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The hora, the hora! How Jewish wedding music got that way
(JTA) — When my wife and I were planning our wedding, we thought it might be cool to hire a klezmer band. This was during the first wave of the klezmer revival, when groups like The Klezmatics and The Klezmer Conservatory Band were rediscovering the genre of Jewish wedding music popular for centuries in Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe.
Of course we also wanted to dance to rock ‘n’ roll and needed musicians who could handle Sinatra for our parents’ benefit, so we went with a more typical wedding band. Modernity won out over tradition.
Or did it? Musician and musicologist Uri Schreter argues that the music heard at American Jewish weddings since the 1950s has become a tradition all its own, especially in the way Old World traditions coexist with contemporary pop. In a dissertation he is writing about the politics of Jewish music in the early postwar period, Schreter argues that American Jewish musical traditions — especially among secularized Conservative and Reform Jews — reflect events happening outside the wedding hall, including the Holocaust, the creation of Israel and the rapid assimilation of American Jews.
That will be the subject of a talk he’ll be giving Monday for YIVO, titled “Yiddish to the Core: Wedding Music and Jewish Identity in Postwar New York City.”
Because it’s June — and because I’m busy planning a wedding for one of my kids one year from now — I wanted to speak to Schreter about Jewish weddings and how they got that way. Our Zoom conversation Wednesday touched on the indestructibility of the hora, the role of musicians as “secular clergy” and why my Ashkenazi parents danced the cha-cha-cha.
Born in Tel Aviv, Schreter is pursuing his PhD in historical musicology at Harvard University. He is a composer, pianist and film editor.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
I was struck by your research because we’re helping to plan a child’s wedding now. It’s the first wedding we’ve planned since our own, and we’re still asking the same questions, like, you’ve got to make sure the band can handle the hora and the Motown set and, I don’t know, “Uptown Funk.” Your research explores when that began — when American Jewish weddings began to combine the traditional and secular cultures.
In the period that I’m talking about, post-World War II America, this is already a fact of life for musicians. A lot of my work is based on interviews with musicians from that period, folks now in their 80s and 90s. The oldest one I have started playing professionally in 1947 or ’48. Popular American music was played at Jewish weddings as early as the 1930s, but it’s a question of proportion — how much the wedding would feature foxtrots and swing and Lindy Hop and other popular dance tunes of the day, and how much of it is going to be klezmer music.
In the postwar period, most of the [non-Orthodox] American Jewish weddings would have featured American pop. For musicians who wanted to be in what they called the “club date” business, they needed to be able to do all these things. And some “offices” — a term they used for a business that books wedding bands — would have specialists that they could call on to do a Jewish wedding.
You’re writing about a period when the Conservative movement becomes the dominant American Jewish denomination. They have one foot in tradition, and the other in modernity. What does a wedding look like in 1958 when they’re building the big suburban synagogues?
The difference is not so much denominational but between the wide spectrum of Orthodoxy and the diverse spectrum of what I describe as “secular.”
Meaning non-Orthodox — Reform, Conservative, etc.?
Right. Only in the sense that they are broadly speaking more secular than the Orthodox. And if so they are going to have, for the most part, one, maybe two sets of Jewish dance music — basically a medley of a few Jewish tunes. You might have a wedding where it could be a quarter of the music or even half would be Jewish music, but this would be for families that have a much stronger degree of attachment to traditional Jewish culture, and primarily Yiddish culture.
There’s a few interrelated elements that shape this. Class is an important thing. For lower class communities in some areas, and I am talking primarily about New York, you’d have communities that are a little bit more secluded, probably speaking more Yiddish at home and hanging out more with other Jewish people from similar backgrounds. So these kinds of communities might have as much as a third or half of the music be Jewish, even though they consider themselves secular. It’s actually very similar to an Orthodox wedding, where you might also have half and half [Jewish and “American” music].
Jews in the higher socioeconomic class might, in general, be more Americanized, and want to project a more mainstream American identity. They might have as little as five minutes of Jewish music, just to mark it that they did this. Still, it’s very important for almost all of them to have those five minutes — because it’s one of the things that makes the wedding Jewish. I interviewed couples that were getting married in the ’50s, and a lot of them told me, “You need to have Jewish dance music for this to be a Jewish wedding.”
Composer and pianist Uri Schreter is pursuing his PhD in historical musicology at Harvard University. (Nicole Loeb)
When I was growing up in the 1970s at a suburban Reform synagogue on Long Island, klezmer was never spoken about. I don’t know any parents who owned klezmer albums. Then when I got married a decade later, it was in the middle of the klezmer revival. Am I right about that? Were the ’50s and ’60s fallow periods for klezmer?
You’re definitely right. Up until the mid-1920s, you still have waves of immigration coming from Eastern Europe. So you still have new people feeding this desire for the traditional culture. But as immigration stops and people basically tried to become American, the tides shift away from traditional klezmer.
