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Israeli drama film ‘Concerned Citizen’ tackles gentrification and race issues in Tel Aviv
(JTA) — The Israeli satirical drama film “Concerned Citizen” opens with the sacrosanct rituals of a bourgeois Tel Aviv life: a robot vacuum slides gracefully across the floor; lush house plants are watered; vegetables are blended into green juice. The score from the Bellini opera “Norma” plays in the background.
Then a car alarm rudely interrupts the utopia.
It only gets worse from here for Ben and Raz, a progressive Israeli gay couple (played by actors Shlomi Bertonov and Ariel Wolf, who are also a couple in real life) living in a pristine renovated apartment in a gentrifying neighborhood in south Tel Aviv. When Ben, a landscape architect, plants a tree on their block, his seemingly innocent desire to improve the neighborhood quickly goes awry, and a series of events forces him to face his own repressed prejudices and hypocrisy.
With the tension of a thriller, “Concerned Citizen,” the second feature film by Israeli writer-director Idan Haguel, tackles the universal themes of privilege and multicultural tension in gentrifying cities, using the hyper-specific lens of Neve Sha’anan — the south Tel Aviv neighborhood that’s home to many of the country’s foreign workers and asylum seekers, as well as the city’s notoriously rundown (but culturally vibrant) Central Bus Station.
After making its world premiere last year at the famed Berlin International Film Festival, the movie debuts in select U.S. theaters on Friday and will also be available to rent on Amazon and Apple TV+.
Ben and Raz’s apartment, a hot commodity in one of the world’s most expensive cities, is the axis around which much of the drama revolves. In one scene, a French-Jewish woman looks into buying the apartment sight unseen. Their neighbors include both the extremely vulnerable and the privileged: immigrants from Eritrea in one apartment, and a writer plotting his move to Berlin with his foreign wife in another.
Idan Haguel spoke with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about the film and his personal connections to it. After losing his suitcase, Haguel chatted on his phone from a cafe in Berlin before heading to New York for the film’s American release.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
JTA: Tell me a little about yourself and how you became a filmmaker.
IH: I was born in the suburban city Rishon LeTsiyon and I always didn’t know what to do with my life. After the army I decided to go to film school. I wanted to be a scriptwriter, to do comedies. I discovered filmmaking, directing, and I gradually fell in love with that part. Then after school, I became a journalist because I couldn’t make a film — it was very difficult for me to get into that world. When my journalism career ended abruptly by the closing of the magazine, I decided that it’s now or never. I made my first feature film, that was a film called “Inertia.” That film is based on childhood memories of my grandparents. My grandparents were immigrants from Lebanon, Romania and Thessaloniki in Greece.
“Concerned Citizen” is partially about immigration. Why was it important to you to focus on the immigrant experience?
I was drawn into the irony, and, some may say, hypocrisy of living in a country that historically was formed by the narrative of [the Jew] being the immigrant of the world, not accepted into other countries, that in some ways still holding that grudge against countries that weren’t receptive to the immigrant Jew and pushed immigrants out. Of course, there is the horror story of Germany and the Holocaust and that’s the extreme end of mistreating “the other.” So living in a country formed by immigrants, [contrasted with] the way we behave to immigrants who are not part of the ethos of the Jewish immigrant narrative — I was drawn into that irony, although it wasn’t an intellectual process. It was more based on the experience of living in that neighborhood in south Tel Aviv, being marinated in the dilemmas and the daily complexity of living in Neve Sha’anan as a bourgeois, middle class person. After a few years I wanted to comment on that. I wanted to be brutally honest with myself and about myself. So my daily life and the life of my neighbors and friends became the material with which I wrote this fictional movie.
And you shot the film in your old apartment!
That was the mindfuck of the whole production, because I made the story close to me but I left a distance. I used my experience but I created these characters who are very close but very different. I shot the therapy scenes in my therapist’s clinic. I shot the building scenes in my building on my street. Everything became very, very close and it was really an “Alice in Wonderland” experience. Looking into a mirror and everything is morphing and making you look different and look differently at yourself and your life.
