Uncategorized
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.
—
The post A history of Mel Brooks as a ‘disobedient Jew’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Netanyahu wants his far-right allies to unite. One of them is betting on a bigger prize: replacing Netanyahu himself.
Israel’s right-wing firebrand Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, has spent the past several days under intense pressure from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to do something he plainly does not want to do: join forces in the coming election with his far-right rival, finance minister Bezalel Smotrich.
Netanyahu has good reason to be worried. Israel elects its 120-member parliament through nationwide proportional representation, but a party must win at least 3.25% of the vote to enter the Knesset. If it falls short, its votes are effectively wasted.
That is precisely the danger facing Smotrich. Recent polls ahead of the Oct. 27 election have repeatedly placed his Religious Zionism party near or below the threshold. Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party, by contrast, is comfortably above it. Netanyahu has therefore been pressing the two men to run together, ensuring that neither party’s votes are lost. Over the weekend, Ben-Gvir’s party issued a statement saying it would not run with Smotrich.
On its face, this looks extraordinarily irresponsible.
Israel has seen what happens when parties gamble with the threshold. In 2022, the left-wing Meretz and Arab nationalist Balad parties together won roughly 6% of the vote, but because each fell below the threshold, neither entered parliament. The result helped Netanyahu secure a comfortable Knesset majority. In 1992, wasted votes for small right-wing parties similarly contributed to Yitzhak Rabin’s narrow victory.
So why would Ben-Gvir risk helping defeat his own political camp?
The obvious explanation is ego. Ben-Gvir and Smotrich dislike each other and compete for many of the same voters.
But there is another possibility: Perhaps Ben-Gvir has already concluded that Netanyahu is going to lose. If so, what looks like recklessness may be perfectly rational.
The parties opposed to Netanyahu currently lead his bloc by roughly 20 seats or more in most serious polling. And it would be naive to assume they would refuse to rely, directly or indirectly, on Israel’s Arab parties if the alternative were another Netanyahu government, an outcome they regard as catastrophic.
If Ben-Gvir believes defeat is coming anyway, preserving every possible seat for Netanyahu’s current bloc becomes a secondary concern. His real contest begins the morning after Netanyahu loses: Who inherits the Israeli right?
Running separately allows Ben-Gvir to preserve his identity, weaken Smotrich and emerge as the undisputed leader of Israel’s radical right, even if the entire Netanyahu camp ends up in opposition.
That possibility would have sounded absurd only a few years ago.
From pariah to power broker
In 2019, Ben-Gvir could not even get elected to the Knesset. For years he inhabited the outer fringes of Israeli politics, a disciple of the racist extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane whose political tradition was considered so toxic that even Netanyahu once treated him as an embarrassment.
By 2022, Ben-Gvir had become one of the most prominent figures on the Israeli right. Netanyahu made him national security minister. The question is no longer whether Ben-Gvir belongs to mainstream Israeli politics. It is whether he might someday lead a substantial part of it.
Imagine Likud going into opposition with 19 seats and Ben-Gvir emerging with 13 – roughly the current polling. Suddenly the distance between them does not look enormous, especially after Likud has spent decades becoming almost inseparable from Netanyahu. Ben-Gvir would possess a substantial parliamentary faction, a fiercely motivated base, enormous public visibility and a powerful argument to right-wing voters: I represent what comes next. Likud represents an exhausted past.
There is no law saying Likud must remain the dominant party of the Israeli right forever. Political parties survive as dominant institutions only as long as voters believe they represent something they want. Once that bond breaks, decades of accumulated political capital can disappear remarkably quickly.
Which raises the question: What exactly is Likud without Netanyahu? The party machinery will remain, along with more than 100,000 members and a formidable institutional legacy. But after three decades of Netanyahu’s dominance, separating Likud’s identity from his own has become increasingly difficult.
Many of its most independent and impressive figures have left or been pushed aside over those decades, among them Tzipi Livni, Dan Meridor, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert and Benny Begin. The cumulative exodus says something about the transformation of a once broader political movement.
The cost of Netanyahu’s compromises
Netanyahu’s dependence on Israel’s Haredi parties has surely done further damage. For decades, Likud could present itself as the natural home of Israel’s secular and traditional right: nationalist voters with strong Jewish identities who nevertheless expected the basic obligations of citizenship to be shared.
That compact is under enormous strain over military service. Most Haredi men have historically been exempted from Israel’s compulsory military service while studying full-time in religious seminaries. The arrangement has become vastly more problematic explosive since Oct. 7 and the wars that followed, which have imposed extraordinary burdens on soldiers and reservists.
The Haredim want their exemptions codified into law, and Netanyahu has attempted to comply. The issue is one of the main ones in the election. A party asking non-Haredi Israelis and their children to shoulder an ever-heavier military burden while protecting broad exemptions for the rapidly growing Haredi population should expect to pay a political price.
