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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.
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Why is JD Vance talking about the Antichrist?
JD Vance said he might be bringing about the End Times, adding that he would not be “shocked if the Antichrist was walking among us.”
Vance was speaking on the Christian YouTube show The Bryce Crawford Podcast about his memoir, Communion, which covers his conversion to Catholicism from Protestantism.
Numerous Catholics online reacted to his statements with confusion and frustration, saying that the ideas about the apocalypse Vance voiced are not central parts of Catholicism. While Catholicism does discuss the idea of the Second Coming, a time in which Christians believe Jesus will return to Earth, the Catholic Church Catechism — the Vatican’s official statements and teachings about the fundamentals of the religion — says that “we are already at ‘the last hour’” ever since Jesus died; the Antichrist is mentioned only briefly as a “a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God,” not as a specific person who will come to the world.
The Antichrist and Armageddon, however, take center stage in many Evangelical churches, where these concepts often drive other extremist ideas, such as labeling politicians the Antichrist — at one point during the Obama administration, a poll found that one in four Americans thought the president might be the Antichrist — as well as Christian Zionism, an attempt to get all Jews to return to Jerusalem to hasten the apocalypse, when many believe Jews will be sent to Hell.
As one snarky Catholic commenter put it, Vance’s apocalypse-heavy discussion of his Catholicism sounded like “three evangelicals in a trench coat.”
It also sounded a lot like Peter Thiel, the billionaire Palantir founder and Vance’s mentor, donor and former employer. Thiel has a famed obsession with the Antichrist; earlier this year, several Catholic institutions distanced themselves from a series of lectures Thiel gave in Rome on the topic. Vance cited Thiel as an influence on his conversion in an essay about why he chose Catholicism, despite the fact that Thiel is not Catholic.
Thiel’s thinking on the Antichrist is esoteric and rambling, but it borrows heavily from that of Carl Schmitt, a Nazi jurist who also wrote at length about the apocalypse. Schmitt, a lapsed Catholic, argued that a “satanic unification of the world” would be brought about by a globalist Antichrist, and supported Hitler because he believed that he would keep the world safely fragmented. Thiel’s own discussion of the Antichrist largely equates the figure with those fearful about climate change, AI and other ideas usually associated with progressive politics.
Vance, who grew up in an Evangelical Christian household in which his “Meemaw” read the bible daily and watched televangelist Billy Graham, has upset Catholics in the past, particularly when he implied that Pope Leo XIV’s theological interpretations were incorrect after the pope made a statement against the U.S. war with Iran.
“I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology,” Vance said at a Turning Point USA event in April, responding to Pope Leo’s comments. “You’ve got to make sure it’s anchored in the truth and that’s one of the things that I try to do and it’s certainly something I would expect from the clergy.”
In the Catholic Church, the pope’s word is infallible when it comes to official church teachings, and Vance’s boldness was offensive to many Catholics.
Vance’s version of Catholicism — one in which he pushes back against the head of the Church and brings in theological ideas foreign to most Catholics — is notable because it represents an increasingly visible ideological schism in the Church. On one side are Catholics committed to the Vatican, and who have been influenced by the liberalism of recent papal teachings. On the other is a growing movement of traditionalist Catholics, who are increasingly skeptical of the institution of the Church and its recent — and not so recent — theological changes, and are looking to other sources for inspiration.
Those changes have included Vatican II, a groundbreaking set of updates to Church teachings made in the 1960s that famously mandated increased tolerance and respect for other religions, particularly Judaism; the church repudiated antisemitism, Christian nationalism and coercive proselytizing. These were controversial moves, however, which led some Catholic movements to reject the document.
Voices suspicious of the Vatican’s more liberal ideas are getting bolder, and louder. The founder of the Society of Saint Pius X, Marcel Lefebvre, rejected Vatican II in large part based on its espousal of religious liberty; just this summer, the group was excommunicated after it ordained four bishops without the Vatican’s permission. In parallel, highly visible Catholic influencers are increasingly becoming the face of the Church for many young people, yet their theology is often only loosely based on the Vatican’s current teachings, and often reaches back to older, more antisemitic ideas the church has since disavowed.
Vance’s stated breaks with the Vatican and Catholic teaching are not overtly about religious tolerance or liberty. But they are a sign of the increasing acceptability of rejecting, or simply ignoring, the teachings of the Vatican and the pope — and, perhaps, of looking to other sources, like Thiel, for theology. The Catholic church is far from perfect, but the more acceptable it becomes to ignore the Vatican, the easier it becomes to declare almost anything — opposing progressive politics, endorsing Christian nationalism or spreading antisemitism — to be part of Catholicism, no matter what the pope says.
