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This year the film program for the Association for Jewish Studies’ 56th Annual Conference will be held online, with all films available for AJS members to stream from December 14 through December 20, 2024. Embracing the heterogeneity of Jewish film, the committee’s selections explore questions of Jewish identity and memory from the vantage point of the present across a wide range of cinematic modes (fiction and non-fiction), genres (comedy, drama, faux documentary, etc.), and global contexts (Argentina, Israel, Germany, the United States).
The program will include three feature-length films and one short film: Egypt: A Love Song (Iris Zaki, Israel, 2022), Three Attempts at Goyification (Michaela Kobsa-Mark, Germany, 2023), The Red Star/ La estrella roja (Gabriel Lichtmann, Argentina, 2021), and A Matter of Opinion (Adam Golfer, United States, 2023).
The feature-length documentary Egypt: A Love Song (Iris Zaki, Israel, 2022) explores Jewish-Arab identity and culture through director Iris Zaki, as she discovers the story of her late paternal grandmother, legendary singer and actress Souad Zaki, who was famous throughout the Arab world in the 1940s. The documentary combines scripted reenactments from Souad Zaki’s life, archival materials, and a journey between father and daughter which leads the director to examine her own complex identity.
The mockumentary Three Attempts at Goyification follows director Kobsa-Mark’s attempts to become a goy (a non-Jew). The film comedically engages with questions of Jewish identity, interrogating what does (or doesn’t) make her a Jew in the eyes of religion, nationality, biology, and society.
The Red Star/ La estrella roja (Gabriel Lichtmann, Argentina, 2021) is a faux documentary uncovering the mystery of Laila Salama, an alleged Jewish spy who operated against the Nazis in 1930s Argentina and contributed to the 1960 kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires.
Finally, the short film A Matter of Opinion (Adam Golfer, United States, 2023) offers a creative reimagining of a 1995 interview recorded between the director’s Holocaust survivor grandfather and his wife with their Ghanaian-American neighbor, who has been prompted by her school assignment to interview someone who was alive during the Second World War. In so doing, it raises important questions about the intersections between the memory of the Holocaust and American racism.
We hope that these films will be useful to you for your research, teaching, or public programming. The conference program includes the distributor contact information. Please ask your libraries to order the films or contact distributors directly. Your response to our program will help us secure distributor cooperation for future AJS conferences.
In addition to the virtual screenings, the film committee has planned two events. The first, AJS @ The Movies, will be devoted to Egypt: A Love Story. There will be a virtual screening of the film followed by a discussion led by film committee members Jim Bunton and Phyllis Lassner.
The second event, “Teaching Through Films,” will focus on pedagogy. Film committee members Daniela Goldfine and Rachel Schaff will discuss the pedagogical opportunities posed by A Matter of Opinion and The Red Star with the film’s directors Adam Golfer and Gabriel Lichtmann.
We look forward to seeing you at the virtual screenings and the pedagogy panel. Together, let’s celebrate the importance of cinema and media for scholarship and teaching. We will see you at the movies!
Rachel Schaff in collaboration with AJS Film Committee members Jim Bunton (chair), Daniela Goldfine, and Phyllis Lassner
