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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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The post A history of Mel Brooks as a ‘disobedient Jew’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Is this Vermont farm the American kibbutz? I camped out there during Sukkot — and got a taste of Judaism’s ancient agrarian roots
Sukkot, the Jewish harvest festival, can feel a little abstract for Jews like me who live in big cities, far removed from the agricultural cycle that gave rise to the holiday. Typically, the extent of my fall harvest consists of buying a pumpkin from Trader Joe’s.
But last weekend, sleeping in a tent at Living Tree Alliance, a Jewish farm and co-housing community in rural Vermont, I found myself much closer to Sukkot’s agrarian roots. Rows of colorful produce stretched across the 93-acre property, much of it destined for the “stone soup” that would become our dinner the following night. Plants grown on the farm formed the sukkah’s schach, or roof covering.
“I forgot scissors,” Melanie Grubman, one of Living Tree’s founding members, told me as she cut yellow flowers off their stems with her teeth for material to decorate the sukkah.
About 16 people, including a few families with children, live on this bucolic property year-round, in what may be the closest American equivalent to an Israeli kibbutz. Residents are expected to volunteer between 8 and 16 hours per month, doing farm chores, serving on committees, managing the on-site AirBnB and keeping common spaces clean. All disagreements are resolved through a system of “sociocracy,” a governance model based on consent; decisions are made only when no one objects. On Shabbat, that work ceases, and chickens raised by residents are butchered kosher-style for dinner.
By living closer to the land, their food supply, and each other, residents say they feel closer to Judaism, too.
“It’s hard for me to pray not in the garden,” Grubman said. “I have no desire to sit inside when holiness is blowing on me.”
The Founders
Sephirah Oshkello, 54, barefoot and wearing a long purple tie-dye dress, swayed back and forth with the rhythm of prayers. As we went around the circle naming those in need before reciting the Mi Shebeirach, the prayer for healing, she offered, “Mama Earth.”
Oshkello, a Hebrew priestess, or kohenet, also works as a holistic nutritionist when she isn’t gardening or leading prayers.
This free-spirited lifestyle is a far cry from the environment in which she grew up. Oshkello was raised in Great Neck, New York, where she attended Temple Israel, a Conservative synagogue.
But after college at University of Maryland, she joined a community service program in Tzfat, Israel, where she got a taste of Jewish communal living, studied Jewish tradition, and spent her days hiking. From there, she spent a year living on an Israeli kibbutz.
“From then on, I felt like, I want to create something like this in the States,” Oshkello said. “Because when I went to Israel, my mom said, ‘OK, go, but you better come back.”
She returned to Great Neck and attended an Orthodox synagogue, but quickly realized it wasn’t the right fit.
“Judaism is connected to the land, and when the Jews got kicked out of their land, it became a culture of the book,” Oshkello said. “I do love to study words, but it only serves one part of our being, right? In Kabbalah, we talk about body, mind, spirit.”
The idea for Living Tree took shape on Oshkello’s second date with her now-husband, Craig, at a vegetarian restaurant in Seattle in 1997, when she told him about her dream to create an intentional Jewish community. The couple moved to secular co-housing in New Hampshire, where they began scouting property in Vermont and making plans for their own Jewish community.
In 2015, she and Craig bought the 93-acre Living Tree property in Moretown, Vt., then just a field with trees and a sugar shack, and moved there about a year later.
Grubman, a 47-year-old Waldorf teacher and owner of an all-women stonemasonry business in Vermont, was among the first residents. Like Oshkello, Grubman grew up in a suburban Jewish community — in her case, a “ritzy” Conservative synagogue outside Philadelphia. But she never connected with the idea of praying while sitting still inside.
“I was one of these angsty teenagers who was like, ‘Nature is busting through the concrete!’” Grubman said. “‘My heart is crying!’”
At Wesleyan University, Grubman became president of the environmental club and wrote her own eco-Haggadah for Passover. She later helped jumpstart Wilderness Torah, a program reconnecting Jews with the agricultural context of the Hebrew calendar, in Berkeley and Oakland, California.
Along the way, she encountered spiritual leaders who helped her understand that Jewish practice could look different from the Judaism of her childhood.
