Transcript

Arielle Angel 00:00

Hello, and welcome back to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast. I’m Arielle Angel, editor in chief of Jewish Currents, and I’ll be your host for today. Today, we’re going to be talking about the film Familiar Touch. By the time you listen to this podcast, it will be available to rent on iTunes, Apple, YouTube, Fandango, and Google, so hopefully you will watch the film. Today, we have the filmmaker, Sarah Friedland. She is both a filmmaker and a choreographer working at the intersection of moving images and moving bodies. Her debut feature film, Familiar Touch, which we’ll be talking about today, won awards for best director, best actress, and best debut film at last year’s Venice Film Festival. And we also have Lynne Segal, which—I know this is a treat for you, Sarah, because you’ve been kind of on the promo trail, but you haven’t gotten to talk about the content of this film with a person who was really an inspiration, on some level, for some of the ideas that you’re working through. So, Lynne Segal is a socialist feminist activist and professor emerita of Gender and Psychosocial Studies. She retired from Birkbeck in 2020. Recent books include Lean on Me: A Politics of Radical Care, Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy, and Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Aging. Thanks for being with us, Lynn.

Lynne Segal 01:33

Thank you. Lovely to be here.

AA 01:34

And excited to talk to you about the film, Sarah.

Sarah Friedland 01:38

Thank you so much, Arielle. It’s also such a pleasure to be in conversation with you, Lynn.

AA 01:42

Sarah, I’m going to start with you. Familiar Touch is about a woman named Ruth, who is taken, in the beginning of the film, to a memory care unit of a senior home. It’s a very, very beautiful film—I’ve watched it twice—about Ruth’s adjustment to this new life, and how being in an environment of total care affects this person, who you really get the sense of as a very independent person, a very fierce and self-possessed person, as she is losing her memory and losing the ability to live on her own. So, this is a Jewish character. She speaks in Yiddish at one point in the film. She’s from kind of like the old neighborhood on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. But you wouldn’t necessarily think that this is an obviously Jewish film, and I wanted to talk to you about the milieu that you told me that you were trying to document through the character of Ruth and give you a little bit of a chance to talk about that.

SF 02:51

Yeah, what I found is that the older adult characters that we see on film usually fall into these two camps: Either they’re the sweet, little old lady that is docile and infantilized and really only valued for her maternal wisdom and sweetness, or there’s a kind of idealized aging woman who’s fabulous and fantastic, kind of in the vein of Book Club (the Jane Fonda series of films), where they’re not experiencing any type of loss or shift in care needs. But, in all of these depictions, I hadn’t really seen this world of women that I grew up in represented. That is, this milieu of leftist Jewish feminists, many of whom were coming of age during a period of countercultural shift or revolution—with women’s lib, with the civil rights movement, with these other major political struggles—and who, artistically, paved the way for my generation. The original inspiration and impetus for the character of Ruth comes from my own grandmother. She was a poetry editor, and intellectual, and former member of the Communist Party, and I wanted to basically show this milieu of Jewish leftist women for whom their independence wasn’t something they took for granted, and whose political commitments have, in many ways, shaped their lives. And I was curious how they were aging, and who was caring for them, and what that shift to being cared for would feel like. The other inspiration for that was working as a care worker. About 10 years ago, I started caring for New York City artists with dementia, and many of them were these octogenarian Jewish women who couldn’t be further from the image of the little old lady. Their fierceness and their intellectual acuity seemed deeply tied to their Jewishness and a way of relationship to Jewish culture and politics. So a big part of the film was trying to honor that generation of Jewish women and this transition of coming of age for them.

AA 05:13

Yeah, it really comes through. First of all, I’ll just say, what you’re saying really resonates. I went to some panels at the JVP National Members’ Meeting that were about intergenerational organizing, and something that the older women (they were all women) activists talked about is just how frustrating it is to be considered “cute.” You know, these are women with PhDs. They were trailblazers in all of the things that they did, and now they’re chaining themselves to the gates of the White House, standing for hours on end, and there’s still younger people in the organization who relate to them as if they’re “cute,” quote, unquote. And they were really arguing for being seen for who they were. I really feel like you feel that in this film with Ruth. The way that—I mean, she is a cook. She says, a cook and not a chef—inspired by, as you told me, Mollie Katzen and the Moosewood Cookbook, in some ways. And that kind of competence and her knowing of her own craft comes out over and over again, even as she doesn’t know her own son. I think that’s a beautiful juxtaposition there.

