Since January 19, we have reviewed on this website 15 movies soon to be shown at the San Diego Jewish Film Festival  and have learned  that we have developed a new addiction, watching Jewish-themed movies.  This addiction cannot  be quit cold-turkey.  So we've decided to institute reviews of such movies that are available at the local video stores, and to invite our readers to submit reviews of some of their Jewish-themed videos as well.  All reviews will be accessible via the "Movies" link found on the bottom right side of the www.jewishsightseeing.com home page.

Kedma directed by Amos Gitai,  2002, 100 min., color, Hebrew with English subtitles

By Donald H. Harrison 

The genius of this film is that there are no obvious villains.  In a single, eventful, day we meet dazed Holocaust survivors being smuggled to British Mandate Palestine aboard the crowded ship Kedma; we glimpse the young, scared recruits to the British Army whose job it is to stop the immigrants; we are introduced to the kibbutzniks who form the backbone of the Haganah, and we encounter Arabs who are leaving their villages in the belief that the Jews intend to kill them.

The fears and motivations of the Holocaust survivors and the Arabs are given voice, whereas the British troops and the Haganah men and women, being less a mystery, are taken more for granted. Although the Haganah fighters kill and are being killed by Arab forces in this film, they demonstrate no racial hatred for their enemies.  In one memorable scene, a Haganah commander who interrogates an Arab taken prisoner after a fierce firefight, realizes from the man's elegant protests that he was not part of the opposing forces. He listens with increasing sympathy as the man emotionally tells his woes.

It is clear that the new war the Holocaust survivors face is one in which enemies at least recognize each other's humanity—neither the Jews nor the Arabs in the months prior to the Israel's Independence act like Nazis toward each other.  The decision of the Haganah commander to let the Arab go his way is not the only act of kindness amid the skirmishing.  A group of Arab villagers, moving their household effects and animals to flee the Jews, encounter a kibbutznik and a refugee. When the kibbutznik asks why they are leaving, they tell of their fears of the Jews—and then, looking at the refugee, they ask if he is a Jew, the irony being that they don't recognize the kibbutznik as one.   Before things can get too stirred up, the matriarch of the clan orders her family to leave the man alone and to keep moving.

We, the viewers, having studied  history, can tell the difference between the Holocaust and Israel's War for Independence, but the Holocaust survivors, having lived history, cannot.  For them, the war with the Arabs is simply an extension of their misery, one enemy having been substituted for another, but both unwilling to simply let them live in peace. We follow two refugees closely.  One despairs that to be a Jew is to suffer, that perhaps suffering has been enshrined as the whole purpose of the Jew.  The other vows to fight and kill as many of the enemy as he can.  He is grateful that, without ever being a chance to change his clothes or rest after disembarking from the Kedma,  he has been given five minutes training in how to use a rifle and is now a fighter for the Jewish homeland.  The Arab-fired mortar rounds and bullets can't tell the difference between the two men, of course.  Which one shall live and which shall die is a matter of complete chance.

It is a fine film, simply made, and well worth renting.