Uncategorized
Roger Waters uses Anne Frank’s name at German concerts, prompting calls for punishment from Jewish groups
(JTA) — Roger Waters projected Anne Frank’s name at recent concerts to draw comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany, leading Germany’s Orthodox rabbinical association to call for a ban on Waters performances in the country.
Observers told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that Waters, the former Pink Floyd frontman known as a leader in the boycott Israel movement, has lumped Anne Frank together with Palestinian Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in on-screen projections at concerts on his current tour. Abu Akleh was killed on an assignment in the West Bank last year.
The screen at Waters concerts also frequently shows a pig-shaped balloon emblazoned with the logo of an Israeli armaments firm. He reportedly at times dons an SS uniform and symbolically shoots a machine gun into the crowd.
Some say the 79-year-old rocker plays with antisemitic stereotypes, going beyond political criticism into incitement of hate. German media “went into the shows and were disgusted by them; it is such blunt and disgusting propaganda they are hearing, and the music is really in the background,” said Sacha Stawski, Frankfurt-based pro-Israel activist and founder of Honestly Concerned.
Waters, who won many hearts in Germany through Pink Floyd’s live “The Wall” concert in 1990, recently performed concerts in Berlin and Munich and was on to Frankfurt, where he had successfully appealed a court order to ban the event. That concert is scheduled for May 28.
The city of Frankfurt had called Waters “one of the most widely spread antisemites in the world,” over imagery and Israel critique at his past concerts, in its attempt to ban him from playing there. Munich’s mayor had also unsuccessfully attempted to block a Waters show.
If they cannot stop him in the courts, opponents said they will continue to try to sway public opinion.
“My goal is to educate about his hatred, to make sure less and less people go into these concerts,” said Stawski, a main force behind efforts to challenge Waters in the Frankfurt court, which claim that Waters is antisemitic. Several German cities have passed legislation barring state-funded venues from hosting events for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement that Waters champions.
Charlotte Knobloch, head of the Jewish community of Munich and Upper Bavaria, said at a protest before Water’s concert last Sunday in her home city that she was frustrated by the courts.
“Since October 2022, there have been arguments about this concert. Legal motions and media headlines have been produced en masse — without yielding any result,” she said. “So that now, in May, we are standing here protesting against a concert that is taking place exactly as Roger Waters always wanted it to.”
Politicians joined in the protest with Knobloch, and even the management of the Olympia Stadium, on monitors ahead of the concert, explicitly distanced itself from the singer’s politics, according to the Suddeutsche Zeitung.
“What do the regular affirmations of ‘Never Again’ by politicians and statements that antisemitism has no place in Germany actually count for, if at the same time errant interpreters and intellectual arsonists are offered a public space to blatantly spread their hatred of Jews and Israel?” read the May 22 statement from the Orthodox Rabbinical Conference of Germany, led by Rabbis Avichai Apel, Zsolt Balla and Yehuda Pushkin. “It is deeply shameful that in no case in Germany has it so far been possible to ban the clearly antisemitic and anti-Israeli concerts of Roger Waters.”
The Belltower journalist Nicholas Potter, who observed the May 17 Berlin concert, argued that Waters promoted antisemitic language.
In speech bubbles on an LED screen in the Mercedes-Benz Arena, Waters blamed the world’s troubles on “THE POWERS THAT BE,” which Potter described as “an ominous, overpowering elite that is not explicitly named — this is an antisemitic blueprint on which many conspiracy narratives work.”
Before the event, BDS supporters outside the arena handed out flyers and held up banners, one of which read, “Jews, Israelis and internationals all agree with the Roger,” added Potter, noting that the average concertgoer appeared to be white, German and around 60 years old.
Waters has had little new to say about the allegations of antisemitism and has not apparently changed his tune. According to the Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, hours before his concert in Munich, Waters posted a message on Facebook calling Israel a “tyrannical, racist regime.” He compared the BDS movement to Germany’s Nazi-era White Rose resistance movement, whose leaders, including siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, were beheaded by the Nazi regime.
His remarks were in keeping with his comments in an interview with Spiegel Magazine in March. He denied that he had ever been an antisemite, and added that it was “bizarre that my career should now be attacked on the basis of allegations made by the Israel lobby.”
