What Became of Due Process in Campus Assault Cases?

The nightmare: You are a male undergraduate. A female friend accuses you of violently raping her on a bed in your living room. Your university charges you with sexual assault. You acknowledge that you slept for less than an hour on the bed where the woman was already sleeping.

You figure the matter will be easily resolved, since your girlfriend and another friend were sitting nearby the entire time, and both will testify that there was no rape, no physical contact and you were both asleep the whole time.

You figured wrong.

The bedrock of individual liberty in this country is that the government cannot deprive us of life, liberty or property without “due process of law.” If we’re charged with a crime, the government must provide us with notice of the charges and with a fair trial in which we are presumed innocent.

Since the law applies to all government entities, students at public universities enjoy due-process protections in disciplinary procedures. Several years ago, rumors of a “rape culture” on American campuses gained momentum. Terms such as “rape” and “sexual assault” were used interchangeably, often without concrete definitions. Unreliable statistics purported to demonstrate that a female college student had about a 1 in 5 likelihood (or greater) of being sexually assaulted at school.

Enter the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which enforces Title IX and has over the years aggressively tried to address this alleged epidemic of sexual assault. On April 4, 2011, it issued a “Dear Colleague Letter,” which created a new scheme for adjudicating accusations of campus sexual assault. It said schools would lose federal funding if they didn’t prosecute such accusations aggressively.

OCR also required schools to adjudicate these cases using the standard of “preponderance of the evidence” for finding guilt — the most minimal evidentiary standard in use, in contrast with the standard of guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Faced with these requirements, schools had every incentive to impose a presumption of guilt upon male students accused of sexual misconduct. Many schools came to regard accused male students as collateral damage in their efforts to prove to OCR their toughness in prosecuting such accusations.

In 2014, the White House further pressured campuses by creating a task force on the issue. Its first report noted that schools were testing new adjudicative protocols in order to hold “offenders accountable.” The report also accorded students making accusations of sexual assault the status of “survivors” and labeled the accused as “offenders.” This introduced a presumption of guilt fundamentally at odds with basic notions of due process.

Not surprisingly, the change led to litigation by male students whose reputations and futures were irreparably damaged by campus kangaroo courts that discarded basic features of a fair hearing in order to achieve convictions.

“Rape” and “sexual assault” began to be used interchangeably, often without concrete definitions.

Back to the nightmare — a real case I’m handling. At the accused student’s disciplinary hearing the university withheld critical evidence from him until the night before his hearing but let a campus police officer testify about the withheld evidence. In doing so, and in other crucial respects, it dispensed with the formal rules of evidence to support the accuser’s claim, while applying them to hamper the defense. Finally, it reached findings that contradicted the evidence and disregarded the testimony from the two eyewitnesses that no assault had occurred. The student was found guilty and suspended for two years. His case currently is in litigation.

OCR, under the Trump administration, recently rescinded the 2011 Dear Colleague Letter, saying it had placed “improper pressure upon universities to adopt procedures that do not afford fundamental fairness,” and that many schools had adopted procedures that “lack the most basic elements of fairness and due process,” which “led to the deprivation of rights for many students.”

The important goals of eliminating campus sexual assaults and protecting the due process rights of accused students are not mutually exclusive. Both the victims of such crimes and the accused benefit when due process is guaranteed. Hopefully, the new OCR rules will restore due process to hearings that have lacked the fundamental fairness to which students are entitled.

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Arthur I. Willner is a civil trial attorney and a partner in the L.A.  office of Leader & Berkon LLP.

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Trump Tramples on Rights and Religious Liberty

I’m worried about our right to religious liberty; about it being used as an excuse for discrimination; about conservative, Christian beliefs being given special treatment by our government; and about our right to religious liberty suffering long-term damage because it’s been cheapened and made partisan by extreme claims.

