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A history of Mel Brooks as a ‘disobedient Jew’
(JTA) — Jeremy Dauber subtitles his new biography of Mel Brooks “Disobedient Jew.” It’s a phrase that captures two indivisible aspects of the 96-year-old director, actor, producer and songwriter.
The “Jew” is obvious. Born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1926, Brooks channeled the Yiddish accents and Jewish sensibilities of his old neighborhoods into characters like the 2000 Year Old Man — a comedy routine he worked up with his friend, the writer and director Carl Reiner. He worked Jewish obsessions into films like 1967’s “The Producers,” which features two scheming Jewish characters who stage a sympathetic Broadway musical about Hitler in order to bilk their investors.
Brooks’ signature move is to inject Jews into every aspect of human history and culture, which can be seen in the forthcoming Hulu series “History of the World, Part II.” A sequel to his 1981 film, “History of the World, Part I,” it parodies historical episodes in a style he honed as a writer on 1950s television programs such as “Your Show of Shows,” whose writers’ rooms were stocked with a galaxy of striving Jewish comedy writers just like him.
The “Disobedient” part describes Brooks’ relationship to a movie industry that he conquered starting in the early 1970s. In a series of parodies of classic movie genres — the Western in “Blazing Saddles,” the horror movie in “Young Frankenstein,” Alfred Hitchcock in “High Anxiety — he would gently, sometimes crudely and always lovingly bite the hand that was feeding him quite nicely: In 1976, he was fifth on the list of top 10 box office attractions, just behind Clint Eastwood.
Dauber describes the parody Brooks mastered as “nothing less than the essential statement of American Jewish tension between them and us, culturally speaking; between affection for the mainstream and alienation from it.”
Dauber is professor of Jewish literature and American studies at Columbia University, whose previous books include “Jewish Comedy” and “American Comics: A History.” “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” is part of the Jewish Lives series of brief interpretative biographies from Yale University Press.
Dauber and I spoke about why America fell for a self-described “spectacular Jew” from Brooklyn, Brooks’ lifelong engagement with the Holocaust, and why “Young Frankenstein” may be Brooks’ most Jewish movie.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “History of the World, Part II” comes out March 6. “History of the World, Part I” may not be in the top tier of Brooks films, but it seems to touch on so many aspects of his career that you trace in your book: the parody of classic movie forms, the musical comedy, injecting Jews into every aspect of human civilization, and the anything-for-a-laugh sensibility.
Jeremy Dauber: I agree. There’s the one thing that really brings it home, and it’s probably the most famous or infamous scene from the film. That’s the Spanish Inquisition scene. You have Brooks sort of probing the limits of bad taste. He had done that most famously in “The Producers” with its Nazi kickline, but here he takes the same idea — that one of the ways that you attack antisemitism is through ridicule — and turns the persecution of the Jews into a big musical number. It’s his love of music and dance. But the thing that’s almost the most interesting about this is that he takes on the role of the Torquemada character.
As his henchman sing and dance and the Jews face torture, the Brooklyn-born Jew plays the Catholic friar who tormented the Jews.
That’s right. And what’s the crime that he accuses the Jews of? “Don‘t be boring! Don‘t be dull!” That’s the worst thing that you can be. It’s his way of saying, “If I have a religion, you know, it is show business.”
His fascination with showbiz seems inseparable from his Jewishness, as if being a showbiz Jew is a denomination in its own right.
One of my favorite lines of his is when he marries [actress] Anne Bancroft, who of course is not Jewish. And he says, “She doesn’t have to convert: She’s a star.” If you’re a star, if you’re a celebrity, you’re kind of in your own firmament faith-wise, and so it’s okay. Showbiz is this faith. But it is very Jewish, because show business is a way to acceptance. It’s a way that America can love him as a Jew, as Mel Brooks, as a kid from the outer boroughs who can grow up to marry Anne Bancroft.
Jeremy Dauber is the author of “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” (Yale University Press)
You write early on that “Mel Brooks, more than any other single figure, symbolizes the Jewish perspective on and contribution to American mass entertainment.” On one foot, can you expand on that?
