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      ‘Aulcie’ Review: Love and Basketball, in Israel

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      This melodramatic documentary chronicles how Aulcie Perry, a basketball center from New Jersey, became a celebrity in Israel after he joined the Maccabi Tel Aviv team.You may not know the name Aulcie Perry, but in Israel, the former basketball center is a legend — like “Michael Jordan and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar rolled into one,” as a sports journalist in the documentary “Aulcie” puts it. Through interviews, archival images and illustrated sequences, the movie, directed by Dani Menkin, offers a treacly biography of the overseas celebrity athlete whose career was ultimately derailed by an addiction to heroin.Born in Newark, N.J., the 6-foot-10 Perry always saw basketball as his calling. Hoop dreams propelled him to the N.B.A., but after he was promptly cut from the Knicks, Perry took a chance: He accepted a spot with Maccabi Tel Aviv. The team proved a solid fit, and Perry led Maccabi to European Champions Cup victories in 1977 and 1981, before drug addiction and a trafficking charge forced him to shelf his remarkable career.
      There is a contagious thrill to the movie’s portrait of its subject’s achievements, especially his whirlwind romance with the Israeli supermodel Tami Ben Ami. But when it comes to Perry’s moments of struggle, “Aulcie” trips up. Schmaltzy music and fuzzy pictures give a hard tug at the heartstrings, and footage of Perry missing shots on an empty court is frequently deployed as a superficial visual metaphor for hardship. The movie also declines to engage with Israel’s evolving politics or culture and where Perry fit in, opting instead for a melodramatic portrait of a star that fell too soon.AulcieNot rated. In English and Hebrew, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. More

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      For a Fractured Israel, a Film Offers Ominous Lessons From Ancient Past

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      An animated epic depicting a Jewish civil war and the destruction of the Second Temple 2,000 years ago is being seen as a warning in a deeply divided country.JERUSALEM — A gripping political thriller swept across cinema screens in Israel this summer, with the movie prompting impassioned debate and striking a particularly resonant chord with Israel’s precarious new government.Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, a right-winger, urged lawmakers to see the film during a recent, stormy session of Parliament. The new president, Isaac Herzog, a former leader of the center-left Labor Party, said that if he could, he would screen it for every child in the country.The epic, animated drama, “Legend of Destruction,” is being widely cast as a cautionary tale for a profoundly polarized society. The movie’s impact is all the more surprising given that it depicts calamitous events in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago.At that time, the first Jewish revolt against the Romans had devolved into a bloody civil war between rival Jewish factions, culminating in the sacking and destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans and their reconquest of the holy city.The bitter civil war changed the course of Judaism and spawned the Talmudic concept that the fall of Jerusalem was caused by infighting and “sinat chinam,” a Hebrew term usually translated as baseless hatred.A graphic and disturbing portrayal of the existential danger posed by such internecine conflict, the movie is causing soul-searching among its audiences — and has the country’s still-new leader urging that its lessons be heeded.After years of toxic political discourse and division, Mr. Bennett declared national unity as a mission of his diverse coalition, which took power in June and is made up of parties from the center, right and left and, for the first time, a small Arab party.Prime Minister Naftali Bennett urged lawmakers to see the movie during a recent, stormy session of Parliament.Amit Elkayam for The New York TimesAnd he is using the temple parable to warn his detractors, led by his notoriously divisive predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu, to tone down the vitriol and efforts to delegitimize his new government.