It Is No Dream: The Life of Theodor Herzl

It Is No Dream is a feature documentary that examines the life and times of Theodor Herzl, the journalist and playwright who was responsible for creating the political movement that led in 1948 to the creation of the Jewish state, Israel. It is the latest production of Moriah Films, the two-time Academy Award winning documentary film division of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an international human rights organization and NGO with over 400,000 member families. Narrated by Academy Award winner Ben Kingsley and starring Academy Award Winner Christoph Waltz as the voice of Theodor Herzl, It Is No Dream examines how Theodor Herzl, an assimilated Jew, born into a traditional but mostly non-religious family in Budapest in 1860, was changed by the trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in Paris, which he covered as a journalist in 1895. Previously, he had advocated the mass conversion of Jews to Christianity as a solution to the growing anti-Semitism of Europe. However, after witnessing the court proceedings where Dreyfus was falsely convicted of treason and the anti-Jewish demonstrations of the French public, Herzl became convinced that the only answer to the anti-Semitism that was spreading across Europe was the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, the Biblical homeland of the Jewish people. He wrote a political treatise entitled "Der Judenstaat" or "The Jewish State" that became an international bestseller, laying out his ideas for creating a new Jewish state.