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Catholic Church urges clergy to address ‘misleading statements’ about Jews by far-right influencers
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops cautioned its members in a recent memorandum that Catholic “media personalities” are distorting the church’s position on Jews and Israel, and said that priests should use Holy Week and Easter sermons to clarify these stances.
Bishop Joseph C. Bambera, who chairs the conference’s committee on interreligious affairs and authored the March 13 letter, specifically named Carrie Prejean Boller, a recent convert to Catholicism who was removed from the White House’s Religious Liberty Commission after a combative hearing in which she attacked Zionism, declaring it incompatible with Catholicism. In the same hearing, she also defended Candace Owens, the far-right influencer and a fellow Catholic with a long track record of offensive comments about Jews and Judaism.
Prejean Boller stated that devout Catholics were required to be anti-Zionist and should not be slandered as antisemites on that basis, and has argued elsewhere that Catholics have replaced Jews as “the new people of God.”
“There were witnesses at the hearing who rebutted Ms. Prejean Boller’s assertions about Catholic teaching, but it was her claims and not the rebuttal that have circulated in the media,” Bambera wrote in the confidential letter, which was first reported last week by Joe Enders, a conservative Catholic podcast host.
Rev. Russell McDougall, director of ecumenical and interreligious affairs at the conference of bishops, said that the memo was intended to help clergy facing questions from local members or journalists about the Catholic position on Jews and Israel.
It was accompanied by a public-facing video released last Wednesday that declared “Catholics must reject antisemitism.” McDougall said in an interview that the video was originally scheduled to be published at the start of Holy Week next Monday but was rushed out after Bambera’s memo was leaked and met with a hostile reaction from some right-wing Catholics.
“Media influencers are out there claiming to be speaking on behalf of the church,” McDougall said. “But practicing Catholics know that within the church it’s the Pope, in union with the College of Bishops, that are the teachers of the church.”
The controversy over Prejean Boller’s remarks came amid growing alarm by many Jews over far-right Catholic influencers, including Owens and Nick Fuentes, who have paired hostility toward Jews with opposition to U.S. government support for Israel, and often suggested their faith motivates both positions.
Joe Kent became the latest prominent figure to be caught up in the maelstrom when he resigned last week as director of the National Counterterrorism Center with a letter claiming that Israel had caused both the current U.S.-Israel war against Iran and the previous Iraq War.
He was quickly feted at a gala in Washington, D.C. hosted by Catholics for Catholics, a right-wing group, where he said he “was able to hear God’s voice” while deciding whether to resign from the Trump administration. Prejean Boller and Owens also spoke at the gala.
Bambera, who sent his memorandum to bishops three days before Kent’s resignation, wrote: “The misleading statements made by media personalities” about the Catholic position on Jews and Israel “have been troubling not only to us, but to our brothers and sisters in the Jewish community.”
The letter emphasized the positions detailed in Nostra aetate, a declaration made as part of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, a years-long assembly to modernize the church. Nostra aetate, one of the most significant parts of Vatican II, as the council is known, redefined the Catholic church’s relationship with Jews, holding that “the Jews” as a group are not responsible for killing Jesus Christ, that the Jewish people have a legitimate relationship with God even without accepting the salvation of Jesus and that Catholics should oppose antisemitism.
Bambera also cited a resource on countering antisemitism created in conjunction with the American Jewish Committee two years ago called “Translate Hate.”
Rabbi Noam Marans, the AJC’s director of interreligious affairs, praised the letter in a statement to the Forward: “With the growth of influencers who mistakenly use their Catholicism to spread antisemitic tropes, we need and appreciate responsible Catholic leaders who distance Catholicism from this hate.”
Theological spat over Zionism
Prejean Boller said during the religious freedom commission hearing in February that she opposed Zionism on theological grounds as a Catholic, a point that Bambera’s letter pushed back on.
