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A new dance club in Williamsburg is bringing Tel Aviv party culture to Brooklyn
(New York Jewish Week) — On a recent Saturday at Silo, a new dance club in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, an aerialist was dangling above the crowd, doing flips on a hula hoop in front of hundreds of people, while hypnotic house music boomed through the venue’s world-class sound system. It was 1 a.m. and the party was just getting started.
Alex Neuhausen, a 39-year-old Jewish musician-turned-club owner, told the New York Jewish Week that this experience of starting the night well past most people’s bedtimes is inspired by Tel Aviv, the beachside Israeli city famous for its club culture.
“In Tel Aviv, they all get dinner with their family and everyone hangs out at 10 or 11, and then you hang out before the club until 2 or 3, and then you go to the club,” Neuhausen said. “They keep super-late hours. You turn the entire night into an experience. We want to do that.”
Some of the biggest night club venues in Brooklyn can hold thousands of people. Silo, by contrast, holds only 500, which carries a more intimate feel. The club is located on the eastern fringes of Williamsburg inside an repurposed airplane hangar, and its high ceiling provides an open, airy atmosphere to what would otherwise feel like a tightly packed room.
An aerialist performs while hanging above the crowd at Silo in Brooklyn. (Courtesy/Annie Forrest)
The team behind Silo is “mostly Jewish,” Neuhausen said, including co-founder Lily Wolfson, the booking consultant, the sound team and the lighting engineers. Neuhausen’s girlfriend, Ariel Lasevoli, who is the club’s director of performance and production, is half-Jewish. A massive two-sided mural, which separates the main club room from the bar area, was created by the Israeli artist Yoshi.
The striking mural is a piece that seems to change after a guest consumes a few drinks while the music plays. The mural portrays a seemingly endless array of black smoke or fire — gray clouds with some white streaks of electricity in the middle of it — but Neuhausen said it is open to interpretation.
“The front represents chaos,” Neuhausen said about the mural, which stretches 15 feet tall and 24 feet wide. “The show room side is a mix of organic patterns, fractals and flowers, but it never quite resolves into anything if you look closely. It’s like a Rorschach [test]; the viewer gives it meaning.”
The Tel Aviv club scene is only one of Silo’s Jewish inspirations: Neuhausen said his interest in dance music goes back to a young age, when he went to his cousins’ bar and bat mitzvahs in the Washington, D.C. area, where he grew up.
“What’s really striking about going to a bar mitzvah is that everyone dances,” Neuhausen said. “It’s the entire family, from the old folks to everyone. It’s just this joyous occasion. American white bread culture doesn’t have a lot of these elements.”
If a bar mitzvah party is a familial, albeit sometimes corny celebration that involves dancing with your loved ones, then it shares a great deal with the ethos of Silo — namely, to provide a place to party all night long while maintaining a welcoming feeling. It’s the antithesis of the exclusive environment that characterizes many high-end Manhattan and Brooklyn nightclubs, which often come with judgmental door policies and an intense, cooler-than-thou attitude.
At Silo on a Saturday earlier this month, the vibe was almost the complete opposite. The security guard cracked jokes with those waiting in line while checking IDs, and Neuhausen himself took our coats as we walked through the door. The attendees were not just Instagram models; college students, queer folks dressed in drag and 50-somethings were also in the mix. It wasn’t a sold out show, but there were nearly 400 people in the room, and almost everyone was focused on the music.
House music — which combines four-on-the-floor drum beats with R&B vocals and other layers — is Silo’s main focus, a style of music that originated at Black LGBTQ clubs in Chicago and Detroit in the 1980s. It’s a history that, Neuhausen said, shares commonalities with the Jewish people.
“These marginalized communities, maybe almost in spite of the oppression, generate great art,” Neuhausen said. “Jews have a lot in common with that shared cultural experience of oppression.”
At Silo in Brooklyn, the club takes inspiration from Tel Aviv’s party culture. (Courtesy/Annie Forrest)
Neuhausen’s father is Jewish, but not “devout about practicing,” he said. “We only went to synagogue a couple of times but I picked up a lot of cultural Jewish identity from him,” he added. “Whenever I see my extended family, it’s much more Jewish.”
In 2012, Neuhausen formed a band with Wolfson and they moved from San Francisco to New York, where Neuhausen took up residence in a garage in Williamsburg. Eventually, he turned the space into a makeshift venue for performances that included bands, comedians, aerialists and eventually DJs.
