This documentary about American Jews and Israel has been canceled (and uncanceled) four times — and counting
‘Israelism,’ a documentary about young Jews critical of Israel, has landed at the center of campus antisemitism debates
A still from the film showing Simone Zimmerman holding up childhood drawings. Courtesy of Israelism
By Mira Fox December 15, 2023
As debates rage on college campuses and in the halls of Congress over antisemitism and Israel, the documentary film Israelism keeps finding itself in the center of the controversies.
The film, which follows two young American Jews as they contrast the version of Israel they learned about in school and at home with the violence they encounter in the West Bank, is critical of several major American-Jewish organizations.
Since the film’s premiere in March, numerous student groups and university departments have sponsored screenings of Israelism on their college campuses, all followed by a Q&A and discussions with the filmmakers, Erin Axelman and Sam Eilertsen.
But since the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, several universities have attempted to cancel screenings at the last minute, to the dismay of student groups hosting the film. Groups of people often with little or no connection to the universities have organized coordinated campaigns against the film, flooding campus administrators and presidents with tens of thousands of emails accusing the film of antisemitism, charges that the filmmakers, who are both Jewish, adamantly deny.
The attempted cancellations — most of the screenings have, in the end, gone ahead — have resulted in threatened disciplinary actions, a department chair stepping down and extensive news coverage. (The chaos has also resulted in an increased demand for Israelism.)
As controversy continues to swirl around Israelism, we’ve compiled a running list of attempts to cancel the film’s screenings.
Hunter College (Nov. 14)
Hunter College’s film and media department had scheduled a screening of Israelism and post-show discussion with Axelman in mid-November. But when interim college president Ann Kirschner was inundated with emails saying the film was antisemitic, she suddenly canceled the screening the morning it was slated to show.
The next day, the college’s senate, composed of a mix of students and faculty, voted to overturn Kirschner’s decision. A spokesperson for the president told The New York Times that the intention had always been to reschedule the film, though the filmmakers said the Times story was the first they heard of that plan.
The screening eventually took place on Dec. 5, and sold out. But unlike most of Israelism’s screenings, which have gone on peacefully, the event was chaotic, with the audience yelling and booing at the moderator.
The audience was angry that Hunter’s Arabic department, which was a co-sponsor of the original screening, was not allowed to be part of the event, and that the moderator, Rabbi Andy Bachman, was not engaging with the film the way they wanted.
“The school administrators weren’t letting the audience directly ask questions like every other Q&A,” Eilertsen, who was watching from the audience, said. “They were making students write their questions on index cards and passing them to Andy, who would then grimace or shake his head when he didn’t like a question and rephrase to an entirely different question.”
Tami Gold, a faculty member in the film department sponsoring the screening, said they had wanted a historian to moderate the discussion, but that Bachman “dominated.”
For his part, Bachman has rejected this characterization, telling Forward reporter Beth Harpaz that he was shouted down and heckled, and didn’t have an opportunity to pose the questions he wanted to ask.
The University of Pennsylvania (Nov. 28)
A progressive Jewish campus group, Chavurah, scheduled an Israelism screening and discussion for October, and the event was initially approved without issue. But after the Oct. 7 attacks, Chavurah decided to postpone the event for a month.
Yet when Jack Starobin, a senior at the college and leader with Chavurah, filed a new request for a room for the event — something he said usually takes three business days — it took weeks. Eventually, university administrators told them that the event was “not right for the atmosphere on campus.”
Starobin called this move “censorship,” directed at Israelism; other Jewish groups, such as Penn Hillel, had been allowed to host events that Starobin said were inflammatory, including one speaker who referred to pro-Palestinian protesters on campus as “enemy combatants.”
Faculty at Penn’s Middle East Center helped the students obtain a space for the screening. But Starobin said he received a call from the student affairs office and another from the vice provost for university life right before the event, saying that if the screening went forward, Chavurah members could be disciplined and the group might lose its funding.
When Starobin asked what rules they broke, the administrators couldn’t answer. “She made a vague reference to us going against the university’s decision,” he said.
The screening went forward as planned, and Starobin said that, despite the threats, the Chavurah students had not heard updates on their disciplinary hearing for weeks.
But as a result of controversy, the chair of the Middle East Center, Harun Küçük, stepped down as department chair. Penn’s faculty union, AAUP-Penn, released a statement saying that his resignation was the result of “inappropriate pressure from administrators.”
Hamilton, Canada (Dec. 6)
Independent Jewish Voices, a Canadian Jewish group that Eilertsen said was “like a Canadian version of JVP” invited the film for a screening in Hamilton, a city in Ontario, where they’d rented out a local independent movie theater, The Westdale Cinema.
IJV had already sold 200 tickets, when the theater’s board decided to cancel the screening after the Hamilton Jewish Federation said it would “inflame” the atmosphere in the city.
After IJV showed up to protest outside the theater, however, garnering coverage in the Canadian news, the board reversed its decision.
“After careful review, we determined that there was no credible evidence that the screening would cause harm to anyone in our community,” the board said in a statement.
Eilertsen said that about a dozen protestors carrying Israeli flags marched outside the theater during the screening, but it otherwise went off peacefully.
Yale (Dec. 12)
The board of the Slifka Center, an independent center for Jewish life at Yale, which hosts Yale Hillel, had to hold a vote as to whether or not to screen Israelism in its space. The screening, which was sponsored by Yale’s chapter of the Jewish student group J Street U, was approved — with the condition that Yehuda Kurtzer, the president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, be allowed to deliver a response after the screening.
But on Dec. 6, a week before the screening, the student organizers said they received a call from Uri Cohen, Slifka’s executive director, saying they could no longer host the screening at the center.
The film was instead shown in a small auditorium on Yale’s campus. At the screening, in a speech to the approximately 75-person audience, a student organizer alleged that donors to the Slifka Center and executives from Hillel International had pressured the center not to show the film, threatening to pull funding.
Kurtzer’s event following the screening was still held at the Slifka Center; during it, audience members attempted to ask why the film was not shown at Slifka, but said he refused to answer.
“That’s not accurate,” Kurtzer said in an email, adding that, although he did answer a question about free speech, he pointed out that he couldn’t speak on behalf of either Slifka or Hillel International. “Some of the activists involved with the film would like to convey that the institutions here are both closed-minded and either incapable or unwilling to discuss the issues involved. This question was asked only once, not by ‘audience members.'”
Even so, students told the filmmakers that the “overwhelming reception of everything was positive” and that students continued to discuss the film until late after the official events had ended.
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