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It’s Purim in Tel Aviv — but in the shelter there are few costumes in sight
An hour before my suburban Boston minyan convened to twirl groggers and shout curses at Haman during the Megillah reading, I hustled into the underground parking garage beneath an old age home across the street from our Tel Aviv rental flat. It was the 25th or 26th siren since the start of the new Iran war 48 hours earlier. According to the Israel Home Front Command app on my phone, our apartment is 1.5 minutes from the underground garage, which is about half the time you have to get to a shelter before the second, more serious siren sounds, informing everyone to get inside immediately and shut the blast door. If you fail to shut the blast door, a shock wave can hurl through the open portal and cause injuries or death. I don’t know if that 1.5 minute figure includes the time it takes to dash down the five flights of stairs.
On Monday night — 12:41 a.m. Tel Aviv time, so technically Tuesday — it was slightly less crowded in the garage than it had been the first time, 26 sirens earlier. In part this was because the cars that had been parked there that first Saturday morning were gone, removed per regulation after Shabbat. It’s also possible that some people were choosing to stay in bed, though I doubt there were many. An elderly woman with limited mobility on the second floor of our building has chosen to sit in the hall during the sirens rather than come with us across the street though we have offered to carry her (the elevator is out of the question). Each time, she waves us on and says with a smile that she’s fine.
The mood in the shelter ranges from chatty during the day to subdued in the middle of the night. During my first siren, I talked with three young women who had by chance all moved to Tel Aviv from Long Island, not far from the town where I grew up. My husband and I met a 60-ish couple from New Jersey who live down the street from our rental and have been in the country for 25 years.
It’s a mostly youngish neighborhood, close to the hot spots on Dizengoff, so there are usually a dozen babies and an equal number of dogs. Someone always gives me a chair; the white hair is the tip-off. There are two kinds of chairs in the garage — a collection of upholstered chairs in shades of sea green and blue of the type you find in a dentist’s waiting room, and another collection of stacking white plastic. The senior home above the garage has kindly set up a table with a hot water urn and tea and a canister of Elite instant coffee; also plain boxed cookies. Few partake of the cookies; if they do, they take only one.
Everyone is considerate, polite. The mood is sanguine, calm. We have befriended a couple in their 40s, the husband Israeli, the wife Canadian; she has rightly dubbed their 17-month-old the shelter mayor. In her newfound thrill in walking — whenever she is not sleeping or nursing — she toddles through the garage to find the dogs, who are typically at her level, height-wise, to play with their snouts. The dogs are patient and willing, the child joyful. For those of us without dogs or babies, both are functioning as emotional supports.
The slightly older children, ages four to, say, 10 seem the most remarkable to me. There is no whining, no restlessness, and there are relatively few games or hand-held devices. They appear to grasp that this is not the time to demand or complain. They mostly sit with, or on, their parents, or move about in their sweatpants or pajamas in sibling pairs before circling back to home base. There’s a fair amount of English — not much French or Russian in this neighborhood — and occasional incongruous loudspeaker announcements in Hebrew intended for the senior residence that are carried into the garage, including one broadcast Saturday evening to say that movie night was cancelled. This netted a big laugh in the garage.
My husband and I are among the few who bring specially-packed bomb bags — water, essential medication, snacks, a change of clothes, our computers. Others arrive as if straight from the beach. When I first packed it, weeks before the first bomb was dropped on Tehran, I asked my husband why he said we should bring our computers. After all, we’d have our phones; we weren’t going to do work in the shelter.
He looked at me curiously, as if I’d missed some important cues. In case our building is destroyed, he reminded me.
Oh.
It is now Day #4 of the war. Readiness is paramount. Showers are a three-minute affair; we sleep in our clothes. We’ve had five sirens today, two that were back-to-back. Meaning that you get the all-clear, stand up, exit, and the siren blares again. It’s also Purim, but there are few costumes in sight. I dashed to the corner grocery after the morning sirens, since, unaware of what was coming, we had not stocked up on food in advance, making it there and back with one bag of essentials in eight minutes. On the sidewalk was a lone Haredi family in costumes. In the shelter, there were two funny hats; one person had put a butterfly decoration around their greyhound’s neck. True, it’s not an especially religious crowd, though there are some kippot in the room. But even they are on their phones. In the shelter for the 31st time, there is no need for reminders of Persia of long ago.
