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Jewish drag queen Sasha Velour is on the cover of The New Yorker this week
(New York Jewish Week) — Subscribers of The New Yorker opened their mailboxes this week to a hard-to-miss hot pink cover with an illustration of a drag queen with a mohawk, large blue earrings and extravagant makeup.
They were looking at “The Look of Pride,” a self-portrait by a Brooklyn-based Jewish drag queen and artist named Sasha Velour. Velour, 35, is featured in the June 12 issue in an interview about how she is celebrating Pride month and why drag has been lifesaving for her.
“Drag is an antidote to shame,” she said.
Velour was the 2017 winner of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and is currently on tour for her new book, “The Big Reveal: An Illustrated Manifesto of Drag,” which intertwines her own personal history — including her Jewish identity — with the history of drag as both a revolutionary art form and cultural practice.
Velour’s Judaism and Jewish family upbringing is a recurring theme in her book. “For years I studied Jewish history and Hebrew language after school and on the weekends,” she writes. “I was bar mitzvahed at 13 and even taught Sunday school when I was in high school, reenacting Jewish fables with puppets that I made myself,” writes Velour, who was raised in New Haven, Connecticut, and the Chicago suburbs.
Velour, whose out-of-drag last name is Steinberg, also writes about the influence her Jewish ancestors had on her — even those who she never knew. In “The Big Reveal,” Velour writes that her great-grandmother, Goldie Rabinovitch, was working at the at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in on March 25, 1911, but was spared from the deadly fire that day because she was late to work — window shopping, as the family lore goes, or possibly buying a pickle in Cooper Square.
“This is a story about snacks!’” Velour writes. Or, as her grandmother Dina would tell her: “Remember Grandma Goldie’s lesson… window-shopping can save your life!”
That same Jewish grandmother also first put Velour in drag when she was a child. “When I visited her house as a little kid, she would always encourage me to channel my inner diva,” Velour writes. “Beating out a drum rhythm on the arm of the couch, she would coach me to walk dramatically into the room, drop my coat, and reveal the look. ‘Fabulous!’ she’d whisper, knowingly.”
“When I was a kid, I loved dressing up with my grandmothers, putting on makeup, staging shows. I didn’t even know it was ‘drag’ but it just made sense to me,” Velour tells The New Yorker in the interview published Monday. “Later, learning more about drag and understanding the existence of queer and trans people around the world quite literally saved my life.”
In her book, Velour also credits the Talmud with showing her how to hold multiple ideas — and, by extension, identities — in her mind at the same time. “According to Talmudic thought, in order to find the truth, we must be able to hold multiple possible meanings as true at the same time,” she writes in her book. “That’s the kind of book I always liked best — a scrapbook that brought many things together in conversation.”
“Both comics and drag come from strong independent traditions that enable artists and performers to develop a more unique and recognizable style, and to address a wider range of political and personal topics,” she tells The New Yorker. “All you need to make art is your own self.”
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The post Jewish drag queen Sasha Velour is on the cover of The New Yorker this week appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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US Lawmaker Introduces Bill to Deport Immigrants With Extremist Ideologies
US Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) leaves the House Republican Conference caucus meeting in the US Capitol on April 15, 2026. Photo: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
US Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) has introduced sweeping legislation aimed at expanding the federal government’s authority to deport, denaturalize, deny US citizenship, and refuse entry to immigrants tied to extremist ideologies, including socialism, communism, and Islamic fundamentalism.
The legislation, titled the MAMDANI Act, short for Measures Against Marxism’s Dangerous Adherents and Noxious Islamists, is a direct political reference to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and what conservatives describe as a growing alliance between far-left anti-Israel activism and Islamist extremism.
Mamdani, a far-left democratic socialist and avowed anti-Zionist, has made anti-Israel activism a cornerstone of his political career and been widely accused of promoting antisemitic rhetoric.
In a statement, Roy argued that the legislation would increase the government’s capability to filter out potential immigrants with anti-American, anti-Western ideologies.
“Not just for the last six years, but for the last 60 years, our immigration system has been cynically used to disadvantage American workers’ competitiveness in favor of mass-importing the third world,” Roy added. “This has not just led to higher crime and lower wages, but also the promulgation of hostile ideologies fundamentally opposed to American values.”