By 2017, Neuahusen and Wolfson’s parties were growing, so they opened up a commercial space called “Secret Loft” in Manhattan, which held only 80 people. It’s where, over the next five years, Neuhausen learned how to perfect the art of throwing parties — and where he assembled the team that would later go on to build Silo.
“It did really well immediately,” Neuhausen said. “We thought this was a thing we could actually do for a living. That was really the dream.”
Those parties ultimately became too big for the space. Wanting to be closer to the booming club scene in Brooklyn, the team eventually opened Silo, which is located next to the established megaclub Avant Gardner.
At Silo, the goal is to create a space that’s welcoming for all. “Last weekend, we had the DJs on the floor, on a little bit of an elevated platform,” Neuhausen said. “They were surrounded by people on all sides — everybody is facing inwards. It’s very different from a concert, it feels more like a community event.” During the week, the venue also hosts DJ workshops.
Neuhausen added that the booking team is “two women and a gay guy,” and the goal is to bring women DJs and people of color into the club. Neuhausen noted that, despite its origins, “there tends to be a lot of white guys” within some sub-genres of house music.
“We are booking more eclectic artists than a lot of venues,” he said. “We’re not about making people feel uncool. We’re not elitist. We book elite level talent, but we want everyone to see it.”
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The post A new dance club in Williamsburg is bringing Tel Aviv party culture to Brooklyn appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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‘Marty Supreme’ is an outstanding celebration — and indictment — of chutzpah
Marty Mouser will have the beef Wellington and caviar, as they are the most expensive items on the menu.
The 23-year-old table tennis phenom, heralded as “the chosen one,” is dining at the Ritz in London. Seated opposite him, his recent opponent, Bela Kletzki. The two are friends, but this didn’t stop Mouser from telling a gaggle of reporters before their match of his plans to “do to Kletzski what Auschwitz couldn’t.” He can say that, he assured them — he’s a Jew.
This, like Mouser’s remark that he is the “ultimate product of Hitler’s defeat,” is all bluster. (He’s really a lowly Lower East Side shoe clerk who stole money from his shop to fly to the tournament.) But we soon see what Auschwitz meant for his survivor companion: defusing bombs on the camp outskirts and once managing to sneak honey from a beehive onto his person, which his fellow prisoners licked off him for nourishment.
We get a flashback of Kletzki. It’s lensed like a Renaissance painting, with honey glistening off of the hairy chest of actor Géza Röhrig, (Hungarian star of the Sonderkommando drama Son of Saul).
You may wonder what exactly this moment is doing in Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, a walloping period piece that follows Mouser’s picaresque ploys to become a global icon by hustling, stealing and lying his way into a tournament in Japan. But there’s rarely a moment in the frenetic picture, set over eight months in 1952, where only one thing is happening. While Kletzki tells his haunting honey story, to pen magnate and potential patron Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary, Mr. Wonderful, indeed), Marty makes eyes at Rockwell’s wife from across the room, another sort of honeypot in mind. The contrast is the point.
Unlike Kletzki, Marty — very loosely based on ping-pong champ Marty Reisman — is an American, New York-born, and believes in the Augie March doctrine of first knocked, first admitted. To get his foot in the door so he can stare down from his rightful place on a Wheaties box, he will shove anyone and everyone out of the way. He refuses to demean himself by playing Harlem Globetrotter halftime shows with Kletzki, or throwing a match for Rockwell — but his principles are malleable when the straits are dire.
Mouser feels entitled to everything: the money in his uncle’s safe at the shoe shop; a suite at the Ritz; other men’s wives; a chunk of the pyramids, which he presents to his manipulative mother (Fran Drescher) with the words, “We built that.”
We know from how he speaks about this hunk of Egyptian rock — and about Kletzki, the Holocaust and Hitler — his entitlement comes in part from a legacy of immiseration and violence he never suffered personally. But Mouser, this New Jew coming of age after the Shoah, claims redemption as his birthright while also striving to float above his people’s history of oppression and retail drudgery, concocting a mythology of self-invention and radical individualism. (Meanwhile, Kletzki, a world champ before the war, is all too happy to be treated kindly and paid decently for hitting balls with skillets for the Globetrotters.)
