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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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Trump administration drops demand that Penn turn over list of Jewish employees
(JTA) — The Trump administration has withdrawn a controversial demand for the University of Pennsylvania to produce a list of Jewish employees as part of a larger investigation into alleged employment discrimination at the Ivy League university.
The withdrawal ends a round of lawsuits over the legality of such a demand, which alarmed Jewish groups on campus and beyond.
The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is overseeing the probe, did not explain its decision to drop the subpoena in its Thursday court filing. A representative for the agency declined further comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
In its own statement, Penn, which had been engaged in a legal back-and-forth over the school’s refusal to compile such a list, said it had “protected its employees’ rights.” The school had shared the names of Jewish staff who had consented to the probe, but resisted sharing the names of all Jewish staff.
“Penn remains committed to fighting antisemitism and all other forms of discrimination, to ensure everyone it serves can learn, work, and thrive,” a university spokesperson said.
The unusual demand, first made in November, came as the Trump administration has aggressively targeted a handful of elite schools accused of failing to curb antisemitism on campus. Most of the time, its intervention has come through the education and health and human services departments, which have cited civil rights violations in seeking to yank billions of dollars in federal funding.
But the EEOC has gotten involved, too, arguing that Penn, in particular, had failed to protect its Jewish and Israeli employees from discrimination. Its case against Penn originated in 2023, and its subpoena had included demands to reveal members of “all clubs, groups, organizations and recreation groups” that were “related to the Jewish religion, faith, ancestry/national origin.” The subpoena also targeted the school’s Jewish studies personnel.
Jewish groups, including Penn Hillel, had argued against the demand, as did free-speech organizations. In an email, Penn Hillel’s director, Rabbi Gabe Greenberg, told JTA the organization welcomed the news.
“Over the past year, I have spoken with hundreds of students, faculty, and staff across the University of Pennsylvania regarding this issue. Every single person expressed objections to the EEOC’s attempt to compel the University to surrender data on Jewish identity and affiliation,” Greenberg said.
He continued, “While many in our community share Penn Hillel’s conviction that campus antisemitism requires urgent, sustained action, demanding ‘lists of Jews’ was a fundamentally incorrect and inappropriate way to address it.”
Earlier this year the agency chair, Andrea Lucas, defended the list-of-Jews demand during an antisemitism conference at Harvard. Lucas told the roomful of Jewish professionals that her office needed the list to identify “potential victims,” including as a means of distributing potential payouts.
(L-r) Andrea Lucas, chair of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, speaks with Brandeis Center founder Kenneth Marcus at an antisemitism conference held at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 16, 2026. (Dillon Meyer Media)
“At some point, either the government will know information about individuals related to their religion or we will not be able to enforce the laws on their behalf,” Lucas said at the time.
A federal judge had ruled in March that the request was reasonable, dismissing efforts by Penn and Jewish groups to declare the ruling unconstitutional. However, the judge delayed the deadline by which Penn would have been forced to comply, giving the university more time to appeal.
The EEOC’s larger antisemitism inquiry into Penn continues.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Austrian town turns Hitler’s birthplace into a police station to keep neo-Nazis at bay
(JTA) — How do you stop neo-Nazis from meeting up at Adolf Hitler’s birthplace? Station officers there around the clock, of course.
That is just what the small town of Braunau in Austria has done — but the officers are not providing surveillance. Instead, they will be on site as part of their regular duties, because Hitler’s first home has become a police station.
After years of discussion, planning and construction, the new police station on a corner near Braunau’s town square opened July 22, in the house where the future Nazi dictator was born in 1889 and spent the first few months of his life.
The building looks different, and there will now be surveillance cameras out front. The city’s aim was “to prevent any association with Adolf Hitler, so as to strip it of that mystique,” the head of the Austrian interior ministry’s history department, Stephan Mlczoch, told reporters on a recent tour.
At Wednesday’s opening ceremony, Austrian Interior Minister Gerhard Karner emphasized that today’s police are “the exact opposite of the symbolism tied to this place. Our police stand … for democracy and the rule of law,” The Associated Press reported.
Some 50 local and district police officers will be stationed at the new site. And there will also reportedly be a police training program on issues related to human rights.
