Chasidim in Canvey, women in the frame

IT WAS a year for the offbeat, the unexpected and the downright strange in the world of Jewish arts — starting in January with the BBC drama McMafia, featuring the Godmans, a Russian family allegedly Jewish but dubbed by our critic Jenni Frazer as “the most unconvincing Jewish family on TV since… well, I can’t remember when”.

On McMafia, the plot twisted from London to Moscow, to Israel, via a good few other countries, but twistier still was The Little Drummer Girl, the BBC’s adaptation of John Le Carré’s thriller set in the 1970s. In a year full of dramas about conspiracies and abuse of power, these two productions made sure that Jews were just as villainous as anyone else.

Other TV highlights included returns of old favourites The Marvelous Mrs Maisel and Fauda, and a great documentary about the strictly Orthodox migration to Canvey Island. Canvey: The Promised Island captured the two communities involved with wit and insight.

Documentaries dominate our film critic Anne Joseph’s list of highlights of the year. She picks out four. Three Identical Strangers (Tim Wardle) is the stand-out. The astounding, thought-provoking story of American triplets who were brought up oblivious to the fact that they each had two identical siblings until a chance encounter at 19. As the story unravels, the reason how and why they had been separated in the first place becomes apparent.

Studio 54 (Matt Tyrnauer) is an exhilarating film that chronicles the rise of fall of the iconic NY nightclub and its creators, two Jewish best friends from Brooklyn, Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell, with rare and unseen footage and compelling interviews.

Unsettling has a simple premise. The leftist Israeli documentary film-maker, Iris Zaki sets up her unmanned camera outside a local shop in the small West Bank settlement of Tekoa and interviews members of the community with fascinating and surprising results. The Oslo Diaries (Mor Lushy and Daniel Sivan) is a riveting account of more than 1,000 days of the secret peace talks, told by the people present at the table.

The standout Jewish feature film of the year was Disobedience, Sebastiàn Lelio’s portrayal of Hendon’s Orthodox community as grey and full of repressed emotion and desire. But also worth a mention are the Israeli feature, Working Woman, which gives a timely focus on sexual harassment in the Chasidim in Canvey (above), plus Mrs Maisel, McMafia’s Alex Godman and Drake workplace; The Wife (Björn Runge) in which Glenn Close stars as Joan Castleman, a loving, supportive wife who sacrificed her own writing ambitions in order to devote herself to her husband, Joe — a (Jewish) Nobel prize winning literary success — and their family; and Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, based on the memoir of Ron Stallworth, Colorado Spring’s first African American police officer. In a narrative that is funny and deadly serious in equal measure, Stallworth and his Jewish colleague, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver) take on the Ku Klux Klan, and Flip has to face up to challenging issues concerning his own identity. Drake continued to dominate the download charts, and Craig David had his best success in the singles chart since 2005.

But the year’s least likely Jewish singing star was Yiddish-speaking Belz Chasid Shulem Lemmer, signed by Universal Records after an executive stumbled across him on YouTube. Yiddish culture was also the inspiration for a new opera, Mamzer Bastard, performed at the Hackney Empire to mixed reviews.

In dance, our critic Joy Sable picks the work of two young Jewish dancer as her highlight: Maureya Lebowitz and Shale Wagman. Lebowitz, originally from California, has risen steadily through the ranks of the Birmingham Royal Ballet, and this year, has been promoted to First Soloist. She already dances a number of principal roles and combines a sure technique with a winning, sunny personality. Just starting out on his full-time professional career, Canadian-born Wagman won a gold medal in the prestigious Prix de Lausanne international ballet competition in February. He dances with a wonderfully fluid style and a true sense of drama.

As for visual arts, it was a year when the spotlight picked out women artists, from Linda McCartney, displayed at the Victoria and Albert’s new photography gallery, to the House of Illustration’s exhibition of the work of Enid Marx, best known for designing the fabric used for seats on the London Underground.

But the most disturbing — and very Jewish — art on display could be seen in Wakefield, with the first British exhibition of the work of sculptor Alina Szapocznikow, a survivor of Auschwitz.

“Her work fearlessly engaged with the politics of her own postwar present,” wrote art historian Griselda Pollock, for the JC.

“Yet always, perhaps unconsciously or against her will, the affectively charged work is recaptured by powerful images from a traumatic past she attempted to silence.”