Amidst the current revival of Yiddish music and culture in attempts to keep the language from “dying out,” it’s easy to forget that Yiddish has led a tenuous existence through much of the 20th Century. Long seen by the wider world as the Jewish tongue, Yiddish has survived suppression, obsolescence and the extermination of most of its native speakers. Today, its musical torchbearers offer CDs and digital downloads to fans of all religions. But back when opera was the only place to hear the greatest singers of the age, the renowned voice that brought Yiddish songs to non-Jewish ears belonged to Isa Kremer, the subject of the film Isa Kremer: The People’s Diva.

A living reminder of a vanished people, Kremer was born into the world’s largest community of Yiddish speakers, the five-million-strong Jewish “pale of settlement” in 19th-Century Western Russia. Yiddish folksongs she heard within the kitchens and wedding ceremonies of her youth would later be performed in sold-out opera houses around Europe and the Americas. She became renowned for her innovative arrangements and her passionate interpretation of lyrics, with dramatic gestures that would bring Jewish characters to life on the stage.

Always aiming for the broader audience, she made only a single foray onto New York’s famous Second Avenue stretch of Yiddish theaters. Yet the show produced what is arguably the genre’s most popular song of that era, “Mein Shtetale Belz.” Written about Kremer’s Bessarabian hometown, it evoked a way of life obliterated by the Second World War.

On tour, she performed in Russian, Italian, French, German, Polish and English, but things always got dicey when she insisted on singing songs in her native tongue. In 1922, an antisemitic riot broke out in Warsaw because of a Yiddish performance she was to give to a Jewish audience. Elsewhere, resistance came from Jews themselves. At stops in America, Yiddish was looked on by some Jews as the unwanted legacy of Old World poverty and the shtetl. In 1936 Berlin, German-speaking Jews looked down on Yiddish speakers because they believed it reinforced the Nazis’ assertion that Jews were different. While in staunchly-Hebrew-speaking 1948 Israel it was called “the language of exile.” Yet in each instance, Kremer used the leverage of her celebrity to bypass these complaints and perform anyway.

Today, commercial recordings of Kremer’s voice are difficult to come by. But some modern singers have continued her efforts at spreading the word about Yiddish beyond the Jewish realm. A few years back Chava Alberstein, an Israeli musician who performs Yiddish songs, got together with Peter Yarrow and New York band the Klezmatics to tape a live concert special at the Neue Synagogue in Berlin. And for at least one evening, in the musical spirit of Isa Kremer, Germans, Israelis and Americans honored a language which has refused to die.

Carrie Bradshaw and her crew might be a little misguided and materialistic, but Sex and the City can teach us one thing: relationships are an endless topic of eavesdrop-worthy conversation. There’s always more to say about other people’s love lives, and there are always ears eager to listen.

It’s a lesson Israeli director Amos Gitai has clearly learned well. In a city halfway across the world from SATC’s NYC, Gitai also tells a story of friendship, love and sex; but he focuses less on the purses, and more on the emotional baggage, his characters carry.

Set in Tel Aviv, Alila follows a bob-haired sexpot named Gabi who’s taken a strong, but emotionally unavailable man for a lover. Like the women in “Sex in the City,” Gabi goes shoe-shopping with her best friend, but Gabi and Mali’s conversations forgo the zingers to focus on candid soul searching. The questions the women raise are just as riveting as the brunch discussions found in SATC, but they handle the topics a little less flippantly. Gabi’s flaky love life, we realize, is a result of her own insecurities: deep down, she’s not the vixen she makes herself out to be.

(Imagine if Samantha Jones turned soft!)

It’s been said that the fifth friend in Sex and the City is the city itself. Similarly, Alila is full of careful cinematic decisions that showcase Tel Aviv as one of the many characters in Gitai’s panorama.

Just as Sex and the City teaches audiences the nuances of New York City culture — from what it means to live on Park Avenue to the necessity of looking down on Los Angeles — Alila captures the nuances of Tel Aviv life. The illegal Asian laborers, the Holocaust survivor living next door, and the drama surrounding the adolescent boy who’s afraid to serve in the army are unique to Israel’s social climate. And, as a backdrop to the plot’s twists and turns, subtle details, such as reports of violence playing on the radio in the background and the bustling colorful streets full of vendors seen from a car window, convey a sense of the general atmosphere of the city that shapes the lives of its characters.

Bottom line: If you’re in the mood for a movie about love, sex and friends in a dynamic city — that focuses a little less on looking fabulous and offers a little more Jewish than a convert named Charlotte — check out Alila.

The hilarious film Circumcise Me: The Comedy of Yisrael Campbell is making its World Television Premiere on The Jewish Channel this month. Orthodox-convert comedian Yisrael Campbell shares his stand-up routine and the wild life story that inspired it.
Watch the trailer above, read more about the film here, and watch the whole thing, in all its side-splitting, knee-slapping hilarity, on TJC this month!

Violence stemming from land disputes between Arabs and Jews is a primary concern within the country. So, in his landmark documentary series Land of the Settlers, Israeli newsman Chaim Yavin starts taking sides in the complicated debate over the withdrawal of Jewish settlements from Gaza and the West Bank, visiting the homes of both Arabs and Jews living in the disputed territories.

The origins of these settlement communities stretch back to decisions made by political figures like Moshe Dayan. In Slaves of the Sword: Moshe Dayan, we get an up-close and personal look at the flamboyant and controversial Israeli Defense Minister. With testimony from both supporters and critics, the legacy of Dayan’s decisions are painted in vivid color.

But for today’s ground-level IDF soldier, the only shade that really matters is green. Among the young conscripts who choose to break their silence in At The Green Line, the politics of protecting Israel’s borders are not always clear-cut. Some refuse to serve, while others try to change the system from inside.

Israel’s not only inhabited by Jews and Arabs, though. Amongst the country’s diverse population is a small group of African-American immigrants who practice Old Testament tradition and call themselves African Hebrews. The revival of polygamous marriage practices among this community is explored in Sister Wife. And while embracing a new spouse may make a husband happy, we see how it can also make a wife feel like a second fiddle.

Issues of sexual needs vs. family acceptance are not restricted to new immigrants either. The travails of being both Orthodox and secretly gay in modern Israel are captured with emotional detail in Say Amen. Within a close-knit Moroccan-Israeli family where producing children is a paramount value, one man struggles to confess his homosexuality to those closest to him.

To see these and more films focusing on the promised land, head over to TJC’s Israel category for a current slate of provocative and engaging titles.

Despite surviving for over 400 years, one unique Sephardic community’s rich culture is facing potential demise in America. Island of Roses: The Jews of Rhodes in Los Angeles traces the Rhodelis’ history — sharing their distinct traditions, and investigating the lives of modern descendants to see how the past is being preserved.

“The summer nights in Rhodes were so clear,” an immigrant from Rhodes remembers, declaring, “the moon shone like the sun.”

A fascinatingly-unique community, the Sephardic Jews of Rhodes were once Spaniards who came to find an idyllic new home in the Greek island of Rhodes. The same night that Columbus set sail in 1492, the King and Queen of Spain forced all Jews out of their country. Sephardic refugees settled throughout the Mediterranean, and a large number of them chose to make their home on the beautiful Rhodes, where almond and lemon trees grew and the smell of roses was always in the air. It was a similar sentiment for nature’s beauty that led them to Los Angeles when a new kind of oppression surfaced.

The Mediterranean island of Rhodes was once heavily populated by Jews, but only a hand-full still live there today. Fleeing WWII and its aftermath, many Rhodes Jews immigrated to Los Angeles, where the warm weather and sunny beach reminded them of home. Island of Roses shares interviews with some of the last surviving immigrants, who offer nostalgic memories of their lost home, and explores how the once vibrant community of Rhodes Jews in Los Angeles now struggles to preserve its traditions as younger, assimilated generations have to make a conscious effort to maintain the practices of their ancestors.

For centuries the Jews of Rhodes lived peacefully, preserving the medieval form of the Ladino language they took with them from Spain and practicing their own distinct Sephardic traditions. But the quiet island was invaded by Germany in 1944, and Rhodes Jews were among the many sent off in cattle cars to their deaths.

Island of Roses reconstructs the past that the Nazis destroyed through the stories and memories of the few living Jews who still remember what life on Rhodes was once like. It sounds ideal when one woman speaks about her vibrant youth on the Mediterranean island, where she spent every day of the summer on the beach and went out at night all dressed up with her girlfriends to listen to music on the Mandraki Harbor.

But the generation that was blessed with such sweet memories is starting to die out. Island of Roses explores the identity struggle facing the descendants of these immigrants. Having grown up immersed in American culture but made familiar with Rhodes customs, the children of immigrants must decide to what degree they identify with each. While they recognize the value of centuries-old traditions that threaten to be lost in history, it’s easier to let these traditions die. It takes a deliberate effort to learn a second language that few people speak, observe old folk practices, and figure out the proportions to a grandmother’s old recipes that she never bothered to write down.

