Law & Order takes on the Hamas-Israel conflict

The original Law & Order (as well as its spinoffs) has always taken inspiration from headlines, so it shouldn’t come as a big surprise that the first episode of its 23rd season (which aired in the US on January 18 and which will be shown in Israel on Hot Zone on January 23 at 10:45 p.m. and on Hot VOD and Next TV), tackles the response to the war between Hamas and Israel on a New York college campus.

Since it’s network television, it tries to cover all the bases in the controversy without causing any actual offense, but given that show’s creator and one of the co-writers of this episode, Dick Wolf, is Jewish and that its most beloved characters tend to be wise and skeptical of violence and self-righteousness, it isn’t surprising that it tips its hat toward the Israeli position. 

It opens with a shot of posters showing hostages abducted by Hamas, defaced by red paint. If you want the episode to surprise you, stop reading here, because there will be some spoilers. After we see the posters, Nathan Alpert (Scott Bryce), the Jewish president of the fictitious Hudson University, walks past them, talking on the phone to his wife about his fear that he will be accused of plagiarism in his academic work, an obvious reference to recently resigned former Harvard president, Claudine Gay.

If he forgot to cite a single article correctly, he worries, his career will be over. Distracted when he sees some keffiya-clad students spray-painting stars of David on a shuttered bagel kiosk, he tells them to stop and is stabbed to death by an assailant who comes from a different direction and tosses a card with the word, “Traitor” written on it onto his body before fleeing. 

Credits roll, with the familiar and much-imitated bong-bong theme, much loved by crime show fans and canines (you can go to YouTube to see many videos of dogs barking along to it). 

A donor character who even looks like Bill Ackman

“Nate was a firm believer in free speech,” his wife tells the detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks). “He didn’t think it was his job to articulate his personal opinions. He thought it might disrupt campus discourse.” The first suspect is Phillip Klein (Jason Babinsky), a nervous, obviously Jewish academic who has been tearing down pro-Palestinian posters when the detectives find him.

He is a politically conservative professor who is furious at the university for firing him, and he says was inspired to threaten to kill the liberal college president after watching news reports coming out of Israel. Klein points out that Alpert had no problem commenting on George Floyd’s death and is angry he stayed silent about Israel, in spite of being Jewish, and that a group of influential donors were demanding he resign.

A wealthy donor with an airtight alibi who even looks like Bill Ackman says he had been pressuring Alpert to ban a student group that supports Hamas. Chloe (Alexa Wisener), an actress and influencer who has family in Gaza who is involved with the pro-Hamas group , has called the president a puppet of the Zionists. When they ask her a few questions, some students accuse the detectives of “being in the pocket of the Israeli government.” 

The eventual defendant is Cameron Lawson (Braxton Fannin), a wealthy, WASPy student. Israeli actress Odelya Halevi plays Samantha Maroun, a Lebanese assistant district attorney, intent on catching the killer. While she doesn’t agree with Chloe and Cameron, she opines that they aren’t crazy. Later, Chloe is shot dead while chanting, “From the river to the sea,” at a rally, and the shooter turns out to be – Klein. He shouts, “Never again!” as the detectives corner him, and is killed after he shoots at them. Dancy muses, “When did expressing your beliefs become so fraught?” and Maroun replies, “When it comes to Israel and Palestine? Forever.” 

They learn that Chloe and Cameron were under the sway of the charismatic professor, Kendra Nasser (Tehmina Sunny). Chloe’s bewildered boyfriend says he feels she “brainwashed them . . preaching and manipulating . . . She’s hardcore, too. She thought October 7 was justified. I mean, I support innocent Palestinians but come on. That was a flat-out act of terror.”

The district attorney’s office decides that Cameron was “doing Nasser’s bidding,” and they decide to go after her as well. When assistant district attorney Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) worries about “the optics,” Sam Waterson as DA Jack McCoy the sole holdover from the original series, says, in his Sam Waterston way, “Let me worry about the optics, you worry about the case.” After some damning testimony against her, Nasser asserts, “The Jewish elite will stop at nothing to silence me. They’re terrified of Middle Easterners with a platform and brain so they’ll do anything to squelch free debate.” 

Eventually, although she says she was proud her student killed, she is exonerated and as she leaves the courtroom – uncharacteristically silent – a brawl breaks out between her supporters and detractors. Maroun and Price discuss the case, and Maroun says it will never be over. Unfortunately, McCoy isn’t on hand with a comforting aphorism.

The melodramatic and fast-paced show hits almost every note you could possibly expect from combining coverage of American campuses following the outbreak of the war against Hamas, and it is even handed in that there is a killer from each faction. But in the end, the noxious professor, who doesn’t even come close to expressing views as vile about the October 7 massacre by Hamas of Israelis (and quite a few foreigners) as real professors have, but she still comes off as an overwhelmingly negative figure.

If the the waves of antisemitism crashing over American academia soon come to an end – as some predict they will – this may be the last Law & Order episode on these themes. If not, stay tuned.