SF 06:30

Yeah. I mean, if I could just speak to the Mollie Katzen of it all for a moment. I mean, it was one of the other ways in which we were thinking of this as a Jewish film. You know, I grew up with her cookbook as a kind of bible of Jewish cooking. You know, so many of the recipes in it speak to a moment of assimilation of immigrant Jews in America—that there’s these recipes that kind of blend old world and new world, and a lot of them are kosher without listing that they’re kosher. Mollie and I talked a lot about the food in Moosewood as marking this moment for her generation, where she was with these women who were coming of age during women’s lib, but it was also coinciding with Back to the Land, and this moment of relating to the environment and food sources in a different way. And so, she very generously lent us her archive and her recipes as a way to place Ruth’s cooking and Ruth’s taste memories in a particular moment of food in America, and its relationship to Jewishness, and how the Jewish American palette has shifted in the 20th century, and trying to place Ruth within that. But in terms of the cuteness, there’s a few things there. Describing older women as cute—it’s so diminishing and infantilizing, and I think it also has a lot to do with desexualizing older women, which Lynn has written brilliantly about older women’s sexuality and desire and the politics of that. I think the other component of cuteness is—it’s where I think ageism and ableism intersect. The idea that as soon as somebody needs care or is perceived as needing care, we see them as no longer talented, or capacious, or having anything to contribute, which is so incredibly untrue. And so, in this film, Ruth’s capacity and her creativity is really centered in her food.

AA 08:31

Lynne, I want to bring you in on this. And there’s a number of avenues—you’ve written both about interdependence as a feminist value, and there’s so much in this film about the politics of care that we could pull out. And you’ve also written a lot about aging, particularly aging as a woman and from a feminist lens. I wondered if we could actually start with your reactions to the film, and then we can dig into some of your ideas.

LS 09:03

Thanks, Arielle. Well, I really love this film. It’s a wonderful film. And I so hope it is reaching more audiences. I mean, in writing about aging as I have, and have been for some time—of course, it’s in the background, everybody’s fear of aging. And the nearer they get to being old, like the middle-age, the more fearful they become, and the more almost horror they express toward the elderly. And what I find that’s so much about is fear of losing their independence, but above all, fear of cognitive decline, fear of dementia. And what’s so good about this film is that it opens up a discussion we just have to have about how we deal with the fact that, as we become old (and very old), many of us will suffer cognitive decline. And so many people now have begun to think: How much actually remains? Even when you do have cognitive decline, you know, touch and smell and music and film—all the things you have enjoyed in the past, very often you still can enjoy, including desire and sex.

LS 10:20

I was thinking of Alix Kates Shulman, who wrote one of the first books I read on caring, for her husband, Scott, when he got Alzheimer’s. She talks about how much she can still do together. You know, they go to the pictures, they go to galleries, and she says: We enjoy it together, even though he won’t remember it, which just means we can go again, actually, and enjoy it all over again. Or Elinor Fuchs, as she writes about caring for her mother in her old age with dementia, in which she says she begins to mother her mother. And it makes her feel so good, because she never was very well mothered by her mother, but for the first time ever, she feels she’s got a really good relationship. Or Jewish lesbian feminist Joan Nestle (who you probably know), who, into her old age, from middle age to old age, is always celebrating her joyful lesbian encounters. And living with her partner, even though she’s had cancer and all sorts of other forms of illness—she doesn’t have dementia—but very much telling us about how the desire to desire continues into very old age. Actually, it continues right up until death, if we’re allowed to express it.

LS 11:40

So, I take from the film so much around what is really possible for us in very old age, and with dementia, but is almost always denied. In my Jewish household, actually, I have to say that there was something about Jewish values there that made it, I think, harder to accept dementia. So, when my grandmother got dementia, really my father, in particular, but my mother, too, was totally ashamed of her. And she was sent off to be cared for by someone else and hardly ever visited us, because such is the value of being clever and being smarter than everybody else: It seemed to make it even harder for them to accept that form of decline, that form of intellectual decline. And there was no interest in all the things that are still possible and the fact—as comes out in your film, Sarah—that we do remain, in many ways, the people we have always been. We retain some of those skills. As I wrote about in my book Out of Time, I talked about the notion of temporal vertigo: That we could sort of time travel, really, and go back into being able to do the things that we could always do if we’re given that space. So that’s why Ruth is able to suddenly go into the kitchen and cook this lovely meal. Or other things that we have been able to do in the past, we will still be able to do if we’re given the space—if we’re given the attention and the kinds of intimacy that will allow us to keep on being, in many ways, that person we always were.

