Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People

A Life Apart: Hasidism in America, is the first in-depth documentary about a distinctive, traditional Eastern European religious community. In an historic migration after World War II, Hasidism found it's most vital center in America. Both challenging and embracing American values, Hasidim seek those things which many Americans find most precious: family, community, and a close relationship to God. Integrating critical and analytical scholarship with a portrait of the daily life, beliefs, and history of contemporary Hasidic Jews in New York City, the film focuses on the conflicts, burdens, and rewards of the Hasidic way of life.

An Orthodox Jewish father tries to alert his adult sons to the dangers of creating impenetrable barriers between themselves and those outside their faith. He takes them on an emotional journey to Poland to track down the family who risked their lives to hide their grandfather for more than two years during World War II. Like many children of survivors, the sons feel that Poland is a country that is incurably anti-Semitic, but it is precisely here that they meet people who personify the highest levels of compassion

We live at a moment in time when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, now more than a century old, continues to be of overwhelming international political and societal importance. From its inception, that conflict has also, of course, had powerful and deeply troubling consequences for Israelis and Palestinians themselves. The story at its most basic level is one that involves two peoples struggling for national recognition and expression in a small but richly significant piece of land. The tragedy of this history, as both the Israeli novelist, Amos Oz, and the Palestinian scholar, Sari Nusseibeh, have each pointed out, stems from a conflict between the rights of two peoples with equal and legitimate aspirations to nationhood and self-expression in a single small territory to which they can both lay claim.

Jake Singer is at loose ends in NYC, and neck deep in psychoanalysis with the outrageous Dr. Morales when he meets the enigmatic and beautiful widow Allegra Marshall.

Lifta is the only Arab village abandoned in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that has not been completely destroyed or repopulated.