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The exhausting, never-ending job of debunking antisemitic conspiracy theories
(JTA) — A few days after the comedian Dave Chappelle appeared to justify the never-ending appeal of Jewish conspiracy theories, this sentence appeared in the New York Times: “Bankman-Fried is already drawing comparisons to Bernie Madoff.”
I’ll explain: Sam Bankman-Fried is the 30-year-old founder of FTX, the crypto-currency exchange that vaporized overnight, leaving more than 1 million creditors on the hook. Bernie Madoff, is, of course, Bernie Madoff, the financier who defrauded thousands of investors through a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme and died in prison.
It’s a fair comparison, as a former regulator tells CNN: “Bankman-Fried, like Madoff, proved adept at using his pedigree and connections to seduce sophisticated investors and regulators into missing ‘red flags,’ hiding in plain sight.”
Nevertheless, seeing these Jewish figures lumped together, I braced myself for the inevitable: Nasty tweets about Jews and money. Slander from white supremacists. Plausibly deniable chin-scratching from more “mainstream” commentators.
What comes next is a familiar script: Jewish defense groups issue statements saying conspiracy theories traffic in centuries-old antisemitic tropes and pose a danger to the Jews. Jewish news outlets like ours post “explainers” describing how these myths take hold.
It’s exhausting, having to deny the obvious: that a group of people who don’t even agree on what kind of starch to eat on Passover regularly scheme to bilk innocents, manipulate markets or control the world. And it often seems the very attempt to explain these lies and their popularity ends up feeding the beast.
Chappelle’s now notorious monologue on “Saturday Night Live” is a case in point. At first pass, it is a characteristically mischievous attempt to both mock the rapper Kanye West for his antisemitism, and to push boundaries to explain why a troubled Black entertainer might feel aggrieved in an industry with a historic over-representation of Jews. Jon Stewart certainly heard it that way, telling Stephen Colbert, “Look at it from a Black perspective. It’s a culture that feels that its wealth has been extracted by different groups. That’s the feeling in that community, and if you don’t understand where it’s coming from, then you can’t deal with it.”
That is a useful message, but consider the messenger. Chappelle appears to disapprove of West’s conspiracy-mongering, but never once discusses the harm it might cause to the actual targets of the conspiracies. Instead, he focuses on the threat such ideas pose to the careers and reputations of entertainers like him and West. The “delusion that Jews run show business,” said Chappelle, is “not a crazy thing to think,” but “it’s a crazy thing to say out loud.” He ends the routine by ominously invoking the “they” who might end his career.
That’s what critics meant when they said Chappelle “normalized” antisemitism: He described where it’s coming from, explained why his peers might feel that way, and only criticized it to the degree that it could lead the purveyors to be cancelled. It’s like saying, “You don’t have to vaccinate your kids. Just don’t tell anybody.”
This week I worked with a colleague on an article about how the “Jews control Hollywood” myth took hold, and at each step of the way I wondered if we were stoking the fire we were trying to put out. No, Jews don’t control Hollywood, we reported, but “nearly every major movie studio was founded in the early 20th century” by a Jew. Those moguls rarely used the movies as a platform to defend Jewish interests, but per Steven Spielberg, “Being Jewish in Hollywood is like wanting to be in the popular circle.”
A documentary shown Thursday night at the DOC NYC festival here in New York teeters on the edge of the same trap. “The Conspiracy,” directed by the Russian-American filmmaker Maxim Pozdorovkin and narrated by Mayim Bialik, uses 3-D animation to explain how conspiracists ranging from a 19th-century French priest to American industrialist Henry Ford placed three Jews — German financier Max Warburg, Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and falsely accused French soldier Alfred Dreyfus — at the center of a vast, contradictory and preposterous scheme to take over the world. It connects age-old Christian animosity to the Jews to centuries of antisemitic paranoia and fear-mongering that led to unspeakable violence at Kishinev, Auschwitz and Pittsburgh. “This myth has plagued the world for centuries,” Pozdorovkin explains.
