As Israeli and American Jews wrestle with the impact of the Oct. 7 attacks and the year that followed, creatives are mobilizing their storytelling skills and searching the philanthropy landscape for funders to support their Jewish-themed projects.

Recent weeks have seen the publication of a number of books — 10/7: 100 Human Stories; The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands; The October 7 War: Israel’s Battle for Security in Gaza — the launch of art exhibitions  — “Zoya Cherkassky: 7 October 2023,” at the Jewish Museum in New York — and the release of numerous documentaries, scripted films and television series, all dedicated to better understanding what happened that dreadful day.

Jewish National Fund-USA recently announced a new fund to support Israeli television and film industry professionals in creating at least $6 million worth of content, which will be developed in the Gaza Envelope-area communities — providing jobs and much-needed recovery income — and distributed domestically and internationally.

At Jewish Story Partners (JSP), which supports Jewish documentary filmmakers, the newest crop of 21 projects receiving grants from a pool of $500,000 includes several documentaries radiating from the events of Oct. 7, representing a diverse array of viewpoints: “Missing Silver,” which is about murdered peace activist Vivian Silver, and an as-yet untitled film described as “an intimately observed story about the complex experience of a family in the aftermath of Oct. 7.”

Shifted funding priorities

As efforts to tell Jewish stories have increased, donors may be shifting their financial support away from arts and toward Israel relief. 

Reboot CEO David Katznelson told eJewishPhilanthropy that big world events may cause funders “to divert funding from art and culture and more towards specific ways of dealing with the events at hand.” 

“Running a Jewish arts and culture organization, if you look at the whole history of the field, it’s kind of an up-and-down path,” said Katznelson. “There are times that people truly are able to see the bigness of what we’re doing and be able to properly focus upon it, and sometimes it’s harder.”

However, he added, “there are people out there who truly understand the power of art and culture to change the world before anything else,” some of whom will maintain or increase their funding.

Roberta Grossman, JSP’s executive director and co-founder, said several individual and foundation donors told her that, this year, they were channeling the bulk of their 2024 giving to Israel, thereby reducing JSP’s capacity to fund filmmakers.

She said she understood the impulse. 

“When people are bleeding on the street, it’s hard to justify funding the arts,” Grossman said, maintaining that the American Jewish community needs the arts “to do the work that Jewish communities do. More so after 10/7,” she told eJP.

Grossman said that antisemitism’s prevalence has become a driver of fundraising, and that “everyone believes what they’re offering is a good solution” [to combat antisemitism], something she believes about film, as well. 

“Films, as Roger Ebert said, are empathy machines, and they can cross intractable divides,” Grossman said, adding that diversifying the Jewish story in film will provide the world with “a much broader, wider view of who Jews are.” 

“We’re such a complex, diverse people. We’re not one race, one color, one economic group,” she said. “Film is the very best way to create connection among people,” she said, “and the most wonderful way to convey history and meaning and connection to the next generation.”

Jewish Story Partners launched in April 2021 with funding from Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation and Maimonides Fund, in addition to other major individual donors and foundations, and has distributed $3 million to more than a hundred films centering on Jewish stories. 

Israeli creatives moving forward

In October 2023, the cast and crew of Israeli satirical sketch comedy show “Hayehudim Ba’im” (The Jews Are Coming) were nearly done filming their newest season. Series co-creator Asaf Beiser was also preparing for his daughter’s bat mitzvah on Shabbat, Oct. 7.

“I woke up to the sounds of the sirens, and my first thought was, there goes the bat mitzvah. We had no idea what had just hit us,” he told eJP. 

First, the “Hayehudim Ba’im” team mobilized in support of writer Hen Avigdori, whose wife and daughter had been taken hostage (the two were freed in the November hostage deal) and who had several more family members who had either been taken hostage or killed on Oct. 7. By January, the “Hayehudim Ba’im” team — many of them with close connections to the murdered and kidnapped victims of Oct.7, as well as friends, relatives and neighbors who were serving in the Israel Defense Forces — got together to meet the moment in satire. They crafted several new segments, which they filmed in March and released in May, including one sketch that directly — and seriously — addressed Oct. 7: “Never Again, All Over Again,” an illustration of Jewish persecution over the ages with similar themes and devastating losses, but most of all, resilience.

Beiser’s next project, like many Israeli TV and film projects currently in development, will center on stories connected to Oct. 7. His research has yielded “a lot of small, amazing stories,” he said. “I’m hearing stories that I just can’t believe. Each one deserves a full-length feature of its own. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of them, just from that particular day.” 

