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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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Israel Reprimands Spain Over Blowing Up of Netanyahu Effigy
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez speaks during a press conference after attending a special summit of European Union leaders to discuss transatlantic relations, in Brussels, Belgium, Jan. 23, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Yves Herman
Israel said on Saturday it had reprimanded Spain‘s most senior diplomat in Tel Aviv over the blowing up of a giant effigy of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a Spanish town this week.
The seven-meter (23-foot) figure was packed with 14 kilograms (31 lbs.) of gunpowder in El Burgo, a small town near the southern city of Malaga, in a decades-old ceremony on April 5, its Mayor Maria Dolores Narvaez told local television.
“The appalling antisemitic hatred on display here is a direct result of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s government’s systemic incitement,” Israel‘s Foreign Ministry said in a statement on X which highlighted a video clip.
Reuters was not immediately able to verify the video.
“The Spanish government is committed to fighting against antisemitism and any form of hate or discrimination. As such we totally reject any insidious allegation which suggests the contrary,” a Spanish Foreign Ministry source said in response.
El Burgo’s Mayor Narvaez said the town has previously used effigies of US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin during the annual event.
Spain has been an outspoken critic of the US and Israeli military campaigns in Iran and Lebanon, despite US threats to punish uncooperative NATO allies.
Spain and Israel have been embroiled in a long-running diplomatic row which began over the Gaza war. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said a Spanish ban on aircraft and ships carrying weapons to Israel from its ports or airspace due to Israel‘s military offensive was antisemitic.
Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares accused Israel of violating international law and the two-week ceasefire after a massive wave of airstrikes across Lebanon this week. Netanyahu said on Wednesday that Lebanon was not part of the ceasefire and Israel‘s military was continuing to strike Hezbollah with force.
Sanchez, who has emerged as a leading opponent of the Iran war, has closed Spanish airspace to any aircraft involved in a confrontation he has described as reckless and illegal.
Iran has repeatedly praised Spain in recent weeks for its hostile posture toward the US and Israel.
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Why Vanderbilt Is Getting Jewish Life Right and Others Aren’t
Vanderbilt University. Photo: Wiki Commons.
This spring, at Vanderbilt University, more than 600 students gathered for a Passover seder – not in a campus center or dining hall, but on the football field at FirstBank Stadium. A space built for spectacle, rivalry, and school pride was transformed, for one evening, into something sacred.
The symbolism matters. So does the scale. And so does the timing of it all.
One week before the seder, Bloomberg reported that Vanderbilt’s regular-decision acceptance rate for the Class of 2030 had dropped to 2.9 percent – lower than Harvard, lower than Princeton, lower than schools that have spent a century cultivating their selectivity mystique. The headline named the obvious: Vanderbilt has become more competitive “as it avoids the campus controversies that have engulfed many top schools.” Tucked inside that dry admissions sentence is one of the most important stories in American higher education. Jewish families already understand what the data are now beginning to confirm. The market for talented students has spoken – and it is now speaking loudly in Nashville.
This is not just an admissions story. It is a case study in how institutional trust is built – and lost. When universities fail to enforce their own norms or articulate clear moral boundaries, they do not simply generate bad headlines. They trigger exit. Students and families, especially those with the most options, respond not to rhetoric but to signals: Who is in charge? What is tolerated? What kind of community am I entering?
In that sense, what is happening at Vanderbilt is not accidental. It is the result of institutional choices the market is now rewarding.
For generations, ambitious Jewish parents knew the college roadmap by heart: Harvard, Columbia, Penn, Yale – the great northeastern institutions that once excluded Jews with official quotas, then welcomed them, and then watched as Jewish students helped build them into world-class research universities. These schools were more than prestigious. They were symbols of arrival, of the great American bargain: work hard, achieve, belong. They were, in a very real sense, home.
That roadmap is breaking down. And Jewish families are not waiting for institutions to fix themselves.
The Atlantic has documented the shift: Jewish students leaving elite northeastern campuses and heading south – to Vanderbilt, Tulane, Emory, and the University of Florida. The numbers are striking. Vanderbilt now enrolls more than 1,000 Jewish students, roughly 15 percent of undergraduates. Clemson’s Hillel has quadrupled in size. The University of Florida has seen a 50 percent surge in Jewish student participation since 2021, its 6,500 Jewish undergraduates making it one of the largest Jewish student populations in the country. Tulane’s Jewish population is now over 30 percent of undergraduates — one of the highest concentrations anywhere. By Hillel estimates, Southern Methodist University now has more Jewish undergraduates than Harvard.
