Join the Institute virtually on Zoom on Monday, November 25, at 12:00 PM for a webinar with Olga Gershenson (University of Massachusetts Amherst). Prof. Gershenson will be discussing her latest book, New Israeli Horror: Local Cinema, Global Genre.

Before 2010, there were no Israeli horror films. The next decade saw a blossoming of the genre by young Israeli filmmakers. New Israeli Horror is the first book to tell their story and analyze their films, from inception to reception. What triggered this sudden development? Why did Israeli filmmakers turn to horror? How do their films portray Israel? What kind of horror scenarios do they depict and how? These questions are particularly poignant now, in light of the attack on October 7, which pitted the real-life horrors against the fictional ones. This talk will include clips from relevant films. No advance viewing is required.

Olga Gershenson is Professor of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies and of Film Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. A multi-disciplinary scholar, her interests lie at the intersection of culture, history, and film. She is the author of New Israeli Horror: Local Cinema, Global Genre (2023), The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe (2013), Gesher: Russian Theater in Israel (2005), as well as editor of Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender (2009). She is currently working on a volume titled The Oxford Handbook of Judaism and Film.

Supported by the generosity of the Radov and Kaye families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

Join the Institute on Wednesday, November 20, at 6:00 PM for this year’s Yosef Yerushalmi Annual Memorial Lecture, “On Jewish Suffering, Jewish History, and the Need to Rethink Antisemitism”, with Magda Teter. This is a hybrid event, you may attend in-person at 617 Kent Hall or virtually via Zoom. Please register using the appropriate link below.

In 2022, graffiti was found in Bethesda, MD., saying, “No Mercy for Jews.” Since October 7th, outbreaks of virulent antisemitism, contempt, and lack of empathy for Jewish suffering have been manifest widely. In this talk, Magda Teter will explore the deep habits of thinking about Jews and traditional scholarly approaches to antisemitism, and seek to reframe our understanding of anti-Jewish animus and antisemitism.

Magda Teter is Professor of History and the Shvidler Chair of Judaic Studies at Fordham University. Teter is the author of Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland (Cambridge, 2005), Sinners on Trial (Harvard, 2011), which was a finalist for the Jordan Schnitzer Prize, Blood Libel: On the Trail of An Antisemitic Myth (Harvard, 2020), Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism (Princeton, 2023), and of dozens of articles in English, Hebrew, Italian, and Polish. Her book Blood Libel won the 2020 National Jewish Book Award, The George L. Mosse Prize from the American Historical Association, and the Bainton Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society. Teter is the recipient of prestigious fellowships, including from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the NEH. She has served as the co-editor of the AJS Review and as the Vice-President for Publications of the Association for Jewish Studies. Teter is currently the President of the American Academy for Jewish Research.

Supported by the generosity of the Knapp and Kaye families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

Join the Institute on Thursday, November 14th, at 12:00 PM for a hybrid lecture with Benjamin Berman-Gladstone, the Warren and Susan Stern Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Thought at Columbia University. You may attend in-person at 617 Kent Hall or virtually via Zoom. Register using the appropriate link below. Please note that registration for in-person attendance will close on Wednesday, November 13 at 3:00 p.m.

“Zionism” is often defined in a vacuum, sometimes (especially by its advocates) as a national liberation movement, and sometimes (especially by its opponents) as a colonial plot. In this lecture, Dr. Gladstone will argue for a history of Zionism not as an abstraction but as a social and intellectual movement embedded in myriad cultural and political contexts across Southwest Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Zionist thought has rarely been reducible to a concrete/static set of principles. Rather, it has operated as a network of overlapping institutions and initiatives or as a space of contestation over issues like labor, gender, culture, and colonialism. By understanding the fragmented and complex development of Zionism across the Jewish world before and since 1948, we can better understand not only its roles in Jewish history but also its manifestations inside and outside Israeli society today.

