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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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Trump national Shabbat divides America’s Jews ahead of National Mall prayer rally
(JTA) — As part of a 250th anniversary celebration of the United States, President Donald Trump is calling on Americans to pray together in a nine-hour marathon on the National Mall Sunday featuring a host of Christian speakers — and one rabbi.
But first, Trump is calling on Jews to mark Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest from sundown Friday to nightfall Saturday, and encouraging other Americans to consider embracing the ritual as well.
“In special honor of 250 glorious years of American independence and on the weekend of Rededicate 250 — a national jubilee of prayer, praise, and thanksgiving — Jewish Americans are encouraged to observe a national Sabbath,” Trump said in his Jewish American Heritage Month proclamation on May 4.
“From sundown on May 15 to nightfall on May 16, friends, families, and communities of all backgrounds may come together in gratitude for our great Nation,” he continued. “This day will recognize the sacred Jewish tradition of setting aside time for rest, reflection, and gratitude to the Almighty.”
The call marked the first time that an American president has formally urged the celebration of Shabbat. Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who converted to Judaism before marrying Jared Kushner, now a prominent Trump advisor, reportedly observes Shabbat according to traditional interpretations of Jewish law.
Trump’s call echoes the legacy of conservative Christian activist Charlie Kirk, who was fatally shot in September. Kirk’s book detailing his own observance of a “Jewish Sabbath” every week was published posthumously.
The exhortation has received mixed reviews from the American Jewish community. Some Jews have said they appreciate the gesture and recognition of a central tradition to Judaism, and even are promoting their own Shabbat services as part of “Shabbat 250.”
Others say Trump is appropriating Judaism to promote conservative political goals and Christian nationalism, a movement backed by a portion of Trump’s base that scholars say could push the country in a direction that is less hospitable to Jews.
Support for the initiative has been strongest among Orthodox Jews, who tend to be more politically conservative. Rabbi Josh Joseph, executive vice president of the Orthodox Union, endorsed Trump’s call soon after it was made.
“This weekend, following President Trump’s encouragement, we will mark Shabbat 250,” he said in a statement earlier this week. “We will pause to acknowledge all the blessings that the Almighty has provided American Jews through the unique devotion to liberty embedded in this nation.”
Some Orthodox synagogues, including many affiliated with the Chabad Hasidic movement, have announced “Shabbat 250” programming, such as dinners and special speakers. The group Young Jewish Conservatives, meanwhile, doled out $180 grants to conservative Jews under 35 who committed to hosting at least five people for a Shabbat dinner in their homes.
More than 7,500 people have declared on a new website, Shabbat250.org, their intention to observe Shabbat. Some Orthodox commentators tied Trump’s proclamation to the week’s Torah portion, which describes how the Israelites, having been freed from Egypt, took a census of themselves in the desert as their new nation came into focus.
“Today we celebrate the numbers, the 250th anniversary, but like a census, this milestone must also be a springboard from which to consider where America is going,” wrote Jonathan Feldstein, president of the Genesis 123 Foundation, a nonprofit that aims to build ties between Jews and Christians, on his Substack.
On the other side, Rabbi Jonah Pesner of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism is among the faith leaders scheduled to participate in a virtual event Friday morning that organizers say will “explain why so many religious Americans of diverse faiths are alarmed and alienated by attempts to use America’s 250th birthday as an opportunity to frame the US as a ‘Christian nation’ and to misrepresent the approach to religious tolerance and freedom adopted by our founders and Constitution.”
The perspective is shared widely on the Jewish left, where many leaders say it is inappropriate and harmful for Trump to involve himself in Shabbat.
“When the state meddles in our sacred affairs, blurring the already fuzzy lines between church and state, it doesn’t elevate the Sabbath; it diminishes the democracy that 250 years of history were supposed to protect,” Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie of the progressive Lab/Shul wrote in a blog post Wednesday. “I suggest we each adapt this ‘National Shabbat’ in our own unique way – not because a leader commanded it, but because our humanity demands it.”
The debate comes ahead of the prayer rally planned for the National Mall on Sunday. The event, called Rededicate 250, is organized by a nonprofit called Freedom 250, which is advertising an event lineup featuring Christian music as well as “Freedom Trucks” that provide educational material provided by the conservative advocacy group PragerU and the Christian classical school Hillsdale College.
Organizers are also promoting performances by U.S. military bands as well as participation from several Trump administration officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Trump himself is set to appear by video, and House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, will also take the stage.