But, ultimately, the documentary recognizes how lucky the Los Angeles Jews of Rhodes are to know their roots and be bound together by their age-old practices. In one scene, a large family is gathered around a dinner table, ready to enjoy a delicious, huge traditional meal and each other’s company, when the family’s aged patriarch begins to sing in Ladino.

“My heart is sighing, what is to become of me in foreign lands,” he croons, the old song’s weighty lyrics moving to a slow melody, sharing an immigrant’s apprehension about moving away from his homeland. The sad song is delivered beautifully, and one can’t help but think that the best way of mourning what is lost is to be grateful for having once had it.

One of the most shocking Holocaust stories is that of Ilse Stein. The Jewess and the Captain reveals how Ilse, a beautiful young Jewish girl, fell in love with a Nazi officer, who went on to save her life — and the lives of several other Jews from the Minsk ghetto. The documentary shares an interview with Ilse just before her death, shocking archival photographs, and KGB secret documents in order to reexamine her strange romance that blossomed in the middle of the ghetto.

While The Jewess and the Captain explores the Holocaust from a Jew’s perspective, Shadows Of Memory looks at WWII through the rarely-explored eyes of ordinary German citizens. People often ask, “How could the Holocaust have happened? How could so many good people not see what was going on?” This documentary tries to answer the daunting question through conversations with three generations of German women, including the filmmaker’s mother, a woman who lived through the war but didn’t see the atrocities—or chose not to.

With the overwhelming number of horror stories the Holocaust produced, it is easy to close our eyes to the most disturbing facts and tales, but Leo’s Journey: The Story Of The Mengele Twins (which premieres tomorrow) confronts the story of Dr. Joseph Mengele head on. Following a rare survivor of the notorious doctor’s “medical” experiments, on his journey back to Auschwitz for the first time since the war, the film explores what Mengele — often referred to as the Angel of Death — was doing with Jewish twins at Auschwitz. What was he researching and why did only 258 of 3,000 twins survive?

Clearly, Leo’s Journey is meant for an adult audience, but A Story About a Bad Dream is a Holocaust film geared towards children. It tells the story of a little girl’s Holocaust experience through the gentle voice of a naïve child, with colorful reenactments that make the story digestible for younger viewers, who, in decades to come, will be responsible for keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive.

These are just a few of the excellent and eye-opening documentaries showing in TJC’s History and Remembrance category, where you’ll find new and provocative titles sharing stories from the Jewish past every month.

The documentary Divine Food: 100 Years in the Kosher Delicatessen Trade tells the story of the Oscherwitz family and their passion for making kosher corned beef, pastrami and other classic deli fare. But tasting is believing. So we hit up New York City’s most famous kosher and kosher-style delis to find out why this food is held so close to Jewish hearts…and stomachs!

Check out TJC Movie Talk — hosted by Forward Arts and Culture Editor Alana Newhouse — in the TJC Original Series category for an inside look at some of the other delicious film selections playing on The Jewish Channel.

For the Magav, Israel’s border guard, keeping terrorists out of the country is a major concern, but not the only one. Far away from heavily patrolled border crossings with Gaza and the West Bank, and out in the hinterlands of the Sinai and Negev deserts, police strive to rebuff entrance to another unwanted immigrant group: Russian prostitutes.

Bringing foreign sex workers to cities like Tel Aviv means easy profits for their handlers. When legal transport isn’t possible, smuggling networks enlist rural cash-poor Bedouinsto facilitate border jumpings from nearby Egypt. Police respond by relying on calculated surveillance and night vision equipment to intercept crossings. Despite these efforts, illegal immigrants with futures in prostitution still make it through.

These cat-and-mouse games are similar to those being played out along America’s desert border with Mexico. Like the Magav, U.S. patrols employ advanced military technologies to guard a massive stretch of territory that far outstrips their manpower.

For illegal aliens who dodge capture, the reward is finding agricultural and service work with dollar wages exceeding anything to be found back home. For Russian prostitutes who find a way into Israel, the payoff is often a life of sexual slavery.

The film Women For Sale recounts this harsh lifestyle from the point of view of the prostitutes themselves. Their illegal immigrant status keeps them firmly under the psychological control of gangs who literally own their bodies, and pimps who ensure they turn a profit.

In Israel, trafficking for sexual exploitation was only made a crime in 2000. Before that, smuggling prostitutes was a safer alternative to running drugs, weapons and terrorists. That industry’s continuing legacy has given Israel prominent mention in annual U.S. and U.N. human trafficking reports.

But the bad press has had an effect. As NYU Professor Rakefet Zalashik tells the Forward’s Alana Newhouse on the latest episode of TJC Movie Talk, Israeli authorities have recently made a more concentrated effort to fight human traffickers and protect former-Soviet immigrants. As for the Magavnikim who watch the dusty border with Egypt, each night’s work is another opportunity to keep terrorists out — and to further block up the prostitute pipeline.

Though it’s been mired in controversy lately, the Israeli army is the country’s greatest unifying force, bringing together people from all walks of society and providing a shared experience. On The Front Line captures the ideological and religious struggles of twenty diverse Israeli youths in a pre-army prep course, as they learn to get along with each other amidst the chaos of the Second Infitada.

“In the past, pioneers dealt with physical swamps, now we deal with social swamps,” explains Lt. Col. Hosea Friedman, founder of Beit Israel, a pre-Army prep course. “The rift in Israeli society is the greatest danger.”

Gunshots arch over the Jerusalem skyline while classes are in session, and in their down time students armed with camcorders capture massive tanks rumbling by their windows — life as usual during the second Infitada. For teens like Elkana, a child of the Kiryat Arba settlement in Hebron, what’s extraordinary is not the gunfire, but the fact that he is conversing with the likes of Avner, a leftist Kibbutznik. Immersed in community work, academic discussion, and each other, the students at Beit Israel don’t just tackle fundamental questions of their Jewish and Israeli identities, but more importantly, begin to chip away at their preconceived notions of those on “the other side.”

Radically different environments have shaped the young lives depicted in On the Front Line. “On the day of Rabin’s assassination, some of my friends were happy,” recalls Elkana, who grew up in the majority Palestinian city of Hebron, where his family lives within a concrete and barbed wire compound. An aspiring radio jockey, Elkana grew up without television. The only modern entertainment to speak of on his compound is the radio, blanketing the pops of bullets and Molotov cocktails from the Arab settlements on the hillside. “It’s frustrating that the Israeli army doesn’t retaliate enough – that every time we go outside my mom has to call me a million times on my cell phone to make sure I’m alive and safe,” he says.

On the other side of the political divide is the liberal Avner, who grew up on Kibbutz Metzner. “How would you feel,” Elkana asks him, trying to explain his right-wing position, “if you were asked to leave your kibbutz?” Avner calmly replies, “ Part of democracy is always having values colliding each other. Not everything that divides is bad – not everything that unites is good.”

For some students, the course at Beit Israel it is their first time toe to toe with faithful Jews. Secular and religious values collide, in and out of the classroom, and the students struggle to get along or to disagree respectfully. “Some of the boys told the girls they weren’t dressed modestly enough,” says Morit, a secular Kibbutznik. “I don’t know if it scared me, or amused me, or made me feel contempt.”

It is not only religious and political values that are on the front line, but also questions of social class and ethnicity. Whether it is on the settlements, in kibbutzim, or in upper class neighborhoods, many of the students have grown up in elitist environments. Their time at Beit Israel, an ‘urban kibbutz’, where part of the course involves interactions with the locals, is a first exposure to the everyday conditions of poverty. “From the outside, it seems so romantic, the prep course kids playing with the local children,” Morit confesses. “It seems so harmonious and beautiful but its not. I have to remind myself that these are not kids from my kibbutz.”

Other students were already painfully aware of these subtleties. “Here in the neighborhood, people are not stupid. They can tell when people are put off,” explains the sephardic Shlomi, a descendant of the Libyan Jews of Tripoli. “They eventually realize that because of their ethnic background and the shade of their skin, they are treated condescendingly.”

On The Front Line engages the most pressing issues facing Israeli youth today, and offers a glimpse into extraordinarily different young lives. In a year’s worth of dialogue, the students at Beit Israel have found no concrete answers to their questioning, no single means to bridge the religious, political and socioeconomic lines that fracture Israeli society. Yet, they have begun to comprehend each other.

The Jewish Channel caught up with Behar to get her take on Cuba under a new Castro, and what that means for the Caribbean island’s Jews.

How was Fidel Castro viewed by the Cuban Jews you interviewed for your film?

I worked on my film between 1999-2002, at a moment when Fidel Castro was still actively ruling Cuba. Most people in Cuba, out of a combination of habit and fear, tended not to talk about Fidel Castro openly. They used the common gesture of bringing their hands to their chins and pretended to be stroking an imaginary beard whenever they wanted to speak about “Him.” I didn’t want to create any problems for the Cuban Jews I interviewed on the island, so I steered away from politics and focused on questions about Cuban Sephardic heritage. Some of the people I interviewed later made aliyah to Israel and I followed up with them there after the completion of the film. They then spoke more openly about Fidel Castro and expressed their dissatisfaction, not so much with him, but with politics in general.

