Israelism (Documentary Film)

The documentary follows two principal subjects: Simone Zimmerman, a Jewish day-school graduate who became a co-founder of IfNotNow, and Eitan, a former American IDF soldier whose identity is withheld. Eitan came to regret his military service in the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria — and later joined Breaking the Silence.[1][4] The film presents their political trajectories as a movement from uncritical support for Israel to pro-Palestinian activism.[1]

The documentary argues that American Jewish institutions — including Jewish day schools, summer camps, Birthright, and Hillel — taught young Jews to love and defend Israel while leaving them unaware of Palestinian experiences.[1] It further argues that pro-Israel advocates have weakened the broader fight against antisemitism by conflating antisemitism with criticism of Israel.[1] The film frames Israel's conduct toward Palestinians through concepts including displacement, oppression, and what it characterizes as apartheid, and presents American Jewish leaders as complicit in perpetuating those conditions.[5]

The film includes interviews with Abe Foxman, former national director of the Anti-Defamation League, and Rabbi Bennett Miller, a former chair of the Association of Reform Zionists of America.[1] Other participants include author and commentator Peter Beinart, Noam Chomsky, and Tom Barkan, an Israeli who worked with a University of Connecticut Hillel chapter.[4] CAMERA also identifies Avner Gvaryahu, executive director of Breaking the Silence, and Palestinian Christian activist Sami Awad among the participants.[5] Foxman later described the completed film as “an anti-Israel and anti-American Jewish community film” and said that he regretted participating.[1]

The film examines the roots of American Jewish attachment to Israel, including the trauma of the Holocaust, antisemitic persecution, Israel's role as a refuge for Jews, and the connection of Diaspora Jews to the Land of Israel, while presenting those motivations alongside what the filmmakers characterize as the cost borne by Palestinians.[4]

The film was directed by Erin Axelman and Sam Eilertsen and produced by Daniel J. Chalfen, Nadia Saah, and Erin Axelman.[5] Axelman and Eilertsen met as students at Brown University and subsequently founded the production company Tikkun Olam.[4] Work began in 2016, and the film premiered in February 2023.[1]

Axelman grew up in a Jewish family in rural Maine and developed a strong attachment to Israel after reading Leon Uris's novel Exodus.[4] At age 18, a teacher introduced them to books by Israeli left-wing writers including Tom Segev, an encounter they describe as revealing what they regarded as significant gaps in the pro-Israel narrative they had absorbed.[4] Eilertsen, by contrast, grew up in a secular family in a Providence, Rhode Island, suburb with no particularly strong connection to Zionism; their meeting at Brown led to both the filmmaking partnership and the creation of Tikkun Olam.[4]

The filmmakers originally planned a documentary about the broader history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but shifted focus to the place of Israel within American Jewish identity and the way American Jews were educated about it.[4] The film was made in English and Arabic with English subtitles.[5] Contemporary reviews list its runtime as 84 or 85 minutes.[2][1]

Independently of the documentary, Ardie Geldman employed the term “Israelism” in the Journal of Jewish Communal Service to describe a narrowed usage of “Zionism” prevalent in American Jewish fundraising and organizational life.[3] In that context, “Zionism” had come to mean little more than support for Israel or being pro-Israel — what Geldman labeled “Israelism” to distinguish it from Zionism as a fuller ideological movement encompassing historical, social, religious, and economic commitments, including the understanding of Israel as the central spiritual and cultural center of the Jewish people.[3]

Geldman contrasted this usage with classic Zionism by characterizing the typical pro-Israel American Jew as one who lives in the United States, supports Israel economically, politically, and emotionally, but derives primary Jewish identification from the American Jewish community rather than from Israel.[3] He also described a Diaspora definition of Zionism as support for Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state in peace and security, under which Jews and non-Jews could be considered Zionists.[3]

This distinction formed part of Geldman's wider analysis of the growing gap between American and Israeli Jews, who share history, religion, and family ties but differ in geography, language, economy, and system of government. He characterized American Jewish identity as primarily religio-ethnic and Israeli Jewish identity as primarily religio-national.[3]

