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The End Jew Hatred Movement is spreading across the country — and sparking controversy
(New York Jewish Week) — Last month, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Jewish Democrat, proclaimed April 29 “End Jew Hatred Day,” citing “an urgent need to act against antisemitism in Colorado and across the country.”
Similar proclamations came from New York Rep. Mike Lawler, a Republican, and dozens of other elected officials nationwide.
But in the New York City Council, an identical effort proved controversial. While the overwhelmingly Democratic council approved April 29 as End Jew Hatred Day annually, six council members either abstained from or voted against what organizers had intended to be an unanimous decision.
The initiative behind the proclamations, called the End Jew Hatred Movement, is a relatively new presence based in New York City that is increasingly making its voice known nationally — through rallies, petitions, a relentless press campaign and now in the halls of government. One measure that demonstrates the initiative’s growth is the number of April 29 proclamations. Last year, there were a handful. This year, according to End Jew Hatred, there were 30.
The movement also provided the spark for the unexpected opposition in the New York City Council. Lawmakers who did not support the proclamation said they demurred because the End Jew Hatred Movement, while run by people who say they “set aside politics and ideology,” has been associated with right-wing Jewish activists.
End Jew Hatred doesn’t publicize much about its structure or funding. It is not a registered nonprofit organization, and would not tell the New York Jewish Week its annual budget or how it receives donations.
Its backers call it an unapologetic voice that’s fighting a growing problem, antisemitism, while its critics say it is an attempt to inject hawkish rhetoric into a national effort to combat anti-Jewish persecution. Amid that debate, the movement’s growth, and its successful spearheading of resolutions nationwide, show how an initiative founded by conservative activists has wielded influence in the conversation about antisemitism, even in liberal political spaces.
Here’s what we know about End Jew Hatred, how it’s establishing itself in New York City and beyond, and why its activities are drawing backlash.
A movement founded in the politics of 2020
Founded in New York City near the beginning of the pandemic, End Jew Hatred first drew local attention in October 2020, when it organized a rally in front of the New York Public Library protesting the way its activists said New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo were unfairly targeting Orthodox New Yorkers with public health restrictions.
Haredi New Yorkers and their backers railed against the city’s regulations that year, and claimed that policies limiting group prayer and other religious ceremonies were selectively enforced against their communities.
“Never in my life did I think I would see this type of blatant Jew-hatred from our public officials,” Brooke Goldstein, who founded End Jew Hatred, said at the rally, which drew dozens of protesters. “Singling out New York Jews for blame in the coronavirus spread is unconscionable and discriminatory.”
But while the movement’s first significant action concerned the pandemic, a spokesman for End Jew Hatred said it was inspired by another seismic event that took place in 2020: the racial justice protests and the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement.
“How can we replicate this for the Jewish people?” said Gerard Filitti, senior counsel for the organization Goldstein directs, the Lawfare Project, describing End Jew Hatred’s genesis. “We saw antisemitism shoot up during the pandemic. So it was kind of the right time to launch this idea.”
Since then, in addition to spearheading the proclamations, the initiative has continued holding rallies, protesting the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which aids Palestinian refugees, for “promoting Jew hatred”; speaking out against antisemitism in Berlin, Toronto and other cities around the globe; and, earlier this year, opposing a reported plea bargain for the men who assaulted Joseph Borgen while he was en route to a pro-Israel rally in May 2021. It was also a signatory on a letter to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg protesting the plea deal, and members of the movement showed up to the alleged attackers’ court hearing.
Nearly three years after its launch, the movement remains opaque about its structure, declining to share any financial information or elaborate on its relationship to the Lawfare Project, which bills itself as an “international pro-Israel litigation fund.” In a brief statement to the New York Jewish Week, a spokesperson for End Jew Hatred said the organization accepts donations from local community members and support from like-minded nonprofit groups, though he declined to detail how those donations were processed.
“Our network of activists spans the globe, from New York City to Los Angeles, from Toronto to Berlin,” he said. “Also, the movement is supported by people from all walks of life who donate both their time and money to make the movement a success. Activists are encouraged to fundraise within their community, and some actions have been supported by organizations that have taken part in them.”