Roy said the bill is intended to confront what he called a “Red-Green Alliance” between far-left and Islamist extremists that has fueled antisemitism, anti-American radicalism, and support for terrorist organizations under the guise of progressive politics.
“By targeting the Red-Green Alliance, this legislation deploys new tools to fight back against the Marxist and Islamist advance that has devastated Europe and has now arrived on our doorstep, especially in my home state of Texas,” Roy continued.
Under the proposal, non-citizens affiliated with socialist parties, communist parties, the Chinese Communist Party, or organizations deemed to promote Islamic fundamentalism could be denied entry or deported. The bill would also expand grounds for denying naturalization and, in some cases, allow denaturalization for individuals found to have concealed ideological affiliations or to be actively advocating for violent anti-democratic movements.
Supporters of the bill argue that the measure is necessary amid rising antisemitic incidents across the United States following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, amid the ensuing war in Gaza. They point to pro-Hamas rhetoric on some college campuses and among far-left activist circles as evidence that immigration enforcement should include stronger scrutiny of extremist ideological affiliations.
In recent years, conservatives have drawn attention to the massive surge in antisemitic protests on American soil, pointing to an increase of foreign migration as the culprit. In the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 slaughters in Israel, protests erupted on US campuses and streets. Many of these demonstrations, many of which devolved into riots, were spearheaded by either foreign nationals or recent migrants from the Middle East or southeast Asia.
US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines warned in 2024 that “actors tied to Iran’s government” have encouraged and provided financial support to many of these protests.
Critics, however, say Roy’s legislation raises serious constitutional concerns, particularly around First Amendment protections, religious liberty, and due process rights. Civil liberties advocates have warned that broad ideological tests for citizenship or deportation could be vulnerable to court challenges and used too broadly against political dissent.
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Orthodox Jews Harassed in Brooklyn as Antisemitic Hate Crimes Surge in New York City Under Mamdani
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani delivers a speech during his inauguration ceremony in New York City, US, Jan. 1, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Kylie Cooper
Multiple videos which emerged this week captured in vivid detail the surge of antisemitic hate crimes that have proliferated under New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s leadership.
On Monday, Williamsburg News shared a 36-second video depicting two young males riding bicycles on Williamsburg Street & Lee Avenue in Brooklyn. The first swerves his bike in front of an elderly Jewish man, leading the victim to turn and address his assailant. Then the second perpetrator comes from behind on his bike and knocks off the Jewish man’s black hat.
Shocking! 2 perps on cyclists assaulted and threw down a hat from a elderly Jewish person, on Williamsburg St & Lee Ave, @WSPUshomrim and @NYPD90Pct are on scene investigating for a possible hate crime. @nypdhatecrimes pic.twitter.com/Y3mXw6CZmH
— WILLIAMSBURG NEWS (@WMSBG) April 20, 2026
Officers from the New York City Police Department (NYPD)’s 90th precinct responded to the assault and opened a hate crime investigation.
Also on Monday, the Boro Park Shomrim, a Jewish organization that monitors antisemitism and also serves as a neighborhood watch group, released a 37-second clip of young males driving a white SUV into a crosswalk before stopping to address a Jewish man with payot wearing traditional Hasidic attire. He begins to walk away, provoking a teenager in the back seat to leap out, chase after him, and yell, “Come here! Come here!”
An individual sitting in the front seat’s passenger side applauds the act of intimidation before the young man rushes back into the SUV which speeds away, tires squealing.
These individuals are wanted by @NYPDHateCrimes for terrorizing and harassing local residents in Boro Park over Pesach. If you can help us identify them, please contact 911 and our 24-hour emergency hotline 718-871-6666. #YourCityYourCall. @NYPD66Pct pic.twitter.com/WFRBGDXej7
— 𝐁𝐨𝐫𝐨 𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐤 𝐒𝐡𝐨𝐦𝐫𝐢𝐦 (@BPShomrim) April 20, 2026
While evidence of these antisemitic incidents emerged from security footage, the perpetrators of a separate incident from last week chose to film their harassment targeting a Jewish pizzeria proprietor themselves.
