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Jason Schwartzman is a cantor and Carol Kane is his bat mitzvah student in comedy ‘Between the Temples’
(JTA) — Jason Schwartzman is starring as a cantor who takes on an adult bat mitzvah student played by veteran actress Carol Kane in an upcoming comedy film.
Shooting for “Between the Temples,” a self-described “anxious comedy,” has already wrapped, Variety reported on Wednesday, but no release date was given. The film was written and directed by Jewish filmmaker Nathan Silver, whose past films include the well-received indie comedies “Thirst Street” and “The Great Pretender.”
“It’s the story of a cantor who is locked in a crisis of faith and finds his world turned upside down when his grade school music teacher re-enters his life as his new adult bat mitzvah student,” Variety reported.
The news comes two weeks after Netflix announced that another Jewish actor, Adam Brody, would play a “charming rabbi” in a comedy series that co-stars Kristen Bell. Netflix also debuted its “Jewish Matchmaking” dating series earlier this month to acclaim.
Schwartzman — the son of Jewish film producer Jack Schwartzman and actress Talia Shire, and nephew of famed director Francis Ford Coppola — is well known as a recurring face in Wes Anderson films and other indie movies and shows. He has played Jewish characters before, including one loosely inspired by Philip Roth in the 2014 comedy-drama “Listen Up Philip.”
Kane, who is also Jewish, has had a long career on stage and screen that ranges from 1975’s “Hester Street,” about Jewish immigrants in New York City’s Lower East Side — for which she was nominated for an Academy Award — to “Hunters,” the Amazon series about post-war Nazi hunters that debuted in 2020.
Other “Between the Temples” cast members include Caroline Aaron, the Jewish actress who has played the protagonist’s mother-in-law on “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”; the Jewish former “Saturday Night Live” writer and Adam Sandler collaborator Robert Smigel; and Dolly de Leon, who is gaining late-career acclaim for her recent performance in the Oscar-nominated film “Triangle of Sadness.”
Variety noted that the film is produced and financed by Ley Line Entertainment, which co-produced this year’s Oscar winner “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and a few other acclaimed indie films since its founding in 2018.
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If You Oppose Terrorism in the West But Not in Israel, You Don’t Oppose Terrorism
An Israeli soldier stands during a two-minute siren marking the annual Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Day, at an installation at the site of the Nova festival where party goers were killed and kidnapped during the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas terrorists from Gaza, in Reim, southern Israel, May 6, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
Soon after the unfortunately named Jihad Al-Shamie’s terror attack on a Manchester synagogue, his father, Faraj Al-Shamie, issued a statement on behalf of the family. The statement distanced the family from Jihad’s jihadi actions, saying that they strongly condemn the “heinous act, which targeted peaceful, innocent civilians.”
That is as it should be. However, it was soon revealed that while Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel was still in progress, Faraj al-Shamie, a trauma surgeon, had praised those undertaking the attack. He had described them as “God’s men on earth.”
That calls into question the sincerity of his attempt to distance his family from his son’s terrorist attack. After all, the vast majority of those killed on October 7 were also “peaceful, innocent civilians.”
Why would somebody condemn his own son’s terror in England, while praising the larger scale terror inflicted by Hamas and other militants in Israel? There are two broad possible explanations.
One explanation is that while he is not actually opposed to acts of terror in the United Kingdom, he has a personal interest in suggesting otherwise.
Being seen to endorse domestic terror, especially if one is an immigrant and a minority in one’s country of adoption, can invite unwanted opprobrium. There are self-interested reasons to avoid this.
The other explanation is that he is opposed to heinous acts against peaceful, innocent civilians only when those civilians are not in Israel. Being in Israel, however, does not make civilians less peaceful or innocent. Nor will it help to suggest that civilians in “settler colonial states” cease to be innocent civilians. First, Jews are indigenous to Israel. Second, under the “settler, colonial” framework, all residents of the US — other than those descended from native Americans — would have no claim against violent terrorism by the indigenous peoples.
Thus, anybody willing to justify the indiscriminate terror against civilians in Israel demonstrates that they are not actually opposed to terrorism.
In this way, somebody’s opinion about terrorism in Israel is the litmus test of how genuine their opposition to terrorism is. If you are not opposed to killing Jews in a synagogue in Jerusalem (or a music festival in the Negev desert, or kibbutzim adjacent to Gaza), then you have no principled reason to oppose killing Jews in a synagogue in Manchester, or office workers in the World Trade Center, or passengers in a flight over Lockerbie.
