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A Jewish group’s tip led to arrest of suspects who wanted to ‘shoot up a synagogue’
(New York Jewish Week) — A tip from a Jewish security organization helped lead to the arrest of two suspects Saturday in connection with online threats to attack a New York City synagogue.
The Community Security Initiative, a group created by UJA-Federation of New York and its affiliated Jewish Community Relations Council, discovered threatening tweets on Friday morning and brought the information to law enforcement, according to a UJA spokesperson.
In a news conference at City Hall on Monday, UJA CEO Eric Goldstein said that after they shared the lead with the New York Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, law enforcement “immediately sprung into action.”
New York City Mayor Eric Adams said during the news conference that Metropolitan Transit Authority police officers arrested the suspects — Christopher Brown, 21, of Aquebogue on eastern Long Island and Michael Mahrer, 22, of Manhattan — at Penn Station, adding that they had “an alleged plan to murder members of the Jewish community in our city.”
“This was not an idle threat,” Adams said. “This was a real threat.”
Join me, @NYPDPC Sewell and other law enforcement leaders at City Hall to discuss the efforts that stopped a potential attack on the Jewish community in New York City this past weekend. https://t.co/WyVz2qe44Q
— Mayor Eric Adams (@NYCMayor) November 21, 2022
Adams added: “Hate is on the rise in America. This hate cannot be allowed to take hold and build and gain further ground. We must reject the hate and the division that drives it.”
On Sunday, Gov. Kathy Hochul, responding to the arrest and Saturday night’s deadly shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado, said state police would increase surveillance and protection efforts at synagogues and other vulnerable sites.
Steve Weill of Flatbush Shomrim, a Jewish community watch organization in Brooklyn, said at the press conference that he received a call on Friday night from NYPD Inspector Ritchie Taylor, an Orthodox Jew, who advised him that there was “a credible threat to the community.”
“We put a plan in place where hundreds of trained volunteers would reach all the synagogues and all the houses of worship in the areas and warn them,” Weill said.
The suspects were caught before that plan was implemented. Weill added that the Jewish community has “an unprecedented relationship” with Adams.
“The information that flows is incredible, that we can get such sensitive information and that they can have the trust in us to relay that to the community in a calm and professional manner,” Weill said.
The Daily Beast reported that the NYPD intelligence division had become aware of Brown’s tweets talking about “shooting up a synagogue and dying.” MTA police, state police, the NYPD and the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force worked together on the investigation, according to Hochul’s office.
According to the Daily Beast, the hunt for Brown led police to an apartment on West 94th St. in Manhattan, where his acquaintance Mahrer was said to live with his parents. Neither Brown nor Mahrer were at the apartment, but detectives found a backpack with a Glock semi-automatic pistol and ammunition . In an intelligence alert, police said Brown had “a history of mental illness.”
What police described as a white supremacist Twitter group operated by Brown was taken down. After being caught, Brown was held on a weapons charge, and Mahrer was charged with illegal weapons possession. Each pleaded not guilty to state charges and are scheduled to appear in court on Nov. 23.
The New York Post reported that Mahrer is Jewish and the grandson of a Holocaust survivor.
UJA-Federation of New York and the JCRC of New York created the Community Security Initiative after the deadly attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. CSI helps provide protection and safety training to Jews and Jewish institutions in New York City, Westchester and Long Island.
The arrests come just weeks after the FBI warned synagogues in New Jersey about a “credible threat” made to them; the NYPD heightened security at city synagogues as a precaution. The FBI later announced that a 19-year-old man who said he had sworn allegiance to ISIS had been arrested for making the threat.
The arrests also come a time of heightened anxiety about antisemitism in New York City and beyond. The NYPD has recorded an increase in the number of reported antisemitic incidents.
Meanwhile, celebrities Kanye West and Kyrie Irving have ignited concerns about antisemitism with their comments and tweets, and turmoil at Twitter has fueled a rise in hate posts, including about Jews, according to watchdogs who monitor the social media platform.
