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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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      Flory Jagoda, Keeper of Sephardic Music Tradition, Dies at 97

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFlory Jagoda, Keeper of Sephardic Music Tradition, Dies at 97A charismatic musician, she sang and wrote songs that linked her to Jewish ancestors who lived in Spain until their expulsion in 1492.Flory Jagoda, left, performing with Heather Spence in Potomac, Md., in 2012. She sang songs she knew from her childhood in the former Yugoslavia and wrote new ones in the Sephardic tradition.Credit…Dayna Smith/Getty ImagesMarch 14, 2021, 2:43 p.m. ETTo Flory Jagoda, the language, rhythms and joys of the Sephardic Jewish music she sang and wrote connected her to her beloved nona — her grandmother — who lived in the small mountain village of Vlasenica in the former Yugoslavia.“I think all the feeling that I have for the Sephardic culture, for stories, for song — it’s really a gift from her to me that I will have for the rest of my life,” Mrs. Jagoda said in an oral history interview for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museumin 1995.They were songs of home and family, of love and Hanukkah, many of them in the diasporic language — Ladino, a form of Castilian Spanish mixed with Hebrew, Arabic and Turkish — spoken by the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492. Some eventually settled in Vlasenica, where Mrs. Jagoda spent part of her childhood, among her beloved grandparents and extended family.Mrs. Jagoda was a Bosnian. She spoke Ladino with her family in Vlasenica, but she conversed in Bosnian and Serbo-Croatian to outsiders.“Our ancestors were Spanish Jews,” she said in the 2014 documentary “Flory’s Flame.” “You carry that love subconsciously. It’s in you. Everything that was Spanish to us was Jewish.”A charismatic musician who played accordion and guitar and was known for the quavery trills of her singing voice, Mrs. Jagoda recorded five albums; performed in her homeland long after immigrating to the United States; and was named a National Heritage Fellow in 2002 by the National Endowment for the Arts.Mrs. Jagoda died on Jan. 29 in a memory care facility in Alexandria, Va. She was 97.Her daughter Betty Jagoda Murphy confirmed the death.Flory Papo was born on Dec. 21, 1923, in Sarajevo, when it was the capital of Yugoslavia, to Samuel and Rosa (Altarac) Papo. Her father was a musician.When Flory was a baby, her parents divorced and she moved with her mother to Vlasenica, where they lived with her grandparents for several years and where she remained when her mother married Michael Kabilijo. Eventually, at about 10, Flory joined her mother and stepfather in Zagreb. She was close to her nona, Berta Altarac, and unhappy about the move to a big city.But she adjusted. Her stepfather bought her an accordion and adopted her. But the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941 forced the family to move.Her stepfather bought train tickets to the Croatian city of Split, using gentile names for the family. Flory went first, charming other travelers on the trip by playing her accordion.“I play it for four hours,” she said in “Flory’s Flame.” “They all came into the compartment. They love it. They love music over there. They sang, we had a party, the conductor came in and sat there and he started singing. Saved my life.”She later wrote a song about the episode, which in English translation says in part:My father tells me,“Don’t speak! Just play your accordion!Play your accordion and sing your songs!”I don’t know why I’m running.What have I done?After Flory and her family had spent several months in Split, the Italian Fascists controlling the city sent hundreds of Jewish refugees, including them, to Korcula, a Croatian island in the Adriatic Sea, where she taught accordion in exchange for food.In 1943, with the Nazis approaching Korcula and other Adriatic islands, Flory and her parents fled on a fishing boat to Bari, an Italian port city on the Adriatic. She spent the rest of the war there.While working as a typist for a U.S. Army salvage depot in Bari, she met Harry Jagoda, a master sergeant. They married in June 1945. She wore a gown made out of a parachute.Mr. Jagoda returned to the United States before her; she arrived in April 1946, on a ship with 300 Italian war brides.Over the next 27 years, Mr. Jagoda built a real estate development business in Northern Virginia. Mrs. Jagoda raised their four children, gave private guitar and piano lessons, and performed