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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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At the Vatican with Chicago’s mayor, a rabbi gave Pope Leo a White Sox kippah
(JTA) — Lizzi Heydemann didn’t plan what she was going to say to Pope Leo XIV.
But when the Chicago rabbi found herself face-to-face with the new pontiff during a Vatican visit alongside a delegation of Chicago leaders, she thanked him for the way he has spoken about the war in Gaza.
“I said, you know, it’s been a hard time over these past two years to be a rabbi, but I want to thank you for, in the midst of conflict, holding the humanity of everyone involved in the conflict,” Heydemann recounted.
Leo, the first American pope and a native of Chicago’s South Side, repeatedly advocated after his election last year for the release of the Israeli hostages as well as a ceasefire in the war in Gaza, which he has referred to as “vengeance” and “barbarity.” The comments angered some Jewish leaders who have interpreted them as unfairly targeting Israel, but for others including Heydemann, they have offered a template for how to criticize the war.
“You may be anti-war, but I do not hear you denouncing or degrading people,” Heydemann said she told Leo. “Thank you for holding the humanity of Israelis and Palestinians in the same breath and the same thought. It’s not something that is modeled very often.”
She added, “He seemed grateful, and like he knew exactly what I was talking about.”
Heydemann, the founder and leader of Mishkan Chicago, an independent Jewish spiritual community, had been invited by Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson to join a delegation of civic, business and faith leaders traveling to Rome last week. (Johnson has been a vocal critic of Israel who has drawn criticism himself from some Jewish leaders in Chicago.) She said she was the only rabbi to take part in the trip.
As she waited for the pope to enter a room where the delegation was assembled on Thursday, Heydemann said she began weeping.
“What I reflected on is that he, maybe more than anyone in the world, is a religious leader with the world’s eyes on him,” Heydemann said. “He is beloved and critiqued constantly, and every rabbi in America has had a little taste over the last few years of that weight.”
While the interaction carried an unexpected emotional weight for Heydemann, it also came with a distinctive Jewish Chicago touch: a White Sox-themed kippah.
She said she included the kippah, which featured the Chicago White Sox logo on the exterior as well as a pomegranate on the inside, in a chest of Chicago-themed gifts presented to the pope on Thursday during the visit as a nod to his lifelong devotion to the baseball team.
“We thought that would be a sweet point connection between me and the pope,” Heydemann said, adding that the pontiff’s typical white zucchetto looks “awfully like a kippah.”
“It brings us all joy to imagine that after a long day at work wearing the cream-colored one that matches his robes, maybe at the end of the day he’ll switch it out for a jersey material, White Sox kippah, and thinks fondly of sweet home Chicago, and the Jewish spiritual community gave it to him,” Heydemann added.
A list of gifts that circulated in local media included another piece of Jewish paraphernalia: a tote bag with the words “Resisting tyrants since Pharaoh.” That’s a catchphrase from T’ruah, the rabbinic human rights group where Heydemann has been on the board. But the rabbi said the inclusion was an error: She was carrying the bag, not giving it to Leo.
Looking back on the meeting with the pope, Heydemann said her experience reflected a broader conviction about “building bridges, even in the presence of difference.”
“There’s too much at stake in our world for us to not be continuing to be in relationship with one another in the presence of differences,” Heydemann said.
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Finalists announced for lucrative Jewish literary award
(JTA) — Amir Tibon’s memoir about his family’s ordeal during the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and Laura Hobson Faure’s history of Jewish children who fled from Germany to France during World War II are among the finalists for the 2026 Sami Rohr Prize.
The annual award — which alternates each year between works of fiction and nonfiction and which honors emerging Jewish writers — is considered one of the most prominent awards in Jewish literature.
The winner of the award, which comes with a $100,000 prize, will be announced on June 16.
A panel of judges will decide among four nonfiction finalists for this year’s award. Since the prize was established in 2006 — the first award was presented in 2007 — Sami Rohr Prize panelists and advisors have included historian and diplomat Deborah Lipstadt, historian Jonathan Sarna and longtime Columbia University journalism professor Sam Freedman.
