Israel is perhaps the most muscular and influential power in the Middle East today. When Israel changes its defense ideology, as per the Nagel Committee Report released last week, the region must take notice.

Under the new doctrine, Israel will not wait for its enemies to build lethal capabilities but will preemptively deny them the pathway to becoming a threat. Islamist Iran and what is left of its proxies remain the top threat to the Jewish State. Turkey is on its watch list. Moderate Arab countries face similar threats from Iran and Turkey, and have an interest in making common cause with Israel.

“Following the October 7 disaster,” the report reads, Israel must move “from a ‘containment’ and defense concept to a ‘prevention’ and readiness concept, alongside building capabilities for immediate and sometimes even disproportionate response.”

Another key recommendation is for Israel to decrease its reliance on importing arms, and reenergize its defense industry — a capable sector that was scaled back to avoid producing weapons and ammunition deemed not commercially competitive on the global market.

With some European countries and Canada threatening bans on arms sales, and with America holding up some ammunition every now and then to apply pressure, Israel has concluded that — even if it doesn’t have an industrial base of scale — producing arms is an issue of utmost national interest, one connected to the state’s existence, not one that must make economic sense.

Media reports state that the Israeli government has already awarded contracts to local companies to produce heavy bombs in order to reduce reliance on the US.

Less reliance on foreign powers means that Arab governments, which once hoped to use their leverage with world capitals to extract concessions from Israel, will have less ability to influence the policy and behavior of the Jewish State.

But since the moderate Arab capitals have vast overlapping interests with Israel, whether in curbing Iranian troublemaking and restricting uninvited Turkish meddling — and since world capitals will not stir Israeli policy the way that some Arab governments might want to — the best option for these Arabs would be to directly coordinate regional policy with Israel.

It is imperative that moderate Arab states and leaders realize the gravity of October 7 and how it has been changing the region. The event ushered in the third phase in relations between the Arabs and Israel.

In the first phase, between 1948 and 1990, the Arabs believed that they could set their population and economic weight against that of puny Israel and its economy, in order to force the world to make a choice. Israel won that round. The second phase was when most Arabs realized that, in a US-led unipolar world, their best option was a two-state solution. Israel played along. Thirty-three years later, October 7 proclaimed the end of that phase.

Now, in the third phase, starting in 2023, with America believing that the Middle East is not as geo-strategically important as it used to be — and therefore shrinking its footprint in the region while pursuing bandaid crisis-management policies — and with Russia watching its effort in Syria go to naught, and with China becoming preoccupied with its stalling economy, the Middle East is on its own.

Israel, Iran, and Turkey emerge as the successors of the great powers.

From an Arab perspective, of the three regional powers, the least expansive and intrusive is Israel, followed by Turkey, which puts its economy ahead of imperial ambitions and therefore limits its regional adventures. To the Arab people and other Arab states, an always expansive and war-obsessed Islamist Iran is the biggest threat, almost an existential one to most of them.

Against such background, it goes without saying that, of the three regional powers, Israel is the best option for the Arab states. Perhaps waiting for the Palestinians to figure out what they want, or who speaks for them, undermines both Arab and Palestinian interests. Arab states should reach out to Israel right away.

If they don’t, they risk becoming regionally irrelevant, sitting back and watching three powers vie for dominance while they wait to see who will emerge as the next boss. Hedging, at this point, and reaping the rewards of taking the right side, might be much better than waiting for the new regional boss to emerge, and dictate their will.

During World War I, Arab leaders did bet on the winning horse — the Allies. They did not get exactly what they wanted, but their choice proved to be much better than the disaster of flirting with the Nazis that some Palestinians and Iraqis did in World War II.

In the unfolding Middle East race, Israel has demonstrated its prowess. Betting on it looks like the safest choice for the Arab governments that seek stability to grow their economies and secure their futures.

Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a research fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD).

