Judas

Dan Wolan’s courageous film can be read through two frameworks, one visual, one verbal.

The visual or spatial is the opening and closing shots. Wolan begins with a pan across the empty Negev of 1959, where the dropout Shmuel Ash plans his retreat to a night watchman’s job. He has abandoned his college education. The film ends on him, having retreated to that new settlement, but writing the words spoken by Gershom Wald, the cantankerous scholar for whom he has been caring in Jerusalem. The climactic iris-in on Shmuel’s pencil tip privileges the written/spoken argument (i.e., Wald’s intellectual exploration), over the settling of the desert. The film’s key challenge is whether this preference is positive or negative. Its central characters serve the director’s critique of the contemporary Israeli Left.

Wald’s argument provides the verbal frame. In his first speech — a phone conversation — Wald strikes a dramatically contrarian position: 

“A man expecting harm will eventually be harmed….A persecuted man feels persecuted because he has turned everyone into persecutors. Or whether it’s his wretched imagination. Such a man not only is miserable but he has a moral flaw. Surely there is a fundamental dishonesty in the enjoyment of persecution as such.”

He is in effect questioning the Israeli’s — and the diaspora Jew’s — sense of historic antisemitism. He continues: “Such a man will suffer loneliness, accidents and ill health more than the rest of us.” Wald proceeds to an even more radical, indeed foolish, contention: “Suspicion and even hatred of the entire human race, all are less lethal than the love for humanity. Love of all humanity reeks of ancient rivers of blood. The knights of the human race are rising to save the world. And no-one can save us from them.” Wald blames the virtuous for the bloodshed of history, not their attacking enemies. In the Israeli context, this blames the Jews for the Palestinians' 100-year genocidal campaign. That line reflects the current blaming of Israel's self-defence for the deaths of the Palestinians' weaponized and bred-for-martydom children.

In this absurd extremism Wald is as crippled intellectually as he is in both legs. The film ends on Shmuel writing Wald’s ultimate self-justification: “He who is willing to change, he who has the courage to change, will be considered a traitor for those incapable of change and are afraid of it. I think that being labelled a traitor can be seen as a great honour.”  

But Wald’s pretence to heroic free thinking is undercut by his own rejections of Shmuel’s position. In the thesis the young man abandoned, he argued that Judas did not betray Jesus but was the first to recognize the saviour’s divinity and purpose.  Shmuel found himself loving Jesus for his humanity and his teachings. Wald angrily rejects this traitorous respect for the Jews’ oldest and worst persecutor. (The latter title has now been taken over by radical Islam.) Here Wald fails to grant his “traitor” Shmuel the respect he demands for himself.

In a related parable Wald describes a tribe that endured much tribulation in their quest for Jerusalem. Finally, they simply found a salubrious location and declared that their “Jerusalem.”  “Where,” Wald asks Shulem, “is your Jerusalem.” As if there were no real “Jerusalem” but what people might arbitrarily declare some place, any place, to be. The Jews should have forgone their historic homeland Palestine and settled in Miami Beach? Africa?  Whatever one might choose to believe, there is an actual Jerusalem — with its history and its besieged present — just as there has been and is real persecution of the Jews and consequently of the Jewish state. Again the crippled scholar's 1959 arbitrary rejection of a historic verity reflects the 2023 slander against the Jewish state, and a betrayal of justice to boot.

Unlike the degenerating Wald, Shulem is only briefly crippled, when he falls with/for Wald’s daughter-in-law Atalia. But when the film ends on his advancing the old man’s argument Shulem has adopted his vision, even as he has joined the new desert settlement. Even the advancing civilization will harbour the misrepresentation of the Jews and their state.

Wolan’s radical questioning of the Israeli Left extends into Shulem’s relationship with Atalia. Her father was a disappointed Arab-lover, whose idealism could not survive the political reality. So, too, her husband Michal, who kept his lost kidney a secret so he could defend Israel in the 1948 war, where he was killed. Wald still has nightmares about his son’s sacrifice in “Ben Gurion’s War,” the term itself a reductive distortion of history. Atalia avenges her husband by seducing then firing her father-in-law’s caregivers, the men who did not die in that war. The film displays the self-service of these various outlaws, Wald’s virtuous “traitors,” with an understanding far short of approval.    

    Setting the film in 1959 enables Wolan indirectly to anatomize the current pro-Palestinian, pro-BDS, etc., misrepresentation and undermining of the Jewish state. The historic detachment allows cooler analysis than depicting the current debate.

    The film was “inspired” by an Amos Oz novel, which is something short of an adaptation. A casual joke encapsulates the life in literature. As Wald starts to end his phone conversation, he quips “Let’s put a comma here,” that is, a pause until the next chat, in life as on the page. “What else is there for us to do? Hunt for whales?” The crippled old man is another Ahab, driven to a self-destructive vengeance.  

You People

  Sure, you can — as many have — complain about the parade of racial stereotypes in this satire of racial stereotypy. But that’s the territory. You could instead enjoy the pungency of their deployment. That’s more fun. 

Jonah Hill’s tour de force is a witty look at the predictable complications when a fumbling Jewish boy and an independent Black girl fall in love and decide to wed. 

The couple’s respective parents’ responses expose the obvious racial fissure. Amira’s father Akbar (born a Woody!) is the more militant opponent, though his strategy is a cold, intimidating detachment. Ezra’s mother Shelley urgently wants to connect but can only speak in racial stereotypes. These antithetical impulses combine to freeze the young couple out of their ardor.

Of its many virtues the comic energy is primary. The opening scenes have hilarious dialogue not just along religious lines but in the current jargon of mod-tech communication. Cameos by Rhea Perlman, Elliott Gould and Richard Benjamin evoke the tradition of Jewish-American film satire. As if to break out of the Jewish stereotype Ezra excels in the Black street basketball game. Eddie Murphy’s straight man extends his own persona history.

Perhaps the most interesting character is Ezra’s podcast partner Mo. They are a non-binary Black who quietly asserts a wisdom, balance and presence without making themself the issue that the Black and Jewish characters provide. Mo deserves their own film, for which this more traditional foray may prepare the way.

I initially recoiled at the overly sentimental eruption in the last scene. Its unreality jarred with the film’s candour and insight. Perhaps that’s the point. The parents’ respective conversions — necessary for any degree of happy ending — may work in the film but may be too much to expect in real life. So that exuberant last scene may suggest a fantasy element in their conversion. On the other hand, we do have the lovely Lauren London, the Ashkenazi Jew playing the Black bride. There is hope.