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He works at a Holocaust museum by day. How’d he end up in ‘Marty Supreme’?
Heading into his audition for Marty Supreme, Isaac Simon was nervous. But not for the reasons you’d expect.
“I was taking a long lunch break from the museum,” he said, “and at the time I was three or four months into my job.”
Appearing in a Josh Safdie movie was something Simon, who runs internship programs at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, had genuinely never dreamed of. He wasn’t an actor, or an aspiring one. He’d never taken an acting class or been in front of a camera.
But two years after he was scouted at a baseball card convention, Simon was invited to try out for the role of Roger, a cocksure amateur who gets hustled on the ping-pong table by Timothée Chalamet’s Marty Mauser. Standing 6-foot-9 with ice-blue eyes, low eyebrows and flowing brown hair, Simon had the look, the paddle skills and, clearly, the temperament to land a pivotal part in an Oscar-bound — and richly Jewish — cinematic hit.
“I don’t get starstruck,” Simon, 31, said. “I get excited.”
The slew of non-actors who feature in Marty Supreme alongside A-listers like Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow and Tyler, The Creator has already become part of the film’s lore. Safdie and veteran casting director Jennifer Venditti have a penchant for casting street regulars; among the first-timers in the movie are basketball legend George Gervin, viral TikTok and YouTube personas and the guy from Shark Tank.
But perhaps none had as personal a connection to the film’s story of post-war Jewish striving as Simon, a native New Yorker whose graduate study at Queens College focused on the development of Holocaust studies in the U.S. In Marty Supreme, which is loosely based on the story of real-life midcentury table tennis star Marty Reisman, one of the protagonist’s best friends is a Holocaust survivor; one of the film’s most arresting scenes is an Auschwitz flashback.
Simon’s day job is, of course, at the largest Holocaust museum in New York. The fateful coincidence of his casting, Simon said, was “like a bizarre lottery ticket I was able to cash in.”
A fateful encounter
The story of Simon’s star turn begins in the summer of 2022, when Venditti spotted him at a baseball card show in Long Island. Venditti was there with Safdie; Simon — then still in grad school — was there with his dad.
Venditti said they was there to cast extras and non-actors for a baseball-related movie, and asked if she could take a two-minute video of him talking about himself. He obliged, and in the recording told her where he was from (New York City) and what he was doing at the show (chasing the famously rare T206 tobacco card series).
“I thought to myself, ‘Wow, could I really have been at the right place and the right time for something I wasn’t even expecting?’” Simon recalled. Then two years passed, and the run-in faded from memory.
It was not until the summer of 2024 that he received an email from Venditti: “Isaac Simon audition opportunity – scouted at card show.” No script was provided and nothing about the project was disclosed — just a date and a location.
On his elevator up to the audition, he heard the hollow bouncing of a ping-pong ball. Having seen a headline about Chalamet being attached to a Reisman biopic a few days earlier, he realized what the next few minutes might entail.
“The first audition was a total blur,” Simon recalled. “I remember playing ping pong with the assistant casting director and he was like, ‘Oh you’re good!’” At a subsequent callback, he played out a few improv scenarios — some light trash talking, or being cheated in a game. A few weeks later, he got called in for costume fittings.
He hadn’t solicited any acting tips, or studied film prior to his audition. But his work at the museum, where he trains educators on how to teach the Holocaust in 90 minutes, had prepared him.
“Because teaching is a performance, there is sort of an inherent performative quality to the work I do,” Simon said. “And so I think that that lent itself well — or at the very least, it didn’t hurt — to the work I was being asked to do for Josh.”
‘Cast for a reason’
Having run through his lines with his dad and his girlfriend, Simon headed upstate that fall to play Roger — and play opposite Chalamet. (This time, he took two days off of work.)
Roger, the reigning hotshot at a humdrum bowling alley, features in two scenes. In the first, he’s goaded into wagering $40 against Marty, who’s feigning amateurism, and loses. He reappears a few minutes as Marty fills up at a nearby gas station, realizing he was hustled by the reigning American champion; he and his pals want their money back.
Walking into the converted Bowlero where they shot the first scene, Simon was floored by the set. “Each individual looked like they were from the 1950s, and yet their outfit was distinctly their own,” he recalled. Miyako Bellizzi, the costume designer, had fitted him in a striped button-up and faded blue work pants; Simon’s hair was slicked back and to the side.
He hadn’t met Safdie before he got to set, and his cues from the Uncut Gems co-director were limited.
