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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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Forever curious, never daunted, Frederick Wiseman sought to repair the world through film
Frederick Wiseman, whose 60-year project of quietly asking America to look at itself — without sermon or embellishment, yet wielding the camera with an ethical ferocity‚ has died at the age of 96. Wiseman was a documentarian par excellence, but — as his year-long 2010 MOMA retrospective and his winter-long 2025 Lincoln Center appreciation show — he was more than a filmmaker and more dynamic than the institutions he critiqued. The 45 films he made between 1967 and 2023 embody the very process of American self-reflection.
Born Jan. 1, 1930, in Boston, Mass., Wiseman grew up in a Jewish household that never made a big show of its Jewishness, yet never let it slip from mind. His father, Jacob Leo Wiseman, was an accomplished lawyer; his mother, Gertrude Leah Kotzen, had a number of jobs but Wiseman once told the Forward that “not being able to study acting was her life’s regret.” In countless interviews, Wiseman described his upbringing as secular but culturally Jewish — one with plenty of Yiddish and the Forverts on the kitchen table. It was a childhood that inculcated a moral restlessness that he would spend his entire creative life channeling through film.
Before the camera, there was the classroom: Williams College, then Yale Law School. Law was his first chosen arena, and there is something telling in that. To make a good lawyer, you need curiosity, patience and the stamina to sit with contradiction. Wiseman found the law constricting and he turned, gradually and then completely, to filmmaking, where the rules were up for grabs but the moral stakes were never abstract.
After helping to produce Cool World, a 1965 feature about drug addiction, violence and economic hardship set in Harlem, Wiseman bought a 16mm camera and went to Bridgewater State Hospital to film Titicut Follies. His first film remains one of his most notorious, not least for influencing Miloš Forman’s 1975 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The state hospital for the criminally insane becomes, through Wiseman’s lens, both theater and trial. The patients are on display for us as are the guards but we, the audience, are on trial too: How do we treat the weakest among us? How do we look away?
Although the film represents an early example of his unobtrusive style, it was so uncomfortably honest that the Massachusetts government succeeded in banning it from general American distribution for 20 years. It was the first known film to be censored for reasons other than obscenity, immorality or national security. This is where his Jewishness lived — in the refusal to flinch from the unspeakable. Wiseman spent six decades getting us to see what we really mean by the places we build, the rules we enforce, and sometimes the people we push to the margins.
His “reality fictions,” as he preferred to call them, are quiet but not passive. They have no narration — no voice-of-God explanations or neat moral conclusions. The camera simply sits, bearing witness to public housing in Chicago, an inner-city high school in Philadelphia, Boston city government, a Dallas department store, a welfare office, a library in Queens, smalltown Indiana, and two views of domestic violence in Florida. What emerges is an archive of American power and American fragility.
Even more than his contemporaries D.A. Pennebaker and the Maysles brothers, Wiseman avoided tying his stories into a single ideological bow. But, just like his friend and follower Errol Morris, he never stopped asking questions. He once said he disliked the word “documentary” because it suggested a neatness and authority that reality refuses to offer. Like a scribe working on a Torah scroll, Wiseman would spend a year or more in his editing room shaping hundreds of hours of footage into a final cut.
Every editing choice was an act of interpretation, and every interpretation was a kind of moral accounting. To watch a Wiseman film is to practice a secular version of cheshbon nefesh — an accounting of the soul. We see the small humiliations of bureaucracy, the quiet heroism of nurses, the petty tyrannies of principals, the warmth and indifference that coexist inside every institution. His films remind us that institutions, including marriage, are made up of people, and people are both better and worse than the systems they create.
Though Wiseman never foregrounded his Jewishness in public, it filtered through his choice of subjects — and his abiding belief in the dignity of ordinary lives. He loved the messy, pluralistic, contradictory spaces where authority and people meet, like a library, a community center, a city council meeting. He loved making films and was annoyed not to be able to film or edit after his 2023 feature, Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros, about a Michelin three star-restaurant and the family that runs it.
He once called his films “epic poems,” but they are also commentaries, in the rabbinic sense: teasing out what is hidden in plain sight, turning it over and over until it yields something that might help us live with ourselves. Wiseman was excited in 2025 when a group of archivists finished the process of restoring and digitizing 33 of his films so that his entire oeuvre can be more easily examined for years to come.
Wiseman’s focus was mainly on the United States, though he did film elsewhere — especially in Paris where he filmed at a strip club and a dance rehearsal at the Paris Opera Ballet. In later years, when asked how he chose what to film, he said simply: “Curiosity.” But curiosity, for Wiseman, was never passive. It was a demand to see. In this, he practiced a form of tikkun olam — repair of the world — that was all the more radical for being so understated. He didn’t shout. He didn’t score cheap points. He invited us to do the hard work ourselves.
He was honored, eventually, by the very institutions he made his life’s work dissecting. A MacArthur “Genius Grant,” a Guggenheim Fellowship, an honorary Academy Award, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Venice. Yet he remained — in temperament and in practice — the same outsider who first brought his camera to that state hospital in 1967, sure only that the camera should watch and listen, and that we should, too.
