This statement has gotten me into more than a few arguments: When you watch one of Nora Ephron's films, it sort of feels like it was written by Woody Allen's well-adjusted sister.

With that said, I'm a huge fan of Sleepless in Seattle, This is My Life, My Blue Heaven, and of course, When Harry Met Sally, and frankly, I'm not ashamed to admit it. I'm also not ashamed to admit that when I tell my girlfriend "let's go to the top of the Empire State Building for Valentines Day", I'm only half-joking. If I may speak even more frankly, Ms. Ephron is indeed a fantastic creator of iconic genre films, but that I wish her name was more often placed alongside the Philip Roth's and Woody Allen's as a top tier Jewish humorist.

Why am I admitting all this on a public forum? Because to be honest, I'm willing to betray my gender by being the one to say that I think Ephron's lack of credibility among many of my friends and colleagues is based solely on the fact that she's a woman, and also her tendency to add more than a little "mush" to her films.

So what? Just because her films have one foot in the romantic comedy quicksand doesn't negate the fact that they are also smart, cosmopolitan, and deeply funny.

In the event that you are that stuck on what to do for Valentine's Day, I'm going to help you out here: pick up a box of wine, and rent one of Ephron's films. Looking for more? Take some of her suggestions on The Daily Beast today.

Ever wondered why it's called "breaking up" and not "breaking down"? You'll get an idea from the new movie, Breaking Upwards, directed by Daryl Wein. In it, a couple decides that their relationship, while not unhappy, has reached its natural end. They then begin to come up with what some politicians might call "an exit strategy."

 

 

Breaking Upwards will be screening at the Manhattan JCC this winter. Click here for more details.

Tension and anticipation filled the room. Would Ahmadinejad live up to the mission of the Durban Review Conference's focus on ending racism and speak to the thousands of oppressed Baha'i in his country? Would he admit the existence of homosexuality in Iran? The balcony, filled with international media including our crew, looked on. It took him 45 seconds to deliver - "Ladies and gentlemen, let us take a look at the UN Security Council. Following World War II, they resorted to military aggression to make an entire nation homeless on the pretext of Jewish sufferings." All of the sudden a large group of UN representatives and pro-Israel NGO representatives stood up and walked out in a dramatic protest. Jewish student activists who had smuggled in clown suits screamed ‘You're a racist!!' while being tackled by UN security. The Iranians and Muslim countries and NGOs cheered voraciously. The Middle East issue had obviously continued to disrupt.

AhmadinejadI wanted to speak to the Iranians, people from a country whose president had repeatedly denounced Israel, incited violence against Jews and denied the Holocaust. If they believed in Ahmadinejad's message then I wanted to give them the chance to explain. Although polite, they were very suspicious of our project and only after our cameraman cornered Iranian UN Ambassador Moayeri on the last day of the conference did we manage to get a statement.

-- Ambassador Alireza Moayeri, UN Ambassador, Iran: "He never crossed the line. His position was perfectly focused on the subject matter of racism. He was just giving examples and instances, which we can see the most vivid examples of it taking place in occupied territories of Palestine by the Zionist regime of Israel."

As I spent the week in Geneva attending conference events and events thrown by activists outside of UN jurisdiction I got a much better understanding of how these groups interact on the international level. Inside the UN they form into political and strategic blocks of influence in order to get enough votes to pass resolutions, in the NGO community they talk past each other not to each other - a pro-Palestinian event in one room, and pro-Israel event in another. If you were to shut your eyes while sitting in the Serpentine Lounge, where delegates gather for espresso and sandwiches, and just listen to all the groups from all over the world huddled up by interest group, cacophony might be a good way to describe it.

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For American artists with Jewish backgrounds, there always seems to be a reserve goldmine from which to dig out quirky characters, tales of youthful mischief and old world-isms. The microcosm of American Jewish neighbourhoods – where fumbling boys experiment with pigtailed girls, steal money from collections for the Jews in Palestine, and enrage their elders – have provided many entertaining and considered meditations on modern life in general. And now to Woody Allen’s Queens, Philip Roth’s Newark and Neil Simon’s Brooklyn, we can add Joel and Ethan Coen’s Minneapolis, where their latest film, A Serious Man, is set.

However, this is no nostalgia trip or celebration of Jewish traditions. The suburban, 1960s Jew-dominated landscape of A Serious Man is a non-schmaltzy, sun-drenched flat landscape of ticky-tacky duplexes fitted with satellite dishes and identical square lawns and inhabited by bored housewives, country-club members and pot-smoking teenagers. It is an insular community, which looks at the outside world with nervousness and derision. The only non-Jews that our loser-hero, physics professor Larry Gopnik, interacts with are his white-trash, gun-toting ‘goy’ neighbours and a Korean student who tries to bribe his way to a passing grade.

In O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the Cohen brothers set Homer’s Odyssey in the 1930s deep south. Here, they put Larry Gopnik through a modern-day version of the trials of Job, in a time when America was about to be hit by winds of anti-conformism and social upheaval, where the certainties of old were questioned and turned on their heads. And so they are for Larry, whose trials and tribulations will have you squirming, cringing, gawping and guffawing.

Physics professor Larry Gopnik is a freier, a sucker, whose cushy life is shredded to pieces as his tzuris mount. (A Yiddish dictionary might come in handy when watching A Serious Man.) His hectoring wife demands a get, a ritual divorce, so that she can re-marry the smarmy Sy Ableman; Larry is forced to move into a Jolly Roger motel with his snoring brother, who nurses a sebaceous cyst and works on a ‘probability map of the universe,’ the Mentaculus; the Columbia Record Club is chasing Larry for a membership fee for a scheme he never signed up to; an anonymous adversary is sending letters to Larry’s tenure committee; Larry’s daughter is stealing money from him to fund a nose job; it’s only two weeks until the Bar Mitzvah of Larry’s truant son, Danny, who is more interested in getting stoned than in rehearsing his Torah portion; and as Larry’s legal bills pile up, resisting the temptation to pocket those hundred dollar bills that the Korean student indiscreetly left on his desk gets harder and harder.

‘Why me? What have I done to deserve this?’ cries Larry. A friend tells him that while it’s not always easy to figure out what God is trying to tell us, at least as Jews they have a lot of wonderful stories and traditions to seek answers from. The friend wears leg braces.

Are the Coens laughing at the Jews? No, the Coens are laughing at Larry’s – and man’s – futile attempts to find answers to the riddles of the universe, whether it’s through consulting rabbis and folk tales or quantum mechanics. And the Coens are laughing at man’s inability to accept coincidence, an inability which leads us irrationally to cling to unearthly mysteries and conspiracy theories instead of, as the medieval rabbi Rashi, quoted with some irony at the start of A Serious Man, said: ‘Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.’

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During the four months I spent researching the film before we flew to Geneva for the Durban Review Conference I occupied my time by talking to as many people as I could and reading article after article.  I learned as much as I could about the background the story of the film would be based upon: other UN conferences on racism, the buildup to the mayhem of the first conference (which began when the Israeli delegation was denied visas to attend to a preparatory meeting in Tehran), what actually happened on the ground in Durban, how each side felt and the details of the conference eventual outcome document - the Durban Declaration and Program of Action - which was a robust statement in support of victims of racism around the world.

Most importantly I learned how the UN, the pro-Zionist organizations and the pro-Palestinians were actively organizing to tell their version of the story. The Jews wanted desperately to prevent a repeat of what happened in 2001.  Palestinians and their supporters didn't see anything wrong with the events of 2001 and, still without a state of their own, thought they could use the Durban Review Conference to continue pleading with the international community for help. UN officials, who felt the 2001 conference was a landmark success, wanted to continue their momentum without being criticized by the NGO community, members of which had been the most vocally anti-Israel. As the April 20, 2009 start date got closer the tension was high, with many countries, including the US and Israel, threatening to boycott.

It didn't take long for me to realize the pro-Israel, pro-Zionist groups were obviously very well funded and very well organized in getting their message out. Antisemitic language had not in fact been included in the UN conference outcome document. But the anti-Semitism the Jews felt that week in Durban led to an eight-year-long fight to never let it happen again. A quick Google search for ‘Durban hate-fest' produced endless results. Groups such as the ADL, B'Nai B'rith, WJC, AJC, The Israel Project etc. had spent a tremendous amount of time speaking to the media, had published numerous pamphlets, media-guides, and op-eds and had been able to control the message, effectively re-branding the first conference an utter failure. They also seemed able to convince Obama administration officials the same.

When I called these organizations they were happy to talk, to give me interviews, to help out in whatever way the could. In the film you'll meet many of these key strategists:

--Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Simon Wiesenthal Center (speaking about a man he met at the 2001 conference): "In the middle of the handshake he pulled his hand back and he said, ‘Are you a Jew?' I said, ‘Yes,' and he wiped his hand off on his jacket."

anne

 

 

--Anne Bayefsky, Hudson Institute: "Saudi Arabia and Cuba and China are all members of the UN Human Rights Council, the lead UN human rights body. It doesn't do human rights. It does anti-Semitism, and the destruction of the State of Israel is its number one agenda."

--Gerald Steinberg, NGO Monitor: "Durban One wasn't just a conference, it wasn't just a week and a half of angry words and declarations targeting Israel. Durban was a strategy. And the Durban strategy was to use the United Nations, to use the rhetoric of human rights, to use international relations, to use the legal system as a
weapon of war and against Israel."

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The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival requires little introduction. Now in its twenty-ninth year, the annual summertime event has turned into the most important global gathering of its kind. Transforming the west coast American city into a temporary stand-in for Berlin or Cannes, albeit a Jewish version, is no small feat. Nor is the festival's distinction for helping serve as the North American starting point for some of Israel and Europe's most significant new Jewish productions.

Over the course of the next week (plus or minus an additional day or two), Zeek film editor Shai Ginsburg will be offering short reviews of his favorite films being showcased at this year's festival, which begins on July 23rd. We'll be updating Shai's blog as his pieces come in. For those unfamiliar with Shai's work, this is as good an introduction as any of his consistently excellent film coverage. The former film editor of Tikkun, Shai Ginsburg began working with Zeek two years ago, when he reviewed Joseph Cedar's brilliant Beaufort.

Desert Brides

Ada Ushpiz’ 2008 documentary Desert Brides explores the life of Bedouins in Israel. Until a decade or so ago, Bedouins were present only on the margins of Israeli cinema, mostly as an emblem of the exotic, primitive Orient in which Jews sought to establish a modern European polity. The present interest of Israeli filmmakers in topics and communities that were traditionally marginalized brought attention to Bedouin communities. Among the films that deal with Bedouins in Israel one should count Dan Verete’s 2001 Yellow Asphalt and such documentaries as Uri Rosenwaks' 2006 The Film Class, Oded Adomi Leshem’s 2007 Voices from El-Sayed, and Ebtisam Mara'ana’s 2007 Three Times Divorced.

Ada Ushpiz
Israeli films commonly explore Bedouin life from a double perspective. On the one hand, they point at the discrimination which Israeli Bedouins experience, not only in their interaction with State and local officials, but also in their interaction with private individuals. On the other, they draw attention to the oppressive character of Bedouin society. Conversely, these films throw into relief the endeavors of the state to uproot the Bedouin from their traditional grounds and settle them in permanent towns. The Israeli government further refused to recognize and provide services to 36 Bedouin villages, in which some 50% of the Bedouin’s in the south of Israel reside; this refusal translates into the abject poverty that dominates Bedouin life, whether in recognized or unrecognized villages. These films also explore the ways that Bedouin society deny what one would consider basic rights to some of its members, particularly to women.

Desert Brides largely focuses on three Bedouin women who are all part of polygamous marriages. While the annulment of a marriage is not prohibited among Bedouins, divorces are unusual and polygamy is still a common practice. About 30% of Bedouin women in the Negev desert live in polygamous marriages. Indeed, the film argues, if not already within such polygamous household, all Bedouin wives live in fear that their husband would “marry over them.” Ushpiz studies the ensuing anxiety and melancholy of her female protagonists. Be they first wives, second wives or the only wives, anxiety and melancholy becomes the core of their experience as Bedouin women.

Ushpiz begins the film with a wedding scene. A woman takes photos and directs a video camerawoman. The sound of music, laughter, screams of delight and the sight of the wedded couple and their joyful guests contrast with the listless, not to say dull expression on that woman’s face. Miriam El Kwader, a professional wedding photographer, supports her family and unemployed husband. Now her husband’s family pressures the reluctant husband to take a second wife.

The director returns to Miriam’s wedding photos and videos throughout the film. The magnificence and display of luxury of these weddings does not merely contrasts with the angst of the film’s protagonists, but also to the poverty in which some of them live. More than that, these weddings appear less like traditional Bedouin celebrations than wedding parties common elsewhere, in Europe, the US and Israel. Yet these similarities are misleading. A completely different fate awaits this newly wedded woman.

The film then returns to these photos and videos to introduce his two other protagonists.

Miriam Al-Nimer, recently divorced, is a successful young woman who runs the local Center for the Elderly. She had promised herself never to enter a polygamous marriage. At first, her marriage indeed seems happy, albeit filled with romance.  But as Desert Brides progresses, we discover that she is a second wife. Notwithstanding what assurances her husband gives her of his love, she constantly feels she has to compete with the first wife and her children for the time and attention of her husband. Ushpiz does not fail to interview the first wife as well, who feels betrayed after having welcomed Miriam into the family. Both women mirror each other.

Desert Brides’last protagonist is Aalya El-Abd. At twenty-seven, she feels she has to marry or be doomed to remain a spinster. As her partner courts her, he promises to divorce his second wife, but refuses to provide a time limit for that. On the day leading to the wedding, Aalya’s sisters warn her not to trust his promises. He will never divorce his first wife, they tell her. She must get used to the idea of being a second wife.

Most disturbing about the portraits of the these three women is the fact that they all believe themselves to be trapped. Despite their intelligence, education and familiarity with Israeli-Jewish society, in which polygamy is unacceptable as well as illegal, they are unable to imagine better lives for themselves. No thought of resistance or of change crosses their lips. In the end, they submit to what they perceive is their fate as Bedouin women.

While watching the film, though, I had one reservation, As capturing and nuanced a study of the life of women in a non-Western society as Desert Brides is, its introduction does it disservice. Preceding the first scene, frames of text dialogue link polygamous marriages in Bedouin communities to Israel's handling of Bedouins. Each begats the other, or so it seems Yet, nothing in Ushpiz’ film actually explores that link. Nowhere does the director examine the ties between the experience of being uprooted and resettled, or of life in an unrecognized village, to the experience of her subjects.

It is all too easy—even if not unjustified—to blame the Israeli state and its treatment of its non-Jewish citizens and residents for the social faults the latter suffer. It is much more difficult to expose and analyze the links between state policy and communities like the Bedouin in concrete, narrative terms. Simply invoking such idée reçue, without subjecting these same beliefs to critique, doesn't explain such causal relations between the Israeli state and its Arab subjects. It is a pity that the otherwise intelligent and probing Desert Brides falls into this trap.

