Uncategorized
How Jewish comedy found religion, from Philip Roth to ‘Broad City’
(JTA) — In the 2020 comedy “Shiva Baby,” a 20-something young woman shows up at a house of Jewish mourners and gently offers her condolences. When she finds her mother in the kitchen, they chat about the funeral and the rugelach before the daughter asks, “Mom, who died?”
While “Shiva Baby” explores themes of sexuality and gender, the comedy almost never comes at the expense of Jewish tradition, which is treated seriously by its millennial writer and director Emma Seligman (born in 1995) even as the shiva-goers collide. It’s far cry from the acerbic way an author raised during the Depression like Philip Roth lampooned a Jewish wedding or a baby boomer like Jerry Seinfeld mocked a bris.
These generational differences are explored in Jenny Caplan’s new book, “Funny, You Don’t Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials.” A religion scholar, Caplan writes about the way North American Jewish comedy has evolved since World War II, with a focus on how humorists treat Judaism as a religion. Her subjects range from writers and filmmakers who came of age shortly after the war (who viewed Judaism as “a joke at best and an actual danger at worst”) to Generation X and millennials, whose Jewish comedy often recognizes “the power of community, the value of family tradition, and the way that religion can serve as a port in an emotional storm.”
“I see great value in zeroing in on the ways in which Jewish humorists have engaged Jewish practices and their own Jewishness,” Caplan writes. “It tells us something (or perhaps it tells us many somethings) about the relationship between Jews and humor that goes deeper than the mere coincidence that a certain humorist was born into a certain family.”
Caplan is the chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Cincinnati. She has a master’s of theological studies degree from Harvard Divinity School and earned a Ph.D. in religion from Syracuse University.
In a conversation last week, we spoke about the Jewishness of Jerry Seinfeld, efforts by young women comics to reclaim the “Jewish American Princess” label, and why she no longer shows Woody Allen movies in her classrooms.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity
[Note: For the purpose of her book and our conversation, this is how Caplan isolates the generations: the Silent Generation (b. 1925-45), the baby boom (1946-65), Generation X (1966-79) and millennials (1980–95).]
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Let me ask how you got into this topic.
Jenny Caplan: I grew up in a family where I was just sort of surrounded by this kind of material. My dad is a comedic actor and director who went to [Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey’s] Clown College. My degrees were more broadly in American religion, not Jewish studies, but I was really interested in the combination of American religion and popular culture. When I got to Syracuse and it came time to start thinking about my larger project and what I wanted to do, I proposed a dissertation on Jewish humor.
The key to your book is how Jewish humor reflects the Jewish identity and compulsions of four sequential generations. Let’s start with the Silent Generation, which is sandwiched between the generation whose men were old enough to fight in World War II and the baby boomers who were born just after the war.
The hallmark of the Silent Generation is that they were old enough to be aware of the war, but they were mostly too young to serve. Every time I told people what I was writing about, they would say Woody Allen or Philip Roth, two people of roughly the same generation.
In “Funny, You Don’t Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials,” Jenny Caplan explores how comics treated religion from the end of World War II to the 21st century. (Courtesy)
The Roth story you focus on is “Eli, the Fanatic” from 1959, about an assimilated Jewish suburb that is embarrassed and sort of freaks out when an Orthodox yeshiva, led by a Holocaust survivor, sets up in town.
Roth spent the first 20 to 30 years of his career dodging the claim of being a self-loathing Jew and bad for the Jews. But the actual social critique of “Eli, the Fanatic” is so sharp. It is about how American Jewish comfort comes at the expense of displaced persons from World War II and at the expense of those for whom Judaism is a real thriving, living religious practice.
That’s an example you offer when you write that the Silent Generation “may have found organized religion to be a dangerous force, but they nevertheless wanted to protect and preserve the Jewish people.” I think that would surprise people in regards to Roth, and maybe to some degree Woody Allen.
Yeah, it surprised me. They really did, I think, share that postwar Jewish sense of insecurity about ongoing Jewish continuity, and that there’s still an existential threat to the ongoing existence of Jews.
