If you are in New York City and struggling with suicidal thoughts, you can call 1-888-NYC-WELL for free and confidential crisis counseling. You can also dial the 24/7 National Suicide Prevention hotline at 988 or go to SuicidePreventionLifeline.org.
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Yeshiva University is left in mourning after a beloved gay alum dies by suicide
(New York Jewish Week) — Before eulogizing their friend on Thursday night, Beth Weiss draped a rainbow flag with a Jewish star over the podium.
It was a potent symbol of the twin identities that Weiss and others who knew Herschel Siegel said he had struggled to reconcile, particularly as a student and 2021 graduate of Yeshiva University. Siegel died by suicide Friday in Atlanta, where he grew up and had been living.
Weiss said during the eulogy they recalled having “a conversation with a gay friend about what it felt like to be queer in the Orthodox world” for the first time with Siegel, a classmate at Y.U., the Modern Orthodox flagship in uptown Manhattan.
“I can’t tell you how invaluable conversations and connections like that are,” Weiss said. “We talked about our dreams for the future, but also the reality of how our future might look because of our queerness.”
Weiss’ comments, delivered at a memorial held on the Y.U. campus and organized by some of Siegel’s friends from college, reflect a narrative solidifying around Siegel’s death. Many believe — based on their conversations with Siegel, his social media posts and their own experiences — that Siegel had considered that there may have been no place for him as a gay man in the Orthodox community where he grew up and attended college.
Even as some in Siegel’s community have downplayed the focus on his sexuality following his death, friends say his suicide should be a wakeup call at a time when Yeshiva University is deeply divided over whether and how to include LGBTQ students. In recent years, the school has fought not to have to recognize an LGBTQ student group, even petitioning the Supreme Court for relief. A trans woman was also told she could no longer pray in a synagogue affiliated with the school.
Weiss told the New York Jewish Week that there are many “Orthodox queer people who are possibly suffering, who feel like they are alone, and who feel like they don’t have a future,” adding, “I know that Herschel felt that way at points in his life because he told me.”
Experts caution that it is a mistake to attribute suicides to single causes. Still, there is no question that LGBTQ youth are at increased risk, particularly when they are not accepted in their communities. According to a 2023 survey by the Trevor Project, a nonprofit focused on suicide prevention in the LGBTQ community, 41% of LGBTQ young people seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year.
Siegel made his struggle transparent. In an Instagram post from March that has circulated widely after his death, he wrote about how the word “abomination” in a Torah portion brought up trauma for him as a gay man within the Orthodox community.
“According to that trauma, my very EXISTENCE as a gay, Jewish, Male was an abomination,” Siegal wrote. “And even decades later, that fear-based thought pattern erupted into my consciousness, at the most unexpected of times.”
He then asked, “Do we ever REALLY heal from the deeply traumatic memories within us? Or is it rather a Journey, like many other emotions, and then we come to realize that one day we are at ease while riding ‘the trauma-coaster’?”
Siegel ended the post on a positive note, sharing gratitude for anyone who “has ever experienced a profoundly traumatizing event within your lives. … The fact that we made it this far is something to be proud of in and of itself!”
He died a month later, on the eve of the Shabbat when the weekly Torah portion includes the Jewish legal prohibition on homosexual intercourse, calling it an “abomination.”
“I think about the bravery, the heroism, the strength of this kid,” said Mordechai Levovitz, a therapist and the clinical director of Jewish Queer Youth, an organization that seeks to support and empower Jewish LGBTQ teens, with a focus on the Orthodox community. “I think any person at all willing to endure a community in a religion that is very cruel to him — and yet sees the value because there is also still value — is someone that I think we can look up to, and that we can learn from, and that we can be inspired by.”
He added, “But also, we can admit and witness and bear the fact that it is because of the community that we created that this kid could not find a future for himself and thought that it would perhaps be better off if he was not here, or if he did not exist.”
