Uncategorized
Did you hear the one about the Jewish comedians who set out to explain Israel?
(New York Jewish Week) — There’s an old joke about Israel (we’ll spare you the too-long set up) that ends, “Before you were a tourist — now you’ve made aliyah.” In other words, whatever preconceptions you had about Israel, they will be shattered once you make the decision to live there.
Joel Chasnoff and Benji Lovitt are two Americans who live in Israel, and they understand the gap between perception and reality. They’ve rewritten what they consider an insider’s guide to the Jewish state, “Israel 201,” which sets out to explain the Israeli psyche when it comes to everything from vocabulary and cuisine to religion and military service. They don’t ignore the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but write that “as impactful, significant and tragic as the conflict is, Israel is so much more that.”
They also understand jokes. Chasnoff, originally from Chicago, and Lovitt, who grew up in Dallas, both make their livings as professional comedians, mostly for Jewish audiences. But while often lighthearted, the book is a serious attempt to get past the cliches, good and bad, about a country that is both demonized and idealized, but too seldom seen as the real country it is.
Over email, the pair answered our questions on Yom Haatzmaut, during which Israel’s 75th year of independence was being celebrated amid national anxiety over the country’s far-right government. On Thursday evening, April 27, the two will appear at an “Israel 75” Comedy Night at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in Manhattan (30 West 68th Street, 7:00 p.m. Get tickets here).
New York Jewish Week: I hate to say “too soon” after 75 years, but do you think readers are ready to laugh with Israel? What do two Jewish comics bring to readers’ understanding of the country?
Chasnoff and Lovitt: Absolutely! Comedy is all about finding the overlooked contradiction and this book, and Israel, are full of them. Throughout our comedy/book tour, we have found crowds who are eager to laugh at and with Israel, even during the current news cycle. Per the book itself, readers especially have told us that they like the 10-question quiz, “How Israeli are You?”, that kicks off the book. That said, there are plenty of serious sections of the book with no laughs at all, such as the power of Yom Hazikaron [Israel’s Memorial Day, marked this past Tuesday]. Comedy is a great tool for introducing complicated topics into a conversation, and it’s definitely an important one in our arsenal.
What’s the single biggest thing people get wrong about Israel?
For one thing, many assume that daily life is consumed by the Arab-Israeli conflict, worries of a nuclear Iran and other threats. One thing we tried to make clear is that daily life continues, even in the most difficult of times. For example, a standup comedian will take the stage just hours after a terror attack a few miles away, and acknowledge in a clever way the tragedy the country has just endured.
In addition to what they get wrong, there are also the aspects of life that people simply don’t know about but are hugely impactful on how Israelis think and live. In “Israel 201,” we wanted to show how Israeliness infuses every angle of daily life, from children who create their own recess games because their school lacks a playground to the Academy of the Hebrew Language, which debates and creates new words to the Israeli lexicon based on current trends of the country.
“Israel 201” includes interviews from Israelis from all walks of life. (Geffen Publishing House)
Books of Israel advocacy bring to mind the old joke, “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the show?” — in the sense that no matter how Israel’s supporters attempt to “normalize” the country, the outside world will always associate the country with conflict, religious strife and the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Who is the intended audience for your book, and were you expecting to change any minds?
Anyone in Israel advocacy knows to target the supporters and undecideds, not the “haters” who you’ll never convince. Though we don’t see this book as advocacy, most of our readers are Jewish. What makes “Israel 201” special however is that it’s equally entertaining for someone who’s only visited for a 10-day trip as for someone who made aliyah 30 years ago. It’s precisely because it’s a “next-level guide” that people of varying levels of Israel experience can learn from it. That said, we’ve heard from readers who’ve never visited that this was a great entry point due to its focus on daily life and what they might see firsthand.
I think your book came out too late to deal with or anticipate the current “constitutional” crisis in Israel, and the protests over the government’s judicial reforms. But what understandings does your book bring to the current showdown? Are you optimistic about Israel’s future?
