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How Jewish comedy found religion, from Philip Roth to ‘Broad City’
(JTA) — In the 2020 comedy “Shiva Baby,” a 20-something young woman shows up at a house of Jewish mourners and gently offers her condolences. When she finds her mother in the kitchen, they chat about the funeral and the rugelach before the daughter asks, “Mom, who died?”
While “Shiva Baby” explores themes of sexuality and gender, the comedy almost never comes at the expense of Jewish tradition, which is treated seriously by its millennial writer and director Emma Seligman (born in 1995) even as the shiva-goers collide. It’s far cry from the acerbic way an author raised during the Depression like Philip Roth lampooned a Jewish wedding or a baby boomer like Jerry Seinfeld mocked a bris.
These generational differences are explored in Jenny Caplan’s new book, “Funny, You Don’t Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials.” A religion scholar, Caplan writes about the way North American Jewish comedy has evolved since World War II, with a focus on how humorists treat Judaism as a religion. Her subjects range from writers and filmmakers who came of age shortly after the war (who viewed Judaism as “a joke at best and an actual danger at worst”) to Generation X and millennials, whose Jewish comedy often recognizes “the power of community, the value of family tradition, and the way that religion can serve as a port in an emotional storm.”
“I see great value in zeroing in on the ways in which Jewish humorists have engaged Jewish practices and their own Jewishness,” Caplan writes. “It tells us something (or perhaps it tells us many somethings) about the relationship between Jews and humor that goes deeper than the mere coincidence that a certain humorist was born into a certain family.”
Caplan is the chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Cincinnati. She has a master’s of theological studies degree from Harvard Divinity School and earned a Ph.D. in religion from Syracuse University.
In a conversation last week, we spoke about the Jewishness of Jerry Seinfeld, efforts by young women comics to reclaim the “Jewish American Princess” label, and why she no longer shows Woody Allen movies in her classrooms.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity
[Note: For the purpose of her book and our conversation, this is how Caplan isolates the generations: the Silent Generation (b. 1925-45), the baby boom (1946-65), Generation X (1966-79) and millennials (1980–95).]
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Let me ask how you got into this topic.
Jenny Caplan: I grew up in a family where I was just sort of surrounded by this kind of material. My dad is a comedic actor and director who went to [Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey’s] Clown College. My degrees were more broadly in American religion, not Jewish studies, but I was really interested in the combination of American religion and popular culture. When I got to Syracuse and it came time to start thinking about my larger project and what I wanted to do, I proposed a dissertation on Jewish humor.
The key to your book is how Jewish humor reflects the Jewish identity and compulsions of four sequential generations. Let’s start with the Silent Generation, which is sandwiched between the generation whose men were old enough to fight in World War II and the baby boomers who were born just after the war.
The hallmark of the Silent Generation is that they were old enough to be aware of the war, but they were mostly too young to serve. Every time I told people what I was writing about, they would say Woody Allen or Philip Roth, two people of roughly the same generation.
In “Funny, You Don’t Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials,” Jenny Caplan explores how comics treated religion from the end of World War II to the 21st century. (Courtesy)
The Roth story you focus on is “Eli, the Fanatic” from 1959, about an assimilated Jewish suburb that is embarrassed and sort of freaks out when an Orthodox yeshiva, led by a Holocaust survivor, sets up in town.
Roth spent the first 20 to 30 years of his career dodging the claim of being a self-loathing Jew and bad for the Jews. But the actual social critique of “Eli, the Fanatic” is so sharp. It is about how American Jewish comfort comes at the expense of displaced persons from World War II and at the expense of those for whom Judaism is a real thriving, living religious practice.
That’s an example you offer when you write that the Silent Generation “may have found organized religion to be a dangerous force, but they nevertheless wanted to protect and preserve the Jewish people.” I think that would surprise people in regards to Roth, and maybe to some degree Woody Allen.
Yeah, it surprised me. They really did, I think, share that postwar Jewish sense of insecurity about ongoing Jewish continuity, and that there’s still an existential threat to the ongoing existence of Jews.
