Uncategorized
A fake reality show trailer shines light on the real issue of child marriage
(JTA) — A three-minute trailer teases a new reality show called “Unseen Housewives,” and features women describing their experiences as child brides in forced marriages.
“I was groomed by a pedophile at age 14 and married by age 16,” one of four young women in the trailer tells the camera.
“I turned into a housewife at 14 but no one seemed to care when it happened,” says another.
There is no such reality show, although the trailer, making the rounds on social media, is describing a real issue. The video was produced for Unchained At Last, a nonprofit that’s been battling forced and child marriages for the past 12 years.
Founded by a woman who left what she calls an abusive forced marriage in a haredi Orthodox community in Brooklyn, Unchained At Last hopes the video will draw attention to its efforts to outlaw marriage for children under the age of 18, regardless of their background.
“We’re trying to solve a problem that most people don’t even know exists,” said Fraidy Reiss, Unchained At Last’s founder and executive director. “Most Americans have no idea that child marriage is legal in the U.S. Child marriage is a nightmarish legal trap.”
Unchained At Last has led a campaign that has outlawed child marriage in seven states, including New Jersey and New York. Legislation prohibiting marriage until the age of 18 is currently pending in 11 states: Maine, Vermont, Connecticut, South Carolina, Illinois, Kansas, Texas, California, New Mexico, Washington and Hawaii. The organization is particularly optimistic about the chances for passage in Vermont and Connecticut. Reiss said the group expects similar legislation to be introduced in Michigan this week.
The idea for the video came from Bruno Guimaraes, the creative director at Area 23, a Manhattan ad agency that specializes in health care campaigns, said Reiss. Guimaraes’ wife, the psychiatrist Morgan Fallor, interviewed survivors of child marriage and prepared their stories for the project.
Guimaraes’s colleague, Jihane Ghostine, produced the “Unseen Housewives” video.
“I just wanted to shed light on this topic,” Ghostine said. “I come originally from Lebanon where it’s actually legal to marry at a very young age. I think through our art and our crafts, we are maybe able to change the world in some kind of way. And this is what pushed me to do this.”
Ghostine said Gustavo Lemme, the director for the trailer, came from Sao Paulo, Brazil to helm the video. The actresses who appeared in the trailer worked at a discounted rate because they support the cause, she said.
The lines in the video are based on the real-life stories of women who were married when they were legally considered children. The trailer was shot in Tampa, Florida.
Reiss, married at 19, left her marriage after 12 years and went on to attend Rutgers University. In 2011, after working as a reporter at the Asbury Park Press and as a private investigator at Kroll, the global investigations company, she founded Unchained At Last. Initially it helped both Jewish and non-Jewish women leave arranged and forced marriages and seek custody of their children in civil court. Reis now describes herself as “a devout atheist.”
The organization has since begun pushing for legislation prohibiting marriage for children — which is legal in 43 states with parental consent or judicial approval. Opponents say child marriage is related to sexual exploitation, increased poverty, a higher risk of health complications and lower educational attainment.
Although the issue crosses various social and religious lines, Reiss has sometimes found herself facing off against Orthodox Jewish communities like the one she left and where, she said, friends were already married in high school. In 2018, the haredi Orthodox advocacy group Agudath Israel of America called the New Jersey legislation too strict, saying it wanted to see an exemption made for older teenagers who want to wed. The bill stalled under Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, and was signed into law by his Democratic successor, Phil Murphy.
Reiss hopes the “Unseen Housewives” trailer will go viral on social media. She plans to screen it during her spring travels to promote Unchained At Last’s legislative agenda.
The group plans to continue with its “chain-in” events, in which women wearing wedding dresses appear in street protests with chains on their wrists and their mouths taped shut. More than 100 wedding gowns, some dating back to the 1940s, have been donated for the demonstrations.
—
The post A fake reality show trailer shines light on the real issue of child marriage appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
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.
Uncategorized
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.
Uncategorized
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.