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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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Amid bombs, drone-strikes and blackouts, these non-Jewish Ukrainian students are studying Yiddish
Daryna Kahaniuk, a 19-year-old student of English philology at the University of Lviv, was in the middle of an online Yiddish class when the air raid started. Outside, the sirens were wailing. Her phone blared out a warning. After five years of war, these sounds didn’t surprise Kahaniuk anymore. She knew the rules: Seek out the designated shelter near her flat, or else a metro station. At the very least, she was supposed to follow the “two-wall rule” and keep away from windows.
But Kahaniuk stayed in her chair. Keeping one eye on her computer screen, where Yiddish class was carrying on somewhere in Zoomland, she checked the Telegram channels on her phone. On Telegram, “you can get information about how many drones, missiles, et cetera were launched and in what direction they were flying, as well as how many of them were destroyed by Ukrainian air defence,” she wrote over Whatsapp. She put her phone to the side and tried to focus on the Yiddish lesson: the aleph-beys, a story by Sholem Aleichem, a song about bulbes, potatoes. But her worries sucked her inward: “I was worried about my family, especially my cousin who lives in Kyiv,” she told me. Still, she didn’t leave class. “I sometimes neglected my own safety and stayed in the lesson because I didn’t want to miss anything studying Yiddish,” she said.
Kahaniuk, a bespectacled young woman whose expression can shift from concern to radiant sweetness in a moment, was 14 when Russia invaded Ukraine. At the time, she lived with her family in Nyzkynschi, a small village on the border with Poland. She has never known an adult life without sirens, air-raid alerts, and missile strikes on power plants that leave the city without electricity and running water for hours at a time. Sometimes she forgets that life used to be otherwise: “It is a little weird to realize how all these things became just a part of your life that it seems that there is no need to explain them.”
Kahaniuk is not Jewish. Neither are the other 14 Ukrainian students who began studying Yiddish this past semester through the Lilka Scholarship, a new partnership between YIVO and the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, a city in western Ukraine. The program is funded by Australian-Jewish philanthropist Irene Kronhill Pletka, whose mother was born in Lviv — or Lemberg, as the city is often known in the Yiddish world. From the 13th century to World War II, Lemberg buzzed with Jews busy with scholarship, journalism, theater and winemaking. Today no more than a couple thousand Jews live in Lviv, a city of more than 700,000.
There is no Jewish graveyard anymore. Technically, the Jewish graveyard is in the stones of Lviv’s streets: During World War II, the Nazis and then the Soviets destroyed the headstones of the Old Jewish Cemetery and used them as pavement all across the city. The names of these Jews are scattered across Lviv like pieces of a puzzle that nobody has cared to solve. When you consider that Yiddish has a whole term — ivre be-loy — to describe the phenomenon of Jews incorporating more Hebrew into their conversation to throw off gentiles who understand Yiddish, it is hard not to wonder what the forgotten Jews of Lviv would make of 15 youthful Ukrainian gentiles studying Yiddish over Zoom (“vos iz Zum?!”) in the company of mostly retired American Jews.
In a city where buildings sit on top of the rubble of Jewish cemeteries, Yiddish is a “subculture” in the most literal sense. Learning the language can feel like an excavation of Ukraine’s past. “Jewish people have been an important part of Ukrainian history and population, so I just wanted to be a little closer to their culture,” Kahaniuk told me. “And honestly, my mom is very interested in learning Jewish history and especially history of Jewish people in Ukraine. So it’s made her happy for me.”
Yiddish has a reputation for being a rootless, wandering language, the language of goles, or exile. It is the language of the Bundist principle of “doikayt,” which means “hereness” in Yiddish and represents the idea that home is portable: Wherever Jews live, that’s where home is. But as YIVO teacher Philip Schwartz, who teaches one of three Beginner Yiddish sections available to Ukrainian students alongside fellow teachers Vera Szabó and Nina Warnke, points out, Yiddish has deep Eastern European roots. “It’s a language that used to be spoken by sometimes a third or half of the population of the places [these students] live in today,” he said. “So it’s a language that has an intimate relation to the places they inhabit themselves … it’s a way of discovering that heritage, and those cultural riches that are out of your reach if you don’t know the language.”
