May 24, 2012 | 4:03 pm

Simon Wiesenthal Center honors uber-producer Jerry Bruckheimer

Posted by Danielle Berrin

Follow me on or

Jerry Bruckheimer. Photo © BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons

The Museum of Tolerance held its annual National Tribute Dinner last week, at the Beverly Hilton, an opportune moment, with hundreds turning out to see the museum confer a humanitarian award on the producer Jerry Bruckheimer, an entertainment industry titan best known for expensive blockbuster franchises such as “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “National Treasure,” along with a slew of successful television series including “CSI” New York and Miami versions and “The Amazing Race”.

During dinner, giant screens scrolled through images of the sleekly modern museum the Simon Wiesenthal Center is building in Jerusalem. Also, a joint project between the SWC and UNESCO that explores the “3,500 year relationship between the Jewish people and the land of Israel” was announced with great fanfare, with plans for exhibitions at UNESCO headquarters in Paris and at the United Nations building in New York.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Wiesenthal Center, paid his debts to the main attraction, a group of Hollywood moguls sitting together at a long communal table in the mezzanine.

“People don’t come here because the rabbi tells them to,” Hier said. “They come here because guys like Jeffrey Katzenberg and Ron Meyer ask them to.”

Katzenberg returned the flattery by referring to Hier as “Commander-in-Chief”.

“There are not many rabbis who have won two academy awards and distinguished honor from the French government”—Hier won France’s Chevalier dans l’Ordre National du Merite in 1993—“in fact, there’s only one of that kind.”
 
As usual, the emotional crux of the evening came during the Medal of Valor presentations, honoring a mix of modern-day heroes, including the former Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and her husband, retired astronaut Mark Kelly, and a group of elderly Tuskegee Airmen, who were the subject of the 2012 film “Red Tails” produced by George Lucas.

Giffords, who was initially unsure whether she would ascend the stage to accept the honor, walked stiffly but surely to the podium sporting a pair of chic and shiny tennis shoes, with her husband on her arm. She was beaming. After an emotional video detailing her ascent through the business world and into the U.S. House of Representatives, where her term was cut short by the assassination attempt that left her with a gunshot wound in her head, Kelly spoke to the crowd.

“Gabby always says the same thing to me as she leaves for therapy each morning,” he began, “her last words are… what?” he asked, turning toward her.

“Fight, fight, fight!” she said with a radiant smile.

“Gabby is a fighter,” Kelly said. “She is tough; tougher than anybody I know. She’s not willing to accept failure or defeat, and she reminds me [of this] every single day. Her dreams for a stronger America are not yet fulfilled, and her future is bright.”

The center also presented medals of valor to Holocaust survivor Elisabeth Mann, who, after being liberated from a concentration camp became a teacher and mother-figure to hundreds of orphaned Jews at a school in Sweden, as well as a group of Tuskegee Airmen, African American members of the U.S. Air Force who flew combat missions over Italy and Germany during World War II.
 
Actress Emily Procter, star of “CSI: Miami,” presented Bruckheimer with his award, but instead of focusing her remarks on the producer, she told an impromptu story about her first real estate purchase. After a seemingly meandering tale about the obstacles in purchasing this home and the magnificent orange tress that sat in the backyard, it turned out the owner was a Holocaust survivor who, when learning of her appreciation for the trees, granted her the sale.

Visibly choked up, Procter said, “He planted those trees in honor of his family”—who perished in the Holocaust—“and he said, ‘I’ll sell you the house if you care for the trees.”

By the time Bruckheimer took the podium, it was near 10 p.m. and the evening had reached its denouement. Surprisingly, there was no video montage of Bruckheimer’s greatest hits, so the producer nervously offered a few remarks, quoting Hannah Senesh, in an effort to ferret out the humanism in his blockbuster body of work.

“I’ve never been mistaken for a message producer,” Bruckheimer said, adding that although moral tales have not been the aim of his filmmaking, they have nonetheless found their way into the heart of his oeuvre. He specifically mentioned his pride in films like “Remember The Titans” that have “explored race through sports”. 

