to move up and down
Looking back on 20 years of the Toronto Jewish Film Festival
“They grew up so fast,” says Helen Zukerman, reminiscing about the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, which celebrates its 20th birthday Thursday night. In honour of the mitzvah, festival founder Zukerman shared with Ben Kaplan her 20 favourite memories of the past two decades. It’s a Canadian success story, with a side of schmaltz.
E.T. shalom home
Can Spielberg’s extraterrestrial tale be the greatest Jewish film ever made?
![Circumcision: ‘Mutilation’ or an ‘act of love’?Rebecca Wald is “100% Jewish.” She celebrates the high holidays, her children attend Hebrew school, she lights candles on the sabbath and she was married to a “100% Jewish” man under a chuppah at a traditional Jewish wedding.But unlike most Jews, from the most secular to the ultra-orthodox, she did not circumcise her son. She has never attended — will never attend — a bris, the age-old ceremony where a Jew trained in circumcision (a ‘mohel’) removes the foreskin of an eight-day-old Jewish boy as a sign of his covenant with God.“All of the babies I saw growing up — whether cousins or the kids I babysat — were circumcised, and it seemed like that was the way things were supposed to be,” said Ms. Wald, who in December launched Beyond the Bris, a website for Jews who question circumcision. “It took having a son, who is intact, for me to really accept how normal [the uncircumcised penis] is.”The South Florida mom is among a growing and vocal minority of Jewish “intactivists” who are challenging the 4,000-year-old ritual because, they say, the procedure inflicts unnecessary pain without any health gains, causes long-term psychological harm, hinders sexual function and pleasure, and strikes at the core of consent. They say there are Jewish women who silently pray they will not bear a son, and that the question, ‘When’s the bris?’ is too presumptive.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lqc61zHIRX1qze0z6o1_1280.jpg)
Circumcision: ‘Mutilation’ or an ‘act of love’?
Rebecca Wald is “100% Jewish.” She celebrates the high holidays, her children attend Hebrew school, she lights candles on the sabbath and she was married to a “100% Jewish” man under a chuppah at a traditional Jewish wedding.
But unlike most Jews, from the most secular to the ultra-orthodox, she did not circumcise her son. She has never attended — will never attend — a bris, the age-old ceremony where a Jew trained in circumcision (a ‘mohel’) removes the foreskin of an eight-day-old Jewish boy as a sign of his covenant with God.
“All of the babies I saw growing up — whether cousins or the kids I babysat — were circumcised, and it seemed like that was the way things were supposed to be,” said Ms. Wald, who in December launched Beyond the Bris, a website for Jews who question circumcision. “It took having a son, who is intact, for me to really accept how normal [the uncircumcised penis] is.”
The South Florida mom is among a growing and vocal minority of Jewish “intactivists” who are challenging the 4,000-year-old ritual because, they say, the procedure inflicts unnecessary pain without any health gains, causes long-term psychological harm, hinders sexual function and pleasure, and strikes at the core of consent. They say there are Jewish women who silently pray they will not bear a son, and that the question, ‘When’s the bris?’ is too presumptive.
San Francisco could ban circumcision
Circumcise a child in San Francisco and you could face a year in jail, under a proposed San Francisco bylaw that will be put to voters in November.
The measure was introduced on municipal ballots this week after San Francisco resident Lloyd Schofield submitted it along with a petition with more than 12,000 signatures.
Mr. Schofield said: “We came at this from the angle of not having a human being strapped down and having their genitals mutilated.”
“If you tried to circumcise a dog, you’d be arrested, and if you tried to circumcise a girl in America since 1996, you’d be arrested, why is it that we’re not protecting our boys?” said Marilyn Milos, an anti-circumcision campaigner based in San Francisco. (Photo: Getty Images/Thinkstock)
The enduring influence of The Protocols of Zion
Book excerpt: In a new book about the origins of conspiracy theories, Jonathan Kay argues that the malign influences of The Protocols of Zion is still with us.
In August, 1897, Theodor Herzl and two hundred fellow activists convened at a concert hall in Basel, Switzerland, to attend the First Zionist Congress. The capstone of their deliberations was The Basel Program, a landmark manifesto aimed at “establishing for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine.” The delegates also officially adopted the Hatikvah, a song that, six decades later, would become the national anthem for the country we call Israel.
But as legend has it, it was all an elaborate act — just a respectable set-piece to divert gentile journalists and spies from the real meeting taking place at a secret location nearby. There, Herzl delivered a clandestine 24-part lecture series for Jewish ears only. In these speeches, “protocols” as Herzl called them, there was little talk of carving a small country out of the Middle Eastern desert. What he proposed was nothing less than a plan for total world domination.
Europe’s gentiles — or goyim, as they were described in Yiddish — generally were a happy, earnest lot, Herzl told his audience. They worked their farms and small businesses assiduously, prayed to a benevolent Christian God, and prospered under the kindly, lawful aristocrats who rose up from among their ranks.
But they were also gullible, lustful, greedy and unstable in their attitudes — human frailties that the calculating, ascetic Jew could exploit in order to rob them of their entitlements.
— Part one of four from Among the Truthers by Jonathan Kay. Read the rest of the excerpt.
The Oy of Comics
“Catholics may confess through a screen in a box, but Jews do it in public–preferably with an audience,” Sarah Lightman and Michael Kaminer wrote about their touring exhibition, Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women.
