Aliyah to The Movies: Russian and Israeli Cinema

Some years ago, when applying for my US passport, I took the naturalisation paperwork to the post office. It stated: ‘Place of birth: Russia. Place of residence: Israel’. Confused, the clerk asked, ‘Is Israel part of Russia?’ ‘No’, I told her, ‘but you have a point.’ Twenty years earlier, the clerk’s mistake would not have made sense. But once Russian Jews became the largest wave of Jewish migration into Israel— today one out of every six Israelis speaks Russian—the country has, in a way, become part of Russia. And Russia has in some ways become a part of Israel.

In a world that is increasingly globalised, decentralised, and diasporic, traditional national boundaries are blurred. Post-Soviet immigrants, known in Israeli parlance as ‘Russians’ are a case in point. These immigrants, who often maintain multiple passports, homes, and languages, make us re-think the meaning of homeland and exile: they are part of a traditional Jewish diaspora and of a new Russian diaspora.This mass migration affected both Israeli and Russian cultures. One site where these changes can be clearly identified is cinema: Russian immigrants and their homeland are becoming common in Israeli films and Israel is beginning to appear in Russian cinema. What do these films, made in both Israel and Russia, tell us about the changes in the cultural landscapes in both countries?

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Charlie Chaplin: Jewish or Goyish?

As nearly as can be determined, Charlie Chaplin is virtually part Jewish almost most of the time.
John McCabe, Charlie Chaplin

In March of 1978, Charlie Chaplin’s body was stolen from his tomb in Switzerland and held for ransom. Two months later it was discovered buried in a farmer’s field and returned to his wife Oona, who remarked, dryly, ‘Charlie would have found this ridiculous.’ According to rumour, the Swiss government suspected that his remains had been stolen by anti-Semitic groups, upset that a Jew should be buried in a Christian cemetery. Chaplin’s Jewishness made him an enemy of the FBI and put him on the Nazi’s list of international targets. He is perhaps one of the most famous Jews in American history hence it is all the more surprising to learn that he was not, in fact, Jewish.

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Unothering the Other: Ajami/The Infidel

If you’re making a film that wants to attack or explode prejudice there are two approaches. One is comic: ridicule, satire, and sheer irreverence are its means.  The other is tragic: to bring an audience into close empathy with the Other, and with other ways of life, making them as familiar as possible to us, and then treat us to the sadness, pain and horror that go along with that ‘othering’ — even, or especially, if the oppressor doing the othering is ‘self’. Read more

My Jewish Oeuvre

It was 1987. I was working as a documentary maker in television. A puzzle was eating away at me. It had dawned on me that I saw nothing on TV that reflected the lives of the ordinary Jewish folks I had grown up with. No characters in dramas or sitcoms. No documentaries. No British Lennie Bruce or Woody Allen. No nothing apart from Miriam Karlin’s character in The Rag Trade, an East End sweat-shop sitcom that had been out in the early sixties and reprised briefly in the seventies. And Jack Rosenthal’s Barmitzvah Boy. Why? Read more

Notes From A Bimah

*severe spoiler alerts

Ruthie, in her gold dress, mumbles a line of her speech about Judith and then is silent. Her hands tremble. We see her cue cards. But she’s not reading what’s on them.
Cut to congregation members who are shouting at her: Louder / Can’t hear you / Speak up / What’s wrong with her / Is she a mute?
Finally, cut back to Ruthie. She responds:
You ask me to be louder, when I’m normally told to be quiet
You ask me to smile, eat more but diet
You tell me today I’m special, when I’ve never been before.
I’ll give you louder… (music begins, voice changes, new scene) hear me roar!

When we decided to make a film that reflected a key moment in Jewish women’s experience, the Knish Collective decided to focus on the moment just before delivering the bat mitzvah address on the bimah. This hyper-important moment, emblematic of the transition into adulthood, is a staple scene for all bar mitzvah films; it’s a sign of the trope. The ‘Bimah moment’ might be said to characterize the genre. Read more

The View From Inside

Recent Palestinian Filmmaking in Israel

A small girl, dressed in blue and white, stands under the Israeli flag in an Israeli Independence Day celebration. This image, a school-day memory, is the starting point for Private Investigation (2003), Ula Tabrai’s documentary which takes her back from her self-imposed exile in Paris to her hometown of Nazareth. In a series of interviews with her parents, teachers and contemporaries she unearths the forging of her own identity as an Israeli-Arab through years of silence, conformity and acceptance of the Israeli-Arab identity.

In many ways, Ula Tabrai typifies the new trends of Palestinian filmmakers in Israel. Unlike their parents’ generation, whose defining experience was the Nakba, these directors are concerned with issues of national identity, gender relations and social structures. They offer a dual scrutiny of both occupying, colonialist Israel and their own community. At their best, they complicate for us the all-too-neat imaginary dichotomy between Western modern Israel and its traditional, developing Palestinian citizens. In many cases these new films are autobiographical or semi-autobiographical journeys, the personal stories of the filmmakers themselves who, as adults, now turn to their own villages, towns and families to understand their stories. For the generation raised in post-1967 Israel, awareness of the Palestinian historical narrative depended heavily on informal channels of education, and the circulation of personal stories within the family. The strictly supervised curriculum of Arab schools in Israel was designed to foster a ‘new’ identity — that of the ‘Israeli-Arab’ — and teach loyalty to the Zionist state. Recent history of the people of Palestine, needless to say, was not taught. These films, then, are a tool for young Palestinians to try to make sense of their national identity and immediate history.

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The Larry David Opus

Outing the Jewish Male

‘Hey, I may loathe myself, but it has nothing to do with the fact that I’m Jewish.’ (Larry David)

The late Lenny Bruce famously defined ‘Jewish’ as anything edgy, ethnic, urban and subversive, despite its origins. Dylan Thomas: Jewish. Ray Charles: Jewish. ‘Goyish’ was, by contrast, anything conservative, safe and associated with the sterility of the suburbs. This devotion to the subversive goes back to some of the most sacred roots of Judaism since Abraham broke his father’s idols and has long been a source of pride but also division between Jews and their neighbours. It is a division more felt than seen, but one which lies at the heart of Jewish comedy in North America. Through his ground-breaking work in first Seinfeld and then Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David appears to have achieved the impossible and made the Jewish ‘Jewish’.

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Stephen Poliakoff in conversation with Melvyn Bragg

The annual Jacob Sonntag Memorial Event at RIBA, November 20th.

MB:    Let’s start at the beginning, taking the strands from your early life; your family — Russian-Jewish; your education — prep school, public school, Cambridge; and your Left-ish culture and politics. So let’s take them one at a time, what you think they gave you and how they matter to you.
SP:        My father and his parents came over from Russia in 1924, when he was fourteen. His fourteen years in Russia were the most vivid part of his life, he told stories about them again and again throughout my childhood. And very good stories they were; told quite slowly — maybe that’s where I get my pacing from. They had a flat near Red Square and he literally witnessed the October revolution from his bedroom window. They had rather a dramatic time: near-starvation after the revolution in their rundown Chekhovian dacha after the revolution. And many adventures: they escaped with one diamond hidden in shoe when Stalin came to power. So they were great stories. My mother came from Jewish aristocracy, Viscount Samuel was head of the family — he was head of the Liberals during the General Strike and led the Liberals in the House of Lords. A cousin had been in Asquith’s cabinet. So it was quite a flamboyant background and that was a pivotal thing in my life, I suppose. Read more