At the other end of the pipeline, the institutions these families are leaving are telling a different story. Hillel International reports that Jewish enrollment at Harvard, Columbia, Penn, and Cornell has declined in recent years. At Ramaz, the storied Modern Orthodox high school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a class that would typically send a dozen or more students to Columbia sent none. Not one. For the first time in living memory. For families who have sent children to Columbia for three generations, that is not a data point. It is a rupture.
These are not random fluctuations. They are directional. They are decisions – deliberate, painful, sometimes grieving decisions – made in thousands of kitchens and synagogues and college counseling offices across the Jewish community. Together, they add up to a verdict.
Before this trend had a name, the argument for heading south was cultural rather than existential. Research had already documented the ideological homogeneity of university administrators at elite institutions and the cultural consequences that follow when institutions lose internal diversity of thought. Southern campuses were maintaining a measure of pluralism and civic openness that had largely vanished from their prestigious northern counterparts. Go where you can actually think out loud. Go where being visibly Jewish does not require a daily calculation of social cost. Go where you can thrive.
After October 7, 2023, that argument became urgent in ways I had not fully anticipated.
A 2024 Hillel survey found that 87 percent of Jewish parents said rising antisemitism was affecting their child’s college selection – not just their anxiety about it, but the actual list of schools their children would consider. FIRE’s free-expression data told the same story from inside the campus: before October 7, 13 percent of Jewish Ivy League students reported self-censoring multiple times a week; after October 7, that number spiked to 35 percent. Even after tensions eased, it settled at 19 percent – well above historical norms, and a number that should haunt every administrator who claims to care about free expression.
A campus in which students systematically self-censor is not merely uncomfortable. It is, by definition, failing in its educational mission.
The message was unmistakable: elite campuses had become environments in which Jewish students systematically adjusted how they spoke, dressed, and moved through public space. For many families, that was not a policy problem to be addressed. It was a dealbreaker.
What we are witnessing is a form of institutional sorting. Universities that maintain basic conditions of pluralism, enforce rules consistently, and create space for visible identity formation are attracting students who want to live and learn in those environments. Universities that substitute process for judgment, or ambiguity for leadership, are experiencing a quieter but no less consequential form of decline.
This is how markets work in higher education. Not instantly, and not perfectly – but over time, unmistakably.
As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, institutions shape habits – and over time, those habits shape the institutions that endure.
What distinguishes the southern schools attracting Jewish students is not geography, and it is not the weather. It is governance.
Consider what happened at Vanderbilt in March 2024. When protesters occupied the chancellor’s office in a disruptive hours-long sit-in – assaulting a campus safety officer to gain entry and physically pushing staff members who offered to meet with them – Chancellor Daniel Diermeier did not convene a task force, issue a hedged statement, or wait for the news cycle to move on. He acted. Three students were expelled. One was suspended. More than twenty were placed on disciplinary probation. The university’s provost was explicit: sanctions reflected the “individual circumstances of each student’s conduct” – a signal that adults were in charge and that the rules applied to everyone.
The protestors called it oppressive. What it actually was is governance – something that, at many elite institutions, has become surprisingly rare.
Elsewhere, this kind of administrative clarity had become almost exotic. At campuses across the Northeast and the West Coast, encampments spread, Jewish students were harassed, and institutional responses ranged from equivocation to paralysis. The contrast with Nashville was not subtle. It was instructive. Vanderbilt enforced its own rules. It turned out that was not a small thing. It was, in fact, the decisive thing.
Students noticed. Families noticed. And, as the admissions data now confirm, they responded. A school where the administration means what it says – where Jewish students can attend Shabbat dinners without political calculation, wear a kippah without mapping potential confrontations, speak openly about Israel without pre-gaming the social cost – is a school where talented, ambitious students of all backgrounds want to spend four years.
This is not aspirational. It is the market working.
And yet the football field seder captures something that the governance story alone cannot.
Jewish families are not only fleeing hostility. They are seeking something positive: campuses where Jewish identity is not peripheral, not controversial, not something to be managed or contained, but woven into the shared fabric of student life. Six hundred students on a football field is not just a religious event. It is what sociologists would recognize as successful institutional integration: a minority identity fully visible within, rather than in tension with, the broader community. It is a demonstration of institutional confidence: the university’s statement that Jewish tradition belongs here, at the center, not at the margins. Students feel that distinction immediately.
One student at the seder put it simply: “I belong to Vanderbilt and I love being Jewish.” Chabad.org described the event as part of a broader national trend of seders held in sports arenas to accommodate “massive crowds of proud and confident Jews.”
That sentence contains an entire theory of what Jewish campus life could look like – and a quiet indictment of what it too often does look like at schools that still trade on reputation while failing the students who trusted them. It is not the sentence most Jewish students at elite northeastern universities are saying right now. It should be the standard by which every campus community measures itself.
