די יערלעכע פּרעמיע פֿאַר ייִדישער ליטעראַטור, אַ טראַדיציע פֿון דער מאָנטרעאָלער ביבליאָטעק במשך פֿון די פֿאַרגאַנגענע 50 יאָר, זוכט אָריגינעלע ביכער אָנגעשריבן אויף ייִדיש און אַרויסגעלאָזט צווישן דעם 1טן יאַנואַר 2024 און דעם 31סטן דעצעמבער 2025. די מחברים קענען זײַן פֿון אומעטום.

דער מחבר וואָס געווינט די „פּרעמיע פֿאַר ייִדישער ליטעראַטור אויפֿן נאָמען פֿון ד״ר הירש און דבֿורה ראָזענפֿעלד“ וועט באַקומען 1,000$.

אינטערעסאַנט איז וואָס מע האָט הײַיאָר צוגעגעבן אַ נײַע תּקנה: ווערק וואָס זענען טיילווײַז אָדער אין גאַנצן געשאַפֿן דורך „איי־אײַ“ וועלן נישט אָנגענומען ווערן.

פֿריִערדיקע ביכער וואָס האָבן באַקומען דעם פּריז זענען באָריס סאַנדלערס ראָמאַן „אַנטיקלעך פֿונעם סאַקוואָיאַזש“ און בער קאָטלערמאַנס ראָמאַן „דער סוד פֿון ווײַסע בערן“. די תּקנות אָנצוגעבן אויף אַ פּרעמיע קען מען געפֿינען דאָ https://www.jewishpubliclibrary.org/en/jacob-lsaac-segal-awards.

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Nadav Lapid is a filmmaker whose work has become increasingly ferocious in its indictment of Israeli society, nationalism and moral self-deception. His latest film, Yes, is not a plea for Israeli innocence, but rather a savage, obscene, self-implicating reckoning with a country in which language, music, sex and grief have all been drafted into the service of monstrous affirmation.

That he was pushed out of a prestigious international film festival in the name of opposing Israeli state violence is not a victory for moral clarity. It is “an intellectual failure,” to quote an open letter that was published in Le Monde on June 9.

Here’s the backstory: Lapid, a dissident Israeli director based in France, was asked to serve on the jury of the international film festival FID Marseille. After his appointment was announced, the festival’s director, Tsveta Dobreva, started to receive phone calls objecting to the presence of an Israeli director on the film festival jury.

Dobreva initially stood by her decision, yet as pressure intensified, the festival and Lapid mutually agreed that he would give up the jury role. Instead, the festival envisioned a more limited role for Lapid in Marseille, in which he would present his first feature, Policeman (2011), followed by a public discussion. However, even this compromise continued to raise the hackles of those who felt that the mere presence of an Israeli filmmaker at FID Marseille was unacceptable.

After a dozen directors threatened to pull their films from the festival over his participation, Lapid exited — not, it seems, out of a desire to capitulate to his opponents, but rather because he felt insulted that so many in the global filmmaking community felt that his presence in Marseille was an instance of “artwashing” designed to deny, obscure or deflect from the crimes of the Israeli government and the IDF.

How does the presence of a dissident filmmaker make him the representative of the very state he critiques? One can argue about and with Lapid’s films. One can validly choose to love them, attack them or reject them. But first one has to watch them.

That point rests at the heart of the Le Monde letter defending Lapid, collectively signed by 10 prominent actors and directors including Natalie Portman and Jacques Audiard. The case against him is that for a blanket cultural boycott of Israeli artists, fueled by the fact that Yes received support from the Israel Film Fund.

What critics may miss: The Israel Film Fund operates independently of Israel’s government, albeit with taxpayer funding, and has supported films sharply critical of Israeli policy — including last year’s The Sea, an antiwar film about a Palestinian boy that won five Ophir awards, Israel’s equivalent to the Oscars. (After The Sea’s award night victory, Israel’s Culture Minister threatened funding cuts to the ceremony.) Le Monde even reported that the Israel Film Fund stepped in to provide 10% of Lapid’s budget for Yes after the European Union declined to support what they judged to be an anti-Israel project.

Lapid himself has not dismissed the boycott debate. He has called it serious, and has long supported political sanctions against the Israeli state. Nor does he appear to think of the filmmakers who oppose him as enemies. He has suggested that their actions come from powerlessness, anger and immense frustration at political inaction over Gaza.

But he understands that political frustrations can lead to censorship with far-reaching implications.“For a year, it was my film Yes that was being attacked,” he told Le Monde earlier this week. “And then, suddenly, my mere presence became unacceptable. I asked myself: What exactly do they want? That I stop making films? Should I leave France? How far will this go?”

Those are troubling questions. Answering them incorrectly — as Lapid’s critics have — risks turning film festivals into places to virtue signal and perform outrage, rather than opportunities to sit with art that fosters critical thinking and discrimination.

The most recent editions of the Berlin Film Festival illustrate that risk. Berlin has always been a deeply political festival, beginning with its Cold War origins. Since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, the festival has been convulsed by furious debates set off by Israel’s war in Gaza, and amplified by the German government’s iron-clad support for the Jewish state.

Accusatory speeches, open letters and political threats have frequently upstaged the actors and filmmakers on the red carpet. The festival has become political in the way that a rally is political. Instead of the films themselves provoking complicated political conversations, the focus has increasingly been on the inability of the Berlinale — one of Germany’s foremost cultural institutions — to issue a robust defense of freedom of expression while respecting Germany’s historic responsibility to Israel.

Marseille risked a similar mistake. Dobreva, the festival director, warned that the boycott threats over Lapid prevented the festival from programming freely and serving as a place of free thinking. She is absolutely right. A film festival should be able to screen Palestinian films, condemn state violence, interrogate potential moral compromises in film funding and still hold clarity about the fact that an individual artist’s value cannot be reduced to the birthplace listed on his passport.

