You’ll Never Look at “Dirty Dancing” The Same Way After the Jewish Film Fest

This week sees the start of the 46th edition of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (hereafter “SFJFF”).  Running from July 16 to August 2, 2026, SFJFF will present 65 films from 17 countries ranging from Israel to Malaysia.  The venues where the screenings will take place include the Herbst Theatre, the Piedmont Theatre, the JCCSF, the Castro Theatre, and the Roxie Theatre.  

Given Israel’s actions in the Middle East, some readers may understandably give the thought of catching a Jewish film the side-eye.  But it also bears repeating that a person can admire the products of Jewish culture while also being appalled by the heinous actions of Benjamin Netanyahu, the IDF, and the land-grabbing “settlers.”  To act otherwise is to make the mistake of engaging in the same simplistic thinking favored by the band of bigots and cretins known as the Republican Party.  SFJFF’s films, with their messy humanity and sometimes complex truths, have more soul (for lack of a better word) than the blanderized garbage that AI proponents currently pass off as art.

Kicking things off is Moshe Rosenthal’s family drama “Tell Me Everything (6:30 PM on July 16, 2026 at the Herbst and 8:00 PM on July 29, 2026 at the Piedmont).”  Self-conscious Boaz’ bar mitzvah gets ruined when he accidentally discovers his father’s secret life.  (Hint:  It’s 1987 and this new disease called AIDS is in the news.)  The blowback from that discovery haunts Boaz into adulthood, and necessitates both mother and son facing some hard truths about themselves.  

Simon Mendes’ documentary “The Darkest Light (12:00 PM on July 19, 2026 at the JCCSF)” deals with a difficult question.  Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach aka “The Singing Rabbi” created music that was adored by many Jewish denominations.  Daughter Neshama Carlebach carried forward both her father’s teachings and his music.  So what happens next when it’s revealed this supposed holy teacher also committed heinous acts of sexual abuse?

Solvan “Slick” Naim’s dramedy “Girl Dad (8:30 PM on July 17, 2026 at the JCCSF)” deals with a far-less fraught daughter-father relationship.  It’s structured around the summer Brooklyn teen Provi spends with her estranged father Elijah (Courtney B. Vance) in Los Angeles.  She’s left NYC for reasons unknown.  Elijah in the meantime is a rideshare driver by day and a struggling composer by night.  The search for an affordable refrigerator turns out to be the means by which father and daughter reconnect.

Beth Harrington’s documentary “Beyond The Duplex Planet (1:00 PM on July 22, 2026 at the JCCSF)” recounts the story behind artist David Greenberger and his cult zine “The Duplex Planet.”  Greenberger developed strong connections with the elderly residents of the Boston nursing home The Duplex.  His conversations with these men became a source of community as he prompted them with such off-the-wall queries as “Which do you prefer, coffee or meat?” The zine served as a way for him to share with the world the strange and affecting results.  Now that Greenberger has himself become an old man, he looks backwards and forwards on his life.  

Karen Alexander’s documentary “Necropolis (1:00 PM on July 23, 2026 at the JCCSF)” takes viewers inside Jerusalem’s Mountain of Rest.  The city’s largest Jewish cemetery is being expanded to accommodate the city’s increasingly aging population.  Making this happen requires bringing together different types of labor, from the Palestinians who help build the facility to the Jews handling the rituals for seeing the clientele off this earthly plane.

Amanda Kramer’s hallucinogenic “Imaginal Disk (5:30 PM on July 26, 2026 at the Roxie)” can be thought of as a music video-like adaptation of the titular Magdalena Bay synth/electropop album.  It’s set in a world where compact disc implants are used to unlock a person’s perfect self.  But when True’s body rejects her disk, she goes on a journey to find her personal version of consciousness and selfhood.

Shy Hannah undergoes a far different search for selfhood in Sophia Takal’s drama “Act One (8:00 PM on July 26, 2026 at the Roxie).”  In SFJFF’s Next Wave Spotlight film, this high school student’s desire to make a career out of acting is neither recognized nor supported by either her family or her peers.  Autocratic acting teacher Melanie mentors Hannah, and admittedly transforms her student’s life in unexpected ways.  Yet is mentorship that’s not much removed from maintaining a strong cult of personality really a good thing?

