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With ‘Let It Be Morning’ and ‘Cinema Sabaya,’ Israeli filmmakers are winning awards for portraying Palestinian stories
(JTA) — Years ago, the Israeli filmmaker Orit Fouks Rotem took a class led by director Eran Kolirin, best known as the maker of “The Band’s Visit.” This month, movies by both filmmakers are getting theatrical rollouts in the United States.
On a recent Zoom call, Palestinian author Sayed Kashua joked: “Was that his class — how to use a Palestinian story?”
Kashua was smiling on Zoom as he said it — he is, after all, known for his often fatalistic sense of humor, particularly when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And the author had given his blessing for Kolirin to make an adaptation of his novel “Let It Be Morning,” and said he loved the final result.
But like most jokes, this one had a kernel of truth: Israel’s two most recent Oscar submissions, hitting New York’s Quad Cinema within a week of each other, both — to varying degrees — tell Palestinian stories.
“Let It Be Morning” is a dark comedy about an Arab Israeli village that has suddenly and with no explanation been cordoned off from the rest of the country by the Israeli military. This event forces its Palestinian residents, including a protagonist trying to return to his comfortable middle-class life in Jerusalem, to reckon with how their dignity as citizens has been denied to them by the mechanisms of the Israeli occupation. At the Quad, the film is accompanied by a retrospective of Kolirin’s work, including “The Band’s Visit,” the basis for the Tony Award-winning musical; the retrospective is sponsored by the Israeli consulate in New York.
The all-female cast of “Cinema Sabaya,” a mix of Jewish and Arab actresses, in a film directed by Orit Fouks Rotem. (Courtesy of Kino Lorber)
The following week will see the opening of Rotem’s film, “Cinema Sabaya.” It follows a group of eight women, some Jewish and some Arab and Palestinian, who bond with each other while taking a filmmaking class in a community center in the Israeli city of Hadera. Cast member Dana Ivgy, who plays the class’s instructor, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the filming experience “felt like how living in Israel should feel,” adding, “We have more women in the film than in the Israeli government.”
Stylistically, the two films couldn’t be more different. “Let It Be Morning” is a tightly plotted narrative with boldly realized characters; almost all of its dialogue is in Arabic. “Cinema Sabaya” is a loose, heavily improvisational piece that is almost entirely set in one room, and is mostly in Hebrew (although in one tense early scene, the characters debate whether to conduct their class in Hebrew or Arabic). One is a dry, Kafkaesque satire; the other is an intimate, naturalistic drama.
But together, the films provide a snapshot of the delicate dance Israeli filmmakers must perform in the current climate. On the one hand, these art-house directors are being feted on the international stage for their empathetic storytelling that incorporates or even centers entirely on Palestinian characters. But on the other, they’re being attacked by government officials for their perceived insufficient loyalty — and their films’ very status as “Israeli” is being questioned, too, sometimes by their own cast and crew.
“Everyone can call it what they want,” Rotem said of her film. “I’m an Israeli and it’s in Israel, but I have partners who call themselves Palestinians, and some of them call themselves Arabs, and each one defined herself. I think it’s really how it should be.”
“A film does not have an identity,” Kolirin insisted in an interview with JTA. “It is a citizen of the screen.”
Eran Kolirin accepted the award for Best Director for “Let It Be Morning” at the 2021 Ophir Awards in Tel Aviv on October 5, 2021. (Tomer Neuberg/ Flash90)
Kolirin isn’t a fan of the label “Israeli film” in this case, even though that is how “Let It Be Morning” was categorized at its 2021 Cannes Film Festival premiere; its own press notes also list Israel as the “country of production.” That Cannes screening took place shortly after Israel’s deadly conflict with Hamas that killed more than 250 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and around a dozen Israelis. The events turned Cannes into a political firestorm when the film’s Palestinian cast refused to attend the premiere.
“We cannot ignore the contradiction of the film’s entry into Cannes under the label of an ‘Israeli film’ when Israel continues to carry its decades-long colonial campaign of ethnic cleansing, expulsion, and apartheid against us — the Palestinian people,” the cast’s statement read in part.
“Each time the film industry assumes that we and our work fall under the ethno-national label of ‘Israeli,’ it further perpetuates an unacceptable reality that imposes on us, Palestinian artists with Israeli citizenship,” the statement continues, calling on “international artistic and cultural institutions” to “amplify the voices of Palestinian artists and creatives.”
