Uncategorized
How a Jewish schoolteacher from New Jersey made it to Hollywood and Broadway at the same time
Robert Kaplow, a retired high school English teacher, has been publishing a monthly newsletter in Metuchen, a small New Jersey town a few miles southwest of Menlo Park, where Thomas Edison set up his laboratory. Kaplow can’t match Edison’s thousand plus patents but the 71-year-old writer has had an impressive creative output. Over the years, he’s churned out a play, a screenplay, nine novels and hours of radio comedy that gained a cult following on NPR.
One of his novels, Me and Orson Welles, was turned into a motion picture. His screenplay, Blue Moon, began life as a monologue and tackles the tragic end of lyricist Lorenz Hart’s life. Kaplow worked on Blue Moon over the course of 14 years.
The film, directed by Richard Linklater, presents the unraveling of Hart’s musical theater career and serves up a glimpse of his sad personal life. Hart was gay but he wasn’t completely comfortable with his sexual identity. Based on actual correspondence that Kaplow bought at an estate sale, the screenplay presents the lyricist as a man infatuated with a college woman half his age. The movie opens with two quotes about Hart in an epigraph. The first describes the lyricist as “alert and alive and fun to be with.” The second refers to him as “the saddest man I ever knew.”
‘An extraordinary teacher’
Kaplow taught English and film at Summit High School in New Jersey for 34 years.
“He was an extraordinary teacher,” said Sally Ball, who was a high school student of Kaplow’s in the mid-1980’s and is now a published poet and an English professor at Arizona State University. “He lived the life of a writer. He really made a literary life seem like a living thing to me.”
Kaplow scored autographed pictures for his high school students of the actor Zac Efron, who starred in Me and Orson Welles. The 2004 novel was turned into a feature film by Linklater. Set in the 1930’s, it told the story of a New Jersey high school student who manages to snag a role in Welles’ groundbreaking production of Julius Caesar.
While he was teaching, Kaplow also made a mark in public radio with his alter ego, a comedic character named Moe Moskowitz. The wisecracking, loud-mouthed Moskowitz was the polar opposite of his soft-spoken creator. Billed as “America’s favorite entrepreneur,” Moskowitz brightened the airwaves on Morning Edition with wacky ideas and get-rich-quick schemes.
A gorilla comedian
Kaplow’s first foray into comedy and drama took place when he was ten. Encouraged by his father Jerome, he donned a full-face gorilla mask and casually looked out the window of the family sedan on the drive to the beach. The sight of the little gorilla in the backseat caused the occupants of other cars to do a double-take, which was often followed by an explosion of laughter.
That comedic impulse showed no sign of abating during his adolescence. On the first page of his prayer book, a Reform siddur, Kaplow provided a divine inscription: “Bob – Best of luck in the future (as if I didn’t know!) – God.”
In high school Kaplow and his friends, inspired by the trippy, multi-track comedy of Firesign Theater, wrote, performed and recorded what he called “little satirical theater pieces.”
When Kaplow attended Rutgers University, he spent most of his time in a band called The Punsters, which produced a weekly radio program of the same name. It featured a half-hour of original comedy, some of which Kaplow would eventually recycle for NPR.
‘The only prayer I know’
At family gatherings, Kaplow’s father, a car salesman, was always the life of the party. At the local White Castle where the counter women were Haitian, Jerome Kaplow would pretend he was a native French speaker when he ordered. And he performed cameos on his son’s radio comedy segments on NPR. When Jerome went to the hospital for an echocardiogram and a technician asked what he did for a living, the elder Kaplow replied: “I’m retired, but I used to be in show business.”
“My father had an ironic, absurdist sense of humor,” Kaplow told me. “I picked up so much from him.”
Jerome lived to 94, deriving much of his sustenance from Milky Way candy bars and gefilte fish, according to his son. Even when he could barely walk, Jerome insisted on going to shul on the High Holy Holidays.
“My father didn’t attend services because he was deeply religious,” Kaplow explained. “He attended because his father was deeply religious — and he felt the need to honor his father’s convictions.”
Religious observance seems to have declined with each generation of the Kaplow family but Robert Kaplow told me he does regularly go to the cemetery to place stones on the graves of his grandparents, mother, father and sister.
“Sometimes I mutter Shema Yisrael,” he told me. “It’s the only prayer I know.”