SF 13:25

That idea of temporal vertigo was so crucial to how I was thinking about writing the film, and also thinking about how Kathleen Chalfant, our lead actor, and I worked on this. I received Lynne’s book Out of Time about seven years ago when I was midway through the writing process. I mean, first of all, the very concept of age identity was new to me at the time. The idea that Lynne writes about is just so beautifully, of how these different selves converge in the present and almost render you no ages and all ages.

AA 13:58

Yeah, let me actually read that piece, if you don’t mind: “As we age, changing year on year, we also retain, in one manifestation or another, traces of all the selves we have been, creating a type of temporal vertigo and rendering us psychically, in one sense, all ages and no age. Thus, the older we are, the more we encounter the world through complex layerings of identity, attempting to negotiate the shifting present while grappling with the disconcerting images of the old thrust so intrusively upon us.” You write about, basically, how aging is not a linear process; that you can move between childhood and old age and back again. You have this beautiful line: “The past returns, never exactly as it was, but also never truly lost.”

LS 14:46

Yes, that is comforting, isn’t it? But one has to be able to be given the space to actually express oneself. One has to be actually surrounded by care. And there has to be people concerned with who we still are, and who we have been. And as we know, the neoliberal moment that we’re in couldn’t be worse for actually dealing with people who need to be cared for and supported, but at the same time can also give us back. I mean, one thing I’m always stressing is: Care and caring is an interactive process. And no matter who we’re caring for, they do give something back to us. You know, if we wait to allow them to express themselves and be themselves, it can be delightful to see who it is that we are caring for. Whatever their age and whatever their cognitive decline, it can still be quite wonderful. Which is why a lot of people who are caring for the elderly feel so bereft when they’re no longer able to care—when that person passes on, and they lose the person that they were caring for, because they no longer have that affection back. We have to think so very differently about care, and to me, the human condition—being interdependent—should be about us caring for each other. Of course, that’s the last thing in the world today that we actually value. We seem to have to value allowing other people to make money out of us rather than making each other feel happier and more pleased about being in the world together.

SF 16:38

Yeah. I’m so glad you read that excerpt from Out of Time. It’s something that Kathleen and I really kept returning to, just in how we thought about our collaboration on set—that if Ruth was experiencing this temporal vertigo, therefore, as a director and actor, we could kind of let our collaboration be unmoored in time and treat each scene as if it were its own universe, its own temporal universe. Lynne’s writing kind of liberated us from thinking about the grammar of the film having to align with the linear sense of time, because most films, most narrative films, have a narrative arc that is very much tethered to linear time. It just gave us permission to allow all of these different roots to emerge. And I think part of what is so incredible about this concept is it pushes back against a decline narrative. I think so much of the stories we get about aging, whether on screen or elsewhere in pop culture, show aging only as a decline, and as a series of losses, and the narrative arc of these stories is around the tragedy of loss.

SF 17:48

I really identified with what you were saying, Lynne, in terms of your own household—the same was true with mine. My grandmother, in the ferocity of her intellectualism, had raised my dad and aunt to treat linguistic, and intellectual, and political expression above all other forms of being, above any other type of sense-making. And so, through the culture they inherited from her, as soon as she became nonverbal, they started speaking about her in the past tense. I think this is true for so many people—that the narrative of loss and decline eclipses the person that is still present and is still very much attached to their own subjectivity and personhood, even if it’s being expressed in a different way. It’s something I saw with my clients when I was a care worker; the people around them had this aura of tragedy, but the people I cared for, they were still very much the protagonists of their own story, and were, through their dementia, in this heightened present all the time that enabled embodied and sensory poetics of everyday life to show up for them in a different way than they had before. Which is not to romanticize dementia but to say that a different form of sense-making occurs. I think, to me, Lynne’s concepts kind of liberate us from that narrative of aging just as loss.