Operatives of the so-called Palestine News Network (PNN) conducted one of their pseudo-interviews of Isaac Garson, owner of Slices Pizza in Hastings-on-Hudson, a community roughly 20 miles north of New York City.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) describes the group’s modus operandi of choreographed hostility, explaining that members “have a history of entering neighborhoods with significant Jewish populations, or approaching those attending Jewish or Israel-related events, where they shoot videos that walk the line between ‘interview’ and provocation.”
The 47-second video appears in a vertical format, indicating filming on a phone. In the lower right corner, the video bears a red and white PNN logo intended as a parody of the traditional CNN logo. Garson emerges from the restaurant, gestures his hands, and says, “I’m going to be calm. I want peace around the world.”
The man filming the encounter then goads, “What about Palestine? Can you say Palestine, specifically?”
The video cuts to footage of a man outside the restaurant who appears to be affiliated with PNN and carries a fractured placard that says, “End US AID to Israel.” However, the word “Israel” was originally at the bottom of the sign but snapped off, requiring the activist to carry along the broken piece to complete his political proclamation.
The next 20 seconds of the video focus on the men harassing a woman wearing a black baseball cap and black sunglasses walking by on the sidewalk. They demand to know “what’s your opinion?” The video cuts off her answer and jumps to them insulting her as “a textbook case of white mediocrity. Mediocre aesthetics, no stances, this is what we call ‘white mediocrity.’ You’re a shining example of mediocrity.”
The woman, taken aback by being insulted by eccentric activists carrying a dilapidated sign on the street, says, “Oh. Well, that’s also your opinion.”
The conclusion of the video returns to Garson, who asks the men: “What happened to Israel in 1948?”
The cameraman then yells, “Oh, it came out! It came out!”
Garson asks, “What happened?”
The cameraman then chants proudly, “The Nakba! The Nakba!”
The Arabic term “Nakba” translates as “catastrophe,” and anti-Zionists regularly deploy it to signify the founding of the modern State of Israel. In 2023, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas issued a decree defining the “Nakba” as “the crime against humanity committed against the Palestinian people in 1948.”
Garson then asks in the video: “How many people were killed on Oct. 7?” referring to the Palestinian terrorist group’s 2023 invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.
The cameraman shoots back, “We support Oct. 7!”
Beginning to walk back into his restaurant, Garson says, “OK, great, you support a murder.”
NEW YORK TODAY: Pro-Hamas Criminals Harass Jewish Pizza Shop Owner in Hastings-on-Hudson
They targeted him specifically because he is Jewish
Then they bully a random white Christian lady and ruin her day.
⁰PNN’s loser Muslim gang ambushed Isaac Garson, the Jewish owner of… pic.twitter.com/o26YdjBkQg— Shirion Collective (@ShirionOrg) April 15, 2026
Hastings-on-Hudson Mayor Tom Drake released a statement on Wednesday condemning PNN’s harassment.
“I am sorry that this type of conduct has reached our amazing and tolerant village,” Drake said. “Today, the strength exhibited by our friend and business owner, who I have been in communication with, makes me proud to be your mayor and do everything to support our businesses and residents, even when faced with such a gross display of hate.”
Drake added, “As a community, we cannot let stickers placed on signs or other forms of hate become normal. While they may seem small in some cases, they are intended to cause fear and intimidation. These actions have targeted a specific population of our village, and I urge all Hastings residents to join me in condemning such actions of hate and come together and support one another.”
The ADL names the leaders of PNN as Ramsey Aburdene and David Wolf, explaining they chose to found the group following the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks in southern Israel. Aburdene says that he has urged people for years to “stop condemning Hamas.”
Wolf is Jewish and described by the ADL as “an extreme anti-Zionist” who “had his Star of David tattooed over with a Palestinian flag.”
PNN has amassed more than 100,000 followers on the X social media platform and has seen its videos shared by prominent anti-Zionist influencers such as British rapper Lowkey and “anti-imperialist journalist” Benjamin Rubenstein.
The incidents come amid continued criticism and scrutiny over the Mamdani administration’s approach to countering antisemitism.
Earlier this month, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch revealed that “confirmed hate crimes increased nearly 12 percent this quarter citywide. We continue to see that the vast majority of our hate crimes are antisemitic in nature.”
Tisch added that “in fact, in the first quarter of 2026, more than half of all confirmed hate crimes, or 55 percent, were antisemitic, despite Jews only making up approximately 10 percent of the population of New York City.”
