S.F. Jewish Film Festival: 'Sabbath Queen' follows drag queen rabbi over two decades

As I watched “Sabbath Queen,” I felt wrapped in it like a tallit and filled with it like a prayer.

This remarkable film about rabbi and drag queen Amichai Lau-Lavie — which gets its West Coast premiere July 28 at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival — feels yin-yang to me. Not white on one side and black on the other, but laughter on one side and tears on the other. Jewish on one side and queer on the other. Grounded in tradition on one side, and profoundly innovative on the other.

Lau-Lavie was born into an Orthodox family in Israel in 1969 and has been living in New York City since 1998. A descendant of Holocaust survivors and the heir to 38 generations of Orthodox rabbis, he’s related to two former Israeli Ashkenazi chief rabbis, Yisrael Meir Lau and David Lau.

But Lau-Lavie, 55, chose a different path. In 2016, he was ordained as a rabbi by the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. He’s the founder and leader of Lab/Shul, an innovative Jewish spiritual community in Manhattan, and also the founder of Storahtelling, which uses theater and storytelling to expand our understanding of the relevancy of Torah, all of which we learn about in the film.

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