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
From the Editor: The Audacity of the Jews to Survive
The annual ‘March of the Living,’ a trek between two former Nazi-run death camps, in Oswiecim and Brzezinka, Poland, May 6, 2024. Photo: Maciek Jazwiecki/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
History has returned for the Jews. For 78 years following the end of World War II, the Jewish people enjoyed an unprecedented period of peace and calm globally. There were rocky periods over this time and plenty of instances of antisemitic violence, from the Munich massacre to the AMIA bombing, but Jews overall were not suffering anywhere near the same pervasive persecution of previous eras. Then came Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists invaded Israel and perpetrated the biggest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, broadcasting their savagery for the world to see. The Oct. 7 atrocities awoke a dormant beast: What followed, amid the ensuing war in Gaza, was a ferocious surge in antisemitic incidents — harassment, intimidation, and violence — around the globe.
Many observers, including Jewish leaders, have described this rise in hostility as a new phenomenon, with antisemitism reaching record levels. But the cold truth that Jewish communities need to recognize is that the world is returning to its pre-1945 norm, when bigotry against Jews was a far more common element of daily life. Of course, now there’s Israel, serving as a place of refuge with a standing military to protect Jews. And today most societies, both elites and the masses, don’t want to be seen as overtly antisemitic, unlike past eras when blatant prejudice and discrimination were more socially and culturally acceptable — often even a point of national pride. But make no mistake: Antisemitism will continue to be normalized and tolerated in a way that no other bigotry would be, including in the West.
If 2023 was the year history returned for the Jews and 2024 was when antisemitism began to normalize once the initial shock went away, then 2025 marked the moment the intifada went global. From Washington to Boulder, from Manchester to Sydney, calls from anti-Israel activists to “globalize the intifada” came to fruition with murderous antisemitic attacks.
Despite the gravity of this moment, discussions of Jews, Israel, and antisemitism, even among friends, have missed key fundamentals about the underlying dynamics of what led us here. Specifically, few people seem to understand what antisemitism really is and why it has proven to be the most enduring form of bigotry in the history of civilization. The answer illuminates why Jews must remain vigilant, practical, and appropriately cautious on one hand while simultaneously maintaining and sharing a deep sense of pride and comfort in the fact that they have faced much worse before and will endure this too. The Jewish people will live on, as their opponents of today fade into the distance.
Israel’s First Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (C) stands under a portrait depicting Theodore Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, as he reads Israel’s declaration of Independence in Tel Aviv, May 14, 1948, in this handout picture released April 29, 2008, by the Israeli Government Press Office (GPO). Photo: REUTERS/Kluger Zoltan/GPO/Handout
An Unprecedented Story
The rabid opposition to Israel and steep rise in antisemitism we’ve seen worldwide over the past two years serve as a reminder that a sizable chunk of humanity deeply resents the will of the Jewish people both to survive and thrive in the face of intense persecution.
Indeed, a key reason for the persistence of antisemitism through millennia is that the story of the Jewish people seems too improbable to believe without invoking the conspiracy theory of the all-powerful Jew.
For the last 2,500-plus years, at least since the Babylonian exile, Jews have been expelled, slaughtered, and scapegoated in such a consistent and widespread way that is unique to the human experience of persecution. In short, antisemitism is civilization’s oldest, most entrenched hatred.
And yet, the Jewish people have endured and survived, collectively forming much of Western civilization’s moral, legal, and spiritual foundation with their ideas and teachings. More than that, Jews have thrived amid unparalleled adversity, becoming disproportionally successful in fields as diverse as law, medicine, and the arts.
To drive home the point, Jews have won about a quarter of all Nobel prizes, despite making up less than 0.2 percent of the world’s population.
How can such a tiny spec of humanity be so extensively persecuted but somehow, despite the obstacles, excel to such a degree? It doesn’t make any sense.
Israel’s story is similar. Only in the Jewish state are the same people worshiping the same God and speaking the same language that they did 3,000 years ago. Many people simply cannot understand that the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948 was the ultimate decolonization project, the return of an ancient people to their homeland in which they always maintained a presence and to which they never gave up deep connection.
