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In episode of CBS’ ‘The Equalizer,’ Adam Goldberg tackles antisemitic hate crimes in Brooklyn
(JTA) — Throughout his career, actor Adam Goldberg has been associated with iconic Jewish roles, from the hero in the kitschy 2003 action comedy “The Hebrew Hammer” to a Jewish soldier in Steven Spielberg’s Oscar winner “Saving Private Ryan.”
But for his latest role, on CBS crime procedural “The Equalizer,” Goldberg didn’t know his character had Jewish ancestry until recently, even though the show is in its third season.
On Sunday night, “The Equalizer” will air an episode called “Never Again,” in which a wave of hate crimes strikes Midwood, a heavily Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. These incidents hit close to home for Harry Keshegian, Goldberg’s character, a computer expert and Brooklyn native who is part of the show’s team of vigilante justice-seekers. (The series, which is set in New York and stars Queen Latifah, is a reboot of the show from the 1980s, which also spawned a series of films starring Denzel Washington.)
The Harry character has long been established as being of Armenian-American heritage. But for this episode, co-showrunner Adam Glass decided to add to Harry’s backstory, giving the character a Jewish mother as well as a complicated relationship with that side of his faith.
This comes to the forefront when the hate crimes, including vandalism and antisemitic threats, start to pile up. “Growing up with a Jewish mom and Armenian dad, I can’t say I knew where I stood in the community,” Harry says during the episode. “But I definitely know where I stand on hate crimes.”
Harry later describes himself as “someone who’s got a history of genocide on both sides of my family.” And like a lot of Jewish Americans, he was of the belief, at least until recently, that antisemitism in everyday life was mostly a problem of the past.
In dealing with a rabbi (played in the episode by veteran Jewish actor Richard Masur), who tries to react to the horrific events with humor, Harry gets some surprising answers about his family’s past and reconnects, to some degree, with his mother’s faith.
The episode was co-written by Glass and Ora Yashar, who are two of several Jewish writers on the show’s staff.
In working on the show, “we’re really lucky and fortunate that we not only get to entertain, but we get sort of tackle… subject matters that are in the news, and, unfortunately, are part of our society,” Glass told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “And obviously antisemitism is one of them.”
Goldberg, 52, whose extensive list of credits over the last 30 years also includes “Dazed and Confused” and a memorable guest arc on “Friends,” told JTA that, earlier in his career, he might not have been as comfortable with this sort of storyline, since it’s subject matter that he has explored before in other high-profile Jewish roles. In 2017, he attempted to put together a crowdfunding campaign to produce a “Hebrew Hammer” sequel inspired by the spike in online antisemitism at the time.
Adam Goldberg in character in a video promoting a crowdfunding effort for a planned sequel to “The Hebrew Hammer.” (Screenshot from YouTube)
“Given just the unbelievable horrific uptick in hate crimes at large, and antisemitism in particular, it just felt like certainly my duty to go there, and also just keep it as grounded as possible,” he said.
The episode was shot at a synagogue in Brooklyn — for security reasons, the team’s publicist would not identify which one — and the team consulted with a rabbi about getting the Jewish touches right.
“I think one of the things that we wanted to just be mindful of is when we’re actually in a synagogue that we were getting things correct,” Yashar said. At the same time, she added, they wanted to get right the way Harry would behave, as someone who hadn’t been inside a synagogue or the Jewish community for many years.
“I found myself being much more sort of moved [and] affected by it than maybe I thought I would,” Goldberg said. “Particularly having explored this terrain in the past.”
Goldberg, like his character, has one Jewish and one non-Jewish parent; he describes his mother as a “hardcore disavowed Catholic.” He went to Jewish day school in Los Angeles from first through sixth grades, and like his character Harry, he drifted away from Jewish education prior to having a bar mitzvah.
“I certainly thought of myself as a Jewish person,” Goldberg said. “I think this is the thing which I grappled with, and I think many Jewish people grappled with — which is how they see themselves, and where they fit in in a world where people have so many different ideas about what it is to be a Jewish person.”
“Grappling with all that as an actor has made that all the more confusing, how to balance all of that,” he added.
Goldberg said he has gotten mostly positive reactions over the years from people who recognize him from his Jewish roles. But he’s mindful of the idea of being typecast as a “neurotic Jew” or “nice Jewish boy,” both of which he sees as tropes. And the reactions he has gotten have not always been as positive.
