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Dave Chappelle isn’t the first to suggest that Jews run Hollywood. Here are the origins of the trope.
(JTA) – On “Saturday Night Live” last weekend, Dave Chappelle really wanted his audience to know there are a lot of Jews in Hollywood.
“I’ve been to Hollywood, this is just what I saw,” he said during his widely dissected monologue. “It’s a lot of Jews. Like, a lot.”
While suggesting that it might not be fair to say Jews run the industry, the comedian said that coming to that conclusion is “not a crazy thing to think.” Chappelle’s “SNL” episode drew a season-high 4.8 million viewers when it aired on NBC (eclipsing Jewish comedian Amy Schumer’s own hosting stint the week before), and his monologue had more than 8.1 million views on YouTube as of Wednesday.
The Anti-Defamation League was quick to denounce Chappelle’s act, calling it antisemitic. Other prominent Jews have followed suit.
“I was very disturbed to see him speaking, to millions of people, a lot of antisemitic tropes,” Pamela Nadell, a professor at American University who researches antisemitism, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
But Chappelle, who was himself riffing on recent antisemitism controversies involving Kanye West and Kyrie Irving, wasn’t exactly breaking new ground by insinuating that Jews run Hollywood. The trope has been a part of show business since its earliest days — when, in a literal sense, Jews did run Hollywood. Or the studios, anyway.
Nearly every major movie studio was founded in the early 20th century by a group of first-generation secular Jews who immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe. Carl Laemmle (Universal), Adolph Zukor (Paramount), William Fox (Fox), Louis B. Mayer (MGM), and Benjamin Warner (Warner) were all Jewish silver-screen pioneers, laying the groundwork for the size and scale of the industry to follow.
But the industry has diversified greatly in the century since, with studios largely swallowed up by corporate behemoths. And while individual Jews may be overrepresented in an industry that has long welcomed and rewarded them, the rhetorical danger, Nadell said, comes in conflating a large Jewish presence in an industry with ownership and control of that industry.
“Jews remain active in Hollywood in a variety of roles, but it would be impossible to say that they run Hollywood, that they own Hollywood,” she said.
“Whenever the Jews enter into any kind of position where they might have influence over people who are not Jewish, then all of a sudden it’s seen as some kind of conspiracy.”
Conspiracy theories dogged Jews in Hollywood from the industry’s beginning. Because so many Jews were in control in Hollywood in its early years, Joseph Breen, who for decades ran the industry’s Production Code office and tried to make movies palatable to Catholic morality groups, blamed “the Jews” for sneaking sex, violence and moral depravity into the movies.
But their rise to the top of the still-young motion picture industry wasn’t because they were a part of some secretive cabal; it’s because, historians say, Hollywood provided a low barrier to entry for enterprising businessmen, and was lacking the antisemitic guardrails of more established industries.
“There were no social barriers in a business as new and faintly disreputable as the movies were in the early years of [the 20th] century,” historian Neal Gabler writes in his landmark 1988 book “An Empire Of Their Own: How The Jews Invented Hollywood.”
In the book, Gabler notes that the movie business, which evolved out of other professions like vaudeville and the garment industry where Jews had already found a toehold, lacked “the impediments imposed by loftier professions and more firmly entrenched businesses to keep Jews and other undesirables out.”
As such, Jews (particularly recent immigrants) were able to thrive in show business in a way they couldn’t in most other industries. Once they were in, family ties or the general phenomenon of affinity groups often led to them elevating other Jews in the industry: For example, prolific Jewish producer David O. Selznick, whose credits include “Gone With The Wind,” “Rebecca” and a huge string of other hits in the 1930s and ’40s, spent many years at MGM, run by his father-in-law, Louis B. Mayer.
Areas like the film, garment and publishing industries were attractive to Jews, Nadell said, “because there were so many other sectors of the economy where they were barred from.”
But in exchange, Hollywood’s prominent Jews had to effectively extinguish their Jewishness.
Yearning to assimilate into American society, the Jews who ran these studios were beset on all sides by antisemitic invective — first from Christian groups like the Legion of Decency, then by anti-Communist groups, both of whom accused Hollywood’s Jews of conspiring to undermine American society with their loose morals.
