Purim Fun

Aaron Herman spoke with teenage author Christopher Huh about his new graphic novel Keeping My Hope. Christopher started writing Keeping My Hope when he was 13 years old. It took him about a year and half to complete the book. To write Keeping My Hope, Christopher spent over a thousand hours conducting research on WWII and the Holocaust by searching the Internet, checking out books from the library, visiting the Holocaust museum, and interviewing Holocaust survivors. Keeping My Hope is a 170 page historical fiction graphic novel. Ari is a teenager whose entire life is turned upside down by the horrors of the Holocaust. His family is torn apart and moved to Auschwitz, where the reader gains an inside look at what prisoners in concentration camps suffered. However, even with these atrocities, the power of friendship shines through and gives Ari hope to keep surviving through the darkest blizzards of terror. Informative yet touching, Keeping My Hope spreads the message of how powerfully racism and prejudice can affect those around us.

Each year the best and brightest showcase their new innovations at Techcrunch Disrupt. Aaron Herman attended Techcrunch Disrupt NY and spoke with Israeli entrepreneurs‎ about their new ventures.

Aaron Herman attended the Tribeca Film Festival and spoke with the directors and cast of the new Israeli revenge film “Big Bad Wolves” What would you do if A vigilante cop and a vengeful father capture and interrogate an accused serial killer. Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado’s brutal follow-up to “Rabies” (TFF 2011) examines a horror that most would not want to imagine: what would you do if someone hurt the one you loved most? The Israeli horror pioneers have stepped firmly out of the slasher genre with this deftly dark riff on unhappily ever after. An unsettling scenario of men pushed too far in the aftermath of a horrific crime against an innocent child, the film avoids cliché by delivering on its creators’ continued promise of unpredictability. The cast, led by award-winning Israeli actor Lior Ashkenazi, offers a slow-burning intensity that occasionally explodes in bursts of violence and shocking revelations. With a film built on powerhouse performances and tangibly gritty atmospheric touches, the duo is making a solid return to TFF filled with twists and turns.

Aaron Herman speaks with Ramaa Mosley Director of The Brass Teapot. John and Alice live in small-town America—20s, married, very much in love, and broke. Once voted “most likely to succeed,” Alice struggles to make ends meet while her friends enjoy the good life. Her husband John, neurotic and riddled with phobias, just wants to get the bills paid. But an accident leads them to a roadside antique shop where Alice is spontaneously drawn to a mysterious brass teapot. It isn’t long before they realize that this is no ordinary teapot and that perhaps they have found the answer to all of their financial woes… THE BRASS TEAPOT is a magical dark comedy that reminds us to be careful what we wish for.

Did you know that there are thousands of stolen Judaica from Jews in the holocaust being sold in flee markets around Germany and Europe? Aaron Herman spoke with Bill Frankel Director of the new organization Bring It Home which aims to reclaim the stolen Judaica. Bring it Home began as a simple trip to explore the famous Budapest flea market, Ecseri. In 2007 while visiting the market, , Bill noticed a substantial number of pieces of Judaica on the vendors’ tables.: There were Kiddush cups, Hanukkah menorahs, Shabbat candleholders, Torah yad/pointers, Tzedaka boxes, and much more. There were hundreds of pieces! Every time he would inquire about a piece one the dealer would bring out more and more to show from under his table. As he walked around, Bill grew overwhelmed by the large number of pieces and the question of how they had come to be in the dealers’ hands.Where did they come from? There could be no answer other than that they had been takenduring the war as Jews were forced from their homes during the Holocaust. Eventually, these pieces of Judaica had ended up on these dealers’ tables. At that moment, Bill felt that they did not belong in the hands of the dealers, but in the hands of the Jewish Community. He felt like he needed to Bring It Home, to bring the lost Judaica back into the Jewish community to be used as it was originally intended. Bill decided to create Bring It Home to fund local community members to go into the markets and buy the Judaica, inventory the pieces, and then send them out to the community with the explicit stipulation that the pieces will actually be used – not to be archived or to be displayed in a museum – but to be used as they were intended. The project is also about keeping the stories of the Jewish communities lost during the Holocaust alive through the artifacts. Each piece will be accompanied by an educational component to connect the recipient (Synagogues, summer camps, Campus Hillels, new immigrants, families still living in the local community) to it’s history, and with information on different traditions, prayers and uses for the Judaica.

