A nice new original Israeli animation (with subtitles) about a bored grandmother in heaven, by Maya Weksler of Goldfish Animation. (Thanks to my daughter Mizmor, beginning her second year of animation studies, for showing it to me!)

[Read more →]

Recommendation: Check out the short animation films created by students in the animation program at Sapir College in Sderot–including “Shadow and Man,” by my daughter Mizmor. I wrote about this unique incubator of young Israeli creativity and talent in my Jerusalem Report column “Animated Identities.”

[Read more →]

Following Haim’s recommendation, I went to see Ari Folman’s documentary, “Waltz With Bashir,” on the 1982 Lebanon War and the Sabra and Shatilla massacre.
Haim is right that every Israeli should see “Waltz.” But so should anyone elsewhere whose country has marched thoughtlessly into war, or for that matter, anyone interested in the art of film. [...]

[Read more →]

Waltz With Bashir directly addresses the philosophical question we’ve been discussing here. Ari Folman, the film’s director, served as an Israeli soldier on the perimeter of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut at the time of the massacre committed there by Lebanese Phalangist militiamen in mid-September 1982. Folman clearly feels guilt, and feels that he abetted an act that was comparable to the Nazis’ massacres of Jews in Europe—his parents are Holocaust survivors. To what extent is he, an individual soldier, morally culpable. Should he have acted otherwise than he did?

[Read more →]