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After Minneapolis, a Youtuber comes for Jewish ‘welfare queens’
Overt antisemitism among online influencers — the folks who often make a very comfortable living from podcasting, live streaming and clip farming — has started to break into the real world.
A notable recent example comes via Tyler Oliveira, a YouTuber who rose to fame with stunts like trying to absorb a swimming pool’s worth of water with paper towels before pivoting to “documentaries” that often purport to expose conservative bugaboos — and who has filmed two recent videos focused on Jews.
Or, as Oliveira put it to his nearly 9 million Youtube subscribers, “the New York town invaded by welfare-addicted Jews” and “New Jersey’s Jewish invasion.”
The two videos — about Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic enclave in New York, and Lakewood, a heavily Orthodox town in New Jersey — fit a mold gaining increasing traction in the second Trump era.
Harmeet Dhillon, civil rights director for the Department of Justice, has said she finds cases to prosecute by scrolling social media. The massive Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation in Minneapolis was prompted in part by a 23-year-old vlogger who made a video claiming to expose social services funding fraud by Somali residents of the city, and an immigrant arrest operation in Manhattan followed an influencer’s demand for a crackdown.
Oliveira tried to get in on the Minnesota action, posting “Inside Minneapolis’ Somali invasion” in December. But he has struck more novel territory with his recent content about the Orthodox Jewish enclaves in the greater New York City region.
The videos themselves total around two hours of footage and are a strange mix of man-on-the-street interviews with Jews and others who he insists on calling “goyim” in the towns he visits, along with more formal interviews with local activists and Oliveira’s own narration.
Oliveira repeatedly seeks to connect what are fundamentally local disputes over land use and the changing face of these suburban towns into something far more sinister, editing in ominous music behind basically stories about a concrete yard turned into a kosher grocery.
“How do you combat a group of people chosen by God, practicing rampant ethno-nationalism,” he asked Mike Caldarise, an independent journalist from a town near Lakewood. Caldarise primarily seemed concerned with the more obscure goal of reforming the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act to prevent synagogues without parking from being built in residential neighborhoods.
“You think moving capital and charging interest is something more valuable than what I do or what?” Oliveira asks a random Jewish man in Lakewood who had questioned his profession as a Youtuber.
Oliveira couldn’t seem to decide if the point of his videos was to make a point about welfare — he vacillates between claiming Orthodox Jews are engaged in fraud and acknowledging they legitimately qualify for programs like Medicaid and food stamps that he doesn’t think taxes should pay for, at least when it comes to large Jewish families — or to hold up the Jewish communities in Kiryas Joel and Lakewood as models for white Americans.
“When you live the same, you look the same, you pray the same, you can do cool shit like that,” he says after visiting volunteer emergency service teams in Kiryas Joel. “We got to do this for ourselves.”
At several points he complains of a double standard that allows Jews to live together but supposedly prevents white people from doing the same, posting screenshots of the Forward’s coverage of a white supremacist settlement in Arkansas that forbids Jews. “Why is it OK for Jewish people to live together in a homogenous Jew-only community but it’s illegal when white people try to build their own?” Oliveira asked.
But coherence doesn’t really matter here. Oliveira isn’t doing investigative journalism. And, although his politics clearly match the manosphere’s politics of white grievance, he’s not much of a pundit. His videos on various minority “invasions” and interspersed with ones about Scientology and scammers targeting European tourists. (The title of one promises a “fart spray gun 🔫 + 2 bodyguards.”)
What matters is that these videos help Oliveira confirm whatever stereotypes his viewers already have about Jews. When a man in Lakewood leaned on his horn, Oliveira commented “that honk was promised to him 3,000 years ago,” referencing a popular antisemitic meme that suggests Jewish attachment to Israel is the result of a broader sense of entitlement.
The notion that Jews are a people apart — and should be treated as such — has exploded since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack in Israel and resulting political turmoil in the U.S. Some of it has a clear connection to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but much of it is nothing more than the regurgitation of longstanding antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish control.