The post Why is JD Vance talking about the Antichrist? appeared first on The Forward.
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How I learned to stop worrying and love my Jewish curls
When I was a kid, my hair was a constant battle. By the time I was in elementary school, my hair went past my waist, and every time my parents decided it was time for a trim — which my dad performed — I resisted strenuously, and after just a few inches were removed, I often cried that it was too short. Every day, one of my parents fought through my hair’s snarls with an old, wooden-handled boar-bristle brush. At least every day until the handle snapped off mid-yank. Then we used a newer, but just-as-fine-bristled version.
But even after I started doing my own hair, and eventually cut it to a more reasonable length, the battle about presentability continued. My mom nagged me constantly, before every event, every dinner party and every time I left the house, to brush my hair. She carried around a purse-sized brush that folded up for her own mid-day hair-brushing needs, and for a while, I did the same. At some point in high school, I got a flat iron to better tame the frizz and messiness that I was constantly trying to brush out, and wound it into a tight, coiled bun while it was still soaking wet to let it dry ruthlessly contained. (This worked, but meant it took about 12 hours to dry.)
My mother treats her hair with the same frustration she had towards mine. She still regularly pulls out that purse brush and frowns at herself in a compact mirror as she pulls it through her hair. My entire life, she has complained that her hair is too big, too frizzy. She reminisced about her year clerking for a judge in Los Angeles, where there wasn’t so much humidity and her hair would finally stay flat.
I thought we both had straight hair that, frustratingly, never acted straight. Or, perhaps more accurately, I had internalized that it would be better if I had straight hair, so much better that the idea it might not be straight never even crossed my mind. This was the ‘90s and early 2000s, and there was an obvious ideal we were both striving for: the kind of straight, glossy hair in TV ads for shampoo. The hair of Jennifer Aniston in Friends. (I got “the Rachel” at one point. Unsurprisingly, it never looked quite right.)
But as I came to realize — in what, looking back, was an astonishingly slow process given the evidence at hand — my hair is not straight. It’s curly! Brushing it never tamed it or helped with frizz, because if you brush out curls, they simply grow larger and frizzier.
In retrospect, this shouldn’t have been so surprising. While there’s no one way to look Jewish and plenty of Jews don’t fit the stereotypes — I’m blonde! — curly hair is a common part of the profile, hence longstanding stereotypes about Jewfros and big, curly Jewish hair are there for a reason. Those negative stereotypes are part of why Jewish women have attempted for decades to fight their hair with keratin treatments or flat irons so that they could look more “American,” more professional, more groomed, more “normal.” Much in the same way that, for several generations, nose jobs have been de rigueur for many Jewish women.
Slowly, I started to realize that maybe my hair wasn’t actually straight, and would look better if I started trying to enhance my curls instead of working against them. I started getting compliments. In college, for her art major thesis project, one of my friends asked if she could draw my hair, sketching out each individual strand.
I wish that I’d figured my hair out earlier; it would have saved me some awkward phases and, more importantly, some resentment about why my hair never looked like it was “supposed” to. I don’t purport to have the same kind of hair trauma as Black girls, some of whom grew up getting burned by hot combs and chemical straightening treatments, or who have been forbidden from wearing their natural hair in schools or workplaces. Nevertheless, the underlying idea is the same: that curlier hair is not neutral. It’s messier or, as my mom put it when I called her to fact check this piece, “less polished.”
These ideas are nothing new; they’ve been passed down through the generations. My grandmother certainly always wanted to seem sophisticated, and she didn’t associate that aesthetic with Jewishness; though her mother spoke Yiddish, she exorcised it from her own vocabulary to such an extent that she used to joke that I knew more Yiddish than she did. She got rid of her Jewish nose, too, and got her hair professionally washed and blown out every week with such devotion that I have no idea what its natural state was. She passed the same ideas down to my mom, who still uses that flat iron I bought in high school.
Today, there’s a whole world of videos online of products and routines meant to deal with various types of curls. I get served videos about different types of curls I am pretty sure were invented in the last two years — “Irish curls” and “Appalachian curls” — and how to perfect the Curly Girl Method to define your exact pattern of waves or coils. Society seems to be more willing to embrace different hair textures (and, not unrelatedly, unique facial features like arched noses too).