Not everyone who has commented on Siegel’s death is connecting it with his sexuality. Rabbi Ilan D. Feldman of Beth Jacob Atlanta, Siegel’s synagogue, wrote an email to the congregation saying that “our thoughts and tefillos [prayers] go out to the Siegel family, whose agony can never be fully fathomed, and who will be embraced and supported by us, their community.” Siegel is survived by his parents and five siblings.
Feldman presided over a funeral on Sunday that people who were present said was attended by about 200 people, with more than 450 tuning in on Zoom. Levovitz said that at the funeral, the rabbi referred to Siegel as being “mentally ill.” Mental illness is considered the strongest predictor of suicide.
Feldman told the New York Jewish Week over the phone that “even by reducing this story to a one-dimensional story of a guy who was gay, who committed suicide, we’re actually doing a disservice to gay people.” He also said Siegel’s family is distressed by the narrative, which they believe is untrue.
“The storyline of this particular case is an openly gay person who had wonderful relationships with the entire Orthodox community, including haredi Orthodox leaders,” Feldman said. “And now we’re going take this guy after his death, during his shiva while his family is grieving, and start talking about [how] gays are marginalized and whether this drove him to suicide, when this is the one case where an Orthodox community embraced a gay person with love and with no exceptions.”
But he acknowledged that there is “a big difference between pressures from the Jewish community and pressures from Jewish tradition,” which under Orthodox interpretations does not permit homosexuality.
“If he ever felt pressure, it was relieved by the love that he received in the community, but the pressure may have been there because Jewish tradition is inconsistent with gay activity,” Feldman said.
A source in the Atlanta community who said he had known Siegel since Siegel was a child said Siegel’s death comes on the heels of another suicide in the Atlanta Orthodox community, also of a young person who identified as a member of the LGBTQ community.
“There is a cloud of sadness. People just feel confused and lost. This is the second time in six months,” the source said. “It’s just resonating very hard for people. Young people taking their lives, it’s not supposed to be something that is normal and is regularly happening.”
Hundreds of people attended the funeral for Herschel Siegel last weekend in Atlanta. (Courtesy)
Chaim Nissel, a dean at Yeshiva University who was an associate provost during Siegel’s tenure as a student, spoke at the Thursday night gathering and said he had known Siegel well, and even had the student visit his home. (Nissel was originally named in the lawsuit by the YU Pride Alliance against the university but was dropped after Y.U. argued that he did not have authority over whether the LGBTQ student club was approved.)
“He struggled to reconcile his identity and love of Torah,” Nissel said. “He died from mental illness.”
Yeshiva University had previously released a statement about Siegel’s death.
“We are deeply saddened by the passing of Herschel Siegel, a member of the Yeshiva University family,” the statement said. “We express our deepest condolences to his family. May his memory be a blessing.”
Siegel’s family did not respond to a request for comment. People close to the family said they were too distraught to speak to the press. The source from Atlanta who knew Siegel since he was a child said the family was “angry for the way that this is being spun,” suggesting that Siegel’s sexuality should not be the only focus.
“I do resent anyone that is trying to make this about him being gay,” the source said. “It’s the chicken or the egg situation. Did being gay in the Orthodox community make his depression more triggering, or was it that he was depressed, and felt alone, which made being gay so much harder?”
Even his closest friends say it’s impossible to untangle those forces.
“Herschel struggled with mental illness and struggled with accepting himself as a gay Orthodox man,” said Emily Ornelas, a friend who was close to Siegel when he was at Y.U.
“That’s a reality,” Orneles said. “Gay people in any organized religion struggle with that. But I do wholeheartedly believe that by the end of his life, he had come to terms with and accepted himself and was able to love himself for who he was in whatever capacity he could. I feel that is true.”
Ornelas says she is choosing to remember the many bright spots in her friend’s life, rather than focus solely on trying to identify reasons for his death. She recalled the way he connected with children when the two staffed a Passover retreat, as well as his energy in his many theater performances at Y.U., the way his smile lit up a room.
