Intent on shaking up the ultimate 'sacred cow' for Jews, Israeli director Yoav Shamir embarks on a provocative - and at times irreverent - quest to answer the question, "What is anti-Semitism today?" Does it remain a dangerous and immediate threat? Or is it a scare tactic used by right-wing Zionists to discredit their critics? Speaking with an array of people from across the political spectrum (including the head of the Anti-Defamation League and its fiercest critic, author Norman Finkelstein) and traveling to places like Auschwitz (alongside Israeli school kids) and Brooklyn (to explore reports of violence against Jews), Shamir discovers the realities of anti-Semitism today. His findings are shocking, enlightening and - surprisingly - often wryly funny.

Yoav Shamir tries to take a witty & satirical approach to a deadly serious issue - anti-semitism in today's world. His film & title focus almost exclusively on the unprecedented access he was given to Abe Foxman and the NY-Based Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Shamir tries to document one of the ADL-reported cases of rising anti-semitism, and this leads him to Crown Heights in Brooklyn, where he interviews black youth. He accompanies students on a March of the Living visit to Poland. He is invited to join Foxman on an ADL delegation to Europe, where he discovers that the ADL is closely aligned with the policies of the Israeli government. He then interviews two American academics who have written about this issue (Mearsheimer & Walt) and concludes that Israel's past is preventing it from moving forward. This singular focus on the US-Israeli lobby as a lense with which to view contemporary anti-semitism means that Shamir ignores more sinister forms, such as Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

A 90-minute film, 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 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.

 
Thanks to our friends at Exile On Moan Street for locating this really high quality Youtube upload of the Gil Scott-Heron documentary The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

Directed by Don Letts for BBC television, this is a superb piece of film making. With commentaries from Chuck D, Mos Def, Richie Havens, Clive Davis and more.

Today marks five years since hip hop producer Jay Dee, aka J Dilla, lost his battle with Lupus and a rare blood disease in a Los Angeles hospital room. Born James Yancey in Detroit, the pioneering beat maker reached the national radar with his critically acclaimed group Slum Village. Over the course of several years and three albums, Dilla helped cement Detroit’s resurgence to the top of a new era of late 90’s, soul-inspired hip-hop. That trendsetting spirit led him to work on albums with A Tribe Called Quest, Erykah Badu, Busta Rhymes, and The Pharcyde. He was also a founding member of the prudction collaborative known as The Soulquarians, which included the aforementioned Badu and Common, along with Roots drummer Questlove and singer D’Angelo, among others. Everyone from Kanye West to Dave Chappele have since paid tribute to Dilla, as he’s become one of the most influential artist’s of the hip hop generation. You can see a glimpse of that legacy in the three-part documentary we’ve dug up.

Eyes on the Prize is a 14-part series which was originally released in two parts: Eyes I in 1985 and Eyes II in 1988. This series, which debuted on PBS stations, is considered to be the definitive documentary on the Civil Rights Movement. “Eyes on the Prize” won more than twenty major awards and attracted over 20 million viewers. These interviews are part of the Henry Hampton Collection housed at the Film and Media Archive at Washington University Libraries. Each transcript represented the entire interview conducted by Blackside including sections which appeared in the final program and the outtakes. For more information, on the various formats of each interview, please contact the Film and Media Archive.

You may also browse and search the Eyes on the Prize Interviews I (1985) and Eyes on the Prize Interviews II (1988) individually.

The first section of the new documentary NESHOBA: THE PRICE OF FREEDOM, from filmmakers Micki Dickoff and Tony Pagano, is so gut-wrenchingly sorrowful that it's an oddly mixed blessing when, as the movie prog-
resses, it becomes both easier to take and less effective. This may have more to do with the way in which events have played themselves out over the 46 years since the original murders around which the film is organized than with the skill of the filmmakers themselves. Still, had Dickoff and Pagano been able to maintain the passion and immediacy of their first third, they might have ended up with one of the most powerful, ground-breaking documentaries of modern times. (Or perhaps one so upsetting that viewers would squirm and head for an early exit.)

In 1964 when she was only 17, Micki Dickoff asked her father if she could go to Mississippi to work with the volunteers  of  Freedom Summer, registering black voters. Her father, a Mississippi native, refused to allow her to go. His was the only Jewish family in a small Mississippi town, and he feared what she would find there. Not long after, his worst fears were confirmed when three of the volunteers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were murdered by local Klansmen, all of them deputy sheriffs of Neshoba County.