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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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In Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey,’ the main hero feels plucked from Exodus
While some scholars note the parallels between The Odyssey and the Book of Genesis, Christopher Nolan’s version of the epic seems to take its cue from Exodus.
The nearly three-hour long movie, staggering in its length and cinematic beauty, does not sing the praises of Homer’s ingenious inventor but depicts a reluctant and flawed leader, played by Matt Damon, whose struggles with the divine and his mutinous men resembles the arc of Moses.
Moses was chosen by God to lead the Israelites out of Egypt and centuries later (although a now infamous marquee in Oregon claimed otherwise) Odysseus was chosen by King Agammemnon to help the Greeks win the war by any means necessary. Both men were forced on years-long journeys and given the responsibility of guiding people home.
After the Trojan War, instead of taking a reliable route, Odysseus steers his three boats on a journey that he claims will allow them to see the world. Ignoring the warning of an old man to abandon their path, Odysseus repeatedly leads his men into danger.
On the island of the carnivorous cyclops Polyphemus, Odysseus comes up with a plan to escape, but can’t control his temper when the cyclops spits out a helmet of an eaten soldier. Enraged, Odysseus shoots Polyphemus with an arrow, causing the cyclops to charge the group and eat several more men just before they reach safety. Odysseus’ attack angers Poseidon, father of Polyphemus, and the crew must deal with rough waters. In Exodus, Moses, angry about being left without water in the desert, disobeys God and strikes a rock twice, an act that will complicate his arrival at the Holy Land.
While Moses struggles with self-doubt in his ability to be a leader, Odysseus is too sure of himself — although his bravado is likely an overcorrection for the guilt of his past mistakes. He forces his men to keep following him even when they challenge his rush to keep landing on unfamiliar shores.
After a nearly-disastorous encounter with the witch Circe, who disarms lost soldiers by turning them into animals, Odysseus starts to experience a Moses-like instance of doubt in the divine. In a move taken from the Passover liturgy’s Wicked Child, Odysseus tells his lieutenant Eurylochus to blame “your gods” for giving Circe the power and license to transform men into beasts.
When Moses lost faith, striking the rock rather than speaking it, his punishment was that he would never see the Promised Land. The punishment of Odysseus, who believes in himself above the entire Pantheon, is an inversion: He alone will make it home, a guilt that eats him up.
The prophet Tiresias tells Odysseus that he and his crew will land on an island where Apollo’s cattle graze and that the men will slaughter the cattle, leading to their deaths. Odysseus argues that he can deny the will of the gods, but, like Moses who came before him, learns divine will is inescapable.
Odysseus warns his men but, stranded and hungry and with no more faith in their leader, they disobey him. When a storm comes to sweep them away, they beg for Odysseus to pray for their safety, but to no avail. The Israelites’ betrayal of Moses also took a bovine form and after their idolatrous worship of the golden calf, Moses pleads to God to spare their lives — but he actually succeeds.
By the time Odysseus reaches home, the veneer of confidence he tried to maintain on his journey is gone. He initially cannot bring himself to face his wife, too disgusted with himself for failing his men and betraying his own values. Odysseus never hunts without sounding his bow first, to give the animal a warning. But he admits that by creating the horse to attack the Trojans under the cover of night, he “turned a fight into a hunt” and “violated all that’s ever sacred between people.”
Even though the war was not his idea and the gods were never going to allow his men to make it home, he carries the burden of all the death and destruction that has been wrought. For him, Moses’ fated death in exile may have seemed like a blessing.
This Odysseus may not be the traditional hero audiences were expecting, but that only makes the movie stronger, offering those familiar with The Odyssey a fresh telling that challenges the traditional glorious depictions of war. Nolan, who loves to explore themes of regret, time and the perils of being too smart for your own good, shares an understanding with the writers of Exodus: that “heroes” are more compelling when they are not perfect.
The post In Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey,’ the main hero feels plucked from Exodus appeared first on The Forward.
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How Michigan’s Senate race is testing pro-Israel Jews’ loyalty to the Democratic Party
(JTA) — Joel Tauber has been through many an election in his 92 years. And, with the exception of “one out of 100 times,” he’s always backed a Democrat — something even more important in the current midterm cycle, he believes.
“Winning the Senate and the House is the beginning of a way back to our democracy,” Tauber, a founding chair of Jewish Federations of North America who has hosted former President Bill Clinton and other Democratic leaders, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “It’s really, really important to me.”