Jews understand that there’s a path to success and that being embraced by a culture means learning about it, immersing yourself in it, being so deeply involved in it that you understand it and master it. But simultaneously, you’re doing that as a kind of outsider. You’re always not quite in it, even though you’re of it in some deep way. In some ways, it’s the apotheosis of what Brooks does, which is being a parodist. In order to be the kind of parodist that Mel Brooks is, you have to be acutely attuned to every aspect of the cultural medium that you’re parodying. You have to know it inside and outside and backwards and forwards. And Brooks certainly does, but at the same time you have to be able to sort of step outside of it and say, you know, “Well, I’m watching a Western, but come on, what’s going on with these guys? Like why doesn’t anyone ever, you know, pass gas after eating so many beans?”
You have this great phrase, that to be an American Jew is to be part of the “loyal opposition.”
That’s right. Brooks at his best is always kind of poking and prodding at convention, but loyally. He’s not like the countercultural figures of his day. He’s a studio guy. He’s really within the system, but is poking at the system as well.
You wrote in that vein about his 1963 short film, “The Critic,” which won him an Oscar. Brooks plays an old Jewish man making fun of an art film.
On the one hand, he’s doing it in the voice of one of his older Jewish relatives, the Jewish generation with an Eastern European accent, to make fun of these kinds of intellectuals. He’s trying to channel the everyman’s response to high art. “What is this I’m watching? I don’t understand this at all.” On the other hand, Brooks is much more intellectual than he’s often given credit for.
For me the paradox of Brooks’ career is conveyed in a phrase that appears a couple of times in the book: “too Jewish.” The irony is that the more he leaned into his Jewishness, the more successful he got, starting with the “2000 Year Old Man” character, in which he channels Yiddish dialect in a series of wildly successful comedy albums with his friend Carl Reiner. How do you explain America’s embrace of these extremely ethnic tropes?
Brooks’ great motion pictures of the late 1960s and 1970s sort of track with America’s embrace of Jewishness. You have “The Graduate,” which came out at around the same time as “The Producers,” and which showed that someone like Dustin Hoffman can be a leading man. It doesn’t have to be a Robert Redford. You have Allan Sherman and all these popular Jewish comedians. You have “Fiddler on the Roof” becoming one of Broadway’s biggest hits. That gives Brooks license to kind of jump in with both feet. In the 1950s, writing on “The Show of Shows” for Sid Caesar, the Jewishness was there but in a very kind of hidden way. Whereas, it’s very hard to watch the 2000 Year Old Man and say, well, that’s not a Jewish product.
What he also avoided — and here I will contrast him with the novelist Philip Roth — were accusations that he was “bad for the Jews.” Philip Roth was told that his negative portrayals of Jewish characters was embarrassing the Jews in front of the gentiles, but for some reason, I don’t remember anyone complaining even though the Max Bialystock character in “The Producers” can be fairly described as a conniving Jew. What made Brooks’ ethnic comedy more palatable to other Jews?
“The Producers” had a lot of pushback, but for a lot of other reasons.
I guess people had enough to deal with when he staged a musical comedy about Hitler.
Exactly. But the other part is that his biggest films are not as explicitly Jewish as something like Roth’s novel “Portnoy’s Complaint.” I actually think “Young Frankenstein” is one of the most Jewish movies that Mel Brooks ever made, but you’re not going to watch “Young Frankenstein” and say, wow, there are Jews all over the place here.
What about “Young Frankenstein,” a parody of classic horror movies, seems quintessentially Jewish?
The script, which is a lot of Gene Wilder and not just Mel Brooks, is really about someone saying, “You know, I don’t have this heritage — I’m trying to fit in with everybody else. My name is Dr. FRAHNK-en-shteen.” And then people say, “No, this is your heritage. You are Dr. Frankenstein.” [Wilder’s character realizes] “it is my heritage, and I’m embracing it. And I’m Frankenstein. And you may find that monstrous but that’s your business.” It’s about assimilation and embracing who you are.
And of course, Wilder as Dr. Frankenstein is unmistakably Jewish, even when he plays a cowboy in “Blazing Saddles.”
