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A group of Israeli emissaries toured a Palestinian museum in DC, and came away with questions
WASHINGTON (JTA) — For Rotem Yerushalmi, a professional campus pro-Israel advocate, what stood out during a recent visit to the Museum of the Palestinian People was an exhibit showcasing different villages’ ceremonial dress.
She strolled past references to the Nakba, which means “catastrophe” and denotes the dispersion of Palestinians during Israel’s War of Independence. And she gazed upon a photograph of an elderly man clutching the key to the dwelling his family left amid that year’s Arab-Israeli war. None of those surprised her.
“The references to the key, the Nakba, were very familiar,” Yerushalmi said. “But the garb! I didn’t know they had different dresses for different areas.”
Yerushalmi was part of a delegation of about 20 Israeli emissaries stationed at U.S. universities that visited the museum late last month. It was the first-ever tour the museum had organized for a group of Israelis.
Like most Jews in Israel, many of them had relatively few interactions with Arabs inside the country, and learned little about Palestinian culture and history in school. But here at the Washington museum, located just a mile from Yerushalmi’s post at Georgetown University, they got a view into a society that is both largely off-limits to them and entwined with their country’s future.
“It’s important because it humanizes each other, I think, for Israelis to hear the Palestinian perspective,” said Bshara Nassar, a Palestinian from Bethlehem who founded the one-room museum in 2019. “Actually having a wall that separates Palestinians from Israelis — there is no way, there is no place to interact.”
The tour was the brainchild of Jonathan Kessler, the former longtime head of student affairs at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby. He now helms Heart of a Nation, which organizes people-to-people encounters between young Israelis, Palestinians and Americans — and which marks a turn away from the pro-Israel advocacy he once championed.
“For the first time, maybe in my lifetime, you’ve got young people from all three societies who simultaneously recognize that their politics is stuck and they desperately want to push forward into a better place,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
He worries that unless they move beyond their “narrow communal silos,” young Jews in the United States “will further distance themselves from Israel, young Israelis will turn their back on the pursuit of peace with the Palestinians, and young Palestinians will give up on coexistence with Israel.”
Recommending a tour of the museum, he said, was a way to make that happen. The Jewish Agency for Israel’s Campus Israel Fellows, which brought the emissaries to Washington, D.C., asked him to recommend museum tours for the group, and he suggested the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the National Museum of African American History and this tiny, barely known institution.
Mohammed El-Khatib, a docent at the Museum of the Palestinian People, leads a group of Jewish Agency emissaries through the museum in Washington, D.C., March 22, 2023. (Ron Kampeas)
For at least some of the emissaries, the visit had Kessler’s intended effect. Mohammed El-Khatib, the group’s docent, described his experience as a Lebanese-born Palestinian refugee, and told of his family’s flight from their ancestral village during Israel’s War of Independence.
“It opens our mind to hear his perspective, to hear him say that he’s Palestinian, but he’s never been to Palestine, he was born in Lebanon, but he identifies as a Palestinian,” said Lielle Ziv, who works at Cleveland Hillel. “He told a story, and not like, right or wrong, it’s not a black-and-white situation. We can both be right,”
The museum is nestled in a townhouse adjacent to a pet care outlet, a Middle East bookstore and a chocolatier. A similar and larger museum in the Palestinian West Bank city of Birzeit, called the Palestinian Museum, is in territory that is off-limits to Israelis.
At the Washington museum, there was a lot of common ground: A Kurdish Israeli emissary said the keffiyeh in one exhibit reminded him of pictures of his male relatives, who wore similar headdresses before they left Iraq for Israel. El-Khatib was pleased to learn that the Arabic name for Hebron, Al Khalil, has the same meaning as the city’s Hebrew name — a “friend of God.”
One of the Israelis recognized the British Mandate passport on display, which once belonged to a Palestinian woman. His grandmother had one that was identical, he said.
When El-Khatib greeted the group, he said “Marhaba, Shalom,” respectively the more formal Arabic and Hebrew terms of welcome, and the group spontaneously answered with “Ahalan,” a less formal Arabic greeting that is commonplace among Israelis. That delighted El-Khatib.
The group was similarly pleased when he showed off some Hebrew phrases in a pitch perfect Israeli accent, which he said he learned from an Israeli ex-boyfriend. The group then pushed him to spill more details about his ex.
“In campus encounters we’re always kind of on duty,” said Nati Szczupak, the director of the Campus Israel Fellows program. “They’re on duty, right? They’re pro-Palestine. We’re pro-Israel. And it’s very rare that you can just talk and get to those moments of like, ‘Hey, I used to wear that hat too, when I was little.’”
