In this issue

THEY WERE BIG bodies, some of them hairy, sitting in a steam bath in New York. We were small bodies, some of us clean-shaven, sitting in our own steam bath in San Francisco. The men were on-screen in a Jewish Film Festival entry circa 1993 called "The Shvitz." We were bathing in comedy on a sweaty San Francisco summer night in the Castro Theatre. "When we sit in this intense heat," one of the guys told us from the high-temperature comfort of his too-tiny towel, "we're all the same, millionaire and pauper."

In this perversely patriotic moment when God blesses America as an act of law and identity and nationality are being used to organize individuals into frightened uniformity, a dip in the democratizing shvitz should probably be made mandatory as well. There are more poignant, identity-based comedies where those came from. The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, featured on page 31, was the first of its kind and, under the inspired design of its executive artistic director, Janis Plotkin, has always remained unlike the rest: a nonunifying voice that developed from the unique nature of its Bay Area demographic. It's a place where queer politics and orthodox religion face off onstage, a Jewish film festival where Palestinian peace activists are recruited for Q&As, where Israeli antiwar voices find a home.

Plotkin invited deported Palestinian Mubarak Awad, a nonviolent resister, to speak to audiences in 1988, just months after the first intifada began. Two years ago, as the al-Aqsa intifada was about to break out, the festival collaborated with the Arab Film Festival, Cinemayaat, in showing Diogenes: Ansar 3, which detailed Israeli abuses at a detention camp in the Negev desert where Palestinians were held without due process in the late '80s and early '90s.

Last year the Israeli Consulate withdrew its cash and support, but Plotkin has never let those sorts of moves bother her. "What's controversial about the Jewish Film Festival," she says, "is people's attachment to what it means to be Jewish. What we think it is to be Jewish is to engage in debate over issues that concern us. People who critique us don't think that's what it means to be Jewish at all."

In a just world, people would be protesting the fact that Plotkin's now stepping down from a position she's held for 21 years. She says she felt like she needed to shift her life a bit and hopes to concentrate on a few projects close to her heart. I wish her luck. But we're the ones who'll need it. At times like these, sane voices like hers are the scarcest commodities around.