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Films
The Other Son
Thomas Wartenberg observes the family as politics.
If you discovered that you were not the offspring of the two people you thought you were, how would you react? Would you not be very affected, taking your identity to have been nevertheless securely established by the family in which you were reared? Or would the revelation cause you to doubt who you were, making you revise your sense of yourself?
Philosophers sometimes put forward this sort of thought experiment in order to problematize our notion of personal identity – our understanding of what makes each of us the unique individual we are. Now complicate the thought experiment: Imagine that what you find out about your biological identity makes you a biological member of a social group that you despised. Imagine, for example, being raised in an anti-Semitic family in pre-World War II Vienna, only to discover in your late teens that you had Jewish ancestry, as one of my former philosophy professors actually did. How would this more complex revelation affect you? How difficult would it be to assimilate such news into your sense of who you were, especially in light of the anti-Semitic beliefs you had come to accept?
A similar situation is the premise of Lorraine Lévy’s The Other Son, a 2012 film that deserves more notice than it has received. Here a Jewish Israeli couple and a Palestinian West Bank couple discover that their sons, both born on the same day, were inadvertently switched during the confusion following an air raid.
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