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A 1990s Israeli play is the feminist production NY needs right now
(New York Jewish Week) — When Anat Gov’s play “HaChaverot Hachi Tovot” (“Best Friends”) premiered in 1999, it was an anomaly among Israeli works of theater. In fact, Gov wrote it with anomalous intentions: In an interview before it opened, she called the piece a form of “compensation for the fact that there are no good roles for women.”
To remedy this, Gov wrote a play with no male roles — a 100-minute romp down memory lane which calls into question the very nature of friendship and whether or not the love between BFFs can stand the test of time.
At the time, the play was a smash, winning the Israel National Theater Award for best comedy of the year, and playing over 700 times during its initial run at the acclaimed Cameri Theatre in Tel Aviv. “Best Friends” was then rewritten as a TV miniseries for HOT, a popular Israeli TV network, and re-staged in 2013, after Gov’s death the previous year.
Today, the play is enjoying a new imagining here in New York: Through April 2, it’s being performed at the Rattlestick Theater in Manhattan, in alternating performances in both Hebrew and English, by the team at the Israeli Artists Project, a non-profit that presents Israeli theater, music and art in the greater New York area.
“Best Friends” is ostensibly about friendship but touches on broad themes of jealousy, fertility struggles, betrayal and much more. And yet, intentionally or not, its deep dive into the force and fury of the female experience comes at a time when the cause of women’s rights is seeing setbacks in Israel and the United States.
“There are so many facets to our work,” says Yoni Venridger, founder and producing artistic director of IAP. “But to put it simply, we want to be a home where people of any affiliation can come together, enjoy our common culture, and put politics aside. In a way, everything we do is inherently political. We are, after all, representing a country. That said, we’re interested in doing Israeli things, being Israeli people, without automatically politicizing our events.”
The play, which is both hilarious and heartbreaking, centers on three women — Leli, Sophie and Tirtza — who are at a breaking point in their lifelong friendship. In the opening scene, Leli calls her two ex-besties to gather; it’s a matter of life or death, she says, refusing to say which one it is. Despite an extended period of silence between the three and heightened tensions between Sophie and Tirtza, in particular, they come together, and begin to unpack every single piece of emotional baggage they have.
As is the case in actual lifelong friendships, there’s a lot to unpack here: high school crushes, first loves, heartbreak, professional successes and woes, births, marriages — no stone is left unturned. Shouting ensues, and laughter, and some awkward silences.
“We need more plays that give central roles to women,” said Vendriger. “It’s not necessarily about writing plays without any male roles, either. What’s critical is writing more lead roles for women, more well-rounded, rich roles for women.”
“Best Friends” is an extreme version of this, of course, by omitting all men from the cast, and it easily passes the Bechdel Test — that is to say, it includes at least two named female characters who discuss something other than a man — with flying colors. Leli, Sophie and Tirtza certainly talk about men, love and heartbreak, but the primary focus is on how they’ve let themselves, and each other, down.
One of the most effective choices Gov made was to have the drama play out in two decades simultaneously. There are two casts: a young version of the women, in the 1960s, and a middle-aged version, in the 1990s. Beyond the illustrative power of showing friendship instead of telling about it, Gov creates a fascinating dynamic between the two sets of women. At times, the two casts interact, holding one another, reminding one another of their various strengths and shortcomings. Who among us hasn’t wished to warn or encourage our younger selves, or that our younger selves could remind us of who we once were?
This revisited version of Gov’s classic was slated to run in New York in May 2020 — but the pandemic, of course, made that impossible. Instead, it arrives in time for Women’s History Month 2023. “The timing kind of just worked out for us,” explained Vendriger.
From left, Maia Karo, Adi Kozlovsky and Karin Hershkovitz Kochavi play a trio of BFFs in “Best Friends.” (Courtesy)
In Israel, a right-wing government is under siege by rivers of enraged citizens — primarily because of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed judicial overhaul, now on pause. But there is pushback among liberal Israelis for other reasons as well. Recently, Betzalel Smotrich, a far-right member of Knesset and the current minister of finance, made sure that Israel would not sign the UN’s International Violence Against Women Act. Prior to this, Smotrich had called himself a “proud homophobe;” he organized a “bestiality parade” as a counter-parade to the Jerusalem Pride march in 2006.
In the United States, women’s rights are also threatened — including by the dismantling of Roe v. Wade, ensuring their right to an abortion.