Everything about the Jews and Israel seems to defy possibility and common sense: Such countries are not resurrected in history, and dead languages such as Hebrew are not revived.
And then consider the land itself: a tiny sliver of earth with a limited supply of natural freshwater, surrounded by larger enemies bent on the Jewish state’s destruction.
But rather than die, Israel survived to become the vibrant democracy, military juggernaut, and high-tech hub that we know today — a mini superpower surpassing its neighbors (and most of the world) in virtually all aspects of state power and quality of life.
The stories of Israel and the Jewish people are puzzles, and the pieces do not fit according to the typical rules of history. For too many people, antisemitic conspiracy theories provide a comforting answer to fill in the blanks to these mysteries.
Car in New South Wales, Australia graffitied with antisemitic message. The word “F**k” has been removed from this image. Photo: Screenshot
What Antisemitism Actually Is – and Why the Jews Are so Hated
Antisemitism isn’t bigotry as we typically understand it. Bernard Lewis, the late and preeminent historian of the Middle East, explained how “it is perfectly possible to hate and even to persecute Jews without necessarily being antisemitic.” How? Because “hatred and persecution are a normal part of the human experience.”
Antisemitism has two special features, Lewis argued, that make it a distinct form of bigotry. First, “Jews are judged by a standard different from that applied to others.” Second, and more importantly, is the “accusation of cosmic, satanic evil attributed to Jews,” the likes of which cannot be found anywhere else. The latter point is why, historically, it was rarely enough just to subjugate the Jewish people and force them to submit to a certain authority. No, the Jews had to be either expelled or slaughtered — after being scapegoated for society’s ills.
While racism is emotional, antisemitism is explanatory, an epistemic failure of the highest degree using a veneer of logic to promote a false version of reality. This is why podcasters and university professors get away with antisemitism but not racism: They can portray the former as a serious intellectual exercise. What they don’t say is that the lies of blood libel and Jewish control are what have always led to pogroms and even genocide.
Antisemitism is a virus of the mind that has gone through three historical mutations. In the Middle Ages, hatred and persecution of Jews were based on their religion. In the 19th and 20th centuries, hatred and persecution of Jews were based on their race. Today, hatred and persecution of Jews are more often based on their nation-state, Israel. As the late British chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks argued, “anti-Zionism is the new antisemitism.” With each new phase, antisemitism adapted to what became morally and intellectually acceptable — religious persecution fell out of fashion during the Enlightenment, and the same happened to racial persecution in the mid-20th century. Persecuting the Jewish state, however, is perfectly acceptable today, especially among cultural and political elites.
In the ancient world, Jews were initially hated for introducing monotheism to the world, practicing a system of laws and values requiring a level of discipline to which others were, frankly, unwilling to commit. And then through the years, Jews continuously refused to conform to the ruling empire of the day, maintaining their identity and practices. Naturally, this built resentment.
At the same time, Jews never sought to proselytize; they were content with their own community, happy to live among others but not particularly interested in expanding the tribe. This too built resentment.
To the gentile, Jews were an exclusive club — one could say a chosen people — which would neither submit to nor express much interest in outside forces. The former is a prime explainer for the prevalence of Islamic antisemitism; the latter helps explain the endurance of Christian antisemitism, with Jews never accepting Jesus.
After thinking about these issues for years, I have come to the simple conclusion that antisemitism is so persistent because people believe Jews are the “chosen people,” and they see in Israel that same chosenness. And they resent them for it.
There is a striking moment in Mein Kampf, Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto, when the Nazi leader concedes that the Jews might just be the chosen people — and seems to fear that his antisemitic plans may be doomed to fail.
“When … I scrutinized the activity of the Jewish people,” Hitler wrote, “suddenly there rose up in me the fearful question whether inscrutable destiny, perhaps for reasons unknown to us poor mortals, did not, with eternal and immutable resolve, desire the final victory of this little nation.”
Whether Jews actually are a chosen people isn’t the point. The antisemite sees the Jewish story and doesn’t express admiration but rather resentment and paranoia. To them, there is something particular about the Jews that simply defies explanation. They are worthy of unique hatred and scorn. Yes, Jews are often hated in specific situations for their God, or for being a successful minority, or other reasons that are often put forward. But underneath these explanations, often subconsciously, is the fear, hatred, and awe that the Jewish people have a divine spark. Many groups, from the West to East Asia (for example, China calling itself “the Middle Kingdom”), make a claim to chosenness, but bigots only single out the Jews for scorn as a result. Because deep down, they believe it.
