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A Jewish expert on monuments on what Philly’s famous Rocky Balboa statue can teach us about memory
(JTA) — Paul Farber was shocked when he first watched “Rocky” and saw a Star of David on the grave of Rocky Balboa’s coach, Mickey Goldmill.
As a Jew and as the founder of the Philadelphia-based Monument Lab, which has explored collective memory through art installations across the country for over a decade, Farber was well positioned to think about the deeper meaning of that brief shot.
“Anytime I see a Jewish funeral in a film, there’s some kind of call to attention. And I always want to know what that means, especially for a Hollywood production, especially when it may not be branded as a Jewish story,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“We’re not there in a prolonged series of mourning, but in a split second, seeing a Jewish site of a memory is really fascinating,” he added.
That outlook lies behind Farber’s work as the host of the new NPR podcast “The Statue,” a deep dive into Philadelphia’s famed statue of Rocky Balboa, the fictional prizefighter at the center of “Rocky.” The series delves into what sports and society can convey about memory, and in his research, Farber discovered a few Jewish nuggets found in the film series — including the fact that Rocky’s love interest was originally supposed to be Jewish.
“They made an actual gravestone [for her character] and it’s in Philadelphia’s most famous cemetery, Laurel Hill. And you can go there and see this gravestone where a movie character is ‘buried,’” he said. “People leave offerings on the gravestone, including small pebbles as if it’s a Jewish site of memory.”
In an interview with JTA, Farber shared his inspiration for the series, how his Jewish upbringing informed his life’s work and the role statues — such as that of Jewish baseball legend Sandy Koufax — do, and should, play.
This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: To start off, I’d love to hear about how you first got interested in studying monuments.
Paul Farber: I’m really interested in the ways that, in cities, we innovate toward the future, and also come to terms with our past, and it happens often in the same exact places. That could be a statue, a street, a corner store. And so that’s a big part for me.
What really inspired this project is a conversation I had with my mother, quite a few years ago. My mother is a lifelong Philadelphian. Her parents were Jewish immigrants in South Philadelphia. And when I told her I was teaching a class at the University of Pennsylvania about Philly neighborhoods, she asked me if I was covering Rocky. When I said, “Oh, it’s not on the syllabus” — and I may have said it in a way that felt dismissive — she gave me this look that I think a lot of us know: “How could you.” So for her birthday, we watched “Rocky” and we went to see “Creed.” My grandfather went to South Philly High and was in the boxing club. He shared stories in our family about what it meant to have sport and culture and belonging go together in South Philly. I started to see that across generations, from long before “Rocky” to this moment now, almost 50 years after the release of the film, many people’s family stories could be channeled through this statue, including my own, and that was enough of a prompt to go dive in.
“Rocky” is obviously not a Jewish story, but there are some nuggets. There’s the funeral scene, and you mentioned something about Adrian almost being Jewish. I’m curious what you think about the little Jewish pieces you can pull out of this famous story, and what those mean to you as a Philly sports fan.
It blew me away that Rocky’s coach, Mick, passes away and the character Rocky goes to his funeral, and you see a Star of David. Anytime I see a Jewish funeral in a film, there’s some kind of call to attention. And I always want to know what that means, especially for a Hollywood production, especially when it may not be branded as a Jewish story. And it just opened up a whole set of questions for me that blurred between art and life, between the film series and the city of Philadelphia.
In episode two, we showcase this monumental art book that Sylvester Stallone [who played Rocky] created. There was this passage in it that just blew me away, about the first draft of “Rocky,” where he says, “As for Adrian, she was Jewish in the first draft.” And he got feedback and cut that character. We never hear about Mickey’s Judaism. We never hear about Rocky’s bond across culture. But the fact that the first scene in the “Rocky” series is in a place called Resurrection Gym — that is obvious Christian iconography — and to put Jewish characters in is really fascinating to me.
There is another famous grave that is involved in the series. The character Adrian eventually passes away, and like the statue, which was made as a bronze sculpture, for the “Rocky” film series they made an actual gravestone and it’s in Philadelphia’s most famous cemetery, Laurel Hill. And you can go there and see this gravestone where a movie character is “buried.” People leave offerings on the gravestone, including small pebbles as if it’s a Jewish site of memory.