Of the 33 prayer leaders set to appear, about half are of evangelical or non-denominational evangelical Christian practice. Baptist, Catholic and Seventh Day Adventist speakers will also speak.
The only non-Christian speaker on the lineup is Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, an Orthodox rabbi and senior scholar at the Tikvah Fund, a politically conservative Jewish think tank, who also sits on the Religious Liberty Commission that Trump created last year.
Rachel Laser, the Jewish CEO of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, denounced the rally as part of a rising tide of Christian nationalism.
“If President Trump and his allies truly cared about America’s legacy of religious freedom, they would be celebrating church-state separation as the unique American invention that has allowed religious diversity to flourish in our country,” she said in a statement. “Instead, they continue to threaten this foundational principle by advancing a Christian Nationalist crusade to impose one narrow version of Christianity on all Americans.”
The rally comes as Americans are growing more appreciative of religion, even if they do not necessarily practice any themselves. A new Pew Research Center report out this week shows that an increasing minority of American adults say religion is “gaining influence in American life” and more than half of Americans say religion plays a positive role in society.
The proportion of Americans who believe Christianity should be declared the official religion of the United States has grown slightly in recent years and now stands at 17%, according to the survey. A much larger proportion of Americans, 43%, said they believe Christianity should not be an official religion but that the government should promote Christian moral values.
The White House will host a reception to mark the start of Shabbat 250 late Friday afternoon.
The attention to Shabbat jolted by Trump’s proclamation has spurred a wave of non-political attention to Shabbat, too. The writer Daniella Greenbaum Davis, for example, explained rabbinic teachings in a column in the Washington Post urging non-Jews to consider adopting Shabbat as a mindfulness practice.
“Shabbat is a Jewish tradition,” Davis wrote. “But the case for a weekly day of rest, taking a formal break from worldly concerns, is universal.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Trump national Shabbat divides America’s Jews ahead of National Mall prayer rally appeared first on The Forward.
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Talarico won’t campaign with Democratic House candidate who wants to open ‘a prison for American Zionists’
(JTA) — Maureen Galindo, the housing activist and conspiracy theorist whose rants about “billionaire Zionists” have defined her pursuit of a U.S. House seat in Texas, is within spitting distance of winning a Democratic runoff in a competitive San Antonio-area district.
But if Galindo becomes the nominee, she’ll be without the support of the state’s most prominent Democrat: U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico.
“This antisemitic rhetoric has no place in our politics. We need leadership in both parties willing to stand up and call out hate wherever it rears its ugly head,” the Texas state representative, whose own surging campaign has garnered national attention, said in a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency when asked about Galindo.
Talarico’s campaign confirmed to JTA that he would not campaign with Galindo if she wins her May 26 runoff, in a district Democrats are hoping to flip following Republican-led redistricting in the state.
Talarico, a pastor, has sought to carve out a lane for himself as a religious progressive. While his interactions with the Jewish community have been minimal, his rejection of Galindo comes after he swore off support from pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC and expressed criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
It was a forceful rebuke of an outsider candidate who has quickly personified an extreme in antisemitic rhetoric among Democrats as the party, caught up in hopes for a “blue wave” in the midterms, is also facing a delicate moment in its relationship with Jews.
Galindo, a sex and family therapist and single mother who rose to local prominence after fighting a proposed redevelopment project affecting her affordable housing, so far has spent only around $11,000 on her campaign. Yet she came in first in the 35th District’s heated Democratic primary in March with 29.2% of the vote.
Her runoff opponent, sheriff’s deputy Johnny Garcia, received 27% of the vote. The third- and fourth-place finishers endorsed Galindo after conceding. Local progressives have suggested that Garcia’s early endorsement from Democratic Majority for Israel along with his positioning as an establishment moderate may have hurt his standing among Democratic voters, while Galindo’s anti-establishment stances may have helped her.
Asked about Talarico’s rejection of her, Galindo told JTA that his stance “says he might be Zionist affiliated so I’ll move around him accordingly.”
“I wouldn’t have been running with anyone anyway,” she wrote in an email. “I run autonomous campaigns so I can maintain my freedom. That’s what people like about me.”
Galindo also told JTA that “coordinated media attacks declaring my anti-Zionist rhetoric as anti-Semitic” were “causing MORE harm to the Jews of San Antonio by playing into all the stigmas that they own the media.”
