Uncategorized
A new book made me appreciate Jewish Sunday schools — and the volunteer women who have powered them
(JTA) — As a kid I went to Sunday school at our Reform synagogue. I didn’t hate it as much as my peers did, but let’s just say there were literally dozens of other things I would have preferred to do on a weekend morning.
As a Jewish adult, I had a vague understanding that Sunday school was a post-World War II invention, part of the assimilation and suburbanization of American Jews (my synagogue was actually called Suburban Temple). With our parents committed to public schools and having moved away from the dense urban enclaves where they were raised, our Jewish education was relegated to Sunday mornings and perhaps a weekday afternoon. The Protestant and Catholic kids went to their own religious supplementary schools, and we Jewish kids went to ours.
In her new book “Jewish Sunday Schools,” Laura Yares backdates this story by over a century. Subtitled “Teaching Religion in Nineteenth-Century America,” the book describes how Sunday schools were the invention of pioneering educators such as Rebecca Gratz, who founded the first Sunday school for Jewish children in Philadelphia in 1838. As such, they were responses by a tiny minority to distinctly 19th-century challenges — namely, how to raise their children to be Jews in a country dominated by a Protestant majority, and how to express their Judaism in a way compatible with America’s idea of religious freedom.
Although Sunday schools would become the “principal educational organization” of the Reform movement, Yares shows that the model was adopted by traditionalists as well. And she also argues that 20th-century historians, in focusing on the failures of Sunday schools to promote Jewish “continuity,” discounted the contributions of the mostly volunteer corps of women educators who made them run. Meanwhile, the supplementary school remains the dominant model for Jewish education among non-Orthodox American Jews, despite recent research showing its precipitous decline.
I picked up “Jewish Sunday Schools” hoping to find out who gets the blame for ruining my Sunday mornings. I came away with a new appreciation for the women whose “important and influential work,” Yares writes, “extended far beyond the classrooms in which they worked.”
Yares is assistant professor of Religious Studies at Michigan State University, with a joint appointment in the MSU Program for Jewish Studies. Raised in Birmingham, England, she has degrees from Oxford University and a doctorate from Georgetown University.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Tell me how your book came to be about the 19th century as opposed to the common 20th-century story of suburbanization.
There’s a real gap in American Jewish history when it comes to the 19th century, chiefly because so many American Jews today trace their origins back to the generation who arrived between 1881 and 1924, the mass migration of Jews from from Eastern Europe. So there’s a sense that that’s when American Jewish history began. Of course, that’s not true at all.
The American Jewish community dates back to the 17th century and there was much innovation that laid the foundations for what would become institutionalized in the 20th century.
Sunday school gets a very bad rap among most historians of American Judaism. If they’ve treated it at all, they tend to be dismissive — you know, there was no substance, they just taught kids the 10 Commandments, it was run by these unprofessional volunteer female teachers, so it was feminized and feminine.
But there’s also a lot of celebration of Rebecca Gratz, who founded the first Sunday school for Jewish children.
That’s the first indication I had that there might be more of a story here. Rebecca Gratz is lionized as being such a visionary and being so inventive in developing this incredible volunteer model for Jewish education for an immigrant generation that was mostly from Western Europe. And yet, by the beginning of the 20th century, [Jewish historians] say it has no value. So what’s the story there?
Two other things led me on the path to thinking that there was more of a story in this 19th-century moment. I did my Ph.D in Washington, D.C. And as I was searching through the holdings of the Library of Congress, there were tons and tons of Jewish catechisms.
“Sunday school gets a very bad rap among most historians of American Judaism,” says Dr. Laura Yares, author of the new book, “Jewish Sunday Schools.” (Courtesy of the author)
A catechism is a kind of creed, right? It’s a statement of religious beliefs. “These are things we believe as Jews.”
So Jewish catechisms had that, but they were also philosophical meditations in many ways. Typically, the first question of the catechism was, what is religion? And then the second question is, what is Jewish religion?
And then I started reading them. They were question-and-answer summaries of the whole of Judaism: belief, practices, holidays, Bible, you name it, that the children were expected to memorize. This idea that you’ve got to cram these kids with knowledge went against this historiographic dismissal of this period as being very thin and that kids were not really learning anything. The idea that children had a lot to learn is something that Sunday school educators actually really wrestle with during this period.
