Israelism is the controversial new documentary about the ways in which our perception of Israel and its relationship to Judaism has changed in recent years, and how some young American Jews are pushing back. It’s not really fair, though, to call it controversial; anything even tangentially related to Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, or Judaism as a monolith risks being controversial, especially in the past two months.

The filmmakers behind Israelism, Eric Axelman and Sam Eilertsen, always knew their movie would be controversial, but obviously never planned for it to become intertwined with the worst situation between Israel and Palestine in decades. They began filming interviews seven years ago, working on Israelism on and off until the film first hit the film festival circuit in February 2023. It began to make the rounds with various screenings, garnering controversy for its subject, but when Israel suffered the loss of 1,200 people on Oct. 7th at the hands of Hamas, roughly 900 of whom were non-military citizens, Israelism suddenly garnered a stronger resonance and drew more attention, good and bad. As the Israeli military continues its assault on Gaza, killing more than 20,000 people so far, the film is unlikely to escape this controversy anytime soon.

Which is kind of a shame; while it’s a divisive issue, Israelism is not a provocation or an angry diatribe. It’s not viciously radical. It follows a movement among some American Jews wherein Israel is criticized for its colonialist stance over the past 75 years since the Nakba, and its appearance as an apartheid state — between settlements across the West Bank to blockades and economic control of Gaza. Israelism aims to portray the awakening of some Jews as they realize the narrative they’ve been told about Israel is not wholly accurate, and the film succeeds. Eilertsen spoke with MovieWeb about the film, and was given the practically impossible task of explaining and answering infinitely complex questions.

From Zionism to Absolute Israelism

MovieWeb: You intentionally distinguish between Zionism and Israelism, which is such an interesting word to use for the film. Why make the distinction, and how do you define Israelism?

Sam Eilertsen: That’s a big question. We did want to start a conversation about the concept of ‘Israelism’ as sort of a distinct subset or even successor ideology to Zionism in the diaspora. The way I would define Israelism is simply by quoting one of the Hillel educators in the film. So she says a line, “Israel is Judaism. I can’t distinguish between the two, maybe some people can’t, but to me, they’re the same.” So, Israel is sort of becoming a religious center in the American Jewish community, and specifically, what Israel refers to.

Sam Eilertsen: How you can sort of distinguish from Zionism and Israelism, is Zionism refers to a broad political movement — or even, you could say, a family of political movements — that historically believed in some sort of Jewish settlement in the land of Israel-Palestine. But there was, and to some extent, still is huge variety within Zionism, from revisionist, very right-wing Zionists who believe that Israel should actually control a much wider swath of the Middle East than the current borders of Israel, as well as non-state or cultural Zionists, who actually didn’t believe in the creation of an exclusively Jewish state. So Zionism has always been sort of a very broad category. We can obviously talk about it much more distinctly in terms of the forms that ultimately created and came to dominate the politics of the state of Israel.

Sam Eilertsen: ‘Israelism’ is more referring to Jews in the diaspora in America, but I’ve also heard from Jews in places like Australia and Britain that this very much reflects their experiences as well, where Israel and supporting Israel is sort of used as a cornerstone of Jewish identity. So if you go back to say, the 1930s or ’40s, or even ’50s, there were both a lot more non-Zionist Jews within the Jewish establishment and there was much less emphasis on Israel in day to day discussions within the community. It was very rare to see an Israeli flag being flown in a synagogue, for example. That really started in the late ’60s or early ’70s.

Israel as sort of a cornerstone of Jewish identity is something that really sprang up in the 1970s, in part as a reaction to fears of assimilation, fears that Jews did not really want to identify as Jewish anymore. Because they weren’t that connected to the religion itself, and they also weren’t facing the same kind of antisemitism that their parents’ generation would have faced.