If this argument sounds a bit vague and irrational, that’s the point. There’s a supernatural element of antisemitism that can’t be explained by logic, reason, or history. As Sacks wrote, antisemitism “is not a coherent set of beliefs but a set of contradictions. Before the Holocaust, Jews were hated because they were poor and because they were rich; because they were communists and because they were capitalists; because they kept to themselves and because they infiltrated everywhere; because they clung tenaciously to ancient religious beliefs and because they were rootless cosmopolitans who believed nothing.”
Because antisemitism is not simply about hatred of Jews but, rather, reflects an even more irrational belief that Jews are responsible for all the world’s ills, antisemites apply their views in such absurd, contradictory ways. It’s a shape-shifting virus that reveals more about the host than the Jews. As the journalist Vasily Grossman observed in his book Life and Fate, “Tell me what you accuse the Jews of — I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.”
A pro-Hamas march in London, United Kingdom, Feb. 17, 2024. Photo: Chrissa Giannakoudi via Reuters Connect
The Line Between Criticism of Israel and Antisemitism
Anti-Zionists — those who either outright call for Israel’s eradication or, more cleverly, advocate policies that would ultimately lead to the same result — like to argue that people accusing them of antisemitism are simply trying to stifle their right to free speech in order to advance a political agenda. Therefore, it’s worth taking a moment to clarify that criticizing Israel is not antisemitic. Contrary to what certain dishonest voices may say, no Jew or Israeli or Zionist has actually made that argument. It is 100 percent fair game to oppose the actions and rhetoric of the Israeli government.
However, it is antisemitic to argue that Israel is an illegitimate entity whose very existence is a crime. Jews have always defined themselves — and historically were defined by others — as a people, not just a religion. To deny this reality and Jewish self-determination, to oppose Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish nation, is to attack the heart of Jewish identity. Unfortunately, this is the core message of the pro-Palestinian movement, whose leaders do not preach two states for two peoples but instead describe the world’s lone Jewish polity as a cancer to be eradicated.
To be more specific, criticism becomes bigotry when it involves demonizing and delegitimizing Israel. Accusing Israel of genocide or running an apartheid state is a demonstrable lie that can’t be labeled legitimate criticism. The same goes for describing Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, as a human rights abuser on the level of China and North Korea.
Those who support the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel employ such rhetoric as part of their campaign of economic warfare against the country. Such efforts seek to destroy the Jewish state through international pressure, undermining Israel to the point that it effectively ceases to survive. Think about the implications for Israeli Jews, who live in a region in which most governments and peoples have shown indifference to if not support for slaughtering Jews.
Moreover, now that the Jewish people have Israel and are not prepared to surrender it after 2,000 years of exile and persecution, the only way to replace Israel with Palestine is by forcibly taking it. That would mean killing or expelling millions of Jews. Those who know this but continue to advocate the anti-Zionist cause are antisemitic. And those anti-Zionists who do not realize this reality shouldn’t simply be able to plead ignorance and absolve themselves.
Imagine if someone demonized and sought to de-legitimize another country — say, Ireland — with the same obsessive hatred that the likes of Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Ilhan Omar, Hasan Piker, Zohran Mamdani, and the leaders of Iran show Israel. Would they not be bigoted against the Irish? Of course they would.
But no one targets Ireland, or any other country, like so many people target Israel, despite its love of life, democratic system, commitment to freedom, and equal treatment under law. That’s the double standard of antisemitism in action.
Separating antisemitism from criticism of Israeli policy is not difficult. As with pornography, “I know it when I see it.”
But if that’s not enough, there are two simple tests to help decipher the difference.
A good rule of thumb is that, if you can take a statement and replace the words “Israel,” “Israeli,” and “Zionist” with “Jew,” “Jewish,” and “Jewish people,” and that statement then sounds like it came straight out of the Dark Ages or Nazi Germany, it is probably antisemitic. The same goes for replacing “Zionism” with “Judaism.” Just try it and see if that person calling to eliminate “vermin Zionists” or using the term “zio” or “israeli” — both always lowercased — is really just critical of Israeli policy.
