Uncategorized
Spielberg’s ‘Fabelmans’ earns 7 Oscar nods, WWII epic with anti-Nazi past gets 9
(JTA) – “The Fabelmans,” Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical drama about his Jewish upbringing, had an expected strong haul of Oscar nominations, picking up seven nods Tuesday morning.
A remake of a movie once targeted by the Nazis, a blockbuster embroiled in a lawsuit with an Israeli family and a documentary by the program director of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival also got recognized in a list jam-packed with Jewish characters, stories and artists.
Spielberg’s movie overcame an anemic box office showing to score nominations in the major categories of best picture, director and screenplay, for Spielberg and celebrated Jewish playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner. The directing nomination brings Spielberg’s total nominations in the category to nine, tying him with Martin Scorsese for the second-most directing nominations in Oscar history.
The film also scored acting nods for Judd Hirsch, who is Jewish, and Michelle Williams, who recently said she is planning to raise her two children with Judaism.
“The Fabelmans” was the best picture nominee with the strongest Jewish themes, but it wasn’t the only one. The psychological drama “Tár,” starring Cate Blanchett as a problematic conductor, picked up six nominations, including for picture, actress and director; the film weaves Jewish mysticism into its storytelling.
“All Quiet On The Western Front,” Netflix’s new German-language adaptation of the classic 1929 novel about the horrors experienced by German soldiers during World War I, was also nominated for nine Oscars, including best picture, international feature and adapted screenplay. The film’s source material was once banned and burned by the ascending Nazi Party, which believed its anti-war stance made the German military look weak and constituted a threat to their plans for world domination.
When the book’s initial 1930 film adaptation, directed by Jewish filmmaker Lewis Milestone, was released in Germany, Nazis led by Joseph Goebbels set off stink bombs, released mice into the theaters and called the movie a “Judenfilm” (or “Jewish film”). Germany and Austria banned the film from being shown in their countries, and the public censorship campaign led the novel’s author, Erich Maria Remarque, to renounce his German citizenship (Nazis were erroneously labeling him as a Jew).
In response, Jewish studio head Carl Laemmle Sr., agreed to heavily edit the movie and remove material deemed objectionable to the Nazis in order to improve its commercial prospects in Germany. One possible silver lining for the remake’s producers: The 1930 film went on to win best picture that year.
Tom Cruise at a “Top Gun: Maverick” premier at Leicester Square in London, May 19, 2022. (Neil Mockford/FilmMagic via Getty Images)
Back to this year’s Oscars: “Top Gun: Maverick,” the action blockbuster sequel, picked up four nominations, including for best picture. The film’s distributor, Paramount, is currently embroiled in a copyright lawsuit with the family of Israeli journalist Ehud Yonay, whose magazine article about a Navy fighter pilot school was the basis for the original “Top Gun” in 1986. In November, a judge dismissed Paramount’s attempts to throw out the suit and ruled the Yonay family could proceed with their claims.
The writer, director and actress Sarah Polley also scored a nomination for best adapted screenplay for her drama “Women Talking,” about a group of abused women in an isolated Mennonite community, which was also nominated for best picture. Polley has a Jewish biological father, whose secret parentage she explored in her 2013 documentary “Stories We Tell.”
The Jewish film producer Gail Berman also scored her first Oscar nomination for producing best picture nominee “Elvis,” while Jewish producing partners Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel scored their own best picture nomination for “The Whale.” The movie, which Aronofsky directed, stars Brendan Fraser (also nominated) as a morbidly obese English professor.
In the performing categories, one actor was nominated for playing a real-life Jewish convert: Ana de Armas received a best actress nomination for her portrayal of Marilyn Monroe in Netflix’s “Blonde.” Monroe converted to Judaism in the 1950s and remained devoted to the religion even after divorcing her husband, Jewish playwright Arthur Miller.
Also, veteran actress Jamie Lee Curtis — whose father, Golden Age Hollywood actor Tony Curtis, was Jewish — picked up her first-ever Oscar nomination for her supporting role as a sinister tax officer in the multiverse sci-fi comedy “Everything Everywhere All At Once.”
Curtis is nominated in the category alongside her co-star Stephanie Hsu, who is also known to fans of the very Jewish TV series “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” as Mei Lin, a Chinese restaurant owner who gets together with co-lead Joel Maisel. Early buzz on the upcoming fifth season of “Maisel” says that Hsu’s character will convert to Judaism.
Another “Everything Everywhere” co-star, Jewish actress Jenny Slate, helped a different film score an Oscar nomination in the best animated feature category: the stop-motion mockumentary “Marcel The Shell With Shoes On.” Slate co-wrote the feature with her ex-husband Dean Fleischer-Camp, who directs; Slate also voices the lead role of Marcel. However, she is not one of the nominated producers on the film.
