Davar Bristol

Finding 100 Faces: capturing Jewish diversity
2020-04-02 19:30 - 21:00 (Europe/London) | Redland Green Bowling Club, Redland Green Road, Redland, BS6 7HE
THIS MEETING HAS BEEN CANCELLED BECAUSE OF COVID-19

In early 2018, composer and film maker Benjamin Till, who had only recently discovered he was Jewish, decided to make the film 100 Faces to find out more about the community he’d been a member of for 43 years without realising. His mission was to find one UK-based Jewish person born every year from 1918 to 2017 and it became a journey which took him all over the world. His final 100 people include Jewish people from all walks of life. Rabbis and chazans rub shoulders with Holocaust survivors, kinder-transportees, well-known actors, musicians and writers, and two men who fought at Cable Street. The film is set to an original score performed by the Israel Camera Orchestra. Sit back and enjoy the film (around 6 mins), and then hear about the bumpy and inspirational ride which led there.

Benjamin Till is an award-winning filmmaker and composer. He grew up in Northamptonshire and describes himself as a fanatical Midlander of Welsh and Jewish extraction. He has many works to his credit including Our Gay Wedding: The Musical, a Bafta-nominated film is considered one of Channel 4’s most successful broadcasts. His most recent film, 100 Faces, won the gold award at the Robinson’s International Short Film Competition. Benjamin sings with, and is Resident Composer for, the Jewish male voice choir Mosaic Voices at New West End Synagogue, London.

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Wondrous Oblivion
2020-03-25 20:00 - 22:00 | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
THIS FILM HAS BEEN CANCELLED BECAUSE OF COVID-19

