Towards the end of Joseph Cedar's Beaufort, the first Israeli film nominated for an Academy Award since 1984, an activist opposed to the war in Lebanon excoriates himself on a television talk show for the death of his son, Ziv, a bomb specialist in the Israel Defense Forces.

By having this grieving parent blame himself rather than generals or politicians for what happened to his child, Joseph Cedar makes a distinct ideological gesture, underlining how Israel as a whole is responsible for the continuation of the now sixty-year-old violent status quo. And by placing the responsibility for communicating such a message on the shoulders of a peace advocate, Cedar makes it clear why he believes we ought to take seriously what liberal Israelis like Ziv's father have to say.

In his earlier feature-length films, Time of Favor (2001), and Campfire (2004), as in Beaufort, the New York-born director created studies of Israel's internal struggles so detailed and accurate that they could almost function as academic monographs. Always guided by an identifiable set of political positions, Cedar's commitments consistently structure his narratives, providing a sense of optimism and resolution at every hopeless juncture. In each instance, Joseph Cedar's outlook and artistry are mutually reinforcing, making his stories speak to us that much more strongly. We walk away from his films understanding Israel better because we saw it through his eyes.

I spoke to Cedar at the end of March about Beaufort, and his next project, on which he's already hard at work.

- Joel Schalit, Zeek Media Editor

ZEEK: The last time you and I spoke, you had just decided to make a film about Veit Harlan, the director of the legendary anti-Semitic drama, Jud Suss (1940). In Harlan's film, Jewish businessman Suss Oppenheimer destroys a dukedom and rapes a German girl. What exactly is your film about? I take it that it's a lot bigger than just a biopic.

CEDAR: So far, most of the scenes are about an artistic drive that overrides everything: Harlan's moral sensibilities, his personal loyalties, and his common sense. What he's really out for is to tell a good story. Harlan thinks he understands Suss, he thinks he identifies with him, and he loves the kind of villain he's making. Harlan thinks he understands who this Suss is, but forgets the whole context. That's how he convinces his actors, that's how he convinces his entire crew - and this is a top notch crew - to go along with such a project.

ZEEK: They'd all worked with directors like Fritz Lang, right?

CEDAR: The production designer was Otto Hunte, who did Metropolis. The composer was a man named Zeller, who later worked with Alfred Hitchcock. But everyone (initially) said no. Nobody wanted to work on this film.

ZEEK: How did Harlan win them over?

CEDAR: Harlan was able to convince them because he was giving them his passion. It's not until just prior to the film's release that he finally realizes that he's being manipulated himself. When he realizes that he's done something that he regrets, he can't live with it. He doesn't know what to do. Then, after the war, when he's acquitted (on charges of anti-Semitism), he's just stuck. One of the things Harlan realizes about Suss is that he has nothing to lose. [When Suss is executed] he can finally be who he is. He doesn't have to lie to anyone. He can say what he wants, and not care about the consequences. And Harlan says, ‘I never had that."

ZEEK: That's an extremely complex portrait of the director.

CEDAR: It's still changing, but I found out that that's what most of the film is about. When it's done, we'll see what the film is really about. (Laughter)

Continue reading...

I read this book mostly with welled-up eyes, and I cried hard when I finished the book. That heavy, deep cry we do sometimes when moments of the unimaginable and unchangeable are revealed to us. A Wall of Two, is a book of poems written by two sisters, Ilona and Henia Karmel, while first in Skarzysko-Kamienna and then later in HASAG-Buchenwald and recently translated by Fanny Howe. The poems are beautiful, heartbreaking and written with such a sense of care and love, and, in moments, simultaneous selflessness and dread, like in The Mark on the Wall:

Praxia Dymitruk, Praxia, Praxia

why did you write your name all over the walls?

Is this pain written down

or resistance to life’s passing?

Were you, too, afraid to disappear?

Without a sound? No one to miss you

because you belonged to no one?

Is your name all you owned, Praxia?

I understand you, little Russian one.

Such a sweet stem of a name.

For a girl so familiar though never known.

Praxia Dymitruk, Praxia, Praxia.

(more here)

The synopsis goes like this: Ilona and Henia Karmel were 17 and 20 years old in 1943 when they entered labor camps from the Krakow ghetto. The sisters wrote the poems on worksheets stolen from the factories where they worked by day and hid them in their clothing. During what she thought were the last days of her life, Henia entrusted the poems to a cousin who happened to pass her in the forced march at the end of the war. The cousin gave them to Henia's husband in Krakow, who would not locate and reunite with his wife for another six months.