Actually, despite the book’s release in March, we feel that the book is filled with examples of these existential questions that Israel grapples with. In the final chapter, we interviewed David Passig, a futurist who foresaw past world events such as 9/11 and the 2008 financial crash. We were actually surprised by how optimistic he was about the country’s future. He noted that it’s hard to have perspective or see the bigger picture when you’re smack in the middle of it. This isn’t the first time Israel has feared for its future. On the eve of the Six-Day War, the Jewish world believed that we were literally on the brink of extinction. All countries go through tremendous growing pains, but if the Zionist pioneers had been able to see what we’ve achieved in the last 75 years, they wouldn’t have believed it. During our five years of writing the book, we repeatedly encountered incredible resilience, from advocates for women’s rights to the rise of LGBTQ activism in the IDF. It is this resilience which makes us optimistic.
—
The post Did you hear the one about the Jewish comedians who set out to explain Israel? appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
VIDEO: A Hasid gives us a tour of Morocco in Yiddish
דער ירושלימער יוטוב־שטערן וועלוול קירשנבוים האָט לעצטנס אַרויסגעשטעלט אַ ווידעאָ אויף ייִדיש פֿון אַ פּרעכטיקן וויזיט, וואָס ער האָט געמאַכט אין מאַראָקאָ. עס באַגלייט אים זײַן חבֿר אַבֿרהם פּרץ.
אינעם ווידעאָ זעט מען ווי קירשנבוים דאַוונט שחרית מיט די אָרטיקע ייִדן און באַזוכט אַ גוט אָפּגעהיטענעם בית־עולם, וווּ עס ליגן באַערדיקט גרויסע צדיקים ווי למשל הרבֿ חיים בן עתר (1696–1743), באַקאַנט ווי דער „אור החיים“. „מענטשן מיינען, אַז נאָר אין אייראָפּע זענען דאָ קבֿרים פֿון צדיקים!“ זאָגט קירשנבוים.
מיר זעען אַ גרויסע, שיינע שיל מיט אַ פֿײַנער אַרכיטעקטור אין קאַזאַבלאַנקאַ; דעם גרויסן אַראַבישן שוק, וווּ קירשנבוים קויפֿט זיך אײַן מלבושים פּונקט ווי די מאַראָקאַנער גייען אָנגעטאָן. ער באַוווּנדערט אויך די שיינע טיי־גלעזער און טשײַניקן, וואָס מע פֿאַרקויפֿט דאָרט, און באַקענט זיך מיט אַ ייִדישן סוחר וואָס האַנדלט מיט זילבער און גאָלד, פּונקט אַזוי ווי זײַן טאַטע און זיידע האָבן געטאָן פֿאַר דור־דורות.
The post VIDEO: A Hasid gives us a tour of Morocco in Yiddish appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Conservative and Christian movies are coming for Hollywood
A star-studded new movie set in a Soviet prison is coming out in November. James Franco and Rob Lowe anchor the cast of Confession, playing a brutal prison guard and an imprisoned dissident professor, and a disheveled Nick Nolte appears as a fellow prisoner.
These actors were once huge gets, and their names could convey legitimacy to a project. Nolte and Franco both have received Academy Award nominations. Lowe was a member of the Brat Pack, and was a regular on The West Wing.
Confession, written by Ben Shapiro and produced by the rightwing tabloid-esque news site The Daily Wire, is not the expected fare for actors with that kind of name recognition; Shapiro’s screenwriting aspirations have been the target of ridicule for years.
Nevertheless, this isn’t the only Daily Wire production getting big names; Danny Trejo signed onto a pro-ICE movie about Minneapolis in the aftermath of the Renee Good shooting, and Jonathan Majors led Run, Fight, Hide: Infidels earlier this year.
Each one of these actors has been, in some way, canceled or in career doldrums so may have been more open to working with The Daily Wire. And some have claimed that they did not know who Shapiro was, or what his politics were; Trejo’s son, Gilbert, said his 82-year-old father did not endorse ICE and was misled about the movie before he signed his contract.
Movie studios have struggled through the pandemic and the streaming era, both of which have tanked box office receipts, leaving the field open for movies from offbeat production studios. In addition to The Daily Wire, there has been a whole ream of Christian movies attempting to shift the stereotype of bible movies — that they’re preachy, low-budget straight-to-TV affairs with cardboard acting — to something more prestigious, or at least profitable.
The Christian company Angel Studios has been placing screenings of the half philo-semitic, half-antisemitic Jesus TV series The Chosen in movie theaters across the country, produced the right-wing hit The Sound of Freedom and is pumping out faith-based movies like the animated King of Kings Christmas story and David, a kiddie movie about the biblical king. Recently, Pinnacle Peak Pictures, another faith-based production company, premiered Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, another bible movie that was notable enough to merit a review in The New York Times. (Though admittedly it wasn’t a particularly positive one.)
