A new federal lawsuit filed on behalf of families of victims of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks accuses the crypto giant Binance of knowingly facilitating the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars to U.S.-designated foreign terror organizations on an “industrial scale,” helping contribute to the deadly incursion in Israel that killed around 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages.

According to the complaint, Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, “deliberately” failed “to monitor inbound funds” to such terror groups as Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, ensuring “that terrorists and other criminals could deposit and shuffle enormous sums on the exchange with impunity.”

“Moreover, when specific customers were designated or particular accounts were subject to seizure orders, Binance allowed those customers and accounts to shift the assets into other Binance accounts, thus negating the effect of any ‘blocking’ or ‘seizing’ of the account,” the complaint states.

Such a policy “demonstrates Binance’s deliberate and conscious effort to enable users to operate on the Binance platform and clearly helps facilitate financial crime on an industrial scale,” the filing adds. 

Among the 306 American plaintiffs are the families of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli-American hostage murdered by Hamas in Gaza; Itay Chen, an Israeli-American IDF soldier whose body was returned to Israel this month; Eyal Waldman, an Israeli philanthropist whose U.S.-born daughter, Danielle, was killed at the Nova music festival during the Oct. 7 attacks; and Yechiel Leiter, the Israeli ambassador to the U.S.

“The lawsuit details how Binance knowingly facilitated the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars between 2021 and 2023 that helped enable the terrorist organizations responsible for the Oct. 7 attacks,” Gary Osen, an attorney representing the plaintiffs who specializes in civil terror cases, said in a statement to Jewish Insider. “One of our goals is to cast a public spotlight on specific ways in which the Binance platform has been used by Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas to finance terrorism.”

The 284-page complaint, filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the District of North Dakota under the Anti-Terrorism Act, targets Binance as well as its founder and former CEO, Changpeng Zhao, and Guangying Chen, a close associate of Zhao whom the lawsuit identifies as the crypto exchange’s “de facto chief financial officer.”

Zhao and Chen could not be reached for comment regarding the lawsuit.

A Binance spokesperson said the company “cannot comment on any ongoing litigation.” 

“However, as a global crypto exchange, we comply fully with internationally recognized sanctions laws, consistent with other financial institutions. For context, the heads of the U.S.Treasury’s FinCEN and OFAC have confirmed that cryptocurrency is not widely used by Hamas terrorists,” the spokesperson told JI in a statement, referring to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and Office of Foreign Assets Control. “Most importantly, we hope for lasting peace in the region.”

The company’s “conduct was far more serious and pervasive than what the U.S. government disclosed during its 2023 criminal enforcement actions,” the complaint says, claiming that Binance “knowingly sent and received the equivalent of more than $1 billion to and from accounts and wallets controlled by the FTOs responsible for the Oct. 7 attacks.”

That figure, the filing states, vastly outnumbers a previous amount of more than $2,000 in known transactions for Hamas disclosed by the federal government in 2023.

In November 2023, Zhao pleaded guilty to money laundering charges and agreed to step down from his executive role. He served four months in federal prison and was pardoned last month by President Donald Trump. Binance itself also pleaded guilty to federal charges and paid over $4 billion in fines.

Last May, Binance participated in a $2 billion business deal with World Liberty Financial, a new crypto company founded by the families of Trump and Steve Witkoff, the president’s special envoy.

“To this day,” the complaint states, “there is no indication that Binance has meaningfully altered its core business model.”

Citing a complex forensic money laundering analysis, the lawsuit identifies a wide range of Binance accounts with alleged terror links and spanning multiple locales, including Venezuela, Gaza, Lebanon and even North Dakota, where an account connected to Hamas was accessed several times from a small city outside Fargo.

The suit refers to Gaza money exchanges, a gold smuggling operation in South America with ties to Hezbollah and a purported Venezuelan livestock entrepreneur allegedly moving millions of dollars for known terror organizations in the Middle East, among other illicit transactions.