So in the section of the film about Cuba, no one brought up Fidel Castro. But when I interviewed my Sephardic Cuban father, who lives in New York with my Ashkenazi Cuban mother, I mentioned that it was widely rumored that Fidel Castro had a Sephardic Jewish grandfather from Turkey. My father is fiercely anti-Castro and I was curious to see how he would react to this remark. Although he definitely was surprised, he continued to nibble on the range of delicious finger foods my mother had set out on the dining table. Finally, he shrugged and said that it didn’t matter whether Fidel Castro was Jewish or not. After all, my father exclaimed, he now lives in USA!

What does his relinquishing of power to brother Raul mean for the future of Cuba’s Jews?

The relinquishing of power to Raul Castro isn’t going to bring about any immediate changes in the life of the Jews in Cuba. The Jewish community in Cuba depends on the economic, moral, and educational assistance of American Jewish organizations and missions. So long as that support continues, the community will not be threatened. Major changes in Cuban Jewish life will only come about when diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States are normalized, allowing for the free flow of people, ideas, and goods between the two countries. Once that occurs, many more American Jews, included those of Cuban Jewish background, will travel to Cuba. No one can predict exactly what will happen then, but I expect there will be many more people involved in preserving Cuban Jewish heritage and in building new Jewish institutions on the island.

One of the more recent creators to be influenced by Jewish-Viennese culture is a key figure in British Pop Art, R.B. Kitaj (pronounced kit-EYE), who died last year at the age of 74 in his home in Los Angeles. His obituary in the New York Times details that he was the first American artist to be elected to the Royal Academy since John Singer Sargent, and retrospectives of his work have shown at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

But before he became friends with Allen Ginsberg or worked in a “Van Gogh yellow studio,” Kitaj was just a dissatisfied kid named Ronald Brooks from Chagrin Falls, Ohio. Knowing he was destined for something more than the typical middle-American lifestyle, he dropped Ron and adopted the more sophisticated and exotic name of his Viennese stepfather, Kitaj. Then he headed to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where he and his art were greatly influenced by the local culture.

Perhaps significantly, Kafka, who also spent time in Vienna, was a major influence on Kitaj, who the New York Times praised for having been able to draw from a range of thinkers and artists, “from Titian to Cezanne.”

Kitaj himself would have been wary of such critical praise. He distrusted, even despised, art critics. In fact, at one point, he accused them of murder. The Tate Gallery in London held a retrospective for Kitaj that received across-the-board horrendous reviews. Immediately afterwards, Kitaj’s second wife, Sandra Fisher, died of an aneurysm at the age of 47. Heartbroken and livid, Kitaj believed the critics’ harsh words were responsible for the tragedy, and he took revenge by painting “The Critic Kills,” which depicted the art critic as a monstrous, yellow-tongued creature.

This clash was just the peak of a long-raging feud. During the age of abstract expressionism, Kitaj was not producing what critics like Clement Greenberg wanted. At a time when it was cool to be abstract, Kitaj wanted to be literal, painting about specific events, attitudes, and experiences. In his words he wanted a more “social art.”

This idea of a “social art” seems to have come from Kitaj’s understanding of his Jewish identity, which in addition to Viennese culture, was a great source of artistic inspiration. He spoke freely about how being Jewish influenced his art, particularly the sense of exile, of being connected to a people but not rooted in a place. In his book, , he wrote, “Diasporism is my mode. It is the way I do my pictures.”
In this Diasporist mode, Kitaj found connection as well as displacement. He was not just a Jew, but one of many Jews; and when Time magazine wrote that “he draws better than almost anyone else alive,” Kitaj made his identity clear, responding, “I draw as well as any Jew who ever lived.”

But the series also shattered Yavin’s universal appeal. His perspective is, ultimately, “If we want peace, we have to dismantle the settlements.” Accordingly, The Land of the Settlers turned him from “everyone’s man” into a man for “the Left.” And it threatened his career. Yet he endured and was able to go on as news anchor for Channel 1, even after the series made its controversial splash in 2003, igniting anger and indignation on both sides of the debate.

Until now. Yavin, 74, also known as “Mr. Television,” just retired (note link is to Jewish Press blog which clearly doesn’t have anything nice to say about the liberal Yavin), after anchoring his last news broadcast in a 40-year career. Israelis may miss their most recognized newsman, but TJC subscribers can still see the now-controversial figure in his ground-breaking The Land of the Settlers at the touch of a button.

William Shakespeare and God.

Now, in any given year, all manner of Shakespeare gets picked up. The guy’s long dead, and the rights to his plays are free, so why not? Someone somewhere, working with a powerful case of writers block, will decide to abandon their original concept and simply adapt the Bard. But, setting the action in Elizabethan-era England is expensive (what with all those costumes), and it can limit the appeal to a mass-audience. So, many adapters simply move it to a modern place like, say, New York City, where they can stick Hamlet in a high-rise, and let Montagues and Capulets run amok on the West Side.

Tales of ancient Israel, however, rarely get such modern cinematic retellings. And this is puzzling, because stories from scripture are free to adapt and have a wealth of blood, lust, honor and intrigue. Sure, there are plenty of renditions with swords and sandals, but when it comes to moving things to the contemporary, a certain carpenter from Nazareth seems to get all the attention. He’s pretty easy to pick out. Think about all those meaningful camera shots of a stricken hero lying down, arms splayed out, feet crossed. Well, they’re designed to make a Christian audience go, “Oh yeah, director, I know what you’re doing there. It’s like Jesus!”

Try getting a similar reaction from a Jewish audience. Sure, Jim Carrey parted his tomato soup in Bruce Almighty and Steve Carrel built an ark in the sequel, but I’m talking about something more high-minded.

Well, you can look no further than The Jewish Channel for such an example, because we’ve got Samson. The film not only transports the ancient Judge from Israel to Holocaust-era Poland, but also strips him of his physical strength in place of a more compelling emotional perseverance. These twists on the original tale make for great drama. And while director Andrzej Wajda’s magnum work may seem unique for its modern take on a tale of ancient Israel, there are actually a few other American films which have found similar inspiration.

In East of Eden, John Steinbeck reset the story of Cain and Abel in California’s World War One-era Salinas Valley. When Elia Kazan adapted it for the screen, it was James Dean who stole scenes as the emotionally tortured Cal, whose hatred for his brother stems from the cold favoritism practiced by his father, Adam.

In Jacob’s Ladder, director Adrian Lyne revisited the ancient dream of angels climbing to and from heaven and earth, as one man’s purgatorial journey toward acceptance of his young son’s death. That man, Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins), is a gas-poisoned Vietnam veteran who experiences other-worldly visions after being wounded in battle.

Those are three compelling cases for more Scriptural adaptations. So, whose story to adapt next? Well, whoever it is, that story won’t cost Hollywood a dime. When it comes to collecting story residuals, God’s not very business savvy.

Driving the rocky Northern California coast has always required caution. The views of the ocean from the two narrow lanes of Highway One are spectacular, but the blind turns and steep drop to the jagged rocks below make for a treacherous journey.

My grandfather used to drive this road constantly, a perilous journey that mirrored the daily animosities faced by NoCal’s immigrant Jewish population. He was a Jew who moved his family to Sonoma County from New York City in the late 1940’s. At the time, he was the only board-certified cardiologist in that part of the state. Since there were no emergency rooms in the area’s small-town hospitals, he would leave his home in Santa Rosa and drive the old coastal road to make house calls. Sometimes, he’d range up to Fort Bragg and Mendocino. Other times it would be just down the road to Petaluma and the small hamlets along the Russian River.

On these more local trips he treated an exiled people living a lifestyle unchanged from the “Old Country.” When there was no school, my grandmother used to make my mother and her sisters go along, to ensure my grandfather didn’t fall asleep while navigating the narrow country roads. He would pull in to the White Russian communities near the coast, and his patients there would come out to greet him dressed in traditional Slavic robes and hats. The “Whites” were on the losing side of the Russian Revolution, fighting against the “Red” Bolshevik forces that would go on to found the U.S.S.R.

Among the exiles he treated were the Russian Jews of Petaluma. They’d arrived in the wake of the Revolution during the 1920s, coming to America to buy inexpensive land and raise chickens, and their ranks included many socialists who strongly supported a communist Russia. By the time my grandfather started treating patients in Petaluma, the post-war Jewish community there had grown to include both Holocaust survivors and American-born Jews from Southern California and the East Coast. The changing face of Jewish Petaluma during this era, and the poultry industry that fueled its rise, is examined in Bonnie Burt and Judy Montell’s documentary, A Home On The Range: The Jewish Chicken Ranchers of Petaluma.

One of the themes explored in the film is how certain anti-Semitic and anti-labor sentiments of Depression-era California sometimes combined to produce ugly episodes like the 1935 tarring-and-feathering of two Jewish union organizers in Santa Rosa. Such intolerance lingered on through the western migrations that followed the Second World War.