“The Great Noticing continues,” reads one of the top comments on Oliveira’s Lakewood video and similar “noticing” references are studded throughout the replies. It’s a coded antisemitic term, labeling the act of identifying the supposedly nefarious Jewish influence over society. The Blue Square Alliance found use of the meme increased more than 2,000% last year.
Orthodox towns like those Oliveira highlighted an easy target for this kind of “noticing” because, if one doesn’t think too hard about it, they appear to confirm various antisemitic stereotypes: they can be insular communities whose leaders often leverage political influence to advance what they perceive to be Jewish interests.
That’s very close to the classic claim that Jews are pulling the strings in society.
But the connection between the reality of towns like Kiryas Joel and broader antisemitic conspiracy theories fall apart upon even cursory inspection. Oliveira seems to suggest that the Jews of Kiryas Joel are somehow gaming the welfare system to fund their lifestyles, while simultaneously acknowledging the high poverty rates in the town that qualify residents for programs like Medicaid. Repeatedly, he implies that Jews should not have children if they need help affording them, as though the birth rates themselves are part of a fraudulent scheme.
And the disputes he covers in Lakewood revolve around where Jews should be allowed to build synagogues and the allocation of school district resources. Those are serious issues for local residents and have received lots of normal media coverage. But convincing the local municipality to install a new traffic light outside an informal synagogue, which Oliveira points to as an example of outsize Jewish influence, would be a pretty bush league priority for any kind of all-powerful cabal.
A flimsy premise also undergirded a much shorter video released this week by Essa Ejelat and Erik Warsaw, two online influencers who use concern for Palestinian rights as a thin veneer for antisemitism. The six-minute short shows the pair walking and driving through an affluent part of Riverdale in the Bronx while Essa talks about how feminine “Zionists” are and Warsaw does a dance meant to represent a scheming Jew. The point of the video is that somehow Rep. Ritchie Torres, a strong supporter of Israel, is responsible for the wealth disparity between Riverdale and poorer parts of the borough.
The claim is so thoroughly absurd — and frankly rather unclear — that it’s hard to fact check, though it’s worth noting that despite Ejelat repeatedly calling it a “Zionist neighborhood” Riverdale is only 20% Jewish.
These kinds of details rarely matter to antisemites, who alternate between accusing Jews of orchestrating capitalism and communism and of simultaneously belonging in Israel (“Why don’t you move back to Israel?” Oliveira asks a man in Lakewood) and needing to vacate the region.
The danger, though, is real.
Racist online content is making its way into the real world. Federal agencies are sharing white supremacist memes on social media at the same time that immigration agents have been documented arresting American citizens based on foreign accents.
Oliveira seems to be pushing to extend the same kind of racist dragnet that spurred the federal crackdown in Minneapolis to capture Jewish communities, even if he recognizes this approach may not catch on for the time being.
“If Americans are upset about Somalis in Minneapolis not assimilating and living according to ‘Sharia law’ while sucking the teat of welfare programs,” he wrote on X while promoting the Kiryas Joel video, “then what’s the excuse for this religious ethno-state feeding their massive families with your secular tax-dollars?”
The post After Minneapolis, a Youtuber comes for Jewish ‘welfare queens’ appeared first on The Forward.
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At Trump’s Christian revival on the National Mall, one rabbi made a Jewish case for America
On the National Mall Sunday, Christian worship music boomed from giant speakers as “Adonai” and other names of God flashed across jumbo screens behind a praise band. Pastors invoked America’s biblical destiny. Sadie Robertson, the Christian social media personality and granddaughter of Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson, preached from both the Old and New Testaments.
And then Rabbi Meir Soloveichik — the lone Jewish speaker at the planned nine-hour “Rededicate 250” rally called by President Donald Trump, billed as a national “jubilee of prayer, praise and thanksgiving” — stepped to the podium and began talking about Irving Berlin.
