Charlottesville Reflection: A Documentarian Remembers

It was August of 2018, yet another scorching summer all around the globe. I was on the road working on a feature documentary project about resurgent anti-semitism that was released last year, “HateAmongUs“.

My trajectory of human despair and mayhem took me and my crews to London, Paris, Berlin, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Los Angeles, New York, Washington, DC, and Charlottesville. Everywhere we went to film, it seemed like 95 degrees, with one hundred per cent humidity. Brutal weather for a brutal subject—in a way, it was a real-life Dante’s Inferno, connecting human hatred from the past to the anxious present we now live on planet Earth.

Each story and interview I covered was intense, visceral, and profoundly moving. Some were historic, others contemporary, and then there were those that were both. The entire experience has pointed to one crystal clear conclusion: You cannot fight antisemitism without fighting racism.

Memorial to local Charlottesville activist Heather Heyer murdered, run over by a neo-Nazi during the August 2017 riots.

I am writing this on my birthday. I was born on August 28th, 1961, two years before Martin Luther King, Jr.’s March on Washington. For my entire life, I’ve seemed to follow an unconscious theme that connected my personal mission and destiny to the struggle for justice for African Americans and justice for all.

No, I am not a politician, attorney, or powerful media executive ‘greenlighting’ the next great, big, new thing. I live the life of a documentarian, constantly searching for new insights into the human condition from people.

And yes, these frames of our lives often are deeply disquieting windows into humanity’s collective and disturbed soul. Each city I visited during the summer of 2018, back when things were ‘normal’, had its own granular story about rising antisemitism.

You cannot fight antisemitism without fighting racism because they are the same issue

Stonewall Jackson statue that was later removed

In Paris, it was the tragedy of the antisemitic murder of 85-year-old Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll; a murder that epitomizes the resilience of trans-generational inhumanity. It is unimaginable that this gentle soul of a woman, who fled the Nazi occupation as a child, would be stabbed to death and burned by two young Arab neighbors whom she had known for years, simply because she was Jewish.

And then Berlin and London, covering stories of renewed acts of antisemitism across Europe and perspectives of those working to counter the trends. And after three weeks of a whirlwind tour, these stories began to connect in truly astonishing ways. Although I plan to write about all these experiences in great detail, I want to focus right now on the last stop of my genocide tour of 2018, Charlottesville, Virginia.

Read more here.

This post appeared In LA Progressive and was republished with their permission.