The film premiered in February 2023 and by December of that year had won awards at the Arizona, Brooklyn, and San Francisco film festivals.[2] It received a full digital release through Watermelon Pictures, a Palestinian-owned distributor, in June 2024 and became available to rent on platforms including iTunes and Vimeo beginning June 7, 2024.[1]

The filmmakers said that the documentary was made primarily for a young American Jewish audience.[4] It screened at more than 100 colleges and at several campus encampments.[1] A separate screening was hosted through UCLA's Israel Studies program.[4] A London screening organized by Na'amod at Genesis Cinema drew capacity crowds over two nights, with an audience of approximately 500 at one panel discussion that included co-director Axelman, Zimmerman, Na'amod co-founder Emily Hilton, Palestinian activist Ahmed Alnaouq, and commentator Owen Jones.[6]

The film was also scheduled for screenings at numerous campuses and other venues in October 2023, in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, placing it within already-heated campus debates about the conflict.[7]

Several planned screenings of the film generated institutional disputes. A screening planned at Yale Hillel's Slifka Center was canceled after pushback, and a subsequent screening elsewhere at Yale in December 2023 prompted students to challenge what they described as the film's omissions and one-sided presentation.[2][1] Screenings at Hunter College, the University of Pennsylvania, and Barnard College were also disputed or initially blocked before eventually taking place at those campuses or alternative venues.[1]

A planned screening organized by Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, and the Chicago Jewish Labor Bund at the Northbrook Public Library in Illinois became its own controversy when the library required a $3,000 security and insurance deposit following community opposition; the fee prevented the screening from occurring.[8] Jewish Voice for Peace said the event was canceled because of alleged threats of harassment and violence by the Chicago Jewish Alliance, while the library trustees adopted a policy permitting security fees or proof of insurance in response to safety concerns.[8]

A December 2024 lawsuit against Hunter College alleged that the institution had enabled anti-Jewish expression by facilitating a screening of the film; the complaint characterized Israelism as antisemitic.[9] The source presented these characterizations as allegations in a legal complaint rather than adjudicated findings.[9] The filmmakers have rejected accusations of antisemitism, arguing that criticism of Israeli policy is not inherently antisemitic, and reported that the organization StopAntisemitism called for canceling a UCLA screening.[4]

CAMERA, a pro-Israel media-monitoring organization, characterized Israelism as political propaganda presented in documentary form.[5] It argued that the film uses emotionally charged imagery, gives partisan activists a platform without meaningful counterbalance, and presents Israel as solely culpable while minimizing Palestinian violence, terrorism, rejectionism, and the historical security concerns rooted in Jewish persecution.[5] CAMERA stated that the only featured participant whose views conflict with the film's dominant perspective — Yishai Fleischer, a spokesman for a Hebron settlement — receives approximately 45 seconds of dialogue.[5]

One of CAMERA's specific criticisms concerns the film's treatment of the August 2001 Sbarro pizzeria bombing in Jerusalem. CAMERA states that 16 people, including seven children and a pregnant woman, were killed and more than 130 wounded in the Hamas terrorist attack.[5] It argues that the film's editing, which places images of Israeli forces confronting Palestinians immediately before footage of the damaged restaurant, leaves attribution ambiguous in a way that could imply Israeli rather than Hamas responsibility.[5]

CAMERA further argues that the film presents Israeli soldiers, checkpoints, and security measures without adequately explaining the suicide bombings, roadside attacks, terrorist organizations, and Palestinian rejection of peace proposals that prompted those measures. It also says the film omits the 1947–48 Arab rejection of the UN Partition Plan and the subsequent invasion of Israel by neighboring Arab states.[5] HonestReporting similarly described the film's focus as targeting Jewish education and the alleged suppression of Palestinian narratives in American Jewish settings.[10]

The Jewish Review of Books argued that the film reduces a complex conflict to a morality tale, presenting its protagonists' political evolution as a conversion narrative from ignorance to enlightenment while omitting major historical and political context.[2] The ADL placed the film in the context of anti-Israel activism, noting that many of IfNotNow's founders appear in it and that it portrays the mainstream Jewish community as “ignorant and awash with anti-Palestinian sentiment.”[7]