UK 2003, 106 mins, English
Director Paul Morrison
In this comedy drama, David Wiseman is mad about cricket but faces two problems: he’s Jewish and he’s absolutely hopeless at playing the game. When a Jamaican family move next door, the father Dennis schools him in the delicate arts of bat and ball. David’s parents come out of their shells thanks to Dennis, while David learns about growing up and becoming assertive both on and off the pitch.
‘The movie presents a pretty convincing account of its time and is well acted. Like Paul Morrison’s earlier movie, Solomon and Gaenor, Wondrous Oblivion is somewhat contrived and occasionally sentimental. But it’s warm, kindly, and has a heart the size of the Oval.’ (Philip French, Observer review)
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Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual?
2020-03-11 19:30 - 21:00 | Redland Green Bowling Club, Redland Green Road, Redland, BS6 7HE
PLEASE NOTE THIS TALK HAS NOW BEEN CANCELLED TO AVOID RISK OF COVID-19 (CORONA VIRUS) INFECTION
Stanley Kubrick is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s great directors. Yet few critics or scholars have considered how he emerged from a unique and vibrant cultural milieu: the New York Jewish intelligentsia. Nathan Abrams reexamines the director’s work in context of his ethnic and cultural origins and focuses on several of Kubrick’s key themes-masculinity, ethical responsibility, and the nature of evil.-At the same time, he will explore Kubrick’s fraught relationship with his Jewish identity and his reluctance to be pegged as an ethnic director.
Nathan Abrams is Professor in Film at Bangor University. He co-convenes the British Jewish Contemporary Cultures network. He lectures, writes and broadcasts widely on UK and American popular culture, history film and intellectual culture. He co-founded Jewish Film and New Media and recent books are Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film (with Robert Kolker, Oxford University Press, 2019), Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual (Rutgers University Press, 2018), Hidden in Plain Sight: Jews and Jewishness in British Film, Television, and Popular Culture (Northwestern University Press, 2016).
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My Polish Honeymoon
2020-02-26 20:00 - 22:00 | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
France 2018, 88 mins, French with English subtitles
Director Elise Otzenberger
Packed with charm and laughter, this delightful comedy follows recently-married Parisian couple, Anna and Adam, as they head off on a belated honeymoon to Poland, leaving their baby in the hands of Anna’s parents. Whilst Anna hopes to find out something of her family’s history, Adam is more interested in having a few days alone with his wife. Immersed in a new but strangely familiar culture, they discover a Poland awash with absurd and wonderful characters, picture perfect beauty and unbearable sadness. Élise Otzenberger’s debut feature is an entertaining and life affirming tale about rediscovering roots and being Jewish today.
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Henri Tajfel: Explorer of identity and difference
2020-02-13 19:30 - 21:00 | Redland Green Bowling Club, Redland Green Road, Redland, BS6 7HE
Henri Tajfel was one of the most influential European social psychologists of the 20th century. Rupert Brown will trace his life from his birth in Poland in 1919, his time as a prisoner-of-war of the Germans in World War II, his post-war work with Jewish orphans in France and Belgium, and thence to his short but brilliant career as a social psychologist. Tajfel was interested in how and why groups see and treat each other in negative ways. He conducted a famous set of studies – known as the minimal group experiments – and developed Social Identity Theory, the heart of which is that people’s identities are often intimately tied up with the groups they belong to and they will work hard to make those groups appear superior to other groups. This theory paved the way for subsequent work which shows how mass-scale human violence, such as the Holocaust, might be possible.
Rupert Brown is Emeritus Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Sussex. He obtained his PhD under Tajfel at the University of Bristol and has been an active researcher in the field of intergroup relations and prejudice. He was the recipient of the 2014 Henri Tajfel medal, awarded by the European Association of Social Psychology and is the author of two widely used student texts, Group Processes (2019) and Prejudice (2010). His biography of Tajfel is published by Routledge (2019).
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Remember
2020-01-29 20:00 - 22:00 | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
Canada/Germany 2015, 94 mins, English
Director Atom Egoyan featuring Christopher Plummer and Martin Landau
‘Christopher Plummer puts on a master class in acting, and his director, Atom Egoyan, delivers one in audience manipulation in Remember a psychological thriller featuring that most blood-boiling of plot devices: a Nazi who escaped justice.’
Mr. Plummer is Zev and Martin Landau plays Max, fellow residents in an assisted-living complex. Max realizes they were both at Auschwitz. He is the brains and Zev is the brawn, so to speak, of a plan Max has hatched to seek vengeance on a concentration camp official who escaped to the United States under a false identity. Max is in a wheelchair, but he arms Zev and sends him on a cross-country journey to interview four people who could be the missing Nazi, the hope being that he’ll kill the man once he finds him. But Zev is floating in and out of dementia, complicating the task and giving Mr. Plummer a chance to turn in a very fine performance.’ (Neil Glezinger, NY Times review)
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Medicine in Ancient Judaism: Why does G-d attempt to kill Moses in Exodus 4?
2019-12-12 19:30 - 21:00 | Redland Green Bowling Club, Redland Green Road, Redland, BS6 7HE
Directly after the burning bush scene, G-d inexplicably tries to kill Moses (Exodus 4:24-26). Fortunately, Moses’ life is saved by Zipporah’s enigmatic “Bridegroom of Blood” ritual. Commentators both ancient and modern have proposed many solutions by filling in the gaps, proposing reasons such as Moses’ failing courage or procrastination. But what did this episode mean in its original setting? This talk will look at how G-d’s attempt on Moses’ life is better understood in the broader historical context of ancient medicine. In this talk, Dr Askin will draw upon recent research from her current project, Medicine in Ancient Israel and Early Judaism, to explore how and why the Bible’s portrayals of medicine and healing seems so mysterious and distant to us.
