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NYC voters elected a BDS mayor. Voters in my city went much farther.
I first declared myself a Zionist when I was 10 years old in 1981, singing the song of Camp Young Judaea Sprout Lake, which went like this: “We are Young Judaeans, we have a story to tell. Too young for Tel Yehudah, but Zionists just as well.” Tel Yehudah was the high school age camp of Young Judaea, the year-round, non-denominational Zionist “movement” founded in 1909.
I was deeply involved in Young Judaea through my high school graduation in 1988. At the time, 40 years after the creation of the state of Israel, being a Zionist was not controversial. But Zionism as a “‘movement” felt fossilized. Its main goal had been achieved generations earlier, but we were still learning about the pre-state ‘Zionist thinkers.” The question of Jewish political autonomy in our ancient homeland had long since been settled. Some Israelis laughed at us. Israel was their country, not a movement.
Flash forward another 35 years and Zionism is very far from being a consensus ideology. We have seen anti-Zionism rise to prominence in New York City with the election of Zohran Mamdani. But it has arguably has reached its highest pitch here in my current city of Somerville, Massachusetts, where 55% of the electorate recently answered “yes” to the following non-binding ballot measure:
“Shall the Mayor of Somerville and all Somerville elected leaders be instructed to end all current city business and prohibit future city investments and contracts with companies as long as such companies engage in business that sustains Israel’s apartheid, genocide and illegal occupation of Palestine?”
This is possibly the most vociferously anti-Israel ballot measure that has been passed by any municipality in the country, making Somerville the unofficial capital of anti-Zionism. Many may criticize this as radically outside the mainstream, but the leaders of Somerville for Palestine, who spearheaded the measure, would take such criticism as a badge of honor. They call it leading on the issue.
Since my high school days, until Oct. 7, 2023, I hadn’t given much thought to Zionism. I never had a great urge to move to Israel. I lived there for a year before and after college. I turned my Jewish engagement into more of a religious enterprise than a political one. But, like many Jews, I have a wide group of friends and family there, and Oct. 7 and its aftershocks rekindled my convictions that Jews cannot rely on anyone else to secure our own safety. I am once again an active Zionist.
But, being a Zionist in Somerville is, frankly, exhausting. My post-Oct. 7 “Stand with Israel” sign was repeatedly stolen and vandalized just a few months into the war. This included a note from someone taped to the sign that ended in “Heil Hitler.”
In Somerville, there have been an ongoing parade of actions meant to isolate Israel and label it as the sole aggressor in the conflict. This included a hastily organized ceasefire resolution in January 2024 that originally did not condemn Hamas’ original attack. Following some last-minute scrambling that led to some improvements in the text, such as condemning Hamas, the measure passed 9-2.
Brian Sokol holds a sign opposing an Israel boycott ballot initiative in Somerville, Massachusetts, in 2025. (Courtesy Sokol)
In response, a group called “Shalom Somerville” was formed. This group counters the anti-Zionist narrative and actions and shares a more nuanced view of the conflict. It includes people from across the religious and political spectrum, all of whom agree on the basic idea that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state. Within that framework, a large majority of the group does not support the current Israeli government or how Israel conducted the war.
Shalom Somerville has had its work cut out for it.
There has been a “standout” for Palestine outside the high school nearly every day. Throughout 2024 and 2025, many city community events have been disrupted by Palestinian activists. This includes Pride events, Disability events, film screenings, local markets, and festivals and an endless stream of graffiti. My own appointment to Somerville’s Human Rights Commission was also opposed by a letter-writing campaign on the basis of my professed Zionism. Protesters — Jewish and not — even showed up to the city’s Hanukkah celebration.
One additional key feature of local anti-Zionism is the extent to which it has divided the Jewish community itself. Somerville for Palestine has amplified the voices of Jews who agree with them. Several editorials signed by lists of self-identifying Jews have appeared in local newspapers. Local synagogues have had to struggle not to alienate either side in order to sustain their membership and some modicum of Jewish unity, with at least one issuing a formal non-statement that left frustrated people on both sides of the issue. Our sanctuaries are no longer sanctuaries.
But the biggest skirmish was the ballot measure. It was originally proposed in March 2025. The City Council meeting that voted whether the question could go directly to the ballot was attended by Somerville for Palestine activists, with their keffiyehs, signs, songs and chants. The City Council decided not to send the measure directly to ballot, but to require ballot supporters to gather the requisite number of signatures (approximately 5,800). As those opposing the ballot passed the chanting crowds while leaving the meeting, some were insulted and spat upon. The local head of the New England ADL, a Somerville resident who also spoke at the meeting, had to be escorted to her car by police officers. Thus began months of canvassing where the ballot measure was peddled in every major town square.
