There is no shortage of clips on social media depicting people tearing down Israeli hostage flyers in public. Now, there is a documentary telling the story.
“Torn: The Israel-Palestine Poster War on NYC Streets,” a film by Nim Shapira, was presented at Yeshiva University’s Belfer Hall on October 30 to an audience that included students, faculty and pro-Israel sticker designers. The event was a joint effort of YU’s Center for Israel Studies, Political Action Club, Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Honors Program and Rabbi Arthur Schneier Program for International Affairs.
“I was moved to create ‘Torn’ after witnessing the rapid transformation of New York City following the events of October 7,” director/producer Shapira wrote to The Jewish Link. “Posters of kidnapped Israelis began appearing across the city, quickly becoming more than images—they sparked conversations, confronted passersby, and resonated deeply with many, regardless of whether they had ‘skin in the game.’ I wanted to capture how the city reacted, how individuals responded, and how this tragic symbol ignited a ‘paper war’ of its own.”
Discussing the message he wanted to convey in the film, Shapira reflected: “‘Torn’ explores community resilience, the challenges of free speech and the complexities of cancel culture. It highlights the often-surprising intersections of art and activism, raising questions about boundaries and how we navigate differences. The film aims to be a mirror, prompting us to consider our roles in shaping societal narratives and what it means to stand for empathy in a divided world.”
The movie features interviews with hostage relatives Liam and Alana Zeitchik and a number of other figures involved in the story. One such person is Elisha Fine, a YU alumnus involved in producing stickers to further awareness of the hostages. “There was a problem, very practically, with the posters,” Fine said. “They rip easily, they’re made of paper, so we made stickers. We advocate by putting together groups of people that put them up together, and we maintain a community around the putting up of hostage stickers.” In an interview with Izzy Fridman, another leader in the push to make the stickers, and Elior Garfinkel-Selis, co-founder of the Hatikvah Sticker Collective, Fridman said that 350,000 stickers have been displayed.
How did Fine make it into the film? “I did it on a lark. … Nim came up to me when I was collecting posters and said, ‘Do you want to be in a film?’ It happened, and I’m delighted that it did.”
Following the film, Shapira and Fine sat down with YU Mashgiach Ruchani Rabbi Yosef Blau and moderator and Provost Dr. Selma Botman for a discussion and Q&A. Shapira explained that a goal of the film was to show the Jewish/Israeli point of view to non-Jews. He also remarked that the audience was among the first hundreds of viewers of ‘Torn.’
How can the public watch the documentary? “The film is currently screening at festivals, universities and private events,” Shapira said. “For updates on future viewings, please visit www.torn-film.com or follow @torn-documentary on Instagram.” See the aforementioned website for more information on the film, including the December 12 screening at the Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center in Manhattan.
Yeshiva University’s Center for Israel Studies hosted a screening on Oct. 30 of the film “Torn: The Israel-Palestine Poster War on NYC Streets,” an expository documentary examining the tearing down of Israeli hostage posters posted around New York City since Oct. 7, 2023.
Co-sponsored by YUPAC and the Rabbi Arthur Schneier Program for International Affairs, the screening took place in the Belfer 218 auditorium and concluded with a panel discussion featuring director and producer Nim Shapira, Rabbi Yosef Blau, Provost Selma Botman and Elisha Fine, a featured speaker in the film.
The film showcased ten individuals, each sharing personal reflections connected to the hostage posters. Among them were relatives of hostages who recounted their families’ stories and individuals who were instrumental in creating, placing and maintaining the posters.
“Through the poster campaign that swept across New York streets—and several other cities around the world—the conflict in the Middle East was no longer distant,” Shapira noted in a statement on the film’s website that he shared with The Commentator. “In making this film, I wanted to capture more than just the headlines or political talking points. I aimed to reveal the personal stories, the intimate pain, and the ideological divides that arose in the wake of the poster campaign.”
Shapira describes his documentary as “a call for deeper empathy and introspection, urging audiences to confront uncomfortable truths and consider how we might begin the process of healing, both individually and as a global community.”
Following the screening, the panelists discussed the messages stemming from the film and its aim to convey the Jewish and Israeli perspective to non-Jewish audiences. Numerous individuals who have designed stickers and posters for the streets of New York City were also in attendance, and shared some of their artwork with students.