The post Israel Is Overhauling Its Defense Ideology; Will Arab States Finally Support It? first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

In 2016, the American comedian Ali Wong put out a comedy special. As reviewer Michelle Ruiz put it at the time for Vogue, “Until her, I’d never seen a pregnant stand-up. I’d never seen a pregnant stand-up pretending to trap a man’s head between her legs in simulated cunnilingus either, but this is the beauty of Baby Cobra.” Jason Zinoman of the New York Times meanwhile called Wong’s performance “something new, a pregnant woman in her third trimester delivering a deliriously filthy and funny hour of comedy woven into a sneakily feminist assault on the double standards of parenting.”

Going on a decade ago, it was refreshing, raw, what have you, to see a woman in this deeply domestic state, speaking about sex and bodies in a way more commonly associated with… well, with men. And a racialized woman, too—a further change of pace in the white, male world of stand-up.

During that era, American comics Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer had moved their web series Broad City onto cable television, showing that young women—not just young men—could be hijinks-having stoners. We were still in the era (Knocked Up, 2007) where men (perhaps played by Seth Rogen) could be slackers and some no-nonsense woman, perhaps played Katherine Heigl, would be the responsible one. We’re kind of back in that era now, but for five minutes there, it was allowed that women sometimes slacked.

Like seemingly all Jewish women at the time, I was a huge fan of this show. I particularly loved the 2015 episode, “Knockoffs,” that weaves together a plot with Abbi’s character trying out a certain new act with a male partner and Ilana’s discount handbag shopping with her mother. It was the second of the two that truly made the episode, showcasing a part of the New York mother-daughter experience never before seen, or at least not seen since The Nanny. But you need both threads to make sense of what follows: The bargains turn out to be found underground, as in literally beneath the road, yielding one of the best comedic lines of all time: “All the good shit is always down a manhole.”

Art about slackerdom, told from the slacker’s perspective, is always a challenge, but they nailed it. Broad City was objectively delightful, but also innovative in a way of specific interest to me: it presented unambiguously Jewish, Jewish-looking young women as protagonists, not sidekicks. They were the comic relief and the ones out having sexual adventures, and going on a satirical version of Birthright Israel. After growing up surrounded by a Gwyneth-led beauty standard, I got a kick out of knowing that I now lived in a world where women like these were considered desirable. What’s it to me if men think Scarlett Johansson’s hot? Abby and Ilana, this is another matter.

I’m a few months older than Jacobson and (this will be relevant) a few years older than Glazer, but close enough in age to both that it was a bit like watching my own early-20s Brooklyn-dwelling life, except hilarious. I remember it as a kind of counterpoint to Lena Dunham’s Girls, about a not-dissimilar milieu and life stage, but just so much sillier, and therefore more my speed. While I can’t say I’m committed to realism or representation in my television viewing generally (or else why so devoted to Midsomer Murders?) there was something special about how this show was covering familiar-to-me territory and getting it so right.

***

As I will be the first in human history to observe, time passes. For most of us, it’s a bit who cares. It’s unremarkable if the classmate who partied hard at 19 is more settled-down at 39. Not so if you made a name for yourself as your own free-spirited slacker-stoner alter ego, the picture of unfettered youth. If you’re Ilana Glazer, if you played the less responsible of the Broad City broads, and had the audacity to grow up, get married, and have a kid, your fans may demand an explanation.

Glazer’s comedy special, Human Magic, filmed at the Elgin and Winter Garden Theatre in Toronto last May and released for streaming in the final days of 2024 (on Hulu in the U.S. but via the adult side of Disney Plus in Canada) , brings the fans up to speed. It reconciles the filthy-mind-possessing Ilana Wexler alter ego from Broad City with the grown-up, responsible, professionally accomplished Ilana Glazer before us today. It is also an attempt at making a 2010s… vibe? ethos? relevant to the 2020s.

