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From ‘how to’ to ‘why bother?’: Michael Strassfeld writes a new guide to being Jewish
(JTA) — “What the son wishes to forget the grandson wishes to remember.” That’s known as Hansen’s Law, named for the historian Marcus Lee Hansen, who observed that while the children of immigrants tend to run away from their ethnicity in order to join the mainstream, the third generation often wants to learn the “old ways” of their grandparents.
In 1973, “The Jewish Catalog” turned Hansen’s Law into a “do-it-yourself kit” for young Jews who wanted to practice the traditions of their grandparents but weren’t exactly sure how. Imagine “The Joy of Cooking,” but instead of recipes the guide to Jewish living had friendly instructions for hosting Shabbat, building a sukkah and taking part in Jewish rituals from birth to death. Co-edited by Michael Strassfeld, Sharon Strassfeld and the late Richard Siegel, it went on to sell 300,000 copies and remains in print today.
Fifty years later, Rabbi Michael Strassfeld has written a new book that he calls a “bookend” to “The Jewish Catalog.” If the first book is a Jewish “how to,” the latest asks, he says, “why bother?” “Judaism Disrupted: A Spiritual Manifesto for the 21st Century” asserts that an open society and egalitarian ethics leave most Jews skeptical of the rituals and beliefs of Jewish tradition. In the face of this resistance, he argues that the purpose of Judaism is not obedience to Torah and its rituals for their own sake or mere “continuity,” but to “encourage and remind us to strive to live a life of compassion, loving relationships, and devotion to our ideals.”
Strassfeld, 73, grew up in an Orthodox home in Boston and got his master’s degree in Jewish studies at Brandeis University. Coming to doubt the “faith claims” of Orthodoxy, he became a regular at nearby Havurat Shalom, an “intentional community” that pioneered the havurah movement’s liberal, hands-on approach to traditional practice. He earned rabbinical ordination from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College when he was 41 and went on to serve as the rabbi of Congregation Ansche Chesed on the Upper West Side and later the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, the Manhattan flagship of Reconstructionist Judaism.
“To be disrupted is to experience a break with the past and simultaneously reconnect in a new way to that past,” writes Strassfeld, who retired from the pulpit in 2015. This week, we spoke about why people might find Jewish ritual empty, how he thinks Jewish practices can enrich their lives and how Passover — which begins Wednesday night — could be the key to unlocking the central idea of Judaism.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: I wanted to start with the 50th anniversary of the “Jewish Catalog.” What connects the new book with the work you did back then on the “Catalog,” which was a do-it-yourself guide for Jews who were trying to reclaim the stuff they either did or didn’t learn in Hebrew school?
Michael Strassfeld: I see them as bookends. Basically, I keep on writing the same book over and over again. [Laughs] Except no, I’m different and the world is different. I’m always trying to make Judaism accessible to people. In the “Catalog” I was providing the resources on how to live a Jewish life when the resources weren’t easily accessible.
The new book is less about “how to” than “why bother?” That’s the challenge. I think a lot of people take pride in being Jewish, but it’s a small part of their identity because it doesn’t feel relevant. I want to say to people like that that Judaism is about living a life with meaning and purpose. It’s not about doing what I call the “Jewishly Jewish” things, like keeping kosher and going to synagogue. Judaism is wisdom and practices to live life with meaning and purpose. The purpose of Judaism isn’t to be a good Jew, despite all the surveys that give you 10 points for, you know, lighting Shabbat candles. It’s about being a good person.
So that brings up your relationship to the commandments and mitzvot, the traditional acts and behaviors that an Orthodox Jew or a committed Conservative Jew feels commanded to do, from prayer to keeping kosher to observing the Sabbath and the holidays. They might argue that doing these things is what makes you Jewish, but you’re arguing something different. If someone doesn’t feel bound by these obligations, why do them at all?
I don’t have the faith or beliefs that underlie such an attitude [of obligation]. Halacha, or Jewish law, is not in reality law. It’s really unlike American law where you know that if you’re violating it, you could be prosecuted. What I’m trying to do in the book is reframe rituals as an awareness practice, that is, bringing awareness to various aspects of our lives. So it could be paying attention to food, or cultivating attitudes of gratitude, or generosity, or satisfaction. My broad understanding of the festival cycle, for example, is that you can focus on those attitudes all year long, but the festivals provide a period of time once in the year to really focus on, in the case of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, for example, saying sorry and repairing relationships.
