(JTA) — Earlier this year Nadav Lapid, the award-winning Israeli dissident filmmaker, traveled with his son to Marseille for a screening of his latest film. He fell in love.

“This city reminded me of Tel Aviv, in a way, with the beach and everything,” he recounted Wednesday to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency — referring to the city he no longer lives in, having built a career with movies that take sharp aim at what he calls the “moral abyss” of Israeli society. When a Marseille film festival then invited him to serve on its jury for its upcoming installment in July, he readily accepted.

Then the boycotts started. Last month around a dozen pro-Palestinian filmmakers threatened to pull out of the upcoming Marseille International Film Festival over Lapid’s planned participation because, they said, he had accepted funding from the Israeli government to support his work. (Lapid’s movies, including his latest, have received funding from Israel’s film fund.) Following this, according to the accounts of both Lapid and the festival’s director, the festival had second thoughts about him serving on the jury.

While the festival offered him the opportunity to participate in a public master class instead, Lapid said, the protesters hadn’t relented: “It’s not enough for these people.”

Frustrated, the director earlier this week decided to pull out of the festival altogether. He’s not happy about it.

“To make people like myself the enemy when the actual state of things is so terrible, it’s insanity. It’s stupidity,” he told JTA. “For them, the highest triumph of the Palestinian cause is if they will cancel my master class in Marseille? I think it’s pathetic.”

Lapid has received a groundswell of support this week: Natalie Portman and hundreds of other film-industry figures have signed open letters criticizing the boycotts against him. While he’s uncomfortable with being in the spotlight for reasons unrelated to his films, Lapid said he’s pleased with this outcome.

“You could have composed an unbelievable cinematic program from only the filmmakers that texted me during the last hour,” he said.

Even so, the filmmaker says, he’s now unsure if he is still welcome in France as a dissident Israeli.

“I asked myself whether they would like me to stop doing movies, or to leave France,” he told JTA. Elsewhere, he’s described himself as “homeless.”

It’s the latest unspooling of painful dynamics around artistic boycotts of artists and institutions seen by the left as normalizing Israel. Last month another French cultural figure, the Jewish comics artist Joann Sfar (“The Rabbi’s Cat”), faced calls to boycott his presence at a literary festival, also in Marseille. In its justification, a pro-Palestinian artist collective, pushing an Instagram post reading “Zionists out of our city,” cited Sfar’s signing of an open letter last year that argued a Palestinian state should not be recognized unless Hamas could be disarmed and Gaza’s Israeli hostages freed.

In recent months, in addition to broader boycotts of the Israeli film and TV industry, several leading cultural critics of Israel — both Jewish and not — have been targeted as well. Those include bestselling author Sally Rooney for publishing a Hebrew-language translation of her novel with a left-wing Israeli publisher (some prominent activists accused her of exploiting a “loophole” in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against Israel); Jewish Currents editor Peter Beinart for speaking at Tel Aviv University; and Jewish author Joshua Leifer for associating with a “Zionist” rabbi at a book event.

In Lapid’s case, the group organizing against him, La Palestine Sauvera Le Cinéma, argued that “Nadav Lapid is not being targeted because of his Israeli nationality.”

Instead, the collective asserted, their objection was due to Lapid having accepted funding from Israel to complete his latest film, “Yes!”; the fact that the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival as an Israeli co-production and competed for Israel’s highest film awards; and Lapid’s past participation in an Israeli film festival in Paris.

“The cultural boycott does not target artists because of their nationality or personal opinions,” the filmmakers wrote, in French, in a blog post. “What is at issue here is the reality of their integration into the institutional and political structures of the Israeli state.”

For Lapid, whose new movie follows Israeli musicians hired to write an openly genocidal post-Oct. 7 anthem for their nation, this argument doesn’t hold water. Lapid has long been critical of cultural boycotts, including BDS. Such measures, he told JTA, are a form of “dogmatic Stalinism” and don’t “move one piece of sand” in Israel.

“I became a test case of purity,” he mused.

Others agree. More than 350 entertainment industry figures signed the first of two open letters in the French newspaper Le Monde backing him, which was published Sunday.

“Inviting an artist to a festival does not make them a cultural ambassador,” the letter reads, in French, decrying a “campaign of intimidation” against Lapid while also noting what the signatories said was the “genocidal logic” of Israel’s campaign in Gaza.