It said that “Catholics can appreciate the religious attachment that the Jewish people have to the land of Israel, but interpret the reemergence in 1948 of a Jewish state in a historical rather than theological context.”
Some critics of the letter — including Enders, the podcaster who first posted a copy on X — argued that by acknowledging that Catholicism rejects “theological claims” related to Israel’s establishment, Bambera was essentially validating Prejean Boller’s statement that Catholics are required to be “anti-Zionist.”
“With all the preceding indignation toward Mrs. Prejean Boller earlier in this directive, it seems out of place to take this long to say she was right about the political state of Israel having “no biblical prophecy fulfillment,” Enders wrote before calling the letter “totally insane.”
McDougall said those who argued that the letter effectively endorsed Prejean Boller’s views on Israel were misguided. He noted that many, including Enders, also complained that the letter had rejected “supersessionism,” a doctrine that Prejean Boller has also expressed support for that holds Christianity had replaced God’s covenant with Jews.
“That’s something the church has repudiated — and quite clearly,” McDougall said. “The Catholic Cchurch may not take a theological position about the State of Israel but it does take a theological position about the people of Israel, and mentions that the permanence of Israel — when so many other ancient people have disappeared without trace — is to be considered part of God’s design.”
Prejean Boller referred the Forward to a social media post she’d made about the memorandum in which she wrote that “individual bishops do not enjoy the prerogative of infallibility every time they issue a statement” and suggested that Bambera’s letter was at odds with Catholic doctrine.
The dispute offers a peek into a roiling intra-Christian debate over Christian Zionism and whether the Bible contains support for Israel’s modern existence. It’s a debate obscure to most American Jews, who often think of Zionism as pertaining to political support for a Jewish state in Israel based on arguments like the need to prevent another Holocaust, rather than on religious grounds like God’s promise to Abraham, which Bambera’s letter references.
The letter was intended to inform sermons across the country during Holy Week, which begins on March 29, and asked bishops to share the contents of the memo with clergy in their respective diocese.
McDougall said the memorandum and letter were intended to reach the church’s core membership, even if they were unlikely to change the views of figures like Prejean Boller and Owens. “I’m not sure that there’s much the leadership of the church can do to reach some of these individuals and groups that think of themselves as more Catholic than the Pope,” he said.
The post Catholic Church urges clergy to address ‘misleading statements’ about Jews by far-right influencers appeared first on The Forward.
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New documentary captures the lively history of Yiddish theater in America
The new documentary Immigrant Songs: Yiddish Theater and the American Jewish Experience, produced by the Milken Archive of Jewish Music, is fast, entertaining and a good introduction to the topic.
Focusing mainly on the musical side of the story, but covering ‘straight plays’ as well, the film opens with a superb ‘warm-up act’: “Hu Tsa Tsa,” a stock Yiddish vaudeville number performed by the widely mourned Bruce Adler, who died in 2008 at age 63. Bursting with charm and talent, Adler, scion of a top Yiddish vaudeville family, demonstrates that Yiddish theater used to be pretty damned lively.
What follows is the oft-told story of the rise and decline of the American Yiddish theater, beginning with its prehistory in the Purimshpiels — the annual performances that for centuries served as the only secular entertainment in the Ashkenazic world. From there the film takes us to Yiddish theater’s 1876 birth in Romania, courtesy of Avrom Goldfadn, a.k.a. “The Father of Yiddish Theater.”
The film also describes Yiddish theater’s arrival in America, which, thanks to massive Jewish immigration, quickly became its capital. We learn of its influence on American theater’s styles of acting and set design. And the film describes the decline of its audience, due to assimilation and the immigration quotas of the 1920s.
There’s an excellent section on “The Big Four” Yiddish theater composers — Joseph Rumshinsky, Alexander Olshanetsky, Abe Ellstein, and Sholom Secunda. All in all, the documentary does a fine job of teaching the aleph-beyz, the ABCs, of the history of Yiddish theater to the uninitiated.
