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Netflix’s ‘You People’ digs into Black-Jewish relations. It also plays a Kanye West song, twice.
(JTA) – The new Netflix comedy “You People,” about an uneasy union between a Jewish man and a Black woman in Los Angeles, was always aiming to provoke its audience.
“I feel like the movie has something to say,” producer Kevin Misher told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “It allows different sides to evolve and understand everybody’s point of view on the world. … People grow to understand each other. And when they don’t understand each other, they understand that there are, in fact, differences.”
But when they shot the movie a year ago, director Kenya Barris (“Black-ish”) and his Jewish co-writer and star Jonah Hill couldn’t have predicted how it would land in the midst of several national stories about Black-Jewish relations, including prominent Black celebrities who have dabbled in antisemitism.
For example, the film’s use of a popular song that includes the N-word in its title at two different intervals — first as a joke about Hill’s character being unable to say the title, then at the end under a hora — takes on a heightened meaning today. Kanye West, who now goes by Ye and is one half of the talent behind the song, recently went on a months-long antisemitic tirade that included him expressing his admiration for Hitler.
Misher, who is Jewish, acknowledges that the track is “a difficult song to play in that moment.” Netflix’s original plans to feature the first scene involving the Ye song in the film’s teaser trailer were scrapped amid his onslaught of antisemitic comments.
But the filmmakers felt the scene needed to remain in the final cut of the film — even as they cut another scene in which their actors spoke Yiddish — because it underlined the uncomfortable racial tensions between Hill’s character, a Jew named Ezra, and co-star Eddie Murphy, who plays Akbar, the soon-to-be father-in-law Ezra is trying to win over.
“It was important, I think, for us to have that song remain, so that it portrayed the divide that they would have to cross,” Misher said. “It wasn’t about the artist of the song, it was about the words in the song.”
Misher also justified the song’s reprisal at the end of the film, noting that Ye himself doesn’t sing on the sample: “Jay-Z is singing at the end.”
“You People” was conceived as a mashup of “Meet The Parents” (which Misher also produced) and “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner.” In a modern-day twist, the white liberal family, rather than expressing anxiety over the race of their child’s partner, fetishizes her family instead.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus and David Duchovny play the Jewish parents. Although the relationship between Jews and whiteness has been a topic of serious academic debate for generations, and although Lauren London, who plays Hill’s Black love interest Amira, herself has an Ashkenazi Jewish father, the Jews in the movie are simply portrayed as white.
Barris’ team was unable to make him available for a JTA interview prior to the film’s release, and Hill has announced he will no longer do press for any of his films, citing his mental health. But Misher told JTA that he thought the film did an admirable job of portraying a specific “culturally Jewish” Los Angeles family. As a Jew himself, he said it was also important to him that the film’s depiction of Judaism be “authentic.”
To that end, he brought on the rabbi and cantor at his own synagogue, Kehillat Israel in Los Angeles, to play the rabbi and cantor at Ezra’s fictional synagogue in the movie. (Scenes depicting a Yom Kippur service were shot at the Skirball Cultural Center, an L.A. Jewish museum.) He also hired an on-set Jewish cultural consultant from Hebrew Helpers, a nationwide Jewish studies tutoring service.
There are other racially charged moments in the film that may sit uneasily with Jewish viewers. A tense dinner-table conversation with Amira’s family includes discussions of the Holocaust and slavery, including Akbar reminding Ezra’s family that some American Jews owned slaves. (The film’s premiere on Netflix on Friday coincides with International Holocaust Remembrance Day.)
Akbar is a follower of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, whose antisemitism gets a small acknowledgement, although the wedding at the end of the film is jointly officiated by a cantor and an imam meant to represent the Nation of Islam. (Most Muslims do not consider the Nation of Islam to be part of the religion.)
Also at the film’s end, Louis-Dreyfus, playing Hill’s mother, apologizes to Amira and Akbar for her series of racist microaggressions “on behalf of all Jewish people.” This follows an apology from Akbar — but only for being mean to Ezra, not for committing his spiritual and political life to an antisemite.
Misher said that while Barris wanted to invoke tense political topics, the core of the film still aimed to be a character-based comedy. Detailed discussions of antisemitism, the filmmakers believed, would have distracted from that.
“If, suddenly, somebody starts standing up at a soapbox and waxing philosophic about the way the world is, I think that would have felt inauthentic to the journey of these specific characters,” he said.
