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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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The biggest Jewish issue in New York’s most Jewish primary wasn’t really Israel
Much of the pro-Israel world seems to have seen New York’s Tuesday Democratic primaries as bad for the Jews. When it comes to at least one race, that perspective needs revising.
Yes, Brad Lander, who is highly critical of Israel, defeated the AIPAC-backed incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman in NY-10 — which, according to the Jewish Electorate Institute, boasts the second-highest number of Jewish voters of any district in the country. But seeing that result as “bad for the Jews” misunderstands what the candidates, both of whom are Jewish and self-professed Zionists, were arguing about.
Both are motivated by a profound wish to protect Jews in the United States from rising hatred. Both understand how high the stakes are. What divided them was the question of how to govern well for Jews — a new iteration of a dispute between two robust strains of Jewish thought that extend deep into our shared history.
Both Lander and Goldman ran on their Jewish identities and built explicit plans for confronting antisemitism into their pitches to voters.
Goldman called himself a “proud Zionist,” and told the NY Jewish Week “I do think there is an undercurrent of antisemitism in the degree to which AIPAC seems to be vilified,” even as he said he’d pushed AIPAC to be more willing to criticize the Israeli government.
Lander, upon winning by an almost two-to-one margin, told supporters, “I will be one of the Jewish members of Congress most willing to stand up for Palestinian human rights, and I will stand firmly against bigotry aimed at Jews. Those are not two different jobs. They are the same job.”
Both men accepted, as a starting premise, that antisemitism is rising and real. What they disagreed about was where the danger is concentrated, and which set of political alliances will actually help contain it.
Goldman focused on concerns about the political left’s tendency to treat Zionism as suspect. He prioritized standing with Israel, staying close to its institutional defenders, and refusing to let the loudest progressive critics define what counts as acceptable Jewish politics.
Lander, instead, argued that conflating support for the Israeli government with Jewish safety leaves Jews exposed if and when that government’s policies become impossible to defend. His strategy: decouple Jewish identity from Israeli state policy, ally with the growing progressive coalition in New York politics, and fight antisemitism from inside that coalition’s ranks rather than outside and against it.
Both of these approaches draw from recognizable, longstanding strains of American Jewish thought. Goldman hewed to the camp of covenantal loyalty first and foremost to the Jewish people, and, by extension, to Israel as a sacred trust. And Lander hewed to the camp of universalist ethics and solidarity with the marginalized.
To call one of those stances worse for Jews than the other ignores the historical truth that both are deeply grounded in American Jewish life. But there is something potentially troubling for Jews about this contest: the evident truth, which it displayed, that the rift between these two schools of American Judaism is widening rather than closing.
That split isn’t really about the state of Israel. It’s a much older argument inside Jewish thought, about whether Jewish ethics point outward or inward first.
The universalist strand understands much of the Hebrew Bible, and centuries of subsequent commentary, as promoting the idea that justice is owed to everyone. It lives by the instruction to remember that we were once strangers in Egypt and the commandment that the same law applies to the stranger as to the native-born. It follows the prophets who reserved their harshest words not for the Jewish people’s enemies, but for that people’s own failures to protect the poor and the powerless.
According to this reading, Jews must practice solidarity with anyone suffering. A Jewish politics that didn’t extend itself to advocating for Palestinians, immigrants, or any other group facing state violence would be failing the tradition rather than honoring it.
The particularist strand reads the same texts and the same history and draws an opposite lesson: that universalism without a prior, unapologetic loyalty to one’s own people is exactly the moral posture that left Jews undefended for most of their history. This strand sees that loyalty as a structural condition that allows Jewish communal survival. To its gaze, a Jewish politics that can’t put Jewish safety first, especially after the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, has lost its way.
What makes the tension between these stances difficult to resolve is that both readings are genuinely supported by the textual and historical record, which is long and varied enough to furnish ammunition for either side without anyone needing to misquote it.
Goldman and Lander didn’t invent this fight. They just gave New York’s most Jewish congressional district a chance to vote on it again, in a fresh context, with the war in Gaza standing in for whatever the live test case happened to be a generation ago — and whatever it will be will be in the next crisis in Jewish history.
That divide is part of why framing progressive victories on New York’s primary night as a loss for Jews flattens something more interesting happening inside NY-10 specifically. This election was a fight between two Jewish candidates, on some of the most Jewish terrain in the entire country, with each offering a fully worked-out theory of how to keep Jews safe, and each able to point to real receipts.
