The Ruins of Lifta

In an earlier documentary called Hiding and Seeking (VL-3/05) that Menachem Daum made with filmmaker Oren Rudavsky, the Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn took his sons to Poland to track down the elderly gentile couple who had saved their grandfather from the Nazis. Daum continues his crusade for mutual understanding in this equally powerful follow-up by the duo, which centers on the ruins of the Arab village Lifta—located on the outskirts of Jerusalem—that was depopulated during the 1948 war, and now offers the only remaining evidence of the previous Palestinian presence in the area. Daum interviews Yacoub Odeh, a gentlemanly Palestinian among those evicted from Lifta, who now leads a group protesting a plan to bulldoze Lifta and build luxury homes. Odeh's glowing reminiscences about Lifta—a place where Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived in amity—are contrasted with the recollections of Jews who argue it was a center of resistance that heroic Zionists (including Daum's own uncle) helped clear of dangerous fighters, highlighting the chasm that separates Jewish and Palestinian conceptions of their mutual history. Daum tries to bridge the gap by bringing Odeh together with Holocaust survivor Dasha Rittenberg for a walk through the ruins, but as that visit and Daum's interviews with other Jews and Palestinians demonstrate, the opposing positions are so hardened that altering them even slightly is difficult (Daum is occasionally dismissed as either misguided or naïve for even attempting to do so). In the end, however, these kinds of small but stubborn efforts still offer a chance of inching towards a solution to what seems intractable hostility in the Middle East. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)