As such, the Jewish studio heads largely refrained from making any movies about Jewish themes, or snuffing out antisemitic content even within their own films, or otherwise exerting their influence in any obviously Jewish way, even as many of the Golden Era of Hollywood’s most acclaimed writers and directors (Herman Mankiewicz, Ernst Lubitsch, George Cukor, Billy Wilder) were also Jewish. “Gentleman’s Agreement,” the landmark 1947 film about antisemitism, didn’t have any Jewish producers, directors or major stars (though some of its credited writers were Jewish).
Famously, Hollywood’s Jews also went out of their way to avoid offending Hitler during the Nazi era, continuing to do business with Germany and largely avoiding featuring Nazis as villains in the prewar years.
Director Steven Spielberg speaks at the Academy Awards in Hollywood, Feb. 9, 2020. (Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
With the demise of the studio system in the 1960s, Jewish creatives ranging from Mel Brooks to Steven Spielberg to Natalie Portman no longer had to hide their identity from audiences, but instead made it an essential part of their public personas. Earlier this week, in a New York Times interview, Spielberg acknowledged that Hollywood was a welcoming place for Jews when he arrived as a young filmmaker.
“Being Jewish in America is not the same as being Jewish in Hollywood,” he said while promoting “The Fabelmans,” a loose retelling of his own Jewish upbringing. “Being Jewish in Hollywood is like wanting to be in the popular circle and immediately being accepted as I have been in that circle, by a lot of diversity but also by a lot of people who in fact are Jewish.”
Still, such ethnic affinity has often been deemed conspiratorial. “Hollywood is run by Jews” and “owned by Jews,” Marlon Brando declared in a 1996 interview with Larry King, further claiming that Jewish studio executives prevented antisemitic stereotypes from being depicted on screen while allowing stereotypes of every other minority group “because that’s where you circle the wagons around.”
(Despite this outburst, which prompted intense backlash from Jewish groups, Brando was known for having close relationships with Jews and demonstrating a strong understanding of Jewish theology and culture throughout his life, and apparently spoke Yiddish quite well.)
This general air of suspicion around Jews in show business has continued into the modern day, as evidenced by Chappelle and West’s comments. In the tweets that precipitated the collapse of his businesses, West singled out Jewish producers and managers in the entertainment industry he had affiliations with, echoing how believers in antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish control tend to fixate on Jews in leadership positions outside of the public eye.
Attorney Allen Grubman, left, and rocker John Mellencamp speak onstage during the 37th Annual Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony in Los Angeles, Nov. 5, 2022. (Amy Sussman/WireImage)
Ignoring the many industry leaders who are not Jewish, such conspiracy theorists tend to focus on the successful managers and lawyers in Hollywood who are, including Jeremy Zimmer, Ari Emanuel, Allen Grubman — and Harvey Weinstein, whose decades of sexual abuse, scorched-earth targeting of his accusers and eventual downfall are the subject of the new movie “She Said.”
And in a similar fashion to Brando, Chappelle suggested that there is a double standard in talking about ethnic groups, with jokes about Jews being seen as taboo in a way that jokes about Black people and other groups are not: “If they’re Black, then it’s a gang. If they’re Italian, it’s a mob. If they’re Jewish, it’s a coincidence and you should never speak about it.”
At the same time as Jews in and out of the industry are fighting such perceptions, they are also pushing for greater visibility. The unveiling of the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles last year almost entirely omitted Jews from Hollywood’s founding narrative, leading to backlash from Jews in the industry and, ultimately, the guarantee of a new permanent exhibition space focusing on Jews.
And there was one other way in which the Chappelle episode hearkened back to the age-old dynamics of the relationship between Jews and Hollywood: “Saturday Night Live” executive producer Lorne Michaels, who presumably allowed the monologue on the air, is Jewish.
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The post Dave Chappelle isn’t the first to suggest that Jews run Hollywood. Here are the origins of the trope. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Passover’s 4 cups of meaning
What if the answer to the ‘Meaning Crisis’ is sitting right in front of us, around our Passover tables?
The Meaning Crisis is a term coined by philosopher John Vervaeke to discuss the constellation of mental health, political and cultural crises that, in his words, derive from people “feeling very disconnected from themselves, from each other, from the world, and from a viable and foreseeable future.” It is, Vervaeke argues, at the root of such seemingly disparate phenomena as the opioid crisis, the rise of right-wing nationalism, and off-the-charts reports of despair and anxiety, particularly among young people.