“What strikes me about this year’s finalists for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature is the remarkable range of stories they tell and the depth of insight they bring to Jewish life and history,” Debra Goldberg, director of the Sami Rohr Prize, said in an email. “Each of the four books explores questions of memory, identity, displacement, resilience and responsibility through deeply personal narratives that feel both timely and enduring.”
The 2026 Sami Rohr Prize finalists are:
Laura Hobson Faure, “Who Will Rescue Us?: The Story of the Jewish Children who Fled to France and America During the Holocaust.” Faure is a professor of modern Jewish history at Université Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne. Yale University Press, her publisher, describes “Who Will Rescue Us” as “the first comprehensive study of Jewish children’s flight from Nazi Germany to France — and their subsequent escape to America from the Vichy regime.” It is her second book.
Shaul Kelner, “A Cold War Exodus: How American Activists Mobilized to Free Soviet Jews.” A professor of Jewish studies and sociology at Vanderbilt University, Kelner’s second book details how American Jews transformed a largely overlooked human rights issue into a landmark 20th-century mass-mobilization effort.
Jordan Salama, “Stranger in the Desert: A Family Story.” Salama, an author and contributor to The New Yorker, National Geographic and other publications, traces his Jewish family’s history “from Moorish Spain and Ottoman Syria to Argentina and beyond.” A mix of travelogue, memoir, history and reportage, “Stranger in the Desert” is his second book.
Amir Tibon, “The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands.” The first book by the Israeli journalist is a first-person account of his family’s ordeal as residents of Kibbutz Nahal Oz, which was violently attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. Alongside accounts of the day’s losses, Tibon also recounts the heroic efforts by his father, a retired major general, to race into the battle zone and rescue his son, daughter-in-law and two granddaughters from Hamas gunmen.
“As the Prize approaches its 20th year, I hope it will continue to support writers whose work expands our understanding of the Jewish experience and sparks meaningful conversation for generations to come,” Goldberg said. “I am immensely grateful to share in the Prize’s mission to honor excellence, nurture talent and connect Jewish voices across the globe.”
The Sami Rohr Prize, named for the late American real estate developer and philanthropist who fled Nazi Germany as a boy, is administered in association with the National Library of Israel. 70 Faces Media, the parent company of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, is the prize’s media partner.
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A decaying historic farmhouse finds a savior in Chabad
A Dutch Colonial home, just one of a handful of pre-Revolutionary War houses left in New York City, has been vacant and decaying for years. The windows are boarded up, signs warning against trespassing cover the property, and chunks of the ceiling are missing inside.
This historic landmark has an unlikely savior: Chabad, the global Lubavitch movement, which is planting one of its thousands of outposts there.
“Dilapidated is an understatement,” Rabbi Zalman Liberow of Chabad of Flatbush said as he gave the Forward a tour.
Chabad of Flatbush, led by Liberow and his wife, Chana, bought the historic Brooklyn property in December 2024 and will soon begin renovations to make the place livable. In the meantime, the couple has already transformed the barnhouse next door into a sanctuary, where a photo of the Lubavitch rebbe hangs on the wall near a compartment once used to store hay.
As other Jewish organizations have shifted toward digital community, Chabad has continued investing heavily in brick-and-mortar real estate, ranging from modest suburban homes to multimillion-dollar towers and converted landmarks. It’s a strategy that anchors Chabad in the communities it serves, but can also be costly: For the most part, Chabad couples — each unit headed by a rabbi and rebbitzin — finance their own operations, raising their own money to buy homes and establish centers of Jewish life.
The Liberows said a generous donation of Bitcoin from a donor, Eliot Stavrach, ultimately allowed them to purchase the 22,000 square foot lot for roughly $3 million, along with securing a high-interest loan to pay the mortgage while the couple awaited the sale of their old headquarters down the street. Last week, that transaction went through and reaped nearly $1.1 million.
The seller had also cut the asking price by nearly half, offloading what had become a white elephant, Liberow said.
“For him, it was a pain. For us, it was good,” Liberow said. “And I thought, even better, this is such an important piece of United States history.”
The prior landlord had reportedly struggled to find a buyer for the landmarked home, which by law cannot be demolished, and any alterations to the facade must be pre-approved by the city Landmarks Preservation Commission. In buying the home, the Liberows are also preventing its further deterioration — to the relief of neighbors who said the abandoned site had become a hotspot for drug use and a symbol of neglect.
