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Missouri Jewish leaders advocate for trans rights at state legislature
(JTA) — “Hi, my name is Dan. I’m 11 years old and I like doing magic and circus skills, especially unicycling. I’m here today to testify against House Bill 170, 183, and 337,” a young voice said into the microphone.
“I really like to play sports with my friends, although honestly I’m not very good at it,” he added. “I’d really like the chance to play.”
Dan — a transgender boy whose parents asked that his last name not be used — was the youngest person to testify at the Missouri State House last week in opposition to eight bills heard in the chamber that would restrict trans children from participating in sports that align with their gender identity and limit their access to specialized medical care.
He was also part of a delegation of Missouri’s Jewish community members, alongside a few Christian clergy, that has been consistently appearing at the state Capitol to advocate for trans rights in response to a slew of bills that activists say violate their religious freedoms and cause significant harm to the LGBTQ community.
Daniel Bogard, the rabbi at Central Reform Congregation in St. Louis and the parent of a trans child, was at the State House Jan. 24 and again on Feb. 1 to support those testifying against the bills and to lobby lawmakers against them. He is a frequent visitor to Jefferson City as a trans rights activist, saying the possibility of restrictions on medical care are what scare him the most. One piece of legislation would bar physicians and health care professionals from providing gender affirmation procedures to anyone under 18. It would also deny access to medication like puberty blockers, which are administered to delay the onset of puberty.
“What we want to do is we want to protect kids from unnecessary and harmful surgeries and medications,” said Brad Hudson, a Republican representative and one of the sponsors of the bill. “I say harmful because giving kids puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and even transgender surgery violates the first duty of medicine, do no harm.” (The Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital and other providers say they are generally considered safe to use.)
Hudson also identified himself in his testimony that he is a Christian pastor, and said that his worldview is one in which human beings are created “in the image and likeness of their Creator.”
“Those are the bills that criminalize treating your child as every medical and psychological mainstream organization recommends,” Bogard countered. “And that means parents are left with a choice of not giving these kids the sorts of treatment and care that are best practice according to everything that we know, or fleeing the state, or staying and risking some sort of criminal charge. The one that terrifies me is the idea of DSS [Department of Social Services] agents showing up to my door to take my kid away.”
Bogard, who has been going to the state Capitol for five years now, says the experience of being back at the State Legislature has been simultaneously “awful and affirming.”
With only 25 hours of advance notice, the group going to testify in Jefferson City had to leave St. Louis at 5:30 am in order to make it on time. (Courtesy of Daniel Bogard)
“What’s remarkable is you go in and two-thirds of the people who are sponsoring these bills or testifying in favor of these bills are using overtly Christian theological language when they’re talking about the why,” he explained. “And then you look around and the people who are showing up to protect trans kids are Jews.”
“I’m just so proud of our Jewish community, the way we have shown up around this issue here in Missouri,” Bogard said, remarking on the decades-long history of Jewish-led LGBTQ advocacy in the state. (The founder of the statewide LGBTQ advocacy group PROMO, which is not itself a Jewish group, was founded by Rabbi Susan Talve, one of the founding members of Bogard’s synagogue. Shira Berkowitz, a Jewish summer camp friend of Bogard’s, is the senior director of public policy and advocacy at the organization, and last year, Bogard and Berkowitz launched a summer camp for trans kids.)
The new principal of Saul Mirowitz Jewish Community School, Raquel Scharf-Anderson, made the two-hour drive early on Jan. 24 to testify on behalf of her students.
“I make all of my decisions in the best interest of children,” Scharf-Anderson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Anything that would impact the students in my school, I want them to see me standing with them.”
The sports bills in particular, she said, would impact trans students at private schools, like Mirowitz.
Over the course of the Jan. 24 hearing, Rachel Aguirre, a special education teacher who ran unsuccessfully for State Senate in the Republican primary in 2022, argued that the government was “founded upon the word of God,” and therefore athletes should only play on teams whose gender matches the sex they were assigned at birth. Nancy Delcour, another witness testifying in favor of the bill, also cited the biblical principle that humankind was created in God’s image, and an attempt to change that is the work of Satan.
Before the nine-hour long hearing was over, another interpretation of the principle of “the image of God” was explored on the hearing room floor.
“As a Jew, this is something that speaks to me quite a bit. We call it ‘b’tzelem Elokim’ — ‘created in the image of God,’ literally,” said Russel Neiss, a Jewish educator and technologist and the parent of a trans child. “But the way we understand this is that God bestows a special honor onto humans that requires that we need to be treated with dignity and we need to treat others with dignity.”