Get A Tissue: and cry your heart out for and with the Karmel sisters. This is the first English publication of these extraordinary poems. Fanny Howe's deft adaptations are presented with a biographical introduction that conveys the powerful story of the sisters' survival from capture to freedom in 1946.

After the war, the sisters immigrated to the United States and continued to write. Henia Karmel is the author of two novels written in English including Marek and Lisa, and Ilona Karmel is also the author of two novels written in English including An Estate of Memory.

This day in 1974 marks the death of Oskar Schindler, who was honored with a tree planting in 1967 at the Yad Vashem memorial as a Righteous Among The Nations, an honor bestowed by Israel to non-Jews who worked to save Jewish lives during the Shoah at great personal risk. At last count, about a year ago, nearly 20,000 people have been given such an honor. Schindler was the only former Nazi party member to ever receive such a recognition at Yad Vashem. Um, duh.

Yad Vashem: Some righteous trees for some righteous folks.

Yad Vashem is an extremely worthwhile organization to support with significant genealogical research and memorial work being done, especially their searchable database. Really, if you have not ever, do take a moment and click through and search your surname, and other surnames in your family. Stunning. Chilling.

Yad Vashem, in addition to collecting donated personal artifacts and written and video testimony, has been working to develop The Lexicon of the Righteous Among The Nations, an encyclopedia to eventually include biographical stories of all persons deignated Righteous as well as Yad Vashem magazine. Also, Yad Vashem offers the International Institute for Holocaust Research, which often has an open call for papers to be presented at various conferences within the facility, and information on ongoing research projects.

So, until you find yourself in Israel next to pay a visit to Yad Vashem for yourself (if you have not already), stay in touch and check their on-line exhibitions page often for updates. And lastly, be sure to stop by the American and Canadian chapters of the Yad Vashem Society (or just about any country you happen to be living) to stay up-to-date on events and projects.

A Very Abridged List of Further Exploration: Yad Vashem: Moshe Safdie: The Architecture of Memory, The Children We Remember: Photographs from the Archives of Yad Vashem by Chana Byers Abells, Where Light and Shadows Meet: A Memoir by Schindler, Rosenberg & Koch, I Will Plant You A Lilac Tree: A Memior of a Schindler's List Survivor by Laura Hillman, and A Voice In The Chorus: Memories of a Teenager Saved By Schindler by Abraham Zuckerman.

Watching Ken Burns' documentary on the War, I note that it's been ten years since my mother died.

When she was alive, her defining features were her inability to locate her reading glasses (which were usually on top of her head), her strong desire that I eat healthy (including "hiding" wheat toast on the bottom of a tuna sandwich topped with a disguise of white toast), and her inability to throw anything out (her modus operandi was to rifle through the refrigerator and pull out items with the plea, "Quick somebody eat this before it goes bad!").

After she died in 1997, I found her secret cache of documents in the basement. Among them were 4 postcards from France. (Apparently mail from the camps continued throughout the war.)

Postcard From Camp De Gurs These postcards were from the Nazi concentration camp called Gurs in the Pyrenees mountains. She had never told me she had been in a camp. She'd never even told me she wasn't born in Queens until I was in high school.

When I had come home from 7th grade history class asking if she knew what had happened in Germany, she peered at me through those big glasses and "I remember a fence we had run under and some men got made at us." And then she had returned to folding the laundry and I knew not to ask more, but not why.

Before the postcards, my mother was amusing, annoying, and doddering. Afterwards, she was what now? A holocaust survivor? But she didn't have a tattooed number. She hadn't been to Auschwitz. And what about me? Was I the son of a survivor? How could my mother, who made banana Jello and packed me and my father lunch everyday be a survivor?

I didn't understand, and I still don't, and a blog entry is too short to figure it out. But what I do know is that what my mother tried to protect me from still shaped my life, if just through that act of protection. And that I must, in the end, make sense first of her love.

There's a fascinating article in The New York Times about postwar pornographic pulp in 1960s Israel called Stalags. The focus of these S&M stories, which captivated a generation of Israeli males: Nazis and prisoners of war.

The books told perverse tales of captured American or British pilots being abused by sadistic female SS officers outfitted with whips and boots. The plot usually ended with the male protagonists taking revenge, by raping and killing their tormentors.