Dr Lindsey A. Askin is Lecturer in Jewish Studies, University of Bristol. She is the author of Scribal Culture in Ben Sira (Brill, 2018), which is based on her doctoral thesis (University of Cambridge, 2012-16). Her research interests include mental illness and medicine in the Bible and ancient Judaism, scribal culture and literacy, Ben Sira, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Book of Jubilees.
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Back to Berlin
2019-11-27 20:00 - 22:00 | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
Following eleven modern-day Jewish bikers on an epic journey from Tel-Aviv to Berlin, crossing nine European countries and 4,500 km in twenty-four days. Their mission, to deliver the Maccabi torch to Hitler’s infamous 1936 Olympic stadium, for the opening ceremony of the 2015 European Maccabiah Games. These riders follow in the tracks of the early 1930s’ bikers who set out from Tel Aviv to all corners of Europe. En route, each country holds a chilling resonance for our motor-cycling Holocaust survivors, descendants of survivors and the grandson of a 1930s Maccabiah Rider. Stories of defiance and survival are revealed, as well as those of horrifying tragedy. As resurgent populism and anti-Semitism once again rear their ugly heads, this film brings an important message through the voice of those who have been personally affected by one of the darkest pages in human history. This isn’t simply a “Jewish” story. It is the story of people overcoming the worst from fellow man to restate our common humanity.
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Here I am; Capturing the Stories of the South Wales Jewish Community
2019-11-14 19:30 - 21:00 | Redland Green Bowling Club, Redland Green Road, Redland, BS6 7HE
There have been two projects in Cardiff over the last 10 years that have used oral history to capture the stories of the Cardiff Jewish community, as well as preserving written records. The talk will look at how we went about it and some of the advantages of oral history, and will give some fascinating snippets from the stories people had to tell. It will also look at what we learnt about identity and belonging and the diversity of experience of the community, from the last Barmitzvah in a synagogue in Cologne ten days before Kristallnacht to the first Jewish wedding in Kidwelly, a village in West Wales.
Colin Heyman was involved in the Hineni Oral History project which started the work in 2009 and John Minkes of the Jewish History Association of South Wales has continued the work over the last three years. In our other lives, Colin is a trainer and facilitator, John a retired criminologist. Our other joint activity is going to see Cardiff City play
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A bag of marbles (un sac de billes)
2019-10-30 20:00 - 22:00 | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
Last year this film was sold out, so we are reshowing it. Canadian director Christian Duguay explores the horrors of World War Two from the perspective of two young Jewish boys living in Nazi-occupied France in Un Sac de Billes (A Bag of Marbles). Based on the acclaimed memoirs of the same name by Joseph Joffo, A Bag of Marbles is a lavishly shot production that is brilliantly acted and is a gut-wrenching reminder of one of history’s darkest chapters. Following the fall of Paris to Nazi Germany during World War II, brothers Maurice (Batyste Fleurial) and Joseph (Dorian Le Clech) are forced to leave their close-knit Jewish family behind for the free-zone along the French Riviera.
Despite the grim war scenes and the dark subject matter, Duguay has created a lavishly shot film that boasts stunning cinematography, lush locations and beautiful period costumes. The film beautifully balances the high stake tension with some sweet and endearing moments between the two brothers and celebrates their innocence. While the film is a dark reminder of a terrible page in our history, its heart-warming story reminds us that there are still good people in our darkest moments (modified from Daniele Foti-Cuzzola)
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Internment of German Jews on the Isle of Man during World War Two
2019-10-10 19:30 - 21:00 | Redland Green Bowling Club, Redland Green Road, Redland, BS6 7HE
During the second war German Jews living in Britain were classified as enemy aliens, and in 1940 many were interned in camps on the Isle of Man. These included David Memel’s father and father in law, and David has recently visited the sites of the camps. He will discuss the historical background to the internments, and the experiences of internees, mainly based on the accounts of his family. Despite the loss of freedom, many interesting experiences resulted, including living with a famous artist and a lion tamer.
David Memel was chair of Limmud Bristol South West 2018 and is a committee member of Davar. He is a retired GP.
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Disobedience
2019-09-25 20:00 - 22:00 | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
The question of whose disobedience, and what kind of disobedience it is, are at the heart of this absorbing and moving love story from Chilean director Sebastián Lelio based on the novel by Naomi Alderman. The drama takes place in the Orthodox Jewish community of north London. Weisz is Ronit, a young photographer evidently living a fashionable and bohemian lifestyle in New York. Out of the blue, she receives some bad news from back home that her father, a much-respected rabbi, has died. Ronit’s return resurrects her past relationships with Dovid (Alessandro Nivola), her father’s favourite pupil, who is now a much admired young rabbi himself. The other is with Esti, beautifully played by Rachel McAdams, who was Ronit’s only ally in youthful rebelliousness back in the day. This is a richly satisfying and powerfully acted work. (modified from Peter Bagshaw, Guardian)
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Saudade: A Sephardic journey
2019-04-09 19:30 - 21:00 | Redland Green Bowling Club, Redland Green Road, Redland, BS6 7HE
10 years ago, after a series of seemingly disparate coincidences, Judy Rodrigues began a journey into 300 years of East End London Jewish history, which led her back through her grandfather’s Sephardic Marrano Jewish roots to Portugal and Northern Spain As an artist, the histories and stories became part of ‘life being lived’ as they began to permeate, enrich and expand the poetic metaphors of experience and place through her work. The journey became as much a search for the sense of a lost community, as that of an individual identity.

