Thursday, December 12 | 7:00 p.m.
The Hive at Leichtag Commons
Get a behind-the-scenes look at HBO’s hit series, Our Boys, with Shuki Ben-Naim, the series’ screenwriter. Through the use of clips and in a facilitated conversation, audience members will explore the dimensions and dynamics within and beyond Israel that were exposed by both the real-life events and the series.
Filmed in Israel, Our Boys demonstrates how popular culture can reflect and refract discourse and how narrative operates to make the lines between fact and fiction almost indistinguishable. In the summer of 2014, three Jewish teenagers are kidnapped and murdered by Hamas militants. Israel is shocked, shaken and furious. Two days later, the burned body of a Palestinian teenager from eastern Jerusalem is found in a forest on the western outskirts of the city. In the ensuing days, an agent from the internal terror division of the Shin Bet investigates the murder, while the parents of the slain teenager begin their long and anguished journey toward justice and consolation. The fictional series based on these real events follows the investigation of Mohammed Abu Khdeir’s murder, and tells the story of all those involved, Jews and Arabs alike, whose lives were forever changed by these events.
Shuki will converse with Chaya Gilboa, a Jerusalemite civil society leader temporarily living in San Diego. Chaya experienced the 2014 events on the ground in Jerusalem and has connections to the victim families on both sides. The discussion will be moderated by Charlene Seidle who helped lead the development of the Jerusalem Unity Prize which is an annual award presented by the parents of the three Israeli boys in their memory.
The conversation will include a frank discussion on how the series was received in Israel including condemnation by many government officials as well as the parents of the three Jewish teenagers who were murdered.
Shuki is a Murray Galinson San Diego Israel-Initiative Visiting Scholar. He is teaching screenwriting at San Diego State University.
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Lee and Toni Leichtag established the Leichtag Foundation in 1991 following the sale of their business. Lee and Toni were lifelong entrepreneurs with a passion for innovation and for supporting talent. They believed that only with big risk comes big reward. Both born to families in poverty, Toni to a single mother, they strongly believed in helping those most in need and most vulnerable in our community. While they supported many causes, their strongest support was for young children and the elderly, two demographics who particularly lack voice in our society.
Lifelong Baltimoreans, Rabbi George and Alison Wielechowski and their sons, 11-year-old Lennon and 9-year-old Gideon, are more than pursuing the good life in Southern California. Having moved to San Diego more than three years ago, they are fulfilling a lifelong dream.
You would think that as the executive director of San Diego LGBT Pride, Fernando Zweifach López Jr., who uses the pronoun they, has done all the coming out they possibly can. A queer, non-binary individual who has worked for many years on civil rights issues, López also speaks openly and often about their father’s family, Mexican-American migrant workers who tilled the fields of rural California.