This isn’t a Jewish spinoff of M*A*S*H*; it’s the circumstances in which a group of World War II veterans found themselves after volunteering for the unit known as Machal—an acronym meaning “volunteers from outside Israel.” An upcoming film from Katahdin Productions, Above and Beyond, (scheduled for completion in 2014) will be the first full-length documentary about the unit that turned the tide of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and helped establish the Israeli Air Force.

In the trailer, former Machal pilots speak about the clandestine recruitment process, which required them to drop everything to aid the fledgling state. Facing war with 5 Arab neighbors, Machal recruited specialists in what the Palestinian Jews lacked, including artillery and flying. “The idea that Jews were going to fight, I found exciting,” says one volunteer.

What compelled these volunteers to leave their post-war lives to fight so far from home? One pilot remembers seeing Jewish refugees arrive from Europe and kiss the ground. He knew “then and there: that was the reason I came.”

Sample Reel for ‘Above and Beyond: The Birth of the Israeli Air Force’ – Playmount Productions from Katahdin Productions on Vimeo.

Seven years before that raid, Klemperer had been stripped of his position at Dresden Technical University. For though his conversion to his wife Eva’s Protestantism spared him deportation,  it did not protect him from the Nuremberg Laws.

The 1942 raid took place in the Klemperers’ rooms in a segregated building called the “Jews’ House.” It was there that he recorded hunger and fear, as well as tedious factory work, a jail sentence, friends’ disappearances, and all manner of indignities.

Though his spirit at times flags, his will to live—and ultimately, to write—never deserts him. The reader is swept along as his story unfolds—all the way to Upper Bavaria, to which he and Eva eventually flee, and back to Dresden, on foot, at war’s end.

These diaries are masterful, essential reading for anyone with an interest in the Nazi years and the human spirit.

But Bennett, who has angered Haredim by leaving them for the majority coalition, need not worry: He has halacha on his side. Jewish law condemns praying for the death of another human being, instead encouraging prayers that call for the death of the evil within an individual.

And unlike the very real envelope received by Bennett, Talmudic references to the Pulsa Dinura are decidedly metaphorical in nature. The targets of the curse are all either angelic beings or deceased individuals meriting spiritual retribution. In the Zohar, the Pulsa Dinura is characterized as a positive force that protects the Shechina, God’s earthly presence, and as a benevolent light that rewards the archangel Metatron.

But whatever the term’s origins, Bennett can take solace in its modern-day manifestation: an aphorism within the Israeli political establishment: “You haven’t made it in Israeli politics until you’ve been cursed by the Pulsa Dinura.” Mazel tov to him.

Photo Courtesy Ventura County Star

As an international bastion of treyf, McDonald’s doesn’t seem to have much Jewish going on. But dig a little deeper and you’ll find that the first Happy Meal box was designed by a famous Jewish illustrator, children’s book author, and Yiddish story aficionado named Simms Taback.

But Taback, who won a Caldecott Medal in 2000, is better known for his rich and whimsical picture books than for changing the ways American children consume chicken nuggets. In Joseph Had a Little Overcoat, not to mention the 40-plus other books that bear his name, Taback’s inimitable style can be seen in full effect: cut-and-paste characters brought to life with dark, suede-like colors and bizarre settings.

Taback isn’t the only Jew to make a lasting impact on the fast food industry. In 1964, two Jewish brothers by the names of Forrest and Leroy Raffel founded Arby’s—(i.e. “R.B.’s,” for Raffel Brothers). And then there’s Subway, which had 12 glatt kosher locations in America during its peak, though now only 5 remain. They might have fared better had they recruited Taback to the cause.

Thanks to Hollywood insider Noë Gold, you no longer have to. In his Yiddish Glossary for Goyim: the Power Shmoozer’s Guide to Hollywood, Gold offers about 100 important Yiddish words that non-Jews (and Jews) should know for getting around the entertainment industry.

Between the half-dozen descriptors for male anatomy plus all the uncharitable ways of describing someone down on their luck (with useful distinctions between schlemiel, schlemazel and schmendrick), Yiddish Glossary is filled with words some of us may have already heard, but can’t quite use, or translate, properly.

A child of Holocaust survivors, Gold has been an editor at the Hollywood Reporter, a contributor to Variety and a staff writer at Paramount Pictures, among other Hollywood accolades. So we take his tips on good authority.

And for those not in Hollywood, well, now you can finally find out what your grandparents have been saying about you all these years.

Shmuel, an Igbo (pronounced Ebo) from Southeastern Nigeria, grew up understanding that he was Jewish, but he knew little religious and cultural history. (Tradition has it that the Igbo are descendants of Gad, founder of one of the lost tribes of Israel.) But when the Internet came to Nigeria, Shmuel began researching, and what he learned convinced him of his Jewish heritage and inspired him to help build the country’s small Jewish community.