What was the other thing that led you to pursue this subject?
When I was beginning to research my dissertation, I was working as a Hebrew school teacher in a large Reform Hebrew school in Washington, D.C. And I remember very distinctively the rabbi coming in and addressing the teachers at the start of the school year. He said, “I don’t care if a student comes through this Hebrew school and they don’t remember anything that they learned. But I care that at the end of the year they feel like the temple is a place that they want to be, that they feel like they have relationships there and they have an (he didn’t use this word) ‘affective’ [emotional] connection.”
And so I’m sitting there by day at the Library of Congress, reading these catechisms that are saying, “Cram their heads with knowledge.” What is the relationship between Jewish education as a place where one is supposed to acquire knowledge and a place where one is supposed to feel something and to develop affective relationships? The swing between those two poles was happening as far back as the 19th century.
You write that owing to gaps in the archives, it was really hard to get an idea of the classroom experience. But to the degree that there’s a typical classroom experience in the 1860s, 1870s and you’re the daughter or grandchild of probably German-speaking Jewish immigrants, maybe working or lower middle class, what would Sunday school be like? I’m guessing the teacher would be a woman. Are you reading the Bible in English or Hebrew?
You are probably going for an hour or two on a Sunday morning. It’s a big room, and your particular class would have a corner of the room. It’s quite chaotic. Most of the teachers were female volunteers. They were either young and unmarried, or older women whose children had grown. Except for the students who are preparing for confirmation — the grand kind of graduation ritual for Sunday schools. Those classes were typically taught by the rabbi, if there was a rabbi associated with the school.
There would be a lot of reading out loud to the students with students being expected to repeat back what they had heard or write it down so they had a copy for themselves. Often the day would begin with prayers said in English, and often the reading of the Torah portion, typically in English, although in many Sunday schools, we do have children reporting they learned bits of Hebrew by rote memorization. Or they memorized the first chapters of the book of Genesis, for example, but I’m not sure that they quite understood what they memorized. “Ein Keloheinu” is a song that often children tell us [in archival materials] that they had memorized in Hebrew. They probably would have learned at least Hebrew script, and a little bit of Hebrew decoding. But it is fair to say that if they were reading the Bible, they were reading it mostly in English, because you have to remember that most of the women who were volunteering to teach in these schools came of age in a generation where Hebrew education wasn’t extended to women.
What’s the goal of these Sunday schools?
The Sunday school movement arose because there was a whole generation of immigrant children who did not have access to Jewish education, because their parents didn’t have either the economic capital or the social capital to become part of the established Jewish community. They couldn’t afford a seat in the synagogue, they couldn’t afford to send their children to congregational all-day or every-afternoon schools [which were among the few options for Jewish education when Gratz opened the Philadelphia Sunday school]. Sunday schools are really a very innovative solution to a problem of a lack of resources.
You also write that the founders of these supplementary schools want to defend children against “predatory evangelists.”
That was how Rebecca Gratz described her goal when she created the first Sunday school. She was very, very worried about the Jewish kids who were not receiving any kind of Hebrew school education. She talks about Protestant missionaries and teachers who would go out onto the street ringing the bell for Sunday school and offering various kinds of trinkets, and Jewish kids would get kind of swept into their Sunday schools. There was a very concrete need to give Jewish children somewhere else to go.
So Gratz and the people who created the first Hebrew Sunday school in Philadelphia looked at what the Protestants were doing and they saw that Protestant Sunday schools were providing very accessible places where kids could go and get a basic primer in their religious tradition.
The approach was to teach Judaism as a religion, as opposed to Judaism as a people or culture, to demonstrate that being Jewish was as compatible as Protestantism with being wholly American.
That is certainly part of it. It’s a demonstration that Judaism is compatible with American public life. But I think there’s actually a much bigger claim that the Sunday schools are making. The claim is not only that Judaism is as good as Protestantism, but that Judaism does religion better than Protestantism. These rabbis who were writing catechisms and teaching confirmation classes were saying that Judaism does liberal religion better than liberal Protestants, liberal Catholics and other kinds of liberal denominations. You see the same sentiment in the Pittsburgh Platform as well, which is the foundational platform of the Reform movement written in the 1880s. Sunday schools take that idea and bring it down to a grassroots level.