Human Magic is the 2020s’ answer to Baby Cobra, which may be where things go awry. It’s no longer groundbreaking to be a pregnant woman or new mom who (glances around anxiously) does sex stuff. It is maybe slightly edgy to admit to being a mom who consumeth the marijuana, as Glazer does, as is central to her personal brand, but stonerdom itself isn’t the rebellion it once was, not with legal dispensaries surrounding the theatre she’s performing at on Yonge Street—to say nothing of the rest of North America—not with all the much-publicized research about alcohol as a carcinogen, making Team Weed seem as if they had the right idea all along.

That’s not to say there isn’t a twist. The twist is that Glazer is not like those other women who love their husbands and have babies with them and enjoy cleaning the house and help their inept-shopper husbands buy T-shirts. And I don’t just mean because she’s a famous person.

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Glazer now describes herself as a “queer Jewy woman,” but does not elaborate on what sort of queer she—a woman with a husband—identifies as. A non-practising bisexual, one might guess. (Human Magic includes what might be the lewdest-ever way of expressing the fact that the speaker is monogamous, and much of the special is about her sexual history with men, though she does mime a sex act involving another woman, but only—hard to explain—to make a feminist point about microphones being too phallic.) And perhaps that as well, I have no idea.

A glance at Instagram and recent media coverage attests that Glazer uses she/her as well as they/them pronouns, suggesting that this is core to what Glazer’s referring to when speaking of queerness. Per a recent profile in The Independent—which was picked up by other clickbait headline outlets like it was still 2014—having a baby paradoxically tapped her into her own gender multitude (as versus the boring thing where it reminds you just how female you are), and today, “she identifies as a non-binary woman.”

“Broad City” star Ilana Glazer has opened up about their pregnancy, saying that the experience helped them realize that they are nonbinary. https://t.co/Q6bR2wkCfJ

— Them (@them) August 12, 2024

If this has you wondering who among us identifies as a binary woman, you are not alone. If you’re not wondering this, you are mad at me for having done so. Those are, you see, the only options.

But the interview got picked up, as they will, and held up as evidence that a beloved celebrity had Come Out As Queer. Fine, an assigned-female-at-birth, feminine-presenting, husband-having one, but why should any of that matter? It’s a big tent! Vogue publisher Condé Nast’s gender-celebrity website Them celebrated this revelation-of-sorts as follows: “We love a subtle nonbinary slay, especially when it comes from none other than Ilana Glazer.”

The subtlety is undeniable. Blink and you’d miss it.

***

You can never know, when talking about another person, what’s a tentative first step on a journey, and what’s a gesture taken on for symbolic reasons. It’s entirely possible that tomorrow, Glazer will announce exclusively they/them—or he/they, or he/him—pronouns, and whichever material transitioning in whichever direction, and I will feel like a terrible person for having even fleetingly interpreted this as a case of a functionally if not technically straight lady presenting herself as more interesting (or oppressed) than she is.

It is also possible that I will wake up tomorrow with the politics and inclinations of someone born a micro-era later than I was (Glazer was born in 1987, whereas I’m an ancient ’83er, and this seems a critical difference for this sort of thing) and be putting she/they into my bios and—despite nothing substantively changing about me or how I live my life—everyone will have to walk on eggshells when discussing me and my bog-standard hetero household.

Everyone apart from the right-wing rabble-rousers, who take a different tack. Well those, and people who from-the-left critique such things, often with the derisive term, spicy straights.

My commitment to the she/her (or, more precisely, to not stating my pronouns and letting others come to the likeliest conclusion) is more a matter of generation or sensibilities than place on any gender spectrum. I have no reason to believe I am more comfortable in my femininity, or however you want to phrase such things, than Glazer is in hers. My hunch here—and it can only be a hunch, I’m not in her brain—is that we have different frameworks for understanding the same kinds of experiences.

Why, then, am I walking on eggshells talking about this? Why am I questioning my choice to use she/her for Glazer, wondering at 9:15 p.m. whether the Wikipedia entry’s use of they/them (which it notes is for consistency, just to pick something) ought to have trumped the Independent profile’s she/her? If I had reason to believe Glazer consistently preferred they/them, I would use they/them, I have no whole thing about this, and believe in using the pronouns people request. Why do I feel like a bad guy here?

