MEASURE OF SUCCESS
Film puts Jews in spotlight
What’s with the Jews? makes its TV première Sunday at 9 p.m. on the documentary Channel.
Why the Jews? will be presented at a Blue Metropolis screening, April 28 at 8 p.m. at Concordia’s de Sève Cinema, 1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W., where it will be followed by a discussion with psychologist/author Susan Pinker, Rabbi Rueben Poupko and the film’s Montreal director/writer/producer John Curtin. Tickets, $10, are available at bluemetropolis.org. Its titles may well mislead audiences: What’s with the Jews? or Why the Jews? Regardless, this documentary with two titles is hardly some racist screed. Rather, it is an illuminating and fascinating look at what propels so many Jews to over-achieve on so many fronts and what the consequences — both positive and negative — have been.
The film’s television version, What’s with the Jews?, makes its première Sunday at 9 p.m. on CBC’s documentary Channel. The theatre version, Why the Jews?, made its world première April 7 in New York City. The film version will be shown on April 28 at Concordia’s de Sève Cinema as part of Blue Metropolis. The screening will be followed by a discussion with psychologist/ author Susan Pinker, Rabbi Rueben Poupko and the film’s Montreal director/writer/producer John Curtin.
The documentary begins with some impressive stats: 22 per cent of Nobel Prize winners, 33 per cent of Oscar-winning directors and 40 per cent of chess champions have been Jewish. What makes these numbers all the more intriguing is their disproportion in relation to their population: Jews represent but .02 per cent, or 14 million, of the people on this planet.
Curtin then drops a rapid-fire Who’s Who of images of notable Jews: Einstein, Freud, Mahler, Proust, Chagall, Kafka, Sontag, Day-Lewis.
Yet while the accomplishments of the aforementioned have drawn praise, they have also induced prejudice and persecution.
As Poupko points out in the doc, people invariably have two reactions to success: they can try to emulate but, if incapable, they seek to destroy.
As noted U.S. trial lawyer and author Alan Dershowitz puts it: “Jewish accomplishment is the other side of the coin, of why so many people have historically hated the Jews.”
Apart from Poupko and Der- showitz, Curtin has interviewed an array of authorities to provide insight as to what drives so many Jews. Many credit a dedication to education and risk-taking.
German-born psychologist Dr. Ruth Westheimer knows better than most about what has triggered her people: “It’s out of necessity. We’ve had to think differently to survive.”
Renowned Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind has another survival/success theory: “Rebelling against false authority.”
In an interview with Curtin shortly before he passed away, Shimon Peres, the one-time Israeli president and prime minister, touched on one of the most troubling themes of all relating to perceptions: “Jews have had more history than geography.”
That situation has changed. The point being that the present geographical situation in Israel with regard to the Palestinian territories has led to ever-ongoing conflict, much to the distress of Peres, who had believed in a two-state solution and was a cowinner of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize for his pursuit of it.
Peres understood full well the dilemma: “If we are the chosen people, for what are we chosen? Chosen to carry responsibility? Chosen to suffer?”
Curtin includes a clip from Fiddler on the Roof, wherein the flummoxed Tevye makes this plea: “Dear God. I know we are the chosen people, but once in a while can’t you choose someone else?”
Humour and irony have gone a long way toward survival and success.
This documentary is quite the departure for Curtin. The former CBC staffer spent much of the last decade focusing on the British Royal Family: Royals & Animals (2014); Serving the Royals (2013); After Elizabeth II: Monarchy in Peril (2010) and Chasing the Royals: The Media and the Monarchy (2011).
But Curtin’s latest with two titles, his 22nd documentary in the last 22 years, is his most ambitious yet. It took him to all corners of the globe and was three years in the making, but it is sure to put him on the radar everywhere.
Although his father was Jewish, Curtin was raised a Roman Catholic.
“My father, a Holocaust survivor, might have been one of the last Jews to leave Vienna in March of 1939,” Curtin says. “And even though there was Jewish ancestry on my mother’s side as well, I didn’t technically qualify as a Jew (where matrimony rules). But I was also so conscious of Jewish history and culture.”
But upon doing research, even Curtin was taken aback. “To think that according to the statistics, that in a hypothetical room with 1,000 people, only two would be Jewish, it’s just so remarkable to see the disproportionate amount of achievement.”
Curtin’s interviews also proved to be an eye-opener.
“Until listening to the likes of Dershowitz and Rabbi Poupko who attributed Jewish accomplishment as a cause, I had always assumed anti- Semitism had been more the result of Catholic Church teachings of an era, that the Jews killed Christ.
“That turned out to be one of the first examples of fake news. I think the Romans killed Christ, and that Christ was a Jew.
“The reality is this is a kind of vicious and tragic cycle, where Jews think by over-performing they will be accepted by society. But the irony is that their success is kind of antagonizing to some.”
As for a followup to this film, Curtin is intrigued by the possibility of a profile of Dershowitz.
“Besides writing 46 books, he has been, as he puts it, at the centre of every case and controversy in the second part of the last century and the first decade of this one. It sounds like hyperbole until he starts to list off all the cases he’s fought — from Klaus von Bulow to the Pentagon Papers and, yes, to O.J. Simpson.
“He took a lot of flak for O.J., especially from his mother. She called it ‘the oy vey, O.J. phase of his life.’ But the point is that he has always been a ferocious opponent of the death penalty.”