“All The Beauty And The Bloodshed,” a portrait of the outsider artist Nan Goldin and her years-long activism campaign against opioid manufacturers the Sackler family, was nominated in the best documentary feature category and is favored to win. The film documents how Goldin was born to Jewish parents but had an emotionally abusive family life and left home in her teens. The Sacklers are also Jewish.
The documentary short category saw the second nomination in a row for Jewish filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt, whose documentary “How Do You Measure A Year” chronicles many years of his daughter Ella’s birthdays. Rosenblatt is the program director of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.
Veteran Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski was also nominated in the international feature category for his drama “EO,” told from the perspective of a donkey. Skolimowski’s father was a member of the Polish Resistance and his mother hid a Jewish family in their house during World War II.
Jewish composer Justin Hurwitz, who won an Oscar for his work on “La La Land,” was nominated again for the score for “Babylon,” a follow-up production with that film’s director, Damien Chazelle.
And in the original song category, Jewish songwriter Diane Warren extended her nomination streak to 14 for the number “Applause,” from the feminist documentary “Tell It Like A Woman.” Warren has never won a competitive Oscar but did receive an honorary Academy Award last year.
—
The post Spielberg’s ‘Fabelmans’ earns 7 Oscar nods, WWII epic with anti-Nazi past gets 9 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Recorded anti-Jewish hate crimes rise 10% in England and Wales
(JTA) — Hate crimes targeting Jewish people in England and Wales rose by 10% in the year ended in March, according to the latest data released by the British government.
Police-reported hate crime — including crime influenced by other factors such as race and sexual orientation — overall increased by 7% compared with the previous year, according to the Home Office data released last week.
British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband posted on X on Monday, “Antisemitism has no place in our society. This morning, I hosted a crucial discussion with the J7 Global Task Force to discuss how we can work together across countries to stamp out the scourge of antisemitism.”
Following the meeting, the Board of Deputies of British Jews issued a statement explaining that Miliband and the task force had discussed, among other things, “the sharp rise in global antisemitism” and the “continued demonisation of Israel.” Representatives from the U.K., the U.S., Canada, Germany, France, Argentina and Australia make up the task force.
“In the meeting, the J7 proposed a new international intergovernmental ministerial task force on antisemitism, comprising the countries represented in the J7 and taking on the key themes discussed. We were pleased that the Foreign Secretary agreed to host an inaugural meeting of J7 countries’ ministers to start this process,” the statement sent to JTA said.
The Community Security Trust, a charity that protects the Jewish community and monitors antisemitism, said on X that the new data show “that antisemitic hate crime remains at an unacceptably high level.”
“As seen previously, Jewish people continue to experience by far the highest police-recorded rate per head of religious hate crime of any faith group,” CST said. “This shows the disproportionate scale of anti-Jewish hatred and its impact on Jewish life in Britain.”
Religious hate crime rose by 13% overall in the 12 months to March 2026, the report said. The overall figure rose from 10,067 to 11,419 offenses.
The two groups most affected were Jews and Muslims, the Home Office said. Religiously motivated hate crimes against Muslims increased 15%, the report found, with spikes reported around public protests in September 2025 and the start of the U.S. war with Iran in February.
The number of recorded offenses affecting Jews rose from 2,874 to 3,162 offenses, spiking after the attack on Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester last year on Yom Kippur.
Two men, Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby, were killed on Oct. 2, 2025, after Jihad Al-Shamie, who was wearing a fake suicide bomb belt, drove into the gates of Heaton Park synagogue and began attacking congregants with a knife. Cravitz died from stab wounds; Daulby was fatally struck by a police bullet during the response.
A spate of violent antisemitic incidents followed this year, including the torching of four ambulances belonging to Jewish volunteer service Hatzola on March 23 and the stabbing of two Jewish men in separate attacks in Golders Green on April 29.
The Home Office figures, which do not include data from London’s Metropolitan Police Service because of a change in how it records crime, showed the second-highest level of religious hate crime directed at the Jewish community since the Home Office began keeping records in 2018. It was surpassed only by the year ending March 2024.
“In the last year, there were 117 police recorded religious hate crimes targeted at Jewish people per 10,000 population, the highest rate for any religious group. The next highest rate was for religious hate crimes targeted at Muslims, with 13 per 10,000 population,” said the Home Office.
The report was published on Oct. 8, at a time of heightened sensitivity. Eleven people were arrested at pro-Palestinian marches in London a day earlier, despite calls by the Metropolitan Police to avoid demonstrating on the anniversary of Hamas’ deadly 2023 raids inside Israel.
Police reported 20 arrests at Saturday’s pro-Palestinian protest in London, where many demonstrators were wearing kaffiyehs, waving Palestinian flags and brandishing banners.
The level of hate directed at the Jewish community has remained at an “elevated level” since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict, the report stated.
