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“What Does It Mean to Translate Spirituality into Cinema?”: Sabbath Queen Artist and Filmmaker Danielle Durchslag Interviews Sabbath Queen Director Sandi DuBowski
Sabbath Queen During the making of his 2001 film about lesbian and gay Orthodox Jews, Trembling before G-d, documentary filmmaker Sandi DuBowski met one potential subject, rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, a “queer bio-dad” who also founded Lab/Shul, the “everybody-friendly, God-optional” congregation. But, as Dubowski relays below, aside from not really fitting the film’s specific brief, Lau-Levine “was too much of a diva and wanted his own movie.” With his most recent picture, Sabbath Queen, DuBowski has more than obliged, following the dissident rabbi for over 21 years, turning what could have been a straightforward biographical portrait into a rich and complex saga that sets its vibrant, iconoclastic subject — descended from 39 generations of Orthodox rabbis — across decades of change within the Jewish community, both in Israel and abroad. Premiering at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, the film is currently playing festivals and limited theatrical engagements through 8Above, and DuBowski, true to the spirit of his subject, dubs these events “expanded cinema” as they use the viewing experience to create larger communities of celebration and ritual.
Interviewing DuBowski for Filmmaker is artist and filmmaker Danielle Durchslag, whose latest project is coincidentally also called Sabbath Queen. (She writes on her website, “The Sabbath Queen is my newest costume project contending with Jewish identity and ritual. It took me a full year to create and transform myself into this satirical, wearable, critical representation of right wing Jewish political power, inspired by the reign and painted portraits of Queen Elizabeth I of England.) Below, they talk about the film’s long journey, the film’s incorporation of critical commentary from Lau-Levine’s brother (and fellow rabbi) Benny, intermarriage and mainstream Judaism, and the film’s final scenes, in which, after October 7, Lau-Levine protests for a ceasefire in Gaza. — Scott Macaulay
Filmmaker: Sandi, I’m so excited to get to talk to you about this remarkable movie that I absolutely love. I wanted to start as filmmakers thinking about the process. Making this film was a 21-year expedition. Could you give some wisdom or thoughts about how a filmmaker sustains passion and focus for that amount of time on one project?
Dubowski: I don’t think I knew that Sabbath Queen would be a life work. I had met Amichai in the late ‘90s in Jerusalem when I was looking for people to be in Trembling Before G-d, which was my film about Hasidic and Orthodox Jews who are lesbian or gay. Everyone kept saying, “The Chief Rabbi of Israel’s nephew is gay. You should meet him.” So, when I met Amichai, I asked him to be in Trembling, and he refused because he was too much of a diva, and he wanted his own movie.
Filmmaker: Well, he certainly got it.
Dubowski: Yeah. He said, “I don’t do collage.” I mean, in all fairness, Trembling was so much about belonging within the bounds of Orthodoxy, and he was already post-denominational and smashing the box, so it wasn’t a fit.
Filmmaker: He was right.
Dubowski: He did deserve his own movie, and we became friends. Even before we began filming five years later in 2003, we deepened a friend relationship. We built an intimacy, a trust together, and this film, Sabbath Queen, really sprang out of that. In the beginning, I was just very entranced with Amichai’s drag character, Rebbetzin Hadassah, a Hasidic rabbi’s wife, with counterculture storytelling, ritual and performance. I was documenting performances and shows, and the film didn’t have the weight yet of a life journey. When I started to film the entire Jewish High Holidays, which was on the 40th floor of Seven World Trade Center overlooking the pit in the aughts, and when I went with the family on his dad’s last trip to Poland for the anniversary of his Bar Mitzvah back to the place of all that trauma and Holocaust, the film just got deeper and deeper and more unexpected. If documentary means deep listening, I was there for the deepest of listening over time.
Filmmaker: What does it mean to really tell a life journey, a story of change and transformation?
Dubowski: It means you just have to let go of any kind of outside parameters and just be inside of the witnessing, however long that takes. But that’s my understanding now in retrospect, because every day during [the making of] Sabbath Queen, I would just make the film. And only now when people at Q&A’s ask me how I had the patience does it dawn on me that I just spent 21 years filming. It was so natural.
Filmmaker: But there’s a whole other aspect to that, which is that 21 years of filmmaking leads to a pile of footage so enormous that it’s almost hard to contemplate.
