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Donald Trump wants the Nobel Peace Prize. Some Israelis and Jews say he should get it.
For anyone who has been living in a state of suspended animation since the Oct. 7 attack when Hamas took hundreds of hostages from Israel, the timing of the announcement on Wednesday that a deal had been reached for their release at the two-year mark could not have been more resonant.
But the timing has another significance: It comes on the eve of this year’s announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize — a sought-after award for the man who demanded and brokered the deal, U.S. President Donald Trump.
Trump has previously expressed resentment that the Nobel committee had not honored him. Since returning to office this year, he has claimed — with some evidence — to have helped end seven world conflicts. And on Wednesday, he announced that he had achieved the biggest deal of them all, a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war that he says could pave the way for lasting peace in the Middle East.
Those grateful for the deal say he deserves the honor.
“I call on the Nobel committee to award President Trump the Nobel Peace Prize. He did something unbelievable,” Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid said in a video statement on Thursday.
“President Trump shouldn’t just win the Nobel Prize — it should be renamed after him,” said the Republican Jewish Coalition in a statement.
And in Israel, a farmer who has used his land to send political messages in the past had the words “Nobel 4 Trump” plowed into his fields.
Trump is clearly eager for the prize. Soon after he announced the deal, the White House tweeted a picture of him with the words “The Peace President” in all-caps. Trump’s son Eric tweeted, “Retweet if you believe @realDonaldTrump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize,” quickly drawing tens of thousands of retweets. And his Jewish commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, added his own take: “Undoubtedly, President Trump should receive the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Not everyone who is happy to see a deal says Trump deserves the prize. “Trump gets what he wants because he is a bully. Period. And apparently, bullying was what was necessary to get this ceasefire done,” wrote Elana Sztokman, an Israeli liberal voice, on her Substack.
It appears unlikely that Trump could get the prize this year. Nominations, which can only come from specific people empowered to suggest recipients, were required to be made by Jan. 31, and the committee said it made its choice in Monday, before the deal.
The prize, awarded most years since 1901, is intended to recognize those “who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” The Nobel committee, which consists of five Norwegians, is famously resistant to pressure campaigns, and some of its members have spoken out against the kinds of anti-democratic policies that Trump is advancing at home.
Still, the committee’s chair Jorgen Watne Frydnes indicated this week — without mentioning Trump specifically — that the committee saw efforts to vie for the prize as a positive.
“We feel that the world is listening, and the world is discussing, and discussing how we can achieve peace is a good thing,” he told the BBC during a rare interview about the process.
At least two people did nominate Trump before the deadline, including an Israeli professor of law at Case Western Reserve University who said she did so in January after a brief ceasefire that resulted in the return of some but not all of the Israeli hostages in Gaza.
“Their return was an act of justice and humanity, and President Trump played a decisive role in achieving it,” Anat Alon-Beck told the Times of Israel on Thursday. “What distinguishes President Trump is his ability to deliver meaningful results through determined leadership. Under his guidance, a historic ceasefire agreement was reached, bringing home hostages whose lives were hanging by a thread.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nominated Trump in July, after the deadline, amid ceasefire talks that did not yield a deal. “It’s well deserved, and you should get it,” Netanyahu told Trump at the White House when presenting the letter, which did not mention Gaza.
Past recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize include Elie Wiesel, the Dalai Lama and South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, as well as two Israeli prime ministers who struck peace agreements and their Arab counterparts. One agreement — for Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, has held — while the other, in 1994 for Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres as well as the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Yassir Arafat, soon collapsed amid unprecedented violence.
