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How Jewish comedy found religion, from Philip Roth to ‘Broad City’
(JTA) — In the 2020 comedy “Shiva Baby,” a 20-something young woman shows up at a house of Jewish mourners and gently offers her condolences. When she finds her mother in the kitchen, they chat about the funeral and the rugelach before the daughter asks, “Mom, who died?”
While “Shiva Baby” explores themes of sexuality and gender, the comedy almost never comes at the expense of Jewish tradition, which is treated seriously by its millennial writer and director Emma Seligman (born in 1995) even as the shiva-goers collide. It’s far cry from the acerbic way an author raised during the Depression like Philip Roth lampooned a Jewish wedding or a baby boomer like Jerry Seinfeld mocked a bris.
These generational differences are explored in Jenny Caplan’s new book, “Funny, You Don’t Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials.” A religion scholar, Caplan writes about the way North American Jewish comedy has evolved since World War II, with a focus on how humorists treat Judaism as a religion. Her subjects range from writers and filmmakers who came of age shortly after the war (who viewed Judaism as “a joke at best and an actual danger at worst”) to Generation X and millennials, whose Jewish comedy often recognizes “the power of community, the value of family tradition, and the way that religion can serve as a port in an emotional storm.”
“I see great value in zeroing in on the ways in which Jewish humorists have engaged Jewish practices and their own Jewishness,” Caplan writes. “It tells us something (or perhaps it tells us many somethings) about the relationship between Jews and humor that goes deeper than the mere coincidence that a certain humorist was born into a certain family.”
Caplan is the chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Cincinnati. She has a master’s of theological studies degree from Harvard Divinity School and earned a Ph.D. in religion from Syracuse University.
In a conversation last week, we spoke about the Jewishness of Jerry Seinfeld, efforts by young women comics to reclaim the “Jewish American Princess” label, and why she no longer shows Woody Allen movies in her classrooms.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity
[Note: For the purpose of her book and our conversation, this is how Caplan isolates the generations: the Silent Generation (b. 1925-45), the baby boom (1946-65), Generation X (1966-79) and millennials (1980–95).]
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Let me ask how you got into this topic.
Jenny Caplan: I grew up in a family where I was just sort of surrounded by this kind of material. My dad is a comedic actor and director who went to [Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey’s] Clown College. My degrees were more broadly in American religion, not Jewish studies, but I was really interested in the combination of American religion and popular culture. When I got to Syracuse and it came time to start thinking about my larger project and what I wanted to do, I proposed a dissertation on Jewish humor.
The key to your book is how Jewish humor reflects the Jewish identity and compulsions of four sequential generations. Let’s start with the Silent Generation, which is sandwiched between the generation whose men were old enough to fight in World War II and the baby boomers who were born just after the war.
The hallmark of the Silent Generation is that they were old enough to be aware of the war, but they were mostly too young to serve. Every time I told people what I was writing about, they would say Woody Allen or Philip Roth, two people of roughly the same generation.
In “Funny, You Don’t Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials,” Jenny Caplan explores how comics treated religion from the end of World War II to the 21st century. (Courtesy)
The Roth story you focus on is “Eli, the Fanatic” from 1959, about an assimilated Jewish suburb that is embarrassed and sort of freaks out when an Orthodox yeshiva, led by a Holocaust survivor, sets up in town.
Roth spent the first 20 to 30 years of his career dodging the claim of being a self-loathing Jew and bad for the Jews. But the actual social critique of “Eli, the Fanatic” is so sharp. It is about how American Jewish comfort comes at the expense of displaced persons from World War II and at the expense of those for whom Judaism is a real thriving, living religious practice.
That’s an example you offer when you write that the Silent Generation “may have found organized religion to be a dangerous force, but they nevertheless wanted to protect and preserve the Jewish people.” I think that would surprise people in regards to Roth, and maybe to some degree Woody Allen.
Yeah, it surprised me. They really did, I think, share that postwar Jewish sense of insecurity about ongoing Jewish continuity, and that there’s still an existential threat to the ongoing existence of Jews.