Benjamin Berman-Gladstone (B.A. Brown University; Ph.D. New York University) is the Warren and Susan Stern Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Thought at Columbia University. He was previously a Fulbright Research Fellow in Israel and a Wexner Graduate Fellow. He specializes in Middle Eastern Zionist thought, Middle Eastern Jewish migration history, and Adeni history. His dissertation, completed in 2024, focused on colonialism and resistance in the Aden protectorates, Adeni Jewish political activism and migration from Aden and Yemen to Israel, and enslavement and the slave trade in the Eastern Aden Protectorate (in its Red Sea and Indian Ocean contexts) in the 1930s and 1940s.

This event was made possible by the generosity of Warren and Susan Stern and the Kaye family.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

Join the Institute in-person at 617 Kent Hall on Tuesday, October 29, at noon for a book talk with Yosefa Raz (University of Haifa), who will be launching her new book, The Poetics of Prophecy: Modern Afterlives of a Biblical Tradition.

Since the mid-1700s, poets and scholars have been deeply entangled in the project of reinventing prophecy. Moving between literary and biblical studies, The Poetics of Prophecy reveals how Romantic poetry is linked to modern biblical scholarship’s development. On the one hand, scholars, intellectuals, and artists discovered models of strong prophecy in biblical texts, shoring up aesthetic and nationalist ideals, while on the other, poets drew upon a countertradition of destabilizing, indeterminate, weak prophetic power. Yosefa Raz considers British and German Romanticism alongside their margins, incorporating Hebrew literature written at the turn of the twentieth century in the Russian Empire. Ultimately, she explains the weakness of modern poet-prophets not only as a crisis of secularism but also, strikingly, as part of the instability of the biblical text itself.

Yosefa Raz is a senior lecturer in the department of English Literature at the University of Haifa, where she specializes in the study of the Bible and its reception, poetry and poetics, and Romantic and contemporary poetry. She is also a poet and translator, with work recently published in The Brooklyn Rail, Boston Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Supported by the generosity of the Appel and Kaye families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

Join the Institute in-person at 617 Kent Hall on Monday, October 28, at 6:00 PM for a discussion with Amanda Miryem-Khaye Siegel, co-editor of Women on the Yiddish Stage, and Caraid O’Brien, contributing author.

The integration of women into public Jewish performance (Yiddish-language theater by 1877 and Hebrew-language theater by about 1918) was a revolution in modern Jewish culture. While a great deal of seasoned Yiddish-speaking male talent preexisted theater in the form of cantors, choristers, and tavern singers, East European Jewish women had no experience participating in public Jewish performance. From the theater’s first days, women assumed positions of authority, security, and visibility in great numbers. Rapidly, by the 1890s, when the center of the Yiddish theater shifted from cities throughout Romania and the Russian Empire where it first launched in the late 1870s to cities across the globe — including London, Buenos Aires, and New York City by the turn of the century — substantial numbers of female Yiddish actors enjoyed celebrity on par with their male counterparts. Women on the Yiddish Stage presents an array of scholarly essays that challenge the existing historical accounting of the modern Yiddish theater; highlight pioneering artists, creators, and impresarios; and map sources and methodologies of this rich area of forgotten history.

Amanda Miryem-Khaye Seigel is a Yiddish singer, songwriter, actor, recording artist and scholar in Yiddish music and culture who “exemplifies the attempt to bring a centuries-old language and culture into the contemporary world” (New York Times). She has performed internationally and released a CD of original and adapted Yiddish songs called "Toyznt tamen=A thousand flavors" in 2015. Miryem-Khaye is co-editor (with Alyssa Quint) of Women on the Yiddish Stage (Legenda, 2023) and a member of the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project. Visit http://www.memkhes.com for more information.

Caraid O'Brien has been translating and performing the plays of Sholem Asch since her debut production of God of Vengeance "set Show World aflame" according to the Village Voice in 1999.  She has received three new play commissions from the Foundation for Jewish Culture and was commissioned by Theater J and Solas Nua in DC to write The Rabbi's House, her adaptation of Sholem Asch's Ibsen inspired drama Rabbi Doctor Silver.  She was a 2019 Translation Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center and Sholem Asch Underworld Trilogy, her translation of three Asch plays was published by White Goat Press. Caraid co-curated the theater section of Yiddish: A Global Culture, the permanent exhibit at the Yiddish Book Center and studied Yiddish theater history and performance with legendary Yiddish actors Luba Kadison and Seymour Rexite.   caraidobrien.com

Supported by the generosity of the Radov and Kaye families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

Join the Institute on Tuesday, October 22, at 7:00 PM for an in-person screening of Israeli film Delegation, introduced by IIJS Film Programmer Stuart Weinstock. Prof. Weinstock will also lead an audience discussion after the screening.

