Blame Theory

A hate crime in Israel, on “Our Boys.”

- Emily Nussbaum

A few episodes into “Our Boys,” Simon, an agent for the Shabak, Israel’s internal security service, talks with two policemen about a case that they are struggling to solve: the death by burning of a sixteen-year-old Palestinian boy. He was abducted in the aftermath of another horrific crime, Hamas’s kidnapping and murder of three Jewish teen-agers—students whose disappearance united Israelis, first in the hope that they would be rescued, and then, once their bodies were discovered, in grief and rage.

Revenge seems to be the likely and logical motive, but the cops reject it. “Jews would never do this,” one of them says, making a dismissive gesture.

“You sure?” Simon asks.

“Yes,” the cop says.

“So is my mother,” Simon says, showing him a text message: “Thank God Jews didn’t do this, take care.”

“Just like my mother,” the second cop replies—and holds up a similar text.

“Let’s recruit them,” Simon says.

It’s the world’s bleakest Jewish-mother joke, a rare moment of humor in “Our Boys,” a galvanic new series on HBO, co-produced with the Israeli network Keshet. Ten episodes long, the show is a partly fictional deconstruction of a hate crime that took place in 2014 and led directly to war in Gaza. It’s a story of family grief and family dysfunction, and also a beautifully paced thriller about a police investigation. But it’s something more ambitious, too: a challenging work of art about the intractable problem of identity—the struggle of any individual to maintain core values, when the world demands nothing but solidarity based on shared victimhood. The show is unusually fearless about letting moral discomfort linger, and manages to be stirring without ever offering false hope, a rarity for even the best-made dramas.