She remembered one rabbi who arrived for Yom Kippur “in white pajamas, covered in dirt.”
“And we were like, ‘Oh, what’s he doing?’ And he was like, ‘Oh, I was davening in the woods,’” Grubman said. “That’s the opposite of suburban Philadelphia Yom Kippur — when you show up in some fancy dress [that] you went to the mall to buy and gossip.”
Living Tree, Grubman said, offered a way to make Judaism a part of daily life beyond prayer and study.
“I felt like Judaism and like the world in general can be very intellectual. And I am a very intellectual person,” Grubman said. “But the more I link it to what I’m doing with my body and my hands, it just feels like it makes more sense to me.”
‘Shtetl Vibes’
There’s a long history of Jews who have sought to build communal, self-sufficient communities. But turning that ideal into a sustainable way of life has always been complicated.
The first kibbutz was established in Ottoman Palestine in 1910; the movement expanded after Israel’s founding in 1948. But the kibbutz system largely collapsed during the country’s financial crisis in the 1980s, when the utopian socialist model slowly gave way to a privatized version. Kibbutzim retained many of their collectivist values, but residents no longer pooled their incomes, raised their children together, or lived completely off the land.
American Jews experimented with communal living, too. During the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and ’70s, tens of thousands of young, college-educated city dwellers moved to rural Vermont as part of a countercultural movement. While few communes were explicitly Jewish, residents included many Jewish hippies. (Sen. Bernie Sanders, who briefly lived on an Israeli kibbutz in his twenties, was kicked off a Vermont commune for allegedly loafing around and talking about politics rather than working the land.)
But few of those experiments lasted as fully communal settlements.
Today, efforts to revive Jewish communal living are taking new forms. Young Jews live together through organizations like Moishe House, where residents get subsidized rent in exchange for planning Jewish community events. In Berkeley, an urban Jewish cohousing community called Berkeley Moshav is under construction; residents will own condos and make collective decisions about shared spaces.
Living Tree Alliance, which operates as both a nonprofit and a homeowners association, has seemed to stand the test of time — it has been hosting residents for over a decade. But like the modern kibbutzim, it’s not a full escape from the trappings of capitalism: Residents, most of whom have day jobs outside their farming responsibilities, don’t share income, and they own their own homes while co-owning the surrounding land.
Grubman, who works three jobs, cringed when I asked if Living Tree sometimes felt like utopia.
“It actually is a lot of work. It’s really really challenging,” Grubman said. “But what else are you going to do? Look at your screen?”
Many of the residents I spoke to were attracted to Living Tree as an escape from modern malaise.
Gil Ben Moshe and Ella Sutherland moved to Living Tree a few months ago with their three children, ages 2, 5 and 14. The couple met at an anarchist community in northern California and co-founded an intentional community in Virginia. After deciding they wanted a Jewish co-housing community instead, they found Living Tree online and moved.
Ben Moshe, wearing a kippah over his long hair, a plaid flannel, and no shoes or socks, has fond memories of living on an Israeli kibbutz until he was 4, when his family moved to the city of Eilat. The transition to urban life was jarring, he said, and he vowed to eventually return to the pastoral life of his early childhood.
“I’ve been so shocked at the discrepancy between people really believing that community is the right way to live, but not actually meaning it when they say it,” Ben Moshe said. “People’s relationship with spirituality is one that resembles more of their shelf with porcelain knickknacks … it’s not their daily bread.”
Arielle Sabot, a 28-year-old who uses they/them pronouns, worked as an apprentice at Living Tree for a year beginning in 2023. They now live in the Boston area, where they attend a traditional egalitarian synagogue and work as an outdoor Jewish educator.
While at Living Tree, they lived in a tiny cabin that lacked running water. During the winter, they chopped their own wood to heat the cabin with a wood-burning stove.
The arrangement wasn’t always idyllic. There were no flush toilets. Dishes, which Sabot had to boil water to wash, could pile up. And living alongside neighbors who were also co-workers could get tense sometimes.
But that proximity, Sabot said, also made some aspects of Jewish life feel more manageable.
“I think it’s easier when your community is right outside your door,” Sabot said. “You don’t have to go somewhere. It was shtetl vibes.”