Dubowski: I had 1,800 hours of original material, 1,100 hours of archival film and video, and hundreds and hundreds of photographs.
Filmmaker: So, you had 3,000 hours of footage. How do you even think about beginning?
Dubowski: You watch everything. Look, I did six years of editing. It was an enormously long process to try to sift through and categorize and think through narrative. And I had two sets of editors. It’s really when I worked with Francisco Bello and Jeremy Stulberg, who are the writer/editors of the film, the film took on a dramatic shape and form. In the very beginning, with my first editor, Phillip Shane, we did improv exercises around the film on a couch. He said, “Imagine what the dream last scene would be.” “Let’s brainstorm all these adjectives that associate with this movie.” They called us the couch philosophers in our coworking space. And then there are all these elements that came through in the editing process. We would watch a Friday night Sabbath Queen ritual, which embraces the Feminine Divine to welcome Shabbat on Friday night. It’s like a musical, performative counterculture, feminist, queer ritual that is God- optional. My editor said to me, “This is ritual. It doesn’t have narrative consequence. And it’s filmed as a ritual. I don’t think it really needs to be in the film.” And I said, “Well, actually, no, this is core. This is why I’m doing this. I want to transmit what it means to immerse in Amichai’s Lab/Shul, his part laboratory, part synagogue. It doesn’t have plot, but it has consequence and deep meaning.” And, you know, to their credit, we tried so many different ways to approach the question, what does it mean to translate spirituality into cinema? What does it mean to translate ritual into narrative?
Filmmaker: It’s very hard to do, by the way.
Dubowski: Very hard to do. What was an amazing discovery and turning point was the animation. I’d never worked with animation in documentary before. But Francisco and Kyle have, and it allowed us to bring in a new language of visuality to touch the sacred. And then we were able to weave the verite of a Sabbath Queen Friday Night ritual with this really wild animated drag character of Rebbetzin Hadassah, who is kind of the Female Divine, and that really create a very complex gorgeous scene. The animation helped us touch the historical, the epic, the ancient and the mystical throughout the film.
Filmmaker: And, also, the playful. You know, this film has such a love affair with playfulness, which, frankly, I think Judaism could use. And I thought the animated sequences were this burst of permission for playfulness, even in moments that are really fraught in this film. Making the animation kind of a sepia-toned world, that’s an interesting choice.
Dubowski: Well, the inspiration for the animation was illuminated medieval manuscripts. It came out of the Book — we are the People of the Book, right? I started to look at these ancient Persian and Sarajevo Passover Hagaddahs and all of these other books, like the Scroll of Esther for Purim, and they became the springboard for our imagination around visualizing the animation.
There’s a flat 2D quality to the art, and there’s a situating of the animation in another world, in an ancient world. We were playing with fire and space. If you read the Torah, they say the letters are black fire on the paper of white fire. So that became the color palette, and it also helped distinguish it from the verite. It felt like we were entering another imaginary space. It was such a great collaboration with our animator, Yaron Shin.
Filmmaker: Let’s get Jewy. I think Amichai is such an ideal container for this tension in Jewish life that almost every Jew I know feels around definitions of Jewish allegiance. What counts as allegiant behavior, and who gets to say [what that is]? Amichai perfectly encapsulates this because as we know on the one hand, he is truly from Israeli rabbinical royalty.
Dubowski: Yeah. 38 generations, a thousand years. Like the Kennedy’s of Judaism.
Filmmaker: Exactly. We’ll call them the Kennewitzes, but yes, that’s who we’re talking about. Simultaneously, he is a radical queer rabbi who is directly pushing against patriarchal norms and a lot of the traditions that he was raised in. Here we have someone who chooses to take on the mantle of learning to become a rabbi and joining the rabbinate, someone who very passionately leads a community and who also has Jewish children with a lesbian couple. Who would deem him an allegiant Jew depends on who you ask. I wanted to ask you, because this tension is so alive right now in Jewish life, how do you think the film Sabbath Queen defines and understands Jewish allegiance?
Dubowski: Well, it’s so interesting because Amichai is a consummate insider/outsider. Because he’s got the DNA, he’s in it. He comes from the power structure and yet that makes him one of the most important voices of critique and resistance to that. He’s not critiquing from the spindly little branch of a tree. He’s critiquing from the trunk. We just did a Jerusalem and Tel Aviv premiere and Amichai’s brother, Rabbi Benny Lau, who is a major renowned Orthodox rabbi who agreed to be in the film —
Filmmaker: —I think he’s the unsung hero of the film.