Roots in pro-Israel and right-wing activism
The Lawfare Project, Goldstein’s group, has represented Jewish students who settled a discrimination lawsuit with San Francisco State University, and the following year, represented an Israeli organization that settled a suit with the National Lawyers’ Guild, after the guild declined to place the group’s ad in its annual dinner journal.
This year, the group is providing legal aid to a Las Vegas-area Jewish teen who had a swastika drawn onto his back. And it sued the mayor of Barcelona over her decision to sever ties with Tel Aviv.
Goldstein also has a history of right-wing activism and controversial statements. She has made appearances on conservative news networks such as Fox News, One America News and Newsmax. She once said that “there’s no such thing as a Palestinian person,” and on Election Day in 2016, tweeted, “Can I run the anti-anti-islamophobia department in the Trump administration?”
Goldstein has said she sees Ronald Lauder — the philanthropist, World Jewish Congress president and conservative donor — as an ally. In a virtual conversation between the two hosted by Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue Synagogue last year, Goldstein thanked Lauder for his “support and his friendship,” and Lauder called Goldstein “so smart and wonderful.” Lauder was also involved with the movement’s effort to establish End Jew Hatred Day in New York City last year.
Ronald S Lauder, President of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) recorded before a bilateral a conversation with Chancellor Scholz. (Michael Kappeler/Getty Images)
End Jew Hatred has also worked with Dov Hikind, a former Brooklyn Democratic state assemblyman who now runs a group called Americans Against Antisemitism. Hikind’s group has partnered with End Jew Hatred, and he has appeared at its events. Hikind told the New York Jewish Week that his group and End Jew Hatred are “involved in terms of pushing the same agenda.”
Hikind has stirred controversy as well: In 2013, he wore blackface as part of a Purim costume, and in 2005, sponsored a bill that would have allowed police to profile Middle Eastern men on the subway. He was a follower of the late right-wing extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane.
Controversy or consensus?
Even as its right-wing connections have sparked suspicion from progressive activists, End Jew Hatred has garnered support from establishment Jewish groups. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations promoted End Jew Hatred Day on Twitter last week, posting a graphic with the logo of the movement. And the city’s Jewish Community Relations Council also backed the City Council resolution.
“All people, regardless of party affiliation, have a role to play in combating antisemitism and other forms of hatred, and we should not lose sight of that,” a JCRC spokesperson told the New York Jewish Week. “From our perspective, every day should be End Jew Hatred Day.”
Lauder has also advocated the use of the term “Jew hatred” in place of antisemitism in a video published by the World Jewish Congress that has been viewed more than 480,000 times.
“No one is embarrassed anymore when they’re called an antisemite,” he said. “Antisemitism must be called what it really is: Jew hatred.”
That view is not universally shared among antisemitism watchdogs. Holly Huffnagle, the American Jewish Committee’s U.S. director for combating antisemitism, said that the term “Jew hatred” is “jarring” and “makes people stop and think.” But she said the term does not capture the way antisemitism is often expressed via coded conspiratorial language.
“[People] might not know what [the term] antisemitism is, but Jew hatred they know,” she said. “In that sense it can be used to get attention, to help people call it out.”
“On the other hand, the antisemitism we see today, in its primary form, which is conspiratorial, is not captured by the term ‘Jew hatred,’” she added. “I hear from a variety of people that they don’t hate Jews, they’re against Jew hatred, they’re not antisemitic, but they believe that Jews have too much power [or] they control the media.”
And End Jew Hatred’s right-wing ties have also made some progressive activists in its home base of New York City wary of its motives. The lead sponsor of the City Council’s End Jew Hatred Day resolution was Queens Republican Inna Vernikov, a former aide to Hikind who has previously spotlighted antisemitism allegations at the City University of New York.