Lady Kul El-Arab

Ibtisam Mara'ana is one of growing number of, yet still all-too-few Israeli-Palestinian filmmakers who seek to transcend the ethnic-national boundaries of their “home” communities and appeal to the Israeli public in general. Her documentaries regularly explore the complex realities not only of the people she captures on film, but also of herself, as a someone with three identities: Israeli, Palestinian and female. As Mara'ana's films suggest, in present-day Israel, reconciling the three proves to be not only difficult but unlikely.

Ibtisam Mara'ana

Mara'ana’s films turn on the travails of women in one of Israel’s minority groups: Palestinian, Druze or Bedouin. Paradise Lost (2003), Badal (2005) and Three Times Divorced (2007) put into relief the endeavor of her female subjects to seize hold of the rights and opportunities offered (or at least nominally proclaimed) by the Israeli “liberal” state while, at the same time, fighting a double oppression: their legal and political oppression as members of a national minority by the very same “liberal” state, and their social oppression as women within traditionally patriarchal communities.

What allows the director to study this double oppression is her own position as an outsider to both Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian societies. As a member of the Palestinian minority, Mara'ana finds herself—despite her best efforts—outside the Jewish culture of the Israeli state. And as a feminist who decided to leave her Palestinian hometown for the big cultural center of Tel Aviv, she consciously places herself outside the Palestinian-Muslim patriarchal culture into which she was born. In her films, Mara'ana translates this “outside” position into narratives that aim to give voice to the distress of Palestinian (as well as Druze and Bedouin) communities within Israel, all the while criticizing the traditional patriarchal customs that still predominate in these communities.

The center of gravity of Mara'ana’s latest film, Lady Kul El-Arab (2008) is somewhat different, as Mara'ana focuses more on a critique of traditional Arab patriarchy. The film follows Duah Fares, native of the largely Druze town of Sajur in the northern part of Israel. After Duah reaches the final stage of the Lady Kul El-Arab beauty pageant, she decides to withdraw and register, instead, as a contestant in the Israeli beauty pageant. The Arab pageant, she tells the director, would offer her only limited, brief opportunities within the Arab sector, while she dreams of an international career as a model. Yet, what seems at first to be a simple story of a young woman’s aspirations to move beyond her community into the “big world,” turns into an account of the ensuing conflict between traditional and liberal values, between the patriarchal tradition in which Duah was raised and the free, progressive state to which she would like to move.

Whereas the Arab pageant adheres to the customs of modesty prevailing in Duah’s community, the Israeli pageant, like other such pageants in Europe and the US, dresses its contestant in revealing clothes. The prospect of Duah’s appearance in a swimsuit spurs condemnation in her hometown and shakes not only her parents, but also her Druze community as a whole. The elders of the community all enlist to pressure her Duah and her parents to yield and withdraw from the Israeli pageant, warning them that they risk being ostracized. But the pressure does not stop there. Duah and her parents receive threats, and she has to go into hiding and remain under constant police protection for the duration of the pageant. Duah now has to weigh her dream against its consequences—for herself as well as to her family. A career as a model, it now becomes clear, would come at a very dear price.

Yet, Lady Kul El-Arab displays a dimension of Mara'ana’s oeuvre as a whole, a dimension that was subdued in her earlier films, but that in this film takes center stage. The director skillfully turns Duah’s story into a compelling tale about the struggle of a young woman to pursue her dream, a tale about the hurdles she has to overcome in order to realize herself and about the ways a patriarchal society mobilizes all of its powers to curb that woman’s free spirit. Yet Mara'ana’s film stops short of considering the most interesting question her subject raises: What is the relationship between Duah’s endeavors to transcend the limits set by her community, and the status of women in a so-called liberal state, of which she aspires to become a member?

The film sets Duah’s story within the coordinates of a simple opposition between oppression and emancipation, failing to question the nature of the emancipation offered by the liberal state. Nowhere does the director stop to question the nature of the “liberal” values her characters—and the director herself, it seems—set so high. Are they indeed as liberating and emancipating as they seem? Would taking part in a beauty pageant truly place Duah’s beyond the yoke of patriarchy? Or would it, perhaps, simply replace one such yoke with another one, as the common feminist critique of these pageants would suggest? The most troubling aspect of Lady Kul El-Arab, then, is that the director seems to sincerely believe that an Israeli beauty pageant is a place of feminist liberation beyond reproach.

 

A History of Israeli Cinema

Raphaël Nadjari’s film, A History of Israeli Cinema, is in fact, groundbreaking. It is the first attempt ever to survey the history of Israeli cinema in the same medium, that is, in film. The outcome is captivating. The documentary will serve as an excellent introduction to those unfamiliar with Israeli film and will certainly become the bread and butter of all college classes on the subject. It is also simply fascinating.

Raphaël Nadjari

Nadjari does not introduce a new history of Israeli cinema. Rather, he portrays it the way it has been described and taught over the past two decades. He thus divides his film into two parts. The first, which focuses on the years 1933-1978, presents a rather homogeneous film scene, shaped and formed by a single idea at a time. At the center of stage is Zionist ideology, the establishment of a new state, and of a new Jewish society and culture. Israeli movies moved from portraying the glory of the Zionist endeavor in Palestine and, in particular, of the New Hebrew Man, through a paean to Jewish might , to ethnic comedies (the Bourekas films) that brought to the surface inter-Jewish ethnic tensions, and finally to personal cinema that explored the confusion of the hegemonic Ashkenazi middle class in general, and of the Ashkenazi male in particular.

The first part of Nadjari's survey is easier to follow than the second one, which deals with the period falling between 1978-2005, and which presents a much more convoluted film scene that pulls in divergent directions. During this era's first decade, the homogeneity that characterized Israeli filmmaking is still somewhat present, at least in terms of subject matter. However, this work is by no means quiescent. The late 1970s through the 1980s were dominated by films that, for the first time, turned on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with the fate of Palestinians under Israeli of paramount concern. Yet, the early 1990s saw the emergence of new films that are much harder to group together under any specific rubric. Israeli cinema no longer followed a single theme or style, but multiple ones.

The sense of disorder is also enhanced by the way Nadjari introduces selections from different Israeli movies. One of the most successful decisions of the director was not to make do with short clips from as many films as possible but, rather, to present longer sequences, selected from fewer films, to allow viewers to get a deeper sense of these productions. Yet, whereas in the first part, each sequence is properly introduced and contextualized, (and its relationship to the present stage of Israeli cinema is made clear), the sequences in the second part lack such context. This is another indication of the disappearance of the homogeneous frame of reference that shaped Israeli cinema for the first few decades of its history.

Nadjari’s second formative decision was to cut between film sequences and interview sequences. These include interviews with directors, actors, producers, film scholars and critics. The director does not see his interviewees as subservient to the film sequences. On the contrary, he turns them into subjects in their own right, of equal importance to the films that they discuss and analyze. A History of Israeli Cinema thus does not merely accentuate the central role scholars and critics played in shaping and forming Israeli films. After all, many filmmakers make their living teaching in the different departments of cinema studies and communication alongside many of the film critics and scholars. History is as much about the relationship between his interviewees and Israeli films as it is about the history of Israeli cinema. The director thus opens his film with the 1935 Avodah  (Labor),  which fetishizes the figure of the Jewish-Zionist settler in Palestine, and cuts to the figure of Nachman Ingber, one of Israel’s most influential film critics, who ironically looks much more like the "Old Jew" Zionism tried to overcome than the young, muscular and Aryan looking man that it set as a masculine ideal.

That said, Nadjari’s film primarily focuses on the history of feature filmmaking in Israel. The one documentary he discusses,  David Perlov’s Yoman (Diary, 1973-1983), accentuates the absence of other documentaries, and begs the question what the relationship is between documentary and feature filmmaking in general and the boom in both that we have witnessed over the past decade in Israel.

Likewise, the director fails to discuss the relationship between television and cinematic productions. Once again, the one television drama noted, Ram Loevy’s 1978 Khirbet Khizah, poses the same question that was asked about documentaries, especially television series and their role in the recent boom in Israeli filmmaking. In a similar manner, History includes just one short feature film, Avi Mograbi’s 1989 Gerush (Expulsion). The choice is particularly interesting given that Nadjari does not note that this is a short, and that Mograbi’s reputation is in documentary, not  feature filmmaking. Nadjari’s choice of Mograbi’s film also raises questions about what the relationship is between Israeli shorts and the “larger” cinematic works.

Be that as it may, Nadjari’s A History of Israeli Cinema is a worthy introduction to Israeli cinema.

For those of you who bought tickets to the Jerusalem Film Festival, you might want to know that the docket now contains one less film. The Yes Men Fix the World, about a group called the Yes Men who "impersonate big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them," will no longer be screened at the Festival. The Yes Men themselves have written this open letter to the festival's organizers in order to explain why they chose to pull their movie from the lineup:

Dear Friends at the Jerusalem Film Festival,

We regret to say that we have taken the hard decision to withdraw our film, “The Yes Men Fix the World,” from the Jerusalem Film Festival in solidarity with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign (http://www.bdsmovement.net/).

This decision does not come easily, as we realize that the festival opposes the policies of the State of Israel, and we have no wish to punish progressives who deplore the state-sponsored violence committed in their name. This decision does not come easily, as we feel a strong affinity with many people in Israel, sharing with them our Jewish roots, as well as the trauma of the Holocaust, in which both our grandfathers died. Andy lived in Jerusalem for a year long ago, can still get by in Hebrew, and counts several friends there. And Mike has always wanted to connect with the roots of his culture.

But despite all our feelings, we cannot abandon our mission as activists. In the 1980s, there was a call from the people of South Africa to artists and others to boycott that regime, and it helped end apartheid there. Today, there is a clear call for a boycott from Palestinian civil society. Obeying it is our only hope, as filmmakers and activists, of helping put pressure on the Israeli government to comply with international law.

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In this video, I explain how Wolverine is clearly a member of the tribe.

Enjoy, because this is as close as you're getting to Hugh Jackman being a Jew.

There are two great passions at the heart of Dan Katzir's documentary film, Yiddish Theater: A Love Story. The first is the unstoppable drive of the octogenarian actress Zypora Spaisman to keep her production of a Yiddish play on the boards during the bitter New York winter of 2000, despite snow storms, a remote theater, lack of financial backing, and a dwindling audience. The second is the fascination of a young Israeli filmmaker for this actress who comes to represent a great Jewish culture in danger of disappearing in the modern world. By creating interesting portraits of those involved in the production of a Yiddish play, the film raises profound questions about the nature of Jewish culture on the edge of the 21^st century.

Katzir's film is not an all-encompassing history of the rich theatrical tradition that existed in Jewish communities throughout Europe in the late 19^th century and perhaps achieved its greatest heights in New York City in the decades leading up to World War II. (Those interested in such an historical overview should see the 1968 documentary "The Golden Age of Second Avenue" or read Nahma Sandrow's excellent book, Vagabond Stars.) Katzir also ignores the particulars of Spaisman's "forced retirement" from the Folksbiene, the Yiddish theater she ran for decades, and her subsequent creation of a new company, the Yiddish Public Theater. (The full story can be found in an article by Sandrow for the New York Times.)  

 

 

Yiddish Theater provides some context for the state of Yiddish-language theater when the scholar Dovid Katz very neatly outlines four major reasons for the decline of Yiddish culture: 1) the Nazi genocide destroyed a large segment of the Yiddish-speaking population; 2) the Soviets forbade the speaking of Yiddish and murdered many writers in the 1940s and 1950s; 3) Israel conducted a "vicious campaign" to extinguish Yiddish, replacing this poor bastard language with Hebrew; and 4) Jews in the West assimilated, leaving behind the old language and culture. So what sort of meshugeneh person continues to perform plays in a "dead language"? 

Enter Zypora Spaisman. Katzir, who narrates the film and asks questions of his subjects from behind the camera, seems smitten with the elderly actress, and he films her lovingly as she prepares a meal in her apartment, braves the snow drifts of the Lower East Side, and puts on make-up in her dressing room. A representative scene: the diminutive Spaisman, wrapped up in a fur coat, slowly makes her way down the stairs and onto the subway, while "My Yiddische Mama" plays on soundtrack. The film's poignancy relies on the fact that this seemingly sweet little old lady is actually a fiercely tenacious woman who survived Hitler and Stalin-but she is fighting a losing battle to keep her art alive. The show closes, and Spaisman must clean out her dressing room and exit the theater. 

This anxiety about the loss of Yiddish culture is balanced by one genuinely humorous segment, an interview with the irascible Seymour Rechtzeit, a Yiddish theater star who, from 1975 until his death in 2002, was President of Hebrew Actors Union-which is now defunct. 

Katzir: Do you feel that your generation has a responsibility to make sure that Yiddish will continue into the new millennium?

Rechtzeit: No.

Katzir: When you see younger people who are interested in Yiddish theater, what would you like to say to all of them?

Rechtzeit: Hello. And goodbye.

Rechtzeit is not sentimental about the curtain coming down, and his ironic humor in the face of the supposed demise of Yiddish theater is, well, very Yiddish.

From a philosophical perspective, all theater, not just Yiddish theater, is always "dying." Theater is an ephemeral art that exists only in the moment when an audience is in the presence of the performers. Scripts and recordings can exist after the fact, but these artifacts are not the performance. The theatrical imperative to be "in the moment" is radically different than a documentary film's mission to capture and preserve. For theater aficionados, the fleeting nature of performance is precisely what makes it so special. Rather than clinging to the past, theater artists create new plays-and new interpretations of old plays-which is why the theater, despite dire prognostications, continues to thrive.

Yiddish theater survives to the extent it does because it is not stuck in the past. Although the film implicitly presents Spaisman as the last hope for the survival of Yiddish theater, the fact is that the Folksbiene seems to be in excellent health and continues to produce plays, as do Yiddish theaters in Bucharest, Montreal, and Tel Aviv. In mainstream American theaters, the masterpieces of Yiddish theater continue to receive new productions in English: New York's Public Theater produced The Dybbuk, adapted by Tony Kushner, in 1997, the Manhattan Ensemble Theater staged The Golem in 2002, and a number of regional theaters have produced Donald Margulies's adaptation of God of Vengeance.

Yiddish Theater: A Love Story gives us a glimpse into the future of the art form when Katzir interviews two younger members of Spaisman's troupe. Roni Neuman is an Israeli actress who doesn't speak Yiddish, but displays a strong commitment to Jewish culture and to her aged mentors. Joad Krohn learned Yiddish in his Orthodox Jewish family in Williamsburg, but he left those traditions behind for tattoos, rock and roll, and the theater. Both young performers exist in between cultures: Israeli and American, traditional and modern, religious and secular. Perhaps Yiddish theater has always existed on such borders, which can account for its vibrancy, but also its precariousness. As the troupe plays its final performance, the simultaneously plaintive and optimistic Krohn notes, "Nobody believed that it would make it as long as it has." The same could be said of Zypora Spaisman, who passed away in 2002 at the age of 86, after a lifetime of dedication to the Yiddish theater. And the same could be said of all Yiddish theater, which cannot continue exactly as it was, but continues nevertheless.

