Sing a Song, Save a Language
| Isa Kremer singing in Yiddish. |
Amidst the current revival of Yiddish music and culture in attempts to keep the language from “dying out,” it’s easy to forget that Yiddish has led a tenuous existence through much of the 20th Century. Long seen by the wider world as the Jewish tongue, Yiddish has survived suppression, obsolescence and the extermination of most of its native speakers. Today, its musical torchbearers offer CDs and digital downloads to fans of all religions. But back when opera was the only place to hear the greatest singers of the age, the renowned voice that brought Yiddish songs to non-Jewish ears belonged to Isa Kremer, the subject of the film Isa Kremer: The People’s Diva.
A living reminder of a vanished people, Kremer was born into the world’s largest community of Yiddish speakers, the five-million-strong Jewish “pale of settlement” in 19th-Century Western Russia. Yiddish folksongs she heard within the kitchens and wedding ceremonies of her youth would later be performed in sold-out opera houses around Europe and the Americas. She became renowned for her innovative arrangements and her passionate interpretation of lyrics, with dramatic gestures that would bring Jewish characters to life on the stage.
Always aiming for the broader audience, she made only a single foray onto New York’s famous Second Avenue stretch of Yiddish theaters. Yet the show produced what is arguably the genre’s most popular song of that era, “Mein Shtetale Belz.” Written about Kremer’s Bessarabian hometown, it evoked a way of life obliterated by the Second World War.
On tour, she performed in Russian, Italian, French, German, Polish and English, but things always got dicey when she insisted on singing songs in her native tongue. In 1922, an antisemitic riot broke out in Warsaw because of a Yiddish performance she was to give to a Jewish audience. Elsewhere, resistance came from Jews themselves. At stops in America, Yiddish was looked on by some Jews as the unwanted legacy of Old World poverty and the shtetl. In 1936 Berlin, German-speaking Jews looked down on Yiddish speakers because they believed it reinforced the Nazis’ assertion that Jews were different. While in staunchly-Hebrew-speaking 1948 Israel it was called “the language of exile.” Yet in each instance, Kremer used the leverage of her celebrity to bypass these complaints and perform anyway.
Today, commercial recordings of Kremer’s voice are difficult to come by. But some modern singers have continued her efforts at spreading the word about Yiddish beyond the Jewish realm. A few years back Chava Alberstein, an Israeli musician who performs Yiddish songs, got together with Peter Yarrow and New York band the Klezmatics to tape a live concert special at the Neue Synagogue in Berlin. And for at least one evening, in the musical spirit of Isa Kremer, Germans, Israelis and Americans honored a language which has refused to die.
Alec Baldwin’s Secret Jewish Identity
Sex And Another City
The cinematic heavens opened last weekend for every woman who moved to New York City for the two L’s — love and labels – or has fantasized about doing so. Armed with Twizzlers and a clique of girlfriends, moviegoers sold out theaters to shed tears over the four women of Sex and the City’s make-believe heartbreaks and drool over the ensembles the women wear while their hearts are being broken.
Carrie Bradshaw and her crew might be a little misguided and materialistic, but Sex and the City can teach us one thing: relationships are an endless topic of eavesdrop-worthy conversation. There’s always more to say about other people’s love lives, and there are always ears eager to listen.
It’s a lesson Israeli director Amos Gitai has clearly learned well. In a city halfway across the world from SATC’s NYC, Gitai also tells a story of friendship, love and sex; but he focuses less on the purses, and more on the emotional baggage, his characters carry.
Set in Tel Aviv, Alila follows a bob-haired sexpot named Gabi who’s taken a strong, but emotionally unavailable man for a lover. Like the women in “Sex in the City,” Gabi goes shoe-shopping with her best friend, but Gabi and Mali’s conversations forgo the zingers to focus on candid soul searching. The questions the women raise are just as riveting as the brunch discussions found in SATC, but they handle the topics a little less flippantly. Gabi’s flaky love life, we realize, is a result of her own insecurities: deep down, she’s not the vixen she makes herself out to be.
(Imagine if Samantha Jones turned soft!)
It’s been said that the fifth friend in Sex and the City is the city itself. Similarly, Alila is full of careful cinematic decisions that showcase Tel Aviv as one of the many characters in Gitai’s panorama.
Just as Sex and the City teaches audiences the nuances of New York City culture — from what it means to live on Park Avenue to the necessity of looking down on Los Angeles — Alila captures the nuances of Tel Aviv life. The illegal Asian laborers, the Holocaust survivor living next door, and the drama surrounding the adolescent boy who’s afraid to serve in the army are unique to Israel’s social climate. And, as a backdrop to the plot’s twists and turns, subtle details, such as reports of violence playing on the radio in the background and the bustling colorful streets full of vendors seen from a car window, convey a sense of the general atmosphere of the city that shapes the lives of its characters.
Bottom line: If you’re in the mood for a movie about love, sex and friends in a dynamic city — that focuses a little less on looking fabulous and offers a little more Jewish than a convert named Charlotte — check out Alila.
World Television Premiere: Circumcise Me
The hilarious film Circumcise Me: The Comedy of Yisrael Campbell is making its World Television Premiere on The Jewish Channel this month. Orthodox-convert comedian Yisrael Campbell shares his stand-up routine and the wild life story that inspired it.
Watch the trailer above, read more about the film here, and watch the whole thing, in all its side-splitting, knee-slapping hilarity, on TJC this month!
60 Years Later, A Treasure Trove of Films
The 60th anniversary of Israel’s Declaration of Independence is May 14th, and today marks the official celebration of Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israeli Independence Day! Celebrate by taking a look at some of TJC’s films about Israel. With six full decades of history and culture to draw from, it’s no surprise that the films in our Israel category are as diverse as they are entertaining and informative.
Violence stemming from land disputes between Arabs and Jews is a primary concern within the country. So, in his landmark documentary series Land of the Settlers, Israeli newsman Chaim Yavin starts taking sides in the complicated debate over the withdrawal of Jewish settlements from Gaza and the West Bank, visiting the homes of both Arabs and Jews living in the disputed territories.
The origins of these settlement communities stretch back to decisions made by political figures like Moshe Dayan. In Slaves of the Sword: Moshe Dayan, we get an up-close and personal look at the flamboyant and controversial Israeli Defense Minister. With testimony from both supporters and critics, the legacy of Dayan’s decisions are painted in vivid color.
But for today’s ground-level IDF soldier, the only shade that really matters is green. Among the young conscripts who choose to break their silence in At The Green Line, the politics of protecting Israel’s borders are not always clear-cut. Some refuse to serve, while others try to change the system from inside.
Israel’s not only inhabited by Jews and Arabs, though. Amongst the country’s diverse population is a small group of African-American immigrants who practice Old Testament tradition and call themselves African Hebrews. The revival of polygamous marriage practices among this community is explored in Sister Wife. And while embracing a new spouse may make a husband happy, we see how it can also make a wife feel like a second fiddle.
Issues of sexual needs vs. family acceptance are not restricted to new immigrants either. The travails of being both Orthodox and secretly gay in modern Israel are captured with emotional detail in Say Amen. Within a close-knit Moroccan-Israeli family where producing children is a paramount value, one man struggles to confess his homosexuality to those closest to him.
To see these and more films focusing on the promised land, head over to TJC’s Israel category for a current slate of provocative and engaging titles.
In Honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day
In honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoa), which is today, I want to highlight some of the films showing on TJC that explore rarely considered facets of the Holocaust experience and prove how many different stories there still are to tell.
