Jews and Judaism

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Television

      To Boldly Explore the Jewish Roots of ‘Star Trek’

      by

      LOS ANGELES — Adam Nimoy gazed across a museum gallery filled with “Star Trek” stage sets, starship replicas, space aliens, fading costumes and props (think phaser, set to stun). The sounds of a beam-me-up transporter wafted across the room. Over his shoulder, a wall was filled with an enormous photograph of his father — Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock on the show — dressed in his Starfleet uniform, his fingers splayed in the familiar Vulcan “live long and prosper” greeting.But that gesture, Adam Nimoy noted as he led a visitor through this exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center, was more than a symbol of the television series that defined his father’s long career playing the part-Vulcan, part-human Spock. It is derived from part of a Hebrew blessing that Leonard Nimoy first glimpsed at an Orthodox Jewish synagogue in Boston as a boy and brought to the role.The prominently displayed photo of that gesture linking Judaism to Star Trek culture helps account for what might seem to be a highly illogical bit of programming: the decision by the Skirball, a Jewish cultural center known mostly for its explorations of Jewish life and history, to bring in an exhibition devoted to one of television’s most celebrated sci-fi shows.But walking through the artifacts Adam Nimoy recalled how his father, the son of Ukrainian Jews who spoke no English when they arrived, had said he identified with Spock, pointing out that he was “the only alien on the bridge of the Enterprise.”The “Star Trek: Exploring New Worlds” exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center includes a navigation console from the U.S.S. Enterprise, the first script from the first episode — and tribbles.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesJewish values and traditions were often on the minds of the show’s writers as they dealt with issues of human behavior and morality, said David Gerrold, a writer whose credits include “The Trouble with Tribbles,” one of the most acclaimed “Star Trek” episodes, which introduces the crew to a cute, furry, rapidly reproducing alien life form.“A lot of Jewish tradition — a lot of Jewish wisdom — is part of ‘Star Trek,’ and ‘Star Trek’ drew on a lot of things that were in the Old Testament and the Talmud,” Gerrold said in an interview. “Anyone who is very literate in Jewish tradition is going to recognize a lot of wisdom that ‘Star Trek’ encompassed.”Adam Nimoy said his father, who played Spock, a part-Vulcan, part-human character, often noted that he was “the only alien on the bridge of the Enterprise,” drawing a parallel between his role and his history as the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesThat connection was not explicit when the show first aired. And a stroll through the exhibition, which covers the original television show as well as some of the spinoffs and films that came to encompass the “Star Trek” industry, mainly turns up items that are of interest to “Star Trek” fans. There is a navigation console from the U.S.S. Enterprise, the first script from the first episode, a Klingon disrupter from “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” and a display of tribbles.The “Star Trek” exhibition has drawn 12,000 attendees in its first two months.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesA “Star Trek” phaser on display.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesA Klingon mask and costume at the “Star Trek” exhibition.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesTo some extent, the choice of this particular exhibition — “Star Trek: Exploring New Worlds” — to help usher the Skirball back into operation after a Covid shutdown reflects the imperatives museums everywhere are facing as they try to recover from a pandemic that has been so economically damaging. “These days — honestly, especially after the pandemic — museums are looking for ways to get people through the door,” said Brooks Peck, who helped create the show for the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle. “Museums are struggling to find an audience and are looking for a pop culture hook.”It seems to have worked. The “Star Trek” exhibition has drawn 12,000 attendees in its first two months here, a robust turnout given that the Skirball is limiting sales to 25 percent of capacity.“This has been bringing in new people, no question,” said Sheri Bernstein, the museum director. “Attendance is important for the sake of relevance. It’s important for us to bring in a diverse array of people.”Jessie Kornberg, the president of Skirball, said that the center had been drawn by the parallels between Judaism and the television show. “Nimoy’s Jewish identity contributed to a small moment which became a big theme,” she said. “We actually think the common values in the ‘Star Trek’ universe and Jewish belief are more powerful than that symbolism. That’s this idea of a more liberal, inclusive people, where ‘other’ and ‘difference’ is an embraced strength as opposed to a divisive weakness.”Jessie Kornberg, the president of Skirball, said she had been struck by the links between “Star Trek” and Jewish beliefs, especially the importance of inclusivity. Alex Welsh for The New York TimesThe intersections between the television series and Judaism begin with its two stars, Nimoy and William Shatner, who played Capt. James T. Kirk. “These are two iconic guys in outer space who are Jewish,” said Adam Nimoy. And it extends to the philosophy that infuses the show, created by Gene Roddenberry, who was raised a Southern Baptist but came to consider himself a humanist, according to his authorized biography.Those underlying connections are unmistakable for people like Nimoy, 65, a television director who is both a devoted “Star Trek” fan and an observant Jew: He and his father often went to services in Los Angeles, and Friday night Sabbath dinners were a regular part of their family life.Nimoy found no shortage of Jewish resonances and echoes in the exhibition, which opened in October and closes on Feb. 20. He stopped at a costume worn by a Gorn, a deadly reptilian extraterrestrial who was in a fight-to-the-death encounter with Kirk.“When he gets the Gorn to the ground, he’s about to kill him,” Nimoy recounted. “The Gorn wants to kill Kirk. But something happens. Instead he shows mercy and restraint and refuses to kill the Gorn.”“Very similar to the story of Joseph,” Nimoy said, referring to the way Joseph, in the biblical book of Genesis, declined to seek retribution against his brothers for selling him into slavery.Leonard Nimoy died in 2015 at the age of 83. Shatner, who is 90 and recently became the oldest person to go into space, declined to discuss the exhibition. “Unfortunately Mr. Shatner’s overcommitted production schedule precludes him from taking on any additional interviews,” said his assistant, Kathleen Hays.The Skirball Cultural Center is set on 15 acres, about 20 miles from downtown Los Angeles.The exhibition ran for about two years in Seattle after opening in 2016 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the original “Star Trek” TV show’s 1966 debut. (That version was on NBC for three seasons.) The exhibition had been intended to tour, but those plans were cut short when the pandemic began to close museums across the country.“Skirball faced a bit of a challenge in trying to explain to its audience how ‘Star Trek’ fit in with what they do,” said Brooks Peck, who helped create the exhibition for the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle. “Happily it completely worked out.”Alex Welsh for The New York TimesThe exhibition was assembled largely from the private collection of Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft and founder of the Museum of Pop Culture, who died in 2018.Peck said he wanted to commemorate the anniversary of the series with an exhibition that explored the outsize influence the television show had on American culture. “The answer that I am offering is that ‘Star Trek’ has endured and inspired people because of the optimistic future it presents — the good character of many of its characters,” Peck said. “They are characters that people would like to emulate.”“Skirball faced a bit of a challenge in trying to explain to its audience how ‘Star Trek’ fit in with what they do,” he said. “Happily it completely worked out. I had always hoped that Skirball could take it. Skirball’s values as an institution so align with the values of ‘Star Trek’ and the ‘Star Trek’ community.”Bernstein, the Skirball director, said the exhibition seemed a particularly good way to help bring the museum back to life.“There was never a better time to present this show than now,” she said. “We very much liked the idea of reopening our full museum offerings with a show that was about inspiring hope. A show that promised enjoyment.”By spring, ‘Star Trek’ will step aside for a less surprising offering, an exhibition about Jewish delis, but for now, the museum is filled both with devotees of Jewish culture, admiring a Torah case from China, and Trekkies, snapping pictures of the captain’s chair that Kirk sat in aboard the Enterprise.“There is no such thing as too much ‘Star Trek,’” Scott Mantz, a film critic, said as he began interviewing Adam Nimoy after a recent screening at the museum of “For the Love of Spock,” a 2016 documentary Nimoy had made about his father. A long burst of applause rose from his audience. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Three Minutes: A Lengthening’ Looks at Jewish Life Before Nazi Invasion

