Ten Great Jewish American Films

To celebrate Moment’s 35th anniversary, we asked Los Angeles Times film critic and NPR contributor Kenneth Turan to choose 10 favorite films that encapsulate the Jewish American experience.

A Serious Man (2009)

Writer-directors Joel and Ethan Coen seized the opportunity afforded by their Oscar-winning success to make this most intensely Jewish of films, a pitch-perfect comedy of Jobian despair that, against considerable odds, turns out to be one of their most universal as well.

Liberty Heights (1999)

Named after (what else but) a Baltimore neighborhood, this is writer-director Barry Levinson’s most specifically Jewish film. A snapshot of the changing times of America in 1954, this mature, accomplished work is both funny and deeply felt and represents personal cinema of the best kind.

Enemies: A Love Story (1989)

Director Paul Mazursky, screenwriter Roger Simon and the powerhouse cast of Anjelica Huston, Ron Silver and Lena Olin expertly adapt Isaac Bashevis Singer’s potent novel of lives warped by the Holocaust.

Crossing Delancey (1988)

Amy Irving plays an independent young Manhattan woman who is taken aback when Reizl Bozyk’s indomitable grandmother tries to set her up with Peter Riegert’s eminently eligible Lower East Side pickle man. Directed by Joan Micklin Silver from a script by playwright Susan Sandler, it’s charming from beginning to end.

Hester Street (1975)

Joan Micklin Silver’s pioneering independent film, which earned an Oscar nomination for star Carol Kane, brings a wonderful touch of Yiddishkeit to its dramatization of Abraham Cahan’s story of immigrant life on the Lower East Side.

The Producers (1968)

Mel Brooks as writer-director. Zero Mostel as maniacal Broadway producer Max Bialystock. Gene Wilder as his feckless accomplice. Springtime for Hitler. Does anything more need to be said?

Gentleman’s Agreement (1947)

Thought to be daring in its day, and a triple Oscar winner, including best picture and best director for Elia Kazan, this classic Hollywood “problem picture” starred Gregory Peck as a crusading writer pretending to be Jewish to root out endemic anti-Semitism.

Uncle Moses (1932)

Trumpeted as the earliest Yiddish sound film, this picture reveals Maurice Schwartz as an actor of effortless presence, with a rich, textured voice and piercing eyes under heavy lids. Playing a flamboyant sweatshop owner who is shocked to find that money can’t buy him love, Schwartz delights in his character’s multiple contradictions. And to see Uncle Moses cutting his fingernails with an enormous pair of scissors is to watch an actor who knew how to milk the smallest moment as if it were Hamlet’s soliloquy.

Pass The Gravy (1928)

Comic actor Max Davidson was likely the most recognizably Jewish of silent film stars, and this hilarious short film about an unfortunate avian misunderstanding has convulsed audiences from the National Yiddish Book Center to Italy’s Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (Festival of Silent Film).

The Jazz Singer (1927)

Celebrated as the film that made Americans go mad for sound, this is first and foremost the story of Al Jolson’s ebullient Jewish entertainer who has to choose between the traditions of the old world and the lures of the new.