Or at least that’s the message you and I might have gotten. But I can also see someone stumbling on this film and being seduced by the rage and cynicism of the conspiracy-mongers — who, I should note, are quoted at length. Part of the problem is the film’s aesthetic: a consistently dark palette and a “camera” that lingers on ugly examples of antisemitic propaganda. Even though these images are seen on a creepy “conspiracy wall” and connected with that red thread familiar from cop shows and horror films, I can well imagine an uninformed viewer asking why members of this tiny minority seem to be at the center of so many major events of the 19th and 20th centuries.
I was reminded of a joke by the Jewish comedian Modi, ridiculing the ritual of inviting celebrities accused of antisemitism to visit a Holocaust museum. “Which is the stupidest idea, ever,” he says. “You’re taking someone who hates Jews into a Holocaust museum. They come out of there [saying] ‘Wow! Oh my God, that was amazing! I want a T-shirt!’”
The poet and essayist Clint Smith, whose cover story in next month’s Atlantic explores the meanings of Holocaust museums in Germany, makes a similar point. After visiting the museum in Wannsee documenting the infamous meeting in which the Nazis plotted the Final Solution, he wonders: “Might someone come to a museum like this and be inspired by what they saw?”
The makers of “The Conspiracy” (oy, that title) obviously intend the very opposite. In an interview with the Forward, Pozdorovkin agrees with the interviewer’s suggestion that those “who most need to see this film might be the least likely to be convinced by it.”
“My hope is that this film has a trickle-down effect,” he explains.
The fault lies not with those who seek to expose antisemitism but with a society that relies on the victims to explain why they shouldn’t be victimized. As many have pointed out, antisemitism isn’t a Jewish problem; it’s a problem for the individuals and societies who pin their unhappiness and neuroses on a convenient scapegoat. Ultra-nationalism and intolerance are the soil in which conspiracies take root.
But as long as scapegoating remains popular and deadly, the victims have to keep explaining and explaining the obvious — that, for instance, the fact that Sam Bankman-Fried and Bernie Madoff are Jewish is no more significant than the fact that Henry Ford and Elon Musk, two people who founded car companies, are gentiles.
The question is, who is listening?
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Historic Early 20th Century Railcar Gets Installed at Boston’s Unfinished Holocaust Museum
A historic railcar being installed in the Holocaust Museum Boston on Nov. 25, 2025. Photo: Holocaust Museum Boston
A restored early 20th-century railcar that was believed to be the type used to transport Jews to extermination camps across Nazi-occupied Europe during Word War II was installed on Tuesday morning in the Holocaust Museum Boston, which is still being built.
The railcar was lifted by a 173-foot-tall tower crane and installed on the fourth floor of the museum currently under construction across from the Massachusetts State House. The railcar is over 30 feet long, 12 feet high, 8.75 feet wide, and weighs more than 12 tons. A group of supporters, city leaders, government officials, Jewish communal leaders, and other community representatives gathered on Tuesday morning to see the railcar’s installation.
“The hardest truth this railcar forces us to confront is this: the Holocaust was not carried out by the Nazis alone. It was carried out by people, ordinary people, who kept the trains running, who stamped the papers, who followed schedules, who chose silence over courage. The machinery of genocide ran because countless individuals did their everyday jobs and looked away,” said Jody Kipnis, co-founder and CEO of Holocaust Museum Boston, before the installation. “This railcar will stand at the heart of the Holocaust Museum Boston to confront that truth.”
The railcar was donated by Sonia Breslow of Scottsdale, Arizona, whose father was among less than 100 people who survived the Treblinka concentration camp, where 900,000 others were murdered. Breslow’s father was transported to the extermination camp in a railcar like the one installed at the Holocaust Museum Boston. He immigrated to Boston after surviving the Holocaust.
