Young, Jewish and Silly

I wonder what Jennifer Bleyer's original draft looked like. She seems to be sitting on her hands all throughout this review of a new documentary entitled, Young, Jewish and Left. Like a Michael Moore installment without the production value or camp animation sequence, YJL chronicles the woe-is-me tales of self-described "anarchist" and "radical" Jews who try to keep holy while reconciling their anti-occupation and antiwar politics with all manner of identity theory gobbledygook. I can't tell what's criticism and what's DVD bonus material for P.C.U. in the following extract:

In fact, it seems to be just love that motivates the dozens of young activists featured in Young, Jewish and Left, which functions as a kind of sprawling introduction to the new Jewish lefty scene. Occasional hints of brattiness, moments of condescension, and fuzzily articulated ideas are more than compensated for with humility, heart, and a basic human acknowledgment that we're all in the same boat. ("We" being not just Jews.) The young people depicted here seem to collectively affirm Che Guevara's famous statement that "the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love."

So, good, it begins with love. Then what? For the most part, you get the feeling that this movement (if it can be called a movement) is occupied primarily with opposing Israel, or with queer and transgender issues, or both at once, as in the case of a group called "Faygelehs for a Free Palestine." There are times when it feels like the movie could have narrowed its narrative lens just slightly and been renamed "Young, Jewish and Anti-Occupation" or "Young, Jewish and Queer.

Che Guevara's labor camps are now guided by true feelings of imprisoning Cuban dissidents and homosexuals and AIDS patients, but never you mind that when Faygelehs for Palestine are manning the barricades. Breyer should have heightened the pathos of this whole sodding project. (I don't so much mind the mockery it makes of Judaism as much as I do the one it makes of the Left.) The filmmakers aspire to prove that all politics is not just local, it's solipsistic. Judge for yourself by watching the simpering and self-parodying trailer. (Let's hear more from the Iraqi Jew whose family was expelled by Saddam and who can't quite get her head around the white Zionist imperialism for which the whole of global Jewry is said to stand.)

I'd very much like to know what some beggared Palestinian in the West Bank thinks about about a post-op New York "trans" being shown the door at shul. What's Arabic for "non sequitur"?