Studying Talmud on the morning commute.
The documentary Why The Jews opens with a recollection from controversial lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who once gave a speech to the Hamburg Bar Association in Germany. He asked the assembled audience of 1,000 lawyers who among them considered themselves to be victims of the Holocaust. “Six or seven people raised their hands,” he says. “I said, ‘Mo, it’s many, many more of you. How many of you have lost a relative to heart disease, to cancer?’ And then I went through various illnesses and everybody raised their hand. I said, ‘How do you know that the cures for those diseases didn’t go up in smoke at Auschwitz, at Treblinka? You don’t know what you lost with the killing of six million Jews, many of whom were among the leading scientists, doctors, innovators, artists in the world.”
Why The Jews is this week’s installment in the 10th annual Beckerman Film Series, hosted by the Jewish Community Center of Greater New Haven and running now through May. Viewers can purchase tickets for individual films or runs of films. In return, they receive links to be able to view the movies from home over the span of a week. The films are grouped into three subjects — antisemitism and racism, theater, and family and relationships — with a group discussion prepared at the end of each grouping. Why The Jews, the final film in the antisemitism and racism group, provides more than enough to fuel a healthy discussion all by itself.
The documentary starts from the observation that, while Jews represent only .2 percent of the world’s population, they make up 21 percent of Ivy League students, 22 percent of Nobel Prize winners, 33 percent of Oscar-winning film directors, and 40 percent of chess champions. It then asks a provocative question: is there a connection?
Why The Jews is at its most compelling when it examines the ways in which Jewish culture prepares people for intellectual pursuits by exalting education through inquiry as a foundation of practicing faith. As Rabbi Marvin Tokayer says in the film, “the best way to pray to God is to study.” It also offers up the even more provocative idea that intellectual rigor and adaptability might be a result of the culture and its people facing such severe repression and existential threat for its entire history. Jews have survived by thinking differently. As chess champion Judit Polgar explains, “the curve of history” forced Jews into it. “You have to be smart because it’s the only thing that’s yours. If you want to survive, it is probably your best chance.”
The documentary interviews Jews excelling in their various fields to ask them how much they feel their identity and experience as Jews as played a part in their success. Acclaimed cellist and MacArthur fellow Alisa Weilerstein explains that “Jews feel the weight of history. You feel it every single day. If you’re put down, if you try harder to succeed, you overcompensate.”
“You’re always questioning,” she adds, “and if you question well, it makes you a better musician.” She also introduces the idea, however, that when she’s playing her best, she feels her own sense of identity slip away — the first iteration of an idea the film picks up later.
Dr. Ruth with Jerry Seinfeld.
The film also gets an interview with sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer, who attributes her bold attitude to discussing sex to her identity and experience as a Jew. “I have chutzpah,” she says, “the nerve to talk about unconventional topics. Even if it is not accepted by society as a whole.”
Westheimer elaborates: “You can say adversity pushed me. Maybe I would have been just a housewife if I stayed in Frankfurt.” She reveals that she lost her entire family to the Nazis. At the age of 10 she watched her father taken away by soldiers in the night. “He turned with a faint smile and waved,” she said. She never saw him again. She last saw her mother at the Frankfurt train station, when she was put on a Kindertransport to Switzerland. “If I had not been on that train I wouldn’t be alive,” Westheimer said.
“Look what they did for me,” she continues. Her family made the “supreme sacrifice” in sending her to safety. “I don’t know that I could have done that with my children.”
As she grew up, “I knew that I had an obligation to make something out of myself,” she says. She had “a strong desire to repair the world” — a central tenet of Jewish faith — and felt that she made a difference. Thanks in part to her work, “it’s alright to go to see a therapist when you have a problem,” she says. “It’s alright to talk about issues of sexuality, to read about it, and to make the best out of your life that you can.”
Shimon Peres.
The film reaches something of an apex with an interview with Israeli leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Shimon Peres, who died in 2016. “A Jew can never be satisfied. To repair, to improve — that is our job,” he says. “A better world will be only in the future.” He explains how that belief lay at the core of Zionism, the founding of the Israeli state, and the work and ingenuity that went into transforming “swamps in the north and deserts in the south” into a place that could support agriculture. Israel’s pioneering work in drip agriculture is now used in 110 countries, and 60 percent of its drinking water comes from desalination.
