House Speaker Mike Johnson on Thursday said Republicans “roundly condemn” a leaked group chat in which Young Republican officials joked about gas chambers, praised Adolf Hitler and used racist, antisemitic and homophobic slurs, as well as an American flag with a swastika that was found in a Republican congressman’s office.

When asked whether he feared extremist or pro-Hitler views among young Republicans, Johnson replied, “No.”

“Obviously, that is not the principles of the Republican Party. We stand for the founding principles of America,” Johnson said in a press conference. “We have stood against that. We fought the Nazis. We roundly condemn it, and anybody in any party who espouses it, we’re opposing that.”

Johnson’s remarks capped two days of intensifying fallout from a Politico exposé that published thousands of messages exchanged over months by rising Republican operatives around the country.

In the cache reviewed by Politico, participants joked “Everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber,” celebrated “Great. I love Hitler,” and traded demeaning references to Black people, Jews and LGBTQ people.

State and local leaders appeared in the chat, including one Vermont state senator. The revelations have already cost several participants their jobs and prompted the deactivation of the Kansas Young Republicans chapter, with the Young Republican National Federation itself calling for implicated officials to “immediately resign from all positions” within the organization.

Civil rights attorney Leo Terrell, who heads the Trump administration’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, reacted saying, “Antisemitism on the right is just as dangerous as antisemitism on the left.”

Meanwhile, Vice President J.D. Vance has sought to downplay the severity of the situation.

Vance posted on X with a screenshot of texts in which Jay Jones, a former Democratic nominee for Virginia attorney general, suggested a prominent Republican deserved “two bullets to the head.”

“This is far worse than anything said in a college group chat, and the guy who said it could become the AG of Virginia,” Vance wrote. “I refuse to join the pearl clutching when powerful people call for political violence.”

Vance later said in an interview on “The Charlie Kirk Show,” “The reality is that kids do stupid things. Especially young boys, they tell edgy, offensive jokes. Like, that’s what kids do. And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke — telling a very offensive, stupid joke — is the cause of ruining their lives.”

Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, praised Republican leaders who condemned the messages, which he called “offensive and very concerning.”

“I’m also glad that many leaders, including @EliseStefanik and @RepMikeLawler, spoke out strongly and swiftly against these hateful statements,” Greenblatt wrote on X.

Gov. Gavin Newsom urged Congress to investigate the scope of extremist sentiment within Republican-aligned youth networks, arguing that the chat logs were “neither fringe nor humorous.” In a letter to the House Oversight Committee chair, Newsom contrasted GOP scrutiny of campus antisemitism with what he characterized as muted responses to hate inside party infrastructure.

Reactions to the messages were building up as a separate controversy ricocheted through the Capitol: a photograph circulating online showed a swastika integrated into the stripes of an American flag displayed in a Republican lawmaker’s office. Capitol Police opened an investigation after Rep. Dave Taylor called the image “vile and deeply inappropriate” and suggested it was the result of vandalism.

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The post Mike Johnson denounces Young Republicans’ group chat that praised Hitler as JD Vance downplays uproar appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Reactions to Slam Frank, Andrew Fox’s musical satire in which Anne Frank is rewritten as a Latinx pansexual girl named “Anita,” have been mixed. Some have called it a timely, comedic takedown of cultural hypersensitivity while others see it as a shonda to the memories of Holocaust victims. In interviews, Fox has refused to break the character of a playwright obsessed with woke culture, so there is no insight from him to understand the musical. Somehow, the show resists fitting neatly into any understanding of humor, making it hard to know exactly who — or what — you’re supposed to be laughing at.

In his  1655 book The Element of Law Natural and Politic, Thomas Hobbes explains humor through what he calls “superiority theory,” which argues that “laughter is nothing but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others.”

There’s also self-deprecating ethnic humor, where one makes jokes about their own ethno-racial group, often highlighting historically demeaning stereotypes or characteristics. In his book Ethnic Humor in Multiethnic America, scholar David Gillota describes it as a “psychological defense mechanism” that takes the power of aggression away from the dominant group since jokes about a minority community are being made by its own members.

Then there’s “culturally intimate humor” which SUNY Farmingdale professor Evan S. Cooper defined in his dissertation “I don’t get It?: Culturally Intimate Humor and Its Audiences,” as a familiar use of culturally specific stereotypes in a positive manner. Contemporary scholars have argued that some ethno-racial humor is a way for minorities to create group solidarity and make fun of the dominant culture, a tactic which Cooper calls “protest humor.”

Because Slam Frank pokes fun at so many identities using a diverse cast and crew, it is impossible to put it neatly into any one category of humor.

