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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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‘Auschwitz’ is a hit Iranian protest anthem, part of a music genre rebelling against official antisemitism
Last month, well-known Iranian singer Mehdi Yarrahi released a song titled “Auschwitz,” about the regime’s brutal crackdown on protesters earlier this winter, which estimates suggest killed between 7,000 and 30,000 people over the course of a few days. The song quickly gained traction online, drawing around 10 million views on the singer’s Instagram account.
The choice of Auschwitz as a historical touchstone was not accidental: it is a direct answer to the Iranian regime’s persistent mockery and denial of the Holocaust, and a point of identification for Iranians who may see an echo of the atrocities committed by the Nazis in their own government’s brutality.
Yarrahi, who lives in Iran, released “Auschwitz” after reports emerged of thousands of Iranian protesters being gunned down in the streets for protesting the regime. The song compares their fate to that of people who endured the Nazi death camps. Its opening line declares: “I come from Auschwitz, of night transfers. I come from a killing field of youth.” The music video accompanying the song features footage of protestors being beaten by regime forces in the streets, as well as photographs of those who were killed.
Yarrahi knows the price one can pay for making anti-regime music. In March 2025, he received 74 lashes as a part of his sentencing for the release of his song “Rousarieto” (“Your Headscarf”), which criticized the regime’s requirement that women cover their hair and dress modestly.
The lyricist behind “Auschwitz,” Hossein Shanbehzadeh, has also faced the regime’s wrath. In 2024, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison after he commented with a single dot in response to a post on X from the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei — a reply that received more likes than Khamenei’s original post. Iranian authorities accused him of being an Israeli spy and of spreading anti-regime propaganda. While Shanbehzadeh languishes in prison, through Auschwitz’s lyrics, his words have now been heard by millions both inside and outside Iran.
The Holocaust metaphor in “Auschwitz” is especially subversive because it invokes a history the Iranian regime refuses to recognize — just as it refuses to acknowledge its own brutality. Many high-ranking members of the Iranian regime have publicly denied, minimized, or questioned the Holocaust, including former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed on the first day of the fighting on Feb. 28. The regime has also hosted state-sponsored cartoon competitions mocking the Holocaust— most recently in 2021 — and was the only country to reject a 2022 United Nations resolution condemning Holocaust denial.
By comparing the regime’s violence against protesters to Nazi brutality — atrocities that Iranian leaders do not acknowledge — Yarrahi’s song challenges both political repression and the antisemitic narratives promoted by the state that have made it a global pariah.
The soundtrack to the revolution
In Iran, where culture is steeped in poetry, protest music has become a central part of the anti-regime movement.
An Iranian activist who was arrested and jailed for his involvement in the protest movement told the Forward, “These songs push people forward. They give you the energy to keep going.” Now living in the United States, he said the music also connects diaspora Iranians to the movement back home. “When we get together with friends in the community, we play these songs,” he said. “We start talking, and the music is playing in the background.”
Music streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music are difficult to access in Iran because of payment sanctions and bans. While protest songs are censored on social media, many Iranians download music using VPNs through Telegram — an encrypted messaging app that has 45 million Iranian users despite being banned — as well as other websites. Many Iranian singers have their own Telegram channels where they share their music.
During the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom protests, the song “Baraye” (“For the Sake Of”) went viral and became an anthem for demonstrators mobilizing against the regime. It garnered 40 million views in its first two days of being released and later won a Grammy.
The singer Shervin Hajipour wrote the lyrics based on responses from Iranians on X to a simple question: “What are you protesting for?” One line references the regime’s “meaningless slogans” — “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.”
According to Thamar E. Gindin, a research fellow at Haifa University’s Ezri Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Research, music has been a meaningful part of the protest movement. “Baraye,” particularly, was sung “from balconies and windows when they didn’t want to go out to the streets and be killed. They sang it at the end of ceremonies.” She compared it to the way many Israelis and other Jews sing “Hatikvah,” as an expression of collective hope.
Polling suggests that Iranian public opinion diverges from official rhetoric.
One survey from last September found that 69% of Iranians believe their country should stop calling for the destruction of Israel. When respondents were asked about their views of foreign countries, the United States received the highest favorability rating, with 53% expressing a positive view. Israel ranked second. A 2014 survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League found that Iranians held the lowest levels of antisemitic attitudes in the Middle East and North Africa outside Israel, despite decades of state-sponsored antisemitic narratives.
Invoking Iran’s pluralistic past
For many Iranians, protest music has become a way to reclaim their national identity. While the regime defines itself through external struggle with Israel and the West, many protestors prefer to define Iran through its culture and history. One figure frequently invoked in protest discourse and music is Cyrus the Great.