After decades in dusty back rooms and closets, the Stalags, a peculiar Hebrew concoction of Nazism, sex and violence, are re-emerging in the public eye. And with them comes a rekindled debate on the cultural representation here of Nazism and the Holocaust, and whether they have been unduly mixed in with a kind of sexual perversion and voyeurism that has permeated even the school curriculum.

The article focuses on a new documentary, "Stalags: Holocaust and Pornography in Israel,” premiering at the Jerusalem Film Festival. It doesn't mention the similar genre in American pulp of the 50s, 60s and 70s -- books like Men's Adventure (in the US, of course, we added sadistic Japanese to the iconography of WWII fiends). In the Israeli versions, the fascination with sexual violence and the fear of emasculation offer some uncomfortable insights, to say the least, into Israeli society. The following excerpt from the documentary would make a nice supplement to any Introduction to Modern Israel class.

I’m going to do something that I despise in other people—I’m going to talk authoritatively about a book that I have not read. It’s really one of the most despicable things that people seem to do more and more of these days. They read about a book, or listen to an author read from his or her book, and then go around talking like they’ve read the book. So I’m going to do that, but at least not without admitting to my folly, nor without promising that I really do intend to read the book (I promise, really). 

Last night I read a piece in the Forward on Tova Reich’s novel My Holocaust. It was the essay title that caught my eye: “The Greatest Shoah on Earth.” In the essay, the reviewer reads Reich’s novel not only as a satire on the “industry” of Holocaust commemoration—or what might more accurately be called the fetishization of the Holocaust—but also as an attempt on her part to settle some personal scores, to level the playing field a bit. And Reich certainly has some interesting connections to the world of “Shoah business.” She is the wife of Walter Reich, who was the director of the D.C. Holocaust museum between 1994 and 1998, and according to this essay he was forced out of the position after a “botched attempt to have Yasser Arafat visit the institution,” even though the visit was allegedly initiated by the museum’s then chairman Miles Lerman, and not Reich. And one of the characters in her novel—“that crazy spiderman rabbi”—is based on her brother Rabbi Avi Weiss who led a group of protesters over the fence surrounding the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz in 1989.

 This reviewer also identifies striking similarities between Lerman, and the novel’s main character, Messer, a Holocaust survivor and founder of Holocaust ConnectioRabbi Avi Weiss, 1989ns, Inc., a company committed to lending the imprimatur of the Holocaust to anyone who can pay for it; he is also chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Reich paints him as a lying, despicable figure who will betray even his family. There’s also, it seems, a comparison between Messer’s chief aide, Monty Pincus, and historian Michael Berenbaum. Ultimately, the book becomes a scathing, yet hilarious condemnation of countless groups—Catholic, Mormon, German, Polish, Japanese, African American, Native American, Palestinian, feminist, and more—all trying to claim their own portion of Holocaust victimhood. Even the main character’s son, a second-generation survivor, is not safe from Reich’s biting indictment against those who wish to capitalize on suffering and memory. 

I think though, that it is precisely because no one is safe in this book that it is so funny—everyone’s intentions are scrutinized in a way that is both provocative and humorous. A couple examples: 

While visiting Auschwitz, the adult daughter of a potential museum donor sees a fellow visitor in a wheelchair and says to her hosts: “I really really appreciate it that Auschwitz is wheelchair-accessible. You know what I mean? Was it always that way—I mean, even at the time of the Holocaust?” Later in the novel, this same woman —an emotionally stunted ball of neuroses with an unusual attachment to her DustBuster—becomes director of the Holocaust museum. Under her baton, the institution is rededicated to the Holocaust’s “other” victims: Gypsies, Freemasons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, political dissidents, homosexuals and, yes, the handicapped and disabled.

Business As Usual: Entrance to Auschwitz  Or how about this next one—multiple racial, cultural, and ethnic groups fight for victimhood supremacy, eventually forming "the United Holocausts rainbow coalition," whose manifesto reads: 

“We reject the hierarchy and caste system of Holocausts. All Holocausts are equal in the eye of God. No one Holocaust is superior to another, no one Holocaust is deserving of special treatment or recognition. All Holocausts are unique."

  But most shocking is the inscription one character leaves in the visitor’s book at the museum:  

I enjoyed it very much. Thank you for making the Holocaust possible.

