By Adam Liss

Hello, my name is Adam, and I’m about to hit you with some contradictions, so please bear with me.  I recently finished building a website as part of the New Jewish Filmmaking Project.  However, there was no film involved.  The website is about Judaism and environmentalism.  It’s also about zombies.  Like I said, please bear with me.

This was actually my second time as a member of the New Jewish Filmmaking Project (or NJFP as it’s usually called).  The program, which is now in its 8th year, partners with the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival to give aspiring young storytellers the chance to work on professional-level film projects.  My first go-round with the NJFP happened when I was in high school, and I did in fact work on a film.  This year, however, saw the participants, who ranged in age from 15 to 25, working on a diverse range of online multimedia projects.  So, in addition to producing several short films that will be shown throughout the course of the festival, the participants also created their own websites that dealt with Jewish heritage, family history, and cultural identity.  Or, in my case, zombies.

Now, you may be wondering what the connection is between zombies, Judaism, and environmentalism.  No, it’s not an undead rabbi driving a Prius, although that is… kind of awesome.  No, what links these three things is their focus on survival.  Before I started working on the site, I’d noticed that a lot of my friends had, independently of each other, developed plans for what they’d do in case of a zombie outbreak.  This was curious.  However, in addition to the stuff you’d expect like stealing cars, shooting zombies, and running around the White House naked, there were also more practical elements like finding shelter, growing food, and, the middle ground, brewing your own beer.  As weird as it may sound, zombie survivalists have a lot in common with environmentalists.

So, in addition to writing a piece about zombies, and another about the Torah as a survival guide (which I won’t go into here), I also wanted to explore the connection between environmentalism and survival.  And, as luck would have it, my mom was invited to show her film, A Home on the Range, at last year’s Hazon Food Conference.  I wasn’t really sure what I would write about it, but I figured an event about Judaism AND environmentalism was too good to pass up.  As it turns out, what impressed me the most when I talked to my mom about her experiences at the conference was how impressed she was with it.  See, I’ve always thought of my mom as a very environmental person.  I mean, she composts, she uses CFLs, she drives a Prius–she lived in San Francisco during the Summer of Love for crying out loud—what more was there?  Well, apparently a lot.  Again, I’ll let you read the whole thing, but what impressed her the most was both the breadth (there were hundreds of people at the conference) and the depth (how everything from Priuses to pickles can be viewed environmentally) of this new environmental movement.  Indeed, seeing it at this scale, she realized how environmentalism was deeply intertwined with human survival.

Anyways, you can read all three of the stories here, and you can also check out the other ten projects, which I would highly recommend.  For those of you living in the Bay Area, you can catch screenings of several of the over 50 short films produced as part of the project at this year’s Film Festival.  In addition, there will be kiosks placed in the theater lobbies for the duration of the festival, so you can explore all the projects in their entirety.  So, whether you’re into carrots, corpses, or knishes, there’s a little something for everyone.