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VIDEO: A Hasid gives us a tour of Morocco in Yiddish
דער ירושלימער יוטוב־שטערן וועלוול קירשנבוים האָט לעצטנס אַרויסגעשטעלט אַ ווידעאָ אויף ייִדיש פֿון אַ פּרעכטיקן וויזיט, וואָס ער האָט געמאַכט אין מאַראָקאָ. עס באַגלייט אים זײַן חבֿר אַבֿרהם פּרץ.
אינעם ווידעאָ זעט מען ווי קירשנבוים דאַוונט שחרית מיט די אָרטיקע ייִדן און באַזוכט אַ גוט אָפּגעהיטענעם בית־עולם, וווּ עס ליגן באַערדיקט גרויסע צדיקים ווי למשל הרבֿ חיים בן עתר (1696–1743), באַקאַנט ווי דער „אור החיים“. „מענטשן מיינען, אַז נאָר אין אייראָפּע זענען דאָ קבֿרים פֿון צדיקים!“ זאָגט קירשנבוים.
מיר זעען אַ גרויסע, שיינע שיל מיט אַ פֿײַנער אַרכיטעקטור אין קאַזאַבלאַנקאַ; דעם גרויסן אַראַבישן שוק, וווּ קירשנבוים קויפֿט זיך אײַן מלבושים פּונקט ווי די מאַראָקאַנער גייען אָנגעטאָן. ער באַוווּנדערט אויך די שיינע טיי־גלעזער און טשײַניקן, וואָס מע פֿאַרקויפֿט דאָרט, און באַקענט זיך מיט אַ ייִדישן סוחר וואָס האַנדלט מיט זילבער און גאָלד, פּונקט אַזוי ווי זײַן טאַטע און זיידע האָבן געטאָן פֿאַר דור־דורות.
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Conservative and Christian movies are coming for Hollywood
A star-studded new movie set in a Soviet prison is coming out in November. James Franco and Rob Lowe anchor the cast of Confession, playing a brutal prison guard and an imprisoned dissident professor, and a disheveled Nick Nolte appears as a fellow prisoner.
These actors were once huge gets, and their names could convey legitimacy to a project. Nolte and Franco both have received Academy Award nominations. Lowe was a member of the Brat Pack, and was a regular on The West Wing.
Confession, written by Ben Shapiro and produced by the rightwing tabloid-esque news site The Daily Wire, is not the expected fare for actors with that kind of name recognition; Shapiro’s screenwriting aspirations have been the target of ridicule for years.
Nevertheless, this isn’t the only Daily Wire production getting big names; Danny Trejo signed onto a pro-ICE movie about Minneapolis in the aftermath of the Renee Good shooting, and Jonathan Majors led Run, Fight, Hide: Infidels earlier this year.
Each one of these actors has been, in some way, canceled or in career doldrums so may have been more open to working with The Daily Wire. And some have claimed that they did not know who Shapiro was, or what his politics were; Trejo’s son, Gilbert, said his 82-year-old father did not endorse ICE and was misled about the movie before he signed his contract.
Movie studios have struggled through the pandemic and the streaming era, both of which have tanked box office receipts, leaving the field open for movies from offbeat production studios. In addition to The Daily Wire, there has been a whole ream of Christian movies attempting to shift the stereotype of bible movies — that they’re preachy, low-budget straight-to-TV affairs with cardboard acting — to something more prestigious, or at least profitable.
The Christian company Angel Studios has been placing screenings of the half philo-semitic, half-antisemitic Jesus TV series The Chosen in movie theaters across the country, produced the right-wing hit The Sound of Freedom and is pumping out faith-based movies like the animated King of Kings Christmas story and David, a kiddie movie about the biblical king. Recently, Pinnacle Peak Pictures, another faith-based production company, premiered Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, another bible movie that was notable enough to merit a review in The New York Times. (Though admittedly it wasn’t a particularly positive one.)
