L ifestyles /C ulture
Film Festival Moves Online for 40th Anniversary
FI L M
JESSE BERNSTEIN | JE STAFF
IT CAN BE HARD to feel
festive these days. But the
Gershman Philadelphia Jewish
Film Festival, beginning Nov.

7 and running until Nov. 21,
is inviting movie lovers every-
where to celebrate a raft of
exciting new Jewish cinema as it
celebrates its 40th anniversary.

Though not a festival in the
traditional sense — there won’t
be the typical sprinkling of live
screenings at venues across
the city — this year’s GPJFF
still provides viewers with
the chance to see new Jewish
documentaries, short films
and features.

Add it iona l ly,
virtual attendees will have the chance
to see a performance and dance
workshop by Ariel Rivka Dance,
take a class on writing for televi-
sion with “BoJack Horseman”
creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg
and sit in on a Jewish visual
artist showcase and panel on the
intersection of art and activism.

Interviews with actors and
subjects that may have taken
place before or after a screening
have been prerecorded, along
with directors’ introductions to
their films.

“It is important to my
colleagues and me that the
festival retains as much of
its character and charm as
possible — even as it goes
virtual,” GPJFF Executive
Artistic Director Olivia Antsis
said. “We are doing every-
thing we can to make sure that
festival-goers and sponsors still
feel connected and engaged.”
One way they’ll do that is
with 40th birthday boxes filled
with festival swag and seasonal
goodies as a thank-you to all
sponsors. Though this year is no one’s
idea of a normal festival, there
are some changes for the day
that in-person screenings could
be held again; the festival’s new
virtual platform, at watch.pjff.

org, may become an annual
occurrence to go along with
the live screenings. And forgive
Antsis for repeating herself, as
she does each year. She really
thinks this lineup could be one
of the best ones yet.

Here are reviews of three
movies set to be screened at
this year’s festival:
“Shiva Baby,” directed by Emma
Seligman. Nov. 19, 8 p.m.

Emma Seligman’s “Shiva
Baby,” titled after a loud and
disruptive infant who is inexpli-
cably brought to a somber and
muted ritual, was adapted
from her 2018 short film. The
story has expanded from the
original, but Seligman wisely
chose to retain the actress at
the center of the movie: Rachel
Sennott, a young comedian
and the GPJFF “Rising Star.”
In a comedy that frequently
calls for the deployment of a
well-timed dead-eyed stare,
Sennott does so with great
skill. Though the charac-
ters at the shiva play it a little
too broadly to be much more
than Jewish “types” (Fred
Melamed and Polly Draper
are the parents to Sennott’s
character), a wild confluence
Avigail Harari and Ran Danker in “Honeymood,” a standout offering at this year’s Gershman Philadelphia Jewish
Film Festival 
WestEnd Films
of romantic circumstances and
Seligman’s eye for the ridicu-
lous keep the movie bouncy
and entertaining.

most critically lauded Israeli
movies of the last decade, has
written a keenly observed,
wonderfully acted romantic
comedy that’s funny in any
language, though we would
advise reading the subtitles.

A newly married couple
experiences about two minutes
of domestic bliss before the
bride discovers that her
groom’s ex-girlfriend has gifted
him with a mysterious ring —
on their wedding night! Her
determination to return the
ring that very night sets them
off on a madcap rush around
Jerusalem. Right at the point where you
think you know what Lavie is
doing, she takes another left
turn. Don’t miss this one.

seek to bridge cultural divides
with food is a delight.

The movie follows the
chefs who will take part in
the Haifa-based A-sham Arab
Food Festival, which will
require pairings of Jewish
and Arab chefs to collabo-
rate on traditional dishes.

The characters of this world
are uniformly intriguing, and
so distinctly Israeli; there is
something unmistakably of
the Promised Land about a
shot of a cramped hummus
restaurant, owned by a Jewish
wife and Arab husband, menu
items scrawled onto a simple
board, walls sagging with
hamsas and Jewish paintings,
the top of one diner’s buttocks
in full view.

The movie begins with a
quote from Anthony Bourdain,
and it’s very much from the
Bourdain school of culinary
entertainment. It dispenses
with the idea that we’re “all the
same,” but believes fervently in
the power of a table full of good
food to be the place where our
commonalities are most easily
summoned. l
“Honeymood,” directed by
Tayla Lavie. Nov. 14, 8 p.m.