‘Kaplow’s gift’
When Kaplow was with The Punsters, they recorded a song titled “I Dreamt I Dreamt of Gefilte Fish,” in which Kaplow mimicked Bob Dylan singing about eating nothing but gefilte fish. In the 70-second ditty “Batman’s Going to a Bat-Mitzvah,” the caped crusader, we learn, is going to chow down on “rugelach and arugula.” A Moskowitz Home Companion,” Kaplow’s parody of A Prairie Home Companion, was sponsored by the fictional “Moskowitz’s Frozen Knishes.”
Kaplow says he was fired from NPR three times — first because Moe Moskowitz was deemed to be a Jewish stereotype, second, according to veteran Morning Edition producer Barry Gordemer, because “some people in the building didn’t think Moe was funny,” and lastly because Kaplow used the network’s logo without permission on a self-produced CD of his Morning Edition comedy segments. You can still find that CD (Cancel My Subscription: The Worst of NPR) on YouTube.
Jay Kernis, Morning Edition’s founding producer, was in Washington, D.C. when Kaplow was being interviewed about the song he sent in, “Steven Spielberg, Give Me Some of Your Money.” Out of the blue, Kaplan started talking in his Moe Moskowitz voice. Kernis called the control room in New York when the interview had concluded and asked Kaplow if he wanted to contribute original comedy to Morning Edition on a regular basis.
Kernis noted that back in the days when NPR aired original comedy and commentary on its newsmagazines, contributors tended to last a couple of years. Then, he said, either NPR producers or the audience grew tired of them. Kaplow lasted 17 years.
“Robert was inventive and he was funny,” Kernis told me. “He was a great performer and a great sound producer.”
“Moe Moskowitz always made me laugh, but also sometimes put a catch into my throat,” Weekend Edition host Scott Simon wrote in a text. “Robert has a gift — an art, really — for putting character into what might otherwise seem a caricature.”
‘An old-fashioned human being’
Kaplow and Richard Linklater kept in touch after Me and Orson Welles had its theatrical run in 2008. When Kaplow mentioned that he had written a monologue about Rodgers and Hart, Linklater asked to read it and, afterwards, shared it with the actor Ethan Hawke, who he tapped to play Lorenz Hart.
Kaplow completed the first draft of the Blue Moon screenplay in the Summer of 2011. In the ensuing years Linklater and Hawke worked with Kaplow on revising it, right up to and during the shoot last summer in Ireland where Kaplow joined them on set.
“We were a good band together,” Hawke told me.
The film takes place on one night in 1943 at Sardi’s, the theater district restaurant, as Hart’s songwriting partner Richard Rodgers basks in the opening night raves of Oklahoma!, Rodgers’ first collaboration with his new writing partner Oscar Hammerstein II.
Hart was struggling with alcoholism and depression during the time the film depicts. He died eight months after the Oklahoma! opening at the age of 48.
“It is hard for us to look at people in pain,” Hawke told me. “People in pain often behave badly, so they’re unlikable. But we have all been that person. We’ve all struggled with the green-headed monster of jealousy. We’ve all been worried that our best days are behind us.”
Linklater said one of the triumphs of Kaplow’s screenplay is that it managed to convey empathy for Lorenz Hart.
“I’m proud that 82 years later we’re honoring him and his contribution to our world,” Linklater said of the lyricist. “There’s no one else like him.”
Hawke described Robert Kaplow as “an old-fashioned human being,” which isn’t surprising given Kaplow’s love of the American songbook, especially its golden age. When he was in his 20’s, Kaplow was so enamored of the Tin Pan Alley era that he wanted to write music for theater.
“When you look at the songwriters of the 1930s and 40s, with the exception of Cole Porter, they’re almost all Jewish,” Kaplow told me. “Rodgers and Hart, Kern, Arlen, Julie Styne and Sammy Cahn. I don’t have an explanation for why, but I feel a little bit like I’m part of that. Whatever that cultural DNA is, I have a little of that.”
The post How a Jewish schoolteacher from New Jersey made it to Hollywood and Broadway at the same time appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Hamas Expands European Reach, Posing ‘High Likelihood’ of Terror Attack in Next Six Months, Intel Report Warns
Palestinian Hamas terrorists stand guard at a site as Hamas says it continues to search for the bodies of deceased hostages, in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip, Dec. 3, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
Hamas operatives have pushed far beyond Gaza, embedding themselves across Europe — and now posing a growing threat inside the United Kingdom, where covert arms caches and active attack plots have put intelligence services on high alert, according to a new report.
Even though Hamas has traditionally focused its operations in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, the Palestinian terrorist group has been steadily cultivating foreign attack capabilities — a trend highlighted in a new report obtained by The Daily Mirror, which warns of a looming threat of Hamas-led attacks in Europe.