Dubowski: A lot of people do really respond to him, some who really identify with Rabbi Benny’s critique of Amichai. He allows that more conservative viewer to enter the film. But in terms of allegiance, power, I just saw what it meant, not just for Rabbi Benny to take this enormous step to be in the film, but to do the premiere with us in Jerusalem and do a post-screening panel. Amichai is queer; he’s ex-Orthodox. He is very critical of Israeli Jewish supremacy. He’s calling for ceasefire. He’s pro-peace. And there was Benny who showed up with love, with respect, with discomfort, and with disagreement.
Filmmaker: So, do you think that’s Jewish allegiance, showing up for the conversation with curiosity and openness?
Dubowski: I believe that we come from a tradition of difficult dialogue. Our whole rabbinic lineage is about disagreement with one another and respectful disagreement. The Talmud is full of it. Some of it is more playful and jokey, and some of it is more serious, and some of it is really head-to-head. And so, for me, the role models of these two brothers couldn’t be more biblical. We’re talking Cain and Abel, and there they are, in the same film, in the same space and in a moment of history that is full of toxicity and polarization, where people have stopped speaking to each other. I cannot tell you how many audience members over the past six months have told me, “I’m not speaking to my cousin, my sibling, my friend anymore.” Politically and ideologically, in the US and Israel, Palestine.
Audiences are finding such hope and even amazement in Amichai challenging all of these allegiances. And yet it’s a profound allegiance between these family members, who aren’t on the same page, but really have so much love and and are really in the commitment to one another despite the differences. After I left, they did a family meeting with Amichai and his cousins, nephews, nieces, siblings, mom, all who came to the screenings. They’re all Orthodox.
Filmmaker: How did it go?
Dubowski: It was a private family meeting, but they talked about the film and really processed Amichai’s journey over the past 30 years – his gayness, his leaving Orthodoxy, his leaving Israel for America, becoming a rabbi, etc. Deep, tough, and profound.
Filmmaker: This is a film that holds room for truly loving discord in a way that I think is pretty singular. As a secular Jewish audience member there were moments that actually felt kind of healing to see Benny, this Orthodox rabbi, at one point talk about how Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross, the drag character, is intolerable to the family. And later on in the film, we get to see him look at the camera and say, “the closet is death.” And that leads me to something I want to talk to you about. Sabbath Queen is such a vivid, dynamic, incredible portrait of Amichai, but I also think in many ways, Amichai is a portal in this film to a portrait of our current tribe. Think how the Jewish community is right now. You could probably paper Manhattan with the amount of film that has been used to depict Jewish suffering, right? There are so many films that exclusively cover that topic. This film absolutely honors and makes space for Jewish pain, but you also have scenes where Jews are bigoted, intolerant and cruel based on political difference. Why was it important for you to show both? We’re so accustomed to only seeing one side of that equation. It’s rare in cinema to really witness not only the trauma of Jewish history, but how those traumas have created confusions and bad behavior in contemporary life.
Dubowski: I screened at Rome Film Festival and immediately got an email from a woman who is Roman, not Jewish, and who said, “I thought all Jews were fundamentalists. Here you are, this Jewish director bringing this progressive Jewish vision, and you upended all my categories. You broke my polarization, and thank you.” So, there’s this kind of narrative of Jewish victimhood at the expense of anyone else which is just intolerable right now. Amichai somehow touches every issue — he touches Holocaust, he touches Israel, he touches progressive politics, he touches Orthodoxy. Gender, sexuality, drag, interfaith — what major issue confronting our people does he not embody in his own story? It really is like the full 360 of our past, present and future identity. From the pain to the bigotry and cruelty. I think that that’s why people are finding that the film just feels so urgent and necessary to our 21st century time and to really interrogating and grappling with who we are.