Her resolution, which passed overwhelmingly, garnered a mix of 14 co-sponsors, including some prominent Jewish Democrats and all six of the council’s Republicans — two of whom have links, respectively, to white supremacists and a person arrested for storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Council Member Inna Vernikov introduced a resolution to create an annual “End Jew Hatred” day in the New York City Council on April 27, 2023. (New York City Council Flickr)
Those right-wing connections were part of what led six progressive council members to either abstain from or vote against the resolution. One of the council members who voted no, Brooklyn’s Shahana Hanif, told the New York Jewish Week that she has participated in multiple actions against antisemitism but opposed the resolution because she didn’t want to endorse End Jew Hatred as a movement.
“Antisemitism is real,” Hanif said. “I understand the urgency. I understand the opportunity when there is a resolution or any kind of symbolic gesture that comes along, that every legislator wants to be united in supporting our Jewish colleagues. But in the same breath, it is our responsibility to know who is leading on these efforts.”
City Comptroller Brad Lander, a prominent Jewish progressive politician, vouched for Hanif’s record of standing up to antisemitism and echoed her concerns. He told the New York Jewish Week that End Jew Hatred’s activists are “right-wingers who have a track record of working very closely with people who foment hatred.”
Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, a progressive group, also opposed the resolution. Rafael Shimunov, a member of the group, said the resolution was “clearly associated with the right,” and noted that at a hearing ahead of the vote, an activist decried bail reform, something right-wing advocates have pushed for years to repeal.
Shimunov also took issue with remarks Vernikov has made about George Soros, the billionaire Jewish liberal megadonor who has become an avatar of right-wing antisemitism, and whom Vernikov called ”an evil man, who happens to be Jewish.” JFREJ activists also noted that also noted that some Republican cosponsors of the bill, such as Vernikov, Vickie Paladino and Joann Ariola, have called for transgender women to be barred from women’s sports at schools and universities. In addition, Paladino has a history of anti-LGBTQ comments. The activists say these views undercut the council members’ calls to oppose hatred directed at Jews.
End Jew Hatred’s supporters dismissed accusations that their cause is right-wing. In a text message, Vernikov told the New York Jewish Week that “this resolution has nothing to do with politics or right-wing extremists.” Hikind also echoed that message.
“Everyone in the Jewish community supported this idea,” Hikind said. “To say it’s just right-wing organizations is dishonest and hypocritical.”
Filliti, the Lawfare counsel, said the aim of the resolution — and End Jew Hatred as a whole — was to send “a unifying message.”
“We’re not looking to make this political,” he said. “We have had so much success with this and we are so happy to see this going forward.”
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5th man charged in March arson of London’s Hatzola ambulances
(JTA) — Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service announced Tuesday that an 18-year-old man has been charged in connection with the March arson attack that destroyed four ambulances owned by Hatzola, a Jewish volunteer emergency service.
Subhan Ahmed, a British national, was charged on Monday with “assisting an offender” in connection with the arson.
The ambulances were set ablaze in the early morning of March 23 in Golders Green, a heavily Jewish neighborhood in London. The incident spurred increased patrols in Jewish communities.
The charge is the latest development in an investigation being led by the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism unit.
Four others have already been charged in connection with the attack.
Three British nationals — 20-year-old Hamza Iqbal, 19-year-old Rehan Khan and 18-year-old Judex Atshatshi — along with a 17-year-old dual British and Pakistani national were all charged in April with “committing arson, destroying or damaging property, and being reckless as to whether life would be endangered.”
The four have remained in custody ahead of a trial planned for January. Ahmed, meanwhile, was released ahead of a June 16 court date.
The ambulance arsons came at the early edge of a wave of incidents that have put London Jews on edge and induced the city’s police force to step up their presence in Jewish communities. The incidents have included multiple incendiary devices placed near synagogues as well as the stabbing in April of two Jewish men in Golders Green. The Metropolitan Police reported last week that antisemitic hate crimes in the capital rose 72% in May.
Following the announcement of Ahmed’s charge, the Community Security Trust, a Jewish organization, thanked the police and the Crown Prosecution Service “for their ongoing work investigating this attack and other arson incidents targeting the Jewish community.”
It added in a statement, “These are very serious allegations, and it is right that those responsible are being held accountable.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Israel boycott battle intensifies at Venice Art Biennale, testing tradition of inclusion
The anti-Israel protests that disrupted the opening of the Venice Art Biennale continue to escalate, with more than 100 artists and curators declaring last week that they will bring legal action against Biennale authorities if their names are not removed from consideration for what in normal times are coveted awards for best artist and best national exhibition.