The tension between the horror of the recent past, and the just-dawning promise of an America where antisemitism is unfashionable, plays through Marty’s vision of what’s to come. He dreams up orange-colored ping-pong balls, a hue only approved for use by the International Table Tennis Federation in 2019. The 1980s synth-pop needle drops remixed by composer Daniel Lopatin, lean into futurism. Our hero is ahead of his time, chafing at the present to which he’s tethered. He wants an unready world to acknowledge his greatness now. He has no patience for a rocky transition.
If the opening credits of Uncut Gems bespeak a past-one’s-prime ritual — a colonoscopy — Marty Supreme‘s titles are set to a burst of youthful virility. (Inventive, hilarious, if something I’ve seen before.)
Timothée Chalamet, outfitted with prosthetic acne scars and eye-shrinking contact lenses, is incandescent and somehow stays to the right side of insufferable as he wrecks the lives of all around him with his singular focus. Unlike Gems’ Howard Ratner, a sleaze with a gambling addiction and little else to offer, Mouser’s talent is undeniable, but like any Safdie protagonist, he takes his licks.
The film, co-written and co-edited with Safdie’s constant collaborator Ronald Bronstein, is a rich Jewish text that alternates between wish fulfillment and nightmare. Mouser competes for the WASPy Rockwell’s patronage while shtupping his icy blonde wife (Gwyneth Paltrow). On the other side of the ledger, his lover, Rachel (a pitch-perfect Odessa A’zion), is attacked near a Forverts delivery truck. Marty’s uncle Murray (music journalist Larry “Ratso” Sloman) calls a cop goyische kopf for ordering the roast beef over pastrami at the Garden Cafe. It’s no mistake that, at his lowest, Mouser faces a treyf humiliation orchestrated by Rockwell: lose and kiss a pig.
But Marty Supreme is too dense with plot points and people to insist on a solely Jewish gloss, even as critics for the non-Jewish press have been tempted to apply one.
Exploring the warrens of postwar New York — the wings of a Broadway theater, the back alley of a Chinatown restaurant, stockrooms, airshafts and fire escapes — all outstandingly revived by legendary production designer Jack Fisk, Safdie proves he’s not only ready for a solo effort away from brother, Benny, but ready to leap over space and time. He may not be ready to say goodbye to all that (New York stuff), the backdrop for all his features up to now, but he easily could.
In this epic of chutzpah, we have a mature work via a singularly immature avatar. Mouser may have never reached the recognition he felt he was owed, but coming into awards season, there’s little doubt that Safdie’s film is a cross-category contender.
Should the gentleman order the caviar, there’s no doubt he’s earned it.
The post ‘Marty Supreme’ is an outstanding celebration — and indictment — of chutzpah appeared first on The Forward.
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The Future of War: Israel Takes Global Lead on Military Innovation With New AI Division, Iron Beam Laser System
A part of Iron Beam laser anti-missile interception system, developed by Israel, is seen in this handout image obtained by Reuters on Sept. 17, 2025. Photo: Israel Defense Ministry/Handout via REUTERS
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced this week a revolutionary reorganization of the technology and artificial intelligence capabilities of the Jewish state’s military, unveiling new plans to prepare for future warfare with cutting-edge advancements.
Israel’s major defense overhaul, unveiled on Tuesday, comes in preparation for the deployment of the long-anticipated “Iron Beam” laser interceptor system, which will be delivered to the military at the end of the month.
Under the name “Bina” — Hebrew word “intelligence” — the IDF has chosen to shut down its Lotem Unit from the C41 Corps, replacing it with the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Division and the Spectrum Division. The latter will focus on communications and electronic warfare with an emphasis on threats from Iran, China, and Russia.
The AI Division will grow through merging other sections within the IDF, including Mamram (the abbreviation for the Center of Computing and Information Systems) and software development units Shahar and Mitzpen. This consolidation of AI-development related divisions intends both to intensify security and avoid accidentally duplicating research efforts. The project will align with Israel’s Project Nimbus cloud computing program supplied by Amazon and Google.
The IDF also announced the ICT Division, which will focus on satellite warfare in outer space.
According to the military, about 50 percent of the new divisions are composed of women soldiers, with female officers comprising 40 percent of the senior command including two of the five top leadership positions.
Brig. Gen. Yael Grossman now heads ICT and the Cyber Defense Division, and Brig Gen. Racheli Dembinsky will head the Spectrum Division. Others in leadership positions include Chief Signals Officer Brig. Gen. Omer Cohen and Maj. Gen. Aviad Dagan.