At the end of the day, the makers of “You People” still believe their film has a message worth sharing.
“I feel like we got it right, in terms of how we represented the relationship between these two families,” Misher said.
As for the other conversations about racism and antisemitism these characters could have had, he said, they might come up if Netflix greenlights a sequel.
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The post Netflix’s ‘You People’ digs into Black-Jewish relations. It also plays a Kanye West song, twice. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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NY Jewish Democrats defend Mamdani after Netanyahu calls him a Hamas supporter
(JTA) — Some top New York Jewish Democrats are defending New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called him an “antisemite” and said he is “buddies” with Hamas.
Netanyahu’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, and the outsized role Mamdani played in it, were the culmination of escalating criticism of Mamdani from Israeli officials in recent weeks.
Mamdani is an avowed anti-Zionist who during his campaign to be the mayor had pledged to arrest Netanyahu. Over the summer, he conceded he didn’t have the power to do so, though he criticized the Israeli government over Gaza in the run-up to the prime minister’s visit.
But while his full-throated criticism of Israel has alarmed some local Jewish officials, many felt that Netanyahu’s attacks on Thursday from the U.N. plenum went too far.
“It’s scurrilous to suggest that the mayor voices support for Hamas,” Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal, who is Jewish, said Friday in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
City Council Speaker Julie Menin, also a Jewish Democrat, has opposed Mamdani on some legislation related to protests outside houses of worship — a sensitive issue in the wake of protesters picketing outside synagogues that were holding Israeli real estate events. Menin said in a press conference on Thursday that Netanyahu’s remarks were “not helpful at all” because “we need to turn the temperature down.”
“This idea of what the prime minister said can really incite violence. We cannot have this,” Menin said.
Mamdani, an outspoken pro-Palestinian advocate, has condemned Hamas as “a terrorist organization” and has denounced antisemitic hate crimes committed in New York.
The mayor responded with a statement of his own, saying that Netanyahu “used his speech to repeat baseless lies meant to sanitize his genocide of Palestinians.”
“Yet no lie can change the fact that he remains the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity,” Mamdani said. The United States is not a party to the ICC and has no obligation to carry out its warrants on U.S. soil.
Netanyahu’s remarks at the U.N. General Assembly came amid a reelection campaign in which Netanyahu’s Likud Party has made Mamdani a villain. Hoylman-Sigal called Thursday’s speech a “political ploy” and a “deflection by someone who has a lot of domestic turmoil, political and otherwise.”
“Clearly, Netanyahu is fighting for his political life,” said Hoylman-Sigal, who is Jewish.
Netanyahu’s arrival in New York sparked a wave of demonstrations in Manhattan on Thursday, including multiple organized by Israeli expatriate groups who emphasized the Oct. 27 Israeli election date. Rallygoers chanted “Vote him out!” at a protest held by the Israeli anti-Netanyahu group UnXeptable.
Even before his visit, Gov. Kathy Hochul pushed back on comments Netanyahu had made. Calling Mamdani a “supporter of the Hamas monsters” was false and “hurt his own credibility,” Hochul said in an interview with the radio station WNYC earlier this week.
Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, which is supportive of Netanyahu and has been harshly critical of Mamdani, called Netanyahu’s remarks “Churchillian” and his “greatest speech.”
“Importantly, he also called out Mamdani as a dangerous antisemite who has endangered Jews in New York City,” Klein said in a statement.
The U.N. speech came as Israeli officials have escalated their rhetoric against Mamdani.
Last month, Ofir Akunis, the Israeli consul general in New York, compared Mamdani’s support for the boycott Israel movement to Nazi Germany. A Mamdani spokesperson told JTA the comparison was “offensive, completely unhinged and detached from reality,” and said Akunis “should be ashamed of himself.”
The statement was Mamdani’s first time weighing in on the Israeli consul general, who had accused Mamdani of being directly responsible for anti-Jewish hate crimes in the city.
Republican City Council member Inna Vernikov, who is Jewish and a staunch Mamdani critic, took issue with the mayor’s response.
“When Mamdani cleans his own house, then he can criticize Jewish leaders,” said Vernikov, pointing to Mamdani’s wife’s anti-Israel views and his vetoing of a bill on protests around schools.