Over the course of his scenes, there were times when he wasn’t sure he was doing what Safdie wanted. Here, it was his inexperience that Simon drew on. “I kept reminding myself that I was cast for a reason, and I was cast as a non-actor for a reason,” he said, “and what I’m bringing to this experience is inherently different than what a trained actor would be. Therefore, if I were a trained actor, I would not be what Josh was looking for in the scenario.”
He didn’t have too much time to banter with the film’s stars during the shoot; most of his time on set was spent with other bit-players. But when the camera was shooting other actors, Safdie wanted to keep the sound of live table tennis in the background, so he had Chalamet and Simon play each other off-camera.
As to who had the upper hand? “We’re probably about even,” Simon said.
Jewish mythmaking
Even after the shoot, Simon couldn’t quite believe it was real. He told almost no one outside his family, superstitious that the scene would get cut. But then the premiere arrived. “It was surreal,” he said.
He’s now seen the film nine times — yes, all the way through — indulging friends who want to see it with him. And his acting has won some praise, with one X post calling it an “incredible underrated performance” liked more than 2,000 times.
Simon likes the movie, if you couldn’t tell, echoing its director and star in calling it a love letter to New York. The film, Simon said, touches on Jewish identity in a way that reminds him of his own family and their experience in this country.
“The way in which it captured intergenerational relationships in Jewish homes in post-war America, in New York specifically, felt very autobiographical for the way that my relatives talked amongst each other,” he said. “There’s a love there that transcends.”
As a Holocaust educator, Simon felt the movie handled that theme appropriately. He found the honey scene — an Auschwitz flashback too intense to explain here — moving, and the Holocaust humor tactfully dispatched. He loved the yiddish.
Yet Simon still couldn’t wrap his head around his own involvement in such a fitting project. His work passing on the history and memory of the Holocaust to future generations was already meaningful before he got an IMDB page.
“So to be cast in a film and have a speaking line,” he said, “and it just so happens that that film is also this incredibly Jewish film — which has direct references in the scene at Auschwitz — is equally bizarre, but also really beautiful, and oddly perfect.”
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Is Netanyahu dead? Has Tel Aviv been flattened? AI videos are dominating the Iran war.
(JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted an unusual video this week: of himself buying coffee at a Jerusalem-area cafe.
It was hardly typical fare for wartime, when Netanyahu can more often be seen giving recorded addresses or touring missile damage within Israel. But the prime minister had come with an important mission: to debunk viral claims of his death.
The claims, which originated on Iranian state media last week, were picked up by social media users on Thursday after Netanyahu gave his first press conference during the war.
Zooming in on details in the seemingly innocuous address, some claimed that Netanyahu had an extra finger on his right hand and missing teeth, signs they said were key tells of AI-generated content.
“Imagine Netanyahu was actually dead this entire past week,” the pro-Palestinian TikTok influencer Guy Christensen wrote in a post on X. “It’s too good to be true but Israel has been using AI generated videos of Netanyahu ever since. One can only hope.”
From the cafe Sataf, Netanyahu issued his response to the conspiracy, posting a video on Sunday of him ordering a coffee, chatting with baristas and telling Israelis that the wars against Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon were going well.
“They say I’m what?” the caption read. Mocking the idea that he had been killed, he joked, “I’m dying for coffee!” Then, alluding to the speculation about the earlier video, he asks, “Do you want to count the number of fingers?” before holding up each hand with his fingers outstretched.
JUST IN: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shares proof that he is alive after online users started speculating that he was dead.
Netanyahu also showed off how many fingers he has.
“We’re doing things I can’t share right now, but we’re striking hard in Iran today and… pic.twitter.com/5tyD5HImCG
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) March 15, 2026
But rather than quelling the claims of his death, the Israeli leader’s response instead spurred more speculation, with users on social media calling into question details in the video including the physics of his coffee cup. In another video posted by Netanyahu on Monday, some social media users pointed to a clip where a ring seemingly disappears from his hand in one of the frames.
“ISRAEL: ‘Benjamin Netanyahu is still alive. Here’s another AI video of him as proof. Just trust me, goy,’ the antisemitic podcaster Stew Peters wrote in a post on X.
The churn of conspiratorial claims about the Israeli leader’s death, which also included an AI-generated image of him being pulled from rubble, highlights the growing challenge of combating misinformation in an era of artificial intelligence and viral deepfakes, especially during times of conflict.