Often in the chronicles of human endeavor, what appears a great beginning, or at least a revival, in a political or ideological movement, in reality represents its final, decadent stage.  Some fireworks burn brightest as they die,  Thus it was that the flourishing anarchist movement during the Spanish civil war of 1936-39, while viewed at the time as a powerful breakthrough for a phenomenon that defined itself in terms baffling to most today, as "libertarian communism," stood at the conclusion of radical labor's intervention in history. 

There are many more such examples, both in totalitarianism and in more benevolent chapters of the modern epic.  From the Parisian insurrection of 1968 to the riots in Athens today, the same judgment appears appropriate:  notwithstanding the frenetic acclamation of superficial commentators, these are better seen as concluding rather than inaugural moments.  In my view, the same could be said of the Islamofascist offensive embodied in the atrocities of September 11, 2001. I believe the horror of that day represented Saudi Wahhabism in extremis, rather than the commencement of a victorious worldwide jihad, just as Hitler's temporary victories in Europe in 1939-41 preceded the eventual collapse, rather than the triumph, of Nazi imperialism.

Of no 20^th century event does the coincidence of spectacle with decline seem more obvious, in retrospect, than the Cuban Revolution of 1959.   The pathetic story of Ernesto "Che" Guevara's fall from revolutionary hero in 1960 to scrounging vagabond liquidated in Bolivia in 1967 was, at the time, perceived by only a few observers in the international radical milieu as a sign that the wave of protest culminating in France six months afterward would close, rather than open, a cycle.

Guevara has returned to prominence as a symbol of the left, displayed on tee shirts and other ephemera, including a brand of cigarettes in Holland.  With that result, the appearance of Steven Soderbergh's bloated two-part film Che, totaling four hours of incident and detail incomprehensible to anybody who is not Cuban or a specialist in the annals of Castroism, comes as no surprise.  But as with the revolution itself, and the subsequent squalid defeat of Guevara's Bolivian campaign, what we see on the screen must stand as a stillborn exercise in nostalgia, rather than evidence of a Castroite resurrection.  

In addition, this cinematic monstrosity signifies the end of Soderbergh's credibility as a film director.   While the Georgia-born cinéaste has been hailed absurdly as a protean figure excelling in all aspects of movie-making, his career has slid since he displayed a clever perceptiveness about sexual deceit in sex, lies, and videotape (1989).  His Erin Brockovich and Traffic, released in 2000, were competent but effective more for their messages - the virtue of protest against corporate corruption in the first case, the power of corruption represented by the drug trade, in the second - than for their cinematic verve.  Traffic, for its part, was marred by unconvincing family entanglements attached to the character of a high government official, played by Michael Douglas.

Soderbergh's obsessions, focused on improbable narrative convolutions that hardly rise to the level of "plot twists," obscure gadgets, and shallow characterizations, have made his later pictures unattractive, when not incomprehensible, to critics and viewers alike.  With the Ocean's 11-12-13 franchise, his flaws were aggravated to a point where the last two films became caricatural.  The blank stupidity of employing the actress Julia Roberts to play a woman pretending to be the actress Julia Roberts, in Ocean's 12, was hard to exceed, although the same film was weighed down (physically no less than psychologically) by the enormously (in every sense) untalented Catherine Zeta-Jones, who had brought nothing but bulk to Traffic. 

In Ocean's 13, Soderbergh outdid his previous artistic failures by humiliating Al Pacino, making him a simulacrum of the suave outlaw roles in some of which he had excelled (see the Godfather trilogy and Carlito's Way, not the ludicrous Scarface).   Ocean's 13 similarly degraded Ellen Barkin, who once joined Pacino in lighting up the classic Sea of Love. And those were but two imbecilities in a movie filled with such tidbits.  Formerly, such film fumbles were usually blamed by the prevalence in Hollywood of a then-common variant of "p.c.": Peruvian cocaine.  In the case of Che, however, the drug at fault is obviously the more familiar political correctness.

Andy Garcia, an underrated and underutilized star who, with obvious justification, trudged through the Ocean's franchise as if his only concern might have been to collect his check, is a Cuban-American and pronounced anti-Castro patriot, so that his inveiglement into the Che disaster was doubtless impossible to imagine.  But a Cuban-born star with a thorough knowledge of the events in Cuba and Bolivia in the 1950s and 1960s could not have saved this latest debacle.  Not even Benicio del Toro, a good choice for a Guevara impersonation, could effect such a rescue.  

Soderbergh's Che appears more a pseudo-documentary than a dramatic film, an effect heightened by the film's dialogue being almost entirely in Spanish.  Yet it is a pseudo-doc with a considerable difference, in that notwithstanding its enervating length, Soderbergh's Che ignores, without exception, the entire backstory of the events it portrays.  The origin of Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship is never explained; nor is the July 26, 1953 failed coup attempt by Castro, centered on an assault at the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba, for which the July 26 Movement (M-26-J) was named.  Among Cubans and foreign experts, the latter gap may be easily explained; how to account for the fact that Batista, universally portrayed by Castrophiles as a monster, was satisfied to see the defiant captive Castro sentenced to no more than 15 years in prison, of which he served only two before he was released in a Batista amnesty?  How, we may ask, does this compare with the dozens of executions carried out after Castro's takeover?  Similarly, the training of Guevara as a medical doctor is unaddressed, although it is doubtful that many spectators of this film will ask how a physician, who has taken the Hippocratic oath to preserve life, could have ordered so many of the mentioned shootings.

The background of Guevara as an anti-American radical in the Guatemalan events of 1954 is also overlooked.  Add to this a silence about the history of the Directorio Revolucionario, the main alternative armed oppositional group to Castro's M-26-J.  Throughout the film, in addition to its near-exclusive Spanish dialogue, groups and names are mentioned without any effort to flesh them out.  A "Faustino" appears and denounces the PSP or Popular Socialist party, as the Cuban Communist party then styled itself, as Stalinists.  His full name, Faustino Pérez, is unmentioned, along with his cooptation into the Cuban Communist leadership.  Nor, of course, is the rich experience of the Cuban Stalinist apparatus as partners of Batista, whom they supported as the Nicaraguan Stalinists once backed Anastasio Somoza, discussed.   A "Rolando" is given orders, and is identified in the credits, printed in a separate pamphlet, as Rolando Cubela; Cubela's later turn against Castro, imprisonment in a plot to kill the dictator, and eventual exile, are deemed unworthy of mention. 

Similarly, Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, a Spanish-born anti-Stalinist revolutionary who distinguished himself as a fighter in Cuba, is casually smeared, without further elucidation (Gutiérrez Menoyo also turned against Castro.)  As in the Ocean's franchise, Soderbergh remains fascinated with gimmicks rather than personalities.  He spends more time in the first half of the film recording the wrecking of apartment walls to gain a tactical position during the climactic battle of Santa Clara than with the crisis of the Batista regime caused by the same battle.       

In its second-half treatment of Guevara's Bolivian misadventure, context is even more important, and further absent.  Whatever one's view of the Bolivian Communist Party as a Soviet and Cuban tool, Guevara's delusions about life in the highland nation were absurd.  Bolivia's marginalized indigenous majority and history of Trotskyist trade-unionism, rather than pro-Soviet leftism or Castro-style socialist caudillismo, had nothing in common with the population in Cuba or its history.  Guevara emerged on the altiplano more as a subimperialist emissary of neighboring Argentina's Peronism than as an authentic social revolutionary, and left no visible influence in Bolivian political life.  Among the many phantom names that passes through this film like water in a sieve is that of Jorge Ricardo Masetti, an Argentine associate of Guevara who began his political career in a Peronist group with fascist tendencies.  This fact was revealed in a 1997 Guevara biography by Jon Lee Anderson, pretentiously credited as the film's Chief Consultant, but apparently ignored. 

Guevara was obviously a heedless risk-taker, as shown by the cigar- and pipe-smoking habits he maintained even though he was asthmatic.  Nobody has ever, it seems, asked what kind of person, especially one trained as a doctor, would so indulge himself. At the time of his death, few might have imagined the glamorous Guevara going to Bolivia to commit "revolutionary suicide" - a planetary equivalent of the "suicide by cop" in which insane individuals wave guns at the police.  But some in the Castroite milieu of the time, which existed in the U.S. no less than elsewhere, and of which I was then still a member, suspected that Guevara had become an uncomfortable presence for Castro.  

I remember vividly the rainy day in San Francisco, in October 1967, when the death of Guevara produced headlines in the local dailies.  We feared Guevara had been encouraged to leave Cuba and immolate himself in a faroff place, surrounded by people who did not understand or sympathize with him, with the complicity of Bolivian Stalinists.  In addition, much has been revealed since Guevara's death about Tamara Bunke, known as "Tania," the German-Argentine who accompanied him to Bolivia and was also killed there.  Bunke was a KGB/Stasi agent assigned to monitor Guevara's Bolivian operations.  All such perspective is missing from Soderbergh's film. 

The only thing more tedious about this film than its artistic and historic nullity was the juvenile reaction to it visible among the recusant leftists, many of them resembling escapees from an asylum, who crowded into its showing in Manhattan, giggling and cheering at predictable war scenes, like children at a Star Wars performance.  The film should be called Castro's 12, because like an Ocean's franchise product, it is all bogus aesthetics and no content - as well as in recollection of the 12 survivors, including Castro and Guevara, of the doomed Cuban revolutionary mission of 1956, in the yacht Granma.  These personages leap into the camera's eye and depart from it much as do the associates of George Clooney in the Ocean's series - but such may be the fate of any film roles created by Soderbergh.

In real history, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, notwithstanding their political faults, along with Gamal Abdel Nasser and Ahmed Ben Bella in North Africa, erupted into global attention as youthful idols.  The leadership of the leading nations then remained in the superannuated hands of men like Eisenhower, Khrushchev, Macmillan, DeGaulle, and Mao.  In this regard, the Cuban revolutionaries, in particular, and as I have written elsewhere, had more in common with Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Elvis Presley than with Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. 

But Guevara himself, as a doctor who embraced terrorism, may better be compared with Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian physician who became second-in-command to Osama bin Laden, as well as the notorious Stalinist assassin and medical anthropologist, Mark Zborowski; Radovan Karadžić, the government psychiatrist who became infamous as a terror leader in the Balkan wars of the 1990s and now faces trial at The Hague, and even Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi death-camp doctor (see Scientific Training and Radical Islam, published by the Center for Islamic Pluralism).  This is the aspect of the Guevara legacy that most needs examination, and is most lacking from Soderbergh's overblown homage to a revolution that led to tragedy and disillusion, even before the Bolivian fiasco that ended Guevara's life.

Next time you’re thinking of telling a tedious anecdote about how “crazy” your family gets during “the holidays,” ask yourself: Am I from Austria? In the March 1958 issue of Folklore, Maurice Bruce relates that “Saint Nicholas’ Eve—the fifth of December—is celebrated in the Styrian valleys of Austria with performances of the ‘Nikolospiel’. The white-bearded Saint Nikolaus, dressed in splendid robes and complete with mitre and crosier, enters each house in order to fill the children’s shoes with small gifts.

“Behind the good saint hovers the black, shaggy, goat-horned figure of the Krampus. Cloven hooves and a long tail are conspicuous features of this roaring, prancing Satyr who rattles the chains that hang from his wrists, and brandishes a bundle of birch-twigs which he wields with more energy than discrimination. . . . His habit of throwing naughty children into the wooden tub which hangs at his back, and thence into the nearest stream, earns him deep respect.”

You’ve got an alcoholic uncle who didn’t vote for Obama. Austrian kids have to put up with the village pederast dressed as the villain from Legend. “The birch—apart from its phallic significance—may have a connection with the initiation rites of certain witch-covens.” Terrific. There are also those delightful “Krampuskarten,” greeting cards whose verses “stress the importance of good behavior if one hopes to . . . escape the attentions of Krampus.”

St Nikolaus schickt Dir die Schuh’,

Krampus läszt Dich heut in Ruh’!

WEILST BRAV WARST!

That means something like, “Congratulations, you didn’t get carted off in a bucket.” Now for the bad news. The Krampus lives, and he’s graduated to more loathsome punishments for naughty boys and girls. Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage (2008), directed by Michael Campus (clearly a corruption of Krampus), is just such an ingenious torment. After this, you will beg for the birch-switch.

In case you’ve never been to a shopping mall, Thomas Kinkade is the Painter of Light™, which is what Lucifer would call himself if he had a PR firm and patent office at his disposal. Kinkade is famous for painting idyllic scenes using proprietary opalescent pigments that respond to the tender touch of a dimmer switch. Edward Hopper he is not. His online gallery lists such categories as “bridges,” “cottages,” “gardens,” “lighthouses,” and “gazebos,” which are “always the center of attention at big family events. And they’re also ideal for those relaxing lazy mornings with the newspaper and coffee. These images remind us that gazebos provide shelter from the elements and soothe us with their charms.”

I hear gazebos are also swell for conducting a Black Mass. Christmas Cottage is no stranger to deals with the devil: How else did Michael Krampus get Peter O’Toole to act in this direct-to-DVD miscarriage? (He plays young Thomas Kinkade’s artistic mentor; his platitudes make Jack Handey’s sound positively Emersonian.) Apart from starring in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), O’Toole appeared in Becket (1964) and The Lion in Winter (1968). He even played Jeffrey Bernard (1999)!

You don’t have to be an art lover to hate the Painter of Light™ and his gingerbread hellscapes, but it helps. You don’t have to be a film buff to hate The Christmas Cottage; you just have to be a human being. This is essentially It’s a Wonderful Life updated for our crummy times. We’ve got to have a giant bake sale / bikini carwash / treasure hunt / bachelor auction to save the skate park / endangered salamander habitat / Goondocks / Grandma’s house from evil real estate developers! Except that in this case it’s far less interesting than that: Maryanne Kinkade (Marcia Gay Harden), the Blessed Virgin Mother of the Painter of Light™, is about to be foreclosed on.

What will become of the Christmas Cottage?

At this point, you could feed a million ant farms with the treacle dripping out of your screen. Who will save us? The real Thomas Kinkade couldn’t paint his way through a picket fence, but the titular hero of this film (Jared Padalecki) sweeps into Placerville, California, in a goddamn motorcycle sidecar, then paints a mural that blows everyone’s mind and saves Christmas. Oh, really? The only town I know of that was ever saved by beautiful murals is Philadelphia, and I don’t think I saw any paintings in here of Benjamin Franklin fist-bumping Mumia Abu-Jamal.

In terms of sheer contempt for reality, the most wonderful character in this movie is Thomas Kinkade’s deadbeat father, a cartoon character in a leisure suit who speaks in Esperanto and throws cherry bombs at emotional moments. You keep wanting him to save everyone with a blue movie called Christmas Frottage, à la Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008), but instead he learns a valuable lesson or something. Then, we can only assume, he goes back to a lucrative career in copper-wire theft.