I hear that and I think of Woody Allen’s characters, atheists who are often on the lookout for antisemitism. But you don’t focus on Allen as the intellectual nebbish of the movies. You look at his satire of Jewish texts, like his very funny “Hassidic Tales, With a Guide to Their Interpretation by the Noted Scholar” from 1970, which appeared in The New Yorker. It’s a parody of Martin Buber’s “Tales of the Hasidim” and sentimental depictions of the shtetl, perhaps like “Fiddler on the Roof.” A reader might think he’s just mocking the tradition, but you think there’s something else going on.
He’s not mocking the tradition as much as he’s mocking a sort of consumerist approach to the tradition. There was this sort of very superficial attachment to Buber’s “Tales of the Hasidim.” Allen’s satire is not a critique of the traditions of Judaism, it’s a critique of the way that people latch onto things like the Kabbalah and these new English translations of Hasidic stories without any real depth of thought or intellect. Intellectual hypocrisy seems to be a common theme in his movies and in his writing. It’s really a critique of organized religion, and it’s a critique of institutions, and it’s a critique of the power of institutions. But it’s not a critique of the concept of religion.
The idea of making fun of the wise men and their gullible followers reminds me of the folk tales of Chelm, which feature rabbis and other Jewish leaders who use Jewish logic to come to illogical conclusions.
Yes.
You write that the baby boomers are sort of a transition between the Silent Generation and a later generation: They were the teenagers of the counterculture, and warned about the dangers of empty religion, but also came to consider religion and tradition as valuable. But before you get there, you have a 1977 “Saturday Night Live” skit in which a bris is performed in the back seat of a luxury car, and the rabbi who performs it is portrayed as what you call an absolute sellout.
Exactly. You know: Institutional religion is empty and it’s hollow, it’s dangerous and it’s seductive.
Jerry Seinfeld, born in 1954, is seen as an icon of Jewish humor, but to me is an example of someone who never depicts religion as a positive thing. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
“Seinfeld” is more a show about New York than it is necessarily a show about anything Jewish. The New York of Seinfeld is very similar to the New York of Woody Allen, peopled almost entirely by white, middle-class, attractive folks. It’s a sort of Upper West Side myopia.
But there’s the bris episode, aired in 1993, and written by Larry Charles. Unless you are really interested in the medium, you may not know much about Larry Charles, because he stays behind the camera. But he also goes on to do things like direct Bill Maher’s anti-religion documentary “Religulous,” and there’s a real strong case for him as having very negative feelings about organized religion which feels like a holdover from the Silent Generation. And so in that episode you have Kramer as the Larry Charles stand-in, just opining about the barbaric nature of the circumcision and trying to save this poor baby from being mutilated.
The few references to actual Judaism in “Seinfeld” are squirmy. I am thinking of the 1995 episode in which a buffoon of a rabbi blurts out Elaine’s secrets on a TV show. That was written by Larry David, another boomer, whose follow-up series, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” is similarly known for its irreverence toward Judaism. But you say David can also surprise you with a kind of empathy for religion.
For the most part, he’s classic, old school, anti-organized religion. There’s the Palestinian Chicken episode where the Jews are rabidly protesting the existence of a Palestinian-run chicken restaurant near a Jewish deli, and where his friend Funkhouser won’t play golf on Shabbos until Larry gets permission by bribing the rabbi with the Palestinian chicken. There, rabbis are ridiculous and can be bought and religion is hollow and this is all terrible.
But then there’s this bat mitzvah montage where for one moment in the entire run of this show, Larry seems happy and in a healthy relationship and fulfilled and enjoying life.
That’s where he falls in love with Loretta Black during a bat mitzvah and imagines a happy future with her.
It’s so startling: It is the most human we ever see Larry over the run of the show, and I believe that was the season finale for the 2007 season. It was much more in line with what we’ve been seeing from a lot of younger comedians at that point, which was religion as an anchor in a good way — not to pull you down but to keep you grounded.
So for Generation X, as you write, Judaism serves “real, emotional, or psychological purpose for the practitioners.”
