How do you tell a story that everyone knows? Oren Rudavsky, in the opening scenes of his recently released documentary Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire, makes the wise decision to begin his film not through the known facts about Wiesel or the Holocaust, but through a more internal logic of art and dreams.

As Wiesel narrates a dream, we see Joel Orloff’s hand-painted animation of dark figures succumbing to a rising river of blood, leaving the dreamer alone to try to rescue his drowning father. Fingers grasp at bodies as they slip under.

“I don’t know what power aided me,” we hear Wiesel say. “All I know is that I managed to save him all by myself.” As anyone who has read Night knows, Wiesel’s father succumbed to dysentery in Buchenwald. That Elie could not save his father, his wife Marion tells us, was the abiding wound he always carried.

Dreams, in Freud’s view, are wish fulfillments. But this dream-act of (temporary) reanimation also expresses Wiesel’s conviction that the dead are not entirely gone if they are remembered. That may be the redemptive vision that drives Rudavsky, as well. The implicit hope that the dead may be saved opens the film and breaks into full voice at its ending, with Wiesel beautifully singing the messianic anthem “Ani Ma’amin” from the stage of the 92nd Street Y.

As he sings, his face gives way to a lush, grassy landscape rushing by as if we’re passengers on a train, while his voice fades into a choral arrangement. In moving past Wiesel’s face and voice, the film embodies and fulfills Wiesel’s belief that the Jewish story will continue, on PBS as in his family line.

For all its focus on European catastrophe and Jewish longings, the documentary casts Elie Wiesel as an “American Master,” the title of the larger PBS series. Wiesel is an American phenomenon, read in classrooms around the country and, for a time, in the White House. Full disclosure: I appear briefly in the film, discussing the reception of Wiesel’s work and the difference between the Yiddish title of his best-known work, Un di velt hot geshvign (And the world kept silent) and the French/English title of its translation, La Nuit (Night).

One of the film’s extended sequences captures a moment that saw Wiesel at the center of American politics and the global stage, when he passionately implored President Reagan to cancel a planned visit to the German military cemetery in Bitburg, once it had become known that Waffen-SS soldiers were buried there. “That place is not your place,” Wiesel says on national TV, with Reagan looking on. “Your place is with the victims of the SS.”

Details less engraved on collective memory emerge from Rudavsky’s film: the shared friendship both men describe, the attempts behind the scenes to ameliorate the clash, Wiesel’s insistence that he was making no claims about German collective guilt. “Only the killers were guilty,” he said.

This episode establishes Wiesel’s courage and role as a preeminent moral voice of his time. Less clear is the trajectory from the solitary writer in postwar Paris to the man who came to represent the Holocaust experience, when his novel/memoir Night became required reading.

One of the brilliant 13-year-old students who discuss the novel in their Newark classroom suggests such an analysis, in distinguishing between the Eliezer of the story and Elie Wiesel, its famous author. In America and elsewhere, Wiesel became so closely associated with Holocaust memory that the Eliezer/Elie distinction, or alternatives to his distinctive voice, are hardly imaginable.

Not one but two stories drive Rudavsky’s documentary: one of unimaginable catastrophe and loss; and another of privilege and success — both Wiesel’s own stature and the broader rise of the American Jewish community in which this story is embedded. How these two narratives are related is a tale that remains to be told.

And yet, alternatives to Wiesel’s powerful voice are heard in the film. Remarkably enough, they emerge from Wiesel’s own family. Marion Wiesel, who married the war-haunted bachelor when he was 40, recounts that her husband had insisted “from the beginning that he didn’t want children.” And then she adds: “I convinced him.”

Photographs of her during those years as a bride and new mother radiate, and we see the hint of a smile on her husband’s mournful visage. As an old woman, she commands attention. Against the widespread veneration of  Wiesel’s pronouncements, she shows herself at least occasionally unpersuaded. Describing Wiesel’s growing religiosity, she comments drily, “I was the pagan in the family.” Served a latke at a family Hanukkah celebration that could easily be played for sentimentality (“the Jewish people live!”), she sniffs: “Doesn’t look like a latke.”

Marion Wiesel’s acerbic tone is particularly welcome as commentary on a topic of increasingly pressing concern. Elie Wiesel, in his Nobel Peace Prize lecture, asserts that he is sensitive to the plight of the Palestinians, “but whose methods I deplore when they lead to violence.” Marion comments: “He didn’t want to criticize Israel under any circumstance. He didn’t want to criticize the occupation. He didn’t want to criticize the settlers. He may not have agreed with them, but he didn’t want to criticize them. Ever.”