“You aren’t against the government,” Mr. Bennett told opposition lawmakers before recommending that they see the movie. “You are placing yourselves against the state, against the good of the nation.”The movie opens in 66 A.D., with the Jewish multitudes prostrating themselves in the courtyards of the temple atoning for their sins on Yom Kippur. Four years later the temple lies in smoldering ruins. The Romans retake the city to find the Jewish population exhausted by internal strife, wretched and starving after their rival warlords burned each other’s grain stores.Its pervading sense of apocalyptic doom speaks to the fears of Israelis at a moment when internal strife appears more threatening than outside enemies. Ideology has given way to identity politics and social schisms. The country is torn by religious-secular tensions; ethnic frictions between Jews and Arabs and Jews of Middle Eastern and European descent; and, in recent years, a growing chasm between the supporters and opponents of Mr. Netanyahu.Israeli leaders have increasingly drawn on the lessons from Jewish history, noting that the Jews enjoyed two previous periods of sovereignty in the land in ancient times, but both lasted only about 70 or 80 years — a poignant reminder for the modern state that, founded in 1948, has passed the 70-year mark.“This is the third instance of having a Jewish state in the land of Israel,” Mr. Bennett said in a recent interview. “We messed it up twice before — and primarily because of domestic polarization.”Even before seeing the movie, in his inauguration speech in June — made almost inaudible by constant heckling — he evoked the disputes of the past that “burned our house down on top of us.”And in a speech marking Israel’s 73rd Independence Day, Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, the military chief of staff, referred to the disastrous lack of solidarity in the past. “While Titus’s troops gathered outside Jerusalem,” he said, referring to the forces led by the future Roman emperor, “the Jewish fighters refused to unite within, and when factionalism prevailed over patriotism, the Romans prevailed over the Jews.”Though years in the making, the July release of “Legend of Destruction” could not have been more timely. Its director, Gidi Dar, began working on it as the Arab Spring turned to winter and civil war tore apart neighboring Syria. As it progressed, he said, it became increasingly relevant to Israel.In May, a deadly flash of mob violence between Arabs and Jews raised the specter of civil war. In June, after four inconclusive elections in two years, Mr. Bennett formed his fragile coalition that is still in its first 100 days and governs by a razor-thin majority.“You flourish, then you crash,” Mr. Dar said. “The dangerous moment is now. We are right there.”Gidi Dar, the director, said he began working on the movie as civil war tore apart neighboring Syria. As work on it progressed, he said, it became increasingly relevant to Israel.Amit Elkayam for The New York TimesA secular Israeli, Mr. Dar believes the country is in a spiritual crisis, lacking vision and purpose. Referring to what he called the “super violent discourse” in politics, society and on the internet, he said, “the point is to raise the alarm before it happens, not after. It’s as if our forefathers are telling us across thousands of years ‘See what happened to us. Don’t be complacent.’”The movie uses an innovative technique, being made up of 1,500 paintings. Top Israeli actors narrate their roles against a haunting soundtrack of imagined temple music. Without taking sides, it tells the story of the civil war largely through the eyes of a young Zealot motivated less by religious fanaticism than by disgust over social injustice and corruption.The movie is made up of 1,500 rich paintings.Michael Faust and David Polonsky/Legend of DestructionIsraelis on the left and right have praised the film as an argument for a new atmosphere of tolerance. But not everybody agrees with the message.At least one far-right former lawmaker disputed the narrative of self-destruction, arguing that the Romans were to blame, not Jewish infighting. Others doubted the film would have any lasting impact.Ideological disputes are nothing new for Israelis, said Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler, an expert in democracy in the information age at the Israel Democracy Institute, a research group in Jerusalem. But now, she said, disagreement had turned into hatred, amplified by social media. “You can force every teenager in Israel to watch this movie, but each one would find in it reinforcement of their current ideas and beliefs.” Mr. Netanyahu’s allies have continued to denounce Mr. Bennett’s government as fraudulent, resting on “stolen” votes from the right and reliant on “supporters of terrorism,” meaning Arab lawmakers.And after a Palestinian militant fatally shot an Israeli soldier along the Gaza border last month, Mr. Netanyahu’s supporters sought to capitalize on the event, portraying the army commanders as weak and restrained and Mr. Bennett as having the soldier’s blood on his hands.The public assault on the