I hear that and I think of Woody Allen’s characters, atheists who are often on the lookout for antisemitism. But you don’t focus on Allen as the intellectual nebbish of the movies. You look at his satire of Jewish texts, like his very funny “Hassidic Tales, With a Guide to Their Interpretation by the Noted Scholar” from 1970, which appeared in The New Yorker. It’s a parody of Martin Buber’s “Tales of the Hasidim” and sentimental depictions of the shtetl, perhaps like “Fiddler on the Roof.” A reader might think he’s just mocking the tradition, but you think there’s something else going on.
He’s not mocking the tradition as much as he’s mocking a sort of consumerist approach to the tradition. There was this sort of very superficial attachment to Buber’s “Tales of the Hasidim.” Allen’s satire is not a critique of the traditions of Judaism, it’s a critique of the way that people latch onto things like the Kabbalah and these new English translations of Hasidic stories without any real depth of thought or intellect. Intellectual hypocrisy seems to be a common theme in his movies and in his writing. It’s really a critique of organized religion, and it’s a critique of institutions, and it’s a critique of the power of institutions. But it’s not a critique of the concept of religion.
The idea of making fun of the wise men and their gullible followers reminds me of the folk tales of Chelm, which feature rabbis and other Jewish leaders who use Jewish logic to come to illogical conclusions.
Yes.
You write that the baby boomers are sort of a transition between the Silent Generation and a later generation: They were the teenagers of the counterculture, and warned about the dangers of empty religion, but also came to consider religion and tradition as valuable. But before you get there, you have a 1977 “Saturday Night Live” skit in which a bris is performed in the back seat of a luxury car, and the rabbi who performs it is portrayed as what you call an absolute sellout.
Exactly. You know: Institutional religion is empty and it’s hollow, it’s dangerous and it’s seductive.
Jerry Seinfeld, born in 1954, is seen as an icon of Jewish humor, but to me is an example of someone who never depicts religion as a positive thing. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
“Seinfeld” is more a show about New York than it is necessarily a show about anything Jewish. The New York of Seinfeld is very similar to the New York of Woody Allen, peopled almost entirely by white, middle-class, attractive folks. It’s a sort of Upper West Side myopia.
But there’s the bris episode, aired in 1993, and written by Larry Charles. Unless you are really interested in the medium, you may not know much about Larry Charles, because he stays behind the camera. But he also goes on to do things like direct Bill Maher’s anti-religion documentary “Religulous,” and there’s a real strong case for him as having very negative feelings about organized religion which feels like a holdover from the Silent Generation. And so in that episode you have Kramer as the Larry Charles stand-in, just opining about the barbaric nature of the circumcision and trying to save this poor baby from being mutilated.
The few references to actual Judaism in “Seinfeld” are squirmy. I am thinking of the 1995 episode in which a buffoon of a rabbi blurts out Elaine’s secrets on a TV show. That was written by Larry David, another boomer, whose follow-up series, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” is similarly known for its irreverence toward Judaism. But you say David can also surprise you with a kind of empathy for religion.
For the most part, he’s classic, old school, anti-organized religion. There’s the Palestinian Chicken episode where the Jews are rabidly protesting the existence of a Palestinian-run chicken restaurant near a Jewish deli, and where his friend Funkhouser won’t play golf on Shabbos until Larry gets permission by bribing the rabbi with the Palestinian chicken. There, rabbis are ridiculous and can be bought and religion is hollow and this is all terrible.
But then there’s this bat mitzvah montage where for one moment in the entire run of this show, Larry seems happy and in a healthy relationship and fulfilled and enjoying life.
That’s where he falls in love with Loretta Black during a bat mitzvah and imagines a happy future with her.
It’s so startling: It is the most human we ever see Larry over the run of the show, and I believe that was the season finale for the 2007 season. It was much more in line with what we’ve been seeing from a lot of younger comedians at that point, which was religion as an anchor in a good way — not to pull you down but to keep you grounded.
So for Generation X, as you write, Judaism serves “real, emotional, or psychological purpose for the practitioners.”
I wouldn’t actually call it respect but religion is an idea that’s not just something to be mocked and relegated to the dustbin. I’m not saying that Generation X is necessarily more religious, but they see real power and value in tradition and in certain kinds of family experiences. So, a huge amount of the humor can still come at the expense of your Jewish mother or your Jewish grandmother, but the family can also be the thing that is keeping you grounded, and frequently through some sort of religious ritual.
