"I'm From the Jews"

       Israeli writers/directors Aharon Shem-Tov and Niv Hachtili based this delightful fable on a  short story by Almog Behar. Its subject is the complexities around Israelis’ identity.

A Jewish teacher, expecting his first child, is visited by the spirit of his maternal Kurdish grandfather. Perhaps “occupied” is more apt than ”visited,” for the young man starts speaking compulsively in Iraqi-accented Hebrew and Arabic. The grandfather is upset that his first grandson won’t bear his name, Anwar. 

Modern Israeli Jews reject the idea of an Arabic name. The Arabic accents are a source of ridicule for the teacher’s class. Though here all Israelis live between air raid warnings, Israeli Arabs live under additional pressure, especially harassment, suspicion and arrest. To reduce his suspicious stereotype, our hero gives up his beard. The Jewish Arab -- or Mizrahi -- is similarly an outsider. (Though this year's Eurovision song contest winner was a Mizrahi.) 

Nor is this a freakish case. Another Jew is arrested for the same suspicious compulsion — though Arabic has not been spoken in his home. When the Arabic-speaking Jew shares a paddy wagon with an Israeli Arab, the latter thinks the world has turned upside down. The latter's resemblance to the police interrogator -- who may have been an undercover plant in the paddy wagon -- underlines the incendiary insecurity in Israeli identities. 
     Reasserting the nation’s diverse cultural roots, the film interweaves the languages. Paradoxically, the very title is in Arabic. Writer Behar is himself a Mizrahi -- an Arab Jew -- like the family here. He is sensitive to the shared experience of the Arab and the Jew and is ardent in his attempt to bridge both cultures. 

      The grandfather’s rejected name, Anwar, is particularly significant. Though rejected as Arabic, it also evokes the peacemaker,  Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, who was assassinated by his military for making peace with Israel. 

       Sadat once said: “There can be hope only for a society which acts as one big family, not as many separate ones.” In that spirit, Behar and his adapters playfully seek to recall and to legitimize Israelis’ diverse languages and cultures and to recover their lost harmony.