Join us for a screening of “The Matchmaker” on January 18th at 7:00pm, and “Firebirds” on January 25th at 7:00pm. Both films will be followed by a moderated discussion and some light snacks.
Discussion after each film will be moderated by Dr. Lauren Strauss. Dr. Strauss teaches Jewish history and Israel studies at the American University in Washington, D.C., where she also serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Jewish Studies Program, and is affiliated faculty with AU’s Center for Israel Studies. At AU, Dr. Strauss’s courses include both Ancient and Modern Jewish civilization, Modern Jewish literature, History of Israel, Black-Jewish Relations, American Jews & Israel, American Jewish Politics, Jews in Popular Culture, Holocaust literature, and more.
A scholar of American Jewish political and cultural history, her forthcoming book is: Painting the Town Red: Jewish Visual Artists, Yiddish Culture, and Radical Politics in Interwar New York. Her next
book explores political activism in the D.C. Jewish community and the relationship between American Jews and democracy. Dr. Strauss lectures widely and is a commentator at Jewish cultural events and in
the press. She is active in “shared society” groups and academic organizations in the U.S. and Israel, and she has curated or served as historian for several museum exhibits, including at the Library of
Congress and the Capital Jewish Museum. She is also the former Executive Director of the Foundation for Jewish Studies, now called the Haberman Institute.
Bruce Goldin has made a generous donation to cover licensing fees for both films, which reduces the cost for tickets to only $36 per adult, inclusive of both film screenings and refreshments. Children and teens under 18 are $10 per ticket, although the films are not recommended for young children.
Type: Comedy & Drama
Arik, a teenage boy growing up in Haifa in 1968, gets a job working for Yankele Bride, a matchmaker. Yankele, a mysterious Holocaust survivor, has an office in back of a movie theater that shows only love stories, run by a family of seven Romanian dwarfs in the seedy area by the port.
Yankele introduces Arik to a new world, built on the ruins of an old one. As Arik begins to learn the mysteries of the human heart through his work with Yankele, he falls in love with Tamara, his friend Beni’s cousin. Tamara has just returned from America and is full of talk of women’s rights, free love and rock and roll. The disparate parts of Arik’s life collide in unexpected, often funny and very moving ways as he lives through a summer that changes him forever.
Type: Drama & Mystery/Thriller
An eighty-year-old man’s body is found with three stab wounds to the chest and a number tattooed along his forearm. Amnon, a police detective and second generation Holocaust survivor, reluctantly accepts the case and struggles to bring it to a quick close.
In the weeks leading up to his death Amikam, the victim, sought a ‘membership card’ to the most horrible club in the world: the club of Holocaust survivors. Despite his age he was still attractive and his charm was evident as he searched the obituaries for widows to beguile.
As the story interweaves past and present, we witness each man’s struggle to rejoin the society which rejected him.