That is not a fight over whether Jews matter in New York politics. It is a fight over which of two coalitions — one anchored to Israel and institutional Jewish groups, and one tied to the multiracial progressive coalition reshaping the city — is the safer harbor for American Jews going forward.
It’s fair to be concerned about how bitter that fight seems to be becoming. But it’s also fair to celebrate the fact that Jewish life can still maintain such rich ideological diversity. This was a constructive political race conducted between Jews, waged substantially in Jewish terms, over which political strategy actually protects Jewish life in a moment when antisemitism is on the rise. It’s arguable that to have the choice between candidates like Goldman and Lander, who take their own Jewishness seriously enough to fight about what it should mean in American politics, is actually very good for the Jews.
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Civil war’s nothing new for Jews. How do we survive this one?
I’ve perhaps arrived early to an older man’s fixation: Civil War. Not the American one. (At least not the one that took place in the 19th Century.)
This week I returned to Westeros for House of the Dragon Season 3, in which various platinum-haired nobles born of incest fight for a throne made of swords with lizards that breathe fire. I chased it with the Public Theater’s fine production of Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays, in which branches of the same family pledge their allegiance to a white or red rose corresponding to their preferred ruler of England.
Before I saw any of that, I was in the Berkshires to see S. Asher Gelman’s play The Zionists, about a Jewish house divided by (what else): Israel. In that play, there was no kingdom to inherit, but our common inheritance as Jews is a tendency to disagree that, if not approached with mutual respect, can yield disastrous results.
Jewish tradition has its own version of these stories: Last week’s parshah was Korach, in which Moses faces rebellion — and the rebels face the fate of being swallowed by the ground and dragged down to Sheol.
A while later in Tanakh time, the House of David and Saul had their factions. Then the sons of David, and on and on.
Jewish civil war, as chronicled by Josephus and other historians, most recently Barry Strauss, was perhaps at its most bitter circa 63 BCE, when the Romans intervened in a succession dispute between the Hasmoneans (leading to the end of the dynasty and the beginning of Judea as a Roman client state) and 70 CE, when rival factions among the Zealots, confronting the common foe of Rome, couldn’t put their differences aside long enough to quell the siege of Jerusalem.
In the Talmud account, it is baseless hatred between two men that sets the temple ablaze.
Recently I spoke with the historian Laura Arnold Leibman. We were discussing early American Jewry, which — surprise — was split on whether to support the Patriots fighting for independence or remain loyal to the British Crown.
Reviewing this more recent history, she remembered teaching a course on antiquity and telling the story of First Century Jerusalem.
“One of my non-Jewish students said, ‘This is so fascinating to hear that there were these different sects of Jews and that they disagreed with each other. Is it like that today?’” Leibman told me. The student, she said, had “clearly never been to a bar mitzvah.”
In Game of Thrones, Shakespeare and the Bible, internecine fighting ends — that is, when it doesn’t begin — when someone dies. Someone is crowned and gets to write the favorable history.
Looking at American Jewry today, we are relitigating the past and revisiting old arguments.
Bundism in the key of anti-Zionism is hot again — though critics say its ideas were tested and failed to the tune of millions of dead Jews between Hitler and Stalin. Supporters of Zionism cite scripture for our claim to the land, archaeology to establish our continued presence or a massacre of Jews that predated an attack on Arabs to point to who’s to blame for ongoing violence.
Given a turbulent present, we too often retreat into familiar narratives, so locked into our views that we shut out perspectives that might challenge us. The history of Am Israel, really a family story, teaches that when we close ourselves off to dissent, we face a kind of doom.
Leibman told me another story that signals a different approach.
After the Revolutionary War, Moses Seixas, the lay leader of the Jewish community in Newport, Rhode Island, paid an early morning visit to his brother-in-law Hiam Levy, accompanied by the local sheriff. Levy was a Tory, and Seixas came to confiscate his belongings for the Revolutionary government.
This all had the makings of a family feud, but researching her book Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism, Leibman found a letter Levy wrote to Moses, conveying his safe arrival in Amsterdam and thanking him for his support getting him set up financially there.
“They may have had political differences,” Leibman said, “but those kin connections trumped other sorts of problems.”
In this, there’s a model to be emulated.
The post Civil war’s nothing new for Jews. How do we survive this one? appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel presses on with settler-fueled archaeology expansion, crippling Palestinian communities
JERICHO, WEST BANK — Israel’s ultranationalist government and its backers are undertaking a major drive to develop and expand archeological sites in the occupied West Bank, with leaders stressing that it is incumbent upon Jewish citizens to connect to their history and heritage.