For decades, Hollywood, and the media industry at large, has been associated with liberalism, progressive politics and diversity. (This is part of why conservative conspiracy theorists often insist that Jews control the media.) Even when conservatives are in power, satirical movies have poked fun at the ruling class — Team America: World Police spoofed George W. Bush’s foreign policy, while M*A*S*H critiqued Richard Nixon. During the current Trump administration, we’ve seen One Battle After Another lambasting immigration policies and rising white nationalism, Eddington on misinformation and populism, and The Apprentice depicting Trump directly.
But a rising number of higher-budget, bigger releases from the right wing, whether The Daily Wire’s conservative political parables or the Christian fables, are bringing a new kind of messaging — about the importance of God and country, about gender roles, about about the centrality of Jesus to the U.S. — to the American movie-going public.
This is no accident. A group of powerful conservative Christians, many of whom worked on Project 2025, are proponents of the Seven Mountains Mandate, a blueprint for Christian nationalism that instructs Christians to gain influence and control over the “seven mountains” of society — which include media, entertainment and the arts. The Mandate is part of the New Apostolic Reformation, a decentralized evangelical movement embraced by millions of Americans.
Jeremy Boreing, the director of many Daily Wire movies — though he has since left the company — said on a podcast hosted by businessman Patrick Bet-David that “It had always been part of our strategy to move into making culture, not just criticizing culture” as a way of proving that “there is a future where conservatives aren’t losing. There’s a future where we have political power and cultural power.”
Cultural power, of course, requires more than just a lot of movies; they have to be well-done, or at least appear to be. Previous Daily Wire productions, as well as other right-wing, MAGA movie ventures, have been hacky. Lady Ballers, about an unsuccessful men’s basketball team pretending to be women so they can dominate the league, was an unsubtle, unfunny and ultimately unwatchable spoof of transgender athletes. And even plenty of higher-budget attempts, like Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, can still fall victim to wooden acting and writing.
But now, with the financial success of movies like The Sound of Freedom and biblical parables like The Chosen, bigger stars are being drawn to projects like the Daily Wire’s lineup of pro-ICE, anti-immigration and anti-LGBTQ movies. With those bigger stars may come new audiences who might not have watched a Christian movie or Daily Wire project otherwise. And where there is money and viewers, mainstream Hollywood will go, too, no matter how progressive people expect the industry to be. We’ve already gotten a biblical epic from Amazon Prime, with The House of David, and there are likely to be many more to come.
After all, it wasn’t so long ago, after all, that Cecil DeMille’s The Ten Commandments was the biggest movie in town.
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‘Heil’ Mary? New Atlanta Falcons logo inspires Nazi comparisons
If there was something off about the logo the Atlanta Falcons unveiled on social media Wednesday, whoever runs their accounts did, uh, not see it.
Behind the black falcon graphic that began appearing on the football team’s helmets in the 1960s was a new background — a flag of red, tan, black and white vertical stripes. To thousands of people who responded to the logo, it looked distinctly German — in a 1930s kind of way.
“The Atlanta Falcons are preparing to invade Poland,” one fan wrote.
A day after its posting, the new profile picture had unleashed a deluge of Nazi memes in the 4,000-plus replies on X. One picture swapped in the logo for Nazi flags in the background of a historical photo of a Hitler rally. Another edited the Falcon claw to look like a Nazi salute.
Others depicted Hitler in a Falcons cap, references to Inglourious Basterds and the Battle of the Bulge and a World War II joke invoking a blown lead in Super Bowl LI.
“Falcons were up 28-3 at Dunkirk,” that tweet read.
The Falcons’ snafu enters a small but growing catalogue of Reich-coded brand mixups. Who can forget the German national soccer team’s ‘44’ soccer jerseys? There was also the swastika-emblazoned Hallmark gift wrap; the accidental Hitler mugs; and (for my money) the worst of the bunch, Zara’s concentration camp uniform shirt.
All of those have been addressed; so far, the Falcons’ has not. We’ve reached out to them for comment.
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