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How this Jewish refugee became Times Square’s queen of porn
(New York Jewish Week) — “She was the most un-grandma person that anyone could have,” says David Bourla at the beginning of a film about his one-of-a-kind grandmother, Chelly Wilson. “Except for the fact that she was Jewish, we celebrated Christmas in a porn theater. It doesn’t get any weirder than that.”
So begins Valerie Kontakos’ documentary, “Queen of the Deuce,” which tells the unlikely story of how a tough-as-nails Jewish lesbian narrowly escaped the Holocaust in Greece and became the successful owner of several pornographic movie theaters in New York City in the the 1970s. The documentary, which premieres in New York on Friday, Nov. 11, is one of several Jewish films playing the documentary film festival DOC NYC, which runs this year from Nov. 9 through Nov. 27.
Born in 1908, Wilson grew up in a religious Sephardic family in Thessaloniki — also known as Salonika in Judeo-Spanish — and was ambitious from a young age. “She had this fierce desire to achieve something,” said Kontakos. “When she was younger, she wanted to be a doctor. But of course that wasn’t an option for her at that point, and given her circumstances, given the fact that she was a Jewish Sephardic woman in Salonika. She came from a very conservative community.”
Relying on a mix of archival footage, interviews and animated sequences, “Queen of the Deuce” is a wide-ranging look at Wilson’s improbable life: her various business ventures, her marriages to men and romances with women, the pain of the loss of her family and more. Central to the film are Wilson’s now-grown grandchildren, who describe their unconventional Jewish grandmother as tough and eccentric, with the confident body language of a mob boss. (Wilson, who died in 1994, appears in the film through home videos.)
As a young woman, Wilson left Athens just before the outbreak of World War II, narrowly escaping the devastating destruction of Thessaloniki’s Jewish community. According to Yad Vashem, out of the approximate 56,000 Jews who lived in Thessaloniki before the war, some 54,000 were killed in the Holocaust.
Wilson got her start in New York selling hot dogs and soda. She sent some of her earnings to Greece to buy newsreel footage and turned the footage into a film called “Greece on the March” — an effort to raise money in the U.S. for the Greek war effort against the Germans. When she played the film at a New York movie theater she met a Jewish film projectionist named Rex Wilson. Although they lacked a common language, he became her second husband.
“He was nice,” Wilson says of Rex in her husky, accented voice. “He provided me with cigarettes.”
(Her first husband, whom she divorced after having two children, Paulette and Dino, was the product of an arranged marriage in Greece. Wilson compares his kisses to “torture” in the film. Later in her life, after Wilson and her second husband split up, her preference for women became an open secret.)
From there, Wilson fell into the movie theater business — first “regular” movies, and then, by the late 1960s, sensing opportunity, she became the owner of several adult movie theaters. Many of them were located on 42nd Street, nicknamed “the Deuce,” which was New York’s infamously gritty red light district at the time.
“It’s unusual not to be surprised by something that she did,” said Kontakos, who first met Wilson in the early 1970s when, as a teenager, she worked at the Wilsons’ Tivoli Theatre on 8th Avenue. “It showed Greek films on Sundays, which were PG, completely family material. The rest of the week they would show porn.”
“Times Square [in the ‘70s] was like the underworld,” added Kontakos, whose family is Greek though not Jewish. “You had drugs there, prostitution, and then you had porn. It was really quite extreme.”
The Adonis Theater marquee, as seen in “Queen of the Deuce.” (Courtesy of the Wilson family)
Wilson was, by all accounts, an exceptionally tough character — she rarely smiled, and usually had a cigarette or a cigar in hand. She frequently held court reclining on the sofa of her living room — her Times Square apartment was above the Eros, a gay porn theater that opened in 1962 — with bags of cash in the corner. Wilson also owned the Adonis, an all-male adult theater so legendary for cruising that it became the locale for a meta, well-known 1978 gay porno film “A Night at the Adonis.”