“I remember that his hugs were absolutely crushing,” Ornelas said. “I think he could have cracked my ribs easily. I remember that when he smiled, he smiled literally with every single one of his teeth. You could probably count them. I can hear his voice. He has a very particular affect to the way he spoke, and I think it was like a tiny bit of a Southern drawl. He was just like a really big part of my life — and all of our lives — for a very long time.”
At the memorial service, Weiss exhorted others who might feel tormented about being gay in an Orthodox community to hold on, despite their pain.
“You are not alone,” they said, holding back tears. “You have a future, and you have people who love and see you fully. You have people who celebrate all the wonderful, beautiful parts of you. And if it feels like you don’t have those people yet, we are here waiting for you with open hearts.”
They then shifted to a “a message to everyone else here with us tonight” — those who identify as allies, and those who are just deeply sad about their friend’s tragic death.
“Be like Herschel,” Weiss said. “Be like Herschel and embrace and love each of us with enthusiasm and with joy. Be like Herschel and see us as the full, valid and nuanced human beings that we are. Be like Herschel, and support us unconditionally. Be like Herschel so that we can continue to be here even though Herschel can’t. And be like Herschel, so that this never ever happens again.”
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5th man charged in March arson of London’s Hatzola ambulances
(JTA) — Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service announced Tuesday that an 18-year-old man has been charged in connection with the March arson attack that destroyed four ambulances owned by Hatzola, a Jewish volunteer emergency service.
Subhan Ahmed, a British national, was charged on Monday with “assisting an offender” in connection with the arson.
The ambulances were set ablaze in the early morning of March 23 in Golders Green, a heavily Jewish neighborhood in London. The incident spurred increased patrols in Jewish communities.
The charge is the latest development in an investigation being led by the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism unit.
Four others have already been charged in connection with the attack.
Three British nationals — 20-year-old Hamza Iqbal, 19-year-old Rehan Khan and 18-year-old Judex Atshatshi — along with a 17-year-old dual British and Pakistani national were all charged in April with “committing arson, destroying or damaging property, and being reckless as to whether life would be endangered.”
The four have remained in custody ahead of a trial planned for January. Ahmed, meanwhile, was released ahead of a June 16 court date.
The ambulance arsons came at the early edge of a wave of incidents that have put London Jews on edge and induced the city’s police force to step up their presence in Jewish communities. The incidents have included multiple incendiary devices placed near synagogues as well as the stabbing in April of two Jewish men in Golders Green. The Metropolitan Police reported last week that antisemitic hate crimes in the capital rose 72% in May.
Following the announcement of Ahmed’s charge, the Community Security Trust, a Jewish organization, thanked the police and the Crown Prosecution Service “for their ongoing work investigating this attack and other arson incidents targeting the Jewish community.”
It added in a statement, “These are very serious allegations, and it is right that those responsible are being held accountable.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Israel boycott battle intensifies at Venice Art Biennale, testing tradition of inclusion
The anti-Israel protests that disrupted the opening of the Venice Art Biennale continue to escalate, with more than 100 artists and curators declaring last week that they will bring legal action against Biennale authorities if their names are not removed from consideration for what in normal times are coveted awards for best artist and best national exhibition.
It’s just the latest battle between activists seeking to shut down Israel’s art exhibition in Venice and the Biennale’s administration who are committed to keeping it open.
Chaos erupted in the streets on the third day of the biennale’s opening last month as demonstrators engulfed the Via Garibaldi chanting Palestinian liberation slogans during their march toward an art exhibit hosted by Israel, held back by Italian police in riot gear. The demonstration was organized by the Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA), a coalition of artists and art industry workers campaigning to ban Israel from participating in the world’s most prestigious art show.