Delegation dramatizes a common Israeli rite of passage: the high school class trip to Holocaust memorial sites in Poland before teenagers begin their IDF service. On this particular trip, shy boy Frisch, aspiring artist Nitzan, and class heartthrob Ido struggle with love, friendship, and politics in the crucible of a busy itinerary through traumatic history. Their experiences are both universally teenage and uniquely Israeli.
(105 minutes; English, Hebrew, and Polish with English subtitles)

Supported by the generosity of the Kaye and Radov families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

Join the Institute on Zoom on Tuesday, October 8, at 12:00 PM for a discussion led by IIJS Co-Director Rebecca Kobrin featuring Professor Arnie Eisen of the Jewish Theological Seminar, Professor David Feldman of Birkbeck, University of London, Professor Susannah Heschel of Dartmouth College, and Professor Derek Penslar of Harvard University.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas invaded Israel and perpetrated the most deadly assault on Jews since the Holocaust.  This attack upended many assumptions both scholars and the public held about Jewish sovereignty, security, and politics.  The activism and protests that exploded throughout the world in the aftermath of this attack raised questions about antisemitism and Israel's place in the world.

Now that a year has passed, scholars must begin to frame and analyze all that took place on and since October 7 within the broader scope of Jewish history.  What are the best frameworks through which to think about, conceptualize, and narrate the events of the past year?  What will this date signify for Jewish history in the future?  Should October 7 be considered a turning point in Jewish history?  

In this webinar, Professor Rebecca Kobrin will lead a discussion with Professor Arnie Eisen [JTS], Professor David Feldman [Birkbeck, University of London], and Professor Susannah Heschel [Dartmouth College]. Together, they will reflect on the significance of the past year from various vantage points in Jewish Studies and provide fresh frameworks for understanding the new terrain in which Jews in Israel and the Diaspora find themselves today.

Rebecca Kobrin is the Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History at Columbia University, specializing in modern Jewish migration, immigration history, urban studies, and business history. She earned her B.A. from Yale and her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, followed by postdoctoral fellowships at Yale and NYU. Kobrin is the author of Jewish Bialystok and Its Diaspora, which won the Jordan Schnitzer Prize, and has edited several volumes, including Chosen Capital and Salo Baron. Her forthcoming book, A Credit to the Nation (Harvard University Press, 2024), explores the world of East European immigrant bankers in America. She has received Columbia’s Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award for her exceptional teaching and mentoring and is a principal investigator of the award-winning Historical NYC Project, a digital humanities initiative mapping New York City’s demographic shifts from 1850 to 1940.

Arnie Eisen is Chancellor Emeritus and Professor of Jewish Thought at The Jewish Theological Seminary. He is a leading authority on American Judaism, and has made significant contributions to Jewish thought and education. Serving as JTS chancellor from 2007 to 2020, he transformed the training of Jewish leaders, emphasizing innovation and authenticity in Jewish life during times of rapid change. Eisen spearheaded the development of JTS’s 21st Century Campus and launched initiatives to expand access to Jewish learning through online resources, public courses, and digitization of JTS’s library. His scholarship includes Galut and Rethinking Modern Judaism, and he has taught at Stanford, Tel Aviv, and Columbia universities. Eisen also serves on advisory boards for the Tanenbaum Center, Covenant Foundation, and Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture.

David Feldman is Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism and a Professor of History, specializing in the history of antisemitism, Jewish history, racialization, and migration in modern Britain. Since joining Birkbeck in 1994, he has been actively engaged in research which addresses public policy, leading a pan-European project on contemporary antisemitism in Western Europe. Feldman has advised institutions such as the United Nations, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and Human Rights Watch, as well as UK bodies like the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism. His writings on antisemitism have appeared in publications including The Guardian, Financial Times, and Haaretz. His latest book, co-edited with Marc Volovici, is Antisemitism, Islamophobia and the Politics of Definition (2023).

