June 09, 2013

When Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, among others on the right, discovered that Barack Obama’s nominee to head the bureau of labor statistics had sent her children to progressive, secular Jewish Camp Kinderland, allegations of  left wing extremism and communists in the Department of Labor  were quickly unleashed. Former Kinderland camper, film maker and comedian Katie Halper talks with BTP’s Kiera Feldman about her new documentary, Commie Camp, in which she sets the record straight about the camp and the values that have shaped three generations of campers and counting.  Commie Camp will be screened on June 28th and 29th at Visionfest at Tribeca Cinemas before moving on to the San Franscisco Jewish film festival .

When the renowned German philosopher, Hannah Arendt, wrote about the 1961 trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi’s “Administrator for Jewish Affairs,” in a series of articles for The New Yorker magazine, her portrayal of Eichmann and her criticism of the Jewish councils for cooperating with the Nazis unleashed a fire storm of protest that persists in some circles to this day.  The  German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta focuses on this fraught period in Arendt’s life in her latest film, Hannah Arendt,now showing at the Film Forum.  She talks about Arendt and the film with BTP’s Marissa Brostoff and Eve Sicular. For more about Arendt and the film see Jim Hoberman's review in Tablet. 

Since the 1990s, some $57 million set aside by the German government and earmarked for Holocaust survivors has been disbursed to false claimants through the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.   Kiera Feldman talks with Paul Berger, staff writer at The Jewish Daily Forward, who has been reporting on the scandal and the failure of the Conference to follow-up on its own investigations.