The Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies continued its 2023 Summer Film Series with Nelson’s Last Stand, a new documentary written and directed by Avi Maor Marzuk.
Nelson’s Last Stand, a “Best Israeli Film” nominee at the 2021 DocAviv Film Festival, is a fascinating exploration of a little-known piece of Israeli history, with abundant archival footage to bring us back to the freewheeling 1970s. When Israel gained control of the Sinai in the 1967 Six-Day War, vacationers and adventurers came in droves. Few were as committed as Rafi Nelson, an eccentric, bearded bohemian who set up a beach resort village in Taba that flourished in the 1970s as an anything-goes getaway for average Israelis, international celebrities, and quite a few Members of the Knesset (Israel’s Parliament). The 1978 Camp David Accords signaled a new era of peace between Israel and Egypt, but for Rafi Nelson, they marked the beginning of a decades-long campaign to keep his beach village and the surrounding area inside Israel’s borders. (81 minutes)
On Monday, August 7th, Israeli journalist and historian Gershom Gorenberg joined the Institute for a virtual Q&A discussing Nelson’s Last Stand and its historical, political, and social contexts.
Gershom Gorenberg is the Knapp Adjunct Senior Research Scholar and Adjunct Professor of Journalism at Columbia University. An Israeli historian and journalist, Gorenberg has been covering Middle Eastern affairs for three decades. Gorenberg is the author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements 1967-1977 and The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount, and coauthor of Shalom Friend, a biography of Yitzhak Rabin that won the National Jewish Book Award.
Gorenberg is a columnist for the Washington Post and a senior correspondent for The American Prospect. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Foreign Policy and other leading publications in North America, Europe and the Middle East. He holds degrees from the University of California at Santa Cruz and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Most recently, Gorenberg published a guest opinion in the New York Times discussing Israel’s ongoing “judicial reform.”
You can view Gershom Gorenberg’s virtual Q&A with Stuart Weinstock, the IIJS Film Series Coordinator, in full below.
This event was made possible by the generosity of the Appel and Kaye families.
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