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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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At the edge of America, six Jewish graves endure
A July 1954 funeral in Fairbanks, Alaska, drew unexpected attention from Jewish newspapers across the country. The woman being buried, Lena Ferguson, was laid to rest in what the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner described simply as the “Jewish plot” inside the city’s Clay Street Cemetery — a small, largely forgotten burial ground that many outside Alaska did not even know existed.
Reports in papers from Florida to Chicago described the “discovery” of what was believed to be the only known Jewish cemetery in the Last Frontier. Some emphasized the unusual circumstances of a Jewish burial in the remote Alaskan interior. Others noted that Ferguson had been married to a non-Jew.
Long before Alaska had a purpose-built synagogue, the Jewish plot at Clay Street had already begun preserving the names of Jews who lived and died in the territory.
The six graves within the plot preserve fragments of a largely forgotten Jewish world built around mining camps, frontier trade, military outposts and isolated immigrant lives. Together, they show how Jewish life appeared in one of the most remote corners of the United States, often before the institutions that sustained it elsewhere.
Ferguson’s funeral itself reflected that improvisational frontier Judaism. According to accounts published at the time, her Jewish identity only became widely known after her brother, Joseph Wishengrad of Catskill, New York, contacted a Fairbanks funeral chapel and requested that she be buried according to Jewish law.
Alaska’s only rabbi, military chaplain Jacob Rubenstein, happened to be away visiting Jewish servicemen stationed at remote military installations. In his absence, Jack Frankel — a former Biloxi, Mississippi, resident working for the United Service Organizations-Jewish Welfare Board — helped officiate the service alongside Robert Bloom, a former Klondike Gold Rush miner who later opened a hardware and general merchandise store in Fairbanks.
Jewish newspapers reported that the cemetery plot had not been used for more than 25 years because many Jews who died in Alaska were sent “to the states” for burial instead.
Before Ferguson, the most recent burial there had been Gussie Beckman in 1939. Born in New York in 1882, Beckman operated the Palace Baths and the Palace Liquor Store on Fourth Avenue in Fairbanks. Her obituary noted that “nothing is known in this city of any surviving relatives.”
Her funeral demonstrated how tenuous Jewish communal life in Alaska could be: a Christian minister, Rev. Rudolph G. Fitz, conducted the service, while Leonard Newman, a University of Alaska mining engineering student from New York City, read the burial prayers. Her pallbearers included future state senator John B. Hall, Deputy Marshal Pat O’Connor and other Fairbanks civic figures.
Other graves preserve similar fragments of frontier life.
Thomas Robin, a Romanian-born immigrant who arrived in Alaska in 1893, was buried in 1923 under the auspices of the Pioneers of Alaska, a fraternal organization founded by early settlers in the territory. His obituary identified him as a member of the Iditarod Igloo chapter.
Julia Warren, buried in 1929, lived near the Mason Creek gold mine and died in an automobile accident alongside three others. Her husband worked as a miner.
Anna Marks, who died in 1915, received a public funeral in Moose Hall, reflecting how civic lodges and fraternal organizations often doubled as gathering places in frontier towns where formal Jewish institutions scarcely existed.
Little survives about David Hurvitz, who died in 1920, beyond a brief bankruptcy notice published years earlier.
And that absence itself forms part of the story. The record preserves only fragments: names, occupations, scattered newspaper clippings and weathered gravestones. Yet together they reveal that Jewish life in Alaska did not begin with synagogues or other organized institutions. It began with individuals — merchants, miners, and immigrants — carrying pieces of Jewish identity into an isolated region where religious infrastructure barely existed.
Alaska’s first purpose-built synagogue, Congregation Beth Sholom in Anchorage, would not be dedicated until 1965, more than a decade after Lena Ferguson’s burial and nearly 360 miles south of Fairbanks.
Clay Street Cemetery eventually closed to new burials as Fairbanks shifted to Birch Hill Cemetery after 1938. In 1982, the historic cemetery was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
Today, Jewish life in Alaska is more visible than it once was. Congregation Or HaTzafon was founded in Fairbanks in 1980, and Chabad established a center there in 2024. The closest active Jewish cemetery is now in Anchorage.