The war with Iran has produced an absolute flood of fabricated imagery, from AI-generated clips circulated by pro-Iran accounts purporting to show missile strikes flattening Tel Aviv or the capture of American troops by Iranian forces. The Israeli disinformation detection company Cyabra said it identified networks containing tens of thousands of accounts that generated material garnering 145 million views in the first two weeks of the war — almost all pro-Iranian, and mostly on TikTok. (The company said during the last Israel-Iran war, in June 2025, that Iran’s internet outage had quelled disinformation bot farms located there.)
“The campaign did not spread organically. Clear coordination patterns were identified, including repeated narratives, identical videos and captions, fixed hashtag clusters, and synchronized burst posting,” Cyabra said in its report published Friday. “These tactics allowed the network to rapidly flood the information environment and dominate online discussions during key moments of the conflict.”
The videos have left some of Israel’s critics confident that the country has been battered far beyond what has been officially reported.
But even Israeli television has not been immune, airing its own misinformation too — albeit unwittingly.
Channel 12 News last week aired a night-vision clip that it said showed American B-2 stealth bombers over Iran flying in formation with F-18 fighter jets.
ניר דבורי הציג סרטון של “מפציצי B2 בשמי איראן”
העובדות: מדובר בסרטון שלקוח מתוך משחק מחשב.
בשרשור: הסרטון המקורי שפורסם במרץ 2023 ביוטיוב.קרדיט: @ItayBlumental @manniefabian pic.twitter.com/zJCugreDZM
— בודקים (@bodkim2022) March 8, 2026
Within hours, the clip was identified not as a Pentagon release, as Channel 12 military correspondent Nir Dvori had suggested on air, but as footage from the combat flight simulator Digital Combat Simulator World. Itay Blumental, Dvori’s counterpart at rival public broadcaster Kan, wrote on X that the footage was “indeed incredible, but also lifted from a video game,” sharing the same YouTube clip from March 2023.
During Monday evening’s broadcast, Dvori apologized and said the mistake was “entirely mine,” but did not specify which footage he was referring to, leaving viewers who had missed the earlier segment with little indication of what had gone wrong. The news network also issued an apology, saying it would “examine its procedures.”
The right-wing Channel 14 also aired the clip — more than once.
i24 News made a similar mistake, the Haaretz newspaper reported, airing a video it treated as apparent footage of an American strike on Iran, though the clip was also from Digital Combat Simulator World.
The segments quickly became internet fodder, with social media users lampooning the news networks and posting their own tongue-in-cheek “exclusive war footage.”
Omer Babai, who runs Kan’s social media, posted a GIF on X of shoot ’em up video game Chicken Invaders, saying it showed “American bombers in Iranian skies.”
Another X user quipped: “Nir Dvori: Iran scattered mines across the Strait of Hormuz,” alongside a screenshot of vintage PC game Minesweeper.
A third posted an image of fellow 1990s gaming staple “Digger,” with the caption: “Exclusive footage of Sinwar in the tunnels of Gaza,” referencing the Hamas chief killed by the IDF. Street Fighter and Pac-Man made cameo appearances too.
Channel 14, widely seen as sympathetic towards Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is no stranger to broadcasting dubious footage. Earlier in the war, the channel aired a video it said showed crowds in Tehran appearing to express support for the Israeli premier with chants of “Bibi joon” — a Persian term of affection translated roughly as “dear Bibi.” But the online Israeli fact-checker FakeReporter later said the chant had been generated with artificial intelligence.
But the B2 gaffes are one side of a much wider phenomenon.
One viral clip, shared across X, TikTok and other platforms, appeared to show missiles pounding Tel Aviv and apartment blocks collapsing under a barrage. AFP and several other outlets found it had been generated using AI, citing telltale distortions in cars, rooftops, smoke trails and even the placement of an Israeli flag sans pole. The Grok AI chatbot on X, however, helped amplify the video, with repeated assurances that “the video is real,” AFP reported.
After the video was exposed as AI-generated, an X account under the name Abdulruhman Ismail, one of the first to share the footage in a post that drew 4 million views, said he would leave it up “because the scene reflects, painfully, what Gaza has endured under Israeli bombardment.” He added, “I am keeping this post for transparency. The video may not be real, but the devastation it evokes is real, and it mirrors what Palestinians have lived through.”
During the June 2025 war, pro-Iran accounts similarly circulated fake videos and images claiming to show strikes devastating Tel Aviv as well as Iranian forces downing Israeli F-35s.