There are many, many fewer Jews in America in much of the 19th century, before the waves of Eastern European immigrants arrived beginning in the 1880s They didn’t really have strength in numbers, or the kind of self-confidence to have a system of day schools, yeshivas or heders, the elementary schools for all-day or every day Jewish instruction.
And this is also a community that has grown up at the same time as the birth of public education in America, independent of churches. That really emerged beginning on the East Coast in the 1840s.This generation of Americans really believes in the power of public education to craft an American public. It’s a project that 19th-century American Jews believe in and want to sustain. So Sunday schools don’t just become the preferred Jewish model because of lack of resources, but because American Jews really believe in the idea of public education.
What happens at the beginning of the 20th century, with the arrival of Eastern Europeans with different models for Jewish education?
A new generation tries to reform Jewish education, led by a young educator from Palestine named Samson Benderly, who leads the new New York Bureau of Jewish Education. He tries to change American Jewish education to make it more professionalized, but to bring more traditionally inclined Jews on board he has to convince them that he doesn’t want to make more Sunday schools, because Sunday schools by the end of the 20th century had become very much associated with the Reform movement in a way that they weren’t when they were founded and for much of the 19th century.
A painting of Philadelphia philanthropist and Jewish education activist Rebecca Gratz by Thomas Sully. (The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia)
Benderly is surveying the scene of recent immigrants living in New York City [tenements] and other kinds of downtown environments, and his proposal is to create these community institutions for these dense communities, where children can be taught Hebrew in Hebrew. His disciples also created Jewish camps as a way to get children out of the inner cities and develop the muscular Zionist ideal of healthy bodies and a robust sense of Jewish collectivity.
You write that Benderly’s vision is a sort of masculine response to the “feminizing” perception of the Sunday schools.
These women teachers are recognizing that they’re being criticized for the kind of thinness of the Jewish education that they’re teaching in comparison to other models, but in periodicals like The American Jewess women are writing back and saying, “But you didn’t teach us Hebrew! I didn’t get that opportunity as a woman, so what do you expect?” It’s really important to note that the women did the best that they could in the time that they had available, and that they were the product of opportunities that were denied to them.
What lessons did you learn about Sunday school and Hebrew school education in the 20th century that relate to your research into the 19th century?
The move that is so decisive for shaping American Jewish education is suburbanization. Rather than having a large immigrant generation who are living in these tight ethnic enclaves, you have American Jewish children who are predominantly growing up in the suburbs, and socializing with children from all sorts of different backgrounds who are attending public schools. The place that you go to get your Jewish education is the synagogue supplemental school, which becomes the dominant model for American Jewish education up until today. Benderly might reflect that it looks a lot more like the Sunday school movement of the 19th century than his vision.
Today’s model is really a religious model. And by that I mean that students go to Hebrew school primarily to kind of check a religious box, to learn about the thing that makes them distinctive religiously, and to achieve a religious coming-of-age marker, which is the bar, bat or b mitzvah. Certainly the curriculum today is more diverse, embracing more aspects of traditional Judaism then you would have seen in a 19th-century Sunday school: more Hebrew, more of a sense of Jewish peoplehood, ethnic identity and Zionism of course. But the question that American Jews are increasingly asking themselves is, is this a model that they still want? So you may have seen that the Jewish Education Project published a report recently on supplemental schools, which saw that enrollment has really, really declined.
Sunday schools are based on a vision of Judaism as a set of a religious commitments that American Jews actualize through belonging to a synagogue and sending their children to a synagogue or a religious school, where they will learn primarily a set of religious skills: the ability to read from the Torah, the ability to decode Hebrew, the ability to navigate the siddur.
Is that still the vision that most American Jews have for what Judaism means to them? I think increasingly the answer seems to be no.
How else did experience in a Hebrew school classroom influence you? Did you access anything else when you were writing the book?
I think about the number of college kids and graduate students and empty nesters who are either volunteering or earning minimum wage, working at Hebrew schools, all over the country. That’s the labor force of American Judaism. These people also bring so much to the table. There are a lot of skills, dispositions and knowledge that don’t tend to get taken very seriously because this is a workforce that just gets kind of put into the category of “oh, they’re part time.” That made me look really closely in the historical archives to see if I could find anything out about the women who are volunteering to teach in Sunday schools. And what I found out was that [many] were public school teachers. And they brought a lot to the table. It was women in fact who were really pushing to make the Sunday school curriculum more experiential and to move away from rote memorization.
