Commie Pinko Jewfest

Are there any conversations more calcified than the ones about Jews
and money? Probably, but not many. So it feels momentous to find a
different portal into that endless discussion, and a happy coincidence
that it’s this year’s Seattle Jewish Film Festival that is
inadvertently providing one. Inadvertently because the theme of the
festival, now in its 14th year, is “Go Green!”—not, of course, as
in “Go money!” And yet, in trying to select a bunch of “eco films” for
their green Jewish Film Festival, the organizers actually ended up with
a collection that has far more interesting things to say about the
other kind of green, and it feels all the more current and urgent as a
result.

It’s odd, but the familiar stereotype of Jews as miserly bankers
rising to the top of the capitalist heap through pitiless interest
charging has always, and especially in America, ignored how many Jews
were actually socialists and communists. Two of the festival’s
films—At Home in Utopia and A Gift to
Stalin—address this collective memory-hole directly, and from
fascinatingly different angles. At Home in Utopia is an American
documentary about “the Coops,” a large cooperative housing project in
the Bronx launched by Jewish communist immigrants from Eastern Europe
in the 1920s. The way these new Americans refused to bend to the
financial and social system they had landed in is startling, all the
more so given the stereotype. In their communal basement libraries and
gardens, in their defense of their Bronx neighbors facing eviction by
profit-driven landlords, and in their disgust at this country’s
treatment of workers in general and African Americans in particular (in
response to which the Coops decided to integrate in the 1930s,
producing, among other fascinating outcomes, a few Yiddish-conversant
African Americans), one sees a profoundly radical and complicated
Jewish-American experience.

This is an almost forgotten Jewish America, the same immigrant stew
that produced Allen Ginsberg, who would later “confess” in his poem
“America”: America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies/America I
used to be a communist when I was a kid and I’m not sorry. Not
quite as nostalgic about his communist upbringing is the main character
in A Gift to Stalin, an Israeli film about a young Jewish boy
with delicate eyes who ends up on a packed, fetid train that is rolling
through the Kazakhstan steppe as part of Joseph Stalin’s program of
ethnic purges in the 1930s. The visual echoes of the trains that would
take Jews to concentration camps just a few years later in Hitler’s
Germany will not be lost on any viewers. The boy plays dead in order to
get off the train, but loses his parents (who had come up with this
means of escape) in the bargain. Where they go is unclear: perhaps to
one of Stalin’s forced-labor camps, perhaps to their deaths. The boy,
now an orphan, is taken in and raised by a burly Kazakh Muslim rail
worker, and together they navigate the dangerous backwater of a society
in which an immoral communist leadership has come to encourage
tremendous human suffering. The message is the exact opposite of that
in At Home in Utopia, essentially: Mr. Stalin, I used to be a
communist when I was a kid and I am very, very sorry.

The setting on the otherworldly Kazakhstan steppe and the
nondoctrinaire moral journey that the characters undertake create a
film that feels more universal than specifically Jewish, a quality
shared by another notable offering from the festival, the French film
Lemon Tree. This is a film about a lemon grove belonging to a
Palestinian woman who inherited the grove from her father, who
inherited it from his father before that. The grove sits right against
a line dividing Palestinian and Israeli territory, and when the new
Israeli defense minister moves in on the other side of the line, there
ensues a clash over whether the grove is a security threat shading
terrorists or a monument to the sacredness of family, memory, and
well-tended earth. Here we have yet another country that seems to have
forgotten its earlier, collectivist Jewish immigrants (in this case,
the Jews who founded Israel’s kibbutzim and were themselves tenders of
lemon trees and other things). And here, again, we have at the center
of all problems the very thing that Marx and his followers felt was
always to be found at the center of all problems: property.