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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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Jewish Democratic support weakened slightly in midterms, survey finds
(JTA) — Democrats lost a small amount of Jewish support overall in the midterm elections, even as an overwhelming majority of Jews voted for the party, according to the results of a new survey published Tuesday.
The poll also found that significant shares of both Jewish Democratic and Jewish Republican voters believe their respective parties have become too accepting of antisemitism.
The survey from the Jewish Electorate Institute, a nonpartisan think tank that often works with Democrats, was the latest data pointing to simmering Jewish discomfort with the majority of the community’s longtime electoral home — even as actual voting patterns have remained largely consistent. Conducted by research firm The Mellman Group, the survey polled 800 national Jewish registered voters online from Oct. 29-Nov. 6, including both early and day-of voters.
The data “reveal warning signs for both political parties” in their relationship to Jews, institute chair Barbara Goldberg told reporters in a briefing.
Researchers found that 69% of Jewish respondents voted for Democrats, a six-point drop from the 2024 election. There was a 3.5% margin of error.
That drop occurred even as several other groups that have consistently voted for Democrats increased their shares in 2026, including voters under 45, voters of color, women and white, college-educated voters.
In the run-up to what would become a historic “blue wave” election, the Jewish vote – a reliably Democratic bloc — received particular attention as several high-profile candidates, including Michigan Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed, broke with longtime party consensus on Israel or otherwise unnerved the Jewish community throughout the campaign. Studies of Jewish voting attitudes published since Election Night, which have also included polls from the liberal Zionist lobby J Street and the pro-Israel group The Jewish Majority, have found that the Jewish party-line vote was largely unchanged despite those reservations.
While the Jewish Electorate Institute did not isolate any polling on Jews in Michigan specifically, it did poll all Jews about their views on El-Sayed and found that his favorability in the group had climbed since September. He is now viewed favorably by 44% of all Jews and 59% of Jewish Democrats, the survey found, with 40% of the former group and 25% of the latter viewing him unfavorably — giving the senator-elect a net favorability rating in both camps. The same polling also found that 41% of Jewish voters view pro-Israel lobbyists AIPAC favorably, and 35% unfavorably.
The survey also found that 36% of Jewish Democratic voters expressed concern about the direction of the party, agreeing with the statement that it has become “too accepting of antisemitic rhetoric within the Party.” One in four Jewish Republicans believed their party was becoming too friendly to white nationalists and the far right.
“The one place both parties are having problems is on rising antisemitism,” Michael Bloomfield, managing director of the Mellman Group who oversaw the survey, told reporters. The questions about antisemitism within the party had not been asked in previous election surveys conducted by the Mellman Group.
In addition, 28% of Jewish Democratic voters said they voted for candidates whose views on Israel caused them concern, saying that other issues outweighed those reservations. One in six Jewish Republicans said they did the same.
In results that echoed an earlier survey put out by the liberal Zionist lobby J Street, 14% of Jewish Democrats said supporting Israel was one of the most important factors in their vote. A higher share of the Jewish Electorate Institute respondents, 27%, said fighting antisemitism was one of their most important issues, while preserving democracy was the top concern.
The Jewish Republican voters surveyed ranked fighting antisemitism as their top concern, and support for Israel as among their top concerns.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Jewish Democratic support weakened slightly in midterms, survey finds appeared first on The Forward.
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Museum cancels Dutch synagogue’s tricentennial celebration over Israel tensions
(JTA) — An exhibition honoring the nearly 300-year-old Amersfoort Synagogue was supposed to be a celebration of Jewish life in Amersfoot, a small city in the central Netherlands.
Instead, Dutch Jews say, it could become the latest casualty of anti-Israel cancel culture that has targeted Jews in the Diaspora.
The city’s mayor in the last week has scrambled to save a planned exhibit on the synagogue after it was canceled, but so far has not been able to guarantee that it will open as planned early next year.
On Nov. 4, Paul Baltus, the director of Amersfoort in C, an organization that oversees the Museum Amersfoort and several of the city’s other cultural institutions, said he was canceling the upcoming synagogue exhibition due to “pressure,” an apparent reference to possible confrontations by pro-Palestinian activists.
Pro-Palestinian protesters have held dozens of demonstrations in the Netherlands since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. On Nov. 8, tens of thousands of people gathered in Amsterdam to demand that the Dutch government impose stricter sanctions on Israel.
Although the museum started planning the exhibition five years ago, Baltus said in a statement, “Since then, the social climate has changed significantly. The situation in the Middle East is also having an impact on Dutch society. The public debate on this subject can be heated and, at times, lacking in nuance.”