In family footage shown in the film, she puffs a cigarette and tells stories in imperfect, Greek-accented English of how she smuggled her children to New York from Palestine and Greece. “I had Dino stolen from Israel, you know?” she says, reclining on her couch in a red silk robe. The story that unfolds is an improbable one, involving secret boat rides, misbehaving children and a chance encounter with a sympathetic official in Athens.
Similar to the fate of Thessaloniki’s Jews, most of Wilson’s family died in the Holocaust. But her shrewdness had saved Paulette: Before she departed for the United States in 1939, Wilson left her daughter in the care of a non-Jewish Greek family — with the specific instructions not to turn her over to her Jewish relatives, even if they came looking for her (which, of course, they did).
Still, Wilson kept her difficult past mostly hidden from her children and grandchildren. And in the film’s interviews, her offspring express the pain of their lost family and histories. They remember that Wilson refused to seek out reparations for her murdered family, saying it was blood money.
For Kontakos, it was important to tell this Holocaust story well, noting that the history the persecution of Greek Jews isn’t as well known as other European Jews. “I do feel it’s still not really discussed as openly as it should be,” she said.
Though Wilson may not have been the warm, nurturing type, she had a fierce dedication to her family, and her children and grandchildren reminisce in the film about her creative spirit and zest for life. Kontakos hopes audiences walk away from the film with a sense of “the joy of life, regardless of the hardships,” she said.
“Queen of the Deuce” is screening in New York on Friday, Nov. 11 and Saturday, Nov. 12 as part of the DOC NYC film festival, and will be available for online streaming Nov. 12 through Nov. 27. For details, click here.
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The post How this Jewish refugee became Times Square’s queen of porn appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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US Rep. Randy Fine Says It Would ‘Be Nice’ to See JD Vance Condemn Tucker Carlson
Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) leaves the US Capitol after the last votes of the week on Sept. 4, 2025. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL), one of the most strident supporters of Israel in the US Congress, indicated during an event on Tuesday that he would like to see Vice President JD Vance criticize popular conservative podcaster Tucker Carlson’s antisemitic conduct.
“I think it’d be nice,” Fine said when asked by The Algemeiner whether he thinks Vance, who is friends with Carlson, should publicly distance himself from the controversial pundit.
“I think that, you know, given that Tucker’s become a deranged lunatic, I think we should all be speaking out against Tucker,” Fine said.
Carlson has sparked a fierce backlash after inviting white nationalist Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier, onto his podcast, where Fuentes made antisemitic statements about “organized Jewry” and praised Sovet dictator Joseph Stalin. Critics argued that Carlson failed to condemn or even challenge Fuentes, arguing the online provocateur and former Fox News host offered a congenial platform to normalize Fuentes’s view. The controversy has ignited a rift within conservative circles, including public rebukes from Republican senators and Heritage Foundation staffers, highlighting growing tensions over antisemitism and Israel in the Republican Party.
Prior to the Fuentes interview, Carlson stoked outrage after inviting guests who engaged in Holocaust minimization and made remarks in favor of Adolf Hitler. Carlson also suggested that Hamas should be considered a legitimate government and not a terrorist organization.
Carlson has repeatedly alluded to the unfounded notion that Israel deliberately oppresses Christians while minimizing the heavily documented persecution of Christians by Islamic movements, such as the ongoing mass killing of Nigerian Christians.
Furthermore, Carlson’s friendship with Vance has come under increased scrutiny, with many observers fearing that the popular pundit might influence the vice president to adopt harsher views against Israel. Vance raised eyebrows recently after he failed to push back against a college student who asked him why the United States should continue to support Israel while claiming that Jews “openly support the persecution” of Christians.
Vance employs Carlson’s son, Buckley Carlson, as his deputy press secretary. Vance recently lashed out at journalist Sloan Rachmuch after she demanded that Buckley publicly answer questions about his positions on antisemitism and Israel, suggesting that the pundit’s son could be exerting influence over the vice president.
