About this project
I'm making a documentary film about American Jews who take an independent line on Israel and the Middle East. The film (which will obviously be different in many ways from the trailer, above) will be called "Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists." As the title suggests, the film will try to strike a tone on these subjects that's less paralyzed by stereotypes than we're used to.
I've interviewed ten people so far including Tony Kushner, Judith Butler, James Schamus, Alisa Solomon, Marilyn Neimark, and Alan Sokal. The center of the film is the story of how people changed their minds: what they were told about Israel and their Jewish identity as they were growing up, what they went through as they started looking at things differently, what Israel and Jewish identity mean to them now. The moral of the story is that people CAN change their minds-- not something that has been obvious on this issue.
I'm looking for funds to do a couple more interviews, to link up the talking heads (who are amazingly passionate and articulate, but still talking heads) to visual images from their personal pasts and from the history of the Middle East that help make sense of their personal transformations, and of course to do all the work that needs to be done to get the film edited and circulated.
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Funding Successful
This project successfully raised its funding goal on November 6, 2011.
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A copy of the film poster signed by the artist, Abigail McClure
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All of the above plus a tree planted in your name in Palestine
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All of the above plus coffee with members of the cast
Project By
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I'm a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. I've written widely on cultural and ethical issues at the transnational scale, for example in "Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress" (1999) and the forthcoming "Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence." With Peter Entell, I wrote the script for (and helped edit) the award-winning documentary "Moving On: The Hunger for Land in Zimbabwe." With Alan Sokal, I founded the group Peace in the Middle East and created the "Open Letter of American Jews to Our Government" (2002 and 2006), which appeared in full-page ads in the New York Times and other newspapers in the US, Israel, Jordan, and elsewhere and led to invitations to speak on television and at the United Nations. This campaign was the origin of this film, which began with the intention of making known the feelings and life stories of some of the signatories of the Open Letter.