Brad Lander, the Jewish progressive and Democratic nominee for New York’s 10th congressional district, blasted both Akunis’ and Netanyahu’s attacks on Mamdani.
“Netanyahu and Akunis are cynically weaponizing accusations of antisemitism for their own narrow, selfish political purposes,” said Lander, one of Mamdani’s most prominent Jewish allies, in a statement to JTA. “They are making Israelis, American Jews, Palestinians, and the whole world less safe.”
Lander himself was the recipient of a Nazi Germany comparison when Bruce Blakeman, the Republican candidate for New York governor, said that Lander “would be a camp guard in the concentration camp if he could.”
Hoylman-Sigal called the comparisons “outrageous,” and said that he is more worried about a rise in far-right parties, including Germany’s AfD.
“We should be very careful, no matter what our background is, to draw such extreme comparisons,” he said.
Phylisa Wisdom, who heads Mamdani’s office to combat antisemitism, told JTA that it is “appalling that some leaders have resorted to comparing their political opponents to Nazis.”
“We can and should disagree — sometimes deeply — but we must be able to do so without debasing public discourse,” she said.
Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a group that leads outreach to non-Jewish community organizations, told JTA in an email that comparisons to Nazis should be out of bounds.
It is “particularly concerning given that our own community frequently, and rightfully, calls out those using dehumanization and/or making inappropriate Holocaust comparisons,” she said.
As a case in point, Spitalnick pointed to the Anti-Defamation League’s article on inappropriate Holocaust comparisons, which includes COVID-19 vaccine requirements and free speech complaints.
The ADL did not return a request for comment on Akunis’ Nazi Germany comparisons.
“Disagree with the Mayor on his policies or rhetoric — I certainly have — but comparisons like this are deeply offensive and wrong, in addition to undermining the very relationships and engagement necessary to ensuring Jewish safety in New York and beyond,” Spitalnick said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post NY Jewish Democrats defend Mamdani after Netanyahu calls him a Hamas supporter appeared first on The Forward.
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‘Nobody Wants This’ star Adam Brody on Gaza: ‘Put me down as thinking it’s a genocide’
Adam Brody, the Jewish actor who plays a “hot rabbi” on the hit Netflix rom-com Nobody Wants This, called the war in Gaza a genocide in a new interview, making him one of just a few Jewish celebrities to speak out publicly against the Israeli campaign.
The comments came in an interview with GQ about Brody’s efforts canvassing for Democratic candidates in the upcoming midterms.
“Put me down as thinking it’s a genocide. Put me down as wanting a free Palestine,” he said. “It’s awful that it’s taken so much death and misery, but it does feel like it’s reaching a breaking point that it should have a while ago. I’m hopeful that another administration can really do some good and correct some of these policies that are helping that situation be as awful as it is.”
The claim of genocide in Gaza is heavily disputed. Several international bodies, human rights organizations and academic institutions have concluded Israel’s actions in Gaza since Oct. 7 fit the description, including a United Nations Commission of Inquiry. Other similar groups, like the International Court of Justice, have not applied the term.
Brody’s comments were surprising in part because he had previously kept his feelings about the war private, even as other leading Hollywood figures openly criticized it. He does not maintain a public social media presence, and he did not participate in pin-wearing campaigns or sign various petitions related to the war — an approach he indicated he might change going forward.
“I’m not wearing a pin, so I’m not inviting a certain question, and perhaps I should,” he said. “I really admire people who do. But 99% of what I’m asked about is about the show. I’m not trying to plead ignorance—here we are doing a political interview, so it makes sense that we wade into this territory—but I’ve never ducked a question, really, not a political question anyway.”
Brody — who came to fame in the 2000s as the teenager Seth Cohen on The O.C. — joins Hacks star Hannah Einbinder and Wallace Shawn (The Princess Bride) as perhaps the most high-profile Jewish actors to publicly call the war a genocide. Other Jewish entertainment figures, like Mandy Patinkin and The Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer, have criticized the war but stopped short of calling it a genocide.
Yet Brody’s comments are perhaps especially notable because of the character he plays on TV. In Nobody Wants This, Brody plays a rabbi dating a non-Jewish woman — introducing her to the beauty and foibles of Jewish faith and culture. Israel has been conspicuously absent from the show, with its creator, Erin Foster, saying she deliberately avoided geopolitics.
Season 3 of Nobody Wants This releases to Netflix October 22.