Can you talk about the south Tel Aviv neighborhood where the film is set, Neve Sha’anan?
It’s the outskirts of the center of Tel Aviv. It was always an immigrant neighborhood. But it changed over the years, it became working immigrants. In the 90s, there were the Romanian immigrants, and then it was Chinese immigrants who came to work in Israel. And over the last 15 years it has become immigrants from Africa, combined with older people who have lived there years and new people who are the more gentrifiers of the neighborhood, artists and gay people and those who are more economically stable. So now the neighborhood is comprised of sex workers, immigrants, junkies, dealers, and gay people. It’s a mix, but the prices have gone low, and people who didn’t have enough money to buy property in the city center started buying there. So the neighborhood has this tension of people who want to live a more bourgeois life, but they’re in the middle of the neighborhood with people who don’t have rights, who are immigrants, who don’t know if tomorrow the government will kick them out. People from all over the world. But it’s become a haven for investors and the neighborhood is in the middle of being gentrified and changed.
So it’s a very interesting setting to live in and to make a film in. It’s very dense. It’s one of the less homogenic and more diverse areas in Israel. Israel prides itself on the diversity of Jewish people coming from Arab countries, coming from Europe. But they’re all Jewish and they share a common mentality and they’re all citizens of Israel. Neve Sha’anan is more diverse – it’s people from India, China, Eritrea, Sudan, the Ivory Coast. I feel it’s a missed opportunity by Israeli society that instead of accepting these people legally and into our society, they are trying to hold back and fight against it. It’s also very ironic that Israel is becoming a state that aspires to have a government like this. It’s mind-boggling. It’s like, we learned nothing from history and our own history. It’s like people don’t want to connect dots. They just want to see the cruel history that they experienced as the Jewish people and feel like it was something personal that happened to them, and like they cannot be the victimizers at all.
You’ve said that this film is very much about the idea of who’s the victim and who’s the victimizer.
When you raise yourself and your children on the narrative of being a victim and perpetuating historical trauma it’s very hard to notice other people’s traumas, and the fact that you are creating traumas for other people. Because you’re constantly in trauma and you’re always dealing with your own trauma and you’re always the victim and you’re the center of the world, but you are not the center of the world. I think it should change. But no one cares what I think! Sometimes I don’t care about what I think.
What was the casting process like?
The casting process was through meeting people and going to plays. [I turned to] the Holot theater company to cast the Eritrean community in Israel. It was cast mainly by meeting actors from the group, having conversations with them. Basically they wanted to participate in the film and I was very lucky about that. They’re a group that used to be based in Holot outside of a temporary incarceration open prison for immigrants who don’t have permits to stay in Israel. They put them in an open prison in the desert close to the Negev.
There’s an interesting scene between the French-Jewish woman (played by Flora Bloch) who is trying to move to Israel and Ben that I thought was a very revealing moment about the ways that Jewishness is expressed when Jews are a minority in the country versus when they are the majority in the country. The French woman is concerned by France’s antisemitism and wants to move to Israel, while Ben is tortured by the complexities of living as a privileged Jewish Israeli person. Can you say something about what that scene meant to you?
One of the things I’m proud about this film is that I feel like it deals with subjects which are not easy subjects to address. But I think we managed to create a balance between comedy and drama that I’m very proud of. I think it allows the film to be self explanatory. It can reveal its deep themes and make you think, in an entertaining way. Again, it’s about irony. It’s about hypocrisy. It’s about human nature. Knowing how to experience your own point of view, and being unable to be in another person’s point of view. It’s human nature, and it’s ever-fascinating to me.
And it also happens to me a lot of times with the fact that I can be in my own shoes and identify my own narrative so much but it’s hard for me to even experience a person who is experiencing the same thing as me but in a different language in different settings. But the resemblance is there so it’s very ironic. And I think that scene is about that.
