“Are you Jewish?”
Perceiving it as a loaded question, Jamie Kastner takes his cue from balshy documentary star Michael Moore and begins a road trip from New York to Auschwitz seeking motives behind the question.
Beginning with a shotgun bar mitzvah in Brooklyn by proselytising Chasidim, things become decidedly less kosher. Kastner is turfed from Pat ‘Pitbull of the Right’ Buchanan’s living room after asking why the US commentator slates Jewish Neocons. Drumming up debate with local Arab kids in a Parisian suburb reveals stereotypes lie just below the surface, “if you’re Jewish we don’t like you – you’ll f**k us over.”
Kastner finds his brethen are regarded with equal disdain in London. An American Jew is repatriating citing escalating antisemitism – “On the TV you have shots of the IDF soldier with his designer shades aiming his rifle at the Palestinians… And I can’t mention Israel to my British friends”, she sighs. Elsewhere in the capital, a newspaper columnist admits he doesn’t read letters from readers with “Jewish-sounding names”. Sheesh!
Despite this negativity, Kastner’s sarcastic asides to the camera make this a tongue-in-cheek poke at Jewish identity, and he has ample fodder when he reaches the Polish city of Krakow. So hard-pushed are the locals to recreate a Jewish quarter (60,000 Jews used to live here) that Goyim are opening Kosher restaurants and staffing the synagogue.
Irreverance is firmly checked at the gates however when the crew addresses ‘Holocaust tourism’.“I don’t have to go and see ovens to know that this all happened”, blasts Kastner as he ignores his cameraman’s pleas that he visit the rest of the death camp.
The film is more an expose of closet antisemitism than about what it means to be Jewish. Perhaps in the Q&A session following the film, Kastner would shed some light on the emotive issues his film raised. Or then again not. The obvious question, “are you proud to be Jewish?” was rebutted with a shrug of the shoulders and a nonchalant “does it matter?”
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