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A history of Mel Brooks as a ‘disobedient Jew’
(JTA) — Jeremy Dauber subtitles his new biography of Mel Brooks “Disobedient Jew.” It’s a phrase that captures two indivisible aspects of the 96-year-old director, actor, producer and songwriter.
The “Jew” is obvious. Born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1926, Brooks channeled the Yiddish accents and Jewish sensibilities of his old neighborhoods into characters like the 2000 Year Old Man — a comedy routine he worked up with his friend, the writer and director Carl Reiner. He worked Jewish obsessions into films like 1967’s “The Producers,” which features two scheming Jewish characters who stage a sympathetic Broadway musical about Hitler in order to bilk their investors.
Brooks’ signature move is to inject Jews into every aspect of human history and culture, which can be seen in the forthcoming Hulu series “History of the World, Part II.” A sequel to his 1981 film, “History of the World, Part I,” it parodies historical episodes in a style he honed as a writer on 1950s television programs such as “Your Show of Shows,” whose writers’ rooms were stocked with a galaxy of striving Jewish comedy writers just like him.
The “Disobedient” part describes Brooks’ relationship to a movie industry that he conquered starting in the early 1970s. In a series of parodies of classic movie genres — the Western in “Blazing Saddles,” the horror movie in “Young Frankenstein,” Alfred Hitchcock in “High Anxiety — he would gently, sometimes crudely and always lovingly bite the hand that was feeding him quite nicely: In 1976, he was fifth on the list of top 10 box office attractions, just behind Clint Eastwood.
Dauber describes the parody Brooks mastered as “nothing less than the essential statement of American Jewish tension between them and us, culturally speaking; between affection for the mainstream and alienation from it.”
Dauber is professor of Jewish literature and American studies at Columbia University, whose previous books include “Jewish Comedy” and “American Comics: A History.” “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” is part of the Jewish Lives series of brief interpretative biographies from Yale University Press.
Dauber and I spoke about why America fell for a self-described “spectacular Jew” from Brooklyn, Brooks’ lifelong engagement with the Holocaust, and why “Young Frankenstein” may be Brooks’ most Jewish movie.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “History of the World, Part II” comes out March 6. “History of the World, Part I” may not be in the top tier of Brooks films, but it seems to touch on so many aspects of his career that you trace in your book: the parody of classic movie forms, the musical comedy, injecting Jews into every aspect of human civilization, and the anything-for-a-laugh sensibility.
Jeremy Dauber: I agree. There’s the one thing that really brings it home, and it’s probably the most famous or infamous scene from the film. That’s the Spanish Inquisition scene. You have Brooks sort of probing the limits of bad taste. He had done that most famously in “The Producers” with its Nazi kickline, but here he takes the same idea — that one of the ways that you attack antisemitism is through ridicule — and turns the persecution of the Jews into a big musical number. It’s his love of music and dance. But the thing that’s almost the most interesting about this is that he takes on the role of the Torquemada character.
As his henchman sing and dance and the Jews face torture, the Brooklyn-born Jew plays the Catholic friar who tormented the Jews.
That’s right. And what’s the crime that he accuses the Jews of? “Don‘t be boring! Don‘t be dull!” That’s the worst thing that you can be. It’s his way of saying, “If I have a religion, you know, it is show business.”
His fascination with showbiz seems inseparable from his Jewishness, as if being a showbiz Jew is a denomination in its own right.
One of my favorite lines of his is when he marries [actress] Anne Bancroft, who of course is not Jewish. And he says, “She doesn’t have to convert: She’s a star.” If you’re a star, if you’re a celebrity, you’re kind of in your own firmament faith-wise, and so it’s okay. Showbiz is this faith. But it is very Jewish, because show business is a way to acceptance. It’s a way that America can love him as a Jew, as Mel Brooks, as a kid from the outer boroughs who can grow up to marry Anne Bancroft.
Jeremy Dauber is the author of “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” (Yale University Press)
You write early on that “Mel Brooks, more than any other single figure, symbolizes the Jewish perspective on and contribution to American mass entertainment.” On one foot, can you expand on that?
Jews understand that there’s a path to success and that being embraced by a culture means learning about it, immersing yourself in it, being so deeply involved in it that you understand it and master it. But simultaneously, you’re doing that as a kind of outsider. You’re always not quite in it, even though you’re of it in some deep way. In some ways, it’s the apotheosis of what Brooks does, which is being a parodist. In order to be the kind of parodist that Mel Brooks is, you have to be acutely attuned to every aspect of the cultural medium that you’re parodying. You have to know it inside and outside and backwards and forwards. And Brooks certainly does, but at the same time you have to be able to sort of step outside of it and say, you know, “Well, I’m watching a Western, but come on, what’s going on with these guys? Like why doesn’t anyone ever, you know, pass gas after eating so many beans?”