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The post Israeli drama film ‘Concerned Citizen’ tackles gentrification and race issues in Tel Aviv appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The Iran war ended terribly for the US, and even worse for Israel
A war that began with immense ambition has ended with profound setbacks for both the United States and Israel.
With an emerging U.S.-Iran peace agreement, what initially appeared to be a historic demonstration of military dominance evolved into a vivid illustration of the limits of both Israeli and American power. The conflict also exposed profound failures in strategic competence within that alliance. Washington and Jerusalem planned effectively for the initial decapitation strikes, but were unprepared for the economic and geopolitical consequences that followed.
The result is a war that may ultimately strengthen the Iranian regime politically, despite the damage it suffered militarily; has weakened international perceptions of American military might; and has diminished both Israel’s own strategic circumstances and its most important alliance.
The opening phase of the war appeared spectacularly successful. Israeli intelligence and airpower decapitated large portions of Iran’s military and security leadership with astonishing speed, including by assassinating Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Key military infrastructure suffered major damage, and for a brief moment, it seemed plausible that the Iranian regime might genuinely face collapse or surrender on terms dictated by Washington and Jerusalem.
That perception proved short-lived.
Iran shifted the battlefield away from conventional military confrontation and toward economic coercion. Its closure of the Strait of Hormuz exposed the extraordinary vulnerability of the global economy to relatively inexpensive forms of pressure. Energy markets panicked almost immediately. Governments across Europe, Asia, and the Gulf pushed urgently for de-escalation.
The central strategic reality became impossible to ignore: the U.S.could not tolerate sustained economic disruption, and the Iranian regime has a strong stomach for suffering. The overwhelming military superiority of the U.S. and Israel effectively ceased to matter.
That asymmetry changed the balance of the conflict. And the resulting agreement appears to preserve much of Iran’s architecture of mischief, which the regime’s many critics had hoped to see dismantled.
Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities have been harmed but can be rebuilt; long-term reductions to that firepower are reportedly not on the table in a planned 60-day negotiation. The regime’s regional proxy network — including Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iraqi militias, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad — survives, even though Hezbollah and Hamas have been battered.
And as Israel is not a party to the ceasefire, it cannot advocate for more stringent terms on this front.
The regime itself remains firmly in power and may receive enormous sanctions relief and renewed economic access. Demands for democratic reforms seem to have been set aside, as has any kind of punishment for the regime’s massacre of thousands — and by some reports tens of thousands — of domestic protestors in January.
The latter aspect is especially galling given that President Donald Trump was driven to intervene because of the January massacre, after he promised Iranians that “help is on its way.” Upon launching the war, he declared that it would enable Iranians to “take your country back.”
Ironically, Trump in his first term pulled out of former President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal over objections that it provided funds for the regime while allowing it to run riot. Now, he is settling for an effective reconstitution of that deal — except one with substantially less American leverage.
The implications extend far beyond Iran itself. The war demonstrated that Tehran can generate immediate global economic panic through relatively cheap tools and can leverage that panic into diplomatic concessions. Before the war, fears about Iran’s ability to blackmail the world economy remained somewhat theoretical. After the war, those fears became a demonstrated geopolitical reality.
There is little evidence that either the American or Israeli governments understood in advance the degree to which the global economy had become vulnerable to this form of coercion. This, even though the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz was completely predictable and indeed expected by every strategist I’ve spoken to for decades.
This outcome may be most devastating for the Iranian people themselves. Many Iranians who despise the regime interpreted the opening phase of the conflict as evidence that the dictatorship might finally face genuine collapse. Instead, the regime not only survived but also regained leverage. The machinery of repression remains intact.
But this result is damaging for every party to this war aside from the Iranian regime.
The war has transformed perceptions of American power. For decades, the U.S. has anchored a global system built on the assumption that Washington could manage regional crises with some strategy in mind. That strategy wasn’t always brilliant, but it was rarely clueless. With the Hormuz confrontation, the world watched the U.S. confront a regional adversary with vastly inferior capabilities and fail to control events.
