{"id":662073,"date":"2026-10-30T21:28:17","date_gmt":"2026-10-30T21:28:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/662073\/"},"modified":"2026-10-30T21:28:17","modified_gmt":"2026-10-30T21:28:17","slug":"who-killed-alex-odeh-review-a-scattered-but-searing-documentary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/662073\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Killed Alex Odeh? Review: A Scattered but Searing Documentary"},"content":{"rendered":"

Times change, the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice, and yet one thing that has remained true for as long as I\u2019ve been alive is that prejudice, bigotry, and explicit displays of racism have always been openly permissible in America \u2014 so long as they\u2019ve been targeted at Arabs and\/or Muslims. That sad and immutable fact was on full display throughout Zohran Mamdani\u2019s<\/a> mayoral campaign last year, and the say the quiet part out loud reaction to Abdul El-Sayed\u2019s current senate race has somehow managed to be even worse on both sides of the aisle (Democrats lament that he \u201cdoesn\u2019t share our values,\u201d while Republicans straight up just call the guy a jihadist). But anyone old enough to remember 9\/11 knows that it didn\u2019t start with the likes of Vicky Paladino<\/a>, just as I assume that anyone old enough to remember the assassination of Alex Odeh knows that it didn\u2019t start with 9\/11.<\/p>\n

\"Carrie<\/a> \"'The<\/a> <\/p>\n

The sole fatality of a bomb that had been planted at the California office where he served as the West Coast Regional Director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), Alexander Michel Odeh was murdered on the morning of October 11, 1985, leaving behind his wife Norma and their three young daughters Helena, Samya, and Susan. To this day, his slaughter remains \u201cunsolved.\u201d And yet, as Jason Osder and William Youmans\u2019 scattered but vital documentary<\/a> \u201cWho Killed Alex Odeh?<\/a>\u201d makes clear soon after it begins, there\u2019s little doubt as to who was behind the killing.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the film<\/a> establishes that the case was effectively solved within days of the attack, and that all three of the primary suspects \u2014 all members of a right-wing terrorist group known as the Jewish Defense League \u2014 were only allowed to flee to Israel because powerful forces within the American political system preferred for them to get away with it. And to get away with it. And to get away with it. More than 40 years later, no efforts have been made to prosecute or extradite the presumptive murderers. One of them has even moved back to the United States.<\/p>\n

And so, despite affecting the aesthetic and tropes of the true-crime format, \u201cWho Killed Alex Odeh?\u201d directly contradicts the expectations of its supposed genre. Instead of establishing a vast mystery for their movie to explore, Osder and Youmans \u2014 one of them Jewish, the other a Palestinian-American \u2014 give shape to the galling absence of one. Stunted and searching by design, their film unpacks the sociopolitical context of Odeh\u2019s killing in order to illustrate how the easily Google-able question posed by its title could possibly remain \u201cunanswered\u201d for so long, and even partakes in some light subterfuge as part of an effort to pin down the culprits on camera.<\/p>\n

What the documentary finds, or at least calls new attention towards, is alternately eye-opening, obvious, and eye-opening for its obviousness. First and foremost, Osder and Youmans use Odeh\u2019s murder as a lens through which to examine the militarization of Jewish extremism at home and abroad (with an emphasis on the emergence of ultra-nationalist JDL founder Meir Kahane). Propelled by archival footage, the film has little room for personal reflection, but implicit in its focus is the willfully short-sighted extent to which \u201cterrorism\u201d has long been framed as an exclusively Muslim practice; Osder suggests in the press notes, but not the documentary itself, that American Jews are seldom taught about the more violent expressions of Zionism, an implication supported by my own memories of going to Hebrew School at a conservative New England synagogue.<\/p>\n

\u201cWho Killed Alex Odeh?\u201d also examines how the tacit permission of such violence is what also allows it to ferment. That Israel welcomed Odeh\u2019s alleged killers back to the holy land, and that President Reagan refused to recognize the severity of the hate crime they had committed against a fellow American on American soil (he never so much as sent a letter of condolence to Odeh\u2019s widow), sent a clear and enduring message that the world\u2019s most powerful governments were okay with the spilling of Palestinian blood. It\u2019s since been alleged that Mossad and the U.S. State Department combined to shut down the murder investigation.<\/p>\n

In the most harrowing sequence of a film that has little use for suspense, Israeli investigative journalist David Sheen disguises<\/a> himself as an ultra-Orthodox Jew and meets one of the alleged killers while wearing a hidden camera \u2014 Baruch Ben-Yosef\u2019s outspoken prejudices seem inextricable from his comfortable position as a pillar of his community. Later, when Osder lures him into a sit-down interview under false pretenses, Ben-Yosef excuses himself from the conversation when Odeh\u2019s name is mentioned, his irritation softened (and made even more upsetting) by the \u201cthis again?\u201d attitude of someone who seems to believe that no one could possibly still give a shit about the 1985 murder of a single Palestinian expat.<\/p>\n

Somewhat diminished in the film\u2019s erratic attempts to contextualize this ever-metastasizing sickness is Odeh himself. Born in Palestine but displaced to Egypt as a child because of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the righteous but mild-mannered Odeh dedicated his adult life to combating discrimination against his people in America. Home video footage and old clips from his television panel appearances paint Odeh as more of an egghead than a firebrand. He worked to make in-roads with the local Jewish community, and didn\u2019t have much of a public profile aside from an occasional appearance on \u201cNewsline.\u201d During his final appearance on the show, he debated a member of the JDL.<\/p>\n

Osder and Youmans also interview members of Odeh\u2019s immediate family, whose \u201cwhat is there to say besides the obvious?\u201d has already been internalized by the rest of the documentary. A different and possibly more rewarding film might have done more to investigate the pain of living in a country that has all but signed off on the hate-based murder of your husband or father, but \u201cWho Killed Alex Odeh?\u201d has little patience for investigations. The only thing more obvious than the identity of Odeh\u2019s murderers is the continued lack of political will to hold them accountable. And a country that lacks the political will to address the slaughter of one Palestinian is a country that lacks the political will to address the slaughter of Palestine itself.<\/p>\n

Grade: B<\/p>\n

\u201cWho Killed Alex Odeh?\u201d is now playing in theaters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Times change, the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice, and yet one thing that has remained…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":662074,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[878,42,43,1530,40,38,41,39,251877,298043],"class_list":["post-662073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-film","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-reviews","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-watermelon-pictures","tag-who-killed-alex-odeh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=662073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662073\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/662074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=662073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=662073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=662073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}