There are at least two meanings of ‘Meaning’ in this context.
First, over the last few hundred years — but especially in the last few decades — there has been a rapid erosion of the structures and communities that gave human lives meaning for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Traditional religious values and structures are far less coherent, attractive or attainable. Familial and communal structures have rapidly shifted. Fewer and fewer of us live in the places where we grew up, surrounded by extended family. The civic bonds many of us once took for granted are frayed as we fundamentally disagree about what American democracy even means. And in the last few decades, the atomizing effects of technology have made us more isolated from one another, with less in-person human contact and even less physical intimacy.
This is also a literal crisis of meaning: who we are, how we understand our world, the concepts by which we organize our lives — all of these are rapidly changing, and with the potential of AI to reshape our economic order and wipe out half of white-collar jobs, it’s possible we ain’t seen nothing yet.
Some of these changes are for the best. To take one personal example, the word ‘marriage’ connoted a very specific form of social arrangement for hundreds of years: a man, a woman, a lifelong union blessed by a religious authority, and the raising of children. The parameters of marriage were never as stable as traditionalists like to claim — just look at our biblical ancestors polygamous marriages, or the deeply unequal access and expectations around extramarital sex stretching through the Mad Men 1950s. But with the progress in women’s rights (e.g. not being considered the property of their husbands, being able to have careers) and LGBTQ equality, obviously the nature and rates of marriage have changed significantly. As someone in a same-sex marriage, I’m very grateful for that.
But it is still a change, and, together with other transformations, it has challenged some traditional notions of masculinity, leading to a resurgence of misogynistic, hyper-conservative models in the so-called ‘manosphere.’ And that’s but one example of many.
In this context — the meaning crisis and the reactionary responses to it — I find the observance of Passover, and the Passover Seder in particular, to be a much-needed antidote to disorientation on one hand, and oppressive traditionalism on the other.
Fittingly, for a holiday obsessed with the number four, I want to explore this in four ways — if you like, the Four Cups of Meaning that can be part of the Passover Seder.
1) Community
For many people, gathering with families of origin can be extremely stressful in our politically polarized time. It was bad enough when it was just the proverbial ‘racist uncle’ we had to endure at Seders. He might’ve been annoying, but he could also be ignored. Now, however, even well-meaning, sincere and committed Jews passionately disagree over a number of subjects, especially a certain country (or two) in the Middle East.
Yet there is a profound value gathering as a family — even as a tribe — and feeling a sense of kinship and belonging to it. Despite real and painful differences, Jews congregating together are connecting to a heritage and an ancestry that cannot be taken away by those who seek to put us outside the tent. That is something very old and very rich. You are not an atomized, isolated individual, separate from a history and a people and a tradition — a tradition which specifically includes the value of disagreement, argumentation and wrestling with the divine.
2) Centering our core values
Within the Jewish family, there are radically different iterations of core values. For me, the meaning of the Exodus is that oppression, slavery and injustice are morally wrong in the highest possible sense. As Exodus 23:9 teaches, “Do not oppress the stranger, for you know the heart of a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” From our experience of oppression — real, imagined or historically projected — we extrapolate the emotional and ethical value that it is wrong to oppress those who are different from us.
I know others have different views — for example, that the story of the Exodus is centrally about something that happened to our tribe, and that our group must never allow to happen to us again. But in terms of the meaning crisis, the debate is part of the solution. We are called at the Passover Seder to discuss the meanings of freedom, to reenact in our lived ritual experience the passage from servitude to liberation.
And not only that. We are invited to cultivate gratitude — in the Dayenu song and elsewhere — for all the blessings around us. We are invited, over and over again, to value questioning, curiosity, even challenging the texts of the Haggadah that for many are the very foundation of the Seder. These values are placed at the center of the Passover symposium. And while we disagree about how these questions are to be answered, just asking them is a retort to the emptiness and nihilism of so much of online culture and political cynicism. Values matter.
3) The power of myth
Human beings are creatures of story. Some linguists believe that it is in the telling of stories that human language itself — and thus human consciousness — evolved. Personally, I don’t regard the biblical narrative as a historical document; I see it as a shared myth of national self-creation, one which we can embody in ritual — in what the scholar of religion Clifford Geertz called “deep play.”
