Jascha Heifetz courtesy 92nd street y

The 92nd Street Y in Manhattan presents a preview screening of “God’s Fiddler: Jascha Heifetz,” a documentary from award-winning director/producer Peter Rosen, on Sept. 18 at 7:30 p.m. A panel discussion featuring Rosen, John Anthony Maltese, Heifetz’s official biographer; and Ayke Agus, a violinist and Heifetz’s longtime accompanist, follows. Maya Pritsker, a Russian-born musicologist, lecturer, journalist, and art critic, will moderate. A reception featuring a short performance with Agus and pianist Elena Fomicheva follows.

“God’s Fiddler” tells Heifetz’s story through vintage performance clips, home movies, personal family photos, and interviews with Ida Haendel, Ivry Gitlis, Itzhak Perlman, and others. The film opens at New York’s QUAD Cinema on Oct. 28.

The event is part of 92Y’s Russian Sundays series. It costs $29. For information, call (212) 415-5500 or www.92y.org.

As America marks the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, a new film highlights the role Jews played in the conflict that pitted North against South. The 86-minute film, “Jewish Soldiers in Blue and Gray,” was produced by the National Center for Jewish Film of Brandeis University. It was screened locally on July 13, at Cong. Beth Tikvah/New Milford Jewish Center.

“Jewish Soldiers in Blue and Gray” was written by Jonathan Gruber, with an assist from Robert Marcus. It was directed by Gruber. It relies on interviews with Civil War historians such as Shalom Lamm and Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer and descendants of Jewish soldiers, as well as original letters and records stored in museums, archives, and private homes. Approximately 7,000 Jews fought for the Union; approximately 3,000 fought for the Confederacy.

Perhaps the most surprising shot in Jeff Prosserman’s “Chasing Madoff” is of Bernard Madoff himself. The silver-haired financial “wizard” lounges in a chair, amusing the surrounding crowd with his observations on the fallacies of the financial markets.

He’s funny, confident, and charming; why would anyone doubt him? Then we see Harry Markopolos, earnest and awkward and self-righteous, repeat yet again that he warned the Securities and Exchange Commission 10 years before Madoff’s final fall that the hedge-fund manager was a crook, that his astonishing returns were a fantasy, that Bernie Madoff was running the largest and longest-lasting Ponzi scheme ever.

In 2002, 22 Palestinian and Israeli teenage girls were brought to Bridgeton for a 10-day women’s leadership program. “My So-Called Enemy” is an award-winning documentary that chronicles the program and follows the lives of six of the girls over the next seven years.

“Enemy,” which won a Spring 2011 CINE Golden Eagle Award, its fifth prize since its release, was shown Sunday, July 10, at the Kaplen Jewish Community Center on the Palisades, followed by a discussion.

Sixty-nine years ago this month, nearly 13,000 Jews were rounded up by French gendarmes and taken to the Velodrome d’hiver sports arena, not far from the Eiffel Tower in Paris. They were held there for days without food, water, or sanitation facilities, and then were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. French policemen, not Nazi soldiers, carried out the operation — and what is even more startling is that, for 50 years, most French felt no responsibility for the action.

The “Vel’ d’hiv’ roundup,” as it was called, became a symbol of national guilt and outrage. Twenty-five years after the liberation of Paris, in 1969, French Jewish filmmaker Marcel Ophuls took aim at the French nation in his provocative four-and-a-half-hour documentary “The Sorrow and The Pity,” where he dealt with the question of collaboration during World War II. The film was immediately banned by a government that was far from ready to tackle the question of its own culpability in the war.

France has the fourth largest Jewish community in the world, after Israel, Russia, and the United States. The community numbers somewhere around 500,000, constituting about 1 percent of the population of France, and it blends more firmly ensconced Jews with first- and second-generation Jews from North Africa. Muslims outnumber Jews about 10:1, and we are acutely aware of the tensions across the country between Jews and Muslims. These figures and disquiet serve as the backdrop for what Baya Kasmi and Michel Leclerc try to do in their zany new film “The Names of Love.”