One of the most shocking Holocaust stories is that of Ilse Stein. The Jewess and the Captain reveals how Ilse, a beautiful young Jewish girl, fell in love with a Nazi officer, who went on to save her life — and the lives of several other Jews from the Minsk ghetto. The documentary shares an interview with Ilse just before her death, shocking archival photographs, and KGB secret documents in order to reexamine her strange romance that blossomed in the middle of the ghetto.
While The Jewess and the Captain explores the Holocaust from a Jew’s perspective, Shadows Of Memory looks at WWII through the rarely-explored eyes of ordinary German citizens. People often ask, “How could the Holocaust have happened? How could so many good people not see what was going on?” This documentary tries to answer the daunting question through conversations with three generations of German women, including the filmmaker’s mother, a woman who lived through the war but didn’t see the atrocities—or chose not to.
With the overwhelming number of horror stories the Holocaust produced, it is easy to close our eyes to the most disturbing facts and tales, but Leo’s Journey: The Story Of The Mengele Twins (which premieres tomorrow) confronts the story of Dr. Joseph Mengele head on. Following a rare survivor of the notorious doctor’s “medical” experiments, on his journey back to Auschwitz for the first time since the war, the film explores what Mengele — often referred to as the Angel of Death — was doing with Jewish twins at Auschwitz. What was he researching and why did only 258 of 3,000 twins survive?
Clearly, Leo’s Journey is meant for an adult audience, but A Story About a Bad Dream is a Holocaust film geared towards children. It tells the story of a little girl’s Holocaust experience through the gentle voice of a naïve child, with colorful reenactments that make the story digestible for younger viewers, who, in decades to come, will be responsible for keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive.
These are just a few of the excellent and eye-opening documentaries showing in TJC’s History and Remembrance category, where you’ll find new and provocative titles sharing stories from the Jewish past every month.
Try the Pastrami, It’s Divine!
The documentary Divine Food: 100 Years in the Kosher Delicatessen Trade tells the story of the Oscherwitz family and their passion for making kosher corned beef, pastrami and other classic deli fare. But tasting is believing. So we hit up New York City’s most famous kosher and kosher-style delis to find out why this food is held so close to Jewish hearts…and stomachs!
Check out TJC Movie Talk — hosted by Forward Arts and Culture Editor Alana Newhouse — in the TJC Original Series category for an inside look at some of the other delicious film selections playing on The Jewish Channel.
Finding A Way In
Israel’s first suicide bombing in over a year took place in Dimona on February 4th. Though the two terrorists involved were from Gaza, they began the journey to their target by ducking through a hole in a border wall with Egypt. The rest of their route highlights the porous nature of Israel’s own Egyptian border, and the threat of those who conspire to cross it illegally.
For the Magav, Israel’s border guard, keeping terrorists out of the country is a major concern, but not the only one. Far away from heavily patrolled border crossings with Gaza and the West Bank, and out in the hinterlands of the Sinai and Negev deserts, police strive to rebuff entrance to another unwanted immigrant group: Russian prostitutes.
Bringing foreign sex workers to cities like Tel Aviv means easy profits for their handlers. When legal transport isn’t possible, smuggling networks enlist rural cash-poor Bedouinsto facilitate border jumpings from nearby Egypt. Police respond by relying on calculated surveillance and night vision equipment to intercept crossings. Despite these efforts, illegal immigrants with futures in prostitution still make it through.
These cat-and-mouse games are similar to those being played out along America’s desert border with Mexico. Like the Magav, U.S. patrols employ advanced military technologies to guard a massive stretch of territory that far outstrips their manpower.
For illegal aliens who dodge capture, the reward is finding agricultural and service work with dollar wages exceeding anything to be found back home. For Russian prostitutes who find a way into Israel, the payoff is often a life of sexual slavery.
The film Women For Sale recounts this harsh lifestyle from the point of view of the prostitutes themselves. Their illegal immigrant status keeps them firmly under the psychological control of gangs who literally own their bodies, and pimps who ensure they turn a profit.
In Israel, trafficking for sexual exploitation was only made a crime in 2000. Before that, smuggling prostitutes was a safer alternative to running drugs, weapons and terrorists. That industry’s continuing legacy has given Israel prominent mention in annual U.S. and U.N. human trafficking reports.
But the bad press has had an effect. As NYU Professor Rakefet Zalashik tells the Forward’s Alana Newhouse on the latest episode of TJC Movie Talk, Israeli authorities have recently made a more concentrated effort to fight human traffickers and protect former-Soviet immigrants. As for the Magavnikim who watch the dusty border with Egypt, each night’s work is another opportunity to keep terrorists out — and to further block up the prostitute pipeline.
Are Dreadlocks the New Peyos?
Though it may not be apparent, Jews and Rastafarians have quite a lot in common, and the dreadlock-sidecurl parallel isn’t even the half of it.
The documentary Awake Zion explores the Jewish-Rastafarian connection in depth, but we wanted to know more. So we had the film’s director, Monica Haim, take us down to the world-famous, reggae record store Jammyland, where she shared her inspiration for the film and showed us what this shared tradition is all about.
The segment’s running in the upcoming episode of TJC Movie Talk, but you can see it here first.
Cuba Without Fidel: Ruth Behar’s Take
Ruth Behar is the documentarian behind the film Adio Kerida: A Cuban Sephardic Journey. Born in Havana, she left Cuba with her family in 1959 following Fidel Castro’s rise to power, and grew up in New York City. Behar is now an award-winning professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan and was named one of the 50 Latinas who made history in the twentieth century by Latina Magazine. In addition to writing and editing several major scholarly works, Behar has published her own personal essays, poetry, and short fiction. Her newest book, An Island Called Home: Returning To Jewish Cuba, recounts her journey back to Cuba and the Jewish communities she discovered there.
The Jewish Channel caught up with Behar to get her take on Cuba under a new Castro, and what that means for the Caribbean island’s Jews.
How was Fidel Castro viewed by the Cuban Jews you interviewed for your film?
I worked on my film between 1999-2002, at a moment when Fidel Castro was still actively ruling Cuba. Most people in Cuba, out of a combination of habit and fear, tended not to talk about Fidel Castro openly. They used the common gesture of bringing their hands to their chins and pretended to be stroking an imaginary beard whenever they wanted to speak about “Him.” I didn’t want to create any problems for the Cuban Jews I interviewed on the island, so I steered away from politics and focused on questions about Cuban Sephardic heritage. Some of the people I interviewed later made aliyah to Israel and I followed up with them there after the completion of the film. They then spoke more openly about Fidel Castro and expressed their dissatisfaction, not so much with him, but with politics in general.
So in the section of the film about Cuba, no one brought up Fidel Castro. But when I interviewed my Sephardic Cuban father, who lives in New York with my Ashkenazi Cuban mother, I mentioned that it was widely rumored that Fidel Castro had a Sephardic Jewish grandfather from Turkey. My father is fiercely anti-Castro and I was curious to see how he would react to this remark. Although he definitely was surprised, he continued to nibble on the range of delicious finger foods my mother had set out on the dining table. Finally, he shrugged and said that it didn’t matter whether Fidel Castro was Jewish or not. After all, my father exclaimed, he now lives in USA!
What does his relinquishing of power to brother Raul mean for the future of Cuba’s Jews?