In “Judaism Disrupted: A Spiritual Manifesto for the 21st Century,” Michael Strassfeld argues that the challenge of each generation’s Jews is to create the Judaism that is needed in their time. (Ben Yehuda Press)
Passover is coming. Probably no holiday asks its practitioners to do so much stuff in preparation, from cleaning the house of every trace of unleavened food to hosting, in many homes, two different catered seminars on Jewish history. Describe how Passover cultivates awareness, especially of the idea of freedom, which plays an important part thematically in your boo
The Sefat Emet [a 19th-century Hasidic master] says Torah is all about one thing: freedom. But there’s a variety of obstacles in the way. There are temptations. There’s the inner issues that you struggle with, and the bad things that are out of your control. The Sefat Emet says the 613 commandments are 613 etzot, or advice, that teach us how to live a life of freedom. The focus of Passover is trying to free yourself from the chains of the things that hold you back from being the person that you could be, not getting caught up in materiality or envy, free from unnecessary anxieties — all these things that distract us or keep us from being who we could be.
The Passover seder is one of the great rituals of Judaism. We’re trying to do a very ambitious thing by saying, not, like, “let’s remember when our ancestors were freed from Egypt,” but rather that we were slaves in Egypt and we went free. And at the seder we actually ingest that. We experience the bitterness by eating maror, the bitter herb. We experience the freedom by drinking wine. We don’t want it just to be an intellectual exercise.
Unfortunately the seder has become rote. But Passover is about this huge theme of freedom that is central to Judaism.
I think some people bristle against ritual because they find it empty. But you’re saying there’s another way to approach rituals which is to think of them as tools or instruments that can help you focus on core principles — you actually list 11 — which include finding holiness everywhere, caring for the planet and engaging in social justice, to name a few. But that invites the criticism, which I think was also leveled at the “Catalog,” that Judaism shouldn’t be instrumental, because if you treat it as a means to an end that’s self-serving and individualistic.
Certainly rituals are tools, but tools in the best sense of the word. They help us pay attention to things in our lives and things in the world that need repair. And people use them not to get ahead in the world, but because they want to be a somewhat better person. I talk a lot these days about having a brief morning practice, and in the book I write about the mezuzah. For most Jews it’s become wallpaper, but what if you take the moment that you leave in the morning, and there’s a transition from home to the outside and to work perhaps, and take a moment at the doorpost to spiritually frame your day? What are the major principles that you want to keep in your mind when you know you’re gonna be stuck in traffic or a difficult meeting?
And a lot of traditional rituals are instrumental. Saying a blessing before you eat is a gratitude practice.
But why do I need a particular Jewish ritual or practice to help me feel gratitude or order my day? Aren’t there other traditions I can use to accomplish the same things?
Anybody who is a pluralist, which I am, knows that the Jewish way is not the only way. If I grew up in India or Indonesia and my parents were locals I probably wouldn’t be a rabbi and writing these books.
But a partial answer to your question is that Judaism is one of the oldest wisdom traditions in the world, and that there has been a 3,000-year conversation by the Jewish people about what it means to live in this tradition and to live in the world. And so I think there’s a lot of wisdom there.
So much in Jewish tradition says boundaries are good, and that it’s important to draw distinctions between what’s Jewish behavior and what’s not Jewish behavior, between the holy and the mundane, and that making those distinctions is a value in itself. But you argue strongly in an early chapter that that kind of binary thinking is not Judaism as you see it.
Underlying the book is the notion that Rabbinic Judaism carried the Jewish people for 2,000 years or so. But we’re living in a very different context, and the binaries, the dualities — too often they lead to hierarchy, so that, for example, men matter more than women in Jewish life. And we’ve tried to change that. We are living in an open society where we want to be more inclusive, not less inclusive. We don’t want to live in ghettos. Now, the ultra-Orthodox say, “No, we realize the danger of trying to live like that. We don’t think there’s anything of value in that modern world. And it’s all to be rejected.” And it would be foolish not to admit that in this very open world the Jews, as a minority, could kind of disappear. But I think that Judaism has so much value and wisdom and practices to offer to people that Judaism will continue to be part of the fabric of this world — the way, for example, we have given Shabbat as a concept to the world.