Political analysts have speculated that Vance, who is widely perceived as a likely successor to US President Donald Trump to lead the Republican Party and win its 2028 presidential primary, could break from GOP orthodoxy by establishing a significantly more critical stance against Israel. A series of recent polls suggest that younger Republicans are increasingly skeptical of the US-Israel alliance. Due to his prominence among Republicans and positioning for the party’s future, conservative leaders have called on Vance to repudiate antisemitism forcefully and reemphasize the importance of the bond between the US and the Jewish State.
On Tuesday, Fine, who is Jewish, also expressed hope that antipathy against Israel and Jews won’t become a major feature in the 2028 presidential primary, arguing that the Trump administration has proactively taken a number of aggressive steps to mitigate the influence of antisemitism among conservatives. He also took a swipe at fellow Republican Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA) and Thomas Massie (KY), branding the anti-Israel lawmakers as “antisemites.”
“Hopefully not, because hopefully we’re going to squash this,” Fine said, “I point out this: I serve with two antisemites on the US House of Representatives, and Donald Trump is seeking to have both of them defeated next year in their primaries. I think it’s clear where the president stands.”
Massie enraged Jewish conservatives after claiming that every member of Congress has an “AIPAC babysitter” which monitors their voting record on Israel. AIPAC, a prominent lobbying group, seeks to foster bipartisan support for the US-Israel alliance.
Massie has also refused to vote in favor of a resolution “calling on elected officials and civil society leaders to counter antisemitism and educate the public on the contributions of the Jewish American community.” He sparked outrage in December 2023 after posting a “meme” which contrasted “American Patriotism” with “Zionism.”
Taylor Greene has also sparked ire from pro-Israel conservatives when she attempted, unsuccessfully, to add an amendment stripping military aid to Israel to a large defense spending bill. In recent months, the lawmaker has intensified her rhetoric against Israel, establishing herself as the sole Republican to condemn Israel for “genocide” in Gaza.
Trump has announced his intention to support primary challengers against both members, who have opposed him on a range of issues including Israel.
Fine spoke to The Algemeiner at an event in Washington, DC titled “Exposing and Countering Extremism and Antisemitism on the Political Right” where he was featured as a keynote speaker. The event was organized in response to the rise of Fuentes and a wave of antisemitic rhetoric baacked by major right-wing online influencers.
Fuentes has praised Hitler, engaged in Holocaust denial, called for “perfidious Jews” to be murdered, all while becoming increasingly popular with an audience of disaffected young men. Along with Carlson and Fuentes, Candace Owens, another prominent right-wing influencer, has spent the last two years following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, spreading conspiracy theories about Israel and calling Jews “demonic” and “pedophilic.”
During his keynote speech, Fine said that the fight against antisemitism is an “existential fight for the nature of our country.”
He stressed that no country that has gone down the “path of antisemitism” has survived and urged Jewish conservatives not to ignore antisemites as fringe voices. Fine lamented the growing issue of right-wing antisemitism, claiming that “we have an issue in our own party, where the evil has come into our own midst.”
Fine argued that Carlson is now the “most dangerous antisemite in America” because he still harbors credibility among conservatives from his popular Fox News show and that most people don’t know that he has become a “nutgbag.”
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‘Sharia Stands Against the Oppressor’: CUNY Imam Issues Verbal Fatwa Targeting Jewish Professor at Interfaith Event
City University of New York (CUNY) students protesting Israel and US President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. Photo: Reuters via Reuters Connect
A New York City college has been walloped by what witnesses described as a portentous verbal fatwa which disrupted an interfaith event school officials hoped would unite students around traditional American values of pluralism, tolerance, and equality.
What most surprised the audience and the panelists who were headlining the event was that the heckler at the City College of New York (CCNY) in Manhattan last Thursday was himself a panelist, a local imam and graduate student, Abdullah Mady, who is enrolled in the Master’s in Translational Medicine (MTM) program. When called on to speak, Mady became irate and opened up a prolonged rant in which he called for imposing sharia law on Americans, defended amputating the limbs of misdemeanor level criminals and the wealthy, and denigrated a Jewish co-panelist, Baruch College professor Ilya Bratman.
