On October 7, 2023, Liat Beinin Atzili and her husband Aviv Atzili were kidnapped from their home in an Israeli kibbutz. The new documentary “Holding Liat” follows Liat’s family — including members in Portland — in the days and months that followed as they fight for her release and face their own conflicting perspectives on the crisis in Israel and Gaza. Lance Kramer, one of the producers of the film, and Joel Beinin, Liat’s uncle, join us.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. On October 7, 2023, 251 Israelis were kidnapped as part of Hamas’ attack on southern Israel. Liat and Aviv Atzili were among them. For months, their family – including members in Portland – didn’t know if Liat and Aviv were alive or dead. That family, and their sometimes conflicting perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, is the subject of a new documentary. It’s called “Holding Liat,” and it’s screening this Thursday at Cinema 21 as part of the Portland Jewish Film Festival. It’ll have a longer run at the theater starting on March 13.
I’m joined now by Lance Kramer, one of the producers of the film, and Portlander Joel Beinin, a former professor of Middle Eastern history at Stanford who is also Liat’s uncle. It’s great to have both of you on the show.
Lance Kramer: So glad to be here, thanks for having us.
Joel Beinin: Thank you for having us.
Miller: Lance, you are related to Joel’s family. Your cousin was married to Liat’s cousin, Joel’s son. And 20 years ago, I understand when you lived in Portland for some time after you graduated from college, you actually lived in Joel’s basement. Had you made a film before in which you were as close to the subjects as you are to your family?
Kramer: Well, this is very much, I guess you could say, a family affair in front of and behind the camera. So first of all, I work with my brother. My brother Brandon is the director of the film. So we have our own kind of familial relationship that we have to navigate all the time as creative partners. And we’ve made two other feature films over the last 15 years, “City of Trees” and “The First Step,” that are very, very intimate portraits of people navigating very difficult situations, in much the same style as “Holding Liat” from a filmmaking standpoint. We were very close to those protagonists as well. But this just took it to a whole another level, as far as just having this even distant familial connection.
Miller: How did you navigate that? I’m curious, for example, if there were ground rules about access, about what you’d cover [and] what you wouldn’t, about how much control these various family members would have over, say, final cut or what would make it into the film?
Kramer: We were always carrying this dual role of being family and filmmaker. We always were very, very clear about that. We also always felt that our responsibility, first and foremost, was to be there as a support. We wanted to make sure that we were causing no harm in the process of introducing a camera into these incredibly sensitive environments, when a family, each person in the family, was going through some of the darkest days of their life.
It’s not the first thing you think of, to bring a camera into those spaces. But what we said, and this is part of our own ethical training, was that everyone in the family would also see the film before it was finished. And that’s something we’ve done with all the protagonists of our film. I think that having that knowledge meant that then there were no “gotcha” moments and that everyone knew that they would be able to see the film before it was finished, which meant that we could be in these intimate, vulnerable spaces, documenting very, very difficult moments and knowing that later on you’d have a chance to see how that showed up in the context of the edit. And each person in the family, we honored that commitment and each person gave their blessing to the finished film.
Miller: You couldn’t know, obviously, when you started filming what was going to happen, in terms of this global event and what was going to happen to your family. But what were your goals? What did you want to accomplish from the beginning?
Kramer: Look, we didn’t know any step of the way what was going to happen, first and foremost. So on one level, we were really just trying to stay present and document an unfolding crisis in real time, from each family member’s point of view, as best as we possibly could. Just that, in and of itself, was almost impossible. Particularly as an independent film with very little, really no outside support.
But we also felt that the experience of not just the hostages but the, so to speak, hostage families and people who were directly impacted by everything that was happening, Israelis and Palestinians as well, was so misunderstood and often misrepresented or reduced in the public limelight. And that the pressure and stress of not just being directly impacted, but then also not being able to have the space to represent your full lived experience and complexity of all of that, was an additional level of stress and even oppression that we felt was so difficult to see.
So in a sense, what we wanted to do is try to just honor the lived experience and the point of view and perspective of each person in the family, and give a space where they could show up as themselves and have a way of expressing their own kind of grief and points of view, with as much authenticity as possible.
Miller: Joel, you and your brother, Liat’s father, grew up on the American East Coast. Then, as I understand it, you were the first one to move to a kibbutz in Israel around 1970. But you only spent two or three years there before you decided to leave, whereas your brother, who came after you, stayed. And that’s where Liat was living. Why did you leave?
