I have generally loved the selections offered here at ChaiFlicks, but I am truly dismayed that Crescendo has made it into the ChaiFlicks repertoire. Rarely do I fail to watch a film all the way through, but only about a half hour into Crescendo, I became so hurt by its garishly ugly stereotyping of Israelis that I simply had to abort. While I am a proud Zionist, and therefore naturally protective of Israel's public image, I am also, by profession, an Arabic linguist and Middle Eastern affairs analyst whose overview of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not unsophisticated, and who harbors consternation over the real misery that too many Palestinians experience in their daily lives. In other words, I embrace many fine films offered here and elsewhere that expose objectionable Israeli attitudes and practices, and that justifiably draw sympathy for the plight of many Palestinians, and so if a film that purports to be of that genre deeply offends ME, it REALLY must be offensive. In my own very extended experience interacting with both Israelis and Arabs, over a lifetime, I have never observed the blatantly racist and supremely arrogant behaviors assigned to the Israeli characters in this film, even among the arch-conservative Israelis with whom I have had working relationships. Yet this film relentlessly depicts young Israelis (musicians and IDF soldiers) as flamboyantly contemptuous of Palestinians, and is replete with gratuitous (i.e., utterly unrelated to the theme and plot) sequences involving tear-gassings of Palestinian townspeople and the bull-dozing of a Palestinian family's home. Again, I endorse and celebrate the films here that take a serious look into the complex and often deeply troubled co-existence of Israelis and Palestinians, but I cannot, for the life of me, understand how ChaiFlicks fails to see how harmful the anti-Jewish stereotyping in this film is to the causes of both art and peace. Please wake up, ChaiFlicks, lest you will make many of your customers worry that you have gone the way of the Peter Beinarts of the world. I want to remain a subscriber here, but there's a good chance I'll now try to cancel my subscription, leaving me more time to fight anti-Semitic propaganda in cinema, alongside friends of mine in the progressive Zionist movement who would surely be horrified if forced to watch Crescendo.