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As landmark Saul Bellow documentary premieres, a look back at his life through the JTA archive
(JTA) — Given his place in the international literary canon, it’s hard to believe that there has never been a widely-released documentary made about the Jewish Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow.
That’s about to change, as PBS debuts “American Masters: The Adventures of Saul Bellow” on Monday night.
The documentary, which was filmed by Israeli director Asaf Galay between 2016 and 2019 and features what is being touted as the last interview Philip Roth gave before his death in 2018, digs deep into Bellow’s personal life and inspirations. Many know about his successful novels and memorable (usually Jewish) characters, but as the film shows, Bellow had a turbulent personal life that involved five marriages. Several of his closest friends and family members felt betrayed or offended by how Bellow wrote unflattering characters closely based on them. His moderate conservative political leanings put him at odds with the ethos of the 1960s, and some saw his framing of occasional Black characters as racist.
But the film also devotes time to explaining — through interviews with scholars, other novelists and members of the Bellow clan — how Bellow’s deep-rooted sense of “otherness” as the son of Jewish immigrants influenced his work, and how he, in turn, influenced many Jewish American writers who followed him. Roth, for instance, says on camera that Bellow inspired him to create fuller Jewish characters in his own work.
To mark the milestone film, we looked back through all of the Saul Bellow content in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s archive. What emerged was a portrait of a leading Jewish intellectual of his time who was deeply invested in the Soviet Jewry movement and Israel, and who was beloved by the American Jewish community — despite his complicated relationship to his Jewishness and his bristling at being called a “Jewish writer.”
The Soviet Jewry movement
Bellow was born in 1915 in Canada to parents with Lithuanian ancestry who first immigrated from St. Petersburg, Russia. In the 1920s, when Bellow was 9, the family moved to Chicago. By the 1950s, the plight of Jews in the Soviet Union — who were forbidden from openly practicing their religion and from emigrating — had become a rallying cry for American Jews. As a 1958 JTA report shows, Bellow was passionate about the issue; in January of that year, he signed a letter to The New York Times about “the purge of Yiddish writers, the refusal of the current Soviet regime to permit a renaissance of Jewish culture and the existence of a quota system on Jews in education, professional and civil service fields.” Other signatories included fellow Jewish writers Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin and Lionel Trilling.
Saul Bellow, Anita Goshkin (his first wife) and their son Gregory Bellow, circa 1940. Bellow’s turbulent personal life involved five marriages. (Courtesy of the Bellow family)
He signed another letter to the Times on the topic in 1965, and in 1969 he circulated an appeal for cultural freedom for Jews to the Soviet Writers Union, getting other prominent writers such as Noam Chomsky and Nat Hentoff to sign. By 1970, the issue had become widely publicized, and Bellow stayed involved, signing onto a petition with several other thought leaders that asked: “Has the government of the Soviet Union no concern for human rights or for the decent opinion of mankind?”
Israel
Like many American Jews, Bellow had complicated feelings on Israel. “If you want everyone to love you, don’t discuss Israeli politics,” he once wrote.
In the 1970s, JTA reports show that he followed Israeli diplomacy closely and was a strong supporter of the Jewish state in the face of international criticism. In 1974, at a PEN press conference, he called for a boycott of UNESCO, the United Nations’ cultural heritage arm that has historically been very critical of Israeli policy.
In 1984, Bellow met with then-Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who was in the United States on an official state visit.
But Bellow wasn’t a blanket supporter of Israel — in 1979, he signed a letter protesting West Bank settlement expansion that was read at a rally of 30,000 people in Tel Aviv. In 1987, while in Haifa for a conference on his work, Bellow criticized the Israeli government for the way it handled the Jonathan Pollard spy case, bringing up an issue that still reverberates in Israel-Diaspora conversation — and in U.S. politics.
“I think the American Jews are very sensitive to the question of dual allegiance, and it is probably wrong of Israel to press this question because it is one which is very often used by antisemites,” Bellow said.
