Accurate representation of the religious Jewish community is more important now more than ever amid a record surge in antisemitism since Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, according to the author of a new fiction novel about an Orthodox Jewish man who discovers in middle age that he is not Jewish.

“Accuracy is so important to me,” Goyhood author Reuven Fenton told The Algemeiner. “People assume that the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community is the Jewish version of the Taliban and that’s not true at all.”

“Whenever you see anything media-oriented that has to do with Orthodox Jews, if you’re part of that world in any way, you look at it and roll your eyes because they never get it right. It’s full of flaws, exaggerations, and misinformation,” added the first-time author, who is also the only Orthodox Jewish reporter on staff for the New York Post. “I felt it was my obligation, [and] that the least I could do in writing this novel was to get everything on the money.”

Goyhood revolves around the story of Mayer, who formerly went by “Marty” before becoming religious. Mayer fled his small town in Georgia for Brooklyn, New York. He is now a devout yeshiva-learning kollel man who is married to the daughter of a well-respected rabbi and has not left the confines of the ultra-religious Jewish community in years. His twin brother, David, is not religious at all and lives a hedonistic lifestyle, constantly pursuing pleasures such as women and cars. The brothers are middle-aged and after their mother dies, they find out they’re not in fact Jewish at all.

Mayer’s only solution is to convert to Judaism, but the earliest appointment he can get to finalize the conversion is days away. In the meantime, the estranged brothers decide to embark on a road trip together, along with their mother’s ashes. Along the way they pick up two tagalongs: an Instagram influencer named Charlayne Valentine and Popeye, a one-eyed dog. During the course of their trip, the twin brothers face a number of situations and make revelations about themselves and their relationships with God. They come to terms with how spirituality and religion plays a role in their lives.

Goyhood is described in the novel as “the state of rebounding from one travesty to the next.”

“Mayer’s big realization has to do with ‘I may not have been living my life a proper way because essentially I have been living this ultra-cloistered life,’” Fenton explained. “During the book, he comes to understand that there are other ways to be a Jew than to be one who spends the entirety of his waking time in a yeshiva. That there’s a virtue in participating in the world and being involved with people and contributing to the world, and not simply thinking yourself for the purpose of collecting schar [merit] that you can redeem in the afterlife. That life is meant to be lived here on earth and he lives that life in the course of three days. He does some major living in a very short amount of time and comes out a different person.”

The author added, “While Mayer ends up loosening up and being more into participating with the world, David actually wants to go the opposite route and be more introspective and learned, spiritual and explore the deeper kind of cerebral things in life.”

Fenton told The Algemeiner that the brothers represent “a duality of one person” and depict two “dueling sides” of Fenton himself — one secular and one religious. Growing up, Fenton’s family was traditional but not particularly religious. When he was around 12 years old, they abruptly adopted an Orthodox religious lifestyle.

Fenton had a secular audience in mind when writing Goyhood and said that’s why he was so focused on giving readers an “authentic experience” when it came to his depiction of Orthodox Jews. He even showed the finished manuscript for Goyhood to his brother, a rabbi, to get a “seal of approval” and make sure the book correctly portrays all aspects of the Orthodox Jewish lifestyle.

“I just think that there’s just a lot of ignorance about the [Orthodox] Jewish people, how they function,” the author said, adding that even at work, “most of my colleagues are not as familiar with the Orthodox world as I am and I’m constantly correcting misperceptions.”

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported last month that it recorded a total of 8,873 antisemitic incidents in the United States in 2023, marking a 140 percent increase from the prior year and the highest level ever recorded by the civil rights organization since it began tracking antisemitic activity in 1979. The majority of the incidents, 5,204, occurred in the last quarter of the year, following the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, when the Palestinian terrorist group invaded southern Israel, murdered 1,200 people, and kidnapped 253 others as hostages.

Fenton said it’s hard for a Jewish author to push for their work to get published, especially if it has Jewish themes, while Jews around the US are facing an uptick in antisemitic incidents. He explained that authors who also express solidarity with Israel are being targeted by the “TikTok mob” of anti-Israel activists, who “review bomb” books on websites, such as GoodReads, and bring a novel’s rating down by giving it one-star reviews “on mass.”

