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SAG strike puts its brash Jewish president, Fran Drescher, squarely in the spotlight
(JTA) — In the second season of “The Nanny,” the sitcom she wrote and starred in, Fran Drescher’s character, Fran Fine, refuses to enter a hotel where the busboys are striking.
“I’m sorry, but the Fines don’t cross picket lines,” she tells her companion, the father of the family she works for. “It’s against our religion.”
The laugh line was one of many moments when Drescher served her signature mashup of brashness, Jewishness and liberal politics throughout her early 1990s series and beyond.
Now, three decades later, Drescher is one of the most prominent advocates for organized labor — and it’s hardly a joke. The union she has led since 2021, the Screen Actors Guild, last week launched a strike over their treatment by studios in an age of digital streaming. Joining with the union representing writers, which is also on strike, the guild has effectively caused Hollywood to grind to a halt — and Drescher is leading the charge.
“What we ultimately received from them is what my mom would call ‘a leck and a schmeck,’” she said during a press conference last week, using the Yiddish for “a lick and a sniff” — meaning an amount so small one can barely smell or taste it — to refer to the offer from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Production.
In leading the 160,000-member union through the strike, Drescher joins a long list of Jewish women labor activists. In 1909, Clara Lemlich, a 23-year-old Jewish garment worker, gave an impassioned speech — also in Yiddish — that ignited a 20,000 person general strike consisting mostly of women, reshaping her industry and strengthening the power of unions.
The “Great Revolt,” referring to a separate 50,000-person, mostly male garment worker’s strike that followed, is seen as a watershed moment in labor history. “That’s really the critical thing: the women launch the Great Revolt,” said Pamela Nadell, director of the Jewish studies program at American University and author of “America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today.”
Lemlich wasn’t alone. Around the same time, Rose Schneiderman, vice president of the New York chapter of the Women’s Trade Union League starting in 1908, was instrumental in the state’s passage of fire safety legislation in the wake of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911. Bessie Abramowitz became one of the founders of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union, launching a major strike against menswear store Hart Schaffner and Marx.
More recently, the American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers union in the United States and one of the top-10 biggest unions overall, has twice been led by Jewish women, including its current president, Randi Weingarten.
“What you’re seeing is a pattern that Jewish women in the labor force, when they have seen injustice, have stood up for it,” Nadell said. “Stories about Jewish women’s social justice activism… it’s passed on from generation to generation.”
Drescher was born and raised in Queens, New York to Sylvia, a bridal consultant, and Mort Drescher, a naval systems analyst. (Her character’s parents on “The Nanny” had the same names.) She told an interviewer that her father taught her to “refine what exists, not accept what is.”
Drescher’s Jewish identity has long been central to her on-screen characters. Throughout the show, Fran Fine teaches the Sheffield family Yiddish terms and the basics about Jewish holidays. The show has drawn criticism for perpetuating stereotypes of Jewish women who are whiny, obsessed with marrying doctors and always looking for a sale — but it also has enduring Jewish fans, including writer and actor Ilana Glazer, who cast Drescher as her aunt on “Broad City.”
In the 1997 romantic comedy “The Beautician and the Beast,” Drescher’s character, New York City beautician Joy Miller, ends up in a fictional Eastern European country ruled by a dictator named Boris Pochenko. In one scene, she tours a factory with the dictator and chats with a worker who expresses dismay that he will have to stay late to work and will miss dinner. She tries to assuage his concern by reminding him that he could still get overtime.
When he says he is unfamiliar with the concept, she gets a dreamy look in her eyes. She is then shown speaking passionately to the workers.
When Pochenko and Miller reunite outside, he lambastes her for acting out of turn.
“You know,” she replies, “I might have said the word ‘strike.’ I say a lot of things! Who listens?”
Drescher has received criticism for her stance against vaccine mandates in the film and television industry during her time as SAG-AFTRA president, though she says she has received all doses of the COVID-19 vaccine.
Days before the contract with the AMPTP was set to expire, Drescher was the focus of more criticism as reality TV star and businesswoman Kim Kardashian — whose net worth is around $1.2 billion, according to Forbes — shared a photo of the two of them together in Puglia, Italy, in the middle of guild negotiations. Kardashian has more than 362 million Instagram followers.