traditional Yugoslav folk music with the Washington Balalaika Society and other groups.But she did not sing the Ladino songs her grandmother had taught her. Her mother, who had emigrated with her husband to the United States in 1948, was haunted by the wartime massacre of 42 family members, including her mother, Flory’s nona, and felt that the Ladino language had died when they did.Her stepfather’s death in 1978, five years after her mother’s, let Mrs. Jagoda reset her musical course.With her parents gone, she began writing down the songs she knew from her childhood; she also started to write new ones in the Sephardic tradition. One of them, “Ocho Kandelikas” (“Eight Candles”), a Hanukkah song, has been performed by the United States Army Band and covered by many artists, including Idina Menzel, the band Pink Martini and the Chopped Liver River Band.Mrs. Jagoda sang at synagogues, folk festivals, community centers and universities, sometimes in various combinations with her daughters, Betty and Lori Jagoda Lowell; her son, Elliot; and two of her grandchildren. In 1985, the family gave concerts at several cities in the former Yugoslavia.“In Novi Sad, we gave a concert in a synagogue with no windows and birds flying in,” Ms. Jagoda Murphy said in a phone interview.Mrs. Jagoda taught her Sephardic oeuvre to Susan Gaeta, who became the older woman’s apprentice in 2003 through a program run by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. They performed as a duo and as the Flory Jagoda Trio, with Howard Bass.“Flory embodied her culture,” Ms. Gaeta said by phone. “Singing Sephardic music and talking about her family was like oxygen to her.”In 2003, Mrs. Jagoda sang at Auschwitz at the unveiling of a plaque to honor Sephardic Jews murdered by the Nazis. She sang a Ladino song, “Arvoles Yoran por Luvias” (“Trees Cry for Rain”), which Sephardic inmates had sung there.The words, translated into English, include the lines “I turn and say, what will become of me,/I will die in a strange land.”In addition to her daughters, Mrs. Jagoda is survived by a son, Andy; six grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. Her husband and son Elliot both died in 2014.For Mrs. Jagoda, her grandmother’s influence never waned.“It was her mission,” she said during a concert in 2013 at the Smithsonian Institution, “to carry and to teach her young ones this language of her heritage — and never forget it.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Yuval Waldman, Bridge-Building Violinist, Is Dead at 74

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyYuval Waldman, Bridge-Building Violinist, Is Dead at 74A conductor as well as a skilled soloist, he liked to spotlight music composed in times of oppression, including the Holocaust.The violinist and conductor Yuval Waldman in 1977. Performing the music of composers who had been persecuted for their beliefs, he once said, was “not just a privilege but a calling.”Credit…Tyrone Dukes/The New York TimesFeb. 27, 2021Updated 4:00 p.m. ETYuval Waldman, an accomplished violinist and conductor with particular interests in building musical bridges between countries and rediscovering neglected works composed under oppressive circumstances, died on Feb. 1 in Brooklyn. He was 74.His son, Ariel Levinson-Waldman, said that the cause was coronary artery disease and that Mr. Waldman had also tested positive for the coronavirus shortly before his death.Mr. Waldman, who lived in Brooklyn, was the son of Jewish parents who survived the purges in Ukraine during the Nazi occupation of World War II, and his childhood involved several dislocations before the family eventually settled in Bat Yam, a Tel Aviv suburb. His career in some ways reflected his multinational upbringing and his sense of music as a lifeline in a turbulent world.He conducted the New American Chamber Orchestra, an ensemble formed in the 1990s and made up of Jewish émigrés from the former Soviet Union. In 2004 he founded Music Bridges International, which fostered concerts and educational programs that included music from different cultures — one program, for instance, featured American and Kazakh composers.He also played and conducted programs of music that had been composed under duress. Among them was a solo program titled “Music Forgotten and Remembered” and that featured works by Eastern European Jews, many of whom died in World War II or were silenced by the repressive practices of the Soviet Union. Another was “The Music of Oppression and Liberation,” featuring composers of various nationalities who were persecuted for their beliefs.