Choose Life

In her documentary film, Dying Doesn’t Feel Like What I’m Doing, Israeli filmmaker Paula Weiman-Kelman has created a poignant and compelling tribute to Rabbi Rachel Cowan.  This is the story of a woman who has made an important contribution to contemporary American Jewry through her work in healing, spirituality, and prayer through meditation. The film includes remarkable home movie footage and photos from her extraordinary life. 

The viewer follows Cowan as she talks about her own spiritual journey, as she chose to convert to Judaism and become a Reform rabbi, and talking honestly about her husband’s death from leukemia (1988) and her own cancer, near the end of her life.  The filmmaker has done an outstanding job in catching comments from Cowan about healing, hope, and the legacy that she leaves behind.

As a child, Cowan attended a Quaker summer camp where she says she learned meditation; she was active in the 1960s Civil Rights movement where she met her husband Paul (they married in 1965); and then together they did a stint in the Peace Corps in Ecuador.  Cowan worked for many years in the field of spirituality, social justice, and welcoming intermarried couples at the Nathan Cummings Foundation, and later was a prime-mover behind the establishment of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality.

Together with her journalist husband, Paul Cowan, she wrote Mixed Blessings, about their own intermarriage, and later, she wrote Wise Aging, with Linda Thal, a handbook about spirituality and choices people can make in their lives as they grow older.  This book has been used in workshops about growing older in many places in North America and recently in Israel too.

Rabbi Rachel Cowan will be remembered for her work in spirituality and healing, social justice and aging, and the film helps to provide a memorial for her legacy.  

Weiman-Kelman’s previous films include Fringes (2012), about Jewish pluralism and reviewed on this blog, and The Annotated Alice (1998) about feminist trailblazer Alice Shalvi, and the update to that film, The Re-Annotated Alice, in which Shalvi talks about growing old, about being alone, about the legacy one leaves behind, and about death and dying. 

 

For distribution information on Dying Doesn’t Feel Like What I’m Doing (documentary, 62 minutes), contact the filmmaker directly (paulawk123@gmail.com), or you can sign up on the film’s website to receive notifications of upcoming screenings. Here’s the link!

Joseph Cedar's New Film -- Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer

Joseph Cedar’s new film, Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer, opened this week in Jerusalem.  This is the story of Norman Oppenheimer, a New York Jew, who makes a living by hustling, putting together deals and selling influence.  He’s lonely and is desperately seeking some self-importance. The role is played by Richard Gere, who we would usually expect to play a completely different character – someone who radiates self-confidence.  Here, he is challenged to play the eager-to-please Norman, and he does it magnificently! And his charming personality makes it easier for him to gain access to places where he wants to be seen as one who takes pleasure in helping others. 

Norman befriends Micha Eshel (Lior Ashkenazi), a deputy minister in the Israeli government.  Courting a person who might one day be in power, Norman buys him an expensive pair of shoes.  According to the filmmaker, these shoes represent “something that doesn’t evaporate, something that the character walks through life in.”  And then when Eshel reaches power, Norman cashes in, obtaining a certain amount of status from his position as someone who knows the new prime minister of Israel.  But the prime minister can’t be seen as accepting gifts, and thus we wonder when will it be necessary for him to just cast his friend aside.

At the Israeli premiere of the film last night, sponsored by the Times of Israel, filmmaker Joseph Cedar had an opportunity to discuss his film with the audience.  He described the film as “a love story between two people, that starts out with a gesture and ends up with one sacrificing himself for the other.”  The gesture is the purchase of the pair of shoes, a symbol of the corrupt and greedy Israeli politician whose willingness to accept an expensive gift shows his own moral failings. 

According to Cedar, the movie is about one American Jew and one Israeli, and also about American Jews collectively.  He also called it a "fairy tale." However, I didn't see it this way. Rather, it seemed to me that this film is a very real satirical and sarcastic portrayal of American Jewry, and a hard-hitting look at the relationship between American Jewry and the political leadership of Israel.  American Jewry in the archetypal character of "Norman" is seen as a bumbling, not-too-aggressive fellow, begging for an opportunity to be seen near the seat of power – the way the leadership of American Jewish organizations grovel at the feet of Israeli politicians, wanting nothing more than to be in their presence and to be of service to the cause, without any critical thinking.

In particular, the film makes fun of AIPAC, which is called "AIPAL " in the film (hinting that all that these Jews want is to be pals with the Israeli leadership). The Israeli politicians don’t provide anything in return; rather, they require the sacrifice of each and every American Jew for the sake of their personal agendas which they define as the agendas of the very survival of the state (a very direct hint to the current leadership in Israel!).

Joseph Cedar certainly knows how to make complex narrative films.  His previous award-winning films include: Footnote, Beaufort, Campfire, and Time of Favor.  I especially loved the way that New York City can be seen as a major character in the film.

But I am troubled by Cedar’s simplistic view of American Jews as groveling in the face of aggressive and confident Israeli politicians.  Notwithstanding this criticism, I really liked this film – the parallel to the “court Jews”, the deviousness, the intrigue, the influence peddling, and above all else, the depiction of both the leaders and their American Jewish followers as morally compromised. 

Pluralism in the Search for Religious/Spiritual Jewish Identity

My husband and I greatly enjoyed Paula Weiman-Kelman's new documentary film, Fringes, which premiered at the Jerusalem Cinematheque this past week at their annual Jewish Film Festival. 

My husband, Ron Kronish (director of the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel), shares his thoughts --

This is a beautifully photographed and well-edited film about three Jewish styles of contemporary Jewish identity:

• ·         the founders and participants of the secular yeshivah in Jerusalem
• ·         Jewish farmers in rural Virginia
• ·         a Bratslav lite rabbi and his wife in Montreal (who plan to make aliyah).

All three portraits were sensitive and sympathetic rather than critical or cynical (which other  filmmakers might have done with these characters). We got to know and like the people in the film, all of whom represented non-mainstream positive attempts at creating a meaningful, contemporary, religious or spiritual Jewish identity.

After the film, I talked with several people about what we saw (and what we didn't see).  Some felt that the film was too "religious" and therefore biased against secular/ cultural Zionism. Others asked "why did we have to see another film in which ultra-orthodox Jews figure prominently?"  One could question the choice of these three sets of characters as the lead figures in a film about contemporary Jewish identity, when the topic is obviously so much more diverse than this film portrays.  But the filmmaker obviously had to make choices as part of her artistic expression and she clearly wanted to choose a limited number of characters in order to offer an in-depth study of each.   

This is a loving and empathetic film about contemporary Jews who are seeking to be Jewish -- and creating Jewish communities -- in new and different ways. Probably the "mainstream" is now broadened and enlightened by many people who have seen this film. And we learned a lot too. I, for one, knew nothing about Jewish CSA farming in Virginia or about the secular yeshiva which is thriving in my own city.

I can imagine that in future films the filmmaker will want to portray more non-mainstream Jewish characters and Jewish communities which will expand our horizons about the growing pluralism among contemporary Jews today.

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Paula Weiman-Kelman is known for her in-depth portrait-style of documentary filmmaking.  Her most recent film, Eyes Wide Open, was reviewed on this blog.   

Fringes, directed by Paula Weiman-Kelman and produced by Jonathan Lopatin, is available from Ruth DiskinFilms.