Susannah Heschel is the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, where she chairs the Jewish Studies Program and is a faculty member in the Religion Department. Her scholarship focuses on 19th- and 20th-century Jewish and Protestant thought, the history of biblical scholarship, Jewish scholarship on Islam, and the history of antisemitism. Among her many publications are Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, which won a National Jewish Book Award, and The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany. She has a forthcoming book, co-written with Sarah Imhoff, The Woman Question in Jewish Studies with Princeton University Press. Heschel has held visiting professorships at the Universities of Frankfurt, Cape Town, and Princeton. Heschel has been honored with five honorary doctorates and the Mendelssohn Prize of the Leo Baeck Institute. Currently, she is a Guggenheim Fellow and is writing a book on European Jewish scholarship on Islam and serves on the academic advisory council of the Center for Jewish Studies in Berlin and the Board of Trustees of Trinity College.

Derek Penslar is the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History at Harvard University. He is the director of undergraduate studies within the history department and directs Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies. Penslar is a resident faculty member at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES) and is also affiliated with Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Penslar takes a comparative and transnational approach to modern Jewish history, which he studies within the contexts of modern nationalism, capitalism, and colonialism. His books have engaged with a variety of approaches and methods, including the history of science and technology, economic history, military history, biography, and the history of emotions. Penslar is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the American Academy for Jewish Research and is an honorary fellow of St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford.

Supported by the generosity of the Radov and Kaye families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

Join the Institute on Tuesday, September 24, at 7:00 PM for our first film event of the fall semester: an in-person screening of Israeli film Arugam Bay, introduced by IIJS Film Programmer Stuart Weinstock. Prof. Weinstock will also lead an audience discussion after the screening.

After completing their military service, three Israeli surfers in their early 20s travel to the southeast coast of Sri Lanka while grieving their friend’s death in combat near Beirut. As they explore the tropical paradise of Arugam Bay, meeting both locals and other expats, the bonds of their friendship are tested. With an outstanding ensemble cast starring Joy Rieger (Valley of Tears), Maor Schwitzer (IIJS’ June 2024 film, Matchmaking), and Yadin Gelman (Image of Victory), Arugam Bay captures a uniquely Israeli coming-of-age journey that resonates deeply today.

(97 minutes; English, Hebrew, and Sinhala with English subtitles)

Supported by the generosity of the Kaye and Radov families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

Join the Institute for a hybrid event, both in-person at 617 Kent Hall and on Zoom, on Monday, September 23, at 12:00 PM for a lecture with Robin Judd (The Ohio State University). Prof. Judd will be discussing her latest book, Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides after the Holocaust.

Facing the harrowing task of rebuilding a life in the wake of the Holocaust, many Jewish survivors, community and religious leaders, and Allied soldiers viewed marriage between Jewish women and military personnel as a way to move forward after unspeakable loss. Proponents believed that these unions were more than just a ticket out of war-torn Europe: they would help the Jewish people repopulate after the attempted annihilation of European Jewry.

In Between Two Worlds, Historian Robin Judd, whose grandmother survived the Holocaust and married an American soldier after liberation, introduces us to the Jewish women who lived through genocide and went on to wed American, Canadian, and British military personnel after the war. She offers an intimate portrait of how these unions emerged and developed—from meeting and courtship to marriage and immigration to life in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom—and shows how they helped shape the postwar world by touching thousands of lives, including those of the chaplains who officiated their weddings, the Allied authorities whose policy decisions structured the couples' fates, and the bureaucrats involved in immigration and acculturation. The stories Judd tells are at once heartbreaking and restorative, and she vividly captures how the exhilaration of the brides' early romances coexisted with survivor's guilt, grief, and apprehension at the challenges of starting a new life in a new land.

Robin E. Judd is a specialist in Jewish, transnational, and gender history, with particular interests in Holocaust studies, the history of antisemitism, the history of religion, the history of leadership, and the history of migration. She is the author of the award winning Between Two Worlds: Jewish War Brides After the Holocaust (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) and Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and German-Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843-1933 (Cornell University Press). Between Two Worlds won two National Jewish book awards and was named by the Jewish Women's Archive as one of its Summer 2024 Book Club picks.  