Drescher later clarified that she was in Italy for a work event related to her position as a brand ambassador for Dolce and Gabbana (she says she had not met Kardashian before they took the photo) and that the negotiating committee was aware of her attendance.
The strike is not the first time she has faced down the studios. Speaking on a Los Angeles magazine podcast in 2020, she said a network had initially pressed her to make the “Nanny” character Italian instead of Jewish. At first, she said, she considered making the switch to facilitate her big break — but she decided against it.
“I do not like living with regret, and I don’t want to rush into doing something to get the job and then when it doesn’t go right or it fails, I kick myself because I thought, ‘Why didn’t we follow our instincts? Why did we listen to them?’” she said on the podcast. “I thought, ‘I can’t live with that regret. I know this character needs to be written very close to me and all the rich and wonderful characters that I grew up with.’”
Referring to her co-writer and then-husband Peter Marc Jacobson, she went on: “Peter and I have a brand of comedy that’s rich in specificity, and not only couldn’t we have written it that way — if the character were Italian — but I couldn’t have performed it that way. So we kind of mustered up our chutzpah and said, ‘No, Fran Fine must be Jewish.’”
Now, Drescher is hoping that the same chutzpah will translate into a better deal for actors who say they are not being fairly paid for work that streams online. Key issues in the contract negotiations include “economic fairness, residuals, regulating the use of artificial intelligence and alleviating the burdens of the industry-wide shift to self-taping,” according to the SAG-AFTRA website. The AI proposal from AMPTP in particular has been a disturbing development to guild members.
“They propose that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get paid for one day’s pay, and their company should own that scan of their image, their likeness, and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity,” said SAG-AFTRA chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland. “So if you think that’s a groundbreaking proposal, I suggest you think again.”
In June, nearly 98% of the guild’s members voted to authorize a strike, and the strike began on Friday. Not only are guild members prohibited from shooting, but they are also banned from promoting films and TV shows that have already been made, including through social media posts, participating in print and radio interviews, and making late night talk show appearances about their work. The actors’ strike is also occurring on the back of the Writers Guild strike, which began in May. Studios and the AMPTP estimate this strike will continue until October.
“The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” a studio executive told Deadline last week regarding the writers’ strike.
Drescher herself is also a member of the WGA, and in May she expressed solidarity between the two unions.
On moving forward with the actors’ strike, Drescher told the AP, “In earnest we extended, hoping that they would make deeper inroads, give us some meat on the bone so we can really have a meaningful conversation.”
“They locked themselves behind closed doors, they kept canceling our meetings and we thought, okay, maybe they’re really duking it out in there,” she added. “Maybe they’re gonna come back with something that we could really have a meaningful discussion. But we got bupkis,” she said, using the Yiddish word for zero. “And I think that we were duped.”
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The post SAG strike puts its brash Jewish president, Fran Drescher, squarely in the spotlight appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Experts, Lawmakers Suggest Same Hateful Ideology That Motivated New Orleans Attack Also Behind Pro-Hamas NYC March
Palestinian Youth Movement protesters speaking in Times Square, New York City, NY, USA on Jan. 1, 2025. Photo: Ethan Johnson/SIPA USA via Reuters Connect
Some experts and lawmakers are drawing a link between the Islamist ideology that seemingly motivated the New Year’s Day terrorist attack in New Orleans and the pro-Hamas demonstration in New York City that took place hours later.
On Wednesday, hours after a US Army veteran who pledged allegiance to Islamic State (ISIS) drove a truck into a crowd of New Year’s Day revelers in New Orleans and killed at least 14 people, protesters marched through New York City, chanting slogans condemning both America and Israel.
Hundreds of anti-Israel demonstrators descended upon the streets of Manhattan, sporting signs calling to “End Zionism,” “End all US aid to Israel,” and for “No War With Iran.” Many of these activists also carried Palestinian flags and bellowed slogans such as “intifada revolution!” — a slogan that many consider to be a call for violence against Israelis, Jews, and Westerners more broadly.
“We’re sending you back to Europe, you white b–ches,” a protester yelled at participants of a pro-Israel counter-demonstration. “Go back to Europe! Go back to Europe!”
