By day, Eid works on a kibbutz, laying bricks and waiting for cement to set. At home, he escapes on Skype, making calls to his beloved in Paris, a married writer and actress, and dreams of one day joining her and producing a play he’s writing. But when his sister gets engaged, he is compelled to marry her fiancé’s sister in a Badal, or exchange, marriage.

Eid, by Yousef Abo Madegem, believed to be the first Israeli Bedouin to direct a feature film, tracks its title character — marvelously played by Shadi Mar’i — as he suffers the whips and scorns of tradition in the face of his own ambition.

Hamlet, indeed, seems like a spiritual basis. Eid is trapped in the expectations of his little life, escaping by rehearsing lyrical monologues responding to sexual abuse he suffered as a child. When he takes a tentative step toward freedom, the irresolution of his lover, waiting at a literal threshold, stops his momentum. (It’s very “now I might do it pat.”)

At its core, the story, written by Yuval Aharoni, director of 2017’s Heritage, is a study of a community rarely seen in Israeli film, that of Bedouin citizens of Israel who rely on Jewish employers, often suffering exploitation at their hands.

What is refreshing about the film, which takes place in the majority Bedouin city of Rahat, is its intimacy and scale. It is not a definitive picture of how the approximately 200,000 Bedouins live, but one man’s story, in which discrimination is largely incidental. (Madegem based Eid’s story on a friend of his.)

Eid is a character of pure potential, fluent in Hebrew, determined to make a life in the theater, but stifled by his demanding father and his duty to a wife he didn’t choose. His bride, played by Angham Khalil, has her own moment to consider her fate, as her mother and mother-in-law slowly unwrap her wedding hijab.

In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, Madegem said he made the film in part to discuss sexual violence against boys and begin a conversation within his community. But the film has universal appeal, and its light touch is impressive for a debut tackling heavy subject matter.

As Eid works through his play, sometimes shouting its lines at his tormenters in the kibbutz, he pokes fun at a suggestion: that it must conclude in a confrontation.

“We’re Bedouins,” he quips “all our stories end in a confrontation.”

They don’t all have to. And, as Eid itself is proof, sometimes the best stories don’t.

The film Eid is having its New York debut at the Other Israel Film Festival at the Marlene Meyerson JCC in New York City on Thursday, Nov. 11, followed by a Q&A with director Yousef Abo Madegem.

The post ‘Eid,’ the first Israeli feature directed by a Bedouin, is a heartfelt portrait of an artist appeared first on The Forward.

Cornell University will pay $60 million to the Trump administration to resolve ongoing antisemitism investigations and unfreeze $250 million in federal funds, becoming the fourth Ivy League school and fifth overall to strike such a deal.

The deal came weeks after another agreement signed by the University of Virginia, and also followed the resolution of an ongoing controversy at Cornell involving a Jewish professor’s course on Gaza.

“With this resolution, Cornell looks forward to resuming the long and fruitful partnership with the federal government that has yielded, for so many years, so much progress and well-being for our nation and our world,” Michael Kotlikoff, the school’s Jewish president, said in a statement Friday announcing the deal.

In a virtual campus town hall after the deal was announced, Kotlikoff linked the university’s negotiation of the settlement to the broader campus climate in the two-plus years since the Hamas attack on Israel and war in Gaza.

“Universities across the country have made significant progress since disruptions on campus on October 7 in articulating our rules, appropriately enforcing our rules and making sure that everybody’s rights are protected,” he said, as reported by the Cornell student newspaper.

As part of the deal, Cornell will pay the federal government $20 million per year for the next three years in exchange for the unfreezing of several grants to the university, many of which are connected to the Department of Defense. Half of the money will be directed to investments in agriculture programs. 

The school also promises to “conduct annual campus climate surveys to ensure that Jewish students are safe and that anti-Semitism is being addressed,” according to a White House release about the deal. In the aftermath of Oct. 7, Cornell’s campus dealt with violent threats against Jewish students as well as a faculty member who had praised the Hamas attacks.

The government, in turn, promises to drop its ongoing Title VI investigations into allegations of discrimination based on shared Jewish ancestry or national origin at the school. Kotlikoff further insisted that Cornell would preserve its academic freedom, and would not be forced to abide by White House guidelines on other campus concerns such as diversity-based hiring and transgender athletes.

Cornell’s agreement follows earlier ones struck by Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Brown and UVA. UVA, the first public university to strike an antisemitism-related deal with Trump, was not required to make any payments to the federal government, according to the deal it announced last month. 

Instead, UVA agreed to end certain diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, known as DEI, and eliminate language referring to transgender people, among other provisions. None of the public terms of its settlement involved addressing antisemitism.