“For all I care, they can try to cancel every concert I do in Germany. I will fight them in court,” he told Spiegel. “It’s a tragedy for Germany that they even try. Because the message to the world is: We Germans don’t care about human rights and freedom of expression.”
People should take Waters at his word and stay away if they disagree with his politics, said Stawski, referring to the fact that Waters also tells Pink Floyd fans who don’t agree with him to “f*** off,” via the arena screen.
“If you are a fan of Pink Floyd but do not want to go along with the antisemitism, buy a CD of Pink Floyd and do not damn well go into these concerts,” Stawski said.
—
The post Roger Waters uses Anne Frank’s name at German concerts, prompting calls for punishment from Jewish groups appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Jewish teens see a generational split in their own families over Mamdani
This article was produced as part of the New York Jewish Week’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around New York City to report on issues that affect their lives.
Sixteen-year-old Chase, who lives on the Upper East Side, is close with his grandparents. They talk about school, work and national politics, but there’s one topic he avoids discussing with them: the New York City mayoral election.
He and his grandparents, who are all Reform Jews, have split views on the 34-year-old democratic socialist frontrunner, Zohran Mamdani. Chase, who did not want his last name included so his views would not be searchable to the public, has positive feelings about the candidate, while his grandparents are strongly opposed to him.
Though Chase thinks Mamdani has “good intentions and questionable execution,” he thinks he would probably vote for Mamadani if he could.
His grandparents, on the other hand, have called Mamdani antisemitic — though they don’t go into much detail beyond that, Chase said. While he thinks their perspective lacks nuance, Chase recognizes that his grandparents faced antisemitism when they were growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950s and 1960s, and were sometimes afraid to be openly Jewish. They see Mamdani’s support of Palestine and harsh criticism of Israel as a rejection of Jews. “To them, Israel is supposed to be a bastion against antisemitism,” Chase said.
Chase’s family is just one example of the generational divide among Mamdani’s supporters and detractors. A poll conducted earlier this month by Beacon Research and Shaw & Company Research found that 73% of voters under 30 support Mamdani compared to just 15% for Andrew Cuomo. For voters in the oldest bracket, 65 and older, Cuomo led Mamdani by 43% to 27%.
For New York City Jews, Mamdani’s candidacy also laid bare divisions. An October 29 poll by Quinnipiac University found 60% of Jewish voters supporting Cuomo and 16% of Jewish voters supporting Mamdani. A different poll from July by Zenith Research and Public Progress Solutions found 43% of Jews support Mamdani with the other votes spread across all other candidates. Mandani’s support in this poll came primarily from younger Jews, with two-thirds of Jews aged 18 to 44 supporting Mamdani compared to just a quarter of older Jews.
At issue for many of New York’s Jews is Mamdani’s commitment to anti-Zionist views, which some classify as a threat to Jews. Mamdani has ties to the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanction) movement, and started the first Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at Bowdoin College, where he graduated in 2014. During his campaign for mayor, he has claimed Israel committed genocide, and that while he believes Israel has a right to exist as a state, he is “not comfortable supporting any state that has a hierarchy of citizenship on the basis of religion or anything else.”
Mamdani’s stances on Israel are a quandary for many liberal New York City Jews, many of whom support his domestic policies, like building affordable housing and raising the minimum wage, but are concerned about Jewish safety and the future of the state of Israel.
Sam Rosberger, a 16-year-old Jew from Harlem who sees himself “in the middle” between Reform and Conservative, supports Mamdani’s domestic policies. “I think generally all his ideas are good, I think rent control is good. The 2% tax on people [making] over a million [dollars] is good,” he said. Although Rosberger admits that some of Mamdani’s statements about Israel have been “possibly troubling,” he does not believe the candidate is antisemitic.
However, his parents had a different first impression of Mamdani. They were “worried about him being antisemitic,” based on information and opinion pieces that circulated online, Rosberger said. Once they started listening directly to Mamdani and his messaging, their views began to change. “I don’t think it was something in specific,” Rosberger said. “They saw his actions and they saw what he said, watching debates and hearing his voice [directly].”
Rosberger’s parents also disliked the other candidates running. They thought former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was “not an appealing person on a personal level,” he said, and they have contrasting policy priorities to Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa, the radio personality and founder of the Guardian Angels. As a result, Rosberger said his parents supported Mamdani in the primary, and he thinks they will likely vote for him in Tuesday’s general election.