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VIDEO: A Hasid gives us a tour of Morocco in Yiddish
דער ירושלימער יוטוב־שטערן וועלוול קירשנבוים האָט לעצטנס אַרויסגעשטעלט אַ ווידעאָ אויף ייִדיש פֿון אַ פּרעכטיקן וויזיט, וואָס ער האָט געמאַכט אין מאַראָקאָ. עס באַגלייט אים זײַן חבֿר אַבֿרהם פּרץ.
אינעם ווידעאָ זעט מען ווי קירשנבוים דאַוונט שחרית מיט די אָרטיקע ייִדן און באַזוכט אַ גוט אָפּגעהיטענעם בית־עולם, וווּ עס ליגן באַערדיקט גרויסע צדיקים ווי למשל הרבֿ חיים בן עתר (1696–1743), באַקאַנט ווי דער „אור החיים“. „מענטשן מיינען, אַז נאָר אין אייראָפּע זענען דאָ קבֿרים פֿון צדיקים!“ זאָגט קירשנבוים.
מיר זעען אַ גרויסע, שיינע שיל מיט אַ פֿײַנער אַרכיטעקטור אין קאַזאַבלאַנקאַ; דעם גרויסן אַראַבישן שוק, וווּ קירשנבוים קויפֿט זיך אײַן מלבושים פּונקט ווי די מאַראָקאַנער גייען אָנגעטאָן. ער באַוווּנדערט אויך די שיינע טיי־גלעזער און טשײַניקן, וואָס מע פֿאַרקויפֿט דאָרט, און באַקענט זיך מיט אַ ייִדישן סוחר וואָס האַנדלט מיט זילבער און גאָלד, פּונקט אַזוי ווי זײַן טאַטע און זיידע האָבן געטאָן פֿאַר דור־דורות.
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Conservative and Christian movies are coming for Hollywood
A star-studded new movie set in a Soviet prison is coming out in November. James Franco and Rob Lowe anchor the cast of Confession, playing a brutal prison guard and an imprisoned dissident professor, and a disheveled Nick Nolte appears as a fellow prisoner.
These actors were once huge gets, and their names could convey legitimacy to a project. Nolte and Franco both have received Academy Award nominations. Lowe was a member of the Brat Pack, and was a regular on The West Wing.
Confession, written by Ben Shapiro and produced by the rightwing tabloid-esque news site The Daily Wire, is not the expected fare for actors with that kind of name recognition; Shapiro’s screenwriting aspirations have been the target of ridicule for years.
Nevertheless, this isn’t the only Daily Wire production getting big names; Danny Trejo signed onto a pro-ICE movie about Minneapolis in the aftermath of the Renee Good shooting, and Jonathan Majors led Run, Fight, Hide: Infidels earlier this year.
Each one of these actors has been, in some way, canceled or in career doldrums so may have been more open to working with The Daily Wire. And some have claimed that they did not know who Shapiro was, or what his politics were; Trejo’s son, Gilbert, said his 82-year-old father did not endorse ICE and was misled about the movie before he signed his contract.
Movie studios have struggled through the pandemic and the streaming era, both of which have tanked box office receipts, leaving the field open for movies from offbeat production studios. In addition to The Daily Wire, there has been a whole ream of Christian movies attempting to shift the stereotype of bible movies — that they’re preachy, low-budget straight-to-TV affairs with cardboard acting — to something more prestigious, or at least profitable.
The Christian company Angel Studios has been placing screenings of the half philo-semitic, half-antisemitic Jesus TV series The Chosen in movie theaters across the country, produced the right-wing hit The Sound of Freedom and is pumping out faith-based movies like the animated King of Kings Christmas story and David, a kiddie movie about the biblical king. Recently, Pinnacle Peak Pictures, another faith-based production company, premiered Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, another bible movie that was notable enough to merit a review in The New York Times. (Though admittedly it wasn’t a particularly positive one.)
