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per liv's request, some thoughts on the making of "Jews Don't Dance in this Fanvid"

"Jews Don't Dance in this Fanvid" has multiple converging origin stories.

I think the most significant might be that my favorite Jewish movie is the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man, and Jews don't dance in that movie, and it always felt like a hole in my Jews dancing vids that they didn't include A Serious Man. I know I've written several times that I've started to feel that movies that feature Jewish dancing tend to feel more authentically Jewish than films that don't. Not that every movie that had Jews dancing was a satisfying representation of Jewish life, but moreso that if there were two movies and both featured Jewish weddings, but one only showed the ceremony and the other showed the dancing, then the one with the dancing would usually be the one that overall had done a better job of telling a story about Jewish identity, because it recognized that the dancing was not just a fun thing to do but an actual and necessary part of the wedding ritual. But A Serious Man was a glaring exception- the whole movie leads up to a Bar Mitzvah, a beautiful representation of what it feels like to go through the ritual, and then no dancing. And I've wanted for years to find a way to work A Serious Man into a vid that showed how beautiful its representation of Jewish life is. Mostly that effort has been concentrated in trying to specifically make an A Serious Man vid- in the past year I've auditioned a few dozen songs and have partial timelines for three different vids, none of which have quite worked out. Someday.

A second stream was Grey's Anatomy, which introduced Dr. Levi Schmitt a few years ago and has given him lovely movements of exploring what Jewish ritual meant to him- an episode where he serves as a shomer for his dead uncle and in the process of performing that ritual learns new and unexpected things about him is a beautiful example. In this latest season he arranges an in-hospital Bar Mitzvah for a surgery patient and it was such a viddable sequence I wanted to do something with it.

But the third stream is all the conversation I've had over the years with so many of you about what the Jews dancing vids mean and how they worked for people. I'm incredibly proud of both Warning: Might Lead to Mixed Dancing and the Sequel and I'm proud of how they represent Judaism as a diverse and complicated set of communities, but I also have started to see the lacks and the shortages in the vid in terms of how we Jews experience Judaism. For some Jews, Judaism is just about dancing. But for many of us, it's about so much more than just dancing. Religion matters, faith community matters, and I wanted to find a way to say that that was important even if it excludes some kinds of Jews. I wanted to make a less inclusive Jewish vid, because my religion is exclusive and that is not entirely a bad thing.

I had some nice exchanges with kass about this. kass's faith community has a lot of overlap with mine, but also a lot of difference, and I was uncertain to some degree if I wanted to exclude some of her experiences from the vid or not. Or maybe to be put more clearly, should this be a vid about Orthodox Jewish ritual, or about Jewish ritual more broadly? kass is so smart and warm and generous, so I think our conversations ultimately led to me making some effort to make sure she felt included by the vid, but I want to mention it because I want to make it clear that it was a thing I debated. Scope was such a much more fraught topic in making this vid, compared to the Jews dancing vids, because this vid was so emotionally close to my heart it was practically bleeding. My father always says that Jews don't make denominations, Rabbis make denominations, and if you got rid of the Rabbis you'd just have Jews. ;) Ultimately I think that was the concluding influence on how I approached who I chose to include and exclude. I wanted to show Jews doing Judaism. As simple and as complicated as that.

I had some different, equally useful conversations about scope with bironic. I was feeling out the edges of whether this is a happy vid about warm happy communities or if it had room for grief and sadness and conflict, and ultimately I decided that part of the joy of Jewish community is the sadness, and part of the joy comes in confrontation. Hadvash and ha'oketz. The funeral sequence was not the last edits to the vid, but it was the last section to get added to the vid as a section, and that was in direct response to bironic saying she wasn't sure I should be showing these sadder or angrier moments and me going NO, MORE SADNESS NEEDED. Not to criticize bironic at all- sometimes the best beta feedback is feedback that helps to negatively clarify what your vid isn't doing right yet. Again, this vid was so close to my heart it was bleeding..