The six graves at Clay Street remain among the earliest surviving records of Jewish life at the edge of America.
The post At the edge of America, six Jewish graves endure appeared first on The Forward.
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Texas candidate’s antisemitic rhetoric sparks outrage ahead of Tuesday runoff. Did it fuel her rise?
(JTA) — When Maureen Galindo finished first in a crowded Democratic primary for a newly redrawn South Texas congressional district in March, the result surprised even seasoned observers of San Antonio politics.
With voters set to decide the Democratic nomination Tuesday, as Galindo faces off with sheriff’s deputy Johnny Garcia, local officials and political observers are grappling with how a little-known candidate with a history of inflammatory remarks about Israel and Jews has come within striking distance of a seat in Congress.
The local housing activist went into the race with little political profile, having received less than 3% of the vote in a San Antonio City Council race last year. Local officials familiar with the contest chalked up Galindo’s success to a litany of factors, including low voter awareness of the candidates and a newly drawn Republican-leaning district that attracted few high-profile Democratic contenders.
What they did not credit for her success was her antisemitic rhetoric. While the race heading into Tuesday night’s runoff has been defined by scrutiny and criticism of Galindo’s views toward Zionists, local political analysts and activists told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that her controversial positions were not widely known ahead of her March win and, if anything, are hurting her chances against Garcia.
Israel is a growing flashpoint in a number of Democratic primaries across the country, and several candidates have drawn allegations of antisemitism as they employ harsh criticism of Zionism. Galindo’s rhetoric has been even more extreme – including vows to turn a local immigrant detention center “into a prison for American Zionists” – but San Antonio political observers caution against lumping her early success in with the recent wins of progressive candidates in urban districts.
Jon Taylor, a political science professor at University of Texas San Antonio, told JTA that Galindo’s antisemitic rhetoric had been largely unknown at the time of the primary.
“What I can tell from previous candidate forums, she talked about the 1%, she talked about going after Trump and ICE,” Taylor said. “None of the stuff on Zionism, from what I could tell, was ever mentioned.”
Now that her antisemitic tirades have received so much attention, Taylor predicted they would turn off voters in the socially conservative district, where elections are usually driven by pocketbook issues.
“To be honest, talking about Israel, talking about some sort of Zionist conspiracy, is not what voters are looking for,” Taylor said.
Galindo has previously told local outlets that it was her “perception that Zionist billionaires run the world” and posted on social media that “ZIOS=GENOCIDAL EUROPEAN COLONIZER FREAKS,” After Texas Senate candidate James Talarico revealed to JTA that he would not back or campaign with Galindo, she told JTA that “coordinated media attacks declaring my anti-Zionist rhetoric as anti-Semitic” were “causing MORE harm to the Jews of San Antonio by playing into all the stigmas that they own the media.”
Galindo, who has raised almost no direct funding for her campaign, has benefitted from an opaque, newly formed Political Action Committee, which Democrats are charging is Republican-backed.
For some Jewish Democrats, the purported GOP-backed funding is evidence that Galindo’s anti-Israel rhetoric is a political liability rather than a strength.
“Republican dark money groups are spending big to elevate anti-Israel Democratic candidates who are out of touch with voters — because they’d rather face a weaker opponent in races that will decide the House majority in November. It’s cynical and it’s disturbing,” the president and CEO of the Democratic Majority for Israel, Brian Romick, said in a statement to JTA.
Taylor noted that the GOP would only be promoting Galindo because the party wants Democrats “to nominate the worst candidate possible,” backing up the notion that her views are not appealing to voters.
The newly launched Lead Left PAC, which has not disclosed its donors, has spent more than $900,000 on ads and mailers promoting Galindo. Campaign finance watchdogs accuse the group of structuring its activity in a way that allowed it to bypass donor disclosures before voters cast their ballots.
Last week, the Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission accusing the PAC of having “strategically gamed federal reporting deadlines” in order to not disclose the sources of its funds ahead of the primaries.
