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For theatergoers at Broadway’s recent spate of Jewish shows, attendance is a form of witness
(JTA) — Jewish stories have had top billing on Broadway this season — and Jewish audiences have been flocking to the theater.
Audiences have lined up to see Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt,” the multigenerational saga of a Jewish family in Vienna, and the devastating consequences of the Holocaust upon its ranks. They have packed the house for “Parade,” a musical retelling of the infamous antisemitic show trial and subsequent lynching of Leo Frank in Marietta, Georgia, in 1915. And just off Broadway, “The Wanderers” (which closed April 2) invited us into the slowly disintegrating marriage of two secular Jews born to mothers who dramatically left the Satmar sect of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, a show replete with intergenerational trauma and a pervasive sense of ennui.
None of these shows offers a particularly lighthearted evening at the theater. So why have they proven so popular? Critics have penned countless reviews of the three plays, analyzing the quality of the productions, the scripts, scores, performances of principal actors, set and design. But for our new book exploring what audiences learn about Judaism from Jewish cultural arts, my colleague Sharon Avni and I have been interviewing audience members after seeing “Leopoldstadt,” “Parade” and “The Wanderers.” We are interested in turning the spotlight away from the stage and onto the seats: What do audiences make of all this? What do they learn?
Take “Leopoldstadt,” for example, a drama so full of characters that when it left London for its Broadway run the production team added a family tree to the Playbill so that theatergoers could follow along. “Leopoldstadt” offers its audience a whistle-stop introduction to modern European Jewish history. In somewhat pedantic fashion, the family debates issues of the day that include Zionism, art, philosophy, intermarriage and, in a searing final scene, the memory of the Holocaust.
For some of the theatergoers that we interviewed, “Leopoldstadt” was powerful precisely because it packed so much Jewish history into its two-hour run time. It offered a basic literacy course in European Judaism, one they thought everyone needed to learn. Others, however, thought that this primer of Jewish history was really written for novice audiences — perhaps non-Jews, or assimilated Jews with half-remembered Jewish heritage, like Stoppard himself. “I don’t know who this play is for,” one interviewee told us. “But it’s not me. I know all this already.”
Brandon Uranowitz, left, who plays a Holocaust survivor, confronts Arty Froushan as a young writer discovering his Jewish roots, in the Broadway production of Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt.” (Joan Marcus)
Other interviewees thought the power of “Leopoldstadt” lay not in its history lessons, but in its ability to use the past to illuminate contemporary realities. I spoke at length with a woman who had been struggling with antisemitism at work. Some of her colleagues had been sharing social media posts filled with lazy caricatures of Jews as avaricious capitalists. Upon seeing “Leopoldstadt,” she realized that these vile messages mirrored Nazi rhetoric in the 1930s, convincing her that antisemitism in contemporary America had reached just as dangerous a threshold as beheld European Jews on the eve of the Shoah.
We heard similar sentiments about the prescience of history to alert us to the specter of antisemitism today from audiences who saw “Parade.” Recalling a scene where the cast members wave Confederate flags during the titular parade celebrating Confederate Memorial Day, Jewish audiences recalled feeling especially attuned to Jewish precarity when the theater burst into applause at the end of the musical number. “Why were we clapping Confederate flags?” one of our interviewees said. “I’ve lived in the South, and as a Jew I know that when you see Confederate flags it is not a safe space for us.”
“Parade” dramatizes the popular frenzy that surrounded the trial of Leo Frank, a Yankee as well as a Jew, who was scapegoated for the murder of a young Southern girl. Jewish audience members that we interviewed told us that the play powerfully illustrated how crowds could be manipulated into demonizing minorities, comparing the situation in early 20th century Marietta to the alt-right of today, and the rise of antisemitism in contemporary America.
What we ultimately discovered, however, was that audience perceptions of the Jewish themes and characters in these productions were as varied as audiences themselves. Inevitably, they tell us more about the individual than the performance. Yet the fact that American Jews have flocked to these three shows — a secular pilgrimage of sorts — also illustrates the power and the peril of public Jewish storytelling. For audience members at “Leopoldstadt” and “Parade,” especially, attending these performances was not merely an entertaining evening at the theater. It was a form of witnessing. There was very little to be surprised by in these plays, after all. The inevitable happens: The Holocaust destroys Jewish life in Europe, Leo Frank is convicted and lynched. Jewish audiences know to expect this. They know there will be no happy ending. In the secular cultural equivalent to saying Kaddish for the dead, Jewish audiences perform their respect to Jewish memory by showing up, and by paying hundreds of dollars for the good seats.