But Tauber is a Michigan resident, and the state’s upcoming U.S. Senate primary is making him deeply uneasy. Like many a Jew in the mitten state, he is pulling for pro-Israel centrist U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens to win on Aug. 4.
Should her opponent, former county health official and staunch Israel critic Abdul El-Sayed, prevail instead, Tauber would take a step he’s said he’s never done before: leave the Senate ballot blank.
“I’d sit it out,” he said, of the general election. Of El-Sayed, he said, “There’s no way that I could vote for him.”
Some Jewish Democratic leaders in the state are prepared to go even further. Several prominent Metro Detroit Jews who have traditionally fundraised for Democrats are also planning fundraisers for the presumptive GOP nominee, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, as a “hedge.” Others are planning to help him if El-Sayed wins the Democratic nomination, one Jew who is close to the Stevens campaign told JTA.
Others affirmed the idea that the Jewish Democratic donor class, feeling abandoned by the party, would back Rogers.
“There are leaders in our Jewish community who are longtime, lifelong Democrats and Democratic fundraisers, who are very concerned with where their party’s going,” said Dennis Bernard, national chair of government relations for the nonpartisan JFNA and a metro Detroit resident. “And if this is the case, they’ve made it clear, both financially and with their vote, that they would support Mike Rogers in the event El-Sayed wins the primary.”
Detroit-area Jewish Democrats have asked Bernard, over golf outings, for introductions to Rogers, he said.
The reason: They see El-Sayed — who has questioned whether Israel should be a Jewish state and suggested that Democrats who support Israel only do so because of financial motives — as portending an existential threat to the national Jewish community. If he wins in a purple state, one in which pro-Israel Jews have for years butted heads U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the pro-Palestinian Democrat, some fear more candidates with similar views will follow, and lead to an unsafe environment for Jews in Michigan and beyond. They worry that increasingly hostile discourse creates an environment in which antisemitic harassment becomes more acceptable and Jewish political activism is considered suspect.
“This is a truly once-in-a-lifetime moment where you have to become a single-issue voter,” Bernard said. “And that issue is antisemitism, our Judaism and Israel. This is where you put party third: our people first, our country second.”
Left-wing congressional primary wins in New York, Colorado and other states have stoked anxiety over the Senate race here, as Michigan — also home to a large Arab/Muslim population — is morphing into a litmus test for the relationship between pro-Israel Jews and the Democratic Party. For the majority of American Jews who back liberal policies, a decades-long bond is being tested like never before.
A similar dynamic played out on a smaller scale after Zohran Mamdani, a vocal anti-Zionist, secured the Democratic nomination in New York City’s 2025 mayoral election. Then, several prominent Jewish donors backed a rival bid by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who ran as an independent while maintaining Democratic ties. Despite recent polling showing that 44% of American Jews hold a favorable opinion of the mayor — a higher favorability score than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — pro-Israel voters still regard his pro-Palestinian rhetoric as disquieting.
The backlash against Israel’s handling of the war in Gaza and growing calls to shun the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC are further straining Jewish-Democratic bonds — and, for some of the most influential of Michigan’s estimated 129,000 Jews, are on the verge of breaking them.
Another Jewish leader told JTA there was also an effort underway to convince pro-Israel Republicans to vote for Stevens in the state’s open primary, even if they decide to later vote for Rogers in the general.
“Anyone who cares about the future of the U.S.-Israel relationship, Democrat or Republican, needs to vote for Haley Stevens in the Democratic primary,” they said, requesting anonymity because they did not want to be seen as speaking for the community. The Republican Party is currently engaged in its own tug-of-war over Israel and antisemitism, with Vice President JD Vance recently criticizing Israel while entertaining conspiracy theories about its ties to Jeffrey Epstein on a popular podcast.
When contacted by JTA, Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America (which is phone-banking for Stevens) and a native of East Lansing, Michigan, declined to comment directly on the possibility of the state’s Jewish Democrats backing Rogers over El-Sayed.
“Our focus is ensuring Haley Stevens wins the primary election,” Soifer said in a statement, also saying that El-Sayed’s “views are not aligned with the vast majority of Jewish Americans.”
At Michigan’s Democratic convention earlier this year in Detroit, Stevens was booed by the rank and file while state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who was then also running for the seat, alleged that an attendee directed an antisemitic remark at her Jewish husband. At the same convention a lawyer for pro-Palestinian encampment participants, who himself had a history of social media posts supporting Hezbollah and retweeting antisemitic conspiracy theories from far-right podcaster Candace Owens, ousted a pro-Israel Jewish incumbent for the party’s nomination for University of Michigan board of regents, a statewide elected position.