“Every tunnel, every missile, every bullet, every attack is paid for by someone,” Izhar Shay, a plaintiff whose son Yaron died defending Kibbutz Kerem Shalom in Israel on Oct. 7, said in a statement shared with JI. “Companies like Binance cannot keep profiting if they enable terrorists to operate in the shadows. This case is about making sure that those who enabled Hamas’ evil are held to account.”

In December 2024, Natalie “Samantha” Rupnow opened fire at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisc., killing two and injuring six before taking her own life. A month later, Solomon Henderson shot and killed one person and wounded another at Antioch High School in Nashville, Tenn., before also killing himself.

What ties the two heinous acts together, a new report from the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism suggests, is an online community of white supremacists increasingly recruiting and inspiring school shooters like Rupnow and Henderson.

The research, published Thursday as an interactive timeline, analyzes the two school shootings that occurred weeks apart. Despite happening in different states, the report found overlapping online activity between the young perpetrators. 

In the months leading up to the shootings, both perpetrators were active on the website WatchPeopleDie, a forum where users can post and view real images and videos of violence — including murders, torture, rape, executions, beheadings, suicides, dismemberments, accidents and animal killings. 

Rupnow and Henderson carried out their attacks 18 and 19 months after creating WPD accounts, respectively. Both shooters posted, reposted, endorsed, replied to or otherwise engaged with extremist content on the site. 

ADL researchers found that extremist material — such as white supremacist and antisemitic manifestos and videos of white supremacist and antisemitic mass murders — was widely accessible on WPD, which originated as a forum on Reddit but is now independent after being banned from the site in 2019 after a user livestreamed the white supremacist Christchurch shooting in New Zealand.

Many videos of extremist mass killings, including those that were livestreamed as they occurred, remain accessible on the site, including the 2022 Buffalo Tops supermarket attack and the 2019 Halle synagogue shooting in Germany. 

Clips from attacks and images of shooters using stylized filters and text, set to music that glorifies the killers, are also popular on the site. Henderson posted one such graphic depicting Payton Gendron, the gunman who killed 10 Black people in the Buffalo supermarket shooting, as a saint holding his manifesto in place of a Bible.

The ADL said it plans to share the timeline with 16,000 school superintendents, urging them to “consider how their students may be able to access the type of dangerous content highlighted in the timeline while on their campuses and in their classrooms.” 

“Kids and teens today have lived their entire lives with easy internet access, putting them even more at risk of encountering violent extremism online,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the group’s CEO, said in a statement. “Extremist ideas combined with gore websites can inspire users to seek out more extremist content, while violence on extremist platforms can inspire others to look for even more violent content. It’s a vicious cycle, especially for young people. We hope this research guides all stakeholders in taking action to prevent future attacks.”

Days after Hamas released a video showing hostage Evyatar David emaciated and being forced to dig his own grave in a tunnel under Gaza, David’s family called on the Trump administration to do anything it can to ensure that the hostages are released.

“Evyatar is fighting for his life with what little strength he has left,” Matan Eshet, David’s cousin, told Jewish Insider on Monday. “You can see it in his eyes. You don’t need a medical degree to understand that Evyatar only has a few days to live.”

David, 24, was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists from the Nova Festival on Oct. 7, 2023. 

In a video released over the weekend, an extremely gaunt David was shown in a tunnel under Gaza digging, with his bones protruding. He wrote on a calendar documenting the small amounts of food — either lentils or beans — his captors have given him on some days, and on other days he wrote “no food.” 

At one point in the video, a Hamas terrorist reaches out from behind the camera to hand him a can of food, and the terrorist’s arm is visibly much thicker than David’s.

“This can is for two days, just to keep me alive,” David said of the food.

“I don’t know what I’m going to eat,” David said. “I haven’t eaten in days … I’m getting thinner and weaker by the day … What I’m doing now is digging my own grave … This is the grave where I think I’m going to be buried. Time is running out.”

Prof. Ronit Endevelt, the former head of the Nutrition Division at the Israeli Health Ministry now on the Hostage Families Forum medical team, estimated that David’s weight dropped about 41% to 40-45 kg.

