‘The Vigil’ is an Instant Classic about the Traumatic Horrors of Anti-Semitism
In the opening scene of The Vigil, the audience sees a young boy in 1940s Kiev being forced by Nazis to shoot a woman in the head. As the boy hesitates, an ominous figure creeps toward him from the fog and shadows—demonic in shape and gait, apparently supernatural. Our title appears: The Vigil
Next, we immediately cut to the scientific, in stark contrast to the earlier ethereal images. A flat container of pills in the present day is numbly fingered, then blandly consumed by a protagonist whose quiet actions reveal they are taken for his mental health. The man is far too young to be an adult version of the child we just saw.
Less than four minutes after beginning, The Vigil has visually established its three major themes, all of them painfully relevant in shaping not just current events, but the entire course of human history. First, there is the irrational and evil widespread hatred of Jews known as anti-Semitism; second, there are the wounds victims of anti-Semitism bear on their souls, not only in their own lifetimes but as both received and passed down through generations; and finally we have the intersecting ways that religion (represented here by Judaism) and science (represented here by medicine) can succeed or fail in addressing these issues.
All of this science may seem out of place in a movie centered around Jewish folklore, but the science of medicine and the art of spirituality both seek to heal. Enter the shomrim. As introduced in The Vigil (and as is the case in our actual world), a shomer is someone appointed to watch a recently deceased person from their time of death until they are buried. As the shomrim perform this function, they read from the Book of Psalms and recite other prayers in a holy process called shemira.
In The Vigil, directed and written by Keith Thomas, a shemira goes terribly wrong when a shomer named Yakov Ronen (Dave Davis) performs the ritual for a reclusive Holocaust survivor named Rubin Litvak (Ronald Cohen and Dun Laskey). Before long, Rubin’s widow, Mrs. Litvak (Lynn Cohen), warns Yakov that her erstwhile beloved was haunted by a mazzik. The mazzikin, according to Judaism, are invisible demons one encounters regularly, all of which cause either minor annoyances or great dangers for their victims. In The Vigil, a mazzik erupts forth as a literal manifestation of trauma, embodying lingering emotional anguish and causing more tangible consequences.
“That was the central thesis going in—that trauma has long-term impacts,” Thomas told me. He added that the movie intentionally juxtaposes larger traumas like wars with more personal and intimate ones, which he believes tend to last longer.
“Those that are carried closest are the ones carried down, from generations to communities, to neighborhoods, families,” Thomas said. “Trauma creates mental scars. And, as I tried to explicate at the very end of the film, they cannot be removed. No therapy, no drug, no exorcism can truly remove trauma. You have to acknowledge it and move forward despite the pain.”
This is not to say that the movie denies the impacts of both the natural and supernatural in our lives. Quite to the contrary, the movie’s underlying premise is that practitioners of religion and science can correctly diagnose the same problem using different conceptual frameworks. Just because they have valid observations, though, it ultimately lies with each individual to find their own way through trauma.
“The Mazzik—the literal embodiment of trauma—will follow him, but it will not get him unless he allows it to,” Thomas said. He added that people who both directly experience trauma and feel trauma in the real world from following the news battle their own mazzikin, and must cope accordingly. “While our current interconnectedness encourages us to take in all the world’s pain, it simply isn’t possible or healthy. We are all born in small circles and we all die in small circles.”
These themes, broadly speaking, apply to every human being alive. Yet to make these universal observations, The Vigil burrows into the tiny world of New York City’s Hasidic Jews.
As the hazeret on top of the proverbial matzah, however, The Vigil contains stretches in Yiddish, the tongue spoken by Ashkenazi Jews since the Middle Ages (and, until recently, nearly rendered extinct). For anyone interested in cultural immersion, the Yiddish tongue falls pleasantly on the ear, much as the on-location scenes shot in Brooklyn’s Borough Park neighborhood comfortingly wash over the eyes. The synthesized worlds of Hasidic Jewry and New York urbanity, with their literal and metaphorical hues of blacks, blues, and grays, are recreated in all their beauty.
Because its subject matter is gloomy, The Vigil is also successful in recreating one of the most conspicuous features of Jewish culture: our hyper-awareness of how we have been and continue to be persecuted.
The TV show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which stopped airing the same year The Vigil was released, broached this same theme comically through a 2017 song, “Remember That We Suffered.” Every Jew, including me, experiences intense trauma from anti-Semitism. Jews have been targeted as far back as the days when we were slaves in Egypt, through the Roman-imposed diaspora that expelled us from our ancestral homeland 2,000 years ago and the Spanish diaspora (plus its infamous Spanish Inquisition) nearly 1,500 years later, continuing during the European pogroms and culminating in the Nazi Empire’s genocidal Holocaust in the 1930s and 1940s.
We have been caricaturized as Shylocks by William Shakespeare and evicted from our homes by Ulysses S. Grant. Now, we endure the indignity of both old and new stereotypes being promulgated by their intellectual inferiors, from Donald Trump and Kanye West to Tucker Carlson.
In addition to being the victims of bigotry, Jews can also be perpetrators. After the Holocaust left 6 million Jews dead, the roughly 3 million survivors relocated to their ancient homeland, ethnically cleansing the non-Jewish (overwhelmingly Muslim Arab) half of Palestine’s 1.5 million people in an event known as the Nakba. From those ashes of persecuted people persecuting other people, Israel—which today includes roughly 10 million Israelis and 5.3 million Palestinians—sprang forth in 1948.