Maharat Rori Picker Neiss, the executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of St. Louis, a rabbi, and the wife of Russel Neiss, also testified against the bills and in support of their child.
“Sitting here for the past two hours has been one of the most painful things that I’ve ever had to do as a mother and we’ve been doing this for four years,” she said. Picker-Neiss stayed home from the Jan. 31 Senate hearing for the first time in four years — but was back at the Capitol fighting for her child’s rights by the next day.
Next week, as another bill limiting what can be said about trans identity in schools makes its way through the Missouri chambers, Scharf-Anderson says school leadership will return to the state Capitol.
“We know that children imitate what we do, and we want to make sure that we’re being good role models for them,” she said. “And we will continue to stand by the children that we need to support who are part of our school and in our broader community.”
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The post Missouri Jewish leaders advocate for trans rights at state legislature appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Nick Fuentes says his problem with Trump ‘is that he is not Hitler’
(JTA) — In the fall, a video of Nick Fuentes criticizing Donald Trump drew the praise of progressive ex-Congressman Jamaal Bowman.
“Finally getting it Nick,” Bowman commented, apparently recognizing some common ground between himself on the left and Fuentes, on the far right, who said in the video that Trump was “better than the Democrats for Israel, for the oil and gas industry, for Silicon Valley, for Wall Street,” but said he wasn’t “better for us.”
Now, Fuentes says there is actually no common ground between him and those on the left.
“My problem with Trump isn’t that he’s Hitler — my problem with Trump is that he is not Hitler,” Fuentes said during his streaming show on Tuesday, which focused mostly on the potential for an American attack on Iran.
He continued, “You have all these left-wing people saying, ‘Why do I agree with Nick Fuentes?’ It’s like, I’m criticizing Trump because there’s not enough deportations, there’s not enough ICE brutality, there’s not enough National Guard. Sort of a big difference!”
Fuentes, the streamer and avowed antisemite who has previously said Hitler was “very f–king cool,” has been gaining more traction as a voice on the right. His interview with Tucker Carlson in October plunged Republicans into an ongoing debate over antisemitism within their ranks, inflaming the divide between a pro-Israel wing of the party and an emerging, isolationist “America First” wing that’s against U.S. military assistance to Israel.
Once a pro-Trump MAGA Republican, Fuentes has become the leader of the “groyper” movement advocating for farther-right positions. The set of Fuentes’ show includes both a hat and a mug with the words “America First” on his desk.
In a New York Times interview, Trump recently weighed in on rising tensions within the Republican Party, saying Republican leaders should “absolutely” condemn figures who promote antisemitism, and that he does not approve of antisemites in the party.
“No, I don’t. I think we don’t need them. I think we don’t like them,” replied Trump when asked by a reporter whether there was room within the Republican coalition for antisemitic figures.
Asked if he would condemn Fuentes, Trump initially claimed that he didn’t know the antisemitic streamer, before acknowledging that he had had dinner with him alongside Kanye West in 2022.
“I had dinner with him, one time, where he came as a guest of Kanye West. I didn’t know who he was bringing,” Trump said. “He said, ‘Do you mind if I bring a friend?’ I said, ‘I don’t care.’ And it was Nick Fuentes? I don’t know Nick Fuentes.”
Trump flaunted his pro-Israel bona fides in the interview, mentioning the recent announcement that he was nominated for Israel’s top civilian honor and calling himself the “best president of the United States in the history of this country toward Israel.”
Fuentes, meanwhile, spent the bulk of his show on Tuesday speculating that Trump will order the U.S. to attack Iran, and concluded that “Israel is holding our hand walking us down the road toward an inevitable war.”
The post Nick Fuentes says his problem with Trump ‘is that he is not Hitler’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Larry Ellison once renamed a superyacht because its name spelled backwards was ‘I’m a Nazi’
(JTA) — Larry Ellison, the Jewish founder of Oracle and a major pro-Israel donor, has recently been in the headlines for his media acquisition ventures with his son.
The new scrutiny on the family has surfaced a decades-old detail about Ellison: that he once rechristened a superyacht after realizing that its original name carried an antisemitic tinge.
In 1999, Ellison — then No. 23 on Forbes’ billionaires list, well on his way to his No. 4 ranking today — purchased a boat called Izanami.
Originally built for a Japanese businessman, the 191-foot superyacht was named for a Shinto deity. But Ellison soon realized what the name read backwards: “I’m a Nazi.”
