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Interview with Kike Like Me director Jamie Kastner
Jamie Kastner’s film Kike Like Me explores Jewish identity in the 21st Century - and pulls very few punches in the process. Get a flavour of the film from the man himself.
BBC Four: Jamie, the film forces the audience to confront its own feelings about Jewish people, even if it’s just to question whether they have any or not. What have the reactions been like?Jamie Kastner: Hope I’m not getting too Morris Albert here, but my hope rather is that the film encourages people to ask themselves how they feel about their feelings about not only Jews, but about any group of non-mainstream-honkies - about identity altogether. How’s that for opening question chutzpah? I see it as a film about identity that happens to look at Jews. They make a great case study because by and large they’re white, (obviously no one’s going to ask a black person if he’s black – and it’s the motivation behind that line of questioning that really interests me) but for some reason Jews are never quite allowed to meld invisibly into the mainstream. Already I digress. Talking too much? (I suppose you’ll also accuse me of talking with my hands – too Jewish perhaps? I’m typing, you anti-Semite!) Aside from people who were just too offended by the title to even show up, the film has had a hearteningly positive response at festivals so far – great press, full houses, enthusiastic Q&A sessions with intelligent questions that seem to lead to all round satisfying dialogue. I know not everyone loves it, which is fine. When it was near completion I showed it to some friends, one couple in particular: secular, middle-aged, Jewish intellectuals. They had totally opposing views. She was extremely disturbed and found my on-camera cynicism/irony hard at times to distinguish from anti-Semitism. He completely disagreed, and while they shouted at each other - and once I took a moment to get over being called a possible anti-Semite by a friend - I thought: yeah, this thing is working.BBC Four: As well as not letting the audience remain detached, the process of filming this documentary appears to change you - you start out as being a detached, ironic observer, but by the end, you’re off the fence and voicing your disgust at the so-called ‘Holocaust tourism’ industry in no uncertain terms. Did you expect this, or did you plan to remain dispassionate and let the interviewees be the ones with the strong opinions?Jamie Kastner: I feel watching the last section of the film as though I’m suddenly the star of a reality show – it’s the part after the guy’s done his song and dance and the mean judge (usually the one with an English accent) says he was crap and the cameras follow him backstage blubbing… I can joke about it now, but the point is, I suppose, I really couldn’t then. No, of course I didn’t plan it. I think when you put yourself on camera you’re in part acknowledging the whole circus and your role in it, so dispassionate no, but I do believe that my main job is still to draw the strong material from the interview subjects.

But the experience in Poland truly was nauseating. It seemed to me the equivalent of former slave owners opening soul-food restaurants and serving grits (and watery faux-grits at that) while in blackface. My own strong reactions that come at the end of Auschwitz were the culmination of all that – and totally spontaneous. Bad director, I wasn’t thinking about how they’d play in the finished movie. And though, wincing at them later in the edit suite, I recognized that while I might, in a cooler moment, have chosen my words more carefully whilst at what is still to some people - Disneyfication or no - a sacred spot, I also recognized their honesty (and, craven filmmaker to the core, the quality of the material): I had definitively, and somewhat unwittingly, become my own subject. Thankfully the film ends soon after.

BBC Four: One of the most powerful scenes in the film occurs in a supposedly tolerant Paris suburb where a street interview descends into a viciously and unashamedly anti-Semitic rant. What were your feelings as a person and as a film-maker at this point?

Jamie Kastner: Again, divided loyalties: craven filmmaker/human being. That scene really just erupted much as you see in the film, I just say “I’m here making a film about Jews,” and two seconds later - pow! All the worst stereotypes flying back and forth - I thought I had stepped onto the West Bank. In fact, for a time I thought I didn’t even have to go shoot in Israel - that I’d already captured the worst of it right outside Paris. Incidentally, that’s the curious thing about Israel these days isn’t it? - it’s there no matter where you go. Anyway, in the moment I was weighing how much of it I needed to get the scene without putting my crew in serious danger. We only shot about 20 minutes there, and a disproportionate amount of it made the cut. Once the young Arab guys told me if I was a Jew, they hated me, I declined their invite to see where they prayed and slept and got the hell out of Sarcelles. Above all it was depressing. It was so sad to hear such ugly nonsense delivered to your face - especially from young people - to see how beyond convincing or even quipping or cajoling into something more reasonable they already were. Okay I’m gonna cry now. Does this mean my film won’t bring about world peace? Thanks a lot.

BBC Four: What were some of the most eye-opening experiences you had whilst filming?

Jamie Kastner: Well we’ve already touched on two of them. But I’m happy to say pretty well everything that made the cut was somewhat surprising to me, hopefully a good sign the audience will feel the same. I go out shooting with a certain amount of research of course, but it’s also improvised. When I go to the forbidding looking Hasidic area of Brooklyn I have no idea the first guy I meet on the street is going to invite me and the crew into his shul, let alone give me a so-called bar mitzvah on the spot. Conversely, I had figured a slick old media pro like right-winger Pat Buchanan would wipe the floor with me in an interview: I had no idea he’d get so distraught by my line of questioning that he would kick me out mid-interview, revealing more about himself than perhaps he’d planned. The whole exercise of making the film was a case of “how do I know what I think till I see what I say” – and the audience is along for the ride, hopefully having to open its eyes and make up its mind at as well.