Getting Outside
Since Living Tree was founded more than a decade ago, organizations explicitly linking Jewish spirituality and the natural world have been “growing exponentially,” Oshkello said.
A 2014 national study helped document the growth of what it dubbed Jewish Outdoor, Food and Environmental Education, or JOFEE, and found more than 2,400 people had participated in immersive Jewish outdoors programs the previous year. In 2025, Adamah, one of the movement’s largest organizations, reported more than 45,000 participants in its programs, including almost 10,000 Jewish teens and college students.
Vermont is especially fertile ground for this kind of experiential Judaism. On Shavuot, Living Tree and the Jewish Community of Greater Stowe hike Mount Mansfield, the state’s tallest peak, carrying a Torah for a small taste of what Moses may have felt ascending Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments. On Tu B’Shvat, Jewish Vermonters snowshoe beneath the full moon, stopping at different trees for reflection, poetry and song. And then there’s “Ski Ride Purim,” when skiers and snowboarders hit the slopes in costume, eating hamantaschen along the way.
“Vermonters are going to be outside as much as we can,” said Beth Liberman, executive director of Jewish Communities of Vermont, the state’s Jewish umbrella organization. “We’re bringing Judaism where it connects for so many people.”
There may be an even larger Jewish constituency to capture: In a 2020 Pew Research Center survey, 51% of American Jews said they derived a great deal of meaning and fulfillment from being outdoors — more than twice the share who said the same about their religious faith.
The Jewish connection with the outdoors was a major draw for Talia Wilk, a 20-year-old spending two weeks at Living Tree through a fellowship program. Wilk said she grew up going to Jewish summer camp, where Judaism felt intertwined with being in nature. Now living in Toronto, she works as a Hebrew school teacher and an educator at an outdoors school. When she heard about the Living Tree fellowship, she jumped at the chance.
“I’ve always had that kind of longing for a space where Jewish holidays and rituals are really connected to the seasons and to the land,” Wilk said.
For Sabot, residing at Living Tree changed their relationship to the Jewish lunar calendar. In Vermont, where the seasonal changes are particularly dramatic — lush greenery in summer, brilliant foliage in fall, mud in spring, and snow in winter — Jewish holidays timed around an agrarian cycle feel more tangible, Sabot said.
Younger Jews in particular, Oshkello said, connect with the idea of getting outside over sitting in pews.
“This next generation, they don’t want to be bored and sit and listen to other people preach,” Oshkello said.
At Living Tree, I began to understand what that connection could feel like. I awoke in my tent around 6 a.m. to the sunrise and roosters cock-a-doodle-dooing as my alarm. Meditating in the sukkah, we took deep breaths and placed our hands on the earth. Eating potluck dinner, we were invited to reflect on the journey of our food, from seed to mouth. On my last day, we learned how to press apples to make hot cider and pickle cabbage.
After three days immersing myself in nature, I headed back toward New York City, eager to take a hot shower and sleep in my own bed.
But the next morning, I found myself missing the fresh air and the feeling of being outside. All weekend, residents had talked about getting Judaism out of their heads and into their bodies. Crammed into the subway on my morning commute, I understood what they meant.
The post Is this Vermont farm the American kibbutz? I camped out there during Sukkot — and got a taste of Judaism’s ancient agrarian roots appeared first on The Forward.
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In its first detailed response to ‘NAZA’ documentary, IDF claims ‘fundamental errors’
(JTA) — The IDF on Thursday issued its first detailed response to “NAZA” after viewing the full documentary alleging Israeli forces knowingly killed large numbers of civilians in the Gaza war, accusing the filmmakers of making fundamental errors about how civilian-casualty estimates, strike approvals and intelligence tools were used.
“The film’s narrative is based on substantial factual errors stemming from a misrepresented and manipulative depiction of reality,” the IDF said in a statement accompanying its findings. The film “presents a distorted, misleading and disingenuous picture of the IDF’s target planning and striking process,” the military said, arguing that it conflates preliminary intelligence work with the later operational and legal process used to decide whether and how a target can be struck.