Let me put it this way. Imagine that you’ve just been given the worst greeting card ever—a hideous mélange of red doilies and green crêpe paper—and you’re sitting there nodding and smiling and staring at the lapidary sentiment: May your holiday wishes burn you with the fire of a thousand suns. Now imagine you have to keep on faking it for 103 minutes. Sounds pretty awful, doesn’t it? Maybe—but the Painter of Light™ has to keep on faking it until he dies. There are some fates worse than the Krampus. Just don’t walk toward the light.

Waltz with Bashir, an animated autobiographical documentary about the First Lebanon War, or ‘Operation Peace of the Galilee’, as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) labelled it, is an intense and deeply compelling account of the catastrophic 1982 invasion. Culminating in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp massacres – the spectre that haunts post-Zionist Israeli society – Ari Folman’s film imparts the view that, for Israelis, post-traumatic stress disorder is now a fact of life.

The film’s powerful graphics, with stark colour palates that shift across flashback sequences, childhood recollections, hallucinations and combat scenes, at once lend it a depth that could not have been achieved through conventional documentary or fiction formats – and also a simplicity that is entirely appropriate for a revisionist narrative that psychologises a complex political event. While his aesthetic judgement is beyond reproach, Folman, who sees Waltz with Bashir as an apolitical film, conveys a disturbingly skewed account of the First Lebanon War.

Folman may have been right to point out in an interview that the Palestinians can tell their own stories, and that he was better placed to focus on the Israeli point of view. But in portraying the IDF combatants as victims of circumstance, and their mental distress as the paramount consequence of Israel’s disastrous US-propped military operation, Waltz with Bashir is not only incredibly self-obsessed, it is also a striking evasion of responsibility.

The film opens with a pack of 26 dogs racing through an upmarket neighbourhood of Tel Aviv. Saliva frothing at their mouths, the beasts send bar stools flying and young mothers running for cover with their children. The dogs come to a halt outside an office building where a man stands in a window, watching them pant and growl. The man is Folman’s fellow Lebanon conscript, the canine rampage his recurring nightmare.

One rainy night some 20 years after the Lebanon war, Folman’s friend opens up about his nightmare for the first time. He is convinced that the dream is connected to his wartime experiences. Being too squeamish to shoot at people, he was ordered to kill dogs instead in order to stop them from barking at soldiers entering Lebanese villages. He shot 26 dogs in total, and he can remember every single one.

Speaking to his friend in a Tel Aviv bar, Folman realises that he himself recalls very little from the war, and that he never even thinks about it. Later that night, however, he has a flashback from Beirut and slowly comes to realise that he was in the city during the Sabra and Shatila massacre, which was carried out by Christian Phalangist forces three months into the war as an apparent revenge for the murder of their leader, the newly appointed president of Lebanon and ally of Israel, Bashir Gemayel.

Folman meets up with another close friend from his time in the army, who advises him to talk to other people who were there so that he can fill the gaps in his memory. The film follows Folman in his conversations and interviews with old friends, a psychologist and the reporter Ron Ben-Yishai, who was also in Beirut during the war (as a journalist). Folman is slowly able to piece together his wartime experience.

On the eve of the three-day assault on Sabra and Shatila, Folman was in a unit of soldiers that was ordered to fire illuminating flares to aid the Phalangists, who ostensibly entered the camps to look for hiding Palestinian terrorists. In reality, there were virtually no Palestinian fighters left in the camps when the Phalangist forces entered, as they had been mass evacuated to Tunisia two weeks earlier. The IDF had predicted beforehand that massacres might occur and then Israeli defence minister Ariel Sharon and his chief of staff received clear reports that the Phalangists were indeed indiscriminately killing residents in Sabra and Shatila, which was surrounded by the IDF, but they did nothing to prevent it.

It is impossible to be unmoved by the deeply personal Waltz with Bashir. Yet once the initial shock settles, the emotional response that the film provokes proves entirely unhelpful for understanding what Israel’s bloody war in Lebanon was about, how the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut could have been allowed to happen, or what being a young combat soldier is like. The film’s subtext – that war is futile and unglamorous – is, as Folman has said, ‘basic, even prosaic and banal’.

Of course the intention of the film is not to explain the details of the war, but to convey its folly through personal stories of former conscripts, who were left with deep emotional wounds. Yet the film is still at pains to blame the Christian Phalangists for the murderous consequences of the war in Sabra and Shatila. Folman has said of the atrocity: ‘It’s the worst thing that humankind can do to each other. One thing for sure is that the Christian Phalangist militiamen were fully responsible for the massacre. The Israeli soldiers had nothing to do with it. As for the Israeli government, only they know the extent of their responsibility. Only they know if they were informed or not in advance about the oncoming violent revenge.’

Perhaps young conscripts such as Folman had little option but to go into the war and then to follow any orders they were given. Perhaps in the midst of messy combat it is impossible for individual soldiers to grasp the full picture of a war or to know what the purpose of a particular task is. Apportioning guilt and responsibility in such situations is not easy, but is it really fair to claim that Israeli soldiers ‘had nothing to do with it’, even though they in fact aided the Phalangists and witnessed, as shown in Waltz with Bashir, families being dragged out on to the streets, lined up against walls and murdered? Though Folman may have been relatively helpless as a 19-year-old soldier, as an adult at least he could recognise that several parties hold responsibility for what happened.

The First Lebanon War has been described as Israel’s first ‘war of choice’, but Waltz with Bashir, though it includes an angry nod to Sharon’s unwillingness to intervene to prevent the massacres, wants to send a message that the consequences of the invasion cannot all be of Israel’s doing, because Israel did not directly pull the trigger.

Waltz with Bashir projects a very contemporary angst on to events of the past. In the post-Zionist era, and particularly after the Second Lebanon War of June 2006, the idea that war is futile, lacks glory and achieves only destruction and mental health problems holds strong purchase in Israel.

Since the film’s release in Israel, its creators have been approached by streams of men who were deployed in Lebanon in 1982. Now in their forties, these men apparently feel the need to vent their anxieties. Waltz with Bashir encourages such confessions as a way of healing war wounds and it reconstitutes Israeli men as victims of post-traumatic stress disorder. It is this conceptualisation of Israelis, whether as civilians or conscripts, as mere victims of circumstance which leads Folman to let the IDF off the hook regarding Sabra and Shatila.

In fact, the overall sentiment of the film is reminiscent of the anti-war slogan ‘Not in My Name’, adopted by Western protesters against the 2003 Iraq invasion. This was a personal proclamation, simultaneously a statement of innocence and a refusal to attempt to change the situation through collective political action. Now, this defeatist attitude and proclamation of innocence is applied to a war that took place a quarter of a century ago by the very men who helped to carry it out.

The most revealing scene in Waltz with Bashir is when Folman’s character is assured by his close friend that he should not feel responsible or guilty as he did not know why he had been ordered to fire the flares which facilitated the Phalangists’ massacre. He believes the real reason why Folman feels so troubled by his war experience is because he is putting himself in the place of the Nazis. The reason he feels so strongly about Sabra and Shatila in particular is because they remind him of ‘those other camps’. Because his parents were in Auschwitz, ‘the camps’ have really been with Folman since childhood, his friend explains.

Here, even the atrocities against the Palestinian refugees are all about Folman and his apparent psychological suffering as a ‘second-generation Holocaust victim’. Waltz with Bashir has been nominated for a range of prestigious film awards but it really takes the prize of the most introspective and narcissistic ex-soldier’s story ever. It is also a striking perversion of history, conflating the systematic extermination of millions during the Second World War with a three-day, spontaneous violent rampage in 1982.

At the end of the film, there is a sudden shift from animation to real archive footage of Palestinian refugee women wailing amongst the rubble and dead bodies in the Sabra and Shatila camps. Suddenly the impact of the graphics which were so forceful throughout the film wanes. Nothing is as shocking as reality.

While the Israelis are drawn as two-dimensional cartoon figures, the Palestinians are the only ones shown as real human beings, in actual film footage. In an attempt, seemingly, to hammer home the point that war is no American action movie, and that the true victims were the refugees in the camps, this final scene is in fact Waltz with Bashir’s ultimate assault on the Palestinians. They only feature as massacred and bloated body parts, as symbols for Israelis’ guilt.

Waltz with Bashir is an excellent, thought-provoking and devastating film. You will have never seen anything like it. Yet though it is highly recommendable, it is also objectionable.

Like many Americans, I find myself in front of my TV on Sunday nights, watching Mad Men. I like the show - certainly enough to watch it at least semi-regularly - but whenver I start to get sucked in, I'm yanked out of that dream state that John Gardner talks about by the show's unflagging insistence on reminding me when it takes place (the 50s; actually, the show takes place in 1960, but the 50s are the cultural and political moment being portrayed). The degree of self-consciousness is so great - it's as if the show itself were an advertisement for an era - that when we see a scene in a doctor's office with the doctor smoking, we feel as if the scene itself were inserted just to show us a smoking doctor. Just to remind us, that is, in case we forgot, that it's 1960 we're talking about and, boy, were things different then.

Now, there's nothing wrong with self-consciousness, but in most other ways Mad Men isn't that kind of show. This is not Being John Malkovich. It's not Adaptation. It is, rather, by most standards fairly traditional on the level of narrative and character, and so the camera's relentless focus on period details feels intrusive in a show that otherwise aims not to be. The same things happens in the movie The Ice Storm - a good movie, it seems to me, but not a great movie, despite some great peformances (Christina Ricci is wonderful, just as she is in the terrific Buffalo 66). For me, at least, one of the reasons the movie is distracting is the way it fetishizes the 70s details. In that sense, the movie is true to the book, though the book, I would argue, is a great book, not merely good.

Now, in the book, too (perhaps even more so), the 70s details are fetishized, but they're fetishized in a way that's much harder to do with a camera - at least when the movie itself is otherwise fairly narratively conventional. The Ice Storm, the book, is narrated in a distant third-person voice (though at the end of the novel we learn that the whole book has been filtered through the sensibility and voice of the older son), and so the wonderful opening chapter that announces the era in which the book takes place is filtered through a particular character and a particular voice and sensibility. In the book, the era becomes a full-fledged character in its own right - which is what the movie may also be trying to do, but it does it much more clumsily.

None of which is to say that movies and TV shows should ignore period details. But the ways in which a book is self-conscious don't always translate seamlessly onto the screen, which is why it's often the case that the truer a movie is to a book, the more trouble it finds itself in. (The Virgin Suicides is another example of a movie that's very true to the book, but because the book is not a filmic book--it's deeply internal--the movie doesn't succeed nearly as well as the book does.)

Joshua Henkin, author of Matrimony, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he'll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

 

****************

Not to toot my own horn (OK, I will, if only briefly), but the book was a 2007 NY Times Notable Book, and the way this is relevant to you is that I'm offering a free copy to three lucky Jewcy readers. All you have to do is send me an email at Jhenkin at SLC dot edu with the subject "Achin' for Matrimony" and you'll be entered in the drawing. For more about the novel, click on here, and for those of you who want to skip straight over the foreplay and buy the book for yourself, your friends, your cousins (Chanukah isn't far away!) here's the place for you.

Finally, a note to book groups. I've been participating in a lot of book group discussions of Matrimony, so if you're in a book group, or know people who are, and would like a visit from the author either in person or by telephone, get in touch with me at the aforementioned email address or through the book group link on my website

I've only watched the 12-minute version of "Obsession," the film sent to more than 28 million people in various swing states, apparently by associates and partisans of the Jewish movement known as Aish HaTorah, or "Fire of the Torah," but it was enough for to understand that it is the work of hysterics. One of my favorite hysterics, the Jerusalem Post's Caroline Glick, is featured prominently, pieces of the sky falling about her head as she rants about the End of Days.

Aish HaTorah denies any direct connection to the film, which is designed to make naive Americans believe that B-52s filled with radical jihadists are about to carpet-bomb their churches, and are only awaiting Barack Obama's ascension to launch the attack. But the manifold connections, as laid out in this article, among others, make it clear that high-level officials of Aish are up to their chins in this project. The most disreputable flack in New York, Ronn Torossian, who represents Aish, makes an appearance in this story, which was to be expected: Torossian last made the news when he employed sock-puppetry in defense of one of his many indefensible clients, Agriprocessors, Inc., the Luvavitch-owned kosher slaughterhouse that treats its employees nearly as badly as it treats its animals, which is saying something, because Agriprocessor slaughterers have been filmed ripping out the tracheas of living cattle.

But I digress. It's said of Ronn Torossian that he represents "right-wing" Israeli politicians, but this description does not do his clients justice. "Right-wing" is Bibi Netanyahu. Torossian represents the lunatic fringe. Several years ago, in one of my only encounters with him, he introduced me to Benny Elon, a rabbi and settler leader who was then Israel's tourism minister, and who, at various points in his career, has more or less advocated the ethnic cleansing of Israel of its Arab citizens. At one point, when Elon had gone to take a telephone call, Torossian and I started talking about Israel's right to reprisal for terrorist attacks. I was arguing in favor of some sort of proportionality (this was after Jenin, in which the Israeli army chose to root out terrorism block by block rather than bomb the city from the air) but Torossian interrupted: "I think we should kill a hundred Arabs or a thousand Arabs for every one Jew they kill." I was somewhat taken aback, of course, because this is a Nazi idea, rather than a Jewish idea. I asked him to explicate: "If someone from a town blows himself up and kills Jews, we should wipe out the town he's from, kill them all. The Israelis are suckers. They should have destroyed Jenin." He went on like this for some time. I would only note that Torossian, to the best of my knowledge, never volunteered for the Israeli army, so he seemed to me by definition a chickenhawk.

Torossian's attitude toward Arabs and toward the peace process are echoed in the approach of Aish HaTorah, which is just about the most fundamentalist movement in Judaism today. Its operatives flourish in the radical belt of Jewish settlements just south of Nablus, in the northern West Bank, and their outposts across the world propagandize on behalf of a particularly sterile, sexist and revanchist brand of Judaism. Which is amusing, of course, because "Obsession" is meant to expose a particularly sterile, sexist and racist brand of Islam.

The tragedy of "Obsession" is not that it is wrong; the tragedy is that it takes a serious issue, and a serious threat -- that of Islamism -- and makes it into a cartoon. Its central argument is that the "Islamofascism" of today is not only the equivalent of Nazism, but worse than Nazism. This is quite a thing for a Jewish organization to argue. One of the featured speakers in "Obsession" is a self-described "former PLO terrorist" named Walid Shoebat, who argues on film that a "secular dogma like Nazism is less dangerous than Islamofascism is today."

This is lunacy, of course. Islamism isn't Nazism. It's bad enough without being labeled Nazism. Martin Gilbert, the biographer of Churchill, shows up in the film as well, and doesn't cover himself in glory: "History has an unfortunate habit of always repeating itself," he says. Always? Does this mean that the Arabs are right now constructing death camps for the Jewish citizens of Israel?

