Don't expect a list of 10 Jewish movies to provide a handy working definition on what a Jewish motion picture is. Jewish cinema can include everything from Biblical epics, Yiddish movie house (such as the 1936 musical Yiddle with His Fiddle), films from Israel and even antisemitic Nazi propaganda such as Jud Süß (1940).

Some Jewish films depict explicitly religious themes, although they're in the minority. Films such equally Fiddler on the Roof (1971) or the underrated jewel Ushpizin (2004) nowadays us with characters who talk and argue direct to God. Yet, generally, a 'Jewish flick' will have little to do with organized religion. The 'Jewishness' of these films is defined by a social atmosphere, a representation of beingness an outsider or even merely a sure cadence in the dialogue. As vague as it sounds, audiences respond to these elements and recognise the moving picture every bit something that 'feels' Jewish.

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Ii cultural settings dominate mod Jewish cinema: New York (every Woody Allen film gear up in NY is, at some level, a Jewish movie) and State of israel – whether or not all films made in the Jewish state are 'Jewish films' is an statement for wider political debate.

In countries with smaller Jewish communities, such as the UK, it becomes harder to discuss the notions of Jewish films. Picture studies lecturer Natan Abrams believes that "at that place is almost no scholarship on the subject of Jewish cinema in the United Kingdom". Nosotros exercise know that Jewish characters have been present since the earliest days of British movie theatre, oft presented in classic antisemitic ways. The Robber and the Jew (1908) and A Bad Day for Levinsky (1909) show Jews as greedy and cunning outsiders. David Lean's Oliver Twist (1948) – a film made just 3 years after the Holocaust – had Alec Guinness portraying Fagin as a grotesque stereotype with a prosthetic hooked nose.

It took a long time for cultural attitudes to modify. The Oscar-winning The Bespoke Overcoat (1955) and The Barber of Stamford Hill (1962) offered more complex representations of Jewish men, the Petticoat Lane-gear up A Kid for Two Farthings (1954) became a family favourite, and Jack Rosenthal'due south TV plays The Evacuees (1975) and Bar Mitzvah Male child (1976) are now regarded as classics.

Exodus (1960)

Manager Otto Preminger

Exodus (1960)

Exodus sits on this list for its massive political touch on rather than the quality of its filmmaking (although it won an Oscar and a Gilded Globe). A 1960s romantic ballsy, produced and directed past Otto Preminger, the film (and the bestselling book before information technology) became the foundation on which a generation of young Jews built their understanding of Centre Eastern politics. Exodus is a rose-tinted and heavily biased have on the founding of Israel that barely acknowledges those Palestinians who experienced an entirely dissimilar story, but its social bear upon is too great to ignore.

Preminger hired the recently blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo to adapt the book and cast an ensemble of leading Hollywood stars (Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint and Sal Mineo amongst others) to tell the story nearly the founding of the Jewish state. Today it may be hard to embrace the impact of the moving picture and the novel. David Ben-Gurion, Israel'southward beginning prime minister, said of the volume: "every bit a literary work it isn't much, but as a piece of propaganda, it's the all-time thing e'er written about Israel".

Fiddler on the Roof (1971)

Director Norman Jewison

Fiddler on the Roof (1971)

Fiddler on the Roof is and then well-known and so widely loved that only a martian would be surprised to detect information technology on this list. Adapted from one of the greatest Broadway musicals, the picture depicts 2 of the defining Jewish experiences of the last 200 years: the breakdown of traditions and the mass migration of (mostly) Russian and Smoothen emmigrants to the new world.

Israeli thespian Topol was merely 35 when he played the lead part of Tevye, just he gave the role a gravitas that it may otherwise accept lacked if the producers had gone with the original Broadway lead, Zero Mostel (who had recently played Max Bialystock in Mel Brooks' 1968 comedy The Producers). The Broadway musical is an art form developed most exclusively by American Jews – the very descendants of those characters depicted in the movie.

