BEYOND THE HOLOCAUST

The Boston Jewish Film Festival

November 5-15, 1998

The Museum of Fine Arts, Coolidge

Corner Theater, Institute of

Contemporary Art, and Warwick

Cinema

There is an unforeseen consequence to all this superficial self-congratulation that only surfaces when we are served a salad that is all tomatoes or all lettuce. We are confronted by our ignorance in a meal such as this; we don't even know where to start eating and so lay our fork down next to the bowl and stare uncomfortably as the vegetables talk among themselves. They speak of things, shared experiences and hidden flavors we never knew existed. In our insecurity, we detect an angry stare from the tomatoes toward our untomato-ness, and we shrink away from the plate.

As I rode the Green Line to the Museum of Fine Arts for the Boston Jewish Film Festival, I nursed similar expectations. What's the first thing that comes to mind when you prepare yourself to watch films that treat "Jewish themes," as the program booklet put it? The Holocaust. I, too, looked forward to a series of Schindler's Lists and documentaries. Arriving at the Museum, I discovered that few of the films listed in the program booklet had anything at all to do with what most consider the watershed experience of Jewish culture. "Jewish themes" went beyond the Holocaust to examine universalisms of love, death, and family within the specific context of Judaism.

Yet I was still uneasy. I knew love and death and family; it was the specific context of Judaism part that discouraged me even before I got to the Museum. I expected to be one of few Christians intruding into an event meant to galvanize a culture of which I was not a part; while I could appreciate all that I saw, I could never really belong. My grandmother gave me a delicate gold crucifix on a chain when I made my First Holy Communion (the gift is a tradition on the Italian Catholic side of the family), and it crossed my mind that perhaps I should have worn it. In a sense, I wanted my crucifix to be my excuse, my reason for not getting the subtle jokes and for keeping to myself in the film discussions that followed the screening. At the last minute, I thought better of advertising my Catholicism so conspicuously, yet I remained absent of any outward signs of Judaism. I expected at best a stiff welcome and a stiff goodbye from festival-goers who could sense that I was an unwanted day tripper into a culture that was theirs alone.

I entered expecting alienation.

I left with an experience of inclusion that redefined the meaning of community.

The festival was in its third day when I arrived at the Museum of Fine Arts' Emerson Theatre to watch four short films by students of the Ma'ale School of Communication, Art of Film and Television in Jerusalem. What followed a brief introduction by festival director Sara Rubin and former Ma'ale School director Udi Lion was a revelation told in softly lilting Hebrew of aspects of Jewish culture rarely added to the American salad bowl.

Perhaps the most abstract film of the four from the Ma'ale school was Hadar Friedlich's Fast of Words, an examination of the attempts of a writer, photographer and musician to spend an entire day without speaking. The remaining films were concerned with issues particular to Judaism, yet the issues were nonetheless resonant among even non-Jews. Yaakov Freedland's Fragments of a Dream set the archetypal figures of the willful: an army-bound son and the proud father unwilling to leave his violent homeland amid the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The theme of self-sacrifice for the sake of family preservation manifested itself in the desert trek of a Sudanese family to Jerusalem in Einat Kapach's Jephtach's Daughter. The highlight of the screenings, however, was Ido, an award-winning documentary directed by Gilaad Goldschmidt, which combined similar themes of youthful rebellion and family relationship with a more contemporary edge. Ido's title character is the singer of a rock band in Israel who undergoes a religious conversion which motivates him to orthodoxy, marriage and abandonment of the band, much to the bewilderment of his "secular" parents and friends.

The success of these four films (and of the other films presented during the film festival) lies in their ability both to ingratiate and to inform. While I could relate to the interpersonal and interpersonal conflicts depicted (haven't we all at one time or another rebelled against our parents? disagreed with our friends? given up something of value for someone else's sake?), the environment in which the universalisms were set clued me into previously unknown aspects of Jewish culture. Before the Boston Jewish Film Festival, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was all bombs and faceless terrorists, and who knew of the rift between so-called secular and observant Jews?

Resulting from its ability to ingratiate and inform is the greatest strength of the Boston Jewish Film Festival--the example set for other ethnic groups in the redefinition of "community." Community is a term quite liberally flung around, and in terms of multiculturalism, it often appears that community is composed solely of people of that ethnicity. If you aren't African-American or Italian or Jewish, you can't possibly understand the needs and intricacies of a particular group, so you might as well not even try--this is the self-defeating implication of the current exclusion of other groups from an ethnic community. At the festival, however, it didn't matter if you were Jewish or not. Just as we all share in the archetypes presented in the films at the festival, so we can all share in a knowledge and appreciation of the particularities of Jewish culture. The festival recast ethnic community not as a simple enclave of people whose ancestors came from the same place but an active and diverse group learning about and learning to value a particular culture. As such, one person could be a member of several "ethnic groups." It was a welcome rarity in an era of so much self-segregation justified as multiculturalism.

I rode back to Harvard on the T, not feeling as though I'd been a "Jew for a day." Rather, I felt that I, as an Italian and African-American Catholic, had been included in the Jewish community, not ephemerally, but permanently--not in spite of my own background, but because of it. Cultural isolation is often defended with the cliche that there is "safety in numbers." Perhaps the Boston Jewish Film Festival demonstrated that those numbers need not be limited to a certain ethnic group, and as we being to call ourselves members of a plurality of cultures, perhaps we may finally become comfortable with our place in the salad bowl and our understanding of the other ingredients.