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Deeply Jewish comedy is having a moment, even as antisemitism rocks pop culture
(JTA) — Two weeks after a Trump-supporting heckler threw a beer can at Ariel Elias at a club in New Jersey over her politics, the Jewish comedian’s fortunes took a turn for the better. A video of the incident went viral and she made her network television debut on Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show.
She spent most of her five-minute set talking about her Jewish identity and how it clashed with parts of her upbringing in Kentucky.
“I’m Jewish from Kentucky, which is insane, it’s an insane origin story,” she said last month before getting to jokes about how Southerners mispronounce her name and how badly her parents want her to date Jews.
Even though the crowd found it funny, Elias’ tight five wasn’t particularly groundbreaking. In the world of standup comedy, discussing one’s Jewish identity in a deep way has become increasingly common on the mainstream stage over the past several years. Jewish comedians are going beyond the bagel and anxiety jokes, discussing everything from religiosity and traditions (and breaking with those traditions) to how their Jewishness has left them prone to awkward situations and even antisemitism.
Ari Shaffir calls his most recent special, which was released earlier this month and titled “Jew” — and racked up close to four million views on YouTube in two weeks — “a love letter to the culture and religion that raised [him].” In his recent one man show “Just For Us” — which drew widespread acclaim and a slew of celebrity audience members, from Jerry Seinfeld to Stephen Colbert to Drew Barrymore — Alex Edelman discussed the details of growing up Modern Orthodox (and infiltrating a group of white nationalists). In 2019, Tiffany Haddish released a Netflix special called “Black Mitzvah,” in which she talks about learning about her Jewish heritage.
At the same time, the current uptick in public displays of antisemitism — punctuated by a series of celebrity antisemitism scandals and comedian Dave Chappelle’s controversial response to them — is complicating the moment for comedians who get into Jewish topics. Jewish comics are even debating what kinds of jokes about Jews are acceptable and which cross a line.
“I find it ironic that at a time where more Jewish comedians feel comfortable expressing their Judaism (i.e. wearing a yarmulke, making Jewish-oriented content) and not hiding it (by changing their name for example), we also see an up-swelling of outright antisemitism,” said Jacob Scheer, a New York-based comedian. “I don’t think — and hope — those two things are not related, but I find it really interesting and sad.”
The two phenomena could be related. Antisemitic incidents nationwide reached an all-time high in 2021, with a total of 2,717 incidents, according to an April 2022 audit from the Anti-Defamation League. Those incidents range from vandalism of buildings to harassment and assault against individuals.
“Now that [antisemitism is] a headline, it actually helps me to do what I need to do, which is just be extra out and loud and proud,” said Dinah Leffert, a comic based in Los Angeles. “I was hiding who I am just so I can survive in this environment. But this environment is not worth it if I have to hide.”
Scheer said that “people who are Jewish with an emphasis on the ‘Jew’ are having a moment.”
“[The] ‘Jew-ish’ world I wouldn’t say is dead, but I don’t think the ‘Jew-ish’ world is producing that much,” he said.
By “Jew-ish,” Scheer clarified that he means comics like Seinfeld and Larry David, who often infuse secular, culturally Jewish material into their comedy. Their apex of fame came during a time when Jewish comedy was not nearly as mainstreamed — the “Seinfeld” sitcom team was famously told that their idea was “too New York, too Jewish.”
Some of Seinfeld and David’s Jewish comedic successors, such as Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen, sprinkled in more explicitly Jewish jokes before 2010. But today, “you see more Alex Edelmans coming out,” Scheer said, referencing the increase in visibility for comedians with more observant upbringings.
Things have progressed to the level of “Jews doing comedy for other Jews about Jewish things,” Scheer added. In August, the first-ever Chosen Comedy Festival at the Coney Island Amphitheater in Brooklyn featured a lineup of mostly Jewish comics whose repertoires ranged from impressions of old Jewish women (who sound like bees) to breakdowns of the differences between how Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews say “Shabbat shalom.” Leah Forster, who also performed at the festival, uses her Hasidic upbringing as source material for her standup routines, creating characters and using accents and impressions. (In her early days as a comedian, Forster performed for women-only audiences while she was a teacher at a Bais Yaakov Orthodox school in Brooklyn.)