“If you so much as mention the word ‘Israel,’ you’re really screwed,” he added.

Nevertheless, Fenton insisted it’s extremely important following the Oct. 7 attacks to share any Jewish-related content and show solidarity with the Jewish community. For that reason, he was determined to wear a Jewish skullcap, also known as a kippah, in the author photo included in Goyhood. The picture was taken after the Oct. 7 attacks, and Fenton said that although he is normally self-conscious about displaying his Judaism, when it came to taking the photo, “because of Oct. 7, I wanted to wear my Judaism proudly.”

He added, “Jews are being silenced right now. Jews are afraid to walk around in public and express Judaism openly. More than ever, right now is the time to say, ‘I’m a Jew. I’m a proud Jew [and] I’m proud to be supportive of Israel as the Jewish homeland.’ Just to announce yourself as a Jew right now is very important.”

“Any kind of exclamation of Judaism right now is important,” he concluded.

Goyhood will be released on May 28 but is available for pre-order now.

The post Author Seeks to Combat Misperceptions About Orthodox Jewish Community With New Novel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

It’s common knowledge that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is a deeply problematic organization, and its decades long collusion with terrorists has been well-documented.

UNRWA’s staff have been caught espousing and encouraging terrorism, and its facilities have been used to hide terror infrastructure, including recent revelations that a Hamas command center was found underneath the UNRWA headquarters in Gaza City, and was sharing its electricity.

Yet, despite this well-publicized and publicly known information, much of the world has turned a blind eye, preferring to maintain the false and lazy narrative of UNRWA being an organization whose sole purpose is to look after Palestinian refugees and their descendants, instead of admitting that UNRWA actively perpetuates the Palestinian conflict.

But after revelations in late January of the direct involvement of at least 12 UNRWA personnel in the October 7 massacre, and a further revelation that at least 10% of its 13,000 Gaza workforce were members of terrorist groups, many countries could no longer ignore these issues and correctly decided to suspend funding to the UN body organization.

During a UN Security Council session on UNRWA, its leader, Philippe Lazzarini, and Israel’s UN Ambassador, Gilad Erdan, traded barbs, with Lazzarini blaming Israel for the Gaza death toll and accusing Israel of leading an “insidious campaign to end UNRWA’s [aid and social services] operations,” and Erdan responding that UNRWA is “one of the weapons” used to try to destroy the Jewish state and is the “single biggest obstacle to a solution.”

In early February, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, under growing pressure to secure UNRWA funding, was forced to appoint what he called an “Independent Review Group” to investigate if UNRWA was doing “everything within its power to ensure neutrality and to respond to allegations of serious breaches when they are made.”

Yet the group’s independence was immediately called into question, with NGO UN Watch labeling the entire investigation “rigged.”

The head of the group appointed was Catherine Colonna, a former French Foreign Minister, who stated on February 22 that the purpose of the review was to “enable donors, the largest among them … to regain confidence … in the way UNRWA operates.”

That means the investigation was never about investigating the workings of UNRWA, but about securing the confidence of donors to keep the money pouring in. And with France being one of UNRWA’s biggest backers, both financially and politically, it’s difficult to see just how independent she could be in this investigation. Colonna had even commended UNRWA for its work shortly before her appointment.

Helping Colonna in this “investigation” was the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) research center, which published a report in 2022 on UNRWA which denied accusations that the agency “instigates violence… through school curricula with an anti-Israeli edge.” The lead author of that report was Kjersti G. Berg, who published a book in 2023 arguing in favor of the Palestinian “right of return,” which would effectively mean the destruction of Israel as a democratic, Jewish-majority state.

With so-called “independent” credentials such as this, it came as no surprise that the “Independent Review Group” delivered its report and verdict on April 22, claiming that the UN agency had “robust” neutrality mechanisms and that Israel hadn’t provided any evidence that agency staff were members of terrorist organizations.

