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A Golda Meir biopic starring Helen Mirren avoids politics. It premiered as Israel’s government faces widespread scrutiny.
(JTA) — When a film about a group of Israeli youths who visit former concentration camps in Poland premiered on Sunday at the Berlin Film Festival, its Israeli producer took the microphone after the screening to decry the state of his nation.
“The new far-right government that is in power is pushing fascist and racist laws,” said Yoav Roeh, a producer of “Ha’Mishlahat” (“Delegation”) on stage after the film’s premiere. He was referring to lawmakers in Israel’s government who have long histories of anti-Arab rhetoric and their new proposals to limit the power of the country’s Supreme Court, which critics at home and around the world deem a blow to Israel’s status as a democracy.
“Israel is committing suicide after 75 years of existence,” Roeh added.
The next day brought the premiere of “Golda,” a highly-anticipated Golda Meir biopic starring Oscar winner Helen Mirren about the former Israeli prime minister and her decisions during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Hours earlier, Israel’s government took another step closer to passing its controversial judicial reforms, and when asked about the political situation, Mirren didn’t mince words.
“I think [Meir] would have been utterly horrified,” she told AFP. “It’s the rise of dictatorship and dictatorship was what has always been the enemy of people all over the world and she would recognize it as that.”
That was the heated backdrop for the debut of “Golda,” which will not hit U.S. theaters until August. But an onlooker wouldn’t know that from the film’s own introductory press conference with Mirren, director Guy Nattiv and other stars from the film. The headlines that have emerged from it have been dominated by the film’s place in the “Jewface” debate, about who should play Jewish characters on screen. Mirren is not Israeli or Jewish.
“Let’s say that we’re making a movie about Jesus Christ. Who’s going to play him?” Mirren’s co-star Lior Ashkenazi stepped in to answer in response to a journalist, eliciting laughter from the press corps.
The film is framed by Meir’s testimony to the Agranat Commission, which investigated the lead-up to the war. As the film shows through flashbacks, Meir appears to have not acted quickly enough on Mossad intelligence about a possible attack from Egyptian and Syrian forces. Israeli forces were surprised on the holiday and initially lost ground; both sides lost thousands of troops, and the war is seen as a major trauma in Israeli history — the moment when the state’s conception of its military superiority over its Arab neighbors was shattered. The film is claustrophobic, shot mostly indoors — in bunkers, hospital rooms and government offices — and offers an apt visual encapsulation of the loss the war would bring.
Mirren walks the red carpet at the Berlin Film Festival, Feb. 20, 2023. She spent time on a kibbutz in 1967. (Courtesy of Berlinale)
Though Meir has historically been lionized as a tough female hero in the United States and in Jewish communities around the world (even non-Jewish soldiers in Ukraine took inspiration from her in the early days of the Russian invasion last year), her legacy is more complicated in Israel and the Palestinian territories. In addition to being associated with the trauma of the war for many Jewish Israelis, she is remembered as an inveterate enemy by Palestinians.
In recent years, the representation of Meir has shifted more favorably in Israel, said Meron Medzini, Meir’s former press secretary and one of her biographers. He said that historians have begun to view her favorably in comparison to some of the political leaders who followed her.
“I consider the film [‘Golda’] part of this effort to rehabilitate her name,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I think she is now gaining her rightful place in the history.”
“Golda” fits into Medzini’s narrative by emphasizing the intractability and pride of her Cabinet ministers as the prime reasons for Israel’s surprise. It affirms Meir’s honor by portraying her as attempting to protect the ministers from criticism — all men — and to promote national unity.
At the press conference, Nattiv gave the briefest of nods to Meir’s complex legacy but like Medzini compared her to Israel’s current slate of leaders, who he reserved brief criticism for.
“Golda is not a super clean character in this movie,” said Nattiv, who is best known for directing “Skin,” a 2018 film about a neo-Nazi. “She had her faults. She made mistakes. And she took responsibility, which leaders are not doing today.”
Meir has long enjoyed a kind of star status in the United States. She was interviewed by Barbra Streisand in 1978, close to the Israeli leader’s death from cancer, for a TV special on Israel’s 30th anniversary.