AA 19:12

Yeah, I really loved what you were describing about working with Kathleen because you really get the sense, in the film, of the challenge of this, where, on the one hand you have this ever-changing awareness—or the character being in a different moment in her own time, in her own history, from childhood to young adulthood and on and on—and at the same time, you have this kind of self—that is, this essence of her, that remains the same. And how do you navigate those two states at the same time? This ever-changing, ever-growing self who lives in time, and this kind of fixed essence of self. It’s a beautiful metaphor for living and time itself.

AA 20:06

But yeah, I mean, Lynne, I am very intrigued by this idea. I am also afraid, you know, of aging. I’m just going to admit that. I’m afraid of exactly the things that you say: losing independence, cognitive decline. These ideas are very beautiful to put forth, in trying to shift the perspective on it, but the experience does seem somewhat harrowing. I mean, just watching my grandmother, who just passed a few weeks ago, go through—not a cognitive but a physical decline, for many years, and having to rely on a caretaker for everything. I think that was really hard for her. No matter how much we told her you’re not a burden, the feeling of being a burden weighed so heavily on her. And there was nothing, honestly, that we could do to shift that, on a certain level. I just wonder how you see your milieu navigating this. Is it just about the conditions? Like, if we were living in a different way, would it feel so different? Or can we actually allow that mourning in? Or where is the space for that mourning, and how does that remain in a healthy space rather than a space that doesn’t allow for aging at all?

LS 21:25

I reflect on it in terms of the human condition. So, although it might have been very hard for your older relative going through physical decline, it’s actually very important, I think, for younger people to be able to try to connect with that—to be with people, truly, to be with them in their suffering, both physical and mental, and to think of how you can connect with that. Because, actually, you can connect, and you can take people out of their pain and out of their anxieties just by engaging together with what they’re interested in. I mean, the first thing you have to do, I think, particularly if we’re talking about mental decline, is enter the world of the other. Just try and listen to them and make sense of what they’re saying, even when it appears to make little sense. If you listen carefully, in all the books I read, you find you can make some sense of it. You can try to connect. And since I think that life is about interdependence, and we’re all going to get older—we’re all going to lose some of our faculties in some way—then it’s important not just to be worrying and anxious about that. And people are worrying and anxious about it. Even under 30, people are starting to worry about: What will happen when I get old? What will happen when I become more dependent? And I think, well, let’s see what happens. Let’s relate to older people.

LS 23:00

I’m actually now writing on intergenerational friendship. We think of older people getting lonely, older people getting anxious. But actually, middle-aged people (and even younger than that) start to worry about getting older. And if you know older people and you see, well, actually they do still have a life, they do still relate to the world, perhaps they do still relate to politics, as I do. Now, in my eighties, I could hardly be more politically involved, particularly at the moment when every other day, I’m having to express my horror, for instance, at what is happening in Gaza. So, I’m there with other people—almost always, now, younger people. I think it is comforting for them to see older people, like me, still completely engaged with the world and able to talk about our experiences. So, I hope that you much younger people can continue to relate to older people and just finding out what their worlds are, what their concerns are, even if they’re just talking about the films they’ve seen, the books they’ve read. But to hear what was significant in their day is interesting. Because I mean, these are not great times right now, are they? And knowing that there can be other times, it seems to me, can be a good thing.

SF 24:23

Yeah, I mean, making this film for the last 10 years as a younger adult, so many people have said: Oh, it’s so sweet that you want to make a film about an older woman. It’s so cute that you’re interested in this. And Lynne’s writing clarified for me how a relation to aging and care has to be a part of any radical politics—and it must be. In America, the number of older adults is going to double by the year 2060, and the number of older adults needing care is going to double by 2080. And so, we are experiencing what Ai-jen Poo calls an elder boom. There will be more and more older adults in the US in the coming decades, and not only are our care systems woefully inadequate to support care, but our culture is one in which people are seen as burdensome the minute they need care, as opposed to what Lynne is writing about, this idea of interdependence—that we all give and receive care throughout our lifetime and that old age is not just this one moment (other than birth) where we need care, but it’s something that ebbs and flows between caregiver and care recipient throughout our lives. We all need to, I think, adapt the politics of anti-ageism, and I think it’s under-discussed within the left.