Some may be surprised to hear that from me. Conservatives have painted me as a secular warrior against religious liberty fighting only for reproductive justice, but I’m a person of faith and the daughter of a pastor. I’m active in the Jewish community and recently traveled to Israel to tour holy sights. Back in 2012, I did testify before members of Congress and took on Rush Limbaugh over insurance covering birth control for women at religiously affiliated organizations. Those who wished to deny insurance coverage claimed that religious liberty required they be allowed to interfere in women’s access to reproductive health care.

I don’t agree. Their interpretation of religious liberty goes much further than the constitutional framers intended, upsetting a balance between competing individual liberties: the right to practice one’s religion and the right to be free of another’s religion. That balance has been a defining characteristic of our democracy, and one that we should hold dear. It also is particularly important to the Jewish community, Muslims, Buddhists and others who don’t practice the dominant Christian religion.

Allowing claims of religious liberty that are so extreme has made it a partisan issue for our country, which is a sad  day indeed.

That’s why it’s especially upsetting to see the damage being done by the Trump administration. Not only is this administration using religious liberty for conservative Christian beliefs as a justification to trample the rights of women and LGBTQ persons, but in the process it is undermining our nation’s long respect for religious liberty. Allowing claims of religious liberty that are so extreme has made it a partisan issue for our country, which is a sad day indeed.

Recently, the Trump administration issued regulations that allow any company, including for-profit, publicly traded Fortune 500 corporations, to exclude birth control from health-care plans if the company has a religious objection. Surely, we can agree that we have lost our appropriate balance when we’re more concerned with the religious beliefs of Chevron than with the woman who works there and can’t get the medical coverage she needs.

The Justice Department also directed that federal agencies should accommodate religious objections. A homophobic federal employee need only say that religion is why he won’t process the Social Security benefits of a same-sex spouse. This policy indicates a striking lack of understanding of this country’s history of discrimination. For decades, racists claimed God’s will required segregation and criminalization of interracial marriage. We are not so far from that past.

The Trump administration continues down the slippery slope and now has argued that not only do Fortune 500 companies have a religion, but the federal government has a religiously informed “conscience,” which should supersede the constitutionally protected right of a detained immigrant to access an abortion. Thankfully, the D.C. Court of Appeals put a stop to that argument. There is nothing more personal than a woman’s decisions about her own body. She must be able to make those in accord with her own beliefs, not a different religious belief imposed on her by her government.

This concern about a government-sponsored religion being imposed on those of a minority faith is the exact reason that our forebears fled their homelands to establish a country with freedom of, and from, religion. Whether women, LGBTQ persons or people of color are being discriminated against in the name of religion or having religious doctrine imposed on their life choices by their boss or by the government, we all must stand together for our tradition of religious liberty, not the Trump administration’s vision of religious domination. n

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Sandra Fluke is a Los Angeles social justice attorney and the state director for an advocacy nonprofit. She is a graduate of the Georgetown University Law Center and a former candidate for California State Senate.

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Diversity in Pro-Life Movement is Richer Than Ever

Two days after the Jan. 22, 1973, Roe v. Wade decision was handed down by the Supreme Court, the editorial page of The New York Times — pro-abortion then, even more pro-abortion now — announced the 7-2 decision “could bring to an end the emotional and divisive public argument” and “will end the argument if those who are now inveighing against the decision as a threat to civilization’s survival will pause long enough to recognize the limits of what the Court has done.”

That gross misstatement established the template that still exists in large measure: Pretend that Justice Harry Blackmun’s decision hadn’t gutted the abortion laws of all 50 states, some very protective, others virtually allowing abortion on-demand well into the second trimester. And because the abortion regime established nearly 45 years ago was — and is — so wildly out of sync with public opinion, its foundations remain inherently unstable.

The irony is that even “pro-choice” scholars knew how slipshod Blackmun’s opinion was. In 2005, for example, Benjamin Wittes wrote, “In the years since the decision an enormous body of academic literature has tried to put the right to an abortion on firmer legal ground. But thousands of pages of scholarship notwithstanding, the right to abortion remains constitutionally shaky. … [Roe] is a lousy opinion that disenfranchised millions of conservatives on an issue about which they care deeply.”

