Poster wars and a ‘Torn’ social fabric
Director Nim Shapira presents his unsparing take on the fallout from October 7
Nim Shapira was a little taken aback. “Wow,” he said during a Zoom interview. “I see that you’re already in sixth gear.”
His reaction wasn’t surprising, given that my first question was, “Has Hamas already won the war?”
Sure, I could have warmed him up first with some softballs: What was it like growing up in Israel? How was your bar mitzvah?
But I’d just watched “Torn: The Israel-Palestine Poster War on NYC Streets,” Shapira’s unvarnished and at times heartbreaking look at how the war and its aftermath played out in New York.
And I was angry.
Not at him, but at a populace hellbent on supporting an organization that even the Arab League has condemned. So, did Hamas win? “Without a doubt, Hamas won the war,” Shapira said. “It’s very sad, because if you look at Hamas’s goals, it was never about the Gazans’ well-being. I would say that Hamas set a trap for us, and we fell for it.”
“Torn” focuses on the posters of the hostages that appeared all over the city and the suburbs, and on the people who ripped them down, crumpled them up, and threw them away.
“When I made the film, for me the question was why are there so many people without skin in the game ripping down the kidnapped posters. When I moved to New York 12 years ago, I didn’t know about microaggression. I didn’t know about lived experience. But when it comes to voices of both Israelis and Palestinians, some of them want to silence us. They don’t want to listen to what we have to say. They don’t, um…”
Shapira pauses as he does often in our conversation, searching for either the right words or the right words in English to express his frustration.
“I think it’s easy to get caught in your own algorithm,” he continues. “Sometimes people are not even aware of it. The amount of vilification and dehumanization that is happening towards us is honestly frightening.
“I keep reminding people I used to be friendly with that people are not their government. But it wasn’t helpful. I couldn’t have a conversation with them. I couldn’t sit down and talk about what’s happening and disagree. It was more about silencing voices….
“These are colleagues and friends from the artistic world. They shared videos about how the hostages are AI-generated. These are people I know, people I had lunch and dinner with.”
Shapira was in Israel on October 7, so he knew the reality. Shortly thereafter, he volunteered to make films about the hostages and the atrocities that happened because “I saw very quickly that the narrative online was very different from what was happening in Israel.”
He also saw the distinctive and soon ubiquitous posters showing the hostages Hamas had kidnapped “being put up on the streets of New York I call home and very quickly saw them pulled down in the streets of my neighborhood.”
By the time Shapira returned to New York around the beginning of November 2023, he knew that several documentaries about the invasion already were being filmed in Israel. He had something else in mind.
“I was sure the war would be over now and the hostages home,” he said. “That’s what I thought. I was doing the film because I wanted to document the zeitgeist of 2023. I want to document that people are not seeing the faces of kids that were stolen from their homes. They see white colonizers.
“I’m doing air quotes if you are recording this conversation. I called the film ‘Torn’ because the social fabric of the city has been torn as well.”
The film focuses both on the vandals caught ripping down and otherwise defacing posters, and on several Jewish poster-makers. They include siblings Alana and Liam Zeitchik, who had six family members taken hostage. In the first minutes of the film, Alana plays a phone message she received from a cousin:
“The house is on fire. The terrorists are here. We are on fire. If we remain inside, we’ll burn alive. If we flee outside, they’ll shoot us. Smoke is filling the room. It’s over. I hear gunshots outside. We’re doomed either way. It’s over.”
We also hear from artists Nitzan Mintz and Dede Bandaid, a couple who created the striking red posters. They said that they were their version of the missing-children photos found on milk cartons.
Ironically, at first there was little interest in the posters. Someone handing them out was told, “Why bother? They’re dead.” But soon pasting the the posters on street lamps became a worldwide phenomenon, and the negative reaction was almost instantaneous. And not just Muslims, but others, young and old, suddenly were set free to unleash their antisemitism.
“When a child’s face becomes a target not for bullets, but for denial and erasure, that’s the moment where antisemitism isn’t abstract anymore,” Mr. Shapira said.
But will the film make a difference? “You know, that’s fair. It’s the million-dollar question. I want my audiences to come out with questions, not answers. For me, it doesn’t matter if you are on the pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian side. You need to be on the pro-human side.
“This film isn’t talking to people who are ripping down posters, because they are blinded with hate. This film is for people on both sides who are grieving and hurting but have it within them to see both sides.
“When I screen the film and people tell me they really appreciate the film, but we didn’t agree with this point or that point, I say to myself that I did a good job. I think if my film allows someone to step outside the theater and have a real conversation with someone who has a different opinion, then, for me, I won.”
Which brings us back to the softballs. “We are a secular family that welcomes the Sabbath,” Mr. Shapira said. “We do a kiddush every Friday night. We celebrate the holidays. The holidays are important to us. Jewish tradition is important to us. Jewish culture is important to us.”
Ironically, Mr. Shapira believes he has become more connected to being Jewish during the decade he’s lived in the United States. “It’s one thing to be a Jew in Israel,” he said. “It’s quite another to be a Jew in New York. I think my tongue tastes more flavors of Judaism in New York than in Israel.
“I don’t want to say I’ve embraced my Judaism more, but I’ve been able to find different representations of Judaism that are not as well known in Israel. I’m still secular, but my Judaism is richer.”
“Torn” opens in New York on September 5 and expands thereafter.
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