She was referring to an exhibit on different types of Palestinian headwear that included a fez, or traditional Moroccan hat, which elicited a squeal of delight from a Moroccan Jewish emissary who said she had a photo of herself as a toddler sporting one of her ancestors’ fezzes.
“It’s not about facts,” Szczupak said. “We know the facts. What about the narrative? What is your story? We’re not arguing about the facts, but how we experienced them.”
The museum’s exhibits include photographs of Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank and in exile, and are marked by contrasts: images of resistance — of a small boy throwing stones — and of the mundane — of young men playing soccer. Arrays of black-and-white photos from the late 19th and 20th centuries feature celebrations juxtaposed with resettlement in refugee camps.
A case includes Palestinian glassware, pottery and headwear throughout the ages. There was a temporary exhibit of line drawings by a contemporary Palestinian artist, and a wall titled “Making their mark” of prominent Palestinians — including Rashida Tlaib, the Democratic congresswoman from Michigan; the late Edward Said, the literary critic and scholar; the sisters Gigi and Bella Hadid, who are models; and DJ Khaled, the rapper.
The museum does not hold back from addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The conflict’s most vexing issue — each side’s fear that the other side wants to replace it — was most evident in the museum’s maps: One depicted the scattering of the Palestinians throughout the Diaspora, and others showed how Israel expanded its territory from the land it was given in the 1947 United Nations partition plan.
Outside the museum, while the Israelis were waiting for the tour to start, a pair of the Israel fellows examined a poster for an exhibit, “The Art of Weeping, by a Palestinian artist, Mary Hazboun. The line drawing of a Palestinian mother in a traditional dress, carrying her babies, evoked the map of the entirety of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank — and then some.
“The proportions are interesting,” one said to the other, in Hebrew. “It includes not just Israel and the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but the Golan Heights and a part of Jordan.”
Ziv said the tour made her think that she “would like more connections” with Palestinians — and it was clear that it was easier to make those connections in Washington than it would be in Tel Aviv or Jenin. El-Khatib said he had never met an Israeli before he moved to the United States.
“When we have Palestinian visitors coming to the museum, they quickly doze off — I mean, to them, it’s more about the achievement of the space,” El-Khatib said. “But when this group came in, I really felt that they were very attentive and hanging on to every word that I said, which was wonderful.”
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At Berlin screening, former Israeli hostages see film about their captivity rewritten after redemption
(JTA) — BERLIN — They stood outside Berlin’s Babylon theater, bundled against the cold, laughing and dragging on cigarettes: the Cunio twins David and Eitan, and their younger brother Ariel.
David and Ariel were among the last Israeli hostages released in October from Hamas captivity, after 738 days. Their presence in Berlin — for a screening of a film about them, now recut with a redemptive ending — felt almost like an apparition. On the other side of two heavy glass doors were hundreds of theatergoers, people who had long waited for this moment.
The brothers and their extended family were in Berlin for a second premiere of Tom Shoval’s film “Letter to David.” The original film, shown in 2025 at the Berlin International Film Festival, or Berlinale, dove deep into the struggles of a family whose members had been abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz on Oct. 7, 2023. By then, six kidnapped members of the family, including three children, had been freed. But David and Ariel remained in captivity.
“Last year I was standing before the screening with a poster of David and Ariel. I was determined, every time I showed the film, to say that it’s an unfinished film,” Shoval told the sold-out audience at the theater in former East Berlin.
“And now I’m standing here. I have David in the audience, and I have Ariel in the audience,” he continued. “This is a precious, precious moment.”
The film “is a testament to love, hope and all the people who did not give up during the two years I was in captivity,” David Cunio said in Hebrew, standing on the stage with his extended family. “You gave me a voice when I could not be present. You were there for me.”
The film’s second showing came as tensions over the war in Gaza and Germany’s support for Israel roiled the Berlinale. After the jury’s president, director Wim Wenders, brushed off a journalist’s exhortation for the festival to take a stand against Israel, the Indian author Arundhati Roy announced she would not attend, and some 80 filmmakers and stars signed an open letter of protest.
Festival director Tricia Tuttle issued a statement saying that “artists should not be expected to comment on all broader debates about a festival’s previous or current practices over which they have no control. Nor should they be expected to speak on every political issue raised to them unless they want to.”
Journalists and filmmakers continued to raise the issue, even on the festival’s final weekend, when some award winners — including the Syrian-Palestinian director Abdullah Al-Khatib, who won best debut film — swatted back at the festival jury, criticizing what they see as Germany’s general support for Israel. Al-Khatib’s allegation that Germany has been “partners in the genocide in Gaza by Israel” prompted a German minister to walk out of the awards ceremony on Sunday.