The evening raised $1.4 million for the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

0 Comments — Leave your comment

Share this post: del.icio.us Digg Facebook Google Reddit StumbleUpon Technorati YahooMyWeb

May 23, 2012 | 12:39 pm

Because we Cannes, Cannes, can’t?

Posted by Danielle Berrin

Francois Mori/Associated Press - The French feminist group ‘La Barbe’ protests on the red carpet at the 65th international Festival du Cannes in southern France.

Because Cannes becomes the center of the film universe each year for ten days, the tales that trickle from the Croisette tend to be somewhat inflated, even inflammatory.

Last year, Lars Von Trier stole the show with some off-the-cuff sympathy for Adolf Hitler. A grain of salt, or rather sand, must accompany this sort of scuttlebutt.

Last week, when it was reported that the French feminist group La Barbe (“The Beard”) had published an open letter in Le Monde decrying the festival’s lack of female-directed films, I wrote to a director friend to inquire about the festival’s mood.

“What women thing?” was his clueless response.

But in fact, a scandal was stirring. On Sunday, La Barbe staged a small protest smack on the red carpet during the premiere of Michael Haneke’s “Amour”. Their protest signage, like their letter in Le Monde, was sardonic in tone: “Marveilleux,” ‘’Merci!!!” ‘’Splendide,” ‘’Incredible!” “Le Barbe” [Marvelous, Thank You, Splendid, Incredible, The Beard]—and were proudly wielded by fake-bearded women to challenge the cuckoo Cannes establishment.

“Men are fond of depth in women,” read the now infamous line of their letter, “but only in their cleavage.”

Do the Cannes programmers have any excuse for an Associated Press observation that reads like this: “None of the 22 films competing for the Palme D’Or prize at the festival this year was directed by a woman.”

While some have suggested that this may be symptomatic of larger industry ills in which the percentage of women directors who are hired to work is negligible at best, it does seem odd that a festival that prides itself on progressivism, freedom of expression and art could be so obtuse.

Cannes certainly likes its gaggle of glamourous women on the red carpet, the letter stated wryly: “[N]ever let the girls think they can one day have the presumptuousness to make movies or to climb those famous Festival Palace steps, except when attached to the arm of a prince charming.”

A woman has won the Palme d’Or, Cannes’ highest prize, only once, an honor attached to Jane Campion for 1993’s “The Piano.” And the current powers that be don’t seem to want to scuffle over the issue. Juror Andrea Arnold, a director who has shown two films at Cannes in the past said, “I’d absolutely hate it if my film got selected only because I’m a woman. I would only want my film to be selected for the right reason, not out of charity.”

Festival director Thierry Fremaux agreed. He responded to the Le Monde lambasting by stating that the festival selects films strictly based on merit. “We would never agree to select a film that doesn’t deserve it on the basis it was made by a woman,” he wrote.

But more than 2,397 women in entertainment have signed on to an online petition on the Website change.org demanding some sort of affirmative action. In a letter penned by the Brooklyn based non-profit Women and Hollywood, “Where Are The Women Directors?”, the authors wrote: “We call for Cannes, and other film festivals worldwide to commit to transparency and equality in the selection process of these films. We judge films as human beings, shaped by our own perspectives and experiences. It is vital, therefore, that there be equality and diversity at the point of selection.” 

Signatories to the letter include feminist thinker and writer Gloria Steinem, playwright/activist Eve Ensler, writer Delia Ephron, and several Israeli groups, including the Haifa Feminist Center, Isha L’Isha, The Women in the Picture Association and The International Women’s Film Festival from Rehovot, Israel.

So is the fancy Festival du Cannes snobbish and sexist? Were the offerings from women not up to 4-star snuff? Or is the entire entertainment industry so subsumed in gendered hierarchy, women not only come up short but silenced?

0 Comments — Leave your comment

May 23, 2012 | 11:25 am

Self-Love for Y-Love

Posted by Danielle Berrin

Y-Love. Photo by Schneur Menaker

Self-actualization can be such a drag.

Just ask the African-American “ex-Chasidic” rapper Yitz Jordan, known to fans as Y-Love, whose religious journey clashed with his human journey when routine bouts of racism and homophobia dented his dignity.

