Rabbi invited to discuss controversial ‘Israelism’ film says he was ‘heckled, interrupted and yelled at’
At a Dec. 5 screening of Israelism, from left to right, Rabbi Andy Bachman; Simone Zimmerman, who is featured in the film, and director Erin Axelman. Photo by Sam Eilertsen
By Beth Harpaz December 14, 2023
A rabbi who’d been invited to discuss the controversial film Israelism at Hunter College was shouted down and heckled by students.
The filmmakers said the audience rancor at the Dec. 5 screening at Hunter, in Manhattan, was unlike anything they’d experienced at dozens of other events featuring the film. They said students were angry because they felt their own questions were getting short shrift, and because they felt questions from the rabbi, Andy Bachman, did not engage with the thesis of the film.
Bachman, in a post on his “Water Over Rocks” Substack column, wrote that he “was lambasted for being a rabbi who dared to dissent from the only line of reasoning that the film and its protagonists had to offer: Israeli and Zionist American Jews are solely responsible for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
He said he was unable “to ask a single question of the film’s creators without being heckled, interrupted and yelled at by students and faculty, in a blinding rage of their own certainty.” Bachman said he was also accused “by students and faculty of being racist, irrelevant, without the right to be there, and an apologist for genocide.”
What the film is about
Israelism is about two American Jews — one of whom, Simone Zimmerman, was onstage with Bachman — who were raised to unquestioningly support Israel, but who come to believe they were misled because their inculcation ignored the experiences and history of Palestinians.
Director Sam Eilertsen, who was in the audience, said Bachman’s questions were “totally valid but also not really engaging with the substance of the film.” The rabbi, he said, was asking, “‘Why didn’t you talk about 1948? Why didn’t you talk about partition?’ — when the film is more about young American Jews’ personal perspectives and not history.”
Audience members were told to write questions on index cards, which Bachman was tasked with posing to the filmmakers. “He had a ton of notecards; he read a couple,” said director Erin Axelman, who was onstage with Bachman and Zimmerman. The rabbi was booed when some students complained that their questions were being ignored or misconstrued.
A rescheduled screening
Israelism debuted in March and was shown on many college campuses before Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks and Israel’s war on Gaza. Since then, a campaign by some Jewish organizations and individuals to label the film antisemitic has resulted in screenings being canceled, though some, like the one at Hunter, were rescheduled.
Eilertsen said the rabbi was added to the event as a “moderator” as a condition of the rescheduled screening, and that contributed to the fraught situation.
“Students and professors came wanting to be able to talk with us and ask us questions,” Eilertsen said, while Bachman saw his role as interviewing Zimmerman and Axelman. “We’ve probably done 50 or 60 of these events and this is the only time anyone was ever yelling and shouting.”
“The audience was very angry,” said Axelman. “They felt they had been censored. They felt the rabbi’s presence was a disingenuous attempt to not engage with the film. They were angry because his questions were not about the film.”
Hunter, which is part of the City University of New York, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The auditorium where the event was held has a capacity of about 150 and was full.
Faculty and students were also upset because the administration did not allow Hunter’s Arabic studies and film and media departments, which had organized the original event, to co-sponsor or formally participate in planning the rescheduled event. Tami Gold, a professor in the film department, said she had wanted a historian, not a rabbi, to moderate the panel. The rabbi, she felt, “dominated” the discussion in a provocative and confrontational way. “Students felt silenced and faculty felt silenced,” she said.
Axelman said the filmmakers have no problem engaging with criticism of the thesis of the film, but “if you just want to talk about the history of Zionism, students are not interested in that debate. They are interested in the stories our film is telling.”
Bachman’s questions
Bachman, former rabbi at Congregation Beth Elohim, a progressive Reform synagogue in Brooklyn, has taught at CUNY and organized events with various perspectives on Israel.
Had he not been shouted down, Bachman wrote, “I might have had a chance to condemn the government of Benjamin Netanyahu and his criminal settler enterprise, which I have persistently done; I might have had a chance to articulate my position of ceasefire twinned with a full return of hostages, the removal of Hamas and the removal of Netanyahu’s government; I might have had a chance to state my belief that most Israelis and most Palestinians still prefer peace and coexistence to war, bloodshed and mass death.”
These are the questions he had for the filmmakers.
- What is your definition of Zionism?
- You refer to 1948 as “when the war happened” and the origin of ethnic cleansing, but chose not to mention the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan, the rejection of which by Arab states contributed to the start of Israel’s War of Independence that resulted in the origins of the Palestinian Refugee Crisis. Why?
- Your film stated that “in 1967, Israel managed to complete its takeover of the West Bank and Gaza” but you don’t mention the Six-Day War in which Israel was again attacked by five Arab nations seeking to eliminate Israel “from the river to the sea.” Why?
- You showed an image of the 2001 Sbarro Pizzeria bombing without mentioning the Second Intifada that resulted in more than 1,000 Israeli deaths by Palestinian suicide bombers and more than 3,000 Palestinian deaths by Israeli soldiers. This led to the destruction of the Camp David Peace Accords and the security barrier cutting off the West Bank from Israel, severely limiting Palestinians’ free movement. Why?
- More than 70% of American Jews voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 election, yet you focused on Donald Trump’s rabid support of Bibi. Why?
- When addressing antisemitism, you had stock footage of white supremacists from the right and Nazis marching in Charlottesville and elsewhere, but no mention of antisemitism on the left nor the Hamas Charter that explicitly calls for the killing of all Jews in Israel, not to mention the obscene call for the genocide of Jews in marches around the world protesting Israel’s war against Hamas. Why?
- Zimmerman claims to have been lied to throughout her K-12 Jewish education and painted Hillel as a home for only pro-Israel advocacy on campus. Why didn’t you interview a teacher from your school in Los Angeles or a Hillel professional at UC Berkeley where you were in school?
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