Joseph Cedar

Cedar was born in New York on August 31, 1968, and moved to Israel with his family at age six.[1][4] He grew up in Jerusalem’s Bayit v’Gan neighborhood and participated in the religious-Zionist Bnei Akiva movement.[4] The eldest of six children, he was raised in a family whose professional lives encompassed scientific research and therapeutic work.[7] His father, Howard, also known as Haim or Chaim Cedar, was a molecular-biology professor and an Israel Prize recipient; his mother, Tzipi Cedar, worked in drama therapy and psychotherapy.[8][7]

Cedar attended Jerusalem’s Netiv Meir yeshiva before his military service.[7] He served in the Paratroopers’ 890th Battalion, working as a paratrooper and medic in the late 1980s and spending time in Lebanon.[8][7] He wanted to enter officers’ training but was rejected, an experience he later recalled through an unfinished attempt to appeal directly to Matan Vilnai, then head of the military’s Manpower Directorate.[7] Cedar went to Vilnai’s home but did not knock on the door.[7] His military service also brought personal loss: he later said that two of his friends had died in Lebanon.[8]

After military service, Cedar applied to the Sam Spiegel Film School but was not accepted.[7] He pursued university studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, earning a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and theater history in 1992.[9] While studying, he worked as a lighting technician and stage manager at Telad studios, gaining practical experience alongside his academic education.[9] He subsequently studied cinema at New York University, completing his studies in 1995.[9] His education thus took him from Jerusalem to New York before he returned to Israel to work and teach.[9]

Cedar taught at the Ma’aleh film school from 1996 to 2001 and later at the Sam Spiegel Film School from 2004 to 2009.[9] These teaching appointments overlapped with the emergence of his feature-film career, including the release of his debut in 2000 and his second feature in 2004.[9] His professional connection to Sam Spiegel consequently developed after the earlier unsuccessful application to study there.[7][9]

Cedar is married and has two daughters and a son; biographical accounts place his home in Tel Aviv.[9] Religious education and observance have remained part of his family life, even as he has reconsidered the public markers through which he identifies himself.[10] In a 2024 interview, he described himself as religious in lifestyle and family terms and said that his children attended religious institutions.[10]

Cedar wrote and directed his first four features: A Time of Favor (2000), Campfire (2004), Beaufort (2007), and Footnote (2011).[2] His first two films both won the Ophir Award for Best Picture, while Campfire also received a Special Mention at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2004.[8] Their subjects placed the national-religious community in the foreground of Israeli cinema, drawing on a social world in which Cedar himself had grown up.[8]

A Time of Favor, also known as Ha-Hesder, is set among yeshivah students in a settlement in the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria.[4] Its story follows a conspiracy to bomb the Temple Mount, combining religious commitment, political purpose, and thwarted personal desire.[4] The plot includes a young soldier drawn toward a charismatic, fanatical rabbi who wants his followers to bomb the Dome of the Rock mosque.[8] The film brought relationships between the army and religious society into Cedar’s first feature-length narrative, making religious Zionism a central rather than incidental part of its dramatic setting.[4][7]

The debut’s recognition included the Israeli film academy’s best-picture award.[8] Its story was also among the early major Israeli cinematic treatments of religious Zionism as a significant force in the country’s life.[4] Rather than presenting the religious setting solely as background, Cedar built the film’s conflict around the intersection of ideological authority and individual choices.[4] The film established a subject he would revisit in Campfire: the relationship between personal needs and the expectations of a closely connected religious community.[4]

Campfire, released in 2004 and also known as Medurat Hashevet, moves its story to 1981.[4][8] Its central character, Rachel Gerlik, is a recently widowed mother considering a move from Jerusalem to a West Bank settlement with her two teenage daughters.[4] The daughters resist the proposed move for different reasons, while their mother seeks acceptance into the group establishing the new community.[4][10] The prospective settlement is associated with Gush Emunim in the Samaria region, giving the family’s decisions a setting shaped by both religious aspiration and social belonging.[10]

The film examines everyday motivations and relationships alongside the settlers’ stated ideals.[4] One sequence juxtaposes young men’s emotional response to a film about the Entebbe raid and Yonatan Netanyahu’s death with their failure to intervene when a friend is sexually assaulted.[4] The contrast places their response to a public story of heroism beside their conduct toward someone in their own circle.[4] Within the larger family narrative, the settlement project is therefore accompanied by questions about compassion, peer behavior, and the practical responsibilities of community life.[4]

Cedar later connected Campfire directly to the Jerusalem surroundings of his childhood.[10] He recalled the establishment of Psagot by a group that had left his neighborhood and described the film as a treatment of his own childhood environment through other characters.[10] Its connection to his upbringing was thus not limited to a general familiarity with religious Zionism; it drew on a remembered movement of people from his immediate surroundings toward a new settlement.[10] The film received five Ophir Awards, including recognition for directing and screenplay as well as best picture.[9][10]