For Israel, the alliance Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spent years cultivating with the American right and with Trump personally has become dangerously fragile. As pressure mounted to stabilize energy markets and prevent wider regional escalation, Trump increasingly presented himself not as a partner coordinating with Israel but as a superior authority managing Israeli actions. He repeatedly framed Israeli military action as dependent on his approval. He cursed Netanyahu in public. He presented Israel as a vassal doing his bidding — something no U.S. president has previously done.
This will destabilize Israel, where much of the governing right previously viewed Trump as a uniquely reliable ally who would support Israeli military objectives without hesitation or conditions.
Previous American presidents pressured Israel privately while still preserving the outward presentation of a relationship between sovereign allies. Trump discarded much of that convention. The new perception weakens Israel’s deterrence dramatically. Plus, with bipartisan support for Israel in Washington even more completely collapsed than after the deleterious war in Gaza, and relations with much of Europe — Israel’s top trading partner — similarly deteriorated, Israel finds itself at a new peak of dangerous international isolation.
This strategic shipwreck bears no resemblance to the sweeping regional transformation that supporters of the war — myself included — initially envisioned. I assumed, partly because of the first days’ successes, that Trump and Netanyahu had a plan. This is not a mistake serious people are likely to make again.
The post The Iran war ended terribly for the US, and even worse for Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Would Judaism have an issue with ‘Disclosure Day?’
Steven Spielberg is in his aliens exist era — but in truth, he’s been there since at least 1977. That’s when the director said NASA sent him a 20-page letter objecting to the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, fearful the public might take to watching the stars the way they did beaches after Jaws. Did this indicate there was something to hide?
“I really found my faith when I heard that the Government was opposed to the film,” he said.
Spielberg’s fascination with UFOs goes back even further. In 1964, five years before the moon landing, he made the 8 millimeter alien invasion flick Firelight, a 17-year-old’s dry run at the topics he’d later handle with Roy Neary and his mesa-like mound of mashed potatoes and the world’s loudest game of Simon.
He’d return to aliens again, with E.T., War of the Worlds and the critically reviled Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. But the 79-year-old director has never been so forthcoming with his views on alien life as he has been on this current press tour for Disclosure Day, where he made the controversial claim that first contact might pose a problem for the faithful.
“Is God, our God only on this planet, or is God a God for every system where there’s civilization, intelligent life, and even developing life?” Spielberg asked on CBS Sunday Morning. This is one of the questions posed by Disclosure Day, which is about the tug of war between a group dedicated to broadcasting the truth about intelligent extraterrestrial beings, and the shady agency determined to keep it under wraps.
Many in the church — meaning Christians, who are represented in the film by ex-novitiate Jane (Eve Hewson) — have said such a disclosure would be a nonissue for their belief. But what of Spielberg’s own coreligionists?
“Within the classic Jewish perspective is the idea that to embrace reality is to embrace our creator,” Rabbi Josh Breindel, whose teachings on speculative fiction earned him the moniker “sci-fi rabbi,” said in an interview. “So, if we were to have irrefutable proof of alien life, then that’s an opportunity for us to celebrate our creator in whose image we were made, and then maybe to probe and say, ‘Where do we see echoes or resonances of that image in this other life form in their sentient discourse?’”
We need not only take Rabbi Breindel’s word for it. The question pops up as early as the Middle Ages.
Writing in the 14th Century, the Spanish philosopher Hasdai Crescas claimed life on other planets wouldn’t be an issue for Jewish faith. Our texts feature many apparent allusions to other worlds in which God has dominion.
A place called Meroz, mentioned in the Book of Judges, has been interpreted as being another planet. The school of Merkabah mysticism, inspired by Ezekiel’s vision of the wheel, is a sort of Judaism-forward UFO watcher group. If we’re talking biblically accurate angels, or even the revelation at Sinai, there’s plenty in the Hebrew Bible that appears otherworldly.
