Keep Not Silent

According to Jewish law, you don't talk about sex because anything powerful enough to bring another soul into the world should be an intensely private matter. Despite this stricture, filmmaker Ilil Alexander's Keep Not Silent--winner of an Israeli Oscar for Best Documentary--serves up a bold, compassionate, and emotionally revealing portrait of three religiously committed lesbians living within the traditional Jewish orthodox community. Miriam-Ester, a wife and mother of 10 who has struggled for 20 years with her love for women, is deeply afraid of exposure and the effect it would have on her children and therefore insists on anonymity (we see the director communicating with a visually distorted image of Miriam-Ester on a videophone). Ruth, a mother of six who also declined to appear on camera, became severely depressed after her fourth child and is now finally separated from her husband, whereas Yudit, a single woman and daughter of a rabbi, openly discusses her life and plans to marry her partner, facing censure from both her family and her community. Of particular interest is Yudit's courageous conversation with her rabbi about how to reconcile honesty, sexual identity, and self-realization with respect to Jewish law, while his counsel to her is to give up her lesbianism, even at the cost of personal love, because--according to his somewhat specious reasoning--only an abusive God would have created people with tendencies they could not overcome. By contrast, Miriam-Ester's rabbi tacitly grants permission to have sex with women as long as her marriage doesn't end--because, after all, the Torah is clear that everyone should have love in their life. An intellectually and emotionally rich exploration of alternative lifestyles in a conventional religious society, this is highly recommended. Aud: C, P. (A. Cantú)