Take the scene where the cast members, wearing black hats and plastic hook noses, rub their hands together under red lights as they sing about colonizing Palestine and being able to charge high rent. Is it self-deprecating humor — a Jewish writer making fun of those who have turned the search for a holy land into a capitalist cash grab? Is it protest humor, using a caricature of how some anti-Zionists might imagine a Jewish cabal making fun of the ridiculous fantasies of antisemites? Is it superiority humor that is painting religious, Zionist Jews as somehow morally inferior? It’s impossible to know — and that’s part of what makes it so hard to know how to react, making for an awkward viewing experience.

If you understand the jokes about neurodiversity and pronouns as a form of protest humor against “woke culture,” does that mean the playwright sees political correctness as the dominant narrative in our society right now? In an age where diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are being targeted by the federal government and political lobbyists have suggested trans people should be considered a terrorist group, the idea that fighting inclusive culture is punching up feels ignorant. But at the same time, even among the left and among those whose identities are under attack — people who make up the cast and crew of Slam Frank — there seems to be an exhaustion with identity politics’ overpolicing of who can say what.

The jokes take on a whole new life in some of the merchandise. Among the items available for purchase in the lobby are t-shirts featuring a photoshopped image of Anne Frank as a nightclub DJ, trucker hats that say “Problem Attic,” and kippot with the Slam Frank logo — a yellow Star of David where the top point has been replaced with a silhouette of Frank, a la Hamilton’s iconic symbol. Unless you confront a wearer on the street, it will be hard to know why the person feels the need to advertise the show. Did they love the musical so much because of its mockery of antisemitism? Or were they enthralled by the takedown of Zionism? Or are they just celebrating a show that made them laugh?

When it comes to Slam Frank, it seems that the only true conclusion is that there is no certain message, which is frustrating for audiences who want to understand what they’re watching. It is particularly hard when we’re living in a time where society seems to constantly demand we proclaim a socio-political opinion on everything.

As a musical, Slam Frank actually holds its own, with pretty catchy — if not politically correct — songs and good performances. But every time I was compelled to laugh with the audience, my amusement was mixed with apprehension and guilt. I knew why I thought the overdone Black American Accent and caricatured Jewish stereotypes were funny; but it’s hard to relax when you don’t know if the rest of the audience is laughing with you or at you.

The post The new Anne Frank musical wants you to laugh at ‘woke culture’ — but is it funny? appeared first on The Forward.

The skyline of Melbourne, Australia, the capital of Victoria. Photo: Alex Proimos/Wikimedia Commons.

Australia’s oldest gallery has returned a Nazi-looted painting to the descendants of a German Jewish family whose members were forced to sell the artwork before they fled Nazi-occupied Germany in the 1930s.

The heirs of Henry and Bertha Bromberg have been fighting to reclaim “Lady With a Fan,” by 17th century Dutch painter Gerard ter Borch, from the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) for 20 years. The gallery told The Jewish Independent that it decided to return the artwork to the Bromberg family after discovering new evidence that proved the painting belonged to the family. NGV did not disclose information about the new evidence regarding the painting’s provenance.

The painting is no longer on the gallery’s website and is instead mentioned on the website for the Lost Art database that is part of the German Lost Art Foundation.

“After thoroughly assessing the painting’s background and origins, the NGV determined that the work had been owned by Dr. Henry Bromberg and was subject to a forced sale in the late 1930s, and that the heirs of Dr. Bromberg were the rightful owners of the painting,” the gallery told The Jewish Independent. “The painting was subsequently deaccessioned from the NGV Collection in 2025 and returned to the Bromberg family.”

“Lady With a Fan” was part of the NGV’s collection for 80 years, since it was purchased by the gallery in 1945. The painting was part of art collections owned by German Jews Max Emden, who left Germany in the 1920s, and Bromberg, his cousin, according to The Jewish Independent. The latter was a judge in a magistrate’s court in Hamburg who fled Europe for the US in 1938 with his wife Bertha after Nazi leader Adolf Hitler gained power in Germany, according to the Smithsonian magazine. In the 1930s, Nazis seized or sold the art collections, including “Lady With a Fan,” owned by Emden and Bromberg.

The French government returned a total of four 16th-century paintings to the Bromberg family between 2016 and 2018, and an art museum in Pennsylvania returned another 16th century artwork to the family last year. The Emden family previously reclaimed two 18th-century artworks that were seized for Hitler’s personal collection.

NGV’s return of “Lady With a Fan” is reportedly only the second time in history that an Australian museum has restituted a Nazi-looted piece of art, following the gallery’s restitution of “Head of a Man” in 2014.