Alternating between the steamy cafes of Berlin and the arid hills near Jerusalem, Gitai recounts the stories of two historical pioneers "reclaimed from the amber of Israeli mythology." Else Lasker-Schüler is a German Expressionist poet who journeyed to Palestine in the 1930s in the wake of Hitler’s rise to power; Tania Shocat is a social activist and early Zionist settler from Russia. Weaving together the plights of these two revolutionary-spirited women, Berlin–Jerusalem explores the dream of the Promised Land, a dream which becomes a story of broken utopias and struggle. Gitai strips Israel’s pioneers of their iconic stature and presents them as merely human, with the attendant human emotions of fear, doubt, and hesitation.