It’s just the latest battle between activists seeking to shut down Israel’s art exhibition in Venice and the Biennale’s administration who are committed to keeping it open.
Chaos erupted in the streets on the third day of the biennale’s opening last month as demonstrators engulfed the Via Garibaldi chanting Palestinian liberation slogans during their march toward an art exhibit hosted by Israel, held back by Italian police in riot gear. The demonstration was organized by the Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA), a coalition of artists and art industry workers campaigning to ban Israel from participating in the world’s most prestigious art show.
ANGA’s agenda is reverberating throughout the Biennale, which is structured around a main international show that this year is hosting 110 invited artists, 100 national exhibitions and 31 official art shows. Many of the artists now threatening legal action first signed a letter this past March demanding that the directors of the Biennale exclude Israel’s exhibition from the show.
Just before the exhibition opened, the Venice Biennale’s five-member international jury — which oversees the prestigious Golden Lion for best artist and best national pavilion — announced that, in keeping with the spirit of the main international exhibition curated by the late Cameroonian art impresario Koyo Kouoh, who appointed them, it would “refrain from considering those countries whose leaders are currently charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court” — namely, Russia and Israel.
Belu-Simion Fainaru, representing the Israeli pavilion, reportedly responded by threatening that if he were excluded from consideration for the awards, he would sue the Biennale in the European Court of Human rights on grounds of antisemitism and nationality-based discrimination. Facing potential legal liability, all five jurors took the unprecedented step of quitting. The Biennale administration then announced that the juried awards would be replaced with Visitor Lions Awards, a popular vote by visitors to the show.
It’s that substitute award that the ANGA-allied artists are now renouncing.
There also have been attempts from the other end of the political spectrum to silence artists representing South Africa and Australia because of alleged anti-Israeli biases. Indeed, the 2026 Biennale, which opened on May 9 and runs through November 26, has become a referendum on artistic freedom of expression and on the place in the cultural sphere of the movement to boycott Israel. “Boycott the Genocide Pavilion,” the brochure ANGA demonstrators handed out at their demonstration stated, “For decades, the Venice Biennale has handed Israel an international stage to culturewash its occupation of Palestine,” and stated that in doing so Biennale authorities are helping to “normalize the ongoing decimation of an entire population.”
The president of the Venice Biennale, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, has refused to cede ground. “Closing the door to some means making openness to others more fragile,” he argued in an impassioned speech announcing the opening of the Biennale’s 61st International Exhibition, adding, “if the Biennale began selecting not works but affiliations, not visions but passports, it would cease to be what it has always been: a place where the world meets, especially when the world is torn apart.”
Serene space
When I stepped into the Israeli exhibition, it seemed to be an invitation to leave behind the fractious world outside. The transcendent artwork, inspired by Paul Celan’s poetry, consists of a large rectangular pool in a tranquil space where the only interruption is the soothing sound of dripping water.
Given Israel’s destructive bombing campaigns, first in Gaza and now in southern Lebanon, presenting Fainaru and his serene artwork to represent the country is a fraught choice. Fainaru lives in Haifa, one of Israel’s most culturally diverse cities, and is a professor at Haifa University, where he told me the rector is Palestinian and more than 50% of his students are Arabs. Fainaru said that his art is about bringing people together and “collective consciousness,” and he argued it should be viewed outside of the political prism that has roiled the Biennale in recent years. “This environment is becoming more and more about boycott, censorship, limitation of freedom, exclusion,” he said, adding “that’s changing the meaning and role of art.”
Some observers who study censorship say the national pavilions at the Venice Biennale have always functioned as cultural diplomacy and in many instances are a form of “artwashing,” a term that refers to the ways that governments and corporations utilize art exhibits to obscure or gloss over unethical policies.
“Clearly they are an attempt to make a country look better, but on the other hand there is something in the art that exceeds the national ambitions,” Svetlana Mintcheva, former director of programs at the U.S,-based National Coalition Against Censorship, said in a phone interview, adding: “It’s counterproductive to censor because it then homogenizes everyone in that particular country as holding particular ideas and that’s not the case.”