The relinquishing of power to Raul Castro isn’t going to bring about any immediate changes in the life of the Jews in Cuba. The Jewish community in Cuba depends on the economic, moral, and educational assistance of American Jewish organizations and missions. So long as that support continues, the community will not be threatened. Major changes in Cuban Jewish life will only come about when diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States are normalized, allowing for the free flow of people, ideas, and goods between the two countries. Once that occurs, many more American Jews, included those of Cuban Jewish background, will travel to Cuba. No one can predict exactly what will happen then, but I expect there will be many more people involved in preserving Cuban Jewish heritage and in building new Jewish institutions on the island.
Death of Jewish-Viennese Artist, R.B. Kitaj
The documentary Servus Adieu Shalom: Jewish Life In Vienna highlights the many accomplished Jews who spent time in Vienna, including Sigmund Freud, Theodore Herzel, Gustav Mahler, Billy Wilder, and Franz Kafka. While producing their world-renowned work, these men were surrounded by highbrow coffeehouse conversation and the city’s ornate and stunning architecture. The documentary not only offers a history of Jews in Vienna but also tries to explain how Viennese and Jewish cultures have complemented one another to positively influence some of the world’s greatest thinkers and creators to this day.
One of the more recent creators to be influenced by Jewish-Viennese culture is a key figure in British Pop Art, R.B. Kitaj (pronounced kit-EYE), who died last year at the age of 74 in his home in Los Angeles. His obituary in the New York Times details that he was the first American artist to be elected to the Royal Academy since John Singer Sargent, and retrospectives of his work have shown at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
But before he became friends with Allen Ginsberg or worked in a “Van Gogh yellow studio,” Kitaj was just a dissatisfied kid named Ronald Brooks from Chagrin Falls, Ohio. Knowing he was destined for something more than the typical middle-American lifestyle, he dropped Ron and adopted the more sophisticated and exotic name of his Viennese stepfather, Kitaj. Then he headed to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where he and his art were greatly influenced by the local culture.
Perhaps significantly, Kafka, who also spent time in Vienna, was a major influence on Kitaj, who the New York Times praised for having been able to draw from a range of thinkers and artists, “from Titian to Cezanne.”
Kitaj himself would have been wary of such critical praise. He distrusted, even despised, art critics. In fact, at one point, he accused them of murder. The Tate Gallery in London held a retrospective for Kitaj that received across-the-board horrendous reviews. Immediately afterwards, Kitaj’s second wife, Sandra Fisher, died of an aneurysm at the age of 47. Heartbroken and livid, Kitaj believed the critics’ harsh words were responsible for the tragedy, and he took revenge by painting “The Critic Kills,” which depicted the art critic as a monstrous, yellow-tongued creature.
This clash was just the peak of a long-raging feud. During the age of abstract expressionism, Kitaj was not producing what critics like Clement Greenberg wanted. At a time when it was cool to be abstract, Kitaj wanted to be literal, painting about specific events, attitudes, and experiences. In his words he wanted a more “social art.”
This idea of a “social art” seems to have come from Kitaj’s understanding of his Jewish identity, which in addition to Viennese culture, was a great source of artistic inspiration. He spoke freely about how being Jewish influenced his art, particularly the sense of exile, of being connected to a people but not rooted in a place. In his book,
In this Diasporist mode, Kitaj found connection as well as displacement. He was not just a Jew, but one of many Jews; and when Time magazine wrote that “he draws better than almost anyone else alive,” Kitaj made his identity clear, responding, “I draw as well as any Jew who ever lived.”
Israelis Say Goodbye to Their Favorite News Anchor, But You Don’t Have To
News anchor Chaim Yavin is known as the “Walter Cronkite” of Israel. So beloved and respected is he in Israeli society, he’s probably one of the few media personalities who could have made The Land of the Settlers, his controversial five-part series on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yavin was able to convince both Israeli settlers and Palestinians living in the West Bank to welcome him into their homes and talk frankly about their perspectives on the disputed territories, and about each other.
But the series also shattered Yavin’s universal appeal. His perspective is, ultimately, “If we want peace, we have to dismantle the settlements.” Accordingly, The Land of the Settlers turned him from “everyone’s man” into a man for “the Left.” And it threatened his career. Yet he endured and was able to go on as news anchor for Channel 1, even after the series made its controversial splash in 2003, igniting anger and indignation on both sides of the debate.
Until now. Yavin, 74, also known as “Mr. Television,” just retired (note link is to Jewish Press blog which clearly doesn’t have anything nice to say about the liberal Yavin), after anchoring his last news broadcast in a 40-year career. Israelis may miss their most recognized newsman, but TJC subscribers can still see the now-controversial figure in his ground-breaking The Land of the Settlers at the touch of a button.
The Untapped Goldmine of Scripture Adaptations
You can make a lot of money writing for the movies. And as far as I can tell, two entities stand above the rest when it comes to generating film plots:
William Shakespeare and God.
Now, in any given year, all manner of Shakespeare gets picked up. The guy’s long dead, and the rights to his plays are free, so why not? Someone somewhere, working with a powerful case of writers block, will decide to abandon their original concept and simply adapt the Bard. But, setting the action in Elizabethan-era England is expensive (what with all those costumes), and it can limit the appeal to a mass-audience. So, many adapters simply move it to a modern place like, say, New York City, where they can stick Hamlet in a high-rise, and let Montagues and Capulets run amok on the West Side.
Tales of ancient Israel, however, rarely get such modern cinematic retellings. And this is puzzling, because stories from scripture are free to adapt and have a wealth of blood, lust, honor and intrigue. Sure, there are plenty of renditions with swords and sandals, but when it comes to moving things to the contemporary, a certain carpenter from Nazareth seems to get all the attention. He’s pretty easy to pick out. Think about all those meaningful camera shots of a stricken hero lying down, arms splayed out, feet crossed. Well, they’re designed to make a Christian audience go, “Oh yeah, director, I know what you’re doing there. It’s like Jesus!”
Try getting a similar reaction from a Jewish audience. Sure, Jim Carrey parted his tomato soup in Bruce Almighty and Steve Carrel built an ark in the sequel, but I’m talking about something more high-minded.
Well, you can look no further than The Jewish Channel for such an example, because we’ve got Samson. The film not only transports the ancient Judge from Israel to Holocaust-era Poland, but also strips him of his physical strength in place of a more compelling emotional perseverance. These twists on the original tale make for great drama. And while director Andrzej Wajda’s magnum work may seem unique for its modern take on a tale of ancient Israel, there are actually a few other American films which have found similar inspiration.
In East of Eden, John Steinbeck reset the story of Cain and Abel in California’s World War One-era Salinas Valley. When Elia Kazan adapted it for the screen, it was James Dean who stole scenes as the emotionally tortured Cal, whose hatred for his brother stems from the cold favoritism practiced by his father, Adam.
In Jacob’s Ladder, director Adrian Lyne revisited the ancient dream of angels climbing to and from heaven and earth, as one man’s purgatorial journey toward acceptance of his young son’s death. That man, Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins), is a gas-poisoned Vietnam veteran who experiences other-worldly visions after being wounded in battle.
Those are three compelling cases for more Scriptural adaptations. So, whose story to adapt next? Well, whoever it is, that story won’t cost Hollywood a dime. When it comes to collecting story residuals, God’s not very business savvy.
The Road To Sonoma
Driving the rocky Northern California coast has always required caution. The views of the ocean from the two narrow lanes of Highway One are spectacular, but the blind turns and steep drop to the jagged rocks below make for a treacherous journey.