Another test is to ask the following question: Is it just a coincidence that Israel happens to be the world’s only Jewish state? When someone accuses Israel of genocide in Gaza but pays little attention to any other conflict in the world, ask this question. When someone claims Israel has no strategic value to the US as an ally and should be cut off, ask this question. And when someone repeatedly promotes conspiracy theories involving Israel without evidence, ask this question. Eventually, it will become obvious when it is not just a coincidence.
Pro-Israel rally in Times Square, New York City, US, Oct. 8, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Jeenah Moon
The Will to Endure
The Jewish people have overcome great empires seeking to destroy them for millennia. Today, they have both reestablished their ancient homeland in the Land of Israel and thrived in the diaspora.
In short, Jews are no longer victims, which much of the world has become accustomed to and known them to be. This reality triggers bewilderment, which can lead to admiration. “All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?” Mark Twain wrote with wonder in an 1899 essay. Often, however, bewilderment with the Jewish story is combined with envy and resentment, paving the way for antisemitism.
The post-Oct. 7 world, one in which virulent opposition to Israel and rampant attacks on Jews have surged, marks the latest chapter of an old story.
Tragically, Jews around the world must face a harsh reality: The alarming surge of antisemitism over the past two years is not a new phenomenon but rather a return to the historical norm.
Education and exposure to Jews in one-on-one or small group situations can help combat antisemitism on an individual level, but ultimately there is no cure for the larger virus. Jews have always been, and continue to be, a scapegoat for the full spectrum of radicals — from Islamists, to far-right white supremacists, to far-left activists who blame Israel for all problems.
But the Jews will once again have the audacity to survive. And Israel, the haven for history’s most beleaguered people, isn’t going anywhere.
What does all this mean? In a sentence, antisemitism will endure, and so too will the Jews.
Aaron Kliegman is the executive editor of The Algemeiner.
Uncategorized
German Antisemitism Commissioner Targeted With Death Threat Letter After Arson Attack on Home
Andreas Büttner (Die Linke), photographed during the state parliament session. The politician was nominated for the position of Brandenburg’s anti-Semitism commissioner. Photo: Soeren Stache/dpa via Reuters Connect
Andreas Büttner, the commissioner for antisemitism in the state of Brandenburg in northeastern Germany, has been targeted the second attack in under a week after receiving a death threat, sparking outrage and prompting local authorities to launch a full investigation.
According to the German newspaper Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten (PNN), the Brandenburg state parliament received a letter on Monday threatening Büttner’s life, with the words “We will kill you” and an inverted red triangle, the symbol of support for the Islamist terrorist group Hamas.
State security police have examined the anonymous letter under strict safety measures, determining that a gray substance inside was harmless. Authorities are now probing the incident as part of an ongoing investigation into threats against the German official.
Ulrike Liedtke, president of the Brandenburg state parliament, condemned the latest attack on Büttner, describing the death threats and harassment as “completely unacceptable.”
“Threats and violence are not a form of political discourse, but crimes against humanity,” Liedtke said. “Andreas Büttner has our complete support and solidarity.”
A former police officer and member of the Left Party, Büttner took office as commissioner for antisemitism in 2024 and has faced repeated attacks since.
On Sunday night, Büttner’s private property in Templin — a town located approximately 43 miles north of Berlin — was targeted in an arson attack, and a red Hamas triangle was spray-painted on his house.
The home of Germany’s antisemitism commissioner, Andreas Büttner, was set on fire overnight in a targeted attack.
His family was inside the house at the time.
This is the second attack against Büttner in the past 16 months. His car was previously vandalized with swastikas. This… pic.twitter.com/cAbFnMIwQ7
— Combat Antisemitism Movement (@CombatASemitism) January 5, 2026
According to Büttner, his family was inside the house at the time of the attack, marking the latest assault against him in the past 16 months.
“The symbol sends a clear message. The red Hamas triangle is widely recognized as a sign of jihadist violence and antisemitic incitement,” Büttner said in a statement after the incident.