The demonstration was organized by the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), a group that plans anti-Israel demonstrations across the United States. PYM has repeatedly praised Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7.
US lawmakers were quick to slam the anti-Israel demonstrations, accusing them of fomenting unwarranted hatred toward the United States and the Jewish state.
“These protesters in New York City are marching not to condemn the ISIS terrorist attack against their own country but to falsely accuse their own country, as well as Israel, of terrorism,” wrote Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY), one of the most strident allies of Israel in the US Congress.
“The hatred for America and Israel far exceeds the hatred for actual terror, apartheid, and genocide in the world,” Torres continued. “For an ideologue, ideology has more reality than reality itself.”
Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), another stalwart ally of Israel, also linked the New Orleans terror attack to the New York City demonstrations, saying that “hours after a jihadist sympathizer killed 10 Americans, pro-Hamas agitators are marching through New York City calling for a global intifada.”
“The governor and the mayor must put an end to this nonsense — now,” Lawler added. “Silence is not an option.”
Israeli diplomat Yaki Lopez similarly linked the two incidents, posting on social media that “pro-Hamas demonstrators chanted ‘intifada revolution’ in New York City while jihadist terrorists carried out a deadly attack in New Orleans, killing over a dozen Americans.”
“There’s little distinction between the actions of [the suspect in] New Orleans, who used a truck as a weapon and terrorist attacks in the West Bank where cars are used to run over Israelis,” added Joe Truzman, a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and editor of its Long War Journal. “It’s terrorism, yet there are people in this country who support ‘resistance’ and ‘intifada.’”
US federal agencies have established a link between domestic anti-Israel protests and foreign actors. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said in July that the Iranian regime has organized “influence efforts” to undermine trust in American institutions, adding that “actors tied to Iran’s government” have encouraged and provided financial support to rampant anti-Israel demonstrations. Haines also said that Iran has weaponized social media against the Jewish state and America, spreading misleading propaganda regarding the ongoing war in Gaza.
Meanwhile, experts have warned of a rising global terror threat in the year following Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities. Last May, experts explained to The Algemeiner that “lone wolf” terrorists inspired by ISIS and al Qaeda could carry out attacks on US soil, incensed by the ongoing war in Gaza and inspired by terrorist violence abroad.
“As I look back over my career in law enforcement, I’m hard-pressed to come up with a time when I’ve seen so many different threats, all elevated, all at the same time,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in April.
The post Experts, Lawmakers Suggest Same Hateful Ideology That Motivated New Orleans Attack Also Behind Pro-Hamas NYC March first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Florida Man Arrested for Alleged Plot to Attack AIPAC Office
The 2018 AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington, DC. Photo: Guatemala Presidency / Handout via Reuters.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) stopped an apparent plot to attack an office of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in Plantation, FL, according to court documents filed earlier this week.
Law enforcement apprehended Forrest Kendall Pemberton, a 26-year-old resident of Gainesville, FL, on Dec. 25, the first night of Hanukkah, after he traveled to Plantation in search of the local AIPAC office, local and national media outlets reported.
Prosecutors alleged in their filings that Pemberton was in a rideshare vehicle carrying multiple firearms, including an AR-15 rifle, and ammunition when law enforcement officers stopped and arrested him.
AIPAIC, the foremost pro-Israel lobbying organization in the US, seeks to foster bipartisan support for a stronger US-Israel relationship.
The court documents reportedly did not specifically name AIPAC as the target. However, an FBI affidavit described an organization with the same mission statement as AIPAC and referenced identical language from the group’s website. The suspect’s search engine history also included queries for AIPAC and its former Plantation office, believing it was the current local office.
According to law enforcement, Pemberton initially scoped out the premises of the Florida site for entry and exit points before later attempting to return with weapons.
Suspicions first arose surrounding Pemberton’s whereabouts after his father reported him missing to the police on Dec. 23. The father said he found a “concerning” note in his son’s backpack that “espoused anti-authority sentiments.” His father added that Pemberton often “espoused antisemitic views.”
An AIPAC spokesperson issued an identical statement to multiple outlets thanking the FBI for its work and saying the pro-Israel organization will not be intimidated.