army’s legitimacy prompted General Kochavi, the chief of staff, to issue a special statement in support of his troops with an ominous warning: “A society that does not back up its soldiers and commanders, also when mistakes are made, will find that there is nobody left to fight for it.”Ahead of Yom Kippur, which falls on Thursday, some Israelis were viewing their government as a last-ditch experiment in whether the right and left, Jews and Arabs, could work together.Failure would be “a disaster,” said Micah Goodman, a philosopher and popular author with whom Mr. Bennett consults. Thinking about internal division as an existential threat was new for Israelis, he said, and likely ignited by the global issue of growing polarization as well as a new sensitivity to Jewish history.The problem, he said, was what he called “the demonization of the government that is trying to end demonization.” More

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      A Rap Song Lays Bare Israel’s Jewish-Arab Fracture — and Goes Viral

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      A Jew and a Palestinian sling slurs at each other, giving voice to hidden prejudice with the aim of overcoming it.BEIT YEHOSHUA, Israel — Uriya Rosenman grew up on Israeli military bases and served as an officer in an elite unit of the army. His father was a combat pilot. His grandfather led the paratroopers who captured the Western Wall from Jordan in 1967.Sameh Zakout, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, grew up in the mixed Arab-Jewish town of Ramla. His family was driven out of its home in the 1948 war of Israeli independence, known to Palestinians as the “Nakba,” or catastrophe. Many of his relatives fled to Gaza.Facing each other in a garage over a small plastic table, the two hurl ethnic insults and clichés at each other, tearing away the veneer of civility overlaying the seething resentments between the Jewish state and its Palestinian minority in a rap video that has gone viral in Israel.The video, “Let’s Talk Straight,” which has garnered more than four million views on social media since May, couldn’t have landed at a more apt time, after the eruption two months ago of Jewish-Arab violence that turned many mixed Israeli cities like Lod and Ramla into Jewish-Arab battlegrounds.By shouting each side’s prejudices at each other, at times seemingly on the verge of violence, Mr. Rosenman and Mr. Zakout have produced a work that dares listeners to move past stereotypes and discover their shared humanity.Mr. Rosenman, 31, says he wants to change Israel from within by challenging its most basic reflexes. “I think that we are scared and are controlled by fear,” he says.Mr. Zakout, 37, wants to change Israel by overcoming their forebears’ traumas. “I am not emphasizing my Palestinian identity,” he says. “I am a human being. Period. We are human beings first.”At first viewing, the video seems like anything but a humanistic enterprise.Mr. Rosenman, the first to speak, launches into a relentless three-minute anti-Palestinian tirade.“Don’t cry racism. Stop the whining. You live in clans, fire rifles at weddings,” he taunts, his body tensed. “Abuse your animals, steal cars, beat your own women. All you care about is Allah and the Nakba and jihad and the honor that controls your urges.”The camera circles them. A guitar screeches.Mr. Zakout tugs at his beard, looks away with disdain. He’s heard it all before, including that oft-repeated line: “I am not a racist, my gardener is Arab.”The duo recorded the song in March and the video in mid-April. Arab-Jewish riots broke out in Israeli cities soon after.Dan Balilty for The New York TimesThen Mr. Zakout, his voice rising, delivers the other side of the most intractable of Middle Eastern stories.“Enough,” he says. “I am a Palestinian and that’s it, so shut up. I don’t support terror, I’m against violence, but 70 years of occupation — of course there’ll be resistance. When you do a barbecue and celebrate independence, the Nakba is my grandmother’s reality. In 1948 you kicked out my family, the food was still warm on the table when you broke into our homes, occupying and then denying. You can’t speak Arabic, you know nothing of your neighbor, you don’t want us to live next to you, but we build your homes.”Mr. Rosenman fidgets. His assertive confidence drains away as he’s whisked through the looking-glass of Arab-Jewish incomprehension.The video pays homage to Joyner Lucas’s “I’m Not Racist,” a similar exploration of the stereotypes and blindness that lock in the Black-white fracture in the United States.Mr. Rosenman, an educator whose job was to explain the conflict to young Israeli soldiers, had grown increasingly frustrated with “how things, with the justification of past traumas for the Jews, were built on rotten foundations.”