Gershon Leib, a junior at a Manhattan Jewish day school, said his older brother is an anti-Zionist who has canvassed for the Mamdani campaign, something that Leib said his parents are not happy about.
“There was definitely some tension in the family over his decision to do so [to canvas], I could definitely feel that,” Leib, 16, said.
Leib, a former New York Jewish Week Teen Fellow, said both of his parents disapprove of Mamdani. While his stance on Israel-Gaza is part of the problem, he said they are primarily concerned by the state assemblyman’s lack of experience and policy platform, which they disagree with.
Leib, on the other hand, sees Mamdani as “the least bad option.” He’s encouraged by what he sees as the success of other progressive mayors such as Boston’s Michelle Wu — who has implemented free buses and expanded free pre-k — to be a positive sign for Zohran’s policies.
Leib said his parents are concerned that his brother has not done enough research into Mamdani’s policy platform and is only supporting Mamdani because of his anti-Zionist stance.
In the Leib family, the generational divide extends upward to the grandparents as well. Like Chase’s grandparents, they are concerned with Mamdani’s history with the BDS movement. The whole dynamic “has been causing some friction, even at the dinner table,” Leib said.
With the election one day away, the situation with his brother is still a bit of an open wound. “Obviously they [Gershon’s grandparents] did not shut him out entirely,” Leib said, “but I could see tension boiling over who he was willing to support.”
—
The post Jewish teens see a generational split in their own families over Mamdani appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Jewish lawyer quits Heritage Foundation’s antisemitism task force over Tucker Carlson defense
A prominent Jewish lawyer has quit a national initiative to fight antisemitism over comments by the president of the Heritage Foundation defending Tucker Carlson’s decision to host the white supremacist Nick Fuentes on his popular streaming show.
Mark Goldfeder, CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, announced in a letter posted to social media on Sunday that he is quitting the National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, convened by the Heritage Foundation, because of Kevin Roberts’ comments last week. The president of the Heritage Foundation both rejected calls to cut ties with Carlson and called conservatives criticizing him “a venomous coalition” within the Republican Party.
Goldfeder wrote that he had joined the national task force, launched in 2023, because he believed it would be nonpartisan, “transcend[ing] politics, ideology, and institutional affiliation.” Roberts’ defense of Carlson, he said, showed that it had departed from those values.
“Elevating him and then attacking those who object as somehow un-American or disloyal in a video replete with antisemitic tropes and dog whistles, no less, is not the protection of free speech. It is a moral collapse disguised as courage,” wrote Goldfeder, who is also an Orthodox rabbi.
He continued, “It is especially painful that Heritage, an institution with a historic role in shaping conservative policy, would choose this moment to blur the line between worthwhile debate and the normalization of hate.”
The episode comes as Republicans are increasingly divided over how to respond to antisemitism on the right, which many within the party say is surging. Some, including Sen. Ted Cruz, say antisemitism must be forcefully rejected, but other leading Republicans have downplayed the issue or, like Roberts, framed the presence of antisemitic rhetoric as a side effect of free speech.
Goldfeder rejected that idea in his letter.
“Free speech protects the right to speak. It does not compel anyone to provide a megaphone for a Nazi,” he wrote. “Those of us who lead or advise efforts to combat antisemitism have a responsibility to draw that line clearly. If we fail to do so, and if we equivocate when hatred dresses itself in the language of populism, we betray both our mission and our values.”
Goldfeder is not the first Jewish voice on the right to break ties with the Heritage Foundation, a key architect of conservative policy, over Roberts’ comments. Rep. Randy Fine, one of four Jewish Republicans in Congress, announced at the Republican Jewish Coalition convention in Las Vegas over the weekend that he would no longer allow Heritage staffers into his Capitol Hill offices and called on his colleagues to do the same.
Roberts’ video and the backlash has spurred open discord within an organization known for its unified conservative voice. The Free Press reported on Sunday that multiple people affiliated with Heritage had denounced the video on social media, and that Roberts’ chief of staff, seen as responsible for it, had been moved to another position.