Kolirin himself supported the cast’s action. He knew they were grieving over the outbreak of violence in Gaza and didn’t want to put themselves in a situation where “some politician is going to wave a flag over their head or whatever.”
What’s more, he said, the status of “Let It Be Morning” as an “Israeli” film, despite the fact that around half the crew was Palestinian, was not his decision: “The film was not submitted to Cannes as an Israeli film,” he said. “You know, you fill in the form: ‘Which were the countries that gave money?’” In this case, the answer was Israel and France.
Most of the cast later did not attend the Ophir Awards ceremony, Israel’s equivalent to the Oscars voted on by its filmmaking academy, where “Morning” won the top prize (which automatically made it Israel’s Oscar submission for that year). In solidarity at the awards, Kolirin read aloud a statement from his lead actress, Juna Suleiman, decrying Israel’s “active efforts to erase Palestinian identity” and what she called “ethnic cleansing.”
Orit Fouks Rotem (Courtesy of Kino Lorber)
“Cinema Sabaya” hasn’t played host to as much offscreen controversy, but its vision of Israeli multiculturalism is still inherently political. Rotem’s mother is a local government adviser on women’s issues in Hadera, and the film was inspired by her experience participating in a photography class designed to unite Jewish and Arab women. Rotem herself later led filmmaking classes in a similar vein as research for “Sabaya.”
In the film, Ivgy’s character, who is modeled on Rotem, instructs her class to film their home lives, while secretly hoping to make a movie from their efforts. When her desire to do so is revealed, the women in the class feel betrayed: They thought they were just making films for themselves, not for their stories to be told by someone else.
Similarly, Rotem said that working with Arab and Palestinian actresses made her “aware to the fact that I can’t really tell their story.” Her solution was to allow the performers — some of whom are well-known activists who had to think twice about appearing in an Israeli movie — to voice their own opinions, and to establish the necessary trust to allow them to be unscripted on camera.
She theorizes that “Cinema Sabaya” has been so well received in Israel because “it doesn’t say ‘occupation, occupation, occupation.’ It says ‘humanity,’ so people are less afraid.” (She also noted that, in real life, the women who attended her filmmaking classes bristled at her initial suggestion to make a documentary about them, telling her to fictionalize their stories instead — which she did.)
Lately the Israeli government has a tendency to view its filmmaking class as agitators unworthy of national support, particularly when they make films criticizing the occupation. Former Culture Minister Miri Regev often disparaged films she thought were bad for Israel, including celebrated international hits such as “Foxtrot” and “Synonyms.” Her current successor, Miki Zohar, has already threatened the makers of a new documentary about the West Bank city of Hebron, saying the movie smears the military and that the directors might have to return government funds.
In recent years, Israel’s culture ministry has pushed two new controversial proposals: a grant program earmarked for those who make films in settlements, which are considered illegal under international law; and a form pledging not to make films “offensive” to Israel or the military that filmmakers would be required to sign in order to apply for certain grants, which many directors have likened to a loyalty oath. For years, some of the country’s largest grantmakers have required applicants to sign a form promising to represent their projects as Israeli on the national stage.
There has also been an effort among some members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new right-wing government to end funding to public broadcaster Kan, which the country’s film industry views as another attack on its free expression.
“Kan has all this dialogue,” Ivgy said. “It has Jewish and religious and Arab and Palestinian, for kids and for grownups. And nothing is taboo there. I feel that it’s very dangerous to close that option down.”
Many Israeli filmmakers are fighting back. Hundreds, including Kolirin and Rotem, have refused to sign the ministry’s pledge, and many have also protested the settlement grant program. Nadav Lapid, one of the country’s most celebrated and outspoken directors, harshly critiqued government restrictions placed on his own work in the 2021 drama “Ahed’s Knee,” which went on to win a special prize at Cannes.
Kolirin said he had recently been on a call with several Israeli filmmakers looking to further organize against artistic restrictions, and that it had given him hope. “I had this feeling of some optimism, which I didn’t have for a long time,” he said. But he didn’t mince words when discussing Israel’s new governing coalition, which he likened to “a circus of mad dogs unleashed.”
Rotem said that the current government is “very, very bad and scary,” but that it has only strengthened her resolve to make political films.