Right. Again, by the mid-’70s, you know, you have Gene Wilder and Elliot Gould and Dustin Hoffman, all Jews, in leading roles. “Young Frankenstein” ends up being a movie about coming home and embracing identity, which is playing itself out a lot in American Jewish culture in the 1970s.
I guess I have to go back and watch it for the 14th time with a different point of view.
That’s the fun part of my job.
You talk about what’s happening at the same time as Brooks’ huge success, which is, although he’s a little younger, the emergence of Woody Allen. You describe Brooks and Woody Allen as the voice of American Jewish comedy, but in very different ways. What are the major differences?
Gene Wilder, who worked with both of them, says that working with Allen is like lighting these tiny little candles, and with Brooks, you’re making big atom bombs. The critical knock against Brooks was that he was much more interested in the joke than the story. And I think with the exception maybe of “Young Frankenstein” there’s a lot of truth to that. The jokes are phenomenal, so that’s fine. Allen pretty quickly moved towards a much more narrative kind of film, and so began to be seen as this incredibly intellectual figure. In real life, Allen always claimed that he wasn’t nearly as intellectual as everyone thought, while Brooks had many more kinds of intellectual ambitions than the movie career that he had. There is a counterfactual world in which “The 12 Chairs,” his 1970 movie based on a novel by two Russian Jewish novelists and which nobody talks about, makes a ton of money.
Instead, it bombs, and he makes “Blazing Saddles,” which works out very well for everybody.
Although he does create Brooksfilms, and produces more narrative, serious-minded films like “The Elephant Man” and “84 Charing Cross Road.”
Right, and decides that if he puts his name on these as a director, they’re going to be rejected out of hand. There is a shelf of scholarship on Woody Allen, but if you look at who had influence on America in terms of box office and popularity, it’s Brooks winning in a walk.
You also mention Brooks and Steven Spielberg in the same sentence. Why do they belong together?
Partly because they had huge popular success in the mid-’70s. Brooks is a generation older, but they are hitting their cinematic success at the same time. And they are both movie fans.
Which comes out in their work — Brooks in his film parodies and Spielberg in the films that echo the films he loved as kid.
Until maybe his remake of “West Side Story,” Spielberg is not really a theater guy in the way that Brooks is, when success meant to make it on Broadway. When Brooks was winning all those Tonys in 2001 for the Broadway musical version of “The Producers,” it may have been almost more meaningful for his 5-year-old, or 7- or 8-year-old self than making his incredibly popular pictures.
You also write about Brooks being a small “c” conservative, a bit of a square. Which I think will surprise people who think about the fart jokes and the peepee jokes and all that stuff. And by square, I mean, kind of old showbizzy, even a little prudish sometimes.
I think that’s right. There’s a great moment that I quote at the end of the book where they are trying out the musical version of “The Producers,” and they want to put the word “f–k” in and Brooks is like, “I don’t know if we can do that on Broadway,” and Nathan Lane is like, “Have we met? You’re Mel Brooks!” He’s a 1950s guy.
Another place where this kind of conservatism comes in is when you compare him to other comedians of the 1950s and ’60s — the so-called “sick comics” like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl who were pushing the envelope in terms of subject matter and politics. He wasn’t part of that. He was part of Hollywood. He was trying to make it in network television.
There is an interview in that era when he complained that people who are writing for television are not “dangerous.” Meanwhile, he himself was writing for television. But I think it’s fair to say that “The Producers” was really something different. You didn’t have to be Jewish to be offended by “The Producers.” But as we were saying before, he is more of the loyal opposition, rather than sort of truly out there. He’s not making “Easy Rider.”
An exhibit space at the Museum of Broadway evokes the scenery from the Mel Brooks musical “The Producers.” (NYJW)
“The Producers” is part of Brooks’ lifelong gambit of mocking the Nazis, I think starting when he would sing anti-Hitler songs as a GI in Europe at the tail end of World War II. Later he would remake Jack Benny’s World War II-era anti-Nazi comedy, “To Be or Not to Be.” And then there is the quick “Hitler on Ice” gag in “History of the World, Part I.” Brooks always maintains that mocking Nazis is the ultimate revenge on them, while you note that Woody Allen in “Manhattan” makes almost the opposite argument: that the way to fight white supremacists is with bricks and baseball bats. Did you come down on one side or the other?