Irony Number 2: In its earliest years the pro-life movement was filled with liberal Democrats. A commitment to protecting the vulnerable and the powerless was the reason I once was up to my elbows in Democratic Party politics. Alas, when adherence to abortion on-demand became a litmus test, virtually all liberal Democrats chose party over principle.

But the movement’s diversity is richer than ever — everything from nonsectarian organizations such as the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) to Feminists for Life to Secular Pro-Life. That is the genius of the pro-life cause: You can oppose killing unborn babies — including those capable of experiencing horrific pain as they are torn limb from limb — for a host of reasons. Pigeonholing the pro-life movement as “right-wing” or Christian-only will never end; it will just be even more foolish.

In its earliest years the pro-life movement was filled with liberal Democrats.

Science and technology, and even television commercials, have made the job of persuasion infinitely easier. When my wife was pregnant, I had to pretend I could make out what I saw on the ultrasound. Nowadays, like hundreds of millions of grandparents, when we went to the obstetrician, we could see our grandkids in four-color “real time,” meaning you could see them running all over the place. The facial features were distinct, not blurs, and no one had to help me figure out (literally) heads from tails.

The debate in the 1990s over partial-birth abortions changed the trajectory of the abortion debate. Pro-lifers are convinced the oncoming debate over banning the abortions of pain-capable children will have no less an impact. There already is overwhelming public support for just such a law.

NRLC believes this will help reveal a truth buried for decades: A majority of Americans oppose — and always have — the reasons 90-95 percent of all abortions are performed.

All this support when the mainstream media is so hostile to our cause that they didn’t have to even feign indifference to the trial of an abortionist convicted of three counts of first-degree murder for aborting late-term babies alive and then murdering them by slicing their spinal cords. Where would public opinion be if people understood that West Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell is no outlier? That he is the real face of the abortion industry that fights any and all attempts to have their facilities inspected without prior notice? (Wonder why?)

Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer Paul Greenberg once wrote, “The right to life must come first or all the others can never take root, much less flourish. As in the Declaration of Independence’s order of certain unalienable rights, among them ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ Note which one is mentioned first. And for good, logical reason.”

The movement toward life and away from death is inexorable. Remember that the next time someone pretends it is pro-lifers who are the outliers.

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Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and National Right to Life News Today.

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What the Movie ‘Titanic’ Taught Me About God

As Tolstoy might have observed, every secular Jewish family is secular in its own way.

When I was a baby, my parents chose to settle far from the neighborhood where the synagogues were. “Why,” my father asked, “would we choose to live in the Jewish ghetto?”

On the other hand, each spring my father led a brief seder from the Maxwell House haggadah. Each fall I asked for a Christmas tree and was refused. And, I had a bat mitzvah.

I always will be grateful for my loving, supportive, open-minded, secular Jewish parents. They didn’t flinch when I announced my career choice: poet, with a backup plan of musician. And they had no issue with my dating non-Jews, or women for that matter.

But it was a different story when, in my early 20s, I found myself falling in love with the most unlikely partner of all: God.

How did this happen? I blame it on a combination of two things — a semester-abroad program and the movie “Titanic.”

It happened in my senior year of college in New York City. I recently had returned from a semester “abroad” on a schooner in the middle of the ocean. This was a surprising turn of events. I had never been on a sailboat before and, in fact, I was frightened by deep water. But I had always been drawn to what frightened me, so when a friend casually mentioned a semester-abroad program on a tall ship, I signed up.

Those six weeks at sea were full of wonder. We learned celestial navigation — aiming sextants at the moon — and took turns cooking dinner for our shipmates in the tiny galley. Some nights, dolphins trailed the boat, braiding their green bioluminescent streams through the water. Recorded music was not allowed, and when I played my violin on the deck beneath the stars, my shipmates gathered around me in silence.

I returned to New York for my senior year with arms like Popeye’s and a new perspective on the miracle that is our planet. It was from this place that I took the subway to 72nd Street and bought a ticket to the newly released “Titanic” movie. With sea air still clinging to my clothes, the story may have felt more real to me than to some of my fellow New Yorkers.