      by

      A documentary based on a home movie shot by an American in 1938 provides a look at the vibrancy of a Jewish community in Europe just before the Holocaust.AMSTERDAM — Glenn Kurtz found the film reel in a corner of his parents’ closet in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., in 2009. It was in a dented aluminum canister.Florida’s heat and humidity had nearly solidified the celluloid into a mass “like a hockey puck,” Kurtz said. But someone had transferred part of it onto VHS tape in the 1980s, so Kurtz could see what it contained: a home movie titled “Our Trip to Holland, Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, France and England, 1938.”The 16-millimeter film, made by his grandfather, David Kurtz, on the eve of World War II, showed the Alps, quaint Dutch villages and three minutes of footage of a vibrant Jewish community in a Polish town.Old men in yarmulkes, skinny boys in caps, girls with long braids. Smiling and joking. People pour through the large doors of a synagogue. There’s some shoving in a cafe and then, that’s it. The footage ends abruptly.Kurtz, nevertheless, understood the value of the material as evidence of Jewish life in Poland just before the Holocaust. It would take him nearly a year to figure it out, but he discovered that the footage depicted Nasielsk, his grandfather’s birthplace, a town about 30 miles northwest of Warsaw that some 3,000 Jews called home before the war.Fewer than 100 would survive it.Now, the Dutch filmmaker Bianca Stigter has used the fragmentary, ephemeral footage to create “Three Minutes: A Lengthening,” a 70-minute feature film that helps to further define what and who were lost.“It’s a short piece of footage, but it’s amazing how much it yields,” Stigter said in an interview in Amsterdam recently. “Every time I see it, I see something I haven’t really seen before. I must have seen it thousands and thousands of times, but still, I can always see a detail that has escaped my attention before.”Almost as unusual as the footage is the journey it took before gaining wider exposure. All but forgotten within his family, the videotape was transferred to DVD and sent to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in 2009.“We knew it was unique,” said Leslie Swift, chief of the film, oral history and recorded sound branch of the museum. “I immediately communicated with him and said, ‘If you have the original film, that’s what we want.’”The Holocaust museum was able to restore and digitize the film, and it posted the footage on its website. At the time, Kurtz didn’t know where it had been shot, nor did he know the names of any of the people in the town square. His grandfather had emigrated from Poland to the United States as a child and had died before he was born.Thus began a four-year process of detective work, which led Kurtz to write an acclaimed book, “Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film,” published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2014.Glenn Kurtz, who found the original footage shot by his grandfather in his parents’ closet in Florida, later wrote a book about the significance of the film.Stigter relied on the book in completing the film, which is co-produced by her husband, Steve McQueen, the British artist and Academy Award-winning director of “12 Years a Slave,” and narrated by Helena Bonham Carter. It has garnered attention in documentary circles and has been screened at Giornate degli Autori, an independent film festival held in parallel with the Venice film fest; the Toronto International Film Festival; Telluride Film Festival; the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam; and DOC NYC. It was recently selected for this month’s Sundance Film Festival.Nasielsk, which had been home to Jews for centuries, was overtaken on Sept. 4, 1939, three days after the German invasion of Poland. Three months later, on Dec. 3, the entire Jewish population was rounded up and expelled. People were forced into cattle cars, and traveled for days without food and water, to the towns of Lukow and Miedzyrzec, in the Lublin region of Nazi-occupied Poland. From there, they were mostly deported to the Treblinka extermination camp.“When you see it, you want to scream to these people run away, go, go, go,” Stigter said. “We know what happens and they obviously don’t know what starts to happen, just a year later. That puts a tremendous pressure on those images. It is inescapable.”Stigter stumbled across the footage on Facebook in 2014 and found it instantly mesmerizing, especially because much of it was shot in color. “My first idea was just to prolong the experience of seeing these people,” she said. “For me, it was very clear, especially with the children, that they wanted to be seen. They really look at you; they try to stay in the camera’s frame.”A historian, author and film critic for a Dutch national newspaper, NRC Handelsblad, Stigter worked on this film, her directorial debut, for five years. She started it after the International Film Festival Rotterdam invited her to produce a short video essay for its Critic’s Choice program. Instead of choosing a feature film, she decided to explore this found footage. After making a 25-minute “filmic essay,” shown at the Rotterdam festival in 2015, she received support to expand it into a feature film.“Three Minutes: A Lengthening” never steps out of the footage. Viewers never see the town of Nasielsk as it is today, or the faces of the interviewees as talking heads. Stigter tracks out, zooms in, stops, rewinds; she homes in on the cobblestones of a square, on the types of caps worn by the boys, and on the buttons of jackets and shirts, which were made in a nearby factory owned by Jews. She creates still portraits of each of the 150 faces — no matter how vague or blurry — and puts names to some of them.An image from the home movie showing Moszek Tuchendler, 13, on the left, who survived the Holocaust and became Maurice Chandler. He was able to identify many other people in the footage of the town where he grew up.United States Holocaust Memorial MuseumMaurice Chandler, a Nasielsk survivor who is in his 90s, is one of the smiling teenage boys in the footage. He was identified after a granddaughter in Detroit recognized him in a digitized clip on the Holocaust museum’s website.Chandler, who was born Moszek Tuchendler, lost his entire family in the Holocaust; he said the footage helped him recall a lost childhood. He joked that he could finally prove to his children and grandchildren “that I’m not from Mars.” He was also able to help identify seven other people in the film.Kurtz, an author and journalist, had discovered a tremendous amount through his own research, but Stigter helped solve some additional mysteries. He couldn’t decipher the name on a grocery store sign, because it was too blurry to read. Stigter found a Polish researcher who figured out the name, one possible clue to the identity of the woman standing in the doorway.Leslie Swift said that the David Kurtz footage is one of the “more often requested films” from the Holocaust Museum’s moving picture archives, but most often it is used by documentary filmmakers as stock footage, or background imagery, to indicate prewar Jewish life in Poland “in a generic way,” she said.What Kurtz’s book, and Stigter’s documentary do, by contrast, is to explore the material itself to answer the question “What am I seeing?” over and over again, she said. By identifying people and details of the life of this community, they manage to restore humanity and individuality.“We had to work as archaeologists to extract as much information out of this movie as possible,” Stigter said. “What’s interesting is that, at a certain moment you say, ‘we can’t go any further; this is where it stops.’ But then you discover something else.” More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      Netflix Series Stirs Debate About the Lives of Ultra-Orthodox Women

