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Bosnian Jews mourn Moris Albahari, one of Sarajevo’s last Ladino speakers

(JTA) — Moris Albahari, a Holocaust survivor, former partisan fighter and one of the last Ladino speakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s dwindling Jewish community, passed away at the age of 93 last month.

It is believed that he was one of four native Ladino speakers remaining in a country where the Judeo-Spanish language once flourished and was spoken by  luminaries like Flory Jagoda, the grande dame of Ladino song, and Laura Bohoretta, the founder of a uniquely Sephardic feminist movement in Bosnia.  

Bosnia’s small Jewish community — with barely 900 members throughout the country, 500 of whom live in Sarajevo — are mourning the loss of a living link to communal memory as well as a dear friend. 

“From you, uncle Moco, I learned a lot about Judaism, about life, about nature and especially about people. About both the good and the evil,” Igor Kožemjakin, the cantor of the Sarajevo Jewish community, wrote in a memorial post on Facebook, referring to Moris as “Čika,” or uncle, a term of endearment in Bosnian. 

“It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevo. Our community is very small, especially after the Holocaust,” Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino language and literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members. Everyone is like a family member.”

When Albahari was growing up in the 1930s, the Jewish community of his native Sarajevo numbered over 12,000. Jews made up more than a fifth of the city and it was one of the most important centers of Jewish life in the western Balkans.

In his youth, the city was part of what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Formed out of the borderlands between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, it was a multiethnic state composed of Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, Slovenians, Macedonians, Hungarians, Albanians and more. Among them were many Jewish communities both Ashkenazi and Sephardic.

The unique mix of of Muslim, Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox Christian communities, with their mosques, synagogues and churches defining Sarajevo’s skyline, earned the city the nickname “Little Jerusalem.”

Speaking in a 2015 documentary made by American researchers, “Saved by Language,” Albahari explained that his family traced their roots back to Cordoba before the Spanish Inquisition, and through Venice, before settling in what would become Bosnia when it was part of the Ottoman Empire.

“We didn’t want to ‘just’ write an article about Moris or Sarajevo; we wanted [the audience] to see what we saw and hear what we heard,” Brian Kirschen, professor of Ladino at Binghamton University, who worked on the documentary with author Susanna Zaraysky, told JTA. “This resulted in a grassroots initiative to create the documentary.” 

In the film, Albahari takes the researchers and their viewers on a tour through what was Jewish Sarajevo, giving glimpses of the thriving Ladino speaking community in which he was raised and explaining how ithe language would save him many times, when the Nazis and their Croat allies, the Ustaša, came to shatter it. 

“In sharing your story of survival during the Holocaust, you opened doors that remained closed for decades,” Kirschen said in a memorial post on Facebook. “Some of your stories were even new to members of your family, but each survivor has their own timeline. While you experienced great pain during your life, from your story, we also learn about moments of kindness and heroism. Through your story, you also taught us about the power of language.” 

Albahari wasn’t yet a teenager when, in 1941, Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy invaded Yugoslavia. The Nazis occupied the eastern portion of the country, including what is now Serbia, while they raised up a Croat fascist party, known as the Ustaša, to administer the newly formed “Independent State of Croatia” — often known by its Serbo-Croatian initials, NDH — in the western regions that included the modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina. 

The Ustaša collaborated in the Nazis’ genocidal plans for Europe’s Jewish and Roma comunities, and they had genocidal designs of their own for the Orthodox Serb communities living in the NDH.

To that end they established the Jasenovac concentration camp, which would become known as the Auschwitz of the Balkans. By the war’s end it had become the third largest concentration camp in Europe, and behind its walls the overwhelming majority of Sarajevo’s Jews — at least 10,000 — were massacred. Including Serbs, Jews, Roma and political dissidents of Croat or Muslim Bosniak background, as many as 100,000 people were killed in Jasenovac. 

Albahari was 11 years old when the Ustaša came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and he was able to help his son escape from the train. 

The teacher helped guide the young Moris to an Italian soldier named Lino Marchione who was secretly helping Jews.

