The Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin: Amos Gitai and Eyal Press in Conversation
On November 4, 1995, Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated at the end of a peace rally in Tel Aviv. His death came at a moment when the Israeli leader, who had shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat following the Oslo Accords, had become the target of an increasingly radical campaign against the peace process. Religious extremists condemned him; far-right political rhetoric portrayed him as a traitor; and militant opponents of territorial compromise saw the pursuit of peace as a betrayal of Israel. Gitai’s 2015 film Rabin, the Last Day examines this climate of ideological and religious extremism, incitement, and political violence that culminated in Rabin’s murder.
This conversation will consider Rabin’s political legacy and the forces that led to his assassination. What happens when political opponents are transformed into enemies, inflammatory rhetoric becomes normalized, and democratic disagreement gives way to violence? And what can Rabin’s assassination teach us about the fragility—and resilience—of democratic societies?
The evening will begin with a short excerpt from Gitai’s Rabin, the Last Day, followed by the conversation and audience Q&A.
Read a profile of Amos Gitai in the New York Times.
Admission is free and available on a first-come, first-served basis, as space is limited.
Register for the event here.
About the Speakers
Amos Gitai is a filmmaker and artist born in Haifa in 1950 and trained as an architect. His films include Kippur and Rabin, the Last Day, which was presented in competition at the Venice Film Festival in 2015. His work on Rabin continued with the theatrical production Yitzhak Rabin: Chronicle of an Assassination Foretold, presented at the Avignon Festival in 2016. In 2018, Gitai donated his extensive archives relating to Rabin’s assassination to the Bibliothèque nationale de France. His sustained investigation of Rabin’s assassination is also documented in the book Yitzhak Rabin: Chronicle of an Assassination (Stanford University Libraries, 2025). He is also co-editor, with Jean-Michel Frodon, of Amos Gitai and the Challenge of Archives (Stanford University Libraries, 2026), which explores his creative process and archival work. Gitai divides his time between Paris and Haifa.
Eyal Press has been writing for The New Yorker since 2014 and became a contributing writer in 2023. He has written for the magazine about a range of subjects, including antisemitism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He is a past recipient of the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism and the author of several books, including Beautiful Souls, a study of moral courage, and Dirty Work, which won the 2022 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism. He has a Ph.D. in sociology from New York University, is a Puffin Foundation Fellow at Type Media Center, and was formerly a fellow at the Carnegie Corporation and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library.