I hear that and I think of Woody Allen’s characters, atheists who are often on the lookout for antisemitism. But you don’t focus on Allen as the intellectual nebbish of the movies. You look at his satire of Jewish texts, like his very funny “Hassidic Tales, With a Guide to Their Interpretation by the Noted Scholar” from 1970, which appeared in The New Yorker. It’s a parody of Martin Buber’s “Tales of the Hasidim” and sentimental depictions of the shtetl, perhaps like “Fiddler on the Roof.” A reader might think he’s just mocking the tradition, but you think there’s something else going on.
He’s not mocking the tradition as much as he’s mocking a sort of consumerist approach to the tradition. There was this sort of very superficial attachment to Buber’s “Tales of the Hasidim.” Allen’s satire is not a critique of the traditions of Judaism, it’s a critique of the way that people latch onto things like the Kabbalah and these new English translations of Hasidic stories without any real depth of thought or intellect. Intellectual hypocrisy seems to be a common theme in his movies and in his writing. It’s really a critique of organized religion, and it’s a critique of institutions, and it’s a critique of the power of institutions. But it’s not a critique of the concept of religion.
The idea of making fun of the wise men and their gullible followers reminds me of the folk tales of Chelm, which feature rabbis and other Jewish leaders who use Jewish logic to come to illogical conclusions.
Yes.
You write that the baby boomers are sort of a transition between the Silent Generation and a later generation: They were the teenagers of the counterculture, and warned about the dangers of empty religion, but also came to consider religion and tradition as valuable. But before you get there, you have a 1977 “Saturday Night Live” skit in which a bris is performed in the back seat of a luxury car, and the rabbi who performs it is portrayed as what you call an absolute sellout.
Exactly. You know: Institutional religion is empty and it’s hollow, it’s dangerous and it’s seductive.
Jerry Seinfeld, born in 1954, is seen as an icon of Jewish humor, but to me is an example of someone who never depicts religion as a positive thing. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
“Seinfeld” is more a show about New York than it is necessarily a show about anything Jewish. The New York of Seinfeld is very similar to the New York of Woody Allen, peopled almost entirely by white, middle-class, attractive folks. It’s a sort of Upper West Side myopia.
But there’s the bris episode, aired in 1993, and written by Larry Charles. Unless you are really interested in the medium, you may not know much about Larry Charles, because he stays behind the camera. But he also goes on to do things like direct Bill Maher’s anti-religion documentary “Religulous,” and there’s a real strong case for him as having very negative feelings about organized religion which feels like a holdover from the Silent Generation. And so in that episode you have Kramer as the Larry Charles stand-in, just opining about the barbaric nature of the circumcision and trying to save this poor baby from being mutilated.
The few references to actual Judaism in “Seinfeld” are squirmy. I am thinking of the 1995 episode in which a buffoon of a rabbi blurts out Elaine’s secrets on a TV show. That was written by Larry David, another boomer, whose follow-up series, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” is similarly known for its irreverence toward Judaism. But you say David can also surprise you with a kind of empathy for religion.
For the most part, he’s classic, old school, anti-organized religion. There’s the Palestinian Chicken episode where the Jews are rabidly protesting the existence of a Palestinian-run chicken restaurant near a Jewish deli, and where his friend Funkhouser won’t play golf on Shabbos until Larry gets permission by bribing the rabbi with the Palestinian chicken. There, rabbis are ridiculous and can be bought and religion is hollow and this is all terrible.
But then there’s this bat mitzvah montage where for one moment in the entire run of this show, Larry seems happy and in a healthy relationship and fulfilled and enjoying life.
That’s where he falls in love with Loretta Black during a bat mitzvah and imagines a happy future with her.
It’s so startling: It is the most human we ever see Larry over the run of the show, and I believe that was the season finale for the 2007 season. It was much more in line with what we’ve been seeing from a lot of younger comedians at that point, which was religion as an anchor in a good way — not to pull you down but to keep you grounded.
