New York Jewish Film Festival 2026
January 14–28, 2026
The Jewish Museum and Film at Lincoln Center continue their partnership for the annual New York Jewish Film Festival, spotlighting the finest documentary, narrative, and short films from around the world that explore the Jewish experience.
Ken Scott
2025|
France / Canada|
102 minutes|
French with English subtitles
The matriarch of a Moroccan Jewish family in the Parisian suburbs will do anything to give her son the best life despite his physical setbacks in this fiery 1960s-set drama.
Guillaume Ribot
2025|
France|
95 minutes|
French with English subtitles
Guillaume Ribot returns to Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 epic Shoah, telling the story of how he accomplished this crucial addition to cinematic Holocaust scholarship and revealing never-before-seen footage.
Matthew Shear
2025|
U.S.|
91 minutes
Matthew Shear’s comic drama stars Amanda Peet as a wealthy but depressed mom who bonds over shared neuroses with a newly unemployed man who’s babysitting three girls. Preceded by Jack Feldstein’s Animated New Yorkers: Joel.
Gerburg Rohde-Dahl
2025|
Germany|
62 minutes
Gerburg Rohde-Dahl’s powerful and momentous documentary follows a group of Israelis and Palestinians who came together in Germany for a seminar in the aftermath of October 7, 2023 to speak and listen.
James L. Freedman
2024|
U.S.|
93 minutes
This eye-opening documentary sheds light on the life of Charles Grodin, a beloved comedy mainstay for generations of viewers as well as a social activist devoted to fighting for wrongly imprisoned people.
Udi Nir, Sagi Bornstein
2025|
Germany / Israel|
82 minutes|
English, French, German, and Hebrew with English subtitles
This urgent and daring documentary profile follows Efrat Tilma, a transgender woman who fled Israel in the 1960s only to return decades later and become a pioneering activist for LGBTQ+ rights.
Judith Colell
2025|
Spain / Belgium|
101 minutes|
Spanish with English subtitles
This remarkable historical thriller tells the gripping true story of the residents of a Spanish village who defied their country’s fascist regime to save Jews smuggled in from Nazi-occupied France.
2025|
U.S.|
79 minutes|
English and Hebrew with English subtitles
Peabody Award–winning director Abby Ginzberg’s heartfelt documentary spotlights Henrietta Szold, one of the 20th century’s most influential American Jewish women, who reshaped history through compassion and humanity.
Katharina Otto-Bernstein
2025|
U.S. / Germany|
106 minutes|
English and German with English subtitles
Katharina Otto-Bernstein’s gripping documentary centers on CIA spy master Peter Sichel—the “Jewish James Bond”—who sat down for a wide-ranging interview about his singular life before he died in 2025 at age 102.
Tom Shoval
2025|
Israel / U.S.|
74 minutes|
Hebrew with English subtitles
Filmmaker Tom Shoval’s deeply moving documentary essay pays tribute to his friend David Cunio, who was taken hostage on October 7, 2023 while also examining the connection between cinema and memory.
Toby Perl Freilich
2025|
U.S.|
95 minutes
This delightful documentary spotlights groundbreaking public artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, the New York City Sanitation Department’s official artist-in-residence since 1977.
Adrián Suar
2025|
Argentina|
97 minutes|
Spanish with English subtitles
A son learns his estranged father has died just as he’s about to travel from the U.S. back to Argentina for his sister’s wedding in Adrián Suar’s alternately touching and raucous story of familial dysfunction.
Marisa Fox
2025|
U.S.|
86 minutes|
Czech, English, German, Hebrew, Polish, and Yiddish with English subtitles
In this absorbing and intimate debut documentary, New York journalist Marisa Fox delves into her mother’s secret past, discovering revelations about her life as a spy and freedom fighter against the Nazis.
Sandra Beerends
2024|
Netherlands|
88 minutes|
Dutch and English with English subtitles
With a rich trove of archival footage, Sandra Beerends’s Neshoma resurrects the vibrant Jewish communities of Amsterdam in the years before World War II changed them forever through the fictional story of a Jewish teenage girl.
