Beyond Them and Us: Films About Israeli Arabs

When Carole Zabar planted herself at a folding table this weekend outside Zabar’s, her family’s Upper West Side establishment, it wasn’t to hawk the lox.

She wanted to promote her pet project and consuming passion for the past few years: the Other Israel Film Festival, running Nov. 6 to 13 at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan.

The festival is not to be confused with the 23rd Israel Film Festival, which opens on Wednesday at the Ziegfeld Theater in Manhattan and runs through Nov. 13 at the Clearview Cinema, on Broadway at 62nd Street. Ms. Zabar’s festival, in its second year, focuses specifically on the experience of Israeli Arabs, which makes it somewhat less mainstream and certainly more of a hard sell to its core audience, New York Jews.

So it was not surprising that a man who stopped in front of Zabar’s on Saturday, saying he was a Holocaust survivor, reacted with such hostility to the festival’s concept. “What are you doing this for?” he demanded. “Why do you care about Arabs? You should care about Jews.”

The criticism doesn’t faze Ms. Zabar, a dynamic 66-year-old woman with flaming red hair. She started the festival, she said, because she believed that Israeli Arabs deserved to be better understood.

“I want people to see Israeli Arabs as human beings,” she said. “Not just as human beings — as citizens that contribute to the vibrancy, the cultural life of Israel.”

Because of this emphasis — and to avoid some of the contentiousness that comes with Middle Eastern matters — the festival has avoided overtly political films. Instead it features material reflecting the daily lives of Israeli Arabs, like “Arab Labor,” a series about an Arab journalist working for a Jewish newspaper; “Lady Kul el-Arab,” about a young woman hoping to be the first Druze Miss Israel; and “Bridge Over the Wadi,” which chronicles the first fraught year of a school for Arabs and Jews. All screenings, which are at the J.C.C. at Amsterdam Avenue and 76th Street, and at Cinema Village on East 12th Street, conclude with panel discussions. (A full schedule is at otherisrael.org.)

To form the festival Ms. Zabar collaborated with Mohammad Bakri, an Israeli Arab movie actor and director who has generated his own share of controversy. Mr. Bakri’s film “Jenin, Jenin,” a documentary about the Israeli Army’s retaliatory strike on a West Bank refugee camp where scores of Palestinians and Israelis were killed in 2002, was originally banned by the Israeli film board. In 2004 the High Court of Israel overturned the ban, but called the film a “propagandistic lie.”

Through working on the festival, Mr. Bakri and Ms. Zabar have developed a close friendship; Ms. Zabar has visited him about five times and come to know his whole family.

“He’s given me a window on Arab-Israeli life,” she said.

Mr. Bakri, in turn, stays with Ms. Zabar when he visits New York. “She is a very courageous woman and a great dreamer,” he said in a telephone interview. “God bless her for what she’s doing for nothing, just for her soul.”

Ms. Zabar could be enjoying a more retiring life as the wife of Saul Zabar, who, with his brother Stanley, owns Zabar’s, a New York institution of smoked fish, coffee and cookware. A mother of three, she has already had several careers: photographer, family-court prosecutor (she began law school at 49) and portrait painter. She has run five marathons (one in three hours and 45 minutes). Ms. Zabar, who was educated in Israel, visits there three times a year and speaks Hebrew fluently.

After contributing toward a new elevator for Fordham University’s law school, her alma mater — “Their elevator was so slow, you could plotz,” she said — Ms. Zabar caught the philanthropy bug. In addition to contributing to an elevator at the J.C.C., Ms. Zabar and her husband gave $5 million to the center’s nursery school. This spring the J.C.C. started an Israel Film Center, of which Ms. Zabar is the founder. She hopes eventually to start a production company at the center to develop films by and about Israeli Arabs.

The festival has not been easy for the J.C.C. Some of its pro-Israel constituents chafe at the notion of a festival devoted to the Arab experience. Rabbi Joy Levitt, the J.C.C.’s executive director, has received phone calls and e-mail messages from various members asking, “Why are we doing this?”

Rabbi Levitt said that part of the J.C.C.’s mission is a commitment to everyone living in Israel. “If 25 percent of the population of Israel is not known to American Jews, then we’re missing something,” she said.

“The point is not, will everybody agree with these films,” she added. “The point is, will people grow from their experience?”

Meir Fenigstein, the executive director and founder of the Israel Film Festival, said the two festivals should appeal to different audiences, given that the J.C.C.’s lineup this year mostly comprises documentaries. Although he did not seem thrilled with the overlap, Mr. Fenigstein said his ticket sales should not be hurt.

Ultimately, Ms. Zabar said she most wanted to change the attitude among many Jews that Arabs are “the enemy, that they want to push the Jews into the sea.”

“They see Israeli Arabs as a threat,” she said. “When you see somebody as a threat, you stop seeing them. All you think about is defending yourself.”