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He’s running? Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett gives off comeback vibes on a DC visit.
WASHINGTON (JTA) — He left office after one of the shortest terms of any prime minister in Israeli history and doesn’t have an active political party.
But just 10 months after stepping down from Israel’s highest position, and amid historic upheaval in Israel, Naftali Bennett is signaling that he’s ready to run again.
Bennett, formerly seen as a hardline right-wing politician, upended Israeli politics in 2021 by leading an ideologically diverse coalition that unseated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after 12 straight years in office. But Bennett’s coalition fell apart after about a year, he stepped down and Netanyahu won the subsequent election.
Now, far from home, Bennett is taking the public stage. On a visit to Washington, D.C., this week, Bennett spoke at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy — a go-to destination for prominent Israeli politicians visiting the United States — took questions from reporters and met with a group of Democratic lawmakers. In a photo from that visit, Bennett appears in his element, explaining something to the group as a crowded room looks on.
“Today in a series of meetings with congressmen and congresswomen on the Hill as well as government officials,” he tweeted in Hebrew along with the photo. “It begins.”
What is beginning is not clear. Bennett wouldn’t answer a question about whether he will run again, and a spokeswoman did not respond to a request to elaborate. But his social media feed suggests that he’s missing being prime minister, and in remarks to reporters on Tuesday it sounded like he might shoot for the office again.
“I’ve become a huge believer that we need moderacy in the way we govern Israel for the next 10 years,” he said at a meeting organized by the Washington Institute, calling himself a “radical moderate.”
“I believe that Israel, for the next decade or two, we need centrist governments that can focus on 70% of the issues that Israelis agree upon, and setting aside that 30% of issues that are in ideological conflict,” Bennett said, repeating a formula he’s often used to describe his governing philosophy. “I think it’s the only way forward for the next 10 to 20 years. We have to pull ourselves out of this ongoing polarization and toxic dialogue. And I believe Israel can succeed by doing that.”
In another tweet, he noted polls showing him winning eight seats in Israel’s parliament were he to return to politics — more than the seven seats his former party, Yamina, won in 2021, before he became prime minister.
On Monday, the eve of Yom Hashoah, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, he posted a speech he delivered as prime minister last year, in which he extolled the virtue of Israel “relying only on ourselves to be strong, and to never apologize for our existence.”
Last week, prior to embarking on his stateside visit, he posted a Twitter thread favorably comparing his performance with Netanyahu’s. “As long as I can remember, I have taken responsibility,” he wrote, accusing Netanyahu and his top advisors of peddling “blame and excuses.” And in a video posted about a week earlier, marking the 100th day of Netanyahu’s current government, he touted the record of his coalition in its first 100 days last year, tweeting, “Something different is possible.” That tweet is now pinned to the top of his feed.
Netanyahu’s coalition has proposed a far-reaching overhaul of Israel’s judiciary that would sap the Supreme Court of much of its power, and which has spurred unprecedented street protests. Part of his mission in the United States, Bennett said at the Washington Institute meeting, was to push back against perceptions that the turmoil was weakening Israel.
“I see that our enemies believe that the protests are a sign of weakness,” Bennett said. “They are misinterpreting what Israel is about. This is a sign of strength, democracy in Israel will prevail, and Israel will come out stronger for all.”
However enthusiastic he may be, Bennett could have a long road to a comeback after emerging battered from his brief time as prime minister. For more than a decade, he had been a leading politician in the pro-settler camp, vehemently opposed to Palestinian statehood and seen as a right-wing influence on Netanyahu. For years, the two men worked together despite personal acrimony between them, but in 2021, Bennett took his party, whose name translated to “rightward” in English, and partnered with a motley crew of right-wing, centrist and left-wing parties, as well as an Islamist party.
Bennett’s former right-wing allies portrayed that decision as a betrayal, and multiple members of his own party defected, depriving his coalition of a parliamentary majority and leading to new elections. Bennett didn’t run and handed the prime ministership to his centrist coalition partner, Yair Lapid, who lost to Netanyahu last fall.
Lapid, who is now leader of the parliamentary opposition, appears to be getting a second wind from the massive antigovernment protests. A recent poll asking Israelis for their preferred prime minister showed him running neck and neck with Netanyahu. Another centrist politician, Benny Gantz, got even higher marks.
This poll didn’t ask about Bennett.
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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.
The post VIDEO: A Hasid gives us a tour of Morocco in Yiddish appeared first on The Forward.
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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.
The post Conservative and Christian movies are coming for Hollywood appeared first on The Forward.
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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.
The post ‘Heil’ Mary? New Atlanta Falcons logo inspires Nazi comparisons appeared first on The Forward.