You have this great phrase, that to be an American Jew is to be part of the “loyal opposition.”
That’s right. Brooks at his best is always kind of poking and prodding at convention, but loyally. He’s not like the countercultural figures of his day. He’s a studio guy. He’s really within the system, but is poking at the system as well.
You wrote in that vein about his 1963 short film, “The Critic,” which won him an Oscar. Brooks plays an old Jewish man making fun of an art film.
On the one hand, he’s doing it in the voice of one of his older Jewish relatives, the Jewish generation with an Eastern European accent, to make fun of these kinds of intellectuals. He’s trying to channel the everyman’s response to high art. “What is this I’m watching? I don’t understand this at all.” On the other hand, Brooks is much more intellectual than he’s often given credit for.
For me the paradox of Brooks’ career is conveyed in a phrase that appears a couple of times in the book: “too Jewish.” The irony is that the more he leaned into his Jewishness, the more successful he got, starting with the “2000 Year Old Man” character, in which he channels Yiddish dialect in a series of wildly successful comedy albums with his friend Carl Reiner. How do you explain America’s embrace of these extremely ethnic tropes?
Brooks’ great motion pictures of the late 1960s and 1970s sort of track with America’s embrace of Jewishness. You have “The Graduate,” which came out at around the same time as “The Producers,” and which showed that someone like Dustin Hoffman can be a leading man. It doesn’t have to be a Robert Redford. You have Allan Sherman and all these popular Jewish comedians. You have “Fiddler on the Roof” becoming one of Broadway’s biggest hits. That gives Brooks license to kind of jump in with both feet. In the 1950s, writing on “The Show of Shows” for Sid Caesar, the Jewishness was there but in a very kind of hidden way. Whereas, it’s very hard to watch the 2000 Year Old Man and say, well, that’s not a Jewish product.
What he also avoided — and here I will contrast him with the novelist Philip Roth — were accusations that he was “bad for the Jews.” Philip Roth was told that his negative portrayals of Jewish characters was embarrassing the Jews in front of the gentiles, but for some reason, I don’t remember anyone complaining even though the Max Bialystock character in “The Producers” can be fairly described as a conniving Jew. What made Brooks’ ethnic comedy more palatable to other Jews?
“The Producers” had a lot of pushback, but for a lot of other reasons.
I guess people had enough to deal with when he staged a musical comedy about Hitler.
Exactly. But the other part is that his biggest films are not as explicitly Jewish as something like Roth’s novel “Portnoy’s Complaint.” I actually think “Young Frankenstein” is one of the most Jewish movies that Mel Brooks ever made, but you’re not going to watch “Young Frankenstein” and say, wow, there are Jews all over the place here.
What about “Young Frankenstein,” a parody of classic horror movies, seems quintessentially Jewish?
The script, which is a lot of Gene Wilder and not just Mel Brooks, is really about someone saying, “You know, I don’t have this heritage — I’m trying to fit in with everybody else. My name is Dr. FRAHNK-en-shteen.” And then people say, “No, this is your heritage. You are Dr. Frankenstein.” [Wilder’s character realizes] “it is my heritage, and I’m embracing it. And I’m Frankenstein. And you may find that monstrous but that’s your business.” It’s about assimilation and embracing who you are.
And of course, Wilder as Dr. Frankenstein is unmistakably Jewish, even when he plays a cowboy in “Blazing Saddles.”
Right. Again, by the mid-’70s, you know, you have Gene Wilder and Elliot Gould and Dustin Hoffman, all Jews, in leading roles. “Young Frankenstein” ends up being a movie about coming home and embracing identity, which is playing itself out a lot in American Jewish culture in the 1970s.
I guess I have to go back and watch it for the 14th time with a different point of view.
That’s the fun part of my job.
You talk about what’s happening at the same time as Brooks’ huge success, which is, although he’s a little younger, the emergence of Woody Allen. You describe Brooks and Woody Allen as the voice of American Jewish comedy, but in very different ways. What are the major differences?