“Some things about my country are amazing and pure,” he said in an interview. “Some are very rotten. They are not discussed. We are motivated by trauma. We are a post-traumatic society. The Holocaust gives us some sort of back-way legitimacy to not plan for the future, not understand the full picture of the situation here, and to justify action we portray as defending ourselves.”For example, Israel, he believes, should stop building settlements “on what could potentially be a Palestinian state” in the West Bank, because that state is needed for peace.Looking for a way to hold a mirror to society and reveal its hypocrisies, Mr. Rosenman contacted a friend in the music industry, who suggested he meet Mr. Zakout, an actor and rapper.They started talking in June last year, meeting for hours on a dozen occasions, building trust. They recorded the song in Hebrew and Arabic in March and the video in mid-April.Their timing was impeccable. A few weeks later, the latest Gaza war broke out. Jews and Arabs clashed across Israel.Their early conversations were difficult.They argued over 1948. Mr. Zakout talked about his family in Gaza, how he missed them, how he wanted to get to know his relatives who lost their homes. He talked about the Jewish “arrogance that we feel as Arabs, the bigotry.”Mr. Zakout and Mr. Rosenman have become fast friends and are at work on a second project.Dan Balilty for The New York Times“My Israeli friends told me I put them in front of the mirror,” he said.Mr. Rosenman said he understood Mr. Zakout’s longing for a united family. That was natural. But why did Arab armies attack the Jews in 1948? “We were happy with what we got,” he said. “You know we had no other option.”The reaction to the video has been overwhelming, as if it bared something hidden in Israel. Invitations have poured in — to appear at conferences, to participate in documentaries, to host concerts, to record podcasts.“I’ve been waiting for someone to make this video for a long time,” said one commenter, Arik Carmi. “How can we fight each other when we are more like brothers than we will admit to ourselves? Change won’t come before we let go of the hate.”The two men, now friends, are at work on a second project, which will examine how self-criticism in a Jewish and Arab society might bring change. It will ask the question: How can you do better, rather than blaming the government?Mr. Zakout recently met Mr. Rosenman’s grandfather, Yoram Zamosh, who planted the Israeli flag at the Western Wall after Israeli paratroopers stormed into the Old City in Jerusalem during the 1967 war. Most of Mr. Zamosh’s family from Berlin was murdered by the Nazis at the Chelmno extermination camp.“He is a unique and special guy,” Mr. Zakout said of Mr. Zamosh. “He reminds me a little of my grandfather, Abdallah Zakout, his energy, his vibes. When we spoke about his history and pain, I understood his fear, and at the same time he understood my side.”The video aims to bring viewers to that same kind of understanding.“That’s the beginning,” Mr. Zakout said. “We are not going to solve this in a week. But at least it is something, the first step in a long journey.”Mr. Rosenman added: “What we do is meant to scream out loud that we are not scared anymore. We are letting go of our parents’ traumas and building a better future for everyone together.”The last words in the video, from Mr. Zakout, are: “We both have no other country, and this is where the change begins.”They turn to the table in front of them, and silently share a meal of pita and hummus. More

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      Bridging Time, Distance and Distrust, With Music

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      Neta Elkayam, an Israeli singer, plumbs the rich culture of the Moroccan Jews she descended from, and introduces it to new audiences in both countries.Neta Elkayam did not really understand the depth of her dual identity until, in her late 20s, she and a friend took a trip from their home country, Israel, to that of their parents, Morocco.