Author, Lecturer, and Professor Yaakov Malkin Receives Jerusalem Film Festival Life Achievement Award

Yaakov Malkin, a leading advocate for Judaism as Culture in Israel, was recently honored with a Life Achievement Award at the Twenty First International Jerusalem Film Festival for his contribution to the Israeli film industry.

The ceremony was held during the festival at the Jerusalem Cinematheque from July 8-17 with Malkin one of two recipients of the award, along with Israeli cinematographer David Gurfinkel.

Malkin, Professor of Aesthetics and Rhetoric at Tel Aviv University, was recognized for his key role in developing the local film industry. In addition to teaching literature and literature of theater and cinema for more than four decades, he has published books on cinema and established cinema circles and clubs.

Professor Malkin is also the founder and academic director of Meitar College for Judaism as Culture in Jerusalem and the co-dean of the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism in Farmington Hills, MI.

Among the many books Professor Malkin has authored are Secular Judaism: Faith, Values and Spirituality and What Do Secular Jews Believe?

The following article, a personal tribute to Yaakov Malkin by Haaretz film critic Uri Klein, appeared in the festival program and also in Haaretz on July 2, 2004.


In one of my first classes at the newly-opened Department of Film & Television of Tel Aviv University, Yaakov Malkin dedicated the class to the term “masterpiece.” He explained that a masterpiece refers not only to great films such as Citizen Kane or 81/2, but also to a film like Gone With the Wind, whose influence was great, even if its quality as a work of art was far from being perfect. And then Malkin turned to the class and asked: “Can someone help me remember who directed Gone With the Wind?” “Victor Fleming,” I hurried to answer, a first year student, eager to prove the knowlege he had gained on his own, in the cinematic wasteland that this place was before the Department of Film & Television and the Cinematheques in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa (and Yaakov Malkin was a key figure in their establishment). And so in that small and seemingly insignificant moment, which I remember so well over thirty years later, the relationship was clinched between that same student who so wanted to learn from his teacher and the teacher who was willing to learn from his students. And it continues until this very beautiful moment in which Yaakov Malkin is recognized for his Life Achievement.

Malkin brought us Auerbach, Buber and Brecht, Chaplin, Bergman and Fellini, but also Abraham and King David. We, who came from a slightly different place (some of the people in that first year of the Film Department were Eytan Green, Irma Klein, Danny Warth, Gidi Orsher), tried to prove to him that those same aesthetic and ethical qualities that he found in City Lights or Wild Strawberries could also be found in a Douglas Sirk melodrama, a Howard Hawks western or a Vincente Minelli musical. And Malkin was ready to listen, because, above any label that can be stuck to his name (teacher, lecturer, critic, writer, journalist, fighter for cinematic culture) he was an intellectual, in the richest sense of the word. In Yaakov Malkin’s case, that meant openness and generosity and curiosity and excitement and loyalty and above all, a great love for everything beautiful and human.

Any place you look in the neither easy nor simple nor comfortable history of local cinema culture you will find Yaakov Malkin. He was one of the first to publish books on cinema - on Chaplin and on Brecht, on the screenplay as literature. He was active in the establishment of cinema circles, clubs and departments, and in bringing film to a public and to an establishment who didn’t always know that cinema is also an art. He collaborated with David Perlov in the making of In Jerusalem, Chris Marker in the production of Description of a Struggle, with his students in the task of editing the cinema periodical Close-Up.

And all this he did - does - with grace, which is another quality that is so significant to Yaakov Malkin’s being an intellectual in the full sense of the word. A man who dedicates his life to the most important thing of all - freedom to know, to love and to live in freedom.

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