The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival makes itself a forum for anti-Israel films
Many Jews have been so ideologically captured by the left that they compulsively identify with and feel endless sympathy for the people in Gaza and the West Bank, most of whom are open in their desire for mass Jewish slaughter, the more sadistic, the better. The latest example of this madness is the upcoming San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (“SFJFF”), which is making itself a showcase for pro-Gaza and anti-Israel grievance films.
The SFJFF has long (always?) leaned left. That’s because the Jewish Film Institution, which sponsors it, is a left-leaning organization. That comes through loud and clear in the last paragraph of its verbose mission statement, which has a lot of airy-fairy nothingness that boasts about its Jewishness while saying nothing actually Jewish (as in, the Torah or core Jewish values). In that last paragraph, though, it gets very specific:
We value the unique perspectives offered by people of every race, ethnicity, gender identity/expression, disability, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, age, physical appearance, language spoken, immigration status, and socioeconomic background. We prioritize continuous learning of anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-discriminatory practices in our organizational culture and programs. We strive to reflect our communities’ complexity in our Board and staff composition.
The only thing missing is a land acknowledgment for its San Francisco offices.
The staff is in line with this mission. Executive director, Lexi Leban (“She/Her”), is a Barnard and San Francisco State University grad whose oeuvre is films about “women’s rights, criminal justice and LGBT issues.” The guest festival director, Ash Hoyle (“He/Him”), is a gay Vassar grad. The programmer, Dominique Oneil, is an “It” person with “They/Them” pronouns. The marketing and communications manager, Rebecca Pierce (“She/Her”), graduated from UC Santa Cruz and writes for The Nation. The development coordinator, Emma Gobler, is another “It” person with “She/They” pronouns. These people are caricatures of leftism.
However, they’re proudly “Jewish.” I mean, it’s everywhere on their website, with “Jewish this” and “Jewish that” thrown about with abandon. One would think that the events on October 7 would have overwhelmed, but that really doesn’t seem to be the case. On their Instagram page, they acknowledged it twice. The first time was a bland, ecumenical nod to October 7:
The second time was to acknowledge Yahav Winner’s death in the massacre:
Otherwise...nothing.
But now, Lexi Leban has announced that the upcoming SFJFF (July 18-August 14) “will be daring—not shying away from tough conversations of the day” about the Israel and Gaza conflict. To the end, we’re told, it will “offer unique perspectives that help to contextualize the current crisis in Israel and Gaza.” So what exactly does that meanWell, there will apparently be short films from Sapir Academic College, the one at which Yahav Winner, the slaughtered filmmaker, worked. Presumably, those films will present the Israeli side of things, although there’s no word yet about their content.
However, there are also three films that the SFJFF will focus on to “contextualize” the current crisis. One is Lyd, a movie that the communist DemocracyNow finds thrilling since it’s all about the “Nakba”—that is, when Arabs living in the new state of Israel voluntarily cleared out to make way for the five Arab nations that attacked Israel, having assumed that they would be able to return and get a share of the post-war spoils. (Funnily enough, DemocracyNow never mentions the 900,000 Jews forced out of their ancient Arab communities after 1948.) The film is manifestly anti-Israel.
The second is Three Promises, which the filmmakers describe this way:
While the Israeli army retaliates against the second intifada in the West Bank in the early 2000s, a mother films her family’s daily life, punctuated by time spent sheltering in the basement. Her son revisits this past, delivering a heart-breaking film that conveys the anguish of children and their parents who are forced to choose between safety and emotional upheaval.
“Retaliates.” That’s some pretty loaded language. During the Second Intifada, residents of the West Bank killed over 1,000 Israelis, most of them civilians. As is the case now, the Israelis responded by trying to kill adult male combatants who deliberately hid amongst the civilian population. Also then, as now, the brains behind the terrorists understood that they could not win a military conflict. They could only win by convincing the world that Israelis are child killers, which meant using children as their shields.
The third movie, The Vanishing Soldier, is a movie out of Israel about a soldier who goes AWOL, only for the Israeli military to believe that he was kidnapped. It’s difficult to find much about the plot, but I did learn that the director is a hard leftist whose sympathy is with the people in Gaza and the West Bank. In an interview he gave two months before the October 7, massacre, Dani Rosenberg had this to say:
“Tel Aviv is a vivid, rich city; it’s one of the capitals of the LGBTQ movement, and is also a city that is just one hour drive from the Gaza strip, one of the poorest places with two million Palestinians behind walls and those walls are built with the money of the city of Tel Aviv,” said Rosenberg.
[snip]
In a remarkable moment in Israel’s history as members of Shlomi’s generation are refusing to report for their military duty in protest, how does Rosenberg feel that chimes with the story of the film?
“First of all, it gives me hope, because the young generation could suddenly rise up and they are doing something my generation never did. Questioning the system, fighting the system. In the beginning, I was critical about this rising, because I felt they’re fighting only for their privilege; for their rights. But now I see that they’ve started to open their eyes. Now they’re seeing that actually they’re living in an unjust country, in a violent country, in a religious country, a militaristic country, and for the first time in Israeli history, reserve soldiers are declaring that they will not return to the army.”
I wonder if October 7 changed Rosenberg’s mind.
I wonder, too, if he or anyone at the Jewish Film Institute or at the SFJFF cares that Gaza residents overwhelmingly support Hamas and its anti-Jewish genocidal goals. Do the “It” people working at the Jewish Film Institute even know that, were they to set foot in Gaza, they’d be executed? Are they so blinded by ideology that they’ll willingly offer themselves up as blood sacrifices?
The fact that these self-loathing, suicidal people are allowed to advocate for the very people who would happily kill them is because they live in free countries. All would benefit from a year-long sojourn in Rafah (assuming that year didn’t become a permanent residency in a Rafah potter’s grave).
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