People talk about representation on screen, and I’m not sure a Jewish funeral necessarily does that, but I would imagine for some people, seeing Rocky Balboa say the “Mourner’s Kaddish“ was maybe their first interaction with Judaism in some way. What do you make of that?
Every shot is deliberate. And it’s actually that kind of attitude and outlook that created the Rocky statue, because Sylvester Stallone was the director of that film, and they could have made a styrofoam version or a temporary one, but they spent over a year making a bronze version so that when the camera faced it, it would make contact. I think very similarly, this is part of the artistry of Stallone that plays out in our podcast series. We’re not with him when he sits shiva. We’re not there in a prolonged series of mourning, but in a split second, seeing a Jewish site of a memory is really fascinating. And to see the coach Mickey, to have his Wikipedia page say he’s Jewish, all that we have is mourning.
I think about how for immigrant Jewish communities, there are gaps in our narratives. Throughout the series, and one of the reasons I wanted to share my perspective as a queer Jewish person who grew up loving sports in Philly, I’ve been informed by my own family’s history, and what we’re able to recall and what gaps there are. And I see that being echoed for so many people in the Rocky story.
It’s clearly a very personal story for you. Why did you think it was important to start the podcast with your own identity, and to include your Jewish mother?
I think it’s important that when we talk about sites of memory, we understand that there are shared and collective ways that we bring the past forward, and there are others that are incredibly personal. My hope was to find, in this case, to spotlight, a significant site of memory in the city, but ask questions about it. And I think it was important to note what position I would take, because I don’t believe there’s one story to the Rocky statue. To tell a biography of a statue, you actually have to tell it of the people who make meaning from it. So in the series, we do a lot of work where we want to know other people’s stories and backgrounds, whether they are refugees from Afghanistan, or community organizers in Kensington [a neighborhood of Philadelphia]. My hope was by positioning this from my perspective, almost as a memoir in a way, that it opened up space for others to have their experiences be valued and made meaning of.
The official artwork for Farber’s podcast. (Courtesy)
Both with the podcast and in your work with the Monument Lab, how do you feel that your Jewish identity informs what you do? Do you see overlap between your Jewish values and the values you work on in your organization?
I absolutely think so. I grew up in a Jewish community in Philadelphia, and tikkun olam was a constant refrain. The work of tikkun olam meant a worldview that necessitated building coalitions and understanding across divides, to not diminish or under-emphasize them, but to appreciate how we work in solidarity, whether that’s around racial justice, gender justice, in various struggles. I am a co-founder and director of an organization that focuses on memory, and that I really get from the stories of growing up in a Jewish household, in a Jewish community, where memory lived in different ways. We were always aware of the stories of trauma and loss, as well as reconciliation and transformation, and how you work with the gaps that you have, and you listen, and you learn and you carry the story with you. Because that is the way to bond generations. Jewish memory really grounds what I do, and I seek to use it as a tool to learn more and to feed connection across divides.
Rocky takes on this almost mythical, godlike status, and his statue in Philadelphia is a bit of a pilgrimage site. Do you see any tension there as a Jew, given the prohibition against idol worship?
I think about the importance of memory, against forces of violence and erasure. I also understand that, in a world that is full of pain and difficulty and loss, we seek places to release that. And so I understand the pull to monuments. What I would like to see, and what we try to do through this series, “The Statue,” and also with the work of Monument Lab, is to look on and off the pedestal, and really think about how history lives with us. As we say in the series and other places, history doesn’t live inside of statues, it lives with people who steward them, who create other kinds of sites of memory, who are vigilant in their modes of commemoration. What I try to do in this work is understand the ambivalence around monuments, the pull to try to remember and be enduring through time, and just that constant reminder that whenever you try to freeze the past, or freeze an image of power, you cut out the potential to find connection and empowerment, and thus forms of survival.
In sports, there are so many ways to honor people, especially different ways that, like a statue, take on the idea of permanence. When Bill Russell died, the NBA retired his number 6 across the league. On Jackie Robinson Day, every April 15, the whole MLB honors Jackie Robinson by wearing his uniform number. But statues just have a different level of oomph. Sandy Koufax has a new statue in Los Angeles that was unveiled last year; Hank Greenberg has one. What do you think it should take for an athlete to reach that status?
The pinnacle in sports is to have a statue dedicated to you outside of the stadium. And I do believe the cultures of social media have amplified that, because we grew up with the story of Sandy Koufax not pitching in the World Series during the High Holy Days, and that wasn’t because we learned it from a statue or a plaque. We learned it because it was carried forward and put into different forms of remembering and recalling its importance. I went to several Maccabi Games in the U.S. — I used to be a sprinter. And the culture of memory and sport, they were one in the same.
In professional sports, the pinnacle is the statue, but I think you brought up other really important ways of remembering that operate in non-statue forms that feel like they are living memorials. The idea of retiring someone’s number, and keeping their number up, is a way to acknowledge, in this really public of all public spaces, an intimacy and a care, and especially when an athlete passes away, how that transcends the lines of city geography. Jackie Robinson Day is something that did not occur immediately after Jackie Robinson was the first Black player to play in the major leagues, but was a product of a later moment when people around Major League Baseball sought to activate his memory. So yes, a statue outside of a stadium is like a particular kind of professional accolade. But the other forms are really meaningful.
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The post A Jewish expert on monuments on what Philly’s famous Rocky Balboa statue can teach us about memory appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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‘The first time my band ever encountered such hostility’
[On Aug. 2, a performance by the klezmer band Dobranotch at a large folk festival in Galicia, Spain, was cut short when pro-Palestinian members of the audience began heckling the musicians and then throwing stones and other objects at them, targeting the band over recent concert appearances they made in Israel.
Afterwards, the festival organizers released a statement, explaining that they cancelled the concert out of concern for the musicians’ safety. The organizers also condemned the fact that “an event historically rooted in peaceful cultural exchange, community gathering, and musical celebration was disrupted by violence.”]
Dobranotch has a special connection with Galicia. In the early years of the band, we visited and performed there many times and developed a deep affection for its traditional music and culture. After many years away, we were glad to be invited back to perform at Festival de Pardiñas, a large local folk festival.
A few months before the event, the organizers informed us that the festival supported Palestine and that some members of the audience might display Palestinian flags. They asked how we would feel about this, given that our music is associated with Jewish culture. We replied that we had no objection, but did not want to be pressured into making political statements from the stage. This appeared to be fully understood.
We received a warm welcome, and the festival was well organized, with several thousand people in attendance. When we stepped onto the stage, a couple of Palestinian flags were visible in the audience. During our performance, more flags were attached to the barrier in front of the stage, and an enormous Palestinian flag was unfolded. A small but very vocal group at the front of the stage began chanting and held up handwritten signs demanding that we “say something about Palestine.”
I do not usually make political statements from the stage on behalf of the band. However, as the pressure continued to grow, remaining silent no longer felt possible. I therefore decided to share my personal views. I said that we are living through a period of growing polarization and radicalization in many parts of the world, visible in very different contexts, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, and political divisions in the United States. My message was simple: We need to be kinder to one another.
But the pressure only intensified. They wanted me to speak more, and they tried to hand me a Palestinian flag to wave from the stage. I tried to explain that, in my view, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is complicated — and the moment I said the word “complicated,” the crowd erupted.
I wanted to continue my statement, but I was not given the chance to do so.
A group of people shouted, insulted us and made hostile gestures. A person carrying a flag managed to get onto the stage. Objects began flying towards the stage, including stones. One of my fellow musicians was hit by a stone. At that moment, we realized that the situation had crossed a line and decided to stop the concert.
escândalo em Pardinhas, algum sionista no palco pic.twitter.com/yh6JNZDZEY
— maNu 🌰 (@nuMaGz) August 2, 2026
As we were leaving the stage, someone from the festival team, obviously shocked by the situation, suggested that I simply say “Free Palestine” so the performance could continue.
I support the right of all people, including both Israelis and Palestinians, to live in freedom, dignity and safety. But repeating political slogans under pressure would have been both meaningless and unacceptable.
The organizers subsequently announced that the concert was being stopped for safety reasons and reiterated the festival’s support for Palestine.