So for Generation X, as you write, Judaism serves “real, emotional, or psychological purpose for the practitioners.”
I wouldn’t actually call it respect but religion is an idea that’s not just something to be mocked and relegated to the dustbin. I’m not saying that Generation X is necessarily more religious, but they see real power and value in tradition and in certain kinds of family experiences. So, a huge amount of the humor can still come at the expense of your Jewish mother or your Jewish grandmother, but the family can also be the thing that is keeping you grounded, and frequently through some sort of religious ritual.
Who exemplifies that?
My favorite example is the 2009 Jonathan Tropper novel, “This Is Where I Leave You.” I’m so disappointed that the film adaptation of that sucked a lot of the Jewish identity out of the story, so let’s stick with the novel. In that book, where a family gathers for their father’s shiva, the characters are horrible people in a dysfunctional family writ large. They lie to each other. They backstab each other. But in scene where the protagonist Judd describes standing up on the bimah [in synagogue] to say Kaddish [the Mourner’s Prayer] after the death of his father, and the way he talks about this emotional catharsis that comes from saying the words and hearing the congregation say the words — it’s a startling moment of clarity in a book where these characters are otherwise just truly reprehensible.
Adam Sandler was born in 1966, the first year of Generation X, and his “Chanukah Song” seems like such a touchstone for his generation and the ones that follow. It’s not about religious Judaism, but in listing Jewish celebrities, it’s a statement of ethnic pride that Roth or Woody Allen couldn’t imagine.
It’s the reclamation of Jewish identity as something great and cool and fun and hip and wonderful and absolutely not to be ashamed of.
From left, Ilana Glazer, Abbi Jacobson and Seth Green in an episode of “Broad City” parodying Birthright Israel. (Screenshot from Comedy Central)
Which brings us to “Broad City,” which aired between 2014 and 2019. It’s about two 20-something Jewish women in New York who, in the case of Ilana Glazer’s character, anyway, are almost giddy about being Jewish and embrace it just as they embrace their sexuality: as just liberating. Ilana even upends the Jewish mother cliche by loving her mother to death.
That’s the episode with Ilana at her grandmother’s shiva, which also has the B plot where Ilana and her mother are shopping for underground illegal handbags. They spend most of the episode snarking at each other and fighting with each other and her mother’s a nag and Ilana is a bumbling idiot. But at the moment that the cops show up, and try to nab them for having all of these illegal knockoff handbags, the two of them are a team. They are an absolute unit of destructive force against these hapless police officers.
I think all of your examples of younger comics are women, who have always had fraught relationships with Jewish humor, both as practitioners and as the target of jokes. You write about “The JAP Battle” rap from “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” which both leans into the stereotype of the Jewish-American Princess — spoiled, acquisitive, “hard as nails” — and tries to reclaim it without the misogyny.
Rachel Bloom’s character Rebecca in “Girlfriend” self-identifies as a JAP, but she doesn’t actually fit the category. It’s her mother, Naomi, who truly is the Philip Roth, “Marjorie Morningstar,” Herman Wouk model of a JAP. So Bloom is kind of using the term, but you can’t repurpose the term when the original is still there.
So as an alternative, I offer up a new term: the Modern Ashkenazi American Woman. It’s very New York, it’s very East Coast, it’s very particular to a type of upbringing and community that in the 1950s and ’60s would have been almost exclusively Conservative Jews, and then may have become a bit more Reform as we’ve gotten into the ’90s and 2000s. They went to the JCC. They probably went to Jewish summer camp.
But even that doesn’t even really speak to the American sense of what Jewish is anymore, because American Jews have become increasingly racially and culturally diverse.
There is also something that’s happening historically with Generation X, and that’s the distance from the two major Jewish events of the 20th century, which is the Holocaust and the creation of Israel.
The Silent Generation and baby boomers still had a lingering sense of existential dread — the sense that we’re not so far removed from an attempted total annihilation of Jews. Gen X and millennials are so far removed from the Holocaust that they don’t feel that same fear.