Spotting similarities for the first time between Yiddish and Ukrainian, students describe flashbulbs of recognition going off in their brains. One student, 19-year-old Diana Blaha, told me about discovering that the word for “frog” in Yiddish, “zhabe,” was nearly the same as “zhaba” in Ukrainian. When I asked Olena Malinovska, also 19, if she saw any similarities between Yiddish and Ukrainian, she replied, “You just feel it spiritually.” The hardest part, she said, was learning the Yiddish alphabet and script. “But then unexpectedly I received a reward because I started recognizing words, phrases,” she said. “Oh yeah, I was excited.”
This fall at Ivan Franko University, Yiddish classes are expected to kick into gear again — perhaps with even more students. But in the meantime, a few newly-minted Ukrainian Yiddishists are embarking on quests of their own. “I found out that my hometown was a place where one of the Hasidic dynasties stemmed from,” Diana Blaha told me. “I’d like to search it more because we have Jewish graveyards, I believe.” Which dynasty was this? “The Tzvi Hirsch Eichenstein Dynasty, from Zhydachiv,” Blaha said. I had never even heard of this dynasty; I wondered how many people in Zhydachiv had.
Daryna Kahaniuk has duties as a Yiddish tutor now. She has one pupil: her mother. After every lesson, “I had to phone her and tell her everything that happened during the lesson, what we did, what we listened to, even the few students from the USA who are Jewish people and what they share about their family experience and their family stories. I must tell her everything, and also how I write in Yiddish, and even the books we have, some songs. I just let her listen to them all the time.”
One of these songs is “Bulbes.” If beginning Yiddish classes had a theme song, “Bulbes” would probably be it. It is a song that teaches the Yiddish days of the week and the monotonous shtetl diet in one go: “Zuntik bulbes, muntik bulbes, dinstick un mitvokh bulbes, donershtick un fraytik bulbes, Shabbos in a novene, a bulbe kugele, zuntik vayter bulbes …” Every day of the week, potatoes. Once in a while, maybe a potato kugel. Then back to plain potatoes.
It’s an unmistakably Yiddish song, bleak and bouncy at the same time. It’s got the salty-sweet flavor of “lakhn durkh trern,” laughing through tears. When there is nothing to eat but potatoes, what is there to do but sing about it?
“So happy and funny it sounds, but just then I realize the dissonance of just feeling so light, and at the same time because of what people had to live with in that time…” Kahaniuk said, trailing off. She said she did not know how to express what she meant. I wondered if there was a way to say “lakhn durkh trern” in Ukrainian.
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Florida redistricting scrambled the map. Three Jewish Democrats found a way through.
Three Jewish Democratic House members from Florida emerged victorious from their party primaries Tuesday amid a redistricting shakeup that scrambled South Florida’s congressional map and threatened to end some of their political careers.
U.S. Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Lois Frankel and Jared Moskowitz all won Democratic nominations in newly redrawn districts, each facing different challenges from the new map and their primary opponents.
But their victories only secured their spots on the November ballot. The bigger question is whether they can win reelection under a successful Republican effort designed to flip four Democratic seats. Earlier this year, Florida’s state legislators approved the new congressional lines at the urging of Gov. Ron DeSantis, to increase the number of Republican seats from 20 to 24 of the state’s 28 districts.
The three Jewish incumbents took different routes for survival.
After her old seat was transformed into more favorable territory for Republicans, Wasserman Schultz, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee and one of Congress’ most prominent Jewish members, moved into Broward County’s heavily Democratic Black-majority precincts, raising questions about representation in a district with a large Black population.
Wasserman Schultz’s opponents argued that the seat should continue to be represented by a Black lawmaker. In her victory speech, Wasserman Schultz promised “to work every day to live up to the legacy of Alcee Hastings,” the congressman who represented the district from 2013 until he died in 2021.
Frankel, a seven-term Jewish Democrat and outspoken supporter of Israel, also relocated to the neighboring district and easily defeated Lake Worth Beach activist Victoria Doyle, winning 75% of the Democratic vote. The seat is now ranked solid Democratic, according to the Cook Political Report.
Moskowitz survives the left. Now he faces a Jewish Republican.
For Moskowitz, who was elected in 2022 after Ted Deutch retired to become chief executive of the American Jewish Committee, Tuesday’s outcome is likely just the beginning.
Moskowitz, who built a reputation as an outspoken supporter of Israel and one of the more bipartisan members of the House, defeated Oliver Larkin, a democratic socialist and fierce critic of Israel, by a 63%-37% margin.
Larkin called for ending U.S. military aid to Israel and accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. He also associated with popular streamer Hasan Piker, who has been embraced by progressive insurgents even as he has championed terrorist groups as righteous fighters against Israel — leading to accusations he trafficks in antisemitism.