“They will probably also do antisemitism training. And I think that’s a good thing,” Hannah Lessing, who was on the expert commission to decide what should be done with the property, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an interview. Lessing, who co-chairs the Austrian delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, was opposed to tearing down the building:
Hitler’s birthplace in Braunau, Austria, as seen on Jan. 15, 2015, as the Austrian government considered forcing a sale to prevent the site’s misuse. A commemorative plaque denouncing fascism was preserved during a later renovation into a police station. (Johannes Simon/Getty Images)
“I don’t like historical cancellation. But we should use it for something,” she said. “A museum was for me not a good idea, because it would attract automatically people who are probably Hitler fans.”
Thomas Ulmer is a retired officer with the Stuttgart police who fought to turn a former Gestapo headquarters in his German city into a place of remembrance. He said the new site could benefit the officers who are stationed there.
“It’s very important to convey the memory and the history to young people, to young police trainees,” he said.
Today — as an activist in the VelsPol advocacy organization for queer staff in the police and justice system — Ulmer brings police recruits to the Hotel Silber Memorial and Learning Center, where they learn how police were co-opted into the Nazi machine.
Recently, he helped design an exhibit in another former Hitler dwelling that became a police station: a nine-room apartment on Prinzregentenplatz in Munich. The exhibit, which spanned 100 years of history, included the years in which Hitler’s popularity grew after the Beer Hall Putsch, his attempted coup in 1923.
The Munich station’s head, Andreas Franken, doesn’t hide the building’s history, Ulmer said. In his office, Franken even has the famous photo of the American war photographer Lee Miller sitting in Hitler’s bathtub.
“When people come to him, whether they’re new police officers or just other people, they always ask him about this picture, and then he can tell the story of the building again,” Ulmer said.
Back in Braunau, the new police station “will continue to be known as ‘Hitler’s birthplace’ and will attract visitors accordingly,” laments Austrian filmmaker Günter Schwaiger, who had opposed the plan back in 2023. In his documentary, “Who’s afraid of Braunau?”, he claimed that Hitler himself wanted to have local officials move into the rooms where he was born.
“It used to be a modest house, but now the Austrian government has turned it into a monument,” he said in an email to the JTA. “We probably need a different generation — one that isn’t afraid of the truth and has the courage to truly come to terms with the past. I hope that generation will emerge.”
A swastika flag flies outside the birthplace of Adolf Hitler in Braunau, Austria, around 1933. (Imagno/Getty Images)
Also disappointed is California attorney Cary Lowe, who was born in Braunau to Holocaust survivors. He was originally in favor of turning the site into a “House of Responsibility.” That plan is still alive, with another local site in mind. The city did “their best to come up with a result that’s acceptable to everybody,” he said. “And now it’s a done deal, so I think we just have to move on.”
The building where Hitler was born dates back to the early to mid-19th century and sits, along with some other structures, on about three quarters of an acre. It has been privately owned, and over the years has housed a school and a branch of a disability support organization.
In 1989, a memorial stone taken from the quarry at the Mauthausen concentration camp was erected in front of the house, and inscribed with a warning “Never again fascism.” Noticeable visits by neo-Nazis declined since then, Cary Lowe told JTA.
“Yes, they still get the occasional individual that wants to carry out a pilgrimage or do a photo op or something in front of the house,” he said. “But it’s on a much smaller scale.”
Braunau’s mayor, Johannes Waidbacher, stands outside the renovated police station in Hitler’s birthplace, July 16, 2026. (Photo by Kerstin Joensson / AFP via Getty Images)
In 2017, the city of Braunau expropriated the vacant property and organized an expert commission to debate possible uses, or even demolition. Suggestions ranged from the serious — a museum — to the wild: An Austrian artist collective called Total Refusal suggested that a controversial statue of Vienna’s wartime mayor Karl Luegers, a devoted antisemite, be picked up by helicopter and dropped over Hitler’s birth house.
But that was not to be. After deciding on the police station option, renovation began. Even then, the idea that Hitler fanatics might seek relics led the city to grind down all the construction rubble and bury it in a secret location.
Lessing hopes that the new police station will reach the younger generation, with lessons of the past accessible in Braunau without having to journey to concentration camp sites in the region.
