salt lake city | “When you’re a falafel king/you’re a falafel king all the way/from your first alef-bet/till your last dying day …”

OK, maybe that’s not exactly how the musical spoof “West Bank Story” begins, but the short film indeed opens with a cadre of snapping dancers taking on the guys on the other side of the tracks. In this 22-minute film, instead of Maria and Tony, we have Avi and Fatima, and the war is not between the Jets and the Sharks, but between the Jewish Kosher King and the Palestinian Humus Hut next door.

“West Bank Story” was one of a handful of Jewish-themed films screened at the Sundance Film Festival, which ended Jan. 30 in Park City, Utah. With the deafening chatter around this small ski town about which studio picked up which film for how many millions of dollars, it’s hard to walk sniffing out, not the hottest films, but the most Jewish of them.

While hordes of ecstatically friendly moviegoers snaked around the corner hoping to get into a screening of “Hustle and Flow,” the feature about a pimp-cum-rap star from Memphis (Paramount paid $16.2 million), I’m desperately trying to sell my extra ticket to a midnight showing of “Odessa Odessa” (I would have taken $5 to $10), a documentary that follows elderly Ukrainians in Odessa, Brighton Beach and Ashdod. The 96-minute film is preceded by a six-minute short from Israel, “Meet Michael Oppenheim,” which, through photographs and a sweet narration, attempts to trace filmmaker Roni Aboulafia’s family history in Israel.

All roads seem to lead to Israel in the Jewish films at Sundance, even those not directly about the Holy Land. Take “Protocols of Zion,” documentarian Marc Levin’s personal journey to uncover the resurgence of this anti-Semitic screed since Sept. 11.

Levin starts off at the site of the World Trade Center, talking to people who blame the Jews for the tragedy. He takes the film to Middle America and the home of the white supremacists and other Holocaust deniers, then veers away from the “Protocols” to Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” and then to the streets of Patterson, N.J., to speak to the Palestinian street kids. He ends up (where else?) at the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, finding the “Protocols” at the root of all these problems (not without the help the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Rabbi Abraham Cooper and the Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman). “Protocols” was bought by HBO, with an undetermined air date. (They’re hoping to sell it to the big screen first).

Perhaps it’s a paranoia arising from “Protocols” that I begin to see Jews everywhere at Sundance (well, we are running all of Hollywood, aren’t we? When Levin tries to get someone on the phone to discuss Jews in Hollywood, he gets passed around from Norman Lear to Larry David to Rob Reiner back to Norman Lear again). When I randomly attend “Palermo Hollywood,” a feature from Argentina, I am surprised to discover that one of the main characters turns out to be Jewish (nicknamed by his friends “the Jew”) who is running away from his wealthy political family that maintains its standard of living despite the financial crisis.

But the most prominent Jewish film at Sundance is “Wall,” a French-Israeli documentary about the security barrier being built in Israel.

“I was surprised to find that there are many Jews that are pro-peace in Israel,” one foreign journalist told me when she exited the film.

Indeed, director Simone Bitton presents a moderate look on both sides of the concrete and barbed wire structure, as she interviews “regular” Palestinians and Israelis, i.e., not the fanatics, but those who live adjacent to the $1 billion project that is meant to bring security to Israel. Bitton is half Arab and half Jewish, which is probably why — with her fluent Hebrew and Arabic — she is able to have frank conversations with both sides. The picture won a Special Jury Prize in the World Cinema Documentary category, so I’m sure it will be available for viewing soon.

Perhaps the fictional and real characters in “Wall” and “Protocols of Zion,” will one day be like Ahmed and Mahmoud, and Uri and Shlomo from “West Bank Story,” who, after their stores burn down, realize how much they have in common, and make falafel sandwiches together.