      by

      The show, “My Unorthodox Life,” tracks the world of Julia Haart, who fled a religious community she found repressive. But some in the community she left say they feel misrepresented.MONSEY, N.Y. — Even at the most liberal flanks of the ultra-Orthodox community here there are daily moments where women live quite differently from men.At synagogue, they must pray in segregated balconies or curtained-off sections. They are prohibited from becoming rabbis and are cautioned against wearing pants, or singing solo or dancing in front of men, lest they distract the men from Torah values.But do they go to college, have careers, watch television, enjoy their lives?Yes, say women of the Yeshivish community in this suburban hamlet 30 miles north of Manhattan, some of whom are upset by how they are portrayed on Netflix’s popular reality series “My Unorthodox Life.”The nine-episode show tracks the world of Julia Haart, 50, who fled Monsey in 2012 and became a successful fashion and modeling executive. Haart paints a dismal picture of her old ultra-Orthodox life, portraying it as oppressive, suggesting women are deprived of decent educations and are basically allowed just one purpose — to be a “babymaking machine.”In the show, Julia Haart describes her former life in an ultra-Orthodox community as repressive, and rejoices in the freedom she feels now that she has left it behind.   Olivia Galli for The New York Times“The women in my community are second-class citizens,” she says in one episode. “We only exist in relation to a man.”It is an image that is rejected by women like Vivian Schneck-Last, a technology consultant who has an M.B.A. from Columbia University and worked as a managing director at Goldman Sachs. She feels Haart diminishes the intellectual and professional strides that women in the community have made.“People in Monsey are upset because she has misrepresented what Orthodox people and particularly Orthodox women are all about,” Schneck-Last said.Roselyn Feinsod, an actuary and partner in the giant accounting firm of Ernst & Young who was once friendly with Haart, said she and her daughter graduated from the same girls high school as Haart, Bais Yaakov of Spring Valley, and that most of its graduates now go on to college. Defying stereotypes of ultra-Orthodox women as unworldly, Feinsod said she has run seven marathons and biked 100 miles around Lake Tahoe.“Monsey is a beautiful community with educated people respectful of each other,” she said.Reactions to the show, both positive and negative, have spread beyond Monsey. The Jerusalem Post, The Times of Israel and lohud.com, which covers an area that includes Monsey, all featured articles about the debate. Critics and supporters of the show have posted videos on YouTube.Under the hashtag #myorthodoxlife, women have described their own successful careers and general satisfaction with the religious life.Roselyn Feinsod, who was once a friend of Julia Haart, said the show misrepresents the career opportunities available to ultra-Orthodox women like herself, a partner at a major accounting firm.Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York Times“People were beyond upset, people were personally insulted,” said Allison Josephs, the founder of the Jew in the City website, who said people posted complaints on the site, which she created to change negative perceptions of religious Jews. “Pretty much every Jew I encountered was feeling, ‘Can you believe what they did to us again?’”Haart defends her depiction as accurate and says she has heard from many ultra-Orthodox and formerly ultra-Orthodox women who agree with her that the community represses women.“Everything about your story resonated so deeply with me,” one woman wrote in a message on Haart’s Instagram page. “I too left the Orthodox community and had to start over after struggling for so long with being unhappy.”Several people familiar with the ultra-Orthodox community wrote directly to The Times to express their support for Haart’s perspective, including Tzivya Green, a former member of the same Yeshivish community in Monsey.“Women are still told to keep quiet and, taught from a young age, that men hold all the power,” Green wrote. “We are taught to never go against a man’s word. Men are everything and women are nothing.”Haart describes the criticism as a personal attack that distracts from the sense of female empowerment she hopes to promote. Since leaving Monsey she has created her own shoe business and is now chief executive of the Elite World Group, among the world’s largest modeling agencies. Her show was just picked up for a second season.Haart agreed to address the debate over her show in an in-person interview if it could be filmed as part of her show. After The Times declined that arrangement, she and The Times were unable to agree on an alternative.Monsey is home to a variety of Orthodox Jews — some modern, some Hasidic and some of the ultra-Orthodox variation that Haart was part of, known as Yeshivish. Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesThough she did not respond to written questions from The Times, saying she had addressed them in prior interviews, she did provide her perspective by pointing out remarks she has made on social media and also by releasing a statement. It said in part: “My sole purpose in sharing my personal story is to raise awareness about an unquestionably repressive society where women are denied the same opportunities as men, which is why my upcoming book and season 2 of my show will continue to document my personal experience that I hope will allow other women to insist on the precious right to freedom.”There are communal pressures in Monsey against television-watching as a waste of time, as the show depicts. The role of women as mothers and homemakers is prized. Though some scholars argue it should not be interpreted as a slight, a prayer in which men thank God for not making them a woman is recited each morning.Still, several women interviewed in Monsey said the show’s perspective is often dated, sometimes exaggerated and conflates the multiple strains of Orthodox Judaism practiced in Monsey.The hamlet of Monsey derived its name from the Munsee branch of the Lenape Native Americans who populated the area before the arrival of Dutch and British colonists. Monsey has become a metonym for the Orthodox Jews of Rockland County, who represent more than a quarter of its population and gather at more than 200 synagogues and roughly half that many yeshivas. Their arrival converted Monsey, a one-stoplight town with a single yeshiva in 1950, into a place populated by a variety of Orthodox Jews — some modern, some Hasidic and some of the ultra-Orthodox variation that Haart was part of, known as Yeshivish or Litvish (Lithuanian), and within those groupings, several gradations or sects of each.That diversity, perhaps not as multicolored as Joseph’s coat, is nonetheless visible on the streets where thick-bearded men in black silk robes and cylindrical fur hats known as shtreimels mix with clean-shaven men in Polo shirts and chinos, recognizable as observant only by their skullcaps.Haart has spoken in interviews about the gradations of Judaism, but some critics of her show say it does not do enough to depict the variations of Orthodox Judaism.  Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesHaart has acknowledged in media appearances and other settings that there are “gradations of Judaism,” and that others from her community may not share her perspective. At its best, she acknowledged in a TV interview with Tamron Hall, her religion fosters an appreciation of charity, of kindness.But critics say those nuances are not captured on the show, where she uses terms like “brainwashed” and “deprogram” to describe ultra-Orthodox life in Monsey in ways that suggest it is more a cult than a personal choice. They say they worry the show describes strictures more typical of, say, the Brooklyn-based Satmar Hasidim, not the less stringent community of which she was part.For example, while the show accurately presents television as frowned upon in Yeshivish circles, they say it doesn’t make clear that many people, including Haart, owned one. (Haart acknowledged on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” that she had a television in her later years in Monsey and said she lied about it to school officials who otherwise would not have admitted her children.)And yes, as Haart explains on the show, some in the community are not crazy about women riding bikes because the pedaling might expose their knees. But the critics said the show does not make clear that women, including Haart, still rode bikes, in modest attire. (Haart posted about her family bike rides on her Instagram account earlier this month.)Though Haart has said she feels she was deprived of an education by a subpar school system, several women said she was a brilliant, top-notch student who could have attended college without any problem, or stigma, had she decided to.“She was very popular, had every opportunity, a leader in the class, and now she’s turned it into some persecution situation,” said Andrea Jaffe, a certified public accountant and former American Express executive who said that for many years she lived across the street from Haart.Haart, left, reaching out to her daughter Batsheva. Haart has said providing her children with a less restricted way of life was one motivation for her decision to leave Monsey.  NetflixMuch of the Netflix show concerns Haart’s relationship with her four children, three of whom retain various ties to Orthodoxy. (Haart is divorced from their father, but has since remarried. Both men appear on the show.) In Monsey, where religious traditions prescribe the patterns of daily life, her candid discussions with the children about her own sexuality, and theirs, run counter to the norm.Feinsod, a mother of four, said she was offended by what she characterized as Haart’s effort in front of a national audience to draw her children away from an observant life.“It’s fine for her to make choices, but for her to try and force the children’s hand in front of an audience of millions of people is disappointing,” she said.Of course, freeing her children from what she describes as the stifling imprint of ultra-Orthodoxy is exactly what Haart embraces as her mission.“I lived in that world and it’s a very small and sad world, a place where women have one purpose in life and that is to have babies and get married,” she tells her 14-year-old son, Aron, in the second episode.She says that, for her, the low-cut tops she favors are not just gestures of style, but emblems of freedom, of a woman controlling her own body and how it is presented.Netflix declined to comment on reactions to its show, which is at least the third it has presented in recent years about Orthodox life. “Unorthodox,” a mini-series, focused on another woman’s flight from her Brooklyn Hasidic community.The Israeli family drama “Shtisel” has been applauded by many in the Orthodox world for its subtlety, rounded characters and humor.Several women who have lived in Monsey or spent considerable time there said that kind of nuance is missing from Haart’s show, which they said gives no sense that some women cannot only avoid misery, but thrive, while maintaining ultra-Orthodox values.“There’s no monolithic Monsey,” Josephs said.Additional reporting by Colin Moynihan. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

