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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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The Nazis would have embraced these elite Germans — nevertheless, they resisted
The Traitors Circle : The True Story of a Secret Resistance Network in Nazi Germany—and the Spy Who Betrayed Them
By Jonathan Freedland
Harper, 480 pages, $26
Sometimes resistance is just mindfully walking around the streets of Berlin with shopping bags in both hands so that you have a reason not to give the Heil Hitler salute. As Jonathan Freedland told the audience at a live taping of John Heileman’s Impolitic podcast, that was the practice of Countess Lagi von Ballestrem — one of the two countesses in the “Traitors Circle” that gives his new book its title. Though members of the circle were involved in more significant opposition to the Nazi regime, this small, practical, personal act of defiance sings to us at our own moment of mounting authoritarianism.
Following on from his 2022 book, The Escape Artist, which traced the story of the first and only Jewish prisoners to escape from Auschwitz through their pre-War lives, capture and imprisonment, flight and depressingly unsuccessful attempts to convince Jewish and wartime governments to take action, Freedland turns his attention to a tea party. At roughly the same time as the events of his other book, these upper-class non-Jews in Berlin met regularly for companionship, dissent and mild subversion. It’s an entirely different form of resistance from Rudolf Vrba’s heroic escape, but one that speaks more directly to our time.
Freedland and his researcher Jonathan Cummings, were tipped off to the existence of this previously little-known coterie of “traitors” by the transcript of a speech from Heinrich Himmler to high-ranking Nazis in August 1944. He was referring to these regular anti-Nazi social gatherings hosted by widow of the late German Imperial Foreign Minister Wilhelm Solf. Just after Operation Valkyrie’s attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler had failed. Himmler — head of the SS, architect of the Shoah, and Hitler’s number two — reassured attendees that the SS was in full control and had also foiled a “traitors circle” from the “reactionary cabal” who were “prattling over tea” at the home of the Widow Solf.
As its subtitle suggests, The Traitors’ Circle tells the story of a small group of German men and women — aristocrats, army officers, diplomats, teachers — who saw what their government had become and decided to fight it from within. From the countesses like von Bellestrem and Maria von Maltzan, to wealthy mandarins like Arthur Zarden, to protestant nobility like Elisabeth von Thadden, they were German insiders, not romantic rebels or racially suspect. They, mostly, came from the right families, wore the right uniforms, spoke with the right accents, and moved in the right circles. Yet, even a decade into the Nazi takeover of Germany, they resisted.
In a breathless prose that he developed in his side hustle as thriller writer Sam Bourne, Freedland dashes through the histories and stories of the seven or eight main characters. The cadence can sometimes be a little repetitive and annoying, but for the most part, it shuttles through the nearly 400 pages of the story in entertaining, if horrifying, fashion. As is the case with the The Escape Artist, though, the events are entirely true. The hardback stretches to more than 450 pages because, to reinforce its facticity, it contains 30 character summaries, maps, more than 45 pages of endnotes and almost the same number of pages listing sources.
The book mainly centers on the time between the Solf-group celebrating Anza von Thadden’s birthday and surviving interrogation at Ravensbrück concentration camp. In sections, though, it extends well before that time to establish the backstories of the resisters, their betrayer, and some of the Nazi elite that prosecuted them. These backstories are crucial to understand not only what they did – hide Jews, sabotage the army, encourage army intelligence to desert – but what gave them the perspective and the moral compass to stand up against a state that would have happily embraced them.
Freedland has noted that, though 3 million Germans were arrested and imprisoned for their anti-Nazi activities, they represent only 5% of the German population. Even before the Nazis had fully consolidated their power over the country, the vast preponderance of people and corporations went along with the vicious lies that legitimized the Reich. Education, empathy, experience of other countries and cultures, true patriotism unfounded in personality cults, and a religious moral upbringing are some of the traits that impelled them to oppose the inhumanity of the regime.
Sadly, corporations like BMW, Porsche, and IG Farben were also deeply complicit in the Nazi takeover. Indeed, Freedland notes that Siemens drew slave labor from the prison population at Ravensbrück, where the Solf-group was held. During the Nazi era, corporations willingly took money and economic control in exchange for loyalty.
Today, corporations are massive but equally tractable. Advances in technology mean that their control of capital and information dwarfs even the great corporations of the past like the East India Trading Company or U.S. Steel. Furthermore, economic logic dictates that they must maximize profit so, especially when faced with egregious retaliation from an ideologically-driven regulatory power, they toe the line. Indeed, corporations throughout modern history have mostly acted as a lever of ideological power not as a bulwark.
From Pharaonic atrocities in antiquity, through capitalist colonial processes like the African Slave Trade to the murder of millions in the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, humans have been cruel and inhuman to other humans for millennia. As Kafka and Orwell recognized, though, the truly frightening potential of the 20th century – being realized in the 21st — is when the networks and system of the modern state are mobilized to identify, delegitimize, isolate and destroy individuals or groups it designates as undesirable.
