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Jewish camp alums cheer ‘Theater Camp,’ Ben Platt movie shot at former Kutz Camp
(JTA) — In January, 25 alumni of the Union for Reform Judaism’s Kutz Camp gathered on their former campus. Although the historic summer camp known for fostering Reform leadership and leaving a mark on modern Jewish music had shuttered in 2019, the alumni were back for a preview screening of “Theater Camp,” a comedy film from Jewish co-creators Ben Platt, Molly Gordon and Noah Galvin filmed on Kutz Camp’s grounds in Warwick, New York.
The mockumentary centers on a fictional upstate musical arts camp, AdirondACTS, that is striving to fend off foreclosure after its founder Joan (Amy Sedaris) falls into a strobe-light-induced seizure at a middle school production of “Bye Bye Birdie.” (Joan is intended to be the subject of the documentary, but filming soon turns to a cast of zealous teachers and campers who forge ahead with an original musical about her legacy entitled “Joan, Still.”)
Platt and Gordon star as codependent best friends and self-serious instructors, alongside Galvin as an artistically repressed “third-generation stage manager” and Jimmy Tatro as Joan’s son, an earnest finance bro humorously trying to balance her accounts. Created by four former theater kids (Platt, Gordon and Galvin wrote the screenplay while Nick Lieberman co-directed with Gordon), “Theater Camp” hopes to resonate beyond its satirized social niche when it premieres on Friday.
Although AdirondACTS is a secular arts camp, the film is peppered with Jewish references — a previous summer’s musical production was called “A Hanukkah Divorce,” and one auditioning 11-year-old chooses camp over sitting shiva for her cousin. The closing performance of “Joan, Still” reveals that Joan was born to an Eastern European Jewish family and immigrated as a young girl.
An undated view of a Kutz Camp bunk. (Jeff Klepper)
Kutz Camp leader Andrew Keene, who rented the site for a weekend in January and organized the “Theater Camp” viewing for alums, said they were moved to watch the campgrounds come back to life. Keene was involved with Kutz for 10 years, first as a participant, then as a staffer and finally as vice chair by the time the camp closed, squeezed by competition from other programs and declining attendance. Kutz was bought by the Town of Warwick and repurposed as a public recreational center.
“It really hit home for us,” Keene told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Even though it wasn’t about a Jewish camp, the themes of inclusion and belonging really resonated.”
Platt and Gordon took inspiration from their own experiences in youth theater — their collaboration dates back to the Adderley School for the Performing Arts, where they met at 4 and 5 years old. But parts of the film also drew from Platt’s summers at a California branch of Camp Ramah, a prominent network of Conservative Jewish camps.
“Molly went to Stagedoor and Noah and Nick went to youth theater camp and we did a youth theater program together, but in terms of my sleepaway summer camp experience it was all at a Jewish summer camp,” Platt said in an interview with Letterboxd. “We have this whole conceit about teachers performing a night time performance for the kids that was ripped directly from my camp experience.”
Like the fictional AdirondACTS camp, Kutz was an incubator of artistic talent. The camp was founded in 1965 and became known as a birthplace of modern Jewish folk music after Debbie Friedman, whose songs revolutionized Jewish prayer and continue to be sung in synagogues nationwide, served as its song leader in 1969.
Debbie Friedman makes a peace sign at Kutz Camp. Her songs would go on to be sung in Reform congregations across the country. (Jeff Klepper)
“I would honestly be surprised if there was another movie written about summer camp, especially a theater summer camp, that did not come from Jewish writers and artists,” said Keene. “It is such an embedded narrative in the American Jewish experience.”
The Jewish summer camp has shaped American Jewish identities for over a century, said Sandra Fox, who teaches at New York University and wrote “The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America.” In the 1920s, when Jews were largely concentrated in cities, they started going to camp amid a broader social movement concerned with how industrialization was affecting children’s physical and mental health.
But it was after World War II that camp took on a vital significance for American Jewish leadership, said Fox. Jews were moving to the suburbs and assimilating into a white middle class, while the Holocaust had left them anxious about the future of their culture and religion.
A trio of counselors get musical at Kutz Camp. (Courtesy of Jeff Klepper)
“Most American Jewish kids went to public school, where they socialized with gentiles,” said Fox. “So Jewish camps were a place where ethnic cohesion could still continue.”
According to a 2020 Pew Research Center study, four in 10 Jewish Americans attended a summer camp with Jewish content. The camps became critical to educating future generations of Jewish leadership.
Rabbi Lisa Silverstein Tzur, the last chair of Kutz, credits the camp with the formation of her Jewish identity. Tzur grew up in a secular household and first attended Kutz in 1983, hoping to learn about crafting Jewish music.