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

      by

      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

    • 63 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Larry Harlow, a Salsa Revolutionary

      by

      The musician, who died on Friday, was a true originator of the genre. An outsider, he lived a Latin music life by immersing himself in Afro-Caribbean culture.In many ways, Larry Harlow — one of the central figures of salsa and its defining label, Fania Records — was a master at mixing the diverse musical connections between New York and the Caribbean. In a career that spanned six decades, he stitched together overlapping genres like rock, jazz and R&B and various Cuban genres like rumba, son and guaracha through intimate, soulful knowledge of both musical traditions.Harlow grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and studied classical piano. His father, Buddy Kahn, was a Jewish mambo musician who led the house band at New York’s Latin Quarter club. The musician and scholar Benjamin Lapidus writes in his new book that Jews were sponsoring Latin dances with live bands as early as the 1930s in New York City. Harlow came out of a tradition of mamboniks, Jews who danced mambo at spaces like Midtown’s Palladium, various spots in Brooklyn and the Catskills hotel circuit. Jewish musicians like Marty Sheller often wrote arrangements, and radio D.J.s like “Symphony” Sid Torin and Dick “Ricardo” Sugar promoted the music. Immortal Latin band leaders like Tito Puente regularly played the Catskills, a space where young musicians like Alfredo “Chocolate” Armenteros, who became a Harlow collaborator, cut their teeth.Yet Harlow, who died on Friday at 82, wanted to go beyond the Europeanized mambo performance styles heard in the Catskills and be true to the music’s African roots. He traveled to pre-Castro Cuba in the 1950s and returned determined to combine what he learned with what was happening in New York, creating a modern synthesis of the traditional and the avant-garde. Seeking acceptance among core post-mambo musicians, he even went so far as to become initiated to the Afro-Caribbean religion of Santería to stake his claim to authenticity and earn respect from the music community.“Here was a Jewish guy hanging out with all these Cubans and Afro-Caribbeans,” he told me in a 2004 interview. “I figured when in Rome, do like the Romans do.”Harlow never tried to pretend he was not who he was. Even after achieving insider status in the Santería community, he was often photographed wearing a Star of David around his neck. He was affectionately known by Spanish-speaking audiences as El Judío Maravilloso (the Marvelous Jew), a sobriquet given to him because of his devotion to the music of the blind Afro-Cuban bandleader and mambo progenitor Arsenio Rodríguez, known as El Ciego Maravilloso (the Marvelous Blind Man). When he chose, in the early 1980s, to release an album called “Yo Soy Latino” (“I Am Latino”), the lead vocalist who delivered the lyrics was the much-loved Puerto Rican singer Tito Allen.Beyond immersing himself in Afro-Carribean spirituality, Harlow was directly involved in the evolution of salsa music, collaborating with Johnny Pacheco and Jerry Masucci, the founders of Fania. According to Alex Masucci, Jerry’s surviving brother, Harlow was the first artist contracted to record for Fania. His first few albums, “Bajándote: Gettin’ Off,” “El Exigente” and “Me and My Monkey,” which includes a version of the Beatles song “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” traded on the bilingual, R&B-influenced bugalú sound, which united Black and Latino listeners.Harlow’s move away from búgalu to a jazz-influenced update on Rodríguez’s more Africanized conjunto sound — which added more trumpets and percussion like conga and cowbell — was crucial for salsa’s gestation. His blend of jazz, mambo and conjunto would become one of the primary influences on the emerging idea of salsa. While Eddie Palmieri and Willie Colón’s innovative use of trombone gave the horn sections a more aggressive, urban sound, Harlow and Pacheco’s influence was also decisive. Harlow’s early ’70s releases, “A Tribute to Arsenio Rodríguez,” “Abran Paso” and “Salsa,” crystallized his new aesthetic. He pioneered recording with both trumpets and trombone. He gave the Cuban charanga sound, which featured flutes and violins, new life. And he incorporated the batá drum, used in religious ceremonies, into his decidedly secular project.Harlow exulted in the spirit of the late 1960s — Rubén Blades told me he was the “Frank Zappa of salsa” — and was a voracious collaborator. His bilingual Beatles cover and the album artwork for “Electric Harlow” flaunted psychedelic style. He played piano for Steven Stills and Janis Ian, and had a rock-jazz project with the Blood, Sweat & Tears keyboardist Jerry Weiss. In 1972, after Miranda left his band temporarily, he painstakingly adapted the Who’s “Tommy” as the salsa opera “Hommy,” transferring the original British characters to New York’s Latino barrios.Although salsa’s burst in popularity during the mid- to late 1970s was organic, feeding off the hip young Latino audiences from the Bronx and Uptown, Harlow helped it blow up by taking a major producing role in Leon Gast’s vérité concert film “Our Latin Thing.” The film was a breakout party for the Fania All-Stars, a supergroup featuring Ray Barretto, Colón, Cheo Feliciano, Pacheco and many others, with Harlow on piano. Last week Masucci told me that Harlow was the connection to both Gast’s involvement and the appearance of authentic Santería devotees that appear late in the film. In 1976, he recorded a celebratory musical history, “La Raza Latina Suite,” with Blades singing in English.Though Harlow wasn’t born into the traditions that birthed salsa, throughout his career he was widely accepted as a pillar of the music. He was one in a long line of Jewish musicians who have played a key role in Afro-Caribbean music, going all the way back to Augusto Coén, a Jewish Afro-Puerto Rican who led a Latin big band in 1934 that was a predecessor to the mambo kings Puente, Machito and Tito Rodríguez. (The exchange went both ways: Even the Queen of Salsa, Celia Cruz, recorded the Jewish folk song “Hava Nagila” with her band La Sonora Matancera.)For Harlow, blending cultures and genres was simply second nature. In 2005, he contributed a wide-open keyboard solo to “L’Via L’Viaquez,” on the Texas psychedelic punk band the Mars Volta’s album “Frances the Mute” — a choice that shouldn’t be considered out of the ordinary. Several musicologists and writers have recognized the influence of Cuban bass patterns, called tumbaos, as well as cha cha cha patterns, on early rock hits like “Twist and Shout,” and “Louie Louie.” To Harlow, the connection between rock and Latin, funk and salsa was natural, a product of the era when he came of age.“It was revolution time,” he once told me. “People were writing songs about protest, and me and Eddie and Barretto were changing the harmonic concept of Latin music. I was the one who psychedelicized them a little bit.” More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Television