None of this means Vanderbilt is perfect, or that every Jewish student should make the same choice. The point is not to replace one prestige default with another. It is to end the reflex that conflates rankings with belonging – and to recognize that Jewish families have far more agency than the prestige reflex would have them believe.
Vanderbilt now ranks alongside – and in some respects above – the Ivy League institutions that have treated governance as optional and campus culture as someone else’s problem. Its students are just as accomplished. Its faculty just as distinguished. Its outcomes just as strong. The prestige gap that once justified defaulting to a narrow set of northeastern schools has closed – and in some cases, it has reversed.
That is the real story behind the 2.9 percent acceptance rate.
Prestige without belonging is not excellence. It is inertia. And inertia, in higher education as in any other sector, is eventually punished.
The signal has been sent. The only question is who is still willing to ignore it.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute
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Syria Says It Foiled Hezbollah Plot to Kill Rabbi as Terror Group Faces Intensifying Israeli Strikes in Lebanon
Rescuers work at the site of an Israeli strike in Beirut, Lebanon, April 8, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir
The Syrian government has announced that security forces foiled a suspected assassination plot against a rabbi in Damascus, dismantling a five-member terrorist cell allegedly linked to the Iran-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah in a targeted security operation.
According to the Syrian Interior Ministry, authorities identified a woman suspected of attempting to plant an explosive device outside the residence of Rabbi Michael Khoury near the Mariamite Church in the Bab Touma district of the Damascus Old City.
Shortly after security forces managed to safely neutralize the explosive device without causing any damage, they arrested five suspects alleged to have links to the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah and believed to have received military training abroad, including bomb-making and placement techniques, local media reported.
Syrian officials have repeatedly disrupted alleged Hezbollah-linked terrorist plots. Last February, investigations uncovered new details about a cell behind attacks targeting the Mezzeh district and its military airport in Damascus, with early findings indicating ties to foreign entities and identifying the weapons used as originating from Hezbollah.
During the initial investigations, the detained suspects reportedly disclosed links to external parties, with findings indicating that the missiles and launch systems used in the attacks, along with drones seized during the operation, were supplied by Hezbollah.
The suspects also reportedly confessed to preparing to carry out new attacks using drones, before security services thwarted the plan.
Hezbollah denied the claims, calling them “false and fabricated allegations.” The terrorist group added that it had “no presence on Syrian territory” and “no activity, connection, or relationship with any party in Syria.”
Hezbollah had close relations with the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who was ousted in late 2024 by rebel forces and replaced by the current government.
The Syrian government’s efforts to thwart Lebanon-based Hezbollah came after multiple Gulf countries said last month they dismantled terrorist networks linked to the terrorist group.
Meanwhile, Israel has been waging a military campaign against Hezbollah in neighboring southern Lebanon amid the joint US-Israeli war against Iran. While the campaign against Iran did not initially target Hezbollah, the terrorist group quickly joined the conflict in early March by launching rockets against the Jewish state in support of the Iranian regime, leading to ongoing and escalating Israeli retaliation.
As regional tensions continue to rise, direct talks between Israel and Lebanon are set to begin in the United States on Tuesday, marking the first such engagement in 43 years.
With the United States acting as mediator, Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Yechiel Leiter, and Lebanon’s ambassador, Nada Hamada Meoud, are expected to discuss de-escalation along the northern border and mechanisms for a stable ceasefire. Hezbollah is not officially participating in the talks.
According to a statement from the Prime Minister’s Office, the negotiations aim to advance Hezbollah’s disarmament and lay the groundwork for peaceful relations between the two countries.
For its part, Lebanon is demanding that Israel halt both aerial and ground operations and withdraw its forces from southern territory, while also seeking international assistance for reconstruction, particularly in the country’s south.
However, it remains unclear how far the Lebanese government can move against Hezbollah without risking escalation into civil conflict, especially as Israel has signaled it will not withdraw its forces until the group’s threat is eliminated. Beirut has so far failed to dismantle Hezbollah’s arsenal.
Meanwhile, Israel has made clear that the negotiations will proceed under fire, with the Israel Defense Forces continuing strikes in southern Lebanon.
Last week, the IDF confirmed that more than 250 Hezbollah terrorists and commanders were eliminated in what it described as its largest strike in Lebanon, including dozens in Beirut, as part of its ongoing military campaign against the terrorist group.
The IDF said the attacks amounted to a precise and extensive strike on Hezbollah’s command and control systems.
“The elimination of the commanders resulted in a strategic and broad-based damage that affected all dimensions of the organization’s capabilities,” a senior military intelligence official told Israel’s Channel 12.
“These are commanders with rich experience and knowledge that have been cut off. We have not yet finished assessing the impact of the blow and we are discovering additional eliminated terrorists every day,” he continued.