Sam Eilertsen: They could just sort of marry non-Jews and, in the fears of some people in the community, sort of disappear into just being Americans. And so, pride in Israel was used as a way of maintaining Jewish identity. Some scholars have referred to it as the civil religion of American Jews, and one way that this has played out specifically, which I also think is an important differentiation from Zionism, is that there’s sort of a de-politicization of Israel. So as I described earlier, Zionism had all these political strains and if you were a Zionist in 1943, you would probably have been aligned with a specific political party in Israel and a specific vision for what you thought an Israeli state should look like.

“Israelism, on the other hand, is sort of based on obscuring or not talking about the real political issues in Israel. So Jackie, that Hillel educator, has another line in the movie where she says, “Supporting Israel is not political to me.” And if you actually think about that, you’re talking about supporting an actual nation state in the world that has a government and an army and is doing real things, including occupying and oppressing millions of Palestinians, in my view. And so to say that supporting such a state is not political, it doesn’t really make sense to me, but that is a very common view in the community.”

Related: The Best Movies About Politics from the 20th Century, Ranked

Sam Eilertsen: And even things like Simone, for example, says in the film that she was encouraged to go to AIPAC conferences — AIPAC being a lobbying organization that lobbies the government to do specific things in regard to Israeli policy. But she was encouraged to do this as if it was viewed as a community event, almost like it wasn’t viewed as “We’re going to go do some lobbying.” It was like, “We’re gonna go do this fun group community activity.” And again, this is kind of how support for Israel is often viewed in the community, as not necessarily being political, even if the actions that you’re actually taking are ultimately political in their outcome.

MW: And I think the deep politicization also then allows people to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

Sam Eilertsen: Definitely. If Israel is Judaism, as Jackie says, then of course anti-Zionism is antisemitism, if you accept that premise,

The Struggle for Free Speech
Tikkun Olam Production

MW: I know you’ve been invited to screen Israelism at different colleges, but there have been some controversies around the screenings. There seem to be targeted petitions to prevent them. Could you talk about your experiences trying to show the film and what kind of efforts there have been to stop you?

Sam Eilertsen: So first of all, we all knew this was going to be controversial. And within a few months of the film coming out, we became aware that certain organizations, including Israeli consulates in some cases, in different cities were reaching out to film festivals or colleges that were screening our film and expressing concern. So there was actually an attempt to censor the film even before the events of Oct. 7, but things got much more intense after Oct. 7, of course.

Sam Eilertsen: And you know, Oct. 7 was obviously a very traumatic moment for so many people. Our team includes American Jews, Palestinians, and Israelis. So a lot of people we are close with and colleagues of ours have lost friends, or know people in Gaza who are in very serious danger. So it’s been a really difficult couple of months. And we definitely want to sit with that trauma and acknowledge the loss and the difficulty that so many people are going through, regardless of where they sit politically.

Sam Eilertsen: But it was after Oct. 7, when the attempts to censor the film started to get really intense. We became aware of campaigns being sort of passed around on the internet and like pro-Israel Facebook groups and WhatsApp groups, where some people could just click a link to send an email to all the college administrators on campuses where our film was being screened.

Colleges were reported getting literally 50,000 emails asking them to cancel our film, and these were all basically copies of the same one or two emails that make these extremely outrageous claims — that our film promotes or supports antisemitism, that our film supports people who chant, “Kill the Jews.” That’s actually one of these emails, which is obviously very offensive and upsetting to us, as an almost entirely Jewish team of filmmakers.

Sam Eilertsen: And, of course, almost none of the people, I think, involved in this campaign have actually seen the film or have any connection to the colleges where they’re emailing. So it’s been very strange and upsetting to see that a couple of colleges did attempt to cancel screenings. Very notably, Hunter College canceled the screening the day that it was supposed to happen. This led to protests that led to the faculty union and the college Senate voting to condemn the decision by the President to cancel the screening, and then the screening did end up happening about a month later.

