Best religion movie is Elmer Gantry. Have watched it many times.
(I reviewed this when it was in the theaters. Now it is available in video.)
Kadosh
"Kadosh," a hard-hitting feminist polemic, revolves around the tangled sexual politics of three men and two women in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect in Jerusalem.
Meir, a Talmudic scholar, and his wife Rivka have been married for ten years but have not been able to produce children, no matter how many prayers are recited or how many ritual baths Rivka takes to rid herself of "uncleanness." In the opening scene, Meir rises from his bed and goes through an elaborate series of prayers culminating in thanks to the Almighty that he was not born a female. The prayers are conducted while he wraps the leather thongs of the 'tfilin' around his arm, which altogether gives the appearance of a junky preparing for a fix. Instead of searching for a vein, Meir seems intent on mainlining God.
Rivka's younger sister Malka is in love with Jacov, but can not marry him. He has joined the Israeli army in defiance of the sect's ban on serving in the military. He is still deeply religious but is regarded as a renegade by the rest of the sect, who view any departure from the rigid code of conduct as evidence of godlessness.
Symbolizing this rigidity in the most dramatic fashion is Yossef, who attends the same Talmud school as Meir. When we first see the two men together, they launch into an extended disputation over whether it is more observant to put sugar into hot water when making tea on the Sabbath or vice versa. It turns out that the water should be poured over the tea and the sugar so as to preclude the possibility that the act amounts to cooking. Yossef is the sect firebrand and drives around in sound-truck during the week urging Jews to "close ranks" against their godless enemies, which includes both turncoats like Jacov and all Arabs.
Their rabbi has instructed Malka to break off with Jacov and marry Yossef. In a truly riveting but repulsive scene, Malka and Yossef are shown in bed on their wedding night. He first reads a prayer that is supposed to heighten the chances of procreation and then coldly instructs Malka to spread her legs. Without any foreplay, he mounts her like a ram and thrusts violently until he has climaxed.
Meanwhile, the rabbi has also instructed Meir to end his marriage with Rivka. The fact that she has not been able to conceive is regarded as a sin by the close-knit community and it is time for him to live up to his responsibility as a Jew. In their world, men are brought into the world to study the Talmud and women are there to support them. This means first of all procreating and secondly to cook and to keep the house clean.
Regarded by Time Magazine critic Richard Corliss as the greatest film ever made in Israel, "Kadosh" is director Amos Gitai's attempt to come to terms with what many secular Jews in Israel regard as a threat to their existence. The ultra-Orthodox Jews are a tightly-organized political faction that pressures Israel from the right. From the standpoint of Gitai, a left-wing Jew whose grandparents came to Palestine in the early part of the century as Labor Zionists, their orthodox cousins are an uncomfortable reminder of where they came from. While tokens of a backward and insular past are considered hindrances to civil society in the Israeli present, the more important question that the film-maker and most secular Jews are not prepared to confront revolves around their future. In truth it is very likely that within 25 years the only "true", i.e. observant, Jews will be the ultra-Orthodox.
The ultra-Orthodox sects, also known as the Hasidim, originated in 18th and 19th century Poland and Russia in a time of great economic stress and persecution. Marxist historian Ilan Halevi explains their origins in his "Question Juive":
"The internal crisis of the Shtetl, whose roots are to be found in the crisis of Polish feudalism, was exacerbated and radically aggravated. The domain of Polish sovereignty was shrinking rapidly. A kingdom that had stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea grew smaller and smaller as around it tsarist Russia, the Hapsburg empire and the German states grew larger and larger. The Polish question became the European question and centuries-old Polish Jewry saw its territory carved up among several states Austria, which took Galicia, lightened the conditions of Jews there: but Russia, having seized the Ukraine and Byelorussia, oppressed them there, said Lenin, 'more harshly than the Negroes'. The Napoleonic conquest, short as it may have been, precipitated the disintegration, inducing a general upheaval in the empires of the centre and east. Following the French occupation, the whole map of the region was transformed. The new frontier of Austria and Russia, which shared the whole of what remained of Poland in 1815, cut the Ashkenazi world in two, divided the dynasties of Hasidic rabbis, and determined new sub-problematics. The sociological unity of Ashkenazi Judaism was beginning to fracture."
Against this pattern of disintegration, the Hasidic rabbis created cults based on three key elements that were supposed to function as life-rafts:
--Strict observance of rituals, particularly those involved with "cleanness"
--Reverence for the rabbi, who in most instances were seen as a potential Messiah
--Fervent recitation of prayers, dancing and singing meant to induce mystical states
For some secular Jews, and even some non-Jews, this last element has served to bring them into the fold. For instance, Bob Dylan drew close to the Lubavitcher Hasidic sect in the 1980s. He swapped these beliefs for Christian fundamentalism not too soon afterwards.
The Lubavitcher sect occupies a place in NYC politics not unlike the sect depicted in "Kadosh" with the blacks of Brooklyn standing in for the unfortunate Arabs. The Lubavitchers have used political clout to gain preferential treatment to gain access to subsidized housing in a neighborhood where it is in short supply. Such tensions provided the backdrop for the riots that broke out during the Dinkins administration when the lead car of a Hasidic caravan struck and killed a black child. A Hasidic scholar Yankel Rosenbaum, identical to the film's characters, was stabbed during the violence and Dinkins was blamed for his death. The Hasidic community then delivered their votes to the "law-and-order" candidate Rudy Giuliani who has done everything possible to intimidate the black community, just the way that the current Labor government in Israel is using every means at its disposal to intimidate Arabs.
The contradictions of late capitalism are acting on worldwide Jewry in a manner that few Marxists--in my opinion--have fully understood. Social and economic processes are in motion that tend to create three distinct "peoples". One is the ultra-Orthodox sect depicted in the film. The second is the Israeli "Sabras", the native-born, largely secular, Jews who retain many of the values of any colonizing people like the Afrikaners. The third are the largely assimilated and secular Jews outside Israel who in a generation or two will retain nothing distinctly Jewish except perhaps their family name. The unique racial politics of worldwide Jewry will be forced to define itself in terms of how these various groups relate to worldwide capitalism and the oppressed Arab and Palestinian peoples. Political polarization will generate at least in some cases a radical response that the film "Kadosh" hints at. It is a positive sign that the film criticizes some of the most backward elements of Israel society and at least points the way toward a deepening critique of that society, including its secular but racist elements.
--
The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