I wouldn’t actually call it respect but religion is an idea that’s not just something to be mocked and relegated to the dustbin. I’m not saying that Generation X is necessarily more religious, but they see real power and value in tradition and in certain kinds of family experiences. So, a huge amount of the humor can still come at the expense of your Jewish mother or your Jewish grandmother, but the family can also be the thing that is keeping you grounded, and frequently through some sort of religious ritual.
Who exemplifies that?
My favorite example is the 2009 Jonathan Tropper novel, “This Is Where I Leave You.” I’m so disappointed that the film adaptation of that sucked a lot of the Jewish identity out of the story, so let’s stick with the novel. In that book, where a family gathers for their father’s shiva, the characters are horrible people in a dysfunctional family writ large. They lie to each other. They backstab each other. But in scene where the protagonist Judd describes standing up on the bimah [in synagogue] to say Kaddish [the Mourner’s Prayer] after the death of his father, and the way he talks about this emotional catharsis that comes from saying the words and hearing the congregation say the words — it’s a startling moment of clarity in a book where these characters are otherwise just truly reprehensible.
Adam Sandler was born in 1966, the first year of Generation X, and his “Chanukah Song” seems like such a touchstone for his generation and the ones that follow. It’s not about religious Judaism, but in listing Jewish celebrities, it’s a statement of ethnic pride that Roth or Woody Allen couldn’t imagine.
It’s the reclamation of Jewish identity as something great and cool and fun and hip and wonderful and absolutely not to be ashamed of.
From left, Ilana Glazer, Abbi Jacobson and Seth Green in an episode of “Broad City” parodying Birthright Israel. (Screenshot from Comedy Central)
Which brings us to “Broad City,” which aired between 2014 and 2019. It’s about two 20-something Jewish women in New York who, in the case of Ilana Glazer’s character, anyway, are almost giddy about being Jewish and embrace it just as they embrace their sexuality: as just liberating. Ilana even upends the Jewish mother cliche by loving her mother to death.
That’s the episode with Ilana at her grandmother’s shiva, which also has the B plot where Ilana and her mother are shopping for underground illegal handbags. They spend most of the episode snarking at each other and fighting with each other and her mother’s a nag and Ilana is a bumbling idiot. But at the moment that the cops show up, and try to nab them for having all of these illegal knockoff handbags, the two of them are a team. They are an absolute unit of destructive force against these hapless police officers.
I think all of your examples of younger comics are women, who have always had fraught relationships with Jewish humor, both as practitioners and as the target of jokes. You write about “The JAP Battle” rap from “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” which both leans into the stereotype of the Jewish-American Princess — spoiled, acquisitive, “hard as nails” — and tries to reclaim it without the misogyny.
Rachel Bloom’s character Rebecca in “Girlfriend” self-identifies as a JAP, but she doesn’t actually fit the category. It’s her mother, Naomi, who truly is the Philip Roth, “Marjorie Morningstar,” Herman Wouk model of a JAP. So Bloom is kind of using the term, but you can’t repurpose the term when the original is still there.
So as an alternative, I offer up a new term: the Modern Ashkenazi American Woman. It’s very New York, it’s very East Coast, it’s very particular to a type of upbringing and community that in the 1950s and ’60s would have been almost exclusively Conservative Jews, and then may have become a bit more Reform as we’ve gotten into the ’90s and 2000s. They went to the JCC. They probably went to Jewish summer camp.
But even that doesn’t even really speak to the American sense of what Jewish is anymore, because American Jews have become increasingly racially and culturally diverse.
There is also something that’s happening historically with Generation X, and that’s the distance from the two major Jewish events of the 20th century, which is the Holocaust and the creation of Israel.
The Silent Generation and baby boomers still had a lingering sense of existential dread — the sense that we’re not so far removed from an attempted total annihilation of Jews. Gen X and millennials are so far removed from the Holocaust that they don’t feel that same fear.
But the real battleground we’re seeing in contemporary American Judaism is about the relationship to Israel. For baby boomers and even for some older members of Gen X, there’s still a sense that you can criticize Israel, but at the end of the day, it’s your duty to ultimately support Israel’s right to exist. And I think millennials and Zoomers [Gen Z] are much more comfortable with the idea of Israel being illegitimate.
Have you seen that in comedy?
