Circumcise Me
Directors: David Blumenthal & Matthew Kalman
United States, 2007
English & Yiddish w/subtitles
Comedian Yisrael Campbell has acquired a hard-earned piece of knowledge he’d like to share with you. That business about the first cut being the deepest? Don’t believe it.
A convert to Judaism — not once, but three times — Campbell was required to go under the knife even though he’d been circumcised as an infant. The bris, in case you couldn’t read the fine print on the covenant when you were six days old, is a religious ritual, not a medical procedure.
In the affectionate and vastly entertaining Circumcise Me, the 40-something performer wrings maximum comic mileage out of his long, strange trip from Philadelphia Catholic Christopher Campbell to Los Angeles Jewish newbie to Jerusalem frummie Yisrael Campbell.
David Blumenfeld and Matthew Kalman’s 44-minute all-meat, no-filler documentary screens in the Seattle Jewish Film Festival on Sun., April 26.
The filmmakers employ a generally bare-bones structure, intercutting Campbell’s excited English-language standup routine in small Jerusalem clubs with a calm, thoughtful offstage interview. The portrait that emerges is of a much smarter, better-grounded and far less damaged individual than the stereotypical alcoholic and drug user who achieved sobriety by putting his faith in a power bigger than himself.
Campbell, to his credit, is not a moralizer or a preacher using his troubled past to steer wayward souls to God. His standup routine is charmingly self-deprecating, infused with amazement and gratitude that his life has taken its utterly unpredictable route to the Holy Land.
Bemusement is Campbell’s stock in trade, a trait we identify with such fervent Jews as the Baal Shem Tov but not so much with today’s ultra-Orthodox of Mea Shearim. But Circumcise Me never probes whether Campbell has a dispensation from his rabbi to perform in public — in places where alcohol is served, no less — or if he catches heat from other members of his community.
Likewise, neither the film nor its subject engage in a serious discussion of Jewish identity, and the narrow definition of a Jew adopted and applied by the Orthodox rabbinate in Israel. Instead, Campbell assumes the persona of an outsider to highlight the absurdist humor in Jewish dogma — the notion of lighting the Hanukkah candle for the current day first, out of compassion for its “nervousness” — as well as the poignant experience of being a member of a community that cries when it’s sad, is silent when it’s sadder and sings when it is despairing.
Campbell, who made aliyah in 2000, describes his large outdoor wedding in Jerusalem a few years later at the height of the second intifada and amidst a wave of suicide bombings. During one of his conversion ceremonies in America, he had necessarily answered in the affirmative that he was throwing his lot in with the Jewish people, not quite knowing what that meant. Only at the height of his nuptial festivities, dancing and celebrating in the face of danger, did he get it — and embrace it.
Its bittersweet moments give Circumcise Me a welcome aura of gravitas. But the movie recognizes that its drawing card is sidesplitting hilarity courtesy of a most unlikely humorist, and makes the most of it.