LGBT Community on Film

From WNYC:

June marks the 40th Anniversary of Stonewall. We're commemorating the occasion by talking about representations of LGBT life and politics on film as part of our Projections series. Film critic Nathan Lee, professor of Cinema Studies at CUNY David Gerstner, and by filmmaker Cheryl Dunye join us to discuss the following films:
"The Boys in the Band" (1970) "Parting Glances" (1986) "The Watermelon Woman" (1996) "Milk" (2008)

The discussion is fascinating for several reasons. At one point one of the guests suggests that representation on film is crucially important for gays in a way it isn't for many other oppressed groups because they pass in everyday life. In that way, I think a lot of it is also relevant for Jews. In particular, there's a discussion of how gays are more welcome on the screen when they die at the end of the film. It was progress when they only wound up severely emotionally damaged rather than dead. Let me recommend for comparison, The Pawnbroker and Sophie's Choice.

(Video might show up around here at some point. Since they watch film clips during the show, video might be helpful, but I think most of what's important comes through in the audio.)

identity acceptance and perception

Interesting, though I disagree.

I have always wondered what difference it makes if the proverbial Cherokee grandmother exists? In what sense is somebody Indian who has to hire a genealogist to find an ancestor? I’m not saying that an adult onset Indian cannot belatedly form tribal ties, but connection to a tribe for such people is the exception rather than the rule.

My own position is that Indian identity is not about what you claim, but rather about who claims you. This is diametrically opposed to Churchill’s idea that self-identification is what counts...

How many of us have come across someone claiming that what they're saying isn't antisemitic since they're "of Jewish descent." Funny, that phrase. I've come across people claiming to be Jewish in a more straightforward way while spouting blatant antisemitism, but plenty of people are quite inconsistent in claiming to be Jewish. They qualify it by saying only that their ancestors are Jewish. For them, it becomes a matter of convenience.

Consider transgendered people struggling for recognition among other queers. Or ask, are Jews people of color if other people of color claim Jews run the world? I think the problems of demanding acceptance over identification can become apparent. But such an identification can be interrogated. What is identification without connection?

Religion and ethnicity

Marko Hoare has an interesting post, entitled "Is Islamophobia equivalent to racism or anti-Semitism? The view from the Balkans."

identity is fluid and communal

Wisconsin Yankee has a good post on identity. Because identity is both fluid, not restricted to neat categories or even fixed in an individual, but also operant within a society, there are bound to be ironies.

The demise of the Becks

Via Bintel Blog, comes this story about the demise of a youthful, Jewish street-scene. A few odd points that seem to close to the American JAP stereotype (as if non-Jewish teens hanging out on street corners could never be "bitchy"). But generally a quite interesting story about how Jewishness comes into play in some people's identities.

Overheard on the 6 train

This morning, as I was riding to work, there were two Sephardic Jews, one Israeli, one from Brooklyn, flirting. It was interesting to see them talk about their shared culture. She didn't know the name of his hometown (just north of Haifa), but she knew she could drop the name of her father's hometown and he'd understand immediately. And she kept mentioning food, confident he'd understand what she meant when she simply said that Brooklyn has good food. Hummus and falafel, rather than latkes and kugel. In other words, they shared an ethnic identification. (There are other ways, probably more significant, in which Jewish cultures differ from the dominant, white culture of the US, but don't we always start with food and geography?) Many of us, without much interaction with the organized Jewish community, may find it easy to forget what that means. But Jews are not, as too often portrayed, simply white (or sometimes, whiter than white). The understanding that Jews are white needs to be problematized.

I'm white, but I don't know that either of them could be appropriately said to be. And if they are, there are other Jews -see Y Love; Rebel Sun; or Sammy Davis, Jr; but also consider the Ethiopian Jews, Beta Israel; or the Chinese Kaifeng Jews; or Jews of India (here's some Indian Jews in Brooklyn). Yet we all (even me) share pieces of a broader Jewish identity that is different from the dominant culture of the US that is understood as defining whiteness. The guy who spoke up to say that his mother's family was also Sephardic, from Syria and Egypt -though he looked more like me- him, too.

Of course, such diversity within Jewish society produces conflict. We're not necessarily less racist than other groups (why would anyone expect otherwise?), and it's a shame to see "anti-Zionists" exploit that to tar all Jews/Zionists/Israeli Jews for the racism of some Jews. Yet she noted that in Brooklyn, there's respect for the diversity of styles of worship among Jews. And he noted that in Israel, his generation is leaving behind the racial divide between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews.