An NFL star has apologized for an antisemitic gesture he mimicked on a livestream earlier this week.

Puka Nacua, a third-year wide receiver who plays for the Los Angeles Rams, made the gesture after he was encouraged to on Tuesday by controversial livestreamer Adin Ross. Ross, who is Jewish, suggested Nacua incorporate the gesture into his touchdown celebration.

On Thursday, after the gesture was widely condemned online and drew responses from the NFL and the Rams, Nacua released a statement.

“When I appeared the other day on a social media livestream, it was suggested to me to perform a specific movement as part of my next touchdown celebration,” reads the statement, which featured the branding of Stand Up To Jewish Hate, an organization founded by Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots. “At the time, I had no idea this act was antisemitic in nature and perpetuated harmful stereotypes against Jewish people.

“I deeply apologize to anyone who was offended by my actions as I do not stand for any form of racism, bigotry or hate of another group of people.”

The gesture — lowering the head into the shoulders while rubbing a hand over a fist — is sometimes known as the “Covetous Jew.”

Neither the Rams nor the NFL said if Nacua would face consequences for the incident in separate statements Thursday.

“The NFL strongly condemns all forms of discrimination and derogatory behavior directed towards any group or individual,” the league said in a statement Thursday. “The continuing rise of antisemitism must be addressed across the world, and the NFL will continue to stand with our partners in this fight. Hatred has no place in our sport or society.”

The Rams wrote, “There is no place in this world for Antisemitism as well as other forms of prejudice or hostility towards the Jewish people and people of any religion, ethnicity, or race.”

Nacua, who finished second in 2023 voting for NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year, received backlash over several statements he made during the livestream. He accused referees of bias and making calls for clout, saying “These guys are lawyers. They want to be on TV, too.” He also claimed that “concussions are all in your head, you just can’t think about it.”

Controversy is more familiar territory for Ross, who was banned from the streaming platform Twitch for more than two years due to his failure to moderate the torrent of racist and antisemitic comments in his stream’s live chat. He has hosted avowed antisemite Nick Fuentes several times on his stream; according to SBNation’s James Dator, “Ross has a reputation for allowing antisemitism on his show, often done under the guise of ‘joking.’”

The post NFL star apologizes for antisemitic hand gesture on controversial livestream appeared first on The Forward.

US Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) speaks during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, March 11, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Julia Nikhinson

The US Senate has passed the Intelligence Authorization Act, annual legislation that authorizes funding and sets policy for the intelligence community, with key measures targeting Iran’s nuclear capabilities and other threats to American national security.

The bill, which received bipartisan support, includes measures such as “prohibiting the intelligence community from contracting with Chinese military companies, improving the security of CIA installations, identifying the threat to America’s food security posed by communist China, and directing necessary resources towards defending our nation from threats posed by Iran,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement on Wednesday.

The legislation is part of the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which sets defense policy and authorizes funding levels. Lawmakers in the Senate passed the NDAA on Wednesday after their counterparts in the House did so last week.

“I’m glad this bill passed both houses of Congress as part of the NDAA and I look forward to it being signed into law by the president,” Cotton said. 

Regarding intelligence, the bill includes measures aimed at suppressing Tehran’s ability to acquire a nuclear weapon. The legislation expands congressional oversight of Iran’s uranium enrichment program and any efforts toward weapons development. 

The bill also formally enshrines limits on the movement of Iranian diplomats on American soil, aligning them with existing limits already applied to diplomats from China, Russia, and North Korea. It also allocates additional resources to bolster US defenses against a range of Iranian threats, including proxy terrorist groups and potential assassination schemes against American citizens. The legislation furhter requires intelligence agencies with knowledge of Iranian lethal threats to report all information to the FBI and to the intended target. 

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, touted the bill’s bolstering of resources to intelligence agencies. 

“I thank my colleagues and am glad to see this bill pass once again on a strong bipartisan basis. It provides the intelligence community the resources it needs to do its mission while ensuring that we maintain rigorous oversight of the [intelligence committee’s] activities,” Warner said in a statement. 