      In ‘My Unorthodox Life,’ Fashion Is a Flash Point

      by

      “Show me a law that says I cannot wear high-heeled shoes.”Early in “My Unorthodox Life,” the Netflix reality series about Julia Haart, the fashion executive who turned her back on her strict religious upbringing for the high life in Manhattan, Batsheva, her elder daughter, strolls onto the set in a trim pair of jeans.“What are you wearing?” Batsheva’s husband, Ben, asks dourly. “I got used to you not covering your hair. But pants?”She has upended not just his sense of decorum but a stringent, and oft-misunderstood, dress code dating from biblical times. Ben, who has been slower to abandon the traditions of his Orthodox upbringing, pleads for time to process her choice. Plainly, she is not having it.“The idea that a woman can wear short skirts but not pants — it’s really just a mind-set that you’re brought up with,” Batsheva said the other day. “I thought it was time to deprogram that thought.”Such debates over fashion are central to a show in which fashion, along with the splashier totems of secularism — the TriBeCa penthouse, the helicopter jaunts to the Hamptons — is itself a protagonist. It is also a flash point around which family tensions revolve.Those tensions are largely inflamed by Julia, the 50-year-old family matriarch and resident firebrand, who rejected the strictures of her Orthodox community in Monsey, N.Y., for a fairy-tale hybrid of “Jersey Shore” and “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.”An irrepressible mix of ambition, entitlement and caustic indignation, she spends much of her time in the series railing against her culture’s restrictive mores and, in particular, its insistence on a version of modesty that prohibits showing one’s collarbone, knees and elbows.Waging philosophical war on the community she fled, she gives rein to a fiercely evangelical bent of her own. “The idea that women should cover, that they are responsible for men’s impulses and impure thoughts, that’s pure fundamentalism,” Ms. Haart said in an interview. “It has nothing to do with Judaism.”Fashion, she insists, has been a liberating force in her life, the most visible and immediately accessible badge of her unfettered self-expression.On the show she exults in pushing boundaries, flaunting generous expanses of what her daughters would call “boobage” and greeting visitors in metallic leather hot pants and thigh-high skirts.Ms. Julia Haart, in a sequined jumpsuit, at the Elite World Group fashion show.via NetflixMore provocatively, she throws on a tailored romper for an impromptu visit to Monsey. “You’re getting some looks,” her friend and colleague Robert Brotherton murmurs as she negotiates the aisles of her hometown supermarket. But Julia is unmoved.She is more inclined to preach the gospel of self-fulfillment than to discuss the high-end labels she favors. But even in the bedroom, it would seem, her own initials aren’t enough, her pajamas boldly stamped with fancy Vuitton monograms. She flaunts chili-pepper-colored trousers and a star-spangled top on the show, proclaiming, “To me every low-cut top, every miniskirt is an emblem of freedom.”Ms. Haart’s relentless sermonizing can seem abrasive at times. “The way she talks about freedom reminds me of someone who is very resentful of all the rules,” said Amy Klein, who alluded to her own abandonment of religious orthodoxy in an article on Kveller, a website focused on Jewish culture and motherhood.Was she acting out of zavka? “That’s Yiddish for ‘spite,’” Ms. Klein said. “The idea is you should dress provocatively so that it really feels like you’re rebelling.”No question, Ms. Haart’s journey was filled with trepidation, as will likely be detailed in her forthcoming memoir, “Brazen: My Unorthodox Journey From Long Sleeves to Lingerie.” After leaving her husband, Yosef Hendler, who is portrayed sympathetically on the show, “I was sleeping with other men but still wearing my wig,” she said. “That’s the level of fear I had. To me, taking my sheitel off meant God was going to kill me and I would go to hell.”She confronted her fears in baby steps, first selling insurance to save enough money to leave Monsey and eventually designing a line of killer heels not unlike the six-inch platform stilettos she wears on the show. “Show me a law that says I cannot wear high-heeled shoes,” she taunts.Or for that matter, the flashy togs that are part of the line she created for Elite World Group, the modeling and talent conglomerate she owns with her husband, Silvio