These days, I find curly hair beautiful; if anything, I wish my curls were curlier. I use a curl serum. I scrunch my hair up to help my curls take shape instead of trying to stretch them down and flatten them. Now my hair is a mix of ringlets and waves, and my hair stylist always asks me if I want her to blow it out straight or style it curly and natural; I always choose the latter. I don’t even own a brush anymore — I just detangle my curls with my fingers.
Every time I see my mom, though, she still tells me to brush it.
The post How I learned to stop worrying and love my Jewish curls appeared first on The Forward.
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In upcoming Israeli election, Netanyahu is preparing to blame a loss on conspiracy
On the morning of Oct. 7, 2023, retired Maj. Gen. Yair Golan woke to sirens and reports of something terrible happening in southern Israel. At around 8 a.m., as the scale of the Hamas invasion was becoming clear, the former deputy chief of staff told his wife he had to go back to the army, found his old military gear, got dressed and left home. He first drove to the Home Front Command headquarters where he grasped the dimensions of the catastrophe, obtained a weapon, vest and helmet, and continued south in his private car.
Eventually Golan began receiving the locations of young people hiding from Hamas gunmen around the Nova music festival and drove into the fields looking for them. Oz Davidian, the farmer who became one of the civilian heroes of Oct. 7, encountered Golan in a tiny Toyota Yaris that could not cross a ravine. Davidian helped him across in his truck; Golan covered him with his rifle, and together they went looking for three young people hiding from terrorist fire. Golan would ultimately rescue six survivors in three trips.
His actions became one of the day’s extraordinary stories of individual initiative amid the collapse of the Israeli state: a 61-year-old retired general – who currently heads the Democrats, a liberal opposition party dedicated to peace with the Arabs – put on his uniform, climbed into a Toyota and went looking for kids who needed saving. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on that dark Saturday, was not heard from until the evening.
Almost three years later, Sara Netanyahu has discovered something sinister in this story.
“When you’re a military man of such high rank,” the prime minister’s wife said in an interview Monday on the fiercely pro-Netanyahu Channel 14, “already early in the morning you were there, already dressed and ready at a very, very early hour when others didn’t know, such as the prime minister?”
She followed this with a sarcastic question: “Who is the prime minister anyway to know that a war is breaking out? Why let him know?”
Asked directly about the increasingly popular theory that there had been “treason” from within Israel on Oct. 7, she left the possibility hanging, saying she wanted a genuine commission of inquiry to establish what happened.
It is the prime minister, of course, who has blocked an inquiry commission. It’s also Netanyahu who in the months preceding the attack refused to meet with the heads of the military, the Mossad and the Shin Bet, who were desperate to warn him that the uproar created by his authoritarian reforms was projecting weakness and inviting attack. Netanyahu is the author of the theory that there is value in Hamas ruling Gaza, since it undermines the West-Bank-based Palestinian Authority. It was his far-right political allies who were planning provocations against Palestinians in the West Bank on Oct. 7, causing the military to divert massive resources there, leaving the Gaza border catastrophically under-guarded.
With the Oct. 27 election fast approaching, Sara Netanyahu’s interview has become the talk of Israeli politics. In the strange calculus of the Netanyahu machine, it hardly matters that the claims make no sense – since there is no dispute about Golan’s aim that day: to fight Hamas and not assist it. There is a bizarre value in the very incoherence – the more confusion, somehow, the better (even if the cost is undermining public faith in the security establishment, in a country facing existential security threats).
Golan threatened to sue Netanyahu for 2.5 million shekels (about $800,000) for defamation and demanded an apology. Netanyahu responded with a demand that Golan apologize to her and threatened a million-shekel countersuit. Opposition politician Avigdor Lieberman, the former defense minister, congratulated Golan for fighting back and described people who spread such conspiracy theories as “psychopaths.”
The uproar reflects a common understanding of the insinuation: Sara Netanyahu was invoking a conspiratorial universe that has been expanding on the Israeli right since the massacre. According to this conspiracy, Oct. 7 represented something more sinister than a catastrophic intelligence and military failure. In this universe, somebody inside Israel betrayed the country.
The theory comes in many variations. Senior officers knew what was coming. The Shin Bet knew. The generals deliberately kept Netanyahu in the dark. Leaders of the anti-government protest movement were somehow involved. Elements of a hostile “deep state” wanted Hamas to humiliate Netanyahu and bring down his government. The genuine mysteries, warnings and failures preceding the massacre supply endless material from which insinuations can be fashioned, transforming the most devastating security failure in Israeli history into a story of deliberate betrayal by Netanyahu’s domestic enemies.