But the real battleground we’re seeing in contemporary American Judaism is about the relationship to Israel. For baby boomers and even for some older members of Gen X, there’s still a sense that you can criticize Israel, but at the end of the day, it’s your duty to ultimately support Israel’s right to exist. And I think millennials and Zoomers [Gen Z] are much more comfortable with the idea of Israel being illegitimate.
Have you seen that in comedy?
I certainly think you can see the leading edge of that in some millennial stuff. The “Jews on a Plane” episode of “Broad City” is an absolute excoriation of Birthright Israel, and does not seem particularly interested in softening its punches about the whole idea of Jews going to Israel. I think we can see a trend in that direction, where younger American Jewish comedians do not see that as punching down.
You’re teaching a class on Jewish humor. What do your undergraduates find funny? Now that Woody Allen is better known for having married his adoptive daughter and for the molestation allegations brought by another adoptive daughter, do they look at his classic films and ask, “Why are you teaching us this guy?”
For the first time I’m not including Woody Allen. I had shown “Crimes and Misdemeanors” for years because I think it’s his most theological film. I think it’s a great film. And then a couple years ago, I backed off, because some students were responding that it was hard to look at him with all the baggage. He’s still coming up in conversation because you can’t really talk about the people who came after him without talking about him, but for the first time I’m not having them actually watch or read any of his stuff.
They have found things funny that I didn’t expect them to, and they have not found things funny that I would have thought they would. They laughed their way through “Yidl mitn fidl,” the 1936 Yiddish musical starring Molly Picon. I also thought they’d enjoy the Marx Brothers’ “Duck Soup” and they did not laugh once. Some of that is the fact that Groucho’s delivery is just so fast.
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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Announces Progress in Legal Battle to Declare CAIR a Terrorist Group
Governor of Texas Greg Abbott attends the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) USA 2026 at the Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center, in Grapevine, Texas, US, March 27, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Callaghan O’Hare
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) on Wednesday announced that a US federal court granted major portions of Texas’s discovery requests against the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), representing significant progress in the state’s legal case to designate the controversial advocacy group as a terrorist organization.
The approved request means that CAIR will have to hand over information including donor lists, award recipients, and records tied to travel by longtime CAIR executive director Nihad Awad to countries described by Abbott as “hosting Islamic terror.”
“Progress in my legal fight against CAIR,” Abbott posted on X. “I demanded CAIR give us its donor list, donee list, and details for Nihad Awad’s travel to 9 countries hosting Islamic terror. A federal court granted my request.”
The ruling, issued by the US District Court for the Western District of Texas, marks one of the most serious legal setbacks CAIR has faced in years as Republican officials intensify scrutiny of the organization’s funding networks and alleged foreign connections.
Court documents show the judge granted in part motions from Abbott and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton seeking extensive discovery from CAIR entities. Among the requests approved by the court were demands for documents identifying donors who gave $5,000 or more over the past decade.
The order also states that donor records with names redacted would be “insufficient,” signaling the court’s willingness to force disclosure of information CAIR has long argued should remain private.
Abbott has accused CAIR of operating surreptitiously while exerting significant political influence across the country. His administration has argued that Texans deserve transparency regarding the organization’s donors, overseas relationships, and internal financial networks.
The legal proceedings began in November, when Abbott formally designated CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations under state law, citing in part what officials described as longstanding ideological and operational ties with Islamist movements hostile to the US and its allies.
“The Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR have long made their goals clear: to forcibly impose Sharia law and establish Islam’s ‘mastership of the world,’” Abbott said in a statement announcing the move. “These radical extremists are not welcome in our state and are now prohibited from acquiring any real property interest in Texas.”
Abbott’s proclamation described CAIR as a “successor organization” to the Muslim Brotherhood and noted the FBI called it a “front group” for “Hamas and its support network.” The document also outlined the history of the organizations and their historical associations with figures and networks tied to Hamas, an internationally designated terrorist group.
CAIR has denied any ties to terrorism and portrayed the Texas investigation as an attack on Muslim civil rights advocacy.