Against this backdrop, the 1990s of “Best Friends” look downright progressive. To Vendriger, however, this play is about the timeless nature of friendship.
“Gov managed to write in a way that makes her work continuously relevant, regardless of the passage of time,” he said. “It’s the humanity of it. There are connections, power struggles, interpersonal attractions — that stuff will never change. Despite the fact that it’s originally from the ’90s, the meditation on the power and fragility of friendship, on the fact that we need to maintain and work on friendships, it all feels immediate and very appropriate for the present day.”
In fact, the IAP team made no changes to the original text.
The play works today, in 2023, because it leans on universal, wide-reaching themes. At the same time, there is a palpable Israeliness to the whole thing, whether it’s the prickly slang or the fact that one character, whose son is serving in the first Lebanon War, is jealous that her friend’s son has asthma, and therefore gets to stay home.
“‘Best Friends’ integrates the complexity of humanity, friendship and Israeli society, and brings them into the realm of humor,” said director Hamutal Posklinsky-Shehory. “It’s funny, but it’s also dramatic and very witty. [In this iteration] the whole staff is female. All the actresses are — six onstage and two understudies — plus the assistant director, play manager, lighting designer, and costume designer. I feel this is very appropriate for the age that we’re living in and really underlines the space we need to give for female identifying artists.”
When Posklinsky-Shehory isn’t directing, she’s a drama therapist at NYC Peace of Mind, a group psychotherapy practice that brings together drama therapists to support and enrich one another’s creative treatment approaches. Her work, she said, informed her directorial choices. “The relationships presented between the three friends are not the healthiest ones,” she said, “and we went through a process, truly trying to figure out and understand the motivations and [emotional landscapes] of the characters.”
To this end, the cast used therapeutic techniques alongside theatrical practices in order to deepen their connections and understanding. “We incorporated some writing activities, with the actors writing to their characters. Another time, we sought connections and differences between our actors and the characters that they play, as a group. In this way, we developed trust and deepened our bond with one another,” she said.
This is, in a sense, the bottom line of the play: the bonds that tie, and how they can unravel under the strains of a lifetime. “As humans, we’re complex,” said Posklinsky-Shehory. “Even in a play that’s all fantastic and sweet and nostalgic, there’s still the complexity and darkness [of life]. I’d like people to leave with an understanding that what we feel is perfect and complex, and that’s OK. We need to accept those parts of ourselves and our society.”
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The post A 1990s Israeli play is the feminist production NY needs right now appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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In the face of conflict over assimilation, appropriation, colonialism and hegemony, a plea for human dignity through dance
Some movies cut so close to home that they make it impossible to have an objective response. When I was watching Tatyana Tenenbaum’s debut feature documentary Everything You Have Is Yours, the moment of truth hit about halfway through.
The film’s protagonist, dancer and choreographer Hadar Ahuvia, is rehearsing in an empty studio, talking about doing her homework at the Jewish Community Center in Hawaii as a child, while her mother taught Israeli folk dance classes in another room. She’d only stop when she heard a favorite song.
“I’d rush out,” Ahuvia says in voiceover “to join a dance or two with women my mother’s age, tucking into their palms for ‘Mah Navu.”
I leaped up because I suddenly remembered dancing with my own Israeli mother, at a New Jersey JCC in the 80s, my small hand tucked into her palm, as we moved softly in a circle with American Jews, to the opening notes of “Mah Navu.” My middle-aged legs were convinced that they still knew what to do. They didn’t, and I slammed into the coffee table, leaving angry bruises on both shins that still refuse to heal.
It’s a little on-the-nose, but so is life:
Like Ahuvia, I’m the daughter of kibbutzniks who moved to the U.S. and raised me here, and I loved the old dances. Like Ahuvia, I knew very little then about the history of how they’d come into being. I only knew they belonged to us, just as Israel belonged to us. And like Ahuvia, I come from a family full of conflict over the war. We throw words at each other: genocide, terrorists, resistance, safety, peace, justice. We wield facts and figures as weapons, we challenge each other’s sources. We demand empathy while offering none; we yell, we sulk, we storm out of group chats, and then collapse into that most un-Jewish of compromises: silences that sometimes last weeks. And this is just with my parents. Don’t even get me started on the uncles.
Despite all our best and worst efforts, we never change each other’s minds.