“She clearly is the great-grandmother of the Jewish people [in the special] and Streisand is very reverential toward her,” Tony Shaw, a history professor at the University of Hertfordshire and the author of “Hollywood and Israel: A History,” said about the Streisand interview. “She just comes across as very humble, slightly out-of-date, out-of-time.”
“Of course, it’s very different from what we now know Golda Meir was really like,” he added, referring to her strong character and political pragmatism, which the film seeks to convey.
Since William Gibson’s critically-panned 1977 play also titled “Golda,” there have been a number of representations of Meir. Most famous among them is Ingrid Bergman’s final performance in “Golda Meir,” a four-hour-long television biopic from 1982. That production “was very much in keeping with Hollywood’s treatment of Israel in that period,” said Shaw, “which was very sympathetic towards Golda Meir, towards Israel and the troubles it was having in the first 30 years of its life.” More recently, Meir appears in Steven Spielberg’s more ambivalent 2005 film “Munich,” in which she helps to recruit the film’s protagonist to track down the figures behind the 1972 Munich Olympics attacks.
Golda Meir meets with Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and troops on the Golan Heights during the Yom Kippur War, Oct. 21, 1973. (Ron Frenkel/GPO/Getty Images)
Nattiv’s work, which has received mixed early reviews, focuses on the war as reflected in Meir’s character, forgoing engagement with broader politics or history.
“My inspiration was ‘Das Boot,’ in the way that she is in the trenches,” said Nattiv, referencing the revered World War II movie from 1981 set in a German U-boat. “She is very alone in the mayhem of war around these men.”
“This is the Vietnam of Israel,” he explained. “It is a very tough and hard look at the war and every soldier that died…Golda takes it to her heart.”
Despite the “Jewface” questioning, Nattiv compared Mirren to an “aunt” figure who, for him, had the “Jewish chops to portray Golda.” Mirren explained to the AFP that she has long felt a connection to Israel and to Meir, especially after a stay on a kibbutz in 1967, not long after the Six-Day War, with a Jewish boyfriend.
“She was at her happiest on the kibbutz actually,” Mirren said. “Their idealism, their dream of the perfect world. And I did experience that which was great.”
Sanders Isaac Bernstein contributed reporting from Berlin.
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This Israeli filmmaker harshly criticizes his country. Pro-Palestinian activists boycotted him anyway
(JTA) — Earlier this year Nadav Lapid, the award-winning Israeli dissident filmmaker, traveled with his son to Marseille for a screening of his latest film. He fell in love.
“This city reminded me of Tel Aviv, in a way, with the beach and everything,” he recounted Wednesday to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency — referring to the city he no longer lives in, having built a career with movies that take sharp aim at what he calls the “moral abyss” of Israeli society. When a Marseille film festival then invited him to serve on its jury for its upcoming installment in July, he readily accepted.
Then the boycotts started. Last month around a dozen pro-Palestinian filmmakers threatened to pull out of the upcoming Marseille International Film Festival over Lapid’s planned participation because, they said, he had accepted funding from the Israeli government to support his work. (Lapid’s movies, including his latest, have received funding from Israel’s film fund.) Following this, according to the accounts of both Lapid and the festival’s director, the festival had second thoughts about him serving on the jury.
While the festival offered him the opportunity to participate in a public master class instead, Lapid said, the protesters hadn’t relented: “It’s not enough for these people.”
Frustrated, the director earlier this week decided to pull out of the festival altogether. He’s not happy about it.
“To make people like myself the enemy when the actual state of things is so terrible, it’s insanity. It’s stupidity,” he told JTA. “For them, the highest triumph of the Palestinian cause is if they will cancel my master class in Marseille? I think it’s pathetic.”
Lapid has received a groundswell of support this week: Natalie Portman and hundreds of other film-industry figures have signed open letters criticizing the boycotts against him. While he’s uncomfortable with being in the spotlight for reasons unrelated to his films, Lapid said he’s pleased with this outcome.
“You could have composed an unbelievable cinematic program from only the filmmakers that texted me during the last hour,” he said.
Even so, the filmmaker says, he’s now unsure if he is still welcome in France as a dissident Israeli.