With Beaufort in 2007, Cedar turned to an Israeli military outpost in southern Lebanon during the weeks before Israel’s withdrawal in 2000.[8] The film follows soldiers stationed at the Crusader fort, concentrating on their confined surroundings and their differing attitudes toward the mission.[4] Ziv doubts the purpose of their presence, whereas Liraz retains confidence in the military and political leadership.[4] Their contrasting positions give the outpost’s impending evacuation a personal dimension, rooted in the soldiers’ understanding of duty and the reasons for remaining there.[4]

The project developed through Cedar’s collaboration with Ron Leshem, whose bestselling novel supplied the film’s basis.[8] Cedar said his involvement began with a monologue Leshem wrote in 2001 from the perspective of a soldier who had served at Beaufort.[8] He contacted Leshem about working together before the novel was finished, and the two subsequently spent several years developing the screenplay.[8] Cedar recalled writing 18 drafts and substantially changing the story from its book form.[8] For him, the collaboration also reopened memories of his own military service, including fear and the loss of friends in Lebanon.[8]

Cedar described the responsibility of adapting recent military experience as stressful because former soldiers and bereaved families could regard the story as their own.[8] His formal choices kept the film close to the outpost rather than broadening it into a panoramic account of the conflict.[8] Apart from its closing moments, the story remains at the position, and no enemy soldier appears on screen.[8] Cedar described the mountain itself as a character, emphasizing the physical setting’s importance to the film’s emotional and dramatic structure.[8]

For the production, the crew constructed an outpost at Nimrod’s Castle, a Crusader fortress near the Lebanese border that Cedar considered similar to Beaufort, and staged the position’s destruction.[8] The departure sequence reverses a familiar war-film image: instead of raising a flag to mark an achievement, Liraz takes one down as the soldiers prepare to leave.[8] The story’s movement toward evacuation is consequently expressed through both the dismantling of the position and the removal of its flag.[8]

Cedar won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 57th Berlin International Film Festival in 2007 for Beaufort.[11] He was the first Israeli director to receive the festival’s directing prize.[11] At the time, he expressed the hope that Israeli leaders would fear wars and find the courage to end them.[11] The film subsequently received a nomination for the 2008 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.[1] It became Israel’s submission after The Band’s Visit, which had defeated it at the Israeli Film Academy awards, was ruled ineligible because of its proportion of English-language dialogue.[12]

Cedar’s fourth feature, Footnote, returned to Jerusalem for a story about professional rivalry within the Hebrew University’s Talmud department.[13] Its protagonists, Eliezer and Uriel Shkolnik, are father-and-son scholars whose levels of recognition differ sharply.[13][14] After two decades of applying and being rejected, Eliezer receives a notification concerning the Israel Prize that has been sent to him in error.[13] The mistake places Uriel in a conflict over whether to correct it, bringing questions of truth, family loyalty, recognition, and academic vanity into the same decision.[13]

Cedar traced part of the film’s originating idea to a misunderstanding involving his own father.[15] After spending more than a year considering a project about Veit Harlan, the director of the Nazi-era film Jud Süß, he felt that he had exhausted the stories worth making.[15] During that period, he received a call about an Italian government award marking Israel’s 60th anniversary.[15] Hearing that academics were among the other recipients, he suspected that the caller had intended to reach his father, the scientist Haim Cedar.[15] He later identified the accompanying feeling that he did not deserve the award as one element that entered the film’s conception.[15]

The production’s attention to the university environment extended to the preparation of its leading actors, Shlomo Bar-Aba and Lior Ashkenazi.[13] They spent time in the university community and studied Talmud; one also grew a beard for the role.[13] Cedar described his approach to acting as allowing performances to contribute something beyond the screenplay.[15] Discussing Bar-Aba’s work, he said that each shot contained something originating with the actor rather than himself, and that the interval between “action” and “cut” offered an experience unlike any other in his work as a director.[15]

Footnote premiered in the main competition at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and won the Best Screenplay Award.[13] Cedar had already left Cannes and was on a flight back to the festival when the award was announced, so international distributor Sharon Harel accepted it on his behalf.[16] The film later received a nomination for the 2012 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, giving Cedar a second nominated feature after Beaufort.[1] Supported by the Jerusalem Film and Television Fund in 2011, it attracted approximately 290,000 Israeli viewers and earned 10.3 million shekels from cinema screenings.[3]

Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer (2016) was Cedar’s first film set outside the Middle East.[6] Written and directed by Cedar, it starred Richard Gere as a character whose conception drew on Joseph Süß Oppenheimer, an early-18th-century German banker and fixer.[6][2] Cedar recast that figure’s archetype as an American Jew navigating Israeli politics.[6] He characterized the film as a love story between American and Israeli Jewry and connected its perspective to his own experience of belonging to both communities.[6]