My grandfather used to drive this road constantly, a perilous journey that mirrored the daily animosities faced by NoCal’s immigrant Jewish population. He was a Jew who moved his family to Sonoma County from New York City in the late 1940’s. At the time, he was the only board-certified cardiologist in that part of the state. Since there were no emergency rooms in the area’s small-town hospitals, he would leave his home in Santa Rosa and drive the old coastal road to make house calls. Sometimes, he’d range up to Fort Bragg and Mendocino. Other times it would be just down the road to Petaluma and the small hamlets along the Russian River.
On these more local trips he treated an exiled people living a lifestyle unchanged from the “Old Country.” When there was no school, my grandmother used to make my mother and her sisters go along, to ensure my grandfather didn’t fall asleep while navigating the narrow country roads. He would pull in to the White Russian communities near the coast, and his patients there would come out to greet him dressed in traditional Slavic robes and hats. The “Whites” were on the losing side of the Russian Revolution, fighting against the “Red” Bolshevik forces that would go on to found the U.S.S.R.
Among the exiles he treated were the Russian Jews of Petaluma. They’d arrived in the wake of the Revolution during the 1920s, coming to America to buy inexpensive land and raise chickens, and their ranks included many socialists who strongly supported a communist Russia. By the time my grandfather started treating patients in Petaluma, the post-war Jewish community there had grown to include both Holocaust survivors and American-born Jews from Southern California and the East Coast. The changing face of Jewish Petaluma during this era, and the poultry industry that fueled its rise, is examined in Bonnie Burt and Judy Montell’s documentary, A Home On The Range: The Jewish Chicken Ranchers of Petaluma.
One of the themes explored in the film is how certain anti-Semitic and anti-labor sentiments of Depression-era California sometimes combined to produce ugly episodes like the 1935 tarring-and-feathering of two Jewish union organizers in Santa Rosa. Such intolerance lingered on through the western migrations that followed the Second World War.
When my grandfather first moved to the area in 1947, many of his neighbors had never seen an East Coast Jew before. While most of the response to his creed was friendly, he was also approached by a group of men with other intentions. They told him to clear out, or there would be trouble. My grandfather had survived quite a few scrapes, so when his wife asked him what they should do about the threat, he responded simply, “get a gun.”
And that was it. He never heard from the men again - a sign that the power of vigilantism in the area had waned because of the sheer persistence of new arrivals. When my grandfather passed away a few years back, winemaking had long ago become Sonoma’s iconic product. But driving those old coastal roads recalls a time when local Jews ignored threats and made chicken king.
Menachem Wecker on Photographer and Evil Aesthetics
Menachem Wecker, who is based in Washington, DC, blogs on religion and the arts at http://iconia.canonist.com. Though he has reviewed and interviewed many painters with evil inclinations, he finds no artist more evil than Mary Cassatt.
Wecker and I chatted over instant messenger about the larger implications of the film Photographer, what it means for art–and artists–to be evil, and why art shouldn’t be blamed for the Holocaust. The interview has been edited for clarity and entertainment value, if not brevity.
The Docent: So, we’re playing this film right now called Photographer, which is about how the head accountant at the Lodz ghetto, Walter Genewin, who fancied himself an amateur photographer, used the ghetto’s Jewish inmates as his subjects.
Menachem Wecker: Sort of like Dr. Mengele…
The Docent: Like Mengele? You mean experimenting on Jews?
MW: Yeah. Using Jews as models for experiments… I suspect that’s not endemic to Nazis.
The Docent: What do you mean?
MW: We’ve seen the sort of pictures emerging from Abu Ghraib, and I’m not a psychologist, but I tend to think that people in positions of power (as in the Stanford Prison experiment, and the Milgram electric shock one) have a tendency of inflicting hard on their subordinates. Experimenting is just an offshoot of that, I imagine.
I wonder if there isn’t more to it though. And I will be treading on very thin ice here…
The Docent: Go for it.
MW: I absolutely don’t want people to read this and think I’m justifying anything the Nazis did…
Read more
Roosevelt, New Jersey
| Directed by: | Richard Kroehling | Rating: | TV-PG |
| Release Date: | 1983 | Running Time: | 51 mins. |
| Language: | English | Genre: | Documentary |
| More Info: | Brief History; Further Reading | Category: | America |
Utopia almost became a reality for one small Jewish community during the Depression, when President Roosevelt signed an order to re-settle New York City’s garment workers in the Jersey Homesteads. Roosevelt, New Jersey: Visions of Utopia explores the story of this independent, agricultural community of Jews, based on socialist principles and the belief that the country air would do a world of good for the urban poor.
“The essence of the plan was that garment workers from New York would leave the slums of New York and they would go over to New Jersey where they would have an idyllic setting in the countryside,” explained labor correspondent A.H. Raskin, declaring, “it would be a self-contained community and a Utopian existence for garment workers.”
It was the first town of its kind in the United States: a society designed by the visionary president to bring peace and country living to city-dwelling factory workers. Much anticipated by destitute factory workers in search of a better life, an abundance of workers lined up to complete application forms for the project. Together, they built the community from scratch. Muddy fields were swiftly transformed into pristine living spaces, with previously-unsettled lands now hosting avant-garde architecture.
Throughout the community, creativity and entrepreneurship flourished. “Labor organization was very vital to the creation of this town,” one resident explains in the film. Benjamin Brown, for instance, founded his own farm, which provided jobs for myriad residents. At the farm, he taught workers farming techniques that would one day help them found Israel with other like-minded people, dedicated to Jewish liberation and community-building.
Although Jersey Homesteads was typified by diligent workers, the residents also knew how to have fun. Every night there was a party that involved singing, delicious food, and sometimes a bonfire. The town’s atmosphere was friendly and family-oriented. One resident joked that mothers could send their children into the street, because they knew other families would happily provide them with a satisfying supper. “There was such freedom about friendship,” a woman resident boasted, “you could walk into people’s houses and just sit down and enjoy an evening; we loved it — life here was just wonderful.”
In the face of mounting anti-Semitism abroad, Jersey Homesteads represented hope for Jews everywhere.
But despite a promising beginning, the experiment ultimately failed when the federal government withdrew funding in 1939 in response to mounting tension in the community. “There were so many different points of view and that to us was humorous and at the same time delightful,” one original Homesteader says, but that once-humorous dissidence among community members became worrisome as time progressed, becoming “fantastic quarrels.”
“I think we learned that Utopias don’t seem to work out because people are not that unselfish,” one man laments. In the end, there were too many people who could not adequately contribute to the community’s financial needs and the price of living became too high.
The Jersey Homesteads experiment may not have been successful, but it was a historic endeavor of America’s Jewish community. The testimonies of the people who lived through it suggest that this type of living situation is possible and rewarding. If given more time, perhaps the residents could have reconciled their differences. In the end, Roosevelt, New Jersey wasn’t Utopia, but for a while there it came quite close.
Never Forget: No Man is an Island
Who was responsible for the Holocaust? Of course there were the Nazis, but what role did the average citizen under Hitler’s rule play? Since social pressures can color our behavior in profound ways, Europeans in WWII might have been complicit in war crimes, not realizing that the external forces of governments and religious institutions were manipulating their behavior.
The contrast between four heroic French women who risked their lives for Jewish souls, and the entire country of Holland that sad idly by as the Holocaust slaughtered millions offers a lesson in the influence that social factors had on individuals during the turmoil of WWII.