Wiseman’s wife Zipporah Batshaw passed away in 2021 but he is survived by his two children and a generation of filmmakers who learned from him that moral clarity need not come at the expense of complexity. They carry forward the project of asking the unasked questions, of looking at what we’d rather ignore. In that way, his legacy is not a monument but a living tradition — an ever-expanding conversation about what it means to be human, to be responsible for each other, and to stand, clear-eyed, in the face of the world as it is.
May his memory be a blessing, and may we, like him, never stop seeing.
The post Forever curious, never daunted, Frederick Wiseman sought to repair the world through film appeared first on The Forward.
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US Ambassador Urges Belgium to Drop Charges Against Mohels, Warning Case Threatens Religious Freedom
A Orthodox Jewish man is seen in the city of Antwerp, Belgium. Photo: Reuters/Belga Photo Dirk Waem
US Ambassador to Belgium Bill White has urged local authorities to drop all charges against three trained circumcisers known as mohels whose homes were raided last spring amid a government probe into illegal circumcisions — with Jewish and political leaders warning the case is a direct threat to religious freedom.
The US diplomat slammed the Belgian government’s legal action against the mohels as a “ridiculous and antisemitic prosecution.”
“Antisemitism is unacceptable in any form, and it must be rooted out of our society,” White wrote in a social media post on X.
The mohels “are doing what they have been trained to do for thousands of years,” he continued. “Stop this unacceptable harassment of the Jewish community here in Antwerp and in Belgium.”
White also called on Belgian Minister of Health Frank Van den Broecke to deregulate the Jewish ritual, effectively lifting government restrictions and allowing it to be practiced freely.
“It’s 2026, you need to get into the 21st century and allow our brethren Jewish families in Belgium to legally execute their religious freedoms!” the US diplomat said. “It’s disgusting what’s happened to these fine men and their families because of your inaction.”
Anti Semitism is UNACCEPTABLE in any form & it must be rooted out of our society.
President TRUMP @POTUS @realDonaldTrump @JDVance @VP @SecRubio @StateSEAS @DeputySecState and I call upon all of Belgium to do a much better job on this subject !
TO BELGIUM,
SPECIFICALLY YOU…
— Ambassador Bill White (@BillWhiteUSA) February 16, 2026
In May last year, Belgian police raided three locations in the Jewish Quarter of Antwerp, a northern Belgian city, seizing circumcision tools from several mohels after a local anti-Zionist rabbi filed a complaint accusing them of performing unauthorized or illegal circumcisions.
A mohel is a trained practitioner who performs the ritual circumcision in Jewish tradition known as a bris.
Among the homes raided by the Belgian police was that of Rabbi Aharon Eckstein, a highly experienced mohel and a prominent leader within the Antwerp Jewish community.
According to a police report, the searches had been ordered by a judge following a complaint filed in 2023 by Rabbi Moshe Aryeh Friedman, an anti-Zionist activist previously accused of Holocaust denial, against Eckstein and other mohels within the Jewish community.
Since 2024, prosecutors have been investigating illegal circumcisions in the country amid concerns from local authorities that some Jewish circumcisions were being performed by individuals without proper medical training.
Now, the three mohels face charges for performing a medical procedure without a license, with prosecutors saying they have gathered enough evidence to secure a conviction, Belgian Member of Parliament Michael Freilich, the country’s only Orthodox Jewish lawmaker, told The Times of Israel.
However, a trial date has not yet been set and could take several months to schedule.
In his complaint, Friedman had accused six mohels, whom he identified to the police, of endangering infants by performing the metzitzah b’peh ritual, in which the mohel uses his mouth to suction blood from the circumcision area.
Eckstein and other rabbis, along with parents of children circumcised by them, have denied such accusations, insisting that they do not perform this practice.
In Antwerp, Friedman is known for publicly criticizing several customs that are important to ultra-Orthodox Jews, who represent the majority of the city’s 18,000 Jewish residents.
At the time, Jewish and political leaders accused local authorities of using the raids as part of a broader effort to intimidate religious figures in Belgium.
Ralph Pais, vice-chair of the Jewish Information and Documentation Centre (JID), commended White for his efforts, emphasizing the message of solidarity it sends to the local Jewish community.
“America continues to honor a commitment that Europe has also vowed to uphold: protecting Jewish life and ensuring that Jews can live openly and safely,” Pais said in a statement. “We expect Belgium to fully comply with the very principles and democratic values it claims to defend.”
Last July, dozens of European Jewish leaders called on the European Union to take action against Belgium, arguing that the Belgian police’s actions “represent a breach of an EU fundamental right, that of freedom of religion” and warning that this “echoes one of the darkest chapters in European history.”
Despite several attempts to ban the Jewish tradition cross Europe, ritual circumcision remains legal in all European countries, though many — including Belgium — limit the practice to licensed surgeons and often perform it in a synagogue.
In 2024, the Irish government arrested a London-based rabbi for allegedly performing a circumcision without the required medical credentials, marking the first arrest of a rabbi in Europe in years related to a bris.
