An introduction to Sabbath Queen

23 Oct

Notes from an introduction to Sabbath Queen (DuBowski 2024) by Dr Jonathan Williams at our screening in October 2025. Our audience gave this film 4.3 stars.

Sabbath Queen, directed by Sandi Simcha DuBowski, is a documentary following the life of Amichai Lau-Lavie. It was shot over 21 years, and the vast quantity of raw footage (1800 hours of original material, 1100 hours of archival footage, plus photos) ended up with a team of four editors to make the final cut. Sabbath Queen had its Australian premiere at the Jewish International Film Festival last year (2024), and we believe this is the first time it’s screened in Australia since then - so we are really fortunate to see it tonight!

DuBowski’s previous feature film credits include being the director/producer of Trembling Before G-d (2001), about gay and lesbian Orthodox Jews and the tensions between their sexuality and their communities and religion. He was also co-producer of A Jihad for Love (Sharma 2008) a documentary that explored similar tensions between queer Muslims and their communities. So obviously, this is a topic of great interest to him.

However, Sabbath Queen is something a little different - yes, Amichai is a queer man reacting to and in conversation with Orthodoxy. But this is not “queer Jews 101” (not that Trembling is that, either, but it is more of a traditional introduction to the topic). As DuBowski said in one interview: “Amichai’s not a monoculture!” so the film picks up numerous strands, jumping between themes, times and places. The result is as much collage as it is narrative, and the film builds up a portrait of a complex person and his wider context. We get some of Amichai’s family history, glimpses of Jewish inter- and intra-community stories and tensions, conflicts between tradition and innovation, and the real pain that can be caused both by pushing boundaries and by staying within them.

Like many good documentaries, it prods us to ask ourselves the same questions: what wisdom do we want to keep of traditions handed down to us? And also, which parts are no longer productive or relevant, what can we let go of in order to live more fulfilling lives? Throughout, Amichai attempts to open conversations between seemingly opposing viewpoints on these issues - to take a “both/and” rather than “either/or” approach. This is a deeply important act when, as his brother Benny points out at one stage, “When someone screams at you, you shut down.”

This film doesn’t talk down to us as an audience - and in fact sometimes it assumes a level of knowledge that many people here won’t have. So, we thought it might be good to offer some (extremely) simple notes on some of the things you’ll see.

The Western Wall is the only remaining element of the Second Temple, which was destroyed about 2000 years ago - it’s one of the holiest sites in Judaism. Conflict over who should be allowed to pray at the Wall (and how) has been ongoing since the founding of the modern state of Israel. In this film we see conflicts about women praying there, especially in mixed gender groups.
The black boxes you see people (mostly men) wearing on their foreheads and arms, attached by long black straps, are not GoPros (thanks to Michael for that image!). They are called tefillin, and contain scrolls with text from the Torah. They are usually only worn during prayer.
The movements of Judaism referred to most often in this film are Orthodox and Conservative. Orthodox includes Haredi (“ultra-Orthodox”) - note the men’s black fedoras or fur hats - but also modern Orthodox as in Amichai’s brother Benny. The Conservative movement arose as a kind of middle-ground between Orthodox on the one hand and Reform/Progressive/Liberal streams of Judaism on the other. Some of the major differences between the streams boil down to their interpretation of halakha (Jewish law) and its bindingness.
Sabbath Queen, the title, is a play on words. Sabbath, or Shabbat, is the weekly day of rest on the Jewish calendar. Queen might refer to Amichai as a queer man, and especially to his drag persona Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross - or both. In addition, part of the Friday night prayer service involves inviting and welcoming in the “Shabbat bride” or “Shabbat queen” - often described as the feminine aspect of God. One thing to note then, is that the film is combining the queer, the feminine and the holy in its title - mirroring in some ways the journey that Amichai is on, to bring forward the queer and feminine from within his Jewish traditions, rituals, philosophies and texts.

Rather than giving us a straight-down-the-line chronological biography, this film is rather a kind of patchwork of original and archive footage, interviews, photos and animation sequences. Stories are often framed within scenes, such as when Amichai’s father reads Torah at his childhood synagogue, prompting a section about his experience of the Holocaust, before returning to the Torah reading. (In fact, the film as a whole almost mirrors this structure.) At other times, snippets are presented with very little context, allowing us to form our own connections: two that I remember in particular are Amichai taking part in a Tashlich ceremony near the start of the film, casting off his sins/things to let go of (anger, lies, more anger); and then Amichai at a scream club, releasing his frustrations (and maybe some of our own) later on. I think of these scenes as the filmmakers painting with emotion rather than narrative.

As I reflected on this film, I pondered DuBowski’s choices of what to include in the documentary. How do you whittle down two decades, thousands of hours of film and a whole life story into 1 hour and 45 minutes? For me, one of the strengths of Sabbath Queen is its refusal to pick just one story to tell - but that also makes it necessary to pay full attention as a viewer or risk a disjointed experience. Focussing on a single story (the conflict around interfaith marriage, for example) might have made for a more standard narrative, but it would not have given us such a broad and intriguing picture of its subject. It sometimes felt like the filmmakers are grappling with a choice: whether to sacrifice the complexity of the person for the sake of a stronger narrative arc, or to sacrifice narrative for the sake of providing a more holistic view of the person. I think this film walks the line of “both/and” rather than “either/or” in this regard - and I’ll be interested to hear what you think of it, too!

An introduction to Sabbath Queen

Further reading

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An introduction to Sabbath Queen

Further reading

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Films at the Bundy Inc.

We meet on Gunaikurnai Country