“Zionists WANT us to blame all Jews to shield them from the violence they perpetrate on Semites across the Middle East,” Galindo continued. “I’m not falling for it and will continue to protect all Jews from their corrupted leaders by constantly reminding folks that its NOT ALL JEWS. We need to be LOUD about our anti-Zionism in these times to protect our neighbors.”
The candidate has also disparaged other groups, including Latino men, whom she has said have a “colonizer mentality.”
When it comes to Jews and Zionists, the candidate has made no secret of her views.
“It’s all very complex. But it’s my perception that Zionist billionaires run the world,” she told the San Antonio Current this week, several days after The New York Times and other outlets publicized her past rhetoric to a national audience. “They’re of all religions. But especially Israeli, Jewish billionaire Zionists who disproportionately and factually own a lot of Hollywood production studios, media companies and banks.”
On social media this week she wrote, “ZIOS=GENOCIDAL EUROPEAN COLONIZER FREAKS.” She has elsewhere referred to the “synagogue of Satan,” a phrase with Biblical origins that was popularized by Louis Farrakhan to promote the idea that today’s Jews are inauthentic, and said that “Israeli leaders are not real Jews.”
On Instagram Wednesday Galindo wrote that, if elected, she would “write legislation so that all Zionism and support of Zionism is undoubtedly Anti-Semitic, since it’s Zionists harming the Semites.” The candidate added that she would turn a local immigrant detention center “into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking,” adding in parentheses, “It will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles which will probably be most of the Zionists.”
Appearing on Texas Public Radio this week, she refuted accusations of antisemitism while reaffirming that she opposes “Zionist Jews.”
“I’m not antisemitic. In fact my last serious relationship was with a Jewish man,” Galindo said. “I’m against Zionist Jews. When I said that the Jews who own Hollywood are doing this, do all Jews own Hollywood? No. The Zionist Jews do. The Zionist Jews own our media, our banks and all of our politicians.”
She added, “There’s plenty of evidence for what I’m saying in the Epstein files.”
On the same program, Garcia, Galindo’s opponent, condemned her for having made “antisemitic remarks” and said he had spoken to concerned local Jews about her rhetoric.
“It gets people to sit out of elections and lose faith in the Democratic Party,” Garcia said. “And my reassurance to them was, look, I understand how bad we lost you in 2024. We saw people leaving our party in droves. … These comments, it’s hurtful, and it does nothing good for our Democratic Party.”
On social media, Galindo has gone after Garcia by depicting him standing in front of U.S. and Israeli flags and saying he “took money from Israel to get into Congress & fund Israeli wars.”
Democratic Majority For Israel is mounting an 11th-hour mobilization effort against Galindo, launching a new six-figure ad campaign for Garcia. “Johnny Garcia is a coalition builder who supports a strong U.S.-Israel relationship and has been clear in standing against antisemitism,” DMFI head Brian Romick told Jewish Insider. “His opponent, on the other hand, proudly embraces vile, antisemitic conspiracies and if she advances could put a Democratic House majority at risk.”
Galindo has received support from Lean Left, a new Florida-based super PAC with unclear origins that has been linked to Republicans.
Asked about Galindo, the San Antonio Jewish Community Relations Council told JTA that it “condemns any and all hateful speech, including the use of antisemitic tropes, in public discourse.” It did not name any candidate in its statement.
San Antonio is home to an estimated 11,000 Jews, who were shaken last year by a mass shooting threat directed at a Jewish community center.
Since Galindo’s record of remarks has come to light, one of her former primary opponents rescinded his endorsement of her. “Over the course of the runoff, I have become increasingly troubled by a series of derogatory, inflammatory and conspiratorial statements directed toward Jewish people and others,” John Lira, a former Small Business Administration staffer, said in a statement.
Lira did not endorse Garcia, instead affirming he would “remain neutral in this runoff election.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Talarico won’t campaign with Democratic House candidate who wants to open ‘a prison for American Zionists’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Cornell trustees back Jewish president after confrontation with pro-Palestinian protesters
(JTA) — Cornell University’s Jewish president will not be penalized for a recent campus altercation with pro-Palestinian protesters who had surrounded his car following a campus debate on Israel, an investigation by the university concluded Friday.
The Ivy League school’s Board of Trustees issued a statement of support for Michael Kotlikoff following an investigation into the April 30 incident. Kotlikoff had recused himself from the investigation, which wrapped after eight days.
“President Kotlikoff has shown a steadfast commitment to Cornell’s values and principles, and we are confident he will continue to lead with integrity,” a Friday statement from the board’s ad-hoc investigation committee concludes.
