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Disturbing news from Blacks and Jews

Call me an ecumenical sentimentalist, but if there's a speck of hope for this earth, it's the unexpected moment in the must-see Blacks and Jews (at the Museum of Fine Arts, December 4 and 11 through 13) when a darkly garbed Brooklyn Chassid gives a heartfelt bearhug to the African-American man who saved his life during the Crown Heights riots.

Of course, Isaac Bitton turns out to be no ordinary entrenched Chassid. He's a former hippie musician from Morocco. And Peter Noel, the rescuer, is no street-corner proselytizer; he's a reporter for the Village Voice. Still, how genuinely nice that they've become cross-race friends! Otherwise, Blacks and Jews (made with great urgency by Northern Californian Jewish directors Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow and an African-American cinematographer, Ashley James) is a glum, troubling documentary of division, prejudice, cultural ignorance, and racism on every side.

In Chicago, coalition-building Jewish organizers are blasphemed by bigots in the synagogue, "Why do you want to have anything to do with black people? They hate us!" In Brooklyn, a Chassid stupidly lectures at disenfranchised blacks about how, under Mayor Dinkins, they (the Other) get all the city services.

In an Oakland moviehouse, African-American high-schoolers chortle at the Schindler's List murder of Jews by the Nazis. "A lot of us didn't know the Holocaust was a true story," explains a student. "That's why we laughed." There's Louis Farrakhan, orator to the one million: "The Jews don't like me. They didn't like Jesus Christ!" And a cocky Muslim pretending to address Jews before Howard University students: "You say you lost six million, and I question that."

Blacks and Jews shows some attempts at rainbow harmony in the '90s: a Chassid/African-American teen rap street theater in Brooklyn, role-playing games in San Francisco, scenes from anti-racist theater. But these goodwilled gropings for interracial understanding are so meager that they're almost depressing. As the filmmakers explain in voiceover, "They cannot replace the close political coalitions of the civil-rights era."

If Blacks and Jews has an agenda, it's a call to resuscitate social consciousness and political commitment, those times of struggle when, on a righteous day, blacks and Jews marched, sat in, and freedom-rode on the same side. Re-creating history Eyes on the Prize-fashion, the film locates a stirring model for activism in late-'60s Chicago, showing how the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs, led by a militant Rabbi Robert Marx, fought both the profiteering banks (non-Jewish) and the greedy real-estate dealers (mostly Jewish) ripping off poor black people wanting to buy a home.

Another section of Blacks and Jews follows Chicago African-American journalist and ex-Muslim Salaam Muwakill as he covers the Million Man March and explains the undeniable appeal of Islam to many ghetto blacks. I'm glad to see Muwakill in the spotlight. He's one of America's most significant social commentators. Only he would dare call Farrakhan "Jerry Falwell in blackface" and, in a wonderful article for In These Times, blame the death of Chicago mayor Harold Washington on his too-typical-for-blacks high-cholesterol diet.

The most ambitious section of Blacks and Jews delves behind the scenes at Oakland's Castlemont High School, site of that infamous class trip to see Schindler's List. The Jewish filmmakers are clearly sympathetic to the black students, who were not educated in any way at school to see a movie about the Holocaust. Steven Spielberg comes up from LA, addresses a school assembly, and saves the day. "I believe Castlemont High got a bad rap," he tells the cheering, vindicated students. "I was thrown out of Ben-Hur for talking."

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Christopher Munch did very well with a footnote to pop history in his first film, The Hours and Times (1993), which dramatized the alleged 1964 tryst between John Lennon and Beatles manager Brian Epstein. This time, with Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day, at the Harvard Film Archive November 28 through 30, Munch chooses the wrong footnote. Or he dramatizes it wrongly. In either case, viewers aren't going to care much about how, in the post-war 1940s, a 23-year-old Chinese-American, John Lee, returned into operation the dormant Yosemite Valley Railroad.

John's obsession with this railroad seems private, fetishist and, because of the awkward, sleepy-faced, first-time thespian miscast as Lee (Peter Alexander), totally unconvincing. Even experienced actors, such as the eccentric pseudo-poet Henry Gibson, sublime in Robert Altman's Nashville and The Long Goodbye, lose their charisma here. I blame Munch's misdirection for his actors' obvious discomfort. The most lost of all is R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe as Alexander's railroad partner. His character seems to be secretly in love with Lee -- but it's honestly hard to understand, because of his mumbling, what the rock-and-roller is so distressed about.

Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day is shot beautifully by cinematographer Rob Sweeney, in handsome black and white, with Ansel Adams-like vistas of the American Northwest. Rarely has there been such a disparity between a film's splendid look and its stultifying content.