“I think in many ways I’ve been sort of forced, and then sort of proudly have come to own my Jewish identity,” he said, “and in the last several years and I’ve been on the receiving end of just an incredible amount of hate on social media.” Goldberg added that he has a photo album on his phone titled “Nazis,” featuring “screenshots of just the most horrific shit you can imagine.”
In “Saving Private Ryan,” Goldberg’s Jewish soldier character taunted Nazi prisoners by waving his Jewish star at them. Around that time, his name was featured on a white supremacist website, which in the late 1990s was a single page.
“I had no idea how bad shit was until the internet,” Goldberg said. “And how bad it’s gotten [in real life] since the internet.”
The two Jewish writers of the episode come from very different backgrounds. While Glass is an Ashkenazi Jew from New York, Yashar comes from an Iranian Jewish family.
“When I was growing up, I was told, ‘They’re white until they know you’re Jewish, don’t wear your Star of David,’” Glass said, echoing a comment by Harry on the show. “Those were things my bubbe [grandmother in Yiddish] said to me. And now I’m telling my kids the same things my bubbe said to me, unfortunately.”
A comic book store also features in the episode’s plot and is a nod to Glass’ other career: In addition to his work in television, Glass is a prolific author of comic books and graphic novels, having authored more than 150. He takes credit for putting Harley Quinn in the Suicide Squad DC comic series.
“I’m in two Jewish businesses,” Glass joked. “The comic book business, and the Hollywood business. Being creative is something that we as a people have always done.”
Yashar, who previously worked on the Netflix series “Atypical,” describes herself in her Twitter bio as “Iranian/Persian/OY Veyish.”
“One of the big things for this episode was that we can’t fight hate alone,” she said. “All marginalized communities, we all need to come together. Being a woman, being Iranian, and being Jewish, you know just my whole life experience has just been teaching me that all along.”
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Tidbits: This Jewish couple gives homeless dogs a free makeover
Tidbits is a Forverts feature of easy news briefs in Yiddish that you can listen to or read, or both! If you read the article and don’t know a word, just click on it and the translation appears. Listen to the report here:
אַ גרויסער בלאָער משׂא־פֿור האָט זיך אָפּגעשטעלט אויף אַ גאַס אין סקיד־ראָו, אַ באַקאַנטער אָרעמער געגנט אין לאָס־אַנדזשעלעס, פֿאַר אַ היימלאָזן מענטש מיט אַ הינטל.
„אײַער הינטל וויל אפֿשר מע זאָל אים צופּוצן אַ ביסל?“ האָט דער מאַן אינעם אויטאָ געפֿרעגט. לכתּחילה האָט דער היימלאָזער אויסגעזען צעטומלט. דערנאָך האָט ער געגעבן אַ קוק אויף זײַן הינטל, וואָס ער האָט שוין ווער ווייסט ווי לאַנג נישט געבאָדן אָדער אָפּגעשוירן, און צוגעשאָקלט מיטן קאָפּ.
מיט אַ שעה שפּעטער איז דאָס הינטל אַרויס פֿונעם משׂא־פֿור, אויסזעענדיק ווי אַ גאָר אַנדער הינטל. זײַן פֿעל, וואָס איז פֿריִער געווען שמוציק און פֿאַרפּלאָנטערט, האָט מען אויסגעוואַשן, צוגעשוירן און געבערשט ביז ער איז געוואָרן ווייך און גלאַנציק. איידער ער איז אַרויס פֿון אויטאָ האָט מען אים געגעבן אַ נאַש, וואָס ער האָט פֿריילעך אײַנגעשלונגען.
די אָרגאַניזאַציע וואָס האָט אויסגעבאָדן דאָס הינטל, „האָליוווּד מאָביל גרומינג“, באַלאַנגט צו טשאָק און יעל רובין. במשך פֿון די פֿאַרגאַנגענע 11 יאָר, האָבן זיי און זייערע מיטאַרבעטער גערייניקט בערך 5,000 הינט פֿרײַ פֿון אָפּצאָל.