The other important thing that happens in the period that I’m looking at is both a negative rejection of klezmer and a positive attraction to other new things. Klezmer becomes associated with immigrant culture, so people who are trying to be American don’t want to be associated with it. It also becomes associated with the Holocaust, which is very problematic. Anything sounding Yiddish becomes associated for some people with tragedy.
At the same time, and very much related to this, there’s the rise of Israeli popular culture, and especially Israeli folk songs. A really strong symbol of this is in the summer of 1950, when the Weavers record a song called “Tzena, Tzena,” a Hebrew Israeli song written in the 1940s which becomes a massive hit in America — it’s like number two in the Billboard charts for about 10 weeks. Israeli culture becomes this symbol of hope and the future and a new society that’s inspiring. This is all in very stark contrast to what klezmer represents for people. And a lot of the composers of Israeli folk song of its first decades had this very clearly stated ideology that they’re moving away from Ashkenazi musical traditions and Yiddish.
So the Jewish set at a wedding becomes an Israeli set.
At a typical Conservative wedding in the 1950s and ’60s, you might hear 10 minutes of Jewish music. The first one would be “Hava Nagila,” then they went to “Tzena, Tzena,” then they would do a song called “Artza Alinu,” which is today not very well known, and then “Hevenu Shalom Aleichem.” They are songs that are perceived to be Israeli folk songs, even though if you actually look at their origins, it’s a lot murkier than that. Like two of the songs I just mentioned are actually Hasidic songs that received Hebrew words in pre-state Palestine. Another probably comes from some sort of German, non-Jewish composer in 1900, but is in Hebrew and is perceived to be a representation of Israeli culture.
But even when the repertoire already represents a shift towards what’s easier to digest for American Jewry, the arrangements and the instruments and the musical ornamentation are essentially klezmer. The musicians I spoke to said they did this because they felt that this is the only way that it would actually sound Jewish.
That is to say, to be “Jewish” the music had to gesture towards Ashkenazi and Yiddish, even if it were Israeli and Hebrew. As if Jews wanted to distance themselves from Eastern Europe — but only so far.
Someone like Dave Tarras or the Epstein Brothers, musicians who were really at the forefront of klezmer in New York at the time, were really focused on bringing it closer to Ashkenazi traditions. Ashkenazi Jewish weddings in America are not the totality of Jewish weddings in America, and Israeli music itself is made up of all these different traditions — North African, Middle Eastern, Turkish, Greek — but in effect most of the really popular songs of the time were composed by Ashkenazi composers. Even “Hava Nagila” is based on a melody from the Sadigura Hasidic sect in Eastern Europe.
Of course, if you’re a klezmer musician you’re allergic to “Hava Nagila.”
Then-Vice President Joe Biden dances the hora with his daughter Ashley at her wedding to Howard Krein in Wilmington, Delaware on June 2, 2012. (White House/David Lienemann)
You spoke earlier about Latin music, which seemed to become a Jewish thing in the 1950s and ’60s — I know a few scholars have focused on Jews and Latinos and how Latin musical genres like the mambo and cha-cha-cha became popular in the Catskill Mountain resorts and at Jewish weddings.
Latin music is not exclusively a Jewish thing, but it’s part of American popular culture by the late 40s. But Jews are very eagerly adopting it for sure. In the Catskills, you would often have two separate bands that alternated every evening. One is a Latin band, one is a generic American band playing everything else. And part of that is American Jews wanting to become American. And how do you become American? By doing what Americans do: by appropriating “exotic” cultures, in this case Latin. This is a way of being American.
Jews and Chinese food would be another example.
And by the way, in a similar vein, it also becomes very popular to dance to Israeli folk songs. A lot of people are taking lessons. A lot of people are going to their Jewish Y to learn Israeli folk dance.
I’ve been to Jewish weddings where the “Jewish set” feels very perfunctory — you know, dance a hora or two long enough to lift the couple on chairs and then let’s get to the Motown. Or the Black Eyed Peas because they were smart enough to include the words “Mazel Tov!” in the lyrics to “I Gotta Feeling.”
So that’s why we always hear that song! I will say though, even when the Jewish music appears superficial, it does have this deeper layer of meaning. It’s very interesting how, despite all these changes, and despite the secularization process of American Jewish weddings, the music still connects people to their Jewishness. These pieces of music are so meshed with other religious components. Of course, most people see this as secular. But a lot of people connect to their Jewish identity through elements such as Jewish music, Jewish food, certain Jewish customs that are easier to accommodate in your secular lifestyle, and the music specifically has this kind of flexibility, this fluidity between the sacred and the profane.
That’s beautiful. It sort of makes the musicians secular clergy.
It’s interesting that you say that. In his history of klezmer, Walter Zev Feldman refers to the klezmer — the word itself means “musician” — as a kind of a liminal character, an interstitial character between the secular and the mundane. The music is not liturgical, but when the klezmer or the band is playing, it is an interval woven with all these other religious components and things that have ritual meaning.
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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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