Australian wire AAP debunked several fakes from this round of conflict, including a video claiming that an Iranian strike set a CIA facility in Dubai ablaze, as well as a fabricated image purporting to show late Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, dead under a pile of rubble.
A separate fabricated clip that racked up tens of millions of views purported to show the Burj Khalifa engulfed in flames as crowds rushed in its direction.
The Tehran Times also shared false images and false reports of extensive damage to the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain.
Iran’s embassy in Austria posted an AI image of a child’s backpack, claiming it was taken at the Minab school in Iran that was hit on the first day of the war.
Tasnim, the Iranian state-affiliated news agency, shared an AI-generated image on X purporting to show an American radar installation in Qatar destroyed in an Iranian strike, The New York Times reported. The paper said Iran’s propaganda “appears focused more on swaying international audiences,” portraying the “success of Tehran’s counteroffensive in effusive terms.”
But X’s head of product told the BBC that 99% of the accounts spreading AI-generated war videos were trying to “game monetization,” posting sensational content to rack up engagement and qualify for payments through the platform’s creator revenue program. The social media giant announced that it will temporarily suspend creators from the program if they post AI-generated videos of armed conflict without disclosing that they were fake.
British politician George Galloway posted a video last week containing AI imagery in which he narrates that the “apocalypse is burning Tel Aviv,” that the city “now looks like Gaza,” and that air defenses over Tel Aviv are “no longer operational.” He says his information came from friends on “Sheinkin Street, Tel Aviv, near Dizengoff Square.”
Former Israeli spokesman Eylon Levy seized on the canard, posting reaction videos of sun-soaked beach scenes and one of himself at Dizengoff Square, casually sipping an iced coffee with the very much intact plaza behind him.
Some people responded to the video by cheering Levy on, saying that they, too, were enjoying a beautiful day in a mostly intact Tel Aviv. But others resisted the evidence in front of them. “Cheap Jew propaganda,” one commenter wrote. “It’s basically flattened out.”
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Jews decry UK newspaper for appearing to justify attack on bakery founded by Israelis
(JTA) — A Guardian column that seemed to rationalize the targeting of a popular Israeli-founded bakery has ignited controversy in the British Jewish community.
The March 14 piece in the British daily, by sports and culture writer Jonathan Liew, came days after the newly opened north London branch of Gail’s was repeatedly vandalized, with its windows smashed and red paint and pro‑Palestinian slogans daubed on its doors.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews denounced the vandalism, saying that “targeting a business on the basis of alleged or perceived Israeli and or Jewish connections reflects a very worrying trend.”
Liew, meanwhile, described the bakery chain’s expansion into diverse neighborhoods as a form of “aggression,” implying that its presence near a Palestinian-owned cafe was inherently provocative.
Critics, including British Jewish media, communal leaders and online commentators, accused Liew of rationalizing an attack on a business they say is being targeted solely because of its founders’ Israeli heritage. Gail’s was founded in the 1990s as a wholesale bakery by Israeli baker Gail Mejia, who with an Israeli partner opened a storefront bakery in 2005. In 2021, the company, today with close to 200 stores, was acquired by the American investment firm Bain Capital.
“We are a British business with no specific connections to any country or government outside the UK,” a spokesperson for Gail’s told the Jewish News. “Our focus right now is on working with the authorities and making sure our people feel safe and supported.”
Although the Guardian piece acknowledges Bain’s ownership, it also notes allegations that the investment firm “invests heavily in military technology, including Israeli security companies.” As a result, wrote Liew, “its very presence 20 metres [65 feet] away from a small independent Palestinian cafe feels quietly symbolic, an act of heavy-handed high-street aggression.” High Street is the British equivalent of “Main Street.”
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators had protested the opening of the branch in the days before the vandalism.
A spokesperson for the Israeli embassy in the U.K. told The Daily Mail that Liew’s article was “an astonishing exercise in bigotry disguised as moral commentary.”
“Beneath its surface lies a familiar and ugly trope: the repackaging of anitsemitic prejudice in fashionable political language,” said Alex Grandler.
The debate, playing out in fiery messages on social media, has highlighted broader concerns about Jewish-owned businesses in Britain being cast as proxies in disputes over the Middle East. In 2025, the Community Security Trust, Britain’s main antisemitism watchdog, recorded 20 incidents involving vandalism at Jewish businesses and organizations.
“In the Guardian’s hall-of-mirrors morality, smashing up a shop because it was founded by Jews is just a touching little political tantrum,” Jewish News editor Richard Ferrer wrote in a column.
