Canadians may recognize award-winning filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici (pronounced Yakobovitch) as The Naked Archeologist - the name of the TV show he hosts, which is premiering on Channel 8 in Israel in May.
Simcha Jacobovici.
Photo: Courtesy
"You know," says Jacobovici, grinning, "It's like The Naked Chef of archeology."
But ruins and remains are not - as he is the first to acknowledge during our hour-long interview in a Tel Aviv hotel - his field of expertise. "What I am is an investigative journalist," he argues for what may be the millionth time since the recent release of his ultra-controversial documentary film, The Lost Tomb of Jesus.
The nearly two-hour movie he made with director James Cameron of Titanic fame - a cinematic cross between TV shows like 60 Minutes and CSI and biblical epics like The Ten Commandments - all but asserts with authority that ossuaries (bone boxes) in a tomb discovered in Jerusalem's East Talpiot neighborhood in 1980 are none other than those of Jesus of Nazareth (a.k.a. Jesus Christ) and his family.
That Jacobovici's having "dug up" and "dusted off" a 27-year-old find - dismissed at the time as one among many regular old relics - is rocking the archeological and theological communities is not surprising to the 54-year-old former Israeli. In fact, he insists, while he doesn't appreciate the personal attacks, he does "welcome the debate."
Indeed, if his previous and upcoming journalistic pursuits are any indication, Jacobovici likes stirring up trouble. So far, it's paid off. Big-time.
Among other awards, his Toronto-based company, Associated Producers, has two Emmys under its belt (one for The Selling of Innocents, on sex trafficking of children, and the other for The Plague of Monkeys, on the Ebola virus). Other topics he's covered on film include Ethiopian Jews, the lost tribes of Israel, the sinking of the Struma refugee ship, Jesus's brother James and terrorism. His latest film - that is going to be broadcast here during Pessah - is The Exodus Decoded, an examination, explains Jacobovici, of whether the biblical exodus was "history or fairy tale." Uh-oh.
As it happens, Jacobovici's own history has a touch of the fairy tale about it - a Jewish one. The son of Holocaust survivors from Romania, he was born and spent half of his childhood here, then moved to Canada, where he was an activist for Jewish causes (he chaired the North American Jewish Students' Network; founded and chaired Network Canada, the country's national union of Jewish students; founded the Canadian Universities Bureau of the Canadian Zionist Federation; and served on the national executive of the Canadian Jewish Congress; was invited to share the dais with prime minister Menachem Begin in 1978, following his announcement of the peace accord with Egypt; was president of the International Congress of the World Union of Jewish Students; and in 1980 - the year the "Jesus tomb" he would investigate a quarter of a century later was discovered - he was awarded the Knesset Medal for his Zionist work on North American campuses, and served as special consultant on Nazi war criminals to Canada's solicitor-general).
Today, the married father of five is an Orthodox Jew, who dines with his Hollywood peers on the kosher food he requests. And Shabbat is sacred. "At the end of the day," says Jacobovici, adjusting his lushly embroidered kippa crowning a head of nape-length hair, "if you refuse to compromise, others come around."
Sometimes, but not when the "others" are archeologists of the arch-critic variety.
Much has been written about your controversial film, including in these pages. But what about the man behind the movie. Who is Simcha Jacobovici?
I was born in Israel in 1953. When I was nine, my parents moved to Montreal, where I grew up. My mother had a thyroid condition, and though today Israel is one of the leaders in thyroid treatment, at the time my mother couldn't be treated in Israel. She was one of the first people to be treated with radioactive iodine anywhere, and the first test case in Canada; thank God, she's fine now. My father was a plastics engineer at the beginning of the plastics revolution.
I attended McGill University, where I did a BA in philosophy and political science. Then I came back to Israel for two years to serve in the army - in what's called sherut shlav bet, which is less than three years, because I was already 21. After that, I went back to Canada - to Toronto - where I did an MA in international relations. I finished my PhD work there, stayed and got married. I have five kids - four girls and a boy - ranging in age from 13 to 20 months.
How did you become a filmmaker?
I first started writing background focus pieces - more like analysis. Slowly, I got involved in investigative stuff. The first time I made a film was in 1981. I had written an article about the plight of the Ethiopian Jews. I ended up writing three pieces [on this subject] for The New York Times, and they created quite a controversy. If you're looking for common denominators in my life, I guess I would say that Ethiopian Jews - like the original Jesus movement I am now interested in - fell between the cracks: They were blacks among Jews and Jews among blacks.
The Jews who followed Jesus also fell between the cracks: Jews don't want to delve into them so as not to Christianize Judaism, and Christians don't want to deal with them so as not to Judaize Christianity. I feel very comfortable in the space in between.
The issue of the plight of Ethiopian Jews was a marriage of my Jewish interests and my journalistic ones. Anyway, I wrote several articles on the subject, and after you write so many articles, what do you do next? So I tried to interest some documentary filmmakers in the topic - my idea was to be a consultant, because I had no training in filmmaking. But nobody wanted to do it. So, I thought, "What do I have to lose?" And I went out and made my first documentary, Falasha, Exile of the Black Jews.
