Several years ago, I tried to corrupt a Jehovah's Witness. She was in her 20s. I urged her to sneak out of her parents' house and register to vote. She didn't listen to me. I thought it must be nice being able to engage in a perfectly ordinary activity and feel that you've done something wildly sinful.
Watching a nine minute documentary on Fandor about Razie, a 90-year-old Jewish woman about to eat bacon for the first time.
The movie is an interview with Razie, illustrated with video, drawings and animation. She had been watching YouTube videos of Christopher Hitchens and it turned her atheist. I never really liked bacon but---I'm giving away the ending here---she thought it was "perfectly okay".
By the way, there's a YouTube video of Slavoj Žižek talking about the difference between faith and fundamentalism. He said that Anne Frank's statement, "...I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart," was a statement of faith. She acknowledged that she was going against all evidence. If you disagreed, she couldn't very well attack you for it since you would have facts on your side. Fundamentalists, on the other hand, simply deny there is any evidence against their views.
Razie had come to take Hitchens' view that all faith was like believing in the tooth fairy.
It seems like there's a trend now---the Jewish religion is being presented as less innocuous than it has in the past. Hassidic Jews are no longer portrayed as urban Amish. There was a movie, Holy Rollers, about Hassidic drug smugglers and Fading Gigolo with Woody Allen being targeted by armed Hassidic enforcers. Contrast that with a movie like A Stranger Among Us or old episodes of Barney Miller.
In this movie, Razie tells the story of how the rabbi rallied a mob against her grandmother and her grandmother's twin sister who had been seen doing something they weren't supposed to. The only way to calm the rabbi down was for the twin sister to be punished. Razie wouldn't say how, but an animation shows her tongue being cut out. The rabbi was later arrested for selling guns.
A film by Sol Freidman.
No comments:
Post a Comment