Uncategorized
As Iran’s Jews prepare for Purim, their government calls its story proof of a past genocide
At the center of Hamadan, Iran, one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world, stands the holiest site for Jews in Iran: a small brick mausoleum traditionally believed to hold the tombs of Esther and Mordechai.
For at least the past 15 years, the tomb has become a flashpoint for protest reacting to Iranian regime–propagated narratives that frame the Book of Esther not as a tale of Jewish survival, but as a genocide of 75,000 Iranians perpetrated by the Jews. Each year on Purim, protesters gather outside the mausoleum. At times, they have thrown Molotov cocktails at the building or burned Israeli flags.
Iranian Jewish leaders have responded with carefully worded appeals to the Interior Ministry, emphasizing their loyalty to the state and asking that protests not be held at the sacred site. And even as the possibility of a U.S.-led attack looms, Iranian Jews are preparing to celebrate Purim with discreet customs reflective of the culture at large — though with dispensation to consume alcohol at home.
Jews in Iran celebrate Purim “with a very low profile” because of “all this antisemitic propaganda,” says Thamar E. Gindin, author of The Book of Esther Unmasked and a research fellow at Haifa University’s Ezri Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Research.
Loyalty as survival
Before the Islamic Revolution, approximately 100,000 Jews lived in Iran and enjoyed significant religious freedom under the Shah, who maintained ties with the United States and Israel. Some Jews fleeing hostile conditions in Arab countries even sought refuge in Iran.
After 1979, however, Sharia law was imposed, political instability grew, and life for religious minorities changed dramatically. Several members of the Jewish community were imprisoned on false accusations of being Zionist spies. A mass exodus of Jewish Iranians followed, with many fleeing to the United States or Israel.
Today, approximately 9,000 to 10,000 Jews remain in Iran — the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside Israel. While they are allowed to practice their religion freely, they face significant discrimination. Jews are barred from holding senior government positions, with a single parliamentary seat reserved for a Jewish representative who, according to Beni Sabti, an Iran expert at the Institute for National Security Studies, is a “puppet.”
“He praises the regime all the time, and he calls Israel ‘the Zionist entity’ and says it must be erased,” said Sabti, invoking the label commonly used by the state’s military opponents. Jews also face legal inequalities, including the diminished weight of their testimony compared to that of Muslims.
Accusations of Zionist espionage remain common and can carry dire consequences. While this has been the case since 1979, the situation worsened for Jews following the Twelve-Day War in June of 2025. Since the war, over 30 Jewish Iranians have been taken prisoner on accusations that they collaborated with the Mossad or Israel.
In an effort to protect community members, Jewish Iranians go to great lengths to demonstrate allegiance to the regime and distance themselves from Israel.
In January, Jewish community leader, Rabbi Younes Hamami Lalehzar participated in a memorial service for Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qassem Soleimani, who was killed by the U.S. in a 2020 drone strike. Lalehzar publicly praised Soleimani, who was a key architect in developing Iran’s terror network across the Middle East, and attended the event alongside Hezbollah and Hamas representatives.
According to Sabti, amid a recent wave of protests, the Jewish community has made a concerted effort to remain invisible. “They didn’t come out from their houses,” he said. If they do, it is just “to buy very basic products.” He said the community learned a painful lesson during the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom protests in Iran, which coincided with Jewish high holidays. During that time, “The Jews just went for synagogue. But when you go with your family or five, six guys together, it looks like a protest, and they were just arrested.”
During this latest round of unrest, the Iranian Jewish Community Association’s Telegram channel filled with carefully neutral messages announcing synagogue closures. “They said, ‘Don’t go to the synagogue.’ They don’t say why. But of course, all know why,” Sabti said — an effort, he explained, to avoid any gathering that could be misinterpreted as anti-regime activity. He added that pro-regime messages have also appeared in the channel.
At the same time, says Gindin, many in the Jewish community are being used as “propaganda hostages” by the regime amid ongoing protests and instability in the country. For example, Jewish community leaders recently participated in a pro-regime Iranian Revolutionary parade. “If they tell you to gather your people to protest against Israel, you don’t have the prerogative to say no when the lives of [thousands of] people are dependent on your collaboration with the regime.”
Despite these efforts, several members of the Jewish community have been arrested on suspicion of involvement in anti-regime protests. Senior community members have publicly denounced the demonstrations and denied any connection to them. Some have reportedly worked behind the scenes to secure the release of those they say were mistakenly accused.
