963, Yad Vashem had named him Righteous Among the Nations — the first former Nazi Party member to be so honored — and an award-winning 1982 novel, Schindler’s Ark, would later serve as the basis for the Steven Spielberg film.

Giorgio Perlasca, meanwhile, waited a bit longer to grant the world a cinematic close-up. Masquerading as a Spanish diplomat, he saved 5,000 Hungarian Jews in wartime Budapest. But when the war ended in 1945, he returned to a quiet life in Italy. It was not until 1987 that a group of Jewish survivors tracked him down, and he was honored as Righteous Among the Nations the following year. His deeds, which he had kept secret from even his family, were recounted in Enrico Deaglio’s 1993 novel, The Banality of Goodness, which was adapted for Italian TV in 2002 as Perlasca: The Courage of a Just Man.

That film, currently playing on The Jewish Channel, emphasizes Perlasca’s audacity — especially his daring rescue of two boys bound for a death camp.

It was one of many instances where Perlasca risked his own life to save Jews. The real-life confrontation was witnessed by 32-year old Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who informed Perlasca that the German officer he had spoken with was Adoph Eichmann — architect of the Nazi Final Solution.

Wallenberg himself would prove an important counterweight to Eichmann’s efforts at genocide in Hungary, sheltering 100,000 of the country’s Jews from deportation. And, like Perlasca, Wallenberg’s story was first portrayed on the small screen. In 1985, the American TV film Wallenberg: A Hero’s Story cast Richard Chamberlain in the leading role. But in 1990, Swedish director Kjell Grede gave his fellow countryman the feature film treatment with Good Evening, Mr. Wallenberg starring Stellan Skarsgard.

Another native son to receive cinematic recognition back home was Japan’s Chiune Sugihara. In 1940, Sugihara used his position at the Japanese consulate in Kaunas, Lithuania to issue at least 6,000 visas to escaping Jews. He also negotiated the right for those Jews to travel through Soviet Russia — via the Trans-Siberian Railroad — and then on to other countries like China, with its 20,000-strong “Shanghai Ghetto.” In 1997, Japanese-American Chris Tashima directed and starred in Visas and Virtue, which won the Academy Award for best live action short film.

More recently, Nippon Animation in Japan marketed an animated version of Sugihara’s story.

Halfway around the world, director Joel Santoni brought the story of yet another heroic diplomat to French television with 2008’s Aristides De Sousa Mendes, The Life Of A Just. Today considered a national hero in his native Portugal, De Sousa Mendes defied his own government’s policies in 1940 by issuing more than 30,000 Portuguese visas to those fleeing Hitler’s invasion of France — including 12,000 Jews.

For his actions, De Sousa Mendes was fired from the Portuguese diplomatic corps and stripped of his pension. Overnight, his family — including 14 children — became social outcasts. Barred from resuming an earlier career as a lawyer, he suffered a disabling stroke in 1945. The family’s sole income would be donations from a local Jewish refugee agency, and De Sousa Mendes died impoverished and disgraced in 1954.

Suffering a similar fate was Dimitar Peshev, Bulgaria’s National Assembly co-speaker and Minister of Justice during World War II. He Successfully lobbied the Bulgarian government to rescind a 1943 order to deport the country’s 48,000 Jews to Nazi concentration camps. After the war, though, he served time in Soviet prison, before returning to Bulgaria and living unrecognized and impoverished for the next three decades. In January 1973, Peshev was named Righteous Among the Nations, but died a month later. In 1998, Gabriele Nissim published The Man Who Stopped Hitler, a novel which revived interest in Peshev. Still, apart from documentary films, there aren’t yet any big screen adaptations of his story.

Elsewhere, a film is in the works about British secret service agent Frank Foley. During the years leading up to World War II, he exploited his consulate post as passport control officer in Berlin to both gather military reconnaissance, and also help Jews escape the Nazi regime. In 1999, author Michael Smith published the novel Foley: The Spy Who Saved 10,000 Jews, which helped lead Yad Vashem to name Foley Righteous Among the Nations that same year.

Meanwhile, Hallmark Hall of Fame has announced the beginning of principal photography on a TV film-version of Irena Sendler’s wartime activities titled Miss Irena’s Children. The film was shot in Riga, Latvia and stars Anna Paquin.

As a member of the Zegota Polish Underground, the catholic Sendler helped smuggle 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto. And though she was named Righteous Among the Nations in 1965, it was a 1999 play produced by American schoolchildren — titled Life In A Jar — which raised international awareness of Sendler, culminating in her 2007 nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Another Catholic with a film is Irish priest Hugh O’Flaherty, whose nickname “the Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican” was earned for saving 4,000 Allied soldiers and Jews from Nazi capture in wartime Rome. In 1983, Gregory Peck played Father O’Flaherty in the star-studded American television film The Scarlet and the Black.