Nobel Prize
After garnering multiple National Book Awards and a Pulitzer Prize, Bellow won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976. JTA’s report on the award noted that Bellow’s most recent book at the time, published right around the time of the Nobel announcements, was a memoir about his 1975 stay in Jerusalem, titled “To Jerusalem and Back.” The report added: “Two of his books, ‘Herzog,’ published in 1964 and ‘Mr. Sammler’s Planet,’ which won him the National Book Award in 1971, have been translated into Hebrew and were enthusiastically received by Israeli critics and public.”
(Bellow wasn’t the only Jew to win a Nobel that year: Milton Friedman won the economics prize, Baruch Blumberg shared the medicine prize and Burton Richter shared the physics prize.)
Bellow, center, with his fifth wife Janis Freedman-Bellow and longtime friend Allan Bloom, who is the subject of Bellow’s last novel, “Ravelstein.” (Courtesy of the Bellow family)
A “Jewish writer”?
The Anti-Defamation League also gave Bellow an award in 1976. According to a JTA report, Seymour Graubard, honorary national chairman of the ADL at the time, said that Bellow “has correctly rejected all efforts to pigeonhole him as a ‘Jewish writer.’ Rather, he has simply found in the Jewish experience those common strains of humanity that are part of all of us — and therein lies his greatness as an American writer.”
Debate over whether or not Bellow should be labeled a “Jewish writer,” and what that meant, dogged him for much of his career. After his death in 2005, at 89, a New York Jewish Week obituary focused on Bellow as “a literary giant who did not want to be bound by the tag of Jewish writer.”
“Mr. Bellow bridled at being considered a Jewish writer, though his early novels, most notably 1944’s ‘The Victim,’ dealt with anti-Semitism and featured characters who spoke Yiddish and Russian,” Steve Lipman wrote.
Bellow’s biographer James Atlas added in the obituary: “He always said he was a writer first, an American second and Jewish third. But all three were elements of his genius. His greatest contribution was that he was able to write fiction that had tremendous philosophical depth.”
In a JTA essay at the time of Bellow’s death, academic and fiction writer John J. Clayton argued: “No good writer wants to be pigeonholed or limited in scope. But he is deeply a Jewish writer — not just a Jew by birth.
“Jewish culture, Jewish sensibility, a Jewish sense of holiness in the everyday, permeate his work.”
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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Announces Progress in Legal Battle to Declare CAIR a Terrorist Group
Governor of Texas Greg Abbott attends the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) USA 2026 at the Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center, in Grapevine, Texas, US, March 27, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Callaghan O’Hare
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) on Wednesday announced that a US federal court granted major portions of Texas’s discovery requests against the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), representing significant progress in the state’s legal case to designate the controversial advocacy group as a terrorist organization.
The approved request means that CAIR will have to hand over information including donor lists, award recipients, and records tied to travel by longtime CAIR executive director Nihad Awad to countries described by Abbott as “hosting Islamic terror.”
“Progress in my legal fight against CAIR,” Abbott posted on X. “I demanded CAIR give us its donor list, donee list, and details for Nihad Awad’s travel to 9 countries hosting Islamic terror. A federal court granted my request.”
The ruling, issued by the US District Court for the Western District of Texas, marks one of the most serious legal setbacks CAIR has faced in years as Republican officials intensify scrutiny of the organization’s funding networks and alleged foreign connections.
Court documents show the judge granted in part motions from Abbott and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton seeking extensive discovery from CAIR entities. Among the requests approved by the court were demands for documents identifying donors who gave $5,000 or more over the past decade.
The order also states that donor records with names redacted would be “insufficient,” signaling the court’s willingness to force disclosure of information CAIR has long argued should remain private.
Abbott has accused CAIR of operating surreptitiously while exerting significant political influence across the country. His administration has argued that Texans deserve transparency regarding the organization’s donors, overseas relationships, and internal financial networks.
The legal proceedings began in November, when Abbott formally designated CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations under state law, citing in part what officials described as longstanding ideological and operational ties with Islamist movements hostile to the US and its allies.
“The Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR have long made their goals clear: to forcibly impose Sharia law and establish Islam’s ‘mastership of the world,’” Abbott said in a statement announcing the move. “These radical extremists are not welcome in our state and are now prohibited from acquiring any real property interest in Texas.”