CCNY and Baruch College are both part of the City University of New York (CUNY) system.
“I came here to this event not knowing that I would be sitting next to a Zionist, and this is something I’m not going to accept. My people are being killed right now in Gaza,” Mady bellowed before challenging the religious bonafides of Muslim students in the audience. “If you’re a Muslim, out of strength and dignity, I ask you to exit this room immediately.”
Mady uttered other pronouncements drawn from the jihadist tradition of radical Islam, in which extremism is offered as a solution to soluble political problems.
“I’m talking about the elite, the filthy rich, the ones that continue to steal from people as we speak today. Those are the ones that deserve their tips to be cut off,” Mady said. “Sharia … stands against the oppressor. When sharia is implemented, pornography — gone. Alcohol industry — gone. Gambling system — gone. Interest is gone, which is what they use to enslave you.”
Ilya Bratman, executive director of the Hillel at Baruch College, told The Algemeiner in an interview on Wednesday that he is no victim but warned that Mady’s ideology is infectious in an age when political actors amass a following by trampling on norms which protect the American system against demagoguery.
“Who are the victims? The students, because they are being indoctrinated, bamboozled, and radicalized,” he said. “The Muslim students are the victims in this story because in this environment they are forced to choose between being supportive of this point of view or disassociated with by their community. That’s very sad, I think. We need education, not indoctrination.”
Bratman noted that just feet away from the panel, a Holocaust survivor was delivering a lecture in another room on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the infamous Nazi-led pogroms in November 1938 that devastated the German Jewish community. That event aimed to teach students how to identify and fight fascism, which Bratman says is fitting given that it took form in Mady’s invective, which promised that Americans could achieve utopia if only they adopt theocratic, anti-capitalist, and antisemitic beliefs.
“It was juxtaposed with another story just downstairs, where an element of fascism was coming through on an American campus,” Bratman explained. “He promoted isolationism, exclusion, superiority, intimidation, hostility, all targeting a very specific type of group, the Jewish people.”
Bratman added that CCNY is not responsible for what transpired, as school officials selected Mady as a panelist based on its belief that he was an average student and New Yorker. However, he noted that Mady’s power to direct masses of students poses a threat to safety and would have led to tragedy had he used his platform to incite violence.
“In this situation, the administration was not trying to do something negative but something amazingly positive,” Bratman explained. “But I think if this person stood up and said, ‘If you are a good Muslim, attack this Zionist.’ And I believe this strongly not because I think they are bad people, but because they have been so bamboozled, so radicalized by ideology. We are at a dangerous moment, a moment of escalation that is a symptom of our society today.”
On Wednesday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul denounced Mady’s conduct as antisemitic.
“This is antisemitism, plain and simple,” Hochul said on the X social media platform, responding to the incident. “No one should be singled out, targeted, or shamed because they are Jewish. I expect to act swiftly to ensure accountability and protect every student’s safety.”
CUNY’s campuses have been lambasted by critics as some of the most antisemitic institutions of higher education in the country.
Last year, the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) resolved half a dozen investigations of antisemitism on CUNY campuses, a consortium of undergraduate colleges located throughout New York City’s five boroughs. The inquiries, which reviewed incidents that happened as far back as 2020, were aimed at determining whether school officials neglected to prevent and respond to antisemitic discrimination, bullying, and harassment.
Hunter College and CUNY Law combined for three resolutions in total, representing half of all the antisemitism cases settled by OCR. Baruch College, Brooklyn College, and CUNY’s Central Office were the subjects of three other investigations.
One of the cases which OCR resolved, involving Brooklyn College, prompted widespread concern when it was announced in 2022. According to witness testimony provided by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law — which filed the complaint prompting the investigation — Jewish students enrolled in the college’s Mental Health Counseling (MCH) program were repeatedly pressured into saying that Jews are white people who should be excluded from discussions about social justice.
The badgering of Jewish students, the students said at the time, became so severe that one said in a WhatsApp group chat that she wanted to “strangle” a Jewish classmate.
