Netflix’s “The Spy” Manages to Convey the Ethnic Irony at the Heart of Eli Cohen’s Life

I’ve been wondering for years why no one has ever made a good Mossad movie. From The Little Drummer Girl (1984) to Munich (2005) to awkward fictions in between, Hollywood has never managed a portrayal of the Israeli secret service that gets beneath the surface of the organization or its people—nothing approaching the gold standard set by the BBC’s masterpiece Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1979) about the British MI6 in the cold war.

By contrast, the Hollywood rendition of Israeli spy action, shoehorned into various genre clichés, tends to involve shooting people and/or blowing them up, interspersed with interludes of Jewish moral discomfort. “I’m proud of what you’re doing,” an Israeli mother says to her son, the Mossad agent Avner in Munich, to which he replies unhappily, “You don’t know what I’m doing.”

I therefore watched the new Netflix series The Spy with low expectations. It was hard to imagine that the series’ star, the outrageous British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, could possibly do justice to what is perhaps the great triumph and tragedy of Israeli intelligence: the story of Eli Cohen.