Abbott’s proclamation described CAIR as a “successor organization” to the Muslim Brotherhood and noted the FBI called it a “front group” for “Hamas and its support network.” The document also outlined the history of the organizations and their historical associations with figures and networks tied to Hamas, an internationally designated terrorist group.
CAIR has denied any ties to terrorism and portrayed the Texas investigation as an attack on Muslim civil rights advocacy.
But critics of CAIR have increasingly pointed to the organization’s history of controversy surrounding extremist rhetoric and its past scrutiny by federal investigators. Awad himself drew backlash after publicly expressing support for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, saying he was “happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land.”
In the 2000s, CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case. Politico noted in 2010 that “US District Court Judge Jorge Solis found that the government presented ‘ample evidence to establish the association’” of CAIR with Hamas.
According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “some of CAIR’s current leadership had early connections with organizations that are or were affiliated with Hamas.” CAIR has disputed the accuracy of the ADL’s claim and asserted that it “unequivocally condemn[s] all acts of terrorism, whether carried out by al-Qa’ida, the Real IRA, FARC, Hamas, ETA, or any other group designated by the US Department of State as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization.’”
CAIR leaders have also found themselves embroiled in further controversy since Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities in southern Israel, in some cases for associating with US-designated terrorists.
The latest court ruling does not resolve the broader lawsuit, which remains ongoing, but it hands Abbott and Paxton a major procedural victory in a case that is increasingly drawing national attention.
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Denmark Sees Historically High Antisemitism for Third Consecutive Year
People take part in an anti-Israel demonstration in Copenhagen, Denmark, Oct. 4, 2025. Photo: Ritzau Scanpix/Emil Nicolai Helms via REUTERS
Antisemitism in Denmark has remained at historically high levels for the third consecutive year, according to newly released data reflecting a deeply entrenched climate of hostility toward Jews and Israelis across Europe, marked by harassment, vandalism, and targeted attacks.
On Thursday, the Danish Jewish Community’’ Department for Mapping and Registering Antisemitic Incidents released its annual report documenting 199 antisemitic incidents in 2025 — the second-highest figure since records began in 2012.
“Unfortunately, antisemitism in Denmark is not diminishing — it has become normalized at a level we have never witnessed before,” Ina Rosen, chairperson of the local Jewish community group, said in a statement.
“This casts a dark shadow over Jewish life in Denmark, but antisemitism is not only a Jewish problem — it is a societal one. No democracy can accept a reality in which an entire group of citizens is subjected to such intense hatred,” she continued.
More antisemitic incidents have been recorded in Denmark since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, than in the previous decade combined, reflecting a sharp and sustained rise in hostility with no signs of abating.
While the data reflected a slight decline from the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 atrocities, with incidents peaking at 207 in 2024, the figures remained far above pre-war levels, which totaled just nine incidents overall.
Denmark’s Jewish population was estimated at 6,400 Jews in 2023.
All across the country, the study pointed to a growing tendency to hold Jews and Israelis collectively responsible for the policies and actions of the State of Israel, with more than half of all reported incidents (52 percent) blaming Jewish individuals, institutions, or organizations for events in the Middle East.
This trend was even more pronounced online, where it rose to 66 percent, reflecting an intensified pattern of scapegoating in digital spaces.
A large majority of the incidents — roughly 70 percent — targeted individuals or institutions visibly identified as Jewish, many of whom received hate messages, death threats, and demands to publicly distance themselves from Israel.
“This is the most common form of antisemitism Danish Jews are experiencing today,” Rosen said. “More and more, merely identifying as Jewish or displaying Jewish symbols is treated as a political stance for which individuals are held accountable. Regardless of how it is expressed, it amounts to an unacceptable imposition of collective guilt on an entire community.”
“We are talking about Jewish fellow citizens who, every day, have to weigh how openly they can show who they are,” she continued. “It is unacceptable for those affected, and it is also a loss for Danish society’s diversity when citizens feel compelled to conceal their identity.”
Among the reported cases were seven incidents of violence, assault, and other forms of physical harassment targeting Jews, alongside 24 cases involving Jewish children and young people.