Sisters in Resistance tells the story of four non-Jewish, French women, who spearheaded a grassroots movement to undermine Hitler’s cause. French women played a marginal role in national government before the war, the documentary explains — they couldn’t vote, and they couldn’t hold a bank account. Their country had disenfranchised them. Ironically, their previously-silenced female voices became the nation’s most vociferous, abandoning self-concern to protest the Nazi invasion and Germany’s annexation of most of France. These women felt they had nothing to lose and sounded a crie de guerre, whereas their male counterparts remained reticent.
Not only did French women speak out against the German occupation, but they also fought for Jewish emancipation. Perhaps they could identify with the Jewish plight, because they understood what it was like to be at the mercy of others — especially since their own country had limited their freedoms. French men, on the other hand, had a more difficult time seeing through Jewish eyes, perhaps because they had always enjoyed personal liberties and didn’t understand the sacrifices taking place around them.
Unlike the brave French women who symbolized France’s voice of dissent, the Dutch were notoriously indifferent toward the Jewish extermination. With more Jews killed in Holland than in any other European country, they were sometimes thought to be in cahoots with the Nazis.
Goodbye Holland Director Willy Lindwer attempts to uncover the reason for Holland’s inaction during the Holocaust. Were the individual Dutch citizens evil or morally corrupt? Lindwer concludes that the individuals’ inaction in the Holocaust is rooted in the influence of larger Dutch social institutions.
Holland was a far more religious nation than France, and Lindwer asserts that this attitude made Holland as a whole predisposed to anti-Semitism. Under the influence of Holland’s Catholic Church, anti-Semitism became institutionalized, his subjects opine, noting that because Catholicism was a cornerstone of Dutch culture, Jews were alienated from the community, and seen as a divisive force. As a result, those interviewed declare, many Dutch people sympathized with the Nazi cause. “The Germans were silently welcomed here by the majority,” asserts a subject of the film.
Holland’s willingness to comply with Nazi authority can also be attributed to the bureaucratic ethos that typified the nation’s government. “Many people, and certainly officials, had the idea that they are just spokes in the wheel, [while] decisions are made by the higher ups,” says the current mayor of Groningen, Jaques Wallage, in the film, asserting that the Dutch were culturally-programmed to follow orders unquestioningly. Holland’s political system depended on blind obedience to authority; compliance was viewed as a virtue, never a vice. Today’s Dutch citizens declare in Goodbye Holland that it must therefore have been easy for the Nazis to gain the masses’ unwavering support.
While not all French women fought the Nazis, and not all Dutch citizens complied with them, it’s worth exploring the societal influences that influenced their behavior during the war, whether or not they were cognizant of the influence at the time. The point isn’t to say that the heroines of Sisters in Resistance weren’t acting consciously, or that the inactive Dutch couldn’t have escaped the model their society set. But both of these films help us answer the basic questions of how the average person acts when confronted with evil.
“No man is an island” is a phrase that’s often bandied about. But the truth behind it has quite a lot of relevance, as these two films demonstrate.
Rabin’s Anti-Nixonian Peace
A man famously attributed with threatening to break the bones of Israel’s enemies, Yitzchak Rabin had lived a lifetime of confrontation. Like Richard Nixon, he’d lost a lot of friends, and had alienated many in his own party.
But, like Nixon visiting China, Rabin was the one man with an appropriately-aggressive reputation to pursue peace with the Palestinians.
And when one takes a cursory look, there are many comparisons to be made between these two statesmen. The political careers of Rabin and Nixon share notable similarities in their trajectory, until one final point: whereas Nixon’s self-destructive and paranoid politics characterized the end of his political career, it was specifically Rabin’s hopes for reconciliation – and a distinct lack of wariness – that defined his later political path, and ultimately brought the end of his life.
Rabin’s first tenure as head of state was cut short by a scandal involving his wife, resulting in political purgatory, followed by an eventual return as Prime Minister. Similarly, Nixon spent a long tenure as Vice-President, suffered a bitter election defeat to John F. Kennedy, and wandered the political wilderness before returning to the White House as President.
Despite seeing daily televised images of protests to their policies, both Rabin and Nixon continued to stubbornly believe in a nebulous “silent majority” of the larger population, which was always on their side. In fact, in an interview the night of his assassination included in the film Rabin, the then-prime minister invoked this exact term to define the unnoticed group of citizens amidst the many loud protests against his peace negotiations.
And while only an infamous Communist-baiter like Nixon could “acceptably”establish American political ties with Red China during the Cold War, only someone with the seasoned military stature of Rabin could make anything close to an “acceptable” peace with Israel’s most bitter enemy, Yasser Arafat and the PLO, in the wake of the First Intifada.
Of course, there’s also their respective partnerships with the leading rock-stars of their time: Nixon with Elvis Presley and Rabin with Aviv Geffen.
But it’s in their final political chapters where light-hearted comparisons among the famously anti-Semitic president and the “warrior for peace” Israeli prime minister really fall apart.
While Nixon’s return to power was marked by legendary paranoia and a hubristic vow to continue the war in Vietnam until he achieved what he termed “peace with honor,”Rabin’s second go-around at the helm found him taking the fateful course of reconciliation with his most heated political rival, Shimon Peres, and pursuing a “battle for peace.” Having previously disparaged Peres in his memoirs, Rabin entered into a doctrinal alliance with Peres that would see them reach the symbolic peak of their partnership with the sharing of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.
Rabin recounts the events that led to the subject’s transformation from a reactionary politician — who fought the most against those with whom he should probably have agreed – into a symbol of partnership amidst great turmoil. Peres and Rabin were beacons of Israel’s Left wing for decades, and their very public tussles belied the fact that they had so much in common.
The still-controversial peaceRabin signed with Yasser Arafat was inspired in part by the sight of Israelis fleeing the Iraqi bombingof Tel Aviv during the first Gulf War. As scud missiles fell all about the city, we are told that Rabin angrily looked out from his apartment window at the clogged highway to Haifa and realized his people only wanted peace. As he recounts in Rabin, “I fought so long as there was no chance for peace… the path of peace is better than the path of war.”
Ironically, it was this same trust in the good intentions of his own people that would eventually lead to his assassination in 1995. Rabin famously refused to wear a bullet-proof vest despite receiving many death threats around the time of the Oslo Accords, declaring that his surviving through wars with opposing forces meant he didn’t have much to fear from civilians in his own country.
So, Rabin was no Nixon – and that’s certainly a good thing. One wonders, though, with the collapse of the Oslo Accords after his death, what might have been achieved if Rabin had taken on just a bit of Nixon’s darker side.
A Neo-Nazi Future that Jews and Blacks Can StopThe presidential candidate sporting a swastika on his arm, John Taylor Bowles, should be taken more seriously than your average crack-pot. He’s a neo-Nazi running for president in the 2008 elections and his campaign is founded on anti-Semitic and racist ideologies. Facing this new reality, Jews and African-Americans can remember the common bond they forged in the U.S. during the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. If they join forces once again, their combined voices will have a stronger impact in combating Bowles’s bigotry.
Before the onslaught of the Holocaust, a select few German Jewish intellectuals — including Albert Einstein — escaped oppression in Europe, seeking refuge in the American melting pot. With little more than the clothes on their backs, these Jews set sail, hoping to find a new freedom beyond Hitler’s grasp. Because so few were permitted this escape, the chance to travel to America was a great privilege that seemed to offer great hope; but life wasn’t as easy as had been expected on the other side of the pond. Although many of these refugee professors had excellent qualifications, they were turned away when applying for positions at prestigious Northeastern universities. To their astonishment, anti-Semitism was alive and well in the U.S. — a nation not nearly as progressive or “free” as it professed to be.
