Given the ongoing destruction of our deepest values as Americans and Jews, art feels like a necessary solace. Last month, I joined my co-religionists and others in the dark, warm, womb-like escape of this year’s New York Jewish Film Festival at the Walter Reade Theater, now in its 35th year, just one year short of double chai.
Curated by Film at Lincoln Center and the Jewish Museum, the two weeks ending January 28 delivered a festival reflective of a broad range of Jewish experience – Holocaust, vanished Europe, Palestinians and Israelis after October 7, historical thrillers by female directors, some heartwarming feature films, and more and more. A wide reach, but Ashkenazi-centric. Unless I missed it, I noted just one feature film, “Once Upon My Mother,” about the unstoppable matriarch of a Moroccan Jewish family whose youngest son is born with a club foot, and one short, “The Cave Synagogue,” where Ugandan Jews prayed in hiding from Idi Amin.
Through a feminist filter, films by women directors are no longer rare, and Peabody Award winner Abby Ginzberg has the chops to make sure her “Labors of Love – The Life and Legacy of Henrietta Szold” will be seen, even if she has to rent screening sites.
At the risk of a spoiler, I have to share the most shocking moment of “The First Lady.” Israeli (male) filmmakers Udi Nir and Sagi Borntein’s German/Israeli production documents the life of Efrat Tilma, a transgender woman who fled Israel as a teen in the 1960s. She eventually returned, transformed, as an airline stewardess (as flight attendants were called back in the day), a volunteer policewoman and, ultimately, a pioneering LGBTQ activist. The film is based on Tilma’s book. The directors, far from the all-powerful male auteur approach, let Tilma call the shots, asking her directorial preferences on camera, including her input on background music (she chooses “Aida”).
Despite Tilma’s public activism, it took the directors six months of knocking on her door to make contact. Much later, she let them gain access to her apartment. That’s the visual shocker. This woman with perfect manicure, exquisitely applied makeup is living in a hoarder’s horror. A visual shock, but the story doesn’t end there. Plus we have a mid-film warning for us Americans: Netanyahu’s return to power beholden to extremist right-wing ministers spelled attacks on LGBTQ liberties. Will this film be censored inside and outside Israel? Many Israeli filmmakers are suffering pariah status worldwide post Israel’s crushing revenge on Palestinians following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack—even for films critical of Israel. But one hopes this film will be seen in Israel and beyond with its message of the bravery needed to win human rights—and its psychic cost.
Back in the cinema womb, we hear words we can probably all relate to: “You think you know your mother until you don’t.” Long-time New York journalist Marisa Fox, director of “My Underground Mother,” realized she had based her own life on a lie when her great aunt accidentally revealed that her mother, “Tamar,” had a secret identity. Fox, along with her father, had seen no reason to go beyond her mother’s story: A girdle-wearing woman in high heels, she’d been born in Poland, escaped to Mandate Palestine pre-World War II to become an underground freedom fighter with the Zionist paramilitary Lehi (aka the Stern Gang). And, thanks to a relative, eventually came to the US. End of story.
“My Underground Mother” (not the best title) documents Fox’s meticulous search over seven years for her long gone mother, who died in 1993, age 58. Thanks to film freezing time, we can see how much Fox and her mother resemble each other. A hunt through a bureaucratic record office in her mother’s Polish town reveals her mother’s birth name, that she was nine years older than she claimed, that her parents were unmarried, and that her father died three weeks after her birth.
Fox’s mother told the world, “I was a hero. Never a victim.” In fact, after the Germans quickly overran her Polish town, she ended up as a 14-year-old slave laborer at a spinning mill with other Jewish girls taken away by the Nazis to what is now the Czech Republic. Tracking down the girls who knew her, Fox learns of her real mother through women at the end of their lives in Australia, Europe, the U.S., Canada, Israel. Yad Vashem documents her mother’s Shoah history. One of the women is incredulous that her mother never shared these facts. She is remembered as generous, sharing treats that came from sex with the guards. One woman describes the Gabersdorf work camp of teenage girls and women as a brothel. Fox has said she hopes the film will destigmatize the sexual violence of the Holocaust.
Fox, with three children of her own, just wishes her mother had shared her full story.
And then we have the tragic hindsight of the Holocaust fate in store for the Jews in the melodrama “I Have Sinned / Al Khet,” Poland’s first Yiddish talkie. The U.S. premiere of the digital restoration of director Aleksander Marten’s 1936 film opens with a World War I conflagration in 1916. A rabbi’s daughter is left pregnant with a love child (shades of Marisa Fox’s mother) when her Jewish officer beloved is fatally wounded. She abandons the baby and 20 years later, now a wealthy American, returns to Warsaw. She is welcomed back by her bungling relatives who placed the newborn up for adoption, not knowing her identity.
No danger of spoiler alert, the wealthy American reunites with her aging rabbi father, who just happens to be a boarder with the family who adopted the abandoned baby girl. The young woman is engaged to a talented musician, whom the rich American wants to bring to the US, breaking the heart of his fiancée. Then, surprise, the fiancée is the abandoned love child. Her adopting father convinces the rich American to do the loving thing and not take her daughter’s beloved away to America. The End.
Yes, this cinematic gem lives on —but behold the 1936 date. Look at the fate of Marisa Fox’s Shoah mother just three years later. The Polish talkie film’s successful American would have survived across the sea, as would the talented musician if he’d left Poland. Instead, he, his fiancée, her adopting father, and the elderly rabbi grandfather are gone to the Shoah. “Al Khet. Al Khet.”
Despite the general bleakness, we need to hold out some feminist inspiration. May art save us. Case in point, “Maintenance Artist,” Toby Perl Freilich’s documentary of public artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, New York City Sanitation Department’s first official (unsalaried) artist-in-residence since 1977. By any measure, Ukeles was unusual in the 1960s, ‘70s New York art scene as an Orthodox Jewish artist. The daughter of a Denver Orthodox rabbi, she eventually married a yarmulke-wearing husband. She realized when she started having children that all the detritus of daily life would have to define her art. While Jackson Pollock and Richard Serra were making their almighty solo male artist statements, Ukeles moved from washing diapers to processing the daily labor of sanitation workers as art. She’d already laid it out in her groundbreaking manifesto (MANIFESTO FOR MAINTENANCE ART 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition “CARE.” ), which states “Maintenance is a drag.”
This tall slim blonde in a jump suit, with chest-length hair often as perfectly curled as an anchor woman’s, eventually won the respect of the male work force of sanitation workers. She showed up daily for the 4:30 a.m. roll call that at least one of her three grown kids interviewed in the film describes as leaving them latchkey children—not a male artist issue.
One of the film’s great takeaways: One of the Black sanitation workers says, “You know why people hate us? They think we’re their mother. They think we’re their maid.” And Ukeles extends the insight: “If they were women, would they hate them? The housekeepers of the city should not be denegrated if women do it in the home, if sanitation workers do it out in the streets. Proof that it’s not gendered.” A truly expansive feminist analysis in a time short on generosity.
Watch for Lilith Magazine’s major feature on Ukeles in the winter issue, in print and online.
Amy Stone is a founding mother of Lilith Magazine.
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