Many factors explain, but would never justify, at least in part, the rejection of Jews that went from Adolf Hitler (18891945), who was in command of Nazi Germany between the 1930s and 1930s, to the core of madness and the hardest core of crime and oppression in 1940. Perhaps the most vigorous of these are those relating to Jewish pride, the pride of an individual, of being part of a Godchosen people to them, of course, “the” Godchosen people to be recognized to be fruitful, to multiply and to occupy seas and fields, starting from Israel, a kind of revived Eden that has occupied more than half of its expanse by the burning sands of the Negev desert. One of the arguments used by a small but vocal group of Jews to confirm this supposed divine preference falls apart in directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s One of Us, two of the most serious researchers of religion and its impact on humans social organizations available to cinema today. With great caution, Ewing and Grady manage to dissect one of the most closed Jewish communities in the middle of New York, more precisely in Brooklyn, in the far west of the city. The little that is known about the Hasidim, ultraOrthodox Jews who live by unrelentingly rigorous — and very specific — readings of the Torah, the holy book of the ancient Hebrews, has been said by amateur scholars and academics who study their customs and traditions based on them on what they can glean from the collateral reports. In “One of Us” three dissonant Hasidic voices rise up, who are probably not quite aware of the consequences of their courageous outpourings.
After a warm introduction, punctuated by saxophone solos in front of the Hudson River, the viewer has the dialectic, sometimes true, sometimes misleading impression of the Hasidics merging with the immensity of contemporary New York. The directors explain that the Hasidim, fleeing the ethnic genocides that ravaged Eastern Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries which unfortunately has happened time and time again in the last century used the Big Apple as a fortress that guaranteed their survival, both physically and culturally , which has proven itself. The very solemn attire, always black, the men’s hats and shaggy beards culminating in cascades of hair that curled around the sideburns, as well as women in long dresses and with hair tucked under white shawls, came shortly after to distinguish themselves from the rest. Jews to take a stand. The ultraOrthodox have never stopped practicing Yiddish, a hybrid of Germanic languages fused with elements of Aramaic and Hebrew, and anyone born into a Hasidic home who rebels deserves the group’s rejection and moral lynching . That’s the hook that “One of Us” uses to present Etty without a doubt as the character who best embodies this notion of apostasy, of renouncing a belief that has become the most unbearable torment one can be subjected to, and all that changing such an attitude brings for better and for worse. The quiet housewife, mother of seven children and convinced of the role she should play in her family and especially in front of her coreligionists, begins to question her ontological nature at the age of 19, shortly after the forced marriage of her young boy, a year younger than he had ever seen. There was, of course, the shock of having her mother shave her long, thick black hair before the wedding night, one of the tenets most adhered to by ultraOrthodox families, plus mandatory sex on Fridays and a vow of blind obedience to her husband, but surely the most scandalous thing about Etty’s process of selfdiscovery is the resulting demonization she is subjected to. Choosing to leave what she knew as life and move to an address she was sure had, Etty becomes a shadow of her former self. Since she had the right to visit her children on sporadic dates, she also had to adjust to invasion attempts by her expartner’s relatives. The New York court has not set a time limit for deciding the lawsuit it is bringing against him.
No less chilling are the stories of Ari, the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of a rabbi—the trauma has left her with a cocaine addiction she still hasn’t quite got over, and the two overdoses she’s been able to relate—and Luzer, who’s gone his wife and children in New York, where he lived in his car, in a public parking lot, with the dream of a chance in Hollywood in his suitcase to Los Angeles, confirm only one central idea. Hardly repressed in Israel, where they are considered insane fundamentalists not without reason, since they even carry out attacks on the Jews themselves (and here the cowardly murder of Yitzhak Rabin must be remembered [19221995])—only America, in the name of its great and unbreakable democratic tradition, would admit people with such intolerant worldviews. But American democracy cannot be the wall of shame.
Movie: One of us
Direction: Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady
Year: 2017
genres: documentary film/religion/sociology
note: 8/10