“In actuality, I was able to not only explore my musicality, but to explore my Jewish identity in a way that was profound,” Tzur told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “My summer at Kutz in 1983 was the single most influential experience that led me to the career path that I chose. Had I not gone to Kutz, I would not have become a rabbi.”
Tzur was gratified that the makers of “Theater Camp” were former camp kids themselves.
“I hope that when they walked into that place — knowing even just a little bit about the history of the camp — I hope that they felt as at home there as they did in their summer camps when they grew up,” she said.
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CNN Exploits Arab Israeli Family’s Death in Iran Attacks to Push Narrative Against Israeli ‘Inequality’
Illustrative: A drone photo shows the damage over residential homes and a school at the impact site following a missile attack from Iran on Israel, in Bnei Brak, Israel, June 16, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Chen Kalifa
In the early hours of Sunday morning, a missile launched by Iran struck the northern Israeli town of Tamra, near Haifa, killing four women from the same Arab Israeli family.
Manar Khatib, her daughters Hala, aged 20, and Shada, 13, and a relative — also named Manar Khatib — were killed when their multi-storey home took a direct hit. Manar’s husband, Raja, and their youngest daughter, Razan, survived. More than a dozen others were wounded and evacuated to Rambam Hospital in Haifa.
Their deaths are heartbreaking, just like every other life lost to the Iranian regime’s indiscriminate barrages of ballistic missiles targeting Israeli civilian areas.
They include an 8-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy killed in Bat Yam, where missiles have hit residential buildings two nights in a row. Rescue workers are still pulling bodies from the rubble.
But CNN wasn’t content to report the tragedy. Instead, it used the Khatib family’s death to push an ugly and misleading narrative: that Israel is running a system of bomb shelter “inequality” between Israelis and “Palestinian citizens of Israel.”
In a report titled “Iranian strikes expose bomb shelter shortage for Palestinian towns inside Israel,” published after Chief International Correspondent Clarissa Ward’s visit to Tamra, CNN describes the town as “somber, compounded by anger over a lack of adequate bomb shelters—an issue that Palestinian citizens of Israel have long warned was a glaring inequality.”
They cite the town’s mayor, who claims just 40% of Tamra’s 37,000 residents have access to a safe room or shelter. “There are no bunkers or public shelters,” CNN adds, “which are otherwise ubiquitous across most Israeli towns and cities.”
CNN offers no evidence that the Khatib family lacked a shelter. In fact, other international outlets — including The Guardian — have reported that the family had two safe rooms, one on each floor of their home. Yet CNN builds an entire narrative on the unverified assumption that they did not.
Instead of establishing facts, the report relies on implication and generalization — using one family’s tragedy to frame a broader accusation of systemic discrimination.
But here’s what CNN doesn’t tell its audience:
Iranian ballistic missiles are indiscriminately targeting Israeli civilians of all ethnicities.
Thousands of them, without access to bomb shelters, have been forced to spend hours sheltering in stairwells.
But this is @CNN‘s shameful agenda-driven angle. pic.twitter.com/i54CstnAey
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) June 16, 2025
These are not comfortable statistics. But they are the reality for millions of Israelis — Jewish and Arab alike.
Israel’s civil defense gaps are real, but they are the product of decades-old infrastructure challenges, uneven urban development, and the strain of being a country under constant threat. They are not the outcome of ethnic or religious bias, nor evidence of a discriminatory policy.
So when CNN isolates Arab towns like Tamra from this broader national picture, it doesn’t shed light on inequality — it distorts it. The result is a politicized narrative built on omission and insinuation.
The Iranian regime is targeting the entire Israeli population. Its missiles do not distinguish between Jews, Muslims, or Christians; between children in Bat Yam or mothers in Tamra.
To wield the unspeakable loss of one family as a political cudgel, as CNN has done, is not only dishonest — it’s disgraceful.
The author is the Executive Director of HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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Why Are Gulf Countries Not Speaking Out Against Their Rival Iran?
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman meets with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on August 18, 2023. Iran’s Foreign Ministry/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
Since 1979, Iran has been a problem for Arab Gulf capitals. Tehran has exported its radical Islamism and terrorism across the region, built loyalist militias, agitated popular opinion against Gulf governments, and pursued a nuclear weapon.
Yet, when Israel sent its fighter jets to finally confront the troublemaking Iranian regime, all six nations of the Gulf Countries Council (GCC) behaved in a mind-boggling way: They denounced “the Israeli aggression” and worked the phones, including with President Trump, to “de-escalate” the situation. There is an explanation for the Gulf’s behavior.
Abdul-Rahman al-Rashed, one of the sharpest Saudi intellectuals, explained the Saudi thinking. In an interview last September, Rashed said that Riyadh lost confidence in America’s commitment to Saudi security.
In 2019, Iran struck Saudi oil facilities in Abqaiq and Khurais. After saying that America was “locked and loaded” to punish Iran in response, President Trump called off the American strike.