My jumpiness isn’t much of a mystery, though. It’s because I’m a repeat visitor to rodeos of this nature. There’s a subset of people who will be next-level furious at me for what they will call erasure, gatekeeping, transphobia. All this because of what is essentially a semantic difference of approach between two people whose lives are—apart from one of them being a famous person who helped create the brilliance that is Broad City—remarkably alike.

Who cares, and more to the point, what does any of this have to do with Human Magic?

The subtext of Human Magic is that Glazer is not just some straight-lady comic offering up relatable anecdotes. She’s someone you’d least expect to be leading such a conventional life. And she describes it all in this cool-kid tone that makes you almost forget that the things she’s talking about (loving your baby, enjoying sex with your husband) are, well, square.

***

I am not an Ilana Glazer-ologist, which is to say, my interest is the persona, not the person. And the persona she presents in Human Magic is no more or less conventionally feminine than the typical straight woman. It is not just the gushing about the husband (more on that in a moment), but visible to anyone with any familiarity with gendered self-presentation in our society. She’s dressed in a black, off-the-shoulder minidress or shirt-and-miniskirt (mini-skort?) combo, with black stockings, a chic necklace, and gorgeous shimmery eyeshadow.

Now someone could be as described and use any pronouns. But the overall effect—combined with Glazer’s own references to herself as a woman and “mom” throughout the special—suggests that one would not be misgendering Glazer to call her a woman. She calls herself a woman! (Why am I walking on eggshells?) And unlike her Broad City co-creator and co-star, who is married to another woman, Glazer is what one might call straight-passing. (A wife, if you’re a woman, is a dead giveaway about the not-straight thing.)

What I keep returning to is the T-shirt interlude. In this part of Human Magic, Glazer pokes gentle fun at her husband for his inability to buy his own clothes. She has to show him the websites and tell him what size he wears. Men!

This is standard stand-up fare. The bumbling husband, flummoxed by a domestic task, or maybe he deems it too trivial. There’s also something mildly absurd about how specifically I related to this (the scientist husband, those exact T-shirt websites). Queer Jewy women, straight Jewy women, not so different after all!. 

Glazer is nothing if not a member of her moment. She admits that she’s married, but encourages applause for the divorcees in the audience at the start of the show, calling herself a “divorce enthusiast.” She performs—literally, she is on a stage—the requisite feminist ambivalence of being in an opposite-sex relationship. “I feel so lucky to be married to my husband, but it’s hard at baseline to be a woman married to a man. Cause I see him sometimes as [here she gets dramatically angry] SOME MAN, instead of the person I chose to spend my life with.”

It’s performative misandry, but it’s also heteropessimism—or what would be called that if the person experiencing it identified as heterosexual. Glazer negotiates a squickiness surrounding her quasi-straight-womanhood (straight quasi-womanhood?) by describing herself as pro-guys, anti-men, with a whole routine about the difference between guys and men. Something about guys wearing sweatpants to buy groceries and men wearing jeans to work out in.

The guys-good, men-bad bit is a little funny, maybe? Not earth-shattering. It taps into something in the culture, though. Specifically, to the loophole according to which you’re permitted to be a ban-men feminist and have a male partner, so long as you tell anyone who’ll listen that you’ve found one of the good ones. Where this is meant to leave the women married to less-good ones (are they victims or just bad feminists?) I’m never clear.

***

Human Magic has its moments, in the Baby Cobra mould. Glazer describes a medical exam she had before giving birth as being “fingered” and in a positive sense—something I think I might find unnerving to hear if I were the doctor who’d performed the exam, but it’s a comedy special, maybe this never happened! She recalls the expletives she uttered when in awe of the miracle of having just had her baby. She confesses—in a scandalous tone—that she enjoys performing oral sex. Is the audience meant to be scandalized because sex, or because the sex-haver is a mom, or is it that third thing: that it’s yeah kinda shameful to be into sex with men, if you’re a queer feminist?