To add just a twinge of complication is the fact that Brooks actually fought Nazis, and also had a brother who was shot down in combat. So for me to sit in moral judgment on anybody who fought in World War II is not a place that I want to be. What’s interesting is that Brooks makes a lot of these statements over the course of a career in which Nazism is done, in the past, defeated. Tragically, the events of the last number of years made white supremacy and neo-Nazism a live question again. When “The Producers” was staged as a musical in the early 21st century, people could say, “Okay, Nazism’s time has passed.” It’s not clear to me that we would restage “The Producers” now as a musical on Broadway, when just last week you had actual neo-Nazis handing out their literature outside a Broadway show. It would certainly be a lot more laden than it was in 2001.
Time also caught up with Brooks in his depiction of LGBT characters. Gay characters are the punchlines in “The Producers” and “Blazing Saddles” in ways that have not aged well. But you also note how both movies are about two men who love each other, to the exclusion of women.
There’s an emotive component to him about these male relationships. Bialystok and Bloom [the protagonists in “The Producers”] is a kind of love story. One of the interesting things is that as it became comparatively more comfortable for gay men to live their truth in society and in Hollywood, there was an evolution. In that remake of “To Be or Not to Be,” there is a much more sympathetic gay character who’s not stereotypical.
What other aspects of Brooks’ Jewishness have we not touched upon? For instance, he’s not particularly interested in Judaism as a religion, and ritual and theology rarely come up in his films, even to be mocked.
It’s not something that he’s particularly interested in. To him, being Jewish is a voice and a language. From the beginning of his career the voice is there. What he’s saying in these accents is that this is Jewish history working through me. It is, admittedly, a very narrow slice of Jewish history.
The first- and second-generation children of Jewish immigrants growing up in Brooklyn neighborhoods that were overwhelmingly Jewish.
It was a Jewishness that was aspirational. It was intellectual. It was a musical Jewishness. It was not in the way we use this phrase now, but it was a cultural Jewishness. It was not a synagogue Jewishness or a theological Jewishness. But of course he is Jewish, deeply Jewish. He couldn’t be anything else. And so he didn’t, and thank God for that.
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Michael Jackson biopic revives legend of Jewish music mogul who battled MTV’s ‘color barrier’
(JTA) — About halfway through “Michael,” the new blockbuster biopic of Michael Jackson, there is a scene in which Jackson (played by his nephew Jafaar) and his lawyer, John Branca (Miles Teller), are sitting with the president of his record label. It’s early in Jackson’s “Thriller” album cycle, as “Billie Jean” has been released as a single, and the “Thriller” video has been filmed, setting the scene sometime in 1983.
Seated in front of several gold records, CBS Records’ head honcho Walter Yetnikoff (played under heavy makeup by Mike Myers) congratulates Jackson on his breakout moment and asks what he can do for him. Jackson and Branca tell Yetnikoff they want just one thing: for Jackson to be featured on MTV, then a brand-new station broadcasting music videos.
Yetnikoff tells them that it’s “not possible” because MTV rarely plays Black artists. Jackson retorts that he is a “proud Black artist” who makes his music for everyone, and that he “won’t be shoved to the back of any bus by MTV or anyone.”
Yetnikoff says he has tried, and Jackson tells him, “Please try harder.” So Yetnikoff asks his secretary to get MTV founder and executive Bob Pittman on the phone.
The executive is then heard on the phone threatening, in colorfully profane terms, to pull all of CBS’s artists from the network unless Pittman agrees to run “Billie Jean” in the next 10 minutes and, subsequently, put the music video in heavy rotation.
In the next scene, it’s clear that the threat worked. Jackson would remain an MTV staple for many years after that.
So who was Walter Yetnikoff? And did things really go down the way “Michael” says they did?
Yetnikoff was one of the music industry’s most colorful figures. Born into a Jewish family in New York in 1933, Yetnikoff became president and CEO of CBS Records in 1975, after spending the first half of the 1970s running CBS’s international division.