Momodou Taal addresses fellow students at a Cornell University pro-Palestinian demonstration in April 2024. (Screenshot from Cornell Daily Sun video)

One prominent on-campus critic of Cornell’s handling of antisemitism issues praised the school’s settlement as “pragmatic” in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

“I think the fact that all Title VI investigations have been closed is a tremendously important reassurance to students and parents that the university, in fact, is doing all it can to protect Jewish students from any kind of antisemitic discrimination or incident,” said Menachem Rosensaft, an adjunct law professor at Cornell.

Rosensaft added that the agreement “also sends a very clear signal to anyone who is inclined to engage in antisemitic discrimination or violence that they will suffer the consequences.”

Rosensaft had been at the middle of a more recent Israel-related controversy at Cornell after he complained to Kotlikoff about a pro-Palestinian Jewish professor’s plan to teach a class on Gaza. Kotlikoff’s criticisms of the class, in emails published by JTA, prompted campus advocacy groups to admonish what they said were his threats to academic freedom.

That professor, Eric Cheyfitz, prompted an internal investigation after he tried to remove an Israeli graduate student from his Gaza class. Last month, Cheyfitz opted to retire from teaching in order to end the investigation.

The university pressure on Cheyfitz, Rosensaft said, was further evidence — along with the settlement — that Cornell has started to take threats of antisemitism seriously.

“He will no longer be able to propagate his extreme anti-Zionism in the classroom,” Rosensaft said.

Further Trump negotiations with universities remain ongoing, even as more and more Jews say they think such deals are only using antisemitism as an excuse to attack higher education.

The terms of a proposed $1 billion payout from the University of California system, recently made public by a court order, include specific reference to antisemitic incidents that took place on UCLA’s campus. In addition, a closely watched negotiation with Harvard remains ongoing.

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New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani holds a press conference at the Unisphere in the Queens borough of New York City, US, Nov. 5, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kylie Cooper

When a single election lays bare a community’s conscience, it deserves more than punditry.

The recent victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York’s Democratic primary was more than a political surprise. It was a sociological revelation — a moment that exposed the moral divide within American Jewry and the fragility of its civic cohesion.

The Times of Israel exit poll tells the story plainly: roughly 63 percent of Jewish voters supported Andrew Cuomo, while a third backed Mamdani, the far-left candidate known for his fierce criticism of Israel and his support for the BDS movement. But the aggregate numbers obscure something more profound. Beneath the data lies a moral geography that splits the community itself; between Brooklyn’s progressive brownstones and Manhattan’s traditional bastions, between younger universalists and older particularists, between two rival moral languages of what it means to be Jewish in America.

In the brownstone belts of Park Slope, Prospect Heights, and Clinton Hill, Mamdani dominated. His margins in some precincts approached 90 percent. These are neighborhoods filled with young professionals, educators, and creatives: Jews who are largely non-Orthodox, highly educated, and politically left-leaning.

They belong to a generation whose moral formation occurred as much on social media as in synagogue pews. Across the East River, in Borough Park, Crown Heights, and the Upper East Side, Cuomo’s support exceeded 80 percent. These precincts are wealthier, older, and denser, with day-school graduates, Federation donors, and Israel mission alumni. One city, two moral worlds.

Political psychology offers a framework for understanding this divergence.

Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham’s Moral Foundations Theory describes human moral reasoning as rooted in several intuitive “foundations.” The first pair — Care and Fairness — orient toward empathy, equality, and the mitigation of harm. The second set — Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity — prioritize group solidarity, respect for tradition, and the protection of what is sacred.

Liberals, Haidt’s research found, tend to emphasize the individualizing foundations of care and fairness; conservatives draw upon all five, including those that bind the group together. These moral instincts operate beneath conscious ideology, shaping the stories people tell about justice, duty, and belonging.

Applied to Jewish life, this model illuminates the Mamdani divide. The younger, Park Slope cohort embodies the individualizing moral style. Their Judaism is ethical universalism — a faith of empathy, repair, and inclusion. To them, Jewish history teaches solidarity with the marginalized, not tribal defense. Their political commitments — tenant rights, climate action, anti-racism, and Palestinian solidarity — feel like moral extensions of their Jewish conscience.

Supporting Mamdani, in this light, is not an act of betrayal but an act of consistency. The Upper East Side cohort, by contrast, lives in the binding moral register. Their Judaism centers on loyalty to the Jewish people, reverence for institutions, and defense of Israel as a sacred trust. When a candidate denounces Israel as genocidal, they hear not critique but violation. The vote for Cuomo was not a calculation of interests; it was an affirmation of covenant.

Survey data confirm that these moral worlds align with generational and institutional divides. Pew Research Center’s 2024 survey found that only 45 percent of Jews under 35 hold a favorable view of Israel’s government, compared with 64 percent among those over 50.

Yet nearly 90 percent across all ages still view the Israeli people positively, suggesting alienation not from Israel itself but from its political expression.