I took Sabbath Queen to Germany, to DOK Leipzig, and I wound up meeting all these super interesting Jews and those who love us, like the guy at the Leipzig airport who tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I’m German, I’m married to an Israeli. We do Shabbat every week. We rotate homes between this queer German couple — one of them is Jewish and the other is not — and another family with kids, both parents are Jews.And, next time you come to Leipzig, come to our Shabbat.” Or this guy who’s Jewish and comes from a super countercultural, squat, DJ, performance, interfaith British Jewish family. His wife is German but not Jewish, and they both teach art in the shadow of a concentration camp in Germany. This is 2025. In the film Amichai calls it “Jew Joy.” It’s not a Jew / non-Jew couple, it’s Jew joy. Everywhere I’m going, I’m realizing that the story of who we’ve been told we are is not who we are today.
Filmmaker: That comes through so strongly.
Dubowski: We are about sacred hybridity.
Filmmaker: As you and I both know, but non-Jews may not be aware of until they see this film, which they should, the issue of intermarriage is treated like a death-level threat in mainstream Jewish life. On this watch of the film, I was really struck by the language that was used by people to the right of Amichai in Jewish life to really push against this idea that intermarriage is acceptable. They said things like, “Judaism is not a game. You can’t play the way you want to play. It’s not a flavor of ice cream.” And what I kept thinking was, who doesn’t like games and ice cream? There’s an idea behind that choice of language that if it’s not severe and dolorous and bathed in sadness and tragedy, somehow it’s not authentic, including, oddly, marriage, right?
As you know, I’m part of a Jewish Muslim couple. I’m happily married to a wonderful Muslim man. I’ve never seen us on screen before. And I’ve certainly never seen a depiction of interfaith Jewish marriage that is as fun and loving and rich as the couples I know who are experiencing that. But this film does that. You’re married to a non-Jew, right? Was it important to you to give a radically different representation of this thing that is so often treated like a threat? Was that part of the mandate for you for making this piece?
Dubowski: Yes. I think it reflects our world. It’s reality. It reflects who we are. 72% of American Jews who are liberal, not Orthodox, are in loving relationships with non-Jews. It is not as if we don’t have a moment where Amichai says, “Look, we don’t know. What my version of rabbinic is, we’re not going to know in a 100 years if this is like a mistake.” There is a moment of humility where Amichai really does ponder and question, but in much of the film there is real celebration. The wedding at the end of the film is between Jew Joy Zen Buddhist gay monks.
Filmmaker: I love that scene.
Dubowski: The film constantly moves in this kind of emotional rollercoaster between celebratory, between critical, between harsh. There are so many different shifting tones of this kind of kaleidoscopic prismatic Jewish identity that we are living in. In some ways you could say the film at the end, in act three, is about the battle between interfaith marriage and the conservative Jewish world.
If anyone ever asked me, “Do I want to see a film on that?”, I would just say, “It just seems so narrow, so no,” but what we do is we steep it with all these big political stakes, the stakes of ethno-nationalism and Jewish supremacy — real struggles around power and control.
Filmmaker: And, also, the way ancestral weight enters all those issues, right? Amichai is such a representation of that.
Dubowski: Yes, he’s got his father and his dead martyred grandfather and all these 38 generations of rabbis on his shoulders, pushing him, pressing him, visibly and invisibly. So interfaith marriage became a microcosm, a story in itself, but also a microcosm of all these larger forces.
Filmmaker: I have to say, I’m not sure those forces are visible unless you’re inside these dynamics. And just as a viewer and a Jew and a filmmaker, I’m really grateful that you chose that way in because it is so accessible and so warm as an entry point.
I know that you were already in the editing process when October 7th happened. And I know that altered the trajectory of the ending of this film. The final minutes now include footage of Amichai protesting for a ceasefire in New York City. We see him in Israel holding a sign that says, “End the Occupation.” Now that you’ve toured this around the world, what kind of responses are you getting to the last few minutes of this piece?
Dubowski: There are quite a number of Jewish film festivals that have rejected the film. There are a few people who walk out at the ending.
Filmmaker: Specifically at that moment?
Dubowski: Yeah. Just happened in Miami. Look, some people say, “I am so thankful. That ending really reflects my progressive, pro-peace, pro-ceasefire political beliefs.” There are other people who say, “I love the film, I hate those last two minutes, why did you have to talk about Gaza? You know, why aren’t you talking about Hamas?” Then I have a woman who just saw it in Vermont and said, “I love the film, I hate the last two minutes, but I’m still recommending it to all my friends.” And that I thought was a real victory because it’s about sitting with discomfort. And for her, sitting with complexity. And that means a lot. You know, those are the people I can move.
