Sandi DuBowski’s Jewish Doc Challenges

Amichai Lau-Lavie wants to get inside the system of Judaism like a virus. A Radical Faerie, a drag queen, a rabbi, and an openly gay man, Amichai is the focus of Sandi DuBowski’s ambitious documentary “Sabbath Queen,” filmed over two decades. Amichai founded a God-optional congregation that erupted established systems of practice in his religious denomination — but the movie follows Amichai into a not-so-hairpin turn toward conservatism in recent years. “Sabbath Queen” finds filmmaker DuBowski skewing away from hagiography and instead toward an active questioning of Amichai’s life’s work. Taking on multiple decades of the man’s life means this film loses its way sometimes amid a scattered approach, but “Sabbath Queen” shrewdly asks hard questions about what it means to be Jewish in the 21st century. Especially when that question is so up for grabs right now.

If you’re not hip to the particulars of Jewish life in America, especially in New York City, “Sabbath Queen” may lose you at points. But DuBowski doesn’t water down the film’s approach, and the most emotionally pungent aspect of his film is inclusion of Amichai’s brother, Binyamin Lau, who has struggled with Amichai’s determination to break from tradition all his life. “The closet is death,” Amichai’s brother says as the movie unpacks how Amichai left Israel in the 1990s after being outed as gay in the media, only to then arrive in New York City and adopt a drag…