ANGA’s agenda is reverberating throughout the Biennale, which is structured around a main international show that this year is hosting 110 invited artists, 100 national exhibitions and 31 official art shows. Many of the artists now threatening legal action first signed a letter this past March demanding that the directors of the Biennale exclude Israel’s exhibition from the show.
Just before the exhibition opened, the Venice Biennale’s five-member international jury — which oversees the prestigious Golden Lion for best artist and best national pavilion — announced that, in keeping with the spirit of the main international exhibition curated by the late Cameroonian art impresario Koyo Kouoh, who appointed them, it would “refrain from considering those countries whose leaders are currently charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court” — namely, Russia and Israel.
Belu-Simion Fainaru, representing the Israeli pavilion, reportedly responded by threatening that if he were excluded from consideration for the awards, he would sue the Biennale in the European Court of Human rights on grounds of antisemitism and nationality-based discrimination. Facing potential legal liability, all five jurors took the unprecedented step of quitting. The Biennale administration then announced that the juried awards would be replaced with Visitor Lions Awards, a popular vote by visitors to the show.
It’s that substitute award that the ANGA-allied artists are now renouncing.
There also have been attempts from the other end of the political spectrum to silence artists representing South Africa and Australia because of alleged anti-Israeli biases. Indeed, the 2026 Biennale, which opened on May 9 and runs through November 26, has become a referendum on artistic freedom of expression and on the place in the cultural sphere of the movement to boycott Israel. “Boycott the Genocide Pavilion,” the brochure ANGA demonstrators handed out at their demonstration stated, “For decades, the Venice Biennale has handed Israel an international stage to culturewash its occupation of Palestine,” and stated that in doing so Biennale authorities are helping to “normalize the ongoing decimation of an entire population.”
The president of the Venice Biennale, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, has refused to cede ground. “Closing the door to some means making openness to others more fragile,” he argued in an impassioned speech announcing the opening of the Biennale’s 61st International Exhibition, adding, “if the Biennale began selecting not works but affiliations, not visions but passports, it would cease to be what it has always been: a place where the world meets, especially when the world is torn apart.”
Serene space
When I stepped into the Israeli exhibition, it seemed to be an invitation to leave behind the fractious world outside. The transcendent artwork, inspired by Paul Celan’s poetry, consists of a large rectangular pool in a tranquil space where the only interruption is the soothing sound of dripping water.
Given Israel’s destructive bombing campaigns, first in Gaza and now in southern Lebanon, presenting Fainaru and his serene artwork to represent the country is a fraught choice. Fainaru lives in Haifa, one of Israel’s most culturally diverse cities, and is a professor at Haifa University, where he told me the rector is Palestinian and more than 50% of his students are Arabs. Fainaru said that his art is about bringing people together and “collective consciousness,” and he argued it should be viewed outside of the political prism that has roiled the Biennale in recent years. “This environment is becoming more and more about boycott, censorship, limitation of freedom, exclusion,” he said, adding “that’s changing the meaning and role of art.”
Some observers who study censorship say the national pavilions at the Venice Biennale have always functioned as cultural diplomacy and in many instances are a form of “artwashing,” a term that refers to the ways that governments and corporations utilize art exhibits to obscure or gloss over unethical policies.
“Clearly they are an attempt to make a country look better, but on the other hand there is something in the art that exceeds the national ambitions,” Svetlana Mintcheva, former director of programs at the U.S,-based National Coalition Against Censorship, said in a phone interview, adding: “It’s counterproductive to censor because it then homogenizes everyone in that particular country as holding particular ideas and that’s not the case.”
The censorship campaign against Israel and Russia took place against the backdrop of the main international exhibition “In Minor Keys,” which emphasizes anti-colonialist themes and the utility of art as a means of reconnecting to local and indigenous practices. The leitmotif of the show, which primarily emphasizes art from the African diaspora, chimes with ANGA’s agenda to give voice to a Palestinian culture that the group claims has been sidelined by Israel’s “colonial expansion.”
Some artworks in the international exhibition address the Palestinian displacement and trauma, while none deal with Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre or Israel’s wounds.