Hamas released a video of David in February of this year, with hostage Guy Gilboa Dalal in a car, visibly distressed while being forced to watch other hostages being released. David’s health has visibly deteriorated since the previous video; he appears much thinner and paler in the new one.

Eshet said his family is “feeling broken” after seeing the new footage. 

“It’s not Evyatar. He doesn’t look like that or sound like that. That’s not how he moves. We see the distress in so many ways. He looks like a shadow of himself,” Eshet said. “He has to get medical care and food already.”

The video of David describing his starvation at the hands of Hamas came as some of the world’s largest media outlets published photos of children in Gaza who they reported were starving, but failed to mention that they suffered from genetic diseases. More broadly, much of the media coverage of Gaza in recent weeks has been about the humanitarian situation and difficulties distributing food to the residents.

“It’s maddening,” Eshet said. “Hamas are the ones taking the aid instead of the civilians. And then they claim that [Israel is] starving them, not Hamas who is preventing people from getting the food, while Hamas is choosing not to let Evyatar receive food.” 

Eshet noted that the arm of the Hamas terrorist who handed Evyatar the can of food was “much bigger and more muscular compared to Evyatar.”

“On the news, you can see people walking in the food markets in Gaza. People do not look the way Evyatar looks,” Eshet added. “No one was close to looking the way Evyatar does.” 

Eshet called on “Israel and the world to demand that Evyatar come home already.”

“We need everyone who sees the difficult pictures of Evyatar to understand that we don’t have another minute. We don’t have another day. We can lose him in the coming days,” he added.

“The U.S. government succeeded in getting a deal on Day minus-One, before [President Donald] Trump’s inauguration,” Eshet said. “America needs to do the same thing again and stand up and insist that the hostages are freed now, regardless of whatever else is happening.

“They did it once. They made a deal happen. They need to use that power again to make sure Evyatar comes home,” Eshet added.

Asked about the reports that Israel plans to expand its military operations in Gaza, including in areas where the hostages are believed to be held, Eshet said he hopes “these are tactical tools to bring about a change, stand up to Hamas and reach a [hostage] deal from a position of strength.” 

Eshet and David are first cousins. Eshet recalled that they “grew up together.”

“Evyatar is a charming and loving person, a good listener with a contagious smile,” Eshet said. “He was a middle child, and was friends with his big brother and little sister. He always paid attention to whoever needed help in the house.”

Eshet said that David loved to play guitar and that his music could always be heard in his parents’ house. Before Oct. 7, David planned to travel the world and try to make a living playing music.

“He had a smile and shining eyes, and we’re all waiting for him,” Eshet said. “He was a boy who became a skeleton in the Hamas tunnels. He needs to come home and be a regular person and live the life that is waiting for him.”

There are 50 hostages remaining in Gaza, 20 of whom are believed to be alive. Hamas rejected the latest attempt by the U.S. and Israel to reach a temporary ceasefire and hostage-release deal late last month.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad also released a video of hostage Rom Braslavski last week, who was also emaciated.

The Hostages Families Forum released a report by its medical team on Monday “warning that the hostages still held alive in Gaza are suffering from deliberate, prolonged, and systematic starvation … causing multisystem damage and posing an immediate risk of death.”

Prof. Hagai Levine, head of the medical team, said that “the outcome of this cruel experiment is foreseeable — body and mind will gradually deteriorate until they collapse. Any further delay in rescuing the hostages may cost human lives. We must not stand idly by while our brothers vanish. We must act now to bring them all home.”

Bob Dylan has never made it easy for the legions of fans, critics, scholars and journalists who analyze his music with almost Talmudic fervor. Famously unforthcoming in interviews, which are rare, the protean singer-songwriter and Nobel Prize winner has succeeded in keeping listeners guessing over the course of his nearly six-decade recording career.