Baltus said he is finding the “tension” surrounding the exhibition, which was slated to begin in early 2027, difficult to manage. “As a small and vulnerable organization, I do not want to expose my staff to that kind of pressure,” he said. While he acknowledged that he could hire security guards and install cameras, “the reality is that our volunteers would still have to deal with a range of reactions.”
Jewish community leaders in the Netherlands said they were shocked by the museum’s actions and called on city officials to ensure the exhibition would go on as planned.
The exhibition is one of several cultural events scheduled to mark the 300th anniversary of the Amersfoort synagogue, which opened in 1727. It is the oldest Ashkenazi synagogue in Western Europe still in use today.
On Nov. 4, Mayor Lucas Bolsius told the City Council that the municipality would begin discussions with the museum and other stakeholders “to ensure that the exhibition can proceed.” The museum’s decision to cancel “has caused considerable pain within the Jewish community, particularly by reinforcing the feeling that its members are not welcome or even allowed to exist,” he told council members.
Following a meeting the next day, Bolsius and Baltsus jointly announced on Nov. 6 that they would work together to try to find a solution.
Over the past week, the mayor said, “helping hands have been offered from the city, central government and across the country to address organizational matters. People and organizations want to help make this exhibition possible.”
Baltus said the help being offered has alleviated some of his concerns. “With this support, we will explore the possibilities with an open mind and a positive intention, in consultation with the Jewish community.”
While Jewish leaders told Jewish Telegraphic Agency that they welcomed these efforts, they said the museum controversy is just the latest example of hostility toward Jewish historical and cultural events in the Netherlands, where anything Jewish – even a 300-year-old diaspora synagogue – is often seen as inseparable from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“We are very glad the mayor intervened. Let this be an example for other authorities,” said Hans Weijel, vice chairman of the Centraal Joods Overleg (CJO), the umbrella advocacy organization that represents the interests of the Netherlands’ 40,000 Jews.
Emile Schrijver, director-general of Amsterdam’s Jewish Cultural Quarter, which encompasses the Jewish Museum, the National Holocaust Museum, the Portuguese Synagogue and other Jewish cultural institutions, said the Museum Amersfoort had made its decision without first consulting the Jewish community or the organizations involved in the planned exhibition.
“Largely since Oct. 7, Jewish artists have had a difficult time finding a stage, and Jewish events, including cultural, can’t find a venue. Jewish events are being cancelled for no reason,” he said.
Schrijver rejected Baltus’s contention that security concerns made the museum exhibition unmanageable, given that the Jewish institutions Schrijver runs in Amsterdam frequently host events, despite pro-Palestinian demonstrations and related security concerns.
“We train our staff all the time. We deal with this every day. Yes, it’s difficult, but no, it’s not impossible,” he said.
Schrijver warned that treating Jewish cultural events as potential security problems risks pushing Jewish communities out of public life.
“The effect of this is that the normality of Jewish presence in a town is being pushed away,” he said. “Suddenly anything Jewish is considered a security hazard or prone to cause problems.”
Cultural institutions have a responsibility to distinguish between their views on Israeli government policy and the history of Jewish communities in the Netherlands, Schrijver said.
“You have to separate your private opinion from the long history of a small town in the Netherlands. What they’re effectively doing is pushing the Jewish community to the fringes of society.”
CJO’s Weijel said the Jewish community has played an important role in Amersfoort’s civic life since the mid-1600s.
“We think it is ridiculous that a museum in a city doesn’t want to have an exhibition about a 300-year-old synagogue and its history in that city. The conflict is in the Middle East, not here,” he emphasized. “If you want proof that this is antisemitism, this is the proof.”
Weijel accused Baltus of being “a coward.”
“He’s afraid something bad will happen, but if you’re that afraid, you should stay in bed.”
In his Nov. 4 statement, Baltus acknowledged the Jewish community’s disappointment and offered to contribute his museum’s “expertise and collection” of Jewish historical artifacts to an exhibition in the synagogue instead. He also offered to incorporate the synagogue’s history into the museum’s permanent exhibition on the history of Amersfoort.
For Schrijver, the Amersfoort controversy is yet another attempt to marginalize Jews in a country they have lived in for generations.
“The moment you make Jewish history dependent on what is happening in the Middle East, you are making Jewish existence conditional,” he said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Donald Trump actually faced a few tough questions on ’60 Minutes.’ So, why does Marine Le Pen get a pass?
Last Sunday, the news show “60 Minutes” hosted an outgoing president of one country and, quite possibly, the incoming president of another. While falsehoods and fatuities flowed from President Donald Trump, his interviewer, Ross Douthat frequently, if futilely, tried to push back. Yet when Marine Le Pen, running for the presidency of France, also fibbed or fudged the truth, her interviewer, Trevor Phillips, did little more than arch an eyebrow.