Friday’s screening of “Letter to David” was by contrast a love fest, and the two police cars out front and uniformed officers circulating inside appeared to have little to do. The audience gave the entire family a standing ovation before the screening.
“I think this is a piece of history,” audience member Nirit Bialer, an Israeli who has lived for years in Berlin, said in an interview. “Just seeing the family, and just following the story about this family on the media, going to the Hostages Square in Israel every time I was there in the last two years: Wow, I’m speechless.”
The film’s original ending showed twins David and Eitan Cunio as actors, grappling with each other in an embrace that is both tender and violent, in a scene from Shoval’s feature film, “Youth,” screened at the Berlinale in 2013.
That ending now segues into a new conclusion, in which the reunited Cunio family embraces. They also view the film together, and Shoval captures their faces as the projector beams from behind.
Shoval said in an interview that he had not changed anything in the first part of the film. “I wanted to leave it as a time capsule, in a way, of how we perceived it back a year ago,” he said.
Though he had been invited to be with the family at their reunion, he chose not to, explaining, “I thought it’s a moment that belongs to them and not to me.”
But he spoke with David soon after he was released. And shortly afterward, he visited Sharon and David Cunio at their home. “I came in the morning and we sat until sunset together and we talked. Even when I’m thinking about it now, I’m getting emotional, because it was really…” He paused. “You’re waiting for a moment for this for so long.”
The Friday screening was not an official part of the Berlinale, but the beleaguered festival director Tuttle made a point of taking the stage herself. The film has been “finished in the way that Tom only hoped and dreamed and believed that he would be able to finish it,” she told the audience.
“We were horrified along with the world and all of you when David Cunio and many members of his family were abducted by Hamas,” she said. And on their release “we rejoiced with everyone as well.”
Saying that the new version was completed too late to be included in the festival schedule, Tuttle thanked two co-production companies that work closely with Israeli artists for backing Friday’s screening: the Israel-based Green Productions and the Berlin-based Future Narrative Fund.
Audience members seemed loath to leave the theater after the screening, lingering over what some described as mix of happiness and worry.
“The fact that David is able to see the movie makes us see the movie in a different way,” commented Konstantin, who had seen the original version last year. A young Jewish actor who lives in Berlin, he asked that his full name not be used, out of concerns about antisemitism. “With the ending, it’s like a full circle, completed.”
Seeing the film again with the Cunio family present “was very uplifting and very happy,” said Berliner Julia Kopp, who also saw the film last year. “But at the same time, it’s not a happy ending … I also have a bit of a heavy heart,” worrying about “how life will go on for them.”
Both brothers have indicated that reentry into everyday life has been challenging after two years of captivity for them and two years of traumatized advocacy by their loved ones. And Ariel Cunio and his partner Arbel Yehud, who was held in captivity until January, have raised nearly $1.8 million since launching a crowdfunding campaign last week aimed at allowing them the time and space to “come back to life.”
A crowdfunding campaign launched on behalf of David and Sharon Cunio their twin daughters, also former hostages, says, “The family not only has to deal with the trauma that follows being held hostage and the events that transpired on October 7th, but also needs to rebuild their entire lives from scratch.”
Shoval said the film — and the screening — offered a vision for what a more settled future might look like.
“For me, the film is about the unification of the brotherhood, and what that means to be torn apart from each other, but also to get back,” Shoval said. “They can sit in the theater and they can see themselves. They can see what they missed, what happened. They can project about the past, about the present. This is a power of cinema, I feel. It felt natural for me to do that: to bring them back.”
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He may have been the world’s most famous mime, but in this play, he won’t shut up
There is a kind of sublime poetry in Marcel Marceau’s first act.
As a young man in occupied France, Marceau (then Mangel) forged identity papers and shepherded dozens of Jewish children across the Alps to Switzerland. In scenarios where staying quiet was essential for survival, Marceau soothed his charges into silence with his own.
In Marcel on the Train, Ethan Slater and Marshall Pailet’s play of Marceau’s pre-Bip life, the world’s most famous mime is anything but silent.
The action of the play, which bounces through time back to Marcel’s father’s butcher shop and forward to a P.O.W. camp in Vietnam (don’t ask), unfolds over the course of a train ride. Slater’s Marceau is chaperoning four 12-year-old orphans, posing as boy scouts going on a hike.
The kids — played by adults — are a rambunctious lot. Marceau tries to put them at ease juggling invisible swords, performing Buster Keaton-esque pratfalls and exhausting his arsenal of Jewish jokes that circle stereotypes of Jewish mothers or, in one case, a certain mercenary business sense.
Pailet and Slater’s script toggles uncomfortably between poignancy and one-liners with a trickle of bathroom humor (the phrase “pee bucket” recurs more often than you would think.)
