Jewish Film Festival 2023

 

Festival Speakers in Order of Appearance

jeannie opdyke smithJeannie Opdyke Smith, Daughter of Irene Gut Opdyke, Irena’s Vow

Jeannie Opdyke Smith is a member of the Holocaust Speakers Bureau in Oregon and Washington state, an honorary member and speaker for the North American Jewish Federation, and a recipient of the Anti-Defamation League’s 2015 Civil Rights Award. She travels the world sharing her mother’s story. Her mother, Irene Gut Opdyke, received a Righteous Among the Nations Medal in 1982 for her courage in protecting Jews in occupied Poland during WWII, and her story is the inspiration for the film Irena’s Vow.

 

Moshe LobelMoshe Lobel, Lead Actor, SHTTL

A native Yiddish speaker from a Hasidic community in Brooklyn, Moshe Lobel debuted on the New York stage as the lead in New Yiddish Rep's Awake and Sing. In 2018, he joined the cast of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, directed by Oscar and Tony Award-winner Joel Grey. The show won the Drama Desk award for best revival. Moshe has appeared on HBO's High Maintenance, Blumhouse Production's The Vigil, and has also worked on Netflix's Unorthodox. As a filmmaker, he co-created Untold Genius, an original comedy series featuring Emmy-nominated Jackie Hoffman and Stephen Tobolowsky, as well as Leibniz's Law, a sci-fi drama.

 

director photo maxim pozdorovkinMaxim Pozdorovkin, Writer and Director, The Conspiracy

An award-winning director and producer based in New York City, Maxim Pozdorovkin is the director of five feature-length documentaries and numerous short films. His most recent feature, The Truth about Killer Robots, premiered at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival and was broadcast on HBO. Our New President premiered at Sundance in 2018 where it won a Special Jury Award for Best Editing. Other films include: Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer (Emmy winner) and The Notorious Mr. Bout, Clinica de Migrantes (HBO). His next film, How to Rob Banks for Dummies, the story of video artist Joe Gibbons, is currently in post-production.

 

Tamar ManassehRabbi Tamar Manasseh, Rabbi on the Block

Tamar Manasseh, a rabbi and community activist from the south side of Chicago, is working to create bridges between African Americans and Jews, helping to overcome decades of fear, misunderstanding, and lack of communication. For nearly a decade, Manasseh, 2016 Chicagoan of the Year, has been leading the fight against gun violence on the south side of Chicago. The organization she created, Mothers and Men Against Senseless Killings (MASK), has become internationally recognized for its commitment to protecting the vulnerable and for building and nourishing at-risk communities. Manasseh credits her activism to her Judaism, and MASK attracts Jewish volunteers from Chicago and beyond. This partnership that has been forged between Blacks and Jews on the ground in this challenged neighborhood can serve as a model for communities around the country.

 

Brad RothschildBrad Rothschild, Director, Rabbi on the Block

An award-winning film director, producer, and writer, Brad Rothschild produced the award-winning documentary feature, Kinderblock 66: Return to Buchenwald (2011), which screened at the Jerusalem Film Festival as well as more than 20 festivals in the United States and around the world. He directed the documentary films African Exodus (2021), about the plight of Israel’s African refugees, and Tree Man (2015), about the people who come to New York City to sell Christmas trees every holiday season. Tree Man won the Audience Choice Award at the St. Lawrence International Film Festival. He currently has several feature-length and short documentaries in development.

 

Nancy Spielberg 3Nancy Spielberg, Producer, Closed Circuit

Nancy Spielberg has devoted her talents to producing documentary films that help preserve important stories and make them educational tools for the benefit of younger generations. She produced Above and Beyond, winner of the audience choice award at more than twenty film festivals, including the Rutgers Jewish Film Festival in 2014. She is the executive producer of Sophie Sartain’s documentary Mimi and Dona, which was broadcast nationally on PBS in 2015, and also of Who Will Write Our History, directed by Roberta Grossman and screened at the Rutgers Jewish Film Festival in 2018, winning the festival’s audience choice award. Her films On the Map and Aulcie, by filmmaker Dani Menkin, were shown at the Rutgers Jewish Film Festival in 2016 and 2020, and both won the festival’s audience choice award. She is the executive producer of Vishniac, directed by Laura Bialis, and was the consulting producer for GI JEWS: Jewish Americans in World War II, which aired on PBS in April 2018.

 

Dr. Aimee Baron,  Speaker: Barren, October 31 

Aimee Baron MD, FAAP, is the founder and executive director of “I Was Supposed to Have a Baby”, a nonprofit organization that utilizes social media to support Jewish individuals and families as they are struggling to have a child.  It provides a warm and nurturing space for those going through infertility, pregnancy loss, infant loss, surrogacy or adoption, in addition to connecting those families to resources in the Jewish community at large. 

Dr. Baron was formerly the Director of Innovation and Growth at NechamaComfort, and has also worked as an Attending Pediatrician in the Newborn Nursery and Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital.

Luzer TwerskyLuzer Twersky, Lead Actor, No Name Restaurant

An actor, writer, and occasional musician, Luzer Twersky was raised as a Hasidic Jew in Brooklyn, New York, and broke away from his community in 2007 to pursue a career as an actor and writer. His awards include a Special Jury Prize for Acting for the film Where is Joel Baum, at the 2012 Starz Denver Film Festival and numerous awards for the Canadian feature film Felix and Meira in 2014.

 

 

AzzanProfessor Azzan Yadin Israel, Speaker for The Good Person

Azzan Yadin-Israel is a professor of Jewish studies and classics at Rutgers University whose broad research interests are reflected in the six books he has published over the past ten years: A philological study of the earliest rabbinic commentary on the Book of Leviticus; a monograph on biblical and theological themes in the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen; three volumes of his Intuitive Vocabulary series (German, Spanish, and Ancient Greek); and his recent book, Temptation Transformed: The Story of How the Forbidden Fruit Became an Apple (University of Chicago Press, 2022).

 

Ethan Katz

Professor Ethan B. Katz, Speaker for The Goldman Case, November 9 @ 7:00pm

Ethan B. Katz is an associate professor of history and Jewish studies at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as chair of the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Jewish Student Life and Campus Climate and cofounder of the Berkeley Antisemitism Education Initiative. An expert on the modern Jewish experience and the history of France, his scholarship has focused on the history of exclusion, belonging, and inter-ethnic relations for Jews and Muslims in France and the Francophone world. These were central themes in his first book, The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Harvard University Press, 2015), which was translated into French and became the basis for a major exhibition at Paris's National Museum for the History of Immigration. Katz’s second book, Colonialism and the Jews (Indiana, 2017), was co-edited with Lisa Moses Leff and Maud Mandel.