King Cyrus, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire, created one of the largest empires of the ancient world. After conquering Babylon in 539 BCE, he issued a decree allowing exiled peoples — including Jews taken captive by the Babylonians — to return to their homelands. In the Bible, he is remembered for permitting Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple.
According to the activist, “Cyrus to Iranians is like the Founding Fathers to Americans,” adding: “Cyrus is a symbol of peace among nations, and also a person who respects human rights and your beliefs regardless of who you are.” He is viewed as particularly “important for what he did for the Jewish people” and other minorities, which, for many anti-regime Iranians, represents an Iran rooted in human rights.
London-based Iranian artist Amin Big A’s 2018 song “Be Name Iran” (“In the Name of Iran”) channels this sentiment. The song gained massive popularity, especially among the Iranian diaspora, during the 2022 protest movement in Iran and has since been widely shared on social media alongside videos of the current protests. The song opens with a tribute to Cyrus: “In the name of Cyrus, that King of Kings — the one who taught us to be good to our friends and companions.”
Iranians invoke Cyrus, he said, to remind themselves and the world of that history. They want to “signal to the world, especially to non-Iranians,” that “if you want to understand how Iranians think, you can look at our history.” For protestors, it is a way to demonstrate that “the current regime in Iran is not representative of Iranians.”
Another song, “Dictator,” released in January by Iranian artists Shaayn and Moonshid during the height of the protests, contrasts Iran’s current authoritarian system with the nation’s ancient past. “It’s basically saying: we had Cyrus, and Cyrus was not a dictator,” said the activist. “Our history is not all about dictators.” One line in the song reads, contrasting Cyrus with a Turkish conqueror: “One gives freedom to the people, another kills and oppresses…. One becomes like Cyrus the Great, another becomes like Timur.”
Over the years, several anti-regime protests have been held at Cyrus’ tomb in Iran. In response, the regime has restricted access to the site and deployed security forces to discourage protestors from gathering there.
According to Beni Sabti, an Iran expert from the Institute for National Security Studies, Cyrus’ pluralistic legacy makes him recognized as “the best King that Iranians had. It’s another reason to love Jews, or to re-love them,” he said, adding: “They don’t believe the state’s propaganda.”
The post ‘Auschwitz’ is a hit Iranian protest anthem, part of a music genre rebelling against official antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
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War with Iran puts the US-Israel alliance at grave risk
The Iran war is strategically sound yet politically unsupported — an unstable foundation for a gamble that could reshape the Middle East. That creates danger for Israel, which needs the support of an American public that is rapidly drifting away.
For decades, the country’s greatest strategic asset has not been its military technology or intelligence capabilities — spectacular as these are — but rather the political, diplomatic and military backing of the United States. That relationship has not been merely transactional. It was supposed to rest on shared values and deep public support across the American political spectrum.
If that support erodes or disappears, Israel’s strategic environment will fundamentally change. To be blunt: it will not be able to arm its military. This creates a paradox. A campaign that has so far demonstrated extraordinary value for the Jewish state also stands a risk of fundamentally weakening it.
An alliance at its strongest
The conflict has showcased the depth of the current U.S.–Israel alliance. To many observers, and critically to Israel’s enemies, the operation has underscored not only Israel’s capabilities but also the reality that it stands alongside the world’s most powerful state.
The strikes have projected deep into Iranian territory, revealed astonishing intelligence penetration, and destroyed or degraded key threats. Israel’s enemies across the region have already been weakened by previous rounds of fighting since Oct. 7, and the current operation has reinforced the impression that Israel can reach its adversaries wherever they operate.
Moreover, Iran’s regime has managed to isolate itself to the point where most Arab countries are in effect on the side of Israel and the U.S. That projection — of an unbreakable and strong alliance – may ultimately be the most important strategic element of this war.
But therein lies the rub.
The political foundations of American support for Israel are eroding, which means the very element that currently strengthens Israel’s deterrence — American participation — may also be the one most at risk.
A just war, unjustified
Americans do not understand why their country is at war.
A Reuters/Ipsos survey conducted at the start of the conflict found only 27% of Americans supported the U.S. action, while 43% opposed it. Other surveys show similar results, with roughly six in ten Americans against the military intervention.
In modern American history that is highly unusual. Most wars begin with a “rally around the flag” moment when public support surges. Even conflicts that later became controversial — from Afghanistan to Iraq — initially enjoyed majority backing.
This one did not — in part because the case for it has not been made clearly to the public.
That error is compounded by years of polarization in American politics; declining trust in institutions and leadership; and the record of President Donald Trump, who has spent years spreading conspiracy theories and demonstrating a remarkable indifference to factual truth. It is no exaggeration to say that many Americans do not believe a word he says – which is perhaps unprecedented.