Pew’s 2021 study showed that 58 percent of American Jews feel emotionally attached to Israel, though that attachment rises to 82 percent among the Orthodox and drops below 60 percent among Reform and unaffiliated Jews. Twenty-two percent now believe the United States is too supportive of Israel — twice the share in 2013 — and that sentiment is concentrated among younger and unaffiliated

Jews. Another 2024 survey by the Benenson Strategy Group found that nearly four in five American Jews still feel close to Israel, and 72 percent say Israel makes them proud to be Jewish, yet 62 percent admit they “sometimes find it hard to support actions taken by Israel or its government.” The picture that emerges is not rejection but tension: enduring identity, waning confidence, moral ambivalence.

This moral bifurcation has deep civic consequences. For much of the 20th century, American Jews reconciled universal and particular obligations through robust institutions. Federations linked philanthropy for the poor to support for Israel. Synagogues fused civic virtue with covenantal belonging. Community centers cultivated the habits of service, dialogue, and shared space.

Those integrative structures made it possible to balance empathy and loyalty within a single communal framework. But as institutional participation has declined, moral formation now occurs in fragmented spaces — online, on campuses, within activist networks — where individual conscience replaces institutional mediation. The result is that empathy and loyalty, once twin pillars of Jewish civic life, now compete rather than complement.

When moral authority fragments, politics becomes identity by proxy. The universalist moral vocabulary of younger Jews often renders Jewish power suspect; the particularist vocabulary of their elders renders dissent heretical. The two sides no longer disagree over policy; they inhabit different moral cosmologies. That is why the Mamdani election felt seismic to the Jewish community and New York City more generally. It revealed, not created, the split between what might be called the “individualizing Jew” and the “binding Jew” — one who sees Judaism as a moral compass for humanity, the other who sees it as the covenantal anchor of a people.

The consequences are not merely internal. A cohesive Jewish community has long served as a vital civic intermediary, connecting minority experience to national ideals. Fragmentation weakens that role. When a third of Jewish voters champion a candidate who accuses Israel of genocide and two-thirds recoil in outrage, institutional consensus becomes nearly impossible. Jewish organizations struggle to articulate shared positions on campus speech, antisemitism, or Israel policy because the moral foundations beneath those debates differ.

The binding moral language of loyalty and sanctity, once the lingua franca of Jewish life, now strikes many younger Jews as exclusionary or even coercive. Yet without it, solidarity itself erodes.

This tension certainly mirrors the broader democratic malaise. Across the West, younger generations are shifting from binding to individualizing moral frameworks — from “who we are” to “whom we protect.” That shift, born of compassion, often dissolves the collective bonds that sustain civic trust. The Jewish community’s fracture is thus a microcosm of the American one. If one of the nation’s most institutionally successful minorities cannot sustain moral coherence across generations, the prospects for the larger democracy are sobering.

Still, Jewish tradition offers a path forward. The Hebrew Bible itself balances competing moral imperatives: love the stranger (Care), pursue justice (Fairness), remember you were slaves in Egypt (Loyalty), honor your parents (Authority), and be holy (Sanctity). The moral genius of Judaism has always been its capacity to integrate rather than choose. A renewed Jewish civic life would recover that synthesis — not by diluting conviction, but by translating between moral dialects.

Doing so requires moral bilingualism. Jewish leaders must learn to speak both the language of empathy and the language of obligation. They must show younger Jews that loyalty need not mean blind allegiance, and show older Jews that care need not mean disavowal. Institutions that can bridge those vocabularies — pairing service projects with Jewish learning, coupling justice work with covenantal memory — will thrive. Those that cannot will wither into echo chambers. The task is to rebuild spaces where the moral foundations overlap, where the passion for fairness coexists with respect for continuity, and where dissent strengthens rather than fractures community.

The Mamdani election dramatized the challenge. It showed that American Jews are not divided between left and right so much as between two moral imaginations.

The future of American Jewish life — and perhaps something of American civic life itself — depends on reuniting those halves. The task is not to pick sides between the moral foundations, but to recover their harmony. That would mean re-embedding compassion within community and rooting loyalty in moral reflection. It would mean building institutions capable of moral translation rather than moral policing. It would mean acknowledging that Jewish flourishing and democratic stability alike require both conscience and covenant.

The Mamdani election did not create this divide, it exposed it. The challenge now is whether American Jews can build a third moral script, one that joins care to continuity, justice to responsibility, empathy to endurance. That work begins by recognizing that not all differences are merely moral styles. Mamdani’s campaign trafficked in ideas that crossed into antisemitism — denying Jewish self-determination, vilifying Israel as inherently criminal, and normalizing hostility toward Jewish identity itself.

A community committed to moral dialogue cannot ignore such realities; tolerance cannot mean the abdication of judgment. Yet if Jews can still hold fast to both conscience and covenant — defending themselves without surrendering compassion, seeking justice without erasing solidarity — they can model for the nation how moral diversity becomes democratic strength. Democracy, like Judaism, survives not on unanimity but on the hard, often uncomfortable work of moral conversation and that work begins with the courage to confront hatred without forfeiting humanity.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.