Since returning to the White House in January, the Trump administration has ramped up US sanctions  on Iran over its nuclear program, human rights abuses, and support for terrorist groups across the Middle East and around the world. During Trump’s first term, the US withdrew from a 2015 deal with Iran that placed temporary restrictions on the Iranian nuclear program in exchange for lifting sanctions, arguing it was too weak and would undermine American interests.

In response, Iran has gone to extensive lengths to obscure its nuclear activity and evade accountability from the international community, according to international nuclear watchdogs. Nonetheless, Iran has continued to claim that its nuclear program is for civilian purposes rather than building weapons. 

The UK, France, and Germany said earlier this year there was no “credible civilian justification” for Iran’s recent nuclear activity, including the enrichment of uranium to near weapons-grade levels, arguing it “gives Iran the capability to rapidly produce sufficient fissile material for multiple nuclear weapons.”

In September, US Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rick Scott (R-FL) introduced the Strengthening Entry Visa Enforcement and Restrictions (SEVER) Act, which would prohibit members of Iran’s government, particularly those sanctioned for supporting the regime, from receiving US visas. The US has also placed severe sanctions on Iran’s oil exports. 

In June, the US bombed three key Iranian nuclear sites during the 12-day war between Iran and Israel. The US had previously tried to negotiate a new nuclear deal with Tehran, to no avail.

Hannah Finkelshteyn and Aakef Khan spent a lot of time in the same building even before they met. Khan’s filmmaking classes at Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts often met on the same floor where Finkelshteyn, a drawing major, had her studio.

But their paths wouldn’t cross in earnest until after Oct. 7 — when they would become unlikely friends and later co-curators of an exhibition bringing together Jewish and Muslim artists. The result is “Open Archways: by the light of the same moon,” opening Thursday at the Bowery Art Collective in Metuchen, New Jersey.

Finkelshteyn, 23, was born in Brooklyn and raised in East Brunswick, New Jersey, in the Modern Orthodox community, attending Jewish schools up until college.

“Oct. 7 and the reaction to Oct. 7 completely shifted my entire experience of college and my ability to learn and my ability to be a part of the Rutgers community,” she told me at a coffee shop in Manhattan. She and Khan took the train into the city together when we met before Thanksgiving.

The first several days after the attacks went by in a haze, Finkelshteyn recalled. She scrolled through articles, and texted and called her many family members and friends in Israel, where she spent a gap year, to ask, “Are you okay?” and “Are you alive?”

“Grief was palpable” among the Jewish community on campus, she said. But as the days went by, she became increasingly aware of responses and social media posts from other classmates that left her feeling confused and isolated. She even dropped a small group course in part because of what she saw her peers saying online.

“I can’t be sitting here being terrified for my family while this person who’s sitting across from me thinks Oct. 7 was a good thing,” Finkelshteyn said.

The only one in that room who she felt she could have an actual conversation with was a Palestinian classmate. “I asked her if her family was okay, and she asked if my family was okay,” she said. “And we both talked about just not being able to focus on anything.”

Finkelshteyn, who graduated last spring, wanted to talk and to listen, to understand and be understood. But there didn’t seem to be a space for that on campus — until a friend of her then-boyfriend (now husband) suggested they start an “Open Dialogue Table” like one he’d seen elsewhere.

The three of them, along with other like-minded students, began setting up a table on campus in shifts with a sign inviting passersby to come talk about Israel and more. “Once a week, every week, we sat at this table, and we had conversations. And honestly, it made things feel a lot less foggy,” she said.

One day, Khan came over and sat down.

Becoming friends and co-curators

Raised in a religious Muslim family of Pakistani descent, Khan, 22, went to public school during the week and to Saturday school at the mosque in South Brunswick, New Jersey, where he grew up. He first heard news not about the Hamas attacks on the Gaza envelope, he said, but about Israel cutting off water and electricity to Gaza. He and Finkelshteyn were on the same campus, but ensconced in their own communities and vastly different news ecosystems. Khan’s conversations and group chats afterward were full of talk about boycotts and encampments.