The most impressive aspect of Immigrant Songs is its well-crafted pace. Though there are a few snippets of vintage Yiddish cinema (Yiddish theater’s “kid brother”), most of the film consists of recent concert footage, some well-selected photographs and ephemera, and a lot of talking heads. Almost every prominent Yiddish theater historian was interviewed for it, along with several musicologists, an archivist, Yiddish actors, directors, producers, etc. (Full disclosure: I am one of them.) Director Jeff Janeczko cuts between the interviewees so smoothly — sometimes in mid-sentence — that it feels like they’re in the same room and feeding off each other’s energy. The movie just flies by.
There are a few errors. Marc Chagall is described as an important designer of Yiddish theater; actually he designed one minor production in Russia in 1921, and never did another. In a bizarre, and biblically illiterate, statement, one interviewee claims that Jews hadn’t developed a theater culture earlier because the Second Commandment’s prohibition of “graven images” forbade the construction of sets. (Actually it’s about idol worship.)
Another interviewee claims that the Yiddish play Der Yeshiva Bokher; oder, Der Yudisher Hamlet — The Yeshiva Student; or, The Jewish Hamlet (Yiddish plays then often had subtitles), is closely patterned on Shakespeare’s tragedy. In truth, the play — written by Isidore Zolotarevski, the prolific writer of shund (“trash”) melodramas — is not only awful, but is as close to Shakespeare as baked ham is to your grandmother’s kreplach.
The film’s biggest fault, however, is its short running time (45 minutes). This is a rich topic, and too much is left by the wayside in the interest of brevity. There’s nothing about what shund melodramas felt like, why they appealed to their audiences, and why they became the only thing a lot of people know about Yiddish theater.
There’s also nothing about the World War I-era wave of shtetl plays, which reflected immigrants’ homesickness without indulging in nostalgia, and provided some of Yiddish theater’s shining moments with plays like Green Fields, The Empty Inn and Tevye. And the most important play in the Yiddish canon, The Dybbuk, is never mentioned.
Perhaps most surprisingly, considering the film’s emphasis on music, there is no examination of Yiddish theater’s influence on Broadway’s music. (Cole Porter — ironically, the only gentile among the major composers of Broadway’s Golden Age — had a pronounced Jewish lilt in a number of his songs, and he actually attended Yiddish theater regularly.)
The film’s last section is about the renewed interest in Yiddish that began in the 1970s and ’80s with the klezmer revival. Much of it focuses on the 2018 Yiddish production of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, whose success was predetermined the moment the production was announced.
For the overwhelming majority of American Jews, from the Orthodox to the unaffiliated, Fiddler is all they know about the lives of their ancestors. And though it’s a world-class piece of musical theater, as a work of social history Fiddler is as phony as a glass eye. Nevertheless, for American Jews it’s a sacred text.
Fiddler was a huge hit, but it was a gimmick, a one-off, whose success does very little for the future of Yiddish theater. Worse, the Yiddish — not the text, but the lines spoken by most of the actors — was often mispronounced and had the wrong intonation. (One elderly gentleman of my acquaintance, a native Yiddish speaker from Czechoslovakia, told me he didn’t understand a word the actors said, and spent the whole evening reading the English supertitles.)
What follows the Fiddler section in Immigrant Songs is mostly bromides. But the best current Yiddish theater reflects the kind of fresh thinking that keeps the form alive.
An occasional well-presented museum piece, like the Folksbiene’s 2016 revival of Rumshinsky’s operetta The Golden Bride, is a very worthwhile project (though it, too, suffered from poorly spoken Yiddish). But the most dynamic contemporary Yiddish theater is, in Jeffrey Shandler’s apt phrase, “post vernacular” — i .e., the use of Yiddish is self-conscious, a deliberate choice rather than something that’s done automatically, as it would have been a century ago when there were a lot more Yiddish speakers in the world.
