6.15.2025
After writing my last post, I felt bad about tarring CCNY as an incompetent school. It wasn’t all bad, so let me offer some gratitude before I dive into telling a story that might shed some light on my experience there.
Thanks, Andrea Weiss, the program’s director and an accomplished documentarian, who taught me to capture two angles in interviews. This lets you cut together interview shots without having to leave the scene. She also explained why documentary editing should be an ‘additive’ not ‘subtractive’ process.
Thanks also to David Briggs and JT Takagi, who taught sound editing and sound recording respectively. I got a lot of good sound practice. One key lesson: movie ambiances are rarely silent. (In an interior suburban scene, for instance, you’d typically have a quiet track of chirping birds, kids playing, lawn mower, dog, etc. Next time you watch a movie, try it out: listen to the background ambiances and you’ll find sounds you normally subconsciously register.)
God, I’m exhausted already… enough with this gratitude shit.
About nine months ago, I got an email from Andrea about a short film she was producing. An undergrad from the Jewish Studies program wanted to make a documentary that highlighted the Civil Rights-era alliance between Black Americans and Jewish Americans. Since he had no previous experience making documentaries, she asked me and Michelene, another filmmaker in the doc MFA program, to help him.
I met Miles outside Shepard Hall. He was sporting a clean beard and a Hamsa necklace. He was Black and fascinated with Judaism. I’d heard the prototypical story of the Civil Rights collaborations before: Jews played a significant role in founding the NAACP and were active in the Civil Rights Movement. Indeed, my grandfather marched in Selma with Martin Luther King. (My dad misses no opportunity to remind me of this story.)
But since then, Black and Jewish communities have drifted apart. And with the current Israel-Palestine situation, the divide seems more chasm than rift. I was lukewarm on the idea of trying to cram all this into a documentary. It seemed pretty Ken Burnsy. But since Andrea thought it was a good idea, I said yes to helping.
Miles told me that he wanted to interview two “experts”—Jewish playwrights Elizabeth Savage and Itamar Moses. They’d each written a play that spoke to the complicated relationship between Blackness and Jewishness in America.
There were glaring gaps in his proposal. For the movie, Miles didn’t have a story outside the interviews themselves. You need something to happen in a documentary—it’s not just a series of interviews. And then there was the elephant in the room. What would the film say about the issue of Palestinian freedom: or what do you call it, Israeli genocide? The war against Hamas? The conflict in the Middle East? This wasn’t a slight crack in the earth, this was a Grand Teton-sized wedge dividing these communities.
But Miles didn’t want to talk about it. I felt annoyed because I was investing time and attention into this project and it soon became obvious we were not going to go there. Without an examination of Israel’s role in changing dynamics around American Jews this film would miss the point, I thought.
I always get a feeling of immense heat in my chest—a kind of terrible anger and revulsion—when I’m working on shit that doesn’t align with my commitment to making good art. This feeling often comes to me when I’ve agreed to work on something and then I later find out it’ll be garbage. I usually sense my misalignment before I commit, but I have trouble saying “no.”
So I said yes to this one, soothing myself with rationales like “I need practice”. But the cope only worked so well. Eventually I turned my frustration inward and blamed myself for agreeing to it in the first place.
The night before the first interview, I learned that Elizabeth Savage, our interview subject, was Miles’s girlfriend. That’s interesting, I thought. Miles immediately denied that his passion for Judaism stemmed from his relationship with her (I never implied it had.)
This meant that his girlfriend was one of the film’s “experts.” I told Miles that the documentary should disclose this info, because not disclosing it would be deceitful. Cinematically, this was also an opportunity. I mean, we were trying to tell a story about these historical forces (the Civil Rights Movement, antisemitism), but those things are boring…especially compared to a hunky 21-year old Black guy fucking an Upper-East Side Jewish dramatist who fell in love with him after she cast him in her play’s leading role as Carver Washington, a whip-smart beekeeper from the Bronx whose life changes when he meets Devora, a Jewish girl fresh out of Yale who is setting up a kibbutz in the neighborhood.
Miles would have none of it. “I don’t think our relationship really needs to be in the film,” he told me. Oh, joyless world!
We went to Elizabeth’s apartment on 97th Street to set up for the interview. The weather was foggy. The view of Central Park, phenomenal. My job was to be the Director of Photography.
After I set up camera and Michelene set up sound, we hit record and Miles sat across from his girlfriend and asked her to describe the inception of her play, “The Bee Play.”
“It all began when around 2006 I learned that bees were going extinct! And, if the bees go extinct, we will all go extinct, too,” she said. Wait, Elizabeth started writing this play in 2006? That was 19 years ago… 19 plus, she must’ve been in her 20s at that time, 19 + 25, makes, wait. Uhhh age gap summer much? This would be so good in the movie.
Unfortunately, we did not linger on the palpable chemistry racing back and forth between these age-gapping, religion-hopping sexpots. The most we got was Elizabeth’s casual mention that when the play hit the stage at the St. Louis Jewish Community Center, “I met you, Miles!”
Miles turned the conversation away from Elizabeth’s play, and the interview became a recital of platitudes. Why can’t we all just get along?!
Then Elizabeth, a petite redhead from Maine, said that she wasn’t born Jewish—she’d converted. My camera framed her in the left third with the window to Central Park on her right.
After the interview was over, I told Elizabeth that growing up I was taught that “people who converted to Judaism are even more Jewish, since they chose to become Jews.” I did hear this growing up. I heard it from my friend’s mother, who had herself converted to Judaism. I don’t believe it though. But I wanted to flatter Elizabeth. She responded, full of vigor, “Damn right!”