Loving your husband, enjoying sex with him, liking that he can carry heavy items (“I’ll tell you one thing daddies can do: carry shit”) not liking that he can’t be bothered to order his own T-shirts, loving your baby, worrying about your baby eating solids and how that’s going, enjoying cleaning your house (this is, Glazer explains, her Shabbat ritual), these are all things that put Glazer in community with the wide world of basic straight ladies. (I detest cleaning my house, which puts me where on the gender spectrum?) She presents her preferences for ordinary things as shocking revelations—the subtext being, can you believe someone like ME is into this stuff?

The more I think of it, the stranger it all seems. Annoying, but also kind of brilliant? There’s a part about how the first time she had fully unprotected intercourse was when trying for a baby. She describes this entirely banal fact of how one plans a pregnancy in extremely funny terms that sound both erotic and sordid.

What Glazer does—and what puts her in the spirit of Ali Wong—is remind that getting older, moving through the various life stages, does not magically remove women’s humanness. (Human Magic the title refers to reproduction, but could as easily refer to what’s imagined happens to women when no longer 22 and carefree.) Human Magic reminds that mothers are also women, that women are also people. Not just as in, people deserving of human rights, but people whose minds go to places that our culture ascribes to teenage boys.

The breakthrough of Broad City was showing that what’s thought of as teenage-boy-ness exists in young women as well. Human Magic extends the privilege to slightly older women. In a way.

***

Is the special not that funny because it’s too sanctimonious? After all, Glazer is an outspoken progressive, Broad City had a Hillary Clinton cameo in 2016 (whole lot of good that did, but I digress), and is a supporter of the Palestinian cause.  

But we are not in the realm of humourless scolding a la Hannah Gadsby’s 2018 anti-comedy comedy special, Nanette. Glazer’s comic timing is still there, her exaggerated expressions, and if some of her qualities that were charming on Broad City now inspire a bit of, you do realize you’re borderline middle-aged now yes?, like when she refers to her toddler as “dawg,” it is clear she does in fact realize this, and is in on the joke.

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Glazer comes across as aware she’s known for having righteous left-wing politics, and uses this as a way of offering unexpected twists. She talks about how dreadful it was, developing breasts early—“shtetl titties,” she calls them—and being sexualized from a young age. She then pivots to how, in her 30s, she’s no longer gently patted in public spaces and how she misses this. That’s it, that’s the joke.

Then there’s the interlude where Glazer admonishes mainstream (non-feminist) pornography for its emphasis on incest. She digresses a bit and you think she’s about to condemn the 1995 movie Clueless for its step-sibling romance. Really, you think, she’s out here cancelling Clueless? Instead she mimes her then-pubescent self let us say really enjoying the film—and in doing so, going somewhere far franker than Clueless itself ever did.   

I suppose a part of me reacted to the knowledge that Glazer doesn’t fully identify as a woman the way I would have had I learned that she no longer considered herself Jewish. (Note: she absolutely does consider herself Jewish; it’s an analogy.) Broad City was such a triumph of Jewish female representation that maybe I am, on some level, unjustly attached to the idea of its creators as female and as Jews.

The CJN’s opinion editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at pbovy@thecjn.ca, not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai. For more opinions about Jewish culture wars, subscribe to the free Bonjour Chai newsletter on Substack.

The post Glazed over: 2010s vibes abound in Ilana Glazer’s made-in-Toronto comedy special ‘Human Magic’ appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

Columbia University is being called on to respond to accusations that it has enabled the proliferation of antisemitic and pro-terror ideologies on campus.

“Dear Katrina Armstrong, the interim president of Columbia University,” Professor Shai Davidai, a faculty member who is one of the most renown pro-Israel activists in higher education, wrote in an open letter published on the X social media platform. “At some point your bulls—t needs to be called out. At some point, your silence must be addressed. Why haven’t you said anything about CU Apartheid Divest, the faculty supported organization that operates like an ideological terrorist cell? (They would never strap-on a suicide belt, but they praise and support those who do).”