This was the first case when Albahari’s Ladino came in handy. Ladino is largely based on medieval Spanish, with a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages mixed in. For speakers of Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language, it’s entirely incomprehensible. But for a speaker of another Romance language such as Italian, it’s not such a stretch to understand, and Moris was able to converse with his Italian savior.

With his family gone, he was taken in by a Serb family, and changed his name to Milan Adamovic to hide his Jewish identity. Still, by 1942, it became clear that neither as Adamovic nor Albahari would he be safe in the town. So he fled to the mountains. 

“If there was [a battle] I took clothes from a dead soldier to wear, I lived like a wolf in the mountains, you know. Visiting villages [asking for something] to give me for eating, it was a terrible time,” Albahari recalled in “Saved By Language.” 

He would only feel safe in villages under the control of partisan forces. Yugoslavia was the only country in Europe to be liberated from Nazi rule by its own grassroots resistance. 

During his time in the mountains, Albahari joined up with a partisan unit aligned with the movement of Josip Broz Tito, who would lead Communist Yugoslavia after the war. By the war’s end, Tito’s partisans numbered over 80,000 and included more than 6,000 Jews, many in prominent positions, such as Moša Pijade, who would go on to serve as vice president of the Yugoslav parliament after the war. 

Moris was out on patrol as a partisan when he came upon a group of American and British paratroopers. They raised their weapons at him, thinking he was an enemy. Moris tried to communicate, but he spoke no English. 

When he asked the soldiers if they spoke German or Italian, they shook their heads. When he asked about Spanish, one perked up: a Hispanic-American soldier by the name of David Garijo. 

In Ladino, Alabahari was able to explain that he was not an enemy but could lead them to a nearby partisan camp where they would be safe. 

“Ladino saved my life in the war,” Albahari recalled in the documentary. 

At the partisan camp, Morris received even bigger news: The family that he had assumed had all perished after he left the train were in fact alive. The former school teacher and Ustaša guard who had warned his father had met them at the next train junction to help them escape. Furthermore, around half of the Jews in the train car were able to escape using the same hole Moris used during his initial escape. 

Ultimately the family all survived the war, unlike so many other Jews of Sarajevo. 

“Where is Samuel, where is Dudo, where is Gedala? They never came back,” Albahari lamented, listing missing neighbors while walking through Sarajevo’s old Jewish neighborhood in the documentary. “Maybe we are happy because we are alive after the Second World War, but also unlikely because every day we must cry for these dead people.”

When Moris returned to Sarajevo, it was an entirely different place from the bustling Jewish community he had once known. 

Gone was the sound of Ladino in the streets and alleyways of Bascarsija, the market district where so many of Sarajevo’s Jews had once lived. Gone were the synagogues — only one of the many synagogues that had existed before WWII still functions. Gone was the robust Jewish life that was once a central part of Sarajevo. 

Moris was still only 14 by the war’s end, so he returned to school and ultimately graduated at the top of his class. He became a pilot and later director of the Sarajevo Airport. 

In this new world, Ladino was spoken, if at all, only in the home.

“Always, when I hear Spanish, I hear my father and mother, and all the synagogues, prayers in Ladino and rabbis who spoke Ladino. But that is in the past,” Albahari says in “Saved by Language.” 

Eliezer Papo, who is a generation younger than Albahari, recalled that in his youth Ladino had long been reduced to a language of secrets. 

“Mostly, Ladino was used when the elders didn’t want youngsters to understand,” Papo said.

Only later, in the 1980s, did community members realize what was being lost and begin to gather to maintain their language, recount what Jewish Sarajevo had been like and share their wartime stories of survival. 

“He never took his story to the places of revenge, but he took it and his life experience to a place of ‘Never again,’ not just ‘Never again for Jews’, but never again for anybody,” said Papo.

Like many Sarajevans, World War II would not be the last major conflict Albahari would see. Less than 40 years later, war would once again come to Sarajevo with the break-up of Yugoslavia. 

From 1992-1995 the city remained under constant siege by Bosnian Serb forces looking to break away from what would become Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moris joined with other Jews of Sarajevo in working to provide aid to their fellow Sarajevans during the harsh period.

Sarajevo’s synagogue was turned into a shelter and a soup kitchen. The community ran a network of underground pharmacies and a message service allowing Sarajevans to get word to family and friends outside of the city during what became the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.