When my grandfather first moved to the area in 1947, many of his neighbors had never seen an East Coast Jew before. While most of the response to his creed was friendly, he was also approached by a group of men with other intentions. They told him to clear out, or there would be trouble. My grandfather had survived quite a few scrapes, so when his wife asked him what they should do about the threat, he responded simply, “get a gun.”

And that was it. He never heard from the men again – a sign that the power of vigilantism in the area had waned because of the sheer persistence of new arrivals. When my grandfather passed away a few years back, winemaking had long ago become Sonoma’s iconic product. But driving those old coastal roads recalls a time when local Jews ignored threats and made chicken king.

Wecker and I chatted over instant messenger about the larger implications of the film Photographer, what it means for art–and artists–to be evil, and why art shouldn’t be blamed for the Holocaust. The interview has been edited for clarity and entertainment value, if not brevity.

The Docent: So, we’re playing this film right now called Photographer, which is about how the head accountant at the Lodz ghetto, Walter Genewin, who fancied himself an amateur photographer, used the ghetto’s Jewish inmates as his subjects.
Menachem Wecker: Sort of like Dr. Mengele…
The Docent: Like Mengele? You mean experimenting on Jews?
MW: Yeah. Using Jews as models for experiments… I suspect that’s not endemic to Nazis.
The Docent: What do you mean?
MW: We’ve seen the sort of pictures emerging from Abu Ghraib, and I’m not a psychologist, but I tend to think that people in positions of power (as in the Stanford Prison experiment, and the Milgram electric shock one) have a tendency of inflicting hard on their subordinates. Experimenting is just an offshoot of that, I imagine.
I wonder if there isn’t more to it though. And I will be treading on very thin ice here…
The Docent: Go for it.
MW: I absolutely don’t want people to read this and think I’m justifying anything the Nazis did…

The Docent:They won’t think that. You’re definitely a Nazi hater. I’ll vouch for you.
MW: But there does seem to be an interesting component of the artist-model relationship, where there is a true fascination with — let’s call it “lower class models.” The best work I’ve seen on modeling is the recent book “Blue Nude” by Elizabeth Rosner. And there does seem to be a lot of power going on from the artist’s perspective and helplessness or vulnerability on the model’s.
The Docent: Upper class artists painting lower class models?
MW: Yes that happens a lot. Or think of Anna Ticho painting the patients in her husband’s waiting room. Or da Vinci chasing after people he described as grossly ugly.
The Docent: Or Diane Arbus photographing freaks.
MW: Yes. Or this whole fad of photographing homeless people. Adi Ness had done a good deal of that. I’ve always maintained that people who are ugly are easier to draw than good looking people–there’s more to caricature.
The Docent: Do you think that relationship is always an exploitative one?
MW: Not at all. I think there are plenty of models who’ve been able to exploit the artists who depicted them. If I got one thing from Rosner it’s that modeling is an art form, too.
It’s like acting I think.
But to tie this all back to the Nazis…
The Docent: Wait — but when the subject is a captive subject, or doesn’t even know they’re being a “model,” is that always wrong? Answer that, and then let’s get back to Nazis.
MW: I’ve been doing a lot of thinking in my religious art writing about evil art. Let’s say a piece that shows the glory of God, we’d call that a good piece from a religious art perspective. And let’s say a piece glorifying a heretic, well that seems bad.
But that’s too literal. What about an evil choice of color or tone or tint. Are there crimes against aesthetics? I’m not sure.
The Docent: Aesthetically evil?
MW: Exactly. So is it wrong to “capture” a model? Doubtful.
The Docent: Which brings us to the next point I wanted to discuss. Evil aesthetics.
MW: I mean if you pull a Skinner move and lock her/him up in a box that’s not so nice. You know Picasso put out cigarettes in women’s faces. There are mean artists. But I’m more interested in crimes they commit against their art. Because the form on the page/canvas never “captures” the model. It creates something new, so it really has little responsibility to the “real” model who is depicted… You know what I mean?
The Docent: Yes.
MW: So, you brought up evil aesthetics. Maybe there is something aggressive about making art. Maybe there is something about the way people respond to artists, almost like the celebrity worship that goes on. They are allowed to do as they please, because they are “ahtists” (said with the accent that works best for “dahling”). I wonder if this is going to turn into an aesthetic nature-nurture problem.
The Docent: There is something to that, did you see that Woody Allen movie Bullets Over Broadway? That’s the argument there – can one be a great artist without bucking social/moral conventions? But we’re getting off track.
MW: I plead guilty. I’m an evil interview subject I fear. Shall we get back on track?
The Docent: Yes, let’s. What I really wanted to talk about was Genewin as a practitioner of a wider Nazi aesthetic. You’ve written about how Hitler was an artist, and was very cognizant of the aesthetic impact of the Nazis.
MW: I believe it was Anselm Kiefer who said WWII was the greatest multi-media event in history. And Hitler put the Bauhaus out of commission, because he hated “modern” art. He has his own quote about people seeing the sky as green and the grass as pink being sterilized.
The Docent: What kind of art did Hitler like?
MW: Well, he was a painter. I think he was not a bad painter at all. There’s this fad to say he was terrible and he hated Jews and launched WWII because he couldn’t get into art school. That’s bunk (I’ll keep it clean).
The Docent: Thank you.
MW: I think our perspective here is key. Many frame the discussion of WWII as a story of the evil tendencies in people. They say: “The Germans were the most cultured people of the time, with their operas and paintings, etc., and yet culture didn’t help them!” So Nazism, then, becomes an attack on culture. As if to say, what good is painting if art lovers can become murderers?
That makes as much sense as saying “Coca-Cola is evil because some murderers drink soda.”
The Docent: But isn’t art what’s supposed to distinguish us from the animals?
MW: Nah. Animals make art. Look at Komar and Melamid’s elephants.
The Docent: Okay, so what’s your response to those people who say the Holocaust shows art’s no good?
MW: That people can be artists and other things too. And they are not necessarily related.
The interesting thing about Hitler is that arguably his art and his politics were linked. That’s unusual I think for evil artists. But that only impacts his art. To say it’s a liability of all art is an abuse of induction. Hitler saw his art and his politics as advancing Germany. And as national acts. Interestingly, I know of no paintings of his that depict Jews or much of anything political. They are all cute landscapes and towns. The book Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics shows that Hitler, as he was being cornered, was not talking to military advisers, but to artists and poets. He wanted to retire from politics and build a grand German museum.
The Docent: How do those cute landscapes tie into his politics?
MW: Well, they don’t. His paintings were his own. But his art extended to his rallies. He designed the Nazi flag and uniforms. He was involved in arranging the lights at the rallies. He practiced for hours in front of a mirror so that every movement he made was planned, like an actor or an athlete. If anything, he was aestheticizing politics, not bringing politics into art. So how can that become an attack on art?
The Docent: I’m convinced. But what effect do you think his aestheticizing politics had on politics?
MW: It made it prettier to look at?
The Docent: And on the Holocaust?
MW: Look, propaganda is a fascinating medium. That’s arguably aestheticized politics.
There’s no reason why that shouldn’t be high art. It’s so practical, so conscious of audience, so “minimalistic” almost. And the Nazis were a master of it, as were the Americans in their campaigns to attract soldiers to the war. The “sending a salami to GI Joe” was a wonderful campaign.
And the Nazis were on to something. We are still seeing the artistic implications of their “work.” All these Holocaust restitution cases that are dominating the headlines. They even managed to turn Klimt into a celebrity.
The Docent: “The Kiss” in college dorm rooms all over America, a product of the Nazis?
MW: The big question now is Barenboim playing Wagner…
The Docent: Yes. But don’t you think that emphasis on aesthetics, and on marketing, makes things rather cold and anesthetized?
MW: How so?
The Docent: There’s a lack of sincerity in doing everything for the effect it will make. Not in art, but in life.
MW: How can effect be anything but sincerity? Are you questioning the Nazis’ sincerity? I think they were pretty darn sincere. Propaganda is far more honest than art is.
The Docent: What I’m getting at is the problem of aestheticizing reality.
MW: Oh I see.
The Docent: One of the tricks of Nazi propaganda was to dehumanize Jews, by depicting them as rats, vermin, non-human.
MW: Sure. They probably learned that from the early Christian artists’ depictions of Saracens and Jews. It’s caricature. I’m not so sure I’m convinced it works though. I think dehumanizing art only works if viewers already despise the dehumanized. I don’t think it makes evil people; it just appeals to the choir. I get the impression most people don’t take art seriously at all.
The Docent: Perhaps, but it makes literal what people are thinking.
MW: That’s a good point. So maybe it does reinforce a bit. That’s a fascinating thing about art. Think of those cave people painting the bison on their cave walls in berry juice. Our best guess is that they thought they were “capturing” the beasts, and that would somehow help them at the hunt. Art does take life and cut it down to size somehow. It does dehumanize, because it turns people into color and line and such. But I guess when it’s used for politics purposes, rather than art ones, we get uneasy.
I just wish people would learn an important lesson from this.
The Docent: What’s that?
MW: If you do think that images have the strength to incite hate, then they also have the power to do good things. So when you see art you like, buy it, or talk about it, or educate yourself about it.
It’s so bizarre to me that people don’t give art much thought until it offends them, and then all of a sudden it’s a force to be reckoned with.
If Hitler’s art killed, Cezanne’s probably gave life.
The Docent: Was he Jewish?
MW: Nah. He was a good Christian. But Pissarro was. You see in the museums he’s always Camille, but he’s Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro. And he looked like a Hasid.
The Docent: He dropped the Jewish names? Just like Winona Ryder.
MW: Well Pissarro, however poor, didn’t shoplift. There is a difference.
The Docent: An important distinction. So, the point I was trying to get to, and we’ll see if you agree…
MW: On the edge of my seat.
The Docent: …is that the Nazi application of aesthetics to life creates a kind of disconnect – or a space – between reality and one’s experience of it.
MW: That sounds smarter than what I was saying. Maybe they sought to bring life up to their artistic ideals?
The Docent: Perhaps. But it’s the kind of disconnect that would allow someone like Genewin to focus more on the quality of the light in his image than the starving Jew at the center of that image.
MW: Yes! Well said.
The Docent: Thanks.
MW: But let’s point out to cover ourselves, that this doesn’t justify the starving.
The Docent: No, of course not.
MW: There’s this case now about this artist who got a starving dog off the street into a gallery. And it died in the gallery, and everyone is debating whether he let it die and all. And sure it makes an important point to watch a dog die in a gallery, but that doesn’t justify killing it.
The Docent: What important point does that make, watching a dog starving?
MW: Well it’s something that happens all the time in the street, but maybe people will notice it if it’s in the gallery.
So many people go to museums like they go to church–expecting the profound. The goal is to let them realize that profundity exists in and outside the gallery/church with equal regularity.
The Docent: Ok, do you have any last thoughts before we finish on this subject?
MW: Sure. I think we need to be open to the possibility that art might be the last shred of goodness and creativity that remains in some very destructive people.
Human sacrifices happened on very beautifully made altars. They were simultaneously awful and evil and beautiful. This shouldn’t scare us, and we shouldn’t worry about humanizing evil. I think evil is not to be pushed away as Other.
Art lets us see that very often people who are destructive also create sometimes, and rather than seeing that as a liability of creativity, or as evil creations, we should see it, at least sometimes, as a struggle within that person.
The Docent: So can we say that beauty is amoral?
MW: Well, Wilde would agree with that. I think it depends on the artist in a sense. But yes, if I had to say yes or no to that sentence, I’d say yes.
The Docent: I’ll take it. Thanks so much for the chat.