As a historian formed by feminist methods, I find it really important to recognize that these women were giving over what they had, as opposed to critiquing them for not teaching in a more traditional way. I think we need to pay attention when women are being scapegoated for problems that are described as problems of Jewish continuity. It blinds us to the role that women’s volunteerism has played in American Jewish life. This whole Sunday school movement was possible only because these women volunteered their time and largely were not paid.
—
The post A new book made me appreciate Jewish Sunday schools — and the volunteer women who have powered them appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
He saved dozens of kids in Auschwitz — he kept it a secret for nearly the rest of his life
Growing up in Israel as the daughter of Holocaust survivors, Judith Richter was taught not to discuss the Shoah. While her mother was very open about her experiences, Richter’s father was more reserved, and Israeli society at the time looked down on European Jews for, as they wrongly assumed, not fighting back. It wasn’t until Richter was an adult that she learned her father had played a critical role in protecting children at Auschwitz-Birkenau — a secret she gleaned not from her father himself but from an article on Josef Mengele in a LIFE magazine that her husband happened to spot in a grocery store.
Erno “Zvi” Spiegel was 29 years old when he was deported from Hungary to Auschwitz along with other members of his family, including his twin sister Magda. As a twin, Spiegel was selected to be a subject for Mengele’s scientific experiments, where he injected subjects with diseases and cancer cells to study their effects on the human body; due to their shared genetics, one twin could serve as a control for the experiment. If one died from the procedure and the other didn’t, the surviving twin would still be killed and subject to an autopsy to understand why they lived.
Mengele also charged Spiegel with looking after the other kids he was experimenting on, whose lives Spiegel would end up saving multiple times. The PBS documentary The Last Twins, directed by Perri Peltz and Matt O’Neill, captures the deep and unexpected relationship Spiegel had with his charges through interviews with the surviving sets of twins from Mengele’s lab along with Spiegel’s family. Uncle Spiegel, as the twins called him, was the only adult that many of the kids trusted during their imprisonment.
When SS physician Heinz Thilo ordered the extermination of all sets of twins, Spiegel was able to intervene by telling Mengele that his subjects were at risk. Sometimes siblings were mistakenly brought in as twins, but Spiegel lied about their birth days so they wouldn’t be sent to the gas chambers. Many recounted how he would teach them math and geography to distract them from their horrific conditions.
When she heard these stories for the first time, Richter told me, she was not surprised her father had put such an emphasis on education, even in the camps.
“My father taught me since I was very young that while your material possessions, home, even your freedom can be taken away from you, the single asset that cannot be taken away from you is your knowledge,” she said.
After Auschwitz was liberated, Spiegel led the kids on an arduous journey through Eastern Europe helping them return to their homes — or at least, to what was left of them.
Although Spiegel, who died in 1993, never told his own children what he had done during the war, he spoke with LIFE Magazine for their 1981 article on Mengele’s experiments. The LIFE piece didn’t just cause revelations for Spiegel’s family; one of the survivors, Peter Somogyi, saw the issue, prompting him to contact Spiegel. The two reunited for the first time in almost four decades in Boston, and after that, Spiegel arranged meetings with a number of the other surviving twins.
Richter began researching her father’s story and the lives of those he had saved for an academic project. However, when director Peltz’s mom, who had known Richter for years, connected the two women, Richter realized the importance of turning her father’s story into a movie.
Directors O’Neill and Peltz, who had previously worked together on the documentary Can’t Look Away: The Case Against Social Media, knew the project was time sensitive given how few living survivors are left. Since they first started shooting the film almost a decade ago, all but one of their interview subjects has died. O’Neill added that today’s political climate contributed to the urgency of getting the film to the public.
“At a time of rising antisemitism, of misinformation of the Holocaust,” O’Neill said, “it’s an essential time for journalistic work based entirely on indisputable truths to come out.”