Running CBS during a pivotal time for the music business, he shepherded artists such as Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen and Gloria Estefan, in addition to Jackson, with whom he began working at the start of his solo career in the late 1970s. Yetnikoff wasn’t known for having a great ear for music, but he excelled at the business side of the music industry and at advocating for his artists.
Yetnikoff was the subject of two well-known books: Frederic Dannen’s “Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music,” published in 1990, and his 2004 memoir, “Howling at the Moon: The True Story of the Mad Genius of the Music World,” written with David Ritz. Also, a 1980 movie called “One Trick Pony,” which starred Paul Simon, had actor Rip Torn playing a fictionalized version of Yetnikoff named “Walter Fox.”
The “Michael” version of Yetnicoff is heard calling the MTV executive “that schmuck” — a Yiddish term in keeping with what both books about Yetnikoff make clear: his Jewish identity was front and center.
“The heart of Yetnikoff’s persona was his Brooklyn Jewishness. An outsized number of label bosses were Jews from Brooklyn, but Walter wore his ethnicity like a gabardine,” Dannen wrote in “Hit Men.”
Later, Dannen wrote, “He would stay late into the night, banging away at the phone, screaming in Yiddish. He shattered glassware, spewed a mixture of Yiddish and barnyard epithets, and had people physically ejected from the building.”
A profile in New York magazine in 1990, after Yetnikoff had fallen out of favor in the music world and given up the hard drinking that had caused him problems at home and at work, cited an array of Jewish antecedents to paint his picture.
“To cut an appropriate figure in the loud-and-dirty rock world, the shy Brooklyn Jew fashioned an indelible caricature for himself — the Orchard Street discounter as music-biz superman, a little Mel Brooks mixed with a lot of Jackie Mason, and dashes of Meir Kahane and Captain Lou Albano,” said the profile, by Eric Pooley. “He could be a mensch — warm, caring, generous — but he could also be a monster.”
So, did Yetnikoff really bring this famous rage to breaking the race barrier at MTV? And did it happen the way the movie “Michael” depicts?
By Yetnikoff’s own account, the answer is yes.
In “Howling at the Moon,” he wrote that “I screamed bloody murder when MTV refused to air [Michael Jackson’s] videos. They argued that their format, white rock, excluded Michael’s music. I argued they were racist assholes — and I’d trumpet it to the world if they didn’t relent.”
He goes on to say that, “with added pressure from Quincy Jones, they caved in, and in doing so, the MTV color line came crashing down.” (While Jones, the famed producer, appears elsewhere in “Michael,” he’s not part of the scene in which Yetnikoff calls MTV.)
Elsewhere in the book, Yetnikoff quotes Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who was trying to get him to write his book with her at Doubleday, as calling him “the guy who got MTV to break the color barrier and play videos by Black artists.”
“Don’t really know if Walter was bragging or accurate,” David Ritz, his co-author on “Howling at the Moon,” told JTA. “I have a feeling he was being accurate, but I can’t prove it.”
The Jackson family and estate, it’s clear, give Yetnikoff credit for getting Jackson’s music on MTV.
“It is difficult today to imagine the level of cultural apartheid at the music channels in 1983 when MTV refused to play Michael Jackson’s short film ‘Billie Jean.’ But Yetnikoff was ferocious on Michael’s behalf and didn’t hesitate to play corporate chicken with the powerful music channel,” the Jackson estate said in a media statement after Yetnikoff’s death at age 87 in 2021.
“In short order, ‘Billie Jean’ was added to MTV in heavy rotation, opening the floodgates for Michael’s extraordinary success and also for a whole generation of black artists. Walter forced that to happen, and with that decision, the wall came tumbling down.”
The family and estate were heavily involved in the movie’s production. But there doesn’t seem to be much evidence for the exact circumstances of the scene in the movie — Yetnikoff making that phone call to MTV, with Jackson and Branca sitting in his office in New York.
Dannen told JTA in an interview that, as told in the movie, “the story sounds fishy to me,” although he did remember an incident — included in “Howling at the Moon” — when Yetnikoff “had to coerce Jann Wenner into putting Jackson on the cover” of Rolling Stone, another music industry institution that hadn’t always given fair weight to Black artists.