Rashed argues that Riyadh was not seeking the US military to fight on behalf of the Saudis, but that the kingdom believed it was protected by American deterrence against its enemies — and Washington let them down.
The Saudi intellectual also said that war with Iran would be much costlier to the Saudis than to the Iranians. The kingdom is among the top 20 economies in the world, and has six or more thriving economic centers. Iran’s puny economy, however, means that Tehran has little to lose in case of war.
Because American unpredictability eroded Saudi confidence, the kingdom decided to seek an alternative. In 2023, Riyadh restored relations with Tehran. The agreement was signed in Beijing, in the hope that China — the senior partner in its alliance with Iran — could guarantee Iranian non-belligerence toward the kingdom.
To curry more favor with Tehran, in April 2025, Riyadh deployed its second-in-command and MBS’s brother, Defense Minister Khaled, to Iran. The Saudi official warned Iranians of an impending strike if Tehran did not give up its uranium enrichment. To its detriment, Tehran ignored the Saudi warning.
Even after Israel’s impressive opening act in the war with Islamist Iran, the Saudis still did not rejoice. Perhaps Riyadh calculated that if the Islamist regime in Tehran falls, they will be relieved, but if it does not, the Saudis would have curried enough favor with the Iranians that would spare the kingdom Tehran’s post-war wrath.
Hedging has also been part of the calculus of the second biggest GCC country, the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Like Saudi Arabia, the UAE had a bitter military experience with Trump. In 2019, when pro-Emirati forces were about to take the strategic Port of Hodeida from the Houthis in Yemen, Washington urged them to step back. Once again, an Arab state felt it could not count on the US for support against Iran.
And just as Saudi Arabia’s economic centers are vulnerable to Iranian missiles, so are the UAE’s main cities — Dubai and Abu Dhabi — which the late Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah called “glass cities” and threatened to smash.
Under President Biden, the Gulf had an even tougher time dealing with Washington. Biden had promised to turn Saudi Arabia into a pariah state, stopped the sale of offensive weapons to Riyadh in the middle of its war against the Houthis, suspended an F-35 sale to the UAE, and removed the Houthis from the US terrorism list.
Biden reversed all these measures, but the damage had already been done. When he knocked on Riyadh and Abu Dhabi’s doors, inviting them to join a US-led coalition against the Houthis, the two Gulf governments balked. America’s credibility problem persisted.
Without American deterrence and enough air defense, the economically prosperous Saudis and Emiratis have much more to lose than the impoverished Iranians and their militias. This is why, while wishing that the Iran regime would collapse, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have not publicly expressed such a sentiment. Unofficial Saudi voices might still be heard on social media, capturing the true anti-Iran popular sentiment — but the governments themselves are taking a “wait and see” approach.
In May, President Trump visited Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Doha (Qatar’s capital). Qatar’s policy significantly differs from that of its two bigger GCC neighbors.
On Tuesday, former Qatari Prime Minister Hamad Bin Jasim, argued on X that “the Gulf region will pay, and is already paying, a heavy price” for the Israeli-Iranian war. “It is not in the interest of Gulf states to see Iran, their large neighbor, collapse. Such a situation would inevitably lead to a destructive spiral … with severe consequences for everyone.”
To avoid such an eventuality, Hamad suggested that Gulf capitals use their influence with Washington to “immediately halt the Israeli madness.”
Also on X, a Saudi columnist immediately rebutted the former Qatari official. “Your tweet reflects [only] the Qatari position on the Iranian regime,” wrote Saleh al-Fhaid.
“Many Gulf citizens [believe] that Iran is more dangerous to them than Israel,” Fhaid added. “The overthrow of the mullahs’ regime is thus in the interest of Gulf states, and the price of this regime’s demise, however painful, harsh, and costly, is far less than the state of attrition that this regime has been practicing against Gulf states for four decades.”
Fhaid then explained the motive behind Qatar’s pro-Iran position: “Some Gulf states view the mullahs’ regime as a guarantee for creating a regional balance. Other Gulf states view the mullahs’ regime as an existential threat.”
The debate in GCC nations, over the fate of Iran’s Islamist regime, is vibrant, even if muffled. The general sentiment wants to see the regime gone. As Fhaid spelled it out, the governments of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait see Islamist Iran as an existential threat. Qatar and Oman believe that they can use Iran to offset Saudi Arabia. All six governments pretend that neutrality and mediation is their best bet — but each one of the two blocs hopes for a different outcome.
Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a research fellow at The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD).
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Israel Hits Nuclear Sites, Iran Strikes Hospital as War Escalates
Smoke rises following an Israeli attack in Tehran, Iran, June 18, 2025. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Israel bombed nuclear targets in Iran on Thursday and Iranian missiles hit an Israeli hospital overnight, as the week-old air war escalated with no sign yet of an off-ramp.