דאָס פּאָרפֿאָלק, וואָס האָט אימיגרירט פֿון ישׂראל, האָט אין 2001 לאַנצירט אַ געשעפֿט וואָס ברענגט אַ לוקסוס־ספּאַ צו פֿאַרמעגלעכע אייגנטימער פֿון הינט. אָבער דערנאָך האָבן זיי באַשלאָסן אַז זיי ווילן אויך העלפֿן די מענטשן מיט הינט, וואָס קענען נישט באַצאָלן דערפֿאַר: סײַ הינט וואָס געפֿינען זיך אין אַ מיקלט פֿאַר חיות, סײַ הינט וואָס וווינען מיט זייערע אייגנטימער אויף דער גאַס.
„אַ מאָל האָבן די אייגנטימער מורא אונדז איבערצוגעבן די הינט, אַפֿילו אויב זיי קענען וואַרטן אין דרויסן,“ האָט יעל געזאָגט. „מיר לאָזן זיי אַרײַנקומען און זען וואָס מיר טוען. די הינט פֿילן זיך אויך בעסער. מע קען זען וויפֿל זיי האָבן הנאה פֿון דער באַהאַנדלונג און ווי עס שפּאַנט זיי אויס. דו ווײַזט זיי ליבע, גיסט זיי אַ נאַש, וואַסער צו טרינקען, און זיי באַצאָלן דיר מיט זייערע קושן.“
אויף דער פֿראַגע, צי זיי זאָרגן זיך נישט, וואָס וועט זײַן ווען די הינט גייען צוריק צו די האַרבע באַדינגונגען פֿון דער גאַס, האָט טשאָק באַטאָנט עטלעכע זאַכן: „זייערע אייגנטימער זענען תּמיד מיט זיי און פּאַסן אויף אויף זיי וויפֿל זיי קענען נאָר. די הינטלעך זענען זייערע ׳קינדער׳. עס זענען אויך דאָ אַ סך אָרגאַניזאַציעס וואָס באַזאָרגן זיי מיט עסן אומזיסט און אַנדערע זאַכן. זיי פֿאַרמאָגן ווייניק, אָבער זיי טוען דאָס בעסטע אויפֿצופּאַסן אויף זייערע הינט.“
צו לייענען וועגן דעם אויף ענגליש גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.
To read about this in English click here.
The post Tidbits: This Jewish couple gives homeless dogs a free makeover appeared first on The Forward.
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The tech worker campaigning for ‘Antisemite of the Week’ doesn’t want to talk about antisemitism
After accusations of discrimination led his San Francisco Tech Week event to be pulled from the schedule, a tech worker has decided to embrace his newfound notoriety.
Mostapha Benhenda cited security reasons last week when he denied an Israeli programmer admission to his AI hackathon event, explaining that he didn’t want the Israeli army to make participants’ electronics “explode in their faces and injure them.”
The Israeli tech worker — a former Israeli soldier named Adam Levi — posted the message online, leading sponsors to pull funding for the event. In the days since, Benhenda has begun openly campaigning for an “Antisemite of the Week” award from pro-Israel watchdog group StopAntisemitism.
“I am a competitor, I play to win, this prize will be my Ballon d’Or,” Benhenda said in a message to the Forward, referring to the annual prize for the world’s best soccer player.
Running this week through Sunday, San Francisco Tech Week draws tens of thousands of tech industry workers to hundreds of panels, competitions and parties across the Bay Area.
The saga began Sept. 29 when Levi posted a screenshot of Benhenda’s messages rejecting his RSVP to the event, called “Build Your Agentic Investment Bank Hackathon.” A page for the hackathon on the digital invitation platform Partiful claimed it had been co-sponsored by Tech Week and the convention’s founder, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Levi’s post was reshared on X more than 1,000 times, leading to the event’s de-listing by Tech Week organizers, who said on X that the event had violated the program’s terms of service.
Levi told The Algemeiner that Andreessen Horowitz told him the company had removed its sponsorship.
Benhenda, whose LinkedIn says he attended college in France, declined to participate in phone interviews. But in messages to the Forward, his response to accusations of antisemitism appeared to shift over a manner of days from defensiveness to bemusement.