Every act of resistance teaches the system what it cannot understand. That’s as true of dissenting Germans in 1943 as it is of whistleblowers and protesters today. Freedland’s conspirators exposed the blind spots of totalitarian logic: that obedience cannot erase morality, that even the most efficient machine depends on the fragile cooperation of individuals.
Their story reads as both a historical thriller and a moral syllabus. Resistance is not a fixed ideology; it’s a form of literacy. You learn how to read the shapes of power and to write between its lines.
In his theoretical discussion of the concept of “resistance” in “Resistances to Psychoanalysis,” Jacques Derrida talks about the emotional pull of the term. He begins nostalgically, thinking about the resonance of the French Resistance “blowing up trains, tanks, and headquarters between 1940 and 1945,” but spends the rest of the book backing away from that macro, material definition. For his part, Freedland shows that resistance is not simply heroic, even violent, self-assertion but rather can be deliberate, pre-planned or responsive, acts of mindfulness. It teaches us to see how ordinary habits — bureaucratic procedures, polite greetings, professional codes — become instruments of control, and how they can also be reclaimed as tools of subversion.
Indeed, in a world of misinformation overload where so many of the platforms that feed us our news and opinions are corrupt — by state interests (TikTok), laissez faire enrichment (Meta), or billionaire racism (X/Twitter) — copious, accessible notes and references are Freedland’s full shopping bags. Presenting the truth is sadly a mark of resistance in a decade marked by lies, propaganda, and deliberate attempts to rewrite the historical record.
The post The Nazis would have embraced these elite Germans — nevertheless, they resisted appeared first on The Forward.
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Marjorie Taylor Greene is feuding with Donald Trump. Could she win over Jewish Democrats?
(JTA) — As the U.S. House prepared this week to take a pivotal vote to force the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, one leading Jewish Democrat had words of praise for a prominent MAGA diehard who helped make the vote possible.
“This is a party that’s got room for Marjorie Taylor Greene, if she wants to come over,” Rep. Jamie Raskin told a group of Florida Democrats on Monday. “We got room for anybody who wants to stand up for the Constitution and for the Bill of Rights today.”
Raskin wasn’t the only influential Jewish Democrat to have recently offered praise for Greene, the far-right Georgia congresswoman with a history of conspiratorial remarks about Jews, Israel and antisemitism.
Last month California Sen. Adam Schiff, who had called Greene part of the “lunatic fringe” when she first entered Congress in 2021, released a short video titled “I agree with… MTG?” The issue they agreed on, Schiff said, was rising healthcare costs, which Jewish Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer also said Greene was “absolutely right” about. Such Democratic praise came as a growing number of Jewish Republicans, including Florida Rep. Randy Fine, have taken the opposite tack and more forcefully denounced Greene as an antisemite.
Such praise for Greene from unexpected corners comes as she is generating positive press for her recent public break with President Donald Trump, which helped spur all but one Republican to ultimately vote on Tuesday to release the Epstein files.
Trump formally withdrew his support for Greene last week, calling her a “RINO,” or Republican in name only, and saying he is willing to support a primary challenge against her.
In recent days Greene, amid her escalating split from the president she once fervently supported, has made the media rounds. She told CNN she was “committed to ending the toxic politics” and told Bill Maher that “I didn’t even know the Rothschilds were Jewish” when she made a now-infamous 2018 Facebook post blaming California wildfires on a space laser she said was funded by the Jewish banking family. Joy Behar of “The View,” like Raskin, urged her to become a Democrat, to wild audience applause.
Yet some Jewish groups are still urging caution when it comes to dealing with the onetime QAnon adherent.
“Marjorie Taylor Greene’s repudiation of Donald Trump – whether on the Epstein files or healthcare subsidies – isn’t something Democrats had on our 2025 bingo card. Her separation from MAGA, however, doesn’t erase her years of political extremism and dangerous lies about Jewish Americans,” Hailie Soifer, head of the Jewish Democratic Council for America, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a statement.
Soifer continued, “If Marjorie Taylor Greene wants to truly distinguish herself from the toxic and divisive politics of Donald Trump, she needs to take meaningful action to repudiate the antisemitic conspiracy theories that she’s previously espoused.”
The head of Democratic Majority for Israel, a pro-Israel group focused on shoring up the left side of the aisle, also expressed hesitation about Greene’s transformation.
“Marjorie Taylor Greene’s sudden and supposed change of heart regarding President Trump does not erase her long record of antisemitic rhetoric, her affinity for spreading dangerous conspiracy theories and her clear anti-Israel actions, which have continued through yesterday,” the group’s CEO, Brian Romick, told JTA in a statement on Tuesday. “She is a key part of the troubling trend and embrace of antisemitism coursing through the GOP.”