You know, in the first 11 chapters of the Torah, there are no Jews. So clearly, Jews and Judaism are not essential for the world to exist. And that’s a good, humbling message.
OK, but one could argue that while Jews aren’t necessary for the world to exist, Judaism is necessary for Jews to exist. And you write in your book, “If the Jewish people is to be a people, we need to have a commonly held tradition.” I think the pushback to the kind of openness and permeability you describe is that Jews can be so open and so permeable that they just fall through the holes.
It certainly is a possibility. And it’s also a possibility that the only Jews who will be around will be ultra-Orthodox Jews.
But if Judaism can only survive by being separatist, then I question whether it’s really worthwhile. That becomes a distorted vision of Judaism, and withdrawing is not what it’s meant to be. I think we’re meant to be in the world.
Your book is called “Judaism Disrupted.” What is disruptive about the Judaism that you’re proposing?
I meant it in two ways. First, Judaism is being disrupted by this very different world we’re living in. The contents of the ocean we swim in is very different than in the Middle Ages. But I’m also using it to say that Judaism is meant to disrupt our lives in a positive way, which is to say, “Wake up, pay attention.” You are here to live a life of meaning and purpose, and to continue as co-creators with God of the universe. You’re here to make the world better, to be kind and compassionate to people, to work on yourself. In my mind it is a shofar, “Wake up, sleepers, from your sleep!” “Judaism Disrupted” says you have to pay attention to issues like food, and justice, and teshuva [repentance].
You were ordained as a Reconstructionist rabbi. Do you think your book falls neatly into any of our current denominational categories?
[Reconstructionist founder] Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan’s notion of Judaism as an evolving religious civilization is the one that I feel closest to. But I feel that the denominational structure isn’t particularly useful anymore. There’s basically two categories, Orthodox and the various kinds of liberal Judaism, within a spectrum. The modern world is so fundamentally different in its relationship to Jews and Judaism that what we’re seeing is a variety of attempts to figure out how to respond. And that will then become the Judaism for the next millennium. It’s time for a lot of experimentation. I think that’s required and out of that will come a new “Minhag America,” to use Isaac Mayer Wise’s phrase for the emerging custom of American Jews [Wise was a Reform rabbi in the late 19th century]. And we don’t need to have everybody doing it one way. As long as people feel committed to Judaism, the Jewish tradition, even if they’re doing it very differently than the Jews of the past, they will be writing themselves into the conversation.
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They led protests against Netanyahu. Can they turn outrage into political power?
On Oct. 7, Israelis will come together to commemorate the third anniversary of the Hamas attack. Three weeks later, they will gather again, this time at the voting booth, for the first national election since Nov. 2022. The shadow of the first event will no doubt loom large over the second.
The election is expected to serve, in large part, as a referendum on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition’s refusal to take responsibility for the failures of Oct. 7. But the fallout will also appear on the ballot itself, which will include several candidates whose lives were upended on that fateful day and the three tumultuous years that followed.
Some stepped into these leadership roles reluctantly, like Likud hopeful Talik Gvili, whose son Ran was the last deceased hostage to return from Gaza, and Sharon Sharabi of Yisrael Beiteinu, whose brothers Yossi and Eli were taken captive; only Eli returned alive.
Alongside those propelled unwittingly into the public eye are a slew of activists-turned-candidates whose path to political leadership was more deliberate. Many rose to prominence in early 2023, during the mass demonstrations against the government’s attempted judicial overhaul. After Oct. 7, they co-led the struggle to free the hostages, together with family members, and then went on to revive the anti-government protests, demanding accountability and calling for elections.
Elections in which they are now candidates.
With A Place for All, the Jewish-Arab party launched by Standing Together leaders, having withdrawn from the race earlier this month, the overwhelming majority of activists have found their political home inside the left-wing, liberal Zionist party formed in 2024 through a merger of Labor and Meretz now known as The Democrats.
Record-high voter turnout for the party’s internal primaries held this past July, and recent polling projecting they will secure at least 10 electoral seats, point to a groundswell of support among protest supporters. But can a movement that repeatedly brought tens of thousands of Israelis into the streets and helped force a pause in the judicial overhaul translate that mobilization into lasting political power? And for the candidates themselves – many with no prior political experience – what does it take to go from protesting outside the Knesset to making decisions inside of it?