“Izanami and Izanagi are the names of the two Shinto deities that gave birth to the Japanese islands, or so legend has it,” Ellison said in “Softwar,” a 2013 biography. “When the local newspapers started pointing out that Izanami was ‘I’m a Nazi’ spelled backward, I had the choice of explaining Shintoism to the reporters at the San Francisco Chronicle or changing the name of the boat.” He renamed the boat Ronin and later sold it.
The decades-old factoid resurfaced this week because of a New York Magazine profile of Ellison’s son, David Ellison, the chair and CEO of Paramount-Skydance Corporation.
Skydance Corporation, which David Ellison founded in 2006, completed an $8 billion merger last year with Paramount Global. Larry Ellison, meanwhile, joined an investor consortium that signed a deal to purchase TikTok, the social media juggernaut accused of spreading antisemitism. Together, father and son also staged a hostile bid to purchase Warner Bros. but were outmatched by Netflix.
After acquiring Paramount, David Ellison appointed The Free Press founder Bari Weiss as the editor-in-chief of CBS News, in an endorsement of Weiss’ contrarian and pro-Israel outlook that has been challenged as overly friendly to the Trump administration.
Larry Ellison, who was raised in a Reform Jewish home by his adoptive Jewish parents, has long been a donor to pro-Israel and Jewish causes, including to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. In September, he briefly topped the Bloomberg Billionaires Index as the world’s richest man.
In December, Oracle struck a deal to provide cloud services for TikTok, with some advocates hoping for tougher safeguards against antisemitism on the social media platform
The post Larry Ellison once renamed a superyacht because its name spelled backwards was ‘I’m a Nazi’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Alex Bregman, who drew a Jewish star on his cap after Oct. 7, inks $175M deal with the Cubs
(JTA) — For the second year in a row, Jewish star third baseman Alex Bregman has signed a lucrative free-agent contract with a team that is run by a Jewish executive and plays in a historic ballpark in a city with a significant Jewish community.
Last year, it was the Boston Red Sox. Now, Bregman is headed to the Chicago Cubs — a team whose Jewish fans possess almost religious devotion.
Bregman, who had opted out of a three-year, $120 million deal with Boston, has signed a five-year, $175 million pact with the Cubs. It is the second-largest contract ever signed by a Jewish ballplayer, behind Max Fried’s $218 million contract in 2024. Bregman previously signed a five-year, $100 million extension with the Houston Astros in 2019.
Bregman, who played the first nine years of his career in Houston, has been one of baseball’s premier third basemen over the past decade, with three All-Star selections, a Gold Glove, a Silver Slugger and two World Series rings. He’s also heralded for his leadership on and off the field.
Bregman grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he played baseball in high school and also, according to his mother, was once teased while leaving school for a bar mitzvah lesson. His grandfather, the onetime attorney for the Washington Senators whom she said Bregman called “zeyde,” gave him a collection of baseball cards featuring Jewish players.
His great-grandfather fled antisemitism in Belarus and fell in love with sports in the United States, The Athletic reported in 2017, as Bregman hurtled toward his World Series win.
“It’s the fulfillment of four generations of short Jewish Bregmans who dreamed of playing in the major leagues,” his father Sam, now the district attorney in Albuquerque’s county as well as a Democratic candidate for New Mexico governor, said at the time. “The big leagues and the World Series. One hundred twenty years in America fulfilled by Alex in this World Series.”
Bregman has also been vocal about his Jewish pride. He celebrated Hanukkah with a local synagogue in Houston, and following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that launched the Gaza War, Bregman drew a Star of David on his hat during a playoff game and participated in a video of Jewish players calling on fans to support Israel.
Some Jewish fans hoped Bregman’s shows of solidarity with Israel would lead him to suit up for another new squad this spring, Team Israel at the upcoming World Baseball Classic. But Bregman announced this week that he will play for Team USA again. Another Jewish ballplayer, Rowdy Tellez, will rejoin team Mexico, taking two big names off the recruitment board for Israel.
Back in 2018, as Bregman was first emerging as a major star, he said he regretted taking a pass on Team Israel the previous year, when it made it to the second round of play. Suiting up for the U.S. team, Bregman had just four at-bats as a backup player.
Now, he has selected a jersey number for his Cubs era that reflects his aspirations.
“I wore No. 3 because I want a third championship,” Bregman said during his first press conference with his new club on Thursday.
The post Alex Bregman, who drew a Jewish star on his cap after Oct. 7, inks $175M deal with the Cubs appeared first on The Forward.