Arts and culture as trauma recovery

As creators process the events of Oct. 7, a year later, many are working toward personal and communal recovery from the damage of the last 12 months.

Reboot’s projects have not necessarily taken a turn toward Israel thematically, Katznelson told eJP, but Reboot-funded podcast “Israel Therapy,” from the vice president for public engagement at the New Israel Fund, Libby Lenkinski, and produced by The Forward and Reboot, centers on guests working through complicated feelings about Israel/Palestine. And over the last six months or so, Reboot has been providing a series of internal Israel-centered programs for its network of nearly 700 creatives, hoping to provide a better understanding of the situation and enable the artists to begin weaving it into their work. The organization has also hosted daylong retreats for social media influencers who write or want to write about Israel, with open spaces for conversations and questions. 

“I don’t know if a film can prevent a genocide or heal one individual, but it can help us remember who needs to be remembered,” Grossman said. “Zachor [remember]: it’s so deeply embedded in our consciousness as Jewish people,” she added, saying JSP’s role is to “complexify the Jewish story.” 

Grossman also acknowledged the importance of processing the trauma.

“On the community level, anything that’s buried tends to fester. Unearthing buried or unseen things, from a psychological point of view, helps us as individuals to move forward,” Grossman said.

Rebecca Honig Friedman, program officer at Maimonides Fund, suggested that some creatives are trying “to take the narrative back, by telling our own stories,” a response to some storytellers outside the Jewish community who may be providing misleading or false narratives.

In Maimonides Fund’s Jewish Writers’ Initiative (JWI) programs for screenwriters and digital storytellers, she added, creators are “grappling with what it means to be a Jew in this moment and wanting to express their Jewish identity in their work.” JWI project creators, she added, “are all in some way celebrating and seeking to make meaning of Jewish identity, history, and traditions, for themselves and their audiences.” 

JWI programs support creators as they launch Jewish-themed projects for mainstream film, television and digital media platforms — screenwriters receive a $10,000 stipend and digital project creators get up to $25,000 of development funding.

Digital media consultant and BimBam (formerly G-dcast) founder Sarah Lefton, who is also JWI’s creative director, said that there is “a larger audience than there ever has been before for stories about Jewish identity and Israel.”

“These stories are often challenging to us personally, and they are causing big waves within institutions,” Lefton said. “They’re inspiring some audiences and angering others. It’s important, it’s problematic, it’s new and it’s definitely disruptive. I think we’ll look back on 5784 as the rise of a second wave of Jewish new media, and a major inflection point.”

Collaborative community of creative practice

At Canvas, which supports what its founder Lou Cove calls “the culture ecosystem,” the organization brought together artists, funders and leaders of different arts agencies and created a leadership development program to teach funders how to support Jewish arts and culture. Canvas has since created a two-year pilot to support grantees with leadership, capacity-building and community-building trainings and workshops, Cove said.

“Grantee partners getting together to just process Oct. 7 and how that’s impacted them as leaders, as managers, as Jews, as as human beings — it’s been a very, very powerful part of the work, not something that we built into our original plan,” Cove said.

Canvas is also helping Artists For Understanding, a new initiative mobilizing diverse artists and cultural figures using humanities and the arts to counter hate, to connect with the Jewish arts community. Artists For Understanding is run in coordination with the White House, the National Endowment for the Arts,  the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, as part of the Biden administration’s  anti-hate efforts, including the National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism and the National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia and Related Forms of Bias and Discrimination and United We Stand: Connecting Through Culture. 

Moving the story forward

Canvas is giving away a minimum of $1 million to arts organizations like Reboot in the arts and culture sector annually, Cove said. 

“I do believe that people who are not of the Jewish community, can find empathy and connection in the arts in a way that they can’t in political discourse right now,” said Cove. “That’s where the hope lies in storytelling after Oct. 7.”

“Jewish art and creativity right now has been essential in providing  solace, empathy, some kind of hope for a way forward,” he continued. He added that the conflation of the “anti-Zionist” and “antisemitic” labels has resulted in “a real blacklisting of Jewish artists, creatives and intellectuals,” many of whom may have “extreme trepidation about bringing their Jewish identities to work.” Others have leaned into their Jewish identities in their work, even at the potential cost of funding. 

Beiser said he considers his work “a national task.”

“The least we can do as writers is to tell those stories. For me, it’s a moral task, and it’s a moral debt.” 

“We desperately need the storytellers to help us through,” Grossman said, “as they grapple with their own emotions, and put it on the screen, it’s going to help all of us,” Grossman added. “Whether it makes us mad or makes us feel better or it’s funny, it’s all part of the processing.”