Cedar subsequently worked in television as a creator and executive producer of Our Boys (2019).[2] He developed the HBO series with Hagai Levi and Palestinian writer-director Tawfik Abu-Wael; the project grew from an HBO initiative about the summer of 2014 in Israel.[17] The Hebrew- and Arabic-language production follows the murder of Palestinian teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir and the investigation into his killers.[17] Cedar said that he had encouraged the project toward a true-crime approach grounded in actual events and people.[17]

Research for Our Boys included an effort by Cedar and his colleagues to follow the perpetrators’ route through East Jerusalem by car.[17] He recalled trying to understand the practical circumstances of finding a boy alone and forcing him into a vehicle, and how unsuccessful attempts could develop into murder.[17] The series’ creation also involved intense artistic and political disagreements among its three creators, which Cedar described as part of their collaboration.[17] In September 2019, he participated in a live podcast discussion about translating the events into television, the surrounding social and political climate, and the production’s reception.[18]

Cedar’s later television work included directing the final three episodes of the eight-part series Constellation for Apple.[19] After a television project he had developed during the COVID-19 lockdowns fell through, he felt a need to return to a set.[19] French producers approached him in March 2022 about Constellation, a French-German-British co-production for an American platform, and he traveled to Berlin approximately two months later.[19] The work on his episodes occupied nearly a year because of the production’s structure.[19]

Constellation was the first project Cedar directed without also receiving a screenplay credit.[19] He was attracted to its story of a mother and daughter with a mysterious relationship and said that its directors enjoyed substantial autonomy.[19] Despite the scale and budget, he described it as providing the greatest artistic freedom he had experienced.[19] The parallel narratives required an unusual production schedule, with 100 shooting days for his episodes distributed across a year rather than concentrated into a single continuous shoot.[19]

Cedar’s international recognition includes directing and screenplay prizes at Berlin and Cannes and Academy Award nominations for two successive features, Beaufort and Footnote.[1][11] His first two films also received Israel’s best-picture Ophir Award, establishing a record of domestic recognition before his later international festival successes.[8] Alongside filmmaking, his teaching at Ma’aleh and Sam Spiegel connected his professional career to Israeli film education through appointments spanning 1996 to 2009.[9]

His early features gave sustained attention to a national-religious community that had previously been largely absent from Israeli cinema.[8] The religious-Zionist upbringing that informed A Time of Favor and Campfire was followed by subjects drawn from other distinctive Israeli institutions: the military outpost of Beaufort and the university department of Footnote.[4][13] An overview of contemporary Israeli cinema places him among its major filmmakers and characterizes his work as combining Hollywood-influenced filmmaking with close attention to Israeli cultural history, particularly religious culture.[20]

In its interpretation of Footnote, the Jewish Review of Books argues that Cedar’s familiarity with the Hebrew University helps explain the film’s playful alterations of real academic people and events.[5] The review reads the film as an examination of scholarly truth, academic recognition, and the marginal position of academic work, linking those concerns to the Hebrew phrase for marginal notes or marginalia.[5] This interpretation places the film’s family competition within a wider inquiry into the value and visibility of scholarship.[5]

Critical responses also distinguished between the film’s academic detail and its domestic drama.[14] In a review for My Jewish Learning, Tamar Fox praised its close attention to academic life while criticizing aspects of the family story.[14] The tension between professional recognition and intimate relationships remained central to that response, as it did to the film’s father-and-son narrative.[14]

Cedar’s account of Norman extended his discussion of belonging beyond Israel’s internal social worlds to the relationship between Israeli and American Jews.[6] His American birth and Israeli upbringing also figure in a reflection published by Tradition Online, which reports his view that he “did not think he could have managed his particular balancing act had he grown up in the United States.”[21] His later television work expanded the settings and production structures of his career, from the multilingual true-crime narrative of Our Boys to directing an international production without a screenplay credit on Constellation.[17][19]

Some religious Zionists objected to A Time of Favor, regarding it as an exaggerated and harsh criticism of their ideological choices.[4] Cedar later described Campfire as a turning point in his relationship with the community: in a 2024 interview, he said he had expected to criticize it while remaining connected to it, but that the film’s reception changed that expectation.[10] He also explained that he had stopped wearing a kippah more than a decade earlier because he did not want to be superficially identified with the religious-Zionist group as he perceived it, while continuing to describe his own lifestyle and family as religious.[10]

Our Boys generated a broader political controversy.[17] Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused the series of antisemitism and called for a boycott of Keshet broadcasts.[22] Cedar called Netanyahu’s reaction cynical and said he wished the prime minister would watch the series.[22] He and his collaborators had described intense artistic and political disagreements during the production.[17] Cedar also acknowledged the difficulty of criticism from families of the three murdered Israeli teenagers who felt that the series gave insufficient attention to their story.[22] He maintained that the production was an artistic expression rather than an undertaking intended to serve Israeli public diplomacy.[22]