Just unbelievable, but the most unbelievable part of the "Obsession" campaign is its timing: What does this film have to do with Barack Obama? The film is meant to suggest that Obama will provide aid and comfort to Islamism, or is an Islamist himself. There is not one shred of proof on this planet that Barack Obama is anything other than an Israel-supporting Christian. Yes, he went to party with Rashid Khalidi. So did I. Does that make me a member of Hezbollah?

I actually have another idea for a film: I would call it "Obsession" as well, but it would be about the poor souls who believe that Obama is a radical Muslim, that Israel has a right to expel Arabs from its lands, and that America should declare war on all of Islam.

The Boy In the Striped Pajamas (view the trailer below) has been accused of ‘Disneyfying the Final Solution’. Watching the film, it is not hard to see why.

For one, it is a childhood tale produced and distributed by the Disney subsidiary, Miramax. And like the Dreamfactory’s animated features, The Boy In the Striped Pajmas, which is based on a children’s book, is a morality tale and a film which both kids and adults can enjoy.

The film tells the story of two eight-year-old boys who are at either side of Auschwitz’s fence. The one wearing the ‘striped pajamas’ -- Shmuel -- is a Jew destined for the gas chambers. The other boy, Bruno, is the son of the camp’s newly-appointed commandant. The two boys strike up an unlikely friendship.

Even after weeks of hanging out with Shmuel by the electric barbed wire fence, playing checkers and eating sandwiches and cakes – which Shmuel wolfs down – Bruno still doesn’t realise that the pajamas are, in fact, uniforms for death camp inmates. He still believes Shmuel lives on some kind of farm for Jews with low ambitions. For example, he observes that one of the ‘farmers’, Pavel, who often comes over to do grunt work at Bruno’s house which is near the camp, ‘used to be a doctor, but now he just peels potatoes’.

Bruno doesn’t get what that smelly smoke coming out of the chimneys is all about or why his dad’s subordinate beat Pavel to death just because he spilled some red wine while serving dinner. He never questions why soldiers with barking Alsatians shout orders at the emaciated ‘farmers’ as they build a wooden hut. And, strangely, Shmuel is rather chubby and manages to get a lot of ‘alone-time’ by the fence which, in reality, would have been closely monitored by SS soldiers in watchtowers.

The question of whether or not the story line and the film’s details are plausible might seem petty. After all, the full title of the book it is based on is The Boy In the Striped Pajamas: A Fable, and so the moral message takes precedence over realism.

In depicting the Holocaust through the eyes of innocent children, who are seen as untainted by the evil that apparently lurks in all grown men, John Boyne, the author of the book, and Mark Herman, the film’s director, can avoid addressing the historical as well as moral complexity of the Holocaust. They simply urge us to feel the pain of innocent children growing up during the Second World War. The injustice suffered by millions of Jews and others appears inexplicable.

The John Betjeman quote which opens the film is telling: ‘Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows.’

But Herman should take heed of Paul Bailey’s injunction, in his introduction to Primo Levi’s memoirs If This Is a Man, which recounts in painstaking detail the horrors of Auschwitz: ‘I hope [Levi’s books] find their way into the hands of the practitioners of the new sentimentality – those who try to persuade us, with increasing shrillness, that Man is vile: the artists who use the terrible fact of the camps for emotional and aesthetic effect, and the critics who compare their grimmer brand of kitsch to King Lear and the paintings of Goya’s last years.’ (1)

The Boy In the Striped Pajamas is based on a children’s novel and it presents a child’s eye view of the Holocaust, so perhaps a bit of simplification is understandable? If it can serve as a light introduction for children to the horrors of the Holocaust and spark in them an interest to find out more, doesn’t that justify a bit of factual laxness?

In fact, the film is not exclusively aimed at young people. There were no children in the cinema where I saw it and Herman himself has said that it is only a family film in the sense that ‘parents can, and probably should, take their kids. I don’t think it’s specifically aimed at kids at all’ (2).

And, besides, as Linda Grant, writing in the Guardian, recognises, there is a danger here: ‘When you make films about the Final Solution for children there’s not much you can say other than to introduce the historical events in a palatable way, and to make a general lesson about being nice to other people.’ (3)

Grant has a point, but her critique misses the mark. Not only is it possible to teach children about the Holocaust without presenting it as a fable, but The Boy In the Striped Pajamas does contain several ‘unpalatable’ moments. For example, Shmuel’s and Bruno’s tragic fate reflect those of most concentration camp inmates.

And while the film, as Grant says, indeed ‘sentimentalises the subject and draws the mind away from the moral complexity of the many questions the Final Solution raises’, when it comes to ‘Disneyfying the Holocaust’, as she puts it, The Boy In the Striped Pajamas is in no way original.

The film is simply the latest manifestation of how the Holocaust has been turned into a simplistic fable. It has become a moral absolute for our relativistic times - the one tragedy that we can all agree must never happen again. To this effect, the Holocaust is now evoked in debates on everything from the conflict in Darfur to animal rights and schoolyard bullying.

As the film’s producer, David Heyman, says, while The Boy In the Striped Pajamas is ‘a Holocaust story set in 1940s Germany, for me it is timeless’. He then cites ‘such contemporary horrors as Rwanda, Darfur and Somalia’ (4). In conceiving of the Holocaust as a historical horror story that keeps being repeated in different forms, we lose sight of the particularities of each of those events and this reduces our ability to properly understand any of them.

Many well-intentioned initiatives to maintain the memory of the Holocaust end up relativising it and belittling the experiences of those who were persecuted, enslaved, gassed to death or forced to flee their home countries under the threat of extermination in Nazi concentration camps.

Consider the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust in Britain for example. Each year, the trust comes up with a new theme for the memorial day, and these are conveyed to the public through simplistic slogans. This year’s theme was ‘Imagine, remember, reflect, react’, while 2007’s key message was ‘same - but different’. The idea that the millions who perished in Europe in the 1930s and 40s were killed ‘just because they were ‘different”’, as the trust put it, means reducing the anti-Semitism that gave rise to the Holocaust to just an extreme form of social exclusion.

The New Labour government initiated Holocaust Memorial Day in 2001 and the trust’s literature is littered with New Labourite buzzwords such as inclusion, crossing cultural barriers, celebrating difference, engaging disaffected youth, building respect and addressing bullying. Taking action on these issues has nothing to do with remembering the Holocaust, and everything to do with the government’s crass community cohesion agenda.

Yes, there are lessons to be learnt from the Holocaust and we should not forget that six million Jews and others were systematically slaughtered at the hands of the Nazis. But the reduction of the Holocaust to a political prop, to a morality lesson for the masses and a mere symbol of evil only serves to diminish the memory of its victims.

While The Boy In the Striped Pajamas takes a childish approach to the Holocaust, it seems most initiatives today to spread awareness of the subject treat us all as children who are incapable of understanding the political and moral complexity of this great atrocity.

As for Grant, she only doubts the validity of making a Holocaust film for children because she believes that not even adults can be expected to understand it. As she puts it: ‘We are ourselves too childlike to understand much of the great opaque experience of the Final Solution, with only occasional windows breaking through the stone walls of history. How can we expect children to understand what we do not?’ (5)

The mainstreaming of this demeaning attitude poses a greater threat to historical awareness and to the memory of the Holocaust than any single children’s film could ever do.

 

 

Mexican director Alejandro Springall describes My Mexican Shivah as a film "about existence" and "acquiring the tools to continue living and re-organizing the family after a loss." While it does deal with such serious themes, don't let the gravity fool you: My Mexican Shivah is as funny as it is thoughtful, and as sexy as it is poignant. Set in a Jewish neighborhood in Mexico City, the seriocomic drama tells the story of a Mexican Jewish family dealing with the sudden loss of their "beloved paterfamilias", Moishe. The film, which debuted at the New York Jewish Film Festival, opens on Friday, August 29 at New York's Quad Cinema (13 street b/5th and 6th ave), and can be seen on Video On Demand from your local cable provider beginning August 29, 2008.

I loved everything about this film: The characters were very real and well acted, the story was complex but relatable, and the whole thing was visually engaging. I especially appreciated the way that shivah rituals were portrayed without presenting them or the characters involved in them as clichés--often the case with religious themes in film. Tell me about how you accomplished this. Making this film was a very personal journey, in the sense that for the first time I relied and deeply trusted my intuition, making a big effort in rejecting everything that felt too rational, too stylish or that drifted away from naturalism. Being profoundly interested in human nature, I also rejected any scene or performance where emotions felt deduced because when emotions truly irrupt then you believe the characters and get engaged in their personal disasters and successes.

This film is about existence, about acquiring the tools to continue living and re-organizing the family after a loss. I wanted the audience to live a shivah and family kvetching, because it is in the bosom of the family where we learn how to feel and also where we can take the masks off and be exactly who we are. Nobody knows us better than our own families, and sitting shivah for seven days is a perfect setup to develop a whole range of emotions, the dark and the bright side of everyone.

Each character, major and minor, had a life of their own, and the arcs of each would continue developing even as the ends credits start to roll. To achieve this, the only tools I had were the actors, and even though it was not mandatory that they were Jewish, I was very keen in looking for Jewish actors to interpret the Jewish characters in the film, so I cast a mixture of professional and non professional actors, and rehearsed with them for 6 weeks because I didn't want to keep on developing characters on the set, I wanted all the actors to come in with their characters already in the skin, incarnated. I only had little time to shoot this movie, and I needed all the time to create a life that was plausible, and get it on film.

It was a bit frustrating for the DP, Art Director, Costume Designer, etc., because I always told them that this film only relied on the actors and therefore their expertise had to be blended in a way that it didn't call the attention or distract the obsessions and pulsations of the characters. Contrary to most films that want to show great production values--a Grand Guignol--we worked the other way around, where less is more, and the more simple the scenes looked, the deeper and complex the different readings.

The two "divine accountants" who attend the shivah--offering commentary as they attempt to calculate whether an angel of light or darkness will accompany Moishe's soul on its journey--remind me of a Greek chorus. Meanwhile, the Chevreman reminds me of a Shakespearian fool. Tell me about the inspiration behind these and the other symbols you used. The two fascinating old Hassids are a metaphor of tradition. As you can see, our family in the film is not religious or observant, but tradition is always present. Galia, the beautiful young woman in the film, rejects religion. She is a modern woman, she doesn't believe that a sacred world exists anymore, but eventually she is the only one who can see the "divine accountants" and realizes the wisdom behind rituals.

I love rituals, especially Jewish rituals, because even though they remit us to an archaic world where time has frozen, it is still very clear how efficient and effective they are. The film is full of subtle details, and I know that you cannot get them all on the first viewing, because even though the film looks very simple, it is very baroque, and a lot of things are in subtext or happening behind the scenes. There are details like Moishe's book about his town, Vielun, which I chose because it was the first town bombarded the first day of WWII, and it was like a little memorial to the Shoah.

Finally, all of our characters are living an extraordinary moment except for the Chevreman, whose job is to organize shivahs, so that character is different because that is his ordinary world.

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During the 1980s, Israeli filmmakers were preoccupied with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the 1990s, they explored the dynamic between Israel's urban centers and the country's periphery. The past decade has witnessed a rise in films that seek to portray the experience of communities previously considered marginal to Israeli cinema. Avi Nesher's latest drama, The Secrets (Israel/France, 2007), joins a host of recent Israeli films, both feature-length and documentary, which explore Israel's ultra-orthodox community.

Ultra-orthodox Jews were mostly absent from Israeli filmmaking until the 1990s. This is no surprise, because Israeli cinema has historically reflected the identity of the Israeli establishment, promoting secularism and criticizing religion as a sign of ethno-nationalism rather than as a cultural facet of everyday life. From the late 1990s, however, the religious experience moved to the center of stage of Israeli cinema.

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Adam Hootnick: director of 'Unsettled'Unsettled, an award-winning independent documentary about the 2005 disengagement from Gaza, opened this month at theaters in NYC and LA. I saw the film in January, at Limmud NY, and called it "amazing." The movie follows six young Israelis in the weeks leading up to the disengagement: Three who live in settlements inside Gaza and don't want to leave, two soldiers who will have to remove the settlers, and a peace activist who's pro-disengagement. It's fascinating, poignant and surprisingly fun. Last week I asked director Adam Hootnick about his experiences making the film, watching people's reactions, and making all-important decisions about the soundtrack (he used to work for MTV.) Here's what he had to say.

I first heard about this film from a woman who went to my yoga studio in Nashville. I was wearing a shirt with Hebrew on it and she said, “Are you Jewish? Did you see Unsettled at the Nashville Film Festival?” She wasn’t Jewish, but had been really affected by it, and really wanted to talk about it. What have you found to be the most surprising and interesting reactions you’ve gotten to your film?

That’s a great story – those are the responses that I find most exciting, if not surprising. I guess it’s not surprising because I always believed that this was not just a Jewish story, not just an Israeli story, and not even just a Middle East story (even though it would be hard to convince theatrical distributors and broadcasters of that….) It’s a story about conflict resolution, and about the fact that human situations are rarely black and white. This is a story about a group of people who are all supposed to be on the same side, but it’s not that simple. It’s a story about people finding ways to not kill each other. So I have not been surprised to find that people from a lot of backgrounds – a former Pakistani ambassador, rabbis, professional negotiators, the Egyptian guy who approached me after a screening to give me a hug – believe this is a story that can have an impact.

How did you come to this project? How long did you spend preparing and how long were you shooting?

I had lived in Israel for a year after college, teaching at the American school there and then working at NBC News in Tel Aviv. Most of my friends were Israeli guys around the same age as I was. They were just out of the army (pretty much everyone has to serve in the IDF) but otherwise they were just like my American friends (almost none of whom went to the military) – they listened to the same music, did the same stuff in their free time. As it became clear that the withdrawal was going to happen, I started thinking about what it would be like for my friends to be sent on this mission against other Israelis. I wondered about the American parallel as well: what it would be like if the US Army was sent to clear out a county of Texas to turn the land over to Mexico? Even without all the religious and geopolitical overtones present in the Middle East, what would it be like to be a soldier sent on a mission to take people from your own country out of their homes?

Having worked for several years as a producer at MTV, telling stories about young people in conflict, I realized this was probably going to be a very compelling story. And, of course, there was also a deeper level, a universal question about how to reconcile religion and democracy when the two seem incompatible. Obviously that’s not just a question in Israel. In terms of preparation, it all happened pretty fast. I didn’t make the decision to leave until May, and I flew to Israel in July. I was over there shooting for two months.

Don't break the chain: A scene from the movieDid you have any expectations for how things were going to go during the pullout? Were you particularly surprised by any of the things you saw?

I had no idea what to expect. In retrospect everything looks like it went smoothly, but in June of 2005 the protests across the country were getting intense – people throwing oil and tire spikes onto highways, riot police, water cannons, etc. There were rumors about settlers stockpiling weapons to resist the evacuation. So nobody knew what was going to happen.

