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How on-the-rise Jewish indie rocker Blondshell takes inspiration from Larry David and Sarah Silverman
(JTA) — When she sits down to write song lyrics, Sabrina Teitelbaum, who records music under the moniker Blondshell, doesn’t plan to reference her Jewishness. It just spills out in subtle turns of phrase.
In her song “Sepsis,” for instance, the quickly-rising 25-year-old rocker sings: “I think I believe in getting saved/Not by Jesus validation/In some dude’s gaze.”
In “Salad,” her latest track, which she debuted on Jimmy Fallon’s late-night show Tuesday night, she flirts with the idea of poisoning a friend’s abuser. She sings: “Look what you did/You’ll make a killer of a Jewish girl.”
“I was bat mitzvahed and the whole thing, but I don’t know — I think, culturally, my Judaism finds its way into my music, even in ways that I haven’t really been aware of until somebody brought it up,” she said on Zoom last week from her home in Los Angeles.
Jewish-tinged dark humor is rarely seen in indie rock, especially in the woman-dominated subsets of the genre that Blondshell is being associated with, alongside the likes of Snail Mail, Soccer Mommy and Mitski. And she’s not afraid of putting it out there — the press release for “Salad” notes the song’s “nod” to her Jewishness and the fact that it came out on the first night of Passover.
Teitelbaum’s self-titled album, which is getting rave reviews in advance of its release on Friday, is full of the coming-of-age stories and feelings found in shows like “Girls” and “Broad City.” On “Kiss City,” she sings, “I think my kink is when you tell me that you think I’m pretty.” On “Joiner”: “You’ve been running around LA with trash/Sleeping in bars with a gun in your bag/Asking can I be somebody else.”
The constant undertone is one of personal trauma — from unhealthy relationships, bad sex and other dark things in her personal life that she didn’t want to elaborate on.
“There are just ways of talking about trauma that I think are kind of distinctly Jewish,” she said, “and that comes up in my music for sure.”
It’s all accompanied by earworm pop melodies and the thick guitar sounds found in some of her biggest influences from the ’90s, like Hole (Courtney Love’s main outfit) and PJ Harvey.
Teitelbaum was born in New York to a Jewish dad and a mom who converted to Judaism. She spent a lot of time watching “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and clips of Sarah Silverman standup on YouTube with her sister. The family attended a Reform synagogue and celebrated the major holidays.
She spent two years in USC’s music writing program before dropping out to fast-track her career. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, she wrote electronic pop under the name BAUM. But during lockdown, she dug deep back into ’90s rock and set out at first with just a goal of improving her guitar skills.
“I was like, ‘OK, I’m going to get better. And I’m going to sit down and practice for an hour a day,’ or whatever it was. And I would procrastinate by writing,” she said. “Because I was like, I don’t want to do scales and get better at chord structure, those things. So yeah, it was me trying to get better at guitar that led to everything.”
Teitelbaum performs on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” April 5, 2023. (Todd Owyoung/NBC)
After finishing a batch of songs as Blondshell, she signed to the buzzy Partisan Records — home to a slew of acclaimed rock groups, such as Fontaines, D.C., Idles and The Black Angels — and began releasing songs last summer. She was quickly grouped together with the vanguard of other female alt-rockers, who have been relentlessly talked about in music journalism for about a decade. The comparisons bring up mixed feelings.
“It can be flattening. People are like, ‘You’re the wave of songwriters, Phoebe Bridgers and Soccer Mommy,’” she said. “My music doesn’t sound anything like Phoebe Bridgers.”
But she added that she is prone to do some categorizing, too.
“There are a lot of women in rock. And so I also get it and I myself have done it when I’m talking about who had been influenced by — I’m like, you know, women in rock in the 90s, PJ Harvey and Courtney Love. I’m also grouping them together.”
Heading out to tour last year across the heart of the country in a van was a startling experience. It was the first time in a while — possible ever — where, as a Jew, she felt like a minority.
“I’m always surrounded by other Jews — like everybody I work with is Jewish,” she said, referencing her manager (Shira Knishkowy), her producer (Yves Rothman) and others she has met in the industry. She mentioned other Jewish rockers she has looked up to, too, including Jeff Tweedy of Wilco and the sisters of Haim.
