Growing up, the person I loved most and who loved me most was my grandmother, Jean. And the person I respected most was my grandfather, Abe. Until I was a teenager, when I realized I could hitchhike across the country and stow away on a ship, “running away from home” meant getting on a bus to Bensonhurst and going to their home. I loved their home. It was filled with books and with delicious food and with unconditional love. In fact my first long distance hitchhike was to go visit them in Miami Beach for Spring Break when I was 14 or 15. (I was arrested on the New Jersey turnpike and my father had to come get me. He gave me the bus fare for the trip. I won a dance contest at their hotel.)
I remember one time my grandmother telling me about Israel. It’s the first time I remember ever hearing about it. She had never been there but she described it as a kind of paradise, but one that needed our help. I must have been 6 or 7 and she told me Jews were the smartest people in the world and much smarter than Arabs. She was trying to instill some kind of tribalism in me. It didn’t work; I was very American.
My parents weren’t religious at all. My father was an outspoken atheist who tried to persuade me not to have a bar mitzvah. My grandmother wanted me to and I took her advice. I didn’t like the experience of Hebrew school and memorizing the part of the Torah I would be required to sing at the ceremony (aliyah). It was really the only time I ever had much contact with a rabbi. After we were bar mitzvah-ed he paid my friend Stuie Cohen and I $20 a week each— in those days an immense sum for a 13 year old— to go the the shul on the way to school so that they would have a minyan, a kind of quorum so that God would hear the congregation’s prayers. They needed 10. They were using the Black handyman— claiming he was an Ethiopian Jew, which he wasn’t— plus me and Stuie. The rabbi told me about how great Israel was. He also told me something horrible that I never forgot: “for every Jew they kill, we kill 10 Arabs.” The IDF is nearly there in Gaza. [Eventually, my father doubled the weekly subsidy to get me to stop going.]
I never paid any attention to Jewish stuff, other than knishes and latkes, after that... until 1967 where some residual bullshit I had picked up in my childhood urged me to go to Israel during the “Six Day War” to fight (for Israel). I didn’t go and, in fact never wanted to visit Israel after that horrible idea. Roland isn’t religious at all either; he was born into a vaguely Christian family but has even less interest in religion than I ever did. But once we were in Egypt for a month he dragged me to a bus leaving from Cairo to Jerusalem. I wasn’t into doing it at all, but he really was, so I went along. He claims we both liked the trip but I only remember one good moment— Christmas Eve in Bethlehem and I had my head pressed against the spot where they say Jesus was born.
Roland’s fascinated with Jewish stuff and also drags me to weird Jewish sites in bizarre places, like shuls in Singapore, Mexico City and Yangon and to see the Jewish community in Cochin (Kerala in India). But he never had to go through any of this brainwashing bullshit that I and all my friends did:
Writing for The Guardian Sunday, Siam Wolfson reviewed the movie, Israelism. Wolfson described the filmmaker, Erin Axelman as an ex-fervent Zionist from Maine who had been brainwashed the same way I was. She read Leon Uris’ 1958 novel Exodus, like we all did. Axelman described it as a “kind of heroic, almost mythical tale of the creation of the state of Israel and it was incredibly empowering. She was lucky, a high school teacher noticed her obsession with Zionism and Israel and suggested she read some books about the history of Palestine. “The narratives I’d learned up to that point only mentioned Palestinians in passing or as an obstacle,” said Axelman. “But I read for an entire year Palestinian historians like Rashid Khalidi and leftwing Israeli historians like Tom Segev.” Wolfson wrote that she said that the process reminded her of what she’d learned in school about the history of the US, “in terms of a people who came to a new country that were refugees or immigrants and created a city on a hill, a beacon of light and a democracy. That narrative is incredibly empowering until you hear about the Native Americans and you realize it lacks some really basic points.”
That change in perception was the inspiration for the documentary Israelism, which Axelman directed with Sam Eilertsen. The film argues that some American Jews are told a story— about Jews escaping persecution and genocide to return to their ancestral homeland— that almost entirely erases the existence of Palestinians. It’s a narrative that has been incredibly influential in shaping global attitudes about the Israeli state and US alliances in the Middle East.
