Moment magazine’s summer edition has the perfect feature for Jewish cinephiles: “Favorite Jewish movie scenes of all time.” It’s such an immense topic that there’s really no definitive way to do it justice. What Moment did was put together a symposium of people who weighed in with their picks. It’s not exactly scientific, but there’s almost no other way to do it.
In addition to favorites scenes, there are other sections, like “Jewish roles played by non-Jews,” or “Favorite movie rabbis.”
Some of the picks are slightly obvious (“Fiddler on the Roof”) and Woody Allen features far more than he probably should in this day and age – but what really emerges is that all of the films are essentially Jewish in their overall content. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it misses out on the potential of including scenes like Ari Gold’s (Jeremy Piven) Yom Kippur scene in the TV series “Entourage.” There is one section of the feature that includes some of these slightly more obscure Jewish scenes and references, and that’s the section on Jewish roles played by non-Jewish actors.
So we put the question to you: What’s your favorite Jewish movie? And what your favorite Jewish movie scene in a movie that’s not obviously about Jewish themes?