Almost everything I saw and experienced surprised me. A few things were negative, including the rare episodes of serious physical violence I saw during the pullout, and seeing some Israelis resort to Holocaust symbolism and calling other Israelis Nazis. But the vast majority of the surprises were incredibly uplifting. I was amazed at the willingness of people on all “sides” of this issue to open up their lives to me, sacrificing their privacy at some of the hardest moments they had ever faced, because they believed it was so important to try to tell the outside world who they were and what they were going through. I was inspired by witnessing, again and again and again, the spectacle of people who responded to this conflict, even in its most intense moments, by saying, essentially, “I hate what you are doing, but I don’t hate you.”

There is a scene that didn’t make the film (because of time constraints) where one of the soldiers goes into a house and meets three guys who are about to be evicted, and they ask to exchange phone numbers with all of the soldiers because they want to try to stay in touch afterward to try to make sure they don’t end up on opposite sides of a battle within Israeli society. These moments of trust and dialogue really bolstered my faith in humanity – I feel very lucky to have witnessed them.

What was the hardest part to shoot?

Two days were hardest. The first was the day the army first went to try to deliver eviction notices, when I saw some of the most violent scuffles take place. Until I saw people start clawing at each other, I had never processed how scared I was that people might start hurting each other. Suddenly I was overcome, more than anything, by sadness, and I just had to put the camera down for a few minutes. I called my co-producer and co-cinematographer, Mickey Elkeles, who is this big, soft-spoken former soldier who had been injured in combat a number of times, figuring he’d tell me to toughen up. He was a little choked up, too. The second was the day I watched one of my characters – who by this time I knew quite well – being removed from her home. Regardless of how you feel about the political issues, it’s a complicated moment, and I wrestled with a lot of questions about my own presence there, putting my camera in people’s faces while this was happening.

How did you choose the six people who you focus on in this film?

I approached it the same way I approached casting any story I did at MTV. I wanted to find regular kids who represented a cross-section of the backgrounds and perspectives that existed, to show what it was like to be one of the young people at the front lines of this conflict where, at least in theory, there was no enemy.

There are some unexpectedly funny moments in this film. When I saw it at Limmud NY everyone was in hysterics as we watched an American reporter try to give the same rehearsed speech over and over as he was pushed forward in a sea of settlers. Were there any other moments when you found yourself laughing unexpectedly?

I was laughing pretty much anytime I was with Lior, the long-haired Gaza surfer-lifeguard. Lior: in a rare clothed appearanceI think in the two months I was shooting the film I only saw him wearing a shirt three times. And usually he was wearing a speedo, which is always funny. Maybe it’s especially funny in Gaza.

In many ways I found Ye’ela to be the most interesting character in the film. Her sister was killed in a terrorist bombing, but she was working to return Gaza to the Palestinians. Her situation was so extraordinary, but somehow her message of reconciliation was less articulate and intense than the settlers protesting the situation. And Tamar and Yuval, the other two pro-disengagement characters, both also seemed to be very ambivalent about their positions.

Did you see that as a pattern across the board? The people who were anti-disengagement were vehement and passionate, and the people who were pro disengagement had more ambivalence?

I think there was definitely more ambivalence on the part of people who were pro-disengagement. While most of them believed it was wrong to have an ongoing settlement and military presence in Gaza, they were not positive that this decision would lead to peace, in the short term or the long term. They were more likely to frame their position in pragmatic terms, rather than emotional ones. They also were not being removed from their homes, and not forced to confront religious convictions that they considered sacred and inviolable, as was the case with many disengagement opponents.

However, I strongly disagree with the characterization that Ye’ela was less articulate, particularly given that she was speaking in a second language. (If her communication in English is unclear, that is my fault as a filmmaker for asking her to communicate in my first language rather than her own.) But I think that when she talks about why she favors compromise with Palestinians, even after Palestinian terrorists killed her sister, and why she believes settlements in Gaza unreasonably put soldiers at risk, how she doesn’t understand how a settler could face the mother of a soldier killed defending settlements, she is quite lucid and intense. No less so than is Meir, the lifeguard and religious student, when he explains that while he believes in peace with Arabs, the Torah is the only true religious text, and negotiation on the borders of Israel can never be permitted.

I know you worked as a producer for MTV, and there’s a lot of really interesting music in ‘Unsettled.’ How did you choose the songs you wanted for this film?

The music is like a seventh character, in a way. I wanted to use a lot of Israeli pop, rock, funk, and hip hop, because in a way it might communicate to young American viewers how much we overlap with other cultures. The hip hop and rock anthems are approachable to viewers who might never have heard a Middle Eastern sound, but can dig something that’s a little bit foreign. And as soon as I heard the lyrics to Matisyahu’s “Youth” – I knew that song had to be in this film. Fortunately, he agreed.

Is there a message you want people to walk away with when they leave ‘Unsettled’?

Not really. Except that I hope people will see something they hadn’t seen before, and have some stereotypes dented a little bit. I hope they will see that people sometimes can resolve painful, passionate disagreements without killing each other. I hope they will think about how they would respond if they were in the shoes of someone else. All the typical indie-filmmaker stuff.

Where are the next few places you’ll be screening the film?

NYC, at the Pioneer Theater, starting Friday May 9th, and LA, at the Laemmle Music Hall 3, starting Friday May 16th. People who aren’t in one of those cities can get it on DVD now, too.

Smart People: Now in theatersNo publisher will touch a manuscript with the word “intellectual” in the title, or so goes one chestnut about how stupid our culture has become. When British studio heads were looking to adapt Alan Bennett’s play "The Madness of George III" for celluloid, they felt it necessary to change the title to The Madness of King George lest too many Americans wonder what had happened to Parts I and II. Still, give us a chance and we may just lift our knuckles off the floor long enough to sit through cerebral entertainment. Sideways proved that an intelligent script featuring a sadsack oenophile snob – and Thomas Hayden Church! – could galvanize a national market for Pinot Noir. Smart People isn’t nearly as good, but it’s heartening to know that even a lackluster script featuring a sadsack literary snob – and Thomas Hayden Church! – can strike a foothold in Hollywood.

Dennis Quaid plays widower Lawrence Wetherhold, a name with Middlemarch-ian cadences wholly appropriate to his profession: He teaches Victorian literature at Carnegie Mellon. Actually, he doesn’t so much teach as hector Victor literature. An edifice to self-absorption in tweeds, Wetherhold could not care less about his students, their names, or their CliffsNotes-prompted opinions about great books. He is shopping around a manuscript with something much worse than “intellectual” in the title, about the untold history of literary theory, and that no one apart himself takes seriously.

Wetherhold suffers a minor seizure after attempting to retrieve his briefcase from his impounded car, which in his blithe indifference he parked across two faculty parking spaces. Since he can’t legally drive for six months, he needs a chauffeur. His doting, overachieving Young Republican daughter Vanessa (Ellen Page) has got SATs and anti-stem cell research leaflets to attend to, so she fobs the task off onto to his wastrel adopted brother Chuck (Hayden Church), who needs a place to stay.

There’s also a surreptitious poet in the family in the form of Wetherhold’s son, enrolled at Carnegie Mellon, but he’s indisposed with daddy issues and hormones (he’s the kind of character Michael Chabon would have made gay). In the course of his physical recovery, Wetherhold undergoes an implausibly emotional one facilitated by the lady doctor who treated him (Sarah Jessica Parker). She took his insufferable course a decade ago and developed a schoolgirl crush that has now metamorphosed into Florence Nightingale syndrome for tenured assholes. If only he remembered her, and hadn’t given her a C…

Thomas Hayden Church: bracing himself for the reviewsHigh-minded misanthropy was better attained by Jeff Daniels in The Squid and the Whale, a film that at least had the courtesy not to indulge in a treacly redemption fantasy. It’s hard to fathom that any woman in her right mind, much less an ER physician with little free time on her hands, would give Wetherhold a second chance after their disastrous first date. Or that a literature prof would not have long ago been shaken violently out of his solipsistic torpor by a right-wing daughter who feeds him career advice from Dick Cheney’s playbook. Hayden Church has a few scene-stealing moments as the least maladjusted, and least accomplished, member of this patchwork bourgeois family, though a disturbing subplot centered around sexual tension with his niece distracts from his winning efforts to inject a little fun in everyone’s drab Pittsburgh lives. Otherwise, the dialog in Smart People is only ever medium-clever.

Though I think debut director Noam Murray shows great potential as a satirist as sharp and merciless as his protagonist. He hits a perfect note in a throwaway scene set at the Penguin Group offices in Manhattan, where Wetherhold’s book has finally, against all expectation, found an unlikely champion. The editor has made some creative changes to market this pompous tome: he’s going to call it You Can’t Read and make everyone hate its author. “The thing is like a fucking bully…NPR will go after you, and pretty soon you’ll find yourself defending it on Charlie Rose.” An entire, funnier, film might have been made out of this untilled soil of tabloid book publishing.

Ben Stein: Schoolboy rebel Ben Stein has worn many hats throughout the course of his professional life. He has been a writer, a professor, a lawyer, a Hollywood consultant, and, famously, an actor and gameshow host. He even had a stint as a speechwriter for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Now Stein is simultaneously taking on some new roles: Documentary filmmaker, self-proclaimed rebel of our generation, and…Intelligent Design proponent? Beginning April 18, he’s bringing his rebellious self to a theater near you with his new movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a documentary about the freedom of speech (or lack thereof) surrounding the Intelligent Design/Darwinism debate.

Stein lays the foundation for his quest in the opening to the film’s impending-doom-filled trailor:

Like most people, I also have questions. Very big questions, like how did we get here? Where are we going? Is there a meaning and purpose in life? Or are we, the universe, and everything in it, merely the result of pure dumb fate and chance? For most of my life, I believe the answers to these questions were fairly straightforward. Everything that exists was created by a loving God.

Fair enough. Respecting that very smart people, namely Darwinist scientists, believe otherwise, Stein remained untroubled by the matter, acknowledging that Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Inquiry entitles everyone to express his own opinion and to pursue his own research. But then the primordial soup hit the fan. Stein heard about Richard Sternberg, former managing editor of Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, a scientific journal affiliated with the Smithsonian Institute, who lost his job and suffered academic and professional persecution simply by allowing an article by Discovery Institute mastermind Stephen C. Meyer to be published. Stein regarded this event as a tragedy, with dangerous implications.

“We believe in a free society,” Stein says. “This isn’t Nazi Germany.” He claims that we are living in a “Era of Darwin” in which people must learn to shut up and play along with the paradigm of evolution, or to face dire consequences. And, according to Stein, everyone is in on the conspiracy, including the media, the academy, and the court systems. The logical conclusion: Darwinists are afraid and are hiding something.

The Mouse Trap: Too complex to work without one of its parts His main argument is that in the time of Galileo, Intelligent Design theorists would have had no problem propagating and vocalizing their ideas. Too bad that in making such an argument, Stein completely overlooks the fact that Galileo was placed under house arrest, had his books banned, and was forced to discredit all of his research, simply for having the audacity to say that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around.

Ultimately, Stein concludes that “Darwinism is not only improbable, it might actually be dangerous.” In a November 2007 interview with Bill O’Reilly, Stein says that he sees gaps in Darwinism that no one is attempting to fill except for Intelligent Design Theorists. Whether or not these theorists turn out to be right is irrelevant, he says—the simple fact that they attempt to provide a counterpoint is noble in itself.

Even if this is a fair argument, it is hard to pick out amid Stein’s use of Design-smattered terminology. In the interview, he refers to Darwin’s theory as a “relic” left over from 19^th century imperialism which states that humans evolved from monkeys (Darwin never said this, by the way) and that life started when some lightning hit a puddle of mud, a theory about which Stein says, “that has never struck me as convincing.” When he says that the cell’s perfectly moving thousands of parts can only be explained by the hand of a benevolent God, he sounds like Michael Behe in “Irreducible Complexity.” These little comments makes it seem like Stein has already made up his mind about which camp is emitting the most truth.

With the releasing of Expelled, Stein sets himself up to be the voice of the subjugated Intelligent Design theorist. And he’s expecting to change some opinions and to raise some controversy. He says:

I now realize that it was my duty to get the word out, to warn others before it’s too late. So I’m gonna begin by warning you. Feel free to watch this film if you must, and I hope you do. But you’ve got to know that doing so could land you in a heap of trouble. Some of you are gonna lose your friends for watching this film. Some of you may even lose your jobs. In fact, if you’re a scientist with any hope of a future, I suggest you leave right now…but if you do leave, will anyone be left to fight this battle? Anyone? Anyone?

Advanced screening reviews are, uh, mixed – according to the Expelled newsroom, Richard Dawkins gave it a thumbs down, but Rush Limbaugh thought it was great! But the question remains: Is it even possible to criticize the movie without being written off as narrow-minded? I guess we shall see, starting April 18.

Low on motivation? Lacking inspiration? In the market for an extra dose of faith in your own abilities, or even in humankind as a whole? Sometimes those elusive needs can be met in the dim enchantment of a movie theater, and this spring offers a bounty of heartening, galvanizing documentaries that will spur you to action. Here are five films sure to rouse even the most cynical critics.

Young@Heart: Cinematical calls the subject of this documentary a "no brainer," and describes the project as "a very sweet film that simply wants to celebrate things like friendship, talent and passion." The movie follows the Young@Heart chorus—a singing group comprised of seniors ages 72 to 88—as they prepare for a big concert. A movie about a bunch of old people singing might sound boring, but these crazy cats perform covers by bands like The Clash, The Ramones, and James Brown. Much more than a smarmy, precious novelty act, the Young@Heart chorus has been around for 25 years, and the documentary demonstrates how music gives these seniors—and can potentially give us all—the gift of longer, happier lives.
Blindsight: Lucy Walker's documentary about six blind Tibetan children who set out to climb Mount Everest has been called "spiritually aware" and "stirring." The journey is the destination in this film, and the children are shepherded along the expedition by their incredible teacher, Sabriye Tenberken. Also blind, Tenberken is one of the founders of Braille Without Borders, and she's determined to use this adventure to reinforce the self-esteem of her students, whose Tibetan society regards blindness as punishment for sin. Tenberken is assisted by a team of skilled climbers, one of them Erik Weihenmayer: The only blind person to have climbed the "Seven Summits," the tallest peak on every continent.
War Dance: Winner of the 2007 Sundance award for documentary direction, this powerful film focuses on three children in the Patongo refugee camp whose lives have been forever changed by the raging violence in war-torn, northern Uganda. Described as "uplifting" and an "honorable, sometimes inspiring exploration of the primal healing power of music and dance," viewers accompany Dominic, Rose, Nancy, and their schoolmates as they prepare to compete in the country's national music and dance festival. The odds are against them: Schools in refugee camps aren't exactly known for winning awards. Despite the atrocities and inconceivable losses they've known, these kids show that with something to look forward to, hope can be cultivated and increased.
Girls Rock! The Movie: This "cheerfully raucous" documentary has been in theaters for about a month, now, but new screenings are popping up all the time, and you can even request to bring it to your town. The film follows preteen and adolescent girls through a Portland, Oregon-based Rock n' Roll Camp during a crucial point in their development, when issues such as body image, self esteem, and boys are beginning to come into play. Within the all-female community of girls ages 8-18, these budding musicians and blossoming women learn to express, respect, and appreciate themselves (not to mention rock the house).
Planet B-Boy: This "great, populist dance film" explores the spread of break dancing across the globe, and details it's "almost spiritual importance" to the b-boys who claim it as their own. The film follows b-boys and their crews from Korea, France, Japan and the United States as they prepare for and compete in the "Battle of the Year." Hip-hop is shown to be a potentially constructive, unifying force: We meet a white, French b-boy in Paris, whose racist mother is forced to acknowledge and confront her bigotry, and the nationalist father of a Korean b-boy, who begins to see hip-hop as unifying. The movie shows how an art form can be a means of transcending race, nationality, caste, and culture.