The betrayal theory has steadily traveled from social media and fringe broadcasters toward the political mainstream. A Reichman University survey previously found that almost a third of Israelis believed to some degree that elements within Israel assisted Hamas in order to harm Netanyahu. Likud Knesset member Tally Gotliv has accused security officials, protest leaders and other political enemies of varieties of treachery, while the prime minister’s son Yair has repeatedly promoted suspicions about the security establishment’s conduct surrounding the attack.
From conspiracy to campaign
This week brought the conspiracy theory directly into the election campaign. Channel 12 political correspondent Daphna Liel reported, citing a Likud source, that an intentional campaign is underway to promote Oct. 7 conspiracy theories in order to distance Netanyahu from responsibility for the massacre “at all costs.”
Golan himself described the same pattern after Sara Netanyahu’s interview, arguing that the remarks represented a planned effort in which Netanyahu’s political opponents are branded as traitors and conspiracy theories supply the evidence.
This fits neatly into Netanyahu’s fixation with avoiding the blame for Oct. 7 – and it comes amid a wider context: The Netanyahu political machine has spent years cultivating distrust of the police, prosecutors, judges, journalists, civil servants and military commanders who come into conflict with the prime minister. The Oct. 7 betrayal narrative folds the greatest catastrophe in Israeli history into this already familiar worldview.
The episode fits an election campaign already distinguished by extraordinary personal ugliness. Netanyahu has circulated an AI-generated video depicting his principal challenger, former IDF chief Gadi Eisenkot, running toward a young man wearing a shirt bearing the words “Israeli unity,” only to run past him and embrace Mansour Abbas, leader of the Arab Ra’am party. The young man in the commercial bore sufficient resemblance to Eisenkot’s son Gal, who was killed fighting in Gaza in December 2023, provoking outrage over what many Israelis saw as an exploitation of Eisenkot’s bereavement. The underlying message of the video was that Eisenkot’s willingness – very much felicitous in a country whose population is one-fifth Arab – to cooperate politically with Arab Israelis amounted to treason.
The same campaign has returned repeatedly to the proposition that Netanyahu’s opponents depend upon hostile or alien forces. A Likud billboard displayed New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani alongside the leaders of Iran, Hezbollah and Turkey beneath the slogan: “They want Netanyahu to lose. Don’t let them win.”
Former Netanyahu allies from the right increasingly describe a political culture in which ordinary democratic rivalry has been replaced by a language of enemies, traitors and conspirators amid an obsession to cling to power.
Naftali Bennett, another former leader of the Israeli right, has warned that the “poison machine” surrounding Netanyahu has grown sufficiently toxic to create the possibility of physical violence against political opponents.
Lieberman’s furious response to the Golan affair comes from the same place. The strategy presents an obvious electoral paradox. Netanyahu enters this campaign needing precisely the voters this rhetoric is likely to repel. Polls have repeatedly given the parties opposed to him a substantial advantage, with most surveys forecasting the broader anti-Netanyahu bloc above 70 of the Knesset’s 120 seats – a landslide by Israeli standards.
The route back to 61 – the number of seats Netanyahu needs to stay in power – therefore runs through Israelis outside Netanyahu’s committed base, with voters who in many cases are security-minded, suspicious of the Palestinians, uncomfortable with the traditional left and deeply critical of the military and intelligence leadership for the failures of Oct. 7.
Netanyahu’s campaign increasingly appears designed to intensify the worldview of the committed rather than soften it for the persuadable. Persuadable voters can readily believe that generals failed catastrophically, that intelligence officials succumbed to groupthink, that the protest movement behaved irresponsibly or that Netanyahu’s opponents have pursued him obsessively. A claim that Yair Golan’s rescue missions indicate advance knowledge of the Hamas attack asks them to enter a considerably stranger universe.
Netanyahu has spent years turning political conflict into an existential contest in which his supporters defend their democratic choice against hostile “elites” and institutions. The betrayal theory takes this to its logical destination by placing the catastrophe of Oct. 7 itself inside the conspiracy.
Striking similarities
Here the comparison with Donald Trump goes considerably deeper than the familiar spectacle of a populist leader attacking judges, prosecutors or unfavorable election results. In both the United States and Israel, something profound has happened to the traditional conservative relationship with the state. Institutions once revered because they embodied national continuity — the military, intelligence services, law enforcement, the courts and the permanent civil service — increasingly become suspect whenever they demonstrate that their loyalty runs to the country and its laws rather than to the political leader who temporarily governs it.
