What Is a Jew to You?

1986, 50 Minutes

Aviva Ziegler has worked in award-winning current affairs television in Australia for over 20 years, observing and documenting the lives of others. In this film, Aviva turns the camera on herself to explore the essence of her own Jewishness.

Being Jewish for Aviva is something of a conundrum: If you have no formal involvement in Judaism and its practices, and you don’t even believe in God, then what is it that makes you answer “yes” when asked if you are Jewish? To pinpoint her Jewish connections, Aviva traces her own family’s religious and cultural diversions from their origins as a tightly knit Viennese family to one whose members are scattered across the globe.  

What is a Jew to You? is not an anguished search for identity but rather, a wry and lighthearted look at some of the confusions and paradoxes that are for Aviva part of being Jewish today.

A Film Australia National Interest Program. © 2011 National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.