But not all efforts at saving Jews were successful, and such was the case of Kurt Gerstein. A Waffen-SS officer who witnessed the gassing of Jews at Belzec and Treblinka, Gerstein approached a Swedish diplomat in 1942 — and later, Vatican representatives — with details of what he had seen. Despite hopes of alerting the wider world to Nazi atrocities, his written reports led to his arrest and “suicide.” A 2002 film adaptation of his story, titled Amen, aired on the Jewish Channel this past year. In 2007, Either Or, a play about Gerstein written by Schindler’s Ark author Thomas Keneally, staged a premiere in Washington DC.

For ten years, Grossman exploited his ability to publish works of striking realism on the plight of all Russians, including Jews, but with a patriotic style that satisfied Soviet censors. As Keith Gessen wrote in a 2006 New Yorker article, Grossman “understood the rules and he was going to play by them.”

He was not alone. “The rules” had been beaten into fellow writer Olga Berggolts after she was imprisoned in late 1938 as part of Stalin’s Great Purge. Composer Dmitri Shostakovich had been publicly denounced in 1936, while the poet Anna Akhmatova was slapped with a 15-year publication ban on all of her work, and forced to hide her masterpiece, Requiem, which mourned Stalin’s campaign against his own people. Yet, when Hitler’s army besieged the city of Leningrad in 1941, all three took on the public mantles of Soviet patriots.

To mark today’s 65th anniversary of the lifting of that siege, the Shorefront Y hosted the Dialogue Literary Theater’s presentation of “I Speak With You from Leningrad…”, a Russian-language performance taken from the music of Shostakovich and the writings of Berggolts and Akhmatova, both of whom weathered the brutal 900-day Leningrad siege, in part, through defiant artistic expression. Indeed, the title of the play itself is a quote spoken by Berggolts and others while broadcasting patriotic writings over Soviet radio from within the embattled city.

The fact that anyone survived such a harrowing ordeal is, itself, amazing. And yet, when set against the larger war — which left over 20 million Russian casualties — and subsequent decades of Russian Jewish life that saw the threat of a Nazi-sponsored Holocaust replaced with Soviet anti-Semitism, one might wonder why a Jewish organization would host a reading of works celebrating Soviet patriotism.

One reason may lay within the tight controls placed on Russian artists of the Great Purge era — a time when the everyday existence of many Russian Jews, especially those with artistic celebrity, was overshadowed by a government demand for intellectual and religious submission. In order to survive, poets and journalists of all religious stripes had to compromise free expression for messages considered acceptable to Stalin’s government. And no Russian Jewish writer better embodied that compromise than Vasily Grossman.

When Germany invaded Russia in June 1941, Grossman became a field correspondent for the newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (”Red Star”), and spent three years riding with the Red Army through some of the most pivotal battlefields of the war. This included another famously-besieged city: Stalingrad, where he wrote about Vasily Zaitsev, a Soviet sniper whose encounter with a German opponent is the basis for the film Enemy at the Gates.

But as the Red Army cut south into Ukraine, and then west toward Berlin, Grossman witnessed a far less heroic side of the war. He learned that the Jewish populace in his hometown of Berdichev, including his own mother, had been murdered. In Poland, he saw the remains of the Treblinka and Majdanek concentration camps, and his 1944 article “The Hell of Treblinka” would later be used as evidence for the prosecution at Nuremberg.

These experiences would spur Grossman and fellow writer Ilya Ehrenburg to begin compiling The Black Book, a master collection of Soviet data on the Holocaust. Yet, unlike Grossman’s earlier writings, this one would be suppressed by Soviet censors — due in no small part to the report’s assertion that the Holocaust was primarily aimed at Jews, and that Ukrainians had been complicit in the Nazi liquidation of ghettos like Berdichev.

For Grossman, The Black Book’s suppression was devastating, and served as his wakeup call to the overtly anti-Semitic policies of the Stalin regime. After more than a decade of dutifully writing by “the rules,” the creative compromise he’d come to live by was broken. For the rest of his life, Grossman tried — mostly in vain — to publish works which included criticisms of the Soviet system.

Again, he was not alone. In 1987, 43 years after the end of the Leningrad siege (and 21 years after her death), Anna Akhmatova’s long-suppressed Requiem was finally published in its complete form in Russia.

Actor Richard Kind tells us about the time his good friend George Clooney begged him for a Christmas tree and what Clooney did when Kind refused. Rapper Y-Love and New York magazine editor Jesse Oxfeld comment. It’s all part of the newest episode of Holy Dazed: Chanukah, now playing on TJC.
Click here to watch in HD.
Happy Chanukah!

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.