Sideshow caught up with Canadian filmmaker Jamie Kastner—the man behind the controversial documentary K*ke Like Me—for a discussion on the “K” word, shotgun bar mitzvahs and the pursuit of a Holocaust memorial dominatrix.

Sideshow: The title of your film [which references the 1961 classic non-fiction novel, Black Like Me] isn’t exactly kosher with a lot of people. One of the broadcaster’s you’re in talks with is even pushing to have it changed. Do you think this word will ever be “reclaimed” so to speak?

Jamie Kastner: I don’t think the word k*ke, beyond my office, is likely to be “reclaimed.” Frankly, I think the question of whether “n***er” has been meaningfully reclaimed is debatable. The reason I’ve stuck to “k*ke” for the title is because it speaks to the very particular position of Jews; on one hand, no matter how far into the mainstream they get, you’re never allowed to forget that it’s the “Jewish neo-cons” or whatever. On the other hand, Jews never seem to be a hip minority either. It seems unlikely you’ll ever see white suburban kids slapping each other five, calling each other ‘my k*ke’ and downing a fifth of Manischewitz on a street corner to be cool.

Sideshow: You scored yourself a pretty quick and dirty bar mitzvah. Does it even count?

Jamie Kastner: It happened much as you see in the film. An orthodox cabby takes me to Lubavitch world headquarters in Crown Heights [New York], tells me not to try going in, then the first guy I meet on the street, comes up, asks if I’m Jewish, then whisks me and the crew in for what he calls my bar mitzvah. It’s true that I had never “laid tefillin” before; whether this counts as my bar mitzvah or not, you’d have to ask a greater religious authority than me.

Sideshow: At one point in the film, you end up in Sarcelles, France where a heated discussion ensues between two Jewish women and two Arab youths. What did you make of the situation?

Jamie Kastner: It was incredible and depressing. I knew I was looking for something like that, not necessarily a riot, but something to happen on camera that would illustrate the prejudices I had read about in that part of the world. Still, to see it flare up with so little provocation into something so vivid and ugly and blind and human, was a heartbreaking surprise.  Beyond what you see on camera, the two young Arab guys having told me at the end that if I was a Jew, they hated me, then invited me to see where they lived and prayed. I declined.

Sideshow: In Germany, you meet up with Lea Rosh, a driving force behind the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Some call her a pushy “memorial dominatrix,” while others think she’s doing a lot of good. Your thoughts?

Jamie Kastner: Going in I had adopted many people’s attitude about her: that she’s rather tasteless and somewhat disturbing for seeming to promote herself as much as the monument, for proposing to put a tooth from a concentration camp in the monument… I did the interview and we certainly saw all these sides of her, but afterwards a few things happened.

I went to Poland where the predominant attitude was not hand-wringing over the best kind of memorial to erect, but rather how to turn Jewish remains into the most effective tourist trap. This immediately made me appreciate more the relative civility of the German efforts, including Frau Rosh’s. What really is her great crime? That she managed to get a massive monument to dead Jews erected next to the Brandenburg Gate? No one but a pushy person could’ve gotten that done.

In short, I feel about the memorial as I do about Ms. Rosh: conflicted. And, I think that her section in my film leaves her and the topic open to this range of interpretation.