The event ignited an array of responses from the students in attendance.
Talya Naggar (SCW ‘27) discussed her impression of the film with the Commentator, “I think it was unnecessarily political at times, but it did shine a light on the process of creating and distributing these posters which often people don’t think about.”
“Firstly, taking hostages as Hamas did is a violation of international law and a war crime. By tearing down the posters, you are not only taking away a critical tangible reminder of the hostages, but you are politicizing an issue of pure human rights,” Naggar said. “Furthermore, it is important to note that an estimated nine American citizens were taken hostage! This tragedy is one affecting fellow citizens. This is personal and this should feel personal.”
Bat-Tzion Atik (SCW ‘26), a vice president of YUPAC, spoke to The Commentator about the urgency of the hostages’ situation pointing out the growing danger the longer they are in captivity. “It’s important to draw attention to the fact that they are still not home and they are still in the hands of a terrorist organization,” Atik said.
“Across the globe, the ideological battle over Israel has raged on the streets, inside college campuses and on the flickering screens of millions of people. Yet the posters have proven to be an unlikely and poignant battleground for the humanity of the victims of the violence,” Professor Ronnie Perelis, director of the Rabbi Arthur Schneier Program shared with The Commentator. “This film by Nim Shapira told the story of the artists and activists behind the iconic posters with deep humanity and showed the complexity of the issues — students need to engage the war and its aftermath with nuance and sensitivity and the film does this. It challenges as it enlightens us.”
“We were privileged to join the Schneier Program in learning through a nuanced perspective about the hostage poster fight here in New York City,” Shoshana Fisher (SCW ‘26), YUPAC co-president, told The Commentator. “Yeshiva University’s location puts it at the heart of the cultural center of the Western world, and when cultures clash we often have a front seat. In this instance we are not the observers, we are active participants in the fight for the world to remember the hostages. This documentary provided incredible insight into the culture clash we see in our very backyard here at YU, and opened our eyes to the multifaceted perspectives that contribute to the posters that pepper the city.”
JEWISH TELEGRAPHIC AGENCY: NY Jewish Week (December 9th, 2024)
Israeli-American filmmaker Nim Shapira was in his hometown of Tel Aviv celebrating Simchat Torah and his mother’s birthday on Oct. 7, 2023. That morning, he woke up to rockets, and watched the news in horror as the number of casualties and hostages rose.
It was a harrowing, life-changing experience. But it was how the ensuing conflict between Israel and Hamas played out in New York City, his home since 2013 — thousands of miles from the deadly war — that inspired his most recent film, “Torn.” The film focuses on “Kidnapped from Israel” posters that rapidly appeared around the city and across the globe in the days and weeks following Hamas’ attack, and how they became flashpoints in the culture war over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
When Shapira returned to New York in early November, he, like countless other New Yorkers, was drawn to the very public street campaign to raise awareness about the 240 hostages taken by Hamas. The “Kidnapped” posters appeared at innumerable venues across the city — subway stations, restaurants, politicians’ offices and much more. Just as quickly as they appeared, activists claiming to represent Palestinian voices would tear them down.
In the weeks following Oct. 7, the fast-spreading poster initiative provided an outlet for Jewish New Yorkers and other supporters of Israel who felt frustrated by their inability to aid the war effort, and were isolated by their distance from the fighting. At the same time, the posters became one more front in the battle for public opinion on the war. Many who tore down the posters berated the activists who put them up and launched a counter-campaign highlighting Palestinian losses.
The 75-minute “Torn” is playing at festivals and theaters around the country, including a forthcoming New York City screening at Temple Emanu-El’s Streicker Center on Dec. 12, followed by a screening at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan on Jan. 21. It explores the motivations of those who both put up and tore down the posters across the city.
“It’s a campaign that works in both physical and online spaces,” Shapira, 42, said of the poster campaign following a screening of “Torn” at New York University in October. “I wanted the film to talk about symbols and what symbols mean to us. When you are thousands of miles away from the conflict, most people don’t have skin in the game, but still participate in tearing down the posters. I wanted to explore this.”
“In some way, people tearing down the posters made them go more viral,” added Shapira, who lives in Brooklyn and previously worked in advertising. “I wanted to look at the zeitgeist of what happened and have the film be an invitation for a conversation.”