For protest leader Yaya Fink, who secured the fifth position on The Democrats’ slate, the answer lies in shifting from resistance to rebuilding.
“The protests were about stopping things from happening. Now it’s time to make things happen,” Fink told the Forward, a transition he describes as “both critically important and completely natural.”
“You cannot stay in crisis-prevention mode forever,” Fink said. “We are incredibly proud of what we accomplished. But it’s time for the next phase: repairing what’s broken, creating change, building anew.”
Fink, a religious activist who helped establish the public-interest lobbying organization Lobby 99, has been involved in social justice movements for most of his adult life. But he describes the judicial overhaul as the first time he felt he was fighting for the country’s very identity as a liberal democracy. “It’s the cause that most affected me as a person and that I also feel I had the most effect on,” he recalled.
From outside the Knesset to inside
Fink is one of more than a dozen candidates near the top of The Democrats’ ticket with a background in activism. Joining him are reservist organizer Omri Ronen; high-tech protest leader Moshe Radman; Moran Zer Katzenstein, founder of Building an Alternative; Arab-Israeli peace activist Somaya Bashir; and Avi Dabush, executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights.
Yair Golan, at the top of the ticket, followed by incumbent lawmakers Naama Lazimi, Gilad Kariv and Efrat Reytan were also regular fixtures on the protest circuit. “These were the politicians who were out on the streets with us day after day, week after week,” Fink said. “It was a natural fit for us to join their party.”
The transition from protest to politics has clear historical precedence in Israel, according to Doron Shultziner, a professor in the Government, Communication and Diplomacy department at Jerusalem Multidisciplinary College who studies social movements,
In the 1970s, Moroccan immigrants Charlie Biton and Saadia Marciano were part of Israel’s Black Panthers, a group of militant radicals who were regularly arrested and often faced police brutality in their struggle against the racism and poverty Mizrahi Jews encountered at the time. Eventually, the two men entered politics on left-wing tickets, continuing their fight for equal treatment for Mizrahi Jews and emerging as early supporters of peace with the Palestinians.
But infighting and limited political influence prevented them from affecting significant change, even for Biton, who served 15 years in the Knesset. In general, Shultziner cautions against assuming that prominence in a protest movement automatically translates to success in office.
“Clearly, politics and protest are two completely different ball games,” he said. “The career of a politician is haphazard and is affected by so many events that they cannot control.”
Similarly, Shultziner pointed to the social justice protest of 2011, when Israelis pitched tents on Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Blvd. and marched in the streets to protest soaring housing costs and economic inequality. As the protest began to wind down, movement leaders Stav Shaffir and Itzik Shmuli moved into politics, securing spots on the Labor ticket in 2013. Shaffir gained prominence demanding budget transparency but spent her parliamentary career in opposition. After leaving Labor in 2019 for a rival left-wing alliance, she was excluded from subsequent electoral partnerships and left the Knesset in 2020.
Shmuli managed to became labor and welfare minister but, as Shultziner explained, his advancement came at a price: “Despite campaigning on a promise not to serve under Netanyahu, he joined Labor leader Amir Peretz in taking the party into the Netanyahu–Gantz unity government, a decision that alienated their supporters. He ended up retiring the following year.”
“So, it really depends on how you define success,” Shultziner noted.
Will protests and protesters change Israeli politics?
For Fink, who remembers these broken promises all too well, loyalty is central to The Democrats’ appeal. “In addition to standing shoulder to shoulder with us on the streets, they were also steadfast in representing the movement in the Knesset,” he said. “It just made sense to go in with people who have demonstrated they cannot be bought by Netanyahu.”
But before Fink can think about the Knesset, he and his fellow Democrats must focus on the road to get there. With Election Day only weeks away, the question is how wide to cast their net.
According to the Israeli Democracy Institute (IDI), by July of 2025, around 1.5 million Israelis were estimated to have taken part in at least one demonstration in the previous three years. And yet most polls have The Democrats at around 10 seats, or roughly 400,000 votes, a significant difference.
“Over time, we see a growing perception that the protests did not succeed in transforming Israel’s political system,” explained Dr. Tamar Hermann, a senior research fellow at IDI.
“With The Democrats’ identity so deeply intertwined with the protest movement, that disillusionment has led voters to look elsewhere.”