Sometimes the play is quite literal. Last year, my friend Shoshana Jedwab, a marvelous Jewish educator, led a bibliodrama performance in which, drawing from Sephardic traditions, we whipped one another with scallions to mock the servitude of Egyptian slavery. It’s fun (and worked really well with my eight-year-old) but it’s also a way of making myth into embodied, living experience. The myths, and their reenactment, bring us into intimacy with the past.
But ritual play may take many forms. Why do we dip our vegetables twice? Why the charoset? Why the orange on the seder plate? Why this? Why that? The inquisitiveness of the Four Questions is modeled by the youngest participant of the seder, but is invited on behalf of all of us. These often inscrutable, embodied, crunchy, weird rituals connect to the myth of the Passover story and make it alive in a way that mere retelling could never do.
As you prepare for your own seders, I invite you to create your own questions based on the themes embedded in the order of the Seder. And to lean into the weird. Which brings me to the final cup of meaning:
4) The non-rational
Passover, like many Jewish holidays, has multiple layers — seasonal, agricultural, mythic — and they all mash together in an often strange, and often charoset-like, mixture.
Particularly this year, the non-rational, emotional, and spiritual content of the Seder feels resonant for me. I cannot sequester the grief I feel at the crumbling of the American experiment in multicultural democracy, or at the ascendant far right in Israel. I feel perhaps a little closer to that pre-redeemed consciousness of my mythic ancestors in the land of Egypt. I am certainly not enslaved, but I do feel the sense of precarity that the Seder invites us to cultivate.
And so I find myself yearning for a miraculous deliverance — maybe not one involving frogs, lice, and boils, but from some unknown, mysterious, sacred source. Perhaps salvation will come from what we do not know. Perhaps there is room for a desperate hope, despite ample reasons not to hope.
As the Hasidic masters noted (and for a wonderful presentation of this, consider downloading the ‘Four Cups of Consciousness’ Haggadah supplement created by the Jewish psychedelic organization, Shefa), the Passover Seder is in large part about consciousness change: using the four cups of wine, the emotional arc of the seder, and the long night of singing, arguing and talking over a festive meal that stretches to midnight to shift our consciousness and open us to the possibility of internal freedom, even when external circumstances are antithetical to it.
This is the freedom of which Viktor Frankl wrote. And while we are a long way from what Frankl endured, I would submit that part of the invitation of the Seder is to imagine the consciousness of freedom even when that freedom is threatened — to be in solidarity with those being oppressed as we gather for our lavish meal, reclining on real or metaphorical cushions and drinking cups of wine, and to hold those two sides together. To know that, as the Haggadah relates, there have always been threats to our physical and spiritual safety. And while our physical freedom can indeed be restricted — and has been — we retain the capacity for ethical and spiritual freedom even in circumstances far worse than our own.
This is the ultimate meaningfulness: that in a time when the structures and language that give our lives meaning are threatened, we can resist the slide to nihilism and despair. And the Seder is a celebration of doing so.
The post Passover’s 4 cups of meaning appeared first on The Forward.
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Tensions flare at Passover Seder over Mamdani’s inclusion
(JTA) — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was briefly interrupted by a heckler during an appearance at a Passover Seder in Manhattan Monday night, marking a tense moment that highlighted ongoing strains between the mayor and segments of the Jewish community.
“The rising tide of antisemitism has caused enormous pain for so many Jewish New Yorkers. Doors are locked that used to be open, routine subway journeys felt fraught, synagogues that once felt like sanctuaries now require armed protection,” Mamdani said before he was interrupted by an individual in the back of the room who stood and shouted, “Every Jewish organization is a target.”
Attendees responded with a blend of shushes and a single voice shouting, “Stop the xenophobia, let him speak.”
“This is New York City, and we love to be here,” Mamdani said as the audience erupted in cheers. “I say it because we know that if there was complete decorum anywhere that we were, then we would have to ask ourselves if we had left the city that we love, and it is important to be here and to acknowledge that this is what it means to love and to lead the place that we call home.”