The peril of these performances, however, is that audiences learn little about antisemitism in reality. The victims of the Nazis and the Southern Jews of Marietta would tell us that they could never have predicted what was to happen. Yet in “Parade” and “Leopoldstadt” audiences are asked to grapple with the naivete of characters who believe that everything will be all right, even as audiences themselves know that it will not. By learning Jewish history on Broadway, audiences are paradoxically able to distance themselves from it, simply by knowing too much.
In the final scene of “Leopoldstadt,” Leo, the character loosely based on Stoppard himself, is berated by a long-lost relative for his ignorance of his family’s story. “You live as if without history,” the relative tells Leo. “As if you throw no shadow behind you.” Audiences, at that moment, are invited to pat themselves on the back for coming to see the show, and for choosing to acknowledge the shadows of their own Jewish histories. The cold hard reality, however, is that a shadow can only ever be a fuzzy outline of the truth.
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Antisemitism Exploding on the Far-Right: The Conspiracy Doesn’t Need an Event Anymore
Dan Bilzerian arrives at the Fashion Nova x Cardi B Collection Launch Party held at the Hollywood Palladium on May 8, 2019, in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, United States. Photo: Xavier Collin/Image Press Agency/NurPhoto via Reuters Connect
In April 2026, Dan Bilzerian — a social media personality with 29.6 million Instagram followers — filed to run for the US Congress against incumbent Randy Fine (R-FL). Within 10 days, he had been interviewed across right-wing, left anti-imperialist, manosphere, and tabloid outlets, calling his Jewish opponent a “fat Jew” and naming “Jewish supremacy” as the greatest threat to America.
My team at NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism collected and coded 3,000 YouTube comments under six of these video appearances. Across the six videos, 41 percent of comments were antisemitic. The lowest single video came in at 23.6 percent. Under TMZ, where the hosts pushed back on Bilzerian on camera, the figure reached 52 percent — the highest of the six.
These are not numbers consistent with the way online antisemitism has usually been studied — including in my own previous work.
Most digital antisemitism research, including the studies my team has run after the Capital Jewish Museum shooting, the Charlie Kirk assassination, the Bondi Beach attack, the Temple Israel Synagogue attack, and the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting, treats the discourse as event-driven. Something happens; comment sections respond. The highest antisemitism rate I have ever documented in those event studies sits in the 12 to 20 percent range.
Sadly, even Bilzerian’s quietest video outran the worst spike I have ever seen after a major attack. There is no event driving these numbers. There is just a candidate.
Online antisemitism is still being produced on the left, by Islamist actors, and by foreign malign-influence operations. None of that has gone away — and on the left in particular, the post-October-7 surge has not receded.
What has changed is that a second front has opened among right-wing influencers with mass audiences, and it is moving fast. Bilzerian comes from there. So did Candace Owens before him. So did Tucker Carlson.
Antisemitism and adjacent conspiracy narratives are now being normalized by these figures at an unprecedented pace, inside the broader Republican coalition, using platform infrastructures and institutional vehicles existing monitoring rarely even looks at.
Jewish institutions calibrated mainly to track the left or external state actors are now watching one front while a second one widens.
The pattern holds across audiences that have nothing else in common. Owen Shroyer is a former Infowars right-populist. George Galloway is a heterodox left anti-imperialist who was expelled from Labour in 2003 over his Iraq War statements. Sneako is a manosphere influencer and Muslim convert. Jimmy Dore is a left-populist commentator.
The antisemitism saturation is steady under all of them, because what is producing it is not the host or the audience but the speaker each is platforming. Under Galloway, a typical comment ran: “It is the Zionists in control of all our western governments that have promoted the illegal immigration issues we have all been experiencing for the past decade.” Under Sneako, where the title named “Jewish supremacy” directly, the wordplay register surfaced — “very Cohencidental,” “Cohencidence” — alongside lines like “anyone who shits on Jews is a legend.”
Under Jimmy Dore, where antisemitism reached 42 percent, the historical-authority register dominated: a Hitler quotation got 71 likes, with a reply reading, “Yes we owe that man AH a big apology.”
Bilzerian’s candidacy is more than a single bad actor. It is a convergence: manosphere reach built up over a decade — poker, weapons, wealth display — converted into a pre-loaded political audience; anti-establishment positioning that reads as left or right depending on the listener but is coherent only as anti-Jewish-power (anti-Trump, anti-AIPAC, anti-Iraq War, pro-Palestinian); eliminationist content visible across the comment sections, including Hadrian endorsements, death wishes referencing the Nova massacre directed at named Jewish commenters, and the line “FINISH THE JOB THIS TIME”; and a Republican primary as the institutional vehicle that cleared the FEC filing process without friction.
