LUNAR: The Jewish-Asian Film Project

We will be filming, editing and promoting a series of 5-8 videos. Five of the videos will be five to ten minutes, covering each of the following sub-themes in the context of Jewish Asian American identity — finding community, food, language, stereotypes & the model minority myth, and cultural values. The rest (number of videos TBD) will be 20-30 minute in-depth interviews about a specific Jewish Asian American intersection – we have already filmed a Jewish & Chinese in-depth video, and we plan to add at least two more identity intersections to the series, depending on the participants who are cast.

Please note that these themes and content structure are tentative, and we are eager to hear insights from our team and cast on how we can improve or change our content design to be more inclusive, engaging and relevant. We will collectively as a team + cast finalize our content design together.

This project was inspired by five young Chinese and Jewish womxn, who came together through Facebook and gathered on Zoom to talk about our experiences with our racial and cultural identities. Choosing such a specific identity intersection allowed our discussion to start with more common ground and uncover more nuances. While we could relate to each other on a deeper level due to our similar racial identities, we still had drastically different lived experiences. Having this opportunity allowed us to feel affirmed and heard, so we were compelled to bring this experience to more Jewish and Asian American individuals and showcase the video products to our broader communities.

We named this project LUNAR because it is an accessible, clear way to represent the intersection of Jewish and Asian-American identities. Both Jewish and some Asian cultural holidays are based on lunisolar calendars, and the moon holds symbolic significance in many Asian cultures and literature traditions. The moon also represents how many multicultural folks navigate our connection to our distinct yet fluid identities. Different facets of our identities can cause us to present different “faces” based on the space or community we are in, just like the moon.

Additionally, we wanted to move away from naming in Hebrew, a practice common in Jewish communal organizations, because both creators had experienced feeling as if Jewish content was not accessible due to the use of Hebrew words without explanation or context. We wanted to hold that as multicultural Jews, we have varying (dis)connections to our Jewish identity – while Hebrew/language in general is a powerful tool of connecting to Judaism for some of us, for others it may be an additional barrier to further engagement with Jewish life.

For the purposes of this project, we decided to forego the AAPI label and instead just use Asian American. As an exclusively Asian-American team of creators, we do not feel that we have the proper resources or knowledge to fully represent and portray Pacific Islander experiences, and we would not want to include PIs in a topical and tokenizing manner. We consulted with some PI folks in our network, and they agreed that using the label “Asian American” exclusively would be more accurate for our project, and an act of allyship to PI communities through foregoing the harmful lumping that comes with the AAPI identifier. We hope to see future efforts specifically highlighting Pacific Islanders in the Jewish community, and we are eager to uplift the work of folks in that identity intersection.

We are partnering with Be’chol Lashon to host our content on their blog and social media platforms. Be’chol Lashon (Hebrew for “in every language”), founded in 2000, strengthens Jewish identity by raising awareness about the ethnic, racial and cultural diversity of Jewish identity and experience. We are also generously funded by the Jews of Color Initiative’s mini-grant program. The Jews of Color Initiative is a national effort focused on building and advancing the professional, organizational and communal field for Jews of Color.