The film focuses on the lives of two young American Jews— Simone Zimmerman, who went to a Jewish school and lived in Israel on an exchange program, and Eitan (who doesn’t use his last name), who joined the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) after graduating high school. Zimmerman describes what she went through as a system of “indoctrination” and “mass mobilization” to turn her into an advocate for Israel within the US. It depicts a system of education and advocacy that demands pro-Israeli activism of some young Jewish Americans. There’s particular focus on what’s taught on birthright, the free trips to Israel for Jews living around the world that are funded by the Israeli government.
The film shows American Jewish children in elementary school waving Israeli flags and chanting: “We wanna go! We wanna go!” At a private Jewish middle school, children are filmed reading Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel, and at birthright “mega events” in Jerusalem thousands of American teenagers are filmed cheering the IDF as a speaker tells them: “It’s up to you to be our soldiers abroad… ready to sway public opinion in Israel’s favor.”
All the subjects of the documentary go through a transformation, in many cases meeting with Palestinians and visiting the West Bank. It depicts a growing movement of Jews, many of them young, who want to support Palestinian rights and lessen Israel’s centrality to American Jewish identity.
The documentary was made before the 7 October Hamas terrorist attack in Israel and subsequent bombing of Gaza. But demand for the film has soared in the past few weeks. The film-makers are now holding weekly virtual screenings as well as a major tour of the US and Europe that is selling out. “People say to us: ‘I want to show my family this film, to help them understand,’” Axelman said.
The duo say promoting the film in the wake of the 7 October attacks has been difficult. “When I first went to Israel-Palestine when I was 21, I volunteered at this hostel with this amazing Israeli guy who does anti-occupation work and runs this hostel with Palestinian folks,” said Axelman. “Both of his parents were murdered by Hamas, and seeing the pain on his face in interviews is unbearable. It’s been obviously a very difficult time for our team— many folks have lost people, or are terrified that they’re going to lose people.”
Axelman says that their film helps explain that complexity of feeling now— that it’s impossible to understand the lenses through which people view the conflict without understanding the stories they’ve been told. “If you think of Israel as totally the land of the Jewish people, it seems like a very straightforward narrative that Hamas committed an isolated incident of pure evil terrorism,” Axelman said. “It’s true that Hamas murdered innocent civilians on a mass scale that is unbelievably traumatizing for Jewish people. It’s also true that happened in the context of brutal occupation that has existed for the entirety of most Palestinians’ lives.”
Axelman grew up in a small Jewish community in rural Maine. Their parents were hippies, of the same generation as Bernie Sanders. Axelman and their brother were the only self-identifying Jewish kids at their high school. “We got made fun of, it made us feel very different,” they said. “It was difficult to formulate a positive Jewish identity, feeling like an outsider and processing the horrors of the Holocaust and the horrors of antisemitism as a young person.”
Learning about Israel was a salve. “It’s true we do have an incredible ancient history there and so it makes sense, from a very basic standpoint, that it has a lot of emotional resonance. Because it is true we needed to escape Europe.”
Eilertsen, the film’s other director, experienced similar depictions of Israel growing up. “In the reform and conservative Jewish movement, Israel is sort of always introduced as almost like a Jewish Disneyland, this place where Jews can be fully Jews,” he said.
By the time they got to Brown University, Axelman was meeting other young people who “had been taught to love Israel unconditionally” but changed their views after coming into contact with Palestinians and hearing their stories.
They remember the leader of Brown Students for Israel, “who would essentially harass Palestinian students, and went to work for the ADL after college,” referring to the staunchly pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League. A decade later, Axelman says, those same students are doing Palestinian human rights work. “Seeing so many of these pro-Israel student leaders go through this transformation made me really interested in making this film.”
The film also argues that in some American Jewish communities, cultural celebration of Israel is channeled into high-stakes political activism. It shows how Hillel, the Jewish campus organization active in most colleges in the US, pushes Jewish students towards pro-Israel advocacy, with ex-IDF soldiers attending meetings of students. One interviewee, Sarah Anne Minkin, the director of programs at the Foundation for Middle East Peace, describes a set of institutions that turn “young Jews into soldiers for Israel.”