Some on the MTV side have disputed the account. “It never happened,” Les Garland, then an MTV executive, has said, according to The New York Times. “Folklore, man, folklore.”
Garland, in a 2017 letter to Digital Music News, stated that “No, MTV did NOT refuse to air black musicians.” And indeed, the network had played a handful of Black artists, though not prominently, in its early years. But Jackson was not the only artist to push for more racial inclusion on MTV.
“Superfreak” singer Rick James had been pushing for videos by Black artists, declaring in an early-’80s interview, “MTV don’t play Rick James, they don’t play Michael Jackson, they don’t play the Commodores, they don’t play Earth, Wind, and Fire, they don’t play Stevie Wonder,” going on to even use the same “back of the bus” metaphor that Jackson used in the movie.
David Bowie famously called out MTV, live on its air, over the same issue, also in 1983 — yielding an unconvincing response from Mark Goodman, a Jewish VJ, about how the network was trying to “do what we think not only New York or Los Angeles will appreciate, but also Poughkeepsie or some town in the Midwest that would be scared to death by Prince, which we’re playing, or a string of other Black faces and Black music. We have to play the music that we think an entire country is going to like.”
Bob Pittman, the then-MTV executive named in the movie as the recipient of Yetnikoff’s phone call, did not respond to an email from JTA requesting comment.
Arts industries are filled with historical examples of Jewish executives and creators going to bat for Black inclusion. George Gershwin, for example, insisted that the characters in “Porgy and Bess” be played by Black actors rather than white actors in blackface, while the Jewish sitcom creator Norman Lear was responsible for one of the first shows to focus on a Black family, “The Jeffersons.” Both men tied their advocacy to their experiences and values as Jews.
If Yetnikoff was motivated by his Jewish identity or a sense of justice to crusade for Jackson, the books about him, including his own, don’t say so. Dannen noted that Yetnikoff strongly pushed for all of his artists, including Jackson.
“At the Grammys, when Jackson won the Grammy for… Album of the Year, he took Yetnikoff up on stage with him, which was a big deal.” Dannen told JTA. Yetnikoff’s Guardian obituary noted that at those Grammys, Jackson had called the label boss “the best president of any record company.”
Jackson went on to work with other Jewish producers and executives throughout his career. He performed in Israel during the “Dangerous” tour in 1993, visiting an Israeli army base and even donning an IDF uniform.
In 1995, he drew allegations of antisemitism after releasing the song “They Don’t Care About Us,” which included the lyrics “Jew me, sue me, everybody do me/ Kick me, kike me, don’t you black or white me.” Under fire, he denied any antisemitism and agreed to change the lyrics. He also partook in the early 2000s fad of non-Jewish celebrities embracing Kabbalah, even sporting a red string during his 2005 criminal trial.
Yetnikoff, too, had a spiritual side. In his biography, he frequently wrote about God, whom he referred to as “Heshie.” Why?
“I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe because Heshie is a familiar Jewish name that I could easily say,” he wrote. ‘‘When a rabbi pointed out to me that perhaps I wanted to say Hashem, I wondered whether my unconscious was playing games with me. Either way, I was trying to connect.’’
The biography was meant as a bit of a mea culpa after a career characterized by the kind of rage shown in that scene in “Michael.” And indeed, Yetnikoff made enemies along the way. But Dannen said the movie’s depiction, which shattered worldwide box-office records for a music biopic during its opening weekend, pointed to a quieter impact as well.
He noted that Jackson’s first solo album, “Off the Wall,” was nominated for an award in the R&B category, despite not really being an R&B record — a dynamic he said “shows sort of the residual racism of the music business” that assumed any Black artist was making traditionally Black music. But by the time “Thriller” came out, Jackson was being ranked in the pop category.
“I would like to believe that Yetnikoff exerted some influence in that area,” Dannon said. Indeed, in the “Michael” scene, Yetnikoff says that “Thriller” is dominating the charts — both R&B and pop.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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DOGE’s cuts to Jewish humanities grants were unconstitutional, judge rules
(JTA) — The Department of Government Efficiency’s cancellation last year of the majority of federal humanities grants, including to several Jewish projects, was unlawful and unconstitutional, a federal judge ruled Thursday.