The censorship campaign against Israel and Russia took place against the backdrop of the main international exhibition “In Minor Keys,” which emphasizes anti-colonialist themes and the utility of art as a means of reconnecting to local and indigenous practices. The leitmotif of the show, which primarily emphasizes art from the African diaspora, chimes with ANGA’s agenda to give voice to a Palestinian culture that the group claims has been sidelined by Israel’s “colonial expansion.”
Some artworks in the international exhibition address the Palestinian displacement and trauma, while none deal with Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre or Israel’s wounds.
Gazan artist Mohammed Joha, who signed a March 26 ANGA petition calling for the exclusion of the Israeli pavilion, is exhibiting No Shelter, which the artist made while witnessing the conflict in Gaza. The work consists of collages made from discarded paper, fabric and cardboard intended to call attention to the cycles of destruction and rebuilding that Palestinians endure. Haitian artist Manuel Mathieu’s Genocide portrays a dark sea alongside what looks like pummeled charred flesh. British Ethiopian artist Theo Eshetu’s Garden of the Broken Hearted includes a rotating dais with a live olive tree, a symbol of Palestinian resilience.
And Kouoh and her team gave pride of place in her show to artists who have been victims of Israel’s conflicts. The very first exhibit to greet visitors at the entrance of the massive Arsenale, a brick linear hall serves as the main exhibition space, which t originally was part of Venice’s Renaissance-era ship building complex, features the poem “If I must Die,” by Palestinian poet Refaat al-Areer, which he posted to social media in late 2023, about a month before he was killed along with several of his family members by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza. The poem, which has become a rallying cry for Palestinian activists, sits below a canvas portraying a disembodied face with penetrating eyes against a fractured background by Issa Samb, a Senegalese artist known for his anti-colonial themes.
The subsequent exhibition at the Arsenale is a monumental multi-media installation titled Khalil by Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi, a former refugee from the 1976 Lebanese Civil war. Sabsabi is also representing Australia at its national pavilion in the nearby Giardini fairground.
Khalil, which was originally intended to be displayed at the Australian Pavilion, was intended as a meditation on Sufi mysticism. It consists of digital projections on a canvas painted in acrylic with swirling shapes, accompanied by sonorous background music and the piped in scent of Oud, which is used in Middle Eastern perfumery.
But Kouoh’s invitation to Sabsabi to exhibit at the Arsenale, which she extended after he was temporarily disinvited from showing the work at the Australian Pavilion, appears to have as much to do with his notoriety as it does his artistic merit. Sabsabi’s commission to exhibit at the Australian Pavilion was canceled after conservative Australian members of parliament and right-wing newspapers denounced him as promoting antisemitism and terrorism over work he had produced in the past, notably YOU, a 2007 multimedia piece that portrays multiple images of former leader Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Australia’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), where the You is on permanent display, originally described the artwork on its website as “obscuring Nasrallah’s face with beams of light that shine from his eyes and mouth, suggestive of a divine illumination.” But last year, after Sabsabi was dropped from representing the Australian Pavilion, the MCA engaged in an act of self-censorship by removing the section of text deifying Nasrallah and updating the description of the artwork to inform viewers that: “The Australian Government listed the entirety of Hezbollah as a proscribed terrorist organization in 2021.”
Meanwhile, subsequent larger furor in the international arts community over Sabsabi’s being censored led to an independent review, which resulted in the reinstatement of his invitation to show at the Australian Pavilion, greatly raising his profile.
Another controversial figure is Gabrielle Goliath, the video and performance artist invited to represent South Africa, was the only artist to be officially banned. Elegy, the work she had planned to show, is a performative piece about gender and LGBT violence that has also addressed the killing and displacement of Palestinian women. But Goliath’s commission was canceled and the South African pavilion shuttered by the country’s culture minister Gayton McKenzie, a vocal supporter of Israel, who reportedly deemed Elegy “highly divisive in nature and relates to an ongoing international conflict that is widely polarizing.”