Dylan, who turns 80 today, remains a mystifying figure in American popular culture, even as many of the songs from his 39 studio albums — the most recent of which, Rough and Rowdy Ways, came out last year — feel as relevant today as they did when they were first produced, including “Masters of War,” “The Times They Are A-Changin,’” and “Hurricane,” among countless other hits.

“Bob Dylan displayed the wit and wisdom of an 80-year-old man from the very first time we heard him at age 21 in 1962,” Seth Rogovoy, the author of Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet, told Jewish Insider in a recent email exchange. “The point is not so much age as it is timelessness.”

Even obscure works from Dylan’s lesser-known albums manage, on occasion, to speak to the moment long after they have been released. “Neighborhood Bully,” from Dylan’s 1983 record Infidels, was released a year after the First Lebanon War and two years after an airstrike in which Israel destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor outside Baghdad. But its themes have clear parallels with the recent conflict between Israel and Hamas. The song, a hard-driving rock number, never explicitly mentions Israel, yet it is widely interpreted as something of a Zionist anthem in the form of a biting satire lambasting those who would fault the Jewish state for defending itself in a hostile region.

The neighborhood bully just lives to survive

He’s criticized and condemned for being alive

He’s not supposed to fight back, he’s supposed to have thick skin

He’s supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in

He’s the neighborhood bully

“It’s so right for this moment, with the whole discussion of Israel being totally hypocritical,” argued Barry Shrage, a professor in the Hornstein Jewish Professional Leadership Program at Brandeis University and the former president of the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston. 

Bob Dylan (Wikicommons)

For Barry Faulk, a professor of English at Florida State University who specializes in 20th century popular music, “Neighborhood Bully” speaks more broadly to what he regards as an aspect of Dylan’s political temperament that in some ways cuts against his reputation as a countercultural icon. “It reminds me that Dylan has long worked outside, even against, the secular liberalism that was the core value of his early audience,” Faulk told JI, describing the song as one of his favorites in Dylan’s extensive oeuvre.

True to form, however, Dylan has kept his distance from “Neighborhood Bully,” a controversial song that has garnered its fair share of criticism over the past few decades — and is, somewhat mysteriously, unavailable on YouTube despite that other songs from Infidels can be accessed on the site.

Dylan has never performed the song live, according to Terry Gans’s 2020 book Surviving in a Ruthless World: Bob Dylan’s Voyage to ‘Infidels.’ The singer only seems to have discussed it once, in a 1984 interview with Rolling Stone in which he denied that the song was a Zionist political statement. 

“You’d have to point that out to me, you know, what line is in it that spells that out,” Dylan told the journalist Kurt Loder, adding: “‘Neighborhood Bully,’ to me, is not a political song, because if it were, it would fall into a certain political party. If you’re talkin’ about it as an Israeli political song — even if it is an Israeli political song — in Israel alone, there’s maybe 20 political parties. I don’t know where that would fall, what party.”

But when Loder asked if it would be “fair to call that song a heartfelt statement of belief,” Dylan seems to have let his guard down ever so slightly.

“Maybe it is, yeah,” he replied. “But just because somebody feels a certain way, you can’t come around and stick some political-party slogan on it. If you listen closely, it really could be about other things. It’s simple and easy to define it, so you got it pegged, and you can deal with it in that certain kinda way. However, I wouldn’t do that, ’cause I don’t know what the politics of Israel is. I just don’t know.”

Despite his self-proclaimed ignorance of Israeli politics, Dylan has nevertheless maintained a connection with the Jewish state throughout his career. He has visited Israel a number of times and played a handful of shows there, most recently in 2011. In 1983, the year he put out “Neighborhood Bully” — released in Hebrew by Ariel Zilber in 2012 — Dylan celebrated his son’s bar mitzvah at the Western Wall. 

Still, on a personal as well as an artistic level, Dylan also seems to have demonstrated something of an ambivalent relationship with his own Judaism. Born Robert Zimmerman, Minnesota’s Jewish son briefly flirted with born-again Christianity in the late 1970s and early ’80s — during which time he produced a trio of evangelical albums, the first of which Slow Train Coming, is regarded as a classic of the form. 