In contrast with the moral clarity of his words about Bitburg, what the film presents us with on this issue is a muddle, and if I am reading Marion right, a bit of a family dispute. In this way, the Wiesel family was no different from so many others.

So, too, does Rudavsky complicate Wiesel’s devotion to Jewish survival in focusing on the discomfort of Elisha Wiesel, the couple’s only son, in the role of living symbol of Jewish continuity. Cuddled on Jimmy Carter’s lap, called to the stage at Oslo, Elisha remembers chafing at being “just an appendage” to his famous father.

And yet, as the film ends, he, too, has embraced Judaism anew, laying tefillin on camera. Elisha’s son, Elijah, also takes up the imperative and burden of Holocaust memory, traveling to Sighet to visit his grandfather’s childhood home, now turned into a museum.

In a stirring scene, the Hebrew letters on the gravestone of his namesake — his great-grandfather — appear with growing clarity, illuminated by the trick of scraping shaving cream off the inscription (not recommended by conservators) and the magic of documentary film.

And yet, Elijah Wiesel with the waist-long hair is not the Eliyahu Vizel of the gravestone, just as Eliezer Vizel of Sighet is not quite the same as Elie Wiesel of Oslo and Boston. “Jewish continuity” is a bridge we narrate over the shifting sands of loss and change. The present, past, and future connect for a fleeting moment, only to drift apart like a dream, a film.

 

The post Elie Wiesel as an American phenomenon and a family man appeared first on The Forward.

When Matt Lieb started Bad Hasbara, his comedy podcast about so-called Israeli and US propaganda, he had a specific audience in mind: himself.

“A Jewish anti-Zionist podcast that made jokes at the expense of the Israeli government was not something that, as far as I knew, existed,” said Lieb, 41, who in addition to podcasting is a comedian, writer and actor. “I wanted to listen to something like that.”

Lieb also wanted an outlet for his anguish over Israel’s conduct in Gaza after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks — not least because he felt the comedy industry at large had failed to meet the moment. “By December 2023,” he told me, “I realized the mainstream comedic sphere was going to be completely silent about this, and was going to move on to other subjects, because it was too politically charged.”

So Bad Hasbara, which has just released its 176th episode, began as an experiment to see if there were others like Lieb: those who regarded the Israeli and American governments as deceitful and propagandistic, and who, no less importantly, saw Israeli ‘Hasbara’ — loosely defined as the Israeli government’s myriad efforts to advertise its country — as funny and sinister.

As it turned out, there were plenty of adherents to Lieb’s worldview. (The podcast, whose full title is Bad Hasbara: The World’s Most Moral Podcast, first aired in late 2023, and has just surpassed 50,ooo YouTube subscribers.)

“What shocked me was the amount of people who related to the podcast, and who wanted to laugh at the same things I was laughing at.” Lieb said. “And the number one comment that we get from people, other than saying that they like the jokes, is ‘Thank you for keeping us sane.’”

One admirer was 50-year-old Daniel Maté, a Canadian-born, Brooklyn-based lyricist, composer and playwright for musical theater, whose plays included a reimagining of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, entitled The Trouble With Doug, and a sequel to Hansel & Gretl set in modern-day Chicago. Maté also had a fairly sizable social media following, and a disdain for Zionism that rivaled Lieb’s.

After a brief Instagram courtship (more on that later), Maté appeared as a guest on one of Bad Hasbara’s first episodes. Lieb enjoyed the experience so much that he invited Maté to co-host permanently. “People loved our vibe,” Maté told me. “We’re a rare pair, with our combination of experience, sensibility, and our places of overlap. Not to be too self-fluffing,” he added.

And though Bad Hasbara has certainly broadened its focus since Maté came aboard, at its heart it’s about the ways people interact with Zionism — a show about the rhetoric that has accompanied the Israel-Hamas war, rather than an analysis of the war itself.

Early adopters

The podcast’s popularity partly reflects the demand for anti-Zionist perspectives in the media and elsewhere after Oct. 7. It’s hardly the only podcast geared towards Israel’s critics: Medhi Hasan’s left-leaning news outlet Zeteo, for example, recently launched Beyond Israelism, an anti-Israel podcast hosted by If Not Now founder Simone Zimmerman.

Still, neither Lieb nor Maté is a recent convert to the cause. Lieb grew up in a secular, Jewish home in Los Angeles that saw Israel as “an absolute moral good,” but he began to have doubts about Zionism in the mid-2000s, when he was an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz. “The Marxists and Islamists indoctrinated me into self-hatred,” he joked.

His embrace of anti-Zionism was sealed on his college Birthright trip, he told me, in part thanks to a guest appearance by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who spoke at an event for Lieb’s and several other Birthright groups.

