Deaf Jam

Gr 9 Up—This remarkable documentary weaves together multiple strands of cultural studies while capturing the dawn of American Sign Language (ASL) slam poetry. It features Israeli-born high school student Aneta Brodski, who enrolls in an extracurricular ASL poetry workshop at the Lexington School for the Deaf in Queens, NY. The film follows her ascent as an innovator in slam poetry as she pairs with American Muslim poet Tahani Salah to perform a politically inspired collaboration simultaneously in ASL and English, which bridges more than one cultural divide. This work is a fabulous entry point into discussions of poetry, cross-cultural studies, identity studies, and the role of language. The instructors pose insightful questions to Brodski and her peers to spur exploration into their identities, and the students' honesty is worth a pause for discussion. Many issues affecting the Deaf community are breached, including the banning of ASL from all US schools from 1880 to 1960. Fascinating commentary on the uniqueness of ASL as a visual, not written, language by Columbia poetry professor Bob Holman is provided, side by side with the statistic that 52 percent of Deaf students are never taught ASL in school today. This exemplifies the depth of understanding that viewers glean from this award-winning film on the richness of ASL.—Sara Lissa Paulson, The American Sign Language and English Lower School, New York City