Judy Rodrigues is an artist working in contemporary contexts with a studio at Spike Island, Bristol. In 2008 she was awarded a residency grant in Mertola, Portugal followed by an exhibition in Porto. In 2014 she received an Arts Council grant to work in Isle of Wight and exhibited in Dimbola Lodge, once home of the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. In 2017 she exhibited in Pico Island, Azores and then worked on a collaborative publication with Portuguese poet Jose Efe. Their book, In Pico, will be launched Jan 2019.

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Footnote
2019-03-27 20:00 - 22:00 | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
Professor Eliezer Shkolnik, an elderly Talmudic scholar, whose long career has never amounted to much, has always been eclipsed by his middle-aged son – Professor Uriel Shkolnik, also a Talmudic specialist – who has been showered with all the awards and fellowships that he himself yearned for. The older man must now reconcile himself to being a footnote in his son’s life. Then, one day, a sensational piece of news turns everything upside down. Joseph Cedar’s Israeli movie Footnote is a sprightly, shrewd and ingenious black comedy of middle age and disappointed ambition. (modified from Peter Bradshaw, Guardian)

Israel 2011, 107 mins, Hebrew with sub-titles
Directed by Joseph Cedar and starring Shlomo Bar’aba and Lior Ashkenazi
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The Jewish Influence on the British film industry and screening of The Man Who Got Carter, a documentary about the Jewish film producer Michael Klinger
2019-03-24 15:00 - 17:30 | Watershed, 1 Canons Road, Bristol, BS1 5TX, United Kingdom
The Jewish Influence on the British film industry and screening of The Man Who Got Carter, a documentary about the Jewish film producer Michael Klinger

This event, part of the Jewish Historical Society’s Jewish History Month, jointly hosted by JHSE, Watershed, UWE and DAVAR will occur at the Watershed. It will provide a unique insight into the potent influence of Jewish entrepreneurs and film-makers on the UK’s film industry. Prof. Andrew Spicer (UWE) will give an overview of how Jewish exhibitors, distributors and producers shaped the evolution of the British film industry from its beginning to the present. Film-maker and writer Tony Klinger will introduce the feature-length documentary, The Man Who Got Carter, about his father, Michael Klinger, a highly successful independent producer from 1960 to the early 1980s whose most famous film was Get Carter (1971). The documentary will be followed by a Q and A session.

Tickets available via Watershed www.watershed.co.uk
Box Office: 0117 927 5100, 1 Canons Road, Harbourside, Bristol BS1 5TX

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Women of Valour
2019-03-12 19:30 - 21:00 | Redland Green Bowling Club, Redland Green Road, Redland, BS6 7HE
At the heart of growing fundamentalism in the Haredi sector lies the fate of women: rabbis have decreed bans on women driving, installed modesty patrols, enforced gender segregation on buses, and caused women’s faces to be omitted in newspapers and magazines. Whilst Haredi men attempt to render women voiceless and faceless, mainstream media does little better. Haredi women, however, are not all sitting silently in their floor-length clothing locked in their homes despairing their helpless fate. In a range of texts and genresthese women have been responding to their experiences. In this talk, Karen will draw on research from her recent book, Women of Valor, to highlight the work Haredi women are doing today.

Karen Skinazi is a senior teaching fellow at the University of Bristol. She has recently published Women of Valor: Orthodox Jewish Troll Fighters, Crime Writers, and Rock Stars in Contemporary Literature and Culture. Her writing about literature, race, gender, Jewish culture, and motherhood has appeared in academic journals and popular papers
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RBG
2019-02-27 20:00 - 22:00 | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
RBG is a remarkable documentary of the career of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which spans several decades, and how she developed a legal legacy while becoming a pop culture icon. In the 1970s Ginsburg played a leading role as a legal warrior for women’s rights. “I ask for no favour for my sex,” she said, quoting the abolitionist Sarah Grimké from 1837. “All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.” An astonishing woman who at 85, having already survived bouts of cancer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the proverbial survivor.

US 2018, 97 mins, English
Directed by Betsy West starring Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Jane Ginsburg, Gloria Steinem

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Finding Relly
2019-02-12 19:30 - 21:00 | Redland Green Bowling Club, Redland Green Road, Redland, BS6 7HE
Rosemary grew up as the daughter of a Czech immigrant in post-war UK and Canada. She was unaware of her father’s Jewish identity and of what really happened to his absent relatives. After her father’s death, she felt compelled to discover the truth about his family. Tracing her aunt Relly, who had emigrated to Australia after surviving Auschwitz, was a significant turning point in her life and her new book Finding Relly is about her journey, both personal and logistical.Rosemary will also talk about using her book to educate schoolchildren about the Holocaust.

