Between the Temples (Nathan Silver, 2024).
On a cold day in Rhinebeck, New York, Ben Gottlieb, the cantor of the local synagogue, walks into a Catholic church. Anxious, and recently widowed, Ben has come to talk about the afterlife. “Yeah, we don’t have Heaven or Hell,” he explains to the priest, pausing sheepishly, “we just have, you know, Upstate New York.” Ben is wondering whether, if he starts believing in heaven, he might be able to “grandfather” his late wife in. “I think that’s more of a Mormon thing,” the priest replies.
On a mild day in Eastern Poland, David chases his cousin Benji through a PKP Intercity train—they haven’t bought tickets. Anxious, and recently bereaved, they have come to Poland on a Holocaust memorial tour, paid for by an allotted sum in their grandmother’s will. “We shouldn’t have to pay for train tickets in Poland—this is our country,” Benji argues, hurtling through the compartments to evade the conductor. “No it’s not,” David replies. “It was our country—they kicked us out because they thought we were cheap.”
Ben, from Nathan Silver’s ninth feature, Between the Temples (2024), has much in common with the cousins in Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain (2024): they are all in their mid-to-late thirties, all from the greater New York area, all grieving, and all in some sense lost. And yet, in their attempt to reconcile Jewishness with place, their attitudes toward their culture and their faith (or lack thereof) could hardly be more different.
Between the Temples revolves around Ben, played with deep sensitivity and self-deprecating humor by Jason Schwartzman. He discovers that he is unable to sing after his wife’s sudden death; while he waits for his voice to return, his duties at the synagogue—to which his mothers, Judith and Meira, are both generous donors—are restricted to giving b’nai mitzvah lessons to twelve- and thirteen-year-olds. Well past adolescence, he finds himself living in his mothers’ basement. He runs into his old music teacher, Mrs. Carla O’Connor (née Kessler), when she picks him up off the floor of the local dive bar after one too many mudslides. Carla, portrayed by a luminous Carol Kane, decides that she wants to study for an adult bat mitzvah under Ben’s tutelage. What begins as a begrudging favor on Ben’s behalf becomes a beguilingly unlikely romance with flavors of Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude (1971). Through teaching spunky, eccentric Carla what was once his own Torah portion, Ben regains his confidence, his faith in love, and his belief that Judaism can be whatever you want it to be—as long as you have the confidence to let it be.
A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg, 2024).
A Real Pain follows odd-couple cousins David and Benji through Poland: from Warsaw, to Lublin, to the Majdanek concentration camp, and finally to their grandmother’s old house in Krasnystaw. Registered for what Benji calls a “geriatric” Holocaust tour group, the pair’s opposite personalities gradually wear their bond thinner and thinner. Benji, played with Roman Roy–esque impishness by Kieran Culkin, is a charming yet directionless stoner who shared a particular bond with their grandmother. David—a characteristically neurotic role for writer-director Eisenberg—has a wife and child in New York and takes daily medication for obsessive-compulsive disorder. At the end of their journey, they decide to each place a stone on their grandmother’s old stoop, a nod to the Jewish tradition of placing a stone on someone’s grave. But the Polish man across the street tells them to remove them: “They’re a hazard.” The Jewish spiritual impulse is dampened. Over the course of their tense pilgrimage, Benji and David reconnect with their inherited history of Jewish suffering, yet emerge more or less unchanged. Benji returns to New York as directionless as before, refusing an invitation to David’s apartment for dinner and lingering at the airport to avoid going home to his mother’s basement. David’s transformation is barely more notable: he returns home to his family, pausing only briefly to place a stone on his own stoop, leaving the lessons of his trip at the door.