We should employ this litmus test more often. We should ask anybody purporting to oppose anti-Jewish and other terrorism in Western countries whether they are similarly opposed to terror in Israel. If they are not willing to state such opposition, they will thereby demonstrate just how phony their opposition to domestic terrorism is.
It is quite possible, of course, that many of those justifying terrorism in Israel would be willing to justify it in other Western countries too. Many of them, even in the US, for example, are happy to call for “death to America.”
Nevertheless, it would be helpful to encourage them, as individuals, to acknowledge this explicitly — rather than hide behind slogans like “globalize the intifada,” which other people, including those seeking public office, attempt to sanitize by introducing ambiguities that are not actually there.
This approach asks us not to restrict their speech (beyond cases of incitement to imminent violence), but rather to encourage them to speak their minds more fully. This is how we can make it clearer to a broader swath of the population exactly what values many of those “social justice” activists actually hold.
Now, it might be said that just as opponents of terror in the West must also oppose terror in Israel, so those who oppose terror both in the West and in Israel should oppose the violence used by Israel and Israelis.
There certainly are cases where this is true. Those opposed to the violent targeting of Palestinians in America, as we all should be, ought also to be opposed to Baruch Goldstein’s murderous rampage, or the terror that a fringe group of the Israeli right visits upon Palestinians in the West Bank. However, that is compatible with recognizing that there is a moral difference between Hamas’ October 7 attack and Israel’s response to it, which sought to prevent another such attack from ever happening again.
British police responded forcefully to Jihad Al-Shamie’s attack, by shooting him, which is exactly what they should have done under the circumstances. That is true even if it turns out that the police should have taken more care not to harm those Jews within the synagogue, two of whom the police accidentally shot. Whether there was any police culpability is a matter for detailed forensic investigation.
Similarly, albeit at a larger scale, one could find fault with some of the ways that Israel has undertaken its response, without drawing a moral equivalence with the Hamas attack. The October 7 attack is manifestly wicked. That Israel responded militarily is the opposite. It had both a right and a duty to protect its citizens from further such attacks. Criticism of the details of that response is a matter for close forensic investigation. However, such an investigation cannot be replaced by memetic metastasizing of the “genocide” accusation.
David Benatar is Emeritus Professor Philosophy at the University of Cape Town. His most recent book is Very Practical Ethics (Oxford, 2024)
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The Netherlands’ Moral Mirror Is Cracking
A view shows the Peace Palace, which houses the International Court of Justice (ICJ), in The Hague, Netherlands, April 28, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw
For decades, Israel viewed the Netherlands as one of its most reliable European friends, a nation whose moral compass — forged in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust — pointed firmly against antisemitism and toward Israel’s right to exist in peace.
Dutch diplomacy was measured, its civil society was open, and its historical consciousness ran deep.
But that image of the Netherlands has begun to fracture. Since the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023, and the ensuing war, the Netherlands has witnessed a surge of anti-Israel rhetoric, antisemitic incidents, and violent protests that have shaken Jewish communities and confounded Israelis who long saw the Dutch as allies in both memory and morality.
The numbers tell a sobering story
The Center for Information and Documentation on Israel (CIDI) has reported an 818% increase in antisemitic incidents compared to the pre-October 7 average.
In 2024 alone, 421 incidents were recorded, the highest since the watchdog began systematic monitoring.
These are not abstract statistics; they represent Jewish families harassed, synagogues threatened, and Israelis attacked on Dutch streets.
One shocking example was the “Jew-hunt” in Amsterdam after the Ajax vs. Maccabi Tel Aviv match in November 2024.
What should have been a sporting event spiraled into open violence: Israeli fans chased through the streets, attacked by mobs on scooters, assaulted simply for being visibly Jewish or Israeli. The term “Jew-hunt” was not invented by the press; it came from officials describing what they saw. For many Israelis, this was not a local disturbance, it was a moral alarm bell ringing from a country they once saw as safe ground.
From moral clarity to moral confusion
How did this happen? Why would a nation that still teaches Anne Frank’s story with pride see antisemitism return so visibly to its streets?
Part of the answer lies in the Dutch self-image. The Netherlands prides itself on tolerance, free speech, and moral independence. In recent years, however, those same virtues have created fertile ground for extremism to hide behind “activism.” The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, long a subject of heated debate, has become a proxy battlefield for identity politics, post-colonial guilt, and populist anger.