The investigation also cleared the protesters, a mix of students and non-students, of any wrongdoing, even as it found that their actions “are inconsistent with university policies governing expressive activity and our standards for respectful conduct, safety, and the prohibition of intimidation.”
Kotlikoff will not be pursuing any complaints against the students involved, Cornell’s board said. The president himself did not immediately release a statement on the investigation’s results, and a spokesperson for the university declined to comment further.
The report’s release sought to quickly close the book on a whirlwind controversy at the Ithaca, New York, university, as long-simmering tensions between Kotlikoff and the campus’s pro-Palestinian contingent boiled over into a rare physical altercation between students and a college president.
The incident that prompted the investigation was the second part of a two-session debate on Israel, sponsored by the non-partisan Cornell Political Union. Kotlikoff was present to introduce the guest speaker, Jewish pro-Palestinian academic and activist Norman Finkelstein.
Multiple video sources from the Finkelstein event showed that, following the talk, members of the protest group Students for a Democratic Cornell followed the president to his car and appeared to try to block its path. When he did edge his way out of his parking spot, they said he bumped some of the protesters with his vehicle, releasing video to the student newspaper The Cornell Daily Sun to back up the allegation.
Kotlikoff issued a statement the next day calling the incident one of “harassment and intimidation,” while some of the protesters accused him of injuring them and running over one person’s foot. The university released its own footage from a security camera in a scene that presented a different view than that of the students, though the exact nature of the confrontation remains murky.
The Cornell trustees who conducted the investigation said the protesters’ initial claims of wrongdoing on Kotlikoff’s part could not be verified by campus police, in part because the affected individuals “refused medical treatment from the EMS team and refused to provide sworn statements as to their account of the incident.”
The board added, “None of the individuals at the scene have provided sworn statements to CUPD [campus police], despite CUPD’s repeated attempts to collect sworn statements in the days following the incident.” The Jewish Telegraphic Agency has reached out to Students for a Democratic Cornell for comment.
Some campus groups including the graduate student union and its affiliated labor union had called on Kotlikoff to resign. Some campus graduate student associations cited what they called an “explicit act of violence against these students” and what they felt was the “misleading nature” of Kotlikoff’s own statement. Cornell’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors also criticized the president’s actions.
But Kotlikoff had his supporters, too. National outlets including The Washington Post’s editorial board celebrated him for having “stood up to campus bullies.” A faculty and student petition supporting him also circulated this week. The petition, which was shared with JTA, says Kotlikoff acted appropriately in the face of “physical intimidation.”
“If we characterize the obstruction of a vehicle and the pursuit of an individual as ‘peaceful protest,’ we erode the safety of our entire campus,” reads the petition, whose signatories, including the number, have not yet been made public. “This is not a matter of siding with a specific policy or a specific person. It is about whether Cornell remains a place where any member of our community (student, faculty or staff) can move freely without fear of being surrounded or harassed.”
Since his appointment as Cornell’s president in 2024, initially on an interim basis, Kotlikoff has weathered a series of Israel-related controversies. He drew blowback from academic freedom advocates for criticizing a planned class to be taught on Gaza by a Jewish pro-Palestinian professor, and in March vetoed two anti-Israel student government resolutions. Under his watch the university also struck a controversial deal to pay $60 million to the Trump administration to resolve antisemitism investigations.
Menachem Rosensaft, an adjunct professor at Cornell’s law school and former general counsel of the World Jewish Congress, is one of Kotlikoff’s backers on campus. Rosensaft told JTA that, though Kotlikoff has made clear his own pro-Israel views, he remains committed to free expression on campus — which he argued the protesters were trying to silence.
“People who have an agenda don’t like those who don’t have an agenda, and who just want to play it straight down the middle,” Rosensaft said. “Mike has played it straight down the middle and he is doing it appropriately. The university is lucky to have him and I’m pleased to say that the board agrees.”
Kotlikoff’s commitment to the debate series on Israel, despite his personal disagreements with Finkelstein, was proof of this, Rosensaft suggested. The first part of the series had featured Israeli historian Benny Morris, and the debate series boasted an unusually diverse list of ideological partners, ranging from Students for Justice in Palestine to the Zionist Organization of America, pro-Israel advocacy group StandWithUs and Cornell’s Jewish Studies program.
Cornell’s commencement is set for May 23. Kotlikoff is scheduled to deliver an address.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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