The contrast between four heroic French women who risked their lives for Jewish souls, and the entire country of Holland that sad idly by as the Holocaust slaughtered millions offers a lesson in the influence that social factors had on individuals during the turmoil of WWII.

Sisters in Resistance tells the story of four non-Jewish, French women, who spearheaded a grassroots movement to undermine Hitler’s cause. French women played a marginal role in national government before the war, the documentary explains — they couldn’t vote, and they couldn’t hold a bank account. Their country had disenfranchised them. Ironically, their previously-silenced female voices became the nation’s most vociferous, abandoning self-concern to protest the Nazi invasion and Germany’s annexation of most of France. These women felt they had nothing to lose and sounded a crie de guerre, whereas their male counterparts remained reticent.

Not only did French women speak out against the German occupation, but they also fought for Jewish emancipation. Perhaps they could identify with the Jewish plight, because they understood what it was like to be at the mercy of others — especially since their own country had limited their freedoms. French men, on the other hand, had a more difficult time seeing through Jewish eyes, perhaps because they had always enjoyed personal liberties and didn’t understand the sacrifices taking place around them.

Unlike the brave French women who symbolized France’s voice of dissent, the Dutch were notoriously indifferent toward the Jewish extermination. With more Jews killed in Holland than in any other European country, they were sometimes thought to be in cahoots with the Nazis.

Goodbye Holland Director Willy Lindwer attempts to uncover the reason for Holland’s inaction during the Holocaust. Were the individual Dutch citizens evil or morally corrupt? Lindwer concludes that the individuals’ inaction in the Holocaust is rooted in the influence of larger Dutch social institutions.

Holland was a far more religious nation than France, and Lindwer asserts that this attitude made Holland as a whole predisposed to anti-Semitism. Under the influence of Holland’s Catholic Church, anti-Semitism became institutionalized, his subjects opine, noting that because Catholicism was a cornerstone of Dutch culture, Jews were alienated from the community, and seen as a divisive force. As a result, those interviewed declare, many Dutch people sympathized with the Nazi cause. “The Germans were silently welcomed here by the majority,” asserts a subject of the film.

Holland’s willingness to comply with Nazi authority can also be attributed to the bureaucratic ethos that typified the nation’s government. “Many people, and certainly officials, had the idea that they are just spokes in the wheel, [while] decisions are made by the higher ups,” says the current mayor of Groningen, Jaques Wallage, in the film, asserting that the Dutch were culturally-programmed to follow orders unquestioningly. Holland’s political system depended on blind obedience to authority; compliance was viewed as a virtue, never a vice. Today’s Dutch citizens declare in Goodbye Holland that it must therefore have been easy for the Nazis to gain the masses’ unwavering support.

While not all French women fought the Nazis, and not all Dutch citizens complied with them, it’s worth exploring the societal influences that influenced their behavior during the war, whether or not they were cognizant of the influence at the time. The point isn’t to say that the heroines of Sisters in Resistance weren’t acting consciously, or that the inactive Dutch couldn’t have escaped the model their society set. But both of these films help us answer the basic questions of how the average person acts when confronted with evil.

“No man is an island” is a phrase that’s often bandied about. But the truth behind it has quite a lot of relevance, as these two films demonstrate.

But, like Nixon visiting China, Rabin was the one man with an appropriately-aggressive reputation to pursue peace with the Palestinians.

And when one takes a cursory look, there are many comparisons to be made between these two statesmen. The political careers of Rabin and Nixon share notable similarities in their trajectory, until one final point: whereas Nixon’s self-destructive and paranoid politics characterized the end of his political career, it was specifically Rabin’s hopes for reconciliation – and a distinct lack of wariness – that defined his later political path, and ultimately brought the end of his life.

Rabin’s first tenure as head of state was cut short by a scandal involving his wife, resulting in political purgatory, followed by an eventual return as Prime Minister. Similarly, Nixon spent a long tenure as Vice-President, suffered a bitter election defeat to John F. Kennedy, and wandered the political wilderness before returning to the White House as President.

Despite seeing daily televised images of protests to their policies, both Rabin and Nixon continued to stubbornly believe in a nebulous “silent majority” of the larger population, which was always on their side. In fact, in an interview the night of his assassination included in the film Rabin, the then-prime minister invoked this exact term to define the unnoticed group of citizens amidst the many loud protests against his peace negotiations.

And while only an infamous Communist-baiter like Nixon could “acceptably”establish American political ties with Red China during the Cold War, only someone with the seasoned military stature of Rabin could make anything close to an “acceptable” peace with Israel’s most bitter enemy, Yasser Arafat and the PLO, in the wake of the First Intifada.

Of course, there’s also their respective partnerships with the leading rock-stars of their time: Nixon with Elvis Presley and Rabin with Aviv Geffen.

But it’s in their final political chapters where light-hearted comparisons among the famously anti-Semitic president and the “warrior for peace” Israeli prime minister really fall apart.

While Nixon’s return to power was marked by legendary paranoia and a hubristic vow to continue the war in Vietnam until he achieved what he termed “peace with honor,”Rabin’s second go-around at the helm found him taking the fateful course of reconciliation with his most heated political rival, Shimon Peres, and pursuing a “battle for peace.” Having previously disparaged Peres in his memoirs, Rabin entered into a doctrinal alliance with Peres that would see them reach the symbolic peak of their partnership with the sharing of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.

Rabin recounts the events that led to the subject’s transformation from a reactionary politician — who fought the most against those with whom he should probably have agreed – into a symbol of partnership amidst great turmoil. Peres and Rabin were beacons of Israel’s Left wing for decades, and their very public tussles belied the fact that they had so much in common.

The still-controversial peaceRabin signed with Yasser Arafat was inspired in part by the sight of Israelis fleeing the Iraqi bombingof Tel Aviv during the first Gulf War. As scud missiles fell all about the city, we are told that Rabin angrily looked out from his apartment window at the clogged highway to Haifa and realized his people only wanted peace. As he recounts in Rabin, “I fought so long as there was no chance for peace… the path of peace is better than the path of war.”

Ironically, it was this same trust in the good intentions of his own people that would eventually lead to his assassination in 1995. Rabin famously refused to wear a bullet-proof vest despite receiving many death threats around the time of the Oslo Accords, declaring that his surviving through wars with opposing forces meant he didn’t have much to fear from civilians in his own country.

So, Rabin was no Nixon – and that’s certainly a good thing. One wonders, though, with the collapse of the Oslo Accords after his death, what might have been achieved if Rabin had taken on just a bit of Nixon’s darker side.

