Drag sabbath

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This article was published 16/05/2025 (314 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

‘Mom, are all rabbis drag queens?’

Sandi DuBowski overheard a 10-year-old boy in California ask that question after screening his latest film, a sprawling documentary about Amichai Lau-Lavie, a suis-generis, queer religious leader — the nephew of the former chief rabbi of Israel — who moonlights as the bombastic blond Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross.

As a filmmaker, DuBowski is drawn to the stories of risk takers who defy containment. Enter Lau-Lavie, whom DuBowski first learned about while working on Trembling Before G-d, his trailblazing 2001 portrait of gay and lesbian Orthodox and Hasidic Jews straddling multiple worlds.

“I went to Jerusalem to look for people to be in the film and everyone kept saying, ‘You have to meet Amichai.’ So I met him and asked him to be in the movie and he refused because he was too much of a diva: he wanted his own movie. He said, ‘I don’t do collage,’” recalls DuBowski, who grew up in Brooklyn.

But DuBowski and Lau-Lavie developed a trusting relationship in the months that followed, and by 2003 the documentarian had hit the record button. What ensued over the next two decades was Sabbath Queen, a deeply rewarding longitudinal portrait of one man’s constant religious and spiritual evolution set against the backdrop of an increasingly hostile world.

“People used to tell me it was like what Richard Linklater did in Boyhood, and I would say, yes, but it’s more like Rabbihood,” says DuBowski, in Winnipeg for tonight’s screening at Public Domain (633 Portage Ave.), where viewers will be treated to a Q&A and an accompanying Shabbat snack spread.

The level of access and scope of his connection to his central character was unprecedented for DuBowski, 55, whose own life experiences consistently found a mirror in Lau-Lavie, who, under tremendous professional risk, conducted an interfaith wedding ceremony for the filmmaker and his husband, Eric.

“I think for me, this is really a mid-life film. It’s about holding these big questions, testing and compromising around structures and systems. Like, where do you push? There’s an inside-outside strategy Amichai employs, so that’s part of it. I think just watching the unfolding of a life.”

That reverse origami reveals a subject, as well as a filmmaker, constantly reorienting himself within the context of both a flexible modern world and a static, text-based landscape, assessing the strictures of religion to renegotiate the boundaries of inherited tradition.

As the film progresses, DuBowski and Lau-Lavie are revealed as deeply introspective, considerate and intellectually open characters, willing to engage soulfully with questions asked both within and without global Jewish communities: Who is Jewish? Who is godly? Who are we to even ask such questions?

“I was at a retreat with Amichai and we were told to lie down and imagine our funeral, our eulogies, our purpose in life, and I got up that night crying. ‘Amichai, I wish I could become a rabbi.’ At that point, the conservative Jewish movement that I grew up in didn’t accept openly gay or lesbian rabbis,” DuBowski recalls.

“And Amichai comforted me and said that artists are the new rabbis, and that’s when I became an artist. I have no rabbis in my family, but I really do feel like I live by that idea — artists as the new rabbis — and that’s how I’m trying to do my own version of spiritual work.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com