The TMZ result shows what happens when this baseline meets resistance. Hosts Harvey Levin and Charles Latibeaudiere did exactly what mainstream-media accountability journalism is supposed to do. They named “fat Jew” as antisemitic on camera. They challenged Bilzerian’s redirection toward Palestinians as the “real Semites.” They refused his pivot from his own rhetoric to attacks on Fine’s record. By the standards of on-camera adversarial framing, this was a textbook intervention. The replies came in at 52 percent antisemitic.
The mechanism is the finding. The audience did not register the host pushback as journalistic accountability. It registered the pushback as further evidence of the conspiracy Bilzerian was naming. TMZ co-founder Harvey Levin’s documented appearance in the Epstein files — a real fact in the public record — became the activation trigger. One commenter, with 30 likes: “the owner of TMZ is in the Epstein files and plays the victim. These people support actual genocide. They are using words as a shield.” Another, with 73 likes: “He would win with ease but I don’t think the tiny hats would ever allow him to run.” A Goebbels quotation circulated through six different stations of one mega-thread, accumulating endorsements at each stop — “based,” “my daddy.” Latibeaudiere, the Black co-host, was recoded as a racial subordinate to a Jewish boss: “his boss and co-partner is a Jue,” “he figures it’s better to be in the house than in the fields.” A single counter-comment in the entire 500-comment sample, detailed and factually correct, arrived sixteen days late and received zero likes.
The dominant strategy that Jewish institutions, journalists, and platforms have for handling antisemitic public figures is on-camera adversarial framing: bring them on, push back, make them defend the indefensible. The assumption is that the audience will absorb the pushback as suppression. The TMZ case shows this assumption breaking. When the audience has already been primed — by years of speaker supply on other platforms — to read the host as part of the system being challenged, adversarial framing does not suppress the saturation. It feeds it.
Antisemitism in this material is not one hate register among several. It is the organizing logic for the others. Anti-Black framings, misogyny, anti-Muslim and anti-trans rhetoric all appear under the videos — but not as parallel categories. They appear under the conspiracy frame, organized by formulations like “the media is run by Jews and pushes X.” Monitoring systems that track hate categories separately measure each layer in isolation and miss the architecture connecting them.
Two things follow.
For Jewish institutions: a Congressional candidate with 29.6 million followers and a steady four-in-10 antisemitism saturation in his comment sections is not a fringe figure. The fact that he can be interviewed on TMZ and the replies come out at 52 percent is not a journalism problem. It is a structural condition. Strategies that depend on the host’s standing to push back will fail when the audience has already coded the host as compromised. And the threat is now coming from a direction the field has been slow to map: the Republican coalition, mass-audience right-wing creators, and the convergence of manosphere reach with anti-establishment populism.
For those tracking online antisemitism: the methodology to see this exists. The bottleneck is not detection. It is the analytical assumption that antisemitism is something that happens around events. When the speaker is the event, the existing framework cannot register what is in front of it.
The FEC filing was processed without friction. The primary ballot will list a candidate calling a sitting Jewish Congressman a “fat Jew” on national television. Both of those institutional doors opened on schedule. The architecture passing through them did not announce itself as extremism, because by the time it arrived it was wearing the credential of a federal Congressional campaign.
Matthias J. Becker, PhD, is AddressHate Research Scholar at NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism. He is the founder and lead of Decoding Antisemitism — now its successor project, Decoding Hate — Research Advisor to AddressHate, and Editor-in-Chief of Digital Hate Review.
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Iranian Rapper Releases Persian Remix of Israeli Song, Calls for Revenge Against Regime
British-Iranian rapper 021Kid in the music video for his Persian remix of the song “Harbu Darbu” (feat. Stilla & Ness). Photo: Screenshot
British-Iranian rapper 021Kid has released a Persian remix of the song “Harbu Darbu” by Israeli rap duo Ness & Stilla, and in the lyrics, he calls for the death of the Iranian regime forces responsible for the killing and oppression of their own people.
The rapper, whose real name is Tony Mohraz, sings in both Farsi and English in “Harbu Darbu,” which was originally released by Ness and Stilla in 2023 in response to the deadly Hamas-led terrorist attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7.
In the Persian remix, 021Kid calls for the destruction of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), an Iranian military force and internationally designated terrorist group, as well as the Basij parliamentary force that operates underneath it. The regime uses the Basij to violently suppress protests and crush political opposition across the country.
The rapper, who was born in Tehran but now lives in the United Kingdom, also sings about Iranian leaders and senior military figures who have been killed in US and Israel strikes. He mentions by name Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force Commander Qasem Soleimani, former Iranian Air Force Commander Aziz Nasirzadeh, and Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the IRGC Aerospace Force.
021Ki further targets the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK), an Iranian opposition group that has been persecuted by the regime and seeks its overthrow but was a US-designated terrorist group from 1997 to 2012.