The terror of Marceau’s most melancholy escortee, Berthe (Tedra Millan) is undercut somewhat by her early, anachronistic-feeling declaration, “Wow, we’re so fucked.” The bumptious Henri (Alex Wyse) would seem to be probing a troubled relationship with Jewishness and passing, but does that discussion a disservice when he mentions how it wouldn’t be the biggest deal if he “sieged a little heil.” Adolphe (Max Gordon Moore) is described as “an exercise in righteousness” in the script’s character breakdown. Sure, let’s go with that.
The presence of a mute child, Etiennette (Maddie Corman), is tropey and obvious. It doesn’t suggest that she inspired him to abandon speaking in his performances, but it doesn’t dismiss that possibility either.
But the chattiness and contrived functions of the fictive children are made more disappointing by the imaginative staging maneuvering around the shtick. Slater, best known for his role in the Wicked films and as Spongebob in the titular Broadway musical, is a gifted physical performer.
When things quiet down, Pailet’s direction, and the spare set by scenic designer Scott Davis, create meadows of butterflies. Chalk allows Marceau to achieve a kind of practical magic when he writes on the fourth wall. One of the greatest tricks up the show’s sleeve is Aaron Serotsky who plays everyone from Marceau’s father and his cousin Georges to that familiar form of Nazi who takes his torturous time in sniffing out Jews.
Surely the play means to contrast silence and sound (sound design is by Jill BC Du Boff), but I couldn’t help but wonder what this might have looked like as a pantomime.
While the story has been told before, perhaps most notably in the 2020 film Resistance with Jesse Eisenberg, Slater and Pailet were right to realize its inherent stage potential. It’s realized to a point, though their approach at times leans into broad comedy that misunderstands the sensibilities of its subject.
Like Slater, who learned of the mime’s story just a few years ago, Marceau was an early acolyte of Keaton and Chaplin. But by most accounts he cut a more controlled figure — that of a budding artist, not a kid workshopping Borscht Belt bits on preteens.
The show ends with a bittersweet montage of Bip capturing butterflies (not jellyfish — you will probably not be reminded of Mr. Squarepants). It means to frame Marceau’s established style as a maturation that nonetheless retains a kind of innocence, stamped by the kids he rescued.
“You’ll live,” Berthe tells him in a moment of uncertainty. “But I don’t think you’ll grow up.”
In Marceau there was, of course, a kind of Peter Pan. But there’s a difference between being childlike and being sophomoric.
Marcel on the Train is playing through March 26 at Classic Stage Company in New York. Tickets and more information can be found here.
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US soldier who protected Jews in POW camp during WWII to be awarded Medal of Honor
(JTA) — An American soldier who is credited with saving the lives of 200 Jewish comrades in a prisoner of war camp in Germany during World War II will receive the U.S. military’s highest decoration, the Medal of Honor.
The award to Roddie Edmonds, who died in 1985, was announced last week. It comes more than a decade after Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, recognized him as a “Righteous Among the Nations” for his bravery and six years after President Donald Trump recounted his heroism during a Veterans Day parade.
Edmonds, a sergeant from Knoxville, Tennessee, was the highest-ranking soldier among a group taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge in January 2045 when the Nazis asked him to identify the Jews in the group. Understanding that anyone he identified would likely be killed, Edmonds made the decision to have all of the soldiers present themselves as Jews.
When a Nazi challenged him, he famously proclaimed: “We are all Jews here!”
The show of solidarity came to light only after Edmonds’ death, when a Jewish man who had been among the soldiers at the camp shared his recollection with the New York Times as part of an unrelated 2008 story about his decision to sell a New York City townhouse to Richard Nixon when Nixon was having trouble buying an apartment following his resignation as president.
When they found the article several years later, it was the first that Edmonds’ family, including his pastor son Christ Edmonds and his granddaughters, had heard about the incident. Soon they were traveling to Washington, D.C., and Israel for ceremonies honoring Edmonds, one of only five Americans to be credited as Righteous Among the Nations, an honor bestowed by Israel on non-Jews who aided Jews during the Holocaust.
As the family campaigned for a Medal of Honor, Edmonds was also the recipient of bipartisan praise from two American presidents.
“I cannot imagine a greater expression of Christianity than to say, I, too, am a Jew,” President Barack Obama said during remarks at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., on International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2016.
Three years later, President Donald Trump recounted the story at the New York City Veterans Day Parade. “That’s something,” he said. “Master Sergeant Edmonds saved 200 Jewish-Americans — soldiers that day.”
Last week, Trump called Chris Edmonds to invite him to the White House to receive the Medal of Honor on his father’s behalf, Chris Edmonds told local news outlets. The Medal of Honor ceremony is scheduled for March 2.
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