Meanwhile, Shalom Somerville focused on preparing for the November vote. We decided to highlight the impact of the measure on Somerville, while also noting that the measure would not have any real effect on Palestinians in Gaza. Despite our objections to the language of the measure, we did not want to be litigating the war. We wanted our local officials to “focus on Somerville,“ not Israel and Palestine. For example, we emphasized that boycotting the construction equipment giant Caterpillar would make it much harder to rebuild our schools and roads, and that boycotting HP, the supplier of laptops for our schools, would cost the schools more money and negatively affect local students and teachers.
We spent the summer organizing and raising funds. When we did start sending out mailers and creating social media ads and posts, we were called carpetbaggers. The campaign also raised several legal issues with the ballot approval process, including the lack of a 150-word pro and con discussion on the ballot itself. Lacking this, less engaged voters were more likely to see it as a simple vote for or against genocide, which the text proclaims as if this were a non-controversial, established fact. These court challenges were called anti-democratic. Both the outside influence and undemocratic charges also tapped into myths of hidden Jewish wealth and power.
The final election result should be understood as a split decision. The ballot passed, but not by a landslide. More importantly, Jake Wilson, the mayoral candidate who said he would not implement the measure, beat Willie Burnley, Jr., who pledged to enact it. This could be taken to mean that the majority of voters either were comfortable with the “statement of conscience” but not with the prospect of implementation. Or, more likely, voters simply had higher priorities in their choices for city government. Voters were focused on Somerville after all.
At left: Somerville for Palestine supporters celebrate a projected win for Question 3, a non-binding resolution imploring the Boston suburb to divest from companies that do business with Israel, Nov. 4, 2025; a still from an ad opposing the measure paid for by a local Jewish group. (Screenshot via Instagram; Screenshot via YouTube)
The ballot measure was just a beginning. The proponents will now push at every turn to implement it. And Shalom Somerville will push back. All of this, will happen regardless of events on the ground in the Middle East or issues we could be working on together in Somerville. The ceasefire currently in place made barely a ripple in the local political climate. Shalom Somerville is also exploring ways to not just react to anti-Israel efforts but to engage positively in creating spaces for dialogue and deeper understanding of Israel and Palestine.
As one of the leaders of Shalom Somerville said after the election, Jews know how to be in the minority and continue to fight for our own dignity. We have done that throughout history. We had grown unaccustomed to this need here in America, but we have tapped back into that deep, generational knowledge. As a first step, we have found each other, learned to support each other, disagreed civilly, relied on each other’s skills, built coalitions, and fought back. Like the first Young Judaeans way back in 1909, we have started a new movement.
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At Berlin screening, former Israeli hostages see film about their captivity rewritten after redemption
(JTA) — BERLIN — They stood outside Berlin’s Babylon theater, bundled against the cold, laughing and dragging on cigarettes: the Cunio twins David and Eitan, and their younger brother Ariel.
David and Ariel were among the last Israeli hostages released in October from Hamas captivity, after 738 days. Their presence in Berlin — for a screening of a film about them, now recut with a redemptive ending — felt almost like an apparition. On the other side of two heavy glass doors were hundreds of theatergoers, people who had long waited for this moment.
The brothers and their extended family were in Berlin for a second premiere of Tom Shoval’s film “Letter to David.” The original film, shown in 2025 at the Berlin International Film Festival, or Berlinale, dove deep into the struggles of a family whose members had been abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz on Oct. 7, 2023. By then, six kidnapped members of the family, including three children, had been freed. But David and Ariel remained in captivity.
“Last year I was standing before the screening with a poster of David and Ariel. I was determined, every time I showed the film, to say that it’s an unfinished film,” Shoval told the sold-out audience at the theater in former East Berlin.
“And now I’m standing here. I have David in the audience, and I have Ariel in the audience,” he continued. “This is a precious, precious moment.”
The film “is a testament to love, hope and all the people who did not give up during the two years I was in captivity,” David Cunio said in Hebrew, standing on the stage with his extended family. “You gave me a voice when I could not be present. You were there for me.”
The film’s second showing came as tensions over the war in Gaza and Germany’s support for Israel roiled the Berlinale. After the jury’s president, director Wim Wenders, brushed off a journalist’s exhortation for the festival to take a stand against Israel, the Indian author Arundhati Roy announced she would not attend, and some 80 filmmakers and stars signed an open letter of protest.
Festival director Tricia Tuttle issued a statement saying that “artists should not be expected to comment on all broader debates about a festival’s previous or current practices over which they have no control. Nor should they be expected to speak on every political issue raised to them unless they want to.”
Journalists and filmmakers continued to raise the issue, even on the festival’s final weekend, when some award winners — including the Syrian-Palestinian director Abdullah Al-Khatib, who won best debut film — swatted back at the festival jury, criticizing what they see as Germany’s general support for Israel. Al-Khatib’s allegation that Germany has been “partners in the genocide in Gaza by Israel” prompted a German minister to walk out of the awards ceremony on Sunday.