The collective Palestine Will Save Cinema, which agitated against Lapid’s presence at Marseille, argued that placing Palestinian and Israeli narratives side by side risked turning the devastation of Gaza into a tidy exercise in balance, as if symmetrical programming could smooth away asymmetrical suffering.

That argument is guilty of its own kind of cultural flattening. Lapid’s films have been arguments with and against the country that formed him. In Synonyms (2019), an existential tragicomedy that is Lapid’s most incisive investigation into Israeli and Jewish identity, a young man moves to Paris after completing his military service. There, he tries — and ultimately fails — to transform himself into a Frenchman by repudiating the Hebrew language and severing ties with his family.

In Ahed’s Knee (2021) an Israeli filmmaker is incensed after being asked to choose from a list of approved discussion topics for a Q&A about his work at a community library. The filmmaker’s protest against government censorship swells into a scorching, self-destructive tirade against Israeli culture, with righteous anger warping into paranoia and cruelty.

When I interviewed Lapid about Ahed’s Knee in Cannes, where the film won the jury prize, the director told me that making the film had allowed him to think through a number of tough yet vital questions: “What does it mean to be good in a bad place? And what does being right matter when it detaches you from your most human instincts?”

He added that sick societies present people with bad choices, where “the normal option doesn’t exist.” Yes is the most extreme form he has given to that idea. In Munich, he said the film is vulgar, noisy and brutal because the “collective soul” it depicts is vulgar, noisy and brutal — and because he, too, is “part of the sickness.”

Rejecting false equivalences is not the same thing as reducing every Israeli artist to an emissary of state violence. Film festivals exist, in part, to teach us to see such distinctions. To exclude an artist of Lapid’s stature, temperament and talent is to admit that we no longer trust art, or ourselves, to withstand complexity and contradiction.

Lapid’s case reveals this category error with special force.

The post Cultural boycotts of Israel just reached peak absurdity appeared first on The Forward.

Think of the British painter David Hockney, who died Thursday at 88, and you think of color. 1967’s “A Bigger Splash,” almost certainly his most famous work, is a study in blue so profound that it’s nearly synesthetic: The pool is such a saturated cool that you can feel the water lap your feet, and the sky so rich with California sunlight that your shoulders burn. When Hockney turned more toward landscapes in later years, trees came in every color of the rainbow — here a pink trunk, there a purple — and roads were streaked salmon and teal.

Which makes it stranger that one of the works of his that I find most evocative has no color at all. It’s a 1975 pen and ink drawing of the American Jewish artist R.B. Kitaj, one of Hockney’s dearest friends, sitting on a bench outside an art school in Vienna.

Kitaj, head propped in his hand, looks out toward the left side of the page. His face is the lone area of detail in a scene thrown together with brisk, expressive lines. There is a sense of place around him, but that place is in the act of disappearing. As the scene spreads to the right and lower edges of the page — the areas that would fall outside Kitaj’s line of sight — it ceases to exist. Kitaj’s bench is slatted, rounded and real, but the bench abutting it is depicted in a few brief strokes. The buildings and street are sketched with light attention within what seems to be Kitaj’s periphery line, and are nonexistent beyond it.

The picture is a study of a man in deep focus. Hockney draws Kitaj’s head — and by inference, everything within it — as real and lifelike. But beyond the scope of Kitaj’s vision — the material the world presents him, possibly to be made into art — Hockney shows his surroundings as being valuable only as perspective lines, helping to situate the subject in space.

To be caught thinking is a vulnerable experience. To have someone restore your sense of your own physical self is a shock. By sketching Kitaj in his moment of remove, Hockney gave a renowned and somewhat glamorous friendship a sense of life. And he gave a sense of life, too, to the thing that made his own art so attractive: the impression of a rare and gorgeous intensity of vision, one that could draw a viewer’s attention so completely that it seemed what was on the canvas was the only real thing on earth.

In his drawing of Kitaj, the line is blurred between his subject’s concentration and his own. Is it really that Kitaj is so immersed in the act of seeing — or that Hockney is, his gaze so rapt upon his friend as to make him able to capture, briefly, what it was like to see through Kitaj’s eyes?

From the first days of their friendship at the Royal College of Art, Hockney and Kitaj existed on two planes for one another: human and artistic. As each worked to find the right way to reflect their own humanity in their art, their concepts of both themselves and their work influenced one another. “I was painting about my Jews and my books and Hockney was just coming out of the closet, so I said paint that,” Kitaj once said. And another time: “He switched to his gay culture as I began on my Jewish culture in its first forms.”

When Kitaj married the painter Sandra Fisher in 1983 — after Hockney introduced them in the 1970s — Hockney was his best man. “Those orthodox Rabbis had never seen such a gang under the chuppa,” Hockney told 032c magazine in 2025. At that moment, he said, “life for me had reached a dangerous perfection.”

A “dangerous perfection.” What did that mean? I see a glimpse of the answer in Hockney’s drawing of Kitaj — a sense of connection so complete as to threaten the boundaries of selfhood. At Kitaj’s wedding, Hockney experienced that threat as a kind of transcendence: Look, how wonderful being alive among other people can be. The experience captured in his drawing of Kitaj is different, but related. It’s that of a kind of looking, and seeing, that briefly gives total knowledge.

That kind of completeness is one of the aims of friendship, and also of art. There will be much to miss about Hockney, an artist who was easy to love. But the rare experience of absolute immersion that his best work gave its viewers may have made, out of all he accomplished, the biggest splash.

The post The Jewish friendship that let David Hockney experience ‘dangerous perfection’ appeared first on The Forward.