“I feel it’s my duty to revive the memory of these composers by performing their music,” Mr. Waldman told The Oklahoman in 2011 when he performed the “Liberation” program at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma in Chickasha. “It’s not just a privilege but a calling.”Vladimir Waldman was born on Dec. 21, 1946, in Lvov, which was then part of the Soviet Union (and is now in western Ukraine, with the name usually rendered Lviv). He changed his first name to Yuval after the family had settled in Israel, taking the name of a figure from the Hebrew Bible associated with music.His father, Eliezer, was a lumber worker who was at one point conscripted into the Soviet Army; his mother, Chaya (Spivack) Waldman, was a teacher. As a boy in Lvov, Yuval was entranced by the violin music he heard at the movies and asked his parents for an instrument. He proved to have a gift for it. At the age of 7 he performed on Soviet radio.During a period of relaxed policies toward Jews after the death of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1953, the family left the country, living in Poland for a time and then in immigrant camps in Austria and Italy before reaching Israel in 1957. Eventually Yuval’s musical skills came to the attention of Isaac Stern, the great violinist, who became a mentor.Mr. Waldman studied at the Samuel Rubin Israel Academy of Music in Tel Aviv and played with Israel’s national orchestra as a teenager. After he graduated from the academy, Mr. Stern helped arrange for him to continue his studies in Geneva and then the United States, at both Indiana University and the Juilliard School. In 1969, at 22, he made his Carnegie Hall debut.Mr. Waldman’s musical career took off thanks to performances like one in 1970 at Riverside Park in New York City, where he was a soloist in a program by the West Side Orchestral Concerts Association. “Eloquent tribute to Mr. Waldman’s virtuosity in the finale was the spontaneous chorus of bravos that went up from his colleagues in the orchestra,” Robert Sherman wrote in a review in The New York Times.In July 1973 Mr. Waldman interrupted his career to join the reserves of the Israel Defense Forces. Because of all of the languages he had mastered through his multinational upbringing and touring, he was assigned to the intelligence unit. His musical skills had gotten him assigned to the entertainment unit as well. When the Yom Kippur War broke out that October, his son said, he was assigned to play for tank units in Sinai.Mr. Waldman’s son said he told the story of the time he clambered onto a tank when a commander ordered him to play something to soothe the troops after a particularly intense bombing. He played Bach. Many in the unit were recent Moroccan immigrants to Israel and had not heard Bach before.“My father remembered a moment when he was playing the Chaconne of Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D Minor,” Ariel Waldman said, “and looked up to see tears streaming down their faces in the dust.”By 1974 Mr. Waldman had returned to his musical career and was performing to acclaim in recitals and with orchestras. He had married Cathy Walder, a pianist and composer, in 1970, and they often performed together. But he also began branching out, serving as concertmaster for ensembles including the Kansas City Philharmonic and music director for events like the Madeira Bach Festival. He conducted and recorded with numerous orchestras, and he was a founder of several quartets and other ensembles.His first marriage ended in divorce in 1997. In addition to his son from his first marriage, he is survived by his wife, Lyudmila Sholokhova, whom he married in 2010; a sister, Rina Weiss; a stepdaughter, Valeriya Sholokhova; and two grandchildren.One of Mr. Waldman’s many activities was directing the Mid-Atlantic Chamber Orchestra in the 1980s and ’90s. At an online memorial service a few weeks ago, Mr. Levinson-Waldman told about a time when that ensemble was going to small towns, performing and bringing along experts to talk at schools, including a singer who would instruct the school choirs about breath-control techniques.“My dad spoke with an accent,” Mr. Levinson-Waldman said. “English was, depending on how you count it, his eighth or ninth language.”And so when he proposed the program to the town of Pulaski, Va., “unfortunately, some of the town leaders heard the wrong thing.” They were outraged, Mr. Levinson-Waldman said, that these out-of-town musicians wanted to instruct their students about birth control.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story 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