An intimate and painful journey into the most uncomfortable corners of family and collective history. Through the figure of his grandmother Ruth, the director confronts the moral paradoxes that link the memory of the Holocaust with the Palestinian expulsion of 1948. Ruth survived Nazism and fled Germany as a child —the country that had expelled her for being Jewish. Decades later, in Haifa, she became part of the new State of Israel and, perhaps unknowingly, a participant in another expulsion: that of the Palestinians during the Nakba. This dual condition —victim and agent— runs throughout the film, shaping a portrait where familial love intertwines with ethical unease.

Rothschild does not seek to judge her, but rather to understand how the need to belong can lead one to accept silences or justifications. In his grandmother’s words there is no hatred, only omissions; the memory of the Palestinians appears merely in the description of their houses, their furniture, their absence. That silence is revealing: it shows how Israeli collective memory was built by leaving out a part of history. The director uses this void as a starting point to explore the cracks in both national and family narratives, understanding that forgetting is also a way of speaking.

The search becomes even more personal when Rothschild acknowledges his own complicity. Under his father’s pressure, he enlisted in the Israeli army and worked as a military cameraman. Years later, from Berlin, he admits to having filmed scenes he would rather not have: the violent arrest of a young Palestinian, the routine of occupation turned into a visual spectacle. His camera, once an instrument of propaganda, now becomes a tool for moral examination. “I learned that I cannot trust myself to do the right thing,” he confesses, a sentence that becomes the core of his self-critique.

Exile in Germany allows him to look from the outside at both the country where he was born and the one his family fled. Berlin —with its Holocaust memory and multicultural present— becomes the setting where Rothschild observes new tensions: Jewish communities divided by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, rising antisemitism, mistrust toward Arabs, and the impossibility of speaking without being labeled. In streets like Sonnenallee or Hermannplatz, where Arab shops coexist with echoes of the diaspora, the director experiences his own dilemma: the desire to belong and the fear of revealing his identity.

The film was conceived before October 7, 2023, but the Hamas attacks and the ensuing devastation in Gaza inevitably changed its meaning. Rothschild does not aim to portray violence, but to let its echo reverberate through his family story. Grief, he says, becomes a weapon; pain, a political argument. In this context, his documentary becomes an act of resistance —an attempt to preserve humanity amid polarization. There are no answers or redemption, only the awareness that living with guilt and doubt is also a form of memory. A Jewish Problem offers no closure, because the issue it raises —how to belong without repeating injustice— has no simple solution. In his trembling and honest gaze lies a question that transcends borders: is it possible to reconcile the memory of one’s own suffering with the responsibility toward the suffering of others? Rothschild does not claim to resolve it; he merely dares to face it.