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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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50 years after the Dirty War, Argentinians remember the Jews who ‘disappeared’
(JTA) — BUENOS AIRES — As Argentina marks the 50th anniversary of the 1976 military coup, a lesser-known aspect of the dictatorship is gaining attention: the disproportionate number of Jews among the disappeared.
Estimates suggest that as many as 1,900 Jews were abducted, tortured and murdered by the military junta during the six-year Dirty War, when many sources say 30,000 people were disappeared. Depending on the source, Jews represented 5% to 8% of the total, even though Jews made up less than 1% of Argentina’s population at the time.
That grim history is being explored in educational initiatives by Argentina’s Jewish community, aimed at younger generations and focused on understanding how the dictatorship operated and the disproportionate suffering it inflicted on Jews.
“The Jews were subjected to a particular form of treatment that resulted in greater brutality on the part of the repressive forces,” according to a new curriculum released by the education department of AMIA, the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. “The experience of Jewish Argentines who were victims of state terrorism was marked by a strong antisemitic imprint among many members of the task forces.”
The AMIA project includes meetings between Jewish youth and relatives of the Jewish “disappeared,” as well as visits to memorial sites. Some 1,000 students are expected to take part this month.
A parallel digital project, Eduiot (“Testimonies”), documents the stories of Jewish victims of the military dictatorship and includes meetings between relatives of the disappeared and high school students.
The materials rely on personal testimonies to explain the human impact of the dictatorship and to put individual stories in the broader historical context.
Eduiot includes the story of Fernando Ruben Brodsky, a 22-year-old student who disappeared in 1979, including accounts from relatives who continue to seek answers. His mother, Sarah Brodsky, shares accounts of her son, a psychology student and kindergarten teacher who was abducted from his home on Aug. 8 and never seen again.
The testimonials relate how security forces subjected Jews to antisemitic abuse when they were kidnapped or detained, including Nazi language and symbols and “special” interrogations reserved for Jews.
The anniversary comes amid renewed debate over how Argentina interprets the dictatorship. President Javier Milei’s government has called for a broader account that also includes victims of left-wing guerrilla violence, which some suggest is a way to minimize the crimes of the dictatorship. Milei and other voices close to the government have also questioned the 30,000-victim figure, promoting a lower number (often 9,000).
Under the junta, the military and state security forces targeted suspected left-wing sympathizers, including students, unionists, journalists and activists.
In 1979, Jewish advocacy groups such as the Anti‑Defamation League expressed grave concern over the disappearances, focusing on the Jewish victims, and Jewish families in Argentina and abroad helped compile lists of the missing. According to an ADL official at the time, “Jews are not specifically targeted as Jews. However, the security agents tend to be suspicious of Jews.”
The best-known Jewish target of the state was journalist Jacobo Timerman, who published a left-leaning newspaper, La Opinion. In 1977, the generals who ruled Argentina shut down the paper and imprisoned Timerman. Among other things, Timerman was accused of masterminding a plot to establish a Jewish homeland in the remote Patagonia region of southern Argentina.
He survived, and in his 1981 memoir, “Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number,” he recounted how he was subjected to torture during his 2 1/2 years in confinement.
According to Eduiot, Jewish advocacy for the disappeared “proved effective in bringing early attention to human rights violations.” The U.S. Congress launched investigations, and in a 1978 article in Le Monde, novelist and Holocaust survivor Marek Halter compared the persecution of Argentine Jews to Nazi-era atrocities.
The Eduiot site includes photographs and audiovisual material, and features the accounts of parents, siblings, cousins, nephews and nieces of Jews persecuted and disappeared under the dictatorship.
“Because every testimony matters and holds great value,” according to its website. “Because these dark episodes of our history must never be repeated, and because we want each of the disappeared to have a space of remembrance on this site, helping families sustain their memory and uphold the call for justice.”
The post 50 years after the Dirty War, Argentinians remember the Jews who ‘disappeared’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Fortnite tops ADL’s new ‘leaderboard’ ranking video games on antisemitism safeguards
(JTA) — The online video game Fortnite tops the Anti-Defamation League’s “leaderboard” ranking online video game companies on their efforts to curb antisemitism and extremism on their platforms.
The Online Gaming Leaderboard, which the antisemitism watchdog billed as the “first comprehensive public evaluation” of how online multiplayer games address antisemitism, ranked 10 popular online games based on safety features, moderation, player protections and written policies meant to address antisemitism and hate.
