Description of The Jews Drawer: Young Jews in Germany

“I am Jewish and as far as I'm concerned everyone should know it, but if somebody doesn't, that's fine, too. I am a Jew, but I don't agree with Sharon's politics, my father doesn't wear a black caftan, and I don't hold my friends (who are my age) accountable for the Holocaust.” --that's what a young slightly cocky voice says offstage, while the camera focuses in on Berlin writer, Lena Gorelik amidst pulsating big city turmoil. A perfectly fitting entry point for the Freiburg documentary “Die Judenschublade- Junge Juden in Deutschland”, a film about young Jews in Germany, that recently premiered with some political prominence in two theaters of the Friedrichsbau cinema. For over a year filmmakers Margarethe Mehring-Fuchs and Stephan Laur went from city to city and brought an array of young Jews to speak before the cameras with natural frankness in a manner that opens any filmgoer's heart and ears for over an hour. For this follow-up to the filmmakers' earlier films “Rap and Ramadan” and “Foreign Love” did not become a brittle documentary. Despite its enormous potential for providing information, the film operates with light-footed drive and reveals an iridescent quick-living world of both differences and similarities. With fast cuts and a soundtrack produced by Ro Kuipers with some of the protagonists themselves both practicing and non-practicing Jewish youth are portrayed in their every day life, sometimes with friends lounging on the sofa, sometimes with their immediate family or hanging out at a dance club--totally normal at a party, but wearing a Star of David. But what all these young people have in common is their intense examination of what it means to them to be Jewish. What do belief, tradition and culture mean in everyday life? How does one come to terms with anti-Semitism, Israel and the Shah? And what's it like living as a third-generation Jew in the land of the Holocaust? “I want to just go to a party like a normal person wearing a chain with the Star of David” says 17-year old Dimitry from Freiburg, who is shown later in the film sat his Ju Jitsu class and in a witty discussion with his girlfriend about Christmas. Overall, the film goes back and forth between being light-hearted and serious. It features Jewish rap music, that is sensitively tied into a range of scenes, including segments showing the training of a Rabbi in Potsdam or the Holocaust Remembrance Day being celebrated at a Berlin High School . Several groups that engage in a fight against racism & xenophobia (Entimon Berlin, the Youth Charity Baden-Württemberg and the Landeszentrale für politische Bildung NRW , and the City of Freiburg with its campaign „Für eine offene Stadt“ [“For an Open City”] have shown support for the film. One can only hope for a broad resonance in schools and movie theaters in other regions, as well. The film has been on tour throughout Germany since March 2006 and it has been invited to the US (Ann Arbor and Boston), to Israel and to Australia.