Gene Wilder, who worked with both of them, says that working with Allen is like lighting these tiny little candles, and with Brooks, you’re making big atom bombs. The critical knock against Brooks was that he was much more interested in the joke than the story. And I think with the exception maybe of “Young Frankenstein” there’s a lot of truth to that. The jokes are phenomenal, so that’s fine. Allen pretty quickly moved towards a much more narrative kind of film, and so began to be seen as this incredibly intellectual figure. In real life, Allen always claimed that he wasn’t nearly as intellectual as everyone thought, while Brooks had many more kinds of intellectual ambitions than the movie career that he had. There is a counterfactual world in which “The 12 Chairs,” his 1970 movie based on a novel by two Russian Jewish novelists and which nobody talks about, makes a ton of money.
Instead, it bombs, and he makes “Blazing Saddles,” which works out very well for everybody.
Although he does create Brooksfilms, and produces more narrative, serious-minded films like “The Elephant Man” and “84 Charing Cross Road.”
Right, and decides that if he puts his name on these as a director, they’re going to be rejected out of hand. There is a shelf of scholarship on Woody Allen, but if you look at who had influence on America in terms of box office and popularity, it’s Brooks winning in a walk.
You also mention Brooks and Steven Spielberg in the same sentence. Why do they belong together?
Partly because they had huge popular success in the mid-’70s. Brooks is a generation older, but they are hitting their cinematic success at the same time. And they are both movie fans.
Which comes out in their work — Brooks in his film parodies and Spielberg in the films that echo the films he loved as kid.
Until maybe his remake of “West Side Story,” Spielberg is not really a theater guy in the way that Brooks is, when success meant to make it on Broadway. When Brooks was winning all those Tonys in 2001 for the Broadway musical version of “The Producers,” it may have been almost more meaningful for his 5-year-old, or 7- or 8-year-old self than making his incredibly popular pictures.
You also write about Brooks being a small “c” conservative, a bit of a square. Which I think will surprise people who think about the fart jokes and the peepee jokes and all that stuff. And by square, I mean, kind of old showbizzy, even a little prudish sometimes.
I think that’s right. There’s a great moment that I quote at the end of the book where they are trying out the musical version of “The Producers,” and they want to put the word “f–k” in and Brooks is like, “I don’t know if we can do that on Broadway,” and Nathan Lane is like, “Have we met? You’re Mel Brooks!” He’s a 1950s guy.
Another place where this kind of conservatism comes in is when you compare him to other comedians of the 1950s and ’60s — the so-called “sick comics” like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl who were pushing the envelope in terms of subject matter and politics. He wasn’t part of that. He was part of Hollywood. He was trying to make it in network television.
There is an interview in that era when he complained that people who are writing for television are not “dangerous.” Meanwhile, he himself was writing for television. But I think it’s fair to say that “The Producers” was really something different. You didn’t have to be Jewish to be offended by “The Producers.” But as we were saying before, he is more of the loyal opposition, rather than sort of truly out there. He’s not making “Easy Rider.”
An exhibit space at the Museum of Broadway evokes the scenery from the Mel Brooks musical “The Producers.” (NYJW)
“The Producers” is part of Brooks’ lifelong gambit of mocking the Nazis, I think starting when he would sing anti-Hitler songs as a GI in Europe at the tail end of World War II. Later he would remake Jack Benny’s World War II-era anti-Nazi comedy, “To Be or Not to Be.” And then there is the quick “Hitler on Ice” gag in “History of the World, Part I.” Brooks always maintains that mocking Nazis is the ultimate revenge on them, while you note that Woody Allen in “Manhattan” makes almost the opposite argument: that the way to fight white supremacists is with bricks and baseball bats. Did you come down on one side or the other?
To add just a twinge of complication is the fact that Brooks actually fought Nazis, and also had a brother who was shot down in combat. So for me to sit in moral judgment on anybody who fought in World War II is not a place that I want to be. What’s interesting is that Brooks makes a lot of these statements over the course of a career in which Nazism is done, in the past, defeated. Tragically, the events of the last number of years made white supremacy and neo-Nazism a live question again. When “The Producers” was staged as a musical in the early 21st century, people could say, “Okay, Nazism’s time has passed.” It’s not clear to me that we would restage “The Producers” now as a musical on Broadway, when just last week you had actual neo-Nazis handing out their literature outside a Broadway show. It would certainly be a lot more laden than it was in 2001.
Time also caught up with Brooks in his depiction of LGBT characters. Gay characters are the punchlines in “The Producers” and “Blazing Saddles” in ways that have not aged well. But you also note how both movies are about two men who love each other, to the exclusion of women.
There’s an emotive component to him about these male relationships. Bialystok and Bloom [the protagonists in “The Producers”] is a kind of love story. One of the interesting things is that as it became comparatively more comfortable for gay men to live their truth in society and in Hollywood, there was an evolution. In that remake of “To Be or Not to Be,” there is a much more sympathetic gay character who’s not stereotypical.
