Here are some streaming videos accessible to RCBC students, staff, & faculty with your active RCBC library barcode. Suggested films are available through the databases:
Description from Kanopy:
At sixteen, Anna Wexler had broken away from her Orthodox Jewish community in New Jersey, rejecting its religious doctrine and social restrictions, and severing ties to her family. This led to her running away from home, sleeping on the streets, and experimenting with sex and drugs with friends who had also left the Orthodox world.
However, after studying in Israel, her friends had a change of heart and returned to the fold. Feeling betrayed, Anna launches a quest to understand their transformation by following three rebellious Jewish teenagers in their yearlong rite-of-passage journey from high school to Israel. Along the way, Anna is forced back to the roots of her own struggle to understand the meaning of faith and the essence of religion and identity.
Description from Kanopy:
The Jewish Americans is a three-night documentary that explores 350 years of Jewish American history. Written and directed by award-winning filmmaker David Grubin, The Jewish Americans is a journey through time, from the first settlement in 1654 to the present. It is about the struggle of a tiny minority who make their way into the American mainstream while, at the same time, maintaining a sense of their own identity as Jews. Focusing on the tension between identity and assimilation, The Jewish Americans is quintessentially an American story, which other minority groups will find surprisingly familiar.
Description from Kanopy
Set almost entirely in a Chinese restaurant, DREAMING OF A JEWISH CHRISTMAS is an offbeat, irreverent musical documentary that tells the story of a group of Jewish songwriters, including Irving Berlin, Mel Torme, Jay Livingston, Ray Evans, Gloria Shayne Baker and Johnny Marks, who wrote the soundtrack to Christianity's most musical holiday.
It's an amazing tale of immigrant outsiders who became irreplaceable players in pop culture's mainstream - a generation of songwriters who found in Christmas the perfect holiday in which to imagine a better world, and for at least one day a year, make us believe in it.
Description from Kanopy:
Little White Lie tells Lacey Schwartz's story of growing up in a typical upper-middle-class Jewish household in Woodstock, NY, with loving parents and a strong sense of her Jewish identity -- despite the open questions from those around her about how a white girl could have such dark skin. She believes her family's explanation that her looks were inherited from her dark-skinned Sicilian grandfather. But when her parents abruptly split, her gut starts to tell her something different.
Description from Kanopy
Mica is a classic young teen. Enthusiastic. Idealistic. Dreaming baseball. At 13, he is studying for his Bar Mitzvah, the Jewish coming of age ritual. He takes to heart his Rabbi's requirement to help "heal the world." Imagining himself a savior of sorts, he launches a grand plan to send baseballs to less fortunate kids in Latin America. Narrowing his focus, he lights on Cuba, a country with a mysterious pull. He knows only that Cubans lack resources and love baseball like he does. Many of their star players have defected to play in the U.S. professional leagues. He also knows that Cuba gave his grandpa refuge during the Holocaust.
HAVANA CURVEBALL affords the unusual pleasure of observing a child growing up, both physically and psychically. As Mica shifts from high-pitched boy to broad-shouldered young man, he squares off against the complexity of the adult world. The simple act of giving, which drove his idealism at age 13, seems elusive at 14 and 15. Facing the obstacles the U.S. embargo throws in his way, he must decide how far to follow his dream. Researching, writing letters, imploring his senator, meeting Cuba activists and an attorney, trying to make sense of a high school history lecture and his grandpa's own resistance, he wonders if the whole enterprise is even possible, let alone worth it.
After two years, he finally boards a plane to Havana with his family, 200 pounds of baseball gear, and all the rhetoric, expectations, and worries of family, friends, and history in tow. Imagining he is finally in the home stretch, his experience there is transformative, confronting him with the question, "does what I do matter?"
Description from Kanopy:
This Emmy-nominated documentary is a hilarious portrait of an extraordinary, ordinary grandmother and a touching account of her grandson's search for his place in the world. Whether taking daily excursions to the grocery store to return under-ripe produce or sharing hard-won wisdom over blintzes on Rosh Hashanah, Lee Abrahams is a woman who lives life on her own terms. For her grandson, a young gay man born to a Jewish mother and Protestant father, 87-year old bubbeh Lee is a vital link to self and cultural identity, and to unconditional love and acceptance. As the two of them relate feelings of love lost or hidden, kibbitz about strategies for shopping, and avoid meddling matchmakers, the strength of their bond emerges.