Filmmakers who dare
to try and make a contem-
porary romantic comedy
are in a particularly difficult
spot. The genre is increasingly
populated by movies that
seek to create ironic distance
from the original strictures of
the romantic comedy, to the
degree that romantic comedies
that poke fun at conventions
of romantic comedy have
themselves become conven-
tional. But what’re you going
to do — play it straight?
Lavie refuses to be boxed in
by either option. The director of “Breaking Bread,” directed
“Zero Motivation,” one of the by Beth Elise Hawk. Nov. 21,
8 p.m.

It’s hard to say if the food
in “Breaking Bread” looks
especially delicious, or if the
sight of people happily enjoying
the inside of a restaurant feels
DON’T MISS A SINGLE ISSUE OF THE
like watching an especially
extravagant fantasy. Either way,
Beth Elise Hawk’s documentary
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L ifestyles /C ulture
New Podcast to Feature ‘Radical Candor’
ARTS JESSE BERNSTEIN | JE STAFF
IF YOU KNEW Debbie Epstein
Henry, it would come as no
surprise that she’d want to get
into the world of podcasting.

After all, the types of stories
that Henry tells on the first
season of her new podcast,
“Inspiration Loves Company,”
are the types of stories she’s
lived to tell — and lived, full
stop. Henry, who lives on the
Main Line, is a lawyer, consul-
tant and entrepreneur. Though
she was once a litigator, her
talent for creating, networking
and public speaking led her to
start a consulting firm, DEH
Consulting, Speaking, Writing.

Her podcast,
which launched on Oct. 22 and will
conclude its first season on
Dec. 16, features frank conver-
sations with other experienced
professionals, mostly women,
who cover topics like race,
office gender roles and “radical
candor,” among other planned
episodes. For the woman who
once fought alongside her
mother for the right to read
Torah from the bimah on a
Saturday morning at her bat
mitzvah, the chance to speak
directly to the challenges faced
by her peers was a natural step.

“I felt this was such an
opportunity to revisit things we
care about, and ask ourselves,
‘What’s the best way to under-
stand and embrace these
issues now?’” Henry said of
“Inspiration Loves Company.”
Henry knows that the
Debbie Epstein Henry’s new podcast is called “Inspiration Loves Company.”
“It just rocked my world,”
she said of the experience. “And
what it made me do was commit
to myself that I’m going to take
smart risks in my life and I’m
not going to wait for anything
to live the life I want.”
So when she felt it was
time to leave litigation to try
something on her own, she
didn’t hesitate.

DEH Consulting, Speaking,
Writing began after Henry sent
out a casual networking email
to a few Philadelphia attor-
neys and found a sprawling
network of lawyers interested
in work-life issues. They were
also interested in live events
where Henry would inter-
view authors, thinkers and
TED talk alums speaking to
work-life issues. DEH went
national, and thousands of
professionals attended the
events over the years — even as
Henry was busy running Bliss
Lawyers, a full-service legal
placement firm.

Heidi Freedman, a lawyer in
Cleveland, has known Henry
for 15 years. She admired
Henry’s mission to make the
legal and professional worlds
more welcoming to women,
and found the DEH events
endlessly fascinating. Listening
to the podcast now, sponsored
in part by her law firm,
Thompson Hine, she’s inspired
in the same way that she is by
Henry’s in-person speaking.

“I always tell her,” Freedman
said, “everything she touches
turns to gold.” l
jbernstein@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0740
Photo by Kristen Jensen
podcast is a risk — one conver-
sational misstep can have dire
professional consequences. But
risk is what she’s preached for
years. When Henry was 26 and a
third-year student at Brooklyn
Law School, a night out with
her husband at her favorite city
diner was cut short when she
started to feel “out of sorts.”
Racing back to the apartment,
she had a grand mal seizure;
in the emergency room, Henry
was quickly diagnosed with a
brain tumor.

“And I ended up finding
this surgeon,” Henry recalled,
“and the surgeon looked at
the brain scan and said, ‘You
know, the way this lesion is
located, it’s very unusual for a
brain tumor — it looks like a
very rare parasite. But you’re
not the demographic, which
is typically found in Latin
American countries. We won’t
know unless we do surgery.’”
Five days later, she went
under the knife.

What her parents and
husband recall, on her behalf, is
the sight of the surgeon jogging
down the hall, bellowing, “It’s
a parasite!” That’s not typically
a sentence that brings relief,
but for Henry, it meant that
the surgery was the end of her
troubles: She was going to be
fine. Name: Elana Collection
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