What other aspects of Brooks’ Jewishness have we not touched upon? For instance, he’s not particularly interested in Judaism as a religion, and ritual and theology rarely come up in his films, even to be mocked.
It’s not something that he’s particularly interested in. To him, being Jewish is a voice and a language. From the beginning of his career the voice is there. What he’s saying in these accents is that this is Jewish history working through me. It is, admittedly, a very narrow slice of Jewish history.
The first- and second-generation children of Jewish immigrants growing up in Brooklyn neighborhoods that were overwhelmingly Jewish.
It was a Jewishness that was aspirational. It was intellectual. It was a musical Jewishness. It was not in the way we use this phrase now, but it was a cultural Jewishness. It was not a synagogue Jewishness or a theological Jewishness. But of course he is Jewish, deeply Jewish. He couldn’t be anything else. And so he didn’t, and thank God for that.
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‘Spatial restructuring’ razes hundreds of residences in West Bank refugee camps
The Israel Defense Forces refers to the systematic demolition of hundreds of homes in the Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams refugee camps as “spatial restructuring,” a bureaucratic euphemism for operations designed to create maneuvering space. For years, Israel has used house demolitions in the West Bank as a punitive measure against terrorists, but over the past 18 months, the purpose behind the policy has changed: Israel is now razing homes in order to widen roads inside the camps, which will allow for the easier passage of military vehicles.
The destruction is part of a trend whereby Israel is importing combat tactics it has used in the wars in Gaza and Lebanon to the occupied West Bank. The main difference is the Israeli settlers — who engaged in persistent efforts to expel Palestinian populations first from Israeli-administered areas of the West Bank, and now from zones under the control of the Palestinian Authority.
In the aftermath of Oct. 7, the IDF distributed thousands of firearms to the settlers, some of whom were recruited as “regional defense soldiers.” As a result, IDF weapons have been used in many of the violent clashes between settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank. Last month, N12 News reported that the IDF will scale back the number of regional defense soldiers — and that Shin Bet will vet the recruits.
But even without the settlers — looking solely from the perspective of the IDF’s military activity — a significant change is underway. From the IDF’s perspective, the West Bank is turning from a place that is home to millions of Palestinians who are not involved in any hostile activity, into a combat zone. And combat zones can be “restructured” according to the military’s needs, even if that includes the demolition of entire neighborhoods or population transfer.
According to the IDF, the change was actually sparked by the Palestinian side. Even before Oct. 7 2023, the army claims, Palestinian terrorist organizations were setting up battalions — larger fighting units that held training exercises and activities based on an organized military doctrine. In July 2023, the IDF responded by launching Operation Home and Garden in the Jenin refugee camp — the largest Israeli military operation since Defensive Shield in 2002. It was a short, targeted maneuver that lasted just two days.
In the aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacre, the IDF described an uptick in the activity of these battalions, which led, in August 2024, to Operation Summer Camps, during which the army entered the refugee camps in Tulkarm and killed the commander of a local battalion. The same month, as Israel Hayom reporter Amir Ettinger revealed, Israel Katz — then minister of foreign affairs and now minister of defense — made the IDF’s intentions quite clear: “The refugee camps are the root of the evil,” he said during a closed-door meeting with leaders of the Yesha Council. “They are not controlled by the Palestinian Authority, but by Iran. The Jenin refugee camp must be cleared of its residents and dealt with the same way we dealt with the Gaza Strip.”
In January 2025, Katz’s words became reality when the IDF launched Operation Iron Wall. According to figures issued by the military, 208 homes were destroyed in the Jenin refugee camp and 234 in the Tulkarm and Nur Shams camps. The goal was to allow armored Israeli vehicles to move within the camp. Satellite images leave no room for doubt as to the extent of the devastation.
The IDF currently has troops stationed permanently inside the refugee camps and is not allowing the tens of thousands of residents who left to return to their homes. Some Palestinians who were expelled have petitioned to Israel’s High Court of Justice, via the Association of Civil Rights in Israel and attorneys Hila Sharon and Reut Shaer. In February, the IDF told the court that it “does not intend to maintain a permanent presence in the refugee camps and, once the goals of the operation have been fully achieved, the current operation in the camps will be ended.” At the same time, the IDF added that “the necessary operational conditions have not yet been fully met.”
“We are a household of six people, including four children,” says Bassem — not his real name — who lived on the outskirts of the Tulkarm refugee camp and who was expelled around a year ago. “They gave us 10 minutes to leave. And that was that. Since then, we haven’t been home.”