Fortnite was followed at the top of the rankings by Grand Theft Auto Online, Call of Duty and Minecraft. Games labeled as having “limited protection” by the ADL included Counter-Strike 2 and PUBG: Battlegrounds.
Madden NFL, Valorant, Clash Royale and Roblox, a collaborative computer gaming platform for children as young as 7, were ranked as having “moderate protection.”
“Without strong safeguards, these platforms can become breeding grounds for harassment and hateful activity that harms players directly, normalizes hateful ideologies and damages trust,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the ADL, said in a statement Wednesday. “This leaderboard provides the transparency that parents, gamers and the industry need to understand where companies are succeeding and where urgent improvements are necessary.”
The leaderboard’s release coincided with a landmark Los Angeles jury verdict finding Meta and YouTube liable for harming a young user through addictive design features.
In the virtual worlds of online gaming, players have posted abusive messages in chats, created antisemitic imagery and even given themselves bigoted usernames.
While Fortnite ranked first, the popular online game has also previously faced scrutiny over allegations that it enabled antisemitic content. Last September, it disabled a character dance feature after users said its gestures resembled a swastika.
Roblox, which has long faced criticism over content moderation, has also been the subject of controversy, including in 2022 when it removed a user-created simulation of a Nazi gas chamber. In the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks in 2023, the Israeli government also urged users to report pro-Palestinian activity in the game that it said included antisemitic content.
The post Fortnite tops ADL’s new ‘leaderboard’ ranking video games on antisemitism safeguards appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran Posts AI Video Showing Missile Striking Statue of Liberty
An Israeli air defense system intercepts a ballistic missile barrage launched from Iran to central Israel during the missile attack, February 27, 2026. Photo: Eli Basri / SOPA Images via Reuters Connect
Iran on Tuesday released an AI-generated video depicting a missile striking the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, a global symbol of American freedom and democracy, in one of the regime’s latest propaganda efforts to influence public perception abroad.
Shared by Iranian state broadcaster IRIB as well as a Telegram channel affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the minute-long video ends with the slogan “One vengeance for all.”
IRGC Official Telegram Channel Releases AI Video Depicting Iranian Ballistic Missile Strike on United States, Hitting New York City and Toppling Statue of Liberty Shown as Idol of Baal Holding Babylonian Talmud pic.twitter.com/JhgNgHW2Zz
— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) March 25, 2026
The video was also circulated by Russian state outlet RT, in what appears to be a stark and symbolic threat against the United States.
‘ONE VENGEANCE FOR ALL’ — Iran ‘bombs’ the Statue of Liberty WITH THE HEAD OF BAAL pic.twitter.com/6tPH15fqkZ
— RT (@RT_com) March 25, 2026
Since the start of the US-Israel war with Iran, which began on Feb. 28, Iranian officials have ramped up their propaganda and disinformation efforts, trying to portray Washington and Jerusalem as responsible for decades of regional conflict while seeking to influence left-leaning Americans to mobilize domestic opposition to the war.
This latest widely circulated video presents a striking sequence portraying the United States as the world’s enemy, drawing on imagery from the dispossession of Native Americans and the atomic bombings of Japan to the Vietnam War and more recent Middle Eastern conflicts to craft a sweeping narrative of American aggression.
The clip also features footage alluding to a child on Jeffrey Epstein’s private island — a recurring theme in Iran’s messaging used to suggest that US President Donald Trump launched the current war to distract the public from the Epstein scandal, in which the late financier was convicted of running a sex-trafficking ring involving underage girls and, allegedly, various influential figures.
Later in the video, AI-generated figures of Iran’s former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the late Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani are shown gazing skyward. Khamenei was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Feb. 28, and Soleimani was killed in a US drone strike in 2020.
The final sequence of the video depicts a missile in Iranian colors striking the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, whose head has been replaced with that of Baal, a false god from the Bible, while the statue holds the Talmud, a key collection of Jewish religious teachings and laws.
This video is the latest example of AI-generated propaganda released since the start of the war with Iran.
Last week, Chinese state television CCTV released a separate AI-generated clip illustrating Beijing’s perspective on the Strait of Hormuz crisis, featuring Persian cats in martial arts combat and an eagle-headed human representing the United States.
Experts note that Russian dissemination of Tehran’s video reflects a broader coordinated effort to use visual propaganda to challenge US foreign policy and influence global perceptions amid rising regional tensions.
The latest video came as the US and Iran began engaging in diplomacy over a possible resolution to the war, although Tehran has reportedly responded negatively to Washington’s proposal.