Rosemary Schonfeld toured the world throughout the 1980s with her band Ova. She is a professional musician and composer based in Devon. She has recorded and produced/co-produced six albums, co-run a recording studio, devised a teaching package for percussionists, and is currently working on a rock opera. She has published an illustrated book of Nonsense Poetry, Standing on Your Head, and short stories.
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1945
2019-01-30 20:00 - 22:00 | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
The arrival of two orthodox Jews upsets the wedding day of a rural town clerk’s son in Hungary in 1945. This drama filmed in elegant black and white is from Hungarian director Ferenc Török. It captures the collective guilt of the community who have moved into the homes and taken possession of the property of their former Jewish neighbours forcing them to face culpability and dishonour when challenged by the two men of faith.

Hungary 2017, 91 mins, Hungarian with sub-titles (Black and White)
Director Ferenc Török with Péter Rudolf and Tamás Szabó Kimme

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The Bagel: past, present and future
2018-12-11 19:30 - 21:00 | Redland Green Bowling Club, Redland Green Road, Redland, BS6 7HE
If smoked salmon and cream cheese bring but one thing to mind, then you are part of a long and fascinating edible history that has brought the roll with a hole from 17th century Poland to the freezers of the modern Anglo-American home. The talk will give a cultural but light-hearted overview of this modest ring-shaped bread that has gained a place in history.
Clarissa Hyman is an award-winning freelance writer, specialising in all aspects of food and travel taking in producers, ingredients, restaurants, recipes, food policy and consumer trends, and she uses food as a means to explore a wider world of culture and history, art and agriculture. She contributes to a wide range of newspapers, magazines and guides, and is the author of Cucina Siciliana (Conran Octopus 2001), The Jewish Kitchen (2003), and The Spanish Kitchen (2005). She has been shortlisted for all of the major cookery writing awards, and twice has won the Glenfiddich Food Writer of the Year Award. She contributed the Fruit section of Dorling Kindersley’s Ingredients (2010). In 2013 Reaktion published her Oranges: A Global History and her next book for Reaktion “Tomatoes: A Global History” will be published in 2019.
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A bag of marbles (un sac de billes)
2018-11-28 20:00 - 22:00 | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
Canadian director Christian Duguay explores the horrors of World War Two from the perspective of two young Jewish boys living in Nazi-occupied France in Un Sac De Billes (A Bag of Marbles). Based on the acclaimed memoirs of the same name by Joseph Joffo, A Bag of Marbles is a lavishly shot production that is brilliantly acted and is a gut-wrenching reminder of one of history’s darkest chapters. Following the fall of Paris to Nazi Germany during World War II, brothers Maurice (Batyste Fleurial) and Joseph (Dorian Le Clech) are forced to leave their close-knit Jewish family behind for the free-zone along the French Riviera.
Despite the grim war scenes and the dark subject matter, Duguay has created a lavishly shot film that boasts stunning cinematography, lush locations and beautiful period costumes. The film beautifully balances the high stake tension with some sweet and endearing moments between the two brothers and celebrates their innocence. While the film is a dark reminder of a horrible page in our history, its heart-warming story reminds us that there are still good people in our darkest moments (modified from Daniele Foti-Cuzzola)
France 2017, 113 mins, French, German, Russian, Yiddish; Director Christian Duguay featuring Batyste Fleurial, Dorian Le Clech