For generations, the right in both countries occupied almost the opposite position. American conservatives wrapped themselves in the FBI, the armed forces and the authority of the state, while Israeli conservatives placed enormous cultural weight on the IDF and the security services as guardians of the Jewish state. The populist transformation has turned this on its head, producing a peculiar new mutation in which loyalty to the state becomes subordinate to loyalty to a leader who claims to embody the state.
Thus, a general who has devoted his life to Israel but challenges Netanyahu can become the target of a sinister conspiracy theory vehiculated by the prime minister’s wife on a propaganda channel.
The Oct. 7 conspiracy theories represent an especially extreme version of this logic. Israel’s military and intelligence establishment can be accused of having tolerated or even facilitated the greatest massacre in the country’s history because such a theory shifts responsibility away from Netanyahu and toward the institutions whose independence has become a political problem for him. Once such a proposition enters ordinary political discourse, distrust of judges, civil servants and election administrators requires a comparatively modest leap of imagination.
The connection to the coming election follows directly from this inversion. A public taught that generals and intelligence chiefs were capable of concealing an impending invasion from the prime minister has already been asked to believe in a conspiracy vastly more elaborate than anything required to manipulate an election.
A public taught that judges, prosecutors, police, journalists, civil servants and opposition politicians have joined a campaign to overthrow its chosen leader has been supplied with an explanation for almost any future defeat. Victory can be presented as the triumph of the people over the establishment; defeat can be interpreted as further evidence of the establishment’s power.
Israel already entered this campaign amid extraordinary anxiety about the integrity of the coming election. Earlier this summer, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak publicly warned that Netanyahu might attempt to sabotage it. Supreme Court Justice Noam Solberg, chairman of the Central Elections Committee, has discussed the narrow legal circumstances under which a genuine national emergency could justify postponing a vote. Golan has warned about attempts to alter election rules and announced plans for extensive monitoring of the vote. Scenarios that would have sounded fantastical during most of Israel’s history have entered ordinary political discussion as Netanyahu approaches an election that threatens to end his extraordinarily long political career.
Oct. 7 vs. Oct. 27
Trump’s experience shows how this political logic can operate when an election finally produces the wrong answer. His campaign against the legitimacy of American elections began years before Jan. 6, 2021, through the repeated proposition that an election system capable of producing his defeat must itself be fraudulent. By the time the 2020 election arrived, millions of supporters already possessed an explanation for a Trump loss. The epistemological groundwork had been laid. Victory demonstrated the people’s will, while defeat demonstrated the conspiracy.
Netanyahu operates in a different political system and national culture, but his increasingly conspiratorial campaign is constructing a comparable political logic in Israel. The institutions capable of declaring that he has lost overlap increasingly with the institutions his supporters are being taught to distrust. The judges belong to the hostile legal establishment; the civil servants belong to the bureaucracy; the media cannot be believed; the security establishment might have betrayed the country on Oct. 7; political opponents may themselves have participated in the conspiracy. A movement immersed in this worldview enters Election Day with an explanation already available should the voters remove its leader.
The transformation of Yair Golan’s Oct. 7 story captures where these politics lead. On the worst morning in Israel’s history, thousands of citizens waited desperately for a state that had disappeared. Reservists, retired officers, farmers, police officers and ordinary people rushed south to fill the vacuum. Golan put on his uniform, found a weapon, climbed into his little Toyota and drove toward the massacre, eventually helping rescue young Israelis hiding from Hamas gunmen in the fields.
Three years later, the prime minister’s wife points to the speed with which he responded as grounds for suspicion, turning evidence of initiative into an insinuation of foreknowledge. The same political method turns military failure into treason, institutional independence into disloyalty and political opposition into subversion. Carried through an election campaign, the logic has one further destination: electoral defeat itself can become another suspicious event requiring explanation.
Much of the Israeli center recoiled from Sara Netanyahu’s interview because the innuendo seemed grotesque. The larger danger lies in the political culture being constructed around precisely such innuendo, one in which patriotism is measured by loyalty to a leader and every person or institution standing between Benjamin Netanyahu and continued power can be cast as part of the plot.
In this sense, Oct. 27 is emerging as a perhaps ever more fateful date than Oct. 7. If the Netanyahu machine is not decisively routed, it is not at all clear that the country can recover as a democracy where the discourse is sane.
The post In upcoming Israeli election, Netanyahu is preparing to blame a loss on conspiracy appeared first on The Forward.
