(JTA) — Cornell University will pay $60 million to the Trump administration to resolve ongoing antisemitism investigations and unfreeze $250 million in federal funds, becoming the fourth Ivy League school and fifth overall to strike such a deal.

The deal came weeks after another agreement signed by the University of Virginia, and also followed the resolution of an ongoing controversy at Cornell involving a Jewish professor’s course on Gaza.

“With this resolution, Cornell looks forward to resuming the long and fruitful partnership with the federal government that has yielded, for so many years, so much progress and well-being for our nation and our world,” Michael Kotlikoff, the school’s Jewish president, said in a statement Friday announcing the deal.

In a virtual campus town hall after the deal was announced, Kotlikoff linked the university’s negotiation of the settlement to the broader campus climate in the two-plus years since the Hamas attack on Israel and war in Gaza.

“Universities across the country have made significant progress since disruptions on campus on October 7 in articulating our rules, appropriately enforcing our rules and making sure that everybody’s rights are protected,” he said, as reported by the Cornell student newspaper.

As part of the deal, Cornell will pay the federal government $20 million per year for the next three years in exchange for the unfreezing of several grants to the university, many of which are connected to the Department of Defense. Half of the money will be directed to investments in agriculture programs.

The school also promises to “conduct annual campus climate surveys to ensure that Jewish students are safe and that anti-Semitism is being addressed,” according to a White House release about the deal. In the aftermath of Oct. 7, Cornell’s campus dealt with violent threats against Jewish students as well as a faculty member who had praised the Hamas attacks.

The government, in turn, promises to drop its ongoing Title VI investigations into allegations of discrimination based on shared Jewish ancestry or national origin at the school. Kotlikoff further insisted that Cornell would preserve its academic freedom, and would not be forced to abide by White House guidelines on other campus concerns such as diversity-based hiring and transgender athletes.

Cornell’s agreement follows earlier ones struck by Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Brown and UVA. UVA, the first public university to strike an antisemitism-related deal with Trump, was not required to make any payments to the federal government, according to the deal it announced last month.

Instead, UVA agreed to end certain diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, known as DEI, and eliminate language referring to transgender people, among other provisions. None of the public terms of its settlement involved addressing antisemitism.

One prominent on-campus critic of Cornell’s handling of antisemitism issues praised the school’s settlement as “pragmatic” in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

“I think the fact that all Title VI investigations have been closed is a tremendously important reassurance to students and parents that the university, in fact, is doing all it can to protect Jewish students from any kind of antisemitic discrimination or incident,” said Menachem Rosensaft, an adjunct law professor at Cornell.

Rosensaft added that the agreement “also sends a very clear signal to anyone who is inclined to engage in antisemitic discrimination or violence that they will suffer the consequences.”

Rosensaft had been at the middle of a more recent Israel-related controversy at Cornell after he complained to Kotlikoff about a pro-Palestinian Jewish professor’s plan to teach a class on Gaza. Kotlikoff’s criticisms of the class, in emails published by JTA, prompted campus advocacy groups to admonish what they said were his threats to academic freedom.

That professor, Eric Cheyfitz, prompted an internal investigation after he tried to remove an Israeli graduate student from his Gaza class. Last month, Cheyfitz opted to retire from teaching in order to end the investigation.

The university pressure on Cheyfitz, Rosensaft said, was further evidence — along with the settlement — that Cornell has started to take threats of antisemitism seriously.

“He will no longer be able to propagate his extreme anti-Zionism in the classroom,” Rosensaft said.

Further Trump negotiations with universities remain ongoing, even as more and more Jews say they think such deals are only using antisemitism as an excuse to attack higher education.

The terms of a proposed $1 billion payout from the University of California system, recently made public by a court order, include specific reference to antisemitic incidents that took place on UCLA’s campus. In addition, a closely watched negotiation with Harvard remains ongoing.

The post Cornell inks $60M deal with Trump administration to resolve antisemitism claims appeared first on The Forward.

When Caesar Was King
By David Margolick
Schocken, 400 pages $35

His comedic DNA is everywhere — The Dick Van Dyke Show, All in the Family, the riffs and routines of Johnny Carson and Larry David. His writers included Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Neil Simon and Woody Allen. Even so, when author David Margolick interviewed the 2,000 Year Old Man for his new biography of Sid Caesar, Brooks told him, “People are going to say, `Gee, this is really good and really interesting. Just one question, David: Who’s Sid Caesar?’”

Now the book is out, and Margolick, a longtime New York Times and Vanity Fair writer, has put the question to rest. When Caesar Was King: How Sid Caesar Reinvented American Comedy is a lively and thoroughly engrossing account of who Caesar was, why he was so important, and how he transformed American comedy with his short-lived (1950-1954) but influential TV program Your Show of Shows.

At the peak of the show’s popularity, Caesar was the most highly paid comedian in America. Some 20 million people tuned into NBC every week to watch the program that was broadcast live on Saturday night from a studio in midtown Manhattan two decades before Saturday Night Live. The variety show featured film spoofs, pantomime, and sketches in which Caesar played a beleaguered husband opposite the brilliant Imogene Coca with her rubbery, “wonderfully flexible face,” as one critic put it.

