Re/Pair
(USA, 101 min.)
Dir. Lacey Schwartz Delgado
Prod. Jon Kamen, Tamara Rosenberg, Martin Silver, Constance Silver, Jason Gutman, Lacey Schwartz Delgado
Programme: TIFF Docs (World premiere)
The 20th century was marked by a massive shift in American culture, with many rights organizations pushing for progress. The civil rights movement, shepherded by activists like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is the most celebrated effort, with historic marches and speeches resonating today. Of the many who stood shoulder to shoulder with Dr. King, arms interlocked, was Abraham Herschel, a Polish born rabbi whose own Abrahamic faith devoted to overcoming the bonds of suffering echoed the preaching of King’s Christian faith.
Throughout this period of the movement, American Jewry and Black leaders often were closely intertwined against the hostilities emanating from both individuals and institutions. However, over the decades that followed, there’s been a growing hostility between the groups, fostered by changing political landscapes, but also due to attempts to pit minority groups against each other.
Lacey Schwartz Delgado’s powerful film attempts a form of corrective. Re/Pair seeks in its own way to show a path to mending the divide between Blacks and Jews through direct conversation. Through a series of paired interviews, the film forms the basis for an intense dialogue, unafraid to dig into the real issues that confront each community while allowing for respectful yet forceful discussion.
Some of the pairs, such as W. Kamau Bell and Adam Mansbach, have a history sharing a stage together. Others, like Van Jones (one of the film’s executive producers) and Batya Ungar-Sargon, have engaged in many such discussions both on television and in other forums. Harry Lennix and David Schwimmer, two actors, share a history on stage together as former classmates in Northwestern University’s drama programme, here reunited with the benefits of decades of friendship. They now have newly minted divides due to current political and social events affecting both communities to which they belong.
Re/Pair wisely leans into those who don’t so clearly bifurcate into Jew or Black. Those of mixed parentage–one Jewish, one Black–speak to their own experiences with prejudices and presuppositions imposed upon them even by members of their own tribes. Then there are those such as Ashley Jackson, daughter of civil rights leader Reverend Jesse Jackson, whose presidential campaign faltered when his “Hymietown” remarks referring to New York became public. Ashley’s own conversion to Judaism illustrates how connections can be fostered, and histories rewritten, as do photos of her father at a pro-Israel, post-October 7th rally in support of his daughter’s convictions, as well as the historic photo by Joseph Louw shot moments afterDr. King’s murder.
There’s nothing fatuous about these conversations, and there’s nothing about Schwartz Delgado’s film that leads to the belief that through some Kumbaya handholding the divides are easily healed. However, the film provides a powerful exemplar about how these very wounds can be healed, about how there’s more connecting these two communities than what tears them apart. Above all, it’s illustrative that the poisonous chants evoking replacement theory (the notion that Jews are illicitly responsible for the diversification of America through financial corruption and nefarious immigration policy) are the mainstream culture attacking both Jew and Black alike, a shared force of evil far more insidious than any divide between these historically oppressed groups.
At a time when online discourse is so rancid, and the difficult process of navigating nuance is driven out algorithmically in favour of immediate rage, Re/Pair serves as a different path, one where listening is as important as talking, where genuinely difficult differences are confronted in all their fulsomeness rather than simply taken superficially. An exceptional exercise in empathy, Lacey Schwartz Delgado and her collaborators have crafted a film of great importance and impact, one that demands to be experienced not simply by members of the communities represented, but by everyone who has a stake in working towards a more just, kind, and collegiate society.