Among the many subjects of the film are the creators of the poster campaign, Israeli artists Dede Bandaid and Nitzan Mintz, who happened to be in New York City on a three-month art residency when the war began.
“Our Facebook feed was flooded with posts from parents, desperately looking for their children and vice versa,” Mintz explains in the film. “We’re in New York, where life carries on as if it’s all normal.”
“We started brainstorming on what we can do,” Bandaid adds. “How to use our expertise to echo the voices of the hostages? It was clear to us that we must do something in the street to capture New Yorkers’ attention.”
Inspired by the missing children milk carton campaign of the 1980s, the married couple printed 2,000 flyers that showed a photo and provided some details about the hundreds of people who were taken from Israel that day. They began pasting them up all over the streets of New York and tried to enlist passersby to help, mostly to no avail.
Discouraged, the couple posted a DropBox folder with the fliers on social media and then collapsed into sleep. “When we woke up in the morning, our phones were just filled with photos and videos from people sharing what they were doing,” Bandaid told the New York Jewish Week last October. “The whole city was filled with posters.”
Also interviewed is prominent hostage advocate Alana Zeitchik, who was named to the New York Jewish Week’s 36 to Watch list this year. She and her brother, Liam, have six relatives among the hostages kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7.
“I started to spot these posters around and it helped me get through every day since Oct. 7,” Liam says in the film. “It meant the world to me to see that people cared.”
“The posters really did affect me,” Alana adds. “A lot of that had to do with seeing them ripped down and putting them up with my brother and hours later, seeing my baby cousins’ faces slashed or something else put into place saying, ‘Glory is the martyr.’ I couldn’t understand it.”
Julia Simon, a senior at Parsons School of Design, is friends with Omer Neutra, a New York native who was, until this week, believed to be a living hostage held by Hamas. (The Israeli military announced Dec. 2 that Neutra was killed during the Oct. 7 attack; his body is believed to be in Gaza.) In the film she, too, describes the pain of grieving for her friend while also seeing Neutra’s image torn down or defaced.
“On my commute to school I would see a picture of Omer on a kidnapped poster, but by the time I would get home it would be vandalized in the most brutal way,” she says. “It was either torn down, or spray painted, or there was something vile written over it. There was a level of anger and sadness that made me go numb.”
While Shapira endeavors to talk with and show empathy to those suffering on all sides of the war, he had little success interviewing people who tore down the posters. “I reached out to people from the other side, but all I heard were horrible things or they didn’t want to talk to me,” he said. “I wanted to have a genuine conversation.”
Instead, the film relies upon TV news footage and social media posts to hear from individuals who were opposed to the poster campaign. The footage shows individuals ripping down or defacing hostage posters, who are then asked why they are doing it and if they would like to share their name. Responses vary from smiling and laughing, to giving the middle finger, to a variety of expletives. Those who engaged on video provided answers like, “Go colonize somewhere else,” “Your posters are propaganda” or“Let’s put up the 3,000 kidnapped kids in Gaza.”
“A week after the war started, people made up their minds about the war,” said Shapira, who is also gay and a vegan. “I was putting up posts on Instagram about the war and people are responding that the hostages are actors or AI manipulations. These were people that were friends of mine and made me feel unwelcome in our shared communities.”
“The film shows pain on all sides, and the thesis is to have a conversation,” Benjamin Meppen, a junior in the NYU Tisch School of the Arts’ film program, told the New York Jewish Week after the October screening.
Shapira agrees with the student’s description. “This film is not for Jews — this film is for New Yorkers, it’s for Americans,” he said. “My hope is that it’s an invitation to talk about compassion and why compassion is lacking.”
Six selections from the 2025 Atlanta Jewish Film Festival
(February 20th, 2025)
You’ve probably seen the videos on social media hundreds of times: There’s a poster of one of the Israeli hostages in Gaza, someone tears that poster down, and someone else yells at them.
Torn, directed by Nim Shapira, is a documentary about this ugly phenomenon, which has repeated itself over and over since October 7, mostly in New York City but also sometimes in other cities.
I liked that the film gives everyone their say while also demonstrating a couple of other things: That, in the end, the presence and the tearing of the posters probably don’t have much effect on the hostages or their fates, and there’s way too much smug assholery in the online influencer space related to Israel/Palestine, and neither side has a monopoly on it.