Here lies one of the ironies of Ben-Gvir’s rise. He represents an even more extreme version of the religious nationalism that has alienated some traditional Likud voters. Yet precisely because he is more extreme, his claim to the future right may become stronger.
Likud’s concessions to the Haredi parties can be understood as transactional politics — bargains Netanyahu needs to remain in power. Ben-Gvir’s religious radicalism is more authentic. He offers a coherent worldview in which Jewish nationalism, religious authority, territorial maximalism and hostility toward the institutions and restraints of liberal democracy reinforce one another. What Likud has adopted gradually, sometimes for reasons of political survival, Ben-Gvir offers as a complete ideological package. In that sense, he offers the product in its purest form.
Consider the Palestinian question. Much of the Israeli right wants permanent Israeli control of the West Bank. But millions of Palestinians live there, and permanent Israeli sovereignty ultimately requires an answer to their political status. If Israel permanently governs millions of Palestinians without equal political rights, its claim to liberal democracy becomes impossible to sustain. Grant them equal rights, and maintaining a decisive Jewish majority is impossible.
The mainstream right has never produced a convincing answer to this dilemma. Its effective policy has largely been to manage the contradiction indefinitely. It looks foolish in this regard. Meanwhile, the extreme right does have an answer: Palestinian submission and, ultimately, though this is whispered and not shouted, expulsion.
That answer is immoral and would carry enormous strategic consequences. It has never represented the clear majority position in Israeli society. But politically it possesses one advantage: clarity. Part of Ben-Gvir’s appeal comes from his willingness to say openly what much of the right prefers to leave unresolved.
Where the numbers are headed
Demography may strengthen him further. Israel’s secular population has lower birth rates than its Haredi and religious-Zionist populations. For decades, Likud was broad enough to accommodate secular nationalists, traditional Jews, religious voters and conservatives who wanted a strongly Jewish state while retaining some attachment to liberal democratic norms. As the right becomes more religious and culturally radical, that coalition becomes harder to maintain. Increasingly, the right will become the religious bloc, and its former secular adherents will move across the aisle.
The nationalist-religious Ben-Gvir consequently begins to look less like an aberration from the Israeli right and more like one possible expression of where it is heading.
That is why his refusal to reunite with Smotrich may be more consequential than another round of ego and rivalry. It may reflect a cold calculation: Netanyahu’s era is approaching its end, his camp may be headed for opposition, and the real prize is no longer merely a place in the next government.
It is the inheritance of the Israeli right.
Ben-Gvir has traveled an extraordinary distance already. Prior to being elected, he was convicted of offenses including supporting a terrorist organization and incitement to racism. As a young Kahanist activist in 1995, he brandished an emblem torn from Yitzhak Rabin’s Cadillac and declared, weeks before Rabin’s assassination: “We got to his car, and we’ll get to him too.”
That man is now Israel’s national security minister.
He may not be wrong about the calculation he appears to be making.
And if Ben-Gvir is positioning himself not merely to survive Netanyahu but to inherit a large part of the movement Netanyahu leaves behind, it is worth understanding that possibility now. Disasters should at least be approached with eyes wide open.
The post Netanyahu wants his far-right allies to unite. One of them is betting on a bigger prize: replacing Netanyahu himself. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
As Nepal’s flood toll climbs, Jewish aid groups mobilize to help survivors recover
Two Jewish humanitarian groups — IsraAID and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, widely known as “the Joint” — have sent emergency aid to Nepal’s border with Tibet where flash floods and landslides have killed at least 800 people and more than 3,000 are still missing.
Triggered by a landslide that tore through the mountainous Rasuwa and Nuwakot districts on Aug. 26, the flooding has destroyed roads, bridges and entire villages and displaced tens of thousands of people.
IsraAID’s four-person emergency team landed in Kathmandu Friday evening. Mai Leshem, who is currently serving as head of mission for the Nepal response, said most of the team are the same people who worked in Nepal between 2015 and 2019, when IsraAID ran a long-term recovery program there after an earthquake killed nearly 9,000 people and injured 22,000.
“It’s a place that’s very deeply connected to us,” she said. A fifth team member, a health specialist, is expected within days.
While the Nepali government and local responders handle search and rescue efforts, Leshem said, IsraAID’s team is focused on supporting communities and first responders once the immediate danger passes — handing out hygiene and dignity kits, running stress-relief programs for kids, and working with overwhelmed hospitals to offer burnout-prevention support to staff. Those hospital workers, Leshem said, are dealing with more than the injured; families of the missing keep showing up looking for loved ones.