So when the Titanic hit the iceberg, splitting her hull like a banana, and when half of the ship began to sink rapidly, pulling the other half after it, I was beyond terrified. It was all too easy to imagine myself on that deck, knowing the freezing water awaited.

I watched, unable to move. On the part of the deck that had not yet sunk, a string quartet played. Beside them, a preacher cried out: “Save us, God!” Shaking, shivering, screaming, holding his arms to the sky: “Dear God, save us!”

I knew with utter clarity that in the moment of my greatest fear I would have put down my violin and gone to that preacher and prayed with him.

When I left the theater, I walked back uptown on Broadway, that river of taxis trailing red lights behind them. A light, cold rain fell.

I was full of questions.

I wouldn’t be seeking a miraculous rescue.

Who was this God I would be calling out to? I wouldn’t be seeking a miraculous rescue. It was about something larger than myself. My impulse to call out had to do with accepting the power of the sea, the vast sky we had sailed beneath, night after night. And it had something to do with relinquishing my own sense of self, joining something beyond me.

But if my instinct was to orient myself to this mystery in the most heightened circumstances, I thought, why wait for a disaster? Why not call out to God in joy? And for that matter, why not think about God in even the most casual moments, like walking home from a movie?

And so it was that I began to fall in love with God. I did not know what that meant. All I knew was that I was at the beginning of a new voyage.

Twenty years after that rainy night on Broadway, I’m still on that voyage.

And I’m still in love.

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Alicia Jo Rabins is a writer, musician and Torah teacher who lives in Portland, Ore.

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What We Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo

Since news broke in October of Harvey Weinstein’s decades of alleged rampant sexual violence and assault, women have come out in force to tell their stories of being on the receiving end of unwanted sexual behavior.

As the Weinstein effect has taken down journalist Mark Halperin, former Amazon executive Roy Price, Oscar-nominated writer-director James Toback, and public intellectual Leon Wieseltier, social media has become the site of confessionals.

Nearly 2 million posts have appeared with the hashtag #MeToo in response to a tweet from actress Alyssa Milano asking those who had been “harassed or assaulted” to speak out.

The five-letter hashtag collapsed everything — from rape to crude humor to being stared at on a train — into a single, powerful catch-all category. Any stripe of sexual misdeed was recognized as part of a mass culture of violence by men against women.

Then an Australian journalist named Benjamin Law launched another campaign, #HowIWillChange, with men confessing their deeds and promising to change their ways.

Law wrote in a series of tweets that men need to recognize they “don’t need to be a perpetrator to be a bad guy.” Questioning allegations, Law wrote, is the equivalent of being a quiet bystander while watching an offense take place.

Men’s #HowIWillChange vows included promising to not interrupt a woman speaking or ask at a job interview how many female executives are with the company, and to shut down catcalls.

Perceived improprieties are now immediately taken up by Twitter. Recently, appearing on a British talk show, actor Adam Sandler touched English actress Claire Foy’s knee.

In the social media whirl that followed, some called Sandler’s act inappropriate and asked whether he would have touched the knee of a man in the same setting. (He had, in a recent interview with Dustin Hoffman). Sandler’s spokesperson said it was a “friendly gesture” that was “blown out of proportion.” A representative for Foy said the actress took no offense.

Sivan Rahav Meir, an Israeli journalist and popular Torah lecturer, characterized the social media approach to addressing sexual assault as dangerously unhealthy.

“Facebook’s algorithms are not the way to combat the plague of abuse sweeping through society, and they may possibly be harmful,” she wrote on her blog.

Rahav Meir cautioned that the indiscriminate outpouring of personal anecdotes may unintentionally normalize sexual assault, giving the mistaken impression that all women have been or will at some point be abused.

“The nonstop flood of heartbreaking stories with the accompanying violence is exaggerated and too intimate,” continued Rahav Meir. “There is a total mishmash of posts between the serious cases of abuse and those of mild harassment as if they are all equally offensive. However, the story of a woman who once had an unpleasant or unwelcome comment directed at her is not in any way connected to a woman who is the victim of a violent assault who requires professional therapy.”