Then, on October 7, 2023, Hamas attacked Israel more than four years after The Vigil premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (September 9, 2019). These atrocities occurred more than two years before I penned my first review of The Vigil for Salon Magazine (February 25, 2021). Yet when I rewatched The Vigil with my Jewish mother during the Fourth of July weekend in 2025—the first time I’d seen the film since reviewing it—I immediately and persistently had one thought: Every Jew who has been traumatized by anti-Semitism should see The Vigil.
I myself survived an anti-Semitic hate crime, nearly being drowned in 1997 by a group of fellow sixth graders when I was 12, while they chanted “Drown the Jew!” and “Christ killer!” For nearly two decades after that, I experienced very little Jew-hatred, but when I criticized Trump for his bigoted rhetoric during the 2016 presidential election, I again experienced the stinging lash of the whip of prejudice, this time from the then-burgeoning MAGA movement.
Of course, compared to those who died on October 7, 2023, and the millions of Jews who lived through the Holocaust after 6 million died, my experiences are trifling. Then again, as Thomas would point out, regardless of the extent of one’s suffering, every Jew who has been burnt by anti-Semitism is left with a degree of trauma from their experience. In fact, even Jews who have never been directly victimized by anti-Semitism can live with the psychic scars due to a phenomenon known as “intergenerational trauma.”
As I wrote for Salon in 2023 when interviewing Dr. Sophie Isobel, a senior clinical lecturer at the University of Sydney who studies intergenerational trauma, “scientists know very little for sure about the causes of this specific type of trauma, but they do know that trauma more broadly is passed from generation to generation by a number of variables.”
Isobel explained, “We know that trauma can directly and indirectly affect across generations and that this is likely due to a mix of behaviors, sociocultural factors, exposure, patterns, biological factors, genetics, and epigenetics.” This trend persists across studies and populations, being passed on from generation to generation.
“Basically, the DNA itself doesn’t change—but how it is expressed does,” Isobel added. “It is proposed that intergenerational trauma can lead to cellular changes that alter the expression of genetic material, which over time become encoded, and that it is a vulnerability to traumatic effects that is passed across generations and then ‘activated’ or not activated by environmental triggers.”
One can draw a direct line between this intergenerational trauma, as experienced by millions of Jews, and the horrible acts committed by those same Jews, in particular the post-October 7 onslaught in Gaza that has killed more than 60,000 Palestinians so far. The old expression goes “hurt people hurt people” for good reason. One does not bring up the millennia of bigotry against Jews to justify or rationalize their genocidal campaign against the Palestinians. This must be done because the underlying dynamics that lead to prejudice and persecution, whether against Jews or Palestinians, can only be understood by sweeping away polemics and looking at the underlying humanity on all sides.
When I suggested to Thomas that his movie is more relevant than ever because of October 7, he disagreed, mainly because the hatred toward Jews displayed on that day—which is reflected in its own way in the film—is far from new.
“The film is designed as both a peek into an insular society and also an exploration of trauma,” Thomas explained. “While there are anti-Semitic acts of violence that are the sources of the characters’ traumas, they are symptomatic of what has been called ‘the oldest hatred.’ The truth is, sadly, anti-Semitism has been around as long as Jews have been around. It is not a bug but a feature of society. In terms of its exposure, it waxes and wanes throughout history.”
Describing October 7, 2023, as an example of this hatred having “burst onto the surface in a rather dramatic and revolting way,” Thomas concluded the phenomenon of anti-Semitism deserves a global context.
“I tend to take an almost geological view of human hatred, ignorance, and intolerance,” Thomas argued. “Our century, as sometimes wretched as it is, is merely a blip in time. Worse has happened, worse will happen, but we shall endure. As the Jewish teaching goes: ‘This too, is for the good.’ All storms pass and flowers always return.”
My Jewish mother, who grew up in northern New Jersey during the 1950s and 1960s, reaches a (perhaps unsurprisingly) similar conclusion about The Vigil.
“I thought it was very interesting,” she told me on July 3, 2025. She liked “the fact that there are scenes in it where you thought—obviously they were not realistic in terms of being real—but that you were able to make the distinction of what was really his psyche and what was real.”
She added, “It’s psychological. It requires thought and introspection.”
While I won’t dare spoil the end of The Vigil, suffice it to say that it tells the story of someone battling a literal demon while grappling with his figurative demons. The ultimate mission, as my mother put it, is for him to learn how to “calm the soul.” During The Vigil’s narrative high point, the protagonist wraps his arm and head in tefillin, small black leather boxes containing parchment scrolls with verses from the Torah, worn by Jewish men during weekday morning prayers. After watching it for the first time with my mother, I asked her for the tefillin worn by her dad, who fought with distinction in World War II. His younger brother, my great-uncle, liberated a concentration camp during his own military service in that crucial crusade.
I’m not saying that they’ll protect me from literal mazzikin. But then again, I’m not saying they won’t. Either way, I know the tefillin and knowledge of my forebears’ examples provide me with some comfort as I cope with my own trauma. Similarly, Thomas argued to me that “for Yacov, in the movie, his acknowledgement of trauma (and corresponding guilt)” is what will ultimately determine whether he can be freed to move on with the rest of his life.
Because it powerfully tells its small story while imbuing it with grander themes, The Vigil works as a poignant character study, drama, and social commentary. It blurs the lines between the mental and the spiritual, the scientific and the religious, the concrete and the metaphysical, emerging from these discourses as a profound work of art. The Vigil will remain relevant to the Jewish experience for as long as the words of Psalm 6:3 continue to be apropos to the news cycle:
“My soul is in deep anguish. How long, Lord, how long?”
Categorized: Editorials