The festival, which was hosted by Stand Up NY (an Upper West Side club that Scheer says is known for being “the Jewish one”) welcomed a packed audience of about 4,000 guests, many of whom were Orthodox. A second Chosen Comedy Festival will take place in downtown Miami in December.
(The New York Jewish Week, a 70 Faces Media brand, was the media partner for the Chosen Comedy Festival but had no say in its lineup.)
The festival’s co-hosts, Modi Rosenfeld and Elon Gold, who frequently collaborate, both grew their audiences in the early days of the pandemic: Rosenfeld with his camera-facing comedic characters, like the esoteric Yoely who delivers news updates with a Hasidic Yiddish twist; and Gold with his Instagram Live show “My Funny Quarantine,” which featured guest appearances from other comedians. Both Gold and Rosenfeld work antisemitism into their material.
Some are finding the moment difficult to navigate. In late October, at the standup show she runs in Los Angeles, the comic two slots ahead of Dinah Leffert asked the room, “Is anyone still even supporting Kanye at this point?” The crowd responded with resounding whoops, claps and cheers, leading Leffert to feel like they did support Kanye West, the rapper who spent much of last month in the news for his multiple antisemitic rants.
Just a few jokes into her own 10-minute set, Leffert walked offstage.
“My body wouldn’t let me keep being inauthentic about what I was really feeling,” she said. “I don’t want to give laughter to people who are anti-Jewish.”
Leffert, who is openly Zionist, said she also observes a level of anti-Zionism in comedy clubs these days that feels to her like antisemitism.
“They’re not criticizing Israel,” she said. “It slips into antisemitism very quickly. And it’s just a really hostile environment.”
During the last large-scale military flare-up of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in May 2021, she felt inundated with Palestinian flag comments on posts about Jewish holidays, not Israel.
“You just get Palestinian flags underneath your Hanukkah posts,” she said.
In October, at a club in Omaha, comedian Sam Morril told a joke about how he hopes Jeffrey Epstein won’t be honored during Jewish Awareness Month.
“Can I ask why you chose to yell out ‘free Palestine’ after a Jeffrey Epstein joke?” he responded. When the heckler said she was making a “public statement” and was looking for “justice,” Morril answered: “A public statement? At the Omaha Funny Bone?”
Eitan Levine, a New York-based comedian known for his TikTok show “Jewish or Antisemitic” — on which he asks people to vote on whether objects like ketchup and mayonnaise, for example, are Jewish or antisemitic (in a loose comic version of the word) — said he receives similar comments online.
“This is a TikTok video about bagels,” Levine said. “What do you mean, you want me to take a stance?”
Though the response to his show has been largely positive and he has gone viral several times, Levine still receives all kinds of white supremacist comments on his videos — with backwards swastika, money bag or mustachioed man emojis evocative of Hitler, along with comments that say “jas the gews” as a spoonerism for “gas the Jews,” as a way to avoid TikTok censorship. Levine said he manually deletes these kinds of comments, but sometimes that’s not enough; one of the guests on his show had to cancel an in-person show due to online threats made against her.
“This stuff is clearly happening and it is dangerous and it is scary,” Levine told JTA.
Writer and comedian Jon Savitt, whose writing has been featured on College Humor and Funny or Die, and says he has often been “the first Jew that people have ever met,” recently launched an experimental web page called Meet A Jew, where users can connect with a Jewish person, much like a pen pal. His 2016-2018 standup show “Carrot Cake & Other Things That Don’t Make Sense” largely dealt with antisemitism — and its audience, he was surprised to see, was largely non-Jewish.
“Not only did I have people come up to me after the show, but I had non-Jews come up to me months later when they saw me and say ‘tikkun olam‘ [Hebrew for the Jewish principle of repairing the world] to me, or recite Hebrew,” Savitt said. “And to me that was the coolest use case because not only were they there, but they kind of retained something.”
Savitt says he isn’t trying to change any extremists’ minds with Meet A Jew, but he sees it as one step that could engage people who may be ignorant or unaware and give them a place to ask questions.
“Although it shouldn’t be on us to educate everyone or to have to constantly be standing up for ourselves, I think there are ways that we can bring other people into the conversation as well,” he said.
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The post Deeply Jewish comedy is having a moment, even as antisemitism rocks pop culture appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Passover’s 4 cups of meaning
What if the answer to the ‘Meaning Crisis’ is sitting right in front of us, around our Passover tables?