While online indictments of nameless alleged perpetrators may raise awareness, they hold no guilty parties to account and contribute to a “sensationalis[t] and gossipy” exercise, she wrote.

Instead, Rahav Meir encouraged women to work the legal system to crush sexual violence.

Trading sober assessment, exacting definitions and legal action for frenzied narrative and confused terminology can have disturbing consequences. It’s a trend that has been playing out on America’s college campuses.

Shortly before the media were consumed with Weinstein and company, the country’s institutions of higher learning released campus security reports containing three years’ worth of data, as universities that participate in federal financial aid programs are required to do annually under a policy known as the Clery Act.

The reports lack clarity. “Consent,” a word that sits at the core of the conversation about sexual violence, especially on campuses, has no uniform definition in Clery Act reporting. An offense classified as “dating violence” must have occurred while the victim and alleged offender were in a relationship, yet there are no clear parameters for what constitutes a “relationship” — and college students often aren’t engaged in relationships in any traditional sense. “Stalking” is defined as causing “substantial emotional distress” on at least two occasions, but the report offers no specific measure of what that looks like.

Federal reporting that most people don’t look at may not have direct impact on this national conversation but may signal the rabbit hole we have headed down: victims left to navigate a confusing landscape, alleged offenders robbed of their legal right to know what they have been accused of and adjudicators who are unqualified to handle the psychological or legal elements of sexual offenses.

Campuses again offer a useful corollary when considering the numbers. The hundreds of thousands of posts in recent weeks suggest that every woman is the victim of a sexual offense and every man an offender.

As Law, the journalist, wrote, he had to “acknowledge that if all women I know has [sic] been sexually harassed, abused or assaulted, then I know perpetrators. Or am one.”

On campus, an oft-cited claim is that 1 in 5 women will be sexually assaulted during her time in a U.S. college. The statistic originated in a widely disputed 10-year-old survey, but its results have been replicated in surveys by individual universities and in a larger report published by The Washington Post.

Critics cite overly broad definitions and concerns with the reports’ methodologies when disputing the horrifying statistic.

A similar argument already has begun to take hold over #MeToo.

Washington Post writer Lisa Bonos asked those who might be shocked at the number of posts to “consider this: There are far more stories of #MeToos than the number of posts on Facebook.”

Women may be holding back because they don’t think their stories rise to the level of #MeToo, or they may not be ready to share them on such a public forum, Bonos posited. But many more stories are out there, she assured her readers.

Meanwhile, an anonymous writer at the free speech-promoting site Quillette offered a hypothetical breakdown in which he attempted to demonstrate that the internet “can cause an awareness campaign to go viral with millions of posts even if it is raising awareness of something that affects only a small percentage of the population.” In his experiment, 812,500 #MeToo posts were quickly generated if 5 percent of Milano’s 3.25 million Twitter followers participated, and then each of those followers in turn had five friends who posted.

“Of course, this analysis does not prove that abuse is rare; it only shows that the success of #MeToo does not prove the contrary,” according to the author, a software engineer.

Each day, women continue to reveal painful stories of personal and professional lives derailed by influential men who systematically violated them. We easily can be transfixed in disgust and communal shame. But for the national conversation to move forward and force away the lies and grime that have hid sexual assault, it cannot stay boxed into hashtags and tweets.

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Rachel Frommer is a reporter with the Washington Free Beacon.

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Change? Not So Fast

There is great excitement among feminists in America that our culture finally is heeding the voices of women.

Over the last several weeks, hundreds of women — millions, if you count Twitter — have come forward with their tales of sexual harassment, assault and rape, mostly against men who have wielded their power to extort sexual acts. Throughout the media, this was heralded as a watershed moment, and we have since been inundated with grandiose declarations that a “sea change” has occurred in the way we understand and acknowledge sexual predation in the workplace and elsewhere.

The only sea change I detected at this gathering was the fish of the day.