A far more positive mentorship gets recounted in Steven Pressman’s documentary “Dust Bowls And Jewish Souls: Another Side Of Woody Guthrie (2:30 PM on July 18, 2026 at the Castro and 3:00 PM on July 28, 2026 at the Piedmont).”  Yiddish poet and future mother-in-law Aliza Greenblatt connected folk singer Woody Guthrie to Jewish culture and history.  The results would change the direction of Guthrie’s music and his political organizing.

Clarence B. Jones, the subject of Ben Proudfoot & Stephen Curry’s acclaimed short documentary “The Baddest Speechwriter Of Them All (12:00 PM on July 17, 2026 at the JCCSF),” is another person whose life direction was changed by exposure to culture.  In Jones’ case, it was the recitation of a Langston Hughes poem by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that got him involved in the Civil Rights Movement.  But how Jones’ behind the scenes activism helped the Civil Rights cause is something viewers must see and hear for themselves.

A different sort of hands-on activism gets chronicled in Poh Si Teng’s documentary “American Doctor (12:00 PM on July 30, 2026 at the Piedmont).”  The film follows a trio of American doctors (Jewish, Palestinian, and Zoroastrian) providing medical services at Gaza hospitals during the Israeli post-October 7 retaliation.  Not only do they save lives and limbs on the ground, these medical practitioners take their accounts of what they’ve witnessed to the halls of Congress.

The Israeli and Palestinian activists featured in Aziz Abu Sarah and Yuval Orr’s work-in-progress documentary screening of “The Day After (11:30 AM on July 26, 2026 at the JCCSF)” seek a long-term solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.  They’ve traveled to Belfast to interview people and learn about the history of The Troubles.  Is there something in the story of the long road to the Good Friday Agreement that could be applied to their Middle Eastern crisis?

The decades-old cold case homicide that’s the subject of Jason Osder and William Lafi Youmans’ Sundance Film Festival award-winning documentary “Who Killed Alex Odeh? (3:00 PM on July 22, 2026 at the JCCSF)” shows on a personal level the political stakes involved.  The victim, Alex Odeh, was a Palestinian-American activist dedicated to dialogue and mutual understanding even in the face of public anti-Arab rhetoric.  On the night Odeh was to speak at a local Jewish Community Center, he was assassinated by a pipe bomb planted in his office.  Odeh’s family still pursues justice for the dead activist despite the passage of four decades.

As viewers of Alison Klayman’s mid-length documentary “Scenes From The Divide (12:00 PM on July 25, 2026 at the JCCSF)” know, the public anti-Arab rhetoric flew fast and heavy during Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for New York City mayor.  But her film’s less concerned with recording name calling than showing how the Mamdani campaign revealed the generational divisions in the NYC Jewish-American community.

A different but unfortunately less successful attempt at political activism gets recounted in Rubika Shah’s documentary “The Mad Dog Of Europe (3:00 PM on July 21, 2026 at the JCCSF).”  Herman Mankiewicz, the “Citizen Kane” scriptwriter, had developed “The Mad Dog Of Europe” back in the 1930s as a direct attack against Adolf Hitler.  However, censors and studio anti-Semitism would interfere with the scriptwriter’s plan to use Hitler’s communication medium of choice against him.

Michael Kosakowski’s experimental documentary “Holofiction (5:00 PM on July 26, 2026 at the JCCSF and 12:00 PM on July 27, 2026 at the Piedmont)” can be simply described as a collection of images of the Holocaust from films and TV.  Yet in seeing such visual tropes as final goodbyes and books being burned, this year’s SFJFF Centerpiece Documentary forces the viewer to reckon with how cinema has attempted to depict a horrific historical event.

Leah Galant’s documentary “Landscapes Of Memory (5:00 PM on July 20, 2026 at JCCSF and 1:00 PM on July 28, 2026 at the Piedmont)” asks who and what Holocaust memorial culture is for.  Is it a physical reminder to the descendants of Nazis?  Is it a political cudgel of antisemitism to be used against Palestinians protesting Israel’s devastation of Gaza?  Or could Holocaust memorials mean something more?

Jacob Pincus’ documentary “I Don’t Know What I’m Doing Here (6:00 PM on July 24, 2026 at the JCCSF and 12:30 PM on July 25, 2026 at the Roxie)” follows the director’s friend Madeleine “Mima” Kohn on her trip to the Romanian town of Sacel to find evidence of her grandmother Esther’s pre-Holocaust life.  But even with an archival tape recording and some photographs, finding out anything about Esther’s past proves difficult.