Before the onslaught of the Holocaust, a select few German Jewish intellectuals — including Albert Einstein — escaped oppression in Europe, seeking refuge in the American melting pot. With little more than the clothes on their backs, these Jews set sail, hoping to find a new freedom beyond Hitler’s grasp. Because so few were permitted this escape, the chance to travel to America was a great privilege that seemed to offer great hope; but life wasn’t as easy as had been expected on the other side of the pond. Although many of these refugee professors had excellent qualifications, they were turned away when applying for positions at prestigious Northeastern universities. To their astonishment, anti-Semitism was alive and well in the U.S. — a nation not nearly as progressive or “free” as it professed to be.
But some scholars found acceptance at all-black colleges in the Old South. From Swastika to Jim Crow chronicles their story, examining the lasting alliances they forged with the African–
American community. Through touching testimony, their African American students, many of whom have gone on to become professors or prominent artists, fondly recall their foreign teachers, testifying to their tremendous contribution to social equality in this country.

During the 1940s and ’50s, segregation, lynching, and institutionalized racism were rampant — and Jews who’d seen so much persecution throughout their history empathized with the African-American struggle. “At a black university, I felt I had so much in common with teachers and students,” one professor recalls in From Swastika. Likewise, the black community identified with the exiled Jews. They, too, understood displacement and suffering: “The notion of man’s inhumanity to man was not foreign to African American citizens,” another professor said.

The empathy among Jews and blacks in these schools and communities led the Jewish professors to do what they could to help their persecuted fellows. In many ways, they set the precedent for the strong Jewish communal involvement in the Civil Rights movement that was to come.

Today, the relationship between Jews and the African-American community has seen a lagging in this partnership. At times, the alliance has been strong (fighting for continued inclusion in American society), while at others it has been weak or wrought with tension (Brownsville and the Crown Heights Riots).

But with America’s leading neo-Nazi organization bent on expansion and hoping to get its foot in the door of mainstream politics in the 2008 election, according to the Anti-Defamation League, now would be a good time to solidify the Black-Jewish partnership. Bowles is being presented as a viable candidate for the Commander in Chief. It’s conceivable that debate regulations will have him spewing his hatred to a national audience with the same prestige of place as major party candidates.

Columbia City Paper’s reporter Corey Hutchins gives us a preview:

Pulling on his red swastika armband the National Socialist Movement’s presidential nominee, John Taylor Bowles, will tap it and say, ‘This … now this is coming back into style.’ And then he’ll smile. And while you looked at him, smiling like that, dressed the way he is and running for president, you might think this is all just a really bad skit made for a Youtube.com presidential joke-fest. But – and I’m sorry but there’s no other way to say this – he and his party are as serious as the Holocaust.

Bowles’s candidacy presents what could be a worst-case scenario for both Jews and African-Americans: hate gone mainstream. And Bowles’s group, the National Socialist Movement, is forming strategic alliances with the Ku Klux Klan, as well as other white supremacist groups . If they can partner up to hate us, surely we can partner up to protect ourselves.

Lest you think this is a fringe issue, when all anti-Semites in America get together, they can be a rather potent force. About 15% of Americans maintain views that are “unquestionably anti-Semitic,” according to the ADL, and at least 5% of Americans wouldn’t vote for a black presidential candidate. Sure, those numbers are only about on-par with Ross Perot’s support, but certainly their message is of far greater concern. It’s one thing to have a guy representing that portion of America ranting about free-trade agreements; it’s quite another to have one calling for the whitening of America.

The Black-Jewish alliance has done a lot for this country. If hatred really is on the rise, the country could use it again, and the subjects of From Swastika to Jim Crow provide us with a good model for re-launching that partnership.

Watch the Trailer:

About the film:
A wondrous coming-of-age story that relates the hope of a young boy amid the tragedy of Ethiopian Jews’ struggle in leaving their war-torn country, Caravan 841 weaves a tale of a young orphan looking to find his place and his self in his new home of Israel. Moshe, a little boy who immigrated to Israel from Ethiopia as a refugee with so many others in the 1990s, anxiously awaits his mother’s arrival – and endeavors to find his way without her.

“I’ve gotta run like a fugitive to live the life I live,” one of Moshe’s few friends serenades him with Bob Marley’s lyrics, singing, as he dances about, “I’m going to be iron, like a lion in Zion.” With big innocent eyes and long skinny legs, Moshe appears vulnerable, but the repeated tests of his inner strength of character prove that the little boy has a lion’s spirit.

Caravan 841 is the story of a boy who’s forced to realize all too soon that the world is cruel and unfair. Life gives Moshe one disappointment after another, but he works through them when he befriends a pair of role models who couldn’t be more different: a strict Orthodox Rabbi and an easy-going saxophone player who owns a night club. The compassionate strangers take a sincere interest in Moshe, but guide him in different directions: while the Rabbi encourages him to pray, study, and live dutifully, his musician friend, Walter, gives him opportunities to laugh, dance and make music — leaving Moshe to choose between them and find his own path.

Orphaned and lonely, Moshe desperately wants something stable to believe in, but after being repeatedly hurt, he’s instinctively distrustful. The Rabbi tells him to trust in God: God, he says, will give him all he needs. Walter, on the other hand, tells Moshe to trust in himself. Recognizing Moshe’s strong will, bravery and independence, Walter knows that a little boy who grew up in Ethiopia and lost his father to murderers in Sudan already knows a great deal about the world and simply needs to trust in the knowledge he has.

The emotionally-rich film is a true work of art, with gorgeous cinematography and passionate music. Caravn 841 opens with a beautiful shot of Moshe running through a field of sunflowers; it’s early in the morning, so the sun’s warm rays offer lighting that’s still soft and non-abrasive. Songs by Bob Marley and Billie Holiday make for a first-class soundtrack that’s highlighted by the beautiful live performances given in Walter’s night club.

Caravn 841 explores what life in Israel is like as an outsider. Although he’s Jewish, Moshe obviously wasn’t raised with a thorough understanding of the religion or culture. Jewish prayers and traditions are slightly foreign to him, and when the Rabbi decides Moshe should be circumcised, the boy, unfamiliar with the practice, runs away terrified.

Ultimately, the film speaks to the importance of emotional strength. An insensitive social worker looms throughout the film, threatening to send Moshe away to boarding school. While she and Moshe are sitting in her office, she reminds him, “You’re not the only child in Israel without a mother.” As harsh as these words are, she is right. Everyone has hardships they must face; what separates one man from the next is the grace with which he handles his struggles. As the Rabbi tells Moshe, “God is testing us from above all the time.” Life’s turmoil, he suggests, is all a test of character.

Like Billie Holiday’s heavy-hearted songs playing in the background, Moshe’s story offers a message of hope – that heartache can be made into something good and meaningful. Moshe accepts his hardships with a stoic attitude and learns from those around him, making something beautiful from the difficult life he’s been handed.

Israeli director Amos Gitai is probably his nation’s most influential filmmaker. Film critics say Gitai is leading the currently-blooming renaissance in Israeli film, with the Village Voice calling him Israel’s “one man new wave.”

Since the start of his career in 1974, Gitai has directed documentaries, shorts, and feature films that have brought him eleven wins on top of an additional twelve nominations from film festivals around the world. Most recently his film Free Zone, which starred Natalie Portman, won an award at the Cannes Film Festival.

But, as often is the case, what the art world applauds is less-easily digested by mainstream Hollywood film-goers. Gitai’s movies are unique, toying both with storytelling and cinematographic techniques. He eschews the same old story structure — exposition, rising action, conflict and then resolution (think of the mountain chart from high school English classes). Instead, Gitai mirrors reality, offering one big chunk of existence, where all of the characters are both good and bad, conflicts go unresolved, and polished happy endings simply don’t exist.

As far as his unique cinematic style is concerned, Gitai possesses a sense of confidence that doesn’t rely on cheap tricks to keep the audience’s attention. Instead of short, cliched shots that jolt the viewer’s focus, Gitai empowers the viewer to decide where to look within the shot through long, hypnotic takes that create a voyeuristic effect.

But before he became a filmmaker, Amos Gitai was trained and worked as an architect. This helps explain his movies, which aren’t stories as much as they are cultural edifices–beautiful things that tell of a particular place and time but resonate far beyond that place and time.
And they should be approached as such.

A good architect has a natural eye for style and knows how to comment on society indirectly. Gitai’s films are visually stunning and loaded with social criticism. Like a pillar, frieze or pediment, his individual shots and scenes serve as points of interest and beauty in his films, instead of merely as place-holders for plot points in a storyline.

If it were not for the Yom Kippur War, Gitai most likely would have followed his original career path. His father had been an architect and Gitai received his PhD in architecture from UC Berkley — architecture made sense. But after helping move wounded soldiers from Israel’s battle fields to hospitals by helicopter (if you’ve seen Kippur, this should sound familiar), Gitai decided, as he revealed in an interview with the BBC, that “architecture is maybe interesting for another country, another life, but it’s a bit too formal an exercise for me.”