One time, while praying at the Kotel in Jerusalem, he said, a group of black-hatted Jews taunted him by repeatedly calling him “shvartze.” As a black religious Jew, he became used to being served last in the kosher pizza line. Coupled with a decade of suppressing his sexuality to commit to the religious life, he wondered, “Why am I fighting tooth and nail to be a second-class citizen?” After the Kotel incident in 2007, he said, “I took off my bekishe [silk Chasidic coat] in the middle of the street in Jerusalem.”

Jordan isn’t the first Modern Orthodox Jew to struggle with a clash of cultures. Last December, Chasidic reggae star Matisyahu shaved his beard and wrote on his blog that it was an act of “reclaiming” himself.

“I felt that in order to become a good person, I needed rules — lots of them — or else I would somehow fall apart,” Matisyahu wrote.

For Jordan, 34, who decided to become Jewish at 6 years old, after seeing a “Happy Passover” announcement on TV, some of those same rules would prove pointless and oppressive.

The first time I met Jordan, I extended my hand for a shake, but he quickly covered his own hand with his cap so we wouldn’t have to touch. The surface of strict and serious devotion to Jewish law, however, belied a deeper conflict roiling inside. For the public persona Y-Love, halachah offered a means to hide.

“I’ve known I was gay my whole life,” Jordan said during a phone interview last week from Los Angeles, where he is spending the summer. His public coming-out, announced in capital letters on a widely disseminated press release, was vociferous in tone, the potent pronouncement of long-unheard roars.

“I mean, I’ve been wanting to come out for years,” he told me.

The closet was too claustrophobic. Jordan grew tired of “not being able to do the most basic things that heterosexual people take for granted — not being able to date, not being able to say a guy is cute online or leave a comment on somebody’s [Facebook] photo, making sure my friends keep secrets — that’s been the M.O. in my life for a long time. Now this weight is lifted off my shoulders.”

This wasn’t his first time. In middle school, he came out to some close friends, but “trying to get a 13-year-old to swear to secrecy is the same thing as getting a PR agent,” he said. He tried again at 15, coming out to the entire school, but added that “homophobia always sent me back into the closet.”

His first sexual experience, also at 15, ended badly. “I started crying afterward,” he recalled. “I went home and put on Jewish music. I was real depressed. It was like, immediately after sex was over, there was no afterglow; it was like, ‘I’ll never do it again. I’ll never do it again. I’ll never do it again.’ ”

For almost a decade, Jordan said he suffered from intense anxiety and depression. “I was on the antidepressant Lexapro. I wasn’t feeling much of anything. I was just artificially happy all the time.”

As a student at Ohr Somayach yeshiva in Jerusalem, he remembers discovering the text that would change his life, a responsum by the Belarusian rabbi Avraham Yeshaya Karelitz, better known as the Chazon Ish. “Literally, it’s called ‘he who is inserted by his fellow man into his throat,’ about oral sex between two men. It doesn’t say it is permitted, but it doesn’t use the word ‘abomination’ ” — used to describe other acts of homosexual encounter — “and I was so happy, I called my friends in Baltimore. This was the first time I had ever seen a loophole that allowed me to have a sex life within a halachic framework.” 

Reconciling the desire for tradition with the opportunities of modern life is an animating force in Jordan’s quest. In his latest music video, “Focus on the Flair,” he alternates between Chasidic costume and drag. In art, as in life, is the ever-present tension between wanting to belong and needing to stand out. Tradition recalls the rewards of community; modernity reinforces the promise of individuality.

“This ultimately boils down to your God-view,” Jordan said. “I believe God is all-knowing and all-understanding. Like, if you’re gonna sit and talk to your therapist, and you think your therapist understands what you’re doing through, then God has to understand.”

Though critics were quick to accuse Jordan of using his coming-out to boost his Y-Love profile, he denied that the announcement was targeted to the release of his new single.

“What, just to get more ‘likes’ on Facebook and viewers on YouTube?” he quipped, adding, “Do I want to become more visible and scream to the world ‘I’m gay’? Yeah. If it boosts my image, that’s wonderful — but I’m out here to change the world, not just sell records.”

