Push the Water by Irit Reinheimer

Push the Water is a politically astute memoir built around the moving image. In it, filmmaker and artist, Irit Reinheimer, weaves together descriptions of archival footage, home movies and memories that prompt new recognitions of her Jewish family’s participation in settler-colonialism and the occupation of Palestine. At the center of this investigation is a painful divide between Reinheimer and her mother, who appears in the foreground as the subject. Through this analysis of their relationship, the author seeks to understand her own connection to tradition, culture and inheritance. These dreamy and vulnerable meditations deny a reader the simple unspooling of the films themselves, asking us to consider what’s been hidden from view, as much as what’s been centered.

This is a story about what it means to be claimed by violent forces and what it looks like to refuse that claim, to choose a queer, liberatory belonging instead. Here you’ll find politics rendered as image, image refracted through memory, and memory bisected by love and rage.

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