An even bigger obstacle may be the ideological gap between protester and party. “They were certainly united in their opposition to the judicial reform. But The Democrats as a party is significantly to the left of many of the protesters,” she said. “The majority of those who showed up consistently were quite conservative. They tend to benefit from a status quo they would like to preserve, which contradicts The Democrats’ message of change and revolution.”
Paradoxically, the movement’s public image may also hamper efforts to reach beyond it. ”In the collective Israeli psyche, the protestors, and by extension The Democrats, are so strongly associated with being Ashkenazi, urban, secular, quasi-socialist, and highly educated.” Hermann said. “Which doesn’t appeal to a broad audience.” That perception is not totally unfounded. A January 2023 IDI survey, conducted during the judicial overhaul protests, found that 20% of Ashkenazi respondents reported participating in protest activities, compared with 10% of Mizrahi respondents; participation among secular Jews was 27%, compared with only 4% among religious Zionists, with most of the large-scale demonstrations taking place in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa.
But beyond the data, the image carries historical baggage which still lingers today. Israel’s Labor movement, The Democrats’ political forebear, was dominated by Ashkenazi Jews of European ancestry while Mizrahi Jews, driven by the marginalization they faced, helped bring Netanyahu’s Likud party to power in the late 1970s.
Hermann notes that even reaching the projected 10 seats will be a huge accomplishment, a sentiment echoed by Shultziner. “Just the fact that they managed to register over 100,000 voters is an impressive feat,” he said. “People who would never have voted for labor in the past are now registering early with the Democrats just so they can vote in the primaries.”
Fink, however, remains determined to reach beyond the party’s base.
“I am a religious man who lives in the North,” he said, “not exactly the stereotypical ‘Kaplanist,’ ” a pejorative nickname for protesters drawn from Tel Aviv’s Kaplan Street, the demonstrations’ main gathering place.
“But who you vote for should not be determined by whether you are religious or secular, Jewish or Arab. Whether you live in the big city or an outlying community.
“The only thing that matters is whether you want Israel to be a liberal democracy or a semi-fascist state. Do you want a government that is honest or one that is crooked? Do you want your money to go to draft dodgers or those who serve? To yet another illegal outpost or to recovery efforts?”
Fink’s message echoes that of the protest movement he helped lead for nearly four years. But it also captures the challenge facing his party: whether the solidarity forged in the streets can survive the compromises of coalition politics. Already, the Democrats’ willingness to govern alongside an Arab party has exposed divisions among their potential partners. Still, their growing momentum and strong polling numbers suggest they may be on the road to fulfilling another promise of the protests – unseating Netanyahu and rewriting the government’s agenda.
The post They led protests against Netanyahu. Can they turn outrage into political power? appeared first on The Forward.
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German city bans stumbling stone memorials to Nazi victims
(JTA) — A decision to bar the “stumbling stone” memorials to victims of the Nazis has touched a nerve in one small German town, and beyond.
At issue is a motion – passed Sept. 25 by the city council of Heidenau in the former East Germany – to stop installation of such memorials in local sidewalks, calling them disrespectful, and to use the town’s North Cemetery instead.
Set into the ground, the small, engraved brass “Stolpersteine,” or stumbling stones, are meant to make pedestrians stop and think about the fate of former residents. There are currently some 116,000 such stones laid in 1,860 municipalities across Europe, mostly in Germany, according to the project’s website.
A curious aspect of the Stolpersteine is that they are opposed by both Germany’s right wing, which view them as detracting from national pride, and by a vocal minority of Jews who feel they don’t do enough to uplift the memory of victims.
The effort to block the memorial stones in Heidenau was sponsored jointly by the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. The town’s current mayor, Conny Oertel, is independent.
The city council’s decision comes as the AfD gains support in German elections nationwide. The party’s support for banning the project in Heidenau has sparked concern about potential moves to suppress official public commemoration of the Holocaust.
The AfD is known for challenging Germany’s culture of Holocaust remembrance in general. Bjoern Hoecke, who leads the party in the neighboring state of Thuringia, once even called Berlin’s Holocaust memorial a “monument of shame” that detracted from German pride. In protest, an artist collective built a replica of the memorial outside his home.
On the other hand, some Jews, albeit a minority, object to the memorials because they say it’s disrespectful to place them where they can be walked on and covered with leaves or trash. The stones have also been targets of vandelism, they note.
