(no subject)

[seekingferret]

Love, Lights, Hanukkah

This year's Hallmark 'Hanukkah' movie was worlds better than last year's efforts. It wasn't a Christmas movie in which a Jew learned the beauty of Christmas. It actually took Chanukah and Jewish culture seriously. That said, there were still some issues.


The premise of the film is that Cristina is an Italian-American restaurant owner (Mia Kirschner, and I had a little trouble with her being so different from Jenny from the L Word) who discovers that her birth mother is Jewish- she was nineteen when she got unexpectedly pregnant and gave up her daughter for adoption. Over the course of the film she meets and gets to know her birth mother's family, including a half-brother and half-sister, and struggles with feeling like she's betraying her dead adoptive mother by doing so. Also she has a romance with Cory from Boy Meets World. But it was one of those lovely romances where the family story is more important than the romance story. Hallmark is good at those, and this one worked.

The best part of the movie was the half-brother's string of terrible latke puns, which included the whole enchi-latke and the choco-latke. Nothing gave me more joy in the movie than that.

The second best part of the movie was a public menorah lighting scene set to the Leslie Odom "Ma'oz Tzur" I linked the other day. It was beautiful music and the scene did a great job of highlighting the best parts of Chanukah as an American Jewish holiday.



I was a bit uncomfortable, though, with an "I got a DNA test telling me I'm 50% Jewish, guess I'd better go out and learn how to celebrate Hanukkah!" line early in the movie. The relationship between blood tests and Jewish identity is and ought to be minimal if not nonexistent, and having a movie make a thing out of it made me anxious.


Also Jews did not dance in the movie.

Comments

[oracne]

No dancing! What?!

[lirazel]

My reaction exactly!

I'm glad the film worked better than past ones.

[snippy]

I mean...what kind of dna is "Jewish"? And "You're 50% Jewish and 50% Italian" seems like a really unlikely dna result.

[rosefox]

I know someone who did 23 and Me and was informed she was 50% Ashkenazi Jewish, which is how she learned she was the result of her mother having an affair (a classic boss/secretary fling). She was in her 50s at the time, both her biological father and her non-biological father were deceased, her mother only divulged her biological father's name with great reluctance, and when she reached out to his family, they were horrified to learn that their beloved patriarch was a philanderer and couldn't overcome their distress enough to really treat her as family. The premise of this movie doesn't bother me on the "can DNA tests tell you that you have Jewish DNA" front, but I think it's wildly far out on the "what happens when you contact your newly discovered biological family" front.

[snippy]

Oh, I totally buy the "newly-found family" bit because it happened in my family. My oldest brother was given up for adoption before our mother even met my father, but she always told us about him. He showed up and was welcomed by all, and is still part of the family 16 years later.

[rosefox]

I'm glad that worked out so well for you!

[seekingferret]

I'm willing to forgive some simplification of the results for the sake of less complicated TV, but I'm not willing to forgive the idea that Jewishness is something that can be reduced to blood signifiers.