When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, murdering 1,200 people and abducting hundreds, the global narrative quickly shifted, especially online. In Dutch cities, massive protests filled the streets, some peaceful, many not. Chants of “From the river to the sea” echoed in public squares. At first glance, these may appear as calls for Palestinian statehood. But in practice, they too often turned into calls for Israel’s elimination, and sometimes, for violence against Jews.
The Dutch demographic landscape also plays a role. The country’s growing communities with roots in Muslim-majority countries often bring with them deep identification with the Palestinian cause. That, combined with a small and highly visible Jewish population (less than 1% nationwide), has produced an imbalance in public discourse.
In many cities, Jewish students now report hiding their identity, removing Stars of David, or avoiding public events for fear of harassment.
The power of media and the failure of nuance
Dutch media coverage has also shifted. Complex Israeli security dilemmas are often flattened into emotional images of Gaza’s suffering, stripped of the context of Hamas’ terror infrastructure or its strategy of human shields. Social media compounds the problem, turning outrage into performance, and moral judgment into tribal belonging.
When the moral conversation becomes binary, oppressor versus oppressed, nuance dies first, and Jewish safety follows. This is not about silencing criticism of Israeli policies; it is about recognizing the line between critique and hate, a line that in the Netherlands, like across Europe, has grown dangerously blurred.
A legacy betrayed
There is something deeply tragic about this Dutch transformation. The Netherlands, more than most European nations, has wrestled publicly with its wartime past, with its collaboration, its resistance, and its guilt. Out of that reckoning grew an ethos of “never again,” not just for Jews, but for all peoples. Yet today, that moral inheritance is being hollowed out by selective empathy.
It is one thing to criticize a government; it is another to chase Jews through the streets of Amsterdam. It is one thing to advocate for Palestinian rights; it is another to vandalize offices of Christian organizations that support Israel, accusing them of “backing genocide.” Such behavior is not protest; it is persecution reborn under new slogans.
The test for Dutch democracy
The Netherlands now faces a test not unlike the one that Europe faced in darker times: Will it confront antisemitism wherever it appears, even when it wears the fashionable mask of “anti-Zionism”?
If yes, that means stronger political leadership, consistent law enforcement, and educational courage — and teaching students to distinguish between political dissent and ethnic hatred. It also means insisting that free speech does not include the freedom to terrorize Jewish citizens.
If the Netherlands wants to remain the moral compass it once claimed to be, it must first look in the mirror and admit that the image reflected there is no longer as clear as it once was.
Because the question Israelis now quietly ask is not whether the Netherlands still supports Israel’s right to exist. It’s whether Dutch society still remembers why that right matters.
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What Trump’s Peace Plan Gets Wrong About Hamas
Hamas fighters on Feb. 22, 2025. Photo: Majdi Fathi via Reuters Connect
Despite his successful effort to release the hostages, Donald Trump’s plan for peace in the Middle East is destined to fail. Among other things, the American peace plan fails to understand basic Hamas ideas of death and time. Without a correct understanding, Israel will be left hanging in the wind, directionless, desperately fighting an interminable and unwinnable war.
Truth is exculpatory. Contrary to Trump’s hopes, there is no credible outlook for genuine peace in the region. Though Palestinian violence has once again been turned on itself, including the extra-judicial Hamas executions of “collaborators,” longer-term consequences will imperil Israel. Soon, the newly-released Hamas criminals will prepare not just for “ordinary” terror attacks, but also for calibrated escalations to chemical, biological or nuclear (radiological) weapons.
There is more. Any future war between Israel and its jihadi adversaries would have little or nothing to do with Palestinian sovereignty or self-determination. To wit, the October 7 massacre of Israeli civilians was detached from any rational plan for a Palestinian state. This mega-crime’s only plausible motive was debasement and lascivious satisfaction.
While veiled from ordinary assessments of politicians, pundits and strategists, the most authentically animating motives for jihadi terror stem from primal needs to overcome personal mortality. It follows, ipso facto, that visible struggles between the Jewish State and Hamas et. al. are generally reflections of much deeper issues.
Rejecting the syntax and generalities of Trump’s “Board of Peace,” Israeli planners need to inquire: What are actual jihadi goals? If Hamas and kindred terror groups seek “power over death,” how should Israel respond? This query is urgent because the jihadist path to immortality is expressly linked to “terror-sacrifice” and “martyrdom.”