In the Guardian piece, Liew seemed to sympathize with the Palestinian-owned cafe in the neighborhood, Cafe Metro, for having been the frequent victim of “pro-Israel activists” who “regularly descend on it to slap stickers on its windows reading ‘Stop killing people’ and ‘One of these days you’ll thank us.’” At the same time, he referred to the window-smashing at Gail’s among the “small acts of petty symbolism” that grow out of Palestinian frustration with their failure to exert influence on the Israel-Palestine debate.
Hadley Freeman, a former columnist for the Jewish Chronicle who now writes a column for The Times, called out Liew for applying an apparent double standard.
“So let me get this straight,” she wrote on X. “1. Petty activism against a Palestinian-owned cafe is bad (agreed!) 2. But *violent* activism against a cafe that people associate (wrongly!) with Israel is justified and understandable.
“Update your rule book accordingly!” she added.
CAMERA UK, a media watchdog group that monitors coverage of Israel, said it had contacted the Guardian, asking if Liew’s column met its “editorial standards.”
“We know the answer, but are nonetheless hoping to see how they justify Liew’s latest defense of antisemitism,” CAMERA said in a statement.
A Guardian spokesperson did share a terse reply with The Daily Mail. “Complaints about Guardian journalism are considered by the internally independent readers’ editor under the Guardian’s editorial code and guidance,” the spokesperson said.
The controversy even reached across the Atlantic. “Good grief — Gail’s is just a bakery!” Patricia Heaton, the actress and conservative political activist, wrote on X. Heaton said she ”had no idea it had any connection to Israel or the Jewish people. But now I want to support it even more.”
Public defenses of the article have been limited, though some pro-Palestinian activists online argued that Liew was only describing the motivations of the protesters rather than endorsing vandalism.
Liew hasn’t responded to the criticism of his column, although he pinned the article to the top of his Bluesky social media account, with the message “the war at home.”
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Report: Israeli group quietly organized charter flights evacuating Palestinians from Gaza
(JTA) — An Israeli organization headed by a right-wing activist quietly arranged a series of charter flights that evacuated Palestinians from Gaza last year, according to an Associated Press investigation.
The organization, Ad Kan, a right-wing Israeli organization founded by Gilad Ach, an Israeli combat reservist and West Bank settler activist, coordinated the flights via another company called Al-Majd, which describes itself on its website as a humanitarian organization “supporting Palestinian lives.”
Among the evacuations facilitated by Ad Kan was a flight in May that transported nearly 60 Palestinians to Indonesia and other locations, as well as two flights in October and November that transported over 300 Palestinians to South Africa.
It was not clear who had planned or paid for the flights. South African Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola decried the evacuations as representing “a broader agenda to remove Palestinians from Palestine,” and an investigation was launched into one of the flight’s origins.
At the time, President Donald Trump had walked back his proposal to relocate the population in Gaza to other countries amid criticism, despite getting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s endorsement.
The AP investigation found that Ach had stuck with Trump’s plan after the U.S. president dumped it, publishing a report detailing how he would implement the “voluntary exit.”
The newly revealed origins of the charter flights adds to a history of controversy surrounding small-scale efforts to evacuate Palestinians from Gaza. Last August, France suspended its effort to evacuate Palestinians after a woman who took part in the program was accused of making antisemitic comments online. The same month, the United States also suspended a program designed to give Palestinian medical care after the far-right Jewish influencer Laura Loomer called the effort a “national security threat.”
Several of the passengers on the South Africa flights told the Associated Press that they were unaware of who was behind the flights, but said they did not care and were more concerned with leaving the besieged territory. (Six Palestinians who spoke to the outlet said they paid up to $2,000 per person for the transportation.)
“There was famine, and we had no options. My children were almost killed,” said a 37-year-old Palestinian who arrived in South Africa in November. “Death and destruction was everywhere, all day, for two years, and nobody came to the rescue.”
In a statement to the Associated Press, Ach rejected South Africa’s allegations that the evacuations amounted to ethnic cleansing and decried the “profound hypocrisy” of countries unwilling to accept Palestinian refugees.
“Their continued presence in Gaza, under dire conditions, serves as a tool to pressure Israel internationally and allows Hamas to maintain its rule over this suffering population,” Ach said.
While it was unclear if Ach had coordinated with the Israeli government to facilitate the evacuations, Muayad Saidam, a Palestinian identified on the group’s website as its Gaza humanitarian project manager, told the outlet that travel arrangements for Palestinians must be made with Israeli authorities.
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