But perhaps that’s the trouble. And part of what makes Everything You Have is Yours such a necessary offering. Tatyana Tenenbaum and Hadar Ahuvia, both of them dance artists, are interested in the body, not the mind. Over the course of seven years, Tenenbaum films Ahuvia’s trips from New York to Poland to Palestine and to her mother’s kibbutz in Israel — everywhere that Ahuvia can, in her own words, “exercise my freedom of movement,” in pursuit of her troubled, troubling lineage.
Tenenbaum’s camera dances with Ahuvia as she wrestles with the folk traditions on which she was raised. The film’s title is taken from one of Ahuvia’s own works in which she and her collaborators demonstrate and re-enact the ways in which early Israeli folk dances appropriated, assimilated, and finally claimed ownership of Palestinian and Jewish Arab traditions.
Everything You Have Is Yours is not a screed or polemic but rather a gorgeous, engrossing portrait of committed dancers — Israeli, Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, American and Palestinian — as they, like Ahuvia, claim their own “freedom of movement” within the shackles that bind past and present. And while Ahuvia’s performances draw from her specific identity and heritage — as her collaborators draw from theirs — her questions are universal: How does history live in our bones? What do we lose, and what do we gain, when we challenge the myths of our childhood? How do we carry the violence inflicted on us and the violence we inflict on others? And where do we go from here?
Ahuvia and Tenenbaum talked to me over Zoom about the film’s long journey to the screen, the impact of the past two years on their relationships and work, and why such a critically well-received project has yet to find a distributor.
I told them I’d connected with the film. I didn’t tell them it was the first movie I’ve seen about Israel that I could imagine watching with my own mother, across our differences, my palm tucked once more in hers.
When I first reached out to you for this interview, Tatyana, you expressed a very strong conviction that you and Hadar needed to be in the conversation together.
Tatyana Tenenbaum: Hadar and I are both dance artists, and that’s how we met, so the movie grew out of a horizontal friendship. Before I proposed to Hadar that we document her process, we had already worked together as performers.
Also, the themes we’ve explored are related: I’m not Israeli, but I do have Ashkenazi Jewish lineage, so for me this project was also a reflection of what it means as an American to have assimilated into a national project and into empire.
You shot and edited over seven years. What kinds of conversations did you need to have as you were working out accountability over the long haul, both to each other and to the other dancers on camera?
TT: So many! I’m a process-based artist and I had never made a film before, and at first I thought it would just be a 10-minute short. And then 15, and then 20, and it kept evolving. Hadar and I had a lot of catch-up work to do around consent. This is personal work and her relationships with her family are very tender. Ultimately the process mattered, not only because of the political ideas Hadar is grappling with and her beautiful artistry, but also her vulnerability.
Was it a shared editing process?
Hadar Ahuvia: No, I am really glad this is Tatyana’s film. I don’t think it would be an interesting thing to see a documentary that I made about myself.
The film has been very well received by audiences and critics, but there has been some struggle getting distribution and getting it shown, particularly by Jewish festivals. What do you think is happening there?
TT: Our struggles with distribution aren’t unique. Films that are critical of Zionism are not films that distributors want to take a risk on. There are exceptions: The Jewish Film Institute, for example, presented the movie in San Francisco for Winterfest, and they made a beautiful panel as the centerpiece of the weekend about it, which was lovely.
Because we were on their roster, all the Jewish festivals then solicited the film. But none of them programmed it. I think it’s worth saying, and worth naming that. It’s a missed opportunity.
HA: And we invite them to reconsider.
While the film has a point of view, it also features Israeli and American dancers rehearsing and performing together while navigating political disagreement. That diversity of thought feels both satisfying and precarious. How have the past two years of fracture, both between and amongst Israeli and American Jews, impacted these dancers and your relationships with them?
TT: It’s been hard. But we’re still in relationship with everyone in the film.
HA: We knew right from the start that we didn’t all sit in the same place politically. Even if we disagree about the exact makeup of what political futures should look like, we believe in the humanity and dignity of all people. And I think that continues to be true for everybody who participated, which enables us to continue to be in relationship.
On the other hand, while the Palestinian-Americans in Freedom Dabka Group are featured prominently, they only appear in parallel. There’s never an intersection, or a moment of seeing the two sets of dancers come together.