But the Heidenau motion is not for the sake of victims; rather it’s a “transparent maneuver by the extremists of the AfD” to suppress Germany’s remembrance culture, said Charlotte Knobloch, who has successfully opposed the placement of Stolpersteine in her home city of Munich, in the state of Bavaria.
“Removing places of remembrance from the cityscape, as has now happened in Heidenau, is absolutely the wrong approach,” said Knobloch, a 93-year-old Holocaust survivor, who heads the Jewish community of Munich and Upper Bavaria.
In a statement issued to the press Friday, Knobloch added that she was “appalled” that the CDU “would lend itself to supporting” the move. “The democratic center should and must find its way back to itself here and find a better solution.”
The joint opposition to the project by the AfD, the mainstream CDU and a local activist group creates a dilemma for Stolpersteine opponents like Knobloch who also abhor the AfD.
Heidenau, in the state of Saxony, is not the first town to act against the project. The city of Munich in Bavaria voted as early as 2004 not to allow the installation of the stones in public spaces, siding with Knobloch. In the city of Pulheim, in North Rhine-Westphalia, the project was blocked in 2011, but eventually the municipality reversed course and allowed the first installations to take place in 2022.
Heidenau is home to 17,000 people. Though the wartime local Jewish population was small, there are five such stones in the town already. An application for 12 more had been submitted by the Alternative Cultural and Educational Center (Akubiz), including for Fritz Goldstein and his wife Martha, who were expelled to Poland in 1938 and survived the war.
Arguing against the stones, the Heidenau motion noted that many citizens, relatives of victims, and activists actually disapprove of this form of commemoration.
Negative reactions to the decision in Heidenau were swift, both from proponents and detractors of the memorial concept itself.
In an email statement, the New York-based March of the Living educational organization called on the town of Heidenau “to reverse its decision and on Germany’s leaders and citizens to oppose every effort to hide this history.”
The city council decision “raises a deeply troubling question: Are political interests being allowed to push the memory of Nazi victims out of public life?” the statement read in part.
Like Knobloch, Munich resident Gabriella Meros doesn’t like the stumbling stones. “They are simply not a dignified way to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust,” said Meros, daughter of a Holocaust survivor and chair of the association Respect and Remember Europe.
She promotes placement of plaques on buildings instead.
But the political move in Heidenau by the CDU and AfD is “outrageous, because they’re exploiting this argument for their own purposes.”
The real problem is, she said, that the AfD “wants to abolish remembrance” itself.
In its platform, the AfD says it aims to promote “positive, identity-establishing aspects of German history.” Critics say that in practice, this could mean reducing funding for educational trips to Holocaust sites and for the memorial sites themselves.
The Stolpersteine project, initiated in 1992 by Cologne-based artist Gunter Demnig, sets engraved memorials into sidewalks in front of buildings where deported victims of the Nazi dictatorship once lived.
Usually, family members from around the world nominate sites and pay a nominal fee for materials. For many, the stumbling stones are a substitute for a grave, for ancestors whose place of death is unknown.
Israel’s Ambassador to Germany Ron Prosor wrote on X
that he was “ashamed” of Heidenau’s decision, noting that members of his own family who were forced to flee the Nazis were commemorated by the stones in Berlin.
“Every person has a name. A world. A story. It is precisely this memory that is being erased here. Whoever erases the victims from the past erases the past itself.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post German city bans stumbling stone memorials to Nazi victims appeared first on The Forward.
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‘NAZA’ documentary draws sold-out crowd – and protests – at US premiere
(JTA) — Even a powerful Nor’easter couldn’t stop the crowds from showing up at the North American premiere of the controversial Israeli documentary “NAZA” on Saturday afternoon.
The two weekend screenings scheduled at Lincoln Center as part of the New York Film Festival sold out in minutes. Dozens of people waited in a box office standby line that stretched around the corner despite the blustery conditions, while at least one local politician scored a ticket: Brad Lander, the Jewish progressive and Democratic nominee for New York’s 10th Congressional District.
Meanwhile, two groups of Israeli-Americans showed up on Saturday with no intention of going inside the theater: one demonstrating in solidarity with the filmmakers, and a larger group across the street that denounced the film as they waved Israeli flags.