Professor Judd teaches courses on Holocaust studies, modern Jewish history, German history, gender history, and history of migration. Judd recently served as the President of the Association for Jewish Studies; she also serves as the Vice Chair of the Leo Baeck Institute’s Advisory Board, and is on the Hadassah Brandeis Institute’s Academic Review committee, and the Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook’s Editorial Board. Judd has received several fellowships and grants, including an ACLS, Hadassah Brandeis Institute Senior Fellowship Award, an NEH summer stipend, the College of Humanities' Virginia Hull Research Award, and the Coca-Cola Grant for Critical Difference.

Supported by the generosity of the Radov and Kaye families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

Join the Institute in-person at 617 Kent Hall on Monday, September 16, at 12:00 PM for a lecture with Jonathan Gribetz (Princeton University). Prof. Gribetz will be discussing his latest book, Reading Herzl in Beirut: The PLO Effort to Know the Enemy.

In Reading Herzl in Beirut, Jonathan Marc Gribetz tells the story of the PLO Research Center from its establishment in 1965 until its ultimate expulsion from Lebanon in 1983. Gribetz explores why the PLO invested in research about the Jews, what its researchers learned about Judaism and Zionism, and how the knowledge they acquired informed the PLO’s relationship to Israel.

Jonathan Gribetz is Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Judaic Studies at Princeton University. He directs the Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia and co-edits the AJS Review, the journal of the Association for Jewish Studies. Gribetz is the author of Defining Neighbors: Religion, Race, and the Early Zionist-Arab Counter (2014) and Reading Herzl in Beirut: The PLO Effort to Know the Enemy (2024). He earned his BA from Harvard University, an MSt in Modern Jewish Studies from the University of Oxford, and his PhD in History from Columbia University. 

Supported by the generosity of the Radov and Kaye families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

Join the Institute virtually on Zoom on Thursday, September 12, at 12:00 PM for a webinar with Fabio Fantuzzi, Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at Columbia University and Ca’ Foscari University. Dr. Fantuzzi’s lecture is titled “Norman Raeben: The Wandering Art, A cultural and artistic itinerary from Sholem Aleichem to Bob Dylan.”

Many scholars have underscored the great relevance of artist Norman Raeben’s figure, particularly for his influence on Stella Adler and Bob Dylan’s careers. Yet, due to the scarcity of studies about his oeuvre, his profound impact on prominent Jewish artists and cultural circles in the United States remains largely unknown. Even forty-six years after his death, most of the works and writings of Sholem Aleichem’s last son have yet to be unveiled to the public. The EU-funded POYESIS project, a joint postdoctoral research fellowship between Ca’ Foscari University and Columbia University, is set to illuminate his art, ideas, and legacy, creating a retrospective exhibition of his works, which will open at the Jewish Museum in Venice on November 10, 2024, and providing the first comprehensive catalog of his works. 

In this seminar, Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow Fabio Fantuzzi will discuss the project’s findings with Professor Jeremy Dauber, commenting on various never-before-seen materials. They will also delve into how Raeben’s art and teaching activity impacted first-, second-, and third-generation Jewish American artists like Stella Adler, Bob Dylan, and Roz Jacobs, offering a unique opportunity to gain deeper insights into the careers of these leading artists and intellectuals.

Fabio Fantuzzi is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at Columbia University and Ca’ Foscari University, working on the EU-funded MSC project POYESIS (Perspectives on Yiddish Cultural Evolution and Its Legacy: Visual Arts, Theatre, and Songwriting Between Assimilation and Identity. A Case Study).

He holds a Ph.D. in Anglo-American Literature, Culture, and Language, and his primary research interests are the intersections between poetry, music, and visual arts in the American Jewish and Italian American literary and artistic traditions. He has published articles and essays in several academic journals, edited the volume Tales of Unfulfilled Times (Ca’ Foscari University Press, 2017), and co-edited the book Bob Dylan and the Arts: Songs, Film, Painting, and Sculpture in Dylan’s Universe (Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2020). His current research studies the work and teachings of artist Norman Raeben and his influence on various leading artists as a case to examine the evolution of Yiddish culture and art in New York in the 20th century. As part of this research, he is curating a retrospective exhibition of Norman Raeben’s works, which will open at the Jewish Museum in Venice on November 10, 2024, and is editing the catalog of his works.

