Israeli ex-pat asks whether it is possible to come home
http://972mag.com/israeli-ex-pat-asks-whether-it-is-possible-to-come-home/111678/
In one of the most affecting scenes of her documentary “P.S. Jerusalem,” filmmaker Danae Elon follows her two little boys and their Palestinian schoolmate, all three dressed nearly identically in hooded sweatshirts and jeans, as they navigate the streets of the city at night, traversing Jewish majority and Arab majority neighborhoods while clutching their skateboards. The boys, who attend the bilingual Hand in Hand School, switch from one language to the next depending on the area they’re in. “Don’t speak Arabic here,” whispers her son in Hebrew to his Palestinian friend. Two minutes later, the Palestinian boy whispers to them in Arabic, “Sh! Not a word in Hebrew!”
It would be easy and natural for adults to dismiss the excited warnings of six and seven-year-old boys as exaggeration for the sake of drama. But in contemporary Jerusalem, being beaten up just for speaking the wrong language in the wrong neighborhood is tragically not unheard of. This is the reality that these boys, children of liberal, secular parents attending the city’s most pluralistic, liberal school, are already aware of in elementary school. (In 2014, the Jerusalem Hand in Hand school was torched by Jewish terrorists in a “price tag” incident.)
When Danae Elon moved back in 2010 to Jerusalem, where she was born and raised, she wanted to give her two young sons and her unborn child — as well as her French-Algerian Jewish partner Philippe — a sense of belonging in the place that she identified as home. New York, she explains in the opening scenes of P.S. Jerusalem, had never felt like home. She describes the city she remembers as a place populated by bohemians and by intellectuals like her father, the renowned Haaretz journalist and writer Amos Elon.
---
She films Philippe as the two of them engage in searching, emotional conversations about her concerns over the questions their children are asking about what they see, and about his increasing dislike for the city. Philippe, the French Jew of Algerian parents, had thought that with his “Arab face,” he would discover a sense of belonging in Jerusalem. Instead he feels increasingly alienated by the radical right-wing politics, violence and what he calls “craziness.” He does not have Danae’s childhood memories to help him see past contemporary events. During one of their conversations about their decision to move to Jerusalem Danae asks him, with a catch in her voice, “Do you think you’ve made a mistake?” He shrugs, looking frustrated and tired.