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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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Iran Parrots Isolationist Right-Wingers Opposing US-Israel Strikes as Trump Denounces Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly
Megyn Kelly hosts a “prove me wrong” session during AmericaFest, the first Turning Point USA summit since the death of Charlie Kirk, in Phoenix, Arizona, US, Dec. 19, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Caitlin O’Hara
US President Donald Trump’s decision to launch joint military strikes on Iran with Israel has provoked an epic fury of opposition from parts of his so-called “America First” base, whose talking points have now apparently inspired Iranian officials to echo them.
“Mr. Rubio admitted what we all knew: US has entered a war of choice on behalf of Israel. There was never any so-called Iranian ‘threat.’ Shedding of both American and Iranian blood is thus on Israel Firsters,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi posted Monday on X, referring to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “American people deserve better and should take back their country.”
A brief excerpt of statements offered by Rubio explaining the rationale for the war began circulating online suggesting Israel had directed the attacks, eliminating the full context of his remarks which emphasized his view that the Iranian regime posed a threat to the US and the world. “The imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked, and we believed they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us,” Rubio said.
“No matter what, ultimately, this operation needed to happen,” he added, arguing that Iran was building up its missile arsenal to such an extent that it could “hold the whole world hostage” while having a degree of “immunity” from outside action due to the damage it could inflict.
Nonetheless, Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, wrote in all capital letters Monday on X that “TRUMP HAS BETRAYED ‘AMERICA FIRST’ TO ADOPT ‘ISRAEL FIRST.’”
In a Monday appearance on SiriusXM’s “The Megyn Kelly Show,” former US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican and outspoken opponent of the Jewish state, said, “I was out there on the front lines for ‘Make America Great Again.’ And ‘Make America Great Again’ was supposed to be ‘America first,’ not ‘Israel first,’ not any foreign country first, not any foreign people first, but the American people first in our problems.”
Pointing her finger and raising her voice, Greene told Kelly that “[US Vice President] JD Vance promised it. [US intelligence chief] Tulsi Gabbard promised it. All of them promised it. And we’re a year in, and we’re in another f**king war, and we’ve got American troops being killed. I think it’s time for America to rip the band-aid off, and we need to have a serious conversation about what the f**k is happening to this country, and who in the hell are these decisions being made for and who is making these decisions?”
Greene later added to her comments on X: “And just like that we are no longer a nation divided by left and right, we are now a nation divided be those who want to fight wars for Israel and those who just want peace and to be able to afford their bills and health insurance.”
Kelly praised Greene’s posting on her show, saying that “X is completely saturated in neocons, the pro-Israel crowd, and people who would love to cheerlead us right into another Middle East ground war that’s endless. I was grateful for your contrary perspective, Marjorie.”
Making her position further explicit, Kelly added, “I don’t think those four service members died for the United States. I think they died for Iran or for Israel … this feels very much to me like it is clearly Israel’s war.”
The next day, Trump was asked at the White House if Israel dragged the US into conflict with Iran and rejected the notion.
“I might have forced their [Israel’s] hand,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office as he met with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. “We were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first. If we didn’t do it, they were going to attack first. I felt strongly about that.”
Beyond Kelly, far-right podcaster Tucker Carlson promoted a comparable point of view as reports circulated that over the past month, he had met with Trump three times in the Oval Office to make the case against a regime change war in Iran.
On Monday, Carlson released a new installment of his show — a monologue running more than 100 minutes — titled “Israel’s war and what it means.”
Carlson said within the first 60 seconds, :First, why did this happen? Now in this case there’s a really simple answer. This happened because Israel wanted it to happen. This is Israel’s war. This is not the United States’s war. This war is not being waged on behalf of American national security objectives to make the United States safer or richer. This war’s not even about weapons of mass destruction.”
Far-right podcaster Candace Owens said the same thing in an interview with Piers Morgan.
“The reason America wants a regime change in Iran is because Bibi Netanyahu is demanding it,” she said, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “There was no imminent threat to the United States when Trump made this decision to do what Bibi wanted. I want to be clear here. This was not Trump’s decision; it was Bibi Netanyahu’s decision. And that is why he did it. We’re very aware that Israel is dictating our foreign policy and we would now like that to stop.”
Owens wrote in response to a clip of Trump saying that US soldiers could die that “Goyim always must die so the Khazarian mafia can expand their borders,” a promotion of the conspiracy theory claiming that the origins of the Jewish people trace back not to Israel but to a Turkic population in the Middle Ages.
Continuing with her months long-efforts to link Israel to the murder of her friend, Turning Points USA chief Charlie Kirk, Owens wrote on Saturday: “Remember when they tried to gaslight us last June by calling us ‘Panicans,’ claiming we were lying about serial killer Bibi Netanyahu’s aims? The ONLY reason this war didn’t begin last June was because of Charlie Kirk. They eliminated that reason on September 10th.”
White nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes — who has celebrated Adolf Hitler and encouraged his “Groyper” followers to rape women — also filtered the attack on Iran through an antisemitic conspiracist ideology.
“This war has nothing to do with nuclear weapons, terrorism, or dead protesters,” Fuentes wrote on Saturday, referencing the Iranian regime’s recent massacre of tens of thousands of anti-government demonstrators. “For decades, Israel has openly pursued an agenda to topple Iraq, Syria, and Iran. They orchestrated all of these wars in order to eliminate their rivals and gain total hegemony over the Middle East.”
On Sunday, Fuentes wrote that “this is a war of aggression for Israel. Americans will die in terrorist attacks and in missile strikes so that Israel can expand its borders in every direction. Trump, Vance, and Rubio sold us out.”
Matt Walsh, a populist-nationalist podcast host for Owens’ former employer, The Daily Wire, said in response to Rubio’s comments that “he’s flat out telling us that we’re in a war with Iran because Israel forced our hand. This is basically the worst possible thing he could have said.”
Trump has rejected Carlson and Kelly’s criticism, however.
“I think that MAGA is Trump — MAGA’s not the other two,” he said in an interview with independent DC newsletter The Inner Circle on Monday night. “MAGA wants to see our country thrive and be safe. And MAGA loves what I’m doing — every aspect of it.”
Noting Kelly in particular, Trump stated she “was opposed to me for years when I ran the first time and nothing stopped me.” He said that “some people are against — and they always come back. She came all the way back. But now I guess she maybe doesn’t like the idea of this war, but I do because I have to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of the Iranians.”
Giving Carlson an apparent green light to continue with his outbursts and conspiratorial provocations, Trump said that the podcaster “can say whatever he wants; it has no impact on me.”
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FBI Investigates Antisemitic Threats at Stanford University
The Hoover Tower rises above Stanford University in this aerial photo in Stanford, California, US. Photo: REUTERS/Noah Berger
A recent antisemitic incident at Stanford University in which someone sent threatening notes to the California campus’s Hillel chapter is being investigated by the FBI and local law enforcement officials.
According to The Stanford Daily, the missives were signed by an entity claiming to represent a faction of Stanford alumni based in Europe which calls itself “exposingstanfordjews.” It vowed to “monitor” campus Jewish life and claimed to have knowledge of “acute credible threats against the personal safety of Jewish Stanford undergraduate and graduate students.” Several campus organizations received the notes, including the Daily, public safety, Stanford’s office for religious and spiritual life, and the Taube Center for Jewish Studies.
The FBI’s involvement in the matter comes amid a spate of attacks on Jewish institutions and individuals across the US.
Last month, for example, two men trespassed the grounds of the Olami Dallas Center in Texas and demanded entry to the home of its rabbi by claiming to be window cleaners. In January, an assailant set the Beth Israel Congregation in Jackson, Mississippi on fire over its “Jewish ties.” Another arsonist struck the San Francisco Hillel building in December.
Stanford University said on Monday that it “strongly condemns the targeting of our Jewish community in this manner,” adding, “The security of and wellbeing of our campus is our top priority, and we are following up with the affected individuals to provide all necessary support.”
In another statement, Stanford Hillel Rabbi Jessica Kirschner said, “The best way I know to combat hate is to be proudly, deeply Jewish, and to keep building community with each other and with caring people across Stanford.”
Antisemitism has previously been an issue on Stanford’s campus. School officials acknowledged the university’s failure to identify and respond to a spate of incidents in a comprehensive 2024 report. Across 148 pages, the document cited the desecration of Jewish religious symbols, swastika graffiti, extreme anti-Zionist activism, and other incidents as causing a hostile environment which deprives Jewish students of a normal college experience.
“Some of this bias is expressed in overt and occasionally shocking ways but often it is wrapped in layers of subtlety and implication, one or two steps away from blatant hate speech,” the report said. “We learned of instances where antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias reached a level of social injury that deeply affected people’s lives: students moving out of their dorms because of antisemitic acts or speech; students being ostracized, canceled, or intimidated for openly identifying as Jewish, or for simply being real, or expressing support for Israel, or even refusing to explicitly condemn Israel; students fearing to display Jewish symbols or reveal that they were Jewish for fear of losing friendships or group acceptance.”
Other elite colleges continue to deal with campus antisemitism nearly three year after it emerged as a major social phenomenon in the aftermath of the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
A significant portion of Jewish students at the University of Pennsylvania still find the climate on campus to be hostile and feel the need to hide their identity, according to a 2025 survey of Jewish undergraduates at the school.
The survey, conducted by Penn’s local Hillel International chapter, found that 40 percent of respondents said it is difficult to be Jewish at Penn and 45 percent said they “feel uncomfortable or intimidated because of their Jewish identity or relationship with Israel.” Meanwhile, the results showed a staggering 85 percent of survey participants reported hearing about, witnessing, or experiencing “something antisemitic.”