But critics of CAIR have increasingly pointed to the organization’s history of controversy surrounding extremist rhetoric and its past scrutiny by federal investigators. Awad himself drew backlash after publicly expressing support for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, saying he was “happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land.”
In the 2000s, CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case. Politico noted in 2010 that “US District Court Judge Jorge Solis found that the government presented ‘ample evidence to establish the association’” of CAIR with Hamas.
According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “some of CAIR’s current leadership had early connections with organizations that are or were affiliated with Hamas.” CAIR has disputed the accuracy of the ADL’s claim and asserted that it “unequivocally condemn[s] all acts of terrorism, whether carried out by al-Qa’ida, the Real IRA, FARC, Hamas, ETA, or any other group designated by the US Department of State as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization.’”
CAIR leaders have also found themselves embroiled in further controversy since Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities in southern Israel, in some cases for associating with US-designated terrorists.
The latest court ruling does not resolve the broader lawsuit, which remains ongoing, but it hands Abbott and Paxton a major procedural victory in a case that is increasingly drawing national attention.
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Denmark Sees Historically High Antisemitism for Third Consecutive Year
People take part in an anti-Israel demonstration in Copenhagen, Denmark, Oct. 4, 2025. Photo: Ritzau Scanpix/Emil Nicolai Helms via REUTERS
Antisemitism in Denmark has remained at historically high levels for the third consecutive year, according to newly released data reflecting a deeply entrenched climate of hostility toward Jews and Israelis across Europe, marked by harassment, vandalism, and targeted attacks.
On Thursday, the Danish Jewish Community’’ Department for Mapping and Registering Antisemitic Incidents released its annual report documenting 199 antisemitic incidents in 2025 — the second-highest figure since records began in 2012.
“Unfortunately, antisemitism in Denmark is not diminishing — it has become normalized at a level we have never witnessed before,” Ina Rosen, chairperson of the local Jewish community group, said in a statement.
“This casts a dark shadow over Jewish life in Denmark, but antisemitism is not only a Jewish problem — it is a societal one. No democracy can accept a reality in which an entire group of citizens is subjected to such intense hatred,” she continued.
More antisemitic incidents have been recorded in Denmark since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, than in the previous decade combined, reflecting a sharp and sustained rise in hostility with no signs of abating.
While the data reflected a slight decline from the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 atrocities, with incidents peaking at 207 in 2024, the figures remained far above pre-war levels, which totaled just nine incidents overall.
Denmark’s Jewish population was estimated at 6,400 Jews in 2023.
All across the country, the study pointed to a growing tendency to hold Jews and Israelis collectively responsible for the policies and actions of the State of Israel, with more than half of all reported incidents (52 percent) blaming Jewish individuals, institutions, or organizations for events in the Middle East.
This trend was even more pronounced online, where it rose to 66 percent, reflecting an intensified pattern of scapegoating in digital spaces.
A large majority of the incidents — roughly 70 percent — targeted individuals or institutions visibly identified as Jewish, many of whom received hate messages, death threats, and demands to publicly distance themselves from Israel.
“This is the most common form of antisemitism Danish Jews are experiencing today,” Rosen said. “More and more, merely identifying as Jewish or displaying Jewish symbols is treated as a political stance for which individuals are held accountable. Regardless of how it is expressed, it amounts to an unacceptable imposition of collective guilt on an entire community.”
“We are talking about Jewish fellow citizens who, every day, have to weigh how openly they can show who they are,” she continued. “It is unacceptable for those affected, and it is also a loss for Danish society’s diversity when citizens feel compelled to conceal their identity.”
Among the reported cases were seven incidents of violence, assault, and other forms of physical harassment targeting Jews, alongside 24 cases involving Jewish children and young people.
The newly released report also warned that this increasingly hostile environment has become entrenched in schools and other educational institutions, citing repeated incidents in which public school students have been subjected to Nazi salutes, called “Jew pigs,” and told that “the world would be better without Jews” and that “all Jews must die.”