“Moris was an inspirational persona to many members of Jewish community and La Benevolencija,” Vlado Anderle, the current president of that local Jewish humanitarian organization told JTA. “He was a man with such inviting spirit and energy.”

When the dust settled on the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the new Bosnian state rose from its ashes, Moris found himself once again in a new role. 

During the communist era in Yugoslavia, religious activity was discouraged. Sarajevo’s Jews emphasized the ethnic character of Jewish culture rather than the religious one. In the new Bosnia and Herzegovina, that was no longer true. So the community worked to reconnect with their religious identity as well. 

“Everybody looked up to the people who had Jewish upbringing before the Second World War,” Papo recalled. “This doesn’t mean that they were rabbis. Just that they knew it better than anyone else.”

Moris, whose formal Jewish education ended in his preteen years, was appointed president of the community’s religious committee.

As such it often fell on him to represent Judaism to the Bosnian society at large, often in a very creative way, according to Papo, who in addition to being a scholar of Ladino is ordained as a rabbi and serves the Sarajevo community as a rabbi-at-large from Israel. 

In one case, while being interviewed on a major Bosnian television station, Moris was asked why Jews cover their head with a kippah or other hat during prayer. Moris’ response, or rather creative interpretation, as Papo called it, was made up on the spot. 

Moris’ interpretation began with the ancient temple in Jerusalem where Jews once had to fully immerse in a ritual bath before entering.

“Since the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed it was reduced to washing the uncovered parts of the body only, before entering a synagogue, similarly to Muslims: the feet, the head, the hands…” Papo recalled him saying. But in Europe, as Moris’ answer went, they began to cover more and more of their body. “In Europe they started wearing shoes, so the feet were not uncovered anymore, and then they started wearing a hat, not to have to wash their head… you know it’s Europe, one could catch a cold if going out with wet hair…”

“A few months later, I came to Sarajevo, and found that everyone has heard this explanation and is talking about it, not just people in the community, but in the street,” Papo said. “And you know, I let it pass, I couldn’t correct them, it was just so beautiful. That was his genius.”

“Identity is all about telling stories. And Moris was one of the great storytellers of the community,” Papo added. And through his stories he expressed an identity which was “made of the same contradictions that Sephardic Judaism is made of, that Sarajevo is made of, that Bosnia and Herzegovina is made and that Yugoslavia was and is made of and that the Balkans are made of.”

Albahari is survived by his wife and a son.

—
The post Bosnian Jews mourn Moris Albahari, one of Sarajevo’s last Ladino speakers appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Ari Emanuel has written a memoir and no one is safe — not even his brother

Roll the Calls: A Memoir
By Ari Emanuel
Knopf, 432 pages, $35

It must be exhausting to be super-agent Ari Emanuel: rising before dawn for a workout regimen, ingesting live worms to consume bacteria, and then placing hundreds of daily phone calls to clients and network honchos. It is, frankly, exhausting just to read about it, notwithstanding the clever, staccato narrative by (uncredited) ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer.

The point of it all, Emanuel keeps insisting in Roll the Calls, is not the dollars.

“Money isn’t the thing that makes me get up at 4:00 a.m.,” he says. “I’m just not sure yet what that thing is.”

Perpetually on the precipice of bankruptcy, he takes bold entrepreneurial risks to survive in an industry wracked by labor discontent, cutthroat infighting and technological change.

The goal, if there is one, seems to be simply to win — to bend everyone around him to his will. And, for the most part, he does. From the mailroom, Emanuel has ascended to the summit: executive chair and CEO of TKO and executive chairman of WME Group, “two companies,” his biographical blurb says, “that sit at the center of sports, entertainment and culture.”

Emanuel is probably best known as the model for the abrasive Ari Gold, the talent agent played by Jeremy Piven in the HBO show Entourage (2004-11). The show’s protagonist, Vincent Chase, is loosely based on one of Emanuel’s clients, the actor Mark Wahlberg. Emanuel says that he could never bear to watch the series, but notes that it helped turbocharge his career.