Gazan artist Mohammed Joha, who signed a March 26 ANGA petition calling for the exclusion of the Israeli pavilion, is exhibiting No Shelter, which the artist made while witnessing the conflict in Gaza. The work consists of collages made from discarded paper, fabric and cardboard intended to call attention to the cycles of destruction and rebuilding that Palestinians endure. Haitian artist Manuel Mathieu’s Genocide portrays a dark sea alongside what looks like pummeled charred flesh. British Ethiopian artist Theo Eshetu’s Garden of the Broken Hearted includes a rotating dais with a live olive tree, a symbol of Palestinian resilience.
And Kouoh and her team gave pride of place in her show to artists who have been victims of Israel’s conflicts. The very first exhibit to greet visitors at the entrance of the massive Arsenale, a brick linear hall serves as the main exhibition space, which t originally was part of Venice’s Renaissance-era ship building complex, features the poem “If I must Die,” by Palestinian poet Refaat al-Areer, which he posted to social media in late 2023, about a month before he was killed along with several of his family members by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza. The poem, which has become a rallying cry for Palestinian activists, sits below a canvas portraying a disembodied face with penetrating eyes against a fractured background by Issa Samb, a Senegalese artist known for his anti-colonial themes.
The subsequent exhibition at the Arsenale is a monumental multi-media installation titled Khalil by Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi, a former refugee from the 1976 Lebanese Civil war. Sabsabi is also representing Australia at its national pavilion in the nearby Giardini fairground.
Khalil, which was originally intended to be displayed at the Australian Pavilion, was intended as a meditation on Sufi mysticism. It consists of digital projections on a canvas painted in acrylic with swirling shapes, accompanied by sonorous background music and the piped in scent of Oud, which is used in Middle Eastern perfumery.
But Kouoh’s invitation to Sabsabi to exhibit at the Arsenale, which she extended after he was temporarily disinvited from showing the work at the Australian Pavilion, appears to have as much to do with his notoriety as it does his artistic merit. Sabsabi’s commission to exhibit at the Australian Pavilion was canceled after conservative Australian members of parliament and right-wing newspapers denounced him as promoting antisemitism and terrorism over work he had produced in the past, notably YOU, a 2007 multimedia piece that portrays multiple images of former leader Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Australia’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), where the You is on permanent display, originally described the artwork on its website as “obscuring Nasrallah’s face with beams of light that shine from his eyes and mouth, suggestive of a divine illumination.” But last year, after Sabsabi was dropped from representing the Australian Pavilion, the MCA engaged in an act of self-censorship by removing the section of text deifying Nasrallah and updating the description of the artwork to inform viewers that: “The Australian Government listed the entirety of Hezbollah as a proscribed terrorist organization in 2021.”
Meanwhile, subsequent larger furor in the international arts community over Sabsabi’s being censored led to an independent review, which resulted in the reinstatement of his invitation to show at the Australian Pavilion, greatly raising his profile.
Another controversial figure is Gabrielle Goliath, the video and performance artist invited to represent South Africa, was the only artist to be officially banned. Elegy, the work she had planned to show, is a performative piece about gender and LGBT violence that has also addressed the killing and displacement of Palestinian women. But Goliath’s commission was canceled and the South African pavilion shuttered by the country’s culture minister Gayton McKenzie, a vocal supporter of Israel, who reportedly deemed Elegy “highly divisive in nature and relates to an ongoing international conflict that is widely polarizing.”
After an unsuccessful lawsuit accusing the South African government of unlawfully revoking her commission, Goliath was relegated to presenting Elegy in a rented church in Venice. This version of the work she exhibited there features eight “funereal screens,” with women singing and commemorating female victims of violence, including a murdered South African student and the Palestinian poet Heba Abunada, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Gaza in 2023.
