A still from the film “Imperfect,” which is screening at the festival.

On Monday, at least 150 people — including representatives from the Sundance Film Festival, WarnerMedia and AMC Networks — will converge on what might seem like an unlikely location: Manhattan’s flagship JCC. They won’t be there to learn Hebrew, prepare for Passover or use the gym. Instead, they’ll be attending a two-day conference on a topic not specifically related to Jewish life: How to make movies more accessible to people with disabilities, reports eJewishPhilanthropy’s Ben Sales.

Showcasing disability: The Film and Television Accessibility Summit is a new feature of the ReelAbilities Film Festival, which begins today at the Marlene Meyerson JCC on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and has become one of the premier venues for showcasing movies about disability, featuring actors and filmmakers with disabilities. The festival runs for a week and has taken place annually since 2008. This year, 15,000 people are expected to attend screenings of 12 feature films and 30 short films both virtually and in-person. One of those attendees is slated to be Robert De Niro, whose has a son with autism, and who is expected on opening night.

Checking the boxes: “One of our partners gave us this list of criteria to reach as far as which films they would consider partnering on, and it had to be a film by a person with a disability, the actor needed to be a person with a disability, plus they needed to be members of other minority groups, people of color, specifically,” Isaac Zablocki, the director of film programs at the JCC, and co-founder of ReelAbilities, told eJP. “They had a list of six different criteria that we had to reach… We managed to find four films that actually fit their very progressive criteria.”

Accessibility in the seats: The festival aims to both focus on disability on-screen as well as prioritize it for the audience: Every film is made as accessible as possible, whether that means providing captions, audio descriptions (which verbally describe events in a film for blind viewers) or — for the first time this year — a sensory friendly space that will provide a soft and calm atmosphere for those who are overwhelmed by the experience of watching a movie.

Read the full story here.

A frame from Disney’s “Luca.”

“Everything we say to others matters. In Judaism, every word has the potential to bring holiness or profanity into the world. How much more powerful then, are the words we say to ourselves? How can it be that we teach our children to be mindful of their words and language to others, but we often fail to support them when they have a nagging voice or worse, we model for them the toxic and limiting behavior of our own negative self-talk?” writes Ben Vorspan in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy on the Jewish seasonal resonance of the Disney/Pixar film “Luca.”

Front of mind: “Mindfulness practices and skills are essential at Jewish day schools. Whether through our social/emotional learning programs or partnership with organizations such as  the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, these opportunities provide us with the tools to notice, interrupt and reframe negative self-talk. As someone immersed in this work, trust me when I say that there is no quicker way to integrate mindfulness into our own day, or that of our students or children, than using, ‘Silenzio Bruno!’”

Passover practice: “As we move toward spring and Pesach, toward our holiday of the liberation of our people and nation, it can be a moment to break free from the Pharaoh’s voice within each of us. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel taught that we can be a Pharaoh unto ourselves, that the true meaning of freedom is ‘the liberation from the tyranny of the self-centered ego.’ In other words, while we eat the bread of affliction, we can embrace the virtue of self-compassion.”

Read the full piece here.

“In my fourth year of rabbinic school, as I delivered a sermon on the portion Tazria, I argued that we can not simply ignore the parts of our tradition that make us uncomfortable — that we have an obligation to ensure we embrace all of our tradition, not simply the ‘Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat’ parts,” writes Rabbi Carrie Vogel in an opinion piece in eJewishPhilanthropy.

Lessons from Noah: “There is a popular children’s book about an extremely powerful person. This person was so powerful they had the ability to control the wind and the rain, the sun and the moon. One day, this powerful person decided, completely on their own, that because everyone was making bad choices they would kill all of them. Well, except for a few. Naturally, this isn’t actually a popular children’s book. It is the story of Noah and the flood, a story we tell annually to our youngest learners, a story we would never consider reading to them otherwise because the content is clearly not developmentally appropriate.”

Finding meaning: “It is our job to help our students extricate meaning, connection and value from generations-old traditions. It is our job to help them understand how something old can be new again and again. But it is also our job to create safe learning spaces. For example, we would not typically have a conversation with 8- or 9-year-olds about murder or adultery (let’s be honest, many of the Ten Commandments would get some side eye from Common Sense Media), but they can absolutely engage in a discussion about how we assess whether a rule is a good rule that we should follow, or a rule that we should push back against.”

Read the full piece here.