As for those in the religious community who have reproved him for repenting his repression, Jordan is not all that bothered. Yes, he’s less observant now and has officially left the Chasidic community. But, he said, “Judaism was in me before I knew what Judaism was. Orthodox Judaism is still my religion. I’m still a Jew, and I still believe in God.”

2 Comments — Leave your comment

May 22, 2012 | 9:21 pm

It’s finally clear why I saw ‘Titanic’ nine times

Posted by Danielle Berrin

My Heart Will Go On... no matter what

It took Daniel Mendelsohn’s discursive and insightful essay on the enduring appeal of the Titanic story for me to realize that it wasn’t my raging teenage hormones that drew me back to the Riviera movie theater over and over again (even if tickets were just $3.75). Rather, it was my inner feminist.

Mendelsohn elucidates in The New Yorker:

Cameron gave his film a feminist rather than a patriotic spin. Rose, of a “good” but impoverished Main Line family, is being married off to the loathsome Cal Hockley, who seals their engagement with the gift of a blue diamond that had belonged to Louis XVI. (“We are royalty,” he smugly tells her as he drapes the giant rock around her neck.) “It’s so unfair,” she sighs during a conversation with her odiously snobbish mother, who, in the same scene, is lacing Rose tightly into a corset. “Of course it’s unfair,” the mother retorts. “We’re women.” Small wonder that nearly half the female viewers under twenty-five who saw the movie went to see it a second time within two months of its release, and that three-quarters of those said that they’d see it again.

Yes, that was me. Except worse; and more so. It also explains, at least in part, why it was worth director James Cameron spending an additional $17 million to transpose the film into 3-D.

Cameron’s picture is about breaking the bonds of family, a point made by means of a clever contrast between its two leading ladies—Rose and the Titanic. At the start of the movie, the ship speeds confidently forward while Rose is described as being “trapped” and unable to “break free” (that corset, that mother); by the end, the ship is immobilized, while the girl strikes off on her own, literally and figuratively. She has to abandon the piece of panelling she’s climbed onto—and tearfully let go of Jack (now a frozen corpse), which she’d promised never to do—in order to swim for help.

Rose, in other words, saves herself; in the end the Titanic is the sacrifice, the price that must be paid for Rose’s rebirth as a girl who acts by and for herself.

Comparing the Titanic story with classic Greek tragedy, Mendelsohn identifies two powerful archetypes that keep luring audiences back to the ill-fated tale.

...the most obvious thing about the Titanic’s story: it uncannily replicates the structure and the themes of our most fundamental myths and oldest tragedies. Like Iphigenia, the Titanic is a beautiful “maiden” sacrificed to the agendas of greedy men eager to set sail; the forty-six-thousand-ton liner is just the latest in a long line of lovely girl victims, an archetype of vulnerable femininity that stands at the core of the Western literary tradition.

But the Titanic embodies another strain of tragedy. This is the drama of a flawed and self-destructive hero, a protagonist of great achievements and overweening presumption. The ship starts out like Oedipus: admired, idolized, hailed as different, special, exalted. Sophocles’ play derives its horrible excitement from a relentless exposition of its protagonist’s fall from grace—and from the fact that his confidence and his talents are what prevented him from seeing the looming disaster. Cameron understood this… The director knew that there is an ancient theatrical pleasure, not totally free of Schadenfreude, in watching something beautiful fall apart.

All this is why we keep watching Cameron’s movie, and why we can’t stop thinking about the Titanic. The tale irresistibly conflates two of the oldest archetypes in literature.

0 Comments — Leave your comment

May 22, 2012 | 2:07 pm

Are European actresses more sensual than American ones?

Posted by Danielle Berrin

A few weeks ago when I was interviewing playwright Iddo Netanyahu about his first produced play “A Happy End”, he made an admiring comment about the lead actress he cast, Czech-born Zuzana Stivínová and her “European sensuality”. This, he said, added depth and enigma to her role.

“American actresses didn’t get it,” he said. But when I asked him to elucidate what he meant, he couldn’t.