A handful of accused men even faced consequences, albeit not legal ones: Harvey Weinstein was fired from his own company, expelled from the motion picture academy and abandoned by his wife. Journalist Mark Halperin was dismissed by NBC News. Leon Wieseltier, weeks from launching a new publication, was dumped by his financial backer, Laurene Powell Jobs. All this after Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly already had been fired from Fox News, though not without multimillion-dollar compensation packages.

“Our consciousness has been raised,” declared journalist Rebecca Traister.

But I say: Not so fast.

Last week, I had dinner with two high-level film producers, both male, and two women who worked for one of them. The only thing we discussed for three hours was Harvey Weinstein and the sexual politics of the entertainment industry.

And let me tell you something: The only sea change I detected at this gathering was the fish of the day.

Both male producers agreed that Harvey Weinstein is an “ugly, pock-marked, smelly bully.” But a rapist? Not so much.

“Most of the women accusing Harvey made a deal with the devil,” one of them said. “If you go to a man’s room at 11 at night, you know what you’re in for. And believe me, I stayed down the hall from him at the Hotel du Cap in Cannes, so I saw the processional of actresses who knocked on his door at all hours.”

So, I guess sexual assault is permissible if it occurs after 11 p.m.?

Next, I was told “the vast majority” of women accusing Weinstein of sexual impropriety really were trading sex for career advancement.

If that’s true, I asked, shouldn’t more of his accusers be movie stars?

When I puzzled over the fact that so many women would claim abuse if they had made “deals” with Weinstein, I was told their confessionals were born of shame for having prostituted themselves early on.

I brought up the actress Annabella Sciorra, who told The New Yorker that Weinstein violently raped her in the early 1990s.

“I’ve known Annabella Sciorra for many years,” one of the producers said, going on to offer a preposterous claim intended to disparage her.

“If you don’t want sex,” the other admonished, “why would you open the door to a man in the middle of the night?”

Actually, “It wasn’t that late,” Sciorra told The New Yorker. “Like, it wasn’t the middle of the night, so I opened the door a crack to see who it was. And [Weinstein] pushed the door open.”

I also asked about Rose McGowan, who suggested Weinstein raped her in 1997. She, too, was callously dismissed.

And when the subject turned to other infamous Hollywood abusers, I was lectured on how “each year, 2,000 young actresses come to L.A. and they will do anything — anything — to be famous.”

I got the feeling these producers feel like victims themselves, since so many young women must use them for parts.

“It’s called ambition,” one of them said.

“Decades ago, I was desperate to sell a TV show and I slept with the female executive who could give it the green light. So I closed my eyes during the act and fantasized about someone else. We do what we must.”

Consensual sex is the sort of ordeal that afflicts men in power.

But when it comes to women, any objections I made about gender inequity, discrimination, intimidation, subjugation, threats, lawyers and hush money were batted away. Even the women at the table referred to one known Hollywood predator as “sweet.” When I suggested he, too, soon would be outed, one producer got so “sad” he skipped his appetizer.

“It’s a witch hunt,” one of them declared.

And he is scared. Because, just like Weinstein, these two are old guard “dinosaurs” whose era serving as gatekeepers to the entertainment industry, with its attendant sexual perks, will soon become extinct.

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Danielle Berrin is a senior writer and columnist at the Jewish Journal.

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A Second, Quieter Festival Explores the Sephardic Journey

It’s hard to describe the pull of nostalgia. I left Casablanca, Morocco, when I was 8, and grew up in Canada and the United States. I’m a proud U.S. citizen and I love my country. When I travel overseas, I skip over Morocco and usually go right to the Jewish homeland of Israel, which I also love.

So, how do I explain my nostalgia for Morocco, an Arab-Muslim country? How can I be attached to a country that feels so foreign, so distant?

It’s true that with the passage of time there’s a tendency to romanticize our past. The very idea of romanticizing feels Moroccan to me. The mystical deserts where Jewish holy men are buried; the souks of Marrakesh; the drama of Tangiers; the French flavors of Casablanca; the Arabic music I still love; the Arab expressions my mother still uses — all of those things dance in my mind as I try to make sense of my attachment to the country of my ancestors.

