Congratulations. You're Still Jewish

In 2010, Natalie Portman won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in Black Swan — a psychological thriller about a ballerina named Nina who is cast as the Swan Queen in Swan Lake. The part requires her to play the White Swan, pure and free. Nina can perform the White Swan flawlessly; she has spent her entire life perfecting that version of herself — obedient, restrained, beautiful in the way that is safe, approved, and applauded. But a Black Swan lives inside her too, and no matter how hard she tries to suppress it, it will not stay buried. The more she fights it, the more it consumes her. The film ends in destruction — because the price of denying who you are is always higher than the price of becoming it.

It is one of the most psychologically honest films ever made because it’s about something every human being knows from the inside: the exhausting, impossible project of trying to be someone other than yourself.

We all have a White Swan identity — the version of ourselves we present to the world, curated, acceptable, and safe. And we all have a Black Swan — the parts of our identity we have decided are too complicated, too dangerous, too costly to carry in public. We learn early which parts of ourselves are welcome and which parts need to be hidden. And so we hide them. We perform the White Swan, we smile, and we assimilate, and we become fluent in the language of belonging.

There is a particular kind of freedom that some Jews and Israelis believe they have found. It goes like this: if you are critical enough of Israel, if you denounce the “occupation” loudly enough, if you make your politics visible and your dissent unambiguous — then you are no longer reducible to your passport. You have transcended the tribal; you have become universal; you are no longer the Other; you are one of them.

And that’s what makes what happened this week to Nadav Lapid, an Israeli filmmaker whose work has won prizes at Berlin, Venice, and Cannes, so ironic. In 2021, he left Israel and settled in Paris, placing himself in voluntary exile from the country whose society he had spent his career criticizing. His films are not subtle about their politics; they are ferocious indictments of Israeli nationalism, “occupation,” and the cultural and moral failures of Israeli society.

This week, ten pro-Palestinian filmmakers threatened to withdraw their films from the Marseille International Film Festival if Lapid was allowed to sit on the jury. The stated reason was that his most recent film had received partial funding from the Israeli Film Fund. Twelve percent of the budget from an independent body that has spent decades financing anti-war Israeli films, Palestinian films, and liberal voices that the current Israeli government has actively tried to defund.

There is a part of me that wants to feel sorry for Nadav Lapid, but another voice wants to gloat, as many did this week, and to ask, quietly: what exactly did you think was going to be different this time? How did you look at the history of Jewish assimilation, at every Jewish intellectual, artist, and dissident who spent their life denouncing the wrong things, joining the wrong causes, apologizing for the wrong sins — and conclude that this time it would be different? That your particular brand of self-criticism would be the one that finally purchased you a seat at the table?

Your identity does not wait for your permission; it does not consult your filmography, read your interviews, or check whether you voted correctly. It walks ahead of you into every room you enter, announcing itself before you have said a single word. You carry it the way you carry gravity. The Jews of Weimar Germany were the most cultured, the most assimilated, and the most thoroughly European people on the continent. They had renounced everything that made them visibly Jewish. And when the moment came, their identity walked into the room ahead of them.

This is the moment worth sitting with, because what happened in Marseille was not really about film funding or festival politics. It was about something much older and much more honest. It was antisemitism doing what antisemitism has always done: refusing to evaluate the individual, refusing to engage with the dissent, refusing to make the distinctions that any serious intellectual framework would demand. It looked at Nadav Lapid — a man who had spent his career on the pro-Palestinian side, voicing them — and saw only his identity - Jewish and Israeli.

There is an entire tradition of Jewish and Israeli public figures who have built their identities around the same wager: that if you are critical enough, progressive enough, universalist enough — you will be exempted. That your politics will function as a kind of passport out of your Jewishness. That antisemitism, which has always been a blunt instrument, will somehow make an exception for you because you have the right opinions. It does not work that way. It has never worked that way.

Antisemitism is not a response to what Jews believe; it is a response to what Jews are. It does not read your resume, check your voting record, or screen your films for ideological compliance. It does not distinguish between the religious and the secular, the Ashkenazi and the Mizrahi, the nationalist and the dissident, the settler and the exile. It sees the passport and stops there.

The Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, was built on a promise: become modern, become secular, become German or French or Austro-Hungarian, and the hatred will dissolve. Heinrich Heine converted to Christianity and called his baptism certificate “an entry ticket to European culture.” Karl Marx himself was Jewish, wrote essays attacking Jews with a ferocity that his antisemitic contemporaries quoted approvingly as if denouncing his own people loudly enough would finally exempt him from being one. Families across Germany changed their names, hid their Shabbat candles, sent their children to churches, became more Prussian than the Prussians. They shed the Black Swan of their Jewishness, piece by piece, convinced that each shed brought them closer to belonging.

It did not work because the people who hated them were not responding to their culture, politics, articles, or films. They were responding to their existence. And existence cannot be argued away, reformed away, or assimilated away. What happened to Nadav Lapid in Marseille this week runs on the same logic, the same ancient and tireless refusal: whatever you think, whatever you make, whatever you renounce — you are still the Jew, the Israeli, the Zionist.

It should surprise no one that this came from the left. There is something that connects the modern progressive movement to every ideology that has persecuted Jews throughout history, and it is identity politics, a system of rewards and punishments, determined entirely by group membership and never by the content of the individual, the exact opposite of liberalism. The Nazis did not ask German Jews what they believed; they asked what they were. The Islamists do not ask the non-believers what their values are because Islamic supremacist ideology divides the world into the believer and the kafir — the unbeliever whose blood may be shed and who must pay the tax of inferiority simply for existing outside of Islam.

