If you travel west on the 80 across the Bay Bridge and into San Francisco, just before the 9th Street exit you'll come across a curious billboard touting an Israeli innovation that turns trash into energy. In the same vein, posters publicizing Israel's press as the only free one in its region began popping up several months ago on BART. The advertisements signal a calculated public relations campaign to awaken positive Israeli sensibilities in the Bay Area, a region that, as a whole, is more progressive than the rest of the country and where criticism of the Israeli-American political paradigm pervades the mainstream.

The Bay Area Jewish community is, so to speak, torn between two competing tendencies: unwavering dedication to the Jewish state and a traditional alignment with liberal causes and suffering peoples. The recent advertisements and the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, which opens tonight, try to intervene on the point, contending that the predicament is more a condition in need of reflection, and that things in the real world are always more complex than "either us or them."

The 28th annual San Francisco Jewish Film Festival opens with "Strangers," a tale of incompatible, star-crossed lovers of Israeli and Palestinian blood who fall in love despite-or because of?-their intuition, soon after abandoning symbols of their respective nationalities to begin life anew. Thematically, the film echoes this summer's "Don't Mess With the Zohan," where Jew and Arab are able to overcome their differences only after they move to the new world, but that message passes more easily as a lightweight comedy than as a tear-filled drama.

The centerpiece of the festival is "Love Comes Lately," a film capturing the heart, spirit and work of Yiddish writer and Noble Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer. The aging Max Kohn, afflicted with a prostate ailment, travels and writes as he attempts to regain some semblance of virility, emboldened by his ability to woo and canoodle women of various ages and dispositions with kind earnestness along the way.

The festival's makeup is documentary and fiction films, the former typically dealing with more intense political topics while the latter tends to exude an air of distracted levity. Some films-like "888-Go-Kosher," a short documentary on balancing modernity with orthodoxy-directly engage with traditional Jewish themes. Others are more tangentially related to Jewishness. Say a Jewish-Canadian teenager becomes the frontman of a heavy metal band and we have "Anvil! The Story of Anvil."

The five films by brothers Barak and Tomer Heymann are sure to offer an insightful perspective into Israeli life. Any comparison to the American Coen brothers is ill-fitting at best since the Heymanns are documentary filmmakers and the Coens work in fiction. Still, the brothers are adept storytellers who have concocted studies on Holocaust imagery in Israeli pornographic magazines ("Stalags"), a bi-national, bi-lingual school ("Bridge Over the Wadi"), along with a pair of dance documentaries and one on the production of a play with delinquent adolescent boys.

The main point of the festival seems to be that if you think you know Judaism, look again: The festival explores Italian Jews and the legacy of fascism and highlights films and television shows emphasizing the diversity in Israel. Zionist historiography has too often attached a monolithic identity to being Israeli and these films go a long way toward emphasizing the assortment of types found in the country, if limited only to those from a Jewish perspective.