Friday’s screening of “Letter to David” was by contrast a love fest, and the two police cars out front and uniformed officers circulating inside appeared to have little to do. The audience gave the entire family a standing ovation before the screening.
“I think this is a piece of history,” audience member Nirit Bialer, an Israeli who has lived for years in Berlin, said in an interview. “Just seeing the family, and just following the story about this family on the media, going to the Hostages Square in Israel every time I was there in the last two years: Wow, I’m speechless.”
The film’s original ending showed twins David and Eitan Cunio as actors, grappling with each other in an embrace that is both tender and violent, in a scene from Shoval’s feature film, “Youth,” screened at the Berlinale in 2013.
That ending now segues into a new conclusion, in which the reunited Cunio family embraces. They also view the film together, and Shoval captures their faces as the projector beams from behind.
Shoval said in an interview that he had not changed anything in the first part of the film. “I wanted to leave it as a time capsule, in a way, of how we perceived it back a year ago,” he said.
Though he had been invited to be with the family at their reunion, he chose not to, explaining, “I thought it’s a moment that belongs to them and not to me.”
But he spoke with David soon after he was released. And shortly afterward, he visited Sharon and David Cunio at their home. “I came in the morning and we sat until sunset together and we talked. Even when I’m thinking about it now, I’m getting emotional, because it was really…” He paused. “You’re waiting for a moment for this for so long.”
The Friday screening was not an official part of the Berlinale, but the beleaguered festival director Tuttle made a point of taking the stage herself. The film has been “finished in the way that Tom only hoped and dreamed and believed that he would be able to finish it,” she told the audience.
“We were horrified along with the world and all of you when David Cunio and many members of his family were abducted by Hamas,” she said. And on their release “we rejoiced with everyone as well.”
Saying that the new version was completed too late to be included in the festival schedule, Tuttle thanked two co-production companies that work closely with Israeli artists for backing Friday’s screening: the Israel-based Green Productions and the Berlin-based Future Narrative Fund.
Audience members seemed loath to leave the theater after the screening, lingering over what some described as mix of happiness and worry.
“The fact that David is able to see the movie makes us see the movie in a different way,” commented Konstantin, who had seen the original version last year. A young Jewish actor who lives in Berlin, he asked that his full name not be used, out of concerns about antisemitism. “With the ending, it’s like a full circle, completed.”
Seeing the film again with the Cunio family present “was very uplifting and very happy,” said Berliner Julia Kopp, who also saw the film last year. “But at the same time, it’s not a happy ending … I also have a bit of a heavy heart,” worrying about “how life will go on for them.”
Both brothers have indicated that reentry into everyday life has been challenging after two years of captivity for them and two years of traumatized advocacy by their loved ones. And Ariel Cunio and his partner Arbel Yehud, who was held in captivity until January, have raised nearly $1.8 million since launching a crowdfunding campaign last week aimed at allowing them the time and space to “come back to life.”
A crowdfunding campaign launched on behalf of David and Sharon Cunio their twin daughters, also former hostages, says, “The family not only has to deal with the trauma that follows being held hostage and the events that transpired on October 7th, but also needs to rebuild their entire lives from scratch.”
Shoval said the film — and the screening — offered a vision for what a more settled future might look like.
“For me, the film is about the unification of the brotherhood, and what that means to be torn apart from each other, but also to get back,” Shoval said. “They can sit in the theater and they can see themselves. They can see what they missed, what happened. They can project about the past, about the present. This is a power of cinema, I feel. It felt natural for me to do that: to bring them back.”
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He may have been the world’s most famous mime, but in this play, he won’t shut up
There is a kind of sublime poetry in Marcel Marceau’s first act.
As a young man in occupied France, Marceau (then Mangel) forged identity papers and shepherded dozens of Jewish children across the Alps to Switzerland. In scenarios where staying quiet was essential for survival, Marceau soothed his charges into silence with his own.
In Marcel on the Train, Ethan Slater and Marshall Pailet’s play of Marceau’s pre-Bip life, the world’s most famous mime is anything but silent.
The action of the play, which bounces through time back to Marcel’s father’s butcher shop and forward to a P.O.W. camp in Vietnam (don’t ask), unfolds over the course of a train ride. Slater’s Marceau is chaperoning four 12-year-old orphans, posing as boy scouts going on a hike.
The kids — played by adults — are a rambunctious lot. Marceau tries to put them at ease juggling invisible swords, performing Buster Keaton-esque pratfalls and exhausting his arsenal of Jewish jokes that circle stereotypes of Jewish mothers or, in one case, a certain mercenary business sense.
Pailet and Slater’s script toggles uncomfortably between poignancy and one-liners with a trickle of bathroom humor (the phrase “pee bucket” recurs more often than you would think.)