Another 31 percent of Jewish Penn students said they feel the need to hide their Jewishness to avoid discrimination, which is sometimes present in the classroom, as 26 percent of respondents said they have “experienced antisemitic or anti-Israel comments from professors.” Overall, 80 percent of Jewish students hold that anti-Israel activity is “often” antisemitic and that Israel’s conduct in war is “held to an unfair standard compared to other nations.”
In December, StopAntisemitism, a Jewish civil rights advocacy group, assigned mediocre and failing grades to over a dozen elite American colleges in a new annual report, citing the institutions’ failing to mount a meaningful response to campus antisemitism.
Of all the Ivy League universities assessed by StopAntisemitism, only three — Cornell University (C), Dartmouth College (B), and Princeton University (D) — merited higher than an “F.” StopAntisemitism, which is led by executive director Liora Rez, said other schools in the conference, such as Harvard University and Yale University, continue to offer Jewish students a hostile environment, citing as evidence feedback it has received from Jewish students who attend them.
“At Harvard, Jewish students report high levels of self-censorship and antisemitism, with federal authors finding the university showed ‘deliberate indifference.’ Despite new initiatives, the campus climate remains tense and accountability uncertain,” the report said. “At Yale, Jewish students faced harassment, exclusion, and blocked access, prompting a federal investigation. Despite policy changes, the campus remains hostile and unsafe for Jewish students.”
Other elite schools such as the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Wesleyan University didn’t perform well either. Ds and Fs were given to the lot. Meanwhile, in the Washington, DC metropolitan region, a destination for students aspiring to future roles in government, American University and Georgetown University earned Ds.
“Even since the recent Gaza ceasefire agreement, antisemitism remains loud, bold, and unchecked, revealing that none of this is about Israel but instead is about Jew-hatred, plain and simple,” the report said. “Coordinated protests, ideological harassment, and institutional apathy continue to endanger Jewish students. Families must confront the facts: Are you prepared to send tuition dollars to a school that allows your children to be threatened, targeted, and blamed simply for being Jewish?”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Hegseth Praises Israel’s ‘Unmatched Skill’ in Battle, Says Allies to Have ‘Complete Control of Iranian Skies’
US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth holds a briefing amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, at the Pentagon in Washington, DC, US, March 2, 2026. Photo: REUTERS / Elizabeth Frantz
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday said that American and Israeli forces will soon achieve “complete control of Iranian skies,” warning that Iran “will be able to do nothing about it” while praising Israel’s military prowess and precision strike capabilities as a defining strategic advantage.
“I stand before you today with a clear message: America is winning unequivocally and without mercy,” Hegseth said during a press conference at the Pentagon alongside Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “We are only four days into the operation; the achievements are amazing and there are more forces on the way.”
The Pentagon chief emphasized that US and Israeli forces are rapidly expanding their operational reach over Iran.
“We’ve taken control of Iran’s airspace and waterways without boots on the ground,” Hegseth continued. “We control their fate.”
He also praised Israeli cooperation and rejected media reports claiming Israel was dragging Washington into war. Those reports followed remarks by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio that were taken out of context and circulated on social media explaining the timing of the strikes, which officials said was a deliberate and coordinated strategic decision.
Hegseth described Israel as a “steadfast partner,” praising its military performance and saying the campaign is being carried out with “unmatched skill and iron determination.”
“Our ally Israel is demonstrating tremendous capabilities. Extraordinary cooperation with such an ally is amazing and necessary. We salute you and appreciate you,” he said.
“The combination of Israel’s defense capabilities and our force is amazing. The Iranian regime knows it is finished,” Hegseth continued.
The defense chief also pledged that Iran will never obtain a nuclear weapon, echoing past remarks by US President Donald Trump that Washington remains committed to the effort and prepared to continue the campaign “for as long as we need to.”
Hegseth warned that continued Iranian aggression would bring “death and destruction from the skies,” stressing that the United States is “playing for keeps.”
Amid conflicting media reports and isolated Iranian drone breakthroughs, he also accused segments of the press of attempting to undermine Trump by framing the campaign in ways that downplay US and Israeli military progress.
Hegseth also assured reporters that the United States has prioritized protecting its troops “ahead of everything else,” noting that before the conflict, roughly 90 percent of American forces in the region were repositioned outside Iranian weapons range.
During the press conference, Caine emphasized that US forces are prepared to maintain operational pressure while prioritizing the safety and protection of American personnel in the region.
“We are attacking and destroying the Iranian missile system to neutralize the threat to the United States and its allies. We are destroying the Iranian navy to prevent them from attacking the US Central Command, and we are making sure that Iran does not rebuild its capability during the war,” he said.
“Iran’s missile capability has decreased by 86 percent since the beginning of the war, 35 percent just since yesterday,” the top uniformed US military official added.