LS 25:36

What I think we need is just a far more complex account of not just aging but of time itself. Time is, to me, about fully living in the present, whereas we’re all encouraged, aren’t we, to just think about the future. If we think about the present and how we live in the present, that changes our attitudes, I think, to aging. And we see that there are always multiplicities in our aging lives, whatever age we are, and that we’re never simply frail or helpless. We’re together with other people (if they care about us and can care for us), able to do all sorts of different things. And so, it changes, it seems to me, our relationship to everything and, as I’m saying, what it is to be human and to acknowledge our dependency throughout our lives—not just in infancy, not just in old age, but we’re always actually dependent on the resources available to us.

AA 26:41

Sarah, maybe this is a good segue to talking about the backdrop of the film and what the political environment is, right now, for care in this country.

SF 26:51

So Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill passed a few weeks ago, which will be the largest cuts to Medicaid in the history of the program since it was started in the 1960s. We tend to think about Medicare as providing for older adults, but actually, Medicaid provides health coverage to 17 million older adults and people with disabilities. And 62% of residents in nursing facilities use Medicaid as the primary payer for those services, which obviously includes people with Alzheimer’s, dementia, and other forms of cognitive disability. So these cuts will be absolutely catastrophic to older adults receiving care in this country. And this is already amid a backdrop of very inadequate care systems in the US. This is cutting back what is already very, very thin. So this will be devastating to so many older adults, and likewise, to care workers. Of course, Medicaid is a part of how care workers are paid. And further, Trump’s immigration policies are causing so much harm to care workers in this country. Immigrants make up 28% of the long-term care workforce. And, just anecdotally, I’ve been on the road with the film, screening it in different places, and have heard from care workers, who work within long-term care facilities, how scared they are of ICE raids coming to care facilities. Until January, the federal government had a policy of not conducting so-called immigration enforcement in certain protected areas like hospitals, schools, nursing homes, and that policy has changed. I believe they’re saying they can enter the kind of quote, unquote, “public areas” of those spaces, like a lobby or a waiting room. And so, care workers across the country, who are caring for our families, are terrified of being stripped away from their families. So, it’s hard to stress just how devastating Trump’s policies are for the state of care recipients and caregivers in this country. And it’s, of course, a feminist issue as well, because typically, when there are gaps in care, it is women—both as paid care workers and unpaid family caregivers—who fill in those gaps.

AA 29:22

Yeah. I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit more about how this ethics of care makes its way into the film. I mean, something that I do notice about the film is that there are a lot of shots about all the reproductive labor that goes into things. The film has very few characters. We have Ruth, who’s the center of the film, and her son, but the only other two characters, really, are two people who work in the elder care facility. But there’s also shots of the people who mop the floors and the people who come and support Ruth in the pool. And there are these actually quite extended shots of just the labor of maintaining the space. And so, I just wanted to hear a little bit more about the way that you thought about those ethics of care, and how they got translated into the film as it was.

SF 30:18

I mean, I think the first thing to be said is that the film is set in a luxury upscale care facility. And there are a few reasons why I set it there. One was to be clear about Ruth’s shifting class identity, and I was imagining her as an older woman having the resources for this upscale facility, in part because of her son’s income, but in some ways, because she’s identifying with younger versions of herself, and grew up working class, she might enter the space and look around and say: Who are all these rich people? And, therefore, identify more with the workers and the staff because she’s identifying herself with a period of her life in which she herself was a food worker and working class. But part of why I set it there was I wanted to create the conditions in which we could really show care work at its best. We rarely get to see care work on screen. Normally, care workers in film and television are either relegated to the background, their work is invisible, or they’re depicted like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, where care work is shown mainly through a lens of elder abuse—which, of course, happens, and is an issue that needs to be addressed. But the majority of care workers that I have encountered are incredibly skilled and dedicated to their work. And, unfortunately, care work is seen as an unskilled profession, and I think it’s the most valuable labor there is because it’s the labor that makes all other life and work possible. And so, I wanted to really underscore the immense skill of this work because it is such a challenging job, particularly in the complexity of it, psychologically. With memory care, particularly, you have to meet someone where they’re at, and so you’re always decoding and responding in an improvisatory way to the expressions of the person in front of you. It’s very nuanced and sophisticated work, and it is not seen, and protected, and compensated as such in this country.

