We explore what made Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer tick with a young Jewish novelist who says she shares some of his influences, dig into the surprising connections between Judaism and Rastafarianism at a beloved Reggae record store, and get the inside scoop on the films of Oscar-nominated Israeli director Joseph Cedar on this edition of TJC Movie Talk With Alana Newhouse.

Starting things off, novelist and Yiddish literature expert Dara Horn gives her take on the documentary Isaac in America and the career of the world’s most famous Yiddish author, I.B. Singer.

As brilliant a writer as Singer was, Horn contends that “his real genius was in his marketing,” and that his greatest achievement was introducing Yiddish literature (in translation) to a non-Yiddish-speaking, and even non-Jewish, audience.

Whereas traditionally Yiddish literature spoke to a particular community — one that shared particular cultural references and linguistic understandings — Singer thought of his writing as coming from that community but no longer speaking to it. Indeed, as Horn notes, the community that had comprised the main audience for Yiddish literature had largely perished in the Holocaust, but Singer found a way to reach new audiences.

Somewhat critically, Horn points to the image of Singer presented in Isaac in America, as a folksy old man, as quite calculated. He deliberately played up his old world origins, she says, to appeal to people’s cultural nostalgia and, thus, sell more books. Horn faults Singer for presenting himself as the last remaining Yiddish writer, when in fact there were other writers in his day who still wrote only in Yiddish, without any expectation of being read.

One such figure was the writer known as Der Nister, who plays a prominent role in Horn’s latest novel, “The World To Come,” which is the story of an art heist — a Chagall painting stolen from the Jewish Museum during a singles event — that connects present-day New York to pre-War Eastern Europe in an exploration of what it means to be an artist. On that subject, Newhouse and Horn both note, Chagall and Singer had similar attitudes.

Horn says she wrote “The World To Come,” in part, to showcase the great body of Yiddish literature that is being forgotten.

Next, it’s off to New York City’s East Village, where the director of Awake Zion, Monica Haim, takes us on a tour of her favorite reggae record store, the world-renowned Jammyland — which just happens to be owned by a Jewish guy named Ira.

Showing off her favorite records and offering more insight into the film’s colorful characters, Haim explains her inspiration for exploring the Jewish-Rastafarian connection in her wildly engaging feature-length documentary.

Watch the segment “A Field Trip To Jammyland” right here.

Back in the studio, Newhouse is joined by film scholar Leonard Quart, Professor Emeritus of Cinema Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center and a contributing editor to Cineaste, to discuss Israeli director Joseph Cedar.

“Each film is better than the last,” an impressed Quart says of Cedar’s oeuvre. From his first film Time of Favor to his latest, the Oscar-nominated Beaufort, Cedar’s films are becoming more controlled and less commercial, notes Quart — and that’s a good thing.

Interviewing Cedar for Cineaste, Quart says he was impressed that Cedar, whose films tend to be critical of his religious Zionist upbringing, still maintains ties to that community.

Quart describes Time of Favor as a “potboiler thriller,” which is an overt critique of the authoritarianism of a settler culture that leads to a “runaway nationalism.” The film’s most charismatic character, according to Quart, is its only female lead — Michal, the rabbi’s daughter (played by Tinkerbell), who rebels against the settlement and her father.

Cedar’s second film, Campfire is another critique of settler culture, this time focusing on the story of a teenage girl who is molested by a soldier on leave. When the settlers find out, they blame her, because a soldier can do no wrong.

But Beaufort, which Quart considers Cedar’s best — showing influences of Stanley Kubrick — deals with the soldiers themselves. Quart calls it an anti-war film where the soldiers themselves express no anti-war sentiment. Yet while Quart likes Beaufort best, he says that since it’s a film where there is “no woman, no romance, no heroism, and not much action,” it’s not likely to find much of an audience in the States.

Time of Favor, on the other hand, which is playing on TJC, has plenty of action, heroism and romance.