Disclosure Day, written by David Koepp from a story by Spielberg, is a chase film about Danny Kelner (Josh O’Connor), a whistleblower for a U.S. government-aligned group called Wardex, intent on studying alien life and technology and keeping their findings suppressed. Danny is a math genius, and in a relationship with Jane, the ex-nun played by Hewson. He’s carrying sacred cargo: a backpack full of flash drives with evidence of spacecrafts and a weird rod made by the alien life forms whose precise capabilities include, but are not limited to, letting you turn invisible or allowing you to control someone else’s body and swap eye colors with them in the process.
In an effort to explain why men in black SUVs are chasing them, Danny shows Jane footage of an alien interrogation. Her response to seeing a small creature tortured by humans is an odd one: She thinks people will worship them as deities.
Here the film stumbles. Jane’s concern about a breakdown in belief may be justified in the realization that we’re not alone, but her leap to calling extraterrestrials “supreme beings” feels unwarranted. Yes, they have impressive technology. Also yes, a human can wield their magic baton MacGuffins, provided they’re wearing surgical gloves.
The faith subplot takes a backseat in the end to a familiar Spielbergian preoccupation: his parents and what he’s inherited from them. We learn the aliens taught Danny math, “the language of the book of the universe,” and made Emily Blunt’s character, Margaret, a Kansas City weatherperson, into a supreme empath, like Star Trek’s Deanna Troi cranked up to 11. As established in The Fabelmans, Spielberg, a product of his engineer father and musician mother, is naturally both. (Gilding the lily of the parental metaphor, there’s a sequence with a train that’s hauling pianos.)
On their phones and on TV, the world will bear witness to “disclosure,” including scenes of emaciated and disemboweled little green men, recalling both images from the Holocaust and current conflicts including Gaza. (Spielberg made it so the coverup for these cruel experiments began in 1947, probably just to align with the year of the Roswell incident, but before that was explained, I was thinking of the UN partition plan.)
Sometime before, Jane makes a call to the abbess at her old nunnery.
Paraphrasing Genesis, she says God made humans his supreme creation, to which the Abbess (Elizabeth Marvel), applies a close reading: “his supreme creation on Earth.”
This view is consistent with rabbinic thought, and the Abbess’ subsequent line, “why would He make such a vast universe, yet save it only for us,” is essentially what the Lubavitcher Rebbe told microbiologist Velvl Greene: “for you to sit here and say there is no life outside of planet Earth is to put limitations on the Creator, and that is not something any of His creatures can do!”
A better question for Jews, perhaps, is if these aliens have a separate covenant with the creator.
If one is interested in the Catholic view, know that Pope Francis said he’d baptize aliens. As for how other sci-fi writers have treated on Jews in Space, Dune scribe Frank Herbert seems to believe the faith was uniquely durable, having made it the only religion from an Earthbound society to survive in an intergalactic reality.
One thing that’s striking about Spielberg’s latest foray into the galaxy is its implications for geo-politics.
The backdrop of Disclosure Day is one of military escalation said to rival the Cuban Missile Crisis. Colin Firth’s foppish Brit bad guy warns that the truth would “tip the balance in an already destabilized world.” This runs counter to works like Watchmen and Independence Day, which posit a great common cause when people are confronted with life forms from outer space.
The difference is that these aliens are no invaders. They come in peace to teach us a lesson in empathy. That, the film seems to say, is the true threat to the world order: that humans behave with humanity.
In the final minutes of the film, the truth comes out and we are given a simple message, conveyed first through click consonants, then a math equation, and finally a single English word: “Listen.”
“I saw that, and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s Shema,’” Breindel said. “If you get it you get it.”
The post Would Judaism have an issue with ‘Disclosure Day?’ appeared first on The Forward.
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14 arrested during rival protests outside Israeli real estate event held at London synagogue
(JTA) — LONDON — Fourteen people were arrested following clashes between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups on Sunday outside an event promoting Israeli real estate being held at a London synagogue.