The episode, which took place at Jewish entrepreneur Michael Dorf’s annual seder at City Winery in the Meatpacking District, comes as Mamdani has faced scrutiny from segments of New York’s Jewish community over his responses to antisemitic incidents and continued alignment with pro-Palestinian activists.
“I have to say I didn’t vote for him,” one male attendee, who asked to remain anonymous for his privacy, said following the seder. “I have certain feelings about him that I think a lot of other people have, but that’s neither here nor there. But that was kind of surprising that a couple of people kind of went out of their way to heckle.”
While the mayor has previously marked Jewish holidays with Jewish leaders and organizations aligned with him on his criticisms of Israel, the event at City Winery involved a lineup of speakers and attendees with differing views.
“Mamdani was here, which is great, yeah, I guess, because he knows at the seder, you lean to the left,” joked comedian Olga Namer later in the evening. “A little bit about me, I’m a Syrian Jew, yes, so that’s good, because I know, at least I’m confident, that Mamdani likes half of me.”
Ahead of the evening, which also featured addresses by former CNN anchor Don Lemon, Israeli musician David Broza and Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie of the non-denominational Lab/Shul, observant Jewish comedian Modi Rosenfeld announced that he had cancelled his appearance, claiming that he had been unaware of the mayor’s inclusion.
“We were not told Mamdani was participating in this event until today,” Rosenfeld’s team said in a statement on Instagram following criticism from pro-Israel activist Shai Davidai. “Modi will no longer be participating.”
Davidai, the former Israeli business school professor at Columbia University, took aim at the Israeli participants in the seder, writing in a post on Instagram, “This is why we’re losing.”
“I have nothing against any of these individuals, but I do have a problem with giving Mamdani a kosher stamp of approval while so many of us are out in the streets fighting against is anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli policies, actions, and rhetoric,” Davidai wrote in an updated caption announcing Modi’s cancellation.
City Council Speaker Julie Menin, who has been seen as a counterweight on Mamdani, used part of her remarks to highlight the passage of her “buffer zone” legislation for religious institutions, which were introduced after a pro-Palestinian demonstration outside of Park East Synagogue in November.
“We all should be able to worship or not worship as we see fit,” Menin said. “We all should be able to go into, whether it’s a synagogue, a church, a mosque or any house of worship, freely without intimidation and harassment, so I’m very proud that we were able to pass this bill.”
Mamdani has not confirmed whether he will sign the legislation, with a spokesperson telling the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he “wants to ensure both the right to prayer and the right to protest are protected here in New York City.”
Former Comptroller Brad Lander, who is currently running for Congress in New York’s 10th Congressional District, joked during his remarks late in the evening that he “did not tell the mayor that we were doing a live reenactment of the four sons during his speech,” making a tongue-in-cheek reference to a core element of the Passover haggadah.
“He gets heckled and, you know, and it kind of goes along with the territory, I thought he dealt with it very gracefully,” Lander told JTA. “As a lot of people said in here tonight, not everyone in that room agrees with each other.”
Indeed, at the conclusion of the seder, several attendees said that they were not aware that the mayor was slated to appear — and questioned his understanding of the holiday’s core narrative.
“If City Winery did not inform people of the politicians in particular, because he’s very polarizing, to have him up there really upset people,” said one attendee, who requested anonymity because she had participated as a private individual. “It feels inauthentic to have him speak about matzah or Judaism, when the whole holiday is about Jews that were enslaved by Pharaoh and then went back to the homeland of Israel.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Tensions flare at Passover Seder over Mamdani’s inclusion appeared first on The Forward.
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NY candidate criticizes Israel on Hasan Piker’s show, sparking backlash in heavily Jewish swing district
(JTA) — Democratic officials in four suburban New York counties are decrying a local congressional candidate who criticized Israel during an appearance this weekend with Hasan Piker, the leftist streamer who has divided Democrats and drawn allegations of antisemitism.
Effie Phillips-Staley is running for Congress in a heavily Jewish district just outside New York City and hoping to face off against a pro-Israel Republican in November. During her appearance on Piker’s show on Saturday, she accused Israel of genocide and being an apartheid state.
Phillips-Staley’s position on Israel has morphed since last July, when she told Jewish Insider that she wanted to be “very clear that the U.S. has to continue to be a critical ally to Israel” and that she wouldn’t support restrictions on aid to Israel.