In her 143-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon called out the agency created by President Donald Trump specifically for its targeting of Jewish projects, including Holocaust research.
“At a time when the specter of antisemitism has reemerged from the shadows, for our Government to deem a project about Jewish women disfavored because it centered on ‘Jewish cultures’ and ‘female’ voices is deeply troubling,” wrote McMahon, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1998. She was referring specifically to a canceled “project on Jewish women subjected to slave labor during the Holocaust.”
Appointees to DOGE, originally overseen by Elon Musk, swiftly overhauled multiple federal agencies in early 2025. That included the National Endowment for the Humanities, where DOGE personnel canceled a wide swath of grants by using the artificial-intelligence software ChatGPT to identify projects they deemed “DEI” — shorthand for diversity, equity and inclusion.
A lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild and a consortium of scholarly groups found during court proceedings that many Jewish grants were classified as “DEI” under DOGE’s rubric. At the same time, the NEH followed up its widespread grant cancellation by awarding its largest grant ever, $10.4 million, to the Tikvah Fund, a politically conservative Jewish group.
McMahon ruled that DOGE engaged in illegal “viewpoint discrimination.”
“Put simply, the Government terminated the grant because the grant sought to empower and amplify the voices of Jewish women who were victims of Nazi persecution,” she wrote. “The Government may have its reasons for disfavoring that perspective, but the First Amendment does not permit it to divest someone of a government benefit.”
Several other terminated Jewish grants were mentioned in the judge’s ruling, including projects to “recover and analyze ancient writings attributed to Moses but excluded from the canonical Hebrew Bible”; a short-fiction anthology by Jewish writers from the former Soviet Union; and multiple projects about Jewish women during the Holocaust. The ruling cited them alongside other cancelled grants focusing on Black Americans, Native Americans and Asian Americans.
“A grant funding the study of the experience of Jewish women during the Holocaust is not wasteful because it concerns Jewish women,” McMahon wrote at one point. “Yet that is precisely how DOGE treated them – deeming grants wasteful because they related to Blacks, women, Jews, Asian Americans, and Indigenous people.”
At the same time, she noted that other grants for Jewish projects were not canceled, including one “proposing to study ‘Council of Jewish Federation records dating 1916 to 1999.’”
The ruling orders the NEH to reinstate the terminated grants.
The NEH did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement to the Washington Post on Friday, the White House signaled that it planned to fight McMahon’s ruling.
“The district court’s ruling is egregiously wrong,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said in the statement. “It conflicts with clear Supreme Court precedent, and provides yet another example of liberal judges trying to reinstate wasteful federal spending at the expense of the American taxpayer. The Trump Administration expects to [be] vindicated as this litigation proceeds.”
The Authors Guild celebrated the ruling.
“We are gratified that justice was done,” Authors Guild president Mary Rasenberger said in a statement, “and we will be watching closely to make sure every one of these grants is restored.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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As anti-LGBTQ laws spread, these two Jewish nonprofits are funding moves to safer states
(JTA) — As anti-LGBTQ legislation proliferated across the United States in late 2024, leaders at two Jewish nonprofits began discussing the mounting crisis for LGBTQ Americans who no longer felt safe in their home states but lacked the financial means to leave.
Now, some of those individuals are receiving interest-free loans to help finance their moves through “Move to Thrive,” an unusual joint initiative launched by the national LGBTQ Jewish advocacy group Keshet and the New York-based Hebrew Free Loan Society in March 2025.
The initiative has drawn more than 400 inquiries, according to Jaimie Krass, the president and CEO of Keshet. So far, 29 applications have been approved, representing 56 people across households in 12 states, and $274,500 in loans have been disbursed.
“It is devastating that this is even necessary, and I think we can draw strength from what has been made possible by this resource, which is that dozens of households have been able to relocate to safer states, have been able to live more fully and openly as their authentic selves,” Krass told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
According to a 2024 survey by the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ youth crisis support nonprofit, nearly two in five LGBTQ+ people aged 13 to 24 said that they had considered moving to a different state, and 4% actually moved due to LGBTQ+-related politics or laws.