The convention was an inflection point for many top Jewish Democratic supporters. Many of these Jewish leaders declined to comment to JTA. Others said much of the enthusiasm for the broader party goals among the staunchly pro-Israel Jews of the Detroit suburbs has been drained.
“I’m feeling kind of confused, and it must be how my Republican friends felt once the Tea Party took over,” said Neil Gorosh, a retired commercial mortgage banker in West Bloomfield and past president of a local Jewish senior living community.
Gorosh ran for office once: a local parks-and-recreation position in 1988. A Democrat during the George H.W. Bush-led GOP wave, he lost. Since then, he said, he has always backed Democrats while developing an elections calculus: He leads with local issues on local races, but Israel on contests of national import.
Accusing the Democrats of “completely rejecting Israel,” he added, “I’m rudderless right now.”
“If it came down to Mike Rogers and El-Sayed, I will vote for Mike Rogers,” Gorosh said. “I wouldn’t write a check, but I would vote for him, and I would tell my like-minded friends to do the same, and the reasons why.”
Michelle “Decky” Alexander, the Michigan Jewish Democratic caucus chair, was one of a very few Jewish leaders who told JTA on the record she would back El-Sayed over Rogers. She insists that there are many others.
“This is what I’ve heard from Jews, even in Detroit: The Supreme Court is too critical to not support a Democrat,” she said.
Alexander recently had an hours-long sitdown with El-Sayed, she said, and believes “he absolutely would be open to dialogue.” In his rallies, the candidate has welcomed Jews and stated, “AIPAC and Israel are not the same as Judaism and the Jewish people.”
For now, though, the focus is purely on Stevens, who is not herself Jewish but represents a large slab of Oakland County — affluent, heavily Jewish Detroit suburbs that have trended liberal over the last few election cycles after formerly electing Republicans. While the Stevens campaign has not responded to interview requests for JTA, she recently told The New York Times that Israel is not a central issue for her and added, “I am not a Netanyahu apologist.”
The congresswoman’s Jewish backers are hoping to drive a strong enough voter turnout to neuter both El-Sayed and the national progressive insurgent movement he represents. (The Democratic Socialists of America are behind many of the emerging candidates, though El-Sayed himself is not a member of the group and has distanced himself from the socialist label.)
Stevens’ supporters point to a growing number of encouraging signs, including endorsements from party leaders such as retiring Sen. Gary Peters, whose seat she hopes to fill. Chuck Schumer, the Jewish Senate majority leader, has also endorsed her. A recent poll commissioned by the Detroit News shows her ahead by seven points, though social media in recent days has been flooded with so many unflattering memes of Stevens on the campaign trail that El-Sayed himself denounced his supporters’ behavior.
Another Detroit News poll this week shows that most likely Democratic voters have a negative view of AIPAC, which according to an AdImpact analysis of the most recent filings has spent more than $28 million for Stevens to date. AIPAC’s support of Stevens is one of El-Sayed’s biggest attack lines. The candidate recently claimed that the group has spent more than $50 million against him, though a campaign representative told JTA that figure includes $20 million from new super PACs that have not disclosed their funding sources and have no immediately apparent links to AIPAC.
The Jewish Stevens supporters who spoke to JTA, some of whom are or have been AIPAC supporters themselves, argue that AIPAC has been unfairly demonized compared to other lobbying groups.
They also shrug off Stevens’ recent critiques of Netanyahu during a debate, at which she said the Israeli prime minister “is a danger to Jews in America and around the world.” Many of her backers chalked up the language to a new political reality for Democrats that rewards criticism of Israel, rather than a shift in her own thinking.
“It’s the needle Democrats have to thread to have any credibility path at all,” Gorosh said. Referring to Israel’s own upcoming elections, he added, “I think he’ll [Netanyahu] be gone after October, but he’ll be gone eventually. Then what do you criticize?”
El-Sayed also has Jewish supporters, most notably former U.S. Rep. Andy Levin, a progressive member of a powerful Michigan political family who lost his House seat to Stevens after AIPAC spent heavily for her in 2022. There is also a Jews For Abdul affinity group.
Speaking to JTA, Levin dismissed concerns about Jewish Democrats rejecting El-Sayed in the general. He said the conversation was being dominated by hardline pro-Israel donors in the community who have pushed similar red lines for decades, rather than being a new shift from the Jewish mainstream.
