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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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Artist alters Whitney Museum display screens to protest Israel’s conduct in Gaza
The Whitney Museum of American Art has over 27,000 pieces in its collection. On July 3, artist Jonathan Allen tried to add a couple more to call attention to what he considers “Israeli atrocities.”
Late that night, Allen vandalized two electronic displays outside the Whitney, a contemporary art museum in Manhattan, plastering them with posters accusing Israel of genocide and targeting Palestinian children.
Staff soon removed the posters after being notified of the vandalism, the museum said in an emailed statement.“I think it’s important artists take risks and use private property and unconventional spaces towards political and social ends,” Allen told the Forward.
Whitney Director of Communications Ashley Reese wrote, “The Museum maintains a zero-tolerance policy for vandalism, harassment, discrimination, or bias of any kind.”
This is not the first time a pro-Palestinian protest has targeted the Whitney. Last year, the museum planned to hold a performance mourning Palestinians killed during the Israel-Hamas war. When footage surfaced of a performer telling audience members to leave a previous performance if they “believe in Israeli in any incarnation,” the Whitney canceled the event.
Shortly afterward, the group Writers Against the War on Gaza held a protest at the Whitney, passing out brochures demanding “the removal of board members tied to genocide, militarism and apartheid.”
Allen’s installation is part of his Interruptions series, where he puts translucent poster-size vinyl stickers with political messages atop digital advertising screens to create a flickering effect.
Since 2019, Allen has installed over 400 interruptions, which began with traditional paper posters. When New York City and the MTA added more digital ad displays, he transformed the posters into their current iteration, most recently featuring quotes from public figures that criticize either Trump or Israel. Allen installs most of his interruptions on city-owned property, such as sidewalk ads or subway monitors — even the children’s entrance of the Brooklyn Public Library.
He acknowledges his project “is temporary vandalism, technically,” but explains that the pieces are very easily removable and don’t damage the displays underneath.
For his most recent interruption, Allen used monitors owned by the Whitney without authorization from the museum. Allen chose the Whitney because he believes it “is the contemporary corporate sphere of the art industry.”
“I feel like bringing attention to this sort of issue in that context was important,” he said.
A joint Instagram post by Allen and Eye on Palestine said the installation highlights the findings of a recent UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry report.
The Israeli government has heavily criticized the report, calling it “defamatory” and a “libellous sham,” and from its inception has accused the commission of bias. Israel did not provide any information to the commission for the investigation.
“The Israeli security forces have deliberately targeted and killed Palestinian children,” one poster says. Another poster stated: “If you can’t draw the line at genocide, you probably can’t draw the line at democracy.”
Critics of the installation echo the Israeli government’s criticisms. Hen Mazzig, an Israeli writer and content creator, called the display “blood libel.” The StopAntisemitism campaign also criticized the display on X. “they don’t care about Palestinian children,” they wrote. “The goal is to vilify Jews.”
Allen believes this is a mischaracterization. “I fully support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, and I support Israel, insofar as its right to exist,” he said. “I don’t think the discussion about what’s happening in Gaza hinges at all on that.”
Though Allen’s installations are typically removed “within hours,” he says each one “has a second life, because it lives on social media, which is where it tends to get the most attention.”
The post Artist alters Whitney Museum display screens to protest Israel’s conduct in Gaza appeared first on The Forward.
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European leaders downplayed the Holocaust. Now Trump is using their tactics against the Smithsonian
A new White House report accusing the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History of “extreme political activism,” and demanding the museum revise its exhibitions to elide the darker elements of the nation’s past, mirrors a troubling trend in Europe, where right-wing nationalist governments have spent the past decade forcing museums to minimize their countries’ roles in the Holocaust.
The 162-page report, issued this past weekend, faults the Smithsonian museum for dwelling, in the administration’s eyes, too heavily on slavery, and for teaching about race and gender in ways that President Donald Trump’s administration considers to “divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.” It follows a 2025 executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” that directed federal institutions to purge “improper ideology” from their exhibits.
Reasonable people can disagree about specific details in museum exhibitions. But there is a difference between engaging in productive disagreements about historical emphases and demanding a national museum be solely devoted to make citizens feel good about their country. And the way that the latter approach has been used to downplay crimes against Jews in Europe should give American Jews, in particular, pause about it being deployed in their own country.
Propaganda in Poland
In 2017, Poland opened a permanent exhibit at the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, which delivered a multi-layered account of the war. The exhibit highlighted Polish suffering under Nazi occupation as well as the Holocaust and the pogroms Poles carried out against their own Jewish neighbors, including the infamous 1941 Jedwabne massacre, in which several hundred Jews were burned alive in a barn by their fellow townspeople.
The right-wing Law and Justice party, known as PiS, called the exhibit “not Polish enough,” forced a merger that replaced the museum’s director, and altered the exhibition to foreground Polish heroism while softening material on Polish complicity in the extermination of three million Polish Jews. Five hundred eminent historians labeled those changes an attempt to turn the museum into a “propaganda institution.”
The following year, the Polish parliament went further, criminalizing any claim that Poland bore responsibility for Nazi crimes, with penalties of up to three years in prison. Yad Vashem warned that the law “jeopardizes the free and open discussion of the part of the Polish people in the persecution of the Jews at the time.” Under international pressure, Poland later dropped the criminal penalty, but the campaign to legislate a flattering national story had made its point.
