What does New York Magazine’s film critic think of TJC’s interfaith romantic comedy? Alana Newhouse welcomes him in-studio to find out, and also sits down with a New York University professor for some frank talk about Israel’s immigrants.

New York magazine and CBS Sunday Morning film critic David Edelstein joins Newhouse to talk about Autumn Sun and the interfaith-romantic-comedy genre. From Annie Hall to Meet the Parents to Knocked Up, Hollywood seems to always find what happens when a Jew and a Christian get together the perfect fodder for lighthearted comedy. But how does Autumn Sun, an Argentinian film, compare to these mainstream American movies?

Edelstein, who had not seen the film before watching it for the show, says he “loved” the farcical setup of Autumn Sun, in which a Jewish woman places a personal ad — only to realize that the perfect applicant is only pretending to be Jewish. As to how it differs from American films dealing with similar issues, Newhouse notes that the couple is older than in most American films, to which Edelstein gleefully replies, “Yeah, we don’t like to see old people kissing, yuck!” Another noted difference is Autumn Sun’s gender-role reversal of the stereotypical “neurotic Jewish male” and “female shiksa goddess” combination found in so many American films, like “Keeping the Faith” and most all of Woody Allen’s work.

Considering the interfaith-comedy genre as a whole, Edelstein notes that these films tend to sidestep the issue of religion altogether and focus only on the cultural differences that clash and make for good comedy — because we live in a liberal, secularized culture in which insistence on marrying within the faith can seem bigoted. The only films Edelstein can think of that do address issues of “miscegenation” in a real way are Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever, which is about race rather than religion, and the low-brow werewolves-vs.-vampires blockbuster Underworld, which discusses what happens when the two breeds mix.

Autumn Sun, Newhouse suggests, does deal more with actual religious differences than most American films do, but Edelstein is dismissive of this point, noting that ultimately the religious differences add up only to some comic blunders over the pronunciation of Yiddish words. However, he points out, because the couple is older, the central questions of religious observance — how will they raise their kids, will they celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah — aren’t as relevant. In this film, “It’s just two lonely people coming together,” making for a “lovely romantic film” that will “make people wonder about barriers that exist between us.”

Turning from the mixing of religious identities to the mixing of ethnic identities, Newhouse examines three films that involve Israel’s difficulties assimilating different groups of immigrants, with the help of NYU professor Rakefet Zalashik.

Zalashik is quick to distinguish between St. Jean and Caravan 841, which focus on the plight of mostly Jewish Soviet (St. Jean) and Jewish Ethiopian (Caravan 841) immigrants in the 1990s, and Women For Sale, which examines the lives of non-Jewish, illegal immigrants from the former USSR who make their living as sex workers in Israel. The latter do not have the same rights as legal citizens, which complicates matters, and in the case of all three films, Zalashik notes, things have gotten somewhat better in Israel in the intervening time since the films were produced.

Newhouse asks Zalashik to explain how things have changed in each case. For Soviet Jewish immigrants, she says, things are much improved. Most have managed to integrate into Israeli society quite nicely, but things have been harder for Ethiopian immigrants, many of whom live in poverty, with high rates of unemployment. They are still marginalized by Israeli society and face discrimination.

The difficulties Israel has faced in integrating new immigrants can be seen elsewhere in the world, such as in Germany’s experience integrating Turkish immigrants. But they are compounded by the fact that mass immigration from both the Soviet Union and Ethiopia (just like with Holocaust survivors immigrating en masse from Eastern Europe in the 40s and 50s) has left the relatively small country of Israel needing to integrate massive numbers of people in a very short amount of time — which would put a strain on any country.

Moving on to Women For Sale, Zalashik corrects a mistake made in the film. Prostitution is not legal in Israel, despite the film making that claim, she assures us, and is baffled by where the filmmakers would have gotten this mistaken impression. She explains that the phenomenon of formerly-Soviet women coming in as sex workers began around 2001 and is connected to poverty, the fall of the Communist Bloc, and globalization. By 2004, Zalashik says, one could see a marked difference in the Israeli government’s policies and the police force’s approach towards this problem, focusing more on protecting these women — most of whom answer to pimps and are often forced into the sex trade — than on criminalizing them. But, she adds, there is still much more that the government needs to do on this issue.