“It was like drugs,” Ms. Elkayam said. “We both felt like we were walking on air. This is how our place needs to feel. I felt home. I felt filled with happiness. I felt like a complete stranger at the same time. A lot of people on the streets looked like me or like people I knew from my childhood.”Now 41, Ms. Elkayam, a singer and visual artist, has since earned a following with recordings of the music of Morocco’s Jews, most of whom left that country decades ago. Ms. Elkayam has joined the ranks of artists from scattered people around the world whose longing for a lost homeland has helped preserve once-thriving cultures.Her connection to her Moroccan heritage led to her latest and most emotional project, with roots in a sprawling transit camp on the outskirts of Marseille, France, that once housed displaced Jews. Many of them were from North Africa, trying to make their way to Israel. Few artifacts remain of life in the camp, called Grand Arenas, which operated from 1945 to 1966, but among them are recordings of Jewish women from the Atlas Mountains in Morocco singing.Ms. Elkayam said she wept the first time she heard the aching, mesmerizing voices of those long-ago Amazighs — often called Berbers, a term some consider derogatory.The Amazighs are an ethnic group largely from North and West Africa who are nowadays mostly Muslim, though there was a significant Jewish Berber minority in Morocco in the past. In present-day Morocco, there is occasional animosity between Arabs and Amazigh, who often say that they feel their culture is neglected by the Arab-majority state.In the recordings, the Jewish women from Morocco sang of displacement and the meaning of home as they headed into a new life in a faraway country, leaving behind all that was familiar.“This is history that you don’t find in books, and you don’t learn at school,” she said in a video interview from her music studio in Jerusalem. “I was crying while listening to the voices of these women. I felt that I needed to make something with it and make it super relevant.”She and her husband, Amit Hai Cohen, a musician, are recording an album, incorporating those old recordings and updating them with electronic beats and elements of jazz.In a way, it is a work she was born into.Ms. Elkayam is recording an album incorporating archival recordings of the singing of Jewish women from the Atlas Mountains in Morocco.Amit Elkayam for The New York TimesMs. Elkayam’s grandparents left Morocco for Israel, more than 2,000 miles away, in the 1950s and 1960s, never to return. They joined an exodus of hundreds of thousands of Jews, most of them drawn to the new state of Israel, that left only a few thousand still in Morocco.She grew up in Netivot, a relatively poor town of Sephardic Jews in southern Israel. Their language, music and food survived in such places — until her parents sent her to boarding school when she was 14, Ms. Elkayam said, she did not know any Ashkenazi Jews — but have faded with time.Ms. Elkayam was very close to her father’s mother, who left Tinghir, an Amazigh village in the Atlas Mountains, in 1956. Sephardic immigrants struggled for years in Israel, and Ms. Elkayam said her grandmother lived inside her memories of home, never fully learning Hebrew or adapting to her new setting. She kept the rhythms of her pastoral life in Morocco, waking at 5 a.m., making bread every day and socializing with other Moroccan exiles.“If it weren’t for the faith and religion and the memories, she wouldn’t have survived,” Ms. Elkayam said. “She lived like she was still in Tinghir. She had a neighbor she spoke Amazigh with. My grandmother wasn’t a happy person, but she was always singing.”Ms. Elkayam’s parents, teachers who were born in Morocco but left when they were young, made their first trip back in 1996. She joked that they brought back nothing but pictures of the cemeteries Jewish tourists visit to trace their family histories.“I never stopped hearing about Morocco,” she said. “We talked about Morocco all the time. Jewish immigrants from Morocco had a lot of troubles and difficulties. That’s why Morocco was always present in their memories.”That longing and sense of displacement, which Ms. Elkayam inherited, is a constant theme in her work, as is a search for her own identity. She said that she barely heard the Amazigh language when she was growing up — other than her grandmother’s occasional chats with the neighbor — and that her mother only spoke Arabic. But she has been working hard on improving the Moroccan Arabic she sings in, and her music videos alternate images of Morocco and Israel.About a million of Israel’s population of nine million are from Morocco or of Moroccan descent, one of the largest demographic groups in the country, and Ms. Elkayam has introduced many of them to the music of their forebears, including artists like the singer Zohra al-Fassiya. Ms. al-Fassiya was a huge star in the Maghreb in the mid-20th century, even performing for Morocco’s royal family. But she moved in 1962 to Israel, where she faded from view, dying in relative obscurity in 1994.It is that work of bridging gaps, across time and nations — and in particular drawing attention to women artists — that makes Ms. Elkayam important, said Christopher Silver, a historian at McGill University in Montreal and an expert on North African Jewish history.