“He put poetry on the jukebox — put the Bible on the jukebox!” said Liz Thomson, a London-based author and Dylan expert.

But while Dylan’s music has always retained something of a Biblical subtext, he has rarely alluded to his Jewish roots, with the exception of some songs such as “Highway 61 Revisited,” “All Along the Watchtower,” “With God on Our Side” and the little-known novelty “Talkin’ Hava Nagilah Blues.” 

“For the most part he is not explicit about these themes,” said Elliot Wolfson, a professor of Jewish Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who contributed an essay on Dylan’s “Jewish gnosis” to a new collection, The World of Bob Dylan.

In many ways, that approach is in keeping with Dylan’s persistent effort to evade any kind of label, according to the music historian and critic Ted Gioia. “For me, Dylan will always be the musician who didn’t care about having a personal logo, or attaching his name to a running shoe, or launching a high-priced fashion line,” he told JI. “If you believe his songs, he expected us to have higher aspirations than that. Even now, I’d like to think that’s what he wants his legacy to be after he’s gone.”

Gayle Wald, a professor of English at The George Washington University, echoed that sentiment. “From a certain perspective,” she said of Dylan, “he’s not very satisfying because he’s not intelligible, always, as a Jew.”

One gets the sense, though, that Dylan wouldn’t want it any other way.

When Matt Weiss was in his early 20s, he would often sneak out of his Brooklyn yeshiva to perform at various events. As the lead keyboardist for an in-demand cover group called the EvanAl Orchestra, Weiss was playing about four nights a week throughout the tri-state region. “We were a very popular wedding band in the regular Orthodox circles,” he said. 

Eventually, Weiss’s teachers found out what he was up to, and, as he recalls, considered kicking him out. He convinced them otherwise. “I explained to them, ‘would you rather a guy who you don’t know what he’s doing, or would you rather a guy who wants to learn at your yeshiva, but this is a great outlet?’” he recalled saying. “It’s not like I’m going to the clubs.”

It is interesting that Weiss should defend himself in that way, because he has made it abundantly clear since then that his main desire is to go to the clubs. In his mid-20s, Weiss discovered electronic dance music and left EvanAl behind to pursue a career as a DJ. Now 29, Weiss — who performs by the stage name Matt Dubb, as in the letter ‘w’ — has built a reputation for himself as an in-demand electronic music artist.

Weiss occupies a unique role in the Orthodox music world, though it is one he initially straddled uneasily. “People were like, what’s this guy doing? He’s bringing club music into the Jewish world,” Weiss said. “You would see these comments on YouTube that were nasty.”

His detractors were right in one sense: Weiss’s music sounds as if it belongs in a nightclub or at a rave, and that is, of course, where he wants it to be heard. But it is also intimately in touch with the ritual of ecstatic song and dance in Jewish culture, creating a kind of tension — a push and pull between innovation and tradition — that has driven much of Jewish-American art. 

For Weiss, who sings and produces as well — he rarely records in English — house music is a kind of alternate religion. “To me, it’s so deep and spiritual,” he told Jewish Insider in an interview from his home in the Midwood neighborhood of Brooklyn. “People think it’s just, like, party music. But it’s so deep. A good beat hits me in the soul.”

Weiss first started DJing when he was performing with EvanAl. Then, traveling abroad to music festivals in Ibiza and throughout Europe, he was introduced to a whole new style of entertainment — one he wanted to learn himself. “I would hear the top, top DJs and be, like, ‘I feel like I could do this,’” he recalled. 

He quickly found his footing. His first album, in 2015, was with the renowned Hasidic pop singer Lipa Schmeltzer, who had previously sung with EvanAl. B Positive was a stylistic departure for Schmeltzer, who had released nearly 20 albums and was unused to the accompaniment of pulsing beats and buzzing synth lines that Weiss taught himself to make via YouTube videos and a computer program. “It was a big risk to do that album,” Schmeltzer told JI. Still, he did it anyway. “I trusted Matt,” he said.

