Tag: Jewish

Docs serve in a war where they’re often the target

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa (second from right) works to save a patient at Gaza’s Nasser Hospital. (Photos courtesy of MPI Media)

By Richard Ades

American Doctor offers a devastating look at the war in Gaza through the eyes of three physicians who’ve served there. Sharing their experiences is important to them—but only if they’re shared fully and honestly, one of them insists early on.

North Carolina-based surgeon Mark Perlmutter is attempting to show an image of children who’ve been mortally wounded in the conflict. “This is what my tax dollars did,” he tells director Poh Si Teng, referring to the U.S.’s support for the Israeli military.

Teng tells him the graphic image may need to be blurred to preserve the children’s dignity, but Perlmutter says doing so would amount to “journalistic malpractice.” The image is shown as is.  

Perlmutter, a Jewish American, has been a passionate opponent of Israel’s devastating war on Gaza, which it launched in response to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack. In fact, Perlmutter’s passion reportedly was what inspired Teng to quit her job and take on the task of bringing the Gazan conflict home to America.

Teng has said she also was inspired by medical dramas like The Pitt, with their built-in emotional resonance. Showing real-life medical emergencies in Gaza could create the same resonance, she reasoned, and help make Americans care about a U.S.-supported war that they’ve largely ignored. And, indeed, the documentary’s scenes of surgeons working frantically to save lives and limbs are just as tense as their scripted counterparts.

There’s one major difference, though: The Pitt’s “Dr. Robby” and other fictional physicians don’t have to worry about being bombed or otherwise murdered while doing their jobs. That’s not the case in Gaza, where Israel has often ignored the rules of military engagement by attacking hospitals and other medical facilities.

North Carolina-based Dr. Mark Perlmutter is a longtime critic of the war in Gaza.

“You don’t bomb hospitals,” says Feroze Sidhwa, a California-based emergency doctor who’s also featured in the film. “This is barbarity.”

Sidhwa acknowledges Israeli claims that some hospitals are legitimate targets because Hamas tunnels run underneath them, but he claims the military’s “evidence” for such tunnels is nothing more than AI-created fabrications.

Both Perlmutter and Sidhwa also charge the military with targeting children, the latter claiming that kids are hundreds of times more likely to be killed in Gaza than they are in Russia’s war with Ukraine.

Rounding out the three featured American doctors is Thaer Ahmad, a Chicago-based Palestinian-American who spends much of the film fighting an Israeli bureaucracy that seems determined to keep him from practicing medicine in Gaza.

Drs. Thaer Ahmad (left) and Mark Perlmutter in a scene from American Doctor

Effectively edited by Ema Ryan Yamazaki and Christopher White, the film skips back and forth between time periods and locations. When they’re not fighting to save lives in Gaza operating rooms, the doctors are shown fighting another kind of battle as they talk to groups and the media about what’s really going on in the war. At one point, they and others also converge on Washington D.C. to talk to members of Congress.

One of their messages is that Israel should be pressured to stop targeting non-combatants, including health care workers. It often seems like a pointless exercise, however, as they make little headway against a government long committed to supporting Israel, and against a society that often equates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.

Sensitively scored by composer Suad Bushnaq, the film reaches its emotional peak when what the doctors had long feared comes to pass: Their hospital is hit by a bomb, showing it’s no more immune from attacks than other Gaza medical facilities.

As a portrait of men trying to do good in the midst of an impossible situation, American Doctor will likely inspire and inform you, and it will most certainly infuriate you. What it won’t do is leave you unmoved.

Rating: 5 stars (out of 5)

American Doctor opens Sept. 4 at Columbus’s Gateway Film Center, as well as in Austin, Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Portland (Oregon), Richmond (Virginia), Seattle-Tacoma and Washington D.C. The film will expand to other areas Sept. 11.

Portrait of an artist as a Hasidic young man

Ralph Scott, Isaac Nippert and Melissa Graves (from left) in CATCO and Gallery Players' co-production of My Name Is Asher Lev (photo by Ben Sostrom)
Ralph Scott, Isaac Nippert and Melissa Graves (from left) in CATCO and Gallery Players’ co-production of My Name Is Asher Lev (photo by Ben Sostrom)

By Richard Ades

The protagonist of My Name Is Asher Lev is still a boy when he begins drawing pictures of Jesus and nude women. Not surprisingly, the images upset his Hasidic Jewish parents.

“No Torah Jew would think of drawing such things,” thunders his father, Aryeh Lev (Ralph Scott).

But the parents soon learn that trying to stifle the youth’s artistic impulses is no easy task. Though he wants to be a good son and a good Jew, Asher himself (Isaac Nippert) seems unable to control his need for self-expression. The result is a recurring argument with his devout father and a source of stress for his mother, Rivkeh (Melissa Graves), who tries to be loyal to both her husband and her gifted son.

Adapted from a novel by Chaim Potok, Aaron Posner’s one-act is set in a particular time and place: a Hasidic enclave in Brooklyn in the 1950s. The basic situation, however, is universal: The parents want their child to obey them and respect their traditions, while the child is driven by his need to find his own way.

Though the play sometimes seems like a collection of biographical scenes rather than a cohesive drama, the unifying factor is Asher’s fierce need to create art. Nippert expresses that need with a portrayal that incorporates joyful discovery and youthful enthusiasm—and, sometimes, youthful petulance. All the while, he succeeds in suggesting ages as young as 5 without turning into a childish caricature.

As Asher’s mother, Graves projects quiet dignity and equally quiet desperation. Because we see Rivkeh through her son’s eyes, she comes off as more of a symbol of long-suffering motherhood than a flesh-and-blood woman, but Graves fills the need by radiating an aura of profound sadness.

Graves also doubles as a couple of relatively minor female characters, but it’s Scott who does the heavy lifting in terms of multiple roles. In addition to Asher’s father, he plays a supportive uncle, a local Hasidic leader and, most notably, Jacob Kahn, a secular Jewish artist who becomes Asher’s mentor. Though some of the portrayals carry a whiff of stereotype, Kahn comes across as distinctive and fully human.

Under Kahn’s exacting tutelage, Asher is encouraged to remain true to his Hasidic identity while studying the European and largely Christian traditions that shaped Western art. The resulting tension leads to a climax that supplies the drama—melodrama, even—that much of the play lacks.

Steven C. Anderson’s sensitive direction makes the most of the work’s strengths, including its portrait of a youth torn between his art and his devotion to his family and faith. Jarod Wilson’s lighting design brings out every nuance of that portrait, while well-chosen background music adds both drama and ethnic flavor. Eric Barker’s painterly scenic design includes a floor divided into multiple, odd-shaped levels and distorted windows that play a symbolic role in later scenes.

The sum total of all this effort is a nearly perfect staging of an interesting, if not-quite-perfect, work of theater.

CATCO and Gallery Players will present My Name Is Asher Lev through Nov. 9 in Studio Two, Riffe Center, 77 S. High St. Show times are 11 a.m. Wednesday, 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday. Running time: 95 minutes. Tickets are $11.50 for Wednesday matinees, $30 Thursday, $45 Friday-Saturday and $41 Sunday. 614-469-0939 or catco.org.