Hester Street (1975)

Director Joan Micklin Silver

Hester Street (1975)

In 1975 Joan Micklin Silver adapted and directed Abraham Cahan's belatedly 19th-century novella Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, about immigrants to New York. Shot in black and white, the motion-picture show is essentially a chamber piece and tells the story of Yankl (Steven Keats) who wants to digest into American culture, and his wife Gitl (Carol Kane in an Oscar-nominated operation) who struggles to give up her sense of tradition.

Equally with many communities, Jewish women have struggled to detect a voice. In the film we see Carol Kane reluctantly being forced to assimilate. The film poses the important question every bit to whether women actually are that much more liberated within mod western society – a question that all the same resonates among modern day immigrant communities.

The Frisco Kid (1979)

Director Robert Aldrich

The Frisco Kid (1979)

Gene Wilder is an accomplished comic performer only he'due south also a gifted (and underrated) dramatic role player. In this one-act-western Wilder presents us with as a bumbling, kind-hearted rabbi from Poland assigned to travel to San Francisco and evangelize a Torah curl. In i touching sequence, he mistakes a group of Amish men for Orthodox Jews.

Wilder's performance ranges from high one-act ("I don't want to hurt you lot!", he says to a chicken, "I just want to make you kosher!") to more serious dramatic moments every bit the rabbi finds himself robbed and swindled in the Wild Westward. Harrison Ford, a major star following the success of Star Wars ii years previously, plays a cowboy who rescues him and helps the rabbi regain his confidence.

Shoah (1985)

Director Claude Lanzmann

Shoah (1985)

Claude Lanzmann's ix-60 minutes documentary on the Holocaust is intensely unsettling. It contains few of the traditional elements associated with documentaries. There is no disembodied voiceover nor archive footage – about of the film consists of survivors and perpetrators telling their stories and sharing their memories. In one sequence a retired barber cuts hair while relating the technical aspects of shaving the heads of thousands of people murdered at Treblinka. A sometime SS guard is secretly filmed education Lanzmann the "Treblinka song" – a song prisoners were forced to learn when they arrived at the decease camp. The film provides sober and substantial evidence of the banality of evil.

Lanzmann later on said he was sceptical whether anything but documentary form could adequately express the horror of Holocaust. "Fiction is a transgression," he wrote, "[Films such as Schindler's List, 1993] transgress because they trivialise, and thus they remove the Holocaust's unique grapheme."

Crimes and Misdemeanours (1989)

Director Woody Allen

Crimes and Misdemeanours (1989)

For the concluding 50 years Woody Allen has occupied a identify in popular culture as the archetypical New York Jew, bursting with neurotic malaise and dry i-liners. He is one of the greatest writer-directors of his generation, and Crimes and Misdemeanours is i of his greatest films.

The film tells 2 carve up stories – one a drama involving a man who decides to have his mistress murdered, the other a bitter romantic comedy virtually unrequited love. The genius of film lies in the contrast of these 2 stories. Allen seems to be disputing conventional rabbinical thought and offers united states of america his (almost) anti-Talmudic view of the globe: life is non off-white, there is no justice and guilt is often absent when information technology should be nowadays and present when it should be absent. Every bit Roger Ebert noted: "The technique is Shakespearean: the crimes of kings are mirrored for comic effect in the foibles of the lower orders."

The Pianist (2002)

Director Roman Polanski

The Pianist (2002)

The Nazi genocide of 6 meg Jews has created a whole moving-picture show subgenre – the Holocaust movie. Every bit with westerns, films about the Holocaust have acquired recognisable tropes and narrative devices (Quentin Tarantino plays with this at the start of Inglourious Basterds, using the championship card "One time upon a fourth dimension in Nazi-occupied France"). For better or for worse, even a masterpiece like Schindler's List is unable to avert noble heroes and a happy ending.