Who exemplifies that?
My favorite example is the 2009 Jonathan Tropper novel, “This Is Where I Leave You.” I’m so disappointed that the film adaptation of that sucked a lot of the Jewish identity out of the story, so let’s stick with the novel. In that book, where a family gathers for their father’s shiva, the characters are horrible people in a dysfunctional family writ large. They lie to each other. They backstab each other. But in scene where the protagonist Judd describes standing up on the bimah [in synagogue] to say Kaddish [the Mourner’s Prayer] after the death of his father, and the way he talks about this emotional catharsis that comes from saying the words and hearing the congregation say the words — it’s a startling moment of clarity in a book where these characters are otherwise just truly reprehensible.
Adam Sandler was born in 1966, the first year of Generation X, and his “Chanukah Song” seems like such a touchstone for his generation and the ones that follow. It’s not about religious Judaism, but in listing Jewish celebrities, it’s a statement of ethnic pride that Roth or Woody Allen couldn’t imagine.
It’s the reclamation of Jewish identity as something great and cool and fun and hip and wonderful and absolutely not to be ashamed of.
From left, Ilana Glazer, Abbi Jacobson and Seth Green in an episode of “Broad City” parodying Birthright Israel. (Screenshot from Comedy Central)
Which brings us to “Broad City,” which aired between 2014 and 2019. It’s about two 20-something Jewish women in New York who, in the case of Ilana Glazer’s character, anyway, are almost giddy about being Jewish and embrace it just as they embrace their sexuality: as just liberating. Ilana even upends the Jewish mother cliche by loving her mother to death.
That’s the episode with Ilana at her grandmother’s shiva, which also has the B plot where Ilana and her mother are shopping for underground illegal handbags. They spend most of the episode snarking at each other and fighting with each other and her mother’s a nag and Ilana is a bumbling idiot. But at the moment that the cops show up, and try to nab them for having all of these illegal knockoff handbags, the two of them are a team. They are an absolute unit of destructive force against these hapless police officers.
I think all of your examples of younger comics are women, who have always had fraught relationships with Jewish humor, both as practitioners and as the target of jokes. You write about “The JAP Battle” rap from “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” which both leans into the stereotype of the Jewish-American Princess — spoiled, acquisitive, “hard as nails” — and tries to reclaim it without the misogyny.
Rachel Bloom’s character Rebecca in “Girlfriend” self-identifies as a JAP, but she doesn’t actually fit the category. It’s her mother, Naomi, who truly is the Philip Roth, “Marjorie Morningstar,” Herman Wouk model of a JAP. So Bloom is kind of using the term, but you can’t repurpose the term when the original is still there.
So as an alternative, I offer up a new term: the Modern Ashkenazi American Woman. It’s very New York, it’s very East Coast, it’s very particular to a type of upbringing and community that in the 1950s and ’60s would have been almost exclusively Conservative Jews, and then may have become a bit more Reform as we’ve gotten into the ’90s and 2000s. They went to the JCC. They probably went to Jewish summer camp.
But even that doesn’t even really speak to the American sense of what Jewish is anymore, because American Jews have become increasingly racially and culturally diverse.
There is also something that’s happening historically with Generation X, and that’s the distance from the two major Jewish events of the 20th century, which is the Holocaust and the creation of Israel.
The Silent Generation and baby boomers still had a lingering sense of existential dread — the sense that we’re not so far removed from an attempted total annihilation of Jews. Gen X and millennials are so far removed from the Holocaust that they don’t feel that same fear.
But the real battleground we’re seeing in contemporary American Judaism is about the relationship to Israel. For baby boomers and even for some older members of Gen X, there’s still a sense that you can criticize Israel, but at the end of the day, it’s your duty to ultimately support Israel’s right to exist. And I think millennials and Zoomers [Gen Z] are much more comfortable with the idea of Israel being illegitimate.
Have you seen that in comedy?
I certainly think you can see the leading edge of that in some millennial stuff. The “Jews on a Plane” episode of “Broad City” is an absolute excoriation of Birthright Israel, and does not seem particularly interested in softening its punches about the whole idea of Jews going to Israel. I think we can see a trend in that direction, where younger American Jewish comedians do not see that as punching down.