Matt Dubb and Lipa Schmeltzer

Weiss’s affinity for the international house music scene makes sense in light of his parochial background. “He’s a frum kid from Lakewood,” said Ruli Ezrachi, a singer and musician who works as Weiss’s manager. In fact, Weiss grew up on top of a shul in Lakewood, N.J., that his father built. He went on to attend yeshivas in Edison, Staten Island and Brooklyn until the age of 25, when he moved on to DJing.

“I was never rebellious,” Weiss said, adding that his father was supportive of his nontraditional route. Weiss isn’t married and has never studied in Israel, though he has been there several times for gigs. Still, as a testament to his religious devotion, he prays with a minyan three times a day and tries to study the Talmud for about 45 minutes each night.

“Even if he goes to Mexico on vacation,” said Ezrachi, “he’s going to be in the Chabad House every morning at 9 a.m. for the minyan.”

Weiss’s best-known songs include the old-world “Baruch Hashem,” with Zusha and Pumpidisa; the bright and earnest “Adama V’shamayim,” which came out in 2019; and his most recent release, from late May, “Ana,” featuring the Israeli singer Itzik Dadya. 

Ezrachi described Weiss as a perfectionist who works on just one song at a time. Normally, he said, Weiss will come up with a beat that functions as a kind of rough sketch for the song to come. Then he will write a melody around it or he’ll find someone who can do it alone or with whom he can partner. The final step: Ezrachi helps Weiss look for a lyricist as well as a singer. “Or sometimes Matt says, ‘I don’t care, I’m just gonna sing it myself.’”

Weiss has played a number of high-profile events since he started in electronic music, such as the Jewish Music Carnival in upstate New York and a Camp HASC fundraiser at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall. But he has yet to break into the secular club scene, a goal he hopes to accomplish soon — not exactly an uncommon wish among Orthodox performers. 

“I have yet to actually do a gig in a mainstream club,” he told JI. “Right now, I only do religious Jewish events. I’ve never played at a club that’s not a Jewish party. I’ve played a club on Purim.”

Before the coronavirus pandemic, Weiss had been scheduled to DJ at a popular electronic music festival in Miami. The March 19 show, featuring such marquee names as Desiigner, Mariah and FatBoy SSE, was supposed to be a coming-out of sorts for Weiss. But the show was cancelled when the virus hit.

Lately, though, Weiss has focused his energy on finance. In 2018, he founded a brokerage firm, Dubbs Holdings, and now invests in businesses around the country through a separate business, Supreme Capital. He has found some success, he said, and at the moment, he is working to build on it, though he wants to pursue music exclusively at some point. “That is the dream,” he said. “But I’m realistic right now.”

There are some signs that may happen soon. He is currently working on a song in partnership with a famous performer with an Orthodox background who managed to find fame beyond the Orthodox community. The artist’s name, Weiss said, could not yet be revealed to the public.

Still, despite his desire to move beyond the Orthodox music scene, it is clear that Weiss has no intention of abandoning his identity as an Orthodox Jew. “I’m very spiritual,” he told JI. “I don’t want to switch that. Like, I don’t want my songs to be about girls. I want them to be about God and stuff like that — spiritual — but I’d love for it to be played everywhere.”

He at least takes comfort in the belief that he has earned several converts within his own community since he started on his path in music. “In the beginning, people hated me,” Matt Dubb said. “But the world has changed.”

“The Song of Names,” due in theaters December 25, is a poignant, haunting and memorable film. It is also the first feature movie ever allowed to film on the grounds of Treblinka.

The film, starring Tim Roth and Clive Owen, darts back and forth between 1938, 1951 and 1985, following the lives of two young boys brought together just before the onset of the Holocaust. Dovidl Rapoport, a Jewish violin prodigy from Warsaw, is taken in as a lodger in London by the family of young Martin Simmonds. 

