Nov

7

2025

Simone Zimmerman (advisory board member): In 2018, my friend Noam Shuster Eliassi quit her job as a UN peacemaker to try her hand at comedy. I was there the first time she performed in front of a Palestinian audience in East Jerusalem. She had them from her opening line: “Don’t worry guys, I’m only going to be here for seven minutes, not 70 years!” The packed courtyard burst into laughter. It was a beautiful thing to witness.

Amber Fares’ film Coexistence, My Ass!, which follows Noam’s journey, began its US tour last week. While watching the film, I couldn’t help being struck by how Noam’s embodiment of solidarity and multiculturalism echoes that of Zohran Mamdani, whose election victory this week has captivated the world.

Coexistence, My Ass! documents Noam as she sets off to Harvard to write a comedy special about growing up in Neve-Shalom/Wahat A’Salam, “the only place in Israel where Jews and Palestinians live together by choice.” Noam jokes about her leftist parents, her mixed Ashkenazi/Mizrahi identity, and the Israeli peace camp. Adored by audiences of all backgrounds, she charms with her fluency in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, and even a sprinkle of words in Farsi, her mother’s mother tongue.

When the pandemic shuts down life in the US, Noam is forced to return home to Israel/Palestine. Noam’s personal story becomes a vehicle for exploring the failure of the “coexistence” project in Israel—the impossibility of equality under apartheid, or of peace with occupation, and now genocide. Weaving together scenes from Noam’s comedy special and from her daily life, the film manages to capture, with humor and nuance, insights about the reality of Israeli society that feel devastating, urgent, and timely.

When I first saw the film last spring, I found myself sobbing, along with Noam—overcome by the rising violence and fascism in Israeli society and the bleak future it portends. Watching the film again at last week’s premiere in New York, I found a hopeful resonance that I didn’t expect.

This week, New York elected Zohran Mamdani—a progressive Muslim socialist immigrant whose campaign promoted a hopeful vision of an inclusive, affordable city. At a GOTV canvas in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza on Tuesday, Naomi Klein told a group of volunteers with JVP Action: “Fascists love uniformity, sameness, top down.” That’s why, she explained, they hate everything this campaign stood for: a multiracial, diverse city that celebrates its difference and its togetherness. Zohran’s campaign was subject to hideous Islamophobic slurs and racist fearmongering. The attacks aimed, among other things, to scare Jewish New Yorkers out of voting for him, to make them believe that they would not be safe or welcome in his coalition. The racists were dealt a resounding rebuke this week—and it is surely being heard around the world.

I have no illusions that this vision is anywhere close to a reality in Israel/Palestine. But if there is any chance of beating fascism, it will be because, as Zohran has done here, people like Noam will do there—remind people that if they choose hope over fear, solidarity over division, there is a better way to live. As Zohran’s mother, the filmmaker Mira Nair, told Vogue India this week, ​​”[Zohran] embodies the multiplicity of the worlds in him without apology, and actually with great celebration.” Noam is one of those people, too. We need more models of that in public life.

Coexistence, My Ass! is touring across the US in the coming weeks, and is playing at IFC in New York City through November 13th. On the film website, you can also invite the filmmakers to your community for a screening.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): I would not have believed the great American movie about prison abolition dates from 1947, but that is in fact when Jules Dassin’s Brute Force was released. In the film, an attempted jailbreak runs into an ambitious, sadistic chief of security and explodes into outright revolution. I find it almost unfathomable how radical the movie is, especially given that it was produced under the censorious Hays Code and in the top-down Hollywood studio system. Dassin, a leftist who was later blacklisted, portrays the prison as a factory gone horribly wrong; he emphasizes the convicts’ work amid hellish machines, as well as the clock on the guard tower, which imposes its ruthless labor discipline. In one of the movie’s most arresting moments, another inmate suggests to the rebel leader, played by Burt Lancaster, that they wait and plan their escape; Lancaster replies that time is always against them, repudiating any vision of gradual progress and offering instead a radical, revolutionary break.

Decades before the rise of mass incarceration (and a full 60 years before Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s classic Marxist study of the phenomenon, Golden Gulag), Dassin already understood prison as a repository for surplus population; thus, the warden complains that he struggles to employ the inmates because of complaints from outside manufacturers and unions, and rebellious prisoners are punished by having to dig a drainpipe that symbolizes their own status as capitalist waste-product. Recalling the endless arguments, just a few years ago, about the propriety of “fascism” as a term for American reaction, it is telling that Brute Force’s villain, the security chief, is a Wagner-listening Nazi torturer who is installed by an unnamed, shadowy elite figure who visits the prison and deposes the feckless warden. Fascism thus represents not an aberration, but the logic of a broader system. In this movie, it can and certainly does happen here.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): This year’s annual Other Israel film festival began last night, November 6th, and continues until November 13th. Its focus has always been on oppositional filmmaking in Israel. The films of the festival, and the festival as a whole, reflect a material contradiction, as the films are almost all funded by a state which in various ways they indict. That contradiction shapes the experience of attending and writing on the festival as well, requiring one to support art funded by the state in order to support artists that oppose the state. The tension was especially acute this year, as films and filmmakers opposed to Israeli policies and the standard Zionist version of history are in an especially difficult period, facing both physical and financial threats within Israel as well as a growing international movement to boycott all films that receive money from the Israeli government.