“I asked myself whether they would like me to stop doing movies, or to leave France,” he told JTA. Elsewhere, he’s described himself as “homeless.”
It’s the latest unspooling of painful dynamics around artistic boycotts of artists and institutions seen by the left as normalizing Israel. Last month another French cultural figure, the Jewish comics artist Joann Sfar (“The Rabbi’s Cat”), faced calls to boycott his presence at a literary festival, also in Marseille. In its justification, a pro-Palestinian artist collective, pushing an Instagram post reading “Zionists out of our city,” cited Sfar’s signing of an open letter last year that argued a Palestinian state should not be recognized unless Hamas could be disarmed and Gaza’s Israeli hostages freed.
In recent months, in addition to broader boycotts of the Israeli film and TV industry, several leading cultural critics of Israel — both Jewish and not — have been targeted as well. Those include bestselling author Sally Rooney for publishing a Hebrew-language translation of her novel with a left-wing Israeli publisher (some prominent activists accused her of exploiting a “loophole” in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against Israel); Jewish Currents editor Peter Beinart for speaking at Tel Aviv University; and Jewish author Joshua Leifer for associating with a “Zionist” rabbi at a book event.
In Lapid’s case, the group organizing against him, La Palestine Sauvera Le Cinéma, argued that “Nadav Lapid is not being targeted because of his Israeli nationality.”
Instead, the collective asserted, their objection was due to Lapid having accepted funding from Israel to complete his latest film, “Yes!”; the fact that the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival as an Israeli co-production and competed for Israel’s highest film awards; and Lapid’s past participation in an Israeli film festival in Paris.
“The cultural boycott does not target artists because of their nationality or personal opinions,” the filmmakers wrote, in French, in a blog post. “What is at issue here is the reality of their integration into the institutional and political structures of the Israeli state.”
For Lapid, whose new movie follows Israeli musicians hired to write an openly genocidal post-Oct. 7 anthem for their nation, this argument doesn’t hold water. Lapid has long been critical of cultural boycotts, including BDS. Such measures, he told JTA, are a form of “dogmatic Stalinism” and don’t “move one piece of sand” in Israel.
“I became a test case of purity,” he mused.
Others agree. More than 350 entertainment industry figures signed the first of two open letters in the French newspaper Le Monde backing him, which was published Sunday.
“Inviting an artist to a festival does not make them a cultural ambassador,” the letter reads, in French, decrying a “campaign of intimidation” against Lapid while also noting what the signatories said was the “genocidal logic” of Israel’s campaign in Gaza.
Among this letter’s signatories were Justine Triet and Arthur Harari, the Oscar-winning team behind “Anatomy of a Fall”; Harari is Jewish and a critic of Israel himself. Arnaud Desplechin, a French filmmaker who often features Jewish characters in his work, also signed. Other signers include acclaimed directors Claire Denis, Mati Diop, and Kleber Mendonça Filho; Romanian director Radu Jude, whose films have explored his country’s complicity in the Holocaust; and Palestinian historian Elias Sanbar.
A second open letter, published on Monday, calls the campaign against Lapid an “intellectual failure” and states, “No matter what crimes a state may commit, no one should be reduced to a passport.” It was signed by a smaller cohort of 10 names, including Portman; French-Jewish director Rebecca Zlotowski; and Oscar-winning filmmakers Jacques Audiard and Michel Hazanavicius.
Like Lapid, Portman — an Israeli-American actress who is one of the most prominent Jews in Hollywood — is a longtime critic of the Israeli government and opponent of the BDS movement.
Creative Community For Peace, a pro-Israel entertainment group, said Wednesday its members also oppose the boycott of Lapid, adding that Israel “funds, screens, and honors films that challenge its leaders, criticize its society, and engage openly with its most difficult debates.”
Unusually, the Marseille festival’s own director, Tsveta Dobreva, also signed one of the open letters in support of Lapid after she appeared to acquiesce to the earlier demands to pull him from the jury.
In an email, Dobreva told JTA her festival “fully supports Nadav Lapid,” saying that she had removed him from the jury out of concern he would be targeted at the event. She did not believe she had “agreed to the boycotters’ demands,” she said.