Intelligence assessments indicate that the terrorist group, backed for years by Iran, Qatar, and Turkey, has been gradually expanding its presence in Europe through a network of charities, NGOs, and criminal gangs, with Israeli diplomatic missions, Israel-linked businesses, and Jewish religious sites among its top targets.
The report also notes that the group has not only stockpiled weapons such as AK-47s and ammunition but is increasingly turning to drone warfare, bolstered by backing from Lebanon and Iran and supported by Eastern European crime networks that help it acquire advanced weaponry.
“The Oct. 7, 2023, assault fundamentally altered Israel’s threat perceptions, but also reshaped Hamas’s calculations,” the report says, referring to the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.
“Following catastrophic damage to its infrastructure in Gaza and significant leadership attrition, the group’s remaining command nodes particularly those in Lebanon began activating contingency plans long under development,” it continues.
“The organization’s leadership now appears more willing to accept the strategic risks of external operations. If Hamas sustains further attrition, external operations may grow in relative importance within the group’s strategy,” the intelligence report adds.
According to the United Kingdom’s domestic counter-intelligence and security agency, MI5, and the Joint Terrorism Analysis Center, the current threat level of a terror attack in the UK is assessed to be “substantial.”
Over the next six months, the report warns, there is a “high likelihood of continued attempts at external operations, particularly in Europe, as Hamas seeks to demonstrate resilience.”
This assessment comes amid multiple intelligence findings showing that Hamas has expanded its terrorist operations beyond the Middle East, leveraging a long-established network of weapons caches, criminal alliances, and covert infrastructure quietly built across Europe over the years.
In October, West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center released a study detailing how Hamas leaders in Lebanon have directed operatives to establish “foreign operator” cells across Europe, collaborating with organized crime networks to acquire weapons and target Jewish communities abroad.
For example, a failed Hamas plot involved an alleged operative in Germany traveling to Lebanon to “receive orders from the Qassam Brigades [Hamas’s military wing] to set up an arms depot for Hamas in Bulgaria,” part of a broader, multi-year effort to cache weapons across Europe.
German authorities foiled the plan, detaining four Hamas members in late 2023 on suspicion of planning attacks.
Earlier this year, the four suspects went on trial in Berlin in what prosecutors described as Germany’s first-ever case against members of the Palestinian terrorist group.
During the investigation, German authorities also found evidence on a defendant’s USB device showing that the Hamas operatives were planning attacks on specific sites in Germany, including the Israeli embassy in Berlin.
Similar weapons depots were established in Denmark, Poland, and other European countries, with Hamas members repeatedly trying to retrieve them to support their operations and plan potential attacks.
Uncategorized
Jerusalem-Based Policy Center Seeks to Forge Inroads With US Lawmakers to Safeguard Israel’s Capital
Thousands of Jews gather for a mass prayer for the hostages in Gaza at the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem, Jan. 10, 2024. Photo: Yaacov Cohen
Amid increasing uncertainty over the future of the US-Israel relationship, a Jerusalem-based organization committed to safeguarding Israel’s capital city has decamped to Washington, DC in an attempt to make inroads with federal lawmakers in the US.
The Jerusalem Center for Applied Policy (JCAP), a research and policy center, aims to help protect and bolster the security, sovereignty, economy, and international standing of “Israel’s indivisible capital” in the face of “existential challenges,” according to its website.
To expand its mission, JCAP has opened a new office in Washington, DC, where some its principals are currently touring to meet with lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
As part of its work, JCAP seeks to mitigate potential threats from terrorist groups and their sponsors and has adopted the goal of spreading awareness about Islamist propaganda campaigns targeting the West, arguing that malevolent entities are trying to undermine the legitimacy of Western democracies and corrode them from within.
Chaim Silverstein, founder and chairman of JCAP, told The Algemeiner in an interview in Washington, DC this week that protecting Jerusalem is critical to preserving the security and existence of Israel from terrorists. He described Jerusalem as “the heart of Israel,” arguing that adversarial entities understand that “if they harm the head” of the Jewish state, “the rest of the body will implode.”
Silverstein added that Jerusalem is particularly vulnerable because it is home to Israel’s largest Arab population, explaining that countries such as Turkey and Iran have been effectively radicalizing Arab citizens of Israel with the hope of turning them against their home and “Islamicizing” Jerusalem.
“Radical Islamic enemies are trying to destroy Jerusalem,” he said, stressing that they want to “liberate it for Islam.”
