Movies on non-Zionist ‘Maus’ creator among diverse features in capital’s Hanukkah film fest |
“Maus” creator Art Spiegelman once famously said that he’s spent a lifetime trying not to think about Israel — but when the annual Jewish Film Festival kicks off at the Jerusalem Cinematheque over the Hanukkah holiday next week, two featured films will give Israelis plenty of opportunity to think about Spiegelman, whose award-winning, 40-year-old graphic novel about the Holocaust continues to resonate with readers today.
The films about Spiegelman, “The Hell of Auschwitz: Maus by Art Spiegelman” and “Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse,” examine how art and artistic creation can serve as powerful tools for processing and confronting trauma, said festival director Daniella Tourgeman.
The two films are part of an annual December event that aims to strengthen the understanding of Jewish identity in all its diversity.
The festival, currently celebrating its 27th edition, will run December 13-18 and will include more than 40 films from 15 countries, as well as discussions, lectures, panels, and special events.
In addition to the Spiegelman double feature, there is a film about a zoo in Ukraine (“Checkpoint Zoo”), at least half a dozen Holocaust-related films, a rare deep dive into the world of nursing, and plenty of biographical movies, including “Billy Joel: And So It Goes” and “Steven Spielberg – The New Hollywood Prodigy.”
One of the two Spiegelman films falls into the biographical realm as well, but both revolve heavily around “Maus,” the only graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize, for its distillation of the Holocaust in comic book form. (“Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse” was screened in Israel for DocAviv 2025 and the summertime Jerusalem Film Festival.)
Spiegelman will not be in Jerusalem for the event; he’s only been in Israel once, for a bar mitzvah trip in 1961, which he described as uncomfortable in an interview with the New York Review of Books in March this year.
“Every young man carried a rifle,” he told the New York Review. “I am very grateful that my parents ended up in America after the war. I’ve always been more comfortable........