But some scholars found acceptance at all-black colleges in the Old South. From Swastika to Jim Crow chronicles their story, examining the lasting alliances they forged with the African–
American community. Through touching testimony, their African American students, many of whom have gone on to become professors or prominent artists, fondly recall their foreign teachers, testifying to their tremendous contribution to social equality in this country.
During the 1940s and ’50s, segregation, lynching, and institutionalized racism were rampant — and Jews who’d seen so much persecution throughout their history empathized with the African-American struggle. “At a black university, I felt I had so much in common with teachers and students,” one professor recalls in From Swastika. Likewise, the black community identified with the exiled Jews. They, too, understood displacement and suffering: “The notion of man’s inhumanity to man was not foreign to African American citizens,” another professor said.
The empathy among Jews and blacks in these schools and communities led the Jewish professors to do what they could to help their persecuted fellows. In many ways, they set the precedent for the strong Jewish communal involvement in the Civil Rights movement that was to come.
Today, the relationship between Jews and the African-American community has seen a lagging in this partnership. At times, the alliance has been strong (fighting for continued inclusion in American society), while at others it has been weak or wrought with tension (Brownsville and the Crown Heights Riots).
But with America’s leading neo-Nazi organization bent on expansion and hoping to get its foot in the door of mainstream politics in the 2008 election, according to the Anti-Defamation League, now would be a good time to solidify the Black-Jewish partnership. Bowles is being presented as a viable candidate for the Commander in Chief. It’s conceivable that debate regulations will have him spewing his hatred to a national audience with the same prestige of place as major party candidates.
Columbia City Paper’s reporter Corey Hutchins gives us a preview:
Pulling on his red swastika armband the National Socialist Movement’s presidential nominee, John Taylor Bowles, will tap it and say, ‘This … now this is coming back into style.’ And then he’ll smile. And while you looked at him, smiling like that, dressed the way he is and running for president, you might think this is all just a really bad skit made for a Youtube.com presidential joke-fest. But – and I’m sorry but there’s no other way to say this – he and his party are as serious as the Holocaust.
Bowles’s candidacy presents what could be a worst-case scenario for both Jews and African-Americans: hate gone mainstream. And Bowles’s group, the National Socialist Movement, is forming strategic alliances with the Ku Klux Klan, as well as other white supremacist groups . If they can partner up to hate us, surely we can partner up to protect ourselves.
Lest you think this is a fringe issue, when all anti-Semites in America get together, they can be a rather potent force. About 15% of Americans maintain views that are “unquestionably anti-Semitic,” according to the ADL, and at least 5% of Americans wouldn’t vote for a black presidential candidate. Sure, those numbers are only about on-par with Ross Perot’s support, but certainly their message is of far greater concern. It’s one thing to have a guy representing that portion of America ranting about free-trade agreements; it’s quite another to have one calling for the whitening of America.
The Black-Jewish alliance has done a lot for this country. If hatred really is on the rise, the country could use it again, and the subjects of From Swastika to Jim Crow provide us with a good model for re-launching that partnership.
Amos Gitai: Israel’s One Man New Wave, Filmic Architect
He looks a lot like that eccentric genius detective on Law and Order: Criminal Intent, doesn’t he? But he’s not.
Israeli director Amos Gitai is probably his nation’s most influential filmmaker. Film critics say Gitai is leading the currently-blooming renaissance in Israeli film, with the Village Voice calling him Israel’s “one man new wave.”
Since the start of his career in 1974, Gitai has directed documentaries, shorts, and feature films that have brought him eleven wins on top of an additional twelve nominations from film festivals around the world. Most recently his film Free Zone, which starred Natalie Portman, won an award at the Cannes Film Festival.
But, as often is the case, what the art world applauds is less-easily digested by mainstream Hollywood film-goers. Gitai’s movies are unique, toying both with storytelling and cinematographic techniques. He eschews the same old story structure — exposition, rising action, conflict and then resolution (think of the mountain chart from high school English classes). Instead, Gitai mirrors reality, offering one big chunk of existence, where all of the characters are both good and bad, conflicts go unresolved, and polished happy endings simply don’t exist.
As far as his unique cinematic style is concerned, Gitai possesses a sense of confidence that doesn’t rely on cheap tricks to keep the audience’s attention. Instead of short, cliched shots that jolt the viewer’s focus, Gitai empowers the viewer to decide where to look within the shot through long, hypnotic takes that create a voyeuristic effect.
But before he became a filmmaker, Amos Gitai was trained and worked as an architect. This helps explain his movies, which aren’t stories as much as they are cultural edifices–beautiful things that tell of a particular place and time but resonate far beyond that place and time.
And they should be approached as such.
A good architect has a natural eye for style and knows how to comment on society indirectly. Gitai’s films are visually stunning and loaded with social criticism. Like a pillar, frieze or pediment, his individual shots and scenes serve as points of interest and beauty in his films, instead of merely as place-holders for plot points in a storyline.
If it were not for the Yom Kippur War, Gitai most likely would have followed his original career path. His father had been an architect and Gitai received his PhD in architecture from UC Berkley — architecture made sense. But after helping move wounded soldiers from Israel’s battle fields to hospitals by helicopter (if you’ve seen Kippur, this should sound familiar), Gitai decided, as he revealed in an interview with the BBC, that “architecture is maybe interesting for another country, another life, but it’s a bit too formal an exercise for me.”
From that point on, Gitai decided he wanted to make films that would “touch a nerve” with his countrymen, and by “touch a nerve” he meant flaunting his left-wing ideals. From the beginning, politics have fueled his films, and continue to do so, as he highlights the horrors of war (Kippur), the oppression of women (Kadosh), the human loss involved in the settlement of Israel (Kedma), and the failings of the nation’s social structure (Alila).
Despite his political assuredness, however, Gitai’s subjectivity and his honest portrayal of humanity transcend politics and give his films universal art-house appeal.
TJC Director Up for Oscar Nomination!
The director of Time of Favor, one of our feature films this month, could soon be up for an Oscar nomination! His newest film, Beaufort, has just been named Israel’s official entry to the Academy Awards’ Best Foreign Language Film category.
Typically, though, the decision was surrounded with controversy.
Beaufort is actually the Israeli Academy of Film and Television’s second choice, after Eran Kolirin’s The Band’s Visit, reports the Jerusalem Post. The latter film was not eligible for the Foreign Language Film category since more than half of its dialogue is in English. The Israeli committee made an appeal to the Academy Awards to reconsider, but the decision to disqualify The Band’s Visit was confirmed.
Since Beaufort won the second highest number of votes at the Ophir Awards, Israel’s version of the Oscars, it was the next in line for the honor. However, according to a previous article in the JPost, many Israelis “believe Joseph Cedar’s film has a better chance at winning an official spot as an Oscar nominee - and ultimately the best chance at winning Best Foreign Language Film.”
While Beaufort is about an IDF unit stationed at the Beaufort outpost in Lebanon just before the Israeli withdrawal in 2000, Time of Favor [HaHesder], Cedar’s first feature film — which premiered in 2000 — investigates the sometimes troubling intersection of militarism and religious extremism in the IDF’s Hesder program, whose enlistees spend part of their time in the army and the other part learning in yeshiva.