Thus, according to Silverstein, JCAP “formulates policy initiatives” to protect Jerusalem from looming threats. The organization maintains a “unique approach” to combatting Islamic extremism, he argued, touting its extensive efforts to monitor and track the Muslim Brotherhood’s global Islamist network. JCAP aims to share the organization’s findings and methodologies with US lawmakers, equipping them with the ability to thwart extremism in their own borders, Silverstein said.
JCAP aims to enhance “Jerusalem’s international standing through proactive diplomacy while countering the influence of hostile international agitators,” its website states, adding that the goal is “advancing strategic partnerships and advocacy to reinforce Jerusalem’s role as Israel’s united and sovereign capital.”
In addition to information about terrorist cells, JCAP also wants to spread awareness about the pervasive influence campaign waged by Qatar against Israel and Western countries. According to Silverstein, Qatar has attempted to soften its image through elevating its prominence in sports, entertainment, and academia while simultaneously spreading misinformation regarding Israel’s domestic policies and military campaign in Gaza. Moreover, he argued that this influence campaign aims to spark chaos within the borders of Western countries such as Canada, Australia, and the US.
US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines warned in 2024 that actors tied to adversarial governments such as Iran have encouraged and provided financial support to rampant protests opposing Israel’s defensive military operations against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza.
Meanwhile, analysts have revealed in recent reports that Qatar, a longtime supporter of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood’s global network more broadly, has spent tens of billions of dollars to influence US policy making and public opinion in Doha’s favor. At the same time, the country has provided the Hamas-run government in Gaza with an estimated $1.8 billion and allows the terrorist group to host an office in Doha.
JCAP acknowledged that the popularity of Israel has declined precipitously in the US, complicating efforts to forge strong ties with certain American lawmakers. Nonetheless, the organization said it believes that US policymakers will understand that their national security interests are intertwined with Israel’s. The organization suggested that despite the souring reputation of the Jewish state among younger US voters, the American military and defense industry still recognize that Israel is a valuable asset. Moreover, the group claimed that their mission — focusing more on Jerusalem rather than Israel writ large — helps to emphasize the shared Christian-Jewish Biblical heritage of the land rather than politics.
Amid the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, many recent polls have shown a precipitous decline in support of Israel among Democrats and, increasingly, even Republicans, especially younger voters.
Though JCAP claims to stay neutral on domestic US issues, it explicitly identifies as “pro-Trump,” praising US President Donald Trump’s policies toward Israel. The group hopes to form inroads with the Trump administration and Republicans to help guide policies on Israel.
Uncategorized
Irish Three-Time Eurovision Winner Backs Ireland’s Withdrawal From Song Contest Over Israel’s Participation
Irish-Australian singer Johnny Logan sings during a rehearsal for the first semi-final in the supporting program of the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) 2024. Photo: Jens Büttner/dpa via Reuters Connect
Ireland’s three-time Eurovision winner Johnny Logan said he supports the country’s national broadcaster in its decision to pull out of the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest after organizers said Israel will be allowed to participate.
Johnny Logan said he was “proud” of RTÉ’s decision and thinks the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which organizes the competition, should have Israel “removed” from next year’s Eurovision contest, set to take place in May in Vienna, Austria. “I really feel that in this case, RTÉ definitely made the right decision,” he said on RTÉ’s radio news program “This Week.”
“I don’t think that Israel should be allowed to hide under the umbrella of the Eurovision … make it look as though, everything’s OK, business as usual, because it’s not. I think most people in Ireland would agree with that,” Logan added. “I think that the EBU should have made a decision regarding Israel, a decision removing them from the show and taking that decision away from individual countries. But being as it is. I really think that what Ireland, what RTÉ, have done is exactly the right thing to do. I support them 100 percent.”
The EBU ruled last week that Israel can compete in next year’s contest, despite backlash over Israel’s participation because of its military campaign against Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip. Following the EBU’s decision, the national broadcasters of Spain, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Slovenia confirmed their withdrawal from the competition. Logan called on the national broadcasters of other countries to also boycott the 2026 Eurovision because of Israel’s involvement.
“And it’s not about the Israeli people, it’s about the people in charge of Israel, the governments that have been making these decisions,” he added. Logan said he believes Israel being allowed to participate “adds a kind of respectability to the way they’ve behaved.”
Logan noted that the Eurovision Song Contest has turned political in the past, and cited as an example Russia being removed from the competition following its invasion of Ukraine. “They did it with Russia in the Eurovision. They say that the Eurovision is nonpolitical but the reality of it is when it is necessary it becomes political,” Logan said. “The Eurovision has been really good to me, but I do feel very strongly about it.”