I certainly think you can see the leading edge of that in some millennial stuff. The “Jews on a Plane” episode of “Broad City” is an absolute excoriation of Birthright Israel, and does not seem particularly interested in softening its punches about the whole idea of Jews going to Israel. I think we can see a trend in that direction, where younger American Jewish comedians do not see that as punching down.
You’re teaching a class on Jewish humor. What do your undergraduates find funny? Now that Woody Allen is better known for having married his adoptive daughter and for the molestation allegations brought by another adoptive daughter, do they look at his classic films and ask, “Why are you teaching us this guy?”
For the first time I’m not including Woody Allen. I had shown “Crimes and Misdemeanors” for years because I think it’s his most theological film. I think it’s a great film. And then a couple years ago, I backed off, because some students were responding that it was hard to look at him with all the baggage. He’s still coming up in conversation because you can’t really talk about the people who came after him without talking about him, but for the first time I’m not having them actually watch or read any of his stuff.
They have found things funny that I didn’t expect them to, and they have not found things funny that I would have thought they would. They laughed their way through “Yidl mitn fidl,” the 1936 Yiddish musical starring Molly Picon. I also thought they’d enjoy the Marx Brothers’ “Duck Soup” and they did not laugh once. Some of that is the fact that Groucho’s delivery is just so fast.
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How a 19th century murder introduced Americans to a Jewish funeral
In June 1857, newspapers from Philadelphia to St. Louis carried reports of a shocking crime in western Massachusetts. Isaac Jackson, a 17- or 18-year-old German Jewish peddler from Westfield, was shot and robbed while traveling his route between the towns of Westfield and Russell. His body was dragged to the bank of a river, concealed beneath stones and debris, and not discovered until the following day. Contemporary newspaper stories described it as one of western Massachusetts’ most notorious murders in half a century.
The crime quickly attracted national attention as accounts proliferated, sometimes differing on details such as Jackson’s age. Reporters described the search for his body, the arrest of Charles Jones, known to readers as the “ministerial burglar,” and the growing public anger that led some spectators to openly discuss lynching the accused before he could stand trial.
The attention came decades before mass migration from Eastern Europe transformed American Jewish life. The country’s Jewish population numbered no more than 200,000. Yet Jackson’s murder became national news, and newspapers far beyond Massachusetts used the story of his funeral to explain Jewish burial and mourning customs to their readers.
After Jackson’s body was recovered, it was taken to Hartford, Connecticut, for burial, “there being no synagogue at Westfield.” His funeral was held at Touro Hall, home of Congregation Beth Israel, which had only recently converted the former North Baptist Church into a synagogue with the help of a bequest from the Jewish philanthropist Judah Touro.
According to an account first published in the Hartford Times and widely reprinted in newspapers across the country, the body was washed and clothed in white linen garments “expressly made by Jewish women,” who considered it a final act of kindness toward a fellow Jew. Earth was placed beneath the head “to indicate that all cometh from the earth and returneth thither again.” The head was turned toward the east, symbolizing, the newspaper explained, “the great reverence of the Israelite towards the land of his nationality,” and the hope that “as the sun rises to revivify all creation so will the dead finally rise to everlasting life.”
As the coffin was lowered, those gathered prayed, “May the soul of the departed come to its resting place in peace.” Each mourner then placed earth upon the grave before reciting the words, “Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.”
The funeral itself was not the only moment that revealed how Isaac’s family mourned.
When word reached Westfield that a peddler had been murdered along the road to Russell, “there was a great rush in that direction, and at least one hundred persons were promptly there. Among them were Coroner Abbott, Justice Lewis, and other prominent citizens.” Isaac’s brother Joseph also hurried to the scene. At first, according to one newspaper account, he refused to believe the victim could be his younger sibling. But when he saw the wagon, he recognized it immediately and “burst into tears.”
As the body was recovered from the stream, Joseph, the newspaper reported, performed what it described as his “first duty as a Jew,” removing from Isaac’s pockets the tefillin he carried “to bind around his forehead and arm each morning upon rising.”