BBC Four: An aspect of the film you explore is the idea of physically looking Jewish as separate from practising the religion - you often get asked “are you Jewish?” even though you never wear religious trappings. Can you put your finger on what it is about the question that concerns you and are you satisfied that the film answered it?

Jamie Kastner: I suppose I don’t feel there is any truly innocent way of asking the question “Are you…” No matter who is asking it – Jew, non-Jew, obvious bigot or otherwise - it belies in the asker a set of generalized assumptions. If you answer yes, what is the set of attributes automatically assigned you? Are you the hook-nosed, money-grubbing, Christian child-bleeding caricature of yore, or a milder, apparently more complimentary modern version? Even if it’s only to determine whether you’re fitting marriage material for someone’s daughter, where is the room in that question for an individual’s sense of who he or she chooses to be? Of course the wrong answer to one asker could land you in a death camp, while to another, merely in a bad marriage with a cholesterol-heavy diet. The film is my answer to the question, which is to encourage the audience, the asker, to ask themselves in return “why do you want to know?” Does the conceit work? By and large the response I’ve gotten so far would indicate yes. But even if this ‘game’ doesn’t work 100% I still (obviously) feel the film works. In any case “Why do you want to know?” strikes me as the only appropriate answer to that question.

BBC Four: The title of the film and some of the instances of humour in it might be offensive to some. As far as you are aware, is the term ‘kike’ being deliberately used by younger Jewish people to take the sting out of it, in the same way that ‘queer’ has been by parts of the gay community or ‘nigger’ has been by some black people?

Jamie Kastner: Clearly the title is intentionally provocative. I’ve stuck by it for a few reasons. My journey in the film is a reference to the conceit used in Black Like Me and its precursor Gentleman’s Agreement, in which Gregory Peck plays a Gentile journalist who starts telling people he’s Jewish for a story on anti-Semitism. Then why not just ‘Jew Like Me’? For one thing, it’s an ironic wink at some of the more recent attempts by recent pop-Jewish movements to ‘rebrand’ Jews in the mode of hip-hop culture: Heeb Magazine, Jewcy Couture… I haven’t actually heard of any attempts to reappropriate the word ‘kike’ per se, but I seriously question whether even say, ‘nigger’ has been successfully reclaimed. It may appear harmless enough when young black kids (or their white imitators) bandy it about ahistorically, but I worry about what happens when one day a black kid gets blindsided when he’s called ‘nigger’ by a real redneck – it sure isn’t going to feel like a compliment.

And if recycling ‘nigger’ is a dubious move by cool black people, then ‘kike’ sure ain’t gonna fly for Jews who for some reason are never a hip minority. Indeed on one hand, while you’ll never hear the white wannabe kids calling each other ‘my kike’ and downing a fifth of Manischewitz on the street corner to be cool, on the other hand no matter how far into the mainstream Jews might get, you’re never allowed to forget that it’s the ‘Jewish neo-cons,’ or whatever. “A spade by any other name is just as black,” as a Jamaican poet I studied at school put it. So yes, ‘kike’ is an ugly and anachronistic word - unfortunately as I discovered in my journeys, the attitudes it represents are still very much current. If only using a prettier word would make them disappear.

BBC Four: The visit to Auschwitz is inevitably the most powerful sequence - tourism mixing with the Holocaust. You seem almost physically sick at times. Do you still feel that it should be blown up, or do you have any sympathy with the argument that it should be there to remind people?

Jamie Kastner: After the title, I know this is in a way also the most controversial part of the film. I know I said earlier that if asked in a cooler moment, like now, I’d choose my words more carefully… I do think what I say at that point of the film is the culmination of, and in reaction to, all the offensive tourist kitsch I’ve seen in Poland, in what ought instead to be treated as a sacred burial ground. What to do with the site beyond its current desecration is really just reduced to a debate of aesthetics or museum theory or something. And so, yeah, why not blow it up? Would a vast hole in the ground be any less fitting a memorial? Incidentally at that moment in the film I say “I think this whole place should be blown up and the people who did it along with it.” The latter part is more complex (chronologically, at least); thankfully though, you didn’t ask about that. In the Q&A following the film’s festival premiere at Hot Docs, someone asked, “What about maintaining Auschwitz as a hedge against holocaust deniers?” Well, sadly, holocaust deniers exist even with Auschwitz there.

Here’s another response to that section I received from a Jewish festival director: “I have never understood why we continue to create this incredible tourist industry for them to show us where they killed all my predecessors and we actually PAY THEM to do it. Blowing up Auschwitz and all the other camps would be my preference as well, but try telling that to Jews that think guilt will keep us all Jewish.”

I’m sure this statement too will only start more arguments, but that’s fine with me: let it be debated, let it all be discussed. That hopefully is what is accomplished by this film. After all, I went back to an editing suite - I didn’t muck around the Polish countryside trying to figure out TNT.

(Incidentally, it turns out the great survivor/writer Primo Levi agrees, if not quite that it should be blown up per se, at least that when he returned to visit Auschwitz, he found its museum incarnation utterly unmoving and unrecognizable. I wonder if they had the hot dog stand in place yet…)

BBC Four: What do you want people - Jewish and otherwise - to take away with them having seen the film?

Jamie Kastner: Their popcorn bags. And their feelings. bbc.co.uk