This morning on NPR’s Saturday show, producer Harvey Weinstein spoke about “Miral,” the drama about the Palestinian refugee crisis by Julian Schnabel, whose release was delayed because the world wasn’t ready for it. Weinstein acknowledged that the film is a p.r. nightmare. He has had to defend it endlessly. He said that his mother, who is in Hadassah, is going on strike against his company because they are producing the film, but that it’s necessary to learn the Palestinian story if we are going to have peace in the Middle East. I’d note that the director, Schnabel, also said that his mother was in the Hadassah.
Earlier this week I came away from the J Street conference saying that American Jews are a backward community. We are. By and large we don’t have a clue about what the Palestinians have suffered with our blessing. Even the best of us are wrestling with our mothers over an ethnocentric narrative — the miraculous founding of Israel– and failing to see the world as it is today. And this backwardness has had an effect. Weinstein is a very powerful man, so is Schnabel. I applaud them for taking on Miral.
But when do we get to the real drama, inside the Jewish family? I’d like to hear Weinstein’s mother on the radio. We need to explain to ourselves and others how people with so much cultural power would come to see it as a necessity to have a piece of land reserved to us that we never go to half the world away. Where did these profound emotional forces come from? How do we escape them?