Given that many victims choose not to come forward, the study pointed to what is likely a far broader wave of antisemitic abuse than the official figures captured.
According to a survey released last year by the Danish Institute for Human Rights, 83 percent of Jewish citizens in Denmark said they alter their behavior in public because they are Jewish, while 62 percent reported hiding Jewish symbols.
In December, Denmark’s government unveiled an $18 million, five-year plan to combat antisemitism through 2030, focusing on security, education, and research, as the country’s Jewish community continued to face a wave of targeted attacks and hostility.
Building on the country’s first national plan to combat antisemitism from 2022, the new initiative focuses on boosting security for Jewish institutions, combating online hate, and introducing programs for children and young people.
As a new addition to the previous plan, the recently released program will appoint an Education Ministry coordinator to fight antisemitism in schools and establish an association to combat antisemitic hate crimes.
Other measures will include expanded educational programs, giving all upper secondary schools the opportunity to apply for study trips that teach students about the Holocaust and antisemitism.
The plan also includes the creation of the Weinberger Institute, a research center focused on hate crimes, led by Jonathan Fischer, a former vice president of the Jewish Community of Denmark.
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Netanyahu deploys AI videos as political weapon, aimed at voter fears of Arab power
As election season in Israel heats up, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and members of his government are deploying a charged weapon against their political opponents aiming to overthrow them: AI-generated viral videos.
In recent weeks, Netanyahu and key allies have taken to social media to post satirical content on their social media accounts, depicting their leading opponents, Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett, as being controlled by Arab-Israeli puppetmasters.
One viral video posted by the prime minister last week, with over a million views, is captioned “taking off the masks.” It shows a smiling Bennett and Lapid embracing before peeling off their faces to reveal those of prominent Arab-Israeli political leaders Mansour Abbas and Ahmad Tibi.
מורידים את המסכות pic.twitter.com/IgFDWXp96N
— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) April 29, 2026
After Bennett and Lapid announced in April that they would run jointly against Netanyahu in the upcoming fall elections, Israeli political Twitter flooded with AI-generated content on this theme, which goes for the jugular on a political vulnerability for Bennett: his past inclusion of Abbas’ Arab Ra’am party in his governing coalition.
One image posted by Likud, Netanyahu’s party, featured Bennett and Lapid depicted as children sitting obediently in the back seat of a car as Abbas drives. The photo is accompanied by the caption: “In any case, Bennett and Lapid will go again with the Muslim Brotherhood, the terrorism supporters.”
גם ביחד זה ברור – הנהג הוא מנסור.
לא משנה איך השמאל מחלק את הקולות שלו.
בכל מקרה בנט ולפיד ילכו שוב עם ברית האחים המוסלמים תומכי הטרור. pic.twitter.com/iYFIZQ8QhJ
— הליכוד (@Likud_Party) April 26, 2026
These AI videos reflect a growing post–Oct. 7 trend in Israeli politics: accusing one’s political opponents of being aligned with Arab parties as a way to delegitimize them.
Dr. Arik Rudnitzky, a researcher in the Arab Society in Israel program at the Israel Democracy Institute, said the trauma Israelis experienced after Oct. 7 has left a profound mark on the Jewish public. That fear, he said, is now being actively mobilized in political messaging.
“The post–Oct. 7 discourse is so influential in Israeli politics that it dictates everything,” Rudnitzky said. On Tuesday, Finance Minister Betzalel Smootrich went as far as to say that Naftali Bennett’s decision to include the Islamist Ra’am party in the 2021-2022 government was worse than the Netanyahu government’s failures tied to Hamas’s attacks on Oct. 7. This, despite the fact that Mansour Abbas has said that Netanyahu tried to court him into joining his coalition in 2021, though Netanyahu has denied this.
According to Rudnitzky, the implicit message is that Israel’s Arab parties are dangerous. The argument is that they are not Zionist (and some Arab parties are even explicitly anti-Zionist). In the aftermath of Oct. 7, while some Arab-Israeli political leaders condemned violence from both Hamas and the Israel Defense Forces on civilians, they stopped short of referring to Hamas as a terror organization. Some also failed to condemn the murder of Israeli soldiers on that day.