Last night, I had the chance to see a staged reading of “A Happy End” at the Museum of Tolerance and Netanyahu was right to describe her performance as special. She was the most seductive member of the cast and brought a charisma to the stage that enriched and enlivened an otherwise simple stage rendering. The best way to describe what Netanyahu must have meant by the “European sensuality” that eludes more (ordinary? hard-edged? invulnerable?) American women is this: strong of mind, softness of manner, elegance in style.

Her voice was deep and rich, her dialogue spun in cadences that sounded like song; her body tall and slender, her movements sure and fluid; and her ideas, though not always wise, delivered with intelligence and passion.

0 Comments — Leave your comment

May 22, 2012 | 2:02 pm

Palme d’Or for ‘Amour’?

Posted by Danielle Berrin

Amour (2012)

There’s big buzz coming out of Cannes for Michael Haneke’s latest film, “Amour”, an ode to enduring love.

“There wasn’t a dry eye in the Lumiere for Michael Haneke’s absolutely brilliant ‘Amour’,” The Wrap.com’s Sasha Stone reported. “No coughing, no walkouts”—something unheard of at the most artistically rich and critically loose film festival in the world.

But Stone had barely any critique of the 70-year-old Austrian filmmaker’s latest, writing:

When you really love someone for a lifetime, it transcends every other kind of love.  Romantic love comes nowhere near it. It is a bond so strong, in fact, that nothing can deter you from doing whatever needs to be done for the one you love. You will endure any test put in front of you, gladly, for a few minutes with your beloved.

Sentimentality is a surprising angle for a Haneke film, an artist best known for bleaker fare like “The Piano Teacher”, about an affair between a teacher and her much younger pupil, and “The White Ribbon,” a strange, disjointed and hauntingly beautiful film about life in a small, puritanical German village prior to World War I.  Of “Ribbon”, which won the Palme d’Or in 2009, Haneke said, “My main aim was to look at a group of children who are inculcated with values transformed into an absolute and how they internalize them. If we raise a principle or ideal, be it political or religious, to the status of an absolute, it becomes inhuman and leads to terrorism.”

“Amour” represents a switch for the politically minded Haneke, though praise for his love story has thus far been comprehensively effusive. The Wall Street Journal called it “the most serious contender” for Cannes’ top award. The festival ends May 27.

The story is about a happily married elderly couple, both retired piano teachers whose relationship undergoes the transformations that come with age and dying. Anne (played by Emmanelle Riva, 85, star of one of my all time favorite films 1959’s “Hiroshima mon Amour”) and Georges (actor Jean-Louis Trintignant, who apparently has not acted onscreen in years) are tested in ways they had not yet experienced when Anne suffers a series of strokes and Georges is forced from partner to caretaker.

Writing on WSJ’s Speakeasy blog, Lanie Goodman observed: “[W]hen their dialogue is no longer possible, the murmurs, cries, and wordless gazes unlock a deeper understanding about the devastating choices we make out of love.”

0 Comments — Leave your comment

May 15, 2012 | 8:11 pm

New world view

Posted by Danielle Berrin

George Clooney and Fred Kramer are arrested for civil disobedience at the Sudanese Embassy in Washington, D.C., in March. Photo by Sasha Lezhnev/Enough Projects

Two years ago, Fred Kramer took a big, luxurious break from work to travel the world and find himself.

In March, as the newly minted executive director of Jewish World Watch, he found himself locked in a jail cell with George Clooney.

“It was quite a day,” Kramer said of the civil disobedience he stirred alongside the world’s most famous movie star, outside the Sudanese Embassy in Washington, D.C.

It began with a protest walk from the Religious Action Center, just down the street from the embassy, but instantly morphed into a paparazzi party, as hordes of reporters desperately cleaved to Clooney. “People were literally tripping over themselves,” Kramer recalled. Kramer got his one-on-one from a Clooney-side seat in the cop car.

“I rode in the wagon with him; we got booked together at the police station; then we were in a cell together for two or three hours before everything got resolved and they let us out,” Kramer said nonchalantly.

Just a short time ago it would have been almost impossible to imagine that he’d be touting his celebrity run-ins to draw attention to his work, but Kramer’s unexpected turn from business developer to nonprofit overseer has demanded it.

“Our culture is clearly somewhat infatuated with celebrities,” he said.