“It felt like a big gray cloud was over Rutgers for months,” Khan, who is currently a senior, told me. But as someone who had always felt the urge to ask, “Why?” and challenge his own beliefs, he said he found it unsettling to be surrounded by only one slice of opinions. So he began actively searching for others. “I was looking for a place to feel like I can belong and speak without feeling like I had to censor myself,” he said.

“I need to stand somewhere where I can see both perspectives,” he said he realized, which led him through the doors of Hillel and steered him toward the Open Dialogue Table.

When Khan first sat down, he started chatting with Finkelshteyn’s boyfriend, who quickly made the connection that both Khan and Finkelshteyn were art students. And then the two artists were off, chatting about filmmakers and LiDAR camera technology.

“It started with me trying to be like, ‘All right, like, what is up with Israel?’” Khan said. “But it ended up being, ‘Wow, I just made two new friends.’ And I think once I started to look at it that way, things became a lot less scary.”

He began carving time out to go to Shabbat dinners. It was uncomfortable at first to walk into such an explicitly Jewish space, Khan recalled, but it helped to hear Finkelshteyn or her boyfriend shout his name from across the room and enthusiastically motion him over to sit with them and meet their friends.

Khan and Finkelshteyn kept talking — about art, religion, language, community and current events. “Once we can talk about other things that we’re passionate about, now we can sort of hear each other out on Israel-Palestine and all those things, and be willing to see each other’s perspectives as valid, even if ultimately we don’t align,” Khan said.

They became artistic collaborators and genuine friends. “I never expected that I would invite someone I met at the Open Dialogue Table to my wedding,” said Finkelshteyn, who got married this past summer. But she did, and Khan came out to celebrate the special day — his first Jewish wedding — with his new friends.

In the months since, Khan and Finkelshteyn have been hard at work pulling together a larger group of Jewish and Muslim artists around them from Rutgers and beyond to meet, talk, create and show their work together.

“Open Archways” is their small way of trying to lift the heavy fog of tension and misunderstanding that marked their college experiences post-Oct. 7. “I believe that starts with grassroots work like this of creating spaces where Muslim and Jewish people can intermingle and create friendships,” Khan said. “They may not agree on everything, but at least they can see the other side as human.”

Living ‘by the light of the same moon’

Khalid Khashoggi has always had Jewish friends, he said. He was born in Beirut in 1965, but hasn’t returned to Lebanon since he was 10, when the civil war broke out and his family left for Europe.

At the English and Swiss boarding schools he attended, he found it easier to bond with Jewish students than the other boys. Reflecting back decades later, he said he thinks it’s because “there is more in common between Jewish and Muslim/Arab cultures than with any Anglo-Saxon culture.” He’s remained close ever since with two of those friends, who he said treated him like a brother.

“I just want other members of my culture to experience that warmth,” Khashoggi, who moved to the U.S. for college and settled here afterward, told me on a video call. He’s been running an SAT prep school for 25 years and, more recently, working with young artists and curators as founder and director of the Bowery Art Collective. The latter began right before the pandemic, when Khashoggi noticed all the art portfolios the test prep students were carrying around and suggested they use the school’s space to have an exhibition.

When the war threatened to make connections like his boarding school friendships all the more improbable, and as he witnessed “scary” incidents of antisemitism that were more “mean and violent” than he’d ever seen before, he came up with the idea of a joint exhibition.

“I could tell that both sides were getting pushed apart,” he said, recoiling at the idea of being placed in a stance of immutable opposition against people he considered friends. As he put it: “Don’t tell us who we need to hate.”

“Let’s use the magic of art to reconnect these communities, even if it’s just 10 people,” he said. “There’s no way we can solve the world’s problems,” he added. “But at least if we can make some friends while we’re doing this — across two communities that have been told not to be friends — then that would be great.”

“There’s nothing like friendship to dispel stereotypes,” Khashoggi said.

He and Arianna Astuni, his co-CEO at the test-prep company and BAC’s executive director, quickly found Finkelshteyn, at the recommendation of another student who’d worked with BAC. She was in, without hesitation. But their first call for a Muslim co-curator was met with a lot of opinions and no applications.