The Meaning Crisis is a term coined by philosopher John Vervaeke to discuss the constellation of mental health, political and cultural crises that, in his words, derive from people “feeling very disconnected from themselves, from each other, from the world, and from a viable and foreseeable future.” It is, Vervaeke argues, at the root of such seemingly disparate phenomena as the opioid crisis, the rise of right-wing nationalism, and off-the-charts reports of despair and anxiety, particularly among young people.
There are at least two meanings of ‘Meaning’ in this context.
First, over the last few hundred years — but especially in the last few decades — there has been a rapid erosion of the structures and communities that gave human lives meaning for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Traditional religious values and structures are far less coherent, attractive or attainable. Familial and communal structures have rapidly shifted. Fewer and fewer of us live in the places where we grew up, surrounded by extended family. The civic bonds many of us once took for granted are frayed as we fundamentally disagree about what American democracy even means. And in the last few decades, the atomizing effects of technology have made us more isolated from one another, with less in-person human contact and even less physical intimacy.
This is also a literal crisis of meaning: who we are, how we understand our world, the concepts by which we organize our lives — all of these are rapidly changing, and with the potential of AI to reshape our economic order and wipe out half of white-collar jobs, it’s possible we ain’t seen nothing yet.
Some of these changes are for the best. To take one personal example, the word ‘marriage’ connoted a very specific form of social arrangement for hundreds of years: a man, a woman, a lifelong union blessed by a religious authority, and the raising of children. The parameters of marriage were never as stable as traditionalists like to claim — just look at our biblical ancestors polygamous marriages, or the deeply unequal access and expectations around extramarital sex stretching through the Mad Men 1950s. But with the progress in women’s rights (e.g. not being considered the property of their husbands, being able to have careers) and LGBTQ equality, obviously the nature and rates of marriage have changed significantly. As someone in a same-sex marriage, I’m very grateful for that.
But it is still a change, and, together with other transformations, it has challenged some traditional notions of masculinity, leading to a resurgence of misogynistic, hyper-conservative models in the so-called ‘manosphere.’ And that’s but one example of many.
In this context — the meaning crisis and the reactionary responses to it — I find the observance of Passover, and the Passover Seder in particular, to be a much-needed antidote to disorientation on one hand, and oppressive traditionalism on the other.
Fittingly, for a holiday obsessed with the number four, I want to explore this in four ways — if you like, the Four Cups of Meaning that can be part of the Passover Seder.
1) Community
For many people, gathering with families of origin can be extremely stressful in our politically polarized time. It was bad enough when it was just the proverbial ‘racist uncle’ we had to endure at Seders. He might’ve been annoying, but he could also be ignored. Now, however, even well-meaning, sincere and committed Jews passionately disagree over a number of subjects, especially a certain country (or two) in the Middle East.
Yet there is a profound value gathering as a family — even as a tribe — and feeling a sense of kinship and belonging to it. Despite real and painful differences, Jews congregating together are connecting to a heritage and an ancestry that cannot be taken away by those who seek to put us outside the tent. That is something very old and very rich. You are not an atomized, isolated individual, separate from a history and a people and a tradition — a tradition which specifically includes the value of disagreement, argumentation and wrestling with the divine.
2) Centering our core values
Within the Jewish family, there are radically different iterations of core values. For me, the meaning of the Exodus is that oppression, slavery and injustice are morally wrong in the highest possible sense. As Exodus 23:9 teaches, “Do not oppress the stranger, for you know the heart of a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” From our experience of oppression — real, imagined or historically projected — we extrapolate the emotional and ethical value that it is wrong to oppress those who are different from us.
I know others have different views — for example, that the story of the Exodus is centrally about something that happened to our tribe, and that our group must never allow to happen to us again. But in terms of the meaning crisis, the debate is part of the solution. We are called at the Passover Seder to discuss the meanings of freedom, to reenact in our lived ritual experience the passage from servitude to liberation.
And not only that. We are invited to cultivate gratitude — in the Dayenu song and elsewhere — for all the blessings around us. We are invited, over and over again, to value questioning, curiosity, even challenging the texts of the Haggadah that for many are the very foundation of the Seder. These values are placed at the center of the Passover symposium. And while we disagree about how these questions are to be answered, just asking them is a retort to the emptiness and nihilism of so much of online culture and political cynicism. Values matter.
