ToI's movie maven Jordan Hoffman reviews 'The Voice of Hind Rajab'
The Times of Israel Daily Briefing
The Times of Israel
4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 20 December 2025
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome to The Reel Schmooze with ToI film reviewer Jordan Hoffman and host Amanda Borschel-Dan, where we bring you all the entertainment news and film reviews a Jew can use.
This week, we hear reviews of two films: the 2019 "An Officer and a Spy," a film by controversial director Roman Polanski on the Dreyfus Affair, which is now playing in the United States, and the shattering documentary, "The Voice of Hind Rajab."
But the pair opens the program by honoring director-actor Rob Reiner, who was slain over the weekend alongside his wife, Michele. We learn about his early acting work and hear about many of his groundbreaking films that have become enduring classics.
Hoffman tells us about Polanski's cinematic childhood and early adult life -- he barely survived the Holocaust and his wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered by the Manson family. We then hear how Polanski skipped out on the sentencing after pleading guilty to engaging in unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, a 13-year-old girl he was photographing for Vogue, and has lived outside of the US ever since, but still working consistently. And after all that, we learn about the merits of the film, "An Officer and a Spy."
The final movie discussed is potentially even more controversial to several listeners, "The Voice of Hind Rajab." The film portrays the attempts of the Ramallah-based Red Crescent to send an ambulance to save the six-year-old Hind, who is trapped in a war zone in northern Gaza in a car with her family, who are all dead. Using the actual soundtrack from the terrified girl's phone calls for help, the film is a carefully crafted re-enactment of the impending tragedy.
Hear which film(s) got a seal of approval on this week's The Reel Schmooze.
The Reel Schmooze is produced by the PodWaves and can be found wherever you get your podcasts.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to The Times of Israel's The Real Shmuse. I'm your host, Amanda Borschal, Dan, here with our movie Maven, Jordan Hoffman, for all the news and movie reviews a Jew or a non-Jew can use. |
| 0:16.9 | Jordan, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me. It's, we were just, we're doing a little pre-shmooze before the schmooze, and we're both just like, |
| 0:25.0 | today is pretty awful. We record a little bit before the podcast goes out, and today we're |
| 0:31.3 | recording especially early because of Kakamemi scheduling. And so we're right now just getting off. We're still reeling from the |
| 0:41.5 | Australia attack. And when the Australia attack happened, we were still reeling from the Providence, |
| 0:46.6 | Rhode Island, Brown University attack. And then we heard this news about Rob Reiner getting |
| 0:53.6 | murdered, just like a triple dose of like, |
| 0:58.1 | what the hell? Can I go back to sleep now? Can I pull the covers up over my head? It's just |
| 1:03.0 | been a pretty rough couple days or not even a rough couple days, one day. I think it all happened |
| 1:07.5 | in 24 hours from Brown to this, to the Rob Reiner thing. |
| 1:12.0 | Yeah. |
| 1:12.6 | And I have to say the Rob Reiner greeted me right when I woke up. |
| 1:17.2 | I got your email. |
| 1:18.2 | I think it was six something in the morning. |
| 1:20.1 | You just sent it actually. |
| 1:21.7 | And I was just astonished that this could have happened. |
| 1:26.2 | We will talk all about that in a second, but I just |
| 1:29.4 | want to say there's one silver lighting here of our different time of recording, et cetera. Do you |
| 1:36.6 | know what that is? You've had a few glasses of wine because we're doing it at night this time |
| 1:40.1 | for you? No. I've had several lotkas, though, I would have to say, because it is Hanukkah, |
| 1:47.2 | and I've, I think, fried so far about 300 lotkas, and I'm not even kidding. And they're all gone, |
| 1:53.3 | of course. But you can't complain about it being the crackadon for you. So that's the one, the only silver line. That's it. That's all we got. |
... |
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