A year ago, after a screening at Baruch College of my documentary “TORN: The Israel-Palestine Poster War on NYC Streets,” four different students asked me the same question: What about the whiteness of the posters?

“TORN” follows the fight that broke out on New York’s streets over the “Kidnapped” posters of those taken hostage by Hamas-led terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023. Many pro-Palestinian activists tore down the posters of those abducted from Israel as soon as they were put up.

The students’ question stunned me and has stayed with me ever since. Look at who was actually on the posters. Among the 251 hostages taken on Oct. 7 were more than two dozen Thai farmworkers, a Nepalese agricultural student, a Filipino caregiver, a Tanzanian agricultural student, Bedouin Arab citizens of Israel, and many dozens of Ashkenazi, Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews whose families came from places as far apart as Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Argentina,Mexico, Morocco, Iraq, Yemen and Iran.  

And yet these students only understood the poster project as a plea for sympathy for “white” people. Afterward, their professor told me that many of them had never heard of Mizrahi or Sephardi Jews.

“TORN” shows what that lens does on the street. In the film, Alana and Liam Zeitchik, whose family is Yemenite, describe confronting people who were tearing down the posters of six of their relatives, all kidnapped to Gaza. A passerby called their cousin’s 3-year-old daughter a “white colonizer.” In another scene, in Williamsburg, a white, middle-aged man in a keffiyeh calls a pro-Israel gathering a “white supremacist” rally. An Israeli woman in the crowd asks him: “Did you see the color of my skin?” Her skin is darker than his.

Today marks three years since Oct. 7, and the hostages’ faces are being held up again at vigils and rallies. Others may again look at the faces of these men, women and children and see “whiteness.” After all, it has become a way of seeing Israelis, and increasingly Jews more broadly. It has traveled from social media to campuses to peer-reviewed journals, and it rests on a mistake. 

America’s racial categories are the wrong lens for the hostage posters, and a dangerously distorting one for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When they turn a kidnapped toddler into a “white colonizer,” they are no longer describing a child. They are deciding she does not deserve to........

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