“Neta has done incredible work to amplify the voice of singers like Zohra al-Fassiya for a new generation,” he said. “She took some of her most iconic music and quickened the tempo, added new instrumentation, sort of paying homage to the original.”Ms. Elkayam working in her studio. Her grandparents left Morocco for Israel in the 1950s and 1960s, never to return.Amit Elkayam for The New York TimesStarting in the 1960s, Morocco, more than other Arab-majority countries, had cordial unofficial dealings with Israel, though there were no formal relations between them. They even worked together secretly on security issues. Jews who had left began to return as tourists, visiting religious sites, cemeteries and families, and Morocco remains a powerful draw for their descendants.In December, Morocco joined a handful of other Arab states in normalizing diplomatic relations with Israel. The government of King Mohammed VI of Morocco has spurred renewed interest in the country’s Jewish history and culture, hoping to ease discontent over the rapprochement with Israel, viewed by many as a betrayal of the Palestinian cause.A documentary recently broadcast on Moroccan state television, “In Your Eyes, I See My Country,” which has been shown at festivals in Marrakesh and elsewhere, follows Ms. Elkayam and Mr. Cohen, her husband, on a trip to Morocco, including visits to their grandparents’ hometowns. It shows Moroccans embracing her, clutching her hand, even telling her that they remember the names of her grandparents.Being an Arabic-speaking Jew, in both Israel and Morocco, means living with a complex, sometimes conflicting set of expectations, said Aomar Boum, an anthropologist at the University of California Los Angeles, who specializes in Jewish-Muslim relations. In the film, it is clear that Ms. Elkayam is “carrying a heavy weight,” he said. “It’s only the music that connects the dots.”The film, which is scheduled to be shown next month at the Miami Jewish Film Festival, shows her and Mr. Cohen performing concerts for largely Muslim audiences, and it ends with him spending days in his family’s former village, where he dresses in traditional Moroccan clothes and country boys welcome him like a brother.Kamal Hachkar, the film’s Moroccan director, said, “What touched me the most about Neta is that I quickly understood that she sang to repair the wounds of exile.” The documentary, he added, “is a way of defying the fatality of the large history which separated our parents and grandparents and that our generation can recreate links through music, which is a real common territory and melting pot for Jews and Muslims.”The political context is inescapable.“Singing in Arabic is a political statement,” Ms. Elkayam said. “We want to be part of this area, we want to use the language to connect with our neighbors. It isn’t only to remember the past.” More

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      American Evangelicals, Israeli Settlers and a Skeptical Filmmaker

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyAmerican Evangelicals, Israeli Settlers and a Skeptical FilmmakerA new documentary illuminates what the director calls an “unholy alliance” that sharply altered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the Trump administration.Maya Zinshtein, in Tel Aviv, directed “’Til Kingdom Come.”Credit…Amit Elkayam for The New York TimesFeb. 26, 2021Updated 11:42 a.m. ETTEL AVIV — The bear hug between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu and their governments was a partnership like no other the two countries had seen. For four years, Israel was Washington’s favorite foreign-policy arena and Jerusalem its best friend, and the brash new American approach to the Middle East dominated Israel’s national-security discourse and its politics.Far less understood was one of the key underpinnings of that relationship: the intricate symbiosis between evangelical Christians in the United States and religious Jewish settlers in the West Bank. In a new documentary, “’Til Kingdom Come,” the Israeli filmmaker Maya Zinshtein delves into this “unholy alliance,” as she calls it, showing how the settlers reap enormous political support and raise money from evangelicals, who, she argues, directly and indirectly subsidize the settlers’ steady takeover of the West Bank, which the Palestinians want for a future state. In return, evangelicals edge closer to fulfilling the prophecy many adhere to that the second coming of Christ cannot happen without the return of diaspora Jews to the Holy Land.That vision doesn’t end well for the Jews: They must accept Jesus or be massacred and condemned to hell. But the film shows Christian Zionists and right-wing Israelis agreeing to disagree about the End of Days while cooperating, and even exploiting one another, in the here and now — and making the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians more difficult to resolve.