“We take these threats very seriously and we are working closely with law enforcement concerning this matter,” the spokesperson said. “We will not be deterred by extremists in pursuing our mission to strengthen the relationship with America’s valued ally, Israel. We are deeply appreciative of the FBI’s work to stop this individual.”
Pemberton faces a federal stalking charge and is accused of traveling to AIPAC with the intent of “killing, injuring, harassing, and intimidating” people with the organization.
The post Florida Man Arrested for Alleged Plot to Attack AIPAC Office first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Antisemitic Hate Crimes in Massachusetts Reach Eight-Year High
The Boston skyline stands behind the Tobin Bridge and the city of Chelsea as seen from Everett, Massachusetts, US. Photo: Brian Snyder via Reuters Connect.
The US state of Massachusetts saw more antisemitic hate crimes in 2023 than at any time since government officials began tracking such data eight years ago, according to a report issued by its Executive Office of Public Safety and Security (EOPSS).
A striking 119 antisemitic hate crimes were reported to law enforcement agencies, EOPSS said, a total which, in addition to eclipsing 2015’s total of 56 incidents, amounts to a 70 percent increase over the previous year. Antisemitic hate crimes also constituted 18.8 percent of all hate crimes reported in 2023, a figure which trails only behind the percentage of hate crimes which targeted African Americans.
The report added that 68.9 percent of the antisemitic incidents involved property destruction or vandalism, a total of 82, while another 19 percent involved intimidation. Some physical assaults, six, were recorded or reported to the police.
EOPSS’s numbers fall somewhat below other figures reported by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in spring 2024, when the civil rights group said 440 antisemitic incidents occurred in the state in 2023, a 189 percent increase over the previous year. However, the discrepancy may be due to differences in methodology, as ADL reports include all antisemitic incidents, while EOPSS’s tally considers those which fit the legal definition of a crime and were brought to the attention of law enforcement.
The ADL has said, however, that their numbers and EOPSS’s are mutually inclusive.
“This report mirrors what sadly we’ve been tracking and responding to on a daily basis. There has been a marked increase in antisemitic hate incidents in the Bay State and in fact across the country,” Peggy Shukur, vice president of the ADL’s East Division, told The Algemeiner on Thursday. “The local increase reflects national trends. Our data showed that over 10,000 antisemitic incidents were recorded in the US since Oct. 7, 2023, an over 200 percent increase compared to incidents reported to us during the same period a year before.”
She added, “Behind every one of these numbers are people who have experienced the harm, fear, intimidation, and pain that reverberates from each of these incidents. The fact that numbers increase by 70 percent is a grim reminder that antisemitism continues to infect our communities in real and pervasive ways.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, antisemitism in Massachusetts has been an acute problem on college campuses, one to which school officials have allegedly hesitated to respond.
“I’ve become traumatized,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) student Talia Khan told members of the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce in March. “MIT has become overrun by terrorist supporters that directly threaten the lives of Jews on our campus. Members of the anti-Israel club on our campus have stated that violence against Jews who support Israel, including women and children, is acceptable. When this was reported to president [Sally] Kornbluth and senior MIT administration, the issue was never dealt with. Then, administrators pleaded ignorance when we reminded them that no action had been taken, saying that they either forgot about it or missed the email.”
Allegations of neglect have prompted civil lawsuits, including one against Harvard University which was recently cleared to proceed to discovery. Filed by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law (Brandeis Center), the suit centers on several incidents involving Harvard Kennedy School professor Marshall Ganz during the 2022-2023 academic year.
Ganz allegedly refused to accept a group project submitted by Israeli students for his course, titled “Organizing: People, Power, Change,” because they described Israel as a “liberal Jewish democracy.” He castigated the students over their premise, the Brandeis Center says, accusing them of “white supremacy” and denying them the chance to defend themselves. Later, Ganz allegedly forced the Israeli students to attend “a class exercise on Palestinian solidarity” and the taking of a class photograph in which their classmates and teaching fellows “wore ‘keffiyehs’ as a symbol of Palestinian support.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Antisemitic Hate Crimes in Massachusetts Reach Eight-Year High first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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