Diddler on the Roof, or, the Sexiest Jewish Movies - Page 2

Girlfriends: Before thirtysomething, Melanie Mayron starred in this 1978 film about a struggling Jewish photographer named Susan Weinblatt aiming for love and career in New York. At the time I was a struggling Jewish writer aiming for love and career in New York with about as much success. Mayron pursues relationships, she cries, she talks to Rabbi Gold, played by Eli Wallach (no relation, except in the general Member of the Tribe sense) and in one too-brief scene exposes her ripe young Yiddish rump for the camera. I adored her and her stunning mop of dark curly hair. Even the act of watching the movie intersected with my personal life, as I saw it with one of the first women I ever dated steadily in New York, Adina, a writer for a Jewish publication. The movie is not available on DVD and as far as I can tell had only a brief appearance on VHS. Who’s keeping the rights locked up? This would be a hit.Lifetime Achievement Award I: My fixation on curvaceous Lainie Kazan (a/k/a Lanie Levine from Brooklyn) started when I saw her in Playboy in 1970. Known for her cleavage as well as her singing, she appealed to me back then when my mind was young and malleable. By the time I noticed her in movies like My Favorite Career, Beaches, My Big Fat Greek Wedding and more recently You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, her ripeness had evolved into double-plus-zaftig dimensions, but her confident, charge-ahead attitude always appealed to me. Even in her late 60s, she was getting it on with Adam Sandler in Zohan. Dare I call her a GMILF?The Secrets: This Israeli movie is set on a women-only Orthodox yeshiva in Sfad, the home of mystics and Kabbalah. The mix of clashing personalities, feminism in a regimented environment and unvoiced, smoldering passions makes this movie a spiritually elevated, shomer-Shabbos version of a 1970s Pam Grier babes-behind-bars prison epic. In this hothouse environment, romance blossoms for two of the women, Naomi and Michelle, who circle around an ailing, mysterious outsider named Anouk, who scandalizes students with a stash of erotic paintings from her late lover in France. Naomi and Michelle gaze at each other, they kiss, they get to know each other in the Biblical sense, and then the hearts start breaking. The movie has a eye-popping scene where the modest clothes fly off so the young and the frum can dip themselves into the ritual mikvah bath as part of an exorcism. The Secrets blends in some humor about the mating rituals of the Orthodox and the requisite funeral and wedding found in all self-respecting Jewish movies. Europa Europa: This movie stands alone in its use of circumcision as a plot device and dramatic tool. It details the true story of a Jewish boy, Solomon Perel, who passes as an Aryan and even winds up in a Hitler Youth training program. Europa Europa haunted me with its plot line about a decent gay (closeted) German soldier learning the true identity of his Jewish Wehrmacht comrade. Nothing happens between the two, as I recall, but the yearning and the doubled sense of fatal concealment (one’s gay, the other’s Jewish) have a terrible poignancy. Other parts of the movie detail Solomon’s desperate attempts to avoid revealing the sign of the covenant, and that includes avoiding sex with Leni, the Nazi-admiring girl he loves. Sexual desire never seems as ominous as it does in Europa Europa. Lifetime Achievement Award II: What can I say about Amy Irving? Technically, she’s not Jewish. Her father had a Jewish background and she was raised a Christian Scientist, so the name and look mask a non-Jewish reality. Still, from her role as Isabella Grossman in Crossing Delancy to Hadass in Yentl, to later works Bossa Nova to Traffic, she embodied my fantasies of what I wanted in a woman. I eventually found a woman who reminded me of Amy Irving, but things didn’t work out. Steven Spielberg got the real Amy Irving, but he couldn’t hang on to her, either. Enemies, A Love Story; The Unbearable Lightness of Being; The Reader: I always linked these movies, especially the first two. Enemies and Lightness burrowed deep into my consciousness. The Reader, while visually explicit, left me cold and repulsed by the characters. Enemies concerns Holocaust survivors in New York after World War II, with one man, Herman Broder (Ron Silver) involved with three beautiful women, his current wife, a married woman, and the wife in Europe who he thought had died in the war. The second is set in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, while The Reader is about the doomed affair of a teen and a mysterious women in his apartment building in 1950s Germany. Enemies and The Reader have Jewish aspects (and I read both the books), Lightness does not, as far as I can tell. Beyond their European settings or characters, the three movies all share one radiant connection: Swedish actress Lena Olin. She’s gorgeous in Lightness (1988) and Enemies (1989), and then compelling in a dual role in Reader (2008). She plays Rose Mather and her daughter Ilana, at different times in the narrative. Knowing Olin’s earlier work gave her small but critical presence in The Reader another layer of meaning for me. Olin may not be Jewish, but I’ll give her honorary status for her signal work in these movies. She can be my kugel queen anytime. Dreck Hall of Shame: Amy’s Orgasm, otherwise known as Amy’s O for prudish Americans who quiver at the very thought of the orgasmic pleasure of a young Jewish woman. Actually, they should quiver at the message of this movie, which I viscerally disliked. I place it in my “Dreck Hall of Shame” of Jewish erotica. It starts with the standard tropes of an ethnic romantic comedy – attractive young person laments inability to find a member of his or her group for marriage, endlessly hounded by family on this subject. In writer Amy’s case, she yaps about Jewish men. Then, she gets into a relationship with a man who’s not Jewish and their faiths never arise as an issue. The movie takes the easy way out – Jewishness is a shorthand for a set of personality traits and shrill family members, but it never assumes a deeper meaning in the lives of characters. When the shaygetz walks in the door, the convictions fly out the window. Lifetime Achievement Award III: The works of director/writer/actor Henry Jaglom are, I’ll admit, an acquired taste, like eating snails. Henry Jaglom’s movies, made by Henry Jaglom and reflecting the obsessions of Henry Jaglom and the mostly female friends of Henry Jaglom, attract me in a weirdly magnetic way. A direct descendant of philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, Jaglom is a strong supporter of Israel and his films typically have at least one main Jewish character. The movies are maddening, but they are nakedly revealing of women’s emotions and issues. Throw in actresses’ curly hair, olive complexions and cute figures, and the emotional tumult is just plain catnip for me. Titles like Eating, Baby Fever, Going Shopping and New Year’s Day suggest the intense subject material. Sensuality and overloads of psychological drama ooze from every frame. A quote from an article about Jaglom says everything you need to know to watch, or run screaming away from, his movies: “Men have a hard time listening. In my films, you must listen. Men usually deny the internal landscape, preferring to externalize their experience. Women become involved. They explore what they are feeling.”

Article Author: Van Wallach

Van Wallach is a writer in Connecticut. He is a native of Mission, Texas and a graduate of Princeton University. His interests in Judaism and languages such as Spanish, Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian and Portuguese often color his essays, so keep your dictionaries at hand. …

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