Oscar season has come and gone, leaving behind a list of winners, a few great catchphrases (“your eggo is preggo”… um, and something about milkshakes), and people like me with an even longer list of movies to see this winter (thanks a lot, academy.) As was reported by Jewcy, this year’s best foreign film award went to legitimately good and simultaneously Jewish film, The Counterfeiters, hailing from Austria. What you might not know is that Brazil’s submission to this Oscar category, the un-nominated O Ano em Que Meus Pais Saíram de Féria (“The Year My Parents Went on Vacation”) is also creating a little bit of buzz these days in the realm of Jewish media.

The film was released over a year ago in Brazil before making appearances at film festivals abroad in 2007, including at Cannes and Tribeca. It even picked up a few awards. It has been shown in limited screenings in the US since last month. But the question remains: is it actually any good?The Year My Parents Went on Vacation: I can't believe my parents are dumping me at grandpa's house.

Set in 1970’s Brazil, “The Year My Parents Went on Vacation” is the story of Mauro, a Brazilian pre-teen who is too distracted by Pelé and Brazil’s World Cup campaign to understand the turmoil taking place in his country under its military dictatorship. When his parents, members of the left-wing resistance movement, are forced to go into hiding, they deliver little Mauro into the care of his grandfather under the pretense that they are going on vacation. But their intended plans go awry, and Mauro is transferred into the care of his grumpy, yet kind hearted neighbor, Shlomo, a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe and active member of his neighborhood’s Orthodox community. Mauro and Shlomo end up forming a unique friendship, learning about each other’s cultures and about themselves.

It’s a familiar sort of story. Maybe too familiar, according to New York Times reviewer A.O. Scott. Although he believes the movie to be “charming,” Scott feels that audiences have heard this story before. Luckily, its likability is able to transcend the plot’s tiredness at times. Writes Scott:

“The Year My Parents Went on Vacation” is most seductive when it focuses on the details of daily life in the lower-middle-class São Paulo neighborhood Bom Retiro. The rhythms of commerce, worship and domesticity — the sounds of apartment house courtyards, synagogues and shops — frequently overshadow what turns out to be a fairly conventional and sentimental story. Though the milieu is, for most viewers, novel, the emotional elements of the film, to say nothing of its characters, are reassuringly if also somewhat disappointingly familiar.

Jan Stuart of Newsday agrees, saying that in certain parts of the film there “contains a glimmer of a great movie wanting to break out.”

On the other hand, the Forward loves this movie, calling it “a Jewish cinema gem.” One bit of insight that reviewer Elissa Strauss adds to the previous reviews is that although the film drags at times, it is not because it is filled with boring Jewish stereotypes.

Through this boredom emerges a surprisingly un-exotic portrait of Jewish immigrants. At no point are we bombarded with violins, forced to drool over warm challah or seduced by the flickering flame of a Sabbath candle...As a result, the Brazilian Jews in the film are neither saintly nor suspect. If anything, they are ordinary: They cook, they clean, they work, they sleep. The non-Jewish Brazilians in the movie receive the same treatment, and the characters move beyond the sensuality and violence that usually mark their cinematic portrayals. For both groups, the mundane is rather becoming.

This characteristic, in itself, has the potential to make this movie worth seeing. Although it isn’t perfect, “The Year My Parents Went on Vacation” is delightful at best and less than two hours long at least.

Scarlett Johansson: following in the footsteps of other do-gooder masked crusaders Actress Scarlett Johansson announced a plan today that will combine two of everyone’s favorite things: tzedakah and big swanky Hollywood parties. ScarJo will purportedly auction off two tickets to the premiere of her upcoming movie, He’s Just Not That Into You, on eBay. All proceeds from the sale will go to international social justice coalition, Oxfam.

Two winners will not only get to chill with the celebrity Jewess at the premiere, but will also be treated as stars for the day, getting glammed out with a Hollywood makeover, and arriving in style by chauffeured car service. Tikkun Olam has never looked so good!

Johansson is full of surprises lately: A few weeks ago, she told us she was planning on being the next Tom Waits, and now she's venturing into the world of charity. Might she be trying to keep up with her socially conscious co-star, The Other Boleyn Girl Natalie Portman? Maybe, but at least it’s for a good cause.

Related: Walk A Mile In Natalie Portman's Shoes

Welcome to Jewcy’s live coverage of the 80th Annual Academy Awards!

I am your humble guide for the evening, a movie obsessed girl from Los Angeles who actually happens to know more than a few people involved in making the things. Throughout the show, I’ll be providing gossip, commentary, and maybe even a little insight, with little to no sense of propriety; this much I promise you. Also, I will be drinking! Things could go anywhere!

Especially because Hollywood has been nutso-crazy of late. To review, a 100-day Writer’s Strike ended only a few weeks ago and a really attractive and talented young actor who people actually liked and respected just died. This leaves Hollywood people in a weird state, and they are an emotive bunch to begin with. Might this lead to a more exciting show than usual? Maybe! Or maybe it will be the same parade of self-congratulation as every other year, but I promise I’ll make it fun. So, without further ado, let’s get to it…

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Hey, everyone needs a hobby: Woody Allen also plays the clarinet

For fans of Woody Allen, the elephant has been in the room for fifteen years now. We remember it's there, right? That Allen took up with his quasi-stepdaughter, Soon-Yi Previn when he was 56, she 22? That he had nude photographs of her? That Mia Farrow accused him of molesting their adopted daughter (a judge found the charges "inconclusive")? Sigh. We -- especially those of us who are, despite it all, fans -- remember.

And yet, for someone whose mature films were once so autobiographical, this notorious, unavoidable aspect of Allen's personal life has seemed absent from his artistic production. On the contrary, many of the films of the last decade and a half (and there has been roughly one each year) have been fluff, like the caper Small Time Crooks, the musical Everyone Says I Love You, the mob farce Bullets Over Broadway -- and those were the good ones. This has led many critics to conclude that Allen's introspective phase is over. The old man is going through the motions.

A closer look at Allen's late films, however, belies that claim. In fact, Allen's new film, Cassandra's Dream, is but the latest in public confessions of moral failure and deep ethical ambivalence. It's in code, but if we look closely at this series of Allen's films -- and this article will have spoilers for Match Point, Cassandra's Dream, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and Scoop -- we can see they are exactly about "the elephant in the room."

The first, and best, of the late films is 1989's Crimes and Misdemeanors. (Notice that, if Farrow's accusations were at all true, this was exactly when Allen became inappropriately interested in the minors living in his home.) That film introduced the central question of the late work: whether there's anyone minding the moral store, whether criminals ever get their comeuppance. Crimes and Misdemeanors also explicitly blends tragedy and comedy, a formal choice that reflects its ethical content. For flawed people, does life end tragically (as it ought to) or comically (as it oughtn't, but often does)?

Don't worry, Sam: You've got a friend who can loan you some eyesIn Crimes, the contrast is stark. Martin Landau, in perhaps the most brilliant performance of a brilliant career, plays Judah Rosenthal, who contracts to kill his wife  mistress (murder is the quintessential immoral act in the late films), and gets away with it. At first he is wrought with guilt, but eventually, the guilt passes. Meanwhile, Woody Allen's character, a good man, loses everything, and the film's moral conscience, a rabbi played by Sam Waterston, goes blind.

In the film's climactic scene, Rosenthal tells his story, in third person. He’s guilt-ridden and believes God is monitering him. “Little sparks of his religious background which he'd rejected are suddenly stirred up,” he says. He’s driven almost to confess. “And then one morning, he awakens. The sun is shining, his family is around him and mysteriously, the crisis has lifted... he's Scot-free. His life is completely back to normal.’’

Knowing now what we didn't know in 1989, it's not a huge stretch to see Allen reflecting on his own situation in these words. Did he commit a crime? Or just a misdemeanor? Who knows. Maybe all he did was fantasize about a much younger woman who was effectively, if not legally, his stepdaughter. But perhaps there were pangs of guilt already. And yet, as Alan Alda's smarmy character says in the film, "comedy is tragedy plus time." Time passes, and Oedipus gets over it. The tragic, ethical sense of what ought to be gives way to a comic, aesthetic play of what just is.

Flash forward to 2005's Match Point, widely regarded as Allen's return to form, and featuring Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as Chris, a tennis pro who, by chance, falls in with a wealthy playboy and ends up marrying his sister Chloe -- all the while lusting after the playboy's fiancee Nola, played by Scarlett Johansson. Eventually, Nola and Chris have an affair, Nola becomes pregnant, and refuses to have an abortion. Chris is trapped: he depends on Chloe's family for his job, his life, his dreams of making it in the world. And so he ends up killing Nola (and a neighbor) in cold blood.

Case in point: Pigeons plus time equals creative pun Chris is almost caught when he fails to destroy a piece of evidence -- a gold ring that bounces on a railing like a tennis ball bouncing on the net. But luckily for him, the ring gets picked up by a drug addict, substantiating rather than undermining his alibi. He escapes. It's a comedy. Cue jazz music and white-on-black credits.

As in Crimes and Misdemeanors, the bad guy gets away with it, though this time the emphasis is less on his cool lack of conscience than on his dumb luck.

The same themes are repeated in Cassandra's Dream. In it, Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell play two working class English brothers, Ian a striver like Match Point's Chris, and Terry, down on his luck. Their wealthy uncle promises them all the money they need -- if they kill a business associate who's about to testify against him. Eventually, the brothers do the deed. But then Terry spirals downward, consumed with guilt, while Ian represses the guilt and gets on with fulfilling his ambitions.

That haircut is a crime AND a misdemeanor: Farrell and McGregor Finally, when Terry is about to crack, Ian plots to kill him before he confesses. But at the last moment, Ian repents, and instead of poisoning Terry, merely punches him. In the ensuing fight, Terry accidentally kills Ian, and then kills himself out of remorse. It's a tragedy. Cue brooding Philip Glass music and white-on-black credits.

Cassandra's Dream is perhaps even darker than Match Point, which was even darker than Crimes and Misdemeanors. In Crimes, the comedy unfolded despite the murderer's remorse. In Match Point, remorse is irrelevant. In Cassandra, it's downright harmful: the tragedy is precipitated precisely because of Terry's last-minute pang of conscience. If he'd been more cruel, there would have been a happy ending.

The lesson is clear: comedy is tragedy plus time -- unless you brood about it.

In this light, even some of Allen's lesser works begin to take on a new light. For example, Scoop's murderous villain is only discovered by a comic mix of supernaturalism and shtick (and Allen's character pathetically dies as he tries to save the heroine). Melinda and Melinda revisits the comedy/tragedy dichotomy, suggesting that luck determines the outcome much more than our own actions. And so on.

So, the elephant is in the room, and in the frame. By now, "Woody and Soon-Yi" have become a fixture on the New York cultural scene; we're no longer shocked. But whether there was misconduct early on, or only unseemliness, Allen has not overlooked the obvious, which is that he is a 72-year-old married to a 30-year-old who wasn't quite his stepdaughter but almost sort of was. Allen is unpunished, but perhaps unforgiven as well, at least by himself.

Let me out!: The elephant plots its escape On the surface, Allen's agonizing agnosticism is squarely at odds with traditional Jewish conceptions of justice, Allen's obvious foil. This is the "religious background which he'd rejected." But Allen hasn't rejected its most salient feature, which is not the pat answer that God sees everything, but the wrestling with the problems of justice and evil in the first place. Judaism is a religion of Job, not just Sunday School, and Allen's extended meditations on the presence or absence of moral order are the essence of the Jewish ethical conscience.

We all know that God does not punish the wicked -- at least not in ways we can see. And yet, we who were raised in the Jewish tradition still experience Jewish guilt, itself both comic and tragic. Is there really no moral order in the world? Is remorse an ally or an adversary? Will there be an accounting at the end, or is religion for suckers? Is it better to remember the past, or let it go?

Allen has now worked out at least three different permutations of these questions in his late films, each one with a different sense of pathos, a different perspective on the mystery. Of course, all this is speculation. Maybe there's really no big deal about the Allen/Previn marriage. Maybe Allen couldn't care less. Or maybe that's what he's trying to figure out.

Debra Sugarman: Filmmaker, photographer, and production designer.Debra Sugarman's documentary, Dear Mr. President, is about an arts camp she founded in New Mexico designed to bring Israeli and Palestinian youth together.  I met Debra on the set of a documentary called The Voices Project; she was the production designer and I was the costume designer, and she helped me build new garment racks, alter dresses, and preserve my sanity.  Afterwards, I asked her some questions about Dear Mr. President and the arts camp that she had founded.

You started an arts camp for Israeli Arabs, Palestinians, and Israeli Jews. Why did you do this and what has that process been like?

My family all gave time and money to improving Jewish life or to Israel. So I learned from that role model: we should give back to the community. I started doing it when I was very young, as a teenager. I worked specifically with mentally and emotionally disturbed kids. I quit doing it because it was really wiping me out and started doing what I am good at, which is art. Then, I began thinking about what I wanted to do to give back, and I really wanted to connect with something that I knew, which was Israel. My family is from Israel, my grandfather was one of the first settlers of Israel, and he worked for the Haganah. So, since I don’t identify as being a Jew religiously at all, but I relate to it as being my ethnicity, I decided that the best use of my time would be to find a way to connect the youth of Israel and Palestine. I think that teenagers are tomorrow’s leaders— I know they are in fact. So the decision became, how do I work with boys and girls that are teenagers without them being attracted to each other, when they should be breaking down barriers between their enemy cultures, not thinking “oh they’re hot.” So that’s how the camp became all girls, and I also think that both cultures under-serve women, though that’s changing a lot. Then the idea of using art and dialogue at a camp came from my life experience being an artist, and having art ameliorate healing in my life as a child.

What was the inspiration for the film Dear Mr. President?