Scaglia Haart, a collection replete with mock croc candy-pink jackets, emerald-sequined jumpsuits and the glittery like.Miriam, left, and Batsheva Haart. Like their mother, they have come a long way. via NetflixHer daughters tend to take their styles cues from mom. Miriam, 20, a student at Stanford, favors vivid tartan strapless tops, hot pink puffer coats and skinny tanks. Batsheva, 28, adopts a cottage-core-inflected look, all fluffy skirts and puffy sleeves, with an occasional, if not overtly racy, display of cleavage.Partial to labels including Valentino, Fendi and Dior, she shows off her caviar tastes on the series, as well as on Instagram and TikTok. Very much her mother’s daughter, she favors vivid prints and color: searing coral, sweet lilac and hibiscus. Like her mother, she has come a long way.Ms. Haart attended the Bais Yaakov seminary in Monsey, where she raised eyebrows when she wore a red dress. “Someone complained and I was called into the rabbi’s office,” she recalled. “He told me: ‘You have to stop wearing color. It’s not appropriate. You’re attracting attention.’ But where in the Bible does it say you can’t wear color?”Where indeed?“Modesty is not mentioned in the scriptures,” said Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University. “Those rabbinical interpretations of modesty were retrojected into the biblical texts over time.”Deeply rooted in the Talmud, the primary source of Jewish law and tradition, those interpretations, Dr. Sarna said, were based largely on the supposition that the sight of a woman, and even her voice, is arousing for men.Ms. Haart on her wedding day in 1991.Elite World Group, via NetflixHistorically, the call to modesty was by no means uniformly or universally heeded. “A considerable degree of divergence was to be found in the social norms in this realm, which were significantly influenced by social, economic and geographic differences,” Yosef Ahituv observes in The Jewish Women’s Archive.Men, it should be noted, were hardly exempt from the rules. Boys were expected to turn up at school in an unvarying uniform of black pants and white shirts buttoned to the neck, Ben recalled. “That way they wouldn’t be distracted from their studies.”And yet, Dr. Sarna points out, “The paradox of modesty is that its obligations fall mainly on women.”Because standards rarely were codified, it was often left to schools to enforce regulations, including the edict to cover one’s knees. Dr. Sarna can still remember a time when teachers measured girls’ skirts to determine how many inches they were above the knee. “Sarah, Rebecca, Leah and Rachel also were modest,” he said. “But I have doubts as to whether anybody was measuring skirts in those earlier days.”Ms. Haart with Batsheva and her son Shlomo in 1999.via NetflixMs. Haart chafed under similar restrictions and ultimately ditched them along with her sheitel and calf-sweeping skirts, trading them for the gilded accouterments of corporate success. Her audacity has earned her a following, but it has also drawn ire.“The show is not called ‘My Fringe Sect Life,’ it is called ‘My Unorthodox Life,’” reads an opinion piece from The Jerusalem Post. Julia “is therefore pointing the accusatory finger at all mainstream Orthodox Jews.”Others question her motives, speculating that the show was a marketing ploy conceived to pave the way to a planned Elite World Group public offering.Julia’s style alone has spawned plenty of chatter.“I know Netflix loves fetishizing ex-Orthodox women who abandon their Judaism,” Chavie Lieber, a reporter for The Business of Fashion, wrote on Twitter, referring to the near prurient fascination spawned by shows like “Shtisel” and “Unorthodox.”But as she observes: “There are thousands (millions?) of Orthodox women who have a very different story. And yes, some of us work in #fashion too.”As Julia herself hammers home repeatedly, and somewhat defensively, her issue is not with her faith but with any and all expressions of religious extremism. Reaching for consensus, she aligns herself broadly with the precepts of feminism.“How many times was I told as a girl, ‘Julia, your dancing, your learning the Talmud, these things are not appropriate,’” she said. “I want to eradicate this whole concept of the well-behaved woman.”And with it the notion of suitable garb. “We are relying on men to tells us what God wants from us,” she likes to chide. “I want women to choose for themselves.” More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Viewing Booth’ Review: Do You See What I See?