“He who doesn’t understand the importance of an archeological site for the preservation of the nation doesn’t understand where his future is going,” Israel Ganz, head of the Yesha Council representing more than 500,000 settlers, told the Forward in an interview on Sunday.
Funding to accelerate the push emerged in May, when the cabinet allocated 250 million shekels (approximately $86 million) to preserve, upgrade and make accessible heritage sites that show ancestral Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria — lands the settler movement contends Jews are entitled to claim.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, linking the drive to Israel entering the 60th year since its victory in the Six Day War, told the cabinet that the funds are an investment “in preserving our past in order to secure our future, strengthen our hold on the Land of Israel and pass on to future generations the heritage, identity and historical truth of our people.”
But Palestinians and left-wing Israeli groups see this as not an innocent educational drive, but rather an intensification of efforts to displace Palestinians and annex the territory.
The archeology drive, reflected in robust budgeting and ambitious planning, including of new roads and wide expropriations of Palestinian land around sites, is moving ahead despite Netanyahu’s decision early this month not to advance a bill creating a separate antiquities authority for the West Bank, both supporters and opponents of the push say. That decision, reportedly to avert international diplomatic fallout, does not affect the allocation of funds. And Ganz notes the Judea and Samaria authority can still be created in the future.
“For sure now we are seeing the largest-scale effort ever to use archeology for annexation,” said Alon Arad, director of the organization Emek Shaveh, a left-wing group watchdogging the use of archeology by settlers as a tool for expansion. The momentum stems from plans made when the coalition took power in 2022 now coming to fruition, and a sense among right-wing parties that promoting Jewish heritage is a way to impress voters for upcoming elections, he added.
Whether this is in Israel’s interest or not is in the eye of the beholder. The flagship site of the archeology drive, the Hasmonean Palaces near Jericho, reflects all that is wrong with Israel’s harsh rule over Palestinians, critics say: settler violence, violation of international law, dispossession of helpless people and a hierarchy in which Israelis have all the rights and Palestinians none.
Digging as a tool
When the Forward visited the site recently, its most striking ruins were those of Palestinian Bedouin homes, 13 of which were destroyed by a settler bulldozer driver during a day-long raid on Feb. 10 by an estimated 50 settlers according to witnesses. Haaretz reported that at least 15 homes were destroyed.
Only 200 meters from the excavations, families are living inside the ruins of their homes. Among them is Ali Kaabnah, his wife Najiba and six children, staying in a house missing one side and with a large hole in the bedroom.
It is half a house, looking as if the driver had been interrupted in the middle of his task. Somehow a refrigerator survived, still plugged in.
“The house doesn’t have supports, it is without pillars. If there is a tremor it will collapse,” Kaabnah said. His and other families have no other place to go and remained even though settlers struck again in late April and last week warned him to leave, he said. “I do not sleep because we do shifts to see if settlers are coming,” he said.
Kaabnah said that he had repeatedly called Israeli police during the bulldozing raid but they did not come. The Israel police did not respond to an inquiry from the Forward about the incident.
Ali’s brother, Yusuf, said he had to be taken to hospital with head injuries during the first attack. and that settlers severely beat his wife, Shikha, 46, during the second attack, resulting in her being treated at a hospital in Nablus. His son Aliyan, 20, was “beaten with clubs without mercy” and his youngest son, 11-year-old Ali, was also attacked, he said: “Until now he screams at night in terror that ‘they are coming.’”
Arad views the settler violence as a state-backed method, along with demolition of homes on the grounds they were built without permits, to drive Palestinians away from the area of the site. The IDF denies siding with settlers and says troops are expected to detain Israeli citizens perpetrating violent acts.
Violence is not the only threatening aspect of the archeology uptick for Palestinians. Land expropriations around sites, which include swaths well beyond the antiquities themselves, are pulling the territory from underneath the Palestinians’ feet, critics say. In the last half year, there have been three land expropriations around sites, the largest at Sebastia in the northern West Bank; plans for roads on land seized from Palestinians to enable easier access, and forays by settlers to establish a presence or control of sites on Palestinian property.
Dror Etkes, a veteran monitor of Israeli policies in the West Bank, says the Sebastia expropriation — said by the government as intended to develop the site for visits by the public — includes the vast majority of the olive groves of the Palestinian village of Sebastia. Emek Shaveh says the expropriation separates the village from antiquities, breaking an ancient attachment central to the identity of locals and harming them economically.
“The goal of Israel’s colonial project is to dispossess and settle,” said Etkes, who heads the West Bank land monitoring group Kerem Navot. “Archeology provides an effective way of doing this.”