According to Bassem, despite the IDF’s claim that it issues individual permits for residents to visit their homes, his request has been denied. He did manage to get access to the home one time — without permission — in the early hours of the morning. “All of the furniture was broken. The doors were open, there were cats and dogs inside, the trees in the yard had no fruit. Everything was dead. And I regret going to see it. I don’t have any security charges against me and I have committed no crime. Why would they do that to my home? And even if they do give me a permit — there’s no furniture left.”
Bassem and his family now live in rented accommodation. The financial assistance they got earlier is dwindling and he cannot see any kind of future. “UNRWA gave us some money at the start and a few cartons of oil, rice and things like that. Now, 80% of the aid has ended. In my opinion, there’s not even a 1% chance we’ll ever get back to our home.”
Delivering a message
“Spatial restructuring” is not a new concept, but, in the West Bank, its meaning has changed. In the past, it mainly referred to roadblocks designed to control the movement of Palestinian and Israeli vehicles and to allow the Israeli authorities to impose a military closure at will. In the past year it has taken on a new significance: the destruction of Palestinian homes and infrastructure.
For example, in August last year, Maj.-Gen. Avi Bluth, the head of the Central Command, ordered the uprooting of thousands of Palestinian olive trees from an area of about 300 dunams (74 acres) belonging to the village of Al-Mughayyir, following a shooting attack in which a Jewish Israeli was lightly wounded. “Every village and every enemy must know that if they carry out an attack against the [Israeli] residents, they will pay a heavy price. They will experience a curfew, they will experience a siege, and they will experience restructuring operations,” Bluth said. “We are now bearing down on this village, which has been responsible for quite a few attacks lately. We will also deliver this message to the village.”
Similar measures were also taken after the terror attack in May 2025 in which 30-year-old Tzeela Gez was shot dead while on her way to the maternity hospital to give birth. The IDF demolished homes in the adjacent village of Burkin overlooking Route 446 — including a four-story apartment block.
Another indication of the change in the IDF’s approach is the increase in the number of Palestinian fatalities in the West Bank since Oct. 7. According to data released by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, 478 and 474 Palestinians were killed by IDF fire in 2023 and 2024 respectively. In 2025, that figure dropped to 221. These have been by far the most deadly years for Palestinians in the West Bank since the early 2000s, at the height of the second intifada. Figures issued by the IDF’s Central Command show a similar trend.
One of the reasons for this increase is the order issued by Bluth — which was revealed last year by Haaretz — that expanded open-fire orders in the West Bank. Here, too, the IDF is importing its operating tactics from the Gaza Strip. The instructions appear to reflect a broader change in the IDF’s combat doctrine, possibly influenced by the fact that many of its soldiers also fought in Gaza.
“A lot of things have changed,” says Meir — not his real name — an officer in the reserves who served for many months in the West Bank before and after Oct. 7. “I’m not sure whether this is something imported from another region, or rather that the security reality has simply changed. Once October 7 happened, it was understood that we can no longer just take it. So, we’re beefing up security: adding posts, bringing back patrols — every patrol that was ever cut has been brought back and every patrol that never existed before has been added.”
Meir claims that the rules of engagement have not been changed and insists that “no one is firing indiscriminately.” At the same time, he adds: “It’s true that there was an understanding that we have to respond more forcefully. Before October 7, people were less eager to use firearms; afterwards, the IDF suddenly remembered that you can’t fight terrorism with the foul odor of tear gas. We are given weapons so that we can use them. When there was a need — we used them. There was a long period of time when we were afraid to shoot, when even shooting in the air would mean that all hell broke loose. You shoot your gun — that’s what it’s for. We don’t walk around with our weapons slung over our shoulders just because it looks good.”
Meir also believes that the change is primarily a response to Palestinian terror. “The Palestinians responded very strongly to October 7. There were Hamas flags, rallies — even violence. It was something out of the ordinary. So, we used the means at our disposal to quiet it down. The Palestinians did things we hadn’t seen before — three armed men tried to infiltrate Adora [a settlement northwest of Hebron], for example, and there were bomb-making factories. We found crazy amounts of terrorist infrastructure.”
‘There’s a problem here. We’ll pay the price’
Maj.-Gen. (Res.) Gadi Shamni, a former Central Command chief, sees things differently. “It’s all a question of proportionality,” he tells Shomrim. “There has been a significant increase in the threat level — a lot of underbelly IEDs and all of that organization [of Palestinian battalions]. That said, October 7 and everything that’s happened since, along with the footage coming out of Gaza, ultimately mean that in a lot of places [the IDF] is sometimes using a ton of force — more than is always necessary. There are some sensitivities which, in the past, [the IDF] treated very seriously. Today, those sensitivities have disappeared — and that’s not a good thing.”