Beinin: I left as a result of political activity. After my wife and I left the kibbutz and moved to Jerusalem – we were there for almost two years – I became very fearful of the kind of place Israel was on the way to becoming and I did not want to serve in the army to defend that. So we came back to the United States about six months after my parents took my brother and sister to live permanently in Israel, where my parents passed away in Israel. My brother and sister and each of them have two children who still live there, although Liat’s younger sister lives here in Portland, and came here in 2014.
Miller: What exactly did you see or experience that made you leave? Why did you say, “I don’t want to live in this country?” If I understand correctly, you’ve described yourself as growing up in a left wing, secular, Zionist-Jewish household. You’re not the only person like that. There’s a gigantic spread of American Jewry and Jewish identity, but it’s a specific one, what I just mentioned. So how did you go from, if I understand correctly, being a Zionist to not wanting to live in Israel?
Beinin: Right, so it’s not just me. It’s also my brother and sister, my parents and my father’s two brothers. So this is, for several generations, my family’s political identity. The organization that we belong to, Hashomer Hatzair which means “The Young Guard,” didn’t support the establishment of a Jewish state before 1948. They supported a binational state. So it was always, problematically at some conjunctures, but it was always an organization that was more inclined than most other political currents in Israel to reach some kind of accommodation with the Palestinians.
After 1967, Israel was drunk with triumphalist militarism, because they had prevailed so easily in the war. And very soon after June 1967, it was apparent that there were strong currents within Israeli society that were going to seek to annex the occupied territories. When we left the kibbutz and came to Jerusalem, we were active with a mainly group of students – new lefty types – who opposed the occupation and also supported the movement of the Black Panthers, which was a movement of Mizrahi Jews, against the structured discrimination against them.
Doing that work taught me that there’s nothing special about the government of Israel. It’s a government that lies, like all governments do – not necessarily worse, but certainly not better. And Israel is headed in a bad place, and I didn’t want to be part of that.
Miller: I want to zoom forward 50 years. It has now, actually, been a couple years now since 2023. But what do you most remember about those two months or so when you didn’t know if you would see your niece again?
Beinin: First, a great deal of fear. Even terror might be an appropriate word. Also, deep sadness that my family in Israel was going through this and I could only experience it at a great remove.
Also, there was a political difference between us, despite the strong family connection. That had to be managed very delicately because I didn’t want to say or do anything that would either endanger Liat and Aviv … We still thought Aviv was alive. Turns out he was killed on October 7. And I wanted to be as supportive as I could of the other members of my family. It was not easy.
Miller: Lance, there is a devastating scene – many in the movie – but one in a very sort of small family way where Yehuda, Liat’s father, and Neta, one of her sons – so Yehuda’s grandson – they’re in a car together. This is when they’d both gone to Washington D.C. to talk to members of various congressional delegations to build American political support for Israeli hostages. Can you describe the tension between this grandfather and grandson?
Kramer: Yeah, in a lot of ways, it’s similar to what Joel is describing. So you see a grandfather, Yehuda, who’s also the father of Liat, who was kidnapped, having just been very outspoken in a room full of … It was a Jewish space. It was hosted by Chabad. And he had been very outspoken and even challenged certain people in the room you see in the film about the way that the family was kind of being, in his words, almost paraded around as a hostage family.
Miller: And my understanding, watching that scene – the earlier one – is that many of the people in that audience are pretty fervent supporters of the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu and of what the Israeli Defense Forces were doing at that time.
Kramer: Precisely. Yehuda was very concerned that his own family’s trauma and situation would be used to serve a political and militaristic purpose that he did not believe in, nor did he think would be a way to honor Liat and Aviv. So he felt very compelled to be outspoken about that.
His grandson was still very fresh, in having just survived the trauma of October 7. He was on the kibbutz. So even just to be there in the first place was almost like re-traumatizing. Let alone, his politics were not the same. So you see, even just in that moment where they’re taking a car ride home after the event, how two members of the same family, two very different generations but still linked by blood, are having to navigate the same crisis but from very different vantage points, and still love each other, still care about each other. But, also have to navigate each other’s very, very vastly different politics and also, where the personal and the political lines are drawn, it’s not really clear.
We felt that being able to see a family go through that together was incredibly powerful and important. If they as a family would have to kind of navigate that, then maybe there could be something that others could learn from that.