Soloveichik, 48, a scion of one of modern Orthodoxy’s most revered rabbinic families and a member of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, used his remarks to offer a Jewish case for American exceptionalism, a contrast to the explicitly Christian vision of the nation’s founding that defined the day.
Recalling how Berlin wrote “God Bless America” as fascism spread across Europe and antisemitism consumed the continent, Soloveichik described the song as both a patriotic anthem and a prayer of gratitude from a Jewish immigrant who found refuge in the United States. The hymn, he said, represented “a plaintive prayer to God that America continue to be blessed.”
The four-minute speech fit squarely within Soloveichik’s broader worldview. A senior scholar at the conservative Tikvah Fund and rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in Manhattan, the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States, he has long argued that America’s civic ideals are aligned with traditional Judaism and biblical morality. His 2024 book, Providence and Power: Ten Portraits in Jewish Statesmanship, examines Jewish political leadership through the lens of faith and moral responsibility.
For Soloveichik, the connection between Judaism and American identity culminated in the Second World War. He noted that “God Bless America” was first broadcast publicly the day after Kristallnacht, when Nazis destroyed Jewish homes and synagogues across Germany. “At the very moment when darkness deepened,” Soloveichik said, “America raised its voice united in the song that Irving Berlin wrote.”
He added that “in the years that followed 1938, the prayer that is ‘God Bless America’ was carried by American soldiers who defeated evil, liberating Europe and the world.”
Then came the line that drew some of the loudest applause of his remarks: “It is a reminder, as hatred of Jews makes itself manifest again, that antisemitism is utterly un-American.”
Separation of church and state
The moment captured the complicated role Jews increasingly occupy within the Trump-era religious right: embraced as part of America’s Judeo-Christian heritage, even as critics warn that the broader movement surrounding events like Rededicate 250 blurs the line between religious pluralism and Christian nationalism.
Rachel Laser, the Jewish CEO of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, denounced the rally before the event. “If President Trump and his allies truly cared about America’s legacy of religious freedom, they would be celebrating church-state separation as the unique American invention that has allowed religious diversity to flourish in our country,” she said in a statement. “Instead, they continue to threaten this foundational principle by advancing a Christian Nationalist crusade to impose one narrow version of Christianity on all Americans.”
Sunday’s event — part revival meeting, part patriotic pageant — was the centerpiece of the Trump administration’s religious programming tied to this year’s 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and House Speaker Mike Johnson were slated to appear alongside evangelical pastors, worship leaders and conservative Christian influencers. President Trump and Vice President JD Vance were scheduled to address the crowd by video, while Trump himself spent the weekend golfing after returning from an overseas trip to China.
“This is a recognition of the deeply embedded history and religious and moral tradition of the country,” Johnson said Sunday on Fox News, dismissing criticism that the rally blurred the separation of church and state. Those objecting to the event, he added, “want to erase the history of America.”
No Muslim speakers appeared on the lineup. Organizers promoted Trump’s declaration of a national “Shabbat 250” observance the day prior as evidence of interfaith inclusion.
One of the Sunday event’s chief promoters, Trump spiritual adviser Pastor Paula White-Cain, had reassured supporters beforehand that the gathering would celebrate America’s Christian foundations without “praying to all these different Gods.”
Soloveichik did not address those tensions. Instead, he closed by returning to the image of America as a nation uniquely capable, in his telling, of transforming a Jewish refugee into the composer of one of the country’s most enduring patriotic hymns.
“To sing this song,” he said, “is to be reminded that America’s story is unique.”