“I have spoken to soldiers and officers, young and old, who used to see things very differently,” Shamni adds. “Today, what they say is: ‘Take no chances — shoot at everything.’ This is a problematic approach and the IDF, at some stage, will have to take control of the situation — because we will end up paying a price. Once, officers dealt with these sensitivities, they briefed their soldiers on how to treat civilians, how to behave in sensitive areas. Today, the lower-ranking soldiers are unaware of any of this, because nobody talks to them. Everything is black or white. There’s no middle ground. And that’s a problem when you’re operating in a civilian environment.”
“[The principle of] proportionality has vanished,” he adds. “When you talk about proportionality, you are told, ‘Now’s the time to kick ass.’ There is also intense pressure from the settlements, the government, from [ministers] Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. Ultimately, the IDF carries out the government’s policies. You can see what Smotrich is doing on the ground and it is incumbent on the IDF to execute those policies. We have a problem here.”
IDF: Freedom of action remains a necessary condition for regional security
The IDF submitted the following response: “The intensive efforts of the IDF to thwart terrorism in Judea and Samaria began before the outbreak of the war. Terrorist infrastructure developed in the refugee camps of the northern Samaria region, from which attacks were launched. In light of this, the IDF launched Operation Iron Wall in January 2025, during which operational and engineering activities were carried out to enable freedom of action for security forces, dismantle terrorist infrastructure and prevent terrorist organizations from establishing a presence.
“In addition to these operational activities, there has been a decrease of about 80% in the volume of terror attacks in northern Samaria recently. Most of the measures implemented during the operation, including the clearing of access routes and other engineering work, were also reviewed by the Supreme Court in response to petitions that were subsequently dismissed following the submission of a formal response and a hearing attended by all parties.
“Vegetation clearing is carried out according to established protocols, with the approval of relevant authorities in Central Command and based on operational requirements. These measures are designed to ensure the safety of road users, protect travel routes and prevent infiltrations and terrorist attacks. Every operation is preceded by a professional assessment. The IDF operates in accordance with the law and its decisions are subject to judicial review. Security forces act against structures built without authorization, prioritizing enforcement against illegal construction near roads that poses a security risk. Such enforcement actions are carried out under the planning and building laws applicable in the region.
“IDF forces continue to operate throughout Judea and Samaria, focusing on targeted counterterrorism efforts to ensure the safety of citizens. The freedom of action maintained by the IDF in terrorist hubs across northern Samaria remains a necessary condition for regional security.”
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Whether it’s viral dot cakes or Love Shack Fancy skirts, Chloe Hechter wants you to know that “Jewish-American Princesses did it first”
On the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Butterfield Market currently boasts hour-long lines for the viral “dot cakes,” which are entirely covered by tiny sprinkles. For influencer Chloe Hechter, however, these cakes are nothing new — she saw them at every college bed party, birthday and Bat Mitzvah she ever went to.
“Jewish-American Princesses did it first,” she claimed in a recent Tiktok.
Hechter, who is 25, regularly receives thousands of likes on her content which is centered around relatable modern Jewish experiences: summer relationships at Jewish summer camp, drama within Jewish sororities, coming home from college for Passover seder. She’s described her mission as reclaiming the “Jewish-American Princess” stereotype, which often brings to mind a girl who is spoiled, materialistic and boy-obsessed. Hechter hopes to present a different narrative.
“Jewish American Princess means a headstrong, confident Jewish woman who knows what she’s worth,” Hechter wrote in a February Substack post. “A girl who knows her place in the world as a woman and as a Jew, and who isn’t afraid to be exactly who she is in those spaces.”
The modern-day stereotype of a “Jewish-American Princess” is known for a dress code of sweat sets from Free City or Aviator Nation, Roller Rabbit pajamas and ruffly skirts from Love Shack Fancy. Before that, as Jamie Lauren Keiles discussed in a 2018 Vox article, the “JAP” uniform included Juicy tracksuits in the 2000s, Calvin Klein jeans in the ‘80s and cashmere sweaters in the ‘50s. But, as the ‘princess’ moniker suggests, these looks have always come at a price (Free City sweatpants currently retail for $168).
