Just as there are Christmas films and television specials, there are Chanukah shows. I mean, we don’t have It’s a Wonderful Life or Miracle on 34th Street, but at least there’s Adam Sandler’s Eight Crazy Nights. We do even better with Pesach— The Ten Commandments, The Prince of Egypt, Exodus: Gods and Kings, and let’s not forget that scene in Marjorie Morningstar where Marjorie’s father presides over the Seder table clad in festive kittel and Marjorie’s luftmensch boyfriend, Noel Airman (the not-so-nice Jewish boy who’s named himself after Christmas) realises how empty his life has been without family, tradition, and faith.
But films about Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, our High Holy Days, in which we do a whole lot of praying, some serious atoning, and starve ourselves? Surely, this is not Hollywood fare. Except that it is — in fact, the first feature-length film to get synchronised sound accompanying its action culminated in the most beautiful rendition of Kol Nidre ever produced.
So, what are my top five High Holy Day depictions on screen?
First, the honourable mentions: the 1980 remake of The Jazz Singer, Enemies: A Love Story, Kissing Jessica Stein and episodes of Transparent (Josh really looks the part of the unwashed as he pounds his chest during the synagogue service in which his girlfriend, Rabbi Raquel, officiates).
Kissing Jessica Stein 3
Kissing Jessica Stein
Then there’s The Marvelous Mrs Maisel (the pilot includes Midge boasting to the butcher that they “got” the rabbi for Yom Kippur), and Broad City (an exclusive short features Abbi and Ilana offering each other support during their fasts). Finally, in last year’s darkly comedic film Shiva Baby, writer-director Emma Seligman might have chosen a shiva over a break-fast meal as the setting, but it could stand in for practically any Jewish family get-together, wherein nosy questions about love interests, lifestyle choices, and career aspirations abound.
But my top five may surprise you.
5 The Way We Were (1973) — When Hubbell says, “Katie, the day you die, you’ll still be a nice Jewish girl,” Katie asks, “Are you still a nice gentile boy?” Hubbell demurs: “I never was. I only looked it to you.” Indeed, Katie Morosky, played by an ethereal Barbra Streisand, begins and ends the “nice Jewish girl” Hubbell always knew her to be: big Jewfro, good politics, among her own kind.
That’s why every time the larger-than-life heroine reaches out to brush back a few strands of Hubbell Gardiner/Robert Redford’s drooping fool’s-gold hair, his shiksappeal tell, we hear the melancholic strains of the theme song reminding us that this relationship is destined for failure.
After all, if Jewish Katie is determined to make the world a better place — whether she’s challenging a government that threatens the freedom of its citizens, shutting down racist ‘jokes,’ or gathering petition signatures to ban the bomb — gentile Hubbell is lazy, shallow, and weak, privilege personified. “Like his country, things had come too easily to him,” writes Hubbell in a short story for his college creative writing seminar, a story that, naturally, gets chosen as the star piece by the course professor and read aloud to his classmates. Hubbell probably scribbled it on a martini glass-ringed napkin while partying with his frat brothers the night before — while Katie doggedly wrote and rewrote her own story, which never saw the light of day.
Still, always an advocate for others, Katie buys Hubbell a typewriter early on in the film, wishing him a “Happy Rosh Hashanah.” The idea of gift-giving on the Jewish New Year is unfamiliar to me, but don’t get me wrong: I like it.
4 I May Destroy You (2020) —Ostensibly not about Jews at all, yet Michaela Coel’s brilliant series about hurt and forgiveness features beautiful renditions of High Holy Day liturgy, making this show an ideal one for the Days of Awe. Cantor Zelermyer and the choir from his Montreal synagogue, Shaar Hashomayim, perform their machzor-inspired songs in two episodes. Listen closely for Ein Kitzvah and later Uvchein Yitkadash. By the way, Zelermyer and the choir played with Leonard Cohen on his last album You Want it Darker (2016) and Cohen was buried in Shaar Hashomayim’s cemetery in Montreal.
3. Valley of Tears (2021) — The most expensive Israeli series ever made centres on the 1973 Yom Kippur war and begins a few hours before Erev Yom Kippur, when soldiers are heading home to spend the day with their families. For those still on the base, danger lurks. We all know the history, but watching it unfold onscreen is heart-rending. Valley of Tears delves deep into the battle on the northern front of the war as it interrogates relationships between friends, fathers and sons, and boyfriends and girlfriends, as well as within communities, and across national lines, asking to whom people owe allegiance and from whom they must seek absolution.
Valley of Tears is also a rare Jewish show that goes beyond brisket and sprinklings of Yiddish (I’m looking at you, Mrs Maisel) and includes Arabic-speaking Jews and members of the Black Panthers, Israel’s Mizrahi social protest movement.
4_S1_Ep4_Valley Of Tears S1 Ep4-2-a
Photos: c4, wb
2 Liberty Heights (1999) —Opening and closing on Rosh Hashanah, Barry Levinson’s autobiographical main character, Ben Kurtzman, explains that in the northwest section of Baltimore in the 1950s, “it was all Jewish.” Before he discovers that signs reading ‘No Jews, dogs, or coloureds’ could keep him from enjoying the pleasures of the beach (including the pretty blondes in sunbathing attire), or that other people eat white bread with luncheon meat and tall glasses of milk (“everything was white,” he reports to his mother), he thought “the whole world was Jewish.”
On Rosh Hashanah, the Kurtzman boys sit downstairs in the synagogue, the women are up in the ladies’ gallery, and Ben’s dad sneaks out to the car dealership to see the latest Cadillac in stock: that’s the family tradition. “The cantor sings, that’s our cue to see the new caddy,” he explains. By the final scene, when Mr Kurtzman rises to leave the synagogue, the world has changed for the Kurtzmans, and Ben, in good ways and bad, has lost his innocence.
1The Jazz Singer (1927) — We’re almost 100 years into ‘talkies,’ and this incredible film still has no peer. Based on the 1925 short story The Day of Atonement by Samson Raphaelson, the film stars Al Jolson (on whom the character is based) as Jackie Rabinowitz, the son of a cantor who defies his father’s wishes and strikes out for fame and fortune.
Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer ezgifcomgifmaker
Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer
The film presents a terrible dilemma for the newly reinvented Jack Robin: perform in his Broadway debut or take his father’s dying place in the synagogue on Yom Kippur. Spoiler: in America, anything is possible. Al Jolson not only belts out the most stirring Kol Nidre in screen history, he also gets to keep his showbiz career.
He probably keeps the love of his mother and showgirl Mary, too, but we can’t know that for sure. Good Mama’s boy, he sings My Mammy and not “My Mary” in the final scene.
