Who Killed Alex Odeh? Review: Cold Case Captures Cultural Stagnation

Who Killed Alex Odeh?
(USA, 83 min.)
Dir. Jason Osder, William Lafi Youmans
Prod. Dawne Langford, William Lafi Youmans, Jason Osder, Daniel J. Chalfen
Programme: US Documentary Competition (World premiere)

 

Does an important film also need to be a great one? That question ultimately ends up being a lingering query in the true crime documentary Who Killed Alex Odeh?. The documentary by Jason Osder (Let the Fire Burn) and William Lafi Youmans in his feature debut tackles the chilling events of October 11, 1985 when Palestinian American activist Alex Odeh was assassinated at his office. The film offers an all-angles approach to the murder, which is less a cold case than one that investigators simply left to stagnate even though they had all the clues pointing to some obvious suspects.

This film tells a story of a greater crime, one of deeply rooted systemic racism in America, underscored by the fact that Odeh was a regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. The documentary concludes that comments Odeh made in support of a free Palestine during a broadcast interview triggered the bombing.

It’s a timely case to reconsider as tensions are at an all-time high regarding the freedom of Palestinians, questions of terror, and the security of Jewish people in the USA and Israel in the aftermath of October 7 and the genocide in Gaza. The film contains a simmering anger as parties including Odeh’s widow Norma and his daughter Helena join the filmmakers in sifting through the case in search of justice for their father, but also for all Palestinians and Arabs who continue to face discrimination.

Helena offers compelling perspectives about what it means to grow up in a family shadowed by violence. She recalls seeing her mom through objects at the door to their home while keeping the kids at a distance. Norma had to live with the worry that she’d trigger a bomb every time she opened her door, just as Alex set off the explosion simply by going to work.

In terms of the case itself, Who Killed Alex Odeh? offers limited new information. Most of the facts of the case, including circumstances and allegedly guilty parties, are already synthesized online. The film inevitably follows the clues and has an extensive range of material with which to do so. There are symptoms of heavy-handed Wikipediitis, though, as the film sets up the facts of the case.

Who Killed Alex Odeh? answers the titular question fairly quickly. It traces Odeh’s assassination to the Jewish Defense League (JDL). It finds a troubling soundbite from JDL chairman Irv Rubin, who tells a reporter, “I have no tears for Mr. Oden. He got exactly what he deserved.”

From those comments, the film charts through a larger history of violence rooted in Zionism, going through Brooklyn-born Meir Kahane’s radicalization of nationalist sentiment in Israel and circling back to agents of violence in the USA, including JDL members Robert Manning, Andy Green, and Keith “Israel” Fuchs. The trio are persons of interest in the Odeh case.

It’s a dizzying amount of information that at times plays like a Gibney-esque info-dump. The documentary seems most confident while sifting through and narrativizing the archives, as navigating historical records seems to be Osder’s forte, especially after looking at the bombing of the Black liberation group MOVE in Let the Fire Burn.

The documentary finds a great example of the interplay between the archives and the history they triggered as it revisits Odeh’s comments regarding the hijacking of an Italian cruise ship by Palestinian terrorists, It’s the soundbite that may have prompted the assassination. Odeh expresses sympathy for action in service of a free Palestine, although as a friend tells in a contemporary interview, and as larger snippets of the footage reveal, he clearly denounced the methodology and actions of fringe terrorists that left innocent people dead. But the documentary shows how a bad edit from the broadcaster reframed the story. The film posits that Odeh became an easy target by fitting the media stereotype of an angry Arab who wished violence on America.

Who Killed Alex Odeh? takes a tonal and formal shift, however, when it switches gears to vérité and goes into investigation mode. It follows Israeli journalist David Sheen as he looks into the three suspects.

If there’s a smoking gun in Who Killed Alex Odeh?, it comes in a tense sequence that follows Sheen to Israel as he tracks down Fuchs after connecting the dots that he’s the “Izzy” referred to in social media posts by JDL faithful. Sheen poses as an Orthodox Jew hunting for an apartment in Fuchs’ conservative neighbourhood. In a twist, when Sheen knocks on Fuchs’ door to ask about the neighbourhood, Fuchs invites him in. Within minutes, Fuchs basically volunteers the information before Sheen can even ask him. He gloats about his violent past without knowing that a microphone records it all for us to hear.

Equally troubling is an interview that Sheen gets with a detective. He tells Sheen that the authorities knew about the suspects, but Mossad shut down the case. Even Sheen, whose career focuses on tracking stories about the Israeli far-right, seems shaken by this information.

Who Killed Alex Odeh? may not necessarily get any further with the case, but the film eventually finds that it’s more important to ask why nobody budges when everyone knows the answer to the question. There’s a compelling argument here that the Odeh case is one story among many in a history of negative stereotypes, bad media representation, and anti-Arab racism that perpetuates today. Justice in the case would be not just a win for the Odeh family, but a collective one for the community that Alex spent his career defending. But it’s telling that his killers remain free, one living only a short distance from where the surviving Odeh family resides.

Who Killed Alex Odeh? premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.

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