But there’s something else — the “Moroccan Judaism” I grew up with. This is a Judaism that elevates celebration, aesthetics, holiness, neighborliness and tolerance. I didn’t grow up with the trauma of the Holocaust. I grew up dreaming in the deserts and beaches around Casablanca. What I most recall about our Jewish neighborhood was cozying up with family and neighbors during Shabbat and Jewish holidays.

It was an intimate and happy Judaism — one you could touch, feel and smell. We were Jews in a non-Jewish land, and we had to hug our Jewish rituals and each other to feel alive and whole.

Are my memories idealized? Probably. But here’s the thing: They feel real to me. The pull of my Moroccan past feels genuine.

This pull of nostalgia is one of the areas explored in the Los Angeles Sephardic Film Festival, which runs Nov. 5–12. While the buzz in the city will be around the larger and more established Israel Film Festival — which we feature in this week’s cover story — it’s worth paying attention to this other festival, especially if you enjoy the story of wandering Jews.

In a way, it makes sense that both festivals are happening simultaneously, because there’s one place where they clearly intersect: Israel. The Jewish state has played a major, even transformational, role in the recent history of Sephardic Jewry. In fact, the film premiering at the Sephardic festival, “Back to Casablanca,” could well have been featured at the Israel Film Festival.

The film tells the story of Ze’ev Revach, an Israeli actor and director born and raised in Morocco. As described on the festival’s website, “He sets out on a journey back to Casablanca, in search of a Moroccan actor to star alongside him in his next film, which he dreams that he’ll be able to distribute around the Arab world. He connects with his mother tongue, discovers the commonalities between the two cultures, but his mission is not a simple one.”

Another film, “Journey from Tunisia,” deals with “the upheaval of centuries of roots for Jews and their Arab neighbors in North Africa, and the forming of new roots in Israel, soon after its rebirth as a nation.”

And then there’s “Why Do They Hate Us?” — a must-see from French-Jewish filmmaker Alexandre Amiel, who hails from Morocco. Shortly after the Charlie Hebdo and kosher market attacks, Amiel was shaken by his 11-year-old son, who asked, “Why do they hate us Jews?” His response was to produce a series on racism and anti-Semitism in France. It aired on French television and will be presented at the festival.

While the film festival is sure to attract Sephardic Jews, it’s also an opportunity for Ashkenazi Jews to learn more about their Sephardic brethren. This learning can’t happen as easily in religious institutions like synagogues, because most of us are attached to our religious customs, our style of prayer, our denominations and so on. Having said that, I know several Ashkenazi synagogues that now offer Sephardic services to their members. A great example is at Valley Beth Shalom, which you can read about in this week’s Journal, where Sephardic musician Asher Levy leads Middle Eastern-style services based on his Syrian roots.

A cultural event like a film festival is an ideal way to learn about different Jewish stories. Culture doesn’t ask us to change our ways, it just invites us to open our eyes and ears and hearts and experience a moment.

Although I’m deeply attached to my Sephardic roots, I have spent a good part of my adult life exploring Ashkenazi traditions, religiously and culturally, for the simple reason that I’m fascinated by the story of my people.

As with the story at Valley Beth Shalom, I’m noticing a similar interest among many of my Ashkenazi friends. Last Friday night, for example, after we sang the Ashkenazi version of “Shalom Aleichem,” one Ashkenazi guest asked, “What’s the Sephardic melody for that song?”

Singing that melody pulled me back to my childhood in Morocco. It’s ironic that an Ashkenazi Jew made me sing it, but that’s emblematic of our generation. We’re pulled by the nostalgia of our own past, but we’re fascinated by the past of other Jews we meet. After centuries of living apart, we’re discovering new Jewish stories, new Jewish melodies, new Jewish traditions, right here in Los Angeles. That’s something I could never taste in my Casablanca neighborhood, as much as I miss it.

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