The terror of Marceau’s most melancholy escortee, Berthe (Tedra Millan) is undercut somewhat by her early, anachronistic-feeling declaration, “Wow, we’re so fucked.” The bumptious Henri (Alex Wyse) would seem to be probing a troubled relationship with Jewishness and passing, but does that discussion a disservice when he mentions how it wouldn’t be the biggest deal if he “sieged a little heil.” Adolphe (Max Gordon Moore) is described as “an exercise in righteousness” in the script’s character breakdown. Sure, let’s go with that.
The presence of a mute child, Etiennette (Maddie Corman), is tropey and obvious. It doesn’t suggest that she inspired him to abandon speaking in his performances, but it doesn’t dismiss that possibility either.
But the chattiness and contrived functions of the fictive children are made more disappointing by the imaginative staging maneuvering around the shtick. Slater, best known for his role in the Wicked films and as Spongebob in the titular Broadway musical, is a gifted physical performer.
When things quiet down, Pailet’s direction, and the spare set by scenic designer Scott Davis, create meadows of butterflies. Chalk allows Marceau to achieve a kind of practical magic when he writes on the fourth wall. One of the greatest tricks up the show’s sleeve is Aaron Serotsky who plays everyone from Marceau’s father and his cousin Georges to that familiar form of Nazi who takes his torturous time in sniffing out Jews.
Surely the play means to contrast silence and sound (sound design is by Jill BC Du Boff), but I couldn’t help but wonder what this might have looked like as a pantomime.
While the story has been told before, perhaps most notably in the 2020 film Resistance with Jesse Eisenberg, Slater and Pailet were right to realize its inherent stage potential. It’s realized to a point, though their approach at times leans into broad comedy that misunderstands the sensibilities of its subject.
Like Slater, who learned of the mime’s story just a few years ago, Marceau was an early acolyte of Keaton and Chaplin. But by most accounts he cut a more controlled figure — that of a budding artist, not a kid workshopping Borscht Belt bits on preteens.
The show ends with a bittersweet montage of Bip capturing butterflies (not jellyfish — you will probably not be reminded of Mr. Squarepants). It means to frame Marceau’s established style as a maturation that nonetheless retains a kind of innocence, stamped by the kids he rescued.
“You’ll live,” Berthe tells him in a moment of uncertainty. “But I don’t think you’ll grow up.”
In Marceau there was, of course, a kind of Peter Pan. But there’s a difference between being childlike and being sophomoric.
Marcel on the Train is playing through March 26 at Classic Stage Company in New York. Tickets and more information can be found here.
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US soldier who protected Jews in POW camp during WWII to be awarded Medal of Honor
(JTA) — An American soldier who is credited with saving the lives of 200 Jewish comrades in a prisoner of war camp in Germany during World War II will receive the U.S. military’s highest decoration, the Medal of Honor.
The award to Roddie Edmonds, who died in 1985, was announced last week. It comes more than a decade after Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, recognized him as a “Righteous Among the Nations” for his bravery and six years after President Donald Trump recounted his heroism during a Veterans Day parade.
Edmonds, a sergeant from Knoxville, Tennessee, was the highest-ranking soldier among a group taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge in January 2045 when the Nazis asked him to identify the Jews in the group. Understanding that anyone he identified would likely be killed, Edmonds made the decision to have all of the soldiers present themselves as Jews.
When a Nazi challenged him, he famously proclaimed: “We are all Jews here!”
The show of solidarity came to light only after Edmonds’ death, when a Jewish man who had been among the soldiers at the camp shared his recollection with the New York Times as part of an unrelated 2008 story about his decision to sell a New York City townhouse to Richard Nixon when Nixon was having trouble buying an apartment following his resignation as president.
When they found the article several years later, it was the first that Edmonds’ family, including his pastor son Christ Edmonds and his granddaughters, had heard about the incident. Soon they were traveling to Washington, D.C., and Israel for ceremonies honoring Edmonds, one of only five Americans to be credited as Righteous Among the Nations, an honor bestowed by Israel on non-Jews who aided Jews during the Holocaust.
As the family campaigned for a Medal of Honor, Edmonds was also the recipient of bipartisan praise from two American presidents.
“I cannot imagine a greater expression of Christianity than to say, I, too, am a Jew,” President Barack Obama said during remarks at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., on International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2016.
Three years later, President Donald Trump recounted the story at the New York City Veterans Day Parade. “That’s something,” he said. “Master Sergeant Edmonds saved 200 Jewish-Americans — soldiers that day.”
Last week, Trump called Chris Edmonds to invite him to the White House to receive the Medal of Honor on his father’s behalf, Chris Edmonds told local news outlets. The Medal of Honor ceremony is scheduled for March 2.
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