“We got some backlash at first,” Astuni told me on a joint video call with Khashoggi. “People get so caught up in the largeness of political issues, and then they’re yelling large things that they really don’t know and they really couldn’t possibly feel.”

For Astuni, who said she was used to watching connections being cultivated in their small gallery and community, the response was surprising. And for her longtime test prep and art collective colleague, it was dispiriting.

“I remember having conversations with friends and saying, I don’t know. I think I’m insane,” Khashoggi said. “Everyone’s telling me that what I’m trying to do is not doable. Or they would be like, yeah, it’s a beautiful idea, but it’s just not the time to do that. It’s not the time to normalize relationships.”

Instead of giving up or waiting for some elusive right time in the distant future, they reworked the ad for a Muslim curator and tried again. This time, applications came in for them to consider. Among them was one from Khan, whom Finkelshteyn had encouraged to submit.

Ultimately, Khashoggi felt, “Aakef was the best applicant. It also helped that he had worked with Hannah before, and knew her, and they had a good dynamic,” he said. “That was really important.”

Together, Finkelshteyn and Khan came up with the exhibition’s subtitle: “by the light of the same moon.” In an environment that tends to emphasize only the differences and tensions between the Muslim and Jewish communities, they wanted to speak honestly about the difficulties while also illuminating points of intersection and understanding.

One of those intersections is the lunar calendar, which both religions follow. “The moon governs when we fast,” Khan said, and determines when Jews and Muslims celebrate holidays and perform certain rituals. More than that, Finkelshteyn added, “it’s something that Muslims and Jews have in common that general American culture does not.”

“The waxing and waning of the moon has welcomed Ramadans and Yom Kippurs, Mawlids and Passover Seders. Its cycle has determined which day we gather in the synagogue for Rosh Hashanah, and which nights we fill the mosque for Taraweeh,” reads the exhibition description they developed. The artists, it says, are exploring “the intersections between Muslim and Jewish culture that begin with the use of the moon as our clock.”

Showing up 

“Open Archways” isn’t like most exhibitions, in part because it brings together supposed arch-enemies. That presented a challenge, even among artists interested in interfaith collaborations. “People get worried like, ‘Oh, is there a specific political agenda? If I sign up for this, am I signing my name next to a certain thing that I don’t want to sign my name next to?’” Finkelshteyn said.

But the project veers from a more typical format in other ways, too. Group shows often come together behind the scenes, with curators putting out a call, artists submitting pre-existing work and the selected pieces being presented side-by-side without their creators ever speaking, save for maybe a quick hello at the opening reception. Here, the goal was to facilitate artist meetups as a fundamental part of the process and for these interactions to build little bridges across communities and help inspire the work on display. In practical terms, this meant artists had to be willing to engage and able to make the time commitment.

The curators ultimately assembled a group of 15 Muslim and Jewish artists with diverse religious and geographic backgrounds. The Muslim artists have roots in Pakistan, Lebanon, Turkey, Syria, Burma and Bangladesh, and their Jewish counterparts in Poland, Austria, Romania, Russia, Azerbaijan, Yemen, Israel and more.

They met as a group twice this fall, first in October at the BAC space in Metuchen with a structured agenda — Khan and Finkelshteyn had everyone sit in a circle, introduce themselves, and share something about their culture that they love, before letting everyone mingle and explore the gallery. The second meetup, at a non-alcoholic “anti-bar” and cafe in the East Village in November, was a little more casual, and allowed the conversations about identity, religion, diaspora, gender and art to expand.

“A lot of it was really oriented around, like, what has your experience been? What is your identity to you? What does it mean?” Miki Belenkov, a participating artist, told me on a video call. One of the themes that emerged in the discussion, they recalled, was around “how do we balance our deep emotional and historical connections to these identities, while also navigating being modern people.”

Belenkov, 28, a queer Jewish artist and art therapist in New York City whose parents were refugees from the Soviet Union — their father is from Muslim-majority Azerbaijan — was raised on ideas of “coexistence and mutual respect and appreciation and sharing of traditions,” they said. “It was exciting to see that here there are people trying to build conversation and space for Muslim and Jewish artists.”