From that point on, Gitai decided he wanted to make films that would “touch a nerve” with his countrymen, and by “touch a nerve” he meant flaunting his left-wing ideals. From the beginning, politics have fueled his films, and continue to do so, as he highlights the horrors of war (Kippur), the oppression of women (Kadosh), the human loss involved in the settlement of Israel (Kedma), and the failings of the nation’s social structure (Alila).

Despite his political assuredness, however, Gitai’s subjectivity and his honest portrayal of humanity transcend politics and give his films universal art-house appeal.

Typically, though, the decision was surrounded with controversy.

Beaufort is actually the Israeli Academy of Film and Television’s second choice, after Eran Kolirin’s The Band’s Visit, reports the Jerusalem Post. The latter film was not eligible for the Foreign Language Film category since more than half of its dialogue is in English. The Israeli committee made an appeal to the Academy Awards to reconsider, but the decision to disqualify The Band’s Visit was confirmed.

Since Beaufort won the second highest number of votes at the Ophir Awards, Israel’s version of the Oscars, it was the next in line for the honor. However, according to a previous article in the JPost, many Israelis “believe Joseph Cedar’s film has a better chance at winning an official spot as an Oscar nominee – and ultimately the best chance at winning Best Foreign Language Film.”

While Beaufort is about an IDF unit stationed at the Beaufort outpost in Lebanon just before the Israeli withdrawal in 2000, Time of Favor [HaHesder], Cedar’s first feature film — which premiered in 2000 — investigates the sometimes troubling intersection of militarism and religious extremism in the IDF’s Hesder program, whose enlistees spend part of their time in the army and the other part learning in yeshiva.

Time of Favor won several Ophir Awards and launched Cedar as one of Israel’s most important — and most controversial — new directors.

Dear Comrade Malenkov!

I am the daughter of Ana Rubinstein, the former wife of Comrade Stalin.
As he is in ill health, I ask you to let me see him. He knows me since I was a child.

R. Sveshnikova (Kostiokovski). If it is not possible to see him, I ask you to grant me an audience on a very urgent matter.
Date: 04.03.55

Ignoring the fact that he murdered 20 million people, Stalin still wouldn’t have been the ideal lover. He was short, his face was covered in pock mark scars, and his arm was crippled from a childhood accident. His personality, as you might have guessed, wasn’t much better. He was severe, easily angered, and extremely paranoid.

Yet Rubinstein apparently loved him anyway, and this discovery raises questions: Could it be that Stalin’s Jewish lover had something to do with his creation of the first Jewish homeland? Did the tyrant create a wannabe Zion just to impress his girl?

If not, Stalin’s motivations for creating a Jewish state in Siberia are hard to pin down. It could be understood as a good-intentioned act, gifting the Jewish people independence and a state of their own–which certainly doesn’t seem characteristic for a ruthless leader. Or, it could be seen as an anti-Semitic plot to rid Russia of Jews by pushing them far away, into the middle of nowhere.

Either way, his plan failed. In Search of Happiness is a poetic documentary that looks at what life is like in modern-day Birobidzhan, the capital of this Soviet Jewish state, where the small population is ever-dwindling. The film offers poignant cinematography that shows swampy farmland and little boys playing soccer around a community cow. Blending these contemporary shots of the backwards society with archival footage of hopeful Jews rushing west, the film shows how a community, that never really blossomed, has devolved into a disappointment.

Stalin’s love-life, like a homeland in Siberia, didn’t fare much better. His first wife died two years after they were married, and his second wife committed suicide. Historians speculate that Stalin and Rubinstein met in between these two marriages, in Saint Petersburg around 1917. At the time, Rubinstein was already divorced, had a daughter, and was working for the Bolshevik underground.

As years passed, their relationship must have sweetened, because, while hundreds and thousands of Jews were being deported and murdered by Stalin’s government, Rubinstein was living a comfortable life on Vasilievsky Island, next door to the home of the nation’s leaders. Years later, when her daughter applied for a job as an engineer at a classified institute, she was hired immediately — despite the fact that a secret KGB decree had just been issued not to hire Jews.

There’s more to suggest that Stalin and Rubinstein had a thing. To this day, the Russian secret service won’t give up the name of the street that Rubinstein’s daughter lived on in Moscow.

And nothing screams sexy-Stalin affair like governmental secrecy.

The mere existence of the TV series is astounding, given Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent Holocaust denial conference – not to mention the country’s fraught relationship with Israel (embodied in Ahmadinejad’s promise to “wipe” Israel “off the map”).
Caught in the middle of all this has been Iran’s own Jewish population. Most people probably assume that the country no longer has any Jews around, but its Jewish population of 25, 000 represents the second largest Jewish community in the Middle East. And as Jews of Iran shows, the community there faces a particularly complex situation: they feel devoted to their native land and culture, which is why they don’t leave; at the same time, that devotion to Iran doesn’t often seem mutual.
And it’s possible that the show is meant to assuage that specific community. “The show’s appearance now may reflect an attempt by Iran’s leadership to moderate its image as anti-semitic and to underline a distinction that Iranian officials often make – that their conflict is with Israel, not with the Jewish People,” claims the AP.

And it’s not just in conferences and diplomatic halls that Iran has displayed an attitude that puts Jews on edge and questions the Holocaust’s historicity. Indeed, many in the population participated in a government-sanctioned a national cartoon contest that awarded prizes to submissions that best mocked the Holocaust. School children were then bused to a museum, where the winning drawings were exhibited.

On the face of it, Zero Degree Turn seems to be turning the tide of anti-semitism and Holocaust denial. The AP gleaned valuable testimonies from various Iranian viewers of the miniseries that suggest a burgeoning sympathy for the Jewish plight. “Once, I wept when I learned through the film what a dreadful destiny the small nation had during the world war in the heart of so-called civilized Europe,” said Tehran bank teller Mahboubeh Rahamati. Similarly, grocery store owner Kazim Gharibi commented: “Through this film, I understood that Jews had a hard time in the war – helpless and desperate, as we were when Iraq imposed war on us.”

While some Iranians are finally willing to acknowledge the horrors of the Holocaust, they’ve immediately put that change of perspective to use in claiming that Israel is comparable to Hitler. So, for a country that once looked askance at the true history of the Holocaust, Zero Degree Turn has become acceptable programming only because it forges this connection.

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Set in Josef Stalin’s Jewish state – the “Jewish Autonomous Region” of Birobidzhan established in 1934 – In Search of Happiness explores Boris Rak’s quest for life’s meaning in the face of his alternative Jewish homeland’s decline.

Regrettably, Boris and his wife, Masha, are the last living descendants of the community’s original settlers. It turns out that Stalin’s plan – moving all the Jews into one corner of Siberia – wasn’t good for the community’s prosperity.

And now the major Jewish communal entity on college campuses, Hillel, is realizing that its own approach to creating defined Jewish spaces in Russia has been similarly ineffective. Hillel held two four-day conferences in Russia to discuss a new strategy for promoting community: “a chain of open-space events,” said newly-appointed Hillel Director for Russia Leia Berlin, declaring that “by next September, we must reshape Hillel from its current closed-club model, where people gather in our premises.”

It’s an interesting contrast: Stalin, not the biggest fan of the Jews, created a closed territory and Judaism didn’t survive there. Hillel, ever working for Jewish growth and renewal, created closed spaces for Jews to gather and is now admitting the approach didn’t work.

Back in Birobidzhan, the elderly Boris reflects upon the disappearance of Jewish religious practices and culture in the erstwhile “alternative Zion.” It’s a warning sign of how bad things can get: His home is decorated with crucifixes, and the couple even keeps a herd of pigs in the backyard. And though he still remembers his Yiddish, he prays to Jesus, because “he was a Jew.” Throughout all of this, the viewer is reminded that Boris and his wife represent the strongest remnants of Birobidzhan’s Jewish community.

To avoid such a grim future for the Jewish community, Hillel is constructing a more-inclusive model that seeks to engender widespread community involvement from both Jews and non-Jews. Hillel thinks it can best promote Jewish growth by not creating groupings that are exclusively Jewish.
In the Ukraine, plans for a public Hillel Cafe are already underway. In Moscow, the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee has awarded Hillel a grant to fund a “Jewish Fashion House” that will foster Russian Jews’ interest in clothing design.

With these seemingly-promising new initiatives, Hillel just may turn things around in the FSU. Of course, they might have reached these conclusions earlier if they had looked to Stalin’s efforts at Jewish community building. The Jewish campus organization was ironically emulating that famous anti-Semite’s model.

Ensconced in the comfort of our homes, it is sometimes easy to forget that individuals featured in documentaries are real. They are people, not actors. Their stories belong to human history, not the Hollywood canon. With this in mind, it’s important to regard documentaries with an air of solemnity. More than a book or newspaper, a documentary can provide a visceral portrait of the past – one that may enable viewers to better understand the present and, perhaps, effect positive change for the future.

