Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

Fathers and Sons
Joseph Cedar’s Footnote
(Sony Pictures Classic, North American Release, 2012). DVD $29
Joanne Intrator and Scott Rose*
Only rarely are scholars of the Talmud featured as characters in popular
entertainments. Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “Yentl the Yeshiva
Boy” became a Broadway play first in 1975, with the intensely committed
Tovah Feldshuh as its protagonist, and then in 1983, as a smash-hit
Hollywood musical film starring Barbra Streisand. Among well-known
movies to mention the Talmud in passing are The Chosen, The Seven-Per-
Cent Solution, Ally McBeal, Schindler’s List, and The Simpsons. (Bart tries
to placate a rabbi displeased over his son’s entry into the profession of
circus clown by quoting from the Babylonian Talmud).
There is precious little clowning around, however, in Joseph Cedar’s
2011 Israeli film Footnote (Hebrew title: , in transliteration:
He’arat Shulayim), although some marketing materials and commentators
allege broad humorous intent in the movie. If anything, Footnote, set in the
Department of Talmud at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is a powerful,
Kafkaesque study in angst-twisted, soul-stifling internecine ambiguity.
With a degree of detachment, it may be allowed that the Talmud itself represents
an ambiguous attempt to apply—with a largely elusive fixed certainty—the
Torah to everyday life.
A passion for examining a question every which intellectual way,
without necessarily formulating a definitive answer to the question, is not
unique to, yet is splendidly characteristic of, Jewish Hochkultur. Footnote
has the virtue of lifting viewers up through its manifest passion for Jewish
philology. Cedar—who studied philosophy at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem—has told interviewers that he knows actual members of the
Department of Talmud and that he loves them and their world. Though the
movie’s narrative compellingly centers on claustrophobic academic rivalries,
some lighter moments provide satirical “you-are-there” realism in a
337