As a multi-instrumentalist and a songwriter, together with the band Le Ombre di Rosso, he has published the albums “Momenti di lucidità” (2016) and “Da Sponda a Sponda” (2021), which puts to music Luciano Cecchinel’s homonymous collection of poems, which was awarded the 2020 Viareggio-Repaci Prize for Poetry.

Supported by the generosity of the Appel and Kaye families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

The IIJS Summer Film Series concludes with “Checkout,” the Israeli hit from director and co-writer Jonathan Dekel. Join us online on Monday, July 15, at 12:00 PM for a virtual Q&A with the filmmaker and IIJS Film Programmer Stuart Weinstock.

In this spy comedy, Dov, an aging and feckless Mossad operative, has just been given notice of his mandatory retirement. About to leave his Istanbul hotel on a wave of self-pity, he decides to stay when he identifies an Arabic-speaking traveler as "Gilgamesh," a notorious terrorist. No spoilers: Dov's pursuit of Gilgamesh plays out more like Curb Your Enthusiasm than Fauda. (97 minutes; English, Hebrew, and Arabic with English subtitles)

Please register for the event below. You will receive an email with a link to watch the film at home on Friday, July 12th. This link will only be available until Monday, July 15th at 11:59pm EDT.

We will be hosting a Zoom Q&A session on Monday, July 15th at 12:00pm EDT with director and co-writer Jonathan Dekel. You will receive a separate email with the Zoom link for the Q&A before the event.

Please email iijs@columbia.edu with any questions.

Jonathan Dekel graduated from Jerusalem's Sam Spiegel School of Film and Television. His thesis film, April Fools, was shot on an iPhone and went on to win Israel's Academy Award (Ophir Award) for Best Short Film along with Best Short at the 2014 Jerusalem Film Festival. Dekel has directed and written for Israeli television and directed music videos. Checkout is his first feature film, and was developed with the Sundance Screenwriter's Lab and won the Emerging Filmmaker Award from the Jerusalem International Film Lab.

Supported by the generosity of the Appel and Kaye families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.

The IIJS Summer Film Series begins this year with “Matchmaking,” the Israeli hit from director and co-writer Erez Tadmor. Join us online on Monday, June 17, at 12:00 PM for a virtual Q&A with the filmmaker and IIJS Film Series Coordinator Stuart Weinstock.

A box office hit in Israel and on the Jewish film festival circuit, Matchmaking tells the comic story of Moti Bernstein, the ideal yeshiva bucher and the perfect match for any Haredi Orthodox bride-to-be. While Moti seems to be on a path towards marriage with an exceptional match, his Ashkenazi world is thrown into turmoil when he falls in love with Nechama, a Mizrahi girl. When the matchmakers of his Haredi community refuse to pair him with Nechama, Moti seeks an unconventional solution to bridge the social gap between them.  (98 minutes; Hebrew with English subtitles)

Please register for the event below. You will receive an email with a link to watch the film at home on Friday, June 14th. This link will only be available until Monday, June 17th at 11:59pm EDT.

We will be hosting a Zoom Q&A session on Monday, June 17th at 12:00pm EDT with director and co-writer Erez Tadmor. You will receive a separate email with the Zoom link for the Q&A before the event.

Please email iijs@columbia.edu with any questions.

Erez Tadmor is an Israeli-born filmmaker working across genre lines with diverse short and feature-length films. His internationally-acclaimed films include: A Matter of Size (2009), Magic Men (2014), the Ophir-Award-winning Wounded Land (2015), The Art of Waiting (2019), and Children of Nobody (2022). His 2004 short film, Strangers, won the Audience Award for Short Films at the Sundance Film Festival.

Supported by the generosity of the Appel and Kaye families.

While all IIJS events are free and open to the public, we do encourage a suggested donation of $10.