In his telling, the entertainment-industrial complex is a transactional, amoral, brutish and (though Emanuel doesn’t use this phrase) testosterone-fueled world, where the key players are nearly all men. It seems impossible to imagine any woman getting away with — let alone prospering from — the unhinged, profanity-laced approach that has become Emanuel’s trademark.

Even in this milieu, there are, in his view, particularly loathsome players. Among them is Harvey “Scissorhands” Weinstein, whom Emanuel indicts for his slovenliness, bullying tactics and editorial interference. Even without a mention of the producer’s alleged track record of sexual harassment and assault, Emanuel’s assessment of Weinstein is withering. “Empty at his core,” Emanuel writes, “Harvey’s sole motivation is to thwart and mess with other people.”

Emanuel expresses contempt, too, for other bold-faced names, including Jeffrey Katzenberg, former chair of Walt Disney Studios and cofounder of the film studio DreamWorks, and Hollywood scribe Nikki Finke, with whom Emanuel had a codependent relationship. He takes on Donald Trump as a client, doesn’t vote for him for president, and drops him, without regret, when he wins and can no longer generate commissions. None of this necessarily makes Emanuel a reliable narrator.

The memoir begins with the word “rage,” which Emanuel observes is also the first word of Homer’s Iliad. The allusion sets Roll the Calls up to be similarly epic. But its angry protagonist is, at best, an antihero, and the stakes of his success surely are less than mythic.

In “Roll the Calls,’ Emanuel argues that his anger, which can turn threatening, provides a bargaining advantage by intimidating adversaries. Courtesy of Penguin Random House

What are the origins of Emanuel’s rage? He points to his lifelong struggles with dyslexia and the bullying and humiliation that resulted. The Emanuel family ethos was unsparingly competitive. In life, he learned, “loser gets fed to lions,” so “keep your fists clenched and your head on a swivel.” And roughhousing with his older brothers, whom he jokingly calls “two violent psychopaths,” may have left Ari bruised and resentful.

Both Ezekiel “Zeke” Emanuel, a prominent oncologist and bioethicist, and former Chicago mayor and prospective 2028 Democratic presidential candidate Rahm Emanuel are known for their combative personalities. Ari suggests that the family is tight-knit and loving. But one of the book’s quietly shocking reveals is Rahm’s mockery of his brother’s dyslexia when they share a stage during Chicago Ideas Week.

Emanuel argues that his anger, which can turn threatening, provides a bargaining advantage by intimidating adversaries. He cites a study showing “that angry negotiators had the edge.” In a bar, he calls out Michael Moore as an [expletive deleted] antisemite for views the director expressed about Israel; Moore denies the charge, they keep talking and Emanuel ends up with a new client.

“You’ve got to be a little psychotic in this town,” Emanuel argues. To succeed, “you need to show that you can color outside the lines, and that, once in a while, you might eat the [expletive deleted] crayon.” The memoir doesn’t delete the expletives.

Yet Emanuel understands the personal costs of his anger enough to have devoted years to psychotherapy aimed at moderating it. (The results seem mixed at best.) Emanuel also admits to a habit akin to stalking: calling potential clients, business partners and others constantly until they succumb to his sales pitch.

This incessant hounding landed him the mailroom gig at Creative Artists Agency, from which he quickly rose — until he departed, with allies, to start his own company. Similar persistence won him the business (and, later, friendship) of the famously curmudgeonly Larry David, who said, over lunch, that he would sign with Emanuel — if only the agent would stop calling.

After his first marriage (unsurprisingly) dissolved, Emanuel deployed his telephone tactics in courtship — not a method, one imagines, that would have worked for a lesser man. In Emanuel’s case, relentless pursuit led, after some drama and heartbreak, to his second marriage, to a much younger woman who had initially resisted his overtures.

None of this is to say that Roll the Calls isn’t worth a read, especially for anyone interested in an unabashedly jaundiced insider account of how Hollywood operates. The book is quick-paced, laugh-out-loud funny at times, and filled with acidic observations and gossip. It is also horrifying.

The post Ari Emanuel has written a memoir and no one is safe — not even his brother appeared first on The Forward.