“I do not take a backseat to any of these so-called ‘lifelong Democrats’ about self-determination for the Jewish people in the holy land, about fighting antisemitism at home and abroad,” he said. “I just have a different view of how we accomplish these things, and they do not have a monopoly in the Jewish community.”
Levin also defended El-Sayed’s record on Jewish issues, saying, “He is a strong advocate for Jewish safety here, in our community.”
For Jews who have long seen themselves as committed Democrats, the prospect of leaving the party is a tough sit. Tauber, for his part, says he still can’t bring himself to vote for any Republican “who is so controlled by Trump, who’s a man of immorality, no values.” (Rogers’ campaign touts his Trump endorsement, and the candidate has also backed Trump’s unfounded claims about election fraud in the state as well as supported the president’s holding up of an international bridge in Michigan. The candidate has also acknowledged antisemitism on the right.)
The Rogers campaign did not respond to a JTA request for comment.
The nationwide importance of this race and the Jewish vote was evident when New York state Republicans recently made an explicit appeal for Jewish Democrats, stating in a digital ad campaign that Jews were leaving the party “in droves” “from Maine to Michigan.” Before he dropped out last week as the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine over sexual assault allegations he has denied, Graham Platner put anti-Israel criticism near the center of his platform.
Some Jews who spoke to JTA comfort themselves by insisting that the House, at least, seems likely to flip, providing a check on Trump even if the Senate remains led by Republicans.
Shimon Levy, an Israeli-American entrepreneur who has lived in the Detroit area since 2014, said he was unconcerned about the prospect of Republicans keeping the Senate.
“F— that,” Levy told JTA. Levy has drifted between the parties over the years, he said, but “I stand and I lead with my Jewish identity. Safety and security of the Jewish community is my first and foremost goal.”
That wouldn’t be possible with El-Sayed on the ticket, he insisted: “El-Sayed has done nothing but put Jews at risk and in danger, and through his words has been so poisonous and has ostracized and villainized, single-handedly, the Jews of Southeast Michigan.”
He added, “If today, as a Jew, you’re still like, ‘Democratic all the way, Democratic down the ticket,’ you need to rethink your survivalist instinct.”
Recently Levy, who describes himself as a reluctant political activist, hosted a candidate meet-and-greet fundraiser that brought in more than $70,000 for Stevens. Attendees were not just Jewish, and not just Democrats. Republicans, too, showed up: “People who are concerned about common-sense politics, who would vote for Haley in a heartbeat.”
The question of how Jewish safety is linked to Israel discourse isn’t abstract in Michigan. West Bloomfield’s Temple Israel was the site of an attack this spring by a Michigan resident whose family members were killed when Israel targeted a Hezbollah outpost in Lebanon. The incident became a factor in the Senate campaign after El-Sayed said of the attacker, “Hurt people hurt people,” which critics felt minimized the crime and equated the attacker with his intended victims.
In late June, the temple itself — the largest Reform congregation in the country — sent an email to congregants stating, “This year, antisemitism is on the ballot.” Without naming candidates, the unsigned message concluded, “The Talmud reminds us that our leaders are chosen by us — silence is not a choice we can make right now.”
Mailers funded by AIPAC’s United Democracy Project and sent to some voters in Michigan, and circulated online, attacked El-Sayed for his friendship with left-wing streamer Hasan Piker and for his statement after the Temple Israel attack.
The mailers accused El-Sayed of having “rationalized a terrorist attack on a Michigan synagogue filled with Jewish children.” (The synagogue preschool was open at the time of the attack.) El-Sayed had condemned the attack, but the mailers accused him of equivocating.
This was not a total break with all Democrats, many emphasized. Jewish pro-Israel state Sen. Jeremy Moss, who is running for Stevens’ congressional seat, and gubernatorial candidate Jocelyn Benson, along with others, continue to receive high marks from the Jewish donor class.
Across Michigan, particularly in the Detroit area, there are (literal) signs of strain. Last month the Oakland County roads commission ordered the removal of Adopt-a-Road signs, located a few miles from Temple Israel, that had been sponsored by a group called “Voices for Palestinians” after temple members voiced objections. A Fourth of July parade in Huntington Woods, another heavily Jewish suburb in the county, was briefly disrupted by a protest after parade organizers had put in place rules forbidding pro-Palestinian signs from being displayed.