When first reached for comment, Benhenda denied that his rejection of Levi was antisemitic at all. He said he banned Levi because his LinkedIn indicated service in the Israeli military’s secretive Unit 8200 during September 2024, when the intelligence unit was linked to the simultaneous detonation of thousands of pagers owned by Hezbollah operatives across Lebanon. (Levi declined to be interviewed, but said on X that “building explosive pagers was never my thing.”)
“I understand Adam’s disappointment, and his resulting emotional accusation of antisemitism, but he perfectly knows it’s unfounded,” Benhenda wrote Sept. 29, adding, “I hope that over the next weeks he will get more clarity about this.”
However, after StopAntisemitism posted about Benhenda on X, he seemed to lose interest in contesting the claim — and began leaning into it instead.
On Saturday, Benhenda shared StopAntisemitism’s post about him with a request.
“I am competing for the ‘Antisemite of the Week’ award at the San Francisco Tech Week,” he wrote. “Can you show your support/hate with a retweet?”
Founded in 2018 by a social media influencer who goes by Liora Rez, StopAntisemitism.org frequently bestows its “Antisemite of the Week” awards to public figures — a mix of elected officials, civic leaders and celebrities — who antagonize Israel.
Recent recipients of the award — which is not actually awarded weekly — have included actor Javier Bardem and Rama Duwaji, the wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Last month, StopAntisemitism sponsored an event where a speaker was later criticized for Islamophobic rhetoric. (Rez did not respond to a request for comment on that story, or for this one.)
Benhenda said in messages to the Forward on Monday afternoon that he did not know very much about the organization, but that he was pining for its distinction, given the group’s 350,000 followers on X.
“What matters isn’t the label, but who puts it,” he added. “Go big or go home, that’s the game in the Silicon Valley.”
Later, though, Benhenda insisted that he still did not understand the accusations of antisemitism against him. His refusal of Levi, he said, had been solely due to Levi’s involvement in the Israeli military.
Meanwhile, he is forging ahead with the hackathon, hosting it Tuesday on the streaming platform Discord for nearly 200 registered participants.
Benhenda blamed the “tremendous lobbying from the Zionist lobby” for the change. But the venue where he had initially planned to host the event indicated there was no change. The supposed host, a coworking space called Frontier Tower, said in an email it had never booked Benhenda’s event to begin with.
The post The tech worker campaigning for ‘Antisemite of the Week’ doesn’t want to talk about antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
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Chef Alon Shaya shares the stories, resilience and recipes of World War II survivors
(JTA) — In 2015, while visiting Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, James Beard Award-winning chef Alon Shaya came face-to-face with a World War II artifact that moved him deeply.
It was a red cloth triangle — cut from a Nazi flag — embroidered with the names of a few dozen female prisoners at the Ravensbrück concentration camp.
In a place where they were starving to death, he learned these women had formed a clandestine “food” club. Together, they talked about recipes, their Friday night Shabbat candlesticks and cherished memories of home.
That red cloth was “100% the catalyst,” Shaya said, for his deep interest in food as “an agent of survival, defiance and bringing people together.”
Now, 11 years after that defining moment in Jerusalem, Shaya’s second book, “Memories of a Good Meal: Recipes of Resilience Inspired by Stories of World War II Survival,” is being published on Oct. 6. Co-authored with food historian June Hersh, the book gathers accounts from survivors and heroes of World War II, illustrating the outsized role that food — and the memory of it — played in human survival. While featuring 80 recipes, it functions as much as a history book as a cookbook.
“The recipes are there to support the stories,” Shaya said. “It’s not the other way around.”
Shaya and Hersh tell the stories of 10 distinct groups impacted by the war, including Jewish partisans, hidden children, Navajo code talkers, persecuted homosexuals, Japanese Americans, and Austrian and German Jews who built new lives in the Dominican Republic.
Alongside these narratives, the authors included family recipes preserved across generations. Where none survived or existed, Shaya crafted recipes using ingredients available to the book’s subjects during the war.
The opening chapter highlights a story particularly close to Shaya’s heart. In 2019, during a visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., Shaya was shown a tattered, 100-year-old, handwritten recipe collection from the Fenves family of Yugoslavia. Saved during the war by the family’s cook, Maris, the Hungarian-language notebook was eventually donated to the museum by survivor Steven Fenves.
Determined to bring those dishes back to life, Shaya worked with Fenves to translate the recipes, filling in missing elements like precise steps, exact measurements and oven temperatures.