Some human rights advocates say even if Trump is unlikely to take home his white whale this year, there’s a chance that he could in the future if the Gaza deal is in fact inked and holds. Nina Graeger, the director of the think tank PRIO, told the BBC, “I think it would be difficult not to look in his direction then,”
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VIDEO: A Hasid gives us a tour of Morocco in Yiddish
דער ירושלימער יוטוב־שטערן וועלוול קירשנבוים האָט לעצטנס אַרויסגעשטעלט אַ ווידעאָ אויף ייִדיש פֿון אַ פּרעכטיקן וויזיט, וואָס ער האָט געמאַכט אין מאַראָקאָ. עס באַגלייט אים זײַן חבֿר אַבֿרהם פּרץ.
אינעם ווידעאָ זעט מען ווי קירשנבוים דאַוונט שחרית מיט די אָרטיקע ייִדן און באַזוכט אַ גוט אָפּגעהיטענעם בית־עולם, וווּ עס ליגן באַערדיקט גרויסע צדיקים ווי למשל הרבֿ חיים בן עתר (1696–1743), באַקאַנט ווי דער „אור החיים“. „מענטשן מיינען, אַז נאָר אין אייראָפּע זענען דאָ קבֿרים פֿון צדיקים!“ זאָגט קירשנבוים.
מיר זעען אַ גרויסע, שיינע שיל מיט אַ פֿײַנער אַרכיטעקטור אין קאַזאַבלאַנקאַ; דעם גרויסן אַראַבישן שוק, וווּ קירשנבוים קויפֿט זיך אײַן מלבושים פּונקט ווי די מאַראָקאַנער גייען אָנגעטאָן. ער באַוווּנדערט אויך די שיינע טיי־גלעזער און טשײַניקן, וואָס מע פֿאַרקויפֿט דאָרט, און באַקענט זיך מיט אַ ייִדישן סוחר וואָס האַנדלט מיט זילבער און גאָלד, פּונקט אַזוי ווי זײַן טאַטע און זיידע האָבן געטאָן פֿאַר דור־דורות.
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Conservative and Christian movies are coming for Hollywood
A star-studded new movie set in a Soviet prison is coming out in November. James Franco and Rob Lowe anchor the cast of Confession, playing a brutal prison guard and an imprisoned dissident professor, and a disheveled Nick Nolte appears as a fellow prisoner.
These actors were once huge gets, and their names could convey legitimacy to a project. Nolte and Franco both have received Academy Award nominations. Lowe was a member of the Brat Pack, and was a regular on The West Wing.
Confession, written by Ben Shapiro and produced by the rightwing tabloid-esque news site The Daily Wire, is not the expected fare for actors with that kind of name recognition; Shapiro’s screenwriting aspirations have been the target of ridicule for years.
Nevertheless, this isn’t the only Daily Wire production getting big names; Danny Trejo signed onto a pro-ICE movie about Minneapolis in the aftermath of the Renee Good shooting, and Jonathan Majors led Run, Fight, Hide: Infidels earlier this year.
Each one of these actors has been, in some way, canceled or in career doldrums so may have been more open to working with The Daily Wire. And some have claimed that they did not know who Shapiro was, or what his politics were; Trejo’s son, Gilbert, said his 82-year-old father did not endorse ICE and was misled about the movie before he signed his contract.
Movie studios have struggled through the pandemic and the streaming era, both of which have tanked box office receipts, leaving the field open for movies from offbeat production studios. In addition to The Daily Wire, there has been a whole ream of Christian movies attempting to shift the stereotype of bible movies — that they’re preachy, low-budget straight-to-TV affairs with cardboard acting — to something more prestigious, or at least profitable.
The Christian company Angel Studios has been placing screenings of the half philo-semitic, half-antisemitic Jesus TV series The Chosen in movie theaters across the country, produced the right-wing hit The Sound of Freedom and is pumping out faith-based movies like the animated King of Kings Christmas story and David, a kiddie movie about the biblical king. Recently, Pinnacle Peak Pictures, another faith-based production company, premiered Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, another bible movie that was notable enough to merit a review in The New York Times. (Though admittedly it wasn’t a particularly positive one.)