Among this letter’s signatories were Justine Triet and Arthur Harari, the Oscar-winning team behind “Anatomy of a Fall”; Harari is Jewish and a critic of Israel himself. Arnaud Desplechin, a French filmmaker who often features Jewish characters in his work, also signed. Other signers include acclaimed directors Claire Denis, Mati Diop, and Kleber Mendonça Filho; Romanian director Radu Jude, whose films have explored his country’s complicity in the Holocaust; and Palestinian historian Elias Sanbar.

A second open letter, published on Monday, calls the campaign against Lapid an “intellectual failure” and states, “No matter what crimes a state may commit, no one should be reduced to a passport.” It was signed by a smaller cohort of 10 names, including Portman; French-Jewish director Rebecca Zlotowski; and Oscar-winning filmmakers Jacques Audiard and Michel Hazanavicius.

Like Lapid, Portman — an Israeli-American actress who is one of the most prominent Jews in Hollywood — is a longtime critic of the Israeli government and opponent of the BDS movement.

Creative Community For Peace, a pro-Israel entertainment group, said Wednesday its members also oppose the boycott of Lapid, adding that Israel “funds, screens, and honors films that challenge its leaders, criticize its society, and engage openly with its most difficult debates.”

Unusually, the Marseille festival’s own director, Tsveta Dobreva, also signed one of the open letters in support of Lapid after she appeared to acquiesce to the earlier demands to pull him from the jury.

In an email, Dobreva told JTA her festival “fully supports Nadav Lapid,” saying that she had removed him from the jury out of concern he would be targeted at the event. She did not believe she had “agreed to the boycotters’ demands,” she said.

“Few festivals or cultural institutions in our days have the courage to extend invitations that may provoke controversy, and we stand with Nadav in believing that this form of self-censorship must be resisted, as it only contributes to the problem,” Dobreva wrote.

Lapid intends his next movie to be a follow-up to “Synonyms,” his 2019 film about an Israeli expat in Paris that won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival. The Marseille festival is scheduled for July, but he says now he has no intention of going: “I’ll find other beaches.”

The post This Israeli filmmaker harshly criticizes his country. Pro-Palestinian activists boycotted him anyway appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — The party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected speculation that he might not run in Israel’s election this fall, following an offhand comment by U.S. President Donald Trump.

On Tuesday, ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl tweeted that Trump had told him he was unsure if Netanyahu wanted to press forward in the elections.

“He’s had an amazing career,” Trump said, according to Karl. “Does he want to continue? Because, you know, he’s a wartime prime minister. We will very shortly win the war one way or the other, and you know he’s a wartime prime minister.”

Netanyahu has been prime minister for more than 15 of the last 17 years, losing power only briefly in 2021 and 2022. Israel’s current wars began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, triggering regional conflict that has grown to include a joint U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.

Trump’s reported comments left some wondering whether he knew something they did not, amid polling suggesting that Netanyahu will struggle to secure enough votes to put together a governing coalition after elections this fall. Could Trump know that Netanyahu is considering suspending his already-active campaign? Or could Trump, who this week told the BBC that Netanyahu does anything the U.S. president tells him to, be planning to order his Israeli counterpart to stand down amid growing anti-Israel sentiment in the United States?

Netanyahu’s Likud party soon demolished the idea. “Prime Minister Netanyahu will run in the upcoming elections — and with God’s help, he will win,” the party posted Wednesday on X.

Only a minority of Israelis were primed to appreciate the declaration, according to a poll released this week by the Israel Democracy Institute. It found that 61% of Israelis, including 27% of Likud members, do not want to see Netanyahu run again this fall. The same proportion said they want to see Israel adopt a two-term limit for prime ministers in the future.

The post Trump is imagining an Israel after Netanyahu. So are many Israelis. Netanyahu isn’t biting. appeared first on The Forward.

(New York Jewish Week) — Standing before hundreds of mourners last month, Rabbi David Wise held up a T-shirt with the words “Proud American, Proud Zionist.”

It was the shirt he had planned to wear to the Israel Day Parade that morning. Instead, he carried it to honor Cara Trager, a Queens-based journalist and congregant of his whose sudden death days earlier had left the local Jewish community reeling.

Most in attendance had planned to attend the parade, as did Trager, whose fierce support for Israel was a defining conviction of her life.

“There was nobody more pro-Israel, and a bigger Zionist, than her,” Trager’s husband, Michael, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “The joke I would say is that I knew how to tell her I love you. I had to tell her I’m pro-Israel.”

