Many of Israel’s ḥaredi communities frown on television, the Internet, and moviegoing, but even some of the most strictly observant make an exception for a relatively new cinematic genre: movies made by ḥaredi women, shown to exclusively female audiences, featuring all-female casts. To a certain brand of secular feminist filmmaker, this might sound like a utopia, but that is far from the intention of the filmmakers or the taste of their audiences. Moreover, these movies are commercial successes within their circumscribed audiences: tickets sell out almost immediately for most new releases. Diana Bahur Nir writes:

Z’khut ha-Shtikah, Hebrew for the right to remain silent, [was released in December] by the female ḥaredi filmmaker Dina Perlstein. The movie, described in the brochure as a “riveting and groundbreaking drama,” has been granted rabbinic approval. Shot in Israel and France, it follows the story of a French journalist who arrives in Israel on assignment and builds tight bonds with a family she was sent to cover. That is—with the women of the family.

Ḥaredi movies promote values that are compatible with the principles of Orthodox Judaism: respecting one’s parents, living morally, and sanctifying life. Some of these movies focus on Jewish identity and the connection to God as central themes.

Ḥaredi cinema has been around for a decade and a half, and it is evolving [constantly]. The change is evident in the topics it deals with, in the production quality, and in the boundaries it is willing to cross. Tsila Schneider is a founding mother of the genre. She is fifty-nine, a mother of eleven, and the wife of a rabbi who lives in Jerusalem. . . . Her first films, Fingerprint (2004) and Where Will I Go (2008), reflect an industry in its youth, but they carved out a path for the more mature, better-produced films that came after. Since then, Schneider has evolved and perhaps gone on to stretch the boundaries farther than her counterparts.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.