Time of Favor won several Ophir Awards and launched Cedar as one of Israel’s most important — and most controversial — new directors.
Stalin: Most Think Ruthless — One (Jewish) Woman Thought Lover
Joseph Stalin murdered millions of Soviet Jews, but this doesn’t seem to have stopped him from having an affair with a Jewish woman, possibly marrying her, and caring for her daughter until the day she died. The Communist government kept the love affair secret for over fifty years, but a historian recently discovered a letter in the basement of the Russian Communist party’s headquarters that read:
Dear Comrade Malenkov!I am the daughter of Ana Rubinstein, the former wife of Comrade Stalin.
As he is in ill health, I ask you to let me see him. He knows me since I was a child.R. Sveshnikova (Kostiokovski). If it is not possible to see him, I ask you to grant me an audience on a very urgent matter.
Date: 04.03.55
Ignoring the fact that he murdered 20 million people, Stalin still wouldn’t have been the ideal lover. He was short, his face was covered in pock mark scars, and his arm was crippled from a childhood accident. His personality, as you might have guessed, wasn’t much better. He was severe, easily angered, and extremely paranoid.
Yet Rubinstein apparently loved him anyway, and this discovery raises questions: Could it be that Stalin’s Jewish lover had something to do with his creation of the first Jewish homeland? Did the tyrant create a wannabe Zion just to impress his girl?
If not, Stalin’s motivations for creating a Jewish state in Siberia are hard to pin down. It could be understood as a good-intentioned act, gifting the Jewish people independence and a state of their own–which certainly doesn’t seem characteristic for a ruthless leader. Or, it could be seen as an anti-Semitic plot to rid Russia of Jews by pushing them far away, into the middle of nowhere.
Either way, his plan failed. In Search of Happiness is a poetic documentary that looks at what life is like in modern-day Birobidzhan, the capital of this Soviet Jewish state, where the small population is ever-dwindling. The film offers poignant cinematography that shows swampy farmland and little boys playing soccer around a community cow. Blending these contemporary shots of the backwards society with archival footage of hopeful Jews rushing west, the film shows how a community, that never really blossomed, has devolved into a disappointment.
Stalin’s love-life, like a homeland in Siberia, didn’t fare much better. His first wife died two years after they were married, and his second wife committed suicide. Historians speculate that Stalin and Rubinstein met in between these two marriages, in Saint Petersburg around 1917. At the time, Rubinstein was already divorced, had a daughter, and was working for the Bolshevik underground.
As years passed, their relationship must have sweetened, because, while hundreds and thousands of Jews were being deported and murdered by Stalin’s government, Rubinstein was living a comfortable life on Vasilievsky Island, next door to the home of the nation’s leaders. Years later, when her daughter applied for a job as an engineer at a classified institute, she was hired immediately — despite the fact that a secret KGB decree had just been issued not to hire Jews.
There’s more to suggest that Stalin and Rubinstein had a thing. To this day, the Russian secret service won’t give up the name of the street that Rubinstein’s daughter lived on in Moscow.
And nothing screams sexy-Stalin affair like governmental secrecy.
The Holocaust — And the Jews — in Iran
Iranian media coverage of the Holocaust has increased 100 percent, thanks to a miniseries that represents the first non-Holocaust-denying television program to air in recent memory. “Iran’s version of ‘Schindler’s List,’” according to the AP, Zero Degree Turn follows the story of fictional character Habib Parsa – who is based on the stories of several Irainian diplomats during WWII, who administered counterfeit Iranian passports to Europe’s fleeing Jews.
The mere existence of the TV series is astounding, given Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent Holocaust denial conference – not to mention the country’s fraught relationship with Israel (embodied in Ahmadinejad’s promise to “wipe” Israel “off the map”).
Caught in the middle of all this has been Iran’s own Jewish population. Most people probably assume that the country no longer has any Jews around, but its Jewish population of 25, 000 represents the second largest Jewish community in the Middle East. And as
And it’s possible that the show is meant to assuage that specific community. “The show’s appearance now may reflect an attempt by Iran’s leadership to moderate its image as anti-semitic and to underline a distinction that Iranian officials often make – that their conflict is with Israel, not with the Jewish People,” claims the AP.
And it’s not just in conferences and diplomatic halls that Iran has displayed an attitude that puts Jews on edge and questions the Holocaust’s historicity. Indeed, many in the population participated in a government-sanctioned a national cartoon contest that awarded prizes to submissions that best mocked the Holocaust. School children were then bused to a museum, where the winning drawings were exhibited.
On the face of it, Zero Degree Turn seems to be turning the tide of anti-semitism and Holocaust denial. The AP gleaned valuable testimonies from various Iranian viewers of the miniseries that suggest a burgeoning sympathy for the Jewish plight. “Once, I wept when I learned through the film what a dreadful destiny the small nation had during the world war in the heart of so-called civilized Europe,” said Tehran bank teller Mahboubeh Rahamati. Similarly, grocery store owner Kazim Gharibi commented: “Through this film, I understood that Jews had a hard time in the war – helpless and desperate, as we were when Iraq imposed war on us.”
While some Iranians are finally willing to acknowledge the horrors of the Holocaust, they’ve immediately put that change of perspective to use in claiming that Israel is comparable to Hitler. So, for a country that once looked askance at the true history of the Holocaust, Zero Degree Turn has become acceptable programming only because it forges this connection.
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In Search of Happiness and a Sustainable HillelNot to be confused with Will Smith’s latest blockbuster The Pursuit of Happyness, the Soviet-Jewish-homeland-chronicling documentary In Search of Happiness differs in subject matter, style, and context from its similarly-titled contemporary analogue. However, it, too, chronicles the journey of a man struggling to survive in a world of unfavorable odds.
Set in Josef Stalin’s Jewish state – the “Jewish Autonomous Region” of Birobidzhan established in 1934 – In Search of Happiness explores Boris Rak’s quest for life’s meaning in the face of his alternative Jewish homeland’s decline.
Regrettably, Boris and his wife, Masha, are the last living descendants of the community’s original settlers. It turns out that Stalin’s plan – moving all the Jews into one corner of Siberia – wasn’t good for the community’s prosperity.
And now the major Jewish communal entity on college campuses, Hillel, is realizing that its own approach to creating defined Jewish spaces in Russia has been similarly ineffective. Hillel held two four-day conferences in Russia to discuss a new strategy for promoting community: “a chain of open-space events,” said newly-appointed Hillel Director for Russia Leia Berlin, declaring that “by next September, we must reshape Hillel from its current closed-club model, where people gather in our premises.”
It’s an interesting contrast: Stalin, not the biggest fan of the Jews, created a closed territory and Judaism didn’t survive there. Hillel, ever working for Jewish growth and renewal, created closed spaces for Jews to gather and is now admitting the approach didn’t work.
Back in Birobidzhan, the elderly Boris reflects upon the disappearance of Jewish religious practices and culture in the erstwhile “alternative Zion.” It’s a warning sign of how bad things can get: His home is decorated with crucifixes, and the couple even keeps a herd of pigs in the backyard. And though he still remembers his Yiddish, he prays to Jesus, because “he was a Jew.” Throughout all of this, the viewer is reminded that Boris and his wife represent the strongest remnants of Birobidzhan’s Jewish community.
To avoid such a grim future for the Jewish community, Hillel is constructing a more-inclusive model that seeks to engender widespread community involvement from both Jews and non-Jews. Hillel thinks it can best promote Jewish growth by not creating groupings that are exclusively Jewish.
