Remaining Relevant: Manhattan Churches Screen Palestinian Cinema

by S.D.

On Friday, April 17, 2026, the St. Paul & St. Andrew United Methodist Church on the Upper West Side hosted a Palestinian Youth Choir concert, entitled Until Every Prisoner is Free: Soundtrack of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Struggle. The multimedia performance included film montages of tanks, prison interiors, and freed Palestinians embracing their loved ones after decades in detention, all projected on a large wall flanked by statues of angels behind the singers. The resultant spectacle served many purposes: raising both funds and awareness, affirmation of Palestinian identity and struggle, and a call to action. The event preceded the fifty-second Palestinian Prisoners’ Day, and all in attendance were urged by performers to attend the next day’s action in Herald Square.

Footage of a tank projected during Palestine Youth Choir performance at St. Paul & St. Andrew

The church’s support for the event came as a welcome surprise to me, given the neighborhood and political climate. The Upper West Side of Manhattan is home to a large demographic of politically conservative or older Jewish residents, who historically (though not universally) hold stronger pro-Zionist sentiments.¹ In addition, the church is in the midst of a capital-raising campaign to repair its aging edifice, and holding a space for a militant Palestinian fundraiser might deter wealthy donors. Yet despite material incentives to the contrary, through the Palestinian Youth choir’s multimedia spectacle, St. Paul & St. Andrew remained steadfast in their mission to “advance [their] longstanding commitment to radical welcome and service to the people of New York, especially the City’s poor and marginalized.”² To me, the event marks an example of moral and/or spiritual principles rising above material concerns.

A few days later and a few blocks further uptown, members of the Palestine Circle and Columbia Student Union hosted a screening and discussion of The Encampments at The Riverside Church of the City. The Palestine Circle describes itself as “a faith-driven fellowship rooted in Riverside Church’s history of prophetic calls for justice, liberation, and solidarity with the oppressed.”³ The Riverside Church is just a few blocks from Columbia’s campus, where The Encampments is set, and where pro-Palestine student protesters have faced a brutal crackdown on free speech and civil liberties.⁴ The church offered a safe space for students to bear witness and talk back to the ongoing repression.

Columbia Student Union advertises “The Encampments” Film Screening and Discussion at the Riverside Church

Using places of worship as a gathering place for the screening of politically subversive cinema strikes me as an expedient strategy for disseminating ideas that may put organizers and audiences at risk of retaliation. In New York City, the struggle for Palestine, which Angela Davis called “a moral litmus test for the world,”⁵ can benefit from the support of institutions that have a particular stake in questions of morality. Houses of worship professing solidarity with the marginalized and oppressed have an obligation to take a stance on the issue of Palestine. Many have pre-existing networks and structures in place to protect and distribute resources among vulnerable members of their communities, which can be further activated through alliance with organizers and Third Cinema-makers.

The struggle for Palestine in New York City could also potentially benefit from the legal protections afforded to these institutions. The city recently passed a controversial buffer-zone law, which requires a security perimeter around houses of worship during protests. The bill was designed to protect synagogues hosting real estate events facilitating the emigration of American Jews to Israel and the Israel-occupied West Bank. While it is unlikely, and perhaps laughable, to suggest that the NYPD will protect a pro-Palestine event⁶ (when I was waiting alongside the barricades set up for the May 5, 2026 protest of the “Great Israeli Real Estate Event” hosted at the Park East Synagogue, I heard a passerby ask an officer “who was in town,” and the officer responded, “An antisemitic protest.”), the privilege afforded to Christians in the United States could potentially be invoked to protect attendees at church screenings.

Finally, there are the simple logistical concerns that churches offer budget-friendly space rentals and large venues equipped with multimedia capabilities. Prodigiously expensive Manhattan has a need for such affordable, centrally-located screening and organizing spaces.

In addition to Riverside and St Paul & St. Andrew in the Upper West Side, other progressive Manhattan churches that could be called upon to host Palestinian film screenings include:

Judson Memorial Church

Located by Washington Square Park, Judson Memorial Church regularly partners with independent filmmakers and hosts justice-oriented multimedia art, performance, and film festivals. In February 2024, Judson has hosted a number of speaker and performance events for the Palestinian struggle, including “A People’s Fair for Palestine: Solidarity is/as Sanctuary” in February 2024, “Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal” in February 2025, and most recently, “Narrating Palestine: Family, History, and Displacement,” in May of 2026. Judson is strongly committed to embodying spiritual ideals through secular action. Its mission statement explains, “Engaging with the world outside of church is not only critical to staying relevant, but it is also how we practice our faith. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, we pray with our feet. In the world, the service begins.”⁷

Middle Collegiate Church

This Lower East Side church has the capacity to host film screenings and has demonstrated solidarity with the Palestinian cause through events such as “Dabke and Dialogue: An Afternoon of Solidarity with Palestine” in October of 2025, in collaboration with Jewish Voice for Peace New York City (JVP-NYC), Palestinian Youth Movement New York City (PYM-NYC), and Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work (NAASW).

Community Church of New York

This Unitarian Universalist Church in Murray Hill is extremely vocal against Israel’s violations of international law, regularly hosting organizing events and posting dispatches from their Solidarity and Witness Trip to Palestine. Recently, Community Church hosted a screening and Q&A with the director of Palestine 36 at Angelika Film Center. On its website, the church explicitly affirms its stance: “As genocide rages in the Middle East, we will use our moral authority to call for an end to ethnic cleansing.”⁸

This is just a starting list of allies in the church with the capacity to host screenings and reach a wide, sympathetic audience.

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In Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation, Teshome H. Gabriel lists examples wherein, “instead of discarding religion as the ‘opium of the masses,’ … Third World filmmakers attempt to give religion or spirituality a special significance in their works” (18).⁹ In that vein, religious feeling is a common theme in recent Palestinian cinema. In Palestine 36 (2025), a Palestinian priest tells an IDF soldier that he hopes God will forgive the soldier’s sins. In All That’s Left of You (2025), a mother and father consult their imam on whether to donate their son’s organs after he is murdered by the IDF. In The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025), the Red Crescent dispatcher asks the little girl if she would like to pray while they wait for the ambulance to arrive.

The religious feeling invoked in these deeply painful scenes becomes manifest when spiritual communities invoke the power of their numbers and networks to create an interfaith alliance against the genocide. Screening organizers should be aware of their allies in progressive churches, and all Christian houses of worship should make their spaces available for Palestinian film screenings and events, as Judson Memorial Church explains, “in order to stay relevant.”