In early July the state Anti-Defamation League chapter, together with Temple Israel, hosted a bipartisan delegation of Michigan lawmakers on the site of the attack, and advocated for increased synagogue security funding. Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a Jewish Democrat, as well as Rep. Shri Thanedar, a Democrat who has tacked from the left to the center on Israel since his election and is now facing a primary challenger endorsed by El-Sayed, were among those in attendance.
Rabbis at the temple gave voice to the uneasiness of the political moment for Jewish liberals.
Rabbi Paul Yedwab, who called the state Democratic convention “a shonda,” or shame, in a recent sermon, said during the same sermon, “The glib answer would be to say, I guess you become a Republican. But that is not as easy as it seems for a liberal Jew.” He went on to criticize the Trump administration’s legal assault on the Southern Poverty Law Center, a monitor of far-right extremism.
Yedwab concluded, “From here on in, it will be incumbent upon us as Americans and as Jews to evaluate each proposal, each issue, each platform, and, indeed, each candidate according to our own independent set of values.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Aptly titled ‘The Darkest Light’ documentary wrestles with Shlomo Carlebach’s contradictions
One of the most influential rabbis of the last century, someone who brought tens of thousands of disaffected Jews closer to Judaism, who helped create Jewish spirituality as we know it today, and who wrote tunes so familiar that most people think they are hundreds years of old, was also, according to overwhelming evidence, a serial child molester who preyed on teenage girls who idolized him.
This is the impossible truth: that the same human being was a holy soul and a monster, a pioneering feminist and an abuser of girls, a person overflowing with love even for people he met on the street and yet so devoid of empathy that he was able to cause profound harm to dozens of young women and girls.
I am speaking, of course, of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach.
This weekend marked the premiere of The Darkest Light, an aptly titled new film about Carlebach’s life, and about the ways his family, followers and community have wrestled with his profoundly contradictory legacy. The moral center of the film is one of Carlebach’s two daughters, Neshama, who was his musical and spiritual heir. It is heartbreaking to watch the many scenes of the two of them together, prior to his death (sudden, of a heart attack, on a plane set to leave LaGuardia Airport in 1994). She is so obviously in love with him, and he with her. If we didn’t know what was coming next, the videos would be achingly sacred and beautiful.
But we do know.
The revelations about Carlebach were first made public in a 1998 article in Lilith magazine, which, as I remember, was like an earthquake in the Jewish spiritual world. There had been whisperings of misconduct for years, but as the film and article emphasize, Carlebach was regarded by many as a saint, possessed of the ruach hakodesh, the holy spirit. And everyone knew that Carlebach was a loving, physical man — he hugged everybody. (I was hugged by him at the Yakar synagogue in Jerusalem in 1993. Charisma is real.) So, maybe some women felt uncomfortable; maybe he even crossed a line now and then. But he did so much good…
Only after his death did several women come forward — not with borderline stories of discomfort but accounts of sexual molestation and abuse. And more women followed.
In the subsequent 30 years, there has been a range of responses to these revelations. Some faithful continue to deny or minimize what Carlebach did. Others have banned Carlebach’s music from performance at synagogue. Wisely, director Simon Mendes does not take a particular stance on these questions, giving airtime to many of them. He even allows Carlebach’s defenders to insist, on camera, that nothing inappropriate ever took place and that theƒ women must be either confused or opportunistic or… something.
But it is Neshama Carlebach who is the film’s protagonist. As she tearfully explains, she was only 19 when her father died. She idolized him, and lost him in an instant. And so when the allegations came out, she stayed silent. How could the man she loved more than anyone in the world — a man also beloved by tens of thousands of devotees — also be such a monster? It was impossible, she relates, to comprehend.
Until the MeToo movement gained prominence in 2017. It was at that time that she, then a 43-year-old woman, realized she had to speak out, which she did in a series of articles and online posts accepting the survivors’ testimony of her father’s abuse. Also inspired by MeToo, many more women came forward with their own stories, and unlike 1998, society in general and the Jewish world in particular were more able to hear them. (Neshama Carlebach has published an essay about the film, which she said “approached an extraordinarily difficult story with compassion, courage and nuance.”)
How to respond? In the film, Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of New York’s Central Synagogue describes the painful process of introspection that the synagogue undertook, placing a one-year moratorium on using Carlebach tunes while they discussed internally what to do. (Perhaps surprisingly, the synagogue resumed singing them afterward.) I personally have been part of several such conversations.
While these debates are important and interesting, ultimately The Darkest Light is about the unknowable questions set forth above: how someone could be a spiritual genius and sexual abuser, a saint and among the worst kind of sinner.
