Screening and Discussion of the Film Israelism

The film Israelism (Tikun Olam Productions, 2023: co-directed by Erin Axelman and Sam Eilertsen) captures the story of American Jews who reassess and reimagine what it means to be Jewish in today’s contested American religious-political landscape and in terms of their accountability to realities in Palestine/Israel. We propose to screen the film (94 minutes) and have a 30-minute guided conversation chaired by Dr. Atalia Omer (University of Notre Dame). The panel will include Dr. Samuel Brody (University of Kansas), who will bring a nuanced account of the diversity of Jewish political experiences and insights into the film’s reception in American Jewish communities and broader social discourse. In addition, the panel will include one of the co-directors who will discuss their own journey in making the film, a Palestinian interlocutor and organizer with Arab and Muslim communities, who will discuss what it means to mobilize for Palestinian rights and dignity in the US together with Jews.

Israelism captures the stories of the protagonists’ socialization to become combatants for Israel, either on the ground in Palestine/Israel through joining the Israeli military or as “ambassadors” on American university campuses, navigating the “narrative battle.” Interrogating pivotal themes about antisemitism and its weaponization and narratives of belonging, displacement, and erasure, the film also provokes thinking about the relation between religion, political-ideological formation, at-homeness, and being out-of-place. Israelism follows young Jewish Americans’ processes of questioning the reduction of their Jewishness to a political project of Israel. The film grapples with the construction of Israelism as the unquestioning valorization of a political project and the conflation of Jews with such a project. One of the most stunning lines from the film is said by Simone Zimmerman, one of the key characters who eventually was instrumental in the emergence of If Not Now, “I arrived in Israel, and I left from Palestine,” capturing her process of unlearning and learning Jewish political ethics anew by listening to Palestinian interlocutors.