After an unsuccessful lawsuit accusing the South African government of unlawfully revoking her commission, Goliath was relegated to presenting Elegy in a rented church in Venice. This version of the work she exhibited there features eight “funereal screens,” with women singing and commemorating female victims of violence, including a murdered South African student and the Palestinian poet Heba Abunada, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Gaza in 2023.
The closing of the South African pavilion didn’t stifle Goliath’s voice and, as with Sabsabi, the controversy over her being canceled may have given her a larger platform. After Venice, Elegy will be traveling to London before moving onto Milan.
It’s difficult to imagine Fainaru’s message of “collective consciousness” finding a similar welcome in arts venues throughout Europe and the United States.
Recent events in Venice and elsewhere suggest that the cultural boycott campaign is gaining momentum, putting freedom of expression under increasing strain. And it’s not just principles that are at stake. Closing Israel’s exhibition in Venice and further marginalizing Israeli artists works at cross-purposes with efforts to achieve mutual understanding and peace in the Mideast. “The price of cultural boycotts is quite high, says Mintcheva of the National Coalition Against Censorship, “because you limit any kind of exchange and you limit understanding of dissent within a country like Israel.”
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Their sons are fighting for Israel, and it’s driving them mad
Oxygen and A Burning Man, two films showing at the Israel Film Center Festival, zero in on the deep-seated anxiety Israeli parents face when their sons are called to duty. Though both are flawed, each captures the universal experience of parents yearning to protect a child from outside forces that they cannot control, yet on some level helped create. They tell personal stories that are also political.
The films evoke a world where war and the threat of war are constants. The sound of warning sirens and drones abound. A repeated scene in Oxygen features apartment dwellers dashing down darkened stairways to the basement for shelter as the alerting alarms shriek in the distance.
Oxygen and A Burning Man are singularly Israeli films — I’m not sure they could be made anywhere else — and on many fronts they are stunners.
Netalie Braun’s Oxygen forges a claustrophobic space. Even the title summons forth the image of gasping for air.
The opening scene metaphorically hints at airless entrapment. Anat (brilliantly played by Dana Igvy) and her child are romping about in the waves. They are neck high in water and appear to be in the middle of the ocean. The moment conjures a nostalgic portrait, but a touch of surreal menace is also present. So too is the openly erotic relationship between mother and son, bordering on incest. They touch each other and their bodies intertwine. And later, when her son Ido (Ben Sultan) is an adult, Anat becomes even more obsessed with him.
Though Ido completes his tour of duty and is coming home, as skirmishes break out on the northern border, he volunteers to return to combat. Anat feels abandoned, betrayed and enraged. Her over-protective maternal instincts kick into high gear as she sets out to get her son discharged from duty. Storming onto the off-limits army base to confront the powers that be, Anat succeeds only in demeaning herself and publicly humiliating her already infantilized son.
Anat’s life is further complicated by her relationship with her larger-than-life warrior father (film producer Marek Rozenbaum) who suffers intense PTSD episodes thanks to his experiences in earlier wars. Sweating and shaking, he belly crawls across the living room floor as if heading to a foxhole. Anat blames his jingoistic furor for boosting Ido’s determination to be a military hero. “You wanted him to be a martyr,” she accuses her father.
He, in turn, reminds her that she gave her written permission for Ido to serve even though she had every right to refuse on the grounds that he was an only son. Anat has grown opposed to Israel’s policies, perhaps even moving towards pacifism, and these feelings are at odds with her own national tribalism. Duality is everywhere.
The final section of the film is enigmatic. It’s unclear to me if what we’re witnessing is real or Anat’s dreams or imaginings or combinations thereof.
She has managed to get her son a temporary leave of absence to celebrate his birthday, which slowly morphs into an explosive celebration that feels more like purgatory than a joyous occasion.
“My mother would do anything for me!” Ido bellows and the large crowd at the shindig repeats the words, growing louder with each repetition. “Anything!” “Anything!”
In a last ditch effort to save him from returning to the base, Anat drugs him, rendering him unconscious. She’s driving away with him, blindfolded and shackled in the passenger seat.
