For the first time, the Milwaukee Jewish Film Festival will present a film with local connections — a documentary made by two Milwaukee-raised friends and children of Holocaust survivors.
Titled “Withdrawal From Gaza,” the film provides a personal view into one of the most dramatic events in the state of Israel’s recent history, the evacuation of the Jewish communities in the Gaza Strip and of four communities in the West Bank in August 2005.
The two men primarily responsible for creating the film are Joel Blasberg, 61 and now of Los Angeles, and Arnie Peltz, 60 and still living in the Milwaukee-area. They have been friends since childhood and even roomed together when they attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Above all, they share interests in Israel and in cinema, although over the years they have expressed this interest differently.
Blasberg, as he explained in a telephone interview, spent some six years living in Israel on a kibbutz. He later went to Hollywood to become a film producer and writer.
Peltz stayed in Milwaukee and was for a long time one of the owners of The Peltz Group, a paper recycling firm, until the firm was sold about three years ago, Peltz said in an interview at his Whitefish Bay home.
All his life, Peltz has been “an avid film viewer,” and has been a regular at the film festival in Telluride, Colo. While he has never lived in Israel, he has visited it 11 times, and “will be going again next month.”
About three years ago, Blasberg and Peltz decided to form a movie production company, which they call Highway 51 Productions. Initially, they wanted this firm to make feature films.
But then came news of the Israeli government’s decision to pull the Jewish communities out of Gaza and part of the West Bank. “I told Arnie this would make a tremendous documentary,” said Blasberg, because this event would be so “painful and historic.”
And both agreed that their film, the company’s first project, would show the drama of Israel, with all its problems, “giving up something that hurts its own people for a peaceful settlement,” said Peltz.
‘ I like both sides’
Peltz provided the funding, while Blasberg “produced, directed, wrote it and hired the crews,” as Blasberg put it. Both men went to Gush Katif some months before the August evacuation to do research, meet members of the Gush Katif settlements and decide which ones to feature in the film.
That visit overturned Peltz’s stereotyped images about the Gaza Israelis and their communities. “I didn’t get the sense that they hated the Palestinians,” he said.
Rather, he felt that they were “more patriotic than the average city person” because, as most of them were farmers, they had a deep connection to the land.
Blasberg returned to film the evacuation itself and was amazed. “The incredible thing is that it wasn’t violent,” he said.
“One of the reasons we decided to make the film was because there was a lot of talk that it would possibly turn into a civil war,” he said. “I never believed it would happen. I believed it would be painful and emotional, but not violent. And that’s the way it turned out, which I think made for a more powerful film.”
Blasberg said he and his Israeli crew shot about 100 hours of film. Then it took “three or four months” before he found the right editor, who had to be both technically good and a speaker of Hebrew.
He found such a person in Oreet Rees, an Israeli living in Los Angeles. “In documentaries, the editor is so crucial and she did such a tremendous job, I was happy to make her co-director” of the film, Blasberg said.
Peltz acknowledged that the research and his viewing of the film have changed his political views. “I went to the right,” he said. “In retrospect, nothing good came from this return. It’s got to suggest that you don’t return something unless you get something in return.”
Blasberg, however, said that between the settlers and the left wing Israelis who believe in returning Israel to the pre-1967 borders, “I like both sides. And I still like both sides.”
But “despite all the divisions, I still think the fact that Israel could withdraw and destroy [these communities] makes the case for the fact that Israel is a peaceful society and deals with difficult issues the best way it can,” Blasberg said.
Since completion of the film, Blasberg and Peltz have focused on getting it seen; they said that HBO and Showtime have both expressed interest.
It already has been shown under a different title, “UnSettled,” at a synagogue in Los Angeles and in Milwaukee last June at the Eisner Museum of Advertising and Design.
Peltz said the title was changed because of other films on the subject with the same or similar titles.
The Milwaukee Jewish Film Festival screening will take place on Thursday, Oct. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the Marcus North Shore Cinemas, 11700 N. Port Washington Rd. Peltz (and possibly Blasberg) will speak at a talkback afterward. (See story about the series.
In addition, the film will be shown at a Women Biyachad Ladies Night Out event on Wednesday, Oct. 18, 6:30 p.m., at the Joseph and Rebecca Peltz Center for Jewish Life in Mequon. For more information about that event, call 262-242-2235.
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