The Conference of European Rabbis, through its Union of Mohels of Europe, is working to create a system of self-regulation and licensing for mohels, aiming to reduce the need for government oversight.
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Qatar’s Children Still Study Antisemitic Textbooks That Whitewash Hitler, Promote Violent Jihad, Study Finds
Qatari Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani speaks after a meeting with the Lebanese president at the presidential palace in Baabda, Lebanon, Feb. 4, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Emilie Madi
Despite Qatari leaders’ rhetoric seemingly promoting peace and opposing hate, the Middle Eastern country continues to educate students with textbooks that celebrate terrorism, hide the Holocaust, and demonize the Jewish people by affirming longstanding antisemitic tropes, according to a new study.
The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se), a nonprofit organization that analyzes schoolbooks and curricula around the world, reviewed 52 textbooks officially approved for the 2025-2026 State of Qatar national school curriculum, in addition to checking them against previous editions for potential revisions. The books covered topics ranging from social studies, geography, and history to Islamic education, Arabic language, and Arabic literature. IMPACT-se applied UNESCO-derived standards and guidelines of peace and tolerance in education.
The researchers found that the same problems from the 2021-2022 school year had not improved, as the textbooks “continue to reproduce antisemitic narratives, religious intolerance toward non-Muslims, and legitimization of violent jihad, all of which were documented in IMPACT-se’s earlier reports.”
The antisemitic material includes promoting stereotypes of Jews as arrogant liars obsessed with opposing Islam. The texts also cast Jews as “fleeing in fear, spreading discord, breaching agreements,” and possessing an “excessive attachment to material wealth, thereby reinforcing an image of Jews as fundamentally untrustworthy.”
In historical recounts of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the textbooks depict Jews as manipulating global affairs and deny Jewish historical connections to the Land of Israel. Maps of the region describe the borders of Mandatory Palestine, the name for the area from 1920-1948 when it was under British administration, as split between “Palestinian territory” and “Israeli expansion.”
The textbooks for Qatari children also glorify violent jihad and death in the name of Islam. They teach that students should “love jihad” and expect entry into paradise for those who choose martyrdom. These instructions accompany demonizations of non-Muslims as “infidels,” “pagans,” and “polytheists.” The textbooks offer little objective information about other faiths. They also promote an Arab nationalist ideology, oppose a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and describe Hamas terrorist attacks as “military operations.”
IMPACT-se researchers cite an Islamic education book for sixth graders as an example of the curriculum’s promotion of terrorism.
“An Islamic education lesson teaches that one of the ways to measure a good Muslim woman is to raise children to sacrifice their lives, in what is understood to be violent jihad,” the report states. “The chapter about classical Islamic figure Nusaybah bint Ka’b praises the fact that she raised her children ‘to love jihad,’ pointing out that her three children later ‘died as martyrs for the sake of Allah Almighty.’ The textbook authors describe this type of upbringing as ‘optimal.’”
For seniors in high school, the report describes how an Islamic education text instructs that “God will reward men and women who fought and died for Islam, and will grant them entry to Paradise. The lesson does not attempt to caution that dying as a result of violent struggle should not be considered the utmost objective, and students are offered no alternative interpretations of this Qur’anic verse.”
An eighth-grade Islamic education book demonizes Jews with one lesson that insists “Jewish people are forever cursed by Allah to never accept the truth of Islam, which is why they consistently reject Islam.”
Eleventh graders learn that Jews “worship (or have worshipped) the Golden Calf, that they revere a character called Uzayr, that they believe themselves to be God’s own children, and that they venerate the Talmud more than the Torah (the latter of which is recognized by Islam as a heavenly-inspired text).”
IMPACT-se explains that this misinformation about Judaism is intend “to promote an antisemitic portrayal of Jewish people as exceptionally arrogant and disloyal to God, both of which are grave offenses from an Islamic point of view.”
As Qatar continues to fill its own students’ heads with anti-Israel propaganda and antisemitic tropes, so too does the country’s monarchy, the House of Thani, seek to spread its ideology in other countries’ educational institutions.
Earlier this month a US federal judge ordered Carnegie Mellon University to reveal its connections to Qatar involving a $1 billion financial relationship in response to the case of a top DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) and civil rights official allegedly failing to respond to antisemitism. Money from Qatar reportedly paid the employee’s salary.
“Foreign governments with appalling human rights records are funding the very offices meant to protect students’ civil rights. This should alarm every parent, every student, and every policymaker in this country,” Lawfare Project director Ziporah Reich said in response to the ruling. “The court recognized that foreign government funding is not peripheral but potentially central to understanding how civil rights laws are applied on campus.”
Last month, the US Department of Education released a new database that showed Qatar is the single largest foreign source of funding to American colleges and universities, flooding academia with $6.6 billion in gifts and contracts.
“America’s taxpayer funded colleges and universities have both a moral and legal obligation to be fully transparent with the US government and the American people about their foreign financial relationships,” US Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement announcing the new figures.