Seven of those arrested came from pro-Israel groups, while six were affiliated with pro-Palestinian groups, the Metropolitan Police told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Monday.
“The Great Israeli Real Estate Event” had drawn controversy for weeks, with multiple organizations including Amnesty International claiming the event organizers were selling “stolen” Palestinian lands in West Bank settlements and politicians including the mayor of London expressing opposition to the event.
The event organizers, meanwhile, told the Jewish News that all the properties being presented were located within Israel’s internationally recognized borders.
The event took place a day before a U.K. appeals court ruled that last year’s ban of a prominent anti-Israel group, Palestine Action, was legal.
The confrontation on Sunday followed similar ones in New York City and beyond over Israeli real estate events in recent months. A demonstration outside a Manhattan synagogue that was hosting such an event in November during which pro-Palestinian activists threatened violence spurred a new law constraining protests there.
London’s Metropolitan Police estimated that 1,000 people showed up to demonstrate outside Edgware United Synagogue, in northwest London. The department said it had coordinated with the Jewish Community Security Trust and deployed officers to deal with any disruptions. It also set up barriers to separate pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel groups.
During the confrontation, 14 arrests were made, including five for violent disorder, six for racial/religiously aggravated offenses, one for assault on an emergency worker, one for Public Order Act-related offenses, and one for common assault.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews’ acting president, Adam Cohen, said the group was “deeply disturbed at the wholly unjustified protest” outside a synagogue in a statement that reiterated that the event organizers had “publicly refuted claims that the event is marketing real estate over the Green Line” separating Israel from the West Bank.
The “false pretenses seems to be little more than an excuse to harass and intimidate members of the Jewish community,” Cohen said.
The protest was organized by an array of pro-Palestinian groups, including the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians, which issued a public letter criticizing the synagogue, and Jewish anti-Zionist groups. At least one Jewish anti-Zionist was arrested while protesting, according to a post by the groups on Instagram.
Under pressure ahead of the event, the original venue set to host it pulled out on Friday, the Jewish News reported. Registered attendees were sent messages via email and WhatsApp on Friday informing them of the change and learned about the new venue via an email at 11 p.m. Saturday that told them there would be ID checks and metal detectors at the doors.
The change in venue came following criticism from not just anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian organizations, but national politicians. Close to 100 members of parliament wrote a letter to Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper calling on her to investigate what they said was event at which “land in cities and towns built on the forced displacement of Palestinian people including properties in Israeli settlements across the occupied West Bank will be available for purchase.”
They also argued allowing the sale of these properties would contribute to settlement expansion, which the U.K. government regards as a violation of international law.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan also expressed “concerns” about the event on Friday after Green Party leader Zack Polanski, a prominent critic of Israel, asked him about it during a public availability.
“I condemn any attempt to sell property in the settlements, be that in London or anywhere else in the world,” Khan said. “I share concerns about the Great Israeli Real Estate taking place in our city, which I oppose.”
The Board of Deputies said it was “very disappointing” that public figures had not acknowledged the event organizers’ claims about no West Bank properties being presented “and instead inflamed tensions through partial and misleading commentary.”
This latest confrontation with anti-Israel demonstrators comes at a time of heightened tension in the U.K. Jewish community, and particularly in Jewish neighborhoods in London, where many residents feel unsafe after a string of incidents including the arson of four Hatzola ambulances in March; attempted attacks on three synagogues; and the stabbing of two Jewish men in the Orthodox neighborhood of Golders Green in late April. Dozens of people have been arrested in connection with the incidents.
As part of a crackdown meant to protect Jewish communities, the British government has adopted policies that give law enforcement new latitude to constrain protests.
“New measures under the Crime and Policing Act, called for by the Board and community partners, will from the end of the month give police new powers to impose conditions on protests near places of worship,” Cohen said. “We are calling on the police to ensure such protests are kept a significant distance from places of worship to prevent intimidation to members of the Jewish community.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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