LS 32:31

I think the big problem is that caring and care workers are so devalued and underpaid. So, although there are attachments formed between that interactive process of caring for someone and being cared for, the underpayment that carers receive means that they often have to leave a job, even though they’re committed to it and feel rewarded from the work they’re doing, because they’re just not paid enough. They’ll get more from stacking shelves or some other, to them, much less rewarding job. And that’s a terrible thing for the person being cared for because they lose contact with someone that they’ve been building up their connection to. So again, as Sarah says, all our values are simply upside down. You know, the most important jobs in our society, as far as I’m concerned, are caring jobs, whether we’re being paid for it or whether we’re not being paid for it. What life is about, as I see it, is our ability to care for each other, to care for each other, and try to create better worlds, but we can’t create better worlds and better communities without putting care at the basis of it. I also was part of writing a manifesto called the CARE Manifesto, which, interestingly, has been incredibly popular and translated into 13 languages. So, everybody sort of knows we actually need to put care at the heart of our politics. But in fact, everyone knows it apart from our politicians, who refuse that and think that they’re only going to put growth and market profits at the heart of their politics. So, everything is upside down until we can turn around our attitudes to care. The only thing that will be valuable as we look back on our lives—it will be what we’ve been able to do for other people. I mean, in the end, all we have is each other, and I don’t think we’re going to think we were here to just make a bit more money for whoever happens to be employing us. We’re here to try and care for each other.

AA 34:42

Thank you so much, Lynne, for that. We haven’t talked a lot—I mean, you’ve mentioned Sarah, desire, talking about desire in older women. I feel like we should probably circle back to that. It’s really interesting how it’s explored in the film because it’s explored, in a certain sense, almost through her expression of desire. It’s a frustrated expression of desire, and also in a sensuality—a way of her experiencing her own body. I’m just curious why that felt so important and what you were trying to work with in that aspect of desire.

SF 35:19

I think part of the ways in which older adults, and particularly older women, are infantilized as they age is by portraying them as no longer sexual. I can think of few things that are quite as dehumanizing and infantilizing as that. That, of course, we have sexuality, as Lynne said, from birth until death. I wanted to show the continuity of who Ruth is in her sexuality and in her relationship to the sensory world. I think something that people don’t know about dementia is that, as much as your cognition declines, your other senses are often heightened. So, touch, taste, smell can be very amplified. And so, I wanted to portray Ruth’s continuity of self as well, and her connection to the sensory world, of everything that she touches, tastes, and smells. I’ll say the politics of this are also inspired by Lynne’s writing. I remember in Out of Time, you writing about, to quote you directly: “The distinct horror attached to the image of the aging female,” and the image of the hag and the witch, and how the fears of aging are specifically placed on the female body rather than the male.

LS 36:35

I mean, I think life is about the desire to desire. But the problem for particularly older women in our society is that they’re written off, almost from early middle age, as objects of desire. And so, we’ve really got to find ways of working out how to turn that around and also just being able to express some form of desire. I remember reading Grace Paley and how exciting she was writing in old age as well, and writing about her friends, and her friends who were even dying. One friend, who she was always on marches with, and so on, her last words, she pulls off her breathing apparatus and says, “Grace, the question is: How are we to live our lives?” That is, we’re always thinking about something good that we might be able to do. Even if relationships are escaping us, there’s still other things that we can desire and other friendships. The importance of friendship—we place all value now on sexual and romantic relationships, don’t we? But other relationships are also crucial—crucial in giving each other pleasure. I think that’s something else we need to be stressing when we think about desire. As far as I’m concerned, we’re not alive unless we are able to express some form of desire, and we should encourage that in everybody, whatever their age.

AA 38:07

Yeah, thank you guys for that. Before we close, I wanted to, Sarah, ask about something that happened at Venice, which is that you used your speech to call attention to the genocide in Gaza. I was just curious about how that has affected the rest of your promotional run. What the response to that was like, what was the decision to make that stand at that time, and how you think that intersects with the politics of the film.

SF 38:39

Yeah, I mean, the speech I gave noted how many days of the genocide had occurred at the time of the awards ceremony. And if I were to give that speech today, it would be 660 days of genocide. I was thinking about my speech there as a type of timekeeping. And Arielle, you’ve written beautifully about Jewish timekeeping and the liberatory politics of timekeeping, and I think that’s very much the role of the filmmaker. You not only keep time, but you make it. As much as I’m not an orator, I am a timekeeper, and I wanted to use the fact of being broadcast internationally to reflect that time back, because time is life. Every day that we do not stop this, Palestinians die. Every hour that we do not stop this, Palestinians die.