Romick specifically pointed out the congresswoman’s record on Israel.
“Greene has consistently voted and spoken out against providing critical support and resources for Israel to defend itself,” Romick said. “There should be no room for antisemitism, her dangerous views on Israel, or reckless conspiracy theories in either political party.”
The discussion around Greene has renewed speculation about the political future for an outspoken member of Congress who still believes disproven theories that the 2020 election was stolen and is the rare Republican to publicly accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza.
The Anti-Defamation League had, in years past, been one of the Jewish groups most loudly sounding the alarm on Greene. A spokesperson for the ADL declined to comment on Greene for this story.
In 2021, as Greene was being stripped of committee assignments over her promulgation of conspiracy theories, including antisemitic ones, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said that Greene “literally is breaking new ground in antisemitism, stringing together so many crazy ideas it’s hard to keep track.” The following year he also called her remarks comparing then-President Joe Biden to Hitler “disgraceful”.
On her rehabilitation tour, Greene has made no effort to signal any change in her thinking on Israel or antisemitism. Even the issue that Greene has taken up as her main breaking point with Trump — Epstein — has in her hands become fodder for more conspiracy theories about Israel.
“It really makes you wonder what is in those files and who and what country is putting so much pressure on him?” Greene wrote about Trump on X last week as she pushed for the Epstein files release. She attached a screenshot of a donations page from the pro-Israel lobbying giant AIPAC.
When asked about the tweet later on CNN, Greene was even more explicit about what she was saying.
“We saw Jeffrey Epstein with ties to Ehud Barak,” she said, referring to documented links between the sex trafficker and the former Israeli prime minister, who visited Epstein’s townhouse on multiple occasions. “We saw him making business deals with them. Also, business deals that involved the Israeli government and seems to have led into their intel agencies. And I think the right question to ask is, was Jeffrey Epstein working for Israel?”
Greene again asserted that Trump was acting on behalf of a foreign power during a press conference with Epstein survivors Tuesday morning, before the House vote.
“He called me a traitor for standing with these women and refusing to take my name off the discharge petition,” Greene said about Trump while flanked by survivors. “Let me tell you what a traitor is. A traitor is an American who serves foreign countries and themselves.”
Greene also isn’t trying to bury her past association with Nick Fuentes, the antisemitic podcaster whose recent interview with Tucker Carlson has spurred broader fears about his “groyper” movement’s hold on the GOP.
In the same CNN interview with Jewish anchor Dana Bash, Greene declined to condemn Carlson’s decision to interview Fuentes. “I don’t believe in canceling people,” Greene said, also reminding viewers that she herself had spoken at a Fuentes-organized conference in 2022.
Greene is close with Carlson, appearing on his show the week before Fuentes and backing recent insinuations promoted by Carlson and Candace Owens that Israel may have played a role in the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. And she has offered some Israel-centric conspiracy theories of her own.
In May Greene suggested that the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence services, may have played a role in John F. Kennedy’s assassination. And in an August interview with conservative personality Megyn Kelly, Greene further stated, “Israel is the only country I know of that has some sort of incredible influence and control over nearly every single one of my colleagues. And I don’t know how to explain it.”
Greene has also advanced talking points circulated by far-right Christians. Last year she opposed a House bill to define antisemitism on the grounds that it “could convict Christians of antisemitism for believing the Gospel that says Jesus was handed over to Herod to be crucified by the Jews.”
At least one Democratic lawmaker embracing Greene publicly says he is still treading carefully.
In a statement to JTA, Raskin — whose remarks in Florida seemingly welcoming Greene were met with some boos — outlined more specifically what he would need to see from her in order to bring her into the fold.
“Before I would welcome Rep. Greene or any other leaders who might flee from Trump’s autocratic personality cult,” he told JTA, “I would of course want to see them repudiate all the forms of authoritarianism, antisemitism, racism, transphobia and bigotry that they have promoted as Republicans and that have become so intertwined with the MAGA Republican brand under Trump.”
Raskin added, “I have real hope that a whole lot of my colleagues will continue to evolve away from the dangerous and divisive swamps of MAGA politics.”
The post Marjorie Taylor Greene is feuding with Donald Trump. Could she win over Jewish Democrats? appeared first on The Forward.
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Cameron Kasky, Jewish Parkland shooting survivor, is running for Congress on platform to ‘stop funding genocide’
(JTA) — Cameron Kasky, the 25-year-old Jewish activist and school shooting survivor, has entered the race to represent one of the United States’ most Jewish congressional districts — on a platform that includes stopping Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza.
“We need leaders who aren’t going to coddle their billionaire donors, who won’t support a genocide and who aren’t going to settle for flaccid incrementalism,” Kasky said in the launch video posted on Tuesday for his campaign to represent New York City’s 12th Congressional District.