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Belonging and belongings: Jewish poetry in the UK today
2018-11-13 19:30 - 21:00 | Redland Green Bowling Club, Redland Green Road, Redland, BS6 7HE
What does it mean to be a Jewish poet? Can a non-Jew, like Micheal O’Siadhail, write about the Holocaust? (See The Gossamer Wall, Bloodaxe 2002). Maybe the Irish and the Jews have enough in common to be able to immerse themselves in each other’s histories. Does a writer and in particular a poet have to belong somewhere before they can write? Who do their poems belong to? What part do journals like Jewish Renaissance and the Jewish Quarterly play in keeping alive the identity of Jewish poets and poetry. How important are Jewish poets like Aviva Dautch, Poet in Residence at the Jewish Museum in London, who also works with refugees getting them to write poetry?
Liz Cashdan is a poet and teaches Creative Writing for the Open College of the Arts. She is former Chair of the National Association of Writers in Education. She also teaches Creative Writing for the Folk House in Bristol and in schools. She is Poetry Editor of Jewish Renaissance and in 1996 won the Jewish Quarterly poetry prize with her historical sequence, The Tyre-Cairo Letters based on a fragment from the Cairo Geneza She has an MA in History from Oxford and a PhD in Literature from Sheffield Hallam University. Her latest collection is Things of Substance: New and Selected Poems (Five Leaves Publications 2013).
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Menashe
2018-10-31 20:00 - 22:00 | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
“Set within the New York Hasidic community in Borough Park, Brooklyn, Menashe follows a kind but hapless grocery store clerk trying to maintain custody of his son Rieven after his wife, Lea, passes away. Since they live in a tradition-bound culture that requires a mother present in every home, Rieven is supposed to be adopted by the boy’s strict, married uncle, but Menashe’s Rabbi decides to grant him one week to spend with Rieven prior to Lea’s memorial. Their time together creates an emotional moment of father/son bonding as well as offers Menashe a final chance to prove to his skeptical community that he can be a capable parent.
Shot in secret entirely within the Hasidic community depicted in the film, and one of the only movies to be performed in Yiddish in nearly 70 years, Menashe is a warm, life-affirming look at the universal bonds between father and son that also sheds unusual light on a notoriously private community. Based largely on the real life of its Hasidic star Menashe Lustig, the film is a strikingly authentic and deeply moving portrait of family, love, connection, and community.” (taken from https://a24films.com/films)
US 2017, 81 mins, Yiddish (subtitled) Director Joshua Z Weinstein featuring Menashe Lustig, Ruben Nibroski
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The Jews of India
2018-10-09 19:30 - 21:00 | Redland Green Bowling Club, Redland Green Road, Redland, BS6 7HE
Dating back to the time of King Solomon, some of the oldest Jewish communities in the world are to be found in India. In 2016, Sonia Jackson joined a tour of Indian Jewish sites and synagogues organised by Maidenhead Synagogue and led by Ralphy and Yael Jhirad. She will give an illustrated talk about the synagogues they visited and their social and historical context.
Sonia Jackson is an Emeritus Professor at UCL Institute of Education. She is a past Chair of Davar and continues to have a strong commitment to supporting Jewish cultural life in Bristol and the surrounding area
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Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr story
2018-09-26 20:00 - 22:00 | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
There can hardly be any more extraordinary story from the Hollywood golden age than that of Hedy Lamarr; an assimilated Austrian Jew, a very beautiful star with a moderate acting talent but an untutored brilliance in science and engineering.. Her tragedy was that she was in the wrong business, precisely that business that promotes beauty over brains – the movie business. Alexandra Dean’s excellent and important documentary about her is very instructive – a parable of modern sexual politics and assumptions about science. Lamarr was an enigma: a great brain trapped in a silly, spurious image of glamour, while her real talent was allowed to wither. A sad but fascinating story. (modified from Peter Bradshaw review)
The film has won several awards since being shown at the Tribeca Film Festival, including a New York Times Critic’s Pick and five audience awards. J. Hoberman named it “one of the ten best films of 2017

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Painting Exile: R. B. Kitaj, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff
2018-04-10 19:30 - 21:00 | Redland Green Bowling Club, Redland Green Road, Redland, BS6 7HE
“The novelty of our time [is] that so many individuals have experienced the uprooting and dislocations that have made them expatriate and exiles.” The words of Edward Said encapsulate the widely-held view that exile was emblematic of the modern world. This talk will focus upon three artists featured in the exhibition ‘Out of Chaos’ at the Laing Art Gallery in 2016-17: Frank Auerbach, R.B. Kitaj and Leon Kossoff. They were loosely grouped under the label the ‘School of London.’ Focusing especially upon the works featured in the exhibition, this talk will explore the different ways that exile is represented, imagined or displaced through each artist’s particular vision; and how that vision might have been shaped by their individual historical circumstances.
Stephen Moonie is a Lecturer in Art History in the Department of Fine Art, School of Arts and Cultures, Newcastle University. He is an expert on modernist painting and criticism, especially in the U.S. during the 1950s and 1960s. He teaches widely across many areas of art history, and has published on various aspects of modern art and art criticism in recent years. He is currently interested in the legacy of the critical debates of the 1960s and the current role of art criticism.