Rewriting the Book of Esther
Each year, in the weeks before Purim, a familiar narrative begins circulating through regime-sponsored media, school lectures, television programs, and academic articles. “I saw it in a lot of blog posts when blogs were a thing. I see it in regime media. It’s really everywhere,” said Gindin.
The Book of Esther does not end gently. Its climactic scenes depict sanctioned violence against the enemies of the Jews. But it is widely considered not to be a verifiable historical account, and there is no independent Persian record of the events it describes.
According to Gindin, many prominent analysts, specifically well-known Iranian political commentator Ali Akbar Raaefi-Pour, push the idea that the narrative is that the story told in the Book of Esther is a false account of historical events. For them, the real historical story of Purim is that Mordechai manipulated the king into banishing Queen Vashti and installing Esther as part of a scheme. Haman sought to expel the Jews because they were oppressing others, but Esther and Mordechai ultimately secured royal approval for the Jews to kill 77,000 Iranians.
Some even link Purim to Sizdah Bedar, the Iranian spring picnic day, claiming that Persians commemorate the day Iranians fled their homes to escape a Jewish massacre by gathering outdoors.
A holy site turned political
Despite the efforts of Iranian Jews to demonstrate allegiance to the regime and hatred of Israel, the tomb of Esther and Mordechai has repeatedly become a stage for anti-Israel and anti-Jewish protests.
As early as 2011, demonstrators hung a banner on the fence reading “The Holocaust of 77,000 Iranians,” and burned Israeli flags. After the October 7 attacks in 2023, the mausoleum was again a magnet: protesters burned Israeli flags and waved Palestinian and Basij militia flags. During that time, calls circulated on Iranian social media to convert the tomb into a museum commemorating alleged Jewish crimes against Iranians.
In the years following, Jewish Iranians making pilgrimages to the site have been met with the sight of a Palestinian flag hanging from the entrance gate.
More recently, after an Israeli strike killed seven IRGC commanders in Damascus in 2024, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the site.
Meanwhile, attempts to push back on the official Purim story have led to arrests of even foreign visitors, according to Gindin, who recounted that several years ago, two American Jewish tourists were detained: “They wrote graffiti in Iran that said ‘Death to Haman.”
So long as renewed military strikes don’t shut the country down, the megillah will be read in synagogues on Purim in distinctively Iranian style, with limited booing for decorum purposes. Costumes will be omitted (a custom that reflects Iran’s modesty norms), and instead of mishloach manot, some will prepare halva. Despite Iran being officially alcohol-free, Jews will be permitted to drink inside their homes for religious purposes.
But they will also continue to play a careful game, showing loyalty to the state in an attempt to secure their own safety.
The post As Iran’s Jews prepare for Purim, their government calls its story proof of a past genocide appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
For many queer Jews, Pride has lost its joy
I noticed something during last year’s Pride that I could not stop thinking about afterward: silence.
Not total silence. Pride events still filled city streets in San Francisco, where I live. Rainbow flags still hung from windows. But many queer Jews I knew had become quieter in subtle, almost imperceptible ways. Some had stopped posting online. Some had withdrawn from political conversations altogether. Others no longer mentioned being Jewish in spaces where that identity had once felt unremarkable.
A few quietly disappeared from communities they had helped build. Invitations were declined. Group chats went unanswered. One friend told me they hesitated before wearing a Star of David necklace to Pride for the first time in years.
At first, I told myself I was imagining it. Then I began hearing the same thing in private conversations: people calculating whether it was safe to say certain things out loud. Wondering whether expressing ongoing grief over the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023 would cost them friendships, belonging or community. Deciding it was easier to remain silent than risk becoming a problem to manage.
I recognized that instinct, because I felt it too.
As a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in San Francisco who has facilitated support groups for queer Jews since Oct. 7, I’ve perceived a clear phenomenon: While for years, many queer Jews experienced queer spaces as a refuge, after Oct. 7, that sense of refuge became less certain.
The spaces where we built chosen family, recovered from shame, fell in love, and constructed identities used to be shaped by the belief that vulnerability should not have to be hidden in order to belong.
Now, in some of those spaces, it feels like certain forms of Jewish grief have become socially suspect.
In some spaces, expressing horror at the massacre of Israeli civilians has felt permissible only when immediately qualified or contextualized.
In conversations over the past year, I have repeatedly encountered the same pattern: queer Jews becoming more cautious and less certain about what they could safely say in response to pressure to express grief only in publicly acceptable ways.
Silence can be a form of self-protection. People grow quiet when they sense that emotional honesty may carry steep social costs inside communities they still want to belong to.