Trager died May 29 from injuries sustained when she and her husband were struck by a car while returning to their home in Hollis Hills, Queens, from an Israeli restaurant four days earlier. She was 71.

“I will spend the rest of my life missing her, and wishing she was here,” Trager’s son, Eric Trager, said during her funeral on May 31. “My mother, Cara Trager, loved, and was loved deeply. This is how I will remember her, and this is how I hope she will always be remembered.”

Michael Trager said that he and his son both attended the May 27 arraignment of the driver who started the chain-reaction collision, Dawood Faisal.

Faisal, 22, has been charged with manslaughter in the second degree, leaving the scene of a collision resulting in death, reckless driving and other crimes for speeding. Faisal pleaded not guilty at his arraignment in Queens Criminal Court, and was remanded to custody without bail.

Michael Trager said that he believed that Faisal had been “looking to do damage in a heavily Jewish area.” Faisal’s attorney, Sara Pervez, did not respond to a JTA request for comment.

“As devastated as the family is, and me in particular, I’d like to at least hope that justice is served, that this puts an end, or at least helps put an end, to senseless violence,” Trager said.

But amid the grief and search for answers, Trager’s family said they remembered her for her resilience, passion and enthusiasm for life.

“In Judaism, we choose life, and she chose life again and again and again,” said Trager’s daughter, Rachel Sales. “She was never less of herself, she was always like, you get the full Cara Trager, all her beliefs, all her opinions, all her love, all her energy, all of it, you know, and we weren’t ready for … we weren’t ready, and she wasn’t ready at all.”

In addition to her husband and children, Trager is survived by her daughter-in-law, Alyssa Saunders; her son-in-law, Benjamin Sales, who worked at JTA until last year; and her grandchildren Max, Teddy, Dov and Yael.

Born on May 4, 1955, in the Bronx to Alex and Sylvia Selinger, Trager grew up in a neighborhood with few Jews. While Sales said her grandparents were “super into Jewish identity and very Zionist,” the lack of a larger Jewish community left her mother “hungry for Judaism” throughout the rest of her life.

Trager attended James Monroe High School and then Queens College, where she wrote for the school newspaper and quickly discovered a talent for storytelling. In 1975, Trager met her future husband, Michael, at a mutual friend’s party. When they reconnected at another gathering the following year, Michael Trager said he was smitten immediately.

“I wanted to marry her that night, but you know, it might be helpful to graduate college, which we did,” he said. “And it was a great marriage. It was really a great marriage.”

After graduating from college, Cara Trager went door to door with her resume, and began her career writing for trade publications, according to her family.

“She really, really wanted to be a writer,” Sales said. “And I think people said, like, ‘You’ll never be able to do it, this is impossible,’ and she was dead set on making it work.”

Before having her first child in the early 1980’s, Trager decided to leave the typical newsroom environment and strike out on her own, eventually building a successful freelance business that included bylines in the New York Post, Crain’s New York Business and Newsday, which she continued writing for until her death.

“She was a storyteller, you know, she kind of had like a flair,” Sales said. “She just liked asking a lot of questions. She was very curious about people.”

Alongside her journalism, Trager also produced publications and marketing materials for a host of Jewish organizations, including the UJA-Federation of New York, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Jewish Theological Seminary.

“She accomplished so much in her 71 years,” Sales said. “She was definitely a trailblazer in terms of being a journalist, being able to work from home, being totally present for her kids, while also building a full career.”

Beyond her professional life, Trager dedicated herself to supporting local Jewish institutions, including serving on the board of the Solomon Schechter School of Queens, which her children attended, and serving in several leadership roles at the family’s synagogue, Etz Hayim at Hollis Hills Bayside.

Trager and her husband visited Israel 11 times together over their lives, and she was also a board member of a children’s home in Israel. Sales said that her mother would frequently tell her and her brother detailed stories about the Holocaust and the birth of the State of Israel when they were young around the dining room table.

“This was really her passion,” Sales said. “We were Conservative. She would never describe herself as observant or religious, but [it was] really more about Jewish identity and Jewish resilience and Israel.”

Known as the matriarch of her family, Trager’s family said she approached motherhood with the same passion she brought to journalism and Jewish activism.

“She was an inspiration,” Rachel Sales said. “She loved people, she loved stories, she loved life, and she was stolen from us, she was 100% stolen from us by, we don’t know why yet, but we’ll find out.”

The post Cara Trager, beloved Queens Jewish communal leader and lifetime journalist, dies at 71 appeared first on The Forward.