Israeli tech entrepreneur Jonathan Medved attributes much of Israel’s financial success to “our attitude toward risk. It’s risk acceptance,” he says. “We have learned to live outside of our comfort zone, in constant existential risk…. We are a troublesome, stiff-necked, active, nutso, crazy, fractious, arguing family,” and that is “where the brilliance comes from” — the idea that “it’s got to be done differently.” Medved connects that with Jews’ relationship to God. “We believe that when God created the world in six days, he didn’t finish the job,” he says.
At the same time, Peres echoes Weilerstein’s sense that sometimes he transcends his identity. To make a peace deal, he explains, eventually involves stopping asking questions, finding problems. “If you want to make peace, close your eyes a little bit,” he says.
Why The Jews is at its most problematic in giving substantial air time to political scientist Charles Murray, whose work is considered controversial at best and “racist pseudoscience” at worst. With co-author Richard Herrnstein, Murray made waves in broader society with the 1994 book The Bell Curve, which argued in part that a person’s race was a significant factor in determining their intelligence. This isn’t a position this reporter has any interest in seriously considering. Murray appears in this documentary because he wrote a 2007 piece arguing that Jews are smarter than other people due to genetics. If one knows this about Murray in advance, it’s excruciating to watch him tiptoe toward his conclusion.
The inclusion of Alan Dershowitz is also eyebrow-raising, considering, most recently, his involvement in the Jeffrey Epstein case, even if his knowledge of the law, and his long career as a professor at Harvard Law School, isn’t in dispute. Dershowitz also addresses the controversy surrounding him. “My email is filled with both love and hate mail,” he says. He goes on to say that “defending the innocent and the guilty alike is part of the Jewish tradition.”
Like a few other interviewees, he grew up Orthodox, but “I broke from it.” Dershowitz makes the strong connection between his experience of Jewish culture growing up and how it prepared him for a career in law, and says that he has noticed it in his Jewish law students as well. “Other groups are just as smart, and just as quick on the draw. But in terms of the cultural quest for always answering a question with a question, never being willing to find a final answer” — that “is characteristic of Jews more than any other group.”
Noam Chomsky.
Why The Jews also argues with itself. Celebrated and muckraking public intellectual Noam Chomsky offers a humble self-introduction that also serves as a sharp rebuke to Murray. “I really have no professional credentials. It’s mostly luck, willingness to do hard work, to keep an open mind, to be critical of dogma,” he says in evaluating his own career. “Everybody’s got these talents if they use them.”
Chomsky explains how growing up “in intense Jewish culture” shaped him profoundly, honing his perceptions of the world and shaping his analytical mind. He also explains how applying those things to the culture around him also caused him to drift away from some of its precepts. He recalls visiting family for Passover when he was 10 years old and watching his Orthodox grandfather smoke a pipe. He knew the Talmudic restriction against smoking on a holiday, which was the same as that against smoking on Shabbat. Only eating was exempt from the rule against work.
“How come Grandfather’s smoking?” Chomsky asked his father.
“He’s decided smoking is eating,” Chomsky recalled his father saying. “And suddenly,” Chomsky understood that the rules were “based on the assumption that God is such an imbecile that you can find ways around his commands and he’s not going to notice.” Like many of the interviewees, Chomsky moved away from Judaism as he became more creative, but never left it entirely behind. As Dershowitz put it, creatives feel that “if you come too close to the candle you’ll get burned, but you have to have the warmth of the candle to give you influence.”
Why The Jews ultimately leaves its own question open. Its coda explains why it’s in the part of the film series dedicated to antisemitism and racism, as rabbis explain that Jews’ disproportionate successes, in their view, could be part of the reason for antisemitism. Jews’ successes remind antisemites of “their own failures,” they reason, and rather than emulate Jews — or simply help build on those successes, and continue the work of repairing the world — they instead think that Jews must be destroyed. For anyone listening to the mob in Charlottesville at the Unite the Right rally in 2017, the rabbis’ reasoning has chilling resonance.
What makes Why The Jews both engaging and flawed also makes it a great discussion piece. At the end of this week, those who sign up to watch the film will be invited to talk about it with others who have done the same. Is there anything more fitting than answering questions with more questions?
Why The Jews runs at the Beckerman Film Series through Feb. 21. Visit the JCC of Greater New Haven’s website to learn more about the Beckerman Film Series and to register to watch the films and take part in the discussions.