For Interview #2, two days later, we visited the home of Itamar Moses, an accomplished playwright who’d written Season 2 of Boardwalk Empire. Itamar was very Jewish (not a convert). He’d recently premiered a play called The Ally that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The play takes place on a college campus where a student’s manifesto addressing police brutality is circulating. Its main character, an indecisive liberal professor, agrees to sign the document, until he learns that it includes a harsh critique of Israel. The character is lost in that moral Grand Canyon between a commitment to social justice, on the one hand, and an instinctive tribalism, on the other—one that fires up every time Israel is accused of apartheid and genocide.
In his brick-walled dining room, Itamar told us that he grew up in Berkeley, California. His parents met during their mandatory military service in Israel. The interview proceeded at the pace he set. Miles did not interrupt. The most interesting part concerned Itamar’s perspective on the breakup between Blacks and Jews. He chalked it up to Black antisemitism of the Louis Farrakhan style, although he admitted this strain of antisemitism was always fringe in the Black Power movement.
Then he also described a fascinating link between white supremacy, antisemitism, and intersectional social justice. I’m paraphrasing Itamar here:
What happened in the 1990s and 2000s was that the social justice movement adopted intersectionality. This idea folded together feminism, racism, and class-struggles into an intertwined theory of history. But, activists debated whether or not to include fighting antisemitism in their charter.
Meanwhile, in the white supremacist movement, antisemitism had always loomed large. White supremacy’s logic was roughly: black and brown people are invading our country and it’s being hidden from us in the media. (This is basically the great replacement theory.) And who are the engineers behind this replacement? It can’t be the brown people themselves, since they’re too stupid to trick us supreme Aryans—no, it’s the devious, powerful, media-controlling Jews.
Antisemitism was like the key to the white supremacy worldview. If you wanted to defeat white supremacy, you absolutely did need to address antisemitism.
But to many on the social justice Left, Jews did not need to be included in their union of oppressed groups. Why not? Partly it was because they could pass as white. But there might be another reason. Perhaps the reason Jews didn’t need to be considered an oppressed group was because they were doing so well. Like financially, culturally, etc… They were doing so well, in fact, they’d become quite… quite powerful. They didn’t need to be protected, because the Jews were so powerful.
So, you get a kind of circular antisemitism.
This was a fascinating argument.
I wanted to follow up with Itamar to discuss it more. The problem with this story, as I saw it, was that it ignored or at least minimized the way Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian territories contributed to social justice advocates distancing themselves from American Jewry.
But that’s why we as documentarians needed to hear perspectives from the other side. My Gmail inbox was pinging with the subject line: “Blacks + Jews” but we hadn’t interviewed any Blacks! (Well, Miles was technically interviewed in his own film—but Miles was also a Jewish studies major). The point is, we had interviewed two Jewish playwrights and we should have wanted to balance the scales.
After Miles’s interview with Itamar’s wrapped up, Itamar asked us who else we were featuring in the documentary. Miles said, “We’re talking to you and Elizabeth, and, that’s about it!”
I offered to the room that “I’d really like to hear the Black perspective on that same period of time [the 90s and 2000s that Itamar was talking about]”.
Itamar’s lovely wife chimed in and said, “you should talk to Eisa Davis—she’s a brilliant playwright and Angela Davis’s niece.”
“I think I have her email somewhere. I can find it for you,” Itamar added. I was floored. This was a home-run! But Miles—young lover, young fool—demurred.
We packed up and loaded our gear on a charming Cobble Hill side street. As we stood in the afternoon sun and debriefed, I recommended to Miles to “seriously consider interviewing Angela Davis’s niece… because that would be really good for the film.” He wasn’t sure about it.
You can lead a horse to water.
Afterwards, Miles drove off and Michelene and I went for a walk. Michelene is a no-nonsense Black woman. She’d been quietly angered by Itamar’s interview. He had blamed the breakup of the alliance on a few virulently antisemitic Black folks: “you mean those dudes preaching on the corner of 125th?” She said. “Look, everybody has their crazies, and we have ours. But we don’t take them seriously!”
Alas, if only there was someone we could interview who could speak with clarity and credibility about the African American perspective on this issue! Oh well!
Why didn’t Miles want to hear the Black side of the story? You might chalk it up to some personal frustration Miles had with his own heritage; he did mention arguing with his Dad over the idea that “Black people can’t be racists.”
But I sensed something more institutional at work. Miles was a student in CCNY’s Jewish Studies department. This documentary will be screened for professors and students in that department. I’d guess Miles was self-censoring to avoid conflict, or worse, cancelation.
So, there it was. The Blacks + Jews documentary was going to be very bad art. But you can learn a lot from failures. The failure to disclose the relationship between subject and director, the closed-mindedness of including only one side of the story, the failure to pull a thread that gets presented to you on a silver-platter…the shape of these failures could become the shape of successes, in reverse.
I began to contemplate Blacks and Jews. Why had they broken up? Well, why were they ever together? Elizabeth and Itamar both said that the Civil Rights alliance was an overarching one…that there was something inherently complementary about these two American cultures.
Arthur Jafa said that Blackness represents “the possibility of transcending profound constraints.”
To me, Jewishness represents holding onto an ancient tradition—and refusing to give it up even in the face of ultra-violence.
Transcending constraints and remembering who you are: that’s basically what it means to be a person.