Berkeley Filmmakers Challenge Censorship in Jewish Community

These days, a person who criticizes Israel for occupying Palestinian lands risks condemnation as an enemy of the Jewish state and may be labeled an anti-Semite or self-hating Jew, say filmmakers Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow.

However, the antidote to restraints on speech is more speech, they argue in their new documentary, Between Two Worlds. The film aims to provoke discussion within the Jewish community around issues such as the occupation, and is intended to blunt the growing censorship of Israel’s critics.

The film will be shown as part of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival at , 2025 Addison St. in Berkeley. A Q-and-A with the filmmakers follows the screening. 

“Some people say that the whole idea of debate is what is Jewish,” Kaufman said, in a recent interview at Snitow-Kaufman Productions in West Berkeley’s . The challenge for the filmmaking duo was raising the issues that need debate within the limitations of a 70-minute documentary.

“How do you get to that level of inspiring people to start talking about what’s real?” Snitow asked.

The filmmakers found the answer in documenting a number of highly charged issues within the Jewish community. Between Two Worlds brings the question of censorship front and center in its recap of the 2009 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival decision to screen Rachel, a documentary about Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old American activist who stood in front of an Israeli bulldozer to protect a Palestinian home from demolition and was crushed to death.

In the Snitow-Kaufman documentary, Peter Stein, executive director of the Jewish Film Festival, talks about the emails he got in response to the decision to show film. “The Jewish Film Festival promotes Israel hatred,” one email said. “You are an anti-Semite,” said another.

Stein comments: “It’s thought police in a way that I haven’t experienced before.”

But it’s not only the ideological right that censors. Between Two Worlds also shows the difficulty Stein faced when he presented a countervailing voice to the liberal film festival audience.

He invited Dr. Michael Harris from Stand With Us/Voice For Israel to speak before showing the film. In introducing Harris, he said the festival wanted to be “utterly candid about the controversy surrounding our screening.” He further stated, “We are not afraid to hear their opinions.”

Harris used his time at the podium to denounce Rachel Corrie, saying, she was responsible for her own death, and to slam the festival. “A Jewish film festival should not be presenting a film and speaker that demonizes Israel,” he said, as the audience loudly booed and heckled, making it very difficult for Harris to speak. “Get off the stage — you’re not welcome,” yelled one member of the audience.

The Snitow-Kaufman film covers a range of controversies. One segment shows emotional scenes at UC Berkeley where the question of divestment by the Associated Students was debated. Another shows a Muslim cemetery in Israel, about to be demolished and replaced by a Jewish Museum of Tolerance.

And the documentary gets personal, with filmmakers delving into their family histories. Kaufman’s father, a passionate Zionist, had great difficulty making peace with the fact that one of his daughters converted to Islam. Kaufman links the dilemma to the notion, popular among some Zionists, that Jews should be having large families to further the race.

“Some of us are leaving the tribe; some of us are staying behind and redefining what it means to be a Jew,” Kaufman says in the film.

The documentary intentionally does not tie up its various pieces for a happy ending, Snitow said, explaining that rather than constructing answers, the film is a jumping off place.

It’s a beginning of a conversation “that we hope continues outside the frame of the film,” Kaufman added, “But it starts with the film.”

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