Wearing a puffy bright orange beanie tilted at an angle on his bald head and an oversized T-shirt depicting Drake with a yarmulke on his head, Jewish rapper Rami Matan, aka Kosha Dillz, gesticulated enthusiastically with his hands as he stood before the crowd that had assembled outside of The Wilmette Theater.
The location for the Tuesday night screening of Kosha Dillz’s documentary Bring the Family Home, named after a song Dillz had written about the hostage crisis, hadn’t initially been The Wilmette Theater. Facets Theater, in fear of threats called in from patrons, cancelled the performance, prompting the Chicago Jewish Alliance (CJA), the organizers of the screening, to search for another venue, which they found in a matter of hours. Events that CJA hosts have a history of this happening, with a Matisyahu concert undergoing a similar fate last year, and CJA is not an organization that bows to intimidation. Dillz joked later on in the night that the Facets cancellation was a good thing as he “couldn’t afford a publicist.”
Bring the Family Home features many musical interludes and dance breaks, but the film’s shape centers around Kosha Dillz and his crew’s many visits to college campuses to engage anti-Israel activists there.
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Outside of the gates of the first school, Columbia University, Dillz converses with a woman in red, holding a sign in red ink, talking about genocide. In the middle of talking about the suffering of Palestinians, Dillz asks the woman to imagine that her children were taken by Hamas and asks what she would do. She becomes flustered and cannot answer. The film showcases how the video of their conversation went viral, reaching 6 million views.
This interaction highlights how universities have become epicenters of anti-Israel activity, attracting all sorts of characters regardless of their connection to the university. Kosha Dillz sometimes capitalizes on this phenomenon to engage in dialogue with students and other pro-Palestinian activists, but more often than not, he is invited by the students to both perform and challenge anti-Zionism, and many jubilant scenes involve him rapping in front of student crowds.
After one of these performances at Chapman College, Dillz attempts to involve anti-Israel students in a dialogue. Instead of responding, the students use multiple bullhorns, one emitting strange, jarring noises to attempt to drown out Dillz as he switches from talking to rapping in defiance. In the first of many moments of extreme pageantry, a woman comes from left field, banging aggressively on a tom as if going into battle, a moment that Dillz laughs about with his crew later.
Next comes Northwestern University. Dillz heads to the encampment, which he finds at first to be deserted after peeking inside a tent. The encampment appears disheveled and forlorn, with plastic bags dotting the lawn next to a huge mound of water bottles, which Dillz later ascends in order to climatically rap on top of it. He helps himself to some of the caramel corn from the huge, abandoned tin by the water bottle mound in a comic acceptance of the encampment’s hospitality.
Finally, a student appears. Wearing some of the most expensive headphones money can buy, the student tears into Northwestern’s complicity in monetarily supporting Israel’s war, saying that “two people on Northwestern’s board are Boeing executives.” The student then accuses Israel of “scholasticide,” which, at the screening, prompted mutters of incredulity from the audience. Dillz is able to deflect these accusations, keeping his cool like the practiced hand that he is, though he later acknowledged to the audience that Israel had destroyed the education infrastructure of Gaza, a move that he deemed necessary for rooting out terrorism. At another encampment later on in the film, when a anti-Israel supporter accuses Israel of destroying hospitals, Dillz says that they wouldn’t need to do this “if terrorists weren’t operating out of hospitals.”
At DePaul, a school that the film repeatedly returns to, outside the gates, Dillz gets into a one-way shouting match—Dillz was not the one shouting—and becomes repeatedly blocked by activists holding enormous Palestinian flags. Dillz bears these small tribulations with an incredulous smile. When Dillz enters the encampment, the camera stops rolling, and only audio is given, shown with subtitles on the bottom of a black screen. These subtitles show some of the vilest sentiments of the whole movie, with anti-Israel activists saying “I hope they f*****g die” about the IDF and “this is the anti-genocide section you need to go to the pro-genocide section” amidst statements of support for Hamas. The fact that the people making these statements were invisible only added to the fear and drama of this central part of the film.
Dillz also visits the University of California, Berkeley, where one of the first shots shows Kosher Dillz walking in front of a building completely plastered with anti-Israel banners and signs. He tries to engage the anti-Israel activists wearing masks and keffiyehs before backing down. “They want us to leave,” he says. Yet just as it appears that Dillz will leave without any sort of meaningful engagement with the other side, he gets into a conversation with a Palestinian student in perhaps one of the most important segments of the movie.
The Palestinian student and Dillz, instead of antagonizing one another, reach a common understanding very quickly in their conversation, with the Palestinian student lamenting the current state of affairs because of “a history of coexistence.” He appears visibly pained by the losses experienced on both sides and looks empathetic to Dillz’s side. In a telling moment, the student attempts to introduce Dillz to the person who had “taught him everything,” but the older-looking gentleman declines to appear for more than a couple of seconds before the camera.
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This intergenerationality appears to trace a lineage of indoctrination from the older to the younger. The tragedy is that even when the young may be sympathetic, the mentors whom they look to are entrenched in their positions. This Palestinian student was remarkable in being the rare exception to the attitudes showcased by the rest of the film, and the film leaves open the question about what happened when the student went back to his mentor after speaking with Kosha Dillz.
At the Q&A after the film, Dillz reiterated his commitment to dialogue amongst all people “white, black, brown, and people of all colors.” Even Michael Kaminsky, one of the students assaulted at DePaul for trying to host an AMA session about Israel, encouraged the audience to “try and find someone you can have a dialogue with … who doesn’t share your views.” Rap is about speech, and even rap battles, which colored the early part of Kosha Dillz’s career, require two partners. Perhaps if more people see this film, they will become inspired to create spaces of dialogue on campus, as Dillz also suggested during the Q&A.
Until then, Dillz and others like him will continue to speak up for Israel even in the worst darknesses of certain college campuses, and it would behoove those on both sides to listen.
Image of Kosha Dillz at The Wilmette Theater by Benjamin Dorfman
Zionists are not real Jews.