Maybe it's worth a brief review of the different sequences in the vid and what they mean to me. The vid opens with bentsching licht, primarily for Shabbat but also for Chagim and for Chanukah. This felt like the natural starting point, lighting candles is how we start and end most Jewish holidays. I did think about starting with an entering a room kissing a mezuzah shot, but the candles felt more right. From there I move to a passage introducing the ideas the lyrics are introducing, of Jews living together as brothers. Images of Jews gathering together for ritual observances of different sorts. Gathering, learning Torah together, eating together. Eating together coalesces specifically into spending holiday meals together- there's a decent length sequence of Passover meals and one of my favorite cuts in the vid is from the orange on the seder plate to the egg on the seder plate. Then I have some latke eating. Somewhere in there is a purim shpiel. Then I segue to the start of a synagogue sequence. Bar Mitzvahs, Shabbat services, weekday davening, as the music intensifies. I was trying to suggest finding both a connection to God and a connection to other Jews, but it was important to me to show the synagogue as a site of both connection and conflict. Women struggling to find a place in the shul, people coming to shul to talk to God about their grief, or their feeling of disconnection, or their uncertainty. Coming in conversation with the divine is an awesome, powerful thing. People doing it have to pay certain prices, but also reap immense benefits. From the synagogue sequence I transition back to different kinds of Jews gathering for different ritual purposes, wrapping up with a section of Jewish mourning rituals- both the ones that give us space to feel our aloneness and the ones that bring us back to our community- before the final conclusion. When talking to lirazel about this I said that my struggle was in balancing the vid's two spheres of ritual activity- the bayis and the beis k'neses. I tried to show both of those at their biggest and most meaningful. There's a sort of hidden image in this passage, lurking underneath fleeing Anatevka on Yentl's boat to America... the image is Moses gathering the Jewish people in the Ten Commandments. It was in many of my drafts before I took it out because it wasn't entirely landing for everyone, but I still sort of think it's there, because so much of this vid is in one way or another about how Jewish ritual recapitulates the Bible, how Jews remain in touch with our history. I end with Danny Saunders saying goodbye to Reuven and leaving the room with a kiss of a mezuza, an appropriate Jewish ritual of leavetaking.

There is a famous Gemara prescribing the specific way in which a Jew is supposed to tie their shoes- the order of feet and so on. I don't think a lot of Jews actually follow this practice strictly, but it's famous because it cartoonishly captures a significant Jewish approach to ritual- ritual is a thing that is supposed to affect every moment of how we live our lives. There is a correct Jewish way to enter and leave a room. There is a correct Jewish way to eat an apple. There is a correct Jewish way to witness a thunderstorm. I wanted to gesture to the deepness of that practice, how if you animate these actions with spiritual meaning they will mean more than simply tying your shoes as a means to an end.


One of the things in the vid I have mixed feelings about is my use of a lot of Hallmark movie content. I don't love these movies, but I have a lot of feelings about them. I think they are on the shallower side compared to deeper representations of ritual in other movies I use, and they are full of goofs like lighting the chanukiah backwards or lighting when it's still light out. But I think sorting out my feelings about Hallmark Jewish movies was a fourth stream leading into making this vid, and so they are there because my feelings about them are unsettled and I wanted to work through some of that.

I think ultimately my sense of these movies is that they are in fact deeply interested in ritual, they're just not so practiced at making that feel specifically Jewish. So they fit in nicely, there's a filmic sense of curiosity about how traditions work and how they fit into peoples' lives, and then since they are romances, how new people can be fitted into old traditions. This is a thing I am thinking about a bunch lately, so even though these movies themselves do not fit as deeply into my heart as A Serious Man or Crossing Delancey, the rituals they depict ended up hitting me, in context of the vid, with a similar power. While making my bicycles vid, I had a conversation with frayadjacent about the way multifandom vids can be 'best bits' vids for shows where you don't have to feel obligated to acknowledge the parts that aren't interesting to vid. I feel like the best bits versions of these Hallmark movies are more than the sum of their parts here.


Lastly, I want to talk about the fact that I almost didn't post this at all. This vid is so emotionally important to me, and it was hitting similarly notes for the Jewish fans I was privately sharing it with, and I wasn't sure if I was willing to share it with non-Jewish fans who wouldn't have the same emotional reactions to it. I specifically decided that I didn't want to premiere it at a con, because to me it's making a somewhat evangelical argument that didn't seem fair to share with an unwilling audience. But even for a willing audience I wasn't sure. Maybe I could just have this be a vid I would continue to share privately with people I was comfortable with, and never make it publicly available. I've got a few fanworks where that was the choice I made, it wouldn't be the first time. But I shared it with sanguinity and her take was that it felt like a sort of invitation to be a guest to these experiences, and I decided I was comfortable with that.