Filmmaker: Especially in this moment, Sandi, when in Jewish life, disagreement has taken on a weight that is just impossible. When I do slideshows of my work for Jewish audiences now, my first slide says in huge letters, “Disagree with me.” And then in parentheses, it says, “When it’s over, we’ll both still be alive.” Because I really feel like the stakes feel almost life and death to disagree on some of these topics. But this film holds space for disagreement in such a unique and loving way.
Dubowski: And let me just add that we’re really getting a very wide spectrum of people coming to see it from left to center-right, and a number of Palestinian peace activists coming to see it in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, in London and New York. It’s been really incredible to hear their reactions of the film and how much it really just touches them,
Filmmaker: So now that this process has created a beautiful film and it’s finished, I want to ask you about how these 21 years have impacted your dynamic with Amichai. You know, when I think about how stressful filmmaking can be, it seems mildly miraculous to me that you two still love each other and want to talk after this amount of time focused on one another. What do you notice about how being in this work process together has shifted or deepened or how has it changed the two of you as a unit?
Dubowski: Well, there is a brother-to-brother quality with Amichai and I.
Filmmaker: And does that mean you can also fight and still love each other?
Dubowski: Yes. You know, he is still a diva. But, when we have been taking the film around together and he’s rabbi-ing, he’s writing a book, he’s working on a podcast, he can’t come everywhere. How do we make when he does come on tour precious and meaningful? A lot of it is trying to imagine how we create sort of an expanded cinema as we move the film — how do we infuse ritual into the experience of Sabbath Queen in the world?
For example, in Boston, we had this incredible premiere at the Boston Jewish Film Festival, and it sold out instantly — we have to go back to Boston for theatrical. We had a Friday night Sabbath Queen feast at this Jewish event space called Mamaleh’s Kibitz Corner, which was deep. It was right after the election. It was so tender and raw — people really wanted to be together. And we had such an amazing group of intergenerational queer, straight, Jewish, and not Jewish folks. Gorgeous food, conversation, singing. And then the film screened at the Brattle, people bouncing off the walls, amazing Q&A. And then we had a Jewish drag and burlesque post-screening show at this fantastic Jewish tavern called Lehrhaus. It was such a gorgeous weekend of community building and cinema and ritual. And we did the same thing at Woodstock Film Festival. We partnered with a Woodstock synagogue for an event in the Sukkah, which is the traditional harvest tent that’s open on all four sides and people are welcome from every direction. So, we used the Sukkah to talk about how we have difficult conversations. Grief, death, disagreement. Filmmakers came and community members too.
When we opened Los Angeles at the Laemmle theaters in December before the fires, we rented an art gallery, where we created this Saturday afternoon space of contemplation sharing and ritual that Amichai led. It was everybody-friendly and God-optional. Amichai calls it a SoulSpa. I think this is what we’re also doing — reimagining what it means to take a film into the world. And, so, I think all of this is really feeding Amichai — feeding his purpose and feeding the big sacrifice that he made to just bare his life on screen in service of a bigger story, in service of the time that we’re in, in service of the need that people have right now, which is so traumatic and so urgent. Amichai has given a gift through his story, but also we can give that gift in many ways to audiences as we tour.
Filmmaker: Along with being your dear friend, Amichai is your rabbi. He leads the services you go to, and he officiated your wedding quite gorgeously.
Dubowski: And he buried my father.
Filmmaker: And he buried your father.
Dubowski: I’m about to light the yahrzeit candle for my Dad’s death anniversary. Eight years ago, I had to fly home from Sundance to the hospital. Amichai buried my father and comforted my family through a year of mourning.
Filmmaker: That’s right. I’ve watched all the ways over the years that his rabbinical approach has really benefited your life. And what just occurred to me as you were answering the last question is through the film and the events and beautiful dynamics you’re creating around it, you’re giving the opportunity for Amichai to be everybody’s rabbi. It’s almost like a sharing of that experience, but with so much honesty about who he is and about who we are as a people.
Danielle Durchslag is a filmmaker and visual artist making work across mediums about some of the most fraught and important aspects of contemporary Jewish life. She has shared her pieces at film festivals, galleries, and museums around the world. In September of 2025 she will have a solo exhibition at Atelier Jolie, with the support of the Invisible Dog Art Center. Her most recent costume / performance art piece, also titled Sabbath Queen, can be viewed here.