The newspapers also offered small glimpses of the life that had ended so suddenly. Isaac was the youngest of four brothers, whose family operated a store in Westfield and maintained traveling peddler wagons throughout the surrounding countryside. On the morning of the murder, he left carrying dry goods, jewelry and ready-made clothing. Among the possessions later identified by his brother was his watch.
The burial rites did not end with the funeral.
Several weeks later, the Springfield Daily Republican published a brief account, later reprinted in the Boston Evening Transcript, about one of Isaac’s brothers while he was again traveling as a peddler with the same wagon. As he unfolded a piece of cloth for a customer, he noticed a single drop of blood. Overcome with emotion, the newspaper reported, he “cried for a few moments like a child,” then folded the cloth and declared that he must return to Hartford so the bloodstained cloth could be buried with his brother. According to the account, everything bearing Isaac’s blood that had been found after the murder had already been interred with him, per Jewish tradition.
Isaac Jackson still rests in Hartford’s Zion Hill Cemetery. Much of his life has been lost to history. But the newspapers that reported his murder preserved something that endures: a careful record of the customs through which his family and community buried him.
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How an obscure centrist politician could be key to defeating Netanyahu in October
(JTA) —
TEL AVIV — At a barbecue on a Netanya rooftop earlier this month, MK Yoav Segalovitz, a politician most people outside Israel have never heard of, told his fellow members of the leading opposition party Yesh Atid that he would not be running with them in the upcoming October election.
It’s a decision that could reshape Israel’s political landscape and determine whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will lose the October 27 election.
That’s because Segalovitz, 67, who formerly headed the Israel Police’s Investigations and Intelligence Division, is planning to join Ra’am, an Arab party that was the kingmaker in the 2021 elections, pollster Yousef Makladeh told Jewish Telegraphic Agency, describing his conversation with Segalovitz prior to leaving the party. Makladeh added that the move had been under discussion for months.
In an official statement last week, Ra’am’s chairman Mansour Abbas and Segalovitz said they had met and held a “cordial and positive” discussion about the possibility of Segalovitz joining Ra’am’s slate in the upcoming Knesset elections. The two agreed to continue direct talks in an effort to advance the matter.
If that indeed happens, it would send a seismic shock though the Israeli political system on two fronts: Segalovitz would be the first lawmaker in decades to leave a Zionist party for an Arab-led party; and that party would be in a position to join other opposition groups to pry control of the next Israeli government away from Netanyahu.
The willingness of Ra’am and two Zionist slates — Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party and Naftali Bennett’s New Right party — to join a coalition in 2021 led by Bennett and Lapid provided the needed seats to push Netanyahu out of power after 12 consecutive years as prime minister. The first coalition in Israeli history to take office with the support of an Arab party was unprecedented –and viewed by many as a historic breakthrough in Jewish-Arab political cooperation.
The question in 2026 is: Could it happen again?
This time around, the prospect of an Arab party in the coalition prompts more wariness among many Israelis, and Bennett and Lapid have both ruled out forming a coalition with one.
Israeli polls have consistently shown that neither Netanyahu’s coalition nor the bloc of opposition Jewish parties led by his chief rival, former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, is on track to secure the 61 seats needed to form a government. The opposition’s Jewish parties have consistently polled at approximately 58 to 60 seats, while Netanyahu’s bloc trails with roughly 50.
That deadlock has thrust Ra’am, led by MK Mansour Abbas, back into the spotlight. Most recent polls give the party between five and seven seats, potentially making it the kingmaker once again.
Founded in 1996, Ra’am, whose name is an Arabic acronym meaning United Arab List, has roots in the Southern Branch of the Islamic Movement and had until recently been a religious Arab party. It had been part of the traditional bloc of Arab parties in the Knesset until Abbas split away, as part of his strategy to shift the party’s focus from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to practical achievements for Israel’s Arab society.
Makladeh, who has conducted surveys for Channel 13 and political parties across Israel’s political spectrum, describes Ra’am as “the missing piece of the puzzle” that could lift the opposition bloc “to 62 or 63 seats.”
In 2021, however, there was a shedding of some of the longstanding reluctance to consider an Arab party in the coalition, for those who saw the political necessity of doing so in order to remove Netanyahu from office. Netanyahu himself had reportedly spoken with Abbas about some form of a political partnership. This time around, the prospect of an Arab party in the coalition prompts more wariness among many Israelis, particularly this early in the election cycle when it is unclear if it will be absolutely necessary to do so.
