Religion and politics make for strange bedfellows in Maya Zinshtein’s fascinating documentary about an unlikely—some would say unholy—alliance between a Jewish charity and a fundamentalist Baptist megachurch that serves as a microcosm of a broader right-wing political coalition embracing both the United States and Israel. The charity is The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, founded in 1983 by American Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein to undertake fund-raising campaigns that provide support for destitute Jews in Israel and elsewhere. A major target of the organization’s appeals from the start was the American evangelical community which, as the case of the Binghamton Baptist Church in Middlesboro, Kentucky demonstrates, has responded with remarkable generosity. It is the rationale behind that response that Zinshtein focuses on.
As the film explains, the literal reading of Scripture adhered to by Binghamton pastors Boyd Bingham III and Boyd Bingham IV, his son and successor (as well as by such televangelists as John Hagee, who founded the organization Christians United for Israel), prophecies that the second coming of Christ will involve a period of tribulation leading to the battle of Armageddon, the final victory of good over evil. That battle must be preceded, however, by the resurgence of Israel, though in the resultant conflagration two-thirds of Jews will perish and of the survivors only those who embrace Christ as the Messiah will be saved. Evangelicals like the Binghams therefore encourage their followers, despite their own economic distress, to strengthen the Jewish state through their donations in the hope that by doing so they will hasten the end times that usher in the so-called Rapture of believers. That explains evangelicals’ support of aggressive Israeli leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu and of American politicians who favor them.
They have become particularly devoted to Donald Trump, whose extreme pro-Israeli policies, such as moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, they see as part of the promised divine plan. Jews like Rabbi Eckstein and his daughter Yael, who recently succeeded her father as head of the Fellowship, admit the irony of allying with a Christian movement predicated on theology that rejoices in the inevitability of Jewish destruction. Yet paradoxically both sides profit from cooperation—the one in terms of revenue to support its humanitarian work, and the other by doing their part in furthering what they believe is God’s purpose. Zinshtein includes telling interviews from the Ecksteins and the Binghams while drawing incisive portraits of the communities they lead and makes excellent use of news footage to explain the wider religious and political context in which they operate. This is an engrossing documentary on a provocative subject. Recommended. Aud: C, P.