How did Jews survive the holocaust? Some were hidden others found innovative ways to hide from the Nazi’s Aaron Herman Speaks with Director Jane Tobias and Caver Chris Nicola about the new movie No Place On Earth. No Place On Earth brings to light the untold story of thirty-eight Ukrainian Jews who survived World War II by living in caves for eighteen months, the longest-recorded sustained underground survival. Built upon interviews with former cave inhabitants, as well as Chris Nicola, the caving enthusiast who unearthed the story, No Place On Earth is an extraordinary testament to ingenuity, willpower and endurance against all odds.

Aaron Herman speaks with Avi Angel Director of Here I Learned To Love. Two brothers, three mothers, a saga during the Second World War, shrouded in fog for almost six decades, the unique emotional narrative of a voyage tracing the roots of a shadowy past, unclear and confusing even to those involved. Brothers Avner and Itzik live in Israel. As toddlers, their lives were saved first by their aunt, later by another young woman. Their past included three women who would become their mothers. But all this remained hidden — even from close family and friends. Now, at the age of 70, Avner decides to take his brother Itzik on a journey in search of their true identity, in an attempt to piece together this incredible story of their survival and most important to deeply connect with the pain and loss of their three mothers.

Where did the Hava Nagila come from? Aaron Herman spoke with Director Roberta Grossman about her new movie Hava Nagila (The Movie) .It is instantly recognizable — musical shorthand for anything Jewish, a happy party tune that you dance to at weddings, bar mitzvahs and even at Major League Baseball games. It conjures up wistful smiles, memories of generations past…and no shortage of eye rolling. But as audiences will discover in Hava Nagila (The Movie), the song is much more than a tale of Jewish kitsch and bad bar mitzvah fashions. It carries with it an entire constellation of history, values and hopes for the future. In its own believe-it-or-not way, Hava Nagila encapsulates the Jewish journey over the past 150 years. It also reveals the power of one song to express and sustain identity, to transmit lessons across generations and to bridge cultural divides and connect us all on a universal level. “When you find a song that says ‘Let us rejoice,’ there’s no better song to leave an evening with. Hava Nagila tells us who we should be and what we, in a fundamental sense, aspire to be—peoples of love and joy and peace.”— Harry Belafonte Featuring interviews with Harry Belafonte, Connie Francis, Glen Campbell, Leonard Nimoy, Regina Spektor and more, Hava Nagila (The Movie) follows the song from the shtetls of Eastern Europe to the kibbutzim of Palestine to the cul-de-sacs of America. It excavates the layers of cultural complexity with humor, depth and heart — traveling the distance between the Holocaust to Dick Dale and his surf guitar, sometimes in the same sentence. It stops at key places — Ukraine, Israel, the Catskills and Greenwich Village, where Belafonte performed a hopeful version in the late 1950s, only to be countered by Bob Dylan, who butchers the song in his version Talkin’ Hava Negiliah Blues. The film covers Allan Sherman’s parody Harvey and Sheila, and Lena Horne’s civil rights anthem Now — both set to the tune of Hava Nagila. The film spotlights Italian-American crooner Connie Francis, who made the song the first track on her famous album of Jewish favorites; and Glen Campbell, who released an instrumental version of Hava on the B-side of his theme song from True Grit. It also dissects the proliferation of pop culture references to Hava Nagila in film and TV and brings the song up to the present, where it’s a rallying tune at sports games, a hot dance number in nightclubs and a global hit online. The resulting film not only entertains us and makes us laugh; but it reminds us of the power of melody to go deep and to bring a celebration to life — offering delightful moments of discovery, one after another, on the song’s fascinating journey from Ukraine to YouTube.

Aaron Herman spoke to Tony Biancha, owner of Halloween Adventure in downtown Manhattan, about his store’s second busiest season — Purim.

Aaron Herman speaks with Paul Debevec of the USC Institute for Creative Technologies about their partnership with the USC Shoah Foundation Institute to create holograms of holocaust survivors telling their stories.