Faith, or skepticism toward it, is more than a matter of content for these films—it informs their cinematic sensibilities. This notion of “faith” does not pertain to organized Judaism so much as Jewish spirituality, a commitment to the holistic vibrancy of Jewish life. Where Between the Temples is associative and playful in its treatment of Jewish spirituality, A Real Pain is dry and reserved. Where Between the Temples is shot on rich, warm 16mm film, through the lens of prolific cinematographer Sean Price Williams, A Real Pain is shot on washed-out digital by Michał Dymek. Even their titles reflect this divergence: Silver suggests that pain, inherited and experienced, might just as powerfully be processed in your head, “between the temples,” through music, through conversation, and, through faith. “Real pain,” Eisenberg’s film would have you believe, must rumble away somewhere darker, less articulable, in muffled sobs on the bus ride home from a concentration camp.
In A Real Pain, Jewishness is mostly subordinated to Americanness—an incongruous flicker against the film’s brief, colorless glimpses of Poland’s contemporary landscape. When the man calls down to David and Benji, objecting in Polish to the stones on the stoop, they can’t understand a thing he says. Benji starts yelling back, “We’re American! American! American!” Eventually, the man’s son emerges and explains the situation in English, but not before their dynamic has been defined by Benji’s binary: American, not-American. Of course, David and Benji are American, but they are also in the midst of their most powerfully, spiritually Jewish interaction.
David and Benji are deeply secular Jews. When Eloge, a Rwandan convert to Judaism in their tour group, bids farewell to Benji by saying, “tzeitchem l'shalom,” the Hebrew for “go in peace,” he doesn’t know what it means. “I’ll Google that later,” he says, flippantly. In another conversation with Eloge, upon discovering that he keeps Shabbat to “focus fully on rest,” David remarks, “To me it’s always seemed, I don’t know, arbitrary.” Eloge, stating the obvious, tells the anxiety-ridden David, “I think it would benefit you.” But theirs is more than a cultural Jewish secularism. The cousins seem to have actively detached spirituality from their understanding of Jewishness: it doesn’t feature in any of their emotional conversations, or the way they live their daily lives. Many ethnic Jews feel little to no connection with religion or spirituality, but for a film so preoccupied with the role of Jewishness in history and in the world, neglecting the spiritual component betrays a lack of depth.
A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg, 2024).
In a recent interview with the New Yorker, Eisenberg refutes the stereotype that all Poles are antisemites. “What I found was diametrically opposed to what I had been warned about,” he says. “This movie is partly an attempt to bring Poles and Jews to a place of reconciliation.” This comes as a surprise, as the film is strikingly inattentive in its portrayal of Poland. Eisenberg’s markers of Polishness will be recognizable to anyone who has spent even a short amount of time in the country: Warszawa Centralna train station, the Palace of Culture, and the proliferation of soup-peddling bar mleczny canteens. Like its Chopin score, the film’s setting is a limited reflection of its characters’ expectations. But A Real Pain fails to capture the deeper essence of Polish life today—both as it relates to Jews and otherwise.
Aside from quick exchanges with hotel receptionists, David and Benji’s shouted conversation with their grandmother’s would-have-been neighbor is the only interaction between Jews and Poles in the film. One of Benji’s many jibes at their non-Jewish British tour guide, James, is that they haven’t interacted with any Poles. Not long after Benji’s criticism, he and David miss their train stop on the way to Lublin. Wandering the platform in a nondescript Polish town, it seems for a moment that they might go off course—that they might break with their tour group once and for all to explore on their own. The scene is charged with just the chaotic energy necessary for such a cataclysmic shift, and it’s hard not to feel disappointed when they find their way back to the others so easily. Even after David and Benji do leave the tour group to find their grandmother’s old house, Eisenberg’s lens remains trained on a set course. His landscapes are dominated by harsh, horizontal lines: a taxi drives straight through empty fields, a harsh construction wall obscures an old town, Benji and David walk along an overpass painted with a mural of Jewish Lublin.
In Ida (2013), director Paweł Pawlikowski returned to Poland from the United Kingdom to tell a story inspired by his Jewish grandmother. His is a Holocaust road-trip movie grounded in intimacy and attention, establishing a filmic lexicon in which subtle glances out the car window can be as tragic as digging up Jewish bones. A Real Pain, with its emotional and spiritual distance, attempts to depict a sense of unfulfilled potential—of traveling to a site of profound significance and feeling less moved than you thought you would. Unfortunately, the emotional and spiritual climax of A Real Pain, the placing of stones on their grandmother’s stoop, is neither long nor involved enough to provide the gravity that viewers may feel lacking elsewhere on their trip.