Despite their comedic hijinks, Margolick repeatedly makes the point that Caesar, who died at age 91 in 2014, was “the unlikeliest of comics: introverted, ill at ease, tongue-tied.” Larry Gelbart, a writer for Caesar who went on to create the hit TV series M*A*S*H in the 1970s, described his boss’ personality as “zero, non-existent.” According to Simon, he was “extremely smart but completely inarticulate.” Even so, he could bring down the house by impersonating everything from an imperious German general to a fly crawling on a piece of feta cheese. He had what another one of his writers, Howard Morris, called a “meshugana energy.”

Though nothing about Your Show of Shows was overtly Jewish, Margolick makes a convincing argument that Caesar’s humor was intrinsically Jewish and that Jews across America read it as such. Among other things, it was Jewish in its “literate, detached, irreverent” point of view, in its “resentment toward the establishment and sympathy for the underdog,” and “in its obsession, born of privation, with food.”

Caesar grew up in Yonkers, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia, who ran a rooming house and luncheonette. Since the eatery catered to laborers, many of them foreign-born, Margolick speculates that Caesar, who didn’t learn to talk until he was 3, developed his uncanny ability to mimic foreign languages — his signature double-talk — by absorbing the “sounds and sensibilities” of the conversations he overheard while busing tables.

After a deadbeat boarder left behind a saxophone, young Sidney learned to play it, eventually offering him a way out of his straitened circumstances. Soon he was playing gigs in the Catskills, where he branched out into comedy to earn a little extra money. By the 1940s, Caesar was back in New York, where he had the great good fortune to meet the Viennese-born Max Liebman, who had been producing musical revues at a resort in the Poconos and thought Caesar was “the finest comic talent since Charlie Chaplin.” Liebman would go on to direct Your Show of Shows and, more than anyone else, make Sid Caesar a star.

But the toll of producing a 90-minute live show over 30-odd weeks for more than four years was tremendous. By its fourth and final season, Your Show of Shows couldn’t sustain the level of brilliance and innovation it had achieved during the so-called golden era of live television production in the 1950s. Audiences were changing as more and more Americans outside the big cities, mostly in the Northeast, were acquiring TVs, and their taste skewed more in the direction of the bandleader and accordionist Lawrence Welk.

Caesar turned 32 during the last year of Your Show of Shows and would go on to headline other shows including Caesar’s Hour and Sid Caesar Invites You, the latter briefly reuniting him with Coca. But by the 1960s, he was largely off the air, grappling with alcoholism, depression and an addiction to pills.

In what is overall a tender and sympathetic portrait, Margolick doesn’t shy away from showing Caesar’s dark side, offering a complex portrait of an enigmatic genius who seemed to be just as much of a mystery to himself as he was to others. Beautifully written and brimming with life, this book establishes Margolick as one of the ultimate mavens of an era of American Jewish history in the mid-to-late 20th century that has all but ceased to exist.

 

The post How the Yonkers-born son of Jewish immigrants became the king of American comedy appeared first on The Forward.

Ukrainian-born Israeli judoka and Olympic medalist Peter Paltchik announced his retirement in an online video and emotional press conference on Monday.

Paltchik, 33, shared a video on social media of him sitting across from his head coach, Oren Smadga, as he announced the shocking news. The former athlete said he has no regrets about his career, reflected on his journey as an athlete, and teared up while thanking Smadga for his support over the years and talking about their close connection.

Paltchik is Israel’s most decorated judoka, winning bronze medals at the Olympics in Tokyo in 2020 and Paris in 2024. He also took home a bronze medal in the International Judo Federation’s 2021 World Judo Masters and won gold in the European Judo Championships’ under-100 kg division in Prague in November 2020. He additionally has gold medals from the 2020 Paris Grand Slam, 2018 Abu Dhabi Grand Slam, 2020 European Judo Championships, and four Grand Prix tournaments.

After Monday’s announcement, the Olympic Committee of Israel praised Paltchik and wished him good luck in all his future endeavors. “Peter proved that a long path of work, discipline, faith, and personal depth can turn a dream into reality,” the committee said in a released statement. “He set an example for an entire generation of athletes and athletes and provided moments that will not be forgotten. Peter, thank you for the way, for the heart, for the values, and for the energy you brought to every scene.”

In September 2024, Paltchik launched the Paltchik Foundation to support talented young athletes. He committed to allocating 3 percent of his business revenues to the foundation, which has all volunteer staff members to ensure that every donation goes directly to helping athletes in need. Paltchik is currently pursing a bachelor’s degree in advertising and marketing communications.

In May, Smadga resigned as the head coach of Israel’s national judo team. A former judoka himself, Smadga was the first Israeli man to win an Olympic medal when he won bronze at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, and he has served as the coach of the men’s team since 2010. Smadga’s 25-year-old son was killed in combat in June 2024 while fighting with the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip during the Israel-Hamas war.