“We don’t want mullah, neither MEK. Smoke ’em on site, show no mercy,” 021Kid raps in English. He then sings in Farsi, “I’m standing with Iran till the end … We get our country back, just watch.”
The song includes some Hebrew phrases as well. “My Persian Jews, Irani Chai and that’s why Am Israeli Chai,” 021Kid raps in the song. “I pull up Tel Aviv, Ma Nishma? [How are you?].”
The music video also features clips from Ness and Stilla’s music video for the Hebrew version of “Harbu Darbu.”
021Kid explained the intention behind his new song in an Instagram post.
“After what happened in Golders Green, London a few days ago where a Jewish man was stabbed — it’s a reminder that hate doesn’t just live online, it shows up in real life,” he wrote, referring to the antisemitic stabbing attack in which two Jewish men were injured in late April.
“Since January, the people of Israel & the jewish [sic] community have shown strength, resilience, and unity and solidarity standing next to us Iranians. As Persians and sons of Cyrus the Great we see it we respect it,” 021Kid further wrote on social media. “In times like this, real allies don’t stay silent. We stand together against hate, against violence, and for something bigger than politics — humanity, strength, and loyalty … From Persians to Israelis — we stand with you, to the very end AM IRANI CHAI & AM ISRAEL CHAI.”
In the original “Harbu Darbu,” released after the Oct. 7 attack in 2023, Ness & Stilla call for revenge against Hamas and Hezbollah, and threaten celebrities who voiced support for the terrorist groups or condemned Israel. The rappers name Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and top Hamas officials Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh, saying “every dog’s day will come.” All three have since been killed by Israel.
In 2024, Ness & Stilla claimed that were denied visas to enter the United States because of the song. The track also received backlash from pro-Palestinian activists who called for it to be removed from YouTube, claiming that it violated the platform’s harassment policies, but YouTube ultimately decided to let the song remain on its website.
Watch the music video for 021Kid’s “Harbu Darbu [Persian Remix]” featuring Ness & Stilla below.
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California man pleads guilty in 2023 death of pro-Israel protester
The man accused in the 2023 death of a pro-Israel protester will avoid a prison sentence after pleading guilty this week to all charges against him.
Loay Alnaji, 53, was at a pro-Palestinian protest in Ventura, California, in November 2023 when he allegedly struck a pro-Israel counterprotester named Paul Kessler with a megaphone. Kessler, who was 69, then fell, hitting his head on the pavement. He died several hours later, with the death ruled a homicide by blunt-force trauma.
Trial proceedings had been set to begin next week, with Alnaji facing up to four years in prison. But Ventura County Superior Court judge Derek Malan offered Loay Alnaji, 53, a deal on Tuesday that allowed Alnaji up to one year in jail followed by three years on probation.
Alnaji accepted the offer. His attorney, Ron Bamieh, told the Ventura County Star that Malan had determined “two old guys had a dispute and an accident happened.”
Alnaji pleaded guilty to the two counts against him — felony involuntary manslaughter and felony battery causing serious bodily injury — and admitted aggravating factors, namely that he used a weapon and that the victim was particularly vulnerable.
He will be sentenced June 25.
The plea deal was too lenient in the eyes of Kessler’s family — which wanted the maximum sentence, according to the Star — as well as Ventura County District Attorney Erik Nasarenko.
“Alnaji should be sentenced to prison for his violent behavior, and our office strongly objects to any lesser sentence,” Nasarenko said in a statement. “While no amount of punishment will ever fully account for the Kessler family loss, a prison commitment underscores the severity of this crime and will deter others from committing similar acts of violence.”
The Kessler family could not be reached for comment.
The guilty plea brings a tragic saga that began in the early days of the Israel-Hamas war closer to an end. Kessler and Alnaji were among 75 to 100 people who descended upon a busy intersection in Thousand Oaks — about 25 miles north of Los Angeles — for dueling protests related to the Israel-Hamas war.
What happened during the altercation remains unclear. Bamieh said Kessler put his phone in Alnaji’s face; when Alnaji swatted the phone away, the megaphone inadvertently hit Kessler’s face. (He also said Kessler had previously been diagnosed with a brain tumor, though the coroner has stated the tumor was not a factor in his death.) After Kessler’s fall, he was bleeding from the head and mouth, but was responsive at the scene and evacuated to a hospital. His condition worsened overnight and he died there early the next day.
Alnaji, who at the time was a computer science professor at Moorpark College, was placed on administrative leave by the school after his arrest and subsequent release on $50,000 bail.
Rabbi Noah Farkas, chief executive of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, welcomed the guilty plea for what he called a “heinous crime.”
“While we would have liked a harsher sentence that better reflects the pain of the Kessler family, we respect the legal process,” Farkas said in a statement. “Our hope is that today’s news helps bring closure to his family and gives our community the ability to demonstrate safely.”
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