Ashkenaz will be premiering in the U.S. at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival tomorrow, August 10th at 3:15pm at the JCCSF.

I caught up with Rachel Leah Jones, director of Ashkenaz, before her U.S. premiere to ask her a few questions about the making of the film, what she hopes audiences will take away, some of the differences in Ashkenazi identity in the U.S. and in Israel, and more. We’ll be doing a follow up review on the film, as I haven’t yet had the opportunity to see it before speaking with her.

Rachel was born in Berkeley, California, and raised in Tel Aviv. Ashkenaz is her second film.

CK: Tell us what moved you to make Ashkenaz.

RLJ: In a sense, Ashkenaz is a work-in-progress that didn’t begin with a film, and may not end with it. I first wrote about Ashkenaziness when I was a graduate student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem over a decade ago. At the time, there was virtually no discourse—political or academic—on Ashkenaziness. It was difficult to figure out which resources to draw upon to discuss Ashkenaziness as a social/cultural construct. So I drew on the insights of critical Israeli and Jewish thinkers like Ella Shohat, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin and Daniel Boyarin. I rummaged through the writings of Zionist ideologues like Theodore Herzl. I quoted Audre Lorde and Tzvetan Todorov. I adopted Ruth Frankenberg’s paradigm for thinking through whiteness. And then I left the subject alone.

When I returned to it, no longer a graduate student but a documentary filmmaker, I thought to “translate” a written essay into a filmic one (“What’s the story?” is still a question that makes me squirm). And it’s a crazy idea. It’s as if I took that very essay, nice and tidy with footnotes and all, and tore it into pieces, scattered it into the wind and then took a camera (and a cameraman and a soundman and a rented car and when I was eight months pregnant a driver too) and went looking for them. Some pieces I found, some I didn’t. Some were legible and some were torn and tattered and messy and deformed if not transformed. Some were lost forever. Some scraps flew in from other texts. And I took scotch tape (and an editor and an editing room and a producer) and tried to put them together. And a decade made for a somewhat different story.

The story I chose to tell was not personal, but grounded in personal experience. Growing up in Israel, I was well aware of my Ashkenaziness. Blond and green-eyed, a half breed Yiddisha-Shiksa (Jewish-Gentile), my Eastern-European mother was often mistaken for my North-African nanny. I was so “Ashkenazi,” that I was forced to play Jimmy Carter in the Camp David skit in 2nd grade, while the roles of Anouar Sadat and Menachem Begin were reserved for kids whose parents were Egyptian and Polish respectively.

One day after school, I ended up at then Prime Minister Begin’s granddaughter’s house. While we played, her grandmother cooked lunch: schnitzel and mashed potatoes—my favorite! I looked on as she summoned my playmate to the table and served her steaming globs of starch beside crispy breaded fillets. My mouth watered, my eyes must have popped out of my head. I stared at the floor, yearning in silence. Begin’s granddaughter ate slowly, chewing her food with boredom, oblivious to me and my hunger—perhaps not so much to eat as to be fed. I can only wonder what would bring an old woman to prefer that I glance at her sideways, eating my heart out, than see me beaming up at her with a mouth full of her cooking. Even though I looked like the Ashkenazi poster-girl (thanks to the Jones in me—my father’s Southern Baptist roots and not the Greenberg in me—my mother’s Lower East Side heritage), I wasn’t spared her “Ashkenazi” treatment.

In Israel, inhospitable, cold, calculating and condescending behavior is commonly associated with Ashkenazim. Kind of like the stereotype of the WASP, only less polite (after all what would Ashkenaziness be without the chutzpah?). Whereas in the US, where I also grew up, Ashkenaziness was synonymous with Jewishness (a problem in and of itself), and to be Jewish was to be warm, animated, argumentative and kvetchy—behaviors that in Israel are commonly associated with Mizrahim (literally “Easterners” in Hebrew, denoting Jews of Asian and African origin).

Of course, whiteness and Ashkenaziness are just notions. But they inform our consciousness and shape our reality. As a rule, white people are considered the rule and non-whites the exception to the rule. And like many rules, it is unspoken, it somehow “goes without saying.” And like many rules, it was meant to be broken. That is some of what I have tried to do with ASHKENAZ.

CK: The screening at the SFJFF is your premiere screening in North America. Tell us how your film has been received thus far in other places, and how you hope it will be received here in the U.S.

RLJ: In Israel, the film has screened in all the cinematheques (Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Sderot, Rosh Pina) and was broadcast on channel 8 (the documentary channel). It has also been doing grassroots circulation (NGOs, community centers, women’s groups). The overwhelming response has been positive: it gets people thinking and feeling and talking. And even though the film isn’t personal (which some people wish it was) everybody starts recounting their own encounters with Ashkenaziness. People are (for the most part pleasantly) surprised to find Ashkenazim, Mizrahim and Palestinians in the same discussion. It’s been my thinking all along that Ashkenaziness is not the exclusive domain of Ashkenazim. As an Israeli social/cultural construct, it defines all of us, and we in turn define it. Some people feel the film is too black and white. Others feel it covers such a broad spectrum of issues and opinions that it ends up politically diffuse. When I showed the film to people in various stages of editing, I never obtained a consensus on which issues were more important, which characters were most moving, who or what was expandable or expendable. This is somewhat true of the finished film too. One editor told me it is an ideal situation. But in moments of doubt, it can also feel calamitous.