“I’ve taken on extremes in the DSA and won,” Moskowitz said in his victory speech, adding in a post on X: “My condolences to @hasanthehun.”
But the new district with a substantial Jewish population was deliberately drawn to be far more favorable to Republicans than Moskowitz’s previous seat, which Frankel will now represent, making him one of the most vulnerable Democrats in the state this fall.
His Republican opponent, Scott Singer, the Jewish former mayor of Boca Raton, won a five-way GOP primary with 31% of the vote. Singer, a Miami Beach native and Georgetown Law graduate, highlighted his support for Israel and his roots in the district.
This setup will test Moskowitz’s political strength.
“We’re running in a tough district hand-drawn by Republicans to defeat me, but I plan to win that too,” Moskowitz said on Tuesday night.
“People here don’t want ideological purity tests. They want someone who will lower costs, fight for the middle class, and stand up to antisemitism and hate in both parties.”
Fine easily defeats openly antisemitic Bilzerian
Elsewhere in Florida, Jewish Republican Rep. Randy Fine easily fended off a primary challenge that attracted national attention because of the antisemitic rhetoric of Dan Bilzerian, the social media influencer once known as the “King of Instagram.”
Bilzerian had repeatedly attacked Fine as a “fat Jew,” called Judaism “terrible,” promoted conspiracy theories about Jews and said he wanted to “kill Israelis.” In the final days of the campaign, Bilzerian posted antisemitic dog whistles, expressing confidence that each voter in the district “understands the Jewish problem,” and that “a vote for Randy is a vote for Israel.”
The race was one of several Florida Republican primaries that tested whether a growing online movement on the right — hostile to Israel and that has at times slid into outright antisemitism — could translate social media followings into electoral success.
Fine won 57% of the vote, which is located just under the northeast part of the state and includes Daytona Beach. Bilzerian came in second, securing nearly 19%.
The race to succeed Ron DeSantis
A somewhat similar dynamic played out in the Republican primary for governor.
U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, the Trump-endorsed frontrunner, won the nomination to succeed DeSantis with about 48% of the vote. James Fishback, a 31-year-old investment manager who made opposition to Israel and AIPAC central to his campaign, finished third with about 10%.
Fishback, who ran what The New York Times described as a “rage bait” campaign, promised to pull Florida’s investments from Israel Bonds, criticized politicians who “visit another country” only to end up “kissing a stupid wall,” and associated himself with antisemitic personalities on the far-right.
Donalds, by contrast, has been a strong supporter of Israel, though he voted in 2024 against the Antisemitism Awareness Act, bipartisan legislation addressing rising antisemitism on college campuses. He is now listed as a cosponsor of a modified bill that clarifies First Amendment protections. Born in Brooklyn and raised for part of his childhood in Crown Heights, he has spoken of his familiarity with Jewish communities and has maintained relationships with Chabad leaders in Florida.
He will face former Republican Rep. David Jolly, who won the Democratic gubernatorial primary, in November. Both nominees are outspoken supporters of Israel.
A progressive upset for Senate
The night was not a clean sweep for establishment candidates.
State Rep. Angie Nixon, a new member of the Democratic Socialists of America, defeated Alex Vindman, a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union, for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate.
Vindman, who became nationally known after testifying during President Donald Trump’s first impeachment, entered the race with greater national name recognition and establishment support. Nixon, who pushed a pro-Palestinian agenda on a state level and actively campaigned with members of the Squad and alongside Larkin, pulled off an upset win, receiving 56% of the vote to Vindman’s 44%.
She will face incumbent Republican Sen. Ashley Moody, who easily won her primary. Moody was appointed to the seat after Marco Rubio left the Senate to become President Donald Trump’s secretary of state.
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I drove a friend to a protest in Jerusalem. Now Israel’s government wants to send me to prison.
‘The people fighting to save Israeli democracy are fighting for the only version of Zionism that can last.’
META: Amit Cahanovich is charged with five counts of joint arson after giving someone a ride to a demonstration where recycling bins were set ablaze.
For nine months I was a political detainee in Israel. My trial is about to begin.
I am as Israeli as they come. My grandparents came to this country — then Palestine, in the 1930s — as Europe began to burn. They helped found a farming village in the Jezreel Valley, Beit Shearim, while most of the family they left behind was murdered in the Holocaust. My late father was a colonel in the Israeli army. I served as a combat soldier in a classified unit, and after Oct. 7, I used my expertise as a data professional to consult for the army during the war. I am married with three young children.