 I’m not sure what I’m supposed to think about all of this, but it does seem pretty funny--maybe that's only acceptable because we're dealing with satire--and Reich may be on to something in her satirical critique of our post-Holocaust world.

Nazi Dollars: Blood Money?Just in time for Yom Hashoah, there's an interesting conversation over at the Virtual Talmud, about restitution for the Holocaust.

In truth, I've never really thought much about this issue.  I've always accepted it as a given that horrible people who do horrible things should pay for them.  But reading about how all of this began has got me thinking...

In 1952 the Prime Minster of Israel, David ben Gurion made one of the gutsiest and hardest political decisions ever to have been made, he accepted restitution funds from West Germany –a country that had just murdered six million Jews. Many objected including future Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Ben Gurion held firm and saw the money as a means towards the end of an eternal antidote to another Holocaust: a powerful state of Israel.

Call me a dolt, but I would have assumed everyone was all about restitution.  It never really entered my mind to think of the implications of accepting money...  it never really occurred to me that such a payment might imply that things were "settled."

Because of course they aren't, can never be.

But it's also true what Rabbi Grossman says...

the agreement by Germany to pay restitution signified that Germany publicly accepted responsibility for its role in the destruction of European Jewry. There is a form of justice in such an admission.

The money is symblic, shows accountability.  And any unwillingness to pay out suggest a lack of that accountability.

Going back to my thoughts yesterday on Yom Hashoah, I find myself thinking about how, when one doesn't want to take money on principle, one can re-route such funds.  How we might think about applying restitution funds to someplace like Darfur. 

Making the money mean more.

Six Million: And countingWith the taste of matzoh still in your mouth, it's time for your next Jewish holiday.  This Sunday is Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.  The holiday has been around since 1959, and according to this site:

In the early 1950s, education about the Holocaust emphasized the suffering inflicted on millions of European Jews by the Nazis. Surveys conducted in the late 1950s indicated that young Israelis did not sympathize with the victims of the Holocaust, since they believed that European Jews were "led like sheep for slaughter." The Israeli educational curriculum began to shift the emphasis to documenting how Jews resisted their Nazi tormentors through "passive resistance"--retaining their human dignity in the most unbearable conditions--and by "active resistance," fighting the Nazis in the ghettos and joining underground partisans who fought the Third Reich in its occupied countries.

Which I find meaningful. That it was not only created as a day on which to mourn the deaths of our victims, but as as a day on which to celebrate the resistance and spirit of those victims.  I think this is an important distinction to make as Jews. Especially considering that our  culture offers such a wealth of oppression/victimization stories. 

I think it's useful to think about how we can see our history as one of passive resistance, and not just  a story about getting our asses kicked over and over.

But what can we do to celebrate this holiday, to pull the theme of resistance forward?

I've only ever celebrated it in one way.  As a Hillel director, at two different campuses, where my students (and I) read the names of the dead over and over for a 24 hour period.

Which always seemed appropriately somber, meaningful.  It felt like a funeral, and that seemed about right.  Until now.

But maybe that's NOT how I want to celebrate Yom HaShoah.  Maybe instead I want to find a way to resist something I dislike about the world I live in... in the name of the six million.

I'm imagining something like the Day of Silence.  Or the Immigration Boycott.  Something big and passive... to showcase how the Jews resisted, in the only ways they could, the atrocities of Hitler's Germany...

By resisting something else unspeakable-- the genocide in Darfur.  Which  some people are thinking about this weekend already.

Obviously it's too late this year, but I'll encourage everyone to make a donation this Sunday, in the name of the six million.  A donation from the Jewish people to Darfur.  Or sign a petition, or two.

And I'm wondering, if I wanted to start something moving... would people play along? Would Jewcy readers help turn Yom Hashoah 2008 into a day for Darfur?

Mazel Tov Sam Modiano77-year-old Holocaust survivor Samuel Modiano celebrated his Bar Mitzvah on Monday at a synagague in Rome, where he now lives.

At 13, Modiano was a prisoner at Auschwitz and even after he emigrated to the Congo, he wasn't able to receive a proper Bar Mitzvah due to civil unrest and lack of a cohesive Jewish community.

Redemption was to be had, however, as hundreds of members of Modiano's temple in Rome joined him in a very emotional ceremony.

Said the Chief Rabbi of Rome:

This is a wonderful example of the Jewish tradition beating in the heart of every Jewish person. The most touching moment was when Samuel exposed his arm to wrap the tefilin around it and uncovered the number tattoo.