The filmmakers, who are Israeli, have previously defended the film’s reporting, saying the identities of its anonymous sources and the cases they described were verified and that editors at the Guardian, which produced the film, had access to the underlying material.
The 10-page response came after an IDF representative attended a screening of “NAZA,” directed by filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, in Bologna, Italy, allowing the military to assess the full film for the first time. The army had previously rejected the documentary’s allegations based on excerpts and publicly available material, saying at the time that the filmmakers had not provided it with a copy despite a request to do so.
The film is based on interviews with 24 Israeli soldiers, most of them intelligence personnel, who describe their roles in surveillance, target selection and strikes in Gaza. NAZA is the Hebrew acronym for collateral damage. The film, which won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival last month, argues that the military accepted high civilian casualty estimates, relied heavily on AI tools to generate targets and weakened safeguards governing strikes.
The IDF in its response Thursday rejected one of the documentary’s most prominent claims, that a strike had been approved despite an estimated civilian death toll of about 500. The military said it had “never planned, approved or carried out” a strike in which 500 civilians, or “anything close to that number,” were expected to be killed.
The IDF also rejected the film’s claim that junior Hamas operatives could be approved for targeting with up to 20 expected civilian casualties, and that senior commanders could be targered with as many as 200. It said the film had confused thresholds requiring approval from more senior commanders, who could then reject the operation, with permission to kill a fixed number of civilians. The military said that no 200-casualty approval threshold had ever existed and that actual thresholds were “much lower,” without specifying what the thresholds were.
The IDF did acknowledge that several incidents involving civilian deaths near humanitarian aid distribution sites prompted operational reviews, changes to instructions and other measures in those areas. However, it disputed testimony that soldiers fired indiscriminately at civilians near the sites and said troops were permitted to fire only at militants or people posing an immediate threat.
Abraham has accused Israeli media of failing to seriously investigate civilian casualties and rules of engagement in Gaza during the war.
The IDF also rejected the film’s suggestion that civilians who remained in evacuation zones could then be treated as legitimate targets. It said evacuation orders did not change a civilian’s status and that every strike still required identification of a military target and a separate proportionality assessment.
When it came to the film’s portrayal of “Lavender” as an AI-powered list of targets approved for attack, the military said the production had misunderstood what the program was: a database used to cross-reference intelligence on members of militant groups which did not make someone in the database a target.
“Artificial intelligence does not determine whether an object or a person is designated as a target, nor whether a target is struck,” the IDF said, adding that those decisions are made by human analysts and commanders.
The IDF also argued that many of the anonymous soldiers featured in “NAZA” were describing only “limited, initial stages” of the targeting process. “Such testimonies therefore cannot be treated as a complete account of the policies at hand, the decisions made and what ultimately happened,” the military said.
A Guardian News & Media spokesperson, in a statement sent to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, said the Guardian “stands fully behind the film,” which it said was based on three years of reporting by the outlet and its partners and interviews with more than 100 sources familiar with IDF systems used in Gaza, including senior commanders involved in authorizing strikes.
The Guardian also rejected what it described as the IDF’s attempt to portray the film’s interviewees as “junior-ranking officers involved only in the early stages of the targeting process.”
“They include officers and soldiers who were involved in multiple stages of the targeting process in Gaza, including intelligence, operations and the final authorization process,” the statement said.
The military did not describe all 24 participants as junior personnel and said only that the testimony of the soldiers interviewed in the film “generally” focused on “limited, initial stages” of the targeting process.
The Guardian said the “process of assessing the credibility of the testimonies was rigorous” and included “leaked classified documents, detailed verification of specific strikes and corroboration via a wider pool of confidential journalistic sources who did not appear on camera in the film.”
The Guardian also said the New York Times, Washington Post and Associated Press had “confirmed the IDF’s use of AI-driven systems in the Gaza offensive and the loosening of safeguards to protect civilians.”
The IDF disputed the film’s suggestion that it did not examine civilian casualties after attacks. Several units tracked strike outcomes and civilian-casualty reports and hundreds of incidents had been reviewed during the war, the military said, arguing that intelligence personnel interviewed in “NAZA” do not appear to belong to those units and “are not positioned to testify on this matter.”