HA: It would have been superficial to try to invite Palestinians into my work. That wouldn’t change the power dynamics of it still being my work, and my authorship. Also, the politics in the real world are such that this kind of collaboration in my work about Israeli dance didn’t feel possible. It would have been superficial for me to rush to solutions.
I even thought about putting videos of Palestinians in different pieces, and that didn’t feel right either, because it wouldn’t give them the agency of representing themselves. And so what I decided to do instead was to “notice the absence.” The absence of relationship with Palestinians comes from the way that apartheid in the State is actualized in my body.
There’s a particularly arresting scene featuring Hadar’s on-stage breakdown of how early Israeli folk dances altered and absorbed Yemeni Jewish steps, and how this represents a “de-Arabization” of the form. Then there is a similar process through which Palestinian dabka becomes Israeli debka. When asked about it on camera, Amer Abdelrasoul of the Freedom Dabka Group says “I don’t know about Israeli Debka, and I don’t wanna see it. Because I’m gonna get pissed.”
TT: Amer didn’t explicitly know about those Israeli dances. At the same time, he wasn’t surprised about them, because they reminded him of other cultural appropriations. That moment creates a visceral response in audiences, but I thought it was a great answer: direct, clear and honest.
I can imagine a critique from the left that within the context of what Palestinians are currently experiencing in Gaza, the occupied territories and elsewhere, art that focuses on Israeli perspectives — even critically — might be problematic. How would you respond to that?
HA: I think it’s important for us to do this work, so that Palestinians don’t have to. As Jews, it’s our responsibility to speak to our people.
How would you respond to the other side, to those who might feel that the critiques embedded in this film harm Jewish safety, and delegitimize Israeli experience?
HA: We really center Israelis. We humanize Israelis and show our diversity. And that itself could actually be critiqued from the Left. But from the Right, what I’ve heard most is, well, cultural exchange is good, isn’t it? Even some of the dancers you see in the movies disagree with my critique of the cultural appropriation in these dances.
I think that cultural exchange is great too. But, again, this is about power dynamics. For example when I see Christian Zionists appropriating Jewish culture — as we see them do with my mother’s dancing in the film’s archival footage — it makes the dangers really clear to me.
TT: The largest Zionist voting bloc in the U.S. are evangelical Christian Zionists. It’s a fact that is often obscured politically, and I actually learned it from Hadar. We hope that the film also gives audiences a tangible experience with the way that, under Christian hegemony, there are people claiming to support us but who do not actually care about Jews.
When you ask the dancer and choreographer Ze’eva Cohen about her identity, she says that the answer to the question of where you come from lies not in your citizenship but in your heritage. What heritages do you invoke in this film?
TT: I am going to say… Somatic abolitionism.
HA: And especially the work of Resmaa Menakem.
I was expecting the answer to be Poland, or Eastern Europe.
TT: Hadar and I share an education in postmodern dance, and we share the idea of being with the body on the level of sensation and function and integration. This is where Menakem has been so important for our dance field. The need for reintegration only emerges because of colonialism. Without colonialism, we wouldn’t need to reintegrate: Our bodies would just be there.
This brings us back to Ze’eva Cohen saying that in Yemeni Jewish culture “if you didn’t dance, if you didn’t sing…you didn’t believe in God, unless it was embodied.”
HA: Dance continues to be a way that I process grief and anger. I’ve been researching Ashkenazi culture, and especially Ashkenazi vernacular and cantorial music, reclaiming this long chain of transmission.
As I’ve been dancing, I’ve been active with Rabbis for Ceasefire, and I’m also in rabbinical school. So, davening and prayer has been another way that I feel I stay connected to being Jewish — to being deeply rooted, while also holding what’s happening in the world, and ultimately being able to envision what else is possible.
Mor Mandel, an Israeli collaborator and dancer featured in the film, says of leaving Israel: “I left the ship sinking, but I still dream in Hebrew.” Hadar, are you still able to dance in Hebrew?
HA: In my research around Yiddish dance, I’ve discovered that there exists a beautiful sense of pride in each dance. I’ve reconnected to Jewish strength through that posture rather than through Zionism. So no, I no longer dance Israeli folk dance for fun.
Except that it felt meaningful to me at my wedding to do “El Ginat Egoz,” a dance by Sarah Levi Tanai, with my mom. It felt like a gesture that acknowledges our shared language. Context matters, right? So I don’t do these dances on the fields of the kibbutz, but it felt right to me to do them at my wedding, with my mom. It felt good to acknowledge this particular dance that…
TT: …that she loves.