A mellow, free-spirited type with a penchant for white linen, Kramer once fancied the artist’s life.

An early foray into filmmaking that produced two smallish independent films — “Wednesday’s Child” (1999) and “Amy’s Orgasm” (2001) — quickly proved to him that “my movies were not going to end up getting made.” So he quit producing and went to work developing the technology company WithoutABox, an online international film-festival application program that, after just eight years, he and his partners sold to the Web giant Internet Movie Database. At 37, Kramer had a bundle of cash and a ballooning wanderlust, which he parlayed into a 34-foot Catalina sailboat and a one-year sabbatical.

When he wasn’t wandering Peru, India or one of six countries in Africa, he was likely to be found chattering in the back at IKAR, the synagogue where he served as board chair. But if the social justice seed was nurtured within the walls of the Westside JCC, it flourished while traveling through the African wilderness, where his wanderings brought him into contact with the consequences of modern genocide.

He returned to Los Angeles inspired to act but unsure what to do. A friend told him Jewish World Watch was looking for an executive director. “My initial reaction was, ‘This is not what I do,’ ” Kramer said. “I had considered myself a businessman, and had assumed when I began looking for new work that it would be finding a new business and making money. I had never really considered the option of running a non-profit.”

He said his involvement with IKAR “had a tremendous effect on my willingness to try something like this, both [in terms] of my Jewish identity and my obligation toward the world.” From living in the lap of luxury to visiting the depths of deprivation, Kramer found himself compelled to support “people having a more difficult time than I am.”

Los Angeles, land of plenty, was the perfect place from which to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. “I can tell you that the level of attention we’re able to draw to our issues when a public figure is advocating for them alongside us is completely different than what we are able to attract when they are not,” Kramer said. The glitter of fame has two sides. “Clearly it’s effective.”

Which is why one of Kramer’s early priorities in his new position is to use L.A.’s backyard celebrity candy store to bring attention to his organization’s cause. On May 20, the Jewish World Watch annual 5K “Walk to End Genocide”  will take place at Pan Pacific Park in Los Angeles, and for the first time some notable Hollywood names will join: Josh Radnor (star of CBS’ “How I Met Your Mother”), Don Cheadle (“Hotel Rwanda,” “Ocean’s Eleven”) and TV’s Lisa Edelstein (“House”).

For some of those connections, Kramer owes a debt to his fiancée, actress Michaela Watkins, who represents another sea change in his life inspired by his travels. “It was really an opening on a number of fronts,” he said, “and that element of the journey started when I met the woman of my dreams.”

Kramer’s dreams for Jewish World Watch include more interfaith work, expanding programming around the country and creating an office for the organization in Washington, D.C. And just maybe, a little help from Clooney.

“One of the things I asked of him,” — in jail — “was, I said, ‘You know, we have the world’s largest solar cooker project,’ ” which provides women and girls with a cooking alternative that eliminates the dangers of collecting firewood. “And in a movie he did, ‘The Men Who Stare at Goats,’ he actually kicks a solar cooker and talks about what a piece of s—- it is.

“So I told him about the cooker project and reminded him of that scene, and he chuckled, and I asked him if he would help me rectify that image and maybe produce a spot where he explains that there’s some real good that comes out of solar cooking.”

Clooney said yes.

0 Comments — Leave your comment

May 9, 2012 | 11:28 am

‘Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish’: A love-hate relationship

Posted by Danielle Berrin

Mendy Zafir in a scene from “Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish.” Photo courtesy of Vilna City Films

Eve Annenberg’s “Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish” is a film full of tricky contradictions.

As its title suggests, it is a celebratory showcase of Yiddish language, with about half its dialogue spoken in Yiddish, with English subtitles. A fact that also happens to fuel Anneberg’s big marketing ploy: “I’m coming to L.A. a week early to literally go around to Jewish senior centers and talk them into getting their people to the theater,” she said during a phone interview the week before the film’s Los Angeles premiere on May 11.

Who says pride is a sin?

“Other Yiddish films will come down the pike,” added Annenberg, who attended Julliard and Columbia University’s film school, “but I think people might say ‘Romeo and Juliet’ was the first to use this much colloquial Yiddish in modern narrative in more than 50 years.”