“I’m just happy that the house will not be torn down and will actually have a future — a good one, it seems,” said Lori Citron Knipel, a former leader in the Brooklyn Democratic Party who used to frequent the house. “So that absolutely warms my heart, because it’s been breaking every time I pass it.”
The house’s history
The Wyckoff-Bennett Homestead is likely among the ten oldest properties in Brooklyn and the 50 oldest houses in all of New York City, according to Simeon Bankoff, former executive director of the Historic Districts Council.
A 1968 report from the Landmarks Preservation Commission noted that “two hundred years of wear have done little to diminish the simple beauty of its clear-cut profile,” and described it as “the most beautiful example of Dutch Colonial architecture in Brooklyn.”
The house is also notable for its role in the Revolutionary War: During the conflict, it quartered German soldiers fighting for the British, known as Hessians. Two of the soldiers etched their names and units into a windowpane.
A historical marker at the house notes that those troops may have taken part in the Battle of Brooklyn, the first major battle after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
According to Liberow, local legend holds that George Washington once stopped at the Wyckoff-Bennett house for tea — though, “we never did find the teacup,” he joked.
Bankoff attributed the properties’ staying power partly to the fact that prior to a venture called 22nd Street Investors LLC purchasing the lots in 2021, the property had only ever been owned by three families over more than 250 years.
Hendrick H. Wyckoff, son of a Dutch settler who emigrated to New Amsterdam in 1637, is believed to have built the house before 1766. In 1835, Cornelius W. Bennett purchased it, and it remained in the Bennett family for four generations before a Jewish couple, Annette and Stuart Mont, bought the property in 1983.
‘A piece of Brooklyn’s history’
The Monts had a deep appreciation for the home’s history, Citron Knipel said, and often opened it to the community. They hosted political fundraisers, birthday parties, and even a wedding at the house, she said, and they welcomed school groups into their home for local history field trips.
Only the facade of the house is landmarked, making its preservation legally required. But the Monts also preserved its interior details, including furniture from the Wyckoffs and Bennetts, an ornate fireplace framed by decorative tiles depicting biblical scenes, and an antique Richardson & Boynton Co. stove.
“There’s a sense of being part of and having a responsibility to the rest of the community to preserve it and move it forward,” Stu said in the 2013 documentary Living in a Landmark.
“And share it,” Annette added. “Because we have bought a piece of Brooklyn’s history.”
But an effort to secure the home’s legacy fell apart in 2010. The Monts had been in talks with the city to purchase the property, only to withdraw after the city reduced the sale price, deducting the rent the Monts theoretically would have paid to continue living there.
Annette died in 2013 at age 72, and Stuart died three years later at age 76. Their children, Ira and Randi Mont, sold the property to 22nd Street Investors LLC, registered to real estate investor Avraham Dishi, in 2021.
In an interview with the Forward, Ira Mont said he believed at the time of sale that 22nd Street Investors LLC would keep the house in good condition — and was disappointed that they ultimately did not.
Dishi drew two complaints for failing to maintain the Wyckoff Bennett house: one for the poor condition of the fence, still active, and another for the condition of the facade and roof, later withdrawn.
Officials at a Landmarks Preservation Commission hearing in March to discuss the Liberows’ minor proposed changes to the home noted there had been “all kinds of vandalism, fires, squatters, [and] drug users” there in recent years.
The Forward reached Dishi’s office by phone and left a message, but did not hear back.
Liberow said he has big plans for the house pending approval from the Landmarks Preservation Commission, including displaying a video in the front yard highlighting Jewish history in the United States. The Commission has already approved plans to install porch railings, a curb cut and a driveway at the site. And like the Motts, the couple plans to open the space up to the public. They’ve already begun hosting Hebrew school and holiday gatherings in the barnhouse next door, which they renovated for about $200,000 with rustic touches including wood paneling, barrels, lanterns and candle chandeliers.
For neighbors, the most meaningful change may simply be that the property is occupied at all.
“We got a very big welcome over here, because everyone’s so happy,” Liberow said. “Someone is going to save the property.”
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