Peltz noted that Spiegel’s heroism wasn’t embodied in one grand act, but “in the step by step, day by day.” Although Mengele’s horrific experiments get a brief mention, the filmmakers chose to focus on the uplifting story of how people came together and protected each other in the midst of tragedy.
“Right now, many of us feel overwhelmed by world events, by things that feel out of control,” O’Neill added. “This is a story of hope in a time of horror and of a man who took the small space that he could control and did good within it.”
In 2017, Richter organized a reunion of the survivors in Israel, where they dedicated a plaque to Spiegel and the twins in Jerusalem. Richter said her father’s strong sense of social responsibility had a profound effect on her life. She noted that in the homes of some Holocaust survivors, the “children grow up with a very strong sense of revenge.” Instead, her father taught her that the best response to hatred was to ask herself how she could help other people.
“Erno was a fighter in his own way,” O’Neill said. “He fought the Nazis by teaching the kids to call each other by their names. He fought the Nazis by teaching them geography. He fought the Nazis by giving them humanity in darkness.”
The Last Twins will be available to stream on pbs.org on April 13 and have a broadcast premiere on Monday, June 15 at 10/9c.
The post He saved dozens of kids in Auschwitz — he kept it a secret for nearly the rest of his life appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
I’m probably going to be on the government’s list of Jews at UPenn
When I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2024, tensions on campus about Israel and Gaza felt hotter than ever. Nearly every week of my senior year, another student or faculty member was being doxxed online for their politics. In the middle of spring finals, police forcibly disbanded the pro-Palestinian encampment in the center of campus. A week later, and four days before graduation, pro-Palestinian activists occupied a campus building, leading to another confrontation with law enforcement and arrests. At graduation, several students whipped out Palestinian flags and signs about justice for Palestine as they walked the stage.
I will once again be a Penn student come fall, having been accepted to the school’s sociology Ph.D. program. Last month, when I returned to campus for the department’s open house, I was surprised that I didn’t notice even a trace of the conflict I had left behind. The fences that had been erected around College Green to prevent a second encampment were gone. There were no cardboard signs about Palestine or Israel on Locust Walk. Talking with my professors and friends still at Penn, they confirmed that pro-Palestinian activism on campus had died down, likely due to a mix of intimidation on the part of the school administration — which only got more intense after the federal government got involved — and a loss of energy in activist spaces.
It’s not that students became completely disconnected: The university still offers clubs for students with a wide range of political perspectives, and courses on Israel and Gaza. But it seemed like the Penn I would be returning to in August had established some semblance of calm, albeit in part due to the university restricting open expression.
Now, the recent ruling that Penn must comply with the federal government’s demand for a list of students and faculty affiliated with Jewish groups and organizations — a sweeping categorization that could include anyone involved in Jewish Studies or Jewish associations regardless of their actual identity — could threaten to bring back the campus wide anxieties when doxxing and harassment were at their highest.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s investigation began in December of 2023, with a stated goal of determining if the university was failing to properly protect Jewish employees from discrimination and harassment. In March 2025, the EEOC asked Penn for membership lists of Jewish campus groups and names of Jewish Studies employees. Penn refused, instead offering to inform all employees about the investigation and how to contact the EEOC if they felt like they had an incident to report. This didn’t satisfy the EEOC, leading to subpoenas, lawsuits and countersuits. And it’s not over yet: Penn has indicated the school plans to appeal the decision forcing the handover of student and faculty names.
Although the EEOC’s jurisdiction is workplace discrimination, some of the lists the EEOC are asking for include students. One such group is those who were involved in confidential listening sessions conducted by the university’s antisemitism task force where Jewish students shared their experiences on campus.
I’ll go ahead and get ahead of the EEOC and make it known that I attended one of these listening sessions. Their confidentiality made them one of the few places on campus where Jewish students could feel comfortable openly discussing their feelings about the situation in Israel and Gaza as well as events at Penn. It was the administration’s way of giving Jews room to be vulnerable — and now the government is weaponizing it against the university.
The irony is stark. Under the auspices of protecting the interests of Jewish students and faculty, the EEOC is threatening the sanctity of the spaces where Jewish students and faculty feel safe.