The two young boys quickly become fast friends as they survive the London blitz together, though Dovidl never learns the fate of his parents and sisters left behind in Poland. On the day he is slated to make his musical debut at a London concert hall, Dovidl disappears without a trace. Decades later, Martin is still searching for him, hunting down clues to find the man he loved as a brother.  

The film was directed by Francois Girard, set to a haunting and pivotal original score from Oscar-winner Howard Shore and produced by Robert Lantos, the Hungarian-born son of Holocaust survivors who has called Canada home for more than 50 years. 

Lantos spoke with Jewish Insider recently about his work on the film, the troubling rise in global antisemitism and the lessons movies can teach about hatred and prejudice. 

“This is a story that — in the climate in which we live today — absolutely has to be told,” Lantos said. “It’s a way to remember, it’s a way to honor the two key words in my entire vocabulary, which are ‘never again.’”

The screenplay for “The Song of Names” was written by Jeffrey Caine and adapted from a novel by Norman Lebrecht of the same name. When Lantos first read the book, he knew immediately that he wanted to bring it to the silver screen. The storyline, he said, is a way of telling a Holocaust tale “in an original manner and an emotionally compelling manner.” The musical-themed plot, he noted, is a conduit for “bringing the horrors of the Holocaust back to a contemporary audience without forcing people to come face to face with living skeletons and images of horror.”

Martin (Tim Roth) in a scene set at Treblinka.

The cast and crew spent just one day filming at the site of the Treblinka extermination camp, where close to a million people were murdered in its just over one year of operation. Today, nothing remains of the original camp, and the site is marked with a haunting memorial to the dead. 

“We asked for a permit and the authorities read the script and surprisingly they said yes,” Lantos recalled. That single day of work was the most difficult and disturbing day on set, he said.

“It was like being in a state of altered reality,” he told JI. “We only shot there for one day. And frankly, I can’t imagine spending more than one day there. The weight of the place is unbearable.”

Caine’s original screenplay contained dialogue for the scenes set in Treblinka. But once the filmmakers arrived on location, they changed the plan entirely. 

“Once we were there, we all felt that the dialogue had to go, because there’s nothing to say there,” Lantos said. “There’s nothing that can be said that wouldn’t be trivial in the context of what we were seeing with our eyes.”

While the original novel told a story of two young Jewish boys living through World War II, the film chose to make Martin and his family not Jewish. 

“The character of Martin provides an access point” to a wider audience, Lantos said. “I thought it’d be important to bring to it the point of view of someone who wasn’t steeped from birth in Jewish rituals and tradition.”

Dovidl (Jonah Hauer-King) enters a synagogue in London in the 1950s.

Dovidl’s connection to religion is a key plot point throughout the film. In one emotional scene, he reflects on the ideas of Judaism as a faith and as an ethnicity — a debate that still resonates strongly today. 

“Ethnicity isn’t soluble in water, Motl,” Dovidl tells Martin, using his affectionate nickname. “It’s a skin you’re born in and wear until the day you die. Now religion — that’s a coat. When it gets too hot — you can take it off.”

Lantos said they consulted with rabbis from Reform to Orthodox to “try and get every detail that had to do with religion and the period this film was set in” as authentic as possible.

Work on “The Song of Names” began several years ago, but Lantos has felt its importance and significance only grow as a rash of antisemitic incidents creeps across North America. 

The scene that was filmed in Treblinka, Lantos said, “is the reason that I felt that the film had to be made. Because in the world in which we now live in, where Jew hatred has found brand new ammunition, and it is firing on all cylinders, and it’s sweeping across Europe and on our campuses in North America, anything that we can do, to not forget… the consequences of that hate and human suffering — anything that I can do to remember, has to be done,” he continued. “If we don’t remember the past, we’re guaranteed to repeat them, to repeat all of its tragedies.”

Dovidl (Clive Owen) performs a solo violin concert.

Lantos has enjoyed a long and storied career as a filmmaker in Canada. His works include the critically acclaimed 2004 film “Being Julia,” starring Annette Benning; 2007’s “Eastern Promises” with Viggo Mortensen and Naomi Watts; and 2010’s “Barney’s Version,” starring Paul Giamatti. 