Anat, the schoolteacher protagonist of Netalie Braun’s drama “Oxygen (6:00 PM on July 25, 2026 at the JCCSF),” happens to be lost in a different way.  She had hoped her beloved son Ido would leave IDF military service before he got sent to fight in Lebanon.  But when she learns that Ido has volunteered for the Lebanese deployment, she starts taking radical steps to (she thinks) save his life.  This film is part of a SFJFF programming sidebar dedicated to Braun’s cinematic works.

Another Braun film, the documentary “Shooting (8:30 PM on July 25, 2026 at the JCCSF and 3:00 PM on July 27, 2026 at the Piedmont),” is a triptych of short documentaries illuminating the boundaries (or lack of same) among war, media, and entertainment.  The subjects of the documentaries are: how the Six-Day War sparked an industry in images glorifying the Israeli military; an Israeli TV reality show whose subjects were an unsuspecting Arab family; and a gun-obsessed war veteran who reinvents himself as a supplier of military props (aka boy toys in some quarters) for the film industry.

Yolanda Signorelli, the central subject of Mark Becker and Aaron Schock’s SF DocFest Jury Prize winner “Amazing Live Sea Monkeys (8:30 PM on July 22, 2026 at the JCCSF),” is heavily involved with a far different sort of toy.   The titular amusement may have been invented by Harold von Braunhut, but a large toy company is fighting Signorelli aka von Braunhut’s widow over her rights to the Sea Monkeys.  While the film’s central subject fights to reclaim her husband’s legacy, she also has to come to terms with a less savory aspect of her late husband’s life.

The first three episodes of Ariel Benbaji’s TV series “Sada (8:30 PM on July 23, 2026 at the JCCSF)” follows the struggles of a widowed 50-ish kindergarten teacher named Lubna Sultani to turn around the fortunes of her family’s 100-year-old coffee factory.  The trouble is, running a coffee factory has long been perceived as a man’s job, and family and friends aren’t really comfortable with Sultani’s creating her new future at the cost of flouting tradition.

Loretta Molitor and Asali Echols’ documentary short “Born Kicking (1:00 PM on August 1, 2026 at the Piedmont)” is a portrait of queer photographer and lifelong rebel Jill Posener.  Her photographs have provided intimate looks at everything from radical feminist London to currently unhoused East Bay communities.  Now she’s gotten to the age where she wants to figure out where to spend the final chapter of her life,

A Gen Z man-child trying to figure out the current chapter of his life happens to be the protagonist of Nick Funess’ cringe comedy “The Hedonist (6:00 PM on July 24, 2026 at the Roxie).”  He’s retreated to his parents’ Arizona compound for alone time after spiraling out.  His week-long “sabbatical” will involve a hired escort named Tess, pool floaties, strap-ons, and sunburn.

Despite featuring hedonistic raunchiness, the Amy Heckerling coming-of-age comedy “Fast Times At Ridgemont High (9:30 PM on July 18, 2026 at the Castro)” treated sex with frankness and abortion as a matter of fact.  It also featured performances by such future stars as Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Forest Whitaker, and Nicolas Cage.

The Heckerling classic is one of the films praised in the Take Action Spotlight documentary “Hollywood Does Abortion (6:00 PM on July 18, 2026 at the Castro, 6:00 PM on July 31, 2026 at the Piedmont).”  Janet Goldwater, Barbara Attie, and Mike Attie’s film looks at images of abortion in both film and television.  Starting with a discussion of the “Maude” episodes where the title character decides to get an abortion, the film considers such issues as lack of non-white representation in images of abortion as well as violence and protests directed against abortion clinics.  You’ll never look at “Dirty Dancing” in the same way again.

SFJFF 46 closes things out with Paula Eiselt’s charming documentary “We Met At Grossinger’s (7:30 PM on August 1, 2026 at the Piedmont).”  Grossinger’s Resort Hotel was the proverbial crown jewel of the Borscht Belt, the nickname for the mid-20th century Jewish resorts established in New York’s Catskill Mountains.  Once a haven for Jewish-American vacationers shut out of anti-Semitic resorts, it would become over the years a Jewish-American cultural touchstone known for launching the careers of entertainers from Milton Berle to Joan Rivers.