Mamdani assumed office on Jan. 1.
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‘Another Holocaust’: Netanyahu Tells Bereaved Families on Memorial Day of Iran Plot to Destroy Israel
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends the opening event for the Memorial Day at the Yad LaBanim House in Jerusalem, April 20, 2026. Photo: Marc Israel Sellem/Pool via REUTERS
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked the Holocaust during a Memorial Day ceremony in Jerusalem on Tuesday, saying joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran had prevented the regime from carrying out its genocidal vision.
“The Ayatollah regime in Iran planned another Holocaust. It plotted to destroy us with nuclear bombs and thousands of ballistic missiles,” he said at the state ceremony for fallen soldiers at Mount Herzl military cemetery. “Had we not acted against the existential threat, had we not acted with determination and daring, the names of the death sites Natanz, Fordow, Isfahan might have joined the names of the death camps of the Holocaust: Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka.”
“But that did not happen because together with our great friend, the United States, we crushed the Iranian regime’s machinery of destruction in time,” he said. “We removed an immediate existential threat.”
Netanyahu ended by saluting wounded soldiers and bereaved families. “May the memory of the fallen of Israel’s wars be blessed and kept in our hearts forever,” he said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wearing the Tefillin of IDF Golani Brigade Fighter First Sgt. Sean Carmeli, who fell in the 2014 war with Gaza. Photo: Ma’ayan Toaf (GPO)
The national Memorial Day, known as Yom Hazikaron, came as Iran poured cold water on the notion of extending the ceasefire, saying it would not send officials to Islamabad to continue negotiations with the US.
Meanwhile, a second ceasefire brokered by US President Donald Trump with Iran’s Lebanese proxy Hezbollah was also poised to be tested, as rocket sirens sounded toward evening in northern Israeli communities near the border with Lebanon.
At a separate Memorial Day ceremony for fallen Mossad personnel, intelligence agency chief David Barnea disclosed that one of the service’s operatives was killed during the war with Iran.
The officer, whose identity remains under gag order, had served in the agency for more than three decades, Barnea said, adding that he was “filled with pride” by his actions.
“There is no other day during the year that is as difficult for us, for me, as Memorial Day for Israel’s fallen,” Barnea said, tracing a line from the defenders of the pre-state Jewish community to the soldiers fighting since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. He said the obligation to defend the country had passed from generation to generation, with each cohort choosing to shoulder it anew.
Other commemorations took place outside the state ceremonies. On Memorial Day eve, OneFamily, a nonprofit that supports victims of terrorism and bereaved families, held a gathering centered on personal testimony.
The evening was led by two bereaved mothers, Liat Smadja and Laly Derai, whose sons were killed in the same explosion in Gaza in June 2024.
Smadja, who serves in the reserves as a casualty notifier, described the cruel inversion of learning that the task she performs for other families had come to her own door.
“I have the job of knocking on doors and delivering the worst possible news, one that changes a family’s life forever,” she said. “And then the message came for me as well.”
In Israel, “the knock on the door” has become a traumatic shorthand for one of the most feared moments in public life, the arrival of military representatives to tell a family that a loved one has been killed.
Derai said the families had forged a bond that cut across their different backgrounds.
“We come from different worlds and different backgrounds. Since [their death], we are one family, connected by something deep and unbreakable.”
Two days earlier, Derai had attended a weekend for bereaved families organized by OneFamily, spending the run-up to Memorial Day among others carrying the same loss.
Yigal Tamam, whose son Adir and daughter-in-law Shiraz were murdered on their way to the Nova music festival during the Oct. 7 attack, was also there.
As rocket fire erupted early in the morning that day, the couple pulled over and ran into a roadside bomb shelter, where they were killed by Hamas terrorists who threw grenades inside. The two were survived by their young daughters.
“I’m breathing but I’m not alive,” Tamam said over the weekend.
He said he breaks down when he thinks about his grandchildren, Goshen, 10, and Gili, 8, growing up without their parents.
OneFamily founder Chantal Belzberg is set to receive the Israel Prize for lifetime achievement, a rare national award granted by the state for outstanding contributions to Israeli society, presented on Independence Day, which follows Memorial Day.