An example of this is the 2017 neo-realist film Menashe, which could far more easily and conventionally have been made in English. Or a well-known piece done in Yiddish translation, like Shane Baker’s stunning Yiddish translation of Waiting for Godot, can become something much more valuable than a mere stunt. The Yiddish version, under Moshe Yassur’s straightforward direction, humanized the play, stripping it of the encrusted pretentiousness that had hidden its soul. (When it was presented in the International Samuel Beckett Festival in Ireland, multiple audience members approached the cast afterwards with the same reaction: “I don’t speak a word of Yiddish. But I’ve seen Godot five or six times, and this is the first time I understood it.”)
There’s a lot to be learned from Immigrant Songs. If you find yourself hungry for more, you couldn’t do better than to seek out YIVO’s online Yiddish theater course “Oh, Mama, I’m in Love!” But by all means, start with Immigrant Songs. It’s a very entertaining and informative appetizer.
The post New documentary captures the lively history of Yiddish theater in America appeared first on The Forward.
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UK PM Starmer Says There Could Be New Powers to Ban Pro-Palestinian Marches
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer gives a media statement at Downing Street in London, Britain, April 30, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Jack Taylor/File photo
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the government could ban pro-Palestinian marches in some circumstances because of the “cumulative effect” the demonstrations had on the Jewish community after two Jewish men were stabbed in London on Wednesday.
Starmer told the BBC that he would always defend freedom of expression and peaceful protest, but chants like “Globalize the Intifada” during demonstrations were “completely off limits” and those voicing them should be prosecuted.
Pro-Palestinian marches have become a regular feature in London since the October 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel that triggered the Gaza war. Critics say the demonstrations have generated hostility and become a focus for antisemitism.
Protesters have argued they are exercising their democratic right to spotlight ongoing human rights and political issues related to the situation in Gaza.
Starmer said he was not denying there were “very strong legitimate views about the Middle East, about Gaza,” but many people in the Jewish community had told him they were concerned about the repeat nature of the marches.
Asked if the tougher response should focus on chants and banners, or whether the protests should be stopped altogether, Starmer said: “I think certainly the first, and I think there are instances for the latter.”
“I think it’s time to look across the board at protests and the cumulative effect,” he said, adding that the government needed to look at what further powers it could take.
Britain raised its terrorism threat level to “severe” on Thursday amid mounting security concerns that foreign states were helping fuel violence, including against the Jewish community.
“We are seeing an elevated threat to Jewish and Israeli individuals and institutions in the UK,” the head of counter-terrorism policing, Laurence Taylor, said in a statement, adding that police were also working “against an unpredictable global situation that has consequences closer to home, including physical threats by state-linked actors.”
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War Likely to Resume After Trump’s Rejection of Latest Proposal, Says IRGC General
Iranians carry a model of a missile during a celebration following an IRGC attack on Israel, in Tehran, Iran, April 15, 2024. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
i24 News – A senior Iranian military figure said that fighting with the US was “likely” to resume after President Donald Trump stated he was dissatisfied with Tehran’s latest proposal, regime media reported on Saturday.
The comments of General Mohammad Jafar Asadi, one of the top Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders, were relayed by the Fars news agency, considered as a mouthpiece of the the powerful paramilitary body.
“Evidence has shown that the Americans do not not adhere to any commitments,” Asadi was quoted as saying.
He further added that Washington’s decision-making was “primarily media-driven aimed first at preventing a drop in oil prices and second at extricating themselves from the mess they have created.”
Iranian armed forces are ready “for any new adventures or foolishness from the Americans,” he said, going to assert that the Iran war would prove for the US a tragedy comparable with what was for Israel the October 7 massacre.
“Just as our martyred Leader said that the Zionist regime will never be the same as before the Al‑Aqsa Storm operation [the name chosen by Hamas leadership for the October 7, 2023 massacre in southern Israel], the United States will also never return to what it was before its attack on Iran,” he said. “The world has understood the true nature of America, and no matter how much malice it shows now, it is no longer the America that many once feared.”