“’Til Kingdom Come” examines the ties between American evangelicals and Israeli settlers.Credit…Abraham (Abie) TroenThe film is being released in the United States on Friday, but when it was broadcast in Israel in the fall it led to a wave of guilt and soul-searching, in part for revealing how families in an impoverished Kentucky community are cajoled by their pastor into donating to an Israeli charity despite the country’s wealth, with a tech sector that routinely mints billionaires. But the film is just as likely to teach Christian and Jewish audiences in the United States a great deal about subjects they may have thought they already understood — including how American politics really work.Zinshtein, 39, a Russian-born Israeli, said she was a classic immigrant, with an outsider viewpoint and an ambition to make a mark in her adopted homeland. Here are edited excerpts from an interview with her conducted at her home in Tel Aviv and by phone.You plunged into your project beginning in mid-2017, months before President Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, the first big display of the power of the relationship. What drew you in?When you live in Israel, you’ve heard about the evangelicals, but no more. People talk about “these Christians that love us.” But they don’t get what that love means. It’s this force beneath the surface, which has an agenda, and people just don’t understand it. But I want to know who is influencing my life.What did you expect to witness?It was clear that promises had been made to the evangelicals during the 2016 campaign. But no one expected things to happen so fast. I remember a meeting with one evangelical leader who’d told me, “Be patient, maybe by late 2019 or early 2020, Trump will recognize Jerusalem as the capital.” He did it three months later, and he moved the embassy six months after that. In my plan, the embassy was supposed to be the third act! I was terrified: What do I do now?What’s wrong with the agree-to-disagree collaboration between American evangelicals and Israeli settlers?We have our democracy, and the settlers are a certain percentage of the country. But they have a much bigger influence than their share of the population. And when you have this enormous political power entering our conversation, it changes the balance. Remember the number of Jews in the world, and the number of evangelicals. It’s not an equal relationship, and we are not the stronger partner.My brother’s in the reserves. He’ll get called up in the next war. And there will always be a war here — it’s when, not if. The evangelicals don’t want people to get killed, but they believe war is a sign. In whose name will we fight these wars?Plus, these people have a very specific set of beliefs that drives them. In the film, for example, you see them celebrating the ban on transgender [members of] the American military. You’re signing on with their whole agenda. You cannot take just one part.Money from Evangelical Americans flows to Israeli charities.Credit…Abraham (Abie) TroenThere’s so much attention paid in the film to Christians’ love for Israel. Do you accept that it’s really a form of love?When you start questioning that, Israelis say, “Wait a minute, Maya. Don’t we have enough people who hate us? Finally, someone loves us. Let’s just take it.” But when someone loves you just for being Jewish, there will always be someone who will hate you just for being Jewish. Someone told me, “When they say they love you, they mean they love Jesus. You are just part of the story. You are the key, and you know what happens with the key after the door is open, right? You don’t need it anymore.”Love is really just another word for support, no?But nobody asked, what did this support actually mean? It’s not “support of Israel.” It’s support of a right-wing agenda that many people here wouldn’t agree with.Evangelicals are the only significant power outside Israel that is openly supporting the settlements. No one else does. But the dangerous thing is that they’re turning that into support for Israel. Pastor John Hagee, when he started Christians United for Israel, was all about the settlements. Today you won’t find him talking about the settlements at all. Just “Israel.” The film shows a religious settler telling visiting Christians that they are bit players in a movie in which Jews are the stars.The amazing thing in this relationship is each side thinks the other one is stupid. Each side is trying to trick the other.The access you won was extraordinary. You didn’t just get an entire Kentucky church and its pastors to open up to you and your crew. You filmed inside the powerful Republican Study