I hope American audiences get an in-depth picture and have a meaningful experience, despite the fact that they may miss out on some of the nuances. That was another hard balance to strike: between the universal and the particular. Taking Israeli audiences to new discursive places while introducing non-Israeli audiences to lesser-known yet cardinal discussion.

CK: Are there conversations you hope to spark with this film?

RLJ: Definitely. I want to bring the discussion of whiteness into the discussion of Israeliness. But I also hope to bring the discussion of whiteness into the discussion of Jewishness. I remember I was first confronted with my whiteness at college. Like many white folks, the initial feeling I had in response to the activism of students of color was “exclusion.” Without skipping a beat I sought “refuge” in my Jewishness. Anything to alleviate the “burden” of a white legacy I didn’t want to inherit, let alone own. Never mind the Jones, lets accentuate the Greenberg. But even had I been 100% Greenberg, I still would have had to answer for my white skin privilege, not to mention Jewish America’s post WWII adoption of white middle-class values and the so-called “Judeo-Christian ethic.” Don’t get me wrong, Jewish history need not be a white history. That’s exactly what I’d like us to talk about: how our Jewish histories should serve not as a means to deny whiteness in this day and age, but rather to critically re-think it altogether.

In Israel, the advent of a neo-Ashkenazi trend, best exemplified by the “Ashkenazi Identity Movement” (whom you will find in the film) raises similar questions. The naming of one’s self as “Ashkenazi” as opposed to simply “Israeli” is a welcome break with the common assumption that European Jews are the norm. In other words, some Ashknazim have understood, in response to Mizrahi identity politics and struggle, that they should put themselves in proportion by hyphenating their identities. More and more young Ashkenazim are reaching the understanding that (historical) Ashkenaziness is also a victim of Zionism (i.e. the Diasporic Jew vs. the New Jew). The problem starts when that victimization is used to obfuscate the fact that Ashkenazim still rule the land. In other words, everything European or Western is still regarded as “good,” everything Arab or Eastern is still regarded as “bad,” but now we are all victims, there are no more perpetrators (I mean, Tommy Lapid is dead, right?).

CK: In the Haaretz review of your film (Dec 21, 2007), Amos Noy writes, “In a brilliant move, the film does what in retrospect appears to be the only thing it could do with something that defines itself by way of negation: it turns to the negated and asks them to define it as they see it.” Can you give us an example of a story in the film where one of the characters is asked to talk about their identity as Ashkenazi, and the tension that surfaces for them in having to speak about that identity.

RLJ: The film includes a variety of characters and situations, among them the “man-on-the-street” or vox popoli. One cloudy afternoon, I met two middle-aged Ashkenazi women on the streets of Tel Aviv. Like two theatre masks signifying tragedy and comedy, one was darker, the other lighter. One was smiling, the other frowning. I asked them the usual questions: Who is Ashkenazi? What is Ashkenaziness? And where the hell is Ashkenaz, anyway? The darker frowning woman said Ashkenaz was Germany (very few Israeli Jews, be they Ashkenazi or Mizrahi, knew the answer to this question). But when it came to “Are you Ashkenazi?” she stumbled through her “inferiority complexes.” I am, but not really. I’m of Eastern European origin, so I’m not pure (she used the word clean). I guess, maybe, I suppose. The lighter smiling woman felt less threatened by the question and just said, “Yes.” But then she said she’d rather be Sephardi, that it goes better with her personality. She was a happy-go-lucky type, and she seemed to think Ashkenaziness couldn’t contain that. Sephardim had more joie de vivre, she explained, Ashkenazim were downers.

It’s a funny moment that makes people laugh. But it’s a moment that breaks my heart. It epitomizes the problem for me: these dichotomous constructs of warm/cold, rational/irrational, cerebral/visceral, etc. that leave everybody—on either side of the Cartesian mind/body split—maimed. Later in the film, I encounter three older Ashkenazi women visiting the Yiddish Writers’ Association. With big smiles, red lipstick and bleached blond hair they lament the fact that Hebrew can’t express half of what Yiddish can, drawing examples from physical forms of human contact like smacks, whacks and slams on the back. In this scene, which seems to rub WASPified Ashkenazim the wrong way, I find redemption.

CK: If there’s one thing you’d like for people to get out of seeing the film, what would that be?

RLJ: To laugh, but also to sigh. The film doesn’t go tear-jerking but if people cried, I’d be happy. It is said about Ashkenazim in Israel that “they don’t cry at funerals.” In other words, we don’t emote; we have no hearts. And the implicit understanding is that, if this is true (which needless to say it is not) we all know who broke our hearts; who stole our souls. Though we also know that not all of us are first degree survivors of the Holocaust and to the extent that we would have been its victims—as European Jews—than we aren’t truly “white.” So what accounts for the “acquired albino syndrome” of Ashkenazim in Israel, as cultural critic Sarah Khinsky put it? Why, as Talmudic scholar Daniel Boyarin framed it, are the European Ostjuden (“Eastern Jews” in Yiddish) considered Western, with all the power and privilege that come with it, while North-African Jews from the Maghreb (“West” in Arabic) are considered Eastern with all the disdain the West holds has the East? There are no simple answers. But let us not be afraid to ask the questions. After all, what do we stand to lose by airing dirty laundry, the whitewashing?