“[Now] this thing keeps happening where I’m like the only Jew on a tour… It’s a new experience that I’m having,” she said. “It kind of gives a different context to my upbringing, and to who ends up feeling familiar to me.”
In a recent conversation with her Jewish grandmother, Teitelbaum was asked a familiar question.
“She was like, ‘What’s your manager’s name?’ I said ‘Shira.’ She said, ‘Oh, a nice Jewish girl. Does she know her name means song?’ And I was like, ‘she knows,’” Teitelbaum said with a laugh.
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The post How on-the-rise Jewish indie rocker Blondshell takes inspiration from Larry David and Sarah Silverman appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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A quiet diplomatic shift in the Middle East, with monumental consequences for Israel
Something significant is happening between Israel and Syria, and it deserves more attention than it is getting.
With the backing of the United States, Israeli and Syrian officials have agreed to create what they call a “joint fusion mechanism” — a permanent channel for coordination on intelligence, de-escalation, diplomacy and economic matters — during meetings in Paris. It appears to be the beginning of institutionalized contact between two countries that have formally been at war since 1948.
If this process continues, it will count as a genuine foreign-policy success for President Donald Trump’s administration.
To understand how profound that change would be, it is worth recalling the two countries’ shared history.
Israel and Syria — which the U.S. struck with a set of targeted attacks on the Islamic State on Saturday — have fought openly or by proxy for decades. Before 1967, Syrian artillery positions in the Golan Heights regularly shelled Israeli communities in the Hula Valley and around the Sea of Galilee. After Israel captured that region in 1967, the direct shelling stopped, but the conflict did not.
Syria remained formally committed to a state of war; Israel entrenched itself in the Golan Heights; both sides treated the frontier as a potential flashpoint to be managed carefully. After Egypt and Israel made peace in 1979, Syria became Israel’s most dangerous neighboring state.
A 1974 disengagement agreement created a United Nations-monitored buffer zone, which mostly ensured peace along the border, but did not resolve anything fundamental. In Lebanon, Israel and Syria backed opposing forces for years, and their air forces clashed briefly during the 1982 Lebanon War. Later, Iran’s growing role in Syria and Hezbollah’s military buildup added new threats. The Syrian civil war then destroyed basic state capacity and created precisely the kind of militia-rich environment Israel fears along its borders.
Now, with the dictator Bashar al-Assad gone and the former rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa in power, Syria is a broken country trying to stabilize. Sharaa’s past associations, disturbingly, include leadership of jihadist groups that were part of the wartime landscape in Syria. But today he governs a state facing economic collapse, infrastructure ruin and a population that needs jobs and basic services. His incentives are simple and powerful: ensure the survival of his regime, invite foreign investment, and secure relief from isolation and sanctions. Those goals point toward the U.S. and its partners, including Israel.
The Trump administration has made it clear that it wants to see new Syrian cooperation with Israel, with the suggestion that progress with Israel will become a gateway to international investment, and to a degree of political acceptance that Syria has lacked for years. Al-Sharaa’s willingness to engage is therefore not a mystery.
Israel’s motivations are also straightforward. After the Gaza war, Israel is facing a severe reputational problem. It is widely viewed abroad as reckless and excessively militarized. The government is under pressure over not only the conduct of the war but also the perception that it has no political strategy and relies almost exclusively on force. A diplomatic track with Syria allows Israel to present a very different picture: that of a country capable of negotiations with ideologically opposed neighbors, de-escalation, and regional cooperation.
There are significant security incentives, too.
Israel wants to limit Iran and Hezbollah’s influence in Syria. It wants a predictable northern border. It wants assurances regarding the Druze population in southern Syria — brethren to the Israeli Druze who are extremely loyal to the state, and who were outraged after a massacre of Syrian Druze followed the installation of al-Sharaa’s regime. It wants to ensure that no armed Syrian groups will tread near the Golan. A coordinated mechanism supervised by the U.S. offers a strong diplomatic way to address these issues.
The U.S. will benefit as well. The Trump team is eager to show that it can deliver lasting diplomatic achievements in the Middle East after the success of the Abraham Accords in Trump’s first term. A meaningful shift in Israel–Syria relations would be a very welcome addition, especially as the U.S.-brokered ceasefire in the Gaza war faces an uncertain future.