One moment from the team’s first days stuck with her. At a shelter in Kathmandu housing displaced residents from a hard-hit community near the Tibet-Nepal border, hand-lettered signs read “no photos, no journalists.” Leshem spoke there with a man in his mid-30s who said he wasn’t as worried about himself as he was about the teenagers and young adults around him — kids, he told her, who’d lost everything and were starting to grow angry.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been on a mission where I heard someone focus so intently on this age group,” Leshem said. “It really moved me to hear him speak with such empathy.”
A mission rooted in memory
The Joint is also coordinating its response through the local Nepali organizations it trained in disaster preparedness after the 2015 earthquake — a strategy Avital Sandler-Loeff, executive director of JDC’s Disaster Relief and Development Unit, described as central to how the organization operates. The Joint reached out to its Nepali partners within hours of the flood because those relationships were already in place.
The organization’s immediate focus is preventing a public health crisis, she said. Standing water and damaged sanitation systems have left officials worried about waterborne disease outbreaks, on top of a housing crisis for the tens of thousands who have no shelter. Some families were swept as far as 25 miles from home, she said, and can’t get back because roads and bridges are still buried in mud.
The Joint is funding hygiene kits, tents, blankets and clothing, buying locally where possible. It expects its focus to shift toward helping people rebuild their livelihoods, many of whom depend on farm fields that were destroyed. Sandler-Loeff and Mickey Noam-Alon, the unit’s director of disaster response, said they hope to travel to Nepal themselves within days, though they’re watching the same renewed flood risk that has kept rescue crews on alert.
Both Sandler-Loeff and Noam-Alon said the organization is in direct contact with other Jewish groups responding to the floods, including IsraAID and World Jewish Relief, to avoid duplicating efforts. The Joint leads the Jewish Coalition for Disaster Relief (JCDR), comprising 49 mostly North American Jewish organizations that address disasters and development challenges worldwide, but Sandler-Loeff said coordination often comes down to something simpler: “We pick up the phone and talk to our friends.”
Asked why this work matters, Sandler-Loeff pointed to her ancestors who lived through the Holocaust.“I wish more organizations had been there for them,” she said.
Noam-Alon said assisting communities in crisis carries extra weight now, at a moment of rising antisemitism worldwide. “Today,” he said, “it’s even more important to show up.”
Both IsraAID and the Joint say they expect to be in Nepal for weeks, if not longer, as the scale of what’s needed becomes clearer.
The post As Nepal’s flood toll climbs, Jewish aid groups mobilize to help survivors recover appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
‘I made a mistake’: Abdul El-Sayed apologizes to Michigan Jews for past comments about synagogue attack
(JTA) — LANSING — Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed apologized for his past comments regarding the March attack on Temple Israel in suburban Detroit during a meeting with the state Democratic party’s Jewish caucus at the party convention on Saturday.
The Democratic nominee told the room that his remarks following the attempted targeting of the West Bloomfield synagogue preschool, in which he had said, in part, “Hurt people hurt people,” were intended to provide “context.”
Reflecting on them, he said on Saturday, “I made a mistake.”
“If my statement caused pain, I’m sorry. It was not what I intended to do,” El-Sayed continued. Referencing the first of two statements he had made about the attack, he added, “We issued a statement, of course, condemning it, and that just should have been it, full stop.”
El-Sayed’s initial Temple Israel comments, which many Jews interpreted as justifying the attack, have alienated Jewish voters in the state. After an initial statement condemning the attack, El-Sayed then followed up with one referencing Israel’s war in Lebanon, where the attacker had lost family in an Israel airstrike.
On Saturday, El-Sayed, a former county health director, insisted that his push for “context” to the attack was broadly appropriate, but not at that moment, explaining that such “conversations” could happen “in the fullness of time.”
“Sometimes you can’t really see context in the moment of acuity or pain,” he said. “The intention for me was not to trample that pain. It was not to discount it. It was not at all to justify any sort of domestic terrorism. That’s wrong, full stop.”
El-Sayed’s apology, which was in response to a question posed to him by a Jewish Democrat in attendance, came amid a new round of outreach efforts he has been making with Jewish voters since he won Michigan’s Democratic senate primary earlier this month. He also plans to attend a Sunday Jewish caucus gathering honoring state Attorney General Dana Nessel with congressional nominee Jeremy Moss in attendance, both of whom the candidate has publicly been at ideological odds with over Jewish issues.
In recent days El-Sayed has also minimized some of his harsh critiques of Israel in his stump speeches and issued a statement distancing himself from onetime campaign ally Hasan Piker, the left-wing anti-Israel streamer.
His nomination acceptance speech later that day made only one, oblique, reference to American support for Israel: “It shouldn’t be this hard to pay your taxes and know that that money’s going to be spent on you, and your kids, and your schools, instead of being dropped in the form of a bomb on somebody else, and their kids, and their school.”