The documentary, which was produced by The Guardian and alleges that Israeli forces knowingly killed large numbers of civilians in Gaza, has received early acclaim, winning the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month. It will be made available for free on The Guardian’s website later this fall.
John Kwiatkowski, senior manager of publicity and communications for Film at Lincoln Center, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that “NAZA sold out almost immediately.”
But “NAZA,” whose name is the Hebrew acronym for “collateral damage,” has also roiled a number of Israeli officials and the country’s military. The Israel Defense Forces issued a public rebuttal after the film’s reception in Venice, with the IDF chief of staff calling the film a “deliberate distortion of reality.”
The Israeli filmmakers, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, have faced intense backlash at home. Israel’s culture minister threatened to strip them of their citizenship and protesters accused the duo of treason in a demonstration outside Szor’s parents’ home.
Roni Tamari, who organized the rally supporting the filmmakers on Saturday, called the Israeli reaction “out of proportion.”
David Lawson, a Jewish Queens resident who had purchased a ticket for the Saturday premiere, told JTA that he’d appreciated Abraham and Szor’s previous film, “No Other Land,” which focused on settler violence in the West Bank community of Masafer Yatta.
Minutes before the screening’s slated start time, Lawson said that he was “very excited” to see “NAZA,” not just for what it will say “about Israel, but also just about the alarming use of AI in warfare in general.”
Lawson said he likes “to hope that the tide is shifting on acceptance of Zionism in the United States,” and that support for “NAZA” was an example of that shift. He also said he was “expecting” to see protesters who disagreed with the film. “Pathetic,” another person in line chimed in, describing the demonstration.
They were referring to the protest organized by the Israeli-American Council, which drew dozens of critics of the film who believe it omits the context of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack in its depiction of the IDF’s military campaign in Gaza. Speakers included IAC’s chief communities officer Noa Peri-Jensch and a pair of survivors of the Nova music festival that Hamas attacked.
A fleet of four black trucks circled the area with LED screens that displayed images of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack along with various messages. “Movies have editors. History does not,” one message read. The trucks were commissioned by the IAC.
“We mourn every innocent life lost in this war, Israeli or Palestinian,” Peri-Jensch said during the rally. “But compassion for Palestinian civilians does not require [us] to erase Oct. 7, ignore Hamas or accept one narrative without questioning it.”
Peri-Jensch was not calling for the film’s screenings to be canceled, she said in an interview, but rather for them to be paired “with context” at festivals, like panels featuring Oct. 7 survivors.
Asked about Israeli officials’ threats toward the filmmakers and the demonstrators calling them traitors, Peri-Jensch said she “cannot comment on what people in Israel do, I can only comment here,” adding that viewers “deserve to know the full scope.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu backed legislation last week that would strip the Israeli filmmakers of their citizenship, while the Israeli army has weighed taking legal action against them.
Protesters gathered outside Szor’s parents’ home multiple nights in a row last week calling on authorities to “expel the traitors.” One speaker called for Abraham and Szor to be executed while the crowd chanted, “Execute the traitors.” Participants in the right-wing protest included activists and campaign staff from National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s far-right party, according to Haaretz.
On Saturday, Nova massacre survivor Rom El-Hai himself referred to the filmmakers as “traitors,” and said that there have been “liars” like Abraham and Szor within the Jewish community since the Bible and during the Holocaust.
In an interview following his remarks, El-Hai said it isn’t his job to say how exactly Abraham and Szor should be dealt with in Israeli society, but that they “should be punished” and that they cannot “live their life in Israel like nothing happened.”
“People need to understand there is a price for what they’re doing,” he said.
Near the standby line running along the sidewalk of Broadway, about a dozen demonstrators who are involved with the group Israelis for Peace held signs reading, “We stand by the countless victims in Gaza and Rachel & Yuval for speaking truth to power.”
Tamari, one of the organizers, said she felt it was “actually very disrespectful” for images of wounded and killed Oct. 7 victims to be shown in public.
Moshe Kayam, an Israeli-American who demonstrated in solidarity with the “NAZA” filmmakers on Saturday, said IAC’s rally was “doing a disservice” because the Oct. 7 attacks were indeed “horrendous,” but “did not justify the mass killing” of civilians in Gaza.
“We want the truth to come out,” Kayam said of the film. “We want everyone to see what really happened there, and the damage that it caused to Gaza, to Israel’s image and to us as Israelis.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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