The closing of the South African pavilion didn’t stifle Goliath’s voice and, as with Sabsabi, the controversy over her being canceled may have given her a larger platform. After Venice, Elegy will be traveling to London before moving onto Milan.
It’s difficult to imagine Fainaru’s message of “collective consciousness” finding a similar welcome in arts venues throughout Europe and the United States.
Recent events in Venice and elsewhere suggest that the cultural boycott campaign is gaining momentum, putting freedom of expression under increasing strain. And it’s not just principles that are at stake. Closing Israel’s exhibition in Venice and further marginalizing Israeli artists works at cross-purposes with efforts to achieve mutual understanding and peace in the Mideast. “The price of cultural boycotts is quite high, says Mintcheva of the National Coalition Against Censorship, “because you limit any kind of exchange and you limit understanding of dissent within a country like Israel.”
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Their sons are fighting for Israel, and it’s driving them mad
Oxygen and A Burning Man, two films showing at the Israel Film Center Festival, zero in on the deep-seated anxiety Israeli parents face when their sons are called to duty. Though both are flawed, each captures the universal experience of parents yearning to protect a child from outside forces that they cannot control, yet on some level helped create. They tell personal stories that are also political.
The films evoke a world where war and the threat of war are constants. The sound of warning sirens and drones abound. A repeated scene in Oxygen features apartment dwellers dashing down darkened stairways to the basement for shelter as the alerting alarms shriek in the distance.
Oxygen and A Burning Man are singularly Israeli films — I’m not sure they could be made anywhere else — and on many fronts they are stunners.
Netalie Braun’s Oxygen forges a claustrophobic space. Even the title summons forth the image of gasping for air.
The opening scene metaphorically hints at airless entrapment. Anat (brilliantly played by Dana Igvy) and her child are romping about in the waves. They are neck high in water and appear to be in the middle of the ocean. The moment conjures a nostalgic portrait, but a touch of surreal menace is also present. So too is the openly erotic relationship between mother and son, bordering on incest. They touch each other and their bodies intertwine. And later, when her son Ido (Ben Sultan) is an adult, Anat becomes even more obsessed with him.
Though Ido completes his tour of duty and is coming home, as skirmishes break out on the northern border, he volunteers to return to combat. Anat feels abandoned, betrayed and enraged. Her over-protective maternal instincts kick into high gear as she sets out to get her son discharged from duty. Storming onto the off-limits army base to confront the powers that be, Anat succeeds only in demeaning herself and publicly humiliating her already infantilized son.
Anat’s life is further complicated by her relationship with her larger-than-life warrior father (film producer Marek Rozenbaum) who suffers intense PTSD episodes thanks to his experiences in earlier wars. Sweating and shaking, he belly crawls across the living room floor as if heading to a foxhole. Anat blames his jingoistic furor for boosting Ido’s determination to be a military hero. “You wanted him to be a martyr,” she accuses her father.
He, in turn, reminds her that she gave her written permission for Ido to serve even though she had every right to refuse on the grounds that he was an only son. Anat has grown opposed to Israel’s policies, perhaps even moving towards pacifism, and these feelings are at odds with her own national tribalism. Duality is everywhere.
The final section of the film is enigmatic. It’s unclear to me if what we’re witnessing is real or Anat’s dreams or imaginings or combinations thereof.
She has managed to get her son a temporary leave of absence to celebrate his birthday, which slowly morphs into an explosive celebration that feels more like purgatory than a joyous occasion.
“My mother would do anything for me!” Ido bellows and the large crowd at the shindig repeats the words, growing louder with each repetition. “Anything!” “Anything!”
In a last ditch effort to save him from returning to the base, Anat drugs him, rendering him unconscious. She’s driving away with him, blindfolded and shackled in the passenger seat.
At the coda, he has shape-shifted into a child again and she’s carrying him, cradled in her arms, onto a ferry’s empty vehicle deck. No cars. No workers.
