b.h. Yael

Letter to My Tribe started with a question: Why don’t more Jews and Israelis speak out about Palestine? Over many years my mother, who represents a more messianic perspective, and I have had numerous arguments, some recorded, some not. These form the backbone of this video essay in which Israelis and Jews, journalists, activists and a rabbi are interviewed, and in which documentation of actions on the ground, in the West Bank, are woven with more personal family histories and journeys to Iraq and to Poland.

Fresh Blood: A Consideration of Belonging is a hybrid documentary which includes questions around Arab Jewishness, negotiating Palestine, gender, belly dancing and memory. This video essay, formed by personal narrative and including a return to Israel/Palestine, engages issues of: Jewish racialized identity, Arab/Jewish dichotomies and the way these come together in Iraqi Jewish culture, and the personal implications of the politics of Palestine and the Jewish holocaust.

Early in the morning of April 9, 1948, commandos of the Irgun (headed by Menachem Begin) and the Stern Gang attacked Deir Yassin, a village with about 750 Palestinian residents. The village lay outside of the area to be assigned by the United Nations to the "Jewish State"; it had a peaceful reputation, but it was located on high ground in the corridor between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Deir Yassin was slated for occupation under Plan Dalet and the mainstream Jewish "defense" force. The Haganah authorized the irregular terrorist forces of the Irgun and the Stern Gang to perform the takeover. In all over 100 men, women, and children were systematically murdered. Fifty-three orphaned children were dumped along the wall of the Old City, where they were found by Miss Hind Husseini and brought behind the American Colony Hotel to her home, which was to become the Dar El-Tifl El-Arabi orphanage.