For me, it’s hard not to feel like part of how we got here is that different political camps of the Jewish community could never seem to figure out how to speak to one another after Oct. 7. There was never really a clear idea of what Jewish students wanted political activity on campus to look like, with some advocating for a complete ban of encampments and anti-Israel referendums and others fully supporting them. Ultimately, I think what most people wanted on campus was a sense of civility, the feeling that screaming matches between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students wouldn’t constantly erupt in the middle of campus, but different factions were too busy arguing with each other to make a well-thought-out plan for how to achieve that.
The faculty who originally complained to the EEOC clearly thought getting the federal government involved was the catch-all solution. But instead, after two of the four classes of undergraduate students who lived through the conflict have graduated, and students are talking to each other in organized dialogue, the EEOC wants to revisit old wounds. The EEOC has discretion when it comes to what steps they choose to take, including issuing a subpoena and determining how to gather information they believe is necessary to their investigation. They have decided to use that discretion to gather information in a way that resurfaces generational trauma for Jews.
After such a period of divisiveness at Penn, it’s telling that an unidentified professor told the student paper The Daily Pennsylvanian that “a remarkably ideologically, religiously, and politically diverse array of organizations and individuals have united” against the subpoena. I didn’t always see eye to eye with the Penn Hillel leadership while I was an undergraduate student, but I agree with their assertion, in the statement they released last week that, “accountability in the face of discrimination is essential, but it must not be achieved by compromising the security of any minority community.”
Despite all the anxiety and frustration this development has provoked, I am choosing to look on the bright side: It seems like Penn’s Jews have finally found something they can unite over.
The post I’m probably going to be on the government’s list of Jews at UPenn appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Iran’s regime is obsessed with Jeffrey Epstein
In the hours leading up to the recent ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran, pro-regime AI-generated videos flooded social media. In one widely circulated clip, a Lego version of Donald Trump is shown desperately pleading with Iran for a ceasefire. The response comes in the form of a ballistic missile with the words “in memory of the victims of Epstein’s Island” written on it, hurling toward U.S. allies in the region.
Another video shows a terrified Trump in bed with young girls, having a nightmare of an Iranian missile barrage before waking and agreeing to ceasefire terms while eating a taco — a reference to the acronym “TACO” (“Trump Always Chickens Out”).
These videos are just some of the dozens released by media organizations affiliated with the Iranian regime that invoke pedophile sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein in its anti-Western propaganda.
“The IRGC is very happy to use him in every venue they have—in media, newspapers, speeches,” said Saeid Golkar, an Iranian-born expert on the Iran regime’s propaganda, using the acronym for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. “Everything they are talking about, especially right now, goes back to the corruption of the West and Epstein.”
Golkar, who grew up exposed to regime messaging, said the fixation on Epstein reflects a broader ideological goal: convincing Iranians that the West is a place of moral decay.
“From the beginning, one of the pillars of the Islamic Republic’s ideology was anti-Westernism and portraying the West as a corrupt place,” he said. “There is no respect for families or values … no limitation for sexual interaction. I remember the phrase ‘living like pigs’ — that they are living together like animals. That was a big concept.”
Golkar says the Epstein files released by the U.S. Department of Justice earlier this year have been a “gift” to the regime, offering a concrete example of the Western immorality it hopes to present to its people. When Iranians express a desire for a “normal life” without Sharia law or morality police, the regime invokes Epstein.
“They say, ‘You don’t want a normal life — you want a corrupted life…. These people don’t care about your freedom. They are a group of pedophiles.’” This, despite the fact that girls can be legally married in Iran at the age of 13, and even younger with the approval of a male guardian and judge.
The Baal game
One of the most prominent features of pro-regime rallies in Iran is the burning of Baal statues. The figure of Baal — meaning “lord” in ancient Semitic languages — is referenced in the Old Testament as a rival to the God of the Israelites. Historically, Baal was a fertility deity associated with rain and agricultural prosperity. Later interpretations and conspiracy theorists came to portray the worship of Baal as tied to sexual deviance and child sacrifice.
A popular online conspiracy theory ties Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirators to Baal, pointing to a viral document from the Epstein files that appears to show bank transfer details with the name “Baal.name” listed where a financial institution would typically appear. They interpret this as evidence that Epstein maintained an account connected to the deity, suggesting he may have worshiped Baal or been involved in ritual abuse. Popular right-wing influencer Candace Owens weighed in with a video titled, “BAAL SO HARD: The Epstein Files,” where she referred to Jews as “pagan gypsies.” It has almost 3 million views.