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NY Jewish Democrats defend Mamdani after Netanyahu calls him a Hamas supporter

(JTA) — Some top New York Jewish Democrats are defending New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called him an “antisemite” and said he is “buddies” with Hamas.

Netanyahu’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, and the outsized role Mamdani played in it, were the culmination of escalating criticism of Mamdani from Israeli officials in recent weeks.

Mamdani is an avowed anti-Zionist who during his campaign to be the mayor had pledged to arrest Netanyahu. Over the summer, he conceded he didn’t have the power to do so, though he criticized the Israeli government over Gaza in the run-up to the prime minister’s visit.

But while his full-throated criticism of Israel has alarmed some local Jewish officials, many felt that Netanyahu’s attacks on Thursday from the U.N. plenum went too far.

“It’s scurrilous to suggest that the mayor voices support for Hamas,” Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal, who is Jewish, said Friday in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

City Council Speaker Julie Menin, also a Jewish Democrat, has opposed Mamdani on some legislation related to protests outside houses of worship — a sensitive issue in the wake of protesters picketing outside synagogues that were holding Israeli real estate events. Menin said in a press conference on Thursday that Netanyahu’s remarks were “not helpful at all” because “we need to turn the temperature down.”

“This idea of what the prime minister said can really incite violence. We cannot have this,” Menin said.

Mamdani, an outspoken pro-Palestinian advocate, has condemned Hamas as “a terrorist organization” and has denounced antisemitic hate crimes committed in New York.

The mayor responded with a statement of his own, saying that Netanyahu “used his speech to repeat baseless lies meant to sanitize his genocide of Palestinians.”

“Yet no lie can change the fact that he remains the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity,” Mamdani said. The United States is not a party to the ICC and has no obligation to carry out its warrants on U.S. soil.

Netanyahu’s remarks at the U.N. General Assembly came amid a reelection campaign in which Netanyahu’s Likud Party has made Mamdani a villain. Hoylman-Sigal called Thursday’s speech a “political ploy” and a “deflection by someone who has a lot of domestic turmoil, political and otherwise.”

“Clearly, Netanyahu is fighting for his political life,” said Hoylman-Sigal, who is Jewish.

Netanyahu’s arrival in New York sparked a wave of demonstrations in Manhattan on Thursday, including multiple organized by Israeli expatriate groups who emphasized the Oct. 27 Israeli election date. Rallygoers chanted “Vote him out!” at a protest held by the Israeli anti-Netanyahu group UnXeptable.

Even before his visit, Gov. Kathy Hochul pushed back on comments Netanyahu had made. Calling Mamdani a “supporter of the Hamas monsters” was false and “hurt his own credibility,” Hochul said in an interview with the radio station WNYC earlier this week.

Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, which is supportive of Netanyahu and has been harshly critical of Mamdani, called Netanyahu’s remarks “Churchillian” and his “greatest speech.”

“Importantly, he also called out Mamdani as a dangerous antisemite who has endangered Jews in New York City,” Klein said in a statement.

The U.N. speech came as Israeli officials have escalated their rhetoric against Mamdani.

Last month, Ofir Akunis, the Israeli consul general in New York, compared Mamdani’s support for the boycott Israel movement to Nazi Germany. A Mamdani spokesperson told JTA the comparison was “offensive, completely unhinged and detached from reality,” and said Akunis “should be ashamed of himself.”

The statement was Mamdani’s first time weighing in on the Israeli consul general, who had accused Mamdani of being directly responsible for anti-Jewish hate crimes in the city.

Republican City Council member Inna Vernikov, who is Jewish and a staunch Mamdani critic, took issue with the mayor’s response.

“When Mamdani cleans his own house, then he can criticize Jewish leaders,” said Vernikov, pointing to Mamdani’s wife’s anti-Israel views and his vetoing of a bill on protests around schools.

Brad Lander, the Jewish progressive and Democratic nominee for New York’s 10th congressional district, blasted both Akunis’ and Netanyahu’s attacks on Mamdani.

“Netanyahu and Akunis are cynically weaponizing accusations of antisemitism for their own narrow, selfish political purposes,” said Lander, one of Mamdani’s most prominent Jewish allies, in a statement to JTA. “They are making Israelis, American Jews, Palestinians, and the whole world less safe.”