After the concert, we discovered evidence suggesting that the protest had been planned and coordinated in advance. We found social-media posts published before the festival accusing us of having performed in “occupied Palestine,” apparently referring to a previous concert in Tel Aviv, and calling for a boycott of our performance.
This was the first time Dobranotch had encountered such hostility, whether as a group performing Eastern European Jewish traditional music or as anti-war emigrants from Russia. It is deeply regrettable and disturbing that such a radicalized and hostile atmosphere could have developed at a traditional culture festival.
The incident shows how difficult public discussion has become when artists are expected to repeat prescribed political formulas rather than being allowed to express a thoughtful position — or simply to choose not to make political statements from the stage at all.
We look with deep sadness at the amount of violence and radicalization in the world, and we wish for peace, safety and freedom for everyone. We believe that our music can do more to bring people together than political arguments ever could. This is where we want to focus our energy.
The post ‘The first time my band ever encountered such hostility’ appeared first on The Forward.
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After settling antisemitism claims, Columbia now faces lawsuit from Palestinian students
A group of current and former Palestinian students and faculty at Columbia University filed a lawsuit this week, alleging that the university discriminated against them because of their Palestinian identity and treated them less favorably than other students engaged in political advocacy.
Filed in New York State Supreme Court, the complaint accuses the university of encouraging the mistreatment of Palestinian students by holding “unfair and biased disciplinary hearings” and creating a “hostile and unsafe environment” following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel that sparked university-wide protests and tensions on campus. The lawsuit alleges that the university “actively participated in and amplified the racially, ethnically, and politically motivated targeting of Palestinian students, staff, and faculty.”
The case is the latest in a string of legal battles born out of Columbia’s handling of campus protests. In July 2025, the Ivy League university on New York’s Upper West Side agreed to pay $21 million to settle charges by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that alleged a hostile work environment for Jewish employees as a part of its federal resolution agreement with the Trump Administration.
In February 2026, the university also settled with a group of Jewish plaintiffs that had alleged the university failed to protect them from antisemitism. As a part of that settlement, Columbia agreed to implement additional programming to address antisemitism.
The new lawsuit alleges that Columbia discriminated against Palestinian students by, among other things, retaining private investigators to surveil students involved in a March 2024 “Resistance 101” teach-in. The event featured Khaled Barakat, whom the U.S. State Department has identified as a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which the U.S. has designated a foreign terrorist organization. Following the event, the lawsuit states that six students were suspended from the university and evicted from Columbia housing.
The suit also accuses the university of failing to treat physical assaults of Palestinian students seriously, citing alleged incidents where keffiyehs were forcibly removed from Palestinian students, and an incident where a student sprayed a foul-smelling substance at pro-Palestinian demonstrators in January 2024.
That incident was initially investigated by the New York Police Department as a possible hate crime, with some claiming that the substance was a military grade chemical weapon, but Columbia later announced that the substance was a legal, non-toxic novelty fart spray. The students involved were suspended, but eventually reached a settlement with Columbia after arguing that they had wrongfully portrayed the incident as a chemical attack rather than a “harmless expression of his free speech.”
It also challenges Columbia’s decision to call in New York police to clear protest encampments and arrest demonstrators in the spring of 2024.
Plaintiffs include lecturer and former anthropology student Hadeel Assali, who allegedly canceled her classes so that students could attend Pro-Palestinian protests and who made headlines earlier this year when she gave a talk at the City University of New York’s law school called “The Underground in Gaza.” That lecture, and her dissertation at Columbia overseen by Mahmood Mamdani, father of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, sought to examine “the history and usage of tunnels in Gaza, focusing on land use and social organization in resistance to colonization,” apparently referring to the Hamas tunnel network.
Other plaintiffs include Bahia Munem, a former lecturer at Columbia’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race; Mahdi Sabbagh, a Ph.D. student; Maryam Alwan, who graduated from Columbia in 2025 and was a student leader in the pro-Palestinian movement who was arrested during the encampment protests; and Layla Saliba, who earned a master’s degree in social work from Columbia in 2025.
In April 2025, the Columbia office of Institutional Equity investigated Saliba and Alwan for their role in writing an op-ed in the campus newspaper Columbia Spectator that called on the university to stop admitting Israeli students who had served in the Israel Defense Forces. The university later dropped its investigations into the two activists.