Between the Temples (Nathan Silver, 2024).
Where Jewish spirituality is a footnote to A Real Pain, it is the narrative thrust of Between the Temples. This isn’t to say that Silver’s film embraces organized religion wholeheartedly—far from it. Ben and Carla face significant opposition from their Jewish community: first against Carla’s bat mitzvah, and then against their budding, if muddled, romance. But instead of approaching spirituality with knowing distance, Silver’s film is interested in the sumptuous messiness of Jewish life in all its forms—from rabbis to Catholic-Jewish atheists, from Filipino converts to reluctant b’nai mitzvah students. Against a soundtrack of kitschy 1970s Israeli pop, a rabbi puts golf balls into a shofar, a game of telephone is played at the Shabbat table, and a bat mitzvah takes place in a backyard. In Between the Temples, Jewishness might be mirthful and malleable, but it is always meaningful.
In casting Carol Kane, Silver entered this effort into a long tradition of Jewish American independent filmmaking. Kane’s roles in Joan Micklin Silver’s Hester Street (1975), in which she plays a Yiddish-speaking immigrant in late-nineteenth-century New York, and Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977), in which she appears as Allen’s character’s first wife, a New York–Jewish PhD student, cemented her as a fixture in postwar Jewish American cinema. Films such as Silver’s romantic comedy, Crossing Delancey (1988), and Joel and Ethan Coen’s A Serious Man (2009) have further contributed to this mode of Yiddish-informed, often absurdist filmmaking, which embraces the complex history and cultural specificity of Jewish Americans onscreen.
Between the Temples continues this tradition, providing a film about American Jewry which doesn’t skirt around its Jewishness, or play it off as a quirk. When Ben performs Carla’s bat mitzvah in her garden, having been forbidden to perform it at his synagogue after a spontaneous declaration of love for Carla over Shabbat dinner, Silver is not nodding toward the absurdity of Jewish tradition. Rather, he is showing its potential to shape-shift. Lingering over Carla’s unkempt garden, Silver ends on a hopeful note: in connecting with their Jewish spirituality through bat mitzvah study, Ben and Carla have found not only meaning, but one another. The pains they have each felt—the sharpness of grief and the loneliness of old age—are no less real for the fact that they have been soothed by faith, even in an unconventional form.
Between the Temples (Nathan Silver, 2024).
The question of reconciling Jewishness with place is as old as Jewishness itself. From the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE, Jews have been a diasporic people, relying on community structures to create a sense of belonging in the face of persecution. And yet, the question has rarely been of more burning urgency than it is today. An engagement with this question is the one thing that truly binds these films, which were both shot before the Hamas attack of October 7 and and released during Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza. Both films reminded me of the concept of doykayt—the Yiddish word for “hereness”—developed by the General Jewish Labor Bund, a secular Jewish socialist party founded under the Russian Empire. Doykayt arose in opposition to emerging Zionist ideologies, proposing that Jewish homeland can exist wherever there are Jews, placing trust in the strength of diasporic community to imbue place with a sense of belonging.
Both A Real Pain and Between the Temples are embroiled in the same existential questions encapsulated by the Yiddish term. They are like-minded, bittersweet calls to reappraise the complex joy of Jewish family, but they are perhaps more illuminating for the divergent ways in which they explore questions of Jewish belonging. Silver has created a surprising, revelatory work of Jewish American filmmaking which roots itself in the complexity of its present; Eisenberg has made a humorous, sometimes sweet film that considers a Jewish American past of post-Holocaust immigration and disillusioned secularism. The films’ central Jewish rituals even reflect these opposite outlooks: A Real Pain’s funereal traditions mark the end of a Jewish life, while Between the Temples’ bat mitzvah marks its beginning.