“It was a very, very hard sell,” Lieb recalled. “And it felt unfair that as someone with, you know, Jewish ancestry, I was being told I had more of a right to this land than someone who was born there, and whose family was born there, who was ethnically cleansed.” (Lieb discussed his Birthright experience at length on Bad Hasbara’s inaugural episode.)

Maté’s opposition to Zionism, by contrast, was more of an inherited condition. His father, the well-known Canadian psychotherapist Dr. Gabor Maté, is a vocal critic of Israel, and in the mid-1980’s, when the younger Maté was coming of age, had become a “pariah in the Canadian Jewish community,” Maté said. He remembers his father being interviewed on Canadian radio, while on a medical trip to the West Bank, and hearing him say that he’d been crying every day since he had arrived because of what he’d seen in the hospitals.

The younger Maté took after his father, politically. Daniel went every summer to the left-leaning Habonim Dror Jewish summer camp, where he says he argued ferociously with his Israeli counselors, some of whom were just out of the army. “I never could get them to see the contradiction between liberalism and Zionism,” he said.

October 7 and beyond

On the evening of Oct. 8, 2023, Maté — who had not yet joined the podcast — went for a walk around his Brooklyn neighborhood. For about an hour, he went live on Instagram with a kind of stream-of-consciousness of despair and frustration, in which he urged his then-20,000 or so followers to properly contextualize the Hamas-led attacks of the previous day; to sympathize no less with Palestinian suffering than Israeli.

“I’d never done an Instagram Live before,” Maté said. “But I had a sense that I needed to un-crazy myself. And I was in a position to help people orient themselves, because I knew what was coming, right? A lot of lies. So I wanted to provide antioxidants.”

Lieb, for his part, had begun uploading sketch videos to Instagram after Oct. 7, in which he played what he saw as a representative liberal Zionist character: that is, someone increasingly unwilling to accept criticism of Israel post Oct. 7. Maté found the character amusing, and told Lieb as much over Instagram. “The videos would always start off with about 45 seconds of decent-sounding politics,” Maté said, “and then would devolve.” Eventually, they set a date for Maté to appear on Lieb’s new podcast. So were the seeds of Bad Hasbara planted.

Both Maté and Lieb agree that the podcast has been buoyed by the procession of news and people coming out of the Middle East. For its first six months, Maté was amazed they never ran out of characters to lampoon. “Hen Mazzig, Eylon Levy, Rabbi Shmuley: It was like the Wu-Tang Clan of propaganda,” he said.

But its blend of levity, righteous indignation and social media fluency has helped Bad Hasbara stand out in an increasingly crowded left-wing media ecosystem. Episodes can be blunt, funny and sarcastic, often quite crude and sometimes willfully provocative. They’re called things like ‘The Greatest Shoahman’ — an episode about Nick Fuentes’ Holocaust denial, naturally — or, on Nov. 8 last year, after Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City, ‘The Zionist Freakout over Zohran’s win.’ Either host is liable to, in the same breath, give eloquent expression to some important, overlooked morsel of Palestinian history, and then refer to Birthright as an “11-day handjob.”

“I think the combination of moral earnestness and complete lack of decorum is compelling,” said Maté.

And despite its mostly easygoing vibe, they’ve thought carefully about the podcast’s message. “We’ve worked really hard to diversify our guests,” said Maté. “Not for the sake of diversity, but for the sake of completion and for the sake of insight.” The only through line, then, between the academics and musicians and actors and politicians and comics who’ve been guests on the show — Rashid Khalidi, Debra Winger, Peter Beinart, Miko Peled, to name just a few — is that “they all see what’s happening as an unjustifiable moral abomination, and they’re willing, with us, to take apart all of the various ways that it gets justified,” said Maté.

This specific entry requirement means the podcast has hosted some not-uncontroversial guests. Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters, who has frequently compared Israel to Nazi Germany, and in Nov. 2023 suggested the Oct. 7 attacks could have been a “false flag operation”, talked to Lieb and Maté in Feb. 2025. Three months later, so did Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian poet, writer and activist whom several mainstream Jewish groups have accused of demonizing Zionism and Jewish Israelis. (El-Kurd is a regular on the college campus circuit; in March 2025, more than 200 Harvard College affiliates and alumni published an open letter arguing that El-Kurd’s appearance at Harvard violated the university’s policies against antisemitism.)

Yet Maté doubts the podcast has reached those who might find such conversations troubling: more passionate defenders of Israel, say, or anyone especially worried that the line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism can sometimes be blurry. “I don’t know how many Zionists listen to our show long enough to stay pissed off,” he said. “It tends to have a certain kind of repellent to it.” It’s also not entirely clear who Maté means by “Zionists.” When asked, he defined Zionism, a little enigmatically, as “the refusal to heal Jewish trauma.”