The collaboration between Keshet and the Hebrew Free Loan Society began in late 2024, when Idit Klein, then Keshet’s leader, approached Rabbi David Rosenn, the president and CEO of the Hebrew Free Loan Society, with the idea.
Rosenn initially told Klein it was not feasible, explaining that the Hebrew Free Loan Society serves individuals in the New York area and generally does not operate nationally.
But then came what Krass called a “dizzying onslaught of attacks” on LGBTQ+ rights following President Donald Trump’s inauguration. In the first weeks of his second term, Trump signed a series of executive orders targeting transgender Americans, including measures recognizing only two sexes, male and female, and another that aimed to outlaw gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth. Lawmakers in red states picked up the pace of their legislation.
As the months went by, Rosenn said “it was clear that things were getting more aggressive in terms of the approach of legislatures in certain states,” so he went to his board to appeal for an exception.
“We concluded that if we did not do this, it would not get done, and we saw this as a matter of people’s personal safety and well-being,” Rosenn said. “People were expressing that they felt like they were at real risk, and we wanted there to be a way for them to make these moves to places where they would feel safe and welcome.”
The initial grant funds for the program came from the Jewish LGBTQ Donor Network, but Rosenn said that after more people learned about the program there had been a “spontaneous outpouring of support from people who heard that this was going on and wanted to be a part.”
So far, the program, which is open to both Jewish and non-Jewish applicants, has distributed loans of up to $10,000 to applicants leaving states including Texas, Arkansas, Missouri and Iowa. The recipients, which included single transgender women and men and over a dozen couples and families, have used the loans to move to states, such as Massachusetts, Illinois and Oregon, with a more welcoming policy environment.
James Glick, who used a Move to Thrive loan to relocate from Texas to Minnesota with his wife, told JTA that the loan had brought him “life changing relief” after he watched anti-trans policies intensify at the Dallas school where he taught.
“I remember when we got the confirmation email, like we both just sat and cried and hugged each other,” they said. “It was just so difficult to move across the country, but it would not have been possible without that help.”
Glick said he first learned about the program through a Facebook group for trangender men in Dallas, and initially doubted whether he and his wife, who are not Jewish, would qualify.
But after learning that the program was “for everyone,” they said the support from Jewish organizations felt especially meaningful at a time when many people around him were dismissing fears about anti-trans policies.
“To have a Jewish organization recognizing that something like this was happening to the trans community, when so many people around me were saying, ‘It’s not that big of a deal, you need to calm down, like you’re going to be fine, why are you freaking out?’ — it was like, oh, no, people do acknowledge and understand that,” Glick said.
While dozens have used “Move to Thrive” to help finance relocations, other LGBTQ Jews and families with trangender children had already begun moving to states with stronger legal protections long before it was launched.
For Krass, the relocations echoed Jewish experiences of moving in search of safety in the past.
“Many of our own families have relocated at different times throughout history to different locations because our safety was undermined, and right now, those same sort of alarm bells of our shared history, of our collective memory, are certainly ringing right now because of the vast number of LGBTQ+ individuals, including LGBTQ+ Jews, who are feeling forced to relocate to a different state for the sake of their own and their family’s safety,” Krass said.
The need for the program, Krass and Rosenn said, appears unlikely to disappear soon.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, there are currently 528 anti-LGBTQ bills under consideration in states across the country, in addition to those — such as a law passed last year in Texas that defined men and women by their reproductive organs — that have already gone into effect.
“That would be a great reason to suspend this program, if nobody felt that they were at risk and they were happy and able to thrive in whatever state they’re in, but since that is not the case, I think we will absolutely try to continue to be a be a resource in this way,” Rosenn said.
He said the partnership between his organization and Keshet also served as an exciting model for collaborations he hoped to see more of in the Jewish world.
“It was also just a signal out to the world that the Jewish community sees that this is going on, cares about this issue and is moving to do something about it, that two organizations who don’t normally do things together, would figure out a way to collaborate to make this happen,” Rosenn said. “It is not just something that is to the benefit of borrowers, it’s also a message about what the Jewish community is trying to accomplish in the world.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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