‘Jesus Camp’ Creators To Release Documentary About Leaving The Hasidic Community
In “Jesus Camp,” the premiere documentary by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, we watched as three children dedicated their young lives to Jesus Christ and the teachings of their church: climate change as a hoax, the imminent return of Jesus as a given, and Christian heavy metal as a legitimate form of art.
The duo behind this documentary recently announced their second one: a documentary that will tell the story of three Hasidic young adults who choose to leave behind religious life for the secular world — and must grapple with the consequences of their decision.
The secular world is fascinated by stories of ultra-religious communities. “Jesus Camp” was even nominated for an Academy Award (but lost, somewhat ironically, to “An Inconvenient Truth”). Although the subjects of “Jesus Camp” had to shut down their Christian camp after the movie aired, due to threats of vandalism, the critical consensus is that Ewing and Grady treated a topic that is very easy to make fun of with even-handed objectivity.
There’s no love lost between many Hasidic communities and the media. The media has a long history of treating Hasidim as “exotic others,” failing to tell their stories with adequate objectivity. Much of the secular world’s knowledge of the Hasidic world comes from those who have left it, or are in the process of leaving it, and as such we are subject to an inevitable bias.
In a statement, the filmmakers said that “our main subjects may be leaving the intense strictures of the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish community, but they’re also grappling with a universal human dilemma: that the cost of freedom can also mean losing the only community they’ve ever known.”
The new documentary, titled “One of Us,” will be premiering on Netflix in the fall.
Becky Scott is the editor of The Schmooze. Follow her on Twitter, @arr_scott
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO