From Israeli series that break out worldwide to the films turning heads at Cannes and Sundance, The Jerusalem Playlist is The Jerusalem Post's guide to culture in Israel and beyond. Longtime 'Post' film and TV critic Hannah Brown joins Ezra Taylor for reviews, recommendations, and the occasional disagreement about what's actually worth your time. Produced by Gadi Zaig.
Hannah Brown has been the film and TV critic for The Jerusalem Post since 2001. Born and raised in New York, she was previously a movie critic at The New York Post, and is the author of the novel If I Could Tell You.
Ezra Taylor is the social media manager at The Jerusalem Post. Originally from Salford, England, he has worked with Haaretz and i24NEWS.
Gadi Zaig produces The Jerusalem Playlist. A studio producer at The Jerusalem Post and the producer of the paper's daily JPost Headlines podcast, he is completing an MFA in filmmaking at Tel Aviv University's Steve Tisch School of Film & Television, and is an actor and fixture of Jerusalem's theater scene.
Michael Rapaport plays a haredi billionaire in new 'Matchmaking' movie
An exiled Iranian singer shares a Haifa stage with a Nova survivor, and Fauda tops Netflix in Lebanon.
Just back from the 42nd Haifa International Film Festival, film critic Hannah Brown describes to social media manager Ezra Taylor the opening-night duet between UK-based Iranian singer Gola and Yuval Raphael, Israel's 2025 Eurovision contestant. They sang "New Day Will Rise" in English, French, Hebrew, and Farsi. Gola later told Brown how, as a schoolgirl in Iran, her day began with chanting against America and Israel. She also described the restrictions that eventually drove her abroad as a female singer. "I truly believe that in the future we will have peace and freedom," Gola said.
Brown and Taylor also ask how Fauda's October 7 season reached No. 1 on Netflix in Lebanon, a country with no diplomatic ties to Israel. Hannah's answer: "They may not all be fans, but apparently a lot of them are watching it."
Then, the conversation turns to Aaron Sorkin's The Social Reckoning, the follow-up to The Social Network. It stars Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg, replacing Jesse Eisenberg, and centers on Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. Is this social media's tobacco moment
They close with Matchmaking 3, Erez Tadmor's comedy about the haredi dating world. Michael Rapaport plays an American ultra-Orthodox billionaire hunting for a son-in-law, and Brown notes the film is drawing haredi audiences into Israeli theaters.
From Israeli series that break out worldwide to the films turning heads at Cannes and Sundance, The Jerusalem Playlist is The Jerusalem Post's guide to culture in Israel and beyond. Longtime 'Post' film and TV critic Hannah Brown joins Ezra Taylor for reviews, recommendations, and the occasional disagreement about what's actually worth your time. Produced by Gadi Zaig.
17 Sept 2026
Israel's Oscars: Israeli stars and a freed hostage on the red carpet
The Jerusalem Post goes inside Israel's biggest film night at Cinema City, catching the country's most talented actors and filmmakers as they arrive. Among them is Omer Shem Tov, abducted from the Nova festival on October 7, 2023 and released in February 2025, who has just finished an acting course at Stella Adler in New York and is presenting an award tonight. "I feel like I'm manifesting my future," he says of a dream he's held since he was four or five years old.
He's one of many voices in a candid red-carpet reel: Oscar-nominated director Meyer Levinson-Blount teasing a new feature about the West Bank; Moshe Rosenthal, whose "Tell Me Everything" arrived with a record-breaking 16 Ophir nominations and would go on to win Best Picture and become Israel's entry for the 2027 Academy Awards; and veteran actress Evgenia Dodina, who learned Polish from scratch for "Mama" and would be named Best Actress after seven previous nominations. It's an intimate look at the people and the human stories behind the year in Israeli cinema.
From Israeli series that break out worldwide to the films turning heads at Cannes and Sundance, The Jerusalem Playlist is The Jerusalem Post's guide to culture in Israel and beyond. Longtime 'Post' film and TV critic Hannah Brown joins Ezra Taylor for reviews, recommendations, and the occasional disagreement about what's actually worth your time. Produced by Gadi Zaig.
9 Sept 2026
Fauda tackles October 7: Is it too much to watch?
In this episode of The Jerusalem Playlist, host Ezra Taylor and Jerusalem Post film critic Hannah Brown dig into the long-awaited fifth season of Fauda, now streaming globally on Netflix. Set two years after October 7, the season sends Doron and the unit from a Marseille manhunt into two flashback episodes that recreate the attack itself, episodes so intense the producers attached a content warning and told viewers they could skip them and still follow the story. As Brown puts it, the images "can't be unseen once you see them." She also explains the real-life losses woven into the production: a crew member killed fighting in Gaza, to whom the season is dedicated, and a lead actor wounded in combat who chose not to return.
From there, the conversation rewinds fifty years to where Israel's counterterrorism cinema began: Menahem Golan's Oscar-nominated Operation Thunderbolt (1977), with Yehoram Gaon as Yoni Netanyahu, and its glossier Hollywood cousin The Delta Force (1986), starring Chuck Norris and Lee Marvin. Brown closes with Hooligans, a KAN crime drama set among Jerusalem's extremist soccer ultras that's now finding an audience on German television, and the question of whether it's risky for Israeli TV to put its own dark side on screen. Her take: "How can Israel not be a place like everywhere else, with crime and social problems worth dramatizing.
