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Demanding loyalty of the U.S. military, Trump hungers for ‘the kind of generals that Hitler had’
During the Third Reich, nearly 18 million Germans entered military service under a vow that bound them not to the state, but to a man:
“I swear by God this sacred oath: that I shall render unconditional obedience to the Führer of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler, and that I am prepared, as a brave soldier, to risk my life at any time for this oath.”
Under that oath, German soldiers invaded foreign countries, torched villages, and executed civilians. Refusals were rare. Obedience was blind. The results were bloody.
Eight decades after Nazi Germany’s defeat, American soldiers are being hurtled toward a threshold of their own — whether to follow the orders of their commander in chief Donald Trump when deployed to American cities where they’re not wanted, and where their presence raises constitutional concerns.
This is a loyalty test that may soon play out nationwide, especially if Trump follows through on his perilous proposal of using progressive cities as military “training grounds,” and pursuing leftist activists as if they were terrorists.
Portland, Oregon — already the target of Trump’s wrath — may become the proving ground. A preliminary court victory for Trump’s plan to send National Guard troops, while animal-costumed protestors mock ICE agents and disrupt their operations, has turned Oregon’s largest city — and my hometown -— into a symbolic battleground.
Trump’s hatred for Portland seems to grow more visceral each time he mentions it. For most of the Rose City’s citizens, the feeling is mutual.
Since June, activists have gathered outside the ICE detention center on the west bank of the Willamette River, aiming to block agents from leaving to pursue undocumented immigrants. Their strategy — nonviolent disruption — has been surprisingly effective.
In recent weeks, Portland’s protesters have captured hearts and headlines worldwide, thanks to viral videos showing battle-ready ICE agents standing face-to-face with activists dressed as unicorns, cows, giraffes, and a whole menagerie of creatures. Of all the images to emerge from anti-ICE protests, none is more enduring — or endearing — than that of a giant frog staring down helmeted federal agents.
Trump has called Portland a “hellscape” and a “war zone,” accusing protesters of mounting a “criminal insurrection.” But the videos tell a different story. When ICE agents fire pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets and pepper balls, it’s often in response to peaceful resistance.
In late September, Trump ordered the federalization of 200 Oregon National Guard troops for a 60-day deployment to Portland. Oregon and city officials sued, arguing the move violated state sovereignty and lacked legal justification. On Oct. 4, U.S. District Judge Karen Immergut blocked the deployment with a temporary restraining order, writing that Trump’s “war zone” claims were “simply untethered to the facts.” She added: “This is a nation of Constitutional Law, not martial law.”
This past Monday, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals — two of them Trump appointees — voted 2-1 that Trump had the right to send Oregon Guard soldiers to Portland to guard the ICE facility. But Oregon and Portland officials won at least a temporary reprieve Friday, when the Ninth Circuit issued a four-day administrative stay to allow the full court time to consider rehearing arguments.
Meanwhile, Trump is laying the groundwork for a broader crackdown. In August, he signed an executive order directing the Pentagon to establish a National Guard Quick Reaction Force, a domestic military police unit to quell civil disturbances.
Trump lackey Stephen Miller has called Portland’s protesters “street terrorists,” labeled the Democratic Party a “domestic extremist organization,” and claimed that “leftwing terrorism” is growing. His solution: “legitimate state power” to dismantle these supposed terror networks.
How America’s top military brass feel about this chest-thumping remains unclear. Summoned from posts around the globe to the Marine Corps base at Quantico, Virginia, they sat stone-faced last month as Trump laid out his vision for deploying military force “in our inner cities.”
“It’s really a very important mission,” Trump told them. “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military — National Guard, but military. This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room, because it’s the enemy from within, and we have to handle it before it gets out of control.”
In recent weeks, Trump has floated invoking the Insurrection Act: “If the governor can’t do the job, we’ll do the job. It’s all very simple.”
It’s unlikely that military commanders would openly defy Trump’s orders. But there are flickers of resistance. Brigadier General Alan R. Gronewold, head of the Oregon National Guard, told state lawmakers in September it was his “desire” that if his troops were deployed to the ICE facility, their mission would be to protect not just the facility, but also the protesters. In point of fact, however, if Guard troops were deployed under Title 10 — as federal forces — Gronewold would have no operational authority over their duties. They would report to U.S. Northern Command under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Although rare, there have been other indications of friction between senior military officials and the Trump administration. Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse was fired as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency after a leaked assessment questioned the strategic value of Trump’s June strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. The DIA report concluded that the strikes had set back Iran’s nuclear program by only a few months, contradicting Trump’s claim that the sites had been “obliterated.”
Earlier in the year, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the chief of Naval Operations, and the head of the National Security Agency were dismissed as part of what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described as a strategic overhaul of Pentagon leadership. A number of other uniformed leaders have also been removed. Critics have described the moves as a purge of institutional voices who had resisted politicization and prioritized independent analysis over loyalty.
When Trump walked onto the stage at Quantico to address America’s generals and admirals, he seemed puzzled that he wasn’t greeted with cheers and applause.
“I’ve never walked into a room so silent before,” he told his decorated military audience. “You know what? Just have a good time. And if you want to applaud, you applaud.”
“And if you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future.”
As Trump militarizes Democratic-led cities and yearns for “the kind of generals that Hitler had,” as he once told his then-chief of staff John Kelly, the stakes could not be clearer. This is not about law and order. It is about loyalty and power. The question is no longer whether Trump will test the military’s obedience — but whether anyone in uniform will have the courage to say no.
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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.”