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Norman: the moderate rise and fall of a New York fixer
2018-03-28 20:00 - 22:00 | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
Norman (Richard Gere), a New York fixer, knows the right people and can get things done. When an Israeli dignitary named Eshel (Lior Ashkenazi) comes to the city, Norman decides to impress the man by buying him some very expensive shoes. It works and he establishes a strong connection to the man, but a few years later, when Eshel becomes the Israel prime minister, Norman can’t communicate with him anymore, and this threatens to destroy his reputation.
“Israeli director Cedar impressively creates a complex and intricately detailed portrait of the web of political, financial, social and religious affiliations that has everything to do with how the world works. Gere presides over it all with an impressively self-effacing portrait of a man who, while you wouldn’t want to experience him in real life, remains fascinating onscreen from beginning to end. Of the countless hustler characters who have driven dramatic films over the decades, Gere makes this one distinctive and different, even if there’s no revelation of the entire man.” (Modified from review by Todd McCarthy)

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From Buenos Aires to Bristol - The history of Limmud, the global Jewish educational phenomenon
2018-03-13 19:30 - 21:00 | Redland Green Bowling Club, Redland Green Road, Redland, BS6 7HE
With Bristol holding its first Limmud event in June 2018, it’s time to hear what makes Limmud so remarkable. Founded in 1980, Limmud has spread all over the world, empowering Jews of every stripe and type to take control of their own learning. It has pioneered modes of participatory leadership and how different Jews can learn and work together while fully respecting their deepest held differences. Still controversial amongst some for its unparalleled approach to inclusion, there are now Limmud events in over 85 places in 44 countries across the world, creating new educators, offering a model for grown up Jewish life everywhere and introducing Jews to each other, who often lived next door but never spoke.
Clive Lawton is one of the co-Founders of Limmud and served as its first Executive Director for 7 years till 2006 and subsequently as a Senior Consultant. Recognised with an OBE, Clive is acknowledged as one of the world’s leading Jewish educators as well as an international advisor on the development of educational leadership and issues of diversity. In the early 1990s Clive was responsible for the grant that first established Davar and spoke at its inaugural event. He has been a Headteacher, Chair of an NHS Hospital Trust, a governor of the Metropolitan Police, an advisor to the Home Office on Race Equality issues and a regular on Radio 4’s Thought for the Day. He is currently CEO of the Commonwealth Jewish Council, a magistrate, scholar in residence at London’s flagship JW3 Cultural Centre, and has authored about a dozen books.

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The Governess
2018-02-28 20:00 - 22:00 | Scott Cinema, Bristol, Northumbria Drive, Henleaze, Bristol, Avon, BS9 4HN, United Kingdom
Set in the 1830s, the story centres on Rosina da Silva, the sophisticated eldest daughter of a wealthy Jewish Italian family living in a small enclave of Sephardic London Jews. When her father is murdered on the street and leaves behind numerous debts, she refuses an arranged marriage to an older suitor, declaring that she will work to support her family, even if she has to take to the stage like her aunt, who is a renowned singer. She decides to use her classical education and advertise her services as a governess, transforming herself into Mary Blackchurch – a Protestant of partial Italian descent – in order to conceal her heritage. However life becomes complicated as she gets to know Charles Cavendish, the patriarch of the house, and his son Henry. Minnie Driver (Rosina) gives one of her best performances with memorable beauty and the screen presence of a real star.
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No poetry after Auschwitz
2018-02-13 19:30 - 21:00 | Redland Green Bowling Club, Redland Green Road, Redland, BS6 7HE
Starting with Theodor Adorno’s much-quoted proposition that ‘After Auschwitz it is barbaric to write poetry’, this talk will explore the tension between confronting the reality of the Holocaust and responding artistically through the medium of poetry to human experience. By focusing on individual poems by survivors such as Paul Celan and Primo Levi and English-language poets such as Anthony Hecht, Michael Longley and Carol Ann Duffy, the talk will tentatively consider how necessary poetry remains in the modern world. Examples of poems will be provided and can be found in the anthology, “Holocaust Poetry”, edited by Hilda Schiff.
Philip Lyons is a teacher and poet who lives in Bristol. He has taught creative writing and literary studies in a variety of settings, including universities, prisons and psychiatric hospitals. Since completing a PhD on Literary and Theological Responses to the Holocaust at the University of Bristol in 1988, he has also worked in the fields of advice and guidance, mental health, and adult education. He is the author of one full-length collection, “Like It Is” (Poetry Space, 2011), and he has given readings throughout the South West, including the Wells Festival of Literature and the Thornbury Arts Festival.
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