“I really became a part of their family,” said Shaya, whose collaboration on what became known as the Rescued Recipes project has raised nearly $1 million for the Holocaust Museum to digitize historical documents and artifacts. “The family wouldn’t be here if Steven and his sister didn’t survive Auschwitz,” said Shaya.
Featured recipes from this chapter reflect the Hungarian culinary traditions of Fenves’s hometown of Subotica, including körözött (a spiced cheese spread) and authentic Hungarian goulash.
Other chapters explore how people sustained themselves despite meager resources. In the profile of Polish Jewish partisan Shalom Yoran — who subsisted largely on potatoes while hiding in the woods — Shaya developed recipes centered on the staple tuber, including Polish herring and potato salad, potato dinner rolls and potato, and pine nut doughnuts with blackberry caramel.
“Shalom’s wife, Varda, shared his story with us,” Shaya explained. “The partisans lived in a hole in the ground in the Polish forest through winters that reached minus-20 degrees, and they did that for four years. Potatoes were a huge part of their survival.”
For Sarah Pelz, executive editor at Harvest, the book’s publisher and the granddaughter of a partisan, the concept of the book resonated deeply, especially in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks inside Israel. “The throughline here is the power of food and memory — the power of food to bring us together at a table, and to remind us who we are and where we come from,” she said in an interview.
“Alon’s message is powerful and necessary right now,” she continued. “He hopes that people will read this book, will cook from it, and that it will bring people together at the table, people of diverse backgrounds, people of diverse perspectives, that it will not just help to enlighten readers, to history and to what happened, but also help bring people together.”
In gathering these accounts across the globe, Shaya and Hersh faced a race against time, as most interviewees were well into their 90s or older. John Kinsel, one of the last living Navajo code talkers, was 107 years old when the authors visited him on the Navajo Nation reservation. His chapter details the vital role Native American Marines played by using their complex language to transmit secret Allied messages in the Pacific theater. The book features recipes inspired by Navajo traditions, including blue corn mush and stuffed pumpkin with stewed lamb.
Throughout the project, Shaya couldn’t help but draw parallels between past atrocities and modern struggles.
“One of the lessons that struck home the most for me is that people will persecute you for what you believe in and gather together and create laws to persecute you,” he said. “We saw it in what happened with immigration in the 1940s, and we see it with what’s happening in America today.”
He was also struck by the role of propaganda, promulgated then by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s chief propagandist, and today by bad actors on social media, in spreading hate and disinformation.
Some of the stories, like the meal prepared by nuns in a convent for a group of persecuted homosexual prisoners, seem almost cinematic in nature.
“I have definitely thought about turning these stories into a miniseries or a movie,” said Shaya. “Nobody has shown interest in it yet, but it is something that I think the more ways these stories can be shared, the better.”
Born in Israel and raised in Philadelphia, Shaya has become one of the country’s leading interpreters of Israeli and Middle Eastern cooking, with a distinctly Southern sensibility. His 2018 cookbook, “Shaya: An Odyssey of Food, My Journey Back to Israel,” blends memoir with recipes.
Shaya was committed to the latest book despite huge demands on his time. The chef and his wife, Emily, have two children, aged five and two. His Pomegranate Hospitality operates three restaurants, Saba and Safta’s Table in New Orleans, where he lives, and Safta in Denver. (Saba means grandfather and Safta means grandmother in Hebrew.) He is also involved in a variety of philanthropic work.
“The work I put into this book fills my heart and makes me feel good, like I’m doing something that builds me up and can have an impact,” said Shaya.
Shaya views the book as an educational tool.
“This book might engage a 13-year-old who really loves the chocolate cake recipe,” Shaya reflected. “If he or she hears the history behind that chocolate cake and delves into the history behind it, they learn that Austrian and German Jews took refuge in the Dominican Republic and wanted to keep their culinary traditions alive and need to use the local resources. That’s how a traditional Sacher torte-inspired tres leches cake came to be. Or a plantain latke, or matzo ball soup with avocado, lime and yucca.
“If those stories can come together and have that kind of impact on one 13-year-old in the world,” he added, “I will feel complete.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Chef Alon Shaya shares the stories, resilience and recipes of World War II survivors appeared first on The Forward.