Roberts responded to the backlash — and to goading by Fuentes — in a second social media statement late Friday that explicitly denounced Fuentes, citing specific comments in which Fuentes downplayed the Holocaust and called for the death penalty against Jews.
It did not mention Carlson, who is closer to the Republican Party’s mainstream and was the subject of protest at the Republican Jewish Coalition convention.
Rep. Randy Fine addresses the Republican Jewish Coalition’s national conference in Las Vegas, Nov. 1, 2025. (Joseph Strauss)
“Nick Fuentes’s antisemitism is not complicated, ironic, or misunderstood. It is explicit, dangerous, and demands our unified opposition as conservatives. Fuentes knows exactly what he is doing. He is fomenting Jew hatred, and his incitements are not only immoral and un-Christian, they risk violence,” Roberts wrote.
“Our task is to confront and challenge those poisonous ideas at every turn to prevent them from taking America to a very dark place,” he added. “Join us—not to cancel—but to guide, challenge, and strengthen the conversation, and be confident as I am that our best ideas at the heart of western civilization will prevail.”
The new statement earned praise from Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, which has long criticized Fuentes and Carlson as elevating antisemitism on the right. The ADL, founded to fight on behalf of Jews facing discrimination a century ago, had criticized the Carlson interview and amplified news reports critical of Roberts’ video.
“Credit to @KevinRobertsTX for stepping forward today and issuing a clear, cogent takedown of the toxic antisemitism and venomous racism expressed by Fuentes,” Greenblatt tweeted. “It was clarifying and crucial to hear firsthand that @heritaghas zero tolerance for this kind of poison.”
For his part, Goldfeder said he believed Heritage was feeling pressure from the antisemitism task force, which is chaired by Jewish and Christian Zionist figures. He also left the door open to a return.
“I want to personally thank the leaders of the task force, many of whom have already spoken up and about the need for Heritage to course-correct before it is too late,” Goldfeder wrote in his resignation letter. “I hope that Heritage will listen and, someday, reclaim the clarity that once defined its best moments. And I look forward to working together again as soon as that day comes.”
—
The post Jewish lawyer quits Heritage Foundation’s antisemitism task force over Tucker Carlson defense appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Remains of Omer Neutra, Israeli-American hostage killed on Oct. 7, are returned to Israel
(JTA) — Hamas has returned remains belonging to Omer Neutra, an Israeli-American who was killed while serving in the Israeli army on Oct. 7, 2023, to Israel.
Neutra was one of two Israeli-American soldiers killed that day, along with Itay Chen, whose bodies were still being held by Hamas in Gaza weeks after the start of a ceasefire under which the group was required to release all hostages. Twenty living hostages were released at the ceasefire’s start, but Hamas has released deceased hostages intermittently and with snafus that have tested the truce.
On Sunday, Hamas transferred remains that it said came from three deceased hostages, which if confirmed would reduce the number of Israeli hostages in Gaza to eight. Neutra was the first to be positively identified.
“With heavy hearts and a deep sense of relief — we share the news that, Captain Omer Neutra Z”L has finally been returned for burial in the land of Israel,” his family said in a statement.
Neutra, who was 21 when he was killed, was the son of Israeli parents who grew up on Long Island, where he attended Jewish day school and camp. Following graduation, he moved to Israel and enlisted in the military. He was serving as a tank commander on Oct. 7.
For more than a year, his parents labored under the possibility that he was alive. Orna and Ronen Neutra became prominent faces of the movement to free the hostages, speaking at the Republican National Convention in 2024 as well as at a gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition and numerous other forums. They also spoke directly with both U.S. presidents during their son’s captivity, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, in an effort to free their son and the other hostages.
After the Israeli army announced in December 2024 that it had concluded that Neutra had been killed on Oct. 7, his school and Jewish community on Long Island held a memorial service for him, while his town of Plainview named both a street and park for him. But family members continued to lobby for the remaining hostages, to return those who remained alive and give those whose loved ones had been killed the closure they desperately sought.
“They will now be able to bury Omer with the dignity he deserves,” the family’s statement said. “Omer has returned to the land he loved and served. His parents’ and brother’s courage and resolve have touched the hearts of countless people around the world.”
The post Remains of Omer Neutra, Israeli-American hostage killed on Oct. 7, are returned to Israel appeared first on The Forward.