The post ‘Nobody Wants This’ star Adam Brody on Gaza: ‘Put me down as thinking it’s a genocide’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Why Mamdani remains focused on Israel as NYC mayor
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at the UN this week, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was there — not in body, but in spirit, having condemned the Israeli prime minister and previously encouraged protests against him.
As a leader in the Jewish community, I know that many American Jews oppose Netanyahu’s government. But many also believe strongly that Israel’s survival as a Jewish homeland is critically important. They, therefore, feel boxed in by the mayor: compelled by conscience to oppose Israel’s leader and to condemn Mamdani’s repeated attacks on Israel’s existence, many of which they find offensive and dangerous.
Because of my previous work for Mayor Bloomberg, I am often asked by Jewish community members why this mayor so frequently puts them in this painful bind. The answer, I believe, lies in motivations worth understanding more clearly.
Of course, Mamdani’s focus on Israel seems partially motivated by principle. He clearly thinks Israel is illegitimate and opposes how it defends itself. I take him at his word that these convictions are sincere. But sincerity still does not explain his single-mindedness. A mayor willing to absorb this much political friction must see some benefit. But what?
To understand, let’s reexamine the 2025 election, often described as a “political tsunami.” The facts, however, are more complicated. Mamdani did defeat his closest opponent by nearly 10%, but in so doing he secured under 51% of the total vote – against a flawed and divided opposition. Viewed this way, his impressive margin seems less sweeping and much narrower.
More important than his electoral margin, though, is the coalition that produced it. His victory rested heavily on three blocs: self-identified very liberal voters; and Muslim and South Asian voters, who turned out in historic numbers. South Asian and Indo-Caribbean turnout, for example, rose 350% between 2021 and 2025, with 87% of South Asian votes going to Mamdani. Analyzing available data, I believe that, taken together, these three blocs accounted for well over 50% of all Mamdani votes.
What makes this coalition intriguing is that it consists of such strange bedfellows. The blocs differ sharply on many key local issues. On same-sex marriage, PRRI’s American Values Atlas found 33% support among Muslim-Americans in 2024, with support among very liberal Americans substantially higher. The divergence is similarly stark on policing, education, and many other policies.
In fact, it is hard to identify many things uniting these blocs besides this candidate: a skilled politician speaking the language of the left, while activating Muslim and South Asian voters just as Mayors Bloomberg and Koch activated Jewish voters and Mayors Adams and Dinkins activated Black voters.
Which brings us back to Israel.
When one barely ekes out a majority against flawed opponents, and one’s coalition is fundamentally misaligned, one must find ways to hold it together. To this end, Mamdani seems to be taking a page from Donald Trump. When Trump’s coalition buckles, he reaches for a “shiny distraction” — attacks on the press; trade wars; threatened invasions of Greenland. For Trump, the specifics are almost irrelevant; what matters is the theater of conflict and the distraction it produces.
For Mamdani, his Greenland is Israel.
Yes, it is a subject on which he holds sincere convictions. But, more importantly, it is one of few issues on which his coalition agrees. His relentless focus on Israel — to the exclusion of other worthy targets, including grave human rights offenders across South Asia and the Muslim world — is no accident. It is a political calculation allowing him to don the mantle of moral crusader while keeping his coalition on-side and united.
For those who believe Mamdani’s politics pose a danger to the Jewish community and want to slow his political momentum, this analysis yields two insights.
First, trying to persuade the mayor to soften his Israel attacks is unlikely to succeed. Doing so is not his inclination or in his political interests.
Second, and maybe more interestingly, Mamdani has a vulnerability that he seems to recognize – a fragile coalition. Allowing Mamdani to
make Israel his “shiny distraction” and engaging him on it plays his game. A different approach would be to defend Israel as-needed, but focusing efforts on pressing Mamdani to do his job – for example, elevating important issues, such as specialized high school admissions practices, on which his coalition happens to be divided.
The upshot? When smart politicians do things that seem politically risky, they usually see something others do not. Mamdani’s Israel focus offers a case-in-point. Those looking to respond should consider resisting the temptation to take the bait when possible. The wiser strategy is to engage under different rules: defending Israel when necessary, then pivoting to the difficult local issues from which Israel is meant to distract.
The post Why Mamdani remains focused on Israel as NYC mayor appeared first on The Forward.
