Oren Rudavsky

Jake Singer is at loose ends in NYC, and neck deep in psychoanalysis with the outrageous Dr. Morales when he meets the enigmatic and beautiful widow Allegra Marshall.

A biographical history of Hungarian immigrant Joseph Pulitzer, who revolutionized how news is presented, to whom it is catered to and the power of giving power to the masses.

A Life Apart: Hasidism in America, is the first in-depth documentary about a distinctive, traditional Eastern European religious community. In an historic migration after World War II, Hasidism found it's most vital center in America. Both challenging and embracing American values, Hasidim seek those things which many Americans find most precious: family, community, and a close relationship to God. Integrating critical and analytical scholarship with a portrait of the daily life, beliefs, and history of contemporary Hasidic Jews in New York City, the film focuses on the conflicts, burdens, and rewards of the Hasidic way of life.

In his twilight, a lonely gay man reflects on his life and the three loves of his long-lost youth one woman and two men. Forced into early retirement by a heart attack, he wanders aimlessly through the graffiti-marred streets of his New York neighborhood. Familiar haunts trigger flashbacks of happy and not-so happy times.

A young farmgirl comes to the big city and is taken advantage of by everybody she meets. The only person who treats her well is a stranger she meets and falls in love with. The stranger turns out to be a vampire who also falls in love with her. He sets out to take revenge on everyone who has mistreated her.

The incredible story of the 1985 bar mitzvah of American Eric Strom in Cracow, the first bar mitzvah to be held in Poland in thirty-five years.

"Sometimes I'm afraid the tale might be forgotten. Sometimes I'm afraid it is forgotten already." Told primarily through his own eloquent words, the film seeks to understand the man behind the searing and widely read memoir Night. Penetrating at the heart of the known and unknown, the film dives into the author’s legacy as one of the most influential survivors of the trauma of the Holocaust.

An Orthodox Jewish father tries to alert his adult sons to the dangers of creating impenetrable barriers between themselves and those outside their faith. He takes them on an emotional journey to Poland to track down the family who risked their lives to hide their grandfather for more than two years during World War II. Like many children of survivors, the sons feel that Poland is a country that is incurably anti-Semitic, but it is precisely here that they meet people who personify the highest levels of compassion

We live at a moment in time when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, now more than a century old, continues to be of overwhelming international political and societal importance. From its inception, that conflict has also, of course, had powerful and deeply troubling consequences for Israelis and Palestinians themselves. The story at its most basic level is one that involves two peoples struggling for national recognition and expression in a small but richly significant piece of land. The tragedy of this history, as both the Israeli novelist, Amos Oz, and the Palestinian scholar, Sari Nusseibeh, have each pointed out, stems from a conflict between the rights of two peoples with equal and legitimate aspirations to nationhood and self-expression in a single small territory to which they can both lay claim.

Ramón Rivera Moret remembers Puerto Rico at a utopian moment through the films produced in rural communities in the 1950s and 60s by the Film Unit of the Division of Community Education alongside stories from his own family.

Aron is 88 years old, Eazek is 94 and Claudine is 89. Over seventy years ago, although they lost their entire families, they survived the holocaust and resettled in New York City. Now they are sharing their stories in a unique program led by a drama therapist with high-school students in Brooklyn. The hope is that this sharing will sensitize the students and give some closure to the adult survivors after all these years. The Witness Theater workshop they participate in culminates in the performance of a play based on Survivor stories.

Lifta, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, is the only Arab village abandoned in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that has not been completely destroyed or repopulated by Jews. Its ruins are now threatened by an Israeli development plan that would convert it into an upscale Jewish neighborhood. Filmmaker Menachem Daum – an Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn – sets out to discover the story behind the headlines.

Portrays the experience of the Roth family when Rachel Roth dies of cancer at age 59. She leaves behind an immediate family consisting of her husband and two daughters. The film focuses on the pain and searching of the Roth family, particularly on the tensions between the demands of Jewish traditions and their own needs during Shiva, the seven day mourning period following the burial. The film is designed to stimulate discussion of the interplay between individuals and communities, and the rituals they practice during a period of suffering and crisis.

Jewish family history is reconstructed in this documentary about the traces of German terror in Eastern Europe during World War II where in which is about the attic of a peasant's home where her family's parents and relatives hid in squalor during the war for two frightening years hid, and then spent most of their lives afterwards trying to forget what happened. Yet their children somehow knew what their parents went through. Deciding to confront her personal demons, Goodstein went back to Poland with her aunt and a group of cousins to meet the woman who sheltered her family.

Night in Newark focuses on the insights of thirty students in Paris Murray's 7th grade classroom at Northstar Middle School. Their close reading of Elie Wiesel's classic Holocaust memoir explores the themes of freedom, memory and survival.