We have no other passports, no other identity than Israeli. But I am now facing charges as an alleged criminal, part of a conspiracy no less — for nothing more than aiding a protest. My story speaks to the lengths of the Israeli government’s efforts to silence dissent.
On Sept. 3, 2025, around the 700th day of the war in Gaza, the families of hostages still held and tortured in Hamas’s tunnels begged Israelis to take to the streets. More than 40 hostages were already dead in captivity, some murdered, some dead from other causes. Like many Israelis, I could not stand by while the government worked to frame this as the families’ private grief rather than a national emergency — anything to delay a reckoning and stay in power a little longer.
I was arrested after a demonstration day in Jerusalem, where a few recycling bins were set on fire — a common occurrence at such protests, before and since. My alleged part is giving a ride to a friend who allegedly lit one of them. Seven of us now face charges that would fit an organized crime indictment. I’m charged with five counts of joint arson, each carrying a sentence of up to 15 years.
I did not know most of my co-defendants. Lawyers call this a legal dragnet, a familiar tool in democracies that are sliding.
For 33 days I was incarcerated in appalling conditions, classified as a danger to the public, moved between three prisons, and even spent one night in a dungeon, for no real reason. After those 33 days, I was released, but remained on house arrest. A probation officer eventually found I posed no danger. The prosecution fought the finding anyway. It took a High Court justice, ruling on a co-defendant’s appeal eight months in, to confirm what we had argued from the start: that “dangerousness” was being used not to assess a threat but to punish us before any verdict. A month after that ruling, I was released.
Since Oct. 7, Jewish terror against Palestinians in the West Bank has surged, met by law enforcement so weak it barely counts as such. Yet dozens of investigators were assigned to the conspiracy cases that included my own, and, according to press reports, the Shin Bet itself took part in interrogations over recycling bins. The Shin Bet, Israel’s equivalent to the FBI, exists to fight terrorism and espionage, not to regulate protest. When a government routes political dissent through its most powerful security service, the question is no longer whether a protester broke a law. It is whether the state has begun treating opposition itself as a threat.
This is not incidental. It is the method of a coalition that unites Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the heirs of the banned, terrorist-designated Kach movement founded by the radical American-Israeli Rabbi Meir Kahane; and with ultra-Orthodox parties that take state money while keeping their youth from modern education and army service. Together they have spent years capturing the institutions meant to check them, the security services, the state comptroller’s office, a weakened judiciary. None of this happens in the dark. It happens on television, because the government’s allies all but run the news agenda. Nearly all criticism gets folded into “Israel as victim.” Antisemitism, though it does exist, gets invoked even when it doesn’t, as a method to silence dissent internationally. Protesters, including hostage families whose only demand was that the state bring their own home, got called traitors and enemies from within.
Meanwhile war has become the alibi. War in Gaza. War in Lebanon. War in Iran. Every operation begins with tactical wins and promises of strategic victory that never fully arrive. Every day of it was used to postpone the prime minister’s own corruption trial a little further.
In 1938 the Yiddish poet Mordechai Gebirtig wrote “Undzer Shtetl Brent” — “Our Town Is Burning” — about the violence closing in on Polish Jews. It calls out to brothers standing with folded arms, watching the fire instead of fighting it. By the time the song became an anthem, the fire had become a catastrophe. I think about it constantly now, not because I believe Jews are fated to see danger only once it’s too late, but because I fear we are, again, mistaking smoke for weather.
Israel is scheduled to hold elections in late October. Ahead of them, the government’s allies are working to inflame the West Bank, the same cynical mechanism that has worked before: unite a divided public against an external enemy, and postpone the reckoning again. There are even signs that the government could try to postpone the election using so-called emergency regulations or putting up other obstacles. Netanyahu himself once made this exact argument when he demanded former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert resign while on trial for corruption, warning that a leader facing charges can never be trusted to put the country’s survival ahead of his own. He was right then. The dynamic he described is now his own government.
The people fighting to save Israeli democracy are fighting for the only version of Zionism that can last: an independent judiciary, free elections, equality before the law, a state that answers to its citizens rather than demanding loyalty to one man. If this government is not replaced, if it teaches a country that dissent is danger, the price will not be paid only by protesters like me. It will be paid by the dream my grandparents crossed the sea to build.
Amit Cahanovich is a native Israeli, married and a father of three, and an independent data consultant. He recently spent nine months as a political detainee in Israel and is now writing a play based on his experience.
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