The dilemma was especially obvious in the opening film of the festival, Shai Carmeli-Pollak’s The Sea, which is a throwback to the greatest Iranian films—particularly the early films of Jafar Panahi, like The White Balloon and The Mirror—as well as the gentle humanism of Italian neorealism, in this case De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. The Sea is a touching story of a young Palestinian boy who dreams of seeing the sea, but who can’t because he lacks a permit to cross from the occupied West Bank into Israel. The same holds for his father, who is unable to obtain legal work in Israel. Neither is deterred, and while the father is doing construction work the boy sneaks into Israel on his own and attempts to make his way to the beach in Tel Aviv. Things inevitably go south for both, and Carmeli-Pollak demonstrates that you can make a film that denounces injustice without banging the viewer over the head. And yet, when the film won the Ophir—Israel’s Oscar—for best film, the government announced it would cut off funding for the prize ceremony.

Coincidentally, another film on the region is also being released this week. In a just world, Fatme Hassona would be regarded as the Anne Frank of the genocide in Gaza. She is the heart and soul of Sepideh Farsi’s unbearably moving Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk. Like Anne Frank’s diary, Farsi’s film is centered around the day to day existence of one person, 24-year-old Fatme, a talented photographer, faithful Muslim, and proud Palestinian and Gazan. The film consists of nothing but the conversations between the two women over WhatsApp or Facetime. Fatme, indefatigable, smiles all the while as she recounts the daily miseries of a life under bombardment, of attacks by tanks and artillery and troops and planes and Apache helicopters. She talks of her dead, shows off her family, and tells of never having left Gaza in her life, and of her desire to see Rome. She speaks of her joy on October 7th, which showed that Gaza still had the ability to fight back, and of her mixed feelings about the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who Israel assassinated in October 2024. To read about at least 65,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza is too abstract; to spend nearly two hours in Fatme’s presence and to learn that she was killed along with her entire family when their building was bombed moves genocide from the realm of a legal question to the reality of an irreplaceable life. Like Anne Frank, Fatme’s story stands for countless real people with real dreams and hopes who were slaughtered by a murderous state.

In this week’s parshah, Abraham and Sarah celebrate the miraculous birth of their son Isaac, who comes into the world despite their advanced ages. But their gratitude and delight soon give way to their decision to exile their slave Hagar, along with her son by Abraham, Ishmael, who nearly dies of thirst during their forced desert wanderings. This drastic narrative shift occurs soon after Isaac is weaned, when Sarah sees Ishmael “metzachek”—an ambiguous word rendered, according to various translations, as “playing,” “laughing,” “mocking,” or “making sport.” Sarah appeals to Abraham, demanding that he banish the child and his mother, “for the son of this slavewoman will not inherit with my son, with Isaac.” What did Sarah see that drove her from joy to jealousy? This barebones scene hangs on a single verb elastic enough to evoke a wide range of scenarios.

Some rabbinic interpretations cite other biblical stories of iniquity that use the root in question to describe actions including idolatry, rape, and murder, in order to attribute these sins to Ishmael. The worse the alleged crime, the better for absolving Sarah and Abraham of their guilt for casting him out. But the second-century sage Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai dismisses these explanations: “I have a positive interpretation,” he says, “and it is mine that I prefer.” Instead of a philological dissection of the word, his argument is based on narrative context: Firstly, he points out, Ishmael’s father is Abraham, who God commands to instruct his son in the ways of justice. It would be a harsh indictment of Abraham’s parenting if Ishmael were committing such crimes under his nose. Secondly, he notes, Sarah does not actually accuse Ishmael of anything; the crux of the issue is clearly inheritance. So Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai imagines Ishmael upbraiding the celebrants at the feast for Isaac’s weaning, laughing at the idea that the second-born Isaac might take his place in the order of inheritance simply because he is the son of Sarah, the first wife. “You fools! I am the firstborn, I will inherit the double portion!” he imagines the teenage Yishmael announcing.

It is notable that Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai describes his own interpretation as “positive.” This may be because Ishmael is guilty of no offense greater than greed. But it also might be a more significant point: Perhaps he considers it praiseworthy to make a claim to one’s inheritance. Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai recognizes that Ishmael is motivated by the same goal that drives the heroes of the story: the inheritance of divine blessing. Contrast this version of Ishmael with the next generation’s anti-hero, Esau, who openly spurns his inheritance and takes divine blessing for granted. The problem is not that Ishmael is a deviant or rebellious son but rather that his values are too in sync with his father’s household. He is too much the model firstborn. Ishmael is simply too similar to whom Sarah wants her own son to be, and he is thus cast as a threat. (Even the key word in question underscores this: “Metzachek” shares its root with Isaac’s name in Hebrew, “Yitzchak.”) The other Rabbis’ stories, which Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai opposes, could be seen as projections of Sarah’s jealousy, the competition with her slave/co-wife still threatening to upend her. They are stories of the way jealousy distorts its object, deceptively making it seem different from the subject. Fundamentally, the rejection of Ishmael comes first; the stories about his depravity are the justifications that follow.

It’s discomfiting to read a story in our ancestral texts of Ishmael desperate and starving in the desert because we, the Hebrews, refused to include him or provide for his basic needs. Why continue to tell such a tale of cutthroat pettiness? Its salience becomes clearer when understood within the whole narrative arc of Breishit, which shows competition giving way to cooperation. Indeed, the text is bookended by diametrically opposed fraternal encounters; it begins with Cain’s act of fratricide and ends with the reconciliation of Joseph and his brothers, who narrowly avoid murder, turning instead toward compassion, forgiveness, and cooperation. But before Jacob’s 12 sons learn to share their inheritance, we see the previous generations squabbling over it, struggling over who is chosen and who is cast out. If it is Joseph and his brothers we should strive to emulate, the story of Hagar and Ishmael’s exile reminds us what cruelty we’re capable of.

Avi Garelick is a researcher and organizer based in Washington Heights, New York.