“For me, it’s also political to show women in Israel in a deep way: I mean Arabs and Jews,” she said. “Because I don’t think there are enough films that are doing that.”
For Kashua, a veteran TV writer and opinion columnist, the question of identity in Israeli and Palestinian filmmaking is even more pronounced. After a long career of trying to write about the Palestinian experience in Hebrew as a way of reaching Israelis, he left Israel for the United States in 2014, becoming discouraged by an incident in which Jewish extremists burned a Palestinian teenager alive as revenge after Palestinian terrorists kidnapped Israeli soldiers. Now based in St. Louis, he has worked as a writer and story editor on Israeli series that center on both Palestinian and Jewish stories — including the global hit “Shtisel,” which focuses on haredi Orthodox Jews, and its upcoming spinoff, along with “Madrasa,” a young-adult series about a bilingual Hebrew-Arabic school.
Israeli filmmakers choosing to center Palestinian stories can be its own radical political act, Kashua believes. He noted that the dialogue in “Morning” is almost entirely in Arabic, a language that Israel demoted from national language status in 2018 — doubly ironic as he had deliberately chosen to write his original novel in Hebrew.
“The idea that this film is ‘Israeli’ — it really contradicts the idea of Israel being a purely Jewish state,” Kashua said. He added that, while he had initially hoped a Palestinian director might have adapted his novel, he was ultimately happy with Kolirin’s approach.
“I truly love the movie, and it’s barely Orientalist,” he joked, echoing Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said’s famous book about how a Western lens on Eastern cultures can be reductive and harmful. “Which is a big achievement for an Israeli filmmaker.”
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The post With ‘Let It Be Morning’ and ‘Cinema Sabaya,’ Israeli filmmakers are winning awards for portraying Palestinian stories appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Dublin city councillors accuse Israel and ‘Zionist lobby’ of quashing proposal to rename Herzog Park
(JTA) — Dublin’s City Council was divided Monday night over a proposal to postpone voting on stripping the name of an Irish-born Israeli president from a city park, with dozens of members voting to move forward with the controversial renaming.
The council ultimately voted to send the “denaming” proposal for Herzog Park back to a planning committee, but not before council members spent more than hour commenting on the proposal and the outcry it drew from Irish, Israeli and Jewish leaders.
Several criticized Israel and said they wanted to see the park named for an Irish Jew whose contributions came at home. Some denounced the “Zionist lobby” and “Israeli lobby” for intervening in the renaming effort.
Pat Dunne, of the United Left party, told chief executive Richard Shakespeare, who proposed postponing the vote on procedural grounds, that he believed the Israeli army was responsible for the outcry. The meeting was livestreamed.
“I’m further convinced that whatever phone calls was made to our CEO and to other officials probably emanated from Israeli intelligence attached to the Israeli Defense Force because they’re active in every issue in relation to Palestine,” Dunne said. “Trace it all the way back, Richard, and you’ll find that’s the source.”
About criticism of the renaming plan from the Irish president and foreign minister, another council member, Cieran Perry, said, “The optics will appear to show these senior Irish politicians carrying out the instructions of the Israeli lobby, and it’s very hard to argue with a view when we see the actual result.”
Ciarán Ó Meachair accused Herzog of having “raped, murdered and pillaged innocent civilians” and said he would continue to press for a renaming, suggesting the British Jewish communist politician Max Levitas, who died in 2018.
“This was a full court press by the Zionist lobby, and they think they will win it,” he said. “They will not win this.”
Herzog Park, located in Dublin’s Jewish hub, was named in 1995 for Chaim Herzog, the son of the first Irish chief rabbi who became Israel’s sixth president in 1983. His son, Isaac Herzog, is the president of Israel today.
Pro-Palestinian activists called for the park to be stripped of the Herzog name during the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, citing Chaim Herzog’s role as a prominent defender of Zionism and his role in Israel’s War of Independence. (He also fought in the British army during World War II.)
Irish Jewish leaders said the proposal to remove Herzog’s name was a hurtful repudiation of decades of strong ties between Ireland and Israel that have recently frayed amid staunch pro-Palestinian sentiment in Ireland. Israel closed its embassy in Dublin last year, citing the Irish government’s “antisemitic rhetoric” including its support for Palestinian statehood.