The main questions now are practical. Can the “joint fusion mechanism” function under pressure? What will happen when there is, almost inevitably, an incident — a drone downed, a militia clash, a cross-border strike? Will the new system effectively lower the temperature, or will it collapse at the first crisis?
Will Iran — facing its own profound internal political crisis — accept a Syria that coordinates with Israel under U.S. supervision, or will it work to undermine al-Sharaa? How will Hezbollah react if Damascus appears to move away from the axis of “resistance” and toward a security understanding with Israel?
How would an Israel-Syria deal impact Lebanon’s moribund efforts to dismantle Hezbollah’s military capacity? Al-Sharaa has already helped significantly by ending the transfer of weapons to Hezbollah from Iran through his territory. Might he also actively help with the disarming of the group?
No one should expect a full peace treaty soon. The question of possession of the Golan Heights probably remains a deal-breaker. Public opinion in Syria has been shaped by decades of official hostility to Israel, and Israeli politics is fragmented and volatile.
But diplomatic breakthroughs can confound expectations. They usually begin with mechanisms like this one, involving limited cooperation, routine contact and crisis management.
If this effort helps move the border from a zone of permanent tension to one of managed stability, that alone would be a major shift. It would also send a signal beyond the region: U.S. engagement still matters, and American pressure and incentives can still change behavior.
The post A quiet diplomatic shift in the Middle East, with monumental consequences for Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel’s Netanyahu Hopes to ‘Taper’ Israel Off US Military Aid in Next Decade
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to the press on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, July 8, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an interview published on Friday that he hopes to “taper off” Israeli dependence on US military aid in the next decade.
Netanyahu has said Israel should not be reliant on foreign military aid but has stopped short of declaring a firm timeline for when Israel would be fully independent from Washington.
“I want to taper off the military within the next 10 years,” Netanyahu told The Economist. Asked if that meant a tapering “down to zero,” he said: “Yes.”
Netanyahu said he told President Donald Trump during a recent visit that Israel “very deeply” appreciates “the military aid that America has given us over the years, but here too we’ve come of age and we’ve developed incredible capacities.”
In December, Netanyahu said Israel would spend 350 billion shekels ($110 billion) on developing an independent arms industry to reduce dependency on other countries.
In 2016, the US and Israeli governments signed a memorandum of understanding for the 10 years through September 2028 that provides $38 billion in military aid, $33 billion in grants to buy military equipment and $5 billion for missile defense systems.
Israeli defense exports rose 13 percent last year, with major contracts signed for Israeli defense technology including its advanced multi-layered aerial defense systems.
US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a staunch Israel supporter and close ally of Trump, said on X that “we need not wait ten years” to begin scaling back military aid to Israel.
“The billions in taxpayer dollars that would be saved by expediting the termination of military aid to Israel will and should be plowed back into the US military,” Graham said. “I will be presenting a proposal to Israel and the Trump administration to dramatically expedite the timetable.”
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In Rare Messages from Iran, Protesters ask West for Help, Speak of ‘Very High’ Death Toll
Protests in Tehran. Photo: Iran Photo from social media used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law, via i24 News
i24 News – Speaking to Western media from beyond the nationwide internet blackout imposed by the Islamic regime, Iranian protesters said they needed support amid a brutal crackdown.
“We’re standing up for a revolution, but we need help. Snipers have been stationed behind the Tajrish Arg area [a neighborhood in Tehran],” said a protester in Tehran speaking to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity. He added that “We saw hundreds of bodies.”
Another activist in Tehran spoke of witnessing security forces firing live ammunition at protesters resulting in a “very high” number killed.
On Friday, TIME magazine cited a Tehran doctor speaking on condition of anonymity that just six hospitals in the capital recorded at least 217 killed protesters, “most by live ammunition.”
Speaking to Reuters on Saturday, Setare Ghorbani, a French-Iranian national living in the suburbs of Paris, said that she became ill from worry for her friends inside Iran. She read out one of her friends’ last messages before losing contact: “I saw two government agents and they grabbed people, they fought so much, and I don’t know if they died or not.”