Now, Netanyahu’s government has taken to framing the choice for voters as existential. “Either you are with the most experienced prime minister in Israel’s history, or you are willing to gamble and put Israel at risk by electing Bennett and Lapid,” said Rudnitzky.
The use of AI by Israeli politicians, Rudnitzky added, makes that message more visceral. “It looks real, it goes straight to the back of your mind, and it hits a nerve.”
Bennett, for his part, has tried to distance himself from this narrative, stating after he announced that he would be running against Netanyahu, “The Arab parties are not Zionist, and therefore we will not rely on them.”
But the videos are taking their toll. Earlier this year, Bennett filed a police report after the Likud X account posted a doctored image that depicted Bennett celebrating with Arab leaders, with the men all raising their clasped hands in celebration. Bennett called the image “malicious forgery.”
Other politicians have deployed similar messaging tactics — against Netanyahu. In February, Avigdor Liberman, a right-wing critic of the prime minister, posted an AI-generated image of Netanyahu holding hands with Abbas in front of a bouquet of heart-shaped flowers, captioned: “Happy Valentine’s Day.”
יום אהבה שמח❤ pic.twitter.com/Sel1CkURFn
— אביגדור ליברמן (@AvigdorLiberman) February 14, 2026
In response, Netanyahu posted an actual photo of Lieberman meeting with Abbas with the caption: “Lieberman published a doctored AI photo of the PM holding hands with Mansour Abbas. So, Avigdor, here’s a real, unedited photo of you and Mansour Abbas.”
Lieberman then shared 10 posts of Netanyahu meeting with various Arab leaders since the 1990s, including former PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and current Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
According to Rudnitzky, such wrestling-ring attacks have become normalized since Oct. 7, aimed at Jewish politicians and voters. “This is not about delegitimizing Arab voters,” he said. “The target is Naftali Bennett — not Mansour Abbas.”
A controversial pragmatist
Arab parties have long represented Israel’s Arab minority in the Knesset but historically remained outside governing coalitions. For decades, this arrangement — Arab parties supporting from the outside or remaining in opposition — was broadly acceptable to both sides. Arab politicians often avoided joining coalitions for ideological reasons, while Jewish parties largely viewed their inclusion as politically untenable.
That changed in 2021, when Abbas made history by joining the winning coalition led by Bennett and Lapid. That decision positioned him as a pragmatist, willing to work with Jewish parties to secure gains for Arab citizens.
In the aftermath of Oct. 7, Abbas issued the most explicit condemnations of Hamas among Arab Israeli political leaders. He has also said that “the state of Israel was born as a Jewish state, and it will remain one,” a rare acknowledgment of Israel’s identity in those terms. Still, no Arab-majority party in Israel defines itself as Zionist.
While it is considered to be the most moderate of the Arab parties in Israel, Abbas’ Ra’am is an Islamist party that emerged from the Islamic Movement in Israel and the Shura Council — organizations tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. Abbas has increasingly sought to distance the party from those groups and has denied any affiliation with the Brotherhood.
Forming a governing coalition in Israel requires at least 61 seats out of 120, and several polls have suggested that any viable opposition to Netanyahu would likely need Arab party support to reach that threshold. But reliance on Arab parties to form a coalition has become more contentious since Oct. 7.
According to the Democracy Index poll, 72% percent of the Jewish public in Israel opposes the inclusion of Arab parties in the governing coalition. Opposition extends beyond the right: 43% of centrist voters and 20% of left-wing voters also oppose such coalitions. Support has declined significantly since before Oct. 7, when roughly 36% of Jewish Israelis backed including Arab parties in government, compared to just 27% today.
Hence the opening for Bibi and his video blitz. “We’ve seen an escalating political discourse over the past several years. There are no more holy cows,” said Rudnitzky. “If you want to mobilize the entire Jewish public and you know that you are in an inferior position in the polls … this is the way to take the demons out of the bottle.”
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