Some queer Jews no longer attend events they once loved. Others still attend, but carefully. They edit themselves in real time, measuring how much grief they can express before it becomes unintelligible to others.
None of this is unilaterally true about queer communities, which are not monoliths. And many LGBTQ people feel profound anguish over Palestinian suffering, as do many Jews.
But queer Jews are exhausted. The strain of constant self-translation; the effort of proving that mourning one people does not entail hatred of another; and the vigilance required to navigate belonging that feels increasingly conditional have taken their toll.
The loss of a place where you were supposed to exist without negotiation feels existential. And as each Pride passes, certain griefs intensify as they remain unspoken.
This Pride, I’m thinking less about who will show up than about who will remain quiet once they arrive.
What kinds of silence do communities require in exchange for belonging?
Joshua Simmons is a psychologist and psychoanalyst who serves on the American Psychological Association’s Collaborative of Jewish Psychologists.
The post For many queer Jews, Pride has lost its joy appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Thomas Massie calls for USS Liberty probe, elevating anti-Israel conspiracy theory to House floor
(JTA) — Republican Rep. Thomas Massie took to the House floor Monday to call for an investigation into Israel’s 1967 attack on an American spy ship, giving new prominence to a decades-old conspiracy theory that has become a touchstone for critics of Israel.
“It’s my great honor, maybe one of the biggest honors of my lifetime, to stand here on the floor and do something that’s 59 years overdue, to recognize the survivors and those who gave their lives on the USS Liberty,” Massie said. “Fifty-nine years ago today when they were viciously attacked by IDF jets and also after that by torpedo boats.”
The attack on the USS Liberty occurred on June 8, 1967, in the midst of Israel’s Six-Day War. The intelligence-gathering ship was stationed off the shore of the Sinai Peninsula during the conflict when it came under attack by Israeli forces, killing 34 crew members and injuring 171 more.
Israel later apologized for the attack, explaining it had mistaken the boat as Egyptian, and paid damages to the United States and the families of the victims. Multiple U.S. investigations, including by the CIA, have since determined that the attack was a mistake.
Still, the incident has become a rallying point for critics of Israel who claim the attack was deliberate and gained more adherents lately as anti-Israel sentiment has swelled. On Friday, Massie cited a host of U.S. military and intelligence officials he said had cast doubt on the outcomes of the U.S. investigations.
“None of these distinguished men think this was an accident,” Massie continued. “They think it was intentional murder by the country of Israel, either as a false flag operation or because they simply didn’t want anybody observing what they were doing that day.”
Massie, who will be departing Congress next year after losing his primary in Kentucky, used the anniversary of the incident to call for Congress to pass a resolution honoring the victims of the attack and for a new investigation into the circumstances surrounding it.
The USS Liberty Veterans Association praised Massie’s remarks in a post on X, writing that it was a story that “NO other member of Congress will even listen to.”
Massie is far from the only critic of Israel to use the attack as broader evidence of Israeli misconduct.
Last year, the far-right influencer Candace Owens interviewed a survivor of the attack and tweeted that there was “perhaps no story that can more enlighten you to the deceitful and despicable nature of the modern state of Israel — and its stranglehold on the American government.”
Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback has called for the attack to be taught in schools, and the antisemitic streamer Nick Fuentes has claimed that Israel initiated the attack to “conceal their troop movements.”
During his speech at Amfest in December, conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, who devoted part of his podcast last year to elevating the conspiracy theory that the attack was a false flag operation on the part of Israel, told attendees that asking “why a foreign government tried to sink one of our ships in 1967” does not “make you an antisemite.”
Oren Segal, the ADL’s vice president of counterextremism and intelligence, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that his organization had been concerned about the “normalization” of Carlson’s views, including his rhetoric on the USS Liberty attack.
“No one’s been a bigger boon to the USS Liberty conspiracy of late than Tucker Carlson,” Segal said.
Following Carlson’s remarks at Amfest, the annual conference of the right-wing group Turning Point USA’s, the ADL denounced conspiracy theories about the attack that it said had swirled for decades.
“Despite official findings that the attack was a tragic case of mistaken identity, these narratives continue to be amplified by actors seeking to inflame distrust and undermine U.S.-Israel relations,” the ADL said in a post on X.
At the conference, the Jewish pundit Ben Shapiro was also asked about the attack by an audience member, and responded that “the vast majority of people who bring this up are doing so to suggest that Israel deliberately attacked an American ship because Israel deliberately wants to harm America.”