Lander himself was the recipient of a Nazi Germany comparison when Bruce Blakeman, the Republican candidate for New York governor, said that Lander “would be a camp guard in the concentration camp if he could.”

Hoylman-Sigal called the comparisons “outrageous,” and said that he is more worried about a rise in far-right parties, including Germany’s AfD.

“We should be very careful, no matter what our background is, to draw such extreme comparisons,” he said.

Phylisa Wisdom, who heads Mamdani’s office to combat antisemitism, told JTA that it is “appalling that some leaders have resorted to comparing their political opponents to Nazis.”

“We can and should disagree — sometimes deeply — but we must be able to do so without debasing public discourse,” she said.

Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a group that leads outreach to non-Jewish community organizations, told JTA in an email that comparisons to Nazis should be out of bounds.

It is “particularly concerning given that our own community frequently, and rightfully, calls out those using dehumanization and/or making inappropriate Holocaust comparisons,” she said.

As a case in point, Spitalnick pointed to the Anti-Defamation League’s article on inappropriate Holocaust comparisons, which includes COVID-19 vaccine requirements and free speech complaints.

The ADL did not return a request for comment on Akunis’ Nazi Germany comparisons.

“Disagree with the Mayor on his policies or rhetoric — I certainly have — but comparisons like this are deeply offensive and wrong, in addition to undermining the very relationships and engagement necessary to ensuring Jewish safety in New York and beyond,” Spitalnick said.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

The post NY Jewish Democrats defend Mamdani after Netanyahu calls him a Hamas supporter appeared first on The Forward.

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‘Nobody Wants This’ star Adam Brody on Gaza: ‘Put me down as thinking it’s a genocide’

Adam Brody, the Jewish actor who plays a “hot rabbi” on the hit Netflix rom-com Nobody Wants This, called the war in Gaza a genocide in a new interview, making him one of just a few Jewish celebrities to speak out publicly against the Israeli campaign.

The comments came in an interview with GQ about Brody’s efforts canvassing for Democratic candidates in the upcoming midterms.

“Put me down as thinking it’s a genocide. Put me down as wanting a free Palestine,” he said. “It’s awful that it’s taken so much death and misery, but it does feel like it’s reaching a breaking point that it should have a while ago. I’m hopeful that another administration can really do some good and correct some of these policies that are helping that situation be as awful as it is.”

The claim of genocide in Gaza is heavily disputed. Several international bodies, human rights organizations and academic institutions have concluded Israel’s actions in Gaza since Oct. 7 fit the description, including a United Nations Commission of Inquiry. Other similar groups, like the International Court of Justice, have not applied the term.

Brody’s comments were surprising in part because he had previously kept his feelings about the war private, even as other leading Hollywood figures openly criticized it. He does not maintain a public social media presence, and he did not participate in pin-wearing campaigns or sign various petitions related to the war — an approach he indicated he might change going forward.

“I’m not wearing a pin, so I’m not inviting a certain question, and perhaps I should,” he said. “I really admire people who do. But 99% of what I’m asked about is about the show. I’m not trying to plead ignorance—here we are doing a political interview, so it makes sense that we wade into this territory—but I’ve never ducked a question, really, not a political question anyway.”

Brody — who came to fame in the 2000s as the teenager Seth Cohen on The O.C. — joins Hacks star Hannah Einbinder and Wallace Shawn (The Princess Bride) as perhaps the most high-profile Jewish actors to publicly call the war a genocide. Other Jewish entertainment figures, like Mandy Patinkin and The Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer, have criticized the war but stopped short of calling it a genocide.

Yet Brody’s comments are perhaps especially notable because of the character he plays on TV. In Nobody Wants This, Brody plays a rabbi dating a non-Jewish woman — introducing her to the beauty and foibles of Jewish faith and culture. Israel has been conspicuously absent from the show, with its creator, Erin Foster, saying she deliberately avoided geopolitics.

Season 3 of Nobody Wants This releases to Netflix October 22.

The post ‘Nobody Wants This’ star Adam Brody on Gaza: ‘Put me down as thinking it’s a genocide’ appeared first on The Forward.

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