I was reminded of this latter point recently, while watching Queen of the Mountain, a documentary celebrating Jewish archaeologist Theresa (Tess) Goell, available this month on The Jewish Channel. Goell embarked on an expedition to Turkey in 1947 in pursuit of her lifelong dream: excavating Nemrud Dagh — the alleged tomb of Antiochus I of Commagene, ruler of Turkey during the Hellenistic Period. As a lone Jewish woman in a predominantly male field (not to mention a Muslim country) Goell overcame what must have seemed like insurmountable odds.

Despite her successful academic career at Radcliffe college, Goell was forced into an arranged (and unhappy) marriage by her father, who expected her to become a stay-at-home mother. Goell saw her life differently. During WWII, she worked as a draftsman and was the only woman employed by her naval yard — talk about a pioneer for women’s liberation. Later in life, she left her family to pursue archeology in Turkey. “People usually walk around a waterfall — i would walk down a waterfall. People usually walk over a bridge — I walked under a bridge,” Goell said. Although she was speaking of her childhood, this declaration could just as easily characterize her entire life. Time and again, she chose the road less traveled. It made all the difference.

Six years passed before Goell obtained permission to excavate. In that time, she amassed sufficient funds for the project and recruited a team of scholars with whom to collaborate. In 1953, at the age of 50, she was ready to start digging. And amidst her archaeological pursuits, she positively changed the surrounding area. Goell taught Kurdish women about hygiene and birth control and supplied medicine from New York to ailing citizens. Her excavation also resulted in improved civil infrastructure, which brought tourism and wealth to a once-destitute area. Ultimately, Goell’s story reminds us to fight for freedom – for the right to pursue personal dreams. Additionally, the film demonstrates that cross-cultural collaboration is both possible and beneficial.

But the power of a documentary also lies in its ability to remind us that people who live among us can be every bit as intriguing as the people we see on the screen. Their stories have yet to be told, but are worthy of our attention. In celebration of another Jewish woman, who marched to the beat of her own drum, I’d like to remember Anita Roddick, the daughter of Italian Jewish immigrants and founder of The Body Shop, who recently passed away from a brain hemorrhage. Though many indulge in Roddick’s savory-scented elixirs, few understand the scope of her global contribution.

Like Goell, Roddick derived much of her inspiration from travel. During her time at the United Nations, Roddick journeyed to foreign countries, where she learned about different cultural practices. Her line of beauty products synthesized the wisdom passed onto her by the people she met during her stints abroad.

Most importantly, however, Roddick realized the necessity of ethical consumerism and was among the first entrepreneurs to promote this ethos. Roddick prohibited the use of ingredients that were tested on animals and promoted fair trade in third world countries. She was also an advocate for the less fortunate at home. In 1990, she founded the magazine The Big Issue, which is produced and sold by the homeless. Additionally, she formed a charity for children in Europe and Asia called Children on the Edge. Dubbed Dame of the British Empire in 2003, her legacy will not be forgotten.

In the end, documentaries can spur us into action. They encourage us to get off the couch and fulfill the Jewish principle of tikkun olam (repairing the world); Roddick and Goell are prime examples of this principle in action. As the old saying goes: where there is a will, there is a way.

Everyone in the Jewish world has been talking about Madonna’s controversial Rosh Hashana visit to Israel for a Kabbalah conference, and her declaring herself “an ambassador of Judaism” to Shimon Peres.

But let’s not forget that America’s current pop fascination with Judaism is just as equally due to Hasidic reggae artist Matisyhau’s efforts. A man who wears Hasidic garb without irony — but can throw it down with the best of the Rastafarians — and a woman who used to perform on stage in sado-masochistic garb but now preaches about the wonders of spirituality to Israeli politicians, both grab headlines for the Hebrews.

Yet Madonna’s promotion of Judaism has spurred more controversy, partly because she seems to equate Judaism with Kabbalah (and particularly the Kabbalah Centre’s brand of it), which many Jews consider a mere fringe element of the faith, but mostly because she’s not Jewish.

We tend to be suspicious of non-Jews who are too fond of Judaism. In contrast, the Jewish masses have been overwhelmingly positive in response to the popularity of Matisyahu. Seeing a man who wears his Judaism on his sleeve and shares his love for God from the pulpit of the stage fills most Jews with pride. Where Matisyahu has managed to be a Jew accepted by the secular world in all his Jewy-ness, Madonna struggles as a non-Jew inserting herself into the Jewish world.

Interestingly, though, Matisyahu and Madonna have more in common in their embrace of Judaism than one might think. As we learn in the documentary portrait of Matisyahu (aptly titled Matisyahu) airing on TJC this month, the reggae Hasid was not always so devout. He may not have published a book called Sex, but as a teenager named Matt Miller, whose friends (we all know what that means) “were into blunts and 40s,” he surely would have been happy to read it. But Matt Miller soon found a sense of higher purpose and meaning in Hasidic Judaism — which has Kabbalistic roots — and reformed his ways.

Some say the shape-shifting Madonna is just going through a phase, but she’s maintained her interest in Kabbalah for several years now. In fact, a Jerusalem Post article sees her recent visit to the Holy Land as proof that her newfound spirituality is “no passing fancy.” On the other hand, Matisyahu’s showed signs that he may have been going through something of a phase himself. In 2006 he gave a strangely depressed interview in which he expressed ambivalent feelings about religion, and he recently announced that he no longer considers himself a Lubavitcher Hasid. As he told the Miami New Times, “I’m really religious, but the more I’m learning about other types of Jews, I don’t want to exclude myself. I felt boxed in.”

Where Matisyahu’s and Madonna’s respective Jewish spiritual journeys will take them is anyone’s guess. But we’ll be watching.

When the Nazi government expelled Jewish scholars from German universities, those professors struggled to find a new home – until they arrived in the segregated American south. From Swastika to Jim Crow tells the story of the roughly fifty Jewish professors who fled from discrimination to find teaching positions in African-American universities, where they sympathized with the plight of their black colleagues and students.

“After, maybe, one or two weeks I became color blind,” one professor explains. “I didn’t have the impression any more that there were different people sitting in front of me. It was like any other kind of students.”

When Germany forced its Jewish intellectuals to flee, America embraced high-profile thinkers like Einstein, but the vast majority of lesser-known Jewish intellectual refuges struggled in the United States. Not only were jobs scarce because of the Depression, but prevalent anti-Semitism and anti-German sentiments made it even harder for these immigrant Jewish professors to find positions. They took teaching jobs in the South not because of the prestige, but rather because African American schools were the only ones willing to hire these normally discriminated against German Jews.

Exploring the similarities between German anti-Semitism and Southern racism through a rich compilation of interviews, archival film footage, and photographs, From Swastika to Jim Crow reveals the ways in which both African-American students and their Jewish professors faced a prejudice that isolated them from white southern society. Their common understanding bonded them together to create a safe haven of interracial, intellectual dialogue and friendship.

But gaining acceptance among their black students and colleagues wasn’t easy. These German professors brought their strict teaching style with them to America. They approached the classroom with greatest formality — wearing three-piece suits, and insisting that students rise when answering questions. Although the students were not accustomed to such an approach in the classroom, with time they grew fond of their foreign professors’ quirks.

These Jewish professors also hoped to become a bridge between the African-American and white communities. In one instance, a professor organized a gathering with both African-American and white families — asking the African-American guests, who arrived first, to sit in every other chair, so that when the white guests arrived they would be forced to interact with one another. The professor knew he couldn’t force people to give up their prejudice, but he was committed to doing whatever he could to encourage tolerance.

The horrors of prejudice became a common thread that could bind these exiled Jewish professors with their black students and colleagues. The film pairs shocking archival footage of the KKK dressed in costume and carrying torches with footage of Nazi salutes and marching German soldiers to compare the barbarity of both sick ideologies. A picture of a lynching shows a mob of average white citizens standing around casually and looking up at the tree, while photographs of the Holocaust depict emaciated corpses piled on top of each other.

And while these blacks and Jews grew beyond their horrific pasts to create a trusting society on campus, a confrontation with white southerners wouldn’t be far behind when they ventured beyond the idyllic settings of their university campus. When one Jewish professor invited a black colleague over for dinner, white townspeople rioted outside his home. At another time, a Jewish couple went out to dinner with their African-American friends to a black restaurant — and were arrested for breaking sanitation laws. The simple act of sharing a meal challenged the south’s social order and undermined notions of inequality that the segregated society refused to abandon.

It was through these simple acts that Jewish intellectuals planted the seeds that would develop into the Civil Rights Movement. By treating their African-American students with the respect and dignity they deserved, Jewish professors acted as catalysts for a progressive thinking that recognized all citizens as equals.

One African-American student explains in the film that, having spent his youth feeling oppressed by the white southerners, he had assumed humanity’s conflict was derived from skin color. but his interactions with his Jewish professor offered him a more complex understanding. “Suddenly,” he says, “I realized it went beyond black and white.”

By sharing in each other’s frustrations and fears, these Jews and blacks began to realize that the “tragedies of the human family” extended beyond the persecution of their own race.