Mucking with Movies: ‘Jews of the Wild West’

If you scroll back far enough on my Facebook, deep into the middle-school good stuff, you’ll find my Bar Mitzvah picture. Babyfaced and clad in a purple velvet suit, skinny jeans, and fedora, I’m tipping my cap to the camera just a few short hours after being made a man in the eyes of my Jewish God.

Since then, I’ve done everything I can to run far, far away from any Jewish stereotype: I’ve skied day after day, refusing to go inside and admit cold, picked up professional wrestling and boxing as hobbies, even the girls I’ve dated. Leaving people surprised when they found out my heritage, “Oh you’re Jewish? Wouldn’t have guessed.”

I was proud to subvert the stereotype, but a deep shame would always resonate that I was running away from my culture and all it has done for me.

Then “Jews of the Wild West” rolls around and helps crystalize a world outside the stereotype. The Wild West has long been characterized as a singular existence for grizzled men wearing ponchos making their bones on nothing but sheer will and elbow grease. As well as being Jewish, I’ve long had a fascination with the American Wild West, particularly the voices that have been left out of the scope.

Director Amanda Kinsey set out on a mission to display “Jewish pride by means of resilience,” as she put it. In an hour-long interview, we discussed this dichotomy and some behind the scenes on the making of the film.

“I did it by chapter because I felt the strength of the film was really a sum of its parts, and it was showing people the diversity of how people got out here, what they did, and why they were here,” she said.

It enables the film to put a hyper-focus on each of its subjects, on whom the stories range widely from that of Jacob David, the tailor for Levi Strauss’ company and Levi Jeans; Ray Frank, the first woman to deliver a sermon in a synagogue in America and possibly the world; or my favorite, Josephine Earp. As wife to Wyatt Earp, participant and possible instigator in the gunfight, depending on if you choose not to believe Josephine, she played a massive part in concocting the narrative that would eventually become the source of the 1993 eponymous flick “Tombstone” and the ensuing creation of vaudeville homage that is modern day Tombstone, Arizona.

My usual issue with this chapter-book style is that it is too choppy, too random, and too unfocused to create a cohesive story. Kinsley credits her decades’ worth of experience in the news — she is too humble to mention that she is a five-time Emmy-award winner — for her ability to make the film flow so smoothly.

“The way I work is I guess a little different than a lot of independent filmmakers … I write a script it’s very, very detailed, meaning all the soundbites, the music, the visuals I want, everything, which personally I think is the most efficient way to go into an edit,” she said.

For an aspiring documentarian like myself, it was a crash course on how to work efficiently and substantially.

There’s an old joke my rabbi at Hebrew School used to tell. It was about a local synagogue that has a mice infestation; one exterminator comes in and sets traps, but the mice get away. The next exterminator comes in and uses a spray, but still they get away. Finally, a young man walks in and has a plan: He puts little kippahs on all the mice, teaches them their Torah portions, and Bar Mitzvah all of them. The mice never come back.

If they showed films like “Jews of the Wild West,” maybe the kids would come back. Maybe I wouldn’t have felt the need to escape if I had seen the full scope of what my ancestors were capable of and what we are still capable of now. I loved my upbringing, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way, but I always knew there was more than I was being taught.

Now I know.

“Jews of the Wild West” will be screening at the Aspen Film ISIS theater on Aug. 23, and that will include a Q&A with the director.

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