“Anyone who uses such a thing wants to intimidate and glorify terror. This is not a protest, it is a threat,” he continued.
Hamas uses inverted red triangles in its propaganda videos to indicate Israeli targets about to be attacked. The symbol, a common staple at pro-Hamas rallies, has come to represent the Palestinian terrorist group and glorify its use of violence.
In August 2024, swastikas and other symbols and threats were also spray-painted on Büttner’s personal car.
Uncategorized
Harvard President Blasts Scholar Activism, Calls for ‘Restoring Balance’ in Higher Ed
Harvard University President Alan Garber speaks during the 374th Commencement exercises at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, May 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
Harvard University president Alan Garber, fresh off a resounding endorsement in which the Harvard Corporation elected to keep him on the job “indefinitely,” criticized progressive faculty in a recent podcast interview for turning the university classroom into a pulpit for the airing of their personal views on contentious political issues.
Garber made the comments last week on the “Identity/Crisis Podcast,” a production of the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Jewish think tank which specializes in education research.
“I think that’s where we went wrong,” Garber said, speaking to Yehuda Kurtzer. “Because think about it, if a professor in a classroom says, ‘This is what I believe about this issue,’ how many students — some of you probably would be prepared to deal with this, but most people wouldn’t — how many students would actually be willing to go toe to toe against a professor who’s expressed a firm view about a controversial issue?”
Garber continued, saying he believes higher education, facing a popular backlash against what critics have described as political indoctrination, is now seeing a “movement to restore balance in teaching and to bring back the idea that you really need to be objective in the classroom.”
He added, “What we need to arm our students with is a set of facts and a set of analytic tools and cultivation of rigor in analyzing these issues.”
Coming during winter recess and the Jewish and Christian holidays, Garber’s interview fell under the radar after it was first aired but has been noticed this week, with some observers pointing to it as evidence that Harvard is leading an effort to restore trust in the university even as it resists conceding to the Trump administration everything it has demanded regarding DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), viewpoint diversity, and expressive activity such as protests.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Garber has spent the past two years fighting factions from within and without the university that have demanded to steer its policies and culture — from organizers of an illegal anti-Israel encampment to US President Donald Trump, who earlier this year canceled $2.26 billion in public money for Harvard after it refused to grant his wishlist of reforms for which the conservative movement has clamored for decades.
Even as Harvard tells Trump “no,” it has enacted several policies as a direct response to criticisms that the institution is too permissive of antisemitism for having allowed anti-Zionist extremism to reach the point of antisemitic harassment and discrimination. In 2025, the school agreed to incorporate into its policies a definition of antisemitism supported by most of the Jewish community, established new rules governing campus protests, and announced new partnerships with Israeli academic institutions. Harvard even shuttered a DEI office and transferred its staff to what will become, according to a previous report by The Harvard Crimson, a “new Office of Culture and Community.” The paper added that Harvard has even “worked to strip all references to DEI from its website.”
Appointed in January 2024 as interim president, Garber — who previously served in roles as Harvard’s provost and chief academic officer — rose to the top position at America’s oldest and, arguably, most prestigious institution at a time when the job was least desirable. At the time, Harvard was being pilloried over some of its students cheering Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel and even forming gangs which mobbed Jewish students wending their way through campus; the university had suffered the embarrassment of its first Black president being outed as a serial plagiarist, a stunning disclosure which called into question its vetting procedures as well as its embrace of affirmative action; and anti-Israel activists on campus were disrupting classes and calling for others to “globalize the intifada.”
Garber has since won over the Harvard Corporation, which has refused to replace him during a moment that has been described as the most challenging in its history.
“Alan’s humble, resilient, and effective leadership has shown itself to be not just a vital source of calm in turbulent times, but also a generative force for sustaining Harvard’s commitment to academic excellence and to free inquiry and expression,” Harvard Corporation senior fellow Penny Pritzker said in a statement issued on behalf of the body, which is the equivalent of a board of trustees. “From restoring a sense of community during a period of intense scrutiny and division to launching vital new programs on viewpoint diversity and civil discourses and instituting new actions to fight antisemitism and anti-Arab bias, Alan has not only stabilized the university but brought us together in support of our shared mission.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.