“The Last Laugh” Post Film Screening Discussion with filmmaker Ferne Pearlstein, and scholars Dr. Chaya Ostrower and Dr. Michael Berenbaum

Check your registration confirmation email to receive the link to the film. The post-film discussion will be offered live on Zoom.(The link to watch the film will expire on Thursday, February 18 at 4pm.)

Classrooms Without Borders, in partnership with Rodef Shalom Congregation and the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage, is honored to welcome filmmaker Ferne Pearlstein and Holocaust scholars Dr. Chaya Ostrower and Dr. Michael Berenbaum to convene this post screening discussion.

~~This program is generously sponsored by Ellen Surloff ~~

THE LAST LAUGH is a feature documentary that proceeds from the premise that the Holocaust would seem to be an absolutely off-limits topic for comedy. But is it? History shows that even the victims of the Nazi concentration camps themselves used humor as a means of survival and resistance. Still, any use of comedy in connection with this horror risks diminishing the suffering of millions. So where is the line? If we make the Holocaust off limits, what are the implications for other controversial subjects (such as 9/11, AIDS, racism, etc.) in a society that prizes freedom of speech?

This thought-provoking film artfully weaves together an intimate cinema verité portrait of Auschwitz survivor Renee Firestone alongside interviews with influential comedians like Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Sarah Silverman, and Gilbert Gottfried, and authors and thinkers like Etgar Keret, Shalom Auslander, and Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, and many others. Completing the mosaic is archival material ranging from The Producers and “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” to clips of comics such as Louis CK, Joan Rivers, and Chris Rock, to newly discovered footage of Jerry Lewis’ never-released film Holocaust comedy The Day the Clown Cried, to rare footage of cabarets inside the concentration camps themselves. In the process, THE LAST LAUGH offers fresh insights into the Holocaust that we haven’t seen before.

After its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival and European premiere at Filmfest München, this critically acclaimed film screened at over a hundred distinguished film festivals around the world, was released theatrically in March 2017, and broadcast on Sky TV in the UK and PBS’s Independent Lens series in the US. Today it continues to screen around the world, as Pearlstein and partner Robert Edwards have become recognized speakers on humor as it relates to the Holocaust, antisemitism, racism, and most recently Covid-19.

Ferne Pearlstein

Ferne Pearlstein is a quadruple-threat: director, cinematographer, producer, editor. A member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Brooklyn Jewish Hall of Fame, one of the few women in Kodak’s “On Film” ad campaign, and winner of the Sundance Cinematography Prize for Ramona Diaz’s IMELDA, she has directed, produced and/or photographed films all over the world, from Japan to Haiti to Uganda to Guyana to Burma, where she snuck her 16mm camera into the rebel army bases of the Karen Liberation Army. Ferne has graduate degrees in documentary from the International Center of Photography and Stanford University. Since her first student film screened at Sundance in 1993, she has had four features premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, most recently the critically acclaimed THE LAST LAUGH starring Mel Brooks, Sarah Silverman and Carl Reiner, which screened at over 100 festivals around the world; was released theatrically in over 25 cities, and aired on PBS Independent Lens, where it was runner-up for the Audience Award, and SkyTV in the UK. As a result, Ferne has become a recognized speaker on humor and the Holocaust, and has now been called upon to discuss humor as it relates to other current events including the Covid-19 pandemic. Ferne is also an activist involved with a group called Persisticon, a feminist organization that stages comedy events to raise money for woman and BIPOC political candidates. She also recently worked with comedians as one of only eight global documentary filmmakers chosen by the UN and Google to direct a series of PSAs about building a sustainable planet. Most recently, Ferne was selected by the UN and Google as one of only eight global documentary filmmakers to direct a series of PSAs about building a sustainable planet, currently screening across all of YouTube’s platforms and was featured at the 2020 United Nations General Assembly.

Dr. Chaya Ostrower

Dr. Chaya Ostrower is a senior lecturer in psychology and a public speaker in Israel and abroad on psychology, humor and the Holocaust. I earned my doctorate in 2000 from Tel Aviv University. The book I author based on my Ph.D, “It kept us alive”, was published by Yad Vashem in Hebrew-2009 and English-2014, and by Springer in German-2018.

You can purchase IT KEPT US ALIVE on AMAZON.

Dr. Michael Berenbaum

Dr. Michael Berenbaum is a writer, lecturer, and teacher consulting in the conceptual development of museums and historical films. He is director of the Sigi Ziering Institute: Exploring the Ethical and Religious Implications of the Holocaust at the American Jewish University, where he is also a Professor of Jewish Studies.

He was the Executive Editor of the Second Edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica that reworked, transformed, improved, broadened and deepened, the now classic 1972 work and consists of 22 volumes, sixteen million words with 25,000 individual contributions to Jewish knowledge. For three years, he was President and Chief Executive Officer of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. He was the Director of the United States Holocaust Research Institute at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Hymen Goldman Adjunct Professor of Theology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. From 1988–93 he served as Project Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, overseeing its creation. He also served as Deputy Director of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, where he authored its Report to the President.

Berenbaum is the author and editor of twenty books, scores of scholarly articles, and hundreds of journalistic pieces. His most recent books include: Not Your Father’s Antisemitism, A Promise to Remember: The Holocaust in the Words and Voices of Its Survivors and After the Passion Has Passed: American Religious Consequences, a collection of essays on Jews, Judaism and Christianity, Religious Tolerance and Pluralism occasioned by the controversy that swirled around Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion. He was the conceptual developer on the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Educational Center and played a similar function as conceptual developer and chief curator of the Belzec Memorial at the site of the Death Camp. He is currently at work on the Memorial Museum to Macedonian Jewry in Skopje, the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, and the Holocaust and Humanity Center in Cincinnati, Ohio.

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