HA: Yes, exactly. That she loves.
Everything You Have Is Yours screens on March 5 and 8 at the Laemmle Theater in Los Angeles. Information on further screenings is available on the film’s website.
The post In the face of conflict over assimilation, appropriation, colonialism and hegemony, a plea for human dignity through dance appeared first on The Forward.
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Britain Sends Destroyer and Helicopters With Counter-Drone Tech to Cyprus
Entrance to the RAF Akrotiri, a British sovereign base in Cyprus, which was hit by an unmanned drone overnight, causing limited damage, after sirens sounded, in Cyprus, March 2, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Yiannis Kourtoglou
Britain is deploying HMS Dragon, an air defense destroyer, to Cyprus after the runway of its Akrotiri base there was hit by an Iranian-made drone.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Tuesday he was sending the naval vessel along with helicopters with counter–drone capabilities to the region, as the conflict in the Middle East intensifies.
France and Greece said they would also send anti-missile and anti-drone systems after the British base on the island was hit on Monday.
“The UK is fully committed to the security of Cyprus and British military personnel based there,” Starmer said in a post on X, adding that he had spoken with Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides about the move.
“We’re continuing our defensive operations and I’ve just spoken with the President of Cyprus to let him know that we are sending helicopters with counter drone capabilities and HMS Dragon is to be deployed to the region,” the British prime minister said.
HMS Dragon is a Type 45 air-defense destroyer equipped with the Sea Viper missile system and advanced radar designed to track and neutralize airborne threats, according to the Royal Navy’s website.
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Trump Awards Medal of Honor to ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ World War II Soldier With ‘Unsurpassed Courage’
US President Donald Trump speaks during a visit at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, US, Feb. 13, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
President Donald Trump bestowed the Medal of Honor to three former US Army soldiers on Monday at a White House ceremony and they included a World War II veteran who was recognized by Yad Vashem as “Righteous Among the Nations.”
Trump posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor to Master Sgt. Roderick (Roddie) W. Edmonds, who refused to single out the Jewish servicemen he fought alongside when he was held by Germans in a prisoner-of-war (POW) camp during World War II. The president said the three US soldiers receiving the Medal of Honor — only one of whom is still living – demonstrated “unsurpassed courage.”
In 1941, Edmonds enlisted in the US Army and soon became one of the youngest master sergeants in the military, Trump said. The native of South Knoxville, Tennessee, led a unit that fought in Europe during World War II and they were captured by German forces on Dec. 19, 1944. Edmonds was held with other American POWS, including Jews, at Stalag IX-B in Bad Orb, Germany. Germans tried to separate Jewish POWs and many of them were sent to Nazi extermination camps or killed. Edmonds was in charge of the American barracks in Stalag IXA, according to the US Army, but refused to help single out Jewish POWs.
“On July 26, 1945, a Nazi SS officer issued an order over the camp loudspeaker, loud and strong, he said that only American Jews were to show up to roll call. Following this morning, he added ‘all who disobey this order will be shot immediately,’” Trump explained at the Medal of Honor ceremony. “There were more than 200 Jewish American soldiers in the camp, and Roddie knew their separation from the group would mean certain death. So that night he summoned his team and devised a plan. The next morning, all 1,200 American men fell in line together, shoulder to shoulder.”
“Enraged, the Nazi commandant rushed forward, drew his Luger pistol, and pressed the barrel between Sgt. Edmond’s eyes,” the president added. “He barked at Roddie, ‘They cannot all be Jews!’ He screamed loud and again and again. And, staring straight back into the raging face of evil, Sgt. Edmonds replied fearlessly, ‘We are all Jews here.’ The Nazi officer lowered his weapon and the soldiers erupted in cheers.”
The president noted that “with total disregard for his own life, Roddie had saved over 200 of his fellow service members.” Stalag IXA was liberated two months later.
Edmonds died on Aug. 8, 1985, in Knoxville. His son, Chris, accepted his Medal of Honor on Monday at the White House ceremony. Trump also posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor to Staff Sgt. Michael H. Ollis and Command Sergeant Major Terry P. Richardson.
Yad Vashem recognized Edmonds as Righteous Among the Nations in 2015. A year later, a ceremony was held at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, and the Righteous medal and certificate of honor was presented to Edmond’s son.