The issue of foreign workers in Israel has been part of the Israeli public agenda in recent years. In the late 1980s, foreign workers came to Israel from many countries, and were employed mainly as household workers, caregivers, and agricultural and construction laborers. Those who stayed legally, and others who stayed illegally, put down roots in Israel, raised families, and had children. Since the 1990s, attempts have been made to reduce the number of foreign workers in Israel by deporting illegal workers. The current struggle has been revolving not only around the workers themselves, but also their children who were born in Israel. In August 2010, the government adopted the recommendations of an inter-ministerial committee to examine the status of children of foreign workers (Cabinet Resolution 2183) and decided to grant residency to hundreds of children who met specific criteria, and to deport children who did not meet them. Activists working for this cause protested the deportations, sometimes capitalizing on the Holocaust to make their point.
The talk will analyze the way Israeli director Noa Maiman, a third generation Holocaust survivor, documents in her film Oy Mama (2010) her grandmother's story during the Holocaust, in order to convey ethical views and encourage activism in the foreign workers issue. In the documentary Maiman tells the story of how her grandmother Fira was saved by a Polish woman during the Holocaust, and how, in present-day Israel, Fira tries to save her Peruvian caregiver and five-year-old daughter from deportation. The talk will show how third generation artists contemporize the Holocaust by negotiating it as a parallel event to other, more contemporary tragedies. Through documentary theory It will explore the way personal nonfiction filmmaking is defined in relation to political struggle and victimhood and trauma and how Maiman creates a cinematic chain of feminine justice and activism which crosses time and space.