Efforts to revive the Yiddish language and culture have been on the increase in recent years, but usually not at the expense of other aspects of Jewish culture. “Romeo and Juliet” may be Annenberg’s “love song to Jewish culture,” but it is also a kind of angry lament at Brooklyn’s ultra-Orthodox community.

“For the longest time, I was a little bit anti-Orthodox. Sexist, racist, anti-Zionist; I was just like ‘they [stink]’,” Annenberg told Heeb magazine in January 2011. Her feelings are undisguised in her film. “Fraud,” one subtitle declares, is a “Hassidic family business.”

In one scene, a payot-sporting, black-hat wearing Yeshiva bocher fakes being crippled to beg for money. Later, he removes his fake peyot and is shown smoking a joint as a naked African American girl crawls out of his bed. 

The celebration of one culture; the denigration of another.

The film’s milieu, which divides the reputed shadiness of the religious community from “normal Brooklyn,” where people do things like read Shakespeare, is bound to offend. But its edginess is all the more provocative, since much of it is based on truth.

Several years ago, Annenberg was walking down Fifth Avenue in New York one night and found herself bewitched by the sound of music emanating from the Millinery Synagogue on 6th Avenue and 39th Street. She was invited upstairs to a mysterious party called Chulent, organized by Yitzchak Schonfeld and designed to accommodate the “narrow margins where secular and [Ch]aredi, atheist and Chasidic, deepest depths and most foolish foolery, overlap,” according to the Web site neohasid.org. In simpler terms, the late-night party “basically is a drop-in lounge for folks that have traveled (or strayed) from the Chasidic world.”

For Annenberg, it was the only social activity in New York that ran late enough to allow her to first put her dying mother to bed. “That’s how I met them,” she said of the young, former Orthodox men and women who conversed mostly in Yiddish — though they also spoke Hebrew, Aramaic and English (“in that order”), which they had learned in their yeshiva studies. For various reasons, they had all broken away from the Orthodox community to try to make their way in the secular world; but for some, it was easier dreamed than done. With virtually no secular-world skills, many resorted to petty scams as the easiest way to make a living.

Then they met Annenberg.

The 40-something filmmaker was so taken with the young Yids, she hatched the idea to make a movie in Yiddish. “I’m a shallow girl,” she said. “I would look at these guys dressed in their Orthodox gear and think, ‘Ohmigod, look how beautiful they are.’ ” The most famous love story in Western culture seemed a natural fit, not to mention the uncanny cultural parallels — naive youth, rigid families, communal feuds and arranged marriages.

Annenberg recruited a small group to help her translate “Romeo and Juliet” into Yiddish (she deemed a translation from the 1930s too outdated). Then she hired them as actors. Their absolute inexperience with Shakespeare so fascinated her, she taped the translation sessions and made them a subplot in the film. “It was like something out of a Jewish version of ‘Hair,’ ” she said.

But when she posted the excerpts from the sessions on Vimeo, a local Orthodox blogger was so aggressively outraged, one of her actors dumped the tapes out of shame. 

“They were so fascinating,” Annenberg said of the Shakespeare sessions. “Their excitement over the material and the fun of it. But in the ultra-Orthodox world, men and women don’t socialize the way we were socializing; we’d sit and talk and study together, and I think that was discomfiting.”

The actors who play Romeo and Juliet in the film even had a real-life romance — their first. The entire film was shot in 30 days for $175,000, and it won an audience award when it premiered at the Berlin Jewish Film Festival last year. Now, several of the formerly floundering ex-Orthodox are pursuing film careers.

But the journey wasn’t entirely blessed. In the middle of the shoot, Annenberg was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer, had a double mastectomy on a Wednesday and returned to the editing suite the following Monday.

“I was really, really lucky,” she said.

Perhaps God liked her movie, I suggested.

“Or not,” she joked. “I can’t tell you how many Orthodox Jews told me, ‘If only you had kept the Sabbath’ ... if only you hadn’t played ‘Avinu Malkeinu’ during the love scene!’”

“Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish” opens May 11 in Los Angeles.

0 Comments — Leave your comment