Political commentator Nadav Perry, host of one of Israel’s most influential political podcasts, says that the party’s ties to conservative Muslim religious leadership, together with the rapid collapse of the 2021 government and the trauma of Oct. 7, 2023, had effectively pushed the idea of Ra’am joining another coalition with Jewish parties back to “square one.”
The addition of Segalovitz to Ra’am could change that by making the party more palatable to the Israeli public and could expand its voting base.
Ameer Bisharat, the former director-general of the National Committee of Arab Local Council Heads, added that Arab Israelis are “hungry for change.”
“Change can come through political power, and Abbas understands that very well. He is trying to create that political power,” Bisharat said
JTA reached out to both Ra’am and Segalovitz for comment. Segalovitz’s spokesperson declined to comment, while Ra’am did not respond to a request for comment.
Segalovitz has been a member of the Lapid-led Yesh Atid party, a centrist bloc which emphasizes secular rights and opposition to draft exemptions for haredi Orthodox yeshiva students, since 2016. He later served as Deputy Minister of Internal Security in the Bennett-Lapid government. In that role, Segalovitz was the public face of the government’s efforts to combat violent crime in Israel’s Arab communities. During his tenure, the number of murders in Arab communities declined sharply before rising dramatically again after the government fell.
Bisharat, who worked with Segalovitz and now advises the public policy department at the Accord Institute on Arab voting patterns, said the Bennett-Lapid government was “successful” for Arab society. It helped build trust between the government and Arab citizens and it presided during a decline in violent crime in the Arab communities in Israel.
Under Segalovitz’s leadership, a special plan was developed to combat crime in Arab communities, focusing on the main drivers of crime, improving case clearance rates and strengthening cooperation among the various authorities, which was not continued under far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. In Segalovitz’s only full year in government, the number of Arab citizens killed in crimes fell from 126 to 116, according to data from the Abraham Initiatives, a nonprofit that tracks violence and crime in Arab communities. The figure surged to 244 the following year, after he was replaced.
“Segalovitz was the point person in the previous government on crime in the Arab community,” said Perry, the political commentator. “He worked on it, and he delivered results. That made him a very popular figure on the Arab street. Not because he was pro-Palestinian, not because he was against the IDF, but because he reduced crime among Arab citizens.”
Former Yesh Atid MK Inbar Bezek, who served alongside Segalovitz in both the party and the coalition that relied on Ra’am, told JTA: “I saw with my own eyes that Yoav is an extremely respected and well-liked figure throughout Arab society, especially among local government leaders.”
Segalovitz’s possible move is far more than symbolic.
Bezek believes Segalovitz could both increase Arab voter turnout and attract Jewish left-wing voters to Ra’am. “I truly think he’s someone who brings voters to the ballot box,” she said. But she emphasized that the addition of Jewish voters would not change the overall balance between the opposing blocs, because those voters would otherwise support the Democrats, the most left-wing Zionist party.
That assessment appears to be supported by a recent Channel 13 poll, which was conducted in part by Makladeh. The survey found that Ra’am would rise to seven seats if Segalovitz joined the party, compared with five seats in most recent polls. Makladeh said six of those seats would come from Arab voters, while one would come from Jewish voters.
The move’s real significance, argued Perry, lies not in winning additional votes before Election Day but in what happens afterward. He says that bringing Segalovitz into the party is intended “to create renewed legitimacy for Ra’am’s participation in a governing coalition.”
“I don’t think this would dramatically reshape the electoral map,” Perry said. “But it could dramatically reshape the question of legitimacy. It could complete Mansour Abbas’ metamorphosis from the leader of a non-Zionist Islamist party into the leader of a Jewish-Arab party that puts the integration of Israel’s Arab citizens first, while setting aside issues related to the Palestinian national struggle.”
Perry’s comments come as leaders of the opposition bloc send mixed and sometimes contradictory signals about whether they would govern with Ra’am.