Much clearer is the podcast’s particular irritation with the idea that Zionism is compatible with liberal values. After all, it’s the doctrine each was raised on, Lieb at home and Maté in his Jewish community more broadly. So if Bad Hasbara has an overarching aim, beyond ridiculing government officials, it’s probably to emphasize what they see as the impossibility of left-wing Zionism. “You can’t be a liberal and Zionist forever,” Maté told me. “You’re fighting yourself.”

The post These two anti-Zionist Jews think the Israeli government is so bad, it’s funny appeared first on The Forward.

Earlier this month, Bret Stephens delivered the “State of World Jewry” address. At the risk of oversimplifying his speech, Stephens’ message was a somber pivot: the millions of dollars spent fighting antisemitism are largely wasted. We cannot “cure” the world of this hatred. Instead, we should spend those resources strengthening Jewish identity — funding Jewish day schools, summer camps, and building a fortress of internal resilience.

On Sunday, Robert Kraft’s Foundation to Combat Antisemitism continued their diametrically opposite approach. During the Super Bowl, they ran an ad featuring a Black student showing allyship to a Jewish student who is being bullied. The message is optimistic: Education, awareness, and cross-cultural empathy can win the day.

One strategy is retreat and fortify; the other is reach out and persuade.

I believe both are destined to fail.

Stephens is right that we cannot logic our way out of hate, but his solution surrenders the public square. Kraft is noble in his pursuit of allyship, but his solution relies on empathy that simply may not exist in large enough quantities.

There is a third path. It does not rely on Jewish introspection, nor does it beg for non-Jewish affection. It relies on universal enforcement.

The Failure of “Particularism”

 

If you poll Americans on how they feel about “antisemitism” (or its modern fraternal twin, “anti-Zionism,” which is a label that now mostly serves as a cover for Jew-hatred), the results are messy. Resistance to these specific bigotries is not universal; it is partisan, generational, and fraught with “context.”

However, if you poll Americans on the universal moral taboos — overt bigotry, dehumanization, and the endorsement of violence — the consensus is overwhelming. Even in our divided era, I am certain that more than 90% of the country agrees that persecuting a racial or religious group or celebrating violence is socially unacceptable.

This is the strategic flaw in both the Stephens and Kraft approaches: They treat antisemitism as a unique problem requiring a unique solution.

But we don’t need a “Jewish” solution. We need a universal solution, and fortunately one already exists.

The most effective way to protect the Jewish community is to stop asking society to protect Jews specifically, and start demanding society protect civilization generally and all of its people equally.

We must broaden the fight. We recruit the entire country not to defend Jews against Jew-hatred, but to defend the core American value that all overt hatred is an inadmissible taboo.

When we make the standard universal, we strip away the “exceptions.” If society agrees that “dehumanization is a firing offense,” then a person dehumanizing a Zionist must be fired the same as if they dehumanized Black or gay Americans — not because the employer loves Zionists or Black or LGBT people, but because the employer fears tolerating and normalizing these taboos of hate regardless of the group being targeted.

To do this, we must re-acquaint the mainstream with the concept of moral taboos.

As Jonathan Haidt explored in The Righteous Mind, true moral taboos are not intellectual; they are visceral. We don’t debate whether incest is wrong; we recoil from it. We need to restore that same visceral recoil to bigotry and the endorsement of violence, which largely exists, but then we must re-familiarize society with the mechanism for enforcing taboos: social consequences.

Stephens gives up on the outer world. Kraft tries to persuade it with carrots. The Third Path uses the stick of social ostracism. Social consequences are society’s immune response. When the immune system is working, a “Rejoicer” who cheers for violence is expelled from the body politic — not by law, but by consensus.

 

The Binary Choice

 

While restoring these taboos sounds like a generational challenge, the alternative makes the choice obvious.

We are either going to restore these universal guardrails — punishing those who egregiously violate them, just as we did to the KKK — or we will allow hate to be normalized until it spills over into political violence that no amount of Jewish Day Schools or Super Bowl ads can stop.

We don’t need to beg the world for its affection, nor should we retreat into a fortress. We need to remind the world that the taboos which protect us are the same ones that hold civilization together. If we lead the fight to restore those universal standards, we won’t just be securing a future for the Jews — we’ll be saving the country from itself.

Erez Levin is an advertising technologist trying to effect big pro-social changes in that industry and the world at large, currently focused on restoring society’s essential moral taboos against overt hatred. He writes on this topic at elevin11.substack.com.