The CST said, “There is an urgent need to reduce the amount of incitement connected to conflict overseas,” adding that “much more needs to be done across society to tackle this problem.”
Over the summer the government announced a major funding boost to support the Jewish community, promising £250 million ($335 million) over the next three years for increased policing and protection of Jewish communities.
More remains to be done, according to community organizations.
A spokesperson for the Board of Deputies of British Jews said the report’s publication “confirms the need for rigorous prosecution to ensure deterrence, and a whole of society approach to tackling hatred and extremism, and to stopping conflict in the Middle East being used to incite hatred against the Jewish community.”
The Campaign Against Antisemitism said the report was evidence that the British justice system was failing the Jewish community.
“Antisemites, emboldened by the Hamas terrorist atrocity three years ago, are not only not letting up in their hatred but are doubling down,” it said in a statement. “That’s because there is no real deterrent. So really these figures are most damning for the criminal justice system, which has utterly failed to defend British Jews.
“Even as conflict in the Middle East is easing off, antisemitism in the U.K. is rising, yet there have been essentially no changes in policing policy over the past three years and nobody has been held to account for this monumental failure,” the campaign said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Recorded anti-Jewish hate crimes rise 10% in England and Wales appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Hasan Piker criticizes ‘opportunists’ who accused Mamdani of genocide
(JTA) — Hasan Piker called the protesters who jeered New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani at an Oct. 7 vigil last week “opportunists,” who “tarnished” the anti-Zionist movement’s message.
Piker, the popular streamer who has campaigned for a number of democratic socialist candidates, made his remarks Sunday at Jewish Currents Live, an all-day event hosted by the left-wing magazine at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Speaking on a panel titled “Can the Left Wield Power?”, he said that the protesters had “valid concerns,” including demands like firing police commissioner Jessica Tisch and disbanding the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, a heavily armed unit that often responds to protests.
But he criticized the Democratic Socialists of America — the left-wing political organization that Mamdani has called his “political home” — for not playing a bigger role in last week’s protest, which started at City Hall and later overran an Israeli peace vigil. DSA did not sponsor the protest, though some campus chapters of its student section, the Young DSA, participated.
“The DSA not being at the forefront of the anti-Zionist mobilization in New York City is what allowed that mobilization to be tarnished by opportunists, sectarians and those who actually were calling him a genocidaire — which I obviously find to be ridiculous,” Piker said, referring to protesters’ chants of “Mayor Mamdani you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.”
Piker, who has drawn heat for his anti-Israel views, did not comment on the Hamas iconography displayed by numerous protesters, nor the decision to crash an Oct. 7 vigil that memorialized the 1,200 people killed in the Hamas-led attacks on that date in 2023, and the 74,000 Palestinians who have been killed since then, according to Gaza health ministry figures, which do not distinguish civilians from combatants.
Separately, Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University pro-Palestinian protest leader who was detained by ICE last year, reportedly criticized those protesters’ “purity politics” during an event in Washington, D.C.
“You don’t have to agree with someone 100 percent — 85 percent is good,” he said, provided that the end goal is “liberating Palestine and ending the unconditional support of the United States.”
Where should Democrats draw the line?
Two Democratic congressional nominees from New York, Brad Lander and Darializa Avila Chevalier, appeared on a separate panel focused on Israel and the Democratic Party.
Lander is Jewish and Darializa Avila Chevalier helped lead Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian encampment in 2024. Peter Beinart, editor-at-large at Jewish Currents, moderated the panel, which also featured Georgia state Rep. Ruwa Romman, the first Palestinian American elected to public office in her state.
Their discussion exposed some of the gaps between Lander and Avila Chevalier, both progressives who were endorsed by Mamdani this year and who appeared in a campaign ad together alongside fellow Mamdani endorsee Claire Valdez.
Beinart asked where Democrats should draw the line on what is considered legitimate Palestinian resistance. He pointed to the pro-Palestinian protest held in New York City on Oct. 8, 2023, which Avila Chevalier attended and Lander called “abominable” at the time.
“I think international law has already drawn that line,” Avila Chevalier said, arguing that U.S. protests should target Israel, which receives U.S. support, rather than Hamas.
“We could be the biggest anti-Hamas protesters, but a protest against Hamas in the U.S. isn’t going to do anything,” Avila Chevalier said. “Because we don’t fund it. We don’t have any structural power over it, there is nothing tying us to that institution other than condemning it endlessly.”
After the event, Lander did not confirm to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency whether he had spoken about that Oct. 8 protest with Avila Chevalier.
“We have talked about these issues broadly in private, and I don’t want to characterize those conversations,” Lander told JTA. “And obviously I’ve made my feelings known in public, and I stand by them. I mean, on that day, I was in mourning.”
An attendee named Mark, 29, who declined to share his last name to avoid potential workplace complications, said he felt that Avila Chevalier “didn’t really acknowledge the criticism about perhaps disregarding loss of life; despite the power imbalance, it is lost life.”