For Israel, the potentially existential threat stems from an adversary that regards violence against Jews and the Jewish State as “sacred.” Today, in the bewildering cacophony of a demonstrably false peace, Jerusalem should distinguish Middle Eastern reality from shadows of reality. To do this capably, three basic concepts will need to be examined in tandem: death, time, and immortality.
What can these three interrelated concepts teach Israeli planners about the force-multiplying perils of Trump’s agreement? To answer thoughtfully, refined thinkers should undertake disciplined inquiries at the individual level, i.e., the level of microcosm. Though an illogical assurance, the promise of “power over death” offers jihadists the greatest imaginable reward for faith-based destructiveness. Significantly, this reward pertains to Islamist adversaries both as direct beneficiaries and reciprocal benefactors.
But first there must be a prior order of business. A two-part question will need to be raised and answered:
How can any one individual, terror group, or state gain “power over death,” and what can such presumed gain have to do with Israel’s fate?
On occasion, as Israelis ought already to have learned, the search for “power over death” demands an explosive end to the jihadist’s life on earth. Although revered by Hamas as “martyrs,” virtually all jihadi leaders strive more-or-less desperately to avoid personal death. As recent facts will affirm, these openly-unheroic commanders are usually “willing” to endure Israeli military retaliations while residing in Qatari five-star hotels. For such senior commanders, it would be difficult to contest, life amid secular affluence remains preferable to a martyr’s existence in asphyxiating tunnels.
All jihadists welcome the “sacrifice” of “unbelievers.” On October 7, 2023, Hamas and kindred perpetrators raped children as well as adults, males as well as females. They burned alive more than a dozen “enemies of the faith.” To support these “battles,” and later engagements with IDF forces, absent Hamas leaders sent large sums of money to “heroic martyr’” families. Often, as a correlative benefit duly sanctified by Islamic clerics, these families were gifted “collective immortality.”
On such matters, history deserves pride of place. In his Lecture on Politics (1896), German historian Heinrich von Treitschke observed: “Individual man sees in his own country the realization of his earthly immortality.” Earlier, German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel opined in Philosophy of Right (1820) that the state represents “the march of God in the world.” Such widely-believed views link loyalty to the state with the promise of “power over death.” In world politics, this is always a monumental promise, but one recognizable only in the eternal shadows of death and time. In the issue at hand, Hegelian and von Treitschke linkages apply equally to an aspiring state (i.e., “Palestine”).
Though it is an incomparable promise, personal immortality still represents an unseemly and disfiguring goal. This judgment owes both to the promise’s calming expression of scientific nonsense (“An immortal person is a contradiction in terms,” reminds philosopher Emmanuel Levinas) and to the fact that any search for life everlasting can foster war, terrorism, and genocide. Looking beyond Trump “remedies,” Israel’s task should be not to remove adversarial hopes for personal and collective immortality, but to “de-link” this search from variously barbarous behaviors.
In Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952), Karl Jaspers comments: “There is something inside all of us that yearns not for reason but for mystery – not for penetrating clear thought but for the whisperings of the irrational….” The most seductive of these irrational whisperings are ones that offer to confer some otherwise unattainable “power over death.” It is somewhere within the twisted criteria of such a “selection” (an appropriate term made infamous at Auschwitz) that rapidly expanding acts of terror-violence can be spawned. This is because any jihadi- promised power over death requires the “sacrifice” of specific “others.”
To deal satisfactorily with both immediate and long-term security threats, Israeli policy-makers will have to understand the most elemental sources of war, terror, and genocide. These sources, which generally evade analytic scrutiny, are rooted in complex intersections of death, time, and immortality. In the end, ipso facto, it is at the conceptual or theoretical level that Israeli scholars and policy-makers must fashion pragmatic operational responses to jihadist violence.
Donald Trump will not save Israel. The Hamas/jihadi terror threat has not been eliminated or reduced. In significant measure, this continuing vulnerability is explicable by enemy ideas of time. Ultimately, it is to “sacred time” rather than “profane time” that jihadi criminals will turn for confirming chronologies of life-everlasting.
Prof. Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is the author of many books and scholarly articles dealing with international law, nuclear strategy, nuclear war, and terrorism. In Israel, Prof. Beres was Chair of Project Daniel (PM Sharon). His 12th and latest book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed., 2018).