      by

      One woman’s reactions to videos of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are interrogated in this documentary by the filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz.More than ever, moving images — body cameras that monitor police conduct, the video review of athletic event rulings — purport to capture the incontestable truth. But can the “evidence,” framed and reliant on human interpretation, truly force us to see eye to eye?In “The Viewing Booth,” the filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz tests this hypothesis.Filmed at Temple University in a dark studio that resembles both a confessional and a laboratory, the documentary considers one young woman’s reactions to videos of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.Singled out from a broader swath of students, Maia Levy, a Jewish American supporter of Israel, peruses a selection of videos — mostly by the human rights watchdog group B’Tselem — that she questions aloud, skeptical as to their authenticity. In one video, soldiers from the Israel Defense Forces raid a Palestinian family’s home in the middle of the night, awakening and interrogating several children. Levy, whom we observe voicing her objections in unforgiving close-up from the perspective of a computer camera, is convinced that the video is manipulating us to feel empathy for the family. Alexandrowicz watches the shared screen in an adjoining room, struck by Levy’s incredulity.Six months later, Levy is invited back to the studio to review the footage of her responses, effectively replaying bits from the documentary’s first half with commentary from Levy and Alexandrowicz. In short: Images are not enough to challenge one’s beliefs.Though moderately compelling to bear witness to one individual’s objections in real time, “The Viewing Booth” touches on gloomy truths about spectatorship in the digital era that might have felt novel a decade ago. Inundated as we are by traumatizing images and indiscriminate claims of “fake news,” it should come as no surprise that our ideological bubbles are actually quite difficult to burst.The Viewing BoothNot rated. In English, Arabic and Hebrew, with subtitles. In theaters. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Music

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

      by

      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