“We didn’t need another museum,” she said. “We have Mauthausen for that.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Stabbing of Jewish man in Manhattan prompts calls for Mamdani to turn down temperature
The stabbing of two men on Manhattan’s Upper West Side on Thursday — one of whom was wearing a kippah on his way home from a Tisha B’Av service at a modern Orthodox shul — has intensified New Yorkers’ fears of being visibly Jewish in public, leaders and community members said.
“Fear has become a lived experience for far too many Jewish New Yorkers. That is not normal,” Mark Treyger, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council, said at a press conference Friday near the location of the stabbing. “Today, Jewish parents are asking whether it is safe for their children to wear a kippah or a Magen David in public. Synagogues preparing for Shabbat are wondering whether they can afford additional security.”
Police said on Thursday afternoon, the suspect — identified as 51-year-old Raul Morales — stabbed an Asian man in the back with a knife before approaching a Jewish man and stabbing him in the torso with a screwdriver. Authorities said he yelled “Allahu akbar” during the attack. Both victims are expected to recover.
Morales is expected to face charges on Friday. Police are investigating the attack as a hate crime, and New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said in a statement Thursday that while the attacker did not have a known history of mental health issues, “the initial investigation suggests that mental health may have been a factor.”
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani condemned the attack as “horrifying” and wrote on X that “these hateful and despicable attacks have no place in our city.”
At Friday’s press conference, City Council Speaker Julie Menin said she was having conversations with her daughter about whether it was safe to wear a Jewish star and with her sons about whether they should wear yarmulkes.
“How can this be normal?” Menin said. “We have to change what is happening in our city.”
But even as New York Attorney General Letitia James urged people not to “assign any particular outcome to this investigation,” adding she did not want to “draw any conclusions,” some leaders were quick to link the attack to a rising political temperature.
Some directly expressed their anger with Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who on Wednesday issued a video address conceding he did not have the authority to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while also calling Netanyahu a war criminal and accusing him of orchestrating a genocide. Unable to arrest Netanyahu, Mamdani encouraged New Yorkers to protest instead.
The UJA-Federation of New York and Orthodox Union said at the time that the mayor’s words put Jews in greater danger.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, the spiritual leader of Manhattan’s Central Synagogue, wrote in an open letter addressed to Mamdani that “you promised during and after your campaign to lead this city with unity rather than fear. Instead, you continue to divide Jews into those whose politics you deem acceptable and Zionists whom you cast beyond the pale.”
Mamdani was not at the press conference, and organizers did not answer a question about whether he had been invited.
“His words have profound, real-world consequence on us,” Eric Goldstein, CEO of UJA-Federation of New York, told the crowd. “Shame on him for doing this for perceived political benefit when it has real-world consequence for the Jews of New York. He must stop. He must stop.”
Rabbi Yosie Levine of the Jewish Center — where the victim had attended a Tisha B’Av service before he was stabbed — also expressed disappointment at Mamdani’s remarks.
“When I was growing up, the only time we saw security outside of my synagogue or outside of my Jewish day school was when the mayor came to speak,” Levine said. “The police were there to protect him. Today, every time the mayor speaks, we need the police to protect us.”
“No elected official is responsible for every act of hate, but every leader is responsible for helping shape the climate in which we all live,” Treyger said.
New York City Comptroller Mark Levine at Friday’s press conference cast the attack as part of a broader trend of rising attacks on Jewish New Yorkers, citing 178 acts of antisemitic hate crimes in the first six months of this year.
Menin pointed to the dozens of swastikas painted on a playground at a Brooklyn playground earlier this year and swastikas spray painted on homes and a synagogue in Queens last month. On Wednesday, a Jewish man was shoved to the ground in Brooklyn, with the attacker making antisemitic remarks, leaving the victim with back and hip injuries.
Thursday’s attacks were just the latest in a series of crimes targeting the Jewish community, they said.
Rabbi Mark Wildes of the Manhattan Jewish Experience told the Forward he was teaching his weekly class when the attacks occurred nearby.
“It literally happened on my block,” he said. “Two of my kids were out and about, and this guy was still at large before they had caught him.” Wildes, whose children are visibly Jewish, said he and his wife immediately tried to get them home. “We were saying, ‘Where are they? Get them inside.’”
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