For Lander, meanwhile, Mark said it was “politically expedient” for him to not directly address Avila Chevalier’s presence at the 2023 protest. “This is a super lefty crowd that probably would eat him alive if he went against her right now,” he said.
During the panel, Avila Chevalier repeated her call for an arms embargo against Israel while Lander stopped short of doing so, consistent with his statements in the past that Israel should be able to buy defensive ware. Both said Congress must pass the Block the Bombs Act and vote to suspend the sale of offensive U.S. military weapons to Israel. Lander was the only speaker on stage who advocated for a two-state solution in the region.
Beinart asked Romman about Jon Ossoff, the Jewish Democratic senator running for reelection in her state, and how she views his stance on Palestine. She said she was pleased that both Georgia senators have been consistently voting in favor of Bernie Sanders’ resolution to block arms sales to Israel, but added that “in terms of leading, in terms of rhetoric, there’s still a lot of work to be done.”
“We’ll get everyone to where we need them to be eventually,” she said.
‘The bund is back in town’
The Jewish Labor Bund — the early 20th-century socialist movement that fought against Bolshevism, Nazism and Zionism — came up at numerous points on Sunday. One attendee doled out fliers with a website URL and the message, “Tell your bubbe the bund is back in town.” It was also a subject of a conversation that featured Molly Crabapple, whose 2026 book “Here Where We Live is Our Country” focuses on the Bund.
Arlene Geiger, an Upper West Sider and longtime activist, told JTA that she related to those conversations.
“My connection to Judaism is not to Israel, it never has been. It’s more to Eastern Europe and the Bund, so that spoke to me,” Geiger said.
Mark, who is from New Jersey, said he doesn’t come from a “staunchly pro-Zionist” family, but that he has a new interest in leftist Jewish spaces since realizing that he could no longer comfortably distance himself from the issue of Israel, which he believes is committing a genocide.
“It’s just an education for me to be immersed in this kind of space,” he said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Hasan Piker criticizes ‘opportunists’ who accused Mamdani of genocide appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
In Israel, boy killed, hikers injured, after suspected Hezbollah cluster bomb detonates
(JTA) — An explosion during a school hiking trip killed a boy about 14 years old on Monday and injured 24 others in northern Israel, Magen David Adom, Israel’s emergency medical service, said.
Rescue teams were dispatched to the scene, and the injured were evacuated to hospitals in northern Israel.
“An initial investigation by IDF forces at the site indicates that it was likely a cluster bomb belonging to the Hezbollah terror organization that had been left in the area and exploded,” the military said in a statement.
“The injured were scattered along the route, some trying to help their wounded friends,” explained David Radko, an MDA medic who said he was the first to arrive on the scene. “Despite the horrific scenes and distress, the injured cooperated with me exceptionally well. Everyone tried to help their friends as much as they could. Some even applied tourniquets to their friends to stop the bleeding.”
Police Commissioner Danny Levy visited the scene and said authorities may ban similar school trips in the near future. “We need to examine whether we are putting students at risk by allowing them to go on these trips,” he said.
Tamir Douadi, a resident of Kibbutz Manara, described the scene in a voice cracking with emotion to Channel 12: “Look, they’re young people, children. You see them sitting there like that, holding their friends.”
The object exploded “in the hands” of one of the schoolchildren, Comm. Meir Eliyahu, commander of the Israel Police’s Northern District told reporters at the scene.
Orly Ben Simon, an MDA paramedic, said personnel identified several people with injuries of varying severity, including a 14-year-old boy who was unconscious and in critical condition. “We immediately began prolonged and intensive resuscitation efforts. Unfortunately, his injuries were critical, and we had to pronounce him dead at the scene,” she said in a statement provided by the MDA.
She added that medical teams treated two teenagers who were seriously injured, as well as other injured people who were able to walk.
In an initial statement, the Ma’alot-Tarshiha municipality said the explosion occurred during an annual hiking trip by students from the ORT Ma’alot religious high school, located in the mixed Jewish-Arab town, about five miles from the Lebanese border. The entire area has come under heavy fire from Hezbollah since Oct. 7, 2023, and some of the munitions have failed to detonate.
MDA said the injured included 22 teenagers and two adults in their 50s. Two of the injured were in serious condition and 10 were in moderate condition. They were evacuated by ambulance and helicopter to hospitals in Haifa, Safed and Nahariya.
Israel’s Education Ministry described the incident as “extremely serious.” According to the ministry, the trip was properly approved in accordance with established procedures. Ma’alot-Tarshiha Mayor Moti Ben David told Israeli media that the route was a popular hiking trail.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post In Israel, boy killed, hikers injured, after suspected Hezbollah cluster bomb detonates appeared first on The Forward.