“Seeing this railcar lifted into its new home took my breath away,” said Breslow. “My father survived a transport to Treblinka in a car just like this. Most who were taken there did not survive. For this railcar to be in Massachusetts, a place where he rebuilt his life, is deeply personal. It ensures that his story, and the stories of millions, will never be forgotten.”
The railcar was discovered in a junkyard in Macedonia in 2012, shipped to the United States, and stored in Arizona before being transported to Massachusetts for conservation. Over the past six months, it was restored by renowned conservator Josh Craine of Deadalus, which is a company that has focused on the conservation of historic artifacts, sculptures, and architectural ornaments since 1989.
The railcar will provide an immersive experience for visitors once the Holocaust Museum Boston opens in late 2026. Visitors will be able to walk through the railcar and it will be displayed by a protruding bay window, making it visible from the street. Outside, people walking by will see museum guests enter the railcar but not leave, “an intentional design symbolizing the millions who never returned and the freedoms that were stripped away,” the museum explained.
“This railcar is not just an artifact, it’s a witness,” added Kipnis. “We want visitors to feel its weight, to understand that millions of people stood where they will stand. Our mission is to transform that understanding into moral courage. At a time of rising hate, the urgency of this museum has never been greater.”
Operated by the Holocaust Legacy Foundation, the Holocaust Museum Boston will be New England’s only museum dedicated exclusively to Holocaust education and the first new museum to be built in Boston in over 20 years.
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Russia Rules Out Big Concessions on Ukraine as Leak Shows Witkoff Advised Moscow
Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomes US President Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff during a meeting in Moscow, Russia, Aug. 6, 2025. Photo: Sputnik/Gavriil Grigorov/Pool via REUTERS
Russia will make no big concessions on a peace plan for Ukraine, a senior Russian diplomat said on Wednesday, after a leaked recording of a call involving US envoy Steve Witkoff showed he had advised Moscow on how to pitch to Donald Trump.
Witkoff is expected to travel to Moscow next week with other senior US officials for talks with Russian leaders about a possible plan to end the nearly four-year-old war in Ukraine, the deadliest in Europe since World War II.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Tuesday he was ready to advance the US-backed framework for ending the war and to discuss disputed points with the US president in talks that he said should include European allies.
Kyiv and its European allies are worried that details of the plan leaked last week show it bows to key Russian demands – barring Ukraine‘s NATO entry, enshrining Russian control of a fifth of Ukraine, and limiting the size of Ukraine‘s army.
Trump later said progress was being made and Moscow was making concessions even though the war – in which Russian forces have been advancing – was only going to move “in one direction.”
But, while welcoming the Trump administration’s efforts, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told reporters in Moscow on Wednesday: “There can be no question of any concessions, or any surrender of our approaches to those key points.”
TRANSCRIPT OF WITKOFF-USHAKOV CALL LEAKED
Moscow also raised concerns about the leak to Bloomberg News of the transcript of a call between Witkoff and Putin’s foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov in which the US envoy advised Ushakov on how to pitch a peace plan to Trump.
Trump, on Air Force One, brushed aside a question from a reporter about why Witkoff appeared to be coaching Russian officials as simply “what a dealmaker does” and “a very standard form of negotiation.”
But Russia said the leak was an unacceptable attempt to undermine peace efforts and amounted to hybrid warfare.
Ushakov said he had used WhatsApp to speak to Witkoff on several occasions and the Russian newspaper Kommersant, which interviewed Ushakov, ran a story headlined: “Who set up Steve Witkoff?”
Bloomberg said it had reviewed a recording of the call. It was not clear how Bloomberg got the recording of the conversation.
A Bloomberg News spokesperson said: “We stand by our story.”
TOO EARLY TO TALK OF PEACE, KREMLIN SAYS
Trump said on Tuesday Witkoff would meet Putin and that Jared Kushner, who helped negotiate the deal that brought about an uneasy ceasefire in the Gaza war between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, would also be involved.