You’re teaching a class on Jewish humor. What do your undergraduates find funny? Now that Woody Allen is better known for having married his adoptive daughter and for the molestation allegations brought by another adoptive daughter, do they look at his classic films and ask, “Why are you teaching us this guy?”
For the first time I’m not including Woody Allen. I had shown “Crimes and Misdemeanors” for years because I think it’s his most theological film. I think it’s a great film. And then a couple years ago, I backed off, because some students were responding that it was hard to look at him with all the baggage. He’s still coming up in conversation because you can’t really talk about the people who came after him without talking about him, but for the first time I’m not having them actually watch or read any of his stuff.
They have found things funny that I didn’t expect them to, and they have not found things funny that I would have thought they would. They laughed their way through “Yidl mitn fidl,” the 1936 Yiddish musical starring Molly Picon. I also thought they’d enjoy the Marx Brothers’ “Duck Soup” and they did not laugh once. Some of that is the fact that Groucho’s delivery is just so fast.
—
The post How Jewish comedy found religion, from Philip Roth to ‘Broad City’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Syria Arrests Team of Hezbollah Assassins Trained to Kill Senior Government Officials
Hezbollah fighters walk near a military tank in Western Qalamoun, Syria, Aug. 23, 2017. Photo: REUTERS/Omar Sanadiki
Syria has stopped a Hezbollah terrorist cell that was plotting to assassinate senior government officials, according to the Syrian Interior Ministry.
An investigation “revealed that the cell was in the process of executing a sabotage agenda that included systematic assassinations targeting high-ranking government figures,” the ministry said in a statement on Tuesday.
With raids at multiple locations, Syrian security forces made 11 arrests and seized a cache of weaponry.
Interior Ministry spokesperson Nour al-Din al-Baba said in an interview with Syria’s al-Ikhbariya television that the government had monitored the Hezbollah cell for three months, learning soon after the start of the investigation that the men had crossed over from Lebanon with forged documents after receiving specialized military training.
Hezbollah, an Iran-backed group based in Lebanon, is an internationally designated terrorist organization.
Syrian military leaders reportedly launched the raids to capture the cell right before the terrorists planned to launch their attack, in what authorities described as the “final stages of readiness.” The coordinated action included operations to apprehend suspects in the Damascus countryside, Homs, Hama, Latakia, and Aleppo,
Al-Baba explained that the group planned to use drones and strike in multiple provinces. The raids uncovered a stockpile of drones, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, automatic rifles, hand grenades, and ammunition. He said that Mohammad Mahmoud Abdul Hamid, a former affiliate of Bashar al-Assad’s intelligence service, had led the terrorist cell after Hezbollah had recruited him. While many of the weapons discovered dated back to Assad’s regime, others appeared freshly stocked by Hezbollah.
Assad, the long-time dictator of Syria, was toppled in December 2024. His Iran-backed rule had strained ties with the Arab world during the nearly 14-year Syrian war, during which Hezbollah fought in Syria to help keep Assad in power.
In a post on X featuring mugshots of the men captured, Syria’s Interior Ministry wrote that “among the most prominent of those arrested is the main individual responsible for the assassinations file in the [Hezbollah] militia, who oversaw on-the-ground planning and target identification.”
عناصر الخلية الإرهابية المرتبطة بميليشيا حزب الله، والذين أطاحت بهم وزارة الداخلية خلال الحملة الأمنية الأخيرة، ومن أبرز المقبوض عليهم المسؤول المباشر عن ملف الاغتيالات في الميليشيا المذكورة، والذي كان يشرف ميدانياً على وضع الخطط وتحديد الأهداف.#وزارة_الداخلية pic.twitter.com/RyuaEwd8pY
— وزارة الداخلية السورية (@syrianmoi) May 5, 2026
The Foundation for Defense of Democracy’s Long War Journal analyzed the photographs and identified some of the individuals, describing one as Aqel Mahmoud Aqel al-Bej, a former member of the Syrian Arab Army from the town of Hayyan in Aleppo Governorate. Another man arrested had served with the Liwa al Quds (the Jerusalem Brigade), a group which supported Assad and later joined the Syrian military.