The lawsuit seeks monetary damages under New York City Human Rights Law, which prohibits discrimination or harassment based on race, creed, national origin, immigration status, or citizenship.
Columbia University did not immediately respond to the Forward’s request for comment.
The post After settling antisemitism claims, Columbia now faces lawsuit from Palestinian students appeared first on The Forward.
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Francesca Hong, pro-Palestinian democratic socialist, polling far ahead in Wisconsin governor’s race
(JTA) — One week after notching a significant primary victory in a Midwestern purple state, pro-Palestinian progressives are looking to repeat their success in Wisconsin.
The Badger State’s chaotic Democratic primary for governor ends Tuesday with state Rep. Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist, polling comfortably in the lead. Despite the best efforts of the state’s Democratic establishment, and the concerns of Wisconsin Jewish groups, Hong appears well positioned to win the primary — leaving many in the state concerned about her electability in the general.
Hong’s record on Israel and antisemitism is of concern to Wisconsin Jews, as well as Democratic figureheads more broadly. She has appeared on livestream fundraisers with Hasan Piker, the left-wing strident Israel critic who has also rallied with Hong, as well as twice with Michael Beyer, a.k.a. “Mike from PA,” who has called Jewish identity “a constructed ethnicity, this demonic ethnicity, wholly invented.”
On one of her appearances with Beyer, Hong urged constituents to fundraise for people on the “front lines in Gaza.”
A poll of likely voters one week before the race, conducted by nonpartisan outlet State Navigate, showed Hong with a commanding lead. Forty-four percent of those surveyed said they favored Hong, twice the total who backed Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, the next-closest candidate. Only 17% of the same voter sample said they identified as democratic socialists, possibly indicating that Hong — whose platform has emphasized working families, healthcare, and data centers — has found wider appeal beyond her movement.
The party’s left flank is buoyed by Abdul El-Sayed’s victory last week in the U.S. Senate primary in Michigan, and hopes that a repeat success is possible in a neighboring Great Lakes state with a similarly purple voting bloc. But El-Sayed performed far short of the comfortable victory many polling outlets had predicted, squeaking a winning margin of just under 1%.
That may not be the case this time. Polling from Marquette Law School, considered the gold standard in the state, has also consistently shown Hong with a wide lead. Despite entering the race with little name recognition, Hong has benefitted from both a national progressive populist push and a crowded, musical-chairs Democratic field that burst with seven candidates at its peak.
The race has today whittled down to four candidates, with Crowley having re-entered the field after previously suspending his campaign. The flip came after Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, the preferred candidate of Crowley and many other institutionalist Democrats, dropped out of the race following an accounting scandal. Former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, the party’s 2022 U.S. Senate nominee and a once-promising figure in the state, also dropped out after failing to gain traction.
During her campaign, Hong apologized for having called the police on a vandalized Israeli flag in her district in December 2023, which at the time she had called “highly antisemitic” and urged to be investigated as a hate crime.
Explaining why she now regrets making the call, Hong recently told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “The image was cropped and incomplete to misrepresent anti-Zionism as antisemitism – a distinction I take seriously.”
Hong’s impact on Israel policy as governor of Wisconsin would be limited. But she has called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government “genocidal” and pushed the state to overturn a ban on government contracts with businesses that boycott Israel. She has also criticized Wisconsin’s current moderate Democratic governor for backing the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s controversial definition of antisemitism.
Hong’s general-election success may hinge on the broader electorate’s views of the Democratic Socialists of America. This week a co-chair of the DSA drew further concern from Jewish Democrats after appearing in a viral interview on The New Yorker’s podcast. Megan Romer called the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks in Israel “largely inevitable” and said she “probably would have” joined a pro-Palestinian rally in New York the day after the attacks if she’d been able to attend.
Prior to Oct. 7, Hong’s state house campaigns had expressed some positive feelings toward Jews and Jewish causes. In January 2023 her campaign sold a Hebrew-language shirt, with proceeds going to Jewish Social Services of Madison.
“Team Hong has upped our commitment to uplifting multiculturalism,” Hong’s campaign wrote on Twitter at the time. She included praise of the symbolic significance of the number 18 in Hebrew and of the Hebrew phrase “L’chaim.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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