Published: 4 June 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
DASH LAWRENCE asks Sydney woman Kea Cranko what drove her to make a documentary on this taboo subject, and what she learned about herself in doing so
IT TAKES A BRAVE PERSON to tackle the State of Israel or Zionism publicly in Australia – especially when you’re Jewish. What comes next is often unpleasant and painful: locked out of Jewish communal spaces; ostracised by family members; condemned privately as a traitor and self-hating Jew.
These dissenting Jewish voices soon learn a salient lesson: call yourself Jewish, critique Zionism and you will pay a price. It’s the lesson others – across time and diasporas, from philosopher Hannah Arendt to former Australian governor-general Sir Isaac Isaacs – have discovered.
This is the path Kea Cranko is now walking. The bright and curious 23-year-old from Sydney’s inner west has just released In Dialogue: Jews on the Borderlands - a self-funded, largely self-made documentary film about Australia’s non-Zionist Jewish Left.
Cranko, who went to the Emanuel School and has a degree in sociology, says she wanted to “give a voice and a platform form to a specific Jewish identity, that very much exists in the Australian Jewish community, but has gone by largely unnoticed.”
The hour-long documentary opens with its most intriguing and compelling scene. Seated in the office of her father, Peter, Kea asks what he makes of her film project.
“It’s confronting to me, it makes me uncomfortable,” Peter tells his daughter.
Though sympathetic, he warns her of falling into a trap; of being reactive to something she doesn’t support.
The Cranko family, originally from Johannesburg in South Africa, arrived in Australia in the early 2000s. Peter was involved in anti-apartheid circles. He clearly understands both the need to and the cost of taking a principled stand.
The scene, although constructed, is unvarnished. It symbolises the generational divide that often runs across Shabbat tables. Moreover, it cuts to the heart of something many viewers will be asking: why put opposition to Israel and Zionism at the centre of your Jewish identity?
