New documentaries on 3 Jewish icons and October 7 - what's on Israeli TV?

This week, there are a number of documentaries about iconic figures – who happen to be Jewish – available on television, as well as a new documentary about October 7 that uses a recording to tell the story of the heroes who saved lives in a bomb shelter.

Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge

If you are a woman who likes wearing dresses, it’s likely you have a wrap dress in your closet, that was either made by or is a knockoff of a Diane von Furstenberg design. The iconic designer is the subject of a documentary now available on Disney+, Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge by Trish Dalton and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy. 

That staple of so many women’s wardrobes, which is flattering and feminine but also comfortable, turned von Furstenberg overnight into one of the world’s most identifiable designers back in the 1970s. She became known both for this garment and for a high-profile private life, both of which are detailed in this very watchable documentary, which was the opening-night movie at the Tribeca Festival this year.

The title comes from an answer that the now 77-year-old utters in an interview, “I don’t think I had a vocation for fashion: I had a vocation to be a woman in charge.”

To say that von Furstenberg came from humble beginnings is an understatement: She was born just 18 months after her mother was released from Auschwitz. “Just the fact that I was born was a victory,” she says, and quotes her mother as saying, “By giving you life, you gave me my life back. You were my torch of freedom.”

Possessed of striking good looks and preternatural self-assurance, she married a German prince, Egon von Furstenberg, and began designing clothes. Her signature dress caught on and she was featured on the cover of Newsweek in 1976. Von Furstenberg and her husband became famous in a New York Magazine cover story where they spoke unabashedly about their open marriage, which scandalized some but fascinated many. They eventually divorced and she later married entertainment mogul Barry Diller.

Over the years, she lost and regained control of her brand – and the dress, which Cybill Shepherd wore in Taxi Driver and which Michelle Obama was photographed in more than three decades later, continues to be a force in the fashion world.

Von Furstenberg is a charming interviewee, dispensing bon mots such as, “The only place to find your strength is by being true to yourself.” She doesn’t hold back on gossip, claiming she refused a threesome with Mick Jagger and David Bowie in the anything-goes era of Studio 54’s heyday (for unspecified reasons) and that she had trysts with Ryan O’Neal and Warren Beatty in the same weekend.

None of her exploits were hidden from her children. “She lived her best life,” her son says: “I don’t think she was that different from any Jewish mom.” Well, not exactly, which is what makes this documentary so much fun.

Steven Spielberg, The New Hollywood Prodigy

I was looking forward to the new Steven Spielberg documentary on Hot 8, Hot VOD, Yes Docu and Yes VOD on August 11: Steven Spielberg, The New Hollywood Prodigy, but just a few minutes into the film, which was produced by various European television companies, the French title flashed on screen – Steven Spielberg: L’homme et l’enfant (Steven Spielberg: The Man and the Child), which was translated in the Hebrew titles as Steven Spielberg: In Spite of Everything. I knew right away that this was one in a series of short, superficial French documentaries translated into English that relentlessly drive home one psychobabble conclusion and skip many important aspects of its subjects’ career.

This new Spielberg film was made after the release of his highly autobiographical movie The Fabelmans, and this one provides virtually nothing new. If you’ve seen The Fabelmans, you know how his life – particularly his parents’ messy divorce and the antisemitism he faced being the only Jew in most of the schools he attended – inspired his films. The documentary features clunky narration, often in poor English. For example, he is described as “the essential linchpin of the film industry,” but is there such a thing as a “non-essential linchpin”?

These indifferently made French documentaries – there was a similar one about Paul Newman a couple of years ago – have one bright spot: photographs. They do manage to find rare and revealing pictures to illustrate the story – and candid photos of Spielberg’s family, who look startlingly like the characters in The Fabelmans, are especially fun, as are pictures of Spielberg on many of his film sets. But this is strictly for film geeks who feel they must see everything about the famed film director and producer.

Zuckerberg: King of the Metaverse

The new documentary, Zuckerberg: King of the Metaverse, available starting on Yes VOD and Sting TV and on Hot VOD, tells the story of the meteoric rise, sort-of fall, and artful pivot of Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg.

Watching it, you will realize how the Aaron Sorkin movie from 2010, The Social Network, was just the very beginning of the story. After all, there are 20-year-olds today who have never known a world without Facebook. The Meta company he built, which now includes the WhatsApp and Instagram apps, is worth $100 billion and connects billions of users worldwide.

This documentary by Nick Green breezes through the gee-whiz origin story of Facebook that we all know: how he invented the social-media platform while he was still an undergrad at Harvard. After detailing the establishment of the platform, it gets into the story Green really wants to tell – about how the social-media site has been used to disseminate hate speech and fake news to incite violence against minorities, influence elections, and launch insurrections, such as the one at the US Capitol Building in 2021.

Zuckerberg is portrayed as indifferent to these concerns. He seems to have consistently outsmarted regulators who sought some kind of oversight against incitement and fake news. In his 2018 testimony before the Senate, which is discussed extensively, he runs rings around the senators. 

In one famous exchange, Senator Orrin Hatch wastes a question, asking how Facebook makes any revenue if it doesn’t charge its users, to which Zuckerberg grins and replies, “Senator, we run ads.” The conclusion that this film reaches is that, despite the efforts of whistleblowers, absolutely nothing has changed at Facebook and likely won’t anytime soon.

Bomb Shelter of Death

The recently broadcast Kan 11 documentary called Bomb Shelter of Death (Migunit Ha Mavet) – which was an episode of Real Time (Zman Emet) with Asaf Liberman but which works as a standalone film – is available for viewing on the Kan website (kan.org.il). It’s an extremely well done but obviously very disturbing documentary about the outdoor bomb shelter at the Re’im Junction where 16 people who fled the Nova Music Festival were murdered by Hamas terrorists on October 7, and four were taken hostage.

Parts of this story have been told before, but this documentary tells of their tragic ordeal in depth, with the help of testimonies of the seven survivors and with the audio recorded by Ayelet Arnin, a Kan news editor who was among those who were killed there and who began recording on her phone when they heard the terrorists outside.

The story that emerges is one of young people who displayed great heroism and kindness toward each other, in the face of the virtual collapse of all governmental systems put in place to protect citizens (when one of the victims managed to reach the police, he was told, “Try to hide, bye!”). Those trapped in the shelter were all attendees at the Nova festival, along with a security guard, Osama Abu Assa, a Bedouin security guard. When they heard terrorists approaching, Abu Assa went out and pleaded with them in Arabic to leave those in the shelter alone, but he was killed.

Terrorists stood outside throwing grenades inside, and one of the most valuable aspects of this documentary is that it shows the heroism of Aner Shapira, a musician and artist from Jerusalem who was in an elite unit of the IDF Nahal Brigade.

The terrorists threw eight grenades into the shelter and Shapira picked up seven and threw them back, but the final one exploded in his hands, killing him. His friend Hersh Goldberg-Polin, also from Jerusalem and an American citizen, was one of four pulled out of the shelter and taken hostage. The others are Alon Ohel, Eliya Cohen, and Or Levy; all four are still being held hostage in Gaza.