“I have no doubt that the world is heading towards a space war, especially after the US and China defined space as a possible war arena,” Dr. Moshik Cohen, CEO for defense technology company AIPEX which focuses on missiles, told the Israeli publication Globes.
“Rival powers are already using it on the battlefield,” Cohen continued. “The Chinese have developed a way to detect stealth aircraft using satellites, and the Russians have jammed GPS signals from US satellites, which have dropped thousands of smart bombs on earth and blocked satellite communications for the Ukrainians. At the same time, the US is promoting Golden Dome, which will consist of a network of low-flying satellites able to perform military missions such as intercepting ballistic and hypersonic missiles and blocking enemy communications.”
Dagan said that the new divisions aspired to use technology to “turn one tank into 100 tanks, one soldier into 100 fighters.”
On Monday, meanwhile, Danny Gold, the head of the Israeli Defense Ministry’s Directorate of Defense Research and Development, revealed that the military would soon receive the “Iron Beam” laser interception system, a project a decade in development.
“With development complete and a comprehensive testing program that has validated the system’s capabilities, we are prepared to deliver initial operational capability to the IDF on Dec. 30, 2025,” Gold said. “The Iron Beam laser system is expected to fundamentally change the rules of engagement on the battlefield. Simultaneously, we are already advancing the next-generation systems.”
Created by Rafael Advanced Systems Ltd., the Iron Beam is intended to supplement rather than replace Israel’s Iron Dome and other air defense systems, focusing especially on smaller targets. As long as the weapon maintains a power source then it cannot run out of ammunition. However, the system does not function optimally in situations with clouds or low visibility.
The IDF chose to rename the laser weapon from Magen Or (Light Shield) to Or Eitan (Eitan’s Light) in honor of Cpt. Eitan Oster, a member of the Egoz Commando Unit killed in October 2024 while fighting the Hezbollah terrorist group in Lebanon.
Brig. Gen. Benny Aminov also announced this week an Israeli breakthrough in countering enemy drone attacks.
“We are now working on interception solutions using drone-based systems that enable response to swarm scenarios while accelerating the development of new directed-energy weapons,” Aminov said. “The issue of low-altitude threats is an example of a challenge that requires our defense establishment to fundamentally change its operational approach, responding within compressed time frames, spiral development, accelerating testing during the development process, and bridging small defense-tech companies with major defense contractors.”
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‘Dancing With the Stars’ Airs Its First Dance Dedicated to Hanukkah During Holiday Special
Alan Bersten, Val Chmerkovskiy, Gleb Savchenko, Emma Slater, Onye Stevenson, and Hailey Bills dancing to “Miracle” by Matisyahu on “Dancing with the Stars” on Dec. 2, 2025, on ABC. Photo: Disney/Eric McCandless
“Dancing with the Stars” aired a holiday special on Wednesday night that included the show’s first celebration of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, which begins later this month.
The reality show and dancing competition aired its first full holiday special, titled “Dancing with the Holidays,” which highlighted the skills of its professional dancers without their celebrity partners. The dances mainly honored Christmas, but for the first time in the show’s 20-year history, there was a dance dedicated to Hanukkah.
Professional dancers Alan Bersten and Val Chmerkovskiy, who are both Jewish, along with four non-Jewish pros – Gleb Savchenko, Emma Slater, Onye Stevenson, and Hailey Bills – danced to “Miracle” by Matisyahu. Bersten choreographed the dance, which included the men linking their raised arms to form a menorah, a hora, a sit-spin as a nod to a spinning dreidel, and a take on some of the dances from the classic Jewish musical “Fiddler on the Roof.”
“We have a lot of work to do,” the Mirrorball champion told the dancers in rehearsal. “We need a miracle.”
In the intro package for the dance, Bersten, who is the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, talked about not seeing much Hanukkah representation around the holiday season when he was growing up. Bersten said he wanted to create something that Jewish kids today could identify with.
“Everyone celebrates holidays in a different way. Growing up Jewish, you don’t really see a lot of Hanukkah representation, so tonight we’re doing a special performance to celebrate Hanukkah,” he said. “Hopefully a Jewish kid’s watching this, and they feel seen, and they feel proud.”
Following the dance, DWTS co-host Alfonso Ribeiro reminded the audience and viewers at home “that the holiday season is for everyone.”
The “Dancing with the Stars” holiday special was released on Disney+ and Hulu.