“Some of the harassment on CUNY campuses has become so commonplace as to almost be normalized,” the American Center for Law & Justice (ACLJ) alleged in July 2022. “Attacking, denigrating, and threatening ‘Zionists’ has become the norm, with the crystal-clear understanding that ‘Zionist’ is now merely an epithet for ‘Jew’ the same way ‘banker,’ ‘cabal,’ ‘globalist,’ ‘cosmopolitan,’ ‘Christ killer,’ and numerous other such dog-whistles have been used over the centuries to target, demonize, and incite against Jews.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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‘Shoulder-to-Shoulder’: Israeli Medical Delegation Assists in Aftermath of Devastating Hurricane in Jamaica
A look at some of the damage caused by Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica. Photo: Provided
A team of 30 Israeli medical professionals who were deployed to Jamaica to assist the local population in the aftermath of the deadly Hurricane Melissa returned home to Israel on Tuesday, and its commander spoke to The Algemeiner about the challenges they faced as well as the devastation on the Caribbean island.
Professor Ofer Merin is the director general of Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem and has been commander of the IDF’s Field Hospital operations for the past 20 years. A trained cardiac surgeon and trauma surgeon, he has been dispatched to oversee medical relief efforts in 10 disaster zones around the world, the most recent being in Jamaica. Merin spoke to The Algemeiner on Tuesday during his trip back to Israel with his delegation of medical professionals, which included doctors, nurses, and paramedical staff from hospitals all around Israel.
“We integrated into the two hospitals and worked shoulder-to-shoulder with the local people,” he said. “It’s by far easier to set up as a stand alone [field hospital] – you come, you set up your tent, you work and see the patients – but this way, you have to integrate and work with them [and] gain their trust, the patients and the healthcare providers.”
The Category 5 hurricane made landfall in western Jamaica on Oct. 28 and caused extensive damage, including the destruction of homes, power and communication outages, damaged sanitation systems, flooding and damages to infrastructure. Recovery efforts are still underway across Jamaica. There have been 45 confirmed deaths, 15 people are still missing as of last week, and more than 1.6 million have been affected, according to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Merin explained that two hospitals located in the disaster zone were severely damaged and completely non-operational. After speaking with Jamaica’s Ministry of Health, Merin said the decision was made for the Israeli team to assist local medical staff, and assist in treating injured patients and emergency cases at the hospitals instead of establishing their own field hospitals in the disaster areas.
“The challenge here was triaging the patients into the emergency rooms into hospitals that were overwhelmed, trying to figure out what was more urgent and less urgent, and working in a lower resources country than what we are used to in Israel,” he added. “Within two days we gained the trust of everyone over there, the patients [and] the staff members. They let us treat patients independently, and this was quite unique. We also assisted the healthcare providers, which were overworking day and night because of the numbers of patients, and some of them lost family members or their houses.”
Merin said he and his team received tremendous feedback from the locals, who were grateful for their help. “People in the street would say, ‘Oh, you’re from Israel? Thank you so much.’ Jamaicans knew we were there. We got such good feedback. It was really heartwarming. The Jamaican people were amazing. They hosted us with such hospitality and open hands and we gained their trust very quickly.”
Eden Bar Tal, the director-general of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in a previously released statement that Israel’s humanitarian mission to Jamaica to help in the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa “reflects the moral and ethical commitment of the State of Israel to extend assistance to regions affected by disasters around the world.”
“Jamaica has a long and unique history of relations with Israel and the Jewish people,” Bar Tal added. “As one of the leading nations in the Caribbean region, Jamaica is an important partner, and we are committed to further strengthening relations between Israel and the countries of the region.”
Hurricane Melissa was the strongest storm to make landfall in Jamaica and the second strongest recorded in the region. The storm also caused extensive flooding and damage in Haiti, Cuba and the Dominican Republic. In 2010, after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, Israel also dispatched a medical delegation and established a field hospital on the island.
Members of Israel’s medical delegation who traveled to Jamaica to assist in the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa. Photo: Provided