Tomer Heymann
2025|
Israel|
54 minutes|
Hebrew with English subtitles
Award-winning documentarian Tomer Heymann’s mouthwatering film is a testament to the two women behind landmark Tel Aviv restaurant Orna and Ella. Preceded by Emily Lobsenz’s A Bit of Everything and Matzoh Balls Too.
Peter Stein, Dawn Freer
2021|
U.S.|
86 minutes
This visually marvelous documentary, which features the voices of Barbara Sukowa and Mark Waschke, portrays the courageous life and work of German Jewish photographer Fred Stein.
Anat Maltz
2024|
Israel / France|
99 minutes|
Hebrew with English subtitles
A young couple is priced out of their Tel Aviv apartment and on the hunt for an affordable new home, just as they are planning to start a family, in Anat Malz’s film about belonging, economic instability, and unsettled romance.
Lionel Baier
2025|
Switzerland / Luxembourg / France|
90 minutes|
French with English subtitles
A 9-year-old stays in his grandparents’ apartment in Paris while the student protests of May ’68 explode in Lionel Baier’s lighthearted but multilayered portrait of an eccentric Jewish family.
Gaylen Ross
2025|
U.S. / Canada|
69 minutes
The notoriously antisemitic automobile tycoon Henry Ford met his match when a Jewish lawyer named Aaron Sapiro brought a libel suit against him. Gaylen Ross’s enlightening documentary tells the ultimate American David and Goliath story.
Aleksander Marten
1936|
Poland|
95 minutes|
Yiddish with English subtitles
During World War I, a rabbi’s daughter becomes pregnant by a German Jewish officer, abandons her baby, and flees to the U.S. This long-unseen, genre-defying gem of the 1930s was the first Yiddish sound film made in Poland.
Natan Gross, Shaul Goskind
1948|
Poland|
68 minutes|
Yiddish with English subtitles
This fascinating, rarely seen classic from post-WWII Poland set in an orphanage and school near Łódź mixes fiction and documentary to address possibilities of processing trauma through artistic expression.
Laetitia Clareton, Tomi Joelah Drucker, Jonas Lajboschitz, Peter Decherney, Yael Bridge, Shari Albert
2024–2025|
U.S., Canada, Denmark, Israel, Uganda|
74 minutes
This program includes Laetitia Clareton’s The Suitcase, Tomi Joelah Drucker’s Blood Ties, Jonas Lajboschitz’s Parents, Peter Decherney’s The Cave Synagogue, Yael Bridge’s The Last Jews of Guantanamo, and Shari Albert’s Double Happiness.
About the Series
The 35th edition of the annual New York Jewish Film Festival spotlights the finest documentary, narrative, and short films from around the world that explore the Jewish experience. Among the oldest and most influential Jewish film festivals worldwide, the 2026 festival showcases nearly 30 features, documentaries, and shorts (eight narrative features, 13 documentary features, and eight short films), including the latest works by dynamic voices in international cinema.
The films for the 2026 New York Jewish Film Festival were selected by Rachel Chanoff, Founding Director, THE OFFICE performing arts + film; Lisa Collins, filmmaker, writer, programmer, journalist, events producer, and guest curator of “Pearl Bowser and the 1970 Black Film Series” at the Jewish Museum; Juliane Camfield, director of Deutsches Haus at NYU; and Aviva Weintraub, director, New York Jewish Film Festival, the Jewish Museum; with assistance from Sarah Eshaghian, film festival coordinator, the Jewish Museum.
Support
Support for the New York Jewish Film Festival is provided by The Liman Foundation, Mimi and Barry Alperin, Sara and Axel Schupf, the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany in New York, Frederick Hertz, and other generous donors.
Acknowledgments
Stuart Hands, Helen Zuckerman, and Jeremie Abessira, Toronto Jewish Film Festival; Igor Shteyrenberg, Miami Jewish Film Festival; Yitzhak Tucker, Jewish Museum intern; and Isaac Zablocki, Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan.
For those interested in additional information about NYJFF titles, please refer to the Print Source guide.



