It's a wide-ranging look at how Israeli screen storytelling is processing October 7 in real time, from a franchise that helped put Israeli TV on the global map to the older films that first made the world watch. Whether you're a Fauda superfan or a newcomer wondering where to start, this is a critic's-eye guide to what's worth your time.
From Israeli series that break out worldwide to the films turning heads at Cannes and Sundance, The Jerusalem Playlist is The Jerusalem Post's guide to culture in Israel and beyond. Longtime 'Post' film and TV critic Hannah Brown joins Ezra Taylor for reviews, recommendations, and the occasional disagreement about what's actually worth your time. Produced by Gadi Zaig.
6 Sept 2026
Eurovision's Israel rule, an Oscar race, Gaza at Venice
Eurovision could bar Israel from hosting. A homegrown drama just made Ophir Awards history. And No Other Land's directors are back - this time at Venice, with Gaza.
The Jerusalem Post's film critic Hannah Brown joins the Jerusalem Playlist to unpack a loaded month for Israeli culture. She walks through the EBU's new hosting rule, which bars countries in "a sensitive geopolitical situation" from staging the contest even if they win, and the tangle it creates now that Bulgaria has taken first, Israel second, and Iran has issued threats over the presumptive host. On film, she breaks down Tell Me Everything, Moshe Rosenthal's 1980s-set drama about a boy who discovers his father is gay at the height of the AIDS crisis, and why its record 16 Ophir nominations put it on a collision course with Israel's decades-long Oscar drought. On Iran's reach, she doesn't mince words: "How many countries has Iran attacked in the last year and a half, eight or something?"
The episode closes on the 83rd Venice Film Festival, where the Oscar-winning No Other Land team returns with Naza, a Gaza documentary that is the only doc in the main competition, alongside Amos Gitai's Rabin-haunted The Road to Jericho. Brown's approach is the show's throughline, reporting on films still wrapped in controversy without prejudging them: "I'm old-fashioned. I like to see a movie before I discuss it." It's a candid, informed tour of where Israeli cinema and soft power collide with a very hard political moment.
From Israeli series that break out worldwide to the films turning heads at Cannes and Sundance, The Jerusalem Playlist is The Jerusalem Post's guide to culture in Israel and beyond. Longtime 'Post' film and TV critic Hannah Brown joins Ezra Taylor for reviews, recommendations, and the occasional disagreement about what's actually worth your time. Produced by Gadi Zaig.
26 Aug 2026
Fauda and Gal Gadot are back, and the timing is no accident
Israeli TV looks unstoppable, Fauda returns to Netflix, Gal Gadot fronts a new thriller, so why are producers worried? Jerusalem Post film critic Hannah Brown breaks it down.
On this episode of The Jerusalem Playlist, Hannah Brown and Ezra Taylor dig into why Fauda's fifth season took years to arrive: creators Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff scrapped a finished script after October 7 and rebuilt the season around it, including two flashback episodes that aired with a violence warning. Brown also unpacks the paradox behind Israel's global TV success: high-concept shows made fast and cheap, like BeTipul (remade abroad as In Treatment). "You can't get much cheaper than that," she says of its two-people-in-a-room premise, "and yet that became the biggest hit."
The conversation then turns somewhere few TV shows go: the controversy over Upward Bound, the bestselling novel credited to nonspeaking autistic author Woody Brown, and the debate over the facilitated-communication method behind it. Drawing on her own family's experience, Brown offers a perspective rarely heard in the coverage: That the real goal is helping people on the spectrum communicate for themselves. "The person on the autism spectrum should be really doing the communicating for themselves," she says.
From Israeli series that break out worldwide to the films turning heads at Cannes and Sundance, The Jerusalem Playlist is The Jerusalem Post's guide to culture in Israel and beyond. Longtime 'Post' film and TV critic Hannah Brown joins Ezra Taylor for reviews, recommendations, and the occasional disagreement about what's actually worth your time. Produced by Gadi Zaig.
19 Aug 2026
Why the film world quietly stopped showing Israeli movies
This week on The Jerusalem Playlist, Ezra Taylor and Hannah Brown talk about three stories in Israeli and Jewish culture. Avi Nesher's October 7 drama Our Loves just landed a slot at the Toronto Film Festival. Last year, Toronto disinvited an Israeli October 7 documentary. This year, they gave one of the biggest platforms to Nesher's film about seven strangers who thought October 6 was the worst day of their lives. Fox Entertainment and Access Entertainment signed on as co-producers.
Then, they discussed the upcoming film Just an Illusion. The directors of The Intouchables made their most personal film. A Mizrachi Jewish boy growing up in 1985 Paris, getting ready for his bar mitzvah while his parents fight and his dad loses his job. Two million tickets were sold in France, and both directors lost their fathers during filming.
And Hannah talks about something close to home. Feelings In Between is a new exhibition at the Jerusalem Theatre featuring collaborative paintings by autistic adults living at Kfar Shimon. The artists work together silently, without planning, without ego. One of them is Hannah's son Danny. Free entry is through August 30.
From Israeli series that break out worldwide to the films turning heads at Cannes and Sundance, The Jerusalem Playlist is The Jerusalem Post's guide to culture in Israel and beyond. Longtime 'Post' film and TV critic Hannah Brown joins Ezra Taylor for reviews, recommendations, and the occasional disagreement about what's actually worth your time. Produced by Gadi Zaig.
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