Although the review did find that biased social-media posts and antisemitic content in some textbooks did “constitute a grave violation of neutrality,” and acknowledged that UNRWA must do more to ensure its employees are politically neutral, it also claimed a significant screening process already existed in order to “ensure compliance with the humanitarian principles.”

Israeli government spokesperson David Mencer disputed this, calling the report a “whitewash” that ignored the severity of the problem, because it did not deal with the enormous scope of Hamas’ infiltration of UNRWA, which is so deep that “it is no longer possible to determine where UNRWA ends, and Hamas begins.”

This lack of any significant critical findings was in contrast to the European Parliament, which, in early April, denounced and condemned UNRWA’s role in inciting violence and antisemitism in a series of resolutions stating that Palestinian school textbooks (created by the Palestinian Authority) were responsible for “hateful contents encouraging violence, spreading antisemitism and inciting hatred” against Jews and Israel.

This echoed a previous denouncement back in April 2021, when the Parliament adopted a resolution condemning UNRWA for the “hate speech and violence taught in Palestinian school textbooks.”

Yet despite this, the EU, along with most donor countries, except for the US, have now resumed funding to UNRWA.

UNRWA remains a serious problem, and by ignoring and whitewashing the evidence of its collusion with Hamas, future Palestinian generations will continue to be condemned to an education indoctrinated with hatred and violence rather than peaceful coexistence.

Justin Amler is a Policy Analyst at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC).

The post Ignoring UNRWA’s Problems Will Only Condemn Future Generations of Palestinians first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Jewish actress Amy Schumer discussed in a new interview the negative attention she’s received for speaking in support of the Jewish community and commenting on the Israel-Hamas war, as well as how discussions about the ongoing conflict are usually one-sided.

“The focus is so razor-sharp on Jewish people but not on Hamas. It’s very strange,” the Trainwreck star, 42, told Variety magazine, while talking about the war that began following Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in southern Israel.

“It’s gotten to this place where you can’t speak up for other Jews without people feeling like it’s a slight to the conditions in Gaza,” added the actress, who was bullied as a teenager for being Jewish. She also recommended that people read Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby to better understand the Jewish state or anything written by Jews because “Jewish people wrote everything down.”

Schumer was in New York in March filming her new movie Kinda Pregnant when a stranger shouted at her from the sidewalk: “F—k you, Amy Schumer! You’re a Zionist! You love genocide!” Meanwhile, during her interview with Variety in Brooklyn, a woman approached the actress’s table and told her: “Thank you for everything you’re doing for Israel. I follow you on social media. I used to live in Israel and … thank you. We support you.” Afterward, Schumer told the reporter from Variety, “That moment you just saw? Maybe 10 times a day that happens to me.”

The Life & Beth star, writer, director, and stand-up comedian has been vocal in her support for Israel since the Oct. 7 attacks — and has been criticized for doing so.

In November, she shared on X/Twitter a video of Martin Luther King Jr. denouncing antisemitism and stating that Israel has the right to exist. Bernice King, the activist’s daughter, responded to Schumer’s post by saying that although she and her father were against antisemitism, she was certain the civil rights leader “would call for Israel’s bombing of Palestinians to cease, for hostages to be released, and for us to work for true peace, which includes justice.”

Schumer clarified her stance on the Israel-Hamas war during her interview with Variety, saying that she doesn’t support the Israeli government.

“I don’t agree with anything that [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu is doing, and neither do the Israelis I know. Of course what’s going on in Gaza is sickening, horrifying, and unthinkable,” she said. “And, I don’t think it’s OK to hate anyone because they were born Jewish.”

Schumer’s friend and fellow actress Jennifer Lawrence also told Variety that she thinks Schumer is better than most at handling scrutiny, regardless of what it’s about. “Amy’s choice to use her voice to speak for justice puts her under immense fire,” Lawrence said. “I wouldn’t say she navigates it so much as she throws her middle fingers up and walks away from negative comments like a gas station fire in a Michael Bay movie.”

The post Amy Schumer Discusses Backlash for Supporting Israel, Receiving ‘Hatred’ for Being Jewish first appeared on Algemeiner.com.