This is why The Pianist is such an important pic. It is not only about the historical events but it also challenges the conventions of the 'genre': not all the Jews are decent people, not all the Germans are bad and the violence is flat and matter-of-fact. The pianist Władysław Szpilman (Adrien Brody, in the role that made him the youngest always best player Oscar-winner) is not a noble hero – he's an ordinary man, motivated past the basic necessities of survival. In short, past breaking melodramatic tropes and archetypes, The Pianist reminds united states of america that the Holocaust happened in a real time, in a real place, to existent people.

Flit with Bashir (2008)

Manager Ari Folman

Waltz with Bashir (2008)

Waltz with Bashir is an blithe documentary feature which, in some ways, acts as a reply to the idealism of Exodus. Director Ari Folman investigates the psychological touch of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon on the soldiers who came back home – and, by implication, the political bear upon these returning soldiers had on Israeli society, not dissimilar to the Vietnam vets returning to the US.

By using an unusual course of animation (Adobe Wink cutouts combined with more than traditional techniques), Folman navigates some of the well-nigh politically sensitive bug in modern Israeli and Jewish life. The flick saves its biggest in-the-face punch for the last few minutes and forces a serial of uncomfortable question on the audience, questions that go to the very heart of Jewish and Israeli identity.

A Serious Man (2009)

Director Joel Coen and Ethan Coen

A Serious Man (2009)

How Jewish tin a Jewish film exist? With A Serious Man, the Coen brothers decided to exam the limits. The moving picture opens with a quote from Rashi, the great medieval rabbi, followed by a sequence in Yiddish, and then a story set around an imminent bar mitzvah and 3 reclusive rabbis. Added to that, the entire story is a mod day retelling of the Book of Job.

All the same the film is as well deeply American and middle-course. Roger Deakin's cinematography reveals a world of bright, blueish skies and bone-white sentinel fences. This is middle America, the suburban paradise God but e'er blesses and never curses – except if you're too Jewish and your name is Larry Gopnik. Information technology is a film rooted in serious Jewish questions about the nature of life and the randomness of suffering.

The Infidel (2010)

Managing director Josh Appignanesi

The Infidel (2010)

This is not only a very Jewish flick, it'south a very British and a very Islamic movie dealing with the matter of multiculturalism. Omid Djalili plays Mahmud, a Muslim who discovers non only that he'southward been adopted just also that he'south Jewish. The script, written by comedian David Baddiel, delivers fistfuls of 1-liners (Mahmud is escorted away by security guard and retorts "Yous detect out you're Jewish and suddenly some bloke in a uniform is leading y'all abroad?").

When asked almost the footing for the comedy in the subject field matter, Baddiel explained: "These communities and cultures are seen as at war or polarised, or at opposite sides of the fence, which allows for a body swap sort of situation to ascend." It has recently been adjusted as a phase musical.

Your suggestions

Ida (2013)

1. Ida (Paweł Pawlikowski, 2013)
2. Yentl (Barbra Streisand, 1983)
3. Pi (Darren Aronofsky, 1998)
4. Everything Is Illuminated (Liev Schreiber, 2005)
5. Fill the Void (Rama Burshtein, 2012)
half dozen. The Shop on Master Street (Ján Kadár, Elmar Klos, 1965)
7. The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet, 1964)
viii. Enemies, A Love Story (Paul Mazursky, 1989)
9. An American Tail (Don Bluth, 1986)
10. Eyes Wide Open up (Haim Tabakman, 2009)

Nosotros asked you lot what was missing from our list, and Paweł Pawlikowski's Ida, a stunning exploration of faith and history which won the Best Film award at the 2013 BFI London Motion-picture show Festival, emerged as the most popular. Barbra Streisand's Yentl came in second place, a musical that, though information technology has its detractors, is notwithstanding loved past many (fun fact: Streisand became the first, and to date only, woman to win the Golden Earth for all-time director). A surprise inclusion is An American Tail, an blithe family favourite about the adventures of rodent immigrant Fievel Mousekewitz.