Committee and at a gala of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, at Mar-a-Lago.It was mind-blowing. You saw all these wealthy Christians and Jews sitting together, saw Christians give testimony about how “before I started to donate to Israel, I had a small shop in Cleveland, and today I have a huge chain of stores, just because I started to donate to Israel.” They think it helps them in their lives.Zinshtein said she made the documentary because “I want to know who is influencing my life.”Credit…Amit Elkayam for The New York TimesHow did you gain that access?The fact that we were Israelis played a crucial role, because we can’t immediately be put in a certain box. If I were a Jew from New York, I’d never have been able to make this film. American Jews are recognized as the other side. We are not. We are part of this bond. The bond is with Israel.You follow the money, showing an elderly Israeli woman who survived a terrorist attack and now gets free food and shoes. If Israel is so wealthy, why does it need foreigners’ help to feed and clothe her?It’s embarrassing. But Israel invests so much in the settlements. Christian money is filling needs created by the settlements. Maybe instead of, I don’t know, building roads in the settlements, we need to take care of our poor. It exposes a much bigger question of priorities.The donors include people in one of America’s poorest counties.I cried so badly. It’s freezing and you’re in a coat and you see kids in a house with no windows coming out with no shoes. Kids with rat bites on their legs. Some Israelis who saw the film asked if they could send money.What do you want the takeaway to be for evangelical viewers?That [Israelis are] not just a Bible, we’re people with a present and a near future. That Israelis and Palestinians want to live in peace. Just because your faith says that God said to Abraham that all this land belongs to the Jewish people — they are not going to suffer the consequences. We are the ones who’ll suffer the consequences, in real life, not just in the afterlife.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘’Til Kingdom Come’ Review: An Unusual Religious Bond

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘’Til Kingdom Come’ Review: An Unusual Religious BondMaya Zinshtein’s revelatory documentary explores the political and philanthropic alliance of American evangelical Christians and Israeli Jews.A scene from the documentary “’Til Kingdom Come,” directed by Maya Zinshtein.Credit…Abraham (Abie) Troen/AbramoramaFeb. 25, 2021Updated 1:23 p.m. ET’Til Kingdom ComeDirected by Maya ZinshteinDocumentary1h 16mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.“’Til Kingdom Come,” the new documentary by Maya Zinshtein, probes the entanglements of politics and prophecy that bind two strange bedfellows: American evangelical Christians and Israeli Jews.The film follows Yael Eckstein, the president of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, and the Kentucky pastors William Bingham III and his son Boyd Bingham IV. The hefty donations that the Binghams’ church makes to Eckstein’s organization — which is advertised through sentimental videos of older Israelis receiving care packages — belies a curious logic: Many Evangelicals believe that the return of Jews to Israel portends Armageddon, leading Christians to the rapture and Jews to hell.[embedded content]Why would Israelis want to court such views? Talking-head interviews with politicians and commentators point to geopolitical opportunism. In recent years, as evangelicals gained a powerful platform under President Trump, Israel’s settler community — which seeks to normalize the occupation of Palestine — sought their support, successfully campaigning for the U.S. embassy to be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.Zinshtein’s patient, observant approach catches her subjects in moments of damning irony: Eckstein smiles awkwardly whenever the End Times are mentioned by her evangelical allies; the Binghams encourage their poverty-stricken congregation to send their spare change to the Holy Land. When a pastor in Bethlehem explains to Bingham IV that his donations support a theocracy that makes Palestinian Christians second-class citizens, Bingham simply insists that it’s all part of God’s plan.Zinshtein’s own Jewish identity brings this doublespeak to a head. In the film’s striking ending, Bingham IV tries to proselytize to the director and her crew during a sermon. He “wants to get them saved right now,” he says. His seeming good will cannot disguise his troubling convictions.’Til Kingdom ComeNot Rated. In Hebrew, Arabic and English, with subtitles. Running time: Running time: 1 hour 16 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More