Eisenkot has said he “doesn’t rule out” a coalition partnership with Abbas. Another strong contender for the premiership, Bennett, whose Together (Beyachad) party is polling second within the opposing bloc, said in February that “after October 7, there is no mandate in Israel for a government that relies on Arab parties.” Bennett recently declined to answer directly when asked whether he would rely on Abbas to form a government. Speculation is high, however, that he would agree to sit with Ra’am, given his past record of including the party in the coalition after running a campaign in which he promised not to do so.
Opposition Leader Lapid joined forces in this election cycle with Bennett after his own party struggled in the polls and the two now run together on the same slate. Lapid has also ruled out forming a government that relies on Arab parties — a notable position given that Lapid was the architect of the move to bring Ra’am into the coalition in 2021. Another opposition leader, Avigdor Liberman who heads Yisrael Beiteinu, sat with Ra’am in the 2021-2022 government. Last week, however, he said that “Ra’am cannot be a coalition partner.”
Segalovitz’s membership in Ra’am could soften that resistance.
“It will be very difficult to delegitimize a party whose number two is a Zionist and a former Israel Police major general,” Makladeh said. He believes that Segalovitz’s addition could effectively “legitimize” Ra’am’s votes in the eyes of the Israeli public, making it easier for opposition leaders to cooperate with the party after the election.
The hesitation among opposition leaders also reflects Netanyahu’s campaign strategy, which identifies the bloc’s dependence on Arab support as its main political vulnerability.
In a video posted this month on X, Netanyahu juxtaposed his political rivals with Abbas under the slogan, “It’s them or us.”
Segalovitz’s potential move has also drawn backlash from the right. Ben-Gvir called Segalovitz’s departure from Yesh Atid “a joint conspiracy by the left to pave the way for a future government with the Muslim Brotherhood.” Coalition lawmaker Tally Gotliv of the Likud called Segalovitz Abbas’ “pet Jew” and warned that his move could lead to “the imposition of Sharia law on Israel.”
Perry said, “Almost the only political asset Netanyahu has left to take into the election is negative campaigning, because it’s very difficult to build a positive campaign around the last term.” He argued that Netanyahu has relatively few lines of attack against Eisenkot beyond the possibility that he could form a government with Arab parties. “That’s basically the Likud’s one-trick pony in 2026,” Perry added. “And it’s a message that has political effectiveness.”
This is why the addition of Segalovitz who comes from the Israeli center and not the far left is significant, Perry explained. The political commentator added: “If Ra’am enters the realm of legitimacy — because it is no longer Ra’am, it is no longer Islamist, and it is no longer only Abbas but Abbas and Segalovitz — then that could create a more realistic possibility of removing Netanyahu after the election.”
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Man charged in Central Synagogue attack linked to posts about Israel, Judaism, and Mamdani
The man accused of attacking a woman and a security guard at Central Synagogue, a prominent New York City congregation on Manhattan’s Upper East Side during Friday night services, had filled his Facebook page with posts about Israel and Judaism in the months leading up to the attack — and, according to his aunt, had expressed a desire to convert to the Jewish faith.
“He’s mentally traumatized because of his desire to belong to that religion [Judaism] — that’s what he’s said,” Myriam Montes, the aunt of Larry Montes, 46, told the New York Post.
“Given what happened, he might not have been in his right mind,” she said. However, she added that she had not spoken with her nephew in three months.
On a Facebook page that appears to belong to Montes, he reposted a video comparing New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Other videos reposted on the page focused on Jewish and Israeli topics. One featured a Jewish man disputing claims that the Talmud contains disparaging remarks about Jesus. In 2024, he posted a photo of the map of Israel with text overlaid that says, “Keep Israel in your heart.” Another reposted video featured Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi explaining why evangelical Christians support Israel.
The page also reposted several videos from Ruhama’s Food, a popular Israeli social media account.
The Facebook page’s recent posts are more disjointed. They include screenshots showing attempts to translate seemingly incoherent Spanish text into Hebrew.
Police said Montes had three prior arrests before the Central Synagogue attack, all of which were for robbery.
Montes was charged with two counts of assault as a hate crime and one count of criminal mischief as a hate crime. He is expected to appear in court on August 20.
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