The newly released report also warned that this increasingly hostile environment has become entrenched in schools and other educational institutions, citing repeated incidents in which public school students have been subjected to Nazi salutes, called “Jew pigs,” and told that “the world would be better without Jews” and that “all Jews must die.”
Given that many victims choose not to come forward, the study pointed to what is likely a far broader wave of antisemitic abuse than the official figures captured.
According to a survey released last year by the Danish Institute for Human Rights, 83 percent of Jewish citizens in Denmark said they alter their behavior in public because they are Jewish, while 62 percent reported hiding Jewish symbols.
In December, Denmark’s government unveiled an $18 million, five-year plan to combat antisemitism through 2030, focusing on security, education, and research, as the country’s Jewish community continued to face a wave of targeted attacks and hostility.
Building on the country’s first national plan to combat antisemitism from 2022, the new initiative focuses on boosting security for Jewish institutions, combating online hate, and introducing programs for children and young people.
As a new addition to the previous plan, the recently released program will appoint an Education Ministry coordinator to fight antisemitism in schools and establish an association to combat antisemitic hate crimes.
Other measures will include expanded educational programs, giving all upper secondary schools the opportunity to apply for study trips that teach students about the Holocaust and antisemitism.
The plan also includes the creation of the Weinberger Institute, a research center focused on hate crimes, led by Jonathan Fischer, a former vice president of the Jewish Community of Denmark.
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Netanyahu deploys AI videos as political weapon, aimed at voter fears of Arab power
As election season in Israel heats up, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and members of his government are deploying a charged weapon against their political opponents aiming to overthrow them: AI-generated viral videos.
In recent weeks, Netanyahu and key allies have taken to social media to post satirical content on their social media accounts, depicting their leading opponents, Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett, as being controlled by Arab-Israeli puppetmasters.
One viral video posted by the prime minister last week, with over a million views, is captioned “taking off the masks.” It shows a smiling Bennett and Lapid embracing before peeling off their faces to reveal those of prominent Arab-Israeli political leaders Mansour Abbas and Ahmad Tibi.
מורידים את המסכות pic.twitter.com/IgFDWXp96N
— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) April 29, 2026
After Bennett and Lapid announced in April that they would run jointly against Netanyahu in the upcoming fall elections, Israeli political Twitter flooded with AI-generated content on this theme, which goes for the jugular on a political vulnerability for Bennett: his past inclusion of Abbas’ Arab Ra’am party in his governing coalition.
One image posted by Likud, Netanyahu’s party, featured Bennett and Lapid depicted as children sitting obediently in the back seat of a car as Abbas drives. The photo is accompanied by the caption: “In any case, Bennett and Lapid will go again with the Muslim Brotherhood, the terrorism supporters.”
גם ביחד זה ברור – הנהג הוא מנסור.
לא משנה איך השמאל מחלק את הקולות שלו.
בכל מקרה בנט ולפיד ילכו שוב עם ברית האחים המוסלמים תומכי הטרור. pic.twitter.com/iYFIZQ8QhJ
— הליכוד (@Likud_Party) April 26, 2026
These AI videos reflect a growing post–Oct. 7 trend in Israeli politics: accusing one’s political opponents of being aligned with Arab parties as a way to delegitimize them.
Dr. Arik Rudnitzky, a researcher in the Arab Society in Israel program at the Israel Democracy Institute, said the trauma Israelis experienced after Oct. 7 has left a profound mark on the Jewish public. That fear, he said, is now being actively mobilized in political messaging.
“The post–Oct. 7 discourse is so influential in Israeli politics that it dictates everything,” Rudnitzky said. On Tuesday, Finance Minister Betzalel Smootrich went as far as to say that Naftali Bennett’s decision to include the Islamist Ra’am party in the 2021-2022 government was worse than the Netanyahu government’s failures tied to Hamas’s attacks on Oct. 7. This, despite the fact that Mansour Abbas has said that Netanyahu tried to court him into joining his coalition in 2021, though Netanyahu has denied this.