The IDF rejected the film’s criticism that its collateral-damage estimates did not distinguish between adults and children. It said international law treats all civilians as protected regardless of age, adding that when commanders knew children were present, that information “led commanders to cancel, postpone or replan strikes.”
It also pushed back on an interviewee’s claim that the IDF believed there were “no uninvolved civilians in Gaza,” saying that may have reflected the soldier’s personal views but did not represent military policy or orders. It also rejected the film’s genocide allegations, saying the interviewees were not in positions to establish genocidal intent by senior commanders or political leaders.
The IDF also criticized the filmmakers’ reporting methods, saying they provided no dates, locations or other identifying details for alleged strikes and did not put their specific allegations to the military before the film’s release. “The filmmakers could have identified and avoided the substantial errors apparent in the film had they conducted adequate verification and corroboration in good faith. The end result shows they did not,” the military said.
The Guardian statement did not say whether the filmmakers solicited detailed responses from the IDF, and why if they did not..
The military said “NAZA” also gave insufficient weight to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, the group’s use of civilian areas for military activity and measures Israel says it took to reduce civilian casualties, including warnings, changes to strike plans and the cancellation of attacks.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post In its first detailed response to ‘NAZA’ documentary, IDF claims ‘fundamental errors’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Zara removes Halloween costume likened to concentration camp uniform
(JTA) — Spanish fashion retailer Zara removed a children’s Halloween costume from its website on Wednesday after social media users noted that the gray-and-blue striped outfit resembled prison garb worn by inmates in Nazi concentration camps.
Zara described the ensemble as “Kids costume featuring vertical stripes with decorative topstitching, a lapel flower and a distressed effect. Includes a cardigan and shorts. Gray / Blue.”
The post was visible via a Google search that continued to display an indexed version of the Zara product page after the listing itself had been removed.
The costume resembles the suit worn by Michael Keaton’s title character in the 1988 horror-comedy “Beetlejuice” and its 2024 sequel, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” Even so, social media users said the vertical stripes and shiny crisscrosses, which some media outlets described as “fake stitched scars,” resembled concentration camp uniforms and the barbed wire visible in many World War II photos.
Priced at $59.90 in the U.S., according to another indexed version of the listing, the costume drew criticism online in Europe on Tuesday. It gained wider attention Wednesday after Israeli journalist Dov Gil-Har, activist Hen Mazzig and others shared images of it on X.
The listing was no longer accessible by Wednesday afternoon. It was unclear exactly when Zara removed it. No reason was given for its removal, and Zara has not made any public statements regarding the controversy, nor has it responded to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s request for comment.
One Instagram commenter wrote “@zara how many levels of approval did this go though (sic)? Who is working for you?” A Facebook user said “It’s supposed to be a groom costume. It does somewhat resemble a (sic) Auschwitz uniform. With all the anti-semitism on the rise I am not surprised.” Another Instagram user asked, “What were they claiming it was meant to be?”
Zara has in the past faced similar controversies over clothing that evoked Nazi or Holocaust imagery. In 2007, it withdrew a handbag from its stores after a customer discovered a swastika embroidered on it; Inditex, Zara’s parent company, said the symbol had not appeared on the design Zara had approved.
In 2014 Zara apologized for selling a blue-and-white-striped shirt with six-pointed yellow-star badges on the chest. The Zara Israel website identified it as a “striped sheriff t-shirt” and the word sheriff was cut out in small letters on the star. The likeness to concentration camp uniforms and the yellow Star of David badges Jews were forced to wear under Nazi rule led Zara to stop selling the shirts and destroy the remaining inventory.
When reached for comment, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which represents Holocaust survivors in compensation negotiations, said the repeated incidents underscore the need for Holocaust education.
“This is not the first time this has happened and it once again makes abundantly clear: The glaring absence of Holocaust knowledge is pervasive,” Gideon Taylor, Claims Conference president, wrote in an email to JTA. “It shouldn’t take the risk of a Shoah survivor opening their door and seeing children that look like they are in concentration camp uniforms for us to see where we have to do better. This should serve as a message to us all of why Holocaust education is so important.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Zara removes Halloween costume likened to concentration camp uniform appeared first on The Forward.