One of the main ways this happens, the film says, is through the pro-Israel lobby group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac).
“This energy and this education quickly turns into actual political lobbying for Israel. We film people who, in Jewish high school, were sent to Aipac conferences to do lobbying. And in that lobbying, the most important thing is Israel is depoliticized. Supporting Israel is presented as this emotional state; it’s just something you’re supposed to do. And criticizing it is simply antisemitism,” Eilertsen said.
The directors point to Aipac’s unwavering support for Donald Trump, even as he refused to condemn antisemitic white nationalists, as evidence of the way the organization prioritizes support for Israel over other interests.
Zimmerman, whose high school sent her to Aipac conferences, says it was just a normal part of her life. “That’s part of the indoctrination, to tell young Jewish people they have to be soldiers in the battles to defend Israel, whether it’s on the ground or on the battleground of public opinion,” she said.
Zimmerman and the film-makers stress that the US has myriad strategic interests in the Middle East that are separate from the Israel lobby. “It’s about these countries’ foreign policy— but they use the narrative about protecting Jews conveniently as an excuse to justify other aspects of their foreign policy,” she said.
The film-makers are precise in their criticism of Aipac, and stress that it does not represent all American Jews, a diverse community that includes anti-Zionists and people with no connection to Israel. “ When people start making exaggerated claims about the power that Aipac actually has, that can slide into antisemitism,” said Eilertsen. “But the reality is that Aipac and aligned groups like Democratic Majority for Israel do have a lot of influence on Capitol Hill and they are widely credited” with helping elect candidates of their choice and defeat others they deem insufficiently supportive of Israel, he said. “These are facts, not conspiracy theories, so the idea that it’s antisemitic to say they have influence on our politics is an absurd deflection.”
Help fight AIPAC here by electing more Members of Congress who will stand up to them. On Saturday, Liza Featherstone looked at the New York City Council elections from the filter of standing up to AIPAC, noting that socialist city councillors “easily fended off right-wing and centrist attempts to use their pro-Palestine stance against them. They won each of their races handily,” despite the right-wing fearmongering on the Middle East that had reached a fever pitch. Murdoch’s Neo-fascist New York Post “flagged five pro-Palestine city council members up for election, accusing them of ‘blaming Israel for Hamas attacks’ and other ‘hateful rhetoric’ about Israel’s war in Gaza— Shahana Hanif of Brooklyn, Sandy Nurse of Brooklyn, Chi Ossé of Brooklyn, Tiffany Cabán of Queens, and Alexa Avilés of Brooklyn. AIPAC shills Eric Adams, New York’s incompetent and criminal mayor and Rep. Ritchie Torres, the corrupt-crypto guy from the Bronx joined the anti-progressive smear-fest against the 5 ceasefire advocates.
“[A]ll five of the targeted councilmembers,” wrote Featherstone, “won by a landslide. City councillor Chi Ossé, a DSA member from Bed Stuy targeted in the Post article for calling the Israeli occupation the ‘root’ of the violence in the region and the Palestine liberation movement ‘legitimate,’ won his election by 98.74 percent, the highest margin of any city council race in New York this year. (Notably, in most of these races huge numbers of people cast their votes on the Working Families Party ballot line, suggesting that voters were paying attention to the intricacies of progressive politics and approved despite all the right-wing fearmongering.)… [E]ven when criticized, these leaders didn’t back down. The attacks on DSA began as soon as Hamas attacked Israel, yet all the city councillors joined protests throughout October, including one organized by Jewish Voice for Peace, in which hundreds of Jewish New Yorkers filled Grand Central station demanding a cease-fire; or another demanding that Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer sign on to that position. Many of these councillors got arrested, showing that they wouldn’t wilt in the face of cynical fearmongering.”
And remember, some of the brainwashed ones turn out like this. This isn't a script for a horror movie; it's real toxic life.