“GOD BLESS AMERICA IS NOT JUST A SONG. IT’S A PRAYER.” 🇺🇸🙏
Rabbi Meir Soloveichik delivers a powerful reminder that America’s love of liberty has always been tied to faith — tracing its story and why anti-Semitism is fundamentally un-American. pic.twitter.com/aKMg42nS2I
— Real America’s Voice (RAV) (@RealAmVoice) May 17, 2026
The post At Trump’s Christian revival on the National Mall, one rabbi made a Jewish case for America appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel to Establish Defense Offices in Former UNRWA Compound
A man handles fallen cables at the Jerusalem headquarters of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) as the headquarters is dismantled by Israeli forces, in East Jerusalem, January 20, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad/File Photo
Israel’s cabinet on Sunday approved a plan to build a defense compound on the site of the recently demolished premises of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in East Jerusalem.
Israel in January demolished structures inside the UN Palestinian refugee agency’s East Jerusalem compound after seizing the site last year, in an act condemned by the agency as a violation of international law.
In a joint statement, the Defense Ministry and Jerusalem Municipality said the new compound would include the establishment of a military museum, a recruitment office and a defense minister’s office.
Defense Minister Israel Katz called the decision one of “sovereignty, Zionism, and security.”
UNRWA, which Israeli authorities accuse of bias, had not used the building since the start of last year after Israel ordered it to vacate all its premises and cease its operations.
A UNRWA spokesperson declined to comment on the Israeli plan.
The agency operates in East Jerusalem, which the U.N. and most countries consider territory occupied by Israel as it was captured from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war. Israel considers all Jerusalem to be its indivisible capital.
UNRWA also operates in Gaza, the West Bank and elsewhere in the Middle East, providing schooling, healthcare, social services and shelter to millions of Palestinians.
“There is nothing more symbolic or justified than establishing the new IDF recruitment office and defense establishment institutions precisely on the ruins of the former UNRWA compound — an organization whose employees took part in the massacres, murders, and atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists on October 7,” Katz said.
Israel has alleged that some UNRWA staff were members of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and took part in the attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, that killed about 1,200 Israelis and led to Israel’s war against Hamas.
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Palestinian Leader’s Son Wins Role in Abbas’ Party, Official Says
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, accompanied by his son Yasser, leaves a hospital in Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, May 28, 2018. REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman
The millionaire businessman son of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has won a steering role in his father’s political party Fatah, a party official said on Sunday, as a succession fight looms for control of the embattled Palestinian Authority (PA).
Yasser Abbas won a seat in elections for the Fatah Central Committee, the party’s highest decision-making body, at its first general conference in almost a decade. Mahmoud Abbas, 90, will remain chairman, it decided.
The PA was set up as an interim administration under the 1990s Oslo accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, an umbrella group still internationally recognized as the representative of the Palestinian people. The powerful Fatah party dominates both the PA and the PLO.
Abbas’ son’s foray into politics has fueled speculation that the president may be seeking to position Yasser, 64, to succeed him as head of Fatah.
That has drawn criticism from some Fatah officials, who say Yasser would be unable to unify Palestinians or help them chart a new political future after years without national elections or tangible steps toward statehood.
In the more than two decades since Mahmoud Abbas was elected to succeed Fatah founder Yasser Arafat, Palestinians have come to view the PA as ineffective and corrupt, something denied by Abbas, who has ruled by decree since his mandate expired in 2009.
In 2007, Abbas’ Fatah forces in the Gaza Strip were overpowered by Hamas militants who seized control of the enclave, a year after Hamas swept the Palestinian parliamentary elections.
Peace talks with Israel meant to lead to the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem collapsed in 2014, with expanding Israeli settlements since carving up areas slated for Palestinian statehood. The PA is also grappling with a financial crisis.
Yasser Abbas, who has never held an official role within Fatah or the PA, runs tobacco and contracting firms in the parts of the West Bank where the PA exercises limited self rule. Critics have long alleged that he and his brother Tarek have used public funds to help their businesses, allegations both men reject.
Among others to have won seats on the Central Committee are Majed Faraj, head of the General Intelligence Agency, and former militant group leader Zakaria Zubeidi, released in a Hamas-Israel prisoner-hostage exchange as part of a 2025 Gaza ceasefire.