Hezbollah has denied ties to the cell, releasing a statement “categorically denying the false accusations from the Syrian interior ministry.”
The Iran-backed terrorist group “wishes only the best for Syria and its people,” it claimed. “Hezbollah has never been a party that works to destabilize the security of any country or target the stability of its people. It has always taken and will continue to take a position of defense against the Zionist enemy and its expansionist plans — the enemy of Lebanon and Syria, which occupies their lands and encroaches on the wealth and resources of their peoples.”
Hezbollah previously positioned as many as 7,000-10,000 men in Syria to support Assad’s authoritarian regime. Many still operate in secret terrorist cells in spite of Assad’s fall.
In April, Syria’s Interior Ministry announced five arrests in another assassination attempt plotted by Hezbollah. The terrorists targeted Rabbi Michael Khoury in Damascus, with authorities identifying a woman who attempted to plant an explosive outside his home. The suspects later confessed to authorities they had drones supplied by Hezbollah they intended to use in an attack.
In March, Reuters reported that sources had said that Hezbollah had lost more than 400 fighters since the start of conflict with Israel on March 2. Israeli forces have put the figure at well over 1,000. That same month, Israeli broadcaster Kan News also revealed that Syria’s government had directed the military to stop Hezbollah cells from attacking Israel from Syrian territory.
In response to the US-Israeli strikes against the Islamic regime in Iran, Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa announced on March 31 that “unless Syria is targeted by any party, Syria will remain outside any conflict.” He added, “We do not want Syria to be an arena of war. But unfortunately, today, things are not governed by wise minds. The situation is volatile and random.”
In addition to threats from Hezbollah cells, Syria also faces Uzbek fighters in the northwest, with sources saying last year that 1,500 lived in the country. On Wednesday, Reuters reported that the Syrian military had arrested five militia members following a disturbance by armed men demanding the release of one of their comrades accused of opening fire in Idlib city.
Uncategorized
Israel’s most dangerous war is with itself
My friend Rabbi Heshy Grossman recently invited me to Jerusalem to meet top Haredi rabbis. Unhappy with my critical writings about the Haredim, this well-meaning true believer hoped to jump-start fruitful dialogue.
So I took the train to Jerusalem, and spent a fascinating day with pleasant and welcoming scholars who left me in even greater despair.
The background: Angst is now dominating Israeli discourse amid a strong feeling among non-Haredi Jews that the country is running out of time to save itself. This can seem related to the Palestinian conflict, or to disputes over authoritarian reforms. But at the end of the day the main issue — for the non-Haredi Jews who are still a majority in the land — is the Haredim.
Concerns used to be about the Haredim — who have always held sway over right-wing coalitions — trying to impose religious strictures, like banning commerce and public transport on the Sabbath, which they have done with varying degrees of success. But the clash has gone far beyond such matters. The wars that began on Oct. 7, 2023 have exposed profound tensions over this large minority evading military service, and the opposition promises to enlist them should it win this fall’s election.
But even that change — heavy lift though it may be — wouldn’t come close to fixing the actual problem.
The Haredi system largely refuses to teach high school boys math, science, English and other non-religious topics. It routes as many men as possible to religious study well into adulthood, for which they expect to receive state stipends rather than pay tuition. With very low male participation in the economy, the community pays minimal taxes and depends on a huge web of ever-expanding welfare. Increasingly, Haredi women do work, but rarely in high-end jobs. The community, which currently makes up about a sixth of the population, is exploding as family sizes approach seven children on average, certainly among the highest for any significant community in the developed world.
This will clearly lead to an economic collapse if nothing changes. On top of that, it does not seem as if the Israeli Haredim can coexist happily with others from a philosophical and cultural standpoint, and the feeling is very much mutual.
‘A sense of separatism’
Heshy drove me all over the city in a whirlwind tour that included the head of the Hebron Yeshiva, one of the most senior rabbis of the Mirer Yeshiva — the world’s largest — the head of a major yeshiva serving mainly youth from the United States, a visiting U.S. Haredi rabbi much involved in the local political scene, and Heshy’s own charming father-in-law, who was the chief rabbi of Atlanta and has long been a beloved columnist for the iconic Mishpacha Magazine.
