Karen Davis

Karen Davis

Karen Davis has been involved in the film festival world for over 20 years—as Executive Director of the Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival from 1993-2011, and as Consulting Programmer for the Palm Beach International Film Festival and the Palm Beach Women’s Film Festival. She currently acts as Artistic Director of the Palm Beach Israeli Film Series, consults for the Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival, and is Moderator for The Cinema Club based in Boca Raton.

Prior to joining the film world, she was a freelance journalist for women's publications like Ms. Magazine and Lilith. She has written four books, including Public Faces/Private Lives: South Florida's Pioneer Women.

Blog Posts

Still Photo from "Working Woman" (2018)

Film Review: "Working Woman"

Karen Davis

Exclusively for JWA, film critic Karen Davis reviews Working Woman, a film about one woman’s #MeToo story in Israel.

Gett: The Trial of Vivian Anselem, 2014

Film Review: "Gett: The Trial of Vivian Amsalem"

Karen Davis

Directed and written by the sister-brother team of Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz and based partly on their own family history, this gripping courtroom drama set in Israel traces a Moroccan Jewish woman's effort to obtain a gett, or religious divorce, after years of a loveless marriage. In Israel, there is neither civil marriage nor civil divorce; only Orthodox rabbis can legalize a union or its dissolution, which is only possible with the husband’s full consent.

Topics: Film
Sophie Tucker, Cropped

"The Outrageous Sophie Tucker": A Film Review

Karen Davis

“I believe in tit for tat, and if that’s the case someone owes me a lot of tat.” That quote begins this fast-paced, extremely well-researched documentary about Sophie Tucker, the bawdy singer/comedian known for being “the last of the red-hot mamas.” And thanks to the producing-writing team of Lloyd and Sue Ecker, a new generation of fans will be giving Sophie lots of “tat,” just as their parents and grandparents did during her career which lasted seven decades from the 1890s thru the 1960s.

Topics: Film

How to cite this page

Jewish Women's Archive. "Karen Davis." (Viewed on September 30, 2023) <https://jwa.org/blog/author/karen-davis>.