After Oct. 7, which happened while Belenkov was in grad school, “I had to make entirely new friends,” they said. “Pretty much just everyone that I had built a community with did not see me as a community member anymore, because of my identity.” They’ve since focused on attending events that “create joy” and forming “community connections with equally peace-loving people.”

Their large-scale textile work in the exhibition, a tablecloth, references both the struggles of the last couple years — including mezuzahs stolen off doorposts and formerly close friends who’ve blocked them on Instagram — but also focuses on “being able to come together in the midst of all of this and still find joy and light.”

Another Jewish artist, Micah Steinerman, 22, is a senior at Rutgers studying drawing and animation whose family’s roots are in Eastern Europe and Yemen. He created a small triptych depicting the holy sites of Jerusalem, foregrounded by a blossoming fruit tree in the center. This is flanked by smaller canvases on either side: One says shalom, as in peace, and the other adapts a quote from his namesake book in the Bible: “Every person will sit under their own fruit tree, and no one will make them afraid.”

But perhaps the highlight of his experience was a collaboration with Khashoggi that melded Arabic and Hebrew calligraphy. “I had become more closed off about my Jewish identity,” he told me on Zoom. Over the course of several sessions with Khashoggi, who taught him some Arabic and oil painting basics, he realized they both related to “having to feel hidden.”

“The painting experience with Micah reconnected me to my own religion, my own culture, my own language. It was something I’d shoved in a box” after leaving Lebanon as a kid, Khashoggi said. “Micah said, ‘Hey, no, let me look in that box, it’s cool.’” That genuine display of interest by someone from another culture, he said, was “healing.”

Building little bridges

On a recent tour to pick up everyone’s finished artwork for installation, Khashoggi was heartened to see a small sign of the project’s success. One of the Muslim artists came along to assist with pickup, and Khashoggi watched as she greeted one of her Jewish colleagues. You can see “the strength of the connection from the way they hug each other,” Khashoggi said.

“I don’t imagine all of a sudden that all Arabs and Muslims and Jews around the world will start hugging each other the way our artists are,” he said. Still, he said, “we have 15 little bridges that we built.”

Khashoggi’s hope, he said, is that “one or two of the people coming to visit will have the wherewithal, the influence, to allow us to open up another show;” he dreams of another “Open Archways” in New York or Paris or Tel Aviv that would expand the circle of Muslim and Jewish artists who are meeting, talking and collaborating.

The BAC gallery where the exhibition is currently installed is dotted with couches and chairs. On opening night, there will be tea and other refreshments and, the curators hope, an opportunity for people to start conversations — maybe a little bit like the one Finkelshteyn and Khan had at the Open Dialogue Table. The art might help.

“You’re looking at the same thing, and you can talk about that thing,” Finkelshteyn said. “I hope there are a few people who come to this exhibit, who come to this reception, or even who just hear about this reception, and think, ‘Oh, people can talk to each other.’”

That doesn’t mean they’ll always be on the same page. She and Khan aren’t, and they said that was scary at first, as they navigated their fledgling friendship. The first time they didn’t agree, Khan recalled, “it felt like the whole place was burning down.” But they soon realized they can still talk and be friends, while also disagreeing.

They, along with Khashoggi, Astuni, and the participating artists, appear clear-eyed about the scale of change this one show is likely to make. But that micro-movement in the right direction seems to be exhilarating to them all the same.

Ali Saracoglu, 30, a New York City–based Muslim artist who moved to the U.S. from Turkey, put it most poetically. “When we check the news, it doesn’t look good,” said Saracoglu, who works in Ebru art, a traditional Turkish form of paper marbling. “In those moments, I remind myself, for a room to be dark, darkness needs to surround everywhere. But if light finds a tiny crack to come in, that’s usually good enough to illuminate the whole room.”

“This exhibit,” he said, “is a step toward finding that crack, or opening that crack ourselves, for the light to come in.”

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