The alleged GOP interference in the Texas race also spurred a row between the Republican Jewish Coalition and the Democratic Majority for Israel, which, after it called on Democrats to condemn Galindo, asked the RJC if it would “condemn the Republican Super PACs promoting her?”
The RJC, Texas GOP and Winred – a Republican donation platform that reportedly was at one point linked in the metadata for the website of Lead Left PAC – did not respond to a request for comment from JTA.
A local Democratic Party official familiar with the race told JTA in an emailed statement that it was likely voters did not know much about Galindo ahead of the race, but that with “more knowledge and media attention, voters are now much better equipped about their choices.”
The race has unfolded against the backdrop of a major Republican redistricting overhaul. Congressional District 35, where Galindo is competing, was impacted so heavily that the incumbent Rep. Greg Casar is now running for a different seat, while roughly 43% of residents of Bexar Country, which the district partially covers, were placed in a new district, according to the San Antonio Report.
On Wednesday, a host of Texas Democratic Party leaders released a joint statement decrying Galindo’s rhetoric, writing that her comments “do not reflect our values as Democrats or as Texans.”
Casar, who chairs the U.S. House Progressive Caucus and currently represents much of the district, made the unusual move last week of endorsing Garcia, Galindo’s moderate runoff opponent, telling the San Antonio Express-News that Galindo’s “very inappropriate remarks” sealed the deal.
“I’m a progressive Democrat. Johnny has been endorsed by the more conservative Blue Dogs. But we can all agree that he’s the candidate who can win this race,” Casar told the outlet.
Rabbi Mara Nathan, the senior rabbi of Temple Beth El, a Reform congregation in San Antonio, told JTA that she did not think Galindo had drummed up support heading into her campaign from voters over her antisemitic rhetoric, adding that “if that had been the case, we would have heard about it much earlier on.”
She explained, “An alarm would have been sounded pretty early, and not necessarily from Jewish people, but from other people in the San Antonio community who are our friends and allies.”
Looking to Tuesday’s primary, Taylor said he believed the public spotlight on Galindo’s remarks had changed the race by making voters more aware of her record.
“With this animus now out there and highly visible, people are really alerted to the danger of this woman and what her rhetoric could mean,” Taylor said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Texas candidate’s antisemitic rhetoric sparks outrage ahead of Tuesday runoff. Did it fuel her rise? appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump announces he has ‘largely negotiated’ Iran deal, Strait of Hormuz opening
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced in a post on Truth Social Saturday afternoon that a deal with Iran had been “largely negotiated,” despite saying earlier in the day that he was undecided on whether to agree to a proposal or resume strikes.
Trump described the deal as a “Memorandum of Understanding pertaining to PEACE” that was “subject to finalization” by the United States, Iran and other countries that participated in talks on Saturday. He noted that he’d “just had a very good call” with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Bahrain.
Trump said in his Truth Social post that, separately, he had spoken with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a conversation that “went very well.” There was no immediate statement released by the Prime Minister’s Office following Trump’s post.
“Final aspects and details of the Deal are currently being discussed, and will be announced shortly,” Trump added.
In the post, Trump said the deal would include the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, though a widely reported quote from Iran’s Fars New Agency, which is close to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said that Trump’s assertion was “incomplete and inconsistent with reality” and that the strait would remain under Iranian control.
Trump’s announcement comes over a month since he unilaterally extended a fragile U.S.-Iran ceasefire in April.
The announcement did not make mention of Iran’s nuclear program or highly enriched uranium, which Trump has previously stressed must be included in a deal.
Trump’s announcement came hours after he told Axios that he was a “solid 50/50” on whether he would be able to make a “good” deal with Iran, or else “blow them to kingdom come.”
Trump also told Axios that Netanyahu was “torn” over the potential deal but rejected the idea that the Israeli leader was “worried” that he might strike an unfavorable agreement.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Trump announces he has ‘largely negotiated’ Iran deal, Strait of Hormuz opening appeared first on The Forward.