SF 39:32

So, I was thinking about it in that way, and also, the choice had a lot to do as well with the setting. The Venice Film Festival is the oldest film festival in the world. It was started by Mussolini and his finance minister, Volpi, as a cultural apparatus of their fascist state. The stage from which I was giving that address, as well as the Palazzo del Cinema, the cinema palace, that was a Mussolini-constructed building. The context and history of the film festival is such that there’s a kind of implicit logic that filmmakers are part of a national delegation. So I was, in some ways, on that stage representing an American delegation. And so, that’s part of the context of why I wanted to make a speech during that awards ceremony in this site of nationalism and fascism and when I had access to a broadcast.

SF 40:34

In terms of the response, there’s a professional side and a personal side. The professional side is a little bit harder to decipher because at the time of giving this speech, I was only freelancing. So in some ways, I was kind of unfirable. So the types of backlash we’ve seen of people losing academic posts wasn’t really possible for me. I didn’t have any institutional employer. I am the kind of highest power on our film because it is an independent film. I am the boss, so to speak. But our film has had a really robust theatrical release. It’s been sold in over 15 different countries. I signed with a major talent agency. So, it’s hard for me to know to what extent success has or has not been tempered. That said, I received a swell of solidarity but also received an immense wave of backlash, including a lot of hate mail, and online abuse, and some death threats. And all of the messages of abuse, all of the hate mail that I received were from other Jews.

AA 41:40

Very common experience.

SF 41:42

Exactly. I knew it would come, but I think the scale of it did something to me that was new. Which is, of course, for a long time, I have not identified with Jewish Zionists and have seen the violence of Zionism as something abhorrent to me. Yet, receiving thousands of messages from other Jews wishing for me to be dead, or for me to be raped, or harmed in all these different ways, it further punctuated my questioning of what it means to be a part of a Jewish people or a sense of tribalism. You know, how is it that these people are my people? It just sort of further punctuated that rupture of a sense of belonging to a people. And I think the other thing that was really striking for me was something that occurred with my dad—and I’ll just say, I have his consent to talk about this here. We had months and months of fighting and periods where we weren’t talking because he felt that I had inadequately grieved Jews who died on October 7th and had implied that, in some way, I was a self-hating Jew. And I felt: How can I possibly be related, how can I feel kinship with someone who is condoning a genocide? Of course, this is very familiar to folks who listen to this podcast.

SF 43:07

And him seeing the scale of violent messages I’ve received is what brought him to fully contend with the violence of Zionism and the genocide in ways that he hadn’t before. He had been sort of willfully ignorant, and I think there was something about seeing his daughter receive these messages that he felt like: How am I, as a quote, unquote, “liberal Zionist,” how are these my people? These people that are telling my daughter to die and be harmed in all these ways? He said to me, “I’m a dad before I’m a Jew, and I am a dad before I am a Zionist.” And in some ways, it was this kind of rhetorical echo of Zionist violence against Palestinians that was being reflected to our family (truly just as language, not real violence) that enabled his politics to shift. It kind of made me hopeful about the potency of familial love to reorganize political attachments.

LS 44:12

I just wanted to say, I feel drawn ever closer into my Jewish belonging because, at least every few weeks now, I join the Jewish bloc (which is well over a thousand, sometimes thousands) going on the marches. And so, I come from, actually, generations of observant, anti-Zionist Jews. But on the marches, what is so wonderful is the care and concern that we receive—not just from other Jews but also from everybody, from young and old, from Islamic, Asian, everyone. People are coming up to us all the time saying: I’m so glad you’re here, I’m so glad you’re here. So there is a sense of solidity, actually, in the Jewish belonging that I have, which, of course, is inevitably critical of Israel and the way in which it’s treated the Palestinians over the last 70 years (and never worse than now).

AA 45:16

This has really been wonderful. Thank you both. To the listeners, I hope that you will watch Familiar Touch.

SF 45:22

Thanks so much.

LS 45:24

Thank you. It’s wonderful.

AA 45:25

This has been another episode of On the Nose. If you liked it, share it, leave us a review, and subscribe to Jewish Currents, JewishCurrents.org. Thanks a lot, everyone. See you next time.