Shai then enumerated a slew of grievances regarding the university’s handling of pro-Hamas and anti-Zionist extremists, including its declining to ever disavow Middle East Studies professor Joseph Massad, who praised Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel and described the men who paraglided into the Nova Music Festival to murder the young people there as “the air force of the Palestinian resistance.” He also cited the university’s allowing pro-Hamas students to crash a memorial service for the men, women, and children who Hamas murdered on the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack.

“You know perfectly well that they aren’t criticizing Israel’s policies. You know perfectly well that they’re criticizing its existence,” he continued. “It doesn’t take much to say that praising the death of Israelis is unacceptable. Silence isn’t violence, but it surely enables it. And true leaders never remain silent. Shame on you for not saying anything. Shame on you for your silence.”

The Algemeiner has asked Columbia University to respond to Davidai’s allegations and will update this story if the school responds.

Davidai’s missive follows 15 months of explosions of antisemitic hatred and extremism on Columbia University’s campus, a trend which began immediately after the Oct. 7 massacre. As The Algemeiner has previously reported, the treatment to which pro-Israel Jewish students, faculty, and staff have been subjected since that day is unprecedented in the school’s history. Jewish students have been beaten up, battered with hate speech, and even prevented from publicly promoting their own self defense.

The professor, a native of Israel, has himself been allegedly persecuted for criticizing the university’s alleged indifference to the proliferation of pro-Hamas sentiment.

Columbia launched an investigation of Davidai in February, several months after he described former university president Minouche Shafik as a “coward” for coddling pro-Hamas activists who, after the Palestinian terrorist group’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, waged a campaign of harassment, intimidation, and violence to demoralize Jewish students and pressure the university into boycotting Israel. The immediate cause cited for the inquiry, as told to The Algemeiner by the professor, was a series of spurious accusations that his denunciations of mass casualty events inspired by jihadist extremism equated to racism against Muslims and minorities of color.

Undeterred by what appeared to Davidai and his lawyers as a cynical attempt to use the disciplinary system to silence a political dissident and shroud him in suspicion, the professor continued advocating for Israel’s existence and Jewish civil rights all the way up to the first anniversary of Oct. 7, a day which saw dueling demonstrations held by pro-Hamas and pro-Israel students across the campus. It also saw a fateful exchange of words between Davidai and a Columbia administrator, Cas Holloway, whom the professor reproached for permitting pro-Hamas students to use the Oct. 7 anniversary for celebrating the terrorist organization’s atrocities, which included wantonly murdering Israelis, sexually assaulting Jewish women, and kidnapping over 200 hostages.

Columbia and Davidai’s legal team interpreted what transpired between the professor and Holloway differently. Davidai defended his approach as a genuine expression of grief and concern for the welfare of Jewish students, while Columbia felt that an unmoored professor had engaged in “threats of intimidation, harassment, or other threatening behavior.” Following the incident, Columbia “temporarily” banned him from campus, a severe disciplinary sanction which to this day prevents him from attending university functions and accessing his office.

The professor is not the first to accuse the university of inadequately responding to the misconduct of pro-Hamas activists.

In August, the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce denounced school officials for punishing only a few of the anti-Zionist activists who last spring occupied an administrative building and staged a riot which prompted the university to advise Jews to refrain from coming to campus. According to documents shared by the committee, 18 of the 22 students who were given disciplinary charges for their role in the incident were later upgraded to “good standing” despite the university’s earlier pledge to expel them. Another 31 of 35 who were suspended for illegally occupying the campus with a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” were restored to good standing as well.

Amnestying those students was “disgraceful and unacceptable,” former education committee chairwoman Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) said at the time.

“The vast majority of the student perpetrators remain in good standing,” she added. “By allowing its own disciplinary process to be thwarted by radical students and faculty, Columbia has waved the white flag in surrender while offering up a get-out-of-jail-free card to those who participated in these unlawful actions.”

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post Columbia University Professors Calls on President to Denounce Pro-Terror Activism first appeared on Algemeiner.com.