3) The power of myth
Human beings are creatures of story. Some linguists believe that it is in the telling of stories that human language itself — and thus human consciousness — evolved. Personally, I don’t regard the biblical narrative as a historical document; I see it as a shared myth of national self-creation, one which we can embody in ritual — in what the scholar of religion Clifford Geertz called “deep play.”
Sometimes the play is quite literal. Last year, my friend Shoshana Jedwab, a marvelous Jewish educator, led a bibliodrama performance in which, drawing from Sephardic traditions, we whipped one another with scallions to mock the servitude of Egyptian slavery. It’s fun (and worked really well with my eight-year-old) but it’s also a way of making myth into embodied, living experience. The myths, and their reenactment, bring us into intimacy with the past.
But ritual play may take many forms. Why do we dip our vegetables twice? Why the charoset? Why the orange on the seder plate? Why this? Why that? The inquisitiveness of the Four Questions is modeled by the youngest participant of the seder, but is invited on behalf of all of us. These often inscrutable, embodied, crunchy, weird rituals connect to the myth of the Passover story and make it alive in a way that mere retelling could never do.
As you prepare for your own seders, I invite you to create your own questions based on the themes embedded in the order of the Seder. And to lean into the weird. Which brings me to the final cup of meaning:
4) The non-rational
Passover, like many Jewish holidays, has multiple layers — seasonal, agricultural, mythic — and they all mash together in an often strange, and often charoset-like, mixture.
Particularly this year, the non-rational, emotional, and spiritual content of the Seder feels resonant for me. I cannot sequester the grief I feel at the crumbling of the American experiment in multicultural democracy, or at the ascendant far right in Israel. I feel perhaps a little closer to that pre-redeemed consciousness of my mythic ancestors in the land of Egypt. I am certainly not enslaved, but I do feel the sense of precarity that the Seder invites us to cultivate.
And so I find myself yearning for a miraculous deliverance — maybe not one involving frogs, lice, and boils, but from some unknown, mysterious, sacred source. Perhaps salvation will come from what we do not know. Perhaps there is room for a desperate hope, despite ample reasons not to hope.
As the Hasidic masters noted (and for a wonderful presentation of this, consider downloading the ‘Four Cups of Consciousness’ Haggadah supplement created by the Jewish psychedelic organization, Shefa), the Passover Seder is in large part about consciousness change: using the four cups of wine, the emotional arc of the seder, and the long night of singing, arguing and talking over a festive meal that stretches to midnight to shift our consciousness and open us to the possibility of internal freedom, even when external circumstances are antithetical to it.
This is the freedom of which Viktor Frankl wrote. And while we are a long way from what Frankl endured, I would submit that part of the invitation of the Seder is to imagine the consciousness of freedom even when that freedom is threatened — to be in solidarity with those being oppressed as we gather for our lavish meal, reclining on real or metaphorical cushions and drinking cups of wine, and to hold those two sides together. To know that, as the Haggadah relates, there have always been threats to our physical and spiritual safety. And while our physical freedom can indeed be restricted — and has been — we retain the capacity for ethical and spiritual freedom even in circumstances far worse than our own.
This is the ultimate meaningfulness: that in a time when the structures and language that give our lives meaning are threatened, we can resist the slide to nihilism and despair. And the Seder is a celebration of doing so.
The post Passover’s 4 cups of meaning appeared first on The Forward.
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Tensions flare at Passover Seder over Mamdani’s inclusion
(JTA) — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was briefly interrupted by a heckler during an appearance at a Passover Seder in Manhattan Monday night, marking a tense moment that highlighted ongoing strains between the mayor and segments of the Jewish community.
“The rising tide of antisemitism has caused enormous pain for so many Jewish New Yorkers. Doors are locked that used to be open, routine subway journeys felt fraught, synagogues that once felt like sanctuaries now require armed protection,” Mamdani said before he was interrupted by an individual in the back of the room who stood and shouted, “Every Jewish organization is a target.”
Attendees responded with a blend of shushes and a single voice shouting, “Stop the xenophobia, let him speak.”
“This is New York City, and we love to be here,” Mamdani said as the audience erupted in cheers. “I say it because we know that if there was complete decorum anywhere that we were, then we would have to ask ourselves if we had left the city that we love, and it is important to be here and to acknowledge that this is what it means to love and to lead the place that we call home.”