“Similarly, the University of Pennsylvania tried to censor a film screening; we were being brought to campus by a Jewish student group, but they claimed that our film being screened would put Jewish students in danger, essentially, which doesn’t really make any sense. But the students actually showed the film anyway. They just told the administrators that, “We don’t care what you say, we’re just going to show the film anyway.” And so now some of the students are theoretically being investigated for potential disciplinary measures for watching a movie, which is just really weird — getting academic discipline for watching a movie doesn’t really make any sense. But that’s the kind of thing that’s been happening.”

Sam Eilertsen: But I will say that the vast majority of screenings on college campuses have not been canceled and have gone forward just fine […] The vast majority of screenings have been just a very lovely and respectful conversation where people representing many different viewpoints come and watch the film and discuss the film and are able to just have a normal conversation, which is I think what a lot of people are looking for right now, a space where people can have a reasonable conversation about these issues. We’ve been trying to provide that.

October 7th and the Far-Right Support of Israel
Tikkun Olam Production

MW: Obviously you started interviewing people like Cornel West way back in 2016, and never would have imagined that your film would sort of coincide with the awful events in Israel and Gaza from Oct. 7th. How have the Hamas attack and Israel’s indiscriminate retaliation affected your film, its distribution, and the way you feel about it?

Sam Eilertsen: We’ve both had these, as I described, very serious attempts to cancel the film as well as more interest in the film than ever. We’re kind of overwhelmed with the number of screening requests, to the point where it’s taking a lot of time for us to even be able to get back to people […] I don’t want to speak too much about our success because obviously a lot of people are really suffering right now in Gaza and across the world, as they watch these events unfold.

Sam Eilertsen: [Oct. 7] has made things much more polarized. I’ve seen dehumanizing rhetoric about Israelis, I’ve seen dehumanizing rhetoric about Palestinians. We’ve seen antisemitism from all perspectives. We’ve also seen very serious Islamophobia and threats to Palestinian people. Aaron and I both graduated from Brown University; a student at Brown University was shot over Thanksgiving break essentially just for being Palestinian, which was very heartbreaking to see. So it’s a really challenging time, but again, we think that people do actually want to have a deeper conversation, not just about what’s happening right now in Gaza, but about the broader structure that has led us up to this moment.

Related: Israelism Review | A Controversial and Important Documentary

Sam Eilertsen: And unfortunately, we’ve seen some of the specific issues that we critique in the film, like the conflation of criticism of Israel with antisemitism, we’ve seen this continue to just explode. The House voted literally to say that all anti-Zionism is antisemitism, which obviously erases a long history of Jewish anti-Zionism as well as, of course, very legitimate critiques of Zionism from Palestinians and others. And we’ve also seen a very disturbing trend, which we really try to highlight in the film, is the extent to which certain Jewish establishment organizations are willing to actually cozy up to white nationalists who themselves are encouraging or spreading antisemitism or antisemitic conspiracy theories.

So in the film, we talk a lot about this with Donald Trump. We show ostensibly the leaders of the Jewish community hesitating to condemn Trump, hesitating to call Trump a racist or a bigot. And unfortunately, since October 7, we’ve seen Elon Musk spread antisemitic conspiracy theories, and the next day he gets a photo op with Benjamin Netanyahu.

Sam Eilertsen: And Elise Stefanik has spread white nationalist great replacement conspiracy theories that are highly antisemitic, and she’s being praised by leaders of the Jewish community. For her, she basically creates a premise that all advocacy for Palestinian rights is calling for the genocide of Jews, which I don’t think is accurate, and it basically puts these college presidents in a no-win scenario. I think they could have done a better job of defending themselves. I obviously would’ve liked to see them say that, “Anyone saying ‘Genocide the Jews’ is 100% not okay.” And also, at the same time, that’s not what’s actually been happening on their campuses. But at any rate, we’ve seen leaders like Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL really applauding Elise Stefanik, who again has a long history of embracing these replacement white nationalist conspiracy theories, which is very disheartening.