Writer/director Jeff L. Lieberman’s Re-Emerging: The Jews of Nigeria is a fascinating portrait of a group that, until recently, had little contact with Jewish communities around the world. Despite a lack of resources and the Israeli government’s disinclination to recognize the Igbo as Jews, Shmuel and his fellow community members are committed. And after a visit from a sympathetic American rabbi, Shmuel reveals his dream: to attend the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Despite the visa difficulties that ensue, Shmuel is determined to become a rabbi: “The community here needs my service.”

Letting It Go by Miriam Katin is that book.

Katin, a New York artist born in Hungary during World War II, has created a graphic novel about moving past her anger toward Germany. On the surface, it’s the true story of Katin’s reaction to her son moving to Berlin – news that, at first, sends her into a tailspin.

But Letting It Go is not a memoir of Holocaust sorrow. It’s a book full of life – a colorful novel of pencil drawings portraying a million small moments that make up Katin’s current life: An obsessive crusade against kitchen cockroaches; a cheer-me-up shopping spree for expensive sunglasses; an embarrassing case of diarrhea in a hotel bed; and, throughout, a touching, loving, supportive relationship with her husband.

Katin emerges as an immensely likable, complex woman – a friend you’d enjoy meeting for a drink.

Born in Transylvania, 7 of the 10 Ovitz children inherited their father’s short stature. After his death in 1923, they hid their Jewishness and toured Europe as the “Lilliput Troupe,” selling out large concert halls across the continent.

They were deported to Auschwitz in 1944, where Dr. Josef Mengele‘s sadistic, ongoing fascination with the family might, ironically, be what saved their lives. Before her death in 2001, Perla, the last surviving sibling, surmised: “If we had been normal size, the whole family would have been burned [the] night [we arrived at Auschwitz].”

After the war, the siblings continued to tour, regularly performing a piece called the “Dance of Death,” which commemorated their experiences in Auschwitz.

Warwick Davies, the host of a recent episode of a British television series devoted to the family, is also of short stature, and identified with their story: “The spirit of a dwarf,” he said “is to use all your skills to survive.”

At first it’s hard to get the point of the video. But as she continues, you realize there’s a wink in her eye. “My husband stayed home. Whatever—he works. He has a job. He works at a café called Crunch and Munch. It’s very yummy.”

Chaya-Suri, the persona created by the irrepressible comedian Deena Mann, goes on to deliver a delicious work of satire that takes us from shopping for summer shoes to poolside drinks, reflecting along the way about life outside of Flatbush (“Miami in general is just like a beautiful continent”) and eventually to Orthodox women’s responsibility to be modestly covered, in the event that men show up at the swimming pool during women’s-only hours.

It’s an act that mines the limitations of a sheltered worldview, and much like those of humorists Mendele Mokher-Seforim and Sholem Aleichem, Mann’s achieves universal appeal precisely through a close observation of her own community’s social and linguistic idiosyncrasies. Join us for daiquiris with Chaya-Suri tonight.

What he finds is a shuttered factory and, to his surprise, a distillery his family once operated. After toasts with the locals, Edelstyn decides to import their vodka to his native U.K.—and to make a film based on his experience, aptly titled How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire.

Stop-motion animation and silent reenactments dramatize selections from Maroussia’s diary and draw parallels between her journey and Edelstyn’s. Early in the film, Edelstyn markets the vodka by staging a struggle between his grandfather and a Bolshevik at a spirits conference. “You can’t just use the iconography of Soviet Russia to sell vodka,” a consultant advises him afterward. By the film’s end, Edelstyn has refined his approach—and names his vodka Zorokovich, after his grandmother.

How To Re-Establish A Vodka Empire – Cinema Trailer from Dartmouth Films on Vimeo.

Though this notion sounds tinged with anti-Semitism, in his new book Einstein’s Jewish Science, philosophy professor Steven Gimbel makes the surprising and uncomfortable claim that there really might be a Jewish way of thinking—and that it’s got its advantages.

Gimbel looks at the social and scientific background of Einstein’s theories and asks how a lonely patent clerk was able to beat the world’s top scientists, including those of the Third Reich, to cracking the bomb. Though Einstein wasn’t religious, Gimbel points to the wide-ranging associative thinking and Talmudic-style deductions in his theories the same way that others have detected Catholic ways of thinking in the writings of Newton and Descartes.

Though Einstein’s Jewish way of thinking isn’t really inferior or evil—at least, we hope it’s not—this book would have us believe that it may not be so far from what the Nazis suspected.

Polish Bar

Reuben, played by Vincent Piazza, is a troubled yet well-intentioned guy who works in his uncle’s jewelry store and just wants to be a DJ. But success has always eluded him. He was “never in a gifted class,” his mother chillingly reminds him, and he used to sell “dirty magazines to Yeshiva students.” It’s not long till he’s struggling with his friends and family, his creative aspirations, and his secret side-job dealing drugs.

Polish Bar makes us feel for poor Reuben and that ludicrous underbelly, but most engaging about the film were the theological debates between Reuben and his Hasidic cousin. Is being a thief in the eyes of the law different than being one in the eyes of God? As the credits ran, we found ourselves mulling over that question, too.