Hungarian ahistoricism
The nation of Hungary offers an even starker case.
Former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government spent years developing the House of Fates, a Holocaust museum on the site of the Budapest rail station from which 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz in a matter of weeks in 1944. Yad Vashem and Hungary’s largest Jewish federation, Mazsihisz, boycotted the project, warning that its planned narrative would leave visitors believing “the citizens of Hungary were essentially blameless for what was inflicted upon their Jewish neighbors.” In fact, Hungarian gendarmes rounded up and deported their Jewish neighbors with minimal direct German involvement.
Orbán separately made efforts to rehabilitate Miklós Horthy, Hungary’s Nazi-allied wartime ruler, as an “exceptional statesman,” and backed a Budapest statue honoring Holocaust victims that was widely seen as covering up Hungary’s role in the deportations by depicting the country as an angel attacked by a Nazi eagle. The implication: all Hungarians were equal victims of the Nazi occupation, an idea that conveniently overlooks the fact that the Nazis had many Hungarian collaborators.
The museum sat empty for years amid the dispute. Jewish leaders in Hungary have only recently reported progress toward a version that names Hungarian, and not just German, responsibility for atrocities against Jews.
The dangers of whitewashing
The recent histories of Poland and Hungary demonstrate that when a government decides that its national story shouldn’t include honest examinations of what its people did to vulnerable minorities, the nation’s integrity as a whole is imperiled.
This is the same demand the Trump administration has issued to the Smithsonian. The White House report does not claim that the museum has facts wrong; rather, it objects that the museum treats history as a tool for “social justice.” The administration demands, instead, “patriotic history” — exactly the same ultimatum issued by governments in Warsaw and Budapest.
Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III says his institution’s goal is scholarship, not partisanship. The administration’s answer is that scholarship itself is the problem, if the story it tells is not celebratory enough.
The kind of “patriotic history” the administration wants entails, instead, a thinner historical accounting, built to avoid making visitors uncomfortable with the actions of their ancestors. A country pressured to foreground its heroism while pushing its failures to the margins is one that shows its own people that, effectively, minorities do not belong.
When Poland won’t discuss Jedwabne, or Hungary won’t acknowledge its own role in the deportation of Hungarian Jews, they send the message that they don’t see Jewish citizens as fully human — in either the past or the present. A U.S. that treats discussing the facts of slavery — or the immigration quotas that helped trap Jews in Europe — as a betrayal of national values is one that suggests the people it wronged, and their descendants, don’t matter.
A serious national museum has to depict a nation’s failures and achievements in the same frame. What the White House is proposing for the Smithsonian is very different, and very dangerous. Jews have watched this play out before and seen where it leads. A nation’s museums are essential to its capacity to reckon with the worst of its history. This is a capacity worth defending in Gdańsk, in Budapest, and now in Washington.
The post European leaders downplayed the Holocaust. Now Trump is using their tactics against the Smithsonian appeared first on The Forward.
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Mamdani more popular than Netanyahu among U.S. Jews, new poll shows
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose outspoken criticism of Israel has made him a frequent target of Jewish and pro-Israel advocates, is viewed more favorably by American Jews than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to a new poll released Tuesday.
The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey of 1,022 Jewish adults nationwide, conducted from June 11 through June 17, found that 44% of American Jews hold a favorable opinion of Zohran Mamdani, compared with 39% who view him unfavorably. By contrast, just 32% of respondents said they have a favorable opinion of Netanyahu, while 59% said they have a negative view of the longtime Israeli leader
The poll suggests that Mamdani’s positions on Israel have not prevented him from maintaining a net-positive image among American Jews overall.
Mamdani won just 26% of the Jewish vote in last year’s mayoral election. Since taking office, he has faced scrutiny from Jewish leaders and Zionist organizations over his sharp criticism of Israel and embrace of Palestinian activism that is shaping his tenure as leader of the city with the largest population of Jews outside Israel. Mamdani refused to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and said he wouldn’t travel to the country. He has also pledged to order the arrest of Netanyahu if he visits the city on his watch, complying with an ICC arrest warrant. That will be tested in September when Netanyahu arrives to speak at the United Nations General Assembly.
Recently, the mayor skipped the annual Israel Day parade, where participation is a longstanding tradition for New York City leaders, and he also called for divestment from Israel’s economy. In congressional races in New York City, Mamdani actively campaigned for candidates who made inflammatory statements on Israel.
Netanyahu, who has been in office since 2009 except for an 18-month hiatus from 2021 to 2022, has seen his standing with Americans erode in recent years despite longstanding ties to the United States. He spent part of his childhood in the Philadelphia area, attended college in Boston and served as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations in the 1980s. Netanyahu has often spoken directly to American audiences, giving frequent interviews to U.S. television networks more often than he has spoken to Israeli media.
The AP survey, which had a reported margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points, also found that American Jews are increasingly critical of the Israeli government’s conduct in the Gaza war and its handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
While a majority of American Jews — 73% — said Israel’s initial military response to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack was justified, just 42% said they supported the continued military operations in Gaza through last year’s ceasefire. The survey also found that, similar to the broader American public, 30% of American Jews believe Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.
The post Mamdani more popular than Netanyahu among U.S. Jews, new poll shows appeared first on The Forward.