For decades, Hollywood, and the media industry at large, has been associated with liberalism, progressive politics and diversity. (This is part of why conservative conspiracy theorists often insist that Jews control the media.) Even when conservatives are in power, satirical movies have poked fun at the ruling class — Team America: World Police spoofed George W. Bush’s foreign policy, while M*A*S*H critiqued Richard Nixon. During the current Trump administration, we’ve seen One Battle After Another lambasting immigration policies and rising white nationalism, Eddington on misinformation and populism, and The Apprentice depicting Trump directly.
But a rising number of higher-budget, bigger releases from the right wing, whether The Daily Wire’s conservative political parables or the Christian fables, are bringing a new kind of messaging — about the importance of God and country, about gender roles, about about the centrality of Jesus to the U.S. — to the American movie-going public.
This is no accident. A group of powerful conservative Christians, many of whom worked on Project 2025, are proponents of the Seven Mountains Mandate, a blueprint for Christian nationalism that instructs Christians to gain influence and control over the “seven mountains” of society — which include media, entertainment and the arts. The Mandate is part of the New Apostolic Reformation, a decentralized evangelical movement embraced by millions of Americans.
Jeremy Boreing, the director of many Daily Wire movies — though he has since left the company — said on a podcast hosted by businessman Patrick Bet-David that “It had always been part of our strategy to move into making culture, not just criticizing culture” as a way of proving that “there is a future where conservatives aren’t losing. There’s a future where we have political power and cultural power.”
Cultural power, of course, requires more than just a lot of movies; they have to be well-done, or at least appear to be. Previous Daily Wire productions, as well as other right-wing, MAGA movie ventures, have been hacky. Lady Ballers, about an unsuccessful men’s basketball team pretending to be women so they can dominate the league, was an unsubtle, unfunny and ultimately unwatchable spoof of transgender athletes. And even plenty of higher-budget attempts, like Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, can still fall victim to wooden acting and writing.
But now, with the financial success of movies like The Sound of Freedom and biblical parables like The Chosen, bigger stars are being drawn to projects like the Daily Wire’s lineup of pro-ICE, anti-immigration and anti-LGBTQ movies. With those bigger stars may come new audiences who might not have watched a Christian movie or Daily Wire project otherwise. And where there is money and viewers, mainstream Hollywood will go, too, no matter how progressive people expect the industry to be. We’ve already gotten a biblical epic from Amazon Prime, with The House of David, and there are likely to be many more to come.
After all, it wasn’t so long ago, after all, that Cecil DeMille’s The Ten Commandments was the biggest movie in town.
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‘Heil’ Mary? New Atlanta Falcons logo inspires Nazi comparisons
If there was something off about the logo the Atlanta Falcons unveiled on social media Wednesday, whoever runs their accounts did, uh, not see it.
Behind the black falcon graphic that began appearing on the football team’s helmets in the 1960s was a new background — a flag of red, tan, black and white vertical stripes. To thousands of people who responded to the logo, it looked distinctly German — in a 1930s kind of way.
“The Atlanta Falcons are preparing to invade Poland,” one fan wrote.
A day after its posting, the new profile picture had unleashed a deluge of Nazi memes in the 4,000-plus replies on X. One picture swapped in the logo for Nazi flags in the background of a historical photo of a Hitler rally. Another edited the Falcon claw to look like a Nazi salute.
Others depicted Hitler in a Falcons cap, references to Inglourious Basterds and the Battle of the Bulge and a World War II joke invoking a blown lead in Super Bowl LI.
“Falcons were up 28-3 at Dunkirk,” that tweet read.
The Falcons’ snafu enters a small but growing catalogue of Reich-coded brand mixups. Who can forget the German national soccer team’s ‘44’ soccer jerseys? There was also the swastika-emblazoned Hallmark gift wrap; the accidental Hitler mugs; and (for my money) the worst of the bunch, Zara’s concentration camp uniform shirt.
All of those have been addressed; so far, the Falcons’ has not. We’ve reached out to them for comment.
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