For decades, Hollywood, and the media industry at large, has been associated with liberalism, progressive politics and diversity. (This is part of why conservative conspiracy theorists often insist that Jews control the media.) Even when conservatives are in power, satirical movies have poked fun at the ruling class — Team America: World Police spoofed George W. Bush’s foreign policy, while M*A*S*H critiqued Richard Nixon. During the current Trump administration, we’ve seen One Battle After Another lambasting immigration policies and rising white nationalism, Eddington on misinformation and populism, and The Apprentice depicting Trump directly.
But a rising number of higher-budget, bigger releases from the right wing, whether The Daily Wire’s conservative political parables or the Christian fables, are bringing a new kind of messaging — about the importance of God and country, about gender roles, about about the centrality of Jesus to the U.S. — to the American movie-going public.
This is no accident. A group of powerful conservative Christians, many of whom worked on Project 2025, are proponents of the Seven Mountains Mandate, a blueprint for Christian nationalism that instructs Christians to gain influence and control over the “seven mountains” of society — which include media, entertainment and the arts. The Mandate is part of the New Apostolic Reformation, a decentralized evangelical movement embraced by millions of Americans.
Jeremy Boreing, the director of many Daily Wire movies — though he has since left the company — said on a podcast hosted by businessman Patrick Bet-David that “It had always been part of our strategy to move into making culture, not just criticizing culture” as a way of proving that “there is a future where conservatives aren’t losing. There’s a future where we have political power and cultural power.”
Cultural power, of course, requires more than just a lot of movies; they have to be well-done, or at least appear to be. Previous Daily Wire productions, as well as other right-wing, MAGA movie ventures, have been hacky. Lady Ballers, about an unsuccessful men’s basketball team pretending to be women so they can dominate the league, was an unsubtle, unfunny and ultimately unwatchable spoof of transgender athletes. And even plenty of higher-budget attempts, like Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, can still fall victim to wooden acting and writing.
But now, with the financial success of movies like The Sound of Freedom and biblical parables like The Chosen, bigger stars are being drawn to projects like the Daily Wire’s lineup of pro-ICE, anti-immigration and anti-LGBTQ movies. With those bigger stars may come new audiences who might not have watched a Christian movie or Daily Wire project otherwise. And where there is money and viewers, mainstream Hollywood will go, too, no matter how progressive people expect the industry to be. We’ve already gotten a biblical epic from Amazon Prime, with The House of David, and there are likely to be many more to come.
After all, it wasn’t so long ago, after all, that Cecil DeMille’s The Ten Commandments was the biggest movie in town.
The post Conservative and Christian movies are coming for Hollywood appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
‘Heil’ Mary? New Atlanta Falcons logo inspires Nazi comparisons
If there was something off about the logo the Atlanta Falcons unveiled on social media Wednesday, whoever runs their accounts did, uh, not see it.
Behind the black falcon graphic that began appearing on the football team’s helmets in the 1960s was a new background — a flag of red, tan, black and white vertical stripes. To thousands of people who responded to the logo, it looked distinctly German — in a 1930s kind of way.
“The Atlanta Falcons are preparing to invade Poland,” one fan wrote.
A day after its posting, the new profile picture had unleashed a deluge of Nazi memes in the 4,000-plus replies on X. One picture swapped in the logo for Nazi flags in the background of a historical photo of a Hitler rally. Another edited the Falcon claw to look like a Nazi salute.
Others depicted Hitler in a Falcons cap, references to Inglourious Basterds and the Battle of the Bulge and a World War II joke invoking a blown lead in Super Bowl LI.
“Falcons were up 28-3 at Dunkirk,” that tweet read.
The Falcons’ snafu enters a small but growing catalogue of Reich-coded brand mixups. Who can forget the German national soccer team’s ‘44’ soccer jerseys? There was also the swastika-emblazoned Hallmark gift wrap; the accidental Hitler mugs; and (for my money) the worst of the bunch, Zara’s concentration camp uniform shirt.
All of those have been addressed; so far, the Falcons’ has not. We’ve reached out to them for comment.
The post ‘Heil’ Mary? New Atlanta Falcons logo inspires Nazi comparisons appeared first on The Forward.
