The Yiddish are coming!

The 10th annual Boston Jewish Film Festival

by Josh Kun

One of my favorite Jewish jokes is set in Boston. It's part of Mel Brooks & Carl Reiner's "2000 Year Old Man" routine, and it goes like this: Reiner, playing the straight reporter, asks Brooks, the time-tested alter cocker, whether he knew Paul Revere. "An anti-Semite bastard," Brooks barks. "He hated the Jews. He heard that they were gonna go in the neighborhood and move in. 'They're coming! They're coming! The Yiddish they're coming!' "

Brooks's joke aside, I've never thought of Boston as a particularly Jewish city. The city where I grew up, Los Angeles, is a Jewish city. New York is a Jewish city. Boston reminds me of San Francisco, the city where I just finished living: there are plenty of Jews, but it's just not a Jewish place. Which is why events like the Boston Jewish Film Festival -- celebrating its 10th anniversary this year -- are simultaneously so crucial and so risky. Crucial for visibility's sake, for tossing Jewishness into the cinematic public sphere in ways that, say, The Governess can't, and risky because it's a condensed, one-stop representational window -- film-festival identity politics at its best and most ambiguous. What makes a feature film or a documentary video "Jewish" anyway?

This isn't just a question for the Boston organizers (I've wondered the same thing ever since reviewing my first Jewish film festival, five years ago), but it is one worth asking. In the age of corporate multiculturalism, in the age of kabbalah chic, in the age of unfinished peace talks, in the age of the Holocaust Oscar, in the age of Lewinsky (when there's Yiddish and blow jobs in the White House), what does the Jewish Film Festival tell us about Jews?

What we learn from this year's program is that Jews can't seem to get enough of found footage, and that with directors like Cynthia Madansky, Alisa Lebow, and Eytan Fox around, queer Jews -- no matter where they plop down in the diaspora -- definitely do it better. Surf the following highlights and see for yourself.

A Letter Without Words
Human Remains
Rothschild's Violin
Amos Gutman, Filmmaker
Treyf
Florentene
Who's the Caboose?
Pop
Train of Life

The Boston Jewish Film Festival is screening at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, the Institute of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, and the Warwick Cinema in Marblehead. Call (781) 899-3830 for a complete schedule.