Fact-checkers have disputed the interpretation of the bank document, noting that “Baal.name” is likely a misreading or formatting artifact of “Bank Name,” and that the actual account name — Clearlake Centre, LLC — is clearly identified elsewhere in the record.
On numerous occasions, the Iranian regime has staged the burning of Baal statues in major cities during pro-regime rallies, sometimes even coordinating multiple burnings across the country. Mehr News Agency, a state-owned Iranian news network, reported on one such rally in early February, writing: “Participants set fire to the symbolic Baal idol, describing the act as a representation of condemnation over crimes linked to Jeffrey Epstein’s island, where children were abused.”
These events are often accompanied by chants of “Death to America,” “Death to Israel,” or “God is Great.” In some cases, the statues have been marked with a painted Star of David.
The Baal figure has also appeared in many of the AI-generated videos circulating online amidst the war. In one, created by pro-regime media organization Explosive Media, Lego versions of a drunken Pete Hegseth and Trump are paired with a rap track: “We hitting the Baal-worshipping Epstein Island crew, the ones who hurt the kids. Revenge for every American soul you and Trump’s dirty crew oppressed and did. We taking payback for the girls you broke.”
Though Explosive Media claims it is not directly affiliated with the Iranian government, Golkar said he has seen evidence suggesting it operates as part of the IRGC’s media apparatus. The regime has also acknowledged granting tiered internet access to select individuals tasked with amplifying official messaging. In early March, government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani said full internet access had been given to those “who can carry the voice of the government further.” Explosive Media, which says it has 2.5 million followers across Iranian messaging platforms, has cited its status as a media organization to explain its continued access. This has prompted experts like Moustafa Ayad, a researcher with the Institute of Strategic Dialogue, to raise questions about how closely it is connected with the state.
Another video, played on Iranian state TV, depicts figures the regime frames as victims of the West — a Native American man, a Gazan child, an Epstein victim, and former Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a US strike in 2019 — gazing skyward as an Iranian missile strikes the Statue of Liberty. In this version, the statue is reimagined as Baal holding a Talmud. Upon impact, both sink into the Hudson River.
The Epstein fixation extends beyond rallies and social media. Golkar said Epstein is frequently referenced in official Basij (a plainclothes paramilitary volunteer militia in Iran) and IRGC materials, as well as in speeches by Iranian officials. Just two days before his assassination, Ali Larijani, Iran’s top security official, posted on X, “It has been reported that what remains of Epstein’s network is working to prepare a conspiracy aimed at fabricating an incident similar to the September 11 attacks, in preparation for accusing Iran of being behind it.”
In another post in response to U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Laranjani posted on X, “Mr. Hegseth! Our leaders have been, and still are, among the people. But your leaders? On Epstein’s island!”
The Epstein War?
These propaganda videos are largely made in English. With Iran still in a media blackout, the Iranian people may not be their intended audience.
Shaping global perception through media is a key part of the Iranian war strategy. In a meeting with a group of Iranian poets in 2024, Ayatollah Khamenei, who was assassinated on the first day of the war, stated, “All war is a media war. Whichever actor has greater media influence will achieve their goals.”
The IRGC has spent years building a media apparatus designed to do just that. IRGC-affiliated production studios, media-focused university programs, and cultural centers are dedicated to training and refining propaganda content. Iran also outsources some of its media production to countries more attuned to Western cultural cues, particularly Pakistan.
A key element of the regime’s narrative is the claim that the Trump administration initiated the war to distract from the Epstein files. This theory has also circulated on both the left and the right in the United States.
In Washington D.C., posters cover the streets referring to the War in Iran, formally titled Operation Epic Fury, as Operation Epstein Fury.
U.S. Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky posted on X shortly after the war began, garnering over 250 thousand likes, “Bombing a country on the other side of the globe won’t make the Epstein files go away, any more than the Dow going above 50,000 will.”
The popular podcaster Joe Rogan espoused the theory on a recent episode, stating, “Look, the Epstein files comes out — we go to war with Iran. It’s a good way to get people to stop talking about certain things.”
The post Iran’s regime is obsessed with Jeffrey Epstein appeared first on The Forward.