Some of Massie’s fellow critics of Israel praised him for bringing up the incident on the floor of Congress on Monday.
“Thank you Thomas Massie for recognizing the heroic members of the USS Liberty, which was attacked by Israel, where 34 crew members were killed and 174 were wounded,” tweeted Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former member of Congress. “Why did our ‘greatest ally’ attack us??”
Other right-wing figures, including at least one member of Congress, criticized Massie’s gambit.
Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas tweeted that he had previously believed that Massie was “standing on heartfelt principles and had intellectual backing” even as they did not always agree.
“But comments like this make me question his authenticity,” Crenshaw wrote. “The USS Liberty incident is a tragic one, but it’s an incident with a clear conclusion if one uses any objective analysis of the facts. … Perhaps we are simply witnessing another example of the irresistible incentive to jump on the bandwagon of grifters that guarantee you a specific kind of social media audience and attention that ultimately results in profits.”
Adam Mossoff, a former legal fellow of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, took aim at Massie’s address in a post on X, writing that the Kentucky Republican had “fully gone down the rabbit hole of antsemitism and Jewish conspiracy theories — via the modern American antisemite’s favorite boogeyman, Israel.”
“For the American woke left and woke right, the USS Liberty is the equivalent of the Dreyfuss Affair in France,” Mossoff wrote. “It’s the cause celebres of nationalism and bigotry in which history’s greatest villains — the Jews — can be smeared again with nefarious and evil motives.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Thomas Massie calls for USS Liberty probe, elevating anti-Israel conspiracy theory to House floor appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Tribeca Festival denounces pro-Israel celebrities’ red-carpet jokes about Israeli dog rape allegations
(JTA) — The Tribeca Festival has denounced jokes alluding to allegations of rape against Israeli prison guards made on the red carpet by the comedian and actor Elon Gold and pro-Israel influencer Lizzy Savetsky.
The two Jewish figures made the jokes at the world premiere of Gold’s new film “The Wedding Entertainer (The Tale of Moishe Badhan)” on Thursday, and Savetsky included them in a highlights reel that she posted to Instagram on Friday.
In the reel, Gold notes that it’s significant that the Tribeca Festival, one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world, included a movie that was made in Israel. The implication was that at a time of surging anti-Israel sentiment, he would not have expected films with an Israeli connection to be admitted.
Then he joked about his time in Israel: “I was only raped by two Israeli dogs.”
Savetsky responded, “I thought they only raped Palestinians.”
“No,” Gold answered, laughing. “I got also a dog.”
The pair were alluding to allegations of sexual abuse by Israeli prison guards against Palestinian prisoners that The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof surfaced in an opinion column last month. One of the most sensational claims, which Israel rejected along with all the others, was that Israeli prison guards use dogs to rape prisoners.
After the comments drew criticism online, the Tribeca Festival said in a statement Saturday that it “unequivocally condemns the offensive and unacceptable remarks” made by Savetsky and Gold.
“Sexual violence and human suffering should never be mocked or minimized,” the festival said. “The comments do not reflect the Tribeca Festival’s values, and we regret the hurt and offense they have caused. We have not been able to reach the filmmakers.”
Pro-Israel activists have condemned the column, Kristof and the newspaper for airing the allegations against Israel, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened to sue the newspaper over the claims.
In an Instagram video response to a New York Times reporter asking for comment over email, Savetsky compared the allegations made in Kristof’s column to an antisemitic blood libel.
In a comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Savetsky denied that the jokes she made on the red carpet were “about rape” as the festival alleged.
“It was a joke mocking the NYT story with a horrific blood libel,” she said in a message to JTA. “Any other interpretation is ridiculous and a deflection from the actual issue here which is irresponsible journalism meant to villainize Zionists. Comedy and the arts have always been used to address real issues—the issue here should not be dog rape, which is biologically impossible, it should be the blood libel spread by the NYT.”
She added, “I stand by it with no regrets. The outrage only exposes how the press and those poisoned by anti-Israel propaganda will twist anything to blame the Jews … even when it means justifying a story with zero evidence about something biologically impossible.”
Gold, who also served as executive producer on the film, did not respond to JTA’s request for comment.
“The Wedding Entertainer (The Tale of Moishe Badhan)” is an Israeli comedy about a Hasidic ex-comedian who re-enters the comedy world after a battle with addiction to earn enough money to marry off his daughter.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Tribeca Festival denounces pro-Israel celebrities’ red-carpet jokes about Israeli dog rape allegations appeared first on The Forward.