According to Rudnitzky, the implicit message is that Israel’s Arab parties are dangerous. The argument is that they are not Zionist (and some Arab parties are even explicitly anti-Zionist). In the aftermath of Oct. 7, while some Arab-Israeli political leaders condemned violence from both Hamas and the Israel Defense Forces on civilians, they stopped short of referring to Hamas as a terror organization. Some also failed to condemn the murder of Israeli soldiers on that day.
Now, Netanyahu’s government has taken to framing the choice for voters as existential. “Either you are with the most experienced prime minister in Israel’s history, or you are willing to gamble and put Israel at risk by electing Bennett and Lapid,” said Rudnitzky.
The use of AI by Israeli politicians, Rudnitzky added, makes that message more visceral. “It looks real, it goes straight to the back of your mind, and it hits a nerve.”
Bennett, for his part, has tried to distance himself from this narrative, stating after he announced that he would be running against Netanyahu, “The Arab parties are not Zionist, and therefore we will not rely on them.”
But the videos are taking their toll. Earlier this year, Bennett filed a police report after the Likud X account posted a doctored image that depicted Bennett celebrating with Arab leaders, with the men all raising their clasped hands in celebration. Bennett called the image “malicious forgery.”
Other politicians have deployed similar messaging tactics — against Netanyahu. In February, Avigdor Liberman, a right-wing critic of the prime minister, posted an AI-generated image of Netanyahu holding hands with Abbas in front of a bouquet of heart-shaped flowers, captioned: “Happy Valentine’s Day.”
יום אהבה שמח❤ pic.twitter.com/Sel1CkURFn
— אביגדור ליברמן (@AvigdorLiberman) February 14, 2026
In response, Netanyahu posted an actual photo of Lieberman meeting with Abbas with the caption: “Lieberman published a doctored AI photo of the PM holding hands with Mansour Abbas. So, Avigdor, here’s a real, unedited photo of you and Mansour Abbas.”
Lieberman then shared 10 posts of Netanyahu meeting with various Arab leaders since the 1990s, including former PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and current Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
According to Rudnitzky, such wrestling-ring attacks have become normalized since Oct. 7, aimed at Jewish politicians and voters. “This is not about delegitimizing Arab voters,” he said. “The target is Naftali Bennett — not Mansour Abbas.”
A controversial pragmatist
Arab parties have long represented Israel’s Arab minority in the Knesset but historically remained outside governing coalitions. For decades, this arrangement — Arab parties supporting from the outside or remaining in opposition — was broadly acceptable to both sides. Arab politicians often avoided joining coalitions for ideological reasons, while Jewish parties largely viewed their inclusion as politically untenable.
That changed in 2021, when Abbas made history by joining the winning coalition led by Bennett and Lapid. That decision positioned him as a pragmatist, willing to work with Jewish parties to secure gains for Arab citizens.
In the aftermath of Oct. 7, Abbas issued the most explicit condemnations of Hamas among Arab Israeli political leaders. He has also said that “the state of Israel was born as a Jewish state, and it will remain one,” a rare acknowledgment of Israel’s identity in those terms. Still, no Arab-majority party in Israel defines itself as Zionist.
While it is considered to be the most moderate of the Arab parties in Israel, Abbas’ Ra’am is an Islamist party that emerged from the Islamic Movement in Israel and the Shura Council — organizations tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. Abbas has increasingly sought to distance the party from those groups and has denied any affiliation with the Brotherhood.
Forming a governing coalition in Israel requires at least 61 seats out of 120, and several polls have suggested that any viable opposition to Netanyahu would likely need Arab party support to reach that threshold. But reliance on Arab parties to form a coalition has become more contentious since Oct. 7.
According to the Democracy Index poll, 72% percent of the Jewish public in Israel opposes the inclusion of Arab parties in the governing coalition. Opposition extends beyond the right: 43% of centrist voters and 20% of left-wing voters also oppose such coalitions. Support has declined significantly since before Oct. 7, when roughly 36% of Jewish Israelis backed including Arab parties in government, compared to just 27% today.
Hence the opening for Bibi and his video blitz. “We’ve seen an escalating political discourse over the past several years. There are no more holy cows,” said Rudnitzky. “If you want to mobilize the entire Jewish public and you know that you are in an inferior position in the polls … this is the way to take the demons out of the bottle.”
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