Keiles explains that JAPs’ historic reputation for dependence on “daddy’s money” stems from Jewish men in the 1950s, still seen by many as nouveau riche, who sought someone to blame. The Jewish-American Princess was encapsulated, Keiles writes, in Goodbye, Columbus’ Brenda Patimkin, who, though educated and beautiful, is also characterized as vain, demanding and uncompromising. It is this kind of portrayal that Hechter hopes to challenge. Though she acknowledges her own privileged background, she also argues that privilege doesn’t necessarily mean out-of-touch.
Hechter’s upbringing was “a gift I’ve been given,” she said. Although she didn’t discuss her background in detail, Hechter expressed her admiration for her parents, who run their own businesses and worked hard to make sure that she grew up in comfort. As opposed to the stereotypical Jewish-American princess, searching for a wealthy husband to provide for her, Hechter said that she uses her background as motivation to be self-sufficient — and as inspiration for her content.
Hechter started out as a child actor, and later went to high school at LaGuardia, the famed performing arts school in New York. At heart, though, she says she was also a writer. Even from a young age, she told me, she would write down funny or ridiculous situations she observed. For a Reform Jewish girl going to New York City private school, there was a lot of material — particularly during B’nei Mitzvah season.
“I’d be like ‘why am I in a party bus to a country club?,’” she joked.
For Hechter, Jewish experiences like these — along with her summers at sleepaway camp — were primarily cultural as opposed to religious. She observed the major holidays, but didn’t go to services regularly; she found the teachings of the Torah interesting but didn’t follow them to the letter.
After she graduated from Syracuse, Hechter began posting skits, which eventually began to go viral. Her first big video, currently at over 660,000 likes, was themed around getting ready for a camp social. In an interview with her college newspaper, she joked that she “would’ve put on makeup” if she had anticipated the video’s success.
Inspired that social media could be her calling, Hechter initially pushed herself to post five times a day, a pace that now seems inconceivable to her. It paid off, though; Hechter currently boasts over 186,000 followers on TikTok and 79,000 on Instagram.
In her videos, Hechter is dedicated to representing a version of her Jewish experience that is rarely shown on screen. Most Jewish characters in film, she says, tend to follow a limited set of archetypes: they’re deeply religious, there’s a depressing undertone or, like Shoshanna Shapiro from Girls, their religion isn’t discussed. When a funny, secular Jew appears on screen, he’s almost always a man.
“I love Adam Sandler and Larry David as much as the next girl, but I wish growing up that I had a cool, fun Jewish girl to look up to,” Hechter said.
Hechter explained that many of her skits draw from experiences she observed on the outskirts; as she tells it, she went to camp but wasn’t the mean girl, she attended lavish Bat Mitzvahs but didn’t have a party of her own, she was in a Jewish sorority but wasn’t super involved. Still, her characters are immediately recognizable.
“People either are experiencing these things firsthand and are like ‘oh my god, this is so me,’” she said. “Or they see it and they make fun of it, like ‘oh my god, this is so my daughter. Oh my god, this is so the people in my sorority.’”
Hannah Wiener, a high school senior from Oceanside, Long Island, is a longtime fan of Hechter. For Hanukkah one year, her sister gifted her a personalized Cameo video in which Hechter talked about their similarities and common interests.
Wiener said that she loves Hechter’s content because she finds it relatable. There are a lot of influencers who make similar videos about Jewish life, but Wiener feels like they make fun of it, rather than treat it “as a normal event like Chloe does.” For Wiener, who went to sleepaway camp herself, Hechter’s camp videos are her favorite. She said that she finds them “to be so funny and also just so heartwarming.”
Middle and high schoolers make up a large proportion of Hechter’s audience — she told me that summer “camp girls”, like Wiener, are her biggest fans. Hechter believes her younger self would have been one of them.
“I genuinely think I would have been my own favorite creator,” she said.
The post Whether it’s viral dot cakes or Love Shack Fancy skirts, Chloe Hechter wants you to know that “Jewish-American Princesses did it first” appeared first on The Forward.
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The Iran war ended terribly for the US, and even worse for Israel
A war that began with immense ambition has ended with profound setbacks for both the United States and Israel.
With an emerging U.S.-Iran peace agreement, what initially appeared to be a historic demonstration of military dominance evolved into a vivid illustration of the limits of both Israeli and American power. The conflict also exposed profound failures in strategic competence within that alliance. Washington and Jerusalem planned effectively for the initial decapitation strikes, but were unprepared for the economic and geopolitical consequences that followed.
The result is a war that may ultimately strengthen the Iranian regime politically, despite the damage it suffered militarily; has weakened international perceptions of American military might; and has diminished both Israel’s own strategic circumstances and its most important alliance.