Progressivism, Nazism, and Islamism operate by the same logic: category precedes you. Your identity is your sentence. And no amount of dissent, loyalty, self-criticism, or exile will commute it.

One hundred thousand German Jews fought for Germany in the First World War. Twelve thousand died in the trenches. Tens of thousands were awarded the Iron Cross. They had done everything a nation could ask of its citizens — they had bled for it, buried their sons in its soil, and proven beyond any possible doubt that they were German first and Jewish second. When Hitler rose to power, one hundred thousand German Jews who had fought for Germany in the First World War believed they were safe. It did not matter. When the time came, they were deported and murdered like every other Jew. The medal did not change what they were in the eyes of those who hated them.

The Black Swan does not disappear because you refuse to look at it. It waits. Hannah Einbinder stood on the Emmy stage in September 2025 and told the world that it is her obligation as a Jewish person to distinguish Jews from the State of Israel. She wore a red pin associated with Artists4Ceasefire. She signed a petition to boycott the Israeli film industry. She said, in the press room afterward, that her religion and culture are “really separate” from what she called an ethno-nationalist state. She was performing the oldest Jewish magic trick in the book:

I am not like them. I have distinguished myself. I am one of you.

She is not one of them, and her inability to see this is not stupidity; it’s something more painful: it is the particular blindness that comes from wanting so badly to belong that you will amputate the parts of yourself that make belonging impossible.

Zack Polanski, the leader of the British Green Party, says he is proud to be Jewish; he also says he is certainly not a Zionist. He has made pro-Palestinian politics the centerpiece of his party’s platform. His deputy leader is a Muslim politician who wrote on October 7th that “white supremacist European settler colonialism must end.” Polanski signed a letter calling for the monitoring of British-Israeli citizens who have served in the IDF.

Polanski truly believes he is using the pro-Palestinian and Muslim members of his party to build political power. This is the joke history keeps telling, but the useful idiots refuse to hear it. He is the one being used; he is the Jewish face that makes the antisemitism look like something else — something principled, something universal, something that couldn’t possibly be what it is. The moment he is no longer useful, the moment the movement he has helped build has enough power to no longer need a Jewish shield, he will discover what every useful idiot in history has eventually discovered.

The Iranian liberals who opened the door for Khomeini discovered it. The German progressives who believed Hitler could be managed discovered it. The Jewish communists who thought the revolution would dissolve the Jewish question discovered it in the gulags. History does not make exceptions for people who were helpful on the way up.

There is another irony in the Marseille International Film Festival incident: the actress who played the White Swan — who, on screen, embodied the psychological destruction of a woman unable to accept the darkest parts of herself — is Natalie Portman. An Israeli. Born in Jerusalem. A woman who, of all people, should understand the cost of denying who you are.

But after October 7th, while Israeli families were identifying bodies and young women came back from the tunnels and described, in broken voices, what had been done to them every day in the dark — Natalie Portman was on Instagram posing with a novel by a Palestinian author. Not a word about the hostages. Not a word about the murdered children. Not a word about the girls who came back and could not speak about what they had experienced.

She was born in Jerusalem. She knows, or should know, that this land is not a colonial project — it is the land of King David, a place where Jews have lived continuously for thousands of years, where her own family’s story is rooted. And yet, in the moment of Israel’s greatest pain, she chose to hold up a book that tells a different story.

This week, she signs a letter in Le Monde defending Nadav Lapid. The letter says that a man cannot be reduced to his passport. That identity is not destiny. That a filmmaker is more than his country.

Here is what we say to that, Natalie: you are wrong. And the world has been proving it to you, and to every Jew who believed what you believed, for two thousand years. The passport is not the whole story, but it is the one antisemitism reads. It is the only page it ever opens. It does not matter that Lapid made films against Israel. It does not matter that you posted books about lost Palestinians’ homes. It does not matter that Einbinder wore a pin. It does not matter that Polanski built his entire career on the cause of people who would not invite him to their table.

When the moment comes — and it always does — they look at the passport and stop reading.

I hope that what happened in Marseille this week was the slap across the face of every Jew and Israeli, to Nadav, to Natalie, to Hannah, to Zack, and to every Jew who still believes the exit exists — read your history.

Understand who you are and what is happening around you.

The membership was never optional.

When I read about what happened to Nadav Lapid in Marseille, one quote came to mind immediately — from Alice in Wonderland: “Speak in French when you can’t think of the English for a thing — turn your toes out when you walk — and remember who you are!”

The whole irony of performing yourself out of your own authenticity, and I say this as a Mizrahi Israeli woman living in America, who grew up in a development town, and whom everyone insists on calling a white colonialist oppressor. 😄

If this piece gave you something — become a paid member, share it, leave a one-time support, or grab one of my books. It’s what keeps me writing instead of learning French.

Much Love, Yama Bar

Sources and Further Reading: Nadav Lapid withdrew from the jury of the FID Marseille International Film Festival following a boycott campaign by pro-Palestinian filmmakers, as reported by Deadline (June 2026), Euronews (June 2026), and Haaretz (June 2026). The open letter defending Lapid, signed by Natalie Portman and over 350 film industry figures, was published in Le Monde and reported by The Wrap and The Washington Times (June 2026). Details on Lapid's film "Yes" and its Cannes premiere appear in Variety (2025). Information on Hannah Einbinder's Emmy speech and Artists4Ceasefire comes from coverage of the 2025 Emmy Awards. Details on Zack Polanski and the British Green Party drawn from public statements and party records. The Coin by Yasmin Zaher, published by Catapult Books (2024), winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize (2025). Background on Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, and the Haskalah drawn from standard historical sources including the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Data on Jewish veterans of World War One and the Theresienstadt deportations sourced from Yad Vashem historical records. The Alice in Wonderland quote is from Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (1871).