Several council members said they opposed the renaming because of the hurt expressed by Jewish Dubliners. “These are people, Irish people, who live in our community, work in our community, and have done nothing wrong, and I don’t think anyone’s intention here was to bring hurt upon them, but that is an outcome of what we’ve done here,” said David Coffey of the centrist Finn Gael party.
One council member, Rory Hogan, said he had gone to the neighborhood around Herzog Park and found that residents there felt they had not been consulted in the renaming plan. He suggested that the council find another way to honor the concerns of pro-Palestinian activists.
“The outcome of this debate should not in any way diminish the urgency of recognizing the atrocities taking place in Gaza,” Hogan said. “We should continue to pursue a way in which we can honor and remember the thousands of civilians who have been killed and the children whose lives have been destroyed. But if we are to create a meaningful memorial of place of solidarity, let it be in a location of real significance to all.”
Ultimately, the vote to send the proposal back to the naming committee passed, with 35 in favor, 25 opposed and 1 abstaining. That means the proposal can resurface in the future, if the committee addresses the process errors that the council’s attorneys assessed and outlined in a legal opinion delivered to the council members before Monday’s meeting.
Several council members also apologized to the family of Terrence Wheelock, a man killed by a police 20 years ago who had been set to have a different park renamed after him, because that proposal was simultaneously derailed.
For some Jewish observers, the council meeting renewed bruised feelings that they thought had been repaired by Shakespeare’s decision to withdraw the proposal.
“Watching the @DubCityCouncil meeting – feeling utterly sick and despondent. There is palpable hatred in that room,” tweeted Ed Abrahamson, an Irish Jew who had raised concerns about the proposed renaming and praised the decision to postpone the vote. “My optimism from last night has vanished.”
The post Dublin city councillors accuse Israel and ‘Zionist lobby’ of quashing proposal to rename Herzog Park appeared first on The Forward.
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‘Antisemite of the Year’ finalists include Tucker Carlson and Ms. Rachel, but not Nick Fuentes
Nick Fuentes says he feels snubbed by the controversial activist group StopAntisemitism, which neglected to include him among its finalists for “Antisemite of the Year.”
The group’s finalists, announced Sunday, include conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, whose friendly interview with Fuentes has splintered the conservative movement.
Other “nominees” include pro-Palestinian celebrities Ms. Rachel, Cynthia Nixon and Marcia Cross; mixed-martial-arts athlete and Holocaust denier Bryce Mitchell; two personalities associated with left-wing network The Young Turks; and social media personalities on both the far left (Guy Christensen) and far right (Stew Peters). Followers are encouraged to vote for whomever they feel is most deserving.
But Fuentes himself, the openly white nationalist and antisemitic livestreamer whose “groyper” movement has gained a toehold this year among young Republicans, was left off.
“Why wasn’t I nominated for antisemite of the year,” Fuentes posted on X after the finalists were revealed, apparently wounded by the omission.
In a follow-up post, StopAntisemitism said it does not nominate people more than once and has nominated Fuentes in previous years. “While he was a finalist a few years back, his absence from this year’s cycle does not erase his antisemitism. Rather, it allows us to focus attention on other individuals who are spreading hate,” the group wrote.
A watchdog presence with more than 300,000 followers on X, StopAntisemitism regularly mobilizes against activists and social media posts. The group has faced criticism for what some perceive as an inordinate focus on Muslim personalities, pro-Palestinian actions and non-prominent individuals. Its defenders deny that, pointing out that StopAntisemitism also regularly spotlights neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers on the right.
“From downplaying white supremacy to promoting the antisemitic ‘great replacement’ theory, Carlson has built a career turning extremist dog whistles into broadcast-ready talking points, legitimizing voices that traffic in Holocaust revisionism, conspiracy, and hate,” StopAntisemitism wrote in its nomination of Carlson.
The group nominated Ms. Rachel, the children’s YouTube personality who has become an outspoken advocate for children affected by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, because it said she “has used her massive platform to spread Hamas-aligned propaganda.” A left-wing group, Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, has defended Ms. Rachel, saying StopAntisemitism targeted her for expressing sympathy with Palestinians.
Nixon was nominated for her “BDS activism” (she was listed in a film‑industry petition boycotting Israeli film institutions and has been outspoken about civilian casualties in Gaza); Mitchell and Peters, meanwhile, have embraced open Holocaust denial.