At the coda, he has shape-shifted into a child again and she’s carrying him, cradled in her arms, onto a ferry’s empty vehicle deck. No cars. No workers.
What’s happening in this flight of fancy? Anat successfully protecting her son who will always be a baby in her eyes? Still, one wonders where her adult son is at this point in the story. Perhaps I’m being too literal-minded.
I wish I could say the film’s resolution is hauntingly ambiguous, but alas for this viewer, it’s just confusing. Still, despite the shortcomings, the film starkly brings to life the anguished experiences of a parent and an adult son trying to survive and failing dismally in a war-ravaged universe that celebrates nationalism and extols sacrifice, coupled with a particularly unsettling mom-son relationship.
Eyal Halfon’s A Burning Man is the more successful of the two films. Set outside a remote army base on a stretch of endless sun-baked desert it immediately elicits an atmosphere of oppressive tedium, pointlessness and futility. It has its Beckettian elements and absurdity is never far from the surface.
Yonah (Shai Avivi who gives a complex understated performance) cannot let go of his child, Omer (Ran Kaplan) and instead of depositing his son at the bus terminal to make the trip on his own, he camouflages his own anxiety by lightly dubbing the three-hour drive across the flat no man’s land a father-son road trip. Throughout much of the ride, Omer is sleeping and when they arrive at the military outpost he departs for his tour of duty with a wave of the hand.
Driving home, Yonah sights a convoy of military vehicles on flatbeds heading towards the garrison, their presence further provoking his deepest fears. He spins around and speeds back to the base.
He asks one of the drivers what the armored carriers will be used for. “Maybe maneuvers, maybe exercises,” he shrugs, not especially interested. But in an unexpected gesture of friendship he gives Yonah a sandwich. The scene is at once comic, poignant and unexpected.
Yonah’s most trenchant and arguably least subtle encounter is with an aging motorcyclist (Benny Avni) who brags about his son having dumped the national service to make animated films instead of working for “Netanyahu’s freaks.” The usually impassive Yonah is triggered, accusing the man’s son of being a “shirker,” “a privileged leech.” It’s a confrontation many Israeli parents, especially those who have children serving tours of duty, might find all too relatable.
Yet Yonah, like Anat, is an amalgam of contradictions when it comes to politics. Later in the film, he meets up with a deserter and desperately tries to defend him when the arresting officers arrive on the scene. They lock arms with the defector, marching him down the hill away from Yonah who screams words of encouragement to him as the threesome recede into the distance.
Let’s not forget our hero’s name is “Yonah” (translation Dove, bird of peace). It’s heavy-handed. I could also have done without the repeated closeups of babblers, small desert birds, known for their cooperative social behavior. Creatures who embody life lessons I suppose.
At one point, Yonah’s zealously religious real estate agent (Vladimir Friedman) arrives on the scene sporting a yarmulke, tzitzit, and frequently quoting biblical text. He is there both to try to sell Yonah an apartment but also to help a fellow Jew who he understand is in trouble. But nothing goes right. Yonah does not welcome his company, his car has broken down and he grows increasingly terrified in the desolate desert, especially as night falls. This segment has some great comic moments.
Along the way, Yonah enjoys an erotic brush with a nubile young woman who is part of a hippie commune, and is helping to set up a “Burning Man” festival in the desert. It’s inspired, she says, by the annual countercultural event in Nevada.
In the final scene, we’re presented with a stoned Yonah dancing wildly about, first by himself in a psychedelically altered desert and then in the middle of the pop-up festival, which is even more hallucinogenic with its strobe lights flashing, music blasting and congested crowds stomping and gyrating. Jonah’s dancing becoming progressively more intense and out of control.
But in the end, it is a hollow, totally meaningless Bacchanalian eruption. The scene takes on a mythic flavor, punctuating both visually and emotionally, all the events that have led to this moment. Yonah is a burning man. He, along with Anat, both living in a neverending combat zone and forever anguished over their sons’ potential fates, have perhaps become a new Israeli archetype.
‘Oxygen’ and ‘A Burning Man’ are being shown as part of the 14th annual Israel Film Center Festival in New York City, June 9-16.
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