Miller: Joel, when, little by little, hostages were being released, families like yours had no idea if their loved ones would be on the list. We learned in the movie that families, if they had a relationship with a liaison from the government, would sometimes get these names, sometimes they wouldn’t, and they’d have no idea if their loved ones were going to be released. What did you hear about what that was like for your family, that uncertainty?
Beinin: You can see in the film that it’s torturous to hope that your child, my niece, is going to be released. And then once, twice, people are being released. You thought that she was going to be released, but she wasn’t. I mean, even at a distance of 10,000 miles, it was excruciating.
Miller: Lance, in the end, Liat was released and your team was there to cover part of the reunion. In particular, we don’t see, as viewers, the reunion with Liat and her children. We do see the reunion with her parents and her sister. What was it like to film that?
Kramer: Actually, I appreciate you calling attention to that because that was a very deliberate decision. Her children were very supportive of the film and the process of documenting the family’s experience. But when it came time to when Liat was being released, they were very clear with us that they did not want that moment of reunification to be filmed. It actually caused a disagreement even within the family, layered on disagreements because Yehuda actually did want that moment filmed. Ultimately, we respected the kids’ wishes.
So what we came up with as a family was that we did not film the moment when the kids were reunited with Liat. But everyone was supportive of being able to film when Yehuda, Chaya, and Tal, Liat’s sister, were reunited. So we filmed that moment, which is kind of the second reunion, but we did so with a cell phone. That’s all that the IDF allowed us to use. We also did it from a distance, so you see in the film we’re actually outside of the room.
We felt that that was the way that we could ethically be able to document the moment but also to give the family space. In that same sequence of events, Brandon, my brother, had to explain to Liat that for those 54 some days that she was held, this film was also being made. So she was also having to give consent in the moment, which she did, to being able to document – which was essential. If she hadn’t given consent, there would have never been a film.
Miller: Joel, how did watching this movie and talking with your family, and in particular, I’m wondering about your brother … How did it change the relationship? Did it change the relationship that you have with him?
Beinin: It did. And that, I think, was actually, from my point of view personally, one of the best outcomes of the film. So my wife and I and Tal all traveled to New York last June for the U.S. premiere of the film at the Tribeca Film Festival. And then the day after the first showing, I sat down with my brother for about three hours. There were two witnesses to that conversation. They participated a little bit, but they were mostly witnesses, my wife and a very old mutual friend.
We worked through, in a more substantial and relaxed way than I can ever remember in our entire lives, what this all meant to us, and what he was doing over there and what I’m doing over here. I’ve been engaged in this issue for my entire life, even after I left Israel. And I think we came to an understanding that while there are still some differences between us, they’re of a very different sort and much less deep than either we or many others believed. It doesn’t easily resolve itself down to Zionist, not Zionist, for example. That’s too simple-minded to explain where we are.
Miller: Lance, Liat is a history teacher and also she’s worked at or volunteered, I’m not sure, as a guide at Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel. How does that particular history inform the way that she views the current relationship between Israelis and Palestinians now, after being released as a hostage?
Kramer: I obviously won’t speak, I can’t speak, for Liat directly, but I can share things that she shared with us and also that she’s just been very public about in writing and public speaking. My sense is that it deeply informs her own understanding of her own experience and the broader kind of global context. She’s deeply passionate about being an educator and also a student of Holocaust and World War II history. I don’t want to give too much away about the end of the movie. But you see at the end of the film where those two identities, of being a hostage and an educator, intersect.
One of the very first things that she did after she was returned was she wrote an op-ed for The New York Times, which had a headline, something like, “Seeking rebirth and not revenge.” And she was very outspoken about her desire to seek reconciliation and healing in the wake of her trauma. Also, her desire not to see any Palestinian, Israeli or anyone harmed as a result of the trauma that she went through, comes from a Jewish teaching that she used to teach as a Holocaust educator, before October 7, called Tikkun Olam, which was the whole idea of seeking this idea of rebirth in the wake of trauma. So even in understanding her own experience, she’s looked to those lessons from the past, particularly from the survivor generation.
Miller: Lance Kramer and Joel Beinin, thanks very much.
Beinin: Thank you for having us.
Kramer: Thank you so much for having us. We really appreciate it.
Miller: Lance Kramer is one of the producers of the movie “Holding Liat,” which is going to be screening this Thursday at Cinema 21 in Portland, as part of the Portland Jewish Film Festival starting on March 13. It’ll have a week-long run at that same theater. Joel Beinin is a Portlander now. He is a former professor of Middle Eastern history at Stanford. He is the uncle of Liat Atzili.
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