Last year’s “winner,” far-right pundit and conspiracy theorist Candace Owens, was also absent despite her recent resurgence promoting conspiracy theories accusing Israeli of involvement in Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Previous “winners” have included Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, as well as rapper Ye and a board chair of Ben & Jerry’s, the progressive ice cream company founded by Jews.
Since its inception in 2019, the “award” has always gone to a person of color.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post ‘Antisemite of the Year’ finalists include Tucker Carlson and Ms. Rachel, but not Nick Fuentes appeared first on The Forward.
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If Israel reinstates the death penalty, it will betray Jewish values — and Jewish history
The Knesset is considering a bill that would instate the death penalty as a punishment for convicted terrorists in Israel. Passing it would be an enormous mistake.
Allowing executions in the Jewish state — the justice system of which has, since 1954, only issued that punishment to Adolf Eichmann — would only give fodder to Israel’s enemies. Right now, Israel stands apart in the Middle East for its abolishment of the death penalty. Hamas regularly executes Palestinians in Gaza, extrajudicially and otherwise. A court operating under Yemen’s Houthi rebels recently sentenced 17 people to death for allegedly spying on behalf of Israel and others. Iran, which has carried out death sentences against Jews, has executed more than 1,500 people in 2025 alone.
Which means that if Israel violates its moral obligations and ethical standards by undoing its historic commitment to not inflicting the one punishment that can never be undone, it will be giving its enemies a gift.
First, changing the justice system to allow for the death penalty would provide Hamas terrorists incarcerated in Israel with a new platform for their message. Hamas could proclaim them to be martyred heroes — a new layer of disingenuous but effective propaganda.
Terrorists such as the perpetrators of the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre often believe that their spirits will receive rewards upon their physical death. Within that framework, lifetime incarceration is a far harsher punishment, and therefore a more effective one. Plus, the notion that executing terrorists will prevent future hostage-taking for prisoner swaps is shaky. Hamas’ relationship with Israel has long been defined by retaliatory action, which means that the state killing of Hamas prisoners is likely to lead to Hamas reciprocally executing future Israeli hostages and “collaborators.” The endless cycle of violence will continue.
And since Israel seeks to be a transparent democracy that follows the rule of law, particularly within its judiciary, a legal death sentencing scheme also would prove costly in terms of public perception.
Israel’s reputation as a bastion of moral clarity in the Middle East has dramatically changed in the more than two years since the Oct. 7 attack. The devastation of the war in Gaza, and of increasing violence in the West Bank, has led to a substantial drop in positive perceptions of Israel worldwide. And while the Israeli judiciary has long been one of the country’s most trusted institutions, the deleterious effects of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pre-war proposals for a judicial overhaul mean it is no longer held in the same high regard, in Israel or the rest of the world, as it once was.
This bill has already advanced past a first reading in the Knesset. Moving it any further toward becoming law would only hasten the decline of Israel’s image.
Some of those who have argued in favor of the bill have invoked the fallacy of “deterrence.” Shin Bet security service Chief David Zini even told the Security Cabinet that enacting the death penalty for terrorists who kill Israelis would help prevent future attacks.
That statement doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Recent studies have concluded that when it comes to deterrence, there is no demonstrable link between the presence or absence of the death penalty and murder rates.
But the most profound reason to reject this bill comes from our own painful history as a people. Many Jews, including myself, have long objected to the death penalty in part because of the shadow of the Holocaust.
We believe, in the words of Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, that “death is not the answer.” By the end of his life, Wiesel publicly said that he saw no possible exceptions to this rule:“With every cell of my being and with every fiber of my memory, I oppose the death penalty in all forms,” he said. “I do not believe any civilized society should be at the service of death. I don’t think it’s human to become an agent of the angel of death.”
In this light, it is particularly troubling that the Israeli bill proposes using lethal injection against convicted terrorists. That method of capital punishment is a direct Nazi legacy, first implemented in human history by the Third Reich as part of their infamous Aktion T4 protocol, used to kill people deemed “unworthy of life.” Dr. Karl Brandt, Adolf Hitler’s personal physician, devised the program.
In the wake of the Holocaust and the unparalleled horrors of the 20th century, more than 70% of the nations of the world have recognized the inviolability of the human right to life, and have abolished the death penalty in law or practice.
21st-century Judaism must reflect this evolution, and Israel must never cross this moral Rubicon.
The post If Israel reinstates the death penalty, it will betray Jewish values — and Jewish history appeared first on The Forward.