Pier Marton's Documentary On The Issue of Jewish Identity for Second Generation Europeans

— It is vital to be who we are, no matter how scary, and then, to move on and be others too – again, no matter how scary. P.M. —

The most remarkable achievement…
Individual identity, individual healing, individual transcendence are his subjects. It deserves a much wider audience.
John Russell, chief art critic at the New York Times
(& a critic for more than a half-century at the Sunday Times of London)

ELIE WIESEL – Nobel Peace Prize recipient
I am moved by what you are doing, I hope your video will reach many viewers. I hope it will bring them closer to a world they could never enter.

PLEASE SEE ALSO
PIER MARTON AND THE SHOAH
&
JEW
After being integrated into the video installation JEW at the Spertus Museum in Chicago and the Judah Magnes Museum in the Bay Area, it toured the U.S. in the context of the exhibit Witness and Legacy. That installation was acquired by the Florida Holocaust Museum.

Its European premiere was at the Berlin Film Festival, alongside Lanzmann’s Shoah premiere, and later was screened at the New York Museum of Modem Art and the Jewish Museum.
Besides the many U.S. cities/museums, Say I’m a Jew has played as well as in Aarhus/Denmark, in Budapest/Hungary (Mondjuk Hogy Zsidó Vagyok) – followed by a discussion between PM and the sociologist András Kovács from CEU (Central European University) & an interview in Szombat, Budapest – and on International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2019, in Warswaw/Poland (Mowim Ze Jestem Zydem).
Since 2014, it has been part of the Mémorial de la Shoah collection in Paris.
It has also played at a Conference in Alternatives in Jewish Education (CAJE), and at various Hillel, Jewish Community Centers and Media Centers across the U.S.
It is distributed by Facets Multimedia & Electronic Arts Intermix. Please let me know if you would like to preview the piece.

A powerful, short documentary film Say I’m a Jew… collaged interviews with men and women who, like Marton, are children of European survivors now living in the United States. Those who speak on Marton’s video describe their struggle of carrying the legacy and their rejection and acceptance of their Jewish heritage. The chorus of different voices says things that are hard to say and hard to hear.
Yehudit Shendar, Senior Art Curator at Yad Vashem, Israel

Pier Marton’s videotape, is a litany of faces and voices of European Jews transplanted to America, intensely revealing of the Jewish experience since World War II. This chorus of voices is the post-holocaust generation, born between 1946 and 1957, who inherited the legacy of terror which their parents somehow survived. The difficult confessions are not only of the cruelties suffered, but of the most painful feelings of anger, contempt and shame turned inward and often resulting in self-hatred and alienation. In this series of statements which seem to break a long silence…the theme which surfaces again and again, is the rejection of one’s Jewishness because that identity is associated with persecution.
Gary Reynolds, Changing Channels, 1985

Much of Martin Buber’s work revolves around the principle that all life is encounter.
Another Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Lévinas, refines this interaction by stating that the meeting with a face implies a distinct responsibility.
In the field of documentary, many filmmakers aim to avoid the so-called “boring talking-heads interviews” and make use of abundant “cutaways.”
For me, the topic in question warrants a different approach; I wanted neither to distract nor to entertain.
By refusing the technique of cutaways, and insisting on and exploring faces, I was hoping for a memorable face-to-face engagement.
–––––––
The space between the television screen and whoever happens to be receiving it, I consider that very holy ground. A lot happens there.
— Fred “Mr. Rogers“

Pier Marton – an early description

One way to describe Say I’m a Jew is to say that it progresses from a “memory” of the Holocaust and early self-denial experiences to a manifesto-like affirmation of Jewish identity.

Another way is to state its intention to stand at the crossroads of various tendencies:

1. The position taken by the noted (non-Jewish) Italian painter, Giorgio de Chirico who, in his memoirs published in 1945, asserts that Antisemitism will end only when the Jews stop hiding and assuming the attitudes of whipped dogs and will say in a loud voice and to everyone’s face ‘I am a Jew and I am proud of it’.

2. The belief expressed first in the context of the Black Liberation struggle that “A culture that takes time off to refurbish itself produces a personality without a purpose. There is no point in finding out who I am if I do not know what to do with that knowledge,”* and later, by the Jewish Feminist writer, Jenny Bourne:** What we do is who we are.

* A Sivanandan, “Culture and Identity” in Liberator. June 1970.
**Jenny Bourne in Race & Class, Summer 1987

One of its many screenings took place in 1998 at the University of Southern California (USC) in the context of the opening of the Institute for Study of Jews in American Life:

The institute’s inaugural public event, a special screening of Pier Marton’s documentary “Say I’m a Jew,” is planned for Thursday, Oct. 22, at 7 p.m. in Room 108 of the George Lucas Instructional Building.
“Say I’m a Jew” explores identity issues confronting the children of Holocaust survivors, both in Europe and the United States.
After the screening, cultural historian Sander L. Gilman, the University of Chicago’s Henry R. Luce Professor of Liberal Arts in Human Biology, will discuss the film and its implications. Gilman is the author or editor of more than 50 books.
The institute’s first academic conference, “Eye & Thou: Jewish Autobiography in Film and Video,” exploring contemporary issues of American Jewish identity, will be held Oct. 24-26 in the Norris Cinema Theatre.