Movie Reviews : An Overambitious Portrait of the Jewish-American

The 85-minute documentary “Present Memory (at Laemmle’s AFI Showcase, Santa Monica) attempts nothing less than a full-scale portrait of what it means to be a Jewish-American. It’s a wildly ambitious subject--far more ambitious than the filmmakers’ skills can encompass.

We’re shown material from the ‘20s in Palestine and Eastern Europe (including some wonderful, rare footage from the Krakov ghetto); later on there’s material from WWII displaced person camps, footage from the Israeli Six Day War, shots of Hasidic neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Interspersed with these sequences are interviews with everyone from the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League, to Alan Dershowitz and his mother Claire.

The issues of assimilation, Zionism, and American anti-Semitism are explored, but not very probingly, and the film’s structure is haphazard and repetitive; too many of the same people are saying too many of the same things, and they’re not necessarily the people we want to be listening to in the first place. (Is it necessary for Claire Dershowitz to hog so much of the screen time?)

Richard Broadman, who directed, seems to have gotten into something bigger than he bargained for but, in fairness, it would probably take a documentarian on the order of a Marcel Ophuls to succeed with a documentary this ambitious about Jewish-American identity.