The tone throughout was cordial, at times warm, somewhat prickly and occasionally intellectual. These were serious men who are easy to like. That made the substance of what they said doubly unsettling.
The first fault line, as expected, was education. My question to the rabbis was straightforward: How can a modern economy function when a large and growing share of its population receives little to no instruction in mathematics, science or “secular” language skills?
Rabbi Moshe Meiselman, who holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was dismissive of the premise. Meiselman, the U.S.-born founder and head of Yeshivat Toras Moshe, described secular studies as an “intellectual game” that he had experienced at the highest levels and found vastly inferior to studying the Torah. He said that Haredi communities from the beginning of the state perceived an aggressive and arrogant stance from the Zionist authorities, who felt “that no intelligent person” would want to be Haredi.
“There is a basic tension in society, and that tension is what created, more than anything else, a sense of separatism within our own environment,” he said.
“Even at the cost of self-harm?” I asked.
“In your view it’s self-harm,” he said. And if the state cut off funding, he added, “we’d simply get money from our people abroad to support us … we will handle it.”
Like the others, he seemed to believe that whatever practical skills are needed for work can be acquired in a year or two. He offered the existence of certain successful Haredi professionals — lawyers, doctors, accountants — as proof. “What relevance does my knowledge of trigonometry have to anyone’s employment? Where does Euclid come in?” he said. “I don’t have to learn to talk with Plato in order to get a profession.”
I was glad to find a more flexible position expressed by Heshy’s father-in-law, Rabbi Emanuel Feldman.
“I’m not sure personally why they should not be able to study physics or chemistry or mathematics,” he said. “I don’t understand why there’s an objection to it.” He argued that this “is not ideological but political and a decision based upon circumstances.” I suggested the circumstances were the Haredi leadership’s preference for a compliant and unquestioning flock. “It’s unfortunate that there is no effective communication and there are elements on both sides who are interested in maintaining a conflict,” he sighed.
Menachem Zupnik, the U.S.-based rabbi, from Passaic, N.J., was also more pragmatic than the Israeli cohort.
“The biggest problem,” he said, “is that nobody goes to work and has a profession… many, many issues are the outgrowth of the fact that they believe that everybody has to sit and learn Torah all the time.” But even he rejected the idea that external pressure — including cutting subsidies and restructuring incentives — would change behavior. “All you’re going to do is cause more hatred.”
Rabbi Shlomo Spitzer, who preferred that I not mention his affiliation, explained the indifference to practical outcomes this way: From the Haredi perspective, Torah and mitzvot are the organizing principles of life. Everything else a person does — work, eating, recreation — is secondary: “these are means, not ends.”
I asked: “When you describe unwavering commitment to Torah, doesn’t that risk becoming fanaticism?”
“What is fanaticism? That is a serious question,” he argued, explaining that following the Torah “to the end” means accepting it literally. “But societies change,” I said. “Values evolve. Why shouldn’t religious frameworks adapt?” His answer was that there are foundations that must be regarded as absolute.
Military tensions
The issue of military service brings the divide between secular and Haredi priorities into the sharpest relief for most Israelis. Here, too, the argument is about identity.
Again and again, the concern surfaced that exposure to the army would erode the religious character of Haredi young men. The fear was personal, and almost visceral. It is not without foundation: Many Israelis would love to have more of the Haredim join mainstream society — and indeed, exposure to that society is well understood as a trigger for leaving Haredi life.
Rabbi Chaim Yitzhak Kaplan, the dean of students at Hebron Yeshiva, put it plainly: “There’s no way that a young man… is going to go in for two, three years in the army and come out the same Haredi.” Moreover, he noted that the specific ages in question — late teens and early twenties — are precisely when he needs youth to be studying, lest they go astray.
It was clear he was sharing a genuinely felt defense of a way of life, not speaking out of cowardice or selfishness.
“Our nation is about learning,” Kaplan said, describing Torah study as the defining activity of Jewish existence. Once that premise is accepted, the hierarchy of obligations shifts. But the truth is that most secular Israelis cannot in honesty accept this idea. Many don’t ascribe much importance to religion as a vocation. It is one of many things that might be important to a person, but seems imbalanced to insist must be important to a country. So the Haredi argument becomes a little like someone telling you they cannot serve in the military because they must become a pilot, plumber, poet or mathematician, and do nothing else, ever. “Very nice,” many Israelis would say, “I’ll see you in the army.”