“As for Witkoff, I can say that a preliminary agreement has been reached that he will come to Moscow next week,” Ushakov told reporters.
Asked by reporters whether a peace deal was close, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted by Russian news agency Interfax as saying: “Wait, it’s premature to say that yet.”
Russian forces control more than 19% of Ukraine following Moscow‘s 2022 invasion, and have advanced in 2025 at the fastest pace since 2022, although the advances remain slow and Kyiv says Russia has incurred heavy losses to achieve them.
Ukraine and its European allies echo former US President Joe Biden in saying the invasion is an imperial-style land grab for which Moscow must not be rewarded.
Putin casts the war as a watershed moment in relations with the West, which he says humiliated Russia after the Soviet Union fell in 1991 by enlarging NATO and encroaching on what he considers Moscow‘s sphere of influence.
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Vast Trove of Medieval Jewish Records Opened Up by AI
A researcher of MiDRASH, a project dedicated to analyzing the National Library of Israel’s digital database of all known Hebrew manuscripts using Machine Learning, including manuscripts from the Cairo Geniza, holds up a 12th century fragment of a Yom Kippur liturgy in Jerusalem, Nov. 24, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
Researchers in Israel are hoping to make new discoveries about Jewish history by loading a digital database of manuscripts stretching back a thousand years into a new transcription tool that uses artificial intelligence.
The Cairo Geniza, the biggest collection of medieval Jewish documents in the world, has been the object of countless hours of study by scholars for more than a century but only a fraction of its over 400,000 documents have been thoroughly researched.
Although the entire collection has already been digitized and is available online in the form of images, most of its items have not been catalogued, many are disordered fragments from longer documents, and only around a tenth have transcriptions.
By training an AI model to read and transcribe the old texts, researchers will now be able to access and analyze the whole collection far more quickly, cross referencing names or words and assembling fragments into fuller documents.
“We are constantly trying to improve the abilities of the machine to decipher ancient scripts,” said Daniel Stokl Ben Ezra of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, one of the principal researchers in the MiDRASH transcription project.
The project has already made significant progress and could open up the documents – written in Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, and Yiddish in a wide variety of handwritten scripts – to many different researchers, Stokl Ben Ezra added.
Transcriptions from more difficult manuscripts are reviewed by researchers for accuracy, helping to improve the AI training.
“The modern translation possibilities are incredibly advanced now and interlacing all this becomes much more feasible, much more accessible to the normal and not scientific reader,” he said.
Funded by the European Research Council, the project is based on the National Library of Israel’s digital database of the Cairo Geniza documents and brings together researchers from several universities and other institutes.
ANCIENT STOREROOM
One document transcribed by the project is a 16th century letter in Yiddish from Rachel, a widow from Jerusalem, to her son in Egypt with his reply written in the margins telling of his efforts to survive a plague sweeping through Cairo.
A Geniza is a synagogue’s repository for significant documents that are ultimately intended for ritual burial, and the one found in the Ben Ezra synagogue in historic Cairo had a dry atmosphere ideal for the preservation of old paper.
Cairo surpassed Damascus and Baghdad in the Middle Ages as the greatest city of the Middle East, a center of global trade, learning, and science and home to a thriving Jewish community, later expanded by refugees fleeing newly Christian Spain.
The great Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who was physician to the family of Saladin, the famous Muslim sultan who ousted the crusaders from Jerusalem, worshipped at the Ben Ezra synagogue while living in Cairo.
As dynasties and empires rose and fell, the community quietly went about its daily life, its religious authorities filling the Geniza with the rabbinical arguments, civic records and other detritus of administrative and intellectual business.
The Geniza’s astonishing haul of records and papers, including some written by Maimonides himself, was discovered by scholars in the late 19th century but, although it has been studied ever since, its enormous size means huge gaps remain.
“The possibility to reconstruct, to make a kind of Facebook of the Middle Ages, is just before our eyes,” Stokl Ben Ezra said.