For decades, Hollywood, and the media industry at large, has been associated with liberalism, progressive politics and diversity. (This is part of why conservative conspiracy theorists often insist that Jews control the media.) Even when conservatives are in power, satirical movies have poked fun at the ruling class — Team America: World Police spoofed George W. Bush’s foreign policy, while M*A*S*H critiqued Richard Nixon. During the current Trump administration, we’ve seen One Battle After Another lambasting immigration policies and rising white nationalism, Eddington on misinformation and populism, and The Apprentice depicting Trump directly.
But a rising number of higher-budget, bigger releases from the right wing, whether The Daily Wire’s conservative political parables or the Christian fables, are bringing a new kind of messaging — about the importance of God and country, about gender roles, about about the centrality of Jesus to the U.S. — to the American movie-going public.
This is no accident. A group of powerful conservative Christians, many of whom worked on Project 2025, are proponents of the Seven Mountains Mandate, a blueprint for Christian nationalism that instructs Christians to gain influence and control over the “seven mountains” of society — which include media, entertainment and the arts. The Mandate is part of the New Apostolic Reformation, a decentralized evangelical movement embraced by millions of Americans.
Jeremy Boreing, the director of many Daily Wire movies — though he has since left the company — said on a podcast hosted by businessman Patrick Bet-David that “It had always been part of our strategy to move into making culture, not just criticizing culture” as a way of proving that “there is a future where conservatives aren’t losing. There’s a future where we have political power and cultural power.”
Cultural power, of course, requires more than just a lot of movies; they have to be well-done, or at least appear to be. Previous Daily Wire productions, as well as other right-wing, MAGA movie ventures, have been hacky. Lady Ballers, about an unsuccessful men’s basketball team pretending to be women so they can dominate the league, was an unsubtle, unfunny and ultimately unwatchable spoof of transgender athletes. And even plenty of higher-budget attempts, like Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, can still fall victim to wooden acting and writing.
But now, with the financial success of movies like The Sound of Freedom and biblical parables like The Chosen, bigger stars are being drawn to projects like the Daily Wire’s lineup of pro-ICE, anti-immigration and anti-LGBTQ movies. With those bigger stars may come new audiences who might not have watched a Christian movie or Daily Wire project otherwise. And where there is money and viewers, mainstream Hollywood will go, too, no matter how progressive people expect the industry to be. We’ve already gotten a biblical epic from Amazon Prime, with The House of David, and there are likely to be many more to come.
After all, it wasn’t so long ago, after all, that Cecil DeMille’s The Ten Commandments was the biggest movie in town.
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‘Heil’ Mary? New Atlanta Falcons logo inspires Nazi comparisons
If there was something off about the logo the Atlanta Falcons unveiled on social media Wednesday, whoever runs their accounts did, uh, not see it.
Behind the black falcon graphic that began appearing on the football team’s helmets in the 1960s was a new background — a flag of red, tan, black and white vertical stripes. To thousands of people who responded to the logo, it looked distinctly German — in a 1930s kind of way.
“The Atlanta Falcons are preparing to invade Poland,” one fan wrote.
A day after its posting, the new profile picture had unleashed a deluge of Nazi memes in the 4,000-plus replies on X. One picture swapped in the logo for Nazi flags in the background of a historical photo of a Hitler rally. Another edited the Falcon claw to look like a Nazi salute.
Others depicted Hitler in a Falcons cap, references to Inglourious Basterds and the Battle of the Bulge and a World War II joke invoking a blown lead in Super Bowl LI.
“Falcons were up 28-3 at Dunkirk,” that tweet read.
The Falcons’ snafu enters a small but growing catalogue of Reich-coded brand mixups. Who can forget the German national soccer team’s ‘44’ soccer jerseys? There was also the swastika-emblazoned Hallmark gift wrap; the accidental Hitler mugs; and (for my money) the worst of the bunch, Zara’s concentration camp uniform shirt.
All of those have been addressed; so far, the Falcons’ has not. We’ve reached out to them for comment.
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