Kaplan did concede that at some point in the future Haredim may have to either agree to serve or leave the country. Meiselman was more strident, saying, in effect, that sages were more valuable than soldiers. “Wars in the world are caused by people not being sufficiently Jewish, religious. … if the Jews were here, acting as they’re supposed to act, then there would be no more war, ” he said. Then the Arab world would not be as antagonist.”
I asked: “Do you think Hitler carried out the Holocaust because the Jews were insufficiently religious?” Exactly, he replied, to my despair. I told him this is the language of an irreconcilable cultural war. “I’m a very honest person,” he replied, quite calmly.
Joy, and denial
In general, there is a pleasingly cerebral atmosphere of learning and debate in these institutions. Study can go on, Kaplan noted proudly, well into the night. The Mirer Yeshiva especially positively teems with boys, many from the U.S., who clearly care deeply about the culture they’re preserving. The entire Mea Shearim neighborhood seems designed to serve that yeshiva, with nary a business visible that is not somehow involved — whether that be the kosher eateries or bookstore full of young men reading and debating in a joyous scene for which I could not recall a secular equivalent.
It was an appealing environment in a strange way, and I understood the desire to preserve it. I proposed to some of those I met that the conflict might remain manageable, enabling that preservation, if the community that was at such loggerheads with society were stable in size.
This line of argument is an awkward and delicate business, as it’s not normally advisable to advise others on reproduction. But it’s also the heart of the matter — and Heshy, for one, knows it, frequently bragging, with eyes twinkling, that his side is “winning.”
“Why don’t you go fight with all the people in Tel Aviv that they should get rid of their dogs and they should have five children?” asked Rabbi Zupnick. My points — that the explosive growth of a welfare-dependent sector risks collapsing the very economy it depends on to sustain it — went unacknowledged.
The theological problem
It was when the conversation moved from policy into theology that things got especially hopeless.
Rabbi Spitzer, for example, said scripture allowed no leeway on the matter of the halakhic prescription of capital punishment by stoning for Sabbath violations. When pressed on whether he’d apply it to his own child, he said: “I don’t want to, I have to.” He clarified, though, that the institutional framework required to implement such sanctions is presently absent — for example, there is no Sanhedrin or Jewish Temple.
But then again, if the Haredim end up as the large majority, there will be.
In the car, as we zoomed around Mea Shearim, Heshy tried to explain that the Haredi community and I simply speak different languages, and I had not understood what the learned rabbi meant. “So I shouldn’t take it literally?” I asked, grasping at a straw.
“I didn’t say that,” Heshy snapped.
A modern state depends on a set of shared assumptions: that citizens will be educated in ways that allow them to participate in a complex economy, that they will contribute to collective defense, that public policy will operate within a framework of shared accountability.
What came across very clearly in my listening tour was that a society organized around Torah study operates according to a different set of assumptions: that insulation from external influence is a virtue, that the Torah is the only valuable truth and that no moral or legal framework except what is ordained therein has any meaning.
These two systems can coexist for a time, if the Haredim are in the minority and they are economically supported. If the Haredim become a majority, as is inevitable unless the birth rate comes down fast, that fragile peace will break. Even though demographic predictions must be couched, it seems clear that without change, soon, non-Haredim will start to despair, and many will flee the country.
Correcting the course
Heshy will not be so happy, but the meetings he set up convinced me all the more that radical steps are needed to completely upend the current dynamic. The leaders of Israel’s opposition say they will move to draft the Haredim if they win the upcoming election. They should go much further. Among the steps necessary:
- Impose a secular core curriculum for all religious schools, and completely cut off state funding to any schools in any sector that resist.
- Eliminate most yeshiva stipends, or funds for those who study Torah full-time.The original draft exemption allowed by Israel’s first leader, David Ben-Gurion, allowed for funds for several hundred students, and that’s a number most Israelis could live with.
- Cap the number of child stipends — state funds allocated per child, to help support young families — at three per family. The idea here would be to encourage the birthrate to come down.