But after she went on a trip to Israel and the West Bank in February, she became strongly critical of Israel and said she now supports cutting U.S. aid.
In a 30-minute interview that also covered immigration and her other campaign priorities, Piker asked Phillips-Staley about her West Bank trip, and about how her Israel stance is sitting with the district’s large Jewish community.
“The majority of people — or maybe not the majority, but certainly a strong number — who have brought this to my attention have been Jews,” she said. “I get the most encouragement, from lots of people, but a lot of encouragement from Jews who really challenged me, especially in the beginning, to be brave and say it like it is.”
Phillips-Staley, a village trustee in Tarrytown, has established herself as the left-wing candidate in the NY-17 primary and has made her anti-Israel stance a focus of her campaign. She said on Saturday that she believes using the words “apartheid” and “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions is “100%” a good litmus test for Democrats.
Meanwhile, Piker, a streamer with millions of followers on YouTube and the streaming platform Twitch, has become one of the most prominent leftist commentators in the United States. He’s drawn scrutiny for his sharp critiques of the Democratic party and Israel, as well as accusations of antisemitism.
Following the interview, the Democratic committees for Westchester, Rockland, Putnam and Dutchess counties issued a joint statement condemning Piker’s “hateful rhetoric” and expressing “deep disappointment” with Phillips-Staley for appearing alongside him.
“Her decision represents a dangerous and unacceptable step toward legitimizing rhetoric that has no place in this District, in mainstream Democratic politics, or in any serious political discourse,” the committees said.
Phillips-Staley responded with a statement of her own, saying, “While I don’t align with every word Hasan Piker has ever said, we must recognize the massive value of a platform that engages millions of young people in the democratic process.”
Phillips-Staley is banking on her Israel stances — which are increasingly in line with the outlook of Democratic voters, particularly younger ones — to buoy her candidacy in a packed primary where nearly half of voters remained undecided in the most recent poll.
Beth Davidson, a Rockland County legislator who is Jewish, led all Democratic primary candidates in the latest polls with 23% of the vote. Davidson was followed by Cait Conley, who was endorsed by a major pro-Israel lobbying group, with 17%; Peter Chatzky, who is Jewish and supports conditioning aid to Israel, at 8%; and Philliips-Staley at 5%.
New York’s 17th Congressional District is home to a number of heavily Jewish areas, including haredi Orthodox communities like Monsey and Kiryas Joel as well as towns in Westchester County with significant populations of non-Orthodox Jews. The Jewish Electorate Institute estimates that nearly 20% of the district’s voters are Jewish, making it one of the top 10 most Jewish congressional districts in the country.
Phillips-Staley acknowledged to Piker that her position on Israel is not uniformly popular among her constituents.
“There are some communities that certainly don’t like the positions that we take, that take issue with me calling out AIPAC, even Democrats,” she said. “It’s not great. But there are just as many or more who say, no this is wrong, keep going. Keep going.”
Phillips-Staley detailed her experience visiting the West Bank, which she has spoken about with other leftist outlets like Zeteo. She said it is “unbearable” that the U.S. is providing aid to Israel’s military to uphold what she called “apartheid” conditions similar to the American Jim Crow era.
The interview also covered Lawler, who currently holds the seat and is seen as vulnerable to losing against the Democratic nominee in November amid a difficult climate for Republicans. Lawler, a staunchly pro-Israel member of Congress, has been endorsed by AIPAC and the Republican Jewish Coalition.
Piker called Lawler a “villain,” and Phillips-Staley said in agreement, “Villain is the word.”
Piker asked Phillips-Staley about Conley, who he said was the “mainstream Democratic party candidate who’s leading in the polls,” though she was second in the latest polling data.
Piker pointed out that Conley is endorsed by the Democratic Majority for Israel, a pro-Israel lobbying group that often overlaps with AIPAC in its spending. Phillips-Staley dismissed Conley as being too far to the right.
“There’s very little light between Cait [Conley] and Mike Lawler in terms of a lot of their policies,” Phillips-Staley said. The two pro-Israel politicians are far apart on the war in Iran, however: Conley has been opposed while Lawler has been a steadfast supporter.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post NY candidate criticizes Israel on Hasan Piker’s show, sparking backlash in heavily Jewish swing district appeared first on The Forward.