What’s happening in this flight of fancy? Anat successfully protecting her son who will always be a baby in her eyes? Still, one wonders where her adult son is at this point in the story. Perhaps I’m being too literal-minded.
I wish I could say the film’s resolution is hauntingly ambiguous, but alas for this viewer, it’s just confusing. Still, despite the shortcomings, the film starkly brings to life the anguished experiences of a parent and an adult son trying to survive and failing dismally in a war-ravaged universe that celebrates nationalism and extols sacrifice, coupled with a particularly unsettling mom-son relationship.
Eyal Halfon’s A Burning Man is the more successful of the two films. Set outside a remote army base on a stretch of endless sun-baked desert it immediately elicits an atmosphere of oppressive tedium, pointlessness and futility. It has its Beckettian elements and absurdity is never far from the surface.
Yonah (Shai Avivi who gives a complex understated performance) cannot let go of his child, Omer (Ran Kaplan) and instead of depositing his son at the bus terminal to make the trip on his own, he camouflages his own anxiety by lightly dubbing the three-hour drive across the flat no man’s land a father-son road trip. Throughout much of the ride, Omer is sleeping and when they arrive at the military outpost he departs for his tour of duty with a wave of the hand.
Driving home, Yonah sights a convoy of military vehicles on flatbeds heading towards the garrison, their presence further provoking his deepest fears. He spins around and speeds back to the base.
He asks one of the drivers what the armored carriers will be used for. “Maybe maneuvers, maybe exercises,” he shrugs, not especially interested. But in an unexpected gesture of friendship he gives Yonah a sandwich. The scene is at once comic, poignant and unexpected.
Yonah’s most trenchant and arguably least subtle encounter is with an aging motorcyclist (Benny Avni) who brags about his son having dumped the national service to make animated films instead of working for “Netanyahu’s freaks.” The usually impassive Yonah is triggered, accusing the man’s son of being a “shirker,” “a privileged leech.” It’s a confrontation many Israeli parents, especially those who have children serving tours of duty, might find all too relatable.
Yet Yonah, like Anat, is an amalgam of contradictions when it comes to politics. Later in the film, he meets up with a deserter and desperately tries to defend him when the arresting officers arrive on the scene. They lock arms with the defector, marching him down the hill away from Yonah who screams words of encouragement to him as the threesome recede into the distance.
Let’s not forget our hero’s name is “Yonah” (translation Dove, bird of peace). It’s heavy-handed. I could also have done without the repeated closeups of babblers, small desert birds, known for their cooperative social behavior. Creatures who embody life lessons I suppose.
At one point, Yonah’s zealously religious real estate agent (Vladimir Friedman) arrives on the scene sporting a yarmulke, tzitzit, and frequently quoting biblical text. He is there both to try to sell Yonah an apartment but also to help a fellow Jew who he understand is in trouble. But nothing goes right. Yonah does not welcome his company, his car has broken down and he grows increasingly terrified in the desolate desert, especially as night falls. This segment has some great comic moments.
Along the way, Yonah enjoys an erotic brush with a nubile young woman who is part of a hippie commune, and is helping to set up a “Burning Man” festival in the desert. It’s inspired, she says, by the annual countercultural event in Nevada.
In the final scene, we’re presented with a stoned Yonah dancing wildly about, first by himself in a psychedelically altered desert and then in the middle of the pop-up festival, which is even more hallucinogenic with its strobe lights flashing, music blasting and congested crowds stomping and gyrating. Jonah’s dancing becoming progressively more intense and out of control.
But in the end, it is a hollow, totally meaningless Bacchanalian eruption. The scene takes on a mythic flavor, punctuating both visually and emotionally, all the events that have led to this moment. Yonah is a burning man. He, along with Anat, both living in a neverending combat zone and forever anguished over their sons’ potential fates, have perhaps become a new Israeli archetype.
‘Oxygen’ and ‘A Burning Man’ are being shown as part of the 14th annual Israel Film Center Festival in New York City, June 9-16.
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