This split-screen experience was unsettling for a few reasons. First, it reminded us that our president’s famous “weave” reflects a mind that is declining as surely as his poll numbers. A glance at the interview transcript reflects the deepening incoherence of the man who occupies the world’s most powerful office. This made all the most startling the cogency of his reply to a question Douthat posed at the end of the interview: whether he could stop hating his enemies if that was the price to enter heaven. To a flabbergasted Douthat, Trump replied, “I probably cannot do that, no, because I do hate some of my enemies and I always will.”
While no one can say whether Trump is destined for heaven or hell, Le Pen’s remarks in her interview suggest that she will make life hell for those men and women who fail to qualify, in her eyes, as French.
Yet, in his interview, Trevor Phillips, formerly of The (London) Times and a recent Bari Weiss recruit, failed to make this as clear as a Mike Wallace, a Dan Rather, or a Scott Pelley would have. Nattily dressed and well-spoken, Phillips presented a segment on the violence that has “erupted in Paris’ romantic boulevards” where “the scent of warm croissants and fresh baguettes has been overwhelmed by the whiff of tear gas.”
Overwhelmed by the weight of silly clichés, Phillips could not help but add “They used to call Paris la ville de l’amour — the City of Love. But there hasn’t been much amour on show lately.” While Phillips does not state who “they” are — given the hoariness of the clichés, perhaps they asked to remain anonymous — he should think twice about his assertion that there is not much love. Of course, the protestors are expressing their anger towards the government of President Emmanuel Macron, but they are also expressing their deep attachment, even love, to the republican tradition that has made Paris la ville de la révolution.
More important than his potted account of the social upheavals in Paris, however, was Phillips’ problematic interview with Le Pen. “In 2011,” he explained, “Le Pen took over leadership of what was then a fringe movement from her father, a tough army veteran convicted and fined for Holocaust denial and hate speech.” Yet nine years earlier, in 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the candidate of this “fringe party” then called the National Front, made it into the second round of the presidential election. Though Le Pen failed to make it into the second round in 2007, that more than 4 million French voted for him suggests that his party and person were hardly fringe. It is also odd that while Phillips noted Le Pen’s Holocaust denialism, he omitted Le Pen’s confession that he had tortured Algerian captives while serving in French Algeria.
No less stunning was Phillips’ description of Marine Le Pen’s decision to banish her father from the party in order “to rid it of its stain of bigotry.” If only it were mere bigotry. The National Front was founded, in part, by former members of the French division of the Waffen SS and sympathizers of the wartime collaborationist regime of Vichy. While the daughter has largely succeeded in removing these elements from the party, which she rebranded as the National Rally, she has not removed the “stain” of antisemitism. Little more than a month ago, the French newspaper Mediapart revealed that Le Pen’s second-in-command, Jordan Bardella, was trafficking in antisemitic bilge even after he joined the party as a teenager.
Time and again, Phillips posed questions but had not adequately prepared for Le Pen’s predictable replies. When he asked, in his opening question, “What is happening in Europe? Has politics here just become more radical?” Le Pen answered that “the extreme left creates chaos. They generate violence against people.” If Phillips had done his due diligence, he would have confronted Le Pen with the recent study by the historian Nicolas Lebourg revealing that while six murders in France since 1986 were “generated” by the extreme left, nearly sixty were “generated” by the extreme right. Phillips might also have mentioned last month’s mass killing and wounding of French Muslims in the town of Trappes by an individual who marinated in the literature of the extreme right.
Finally, when Le Pen made the jaw-dropping claim that “discrimination does not exist in France” and, moreover, is “the least racist country in the world,” Phillips did, in fact, raise an eyebrow while repeating her words. But it would have been more effective, perhaps, to raise the findings of various organizations, like the Defenseur des droits, which concluded in 2024 that the “perceived origin” of a job applicant weighs more than any other factor in hiring decisions in France.
As for his lack of follow-up questions to Le Pen’s assertion that France is the world’s least racist country, Phillips’ professional malfeasance was made fully manifest. In every presidential campaign, Le Pen has committed to establishing the law of national priority, which in effect would constitutionalize a racist agenda. Based on the extreme rightwing hobbyhorse of the “great replacement” — namely, that France’s white population is deliberately being replaced by third world immigrants — the law will limit employment opportunities, social and housing benefits to French citizens. Such a law not only runs counter to the laws of the European Union, but also to the humanist and universalist grounding of France’s constitution.
Phillips failed to contest this claim. Ironically, he closed the interview with Le Pen’s assurance that “French people have got to know me.” If only Phillips had done so, as well.
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