The episode, which took place at Jewish entrepreneur Michael Dorf’s annual seder at City Winery in the Meatpacking District, comes as Mamdani has faced scrutiny from segments of New York’s Jewish community over his responses to antisemitic incidents and continued alignment with pro-Palestinian activists.
“I have to say I didn’t vote for him,” one male attendee, who asked to remain anonymous for his privacy, said following the seder. “I have certain feelings about him that I think a lot of other people have, but that’s neither here nor there. But that was kind of surprising that a couple of people kind of went out of their way to heckle.”
While the mayor has previously marked Jewish holidays with Jewish leaders and organizations aligned with him on his criticisms of Israel, the event at City Winery involved a lineup of speakers and attendees with differing views.
“Mamdani was here, which is great, yeah, I guess, because he knows at the seder, you lean to the left,” joked comedian Olga Namer later in the evening. “A little bit about me, I’m a Syrian Jew, yes, so that’s good, because I know, at least I’m confident, that Mamdani likes half of me.”
Ahead of the evening, which also featured addresses by former CNN anchor Don Lemon, Israeli musician David Broza and Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie of the non-denominational Lab/Shul, observant Jewish comedian Modi Rosenfeld announced that he had cancelled his appearance, claiming that he had been unaware of the mayor’s inclusion.
“We were not told Mamdani was participating in this event until today,” Rosenfeld’s team said in a statement on Instagram following criticism from pro-Israel activist Shai Davidai. “Modi will no longer be participating.”
Davidai, the former Israeli business school professor at Columbia University, took aim at the Israeli participants in the seder, writing in a post on Instagram, “This is why we’re losing.”
“I have nothing against any of these individuals, but I do have a problem with giving Mamdani a kosher stamp of approval while so many of us are out in the streets fighting against is anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli policies, actions, and rhetoric,” Davidai wrote in an updated caption announcing Modi’s cancellation.
City Council Speaker Julie Menin, who has been seen as a counterweight on Mamdani, used part of her remarks to highlight the passage of her “buffer zone” legislation for religious institutions, which were introduced after a pro-Palestinian demonstration outside of Park East Synagogue in November.
“We all should be able to worship or not worship as we see fit,” Menin said. “We all should be able to go into, whether it’s a synagogue, a church, a mosque or any house of worship, freely without intimidation and harassment, so I’m very proud that we were able to pass this bill.”
Mamdani has not confirmed whether he will sign the legislation, with a spokesperson telling the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he “wants to ensure both the right to prayer and the right to protest are protected here in New York City.”
Former Comptroller Brad Lander, who is currently running for Congress in New York’s 10th Congressional District, joked during his remarks late in the evening that he “did not tell the mayor that we were doing a live reenactment of the four sons during his speech,” making a tongue-in-cheek reference to a core element of the Passover haggadah.
“He gets heckled and, you know, and it kind of goes along with the territory, I thought he dealt with it very gracefully,” Lander told JTA. “As a lot of people said in here tonight, not everyone in that room agrees with each other.”
Indeed, at the conclusion of the seder, several attendees said that they were not aware that the mayor was slated to appear — and questioned his understanding of the holiday’s core narrative.
“If City Winery did not inform people of the politicians in particular, because he’s very polarizing, to have him up there really upset people,” said one attendee, who requested anonymity because she had participated as a private individual. “It feels inauthentic to have him speak about matzah or Judaism, when the whole holiday is about Jews that were enslaved by Pharaoh and then went back to the homeland of Israel.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Tensions flare at Passover Seder over Mamdani’s inclusion appeared first on The Forward.
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NY candidate criticizes Israel on Hasan Piker’s show, sparking backlash in heavily Jewish swing district
(JTA) — Democratic officials in four suburban New York counties are decrying a local congressional candidate who criticized Israel during an appearance this weekend with Hasan Piker, the leftist streamer who has divided Democrats and drawn allegations of antisemitism.
Effie Phillips-Staley is running for Congress in a heavily Jewish district just outside New York City and hoping to face off against a pro-Israel Republican in November. During her appearance on Piker’s show on Saturday, she accused Israel of genocide and being an apartheid state.
Phillips-Staley’s position on Israel has morphed since last July, when she told Jewish Insider that she wanted to be “very clear that the U.S. has to continue to be a critical ally to Israel” and that she wouldn’t support restrictions on aid to Israel.