Following the strike that damaged the Soroka medical center in Israel‘s southern city of Beersheba, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tehran’s “tyrants” would pay the “full price.”
Defense Minister Israel Katz said the military had been instructed to intensify strikes on strategic-related targets in Tehran in order to eliminate the threat to Israel and destabilize the “Ayatollah regime.”
Israel‘s sweeping campaign of airstrikes aims to do more than destroy Iran‘s nuclear centrifuges and missile capabilities. It seeks to shatter the foundations of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s government and leave it near collapse, Israeli, Western, and regional officials said.
Netanyahu wants Iran weakened enough to be forced into fundamental concessions on permanently abandoning its nuclear enrichment, its ballistic missile program, and its support for terrorist groups across the region, the sources said.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, speaking to reporters outside the damaged hospital, said “regime change” in Tehran was not a goal the security cabinet had set “for the time being.”
US President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has kept the world guessing about whether Israel‘s superpower ally would join it in airstrikes.
Israel said it had struck Iran‘s Natanz and Isfahan nuclear sites. It initially said it had also hit Bushehr, site of Iran‘s only functioning nuclear power plant, but a spokesperson later said it was a mistake to have said this.
An Iranian diplomat told Reuters Bushehr was not hit and Israel was engaged in “psychological warfare” by discussing it. Any attack on the plant, near Arab neighbors and housing Russian technicians, is viewed as risking nuclear disaster.
Trump has veered from proposing a swift diplomatic end to the war to suggesting the United States might join it. On Wednesday, he said nobody knew what he would do. A day earlier he mused on social media about killing Iran‘s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, then demanded Iran‘s unconditional surrender.
A week of Israeli air and missile strikes against its major rival has wiped out the top echelon of Iran‘s military command, damaged its nuclear capabilities, and killed hundreds of people, while Iranian retaliatory strikes have killed at least two dozen civilians in Israel.
STRAIT OF HORMUZ
Iran has been weighing its options in responding to its biggest security challenge since the 1979 revolution. A member of the Iranian Parliament’s National Security Committee Presidium, Behnam Saeedi, told the semi-official Mehr news agency Iran could consider closing the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of daily global oil consumption passes.
Tehran has in the past threatened to close the strait. Shipping sources said on Wednesday that commercial ships were avoiding Iran‘s waters nearby.
Oil prices rose after Israel and Iran continued to exchange missile attacks overnight and Trump’s stance on the conflict kept investors on edge.
Iran was maintaining crude oil supply by loading tankers one at a time and moving floating oil storage much closer to China, two vessel tracking firms told Reuters, as the country seeks to keep a key source of revenue while under attack.
The conflict poses a fresh hurdle for Iran, which uses a shadow fleet of tankers to conceal their origin and skirt US sanctions reinstated in 2018 over its nuclear program.
Countries around the world are taking measures to evacuate their citizens from Israel and Iran and airspace in the region remains closed.
Earlier, the Israeli military said it targeted the Khondab nuclear site near Iran‘s central city Arak overnight, including a partially built heavy-water research reactor. Heavy-water reactors produce plutonium, which, like enriched uranium, can be used to make the core of an atom bomb. Iran‘s atomic energy agency said the attack caused no casualties.
The Israeli military also said it attacked launch sites in western Iran after attempts to restore them were detected.
Israel, which has the most advanced military in the Middle East, has been fighting on several fronts since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas triggered the Gaza war. It has severely weakened Iran‘s regional allies, Hamas in Gaza and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and bombed Yemen’s Houthis.
The extent of the damage inside Iran has become more difficult to assess in recent days, with the authorities apparently seeking to prevent panic by limiting information.
Iran has stopped giving updates on the death toll, and state media have ceased showing widespread images of destruction. The internet has been almost completely shut down, and the public has been banned from filming.
Israel has issued evacuation orders for whole sections of Tehran, a city of 10 million. Thousands of residents have fled, jamming the highways out.
Inside Israel, the missile strikes over the past week are the first time a significant number of projectiles from Iran have pierced defenses and killed Israelis in their homes.
The director general of the Israeli hospital that was damaged in Beersheba, Shlomi Kodesh, told reporters at the site that a missile strike had destroyed several wards and wounded 40 people, mostly staff and patients.
Netanyahu, visiting the site, said he had issued instructions that “no one is immune” from Israeli attacks.
Iran‘s Revolutionary Guards said they had targeted Israeli military and intelligence headquarters near the hospital. An Israeli military official denied there were military targets nearby.
Missiles also hit a residential building in Ramat Gan, east of Tel Aviv.
Iran‘s Revolutionary Guards said in a statement that missile and drone attacks have targeted military and industrial sites linked to Israel‘s defense industry in Haifa and Tel Aviv.
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