“Few festivals or cultural institutions in our days have the courage to extend invitations that may provoke controversy, and we stand with Nadav in believing that this form of self-censorship must be resisted, as it only contributes to the problem,” Dobreva wrote.
Lapid intends his next movie to be a follow-up to “Synonyms,” his 2019 film about an Israeli expat in Paris that won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival. The Marseille festival is scheduled for July, but he says now he has no intention of going: “I’ll find other beaches.”
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Trump is imagining an Israel after Netanyahu. So are many Israelis. Netanyahu isn’t biting.
(JTA) — The party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected speculation that he might not run in Israel’s election this fall, following an offhand comment by U.S. President Donald Trump.
On Tuesday, ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl tweeted that Trump had told him he was unsure if Netanyahu wanted to press forward in the elections.
“He’s had an amazing career,” Trump said, according to Karl. “Does he want to continue? Because, you know, he’s a wartime prime minister. We will very shortly win the war one way or the other, and you know he’s a wartime prime minister.”
Netanyahu has been prime minister for more than 15 of the last 17 years, losing power only briefly in 2021 and 2022. Israel’s current wars began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, triggering regional conflict that has grown to include a joint U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.
Trump’s reported comments left some wondering whether he knew something they did not, amid polling suggesting that Netanyahu will struggle to secure enough votes to put together a governing coalition after elections this fall. Could Trump know that Netanyahu is considering suspending his already-active campaign? Or could Trump, who this week told the BBC that Netanyahu does anything the U.S. president tells him to, be planning to order his Israeli counterpart to stand down amid growing anti-Israel sentiment in the United States?
Netanyahu’s Likud party soon demolished the idea. “Prime Minister Netanyahu will run in the upcoming elections — and with God’s help, he will win,” the party posted Wednesday on X.
Only a minority of Israelis were primed to appreciate the declaration, according to a poll released this week by the Israel Democracy Institute. It found that 61% of Israelis, including 27% of Likud members, do not want to see Netanyahu run again this fall. The same proportion said they want to see Israel adopt a two-term limit for prime ministers in the future.
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Spain reports 86% rise in antisemitic incidents, as interior minister takes aim at ‘xenophobia’
(JTA) — Antisemitic offenses in Spain rose 86% last year amid the country’s highest total hate incidents on record, according to a report from the Spanish government.
Jews were targeted in 69 hate crimes and incidents in 2025, up from 37 in 2024, according to a report released last week by Spain’s Interior Ministry. Islamophobic attacks also increased from 15 to 35 incidents.
Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said in a video posted on Facebook that his office documented 2,417 total hate incidents last year, the highest figure since it began recording in 2014. Spain is home to about 70,000 Jews, according to the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain.
The ministry defined antisemitism as any act of hatred, violence or discrimination directed against Jews or “nationals of the State of Israel.”
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has become one of Europe’s sharpest critics of Israel and its military action in Gaza, which he says constitutes genocide. Spain imposed a total arms embargo on Israel in 2025 and permanently withdrew its ambassador in March, following Israel’s withdrawal of its ambassador to Spain in 2024.
The Interior Ministry said hate crimes motivated by racism and xenophobia accounted for the largest number of offenses at 934. Grande-Marlaska called out “public officials” for rhetoric and policies that he said inflamed xenophobic sentiment.
Grande-Marlaska released his report as Spain’s far-right, anti-immigration Vox party advocates for a “national priority” policy that favors Spaniards over others in access to public aid and benefits, such as subsidized housing and healthcare. Vox recently struck deals with the conservative People’s Party to insert the “national priority” clause into coalition agreements in the regions of Extremadura, Aragón and Castile and León.
“The national priority is xenophobia,” Grande-Marlaska said. “It is institutionalized xenophobia, protected and promoted by public officials who legitimize and amplify hate speech that, in the past, would have been condemned when it entered the public sphere.”
Vox is strongly supportive of Israel, whose government has allied with the party despite a history of neo-Nazis in its ranks. Vox leader Santiago Abascal visited Israel in 2024 to show his support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after Sánchez recognized a Palestinian state.
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