But after she went on a trip to Israel and the West Bank in February, she became strongly critical of Israel and said she now supports cutting U.S. aid.
In a 30-minute interview that also covered immigration and her other campaign priorities, Piker asked Phillips-Staley about her West Bank trip, and about how her Israel stance is sitting with the district’s large Jewish community.
“The majority of people — or maybe not the majority, but certainly a strong number — who have brought this to my attention have been Jews,” she said. “I get the most encouragement, from lots of people, but a lot of encouragement from Jews who really challenged me, especially in the beginning, to be brave and say it like it is.”
Phillips-Staley, a village trustee in Tarrytown, has established herself as the left-wing candidate in the NY-17 primary and has made her anti-Israel stance a focus of her campaign. She said on Saturday that she believes using the words “apartheid” and “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions is “100%” a good litmus test for Democrats.
Meanwhile, Piker, a streamer with millions of followers on YouTube and the streaming platform Twitch, has become one of the most prominent leftist commentators in the United States. He’s drawn scrutiny for his sharp critiques of the Democratic party and Israel, as well as accusations of antisemitism.
Following the interview, the Democratic committees for Westchester, Rockland, Putnam and Dutchess counties issued a joint statement condemning Piker’s “hateful rhetoric” and expressing “deep disappointment” with Phillips-Staley for appearing alongside him.
“Her decision represents a dangerous and unacceptable step toward legitimizing rhetoric that has no place in this District, in mainstream Democratic politics, or in any serious political discourse,” the committees said.
Phillips-Staley responded with a statement of her own, saying, “While I don’t align with every word Hasan Piker has ever said, we must recognize the massive value of a platform that engages millions of young people in the democratic process.”
Phillips-Staley is banking on her Israel stances — which are increasingly in line with the outlook of Democratic voters, particularly younger ones — to buoy her candidacy in a packed primary where nearly half of voters remained undecided in the most recent poll.
Beth Davidson, a Rockland County legislator who is Jewish, led all Democratic primary candidates in the latest polls with 23% of the vote. Davidson was followed by Cait Conley, who was endorsed by a major pro-Israel lobbying group, with 17%; Peter Chatzky, who is Jewish and supports conditioning aid to Israel, at 8%; and Philliips-Staley at 5%.
New York’s 17th Congressional District is home to a number of heavily Jewish areas, including haredi Orthodox communities like Monsey and Kiryas Joel as well as towns in Westchester County with significant populations of non-Orthodox Jews. The Jewish Electorate Institute estimates that nearly 20% of the district’s voters are Jewish, making it one of the top 10 most Jewish congressional districts in the country.
Phillips-Staley acknowledged to Piker that her position on Israel is not uniformly popular among her constituents.
“There are some communities that certainly don’t like the positions that we take, that take issue with me calling out AIPAC, even Democrats,” she said. “It’s not great. But there are just as many or more who say, no this is wrong, keep going. Keep going.”
Phillips-Staley detailed her experience visiting the West Bank, which she has spoken about with other leftist outlets like Zeteo. She said it is “unbearable” that the U.S. is providing aid to Israel’s military to uphold what she called “apartheid” conditions similar to the American Jim Crow era.
The interview also covered Lawler, who currently holds the seat and is seen as vulnerable to losing against the Democratic nominee in November amid a difficult climate for Republicans. Lawler, a staunchly pro-Israel member of Congress, has been endorsed by AIPAC and the Republican Jewish Coalition.
Piker called Lawler a “villain,” and Phillips-Staley said in agreement, “Villain is the word.”
Piker asked Phillips-Staley about Conley, who he said was the “mainstream Democratic party candidate who’s leading in the polls,” though she was second in the latest polling data.
Piker pointed out that Conley is endorsed by the Democratic Majority for Israel, a pro-Israel lobbying group that often overlaps with AIPAC in its spending. Phillips-Staley dismissed Conley as being too far to the right.
“There’s very little light between Cait [Conley] and Mike Lawler in terms of a lot of their policies,” Phillips-Staley said. The two pro-Israel politicians are far apart on the war in Iran, however: Conley has been opposed while Lawler has been a steadfast supporter.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post NY candidate criticizes Israel on Hasan Piker’s show, sparking backlash in heavily Jewish swing district appeared first on The Forward.