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Out of Evil

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Out of Evil
Directed byJoseph Krumgold
Written byYehuda Ya'ari
Produced byLeo Herrmann
StarringMordechai Ben-Ze'ev, Nahum Buchman, Roberta Hodes
CinematographyLeroy Phelps, Alphonso Frenguelli
Production
company
Urim Palestine Film Company[1]
Distributed by1951
Running time
84 minutes[1]
CountryIsrael
LanguageEnglish

Out of Evil (Hebrew: Mi Klalah L'Brahah) is a 1950 film directed by Joseph Krumgold, starring Mordechai Ben-Ze'ev, Nahum Buchman, and Roberta Hodes. The film follows a family's movements between a kibbutz and Nazi Germany, as well as between peacetime and the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.[1] It was screened at the 6th Locarno Film Festival[2] and screened in competition at the 1950 Venice Film Festival, and released in Israel in 1951.[3]

Synopsis

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The film is set in the 1920s on a kibbutz (communal farm), where a group of young pioneers are working to establish a new home for Jews. At the center of the story is a young couple, Ya’acov and Hava, who fall in love and want to marry, but their desire for a traditional family life creates tension within the community. When the couple becomes pregnant and has a baby, the financial strain on the kibbutz becomes increasingly difficult to manage. The couple decides to leave the kibbutz and return to Munich, only for the parents to be killed by the Nazis. Their son, Joseph Halochem, then returns to the kibbutz and fights in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

Themes

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The film has been revisited by humanistic scholars. According to Judd Ne’eman, the tension between the family and the group illustrates the Zionist realism movement's emphasis on the collective over the family, in a reversal of the family's traditionally cherished role within Jewish society.[4] Liat Steir-Livny noted that the film depicts a narrative in which diaspora Jews, following punishment in the Holocaust, came to learn bravery and transformed into "new Jews."[5]

Notably, the film's narrative stands out for its acknowledgment of both antisemitism and the goal of achieving a Jewish majority population as motivations for immigration. According to scholar Amanda Bernstein, this nuanced approach became rare in films following that era, with most focusing primarily on antisemitism as the driving force behind immigration.[6]

References

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  1. ^ a b c "Out of Evil". Israeli Film Archive. Retrieved 2025-06-08.
  2. ^ "Locarno Film Festival · All the films of the Locarno Film Festival..." Locarno Film Festival. Archived from the original on 2025-04-07. Retrieved 2025-04-15.
  3. ^ "Out of Evil". Israeli Film Archive. Retrieved 2025-06-08.
  4. ^ Ne’eman, Judd (1999). "The Death Mask of the Moderns: A Genealogy of "New Sensibility" Cinema in Israel". Israel Studies. 4 (1): 100–128. doi:10.1353/is.1999.0027. ISSN 1084-9513. JSTOR 30245730.
  5. ^ Steir-Livny, Liat (2019). "Mizrahi Jews and Holocaust Survivors in 1950s Israeli Cinema: A Revised Outlook". Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies. 37 (2): 1–34. doi:10.1353/sho.2019.0025. ISSN 1534-5165.
  6. ^ Bernstein, Amanda (2025). "The cost of negating the exile(s): Jewish immigration and the Nakba in Israeli fiction cinema, 1948–2023, an Israeli perspective". Journal of Modern Jewish Studies. 0: 1–19. doi:10.1080/14725886.2025.2477262. ISSN 1472-5886.
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Out of Evil at IMDb

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