Ganz and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu — who famously raised the idea in November 2023 of dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza — are particularly enthusiastic about developing the Hasmonean palaces site. Harkening back to the days of Joshua, Eliyahu terms the Jericho vicinity “the gateway to the land of Israel.”
He does not appear to view the settler violence at the site as a problem. In a social media post released the day of the bulldozer raid, he declared that “in every place where there is building on Jewish heritage, we will destroy it.” Speaking from the site, he promised a mass infusion of funds to achieve the perceived revival of its past glory.
Claims of vandalism
At present the Hasmonean Palaces site looks unimpressive, lacking signage, explanations or a path. Only some of the antiquities are roped off. But Ganz describes the site as being on a par with Israel’s most important ones. “I can’t say what the breadth of the site is but it certainly doesn’t fall short of Masada,” Ganz said.
According to the IDF body dealing with civilian affairs in the West Bank, called the civil administration, the site is “of great importance to Jewish heritage as well as to the architecture of the early Roman period.”
“It was built as a winter palace for the Hasmoneans in the first century BCE and served the Hasmonean dynasty for approximately 200 years,” the civil administration wrote in a statement. Subsequently during the reign of Herod there was also significant construction including a fortified palace, a bridge and a sunken garden, it added.
Ganz says the site needs to be safeguarded from what he claims is deliberate and systematic destruction by the Palestinian Authority, which he alleges has targeted it and other sites in a bid to erase evidence of Jewish ties to the land. The Civil Administration statement also cited vandalism as a major problem, though it did not specify involvement of the Palestinian Authority.
Palestinian Authority assistant deputy minister of tourism and antiquities Jehad Yasin said in remarks to the Forward that allegations of PA culpability aim to enable Israel to take over West Bank sites. “We haven’t done that. We do our best to keep our sites and if someone does something it doesn’t mean you have the right to take this site,” he said.
Yasin stressed that for an occupying power to expand sites and carry out anything other than salvage excavations violates international law. Referring to the Israeli plans at the site near Jericho, he said: “They don’t have the right to make an archeological park or an excavation. It’s a Palestinian site.”
Arad agrees Hasmonean Palaces is an important site but stresses that this in no way justifies harming Palestinians.
Ganz’s vision for the site includes new excavations, touching up finds to preserve them and steps to “absorb the public.” A new access road is seen as essential for tourism, and he wants to see a convenience store along with state-of-the-art scanning capability enabling visitors to explore information about the site.
The land for the road has already been seized by military order from Palestinians, Etkes said, adding that when it is paved it will take less than a half hour to drive from Jerusalem to the site. What’s more, according to Etkes an illegal outpost overlooking the site and situated next to an army intelligence base is on the way to becoming a full-fledged settlement.
Arad says all of this amounts to Israel turning the site into a “touristic settlement,” something he stresses has been done previously on a large scale at the popular City of David site in occupied East Jerusalem.
“You change the identity so that from a village on the outskirts of Jericho it becomes a palace of a dynasty. You don’t need actual settlers there, it’s enough to build an access road, put up a fence and whatever comes with tourist development-a kiosk, a parking lot, someone to guard it.” Arad said.
The goal, in his view, is to woo the public to the settler view that the West Bank is part of Israel. “You start bringing in tourists and it’s a normalizing process for people to go inside the West Bank and return to Haifa or wherever they are from,” he said. “They go in and out and it was fun for them and you create the idea that this is part of Israel.”
As for the possibility of there being an Arab presence at the Hasmonean Palaces site, Ganz said: “If they don’t harm the site they will be allowed gladly. But if, God forbid, there are security incidents or harm to the site, then they can’t be there.”
Ganz stressed that the homes at the site needed to be destroyed for being illegally built, but that the demolition should have been done by the state and not what he depicted as a lone deviant. “No one is permitted to take the law into their own hands,” he said.
Etkes predicts that based on the experience of other sites, local Palestinians face an extremely bleak future. He termed the sight of Palestinians living in what is left of their houses “one of the worst things I have ever seen in the West Bank.”
But that is by no means the end of the harm Israel will cause to Palestinian civilians in the vicinity of the archeological site, he said. “We will see an area completely disconnected from its surroundings,” said Etkes. “Palestinians won’t be able to enter the area. Two roads [for Israelis] will lead to this area. Settlers will be very violent, it will be very restricted for the Palestinians, construction in the area [by Palestinians] will be completely banned, the construction that already exists is without a permit and a large part of it will be demolished by Israeli authorities.”
He declared: “It will be another national park that will tell one story — the story the Israeli radical right wants you to hear.”
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