Nadav Lapid's 'Yes!': Israeli director's wartime film raises eyebrows and ire

The Times of Israel Daily Briefing

The Times of Israel

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4.5 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 18 April 2026

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

Welcome to The Reel Schmooze with ToI film reviewer Jordan Hoffman and host Amanda Borschel-Dan, where we bring you all the entertainment news and film reviews a Jew can use.

We start the program with a "Jangle" -- a Jewish angle -- on this week's entertainment news. Hoffman brings a tale of our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, who defends three Israelis in Times Square who are being attacked by a would-be social media influencer. Hear what transpires.

Our main feature this week is Israeli director Nadav Lapid newest film, "Yes!" The film has raised eyebrows -- and not a little amount of ire -- in Israel for its messaging, with the Minister of Culture Miki Zohar weighing in.

Now screening in the United States, the film premiered in 2025 at the Cannes Film Festival. The film focuses on an artistic couple that is willing to do almost anything to succeed in their art, including sex work and writing a horrific anthem calling for the complete destruction of Gaza.

Stick around to see if "Yes!" got an "oy," "meh" or "not bad" in this week's The Reel Schmooze.

The Reel Schmooze is produced by Ari Schlacht and can be found wherever you get your podcasts.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Times of Israel's The Real Shmuse, bringing you all the entertainment news and movie reviews a Jew can use.
0:13.7	I'm your host, Amanda Borschal Don, here with our movie maven, Jordan Hoffman.
0:18.9	Jordan, thank you for coming at me straight from New Jersey.
0:23.2	I'm here in Central New Jersey. Hello to everyone. Hello to all the listeners. Passover is over.
0:29.1	Easter is over. Greek Easter, which comes later than non-Greek Easter is over also. And now
0:35.4	we're just, we're just into spring and also summer. It's very hot here
0:40.1	on the east coast of the USA this week, which is fun. And yeah, thanks to all the listeners who
0:48.2	wrote in after our episode of the Ten Commandments. We got a lot of amusing memories from people.
0:56.4	And one woman said, agreed with me.
0:58.7	She seemed to think that growing up in the USA, the Ten Commandments was split over two nights.
1:05.3	And according to the internet, they only did it once.
1:09.4	I mean, I read this on, you know, the source of all knowledge,
1:12.4	Wikipedia, so I could do a little bit of a deeper dive, but according to Wikipedia, they
1:16.6	showed it just in one marathon setting, but maybe this woman and I just be imprinted on that one
1:22.0	time when they split it over two nights. So is that five commandments a night then?
1:26.9	Exactly. Precisely. Thou shalt not, thou shalt wait till... Hold that thought. Hold that thought.
1:34.0	Hold that thought. So yeah, that was fun. That seemed to, you know, it's funny. We did that movie
1:38.6	thanks to a recommendation from Yaakov over there at T.O.I. It was a last minute. And it was a little corny.
1:46.4	Nobody's going to want it. But apparently people seen everybody had, everybody who's old enough to
1:50.0	remember watching as a kid has fun memories of the Ten Commandments. So I do think we'll do maybe
1:56.6	another sandal epic later on the real schmuse because we were reminded with listener comments
2:03.7	that many of them, although the bulk of them tend to be about Roman stories and New Testament
	...

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