The girls and I watched a film that a guy that was volunteering at the camp had produced. It was about a guy on a road trip across the US looking for this doctor, who later told him that he wouldn’t live long. So we watched Daniel’s film and afterwards, we talked about going in an RV next summer and calling the film some funny, superfluous title like “Looking for Daddy” or something. That’s how the seed was planted. From there I just thought that we should create a mini version of the camp, and used the RV as a stage. Then my friend Devon came up with the idea that we should deliver a message to the president, and that’s how we came up with the title Dear Mr.President. So the goal became to go from one side of the US to the other with these girls, and to meet up with the president.

On the trip, one of the girls, an Israeli Jew, asks another, a Palestinian, “Why would I trade places with you? Why would I choose to suffer?” Do you think this mentality is at the core of the conflict?

Dear Mr. President: The girls have a moment. First, I want to say that Amit (Israeli and Jewish), who said that, to Hameen(who lives in the West Bank), didn’t mean it the way that it sounded. As you saw, she made amends with Hameen and let her know that. But Amit was a very brilliant girl, all of those girls were very bright, and her point is well-taken, so in answer to your question I think it’s a kernal, it’s not the core issue. But yes, who wants a perceived enemy to be stronger than they?

In your trip across the country with the five girls, you visited many historical sites, including Wounded Knee. What were your reasons for this, and how were the girls affected by these landmarks?

I knew that I was going to have to stop in South Dakota for a million reasons, not the least of which is the history of native culture. Stopping at Wounded Knee, I felt like we had the potential to discover something about a culture that had been obliterated, but that still exists. When Amit read what was on the plaque at Wounded Knee, it really resonated with the Palestinian girls. That feeling of entrapment and of capture. It was what they feared most: that their land, their lives, and their families’ lives could be gone completely.

You have said that young women will make very good leaders. How do you think the women in your film can change politics in the Middle East, and why do you think that they would make good leaders?

One thing that happened with the camp, and consequently happened with the girls, was that they learned what it takes to build a new paradigm. When I picked the girls in the film, I got very lucky because all of the girls, were incredibly, uniquely intelligent. I think that when given the opportunity, young women, and the female gender in general, become multi-taskers. If we go the route of say, my mother, she was finishing up school, answering the phone, making meals, putting the baby to bed, being a good wife— I mean we are just genetically pre-disposed to multi-tasking really well. We haven’t been given the largest leadership roles, say, in the United States, or in our generation, but it’s really changing. It’s also changing over in Israel. I think that things take time. We’re talking about huge cultural shifts. How do you get a male-dominated society to get in touch with their feminine energy enough so that a woman runs their country or their world? How does that happen?

More on Debra Sugarman

Pickles was the most challenging and touching documentary that I saw at the Other Israel Film Festival. A moving film about the limitations of faith and culture, it follows the lives of eight Muslim widows who start a pickling factory in Israel.

Each woman in the film has her own struggle: Samira is estranged from her daugher, whose husband's family won't let the two women interact; Matza's son dies of a botched operation; Fatma begins a career in marketing once she is well into her fifties. Working in the factory gives them the opportunity to share these stories with each other. As they form a community, the women begin to question their roles in society. I interviewed Nitza Gonen, the producer of the film, to learn more about the significance of the film, its legacy, and the ideas behind it.

Women at work: In the pickles factory.What inspired the film Pickles?

One day, Dalit, the director, read an article about eight Muslim women in a northern village in Israel who started a pickle factory, and this story was very unusual because it was about widows. A widow isn’t supposed to go out of the home, she is supposed to watch over her children. She lives off social security and is watched over by her husband’s family. She is very miserable. She is not supposed to remarry. If she does, she cannot bring her children with her, and she must give them to her former husband’s family. There are few films about the inner lives of Muslim women. We wanted to lift the veil—and show that on the other side they were having a revolution.

As an Israeli Jewish woman making a documentary about Muslim widows, what were some of the obstacles that you faced during the production of the film? How did you deal with the language barrier? Were the villagers or women’s families suspicious of the motives of your film?

First, I don’t speak Arabic—none of us on the film crew speak it. We needed a common language so we got a translator. She was a Muslim woman who taught us the different cultural codes. The widows were very nice to us. They knew we had good intentions and that we were just trying to expose their lives to the world. The problem was with this woman in the municipality. Her role was to care for the women of the village and when she saw that we were making a film she interfered and forbade us from shooting private moments in the home and in the factory. She represented women trying to keep up their modesty and tradition, so I don’t blame her. Somebody had to protect the widows. But they couldn’t disobey her. She had lots of influence and she helped them to take care of their families. It was difficult because we didn’t want to raise conflict, so we missed some interesting situations.

In an interview with PBS, Dalit Kimor, the director, said that "Not one political word was said when we were filming" between the filmmakers and the widows. Why did you choose to do this? Do you consider your film political?

We didn’t want to make a political film. The widows weren't concerned with politics—on the first day of filming, Arafat died, and no one talked about him in the village. No one was occupied with his death. No one was praying for him in the mosques. They didn't speak about it. We didn't speak about it. We wanted to make a social human film. In Israel every film is political. Choosing Arab women as a subject of a film is political. Some people have criticized the film for not being political. It is completely innocent of politics.

Nitza Gonen: In her house in Israel.You have said that the women had never heard of the word feminism and yet were creating a small revolution. Was this film made from a feminist perspective? Did a feminist thread evolve during the production of this film?

Neither Dalit nor myself are feminists in the classic sense. Feminism is old news—we are feminists, but we are beyond this term. We didn't aim to make a feminist film, but the film talks about the rise of feminism in Arab society in Israel. The widows made a revolution in the village and the young women respect them. Now they are thinking of going to work, to school, and developing careers—and they weren't thinking of this before. These women did something for feminism without knowing it. Feminism is not the subject of the film, but it is the subtext.

After the production of Pickles, did any of the women stay in touch? Was a social network established? Did the pickle factory leave a legacy for the women in the film?

Widows are supposed to live in loneliness, and the factory gave them the opportunity to have a social club. In the film they cry together and tell jokes and comfort each other, and this it is not something that was in their lives before. So when the factory closed they had to go back to their former lives—but not Fatma. Because she was the marketing director she had a lot of contacts, so she is still making pickles, with her daughters. They have started their own business. Her daughters want to go to school, so she is saving money so they can study.

What has been the response to Pickles internationally and in Israel?

People liked the film very much, although it's unusual because when Israelis make films on Arabs it's always about identity, conflict with Palestinians, or about Palestinians, and this film was not dealing with this. In Israel, our subject was not dealing with the hard stuff. The big success of the film was abroad. People were surprised to learn how Arab women were living, to discover that they are like us, like everybody. The Muslim world in the eyes of the West—it's a kind of riddle. We see them as fanatics or fundamentalists, but we don't see their lives. The film revealed a lot about this without saying it.

Through the production of Pickles, you started a dialogue between secular Muslim women and secular and non-secular Jewish women in Israel. Have you done other work to increase dialogue or contact between Muslims and Jews in Israel? What are your thoughts on Jewish and Muslim relations in Israel?

We are both Mediterranean and we come from the same area. We have many shared characteristics: hospitality, human warmth, we are straight-forward. Before 1948, Arabs and Jews lived together and sometimes had good relations. Through progress I think that we will have better relations. On the last film I worked on, the director of photography and director were both Arab. I would like them to join all fields of life in Israel. We share the same country and there is no excuse for being apart.

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Also in Jewcy:

The Other Israel Film Festival

The mission of the Other Israel Film Festival is to expose the lives of Muslims that live in Israel. I am behind the mission of the festival. I am interested in the Muslim perspective in Israel and I am interested in the art that Muslims are generating. Do they feel like second-class citizens, how do Muslim women view themselves, and what is the Other Israel?

This is the first year of the festival, and I believe that it was an inspiring one. I have been to my share of festivals, including the Sundance Film Festival and the New York Film Festival, and I've thrown my own. There were technical problems with the festival, like the films being re-sized as we watched them, but I understood these problems as a festival's growing pains. The Other Israel Film Festival got a group of films and filmmakers together that got the other side seen and heard, and I commend them for that.

Here are some highlights of the festival.

The Syrian Bride

Nervous on your wedding day?Every bride is nervous on her wedding day. She might trip on her dress or Aunt Ethel might get wasted at the reception. A million things might go wrong, but eventually, her nervousness recedes, she kisses the groom, and the two begin a married life.

Mona is nervous on her wedding day for different reasons. As a Palestinian, once she marries her Syrian fiancé, she can never return to Israel or see her family again—the Israeli government has also prohibited her father from attending her wedding. So Mona must turn her back on her family in order to get married. This is more than most brides have to deal with on their wedding day.

The Syrian Bride exposes the difficulties of not being a citizen of your homeland. My biggest critique of the film is that it could have gone further, and investigated what it means to live with resignation— to know that you are not in control, do not have basic privileges, and are denied happiness because of your lack of identity. The Syrian Bride alludes to these themes, but the lack of resolution leaves loose ends where solid conclusions are necessary.

Pickles

Women starting a feminist revolution through...Pickles?According to convention, Muslim widows are dead to the world. They cannot remarry or work outside of the home, or do anything other than raise their children and mourn their husband's death. They must live the rest of their days with their husband's family as well. The family watches over the widow and ensures that she does not disrespect her husband's memory.

These are the makings of a barren, miserable, and lonely life.

However, this is not the case for a group of eight Muslim widows. They start a pickling factory to earn money for their families, and in so doing, they give meaning to their lives. They have a place to go to, a job to do, and soon, a social network forms. However, none of the women is prepared for the difficulties that await them.

This is a moving documentary about the limitations of faith and culture, and the inherent disadvantages of living in a chauvinistic society. Pickles asks: must we accept these limitations? It is an articulate and intimate portrait of Muslim life.

Roads

The road from poverty.Amores Perros begins with two young men in a speeding car, escaping a car full of thugs, as a dog bleeds to death in the backseat. Roads begins with two young boys in a speeding car, escaping a car full of thugs, as a sheep bleeds to death in the backseat. Coincidence?

Roads is about a young Arab boy working for a heartless drug-dealer. One day, he decides to take the money and run. Then, he gets his best friend and a Jewish drug-addict involved. Will he escape his life of poverty or get stopped along the way?

Perhaps if Roads were not a rip-off of Amores Perros, I could appreciate it. Then again, the terrible plot-development, sloppy editing, and lazy camera work were no picnic to sit through. As a filmmaker, I've learned that a great idea does not make a great film; good storytelling, strong acting, and careful attention to detail make a great film. It takes vision and a high level of technical skill to pull one off—and you must make your stories your own. Roads lacks the originality that makes a film worth watching.

(Welcome, Stumblers!)

The Kingdom, still playing in major movie houses, may be the most important recent contribution to the public discussion of U.S.-Saudi relations. Surprisingly and even hearteningly for those who follow developments in the desert monarchy, the film begins with the “W” word – Wahhabi – referring to the ultrafundamentalist Sunni Muslim sect that provides ideological support for the Riyadh regime.

American media, guided by academic Middle East Studies experts, have assiduously evaded discussion of Wahhabism, its murderous career over the past 250 years of Islamic history, and its complicity in incitement, recruitment, and financing of terrorism in Iraq today. Western journalists, academics, and politicians have even chimed in with Saudi claims that Wahhabism does not exist – only Islam, or “Salafism,” an abuse of the Islamic vocabulary. Wahhabis call themselves “Salafis” for the same reason Stalinists called themselves “progressives;” because when they are open about their affiliations and goals, they are repudiated.

The Kingdom is directed by Peter Berg, better known as an actor, with co-production by cinema genius Michael Mann (my favorite of Mann’s earlier films is the 1995 classic Heat, with Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino, followed by Collateral in 2004.) Jamie Foxx, who costarred in Collateral, is the lead in The Kingdom, as an FBI agent who, by means best described as “direct action,” takes over investigation of a terrorist bombing at a compound for Westerners on Saudi territory.

The picture has flaws – some of its Arabic translations are inaccurate. It is more than a bit difficult to imagine an American investigative team charging through Wahhabiland in such an energetic fashion. But The Kingdom has all the basic facts about the Saudi environment right, beginning with its references to Wahhabism. It correctly identifies the Saudi website alsaha.com as a major jihadist communications outlet that uses up-to-date technology to support the terrorist offensive. And most important, it includes an oleaginous American diplomat (Jeremy Piven) as reluctant to offend the Saudi authorities, and the armed bodies of men protecting the Saudi order as mainly ambivalent about extremism, when not sympathetic to it.

The Kingdom is a classic action epic, about which it is superfluous to analyze plot and characterization. Bombs blast away and guns go off, blood splashes in all directions, Foxx is tough and resourceful, a female FBI special agent played by Jennifer Garner is almost as tough, and an apparently Jewish special agent (Jason Bateman), is briefly kidnapped and threatened with beheading in front of a jihadist videocam.

But even with its improbabilities and other shortcomings, right now The Kingdom has almost the character of a documentary reportage rather than a dramatic film. Last week, a few days after seeing it, I attended a Capitol Hill press conference on the Saudi state held by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) – and had the sense I was walking into a scene left out of the movie.
On Monday, October 22, a new anti-Wahhabi coalition of American Muslims (www.al-baqee.org) will hold a demonstration at the Royal Saudi Embassy in Washington, protesting against Wahhabi terrorism in Iraq, and condemning the support for such atrocities originating south of the Iraqi-Saudi border. I am scheduled to speak at the rally, and plan to end my remarks by exhorting all present to see The Kingdom and urge others to do the same. Non-Muslims can hardly imagine the liberating effect of the seeing the truth about Wahhabism on the big screen.

I would close with my only caveat about the film: its ending proposes, Hollywood-style, moral equivalence between the combatants on both sides of the terror war. But no parallel, much less an attitude of neutrality in the conflict with the Wahhabis, is acceptable. America seeks to protect innocent people and has become a powerful ally of those who advocate pluralism in Islam; Wahhabis murder and lie without restraint. The main Wahhabi lie is the claim that Riyadh, the Wahhabi capital, and the rest of Saudi territory, aside from the Hejaz region of west Arabia including the cities of Mecca and Medina, are holy Islamic territory. Riyadh and the Wahhabi hinterland of Najd are not and never were sacred to Muslims; Najd was cursed by the Prophet Muhammad himself as a source of “earthquakes, conflicts, and the horns of Satan.”

For non-Muslims who will not easily contend with the learning curve required to understand the much-evoked “battle for the soul of Islam,” as well as for Muslims thirsty for truth about the crisis in the global umma, The Kingdom is a welcome relief from polite dissimulation about Saudi Arabia.

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ALSO IN JEWCY

Ali Eteraz on Saudi Arabia:

• The Quran I Hate, and the One I Love
• The Threat That Is Iran

Other Shvitz bloggers on Saudi Arabia:

• Challenging the Religious Police
• Jihadi Jonestown
• Fun with Pig and Ape
• Abdallah Will Be Joining Us Shortly, As Soon As He's Done Executing His Prisoner.

Stephen Suleyman Schwartz has covered the Saudi peninsula before in "The Walter Duranty of Saudi Arabia."