The opening phase of the war appeared spectacularly successful. Israeli intelligence and airpower decapitated large portions of Iran’s military and security leadership with astonishing speed, including by assassinating Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Key military infrastructure suffered major damage, and for a brief moment, it seemed plausible that the Iranian regime might genuinely face collapse or surrender on terms dictated by Washington and Jerusalem.
That perception proved short-lived.
Iran shifted the battlefield away from conventional military confrontation and toward economic coercion. Its closure of the Strait of Hormuz exposed the extraordinary vulnerability of the global economy to relatively inexpensive forms of pressure. Energy markets panicked almost immediately. Governments across Europe, Asia, and the Gulf pushed urgently for de-escalation.
The central strategic reality became impossible to ignore: the U.S.could not tolerate sustained economic disruption, and the Iranian regime has a strong stomach for suffering. The overwhelming military superiority of the U.S. and Israel effectively ceased to matter.
That asymmetry changed the balance of the conflict. And the resulting agreement appears to preserve much of Iran’s architecture of mischief, which the regime’s many critics had hoped to see dismantled.
Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities have been harmed but can be rebuilt; long-term reductions to that firepower are reportedly not on the table in a planned 60-day negotiation. The regime’s regional proxy network — including Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iraqi militias, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad — survives, even though Hezbollah and Hamas have been battered.
And as Israel is not a party to the ceasefire, it cannot advocate for more stringent terms on this front.
The regime itself remains firmly in power and may receive enormous sanctions relief and renewed economic access. Demands for democratic reforms seem to have been set aside, as has any kind of punishment for the regime’s massacre of thousands — and by some reports tens of thousands — of domestic protestors in January.
The latter aspect is especially galling given that President Donald Trump was driven to intervene because of the January massacre, after he promised Iranians that “help is on its way.” Upon launching the war, he declared that it would enable Iranians to “take your country back.”
Ironically, Trump in his first term pulled out of former President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal over objections that it provided funds for the regime while allowing it to run riot. Now, he is settling for an effective reconstitution of that deal — except one with substantially less American leverage.
The implications extend far beyond Iran itself. The war demonstrated that Tehran can generate immediate global economic panic through relatively cheap tools and can leverage that panic into diplomatic concessions. Before the war, fears about Iran’s ability to blackmail the world economy remained somewhat theoretical. After the war, those fears became a demonstrated geopolitical reality.
There is little evidence that either the American or Israeli governments understood in advance the degree to which the global economy had become vulnerable to this form of coercion. This, even though the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz was completely predictable and indeed expected by every strategist I’ve spoken to for decades.
This outcome may be most devastating for the Iranian people themselves. Many Iranians who despise the regime interpreted the opening phase of the conflict as evidence that the dictatorship might finally face genuine collapse. Instead, the regime not only survived but also regained leverage. The machinery of repression remains intact.
But this result is damaging for every party to this war aside from the Iranian regime.
The war has transformed perceptions of American power. For decades, the U.S. has anchored a global system built on the assumption that Washington could manage regional crises with some strategy in mind. That strategy wasn’t always brilliant, but it was rarely clueless. With the Hormuz confrontation, the world watched the U.S. confront a regional adversary with vastly inferior capabilities and fail to control events.
For Israel, the alliance Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spent years cultivating with the American right and with Trump personally has become dangerously fragile. As pressure mounted to stabilize energy markets and prevent wider regional escalation, Trump increasingly presented himself not as a partner coordinating with Israel but as a superior authority managing Israeli actions. He repeatedly framed Israeli military action as dependent on his approval. He cursed Netanyahu in public. He presented Israel as a vassal doing his bidding — something no U.S. president has previously done.
This will destabilize Israel, where much of the governing right previously viewed Trump as a uniquely reliable ally who would support Israeli military objectives without hesitation or conditions.
Previous American presidents pressured Israel privately while still preserving the outward presentation of a relationship between sovereign allies. Trump discarded much of that convention. The new perception weakens Israel’s deterrence dramatically. Plus, with bipartisan support for Israel in Washington even more completely collapsed than after the deleterious war in Gaza, and relations with much of Europe — Israel’s top trading partner — similarly deteriorated, Israel finds itself at a new peak of dangerous international isolation.
This strategic shipwreck bears no resemblance to the sweeping regional transformation that supporters of the war — myself included — initially envisioned. I assumed, partly because of the first days’ successes, that Trump and Netanyahu had a plan. This is not a mistake serious people are likely to make again.
The post The Iran war ended terribly for the US, and even worse for Israel appeared first on The Forward.