But skepticism was still palpable among the 30 or so Jewish Democrats in the room, a crowd that included one delegate who said his daughter and grandson had been inside Temple Israel when it was attacked.
“Our safety as Jews in America relies on, I think, what’s said by public figures, and how they present themselves in public, and how they advocate for Jews in public,” he said just prior to El-Sayed’s apology.
Not all of El-Sayed’s answers pleased the room. Fielding another question about whether he would support the longstanding Democratic platform of a two-state solution in the Middle East if elected senator, the candidate pivoted.
“It’s incoherent to start with a solution and say, ‘Figure out how to work here,’” El-Sayed said. “To me, it’s about starting with a process and saying, ‘How do we dignify equal rights to peace, dignity, and self-determination for Palestinian people and Jewish Israelis alike?’”
He added, as he has in other interviews, that he was open to the possibility of a two-state solution “if that’s what a free Palestinian and free Jewish Israeli people decide.” But, he qualified, “Our country, under the guise of a two-state solution, has been aiding, arming, and abetting a government that wants to foreclose on the possibility of a second state.”
That didn’t sit well with some in attendance, even as El-Sayed’s apology for his other comments was broadly appreciated.
“I really liked him apologizing for misspeaking. We’ve all made comments that we regret later on,” Rebecca Kasen, a Lansing-area Michigan Jewish Democrat in attendance, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I was less comfortable with what he said about not supporting a two-state solution.”
Overall, Kasen said, her opinion of El-Sayed had improved after the Jewish caucus meeting as a result of his apology.
“I was probably a more reluctant voter for him” beforehand, she said. That had changed: “Instead of just going to vote now, I am going to be enthusiastically voting for him.”
As the senate race is shaping up to be the potential tipping point to decide control of the chamber in a crucial midterm year seen as a referendum on President Donald Trump, the views of the state’s Jewish Democrats regarding their party have been placed under a microscope for more reasons than just El-Sayed. That has led some longtime Jewish Democratic voters to defect to the Republican opponent, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, and also led to some awkward moments at the convention.
In one example, Washtenaw County Prosecutor Eli Savit, the party’s progressive Jewish nominee for state attorney general, addressed the Jewish caucus by declaring, “We’re going to win and keep the attorney general’s office in the hands of a Michigan Jewish Democrat.” Conspicuously absent from the day’s events was Nessel, the Jewish Democrat currently holding the seat.
Prior to the Saturday convention, Nessel, the state’s highest ranking Jewish official, had announced she would not be attending for fear she would be targeted by antisemitic harassment. Earlier this week, in a podcast interview with The Atlantic, Nessel had reiterated her issues with El-Sayed’s comments about Temple Israel and expressed hope he would walk them back soon.
Nessel’s son Zach Nessel, secretary of the state Jewish Democratic caucus, told the caucus that his mother’s absence stemmed from “agitators” who had targeted her at the party endorsement convention in the spring. Attendance at Saturday’s event was less than one-third of what the Jewish caucus had drawn at the spring convention, organizers said.
Zach Nessel criticized the state Democratic Party for failing to take prompt action to remove the agitators from the earlier convention. He told JTA that Jews in the party “have a right to be concerned.”
“I think the Democratic Party needs to put more work into addressing their concerns,” Zach Nessel said. “But I think that can’t happen without showing up.”
Moss, the Michigan state senator who has recently been at the center of another El-Sayed-related controversy, was spotted at the convention on Saturday but did not attend the Jewish caucus events.
One ally of El-Sayed’s who also addressed the caucus is University of Michigan Board of Regents nominee Amir Makled. He is an attorney for members of the school’s pro-Palestinian encampment movement who had pushed out a Jewish pro-Israel incumbent at the previous convention. During his own address to Jewish delegates, Makled did not mention his history of social media posts including retweeting far-right antisemitic conspiracy theorist Candace Owens and sharing praise for Hezbollah leaders.
Makled’s speech later that day at the nominating convention alluded to his work with the encampments as he declared that Michigan “will never have a university where students are punished simply because their speech makes the powerful uncomfortable.”
In-between candidate meet-and-greets, Jewish caucus members shared their anxieties about their closely scrutinized role in the midterm elections. They were gravely concerned about protecting democracy and election security from Republican threats, and felt that flipping the Senate was crucial.
Yet it was hard, they said, to get much of the Jewish community onboard this time, given the positions of El-Sayed and some other members of the Democratic slate. Michigan is home to an estimated 100,000 Jews, and the senate race is currently polling in a dead heat, making their votes potentially pivotal.
“How do we unify our community to put the country first?” one attendee asked the group. “I have a hard time doing that.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post ‘I made a mistake’: Abdul El-Sayed apologizes to Michigan Jews for past comments about synagogue attack appeared first on The Forward.
