Video preview of the new documentary by Alice Rothchild and Sharon Mullally
Voices Across the Divide Preview from Trailer for Voices Across the Divide.
Click here for a photograph slideshow of the film.
Voices Across the Divide explores my personal experiences, born in Boston in 1948 to first generation parents and growing up with the State of Israel as my friend, my pride, and ultimately my heartbreak. I became a teenager in the dark shadow of the Holocaust and the redemptive sunshine of the founding of the State of Israel, the heroic David miraculously fighting the goliaths of anti-Semitism and Arab hostility. As a young Jewish woman, I completely succumbed to the national mythos surrounding the 1948 Israeli War of Liberation and like many in my generation, in the famous words of former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, there was no Palestinian people. There was also no Nakba or Palestinian catastrophe created when Jews founding Israel drove Palestinians off of their land. There was not even any doubt that this land was rightfully ours.
AcrossDivideVisit our page on Grantmakers in Film + Electronic Media
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In 1981, my mother, Sylvia Rothchild, wrote a book called Voices from the Holocaust, which painfully chronicled the oral histories of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust. While deeply immersed in these stories, I gradually began to understand that buried in the wounds of my own people's near annihilation and the subsequent victories of war, another people's story was lost. I came to believe that this coexisting, unspoken, and interwoven tragedy is a critical and destabilizing force in this intractable conflict.
Sixty plus years after the war, I feel it is my personal responsibility as my mother's daughter and as a Jewish American who has grappled with the multiple narratives in this region, to complete the cycle, to listen and document the tragedy that was created by my own people's tragedy. I believe, paraphrasing the words of Edward Said, if a culture does not tell its own narrative, it ceases to exist, it experiences cultural genocide. Jews have learned that lesson well; for myself, I cannot continue to be part of another people's cultural genocide.
With this foundation, the documentary then focuses on the Palestinian history that occurred as a consequence of the founding of the State of Israel, the 1948 Nakba, and the repercussions of that tragedy. Through interviews with Palestinian survivors and their families living primarily in the United States, Voices Across the Divide creates a vivid oral history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as seen through the eyes of the Palestinians and the heart of a Jew. By exploring these stories, the film confronts the commonalities of trauma, loss, yearning, immigration, and the realities of injustice and dispossession, humanizing an often tortured and misunderstood history and raising voices to build a just and lasting peace in Israel and Palestine. The act of the Palestinian telling and the Jew listening is both a powerful moment of shared consciousness, humanity, and ultimately reconciliation on its most personal level.
The documentary is coproduced with Sharon Mullally, an Emmy Award winning independent producer-director and editor whose work regularly appears on local and national public television. Most recently, Sharon produced a series of short videos on peace and social justice for the American Friends Service Committee. Sharon is a founder of extendedPLAY, a non-profit educational media group begun in 1998.
Please visit extendedplay.org for more information.
Contact us at VoicesAcrosstheDivide@riseup.net
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Payments are through extendedPLAY inc.
Visit our page on Grantmakers in Film + Electronic Media
to read about the film and learn more about funding for the project.
Pamela Berger, an art history and film professor at Boston College, is providing consultation and guidance. I am also networking with videographers that have accompanied me on health and human rights delegations to Israel/Palestine as well as a host of activists and Jewish and Arab film makers in the US, Israel, and the West Bank who have offered me relevant historical footage and advice. I am grateful for the photos provided by Zochrot in Tel Aviv and Badil in Bethlehem.
~Alice Rothchild www.alicerothchild.com