When a president with that record launches a war, at least half the country assumes the worst. Even if the strategic logic is sound, the credibility deficit remains.
The tragedy is that the war is, in fact, eminently justifiable. The Islamic Republic has long since forfeited the moral legitimacy that normally shields states from outside force. It brutally suppresses its own population, jailing and killing protesters, policing women’s bodies, and crushing dissent with an apparatus of repression. Its foreign policy is not defensive but revolutionary. Through proxy militias it has destabilized Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, as well as the Palestinian areas, in some cases for decades.
The regime has pursued nuclear weapons through a series of transparent machinations, deceptions and brinkmanship. Negotiations have repeatedly been used as delaying tactics while enrichment continued. Any deal that relieved sanctions would not simply reduce tensions; it would also inject new resources into a system dedicated both to repression at home and aggression abroad — one that is despised by the vast majority of its own people, as murderous dictatorships inevitably will be.
There is a doctrine in international law known as the Responsibility to Protect — the principle that when a state systematically brutalizes its own population, the international community may have the right, even the obligation, to act. By that standard, the Iranian regime has been skating on thin ice for years.
But with this clear rationale left uncommunicated, the politically dangerous perception has spread that the U.S. was reacting to Israel rather than acting on its own strategic judgment.
A perilous future
If Americans come to believe that Israel caused a costly war that they did not support in the first place, the backlash could be severe.
For centuries, one of the most persistent antisemitic tropes has been the accusation that Jews manipulate powerful states into fighting wars on their behalf. The suggestion that Israel can pull the U.S. into conflict feeds directly into that mythology. Once such perceptions take hold, they can be extremely difficult to reverse.
Even people who reject antisemitism outright can absorb a softer version of the same idea: that American interests are being subordinated to Israeli ones. In a political environment already marked by growing skepticism toward Israel, that perception risks deepening the erosion of support that has been underway for years.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio seemed to inadvertently feed such notions by suggesting in recent days that the U.S. had to attack Iran because Israel was going to do so “anyway,” and then America would have been a target. It was a short path from that to conspiracy theorists like Tucker Carlson blaming Chabad for the war.
A future Democratic president, facing a base that appears to have abandoned Israel, may feel far less obligation to defend it diplomatically or militarily. Even a Republican successor could prove unreliable if the party continues its drift toward isolationism.
That likelihood is compounded by studies showing that a large part of the U.S. Jewish community itself no longer backs Zionism. That process is driven by Israel’s own policies, including the West Bank occupation and the deadly brutality of the war in Gaza.
So the very war that is showcasing the best the U.S.-Israel alliance has to offer is also at risk of fundamentally damaging that partnership. Particularly if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — the rightful object of much American ire — manipulates the Iran campaign into an electoral victory this year, the alliance’s greatest success could also be its undoing.
The post War with Iran puts the US-Israel alliance at grave risk appeared first on The Forward.
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Report: Iran’s New Military Plan Is Regime Survival Through Regional Escalation
Members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) attend an IRGC ground forces military drill in the Aras area, East Azerbaijan province, Iran, Oct. 17, 2022. Photo: IRGC/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
i24 News – After last year’s devastating conflict with the United States and Israel, Iranian leaders have reportedly adopted a major strategic shift aimed at expanding the war across the Middle East to secure the regime’s survival, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Previously, Iran responded to foreign strikes with limited, targeted reprisals. The new doctrine abandons that approach, aiming instead to escalate the conflict regionally, particularly against Gulf Arab states and critical economic infrastructure. The goal is to disrupt the global economy and pressure Washington into shortening the war.
This decision followed the twelve-day war with Israel in June 2025, during which Israeli and US strikes eliminated senior Iranian military leaders, destroyed key air defense systems, and severely damaged nuclear facilities. In response, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—before his elimination early in the current conflict—activated a strategy designed to maintain continuity even if top commanders were neutralized.
Central to this approach is the so-called “mosaic defense” doctrine: a decentralized military structure in which the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) operates through multiple regional command centers. Each center can conduct operations independently, allowing local commanders to continue fighting even if national leadership is incapacitated. This makes the military apparatus more resilient to targeted strikes.
Analysts cited by the Wall Street Journal suggest that Tehran’s calculation is to make the conflict costly enough for all parties to force the US and its allies into a diplomatic resolution.
However, the plan carries enormous risks. By escalating attacks on regional states and international economic interests, Iran could provoke a broader coalition against itself. Despite prior military losses, Iranian forces retain the capability to launch drone and missile strikes, maintaining their influence over the ongoing conflict.
For Iranian leaders, the immediate priority remains unchanged: the survival of the regime, even if it requires a major regional escalation.