- Generously fund adult education and professional training for Haredim, and set up a state authority for absorbing, housing, training and assisting those who want to leave the fold altogether.
Recently, an Israeli news program interviewed a Haredi mother of nine who works to support her husband’s study. She seemed proud of his economic cluelessness since his job was to “keep the flame alive.” She predicted the Haredim will never join the army no matter what. When the exasperated reporter — himself religious but not Haredi — asked whether it was fair that other mothers should spend their days in fear for their sons’ lives as they serve, she replied that she too spends her days in fear of her children becoming secular. She seemed very serious, and not at all apologetic.
Is she an exception? Can this way of thinking be changed? If the answers to these questions are no, we have a national emergency.
The post Israel’s most dangerous war is with itself appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Announces Progress in Legal Battle to Declare CAIR a Terrorist Group
Governor of Texas Greg Abbott attends the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) USA 2026 at the Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center, in Grapevine, Texas, US, March 27, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Callaghan O’Hare
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) on Wednesday announced that a US federal court granted major portions of Texas’s discovery requests against the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), representing significant progress in the state’s legal case to designate the controversial advocacy group as a terrorist organization.
The approved request means that CAIR will have to hand over information including donor lists, award recipients, and records tied to travel by longtime CAIR executive director Nihad Awad to countries described by Abbott as “hosting Islamic terror.”
“Progress in my legal fight against CAIR,” Abbott posted on X. “I demanded CAIR give us its donor list, donee list, and details for Nihad Awad’s travel to 9 countries hosting Islamic terror. A federal court granted my request.”
The ruling, issued by the US District Court for the Western District of Texas, marks one of the most serious legal setbacks CAIR has faced in years as Republican officials intensify scrutiny of the organization’s funding networks and alleged foreign connections.
Court documents show the judge granted in part motions from Abbott and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton seeking extensive discovery from CAIR entities. Among the requests approved by the court were demands for documents identifying donors who gave $5,000 or more over the past decade.
The order also states that donor records with names redacted would be “insufficient,” signaling the court’s willingness to force disclosure of information CAIR has long argued should remain private.
Abbott has accused CAIR of operating surreptitiously while exerting significant political influence across the country. His administration has argued that Texans deserve transparency regarding the organization’s donors, overseas relationships, and internal financial networks.
The legal proceedings began in November, when Abbott formally designated CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations under state law, citing in part what officials described as longstanding ideological and operational ties with Islamist movements hostile to the US and its allies.
“The Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR have long made their goals clear: to forcibly impose Sharia law and establish Islam’s ‘mastership of the world,’” Abbott said in a statement announcing the move. “These radical extremists are not welcome in our state and are now prohibited from acquiring any real property interest in Texas.”
Abbott’s proclamation described CAIR as a “successor organization” to the Muslim Brotherhood and noted the FBI called it a “front group” for “Hamas and its support network.” The document also outlined the history of the organizations and their historical associations with figures and networks tied to Hamas, an internationally designated terrorist group.
CAIR has denied any ties to terrorism and portrayed the Texas investigation as an attack on Muslim civil rights advocacy.
But critics of CAIR have increasingly pointed to the organization’s history of controversy surrounding extremist rhetoric and its past scrutiny by federal investigators. Awad himself drew backlash after publicly expressing support for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, saying he was “happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land.”
In the 2000s, CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case. Politico noted in 2010 that “US District Court Judge Jorge Solis found that the government presented ‘ample evidence to establish the association’” of CAIR with Hamas.
According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “some of CAIR’s current leadership had early connections with organizations that are or were affiliated with Hamas.” CAIR has disputed the accuracy of the ADL’s claim and asserted that it “unequivocally condemn[s] all acts of terrorism, whether carried out by al-Qa’ida, the Real IRA, FARC, Hamas, ETA, or any other group designated by the US Department of State as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization.’”
CAIR leaders have also found themselves embroiled in further controversy since Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities in southern Israel, in some cases for associating with US-designated terrorists.
The latest court ruling does not resolve the broader lawsuit, which remains ongoing, but it hands Abbott and Paxton a major procedural victory in a case that is increasingly drawing national attention.