There are hints that Carlebach himself wrestled with this dilemma. The film’s title is taken from an improvised homily in which Carlebach says that sometimes evildoers are better than those who claim to be righteous, because darkness never claims to be something it isn’t; it never claims to be light. But imagine, Carlebach continues, when the good turns out to be evil — that is the darkest light, darker even than darkness itself. It’s hard not to hear this as a kind of veiled confession.
The film also sets forth many of the relevant circumstances of Carlebach’s life. His family fled Germany in 1939, right before Hitler stopped Jewish refugees from leaving. One can only imagine the trauma he experienced. Next, Carlebach spent nearly 30 years in Orthodox Jewish environments, especially the Chabad-Lubavitch sect, in which men and women are strictly segregated and men are forbidden from even touching women or hearing their voices in song.
And then came the 60s. Carlebach was right in the center of the Summer of Love, founding his House of Love and Prayer in San Francisco in 1967. The film sympathetically describes what that might have been like: Suddenly, all the rules were canceled, and people were making love with one another in public. Carlebach was 42 at the time. He had lived a repressed life for decades, and now all was permitted.
Bob Dylan once wrote, “to live outside the law, you must be honest.”Inside a fixed legal system like traditional Jewish law, the rules are clear — Orthodox sexual abusers still break them, of course, but the boundaries are firmly set. But outside, you’re on your own. And Carlebach seemed to lack the inner resources to draw boundaries and live within them. In Kabbalistic language, he was all hesed, all lovingkindness, without boundary or limit.
That is dangerous. No matter how high the spiritual high may be, it must be accompanied by ethics, empathy, and remembering the humanity of the other. There is no experience of holiness that justifies harming another person, especially in such a grievous way.
I mentioned hugging Carlebach in 1993. While the experience was electrifying, I also remember feeling off — much as I felt in the presence of another eros-drenched, consent-challenged charismatic rabbi in the Jewish Renewal movement of the 2000s. The eros was overflowing, spilling out onto all of us. It was spiritual and sexual and charismatic — and, to me, a little bit nauseating as well. I am all for fusing spirituality and sexuality, and as a gay man, I’m fortunate to have lived a very full sensual life. But in these encounters, part of me wanted to run away. It felt like there was no consent, no boundary, no space.
This is not a specifically Jewish problem. When charismatic spiritual leaders infuse their teaching with erotic energy, there is a risk, it seems to me, that the energy takes over. Ethical considerations, rules of consent, even basic empathy, get drowned in the sea of sacred-sexual flow which is experienced subjectively by the guru. I have no idea what Carlebach was thinking or feeling when he reached under a large Jewish book on his lap to fondle the teenage girl he was “teaching.” But I’m not sure it was so separate from the spiritual-sexual Torah he gave over to legions of adoring fans. Maybe the two sides of Carlebach are less a contradiction than a continuum.
And then there are his most devoted followers, still venerating the smashed idol of Carlebach’s sainthood. One thing The Darkest Light does not explore is that this group of spiritual quasi-hippies overlaps with some of the most extreme religious nationalists in Israel. These are the people whose kids are conducting pogroms in the West Bank. And to be honest, I see a connection. Israel, like Carlebach, offers these spiritual “mad ones” (in Kerouac’s term) the real deal: actual spiritual energy, infused with love and community and holiness. Yet Israel, like Carlebach, also harms a lot of people — often at the hands of Carlebach-singing, weed-smoking ‘hippies’ themselves. In both cases, I see a group of enthusiasts whose very real spiritual ecstasy has blinded them to ethics — or to anything that would destroy their good vibes.
I have felt these vibes myself. I have prayed ecstatically with Hasidim in Jerusalem and on Mount Meron. I have hiked and camped in the nature of the Land of Israel from the Eilat mountains to the finger of the Galilee. Whatever it is, even if it’s just in our imagination, the experience of spiritual ‘energy’ is real. I can appreciate the yearning to keep it pure, holy, and free from defilement.
But that urge, itself, leads to injustice. There is no responsible spirituality without ethics. There is no moral eros without boundary. And if anyone defiled anything, it was Carlebach himself who did so, not his victims or his critics or his family. That truth may be hard to accept, but it is the truth.
In the end, Carlebach was not a god or a demon; he was a deeply beautiful and even more deeply broken human being with capacities for good and evil within him. He only had a lot more of each than most of us. And as another Jewish teacher of mine once told me, the greater the light… the greater the shadow.
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