But many of Lantos’s films, particularly his recent ones, have dealt with the experiences of Jews during the Holocaust. Those include 1999’s “Sunshine,” starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz; 2003’s “The Statement” with Michael Caine; and 2015’s “Remember,” featuring Christopher Plummer. 

Lantos said his parents, both Hungarian Holocaust survivors, opted to hide their Jewish identity when he was a child, hoping that “the solution to sparing their son of the horrors and persecutions that they had lived through was to forget all about being Jewish.” 

The award-winning producer said that for decades he made films that had nothing to do with the Holocaust or with his Jewish identity — which finally changed with 1999’s “Sunshine,” which follows five generations of a Hungarian Jewish family and in many ways mirrors his own life story. 

“Up until that point, I didn’t feel that compelling need” to tell stories of Jewish persecution, Lantos said. And since then, as he watches a resurgence of antisemitism across the world, “I can’t think of anything that is more important to deal with than that in my life. I happen to be a filmmaker. That gives me a way of dealing with it that could possibly make a difference.”

On a hot summer weekend in upstate New York in 1969, hundreds of thousands of music lovers swarmed the Borscht Belt towns of Sullivan County, bound for a festival on the property of a Jewish dairy farmer named Max Yasgur. The festival’s promoters and financers — Michael Lang, John Roberts, Joel Rosenman and Artie Kornfeld — billed the event as “an Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music.”

An array of Jewish performers were counted among the dozens of acts, including Jefferson Airplane’s Jorma Kaukonen, Barry Melton, Arlo Guthrie, Robbie Robertson and many of the founding members of doo-wop group Sha Na Na.

The Woodstock festival defined a generation and spawned multiple incarnations. The most recent attempt to hold a similar festival on the 50th anniversary of the original fell through after a series of production, artist, and venue issues. Lang, one of the co-founders of the original Woodstock, spoke to Jewish Insider on the eve of the festival’s anniversary about the legacy of the historic weekend that defined a generation.

On whether a festival like Woodstock could happen again and what it might look today: Well, you know, nothing is reproducible in the sense of recreating what happened, but you can certainly create an event which has the same values and has the same goals. Ours was to engage the public on what we see as kind of the critical issues of today, which is climate change and global warming and sustainability and activism and gun control. These are things that are really affecting all of our lives, some of which really I think endanger the survival of the human race.

On the parallels in national climate between the 60s and the present: We’ve definitely taken a huge giant step backwards and I credit the present administration with that. And there are amazing similarities. We were dealing with the civil rights movement and women’s rights and the beginning of the concern for the planet and trying to end what we thought was an unjust war. And today we have Black Lives Matter and we have the #metoo movement and we have climate deniers in the White House and that’s really what… motivated us to have another festival, to sort of reengage the public in those issues because everybody’s got to take responsibility. And you can no longer be complacent. Lives are at stake… And the most powerful weapon we have is obviously our voices and our votes.

Lang on the impact his upbringing had on his professional endeavors and the outsized Jewish representation throughout the festival: I don’t know if it has to do with being Jewish or just being brought up in a Jewish household, but the things that we learn from our Jewish mothers and fathers stay with us. And in my household it was about diversity and compassion and doing the right thing, and I assume that’s something that takes place in a lot of Jewish homes around the world.

On the dynamic between festival-goers and locals who lived in the communities around the original festival: Once the kids started to arrive and they started to interact and they realized they weren’t monsters and they weren’t going to steal their cattle and they were polite, there was a love affair that went on with everybody who was local and all these kids coming in. So everybody was helping with sandwiches and water and pulling cars out of ditches. It completely broke down that generation gap that we had been experiencing all those years.

How do you want Woodstock to be remembered 50 years from today — 100 years after the festival? Pretty much the way it is remembered now. It stands for hope and compassion and a better way to work and live together on this planet. I think that it’s a moment of inspiration and that’s a feasible outcome for the human race.