In the Ukraine, plans for a public Hillel Cafe are already underway. In Moscow, the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee has awarded Hillel a grant to fund a “Jewish Fashion House” that will foster Russian Jews’ interest in clothing design.
With these seemingly-promising new initiatives, Hillel just may turn things around in the FSU. Of course, they might have reached these conclusions earlier if they had looked to Stalin’s efforts at Jewish community building. The Jewish campus organization was ironically emulating that famous anti-Semite’s model.
Dame of Beauty, Meet Queen of the Mountain
By today’s standards, the resources available to women during the 1930’s and 1940’s were, well, limited. That’s what makes the story of archaeologist Theresa Goell so amazing; she was a pioneer for women. And I’d argue that one of the leading beauty-products manufacturers was, too.
Ensconced in the comfort of our homes, it is sometimes easy to forget that individuals featured in documentaries are real. They are people, not actors. Their stories belong to human history, not the Hollywood canon. With this in mind, it’s important to regard documentaries with an air of solemnity. More than a book or newspaper, a documentary can provide a visceral portrait of the past – one that may enable viewers to better understand the present and, perhaps, effect positive change for the future.
I was reminded of this latter point recently, while watching Queen of the Mountain, a documentary celebrating Jewish archaeologist Theresa (Tess) Goell, available this month on The Jewish Channel. Goell embarked on an expedition to Turkey in 1947 in pursuit of her lifelong dream: excavating Nemrud Dagh — the alleged tomb of Antiochus I of Commagene, ruler of Turkey during the Hellenistic Period. As a lone Jewish woman in a predominantly male field (not to mention a Muslim country) Goell overcame what must have seemed like insurmountable odds.
Despite her successful academic career at Radcliffe college, Goell was forced into an arranged (and unhappy) marriage by her father, who expected her to become a stay-at-home mother. Goell saw her life differently. During WWII, she worked as a draftsman and was the only woman employed by her naval yard — talk about a pioneer for women’s liberation. Later in life, she left her family to pursue archeology in Turkey. “People usually walk around a waterfall — i would walk down a waterfall. People usually walk over a bridge — I walked under a bridge,” Goell said. Although she was speaking of her childhood, this declaration could just as easily characterize her entire life. Time and again, she chose the road less traveled. It made all the difference.
Six years passed before Goell obtained permission to excavate. In that time, she amassed sufficient funds for the project and recruited a team of scholars with whom to collaborate. In 1953, at the age of 50, she was ready to start digging. And amidst her archaeological pursuits, she positively changed the surrounding area. Goell taught Kurdish women about hygiene and birth control and supplied medicine from New York to ailing citizens. Her excavation also resulted in improved civil infrastructure, which brought tourism and wealth to a once-destitute area. Ultimately, Goell’s story reminds us to fight for freedom – for the right to pursue personal dreams. Additionally, the film demonstrates that cross-cultural collaboration is both possible and beneficial.
But the power of a documentary also lies in its ability to remind us that people who live among us can be every bit as intriguing as the people we see on the screen. Their stories have yet to be told, but are worthy of our attention. In celebration of another Jewish woman, who marched to the beat of her own drum, I’d like to remember Anita Roddick, the daughter of Italian Jewish immigrants and founder of The Body Shop, who recently passed away from a brain hemorrhage. Though many indulge in Roddick’s savory-scented elixirs, few understand the scope of her global contribution.
Like Goell, Roddick derived much of her inspiration from travel. During her time at the United Nations, Roddick journeyed to foreign countries, where she learned about different cultural practices. Her line of beauty products synthesized the wisdom passed onto her by the people she met during her stints abroad.
Most importantly, however, Roddick realized the necessity of ethical consumerism and was among the first entrepreneurs to promote this ethos. Roddick prohibited the use of ingredients that were tested on animals and promoted fair trade in third world countries. She was also an advocate for the less fortunate at home. In 1990, she founded the magazine The Big Issue, which is produced and sold by the homeless. Additionally, she formed a charity for children in Europe and Asia called Children on the Edge. Dubbed Dame of the British Empire in 2003, her legacy will not be forgotten.
In the end, documentaries can spur us into action. They encourage us to get off the couch and fulfill the Jewish principle of tikkun olam (repairing the world); Roddick and Goell are prime examples of this principle in action. As the old saying goes: where there is a will, there is a way.
Matisyahu and Madonna: Musical Jewish Ambassadors or Confused Souls?
Everyone in the Jewish world has been talking about Madonna’s controversial Rosh Hashana visit to Israel for a Kabbalah conference, and her declaring herself “an ambassador of Judaism” to Shimon Peres.
But let’s not forget that America’s current pop fascination with Judaism is just as equally due to Hasidic reggae artist Matisyhau’s efforts. A man who wears Hasidic garb without irony — but can throw it down with the best of the Rastafarians — and a woman who used to perform on stage in sado-masochistic garb but now preaches about the wonders of spirituality to Israeli politicians, both grab headlines for the Hebrews.
Yet Madonna’s promotion of Judaism has spurred more controversy, partly because she seems to equate Judaism with Kabbalah (and particularly the Kabbalah Centre’s brand of it), which many Jews consider a mere fringe element of the faith, but mostly because she’s not Jewish.
We tend to be suspicious of non-Jews who are too fond of Judaism. In contrast, the Jewish masses have been overwhelmingly positive in response to the popularity of Matisyahu. Seeing a man who wears his Judaism on his sleeve and shares his love for God from the pulpit of the stage fills most Jews with pride. Where Matisyahu has managed to be a Jew accepted by the secular world in all his Jewy-ness, Madonna struggles as a non-Jew inserting herself into the Jewish world.
Interestingly, though, Matisyahu and Madonna have more in common in their embrace of Judaism than one might think. As we learn in the documentary portrait of Matisyahu (aptly titled Matisyahu) airing on TJC this month, the reggae Hasid was not always so devout. He may not have published a book called Sex, but as a teenager named Matt Miller, whose friends (we all know what that means) “were into blunts and 40s,” he surely would have been happy to read it. But Matt Miller soon found a sense of higher purpose and meaning in Hasidic Judaism — which has Kabbalistic roots — and reformed his ways.
Some say the shape-shifting Madonna is just going through a phase, but she’s maintained her interest in Kabbalah for several years now. In fact, a Jerusalem Post article sees her recent visit to the Holy Land as proof that her newfound spirituality is “no passing fancy.” On the other hand, Matisyahu’s showed signs that he may have been going through something of a phase himself. In 2006 he gave a strangely depressed interview in which he expressed ambivalent feelings about religion, and he recently announced that he no longer considers himself a Lubavitcher Hasid. As he told the Miami New Times, “I’m really religious, but the more I’m learning about other types of Jews, I don’t want to exclude myself. I felt boxed in.”
Where Matisyahu’s and Madonna’s respective Jewish spiritual journeys will take them is anyone’s guess. But we’ll be watching.
TJC’s Amazing Lineup of FilmsHere’s a sampling of the incredible, award-winning feature films playing on The Jewish Channel, channel 291 on Cablevision’s iO Digital Cable:
Round Eyes in the Middle Kingdom. Why would a Polish Jew fight for a Communist China alongside Mao...
The Tollbooth. With an all-star cast including Tovah Feldshuh, this critically acclaimed film tells a heartfelt coming-of-age story...
Rabin, Part 2. Yitzhak Rabin was a leader who confronted violence while promoting peace, despite criticism. The second...