The video’s caption includes the three main points of his campaign: “Medicare for all. Stop funding genocide. Abolish ICE.”
While Kasky’s anti-Trump positions are likely to go over well with the district’s largely liberal populace, his stance that Israel is committing a genocide — and the apparent centrality of that stance to his campaign — could be an issue for constituents. The district includes the Upper West and East Sides of Manhattan, where many voters sided with the pro-Israel Andrew Cuomo over Zohran Mamdani in the city’s recent mayoral election, as well as Midtown Manhattan.
Kasky’s messaging may, however, speak more to young voters in the district. A New York Times/Siena poll from September found that 66% of New York City voters ages 18 to 29 found that Mamdani, an anti-Zionist, “best addressed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” among the mayoral candidates.
A democratic socialist, Kasky was a vocal supporter of Mamdani throughout the mayoral election — and an aggressive critic of fellow Democrats who objected to the mayoral candidate’s anti-Israel stances.
“‘Vote blue no matter who unless it’s a Muslim who criticizes Israel’s extremist far right nationalist government’ is not ‘vote blue no matter who,’” he wrote in one tweet.
In another, he wrote that Democrats who refused to endorse him after the primary should “go get a consulting gig and stop disrespecting your own voter base.”
Kasky had teased entering the crowded race for months, ever since Rep. Jerry Nadler, Congress’ most senior Jewish member, announced he would not be running for reelection.
In that time, Kasky has also weighed in on the viability of Micah Lasher, the Jewish state Assembly member and former Nadler aide who launched his own campaign for the seat earlier in the fall.
Lasher is unable to “fight fascism” because of his “genocide denial and free speech attacks on students,” Kasky wrote, with a screenshot of a Lasher tweet from Oct. 28, 2023, that criticized what Lasher called the “awful use of the word ‘genocide’ by some westerners to describe Israel’s actions.” (As the war in Gaza neared its two-year mark this summer, a poll found that half of Americans believed Israel had committed genocide, a claim that Israel and the United States both reject.)
Kasky also reposted a poll according to which Brad Lander, Mamdani’s most prominent Jewish ally, would beat the moderate congressman Dan Goldman, who is Jewish and withheld an endorsement due to “some of the rhetoric coming from Mamdani.”
“Needless to say, I am looking forward to working with Brad Lander,” Kasky wrote.
Kasky is the co-host of the “For You Podcast” with Tim Miller, which attempts to “break down the politics of the TikTok generation,” for The Bulwark, a center-right, anti-Trump media company.
One of Kasky’s podcast guests over the summer is now his opponent: Jack Schlossberg.
Schlossberg, who is the grandson of President John F. Kennedy and has said he is “at least 100% half Jewish,” announced his own candidacy for the 12th Congressional District last week.
Kasky remarked on their podcast that many women in his life have crushes on Schlossberg — and Schlossberg replied that the two men have a similar appeal.
“I always say, when you go unhinged politics Jew, it’s hard to go back,” Kasky said.
Kasky was thrust into the national spotlight as a survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, in 2018. Together with other survivors, he led a march in Washington and spurred a national movement that is seen as crucial to the 2022 passage of the most significant federal gun control legislation in decades.
Kasky, a junior at the time of the shooting, is credited with having selecting the name and hashtag #NeverAgain — which has long been linked to Holocaust commemoration — for the student-led gun control campaign. (Another co-founder of Never Again MSD is David Hogg, who recently stepped down as the youngest-ever vice chair of the Democratic National Committee.)
Before the shooting, Kasky said he played Motel in a school production of “Fiddler on the Roof.” The quality of his performance was proof, he joked, that he was not a paid actor in the protests, as some conspiracy theorists accused.
Kasky attended Hebrew school growing up, which he referenced when speaking on MSNBC about the “No Kings” protests against Trump.
“This kind of reminded me of my education growing up — when you go to Hebrew school, you learn about fascism a little bit younger than the other kids,” he said. “And you find yourself asking, in the face of authoritarianism, in the face of seeing a genocide happen before the entire world, what would I do? How would I react?”
He moved to New York City to attend Columbia University, where he later dropped out, and lives in the 12th Congressional District that’s been described as a “crown jewel” of New York politics.
Now, Kasky is running on a progressive agenda that emphasizes fighting Trump and stopping U.S. military aid for Israel, referring to the country’s actions in Gaza in no uncertain terms as a “genocide” — a response which he says has been informed in part by his Jewish identity.
“I am always surprised when people ask me why I focus so much on Palestine,” he wrote. “Beyond my Jewish identity making me strongly opposed to genocide, I’m a school shooting survivor-turned-activist. I started my adult life demanding an end to American-made weapons slaughtering children.”
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