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King David gets the kiddie treatment
The figure of David is most often imagined nude, and for some people that’s a problem.
Michelangelo’s statue was once made to don a fig leaf in exhibition replicas. As recently as 2023, a school principal in Tallahassee, Florida resigned after parents complained that an image of the marble used in a lesson on Renaissance art was pornographic. (Interestingly, no one is calling for a redacted edition of the Bible, where David is an unabashed adulterer who dances naked before the lord.)
David, like Odysseus, was a man of twists and turns, and that’s what makes him so compelling. Yet there has always been a temptation to contort him into a tidier package, PG and legible to youth. In Hebrew school — and, I imagine, Christian Sunday schools — we hear of his underdog exploits with Goliath. We rarely hear what happens next.
As novelist Geraldine Brooks observed in her book The Secret Chord, David was “the first man in literature whose story is told in detail from early childhood to extreme old age.” It is also a singularly strange story to adapt for children beyond that initial showdown with a Philistine with a pituitary disorder — the rest of David’s story is rife with sex and violence.
Even so, Angel Pictures, the up-and-coming, largely faith-based production house behind The Sound of Freedom (a fear-mongering pageant about human trafficking) and The King of Kings (about you know who) endeavored to put this narrative to film, following a “prequel” series, called Young David. The resulting animated musical David punches above its weight in production value with meticulous filaments of CGI hair and charismatic character design. If you’re looking for biblical fidelity, it mostly follows the text, but in making it family friendly — and perhaps to point in the direction of a certain legacy sequel — it slaps a narrative fig leaf over the interesting bits. Somehow, like so many neutered renditions of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” it makes David boring.
Why target this one to kids? David is introduced as a shepherd boy with a sling, making him ripe for a young audience, at least if you skip the part where he decapitates Goliath and carries his head around as a trophy, which this film does. Most children’s media about him emphasizes those salad days heroics or his side hustle as a psalmist.
But the boy will go on, soon after he reaches his age of majority, to procure 200 Philistine foreskins in battle as a bride price. In exile from Saul, we’re told that, when he raided a region, “he would leave no man or woman alive.” At Hebron, he rewards the eager assassins of his rival by relieving them of their hands and feet.
What about this demands the Dreamworks treatment? The aforementioned prequel kiddie show, with its humble pastoral lessons, had to lead to something, I suppose, and here it’s a musical time jump with a new character model and older voice actor. The ads invite us to “watch how a boy becomes a man,” and, more saliently, to do the watching “this Christmas.”
To Christians, David is a sort of Old Testament flashing arrow pointing to Christ. “Christ” means anointed one; David, as we see in the film’s opening moments, after he saves a whelping lamb from a lion, had a horn of oil poured over him by Samuel. Jesus, a metaphorical shepherd, is sometimes called the Son of David.
As scholars of Christianity like Elaine Pagels have noted, the genealogy laid out by Matthew and Luke connects Jesus to David as a way of fulfilling messianic prophecies in Isaiah. This is then, a stealth Christmas story or almost a Jesus prequel, kind of a biblical Phantom Menace, with the added benefit of capturing a Jewish audience that goes out to the movies on Christmas and may be looking for family fare. Catholic comedian Kevin James has promoted it, as has Michael Rappaport.
The story, buoyed by boilerplate praise pop that sings of running towards adventure and “following the light,” tracks the moment David is selected as the future king up to his coronation, stopping before his uniting of the kingdoms in a new capital and his late vocation as a rooftop voyeur with major character flaws.
This David — auburn-haired and American-accented, while all other characters sound vaguely Israeli — is instantly likable, and unbearably insipid, “a man after God’s own heart.” The film had a rabbi advisor — one whose focus is on “ministering to Christians” — and that brings a veneer of Jewish authenticity. Samuel sings some of Psalm 118 in Hebrew as he anoints David (an odd choice given that David is the traditionally-credited author). Production notes boast of paleo Hebrew text appearing throughout and identify some of the songwriters as “Jewish believers in Jesus.” There are wolf motifs littering in the palace of Saul, whose tribe’s founder was likened to a ravenous wolf. Despite these trappings, the project feels derived from a familiar Christian impulse, and errs by taking David’s story beyond the Valley of Elah, where our hero still had a semblance of innocence.
The infancy narrative of Jesus may work for young people around Christmas time, sparing them the gory details of the crucifixion. But beyond a point, David’s early life can’t be so neatly detached from what follows, as the rest of the Bible, even the Christian parts, relies on it. It is hard to imagine this David — pure, faithful, a good shepherd who is reluctant to lead and ostensibly asexual — conquering Jerusalem. It’s harder still to imagine him having his way with Bathsheba (in what many now regard as rape), sending her husband to his death and losing several children as God’s punishment for these transgressions.
None of these events are the film’s concern, but without those pivotal plot points, we don’t have the Temple or the king — Solomon, born of Bathsheba — to build it. Without a temple in Jerusalem, there’s no backdrop for the Passion the film’s hinting at to play against.
The screenplay, by directors Brent Dawes and Phil Cunningham, seems to be optimizing for action — Cunningham described David’s journey as “packed with adventure, with music, with fun” — while staying too squeamish to mount a proper battle scene. There’s the intrigue of Saul’s court, and the thread of dramatic irony, as the old king confides in David about his fear of God’s appointed successor, not knowing it’s him. We see David dash into exile in the wilderness, but we don’t witness his raids or any other mischief, only a crisis of faith. We get a glimpse of the mincing Philistine king Achish (we know he’s evil because of his eyeshadow and earrings) and the skull-laden Amalekites who raze David’s outpost at Ziklag and take his followers captive. (Saul’s failure with the Amalekites is appropriately sanitized — he fell short by letting them escape, not in sparing Agag’s life and keeping his best livestock. If God ordered their genocide, as he does in the source material, we don’t hear about it.)
In case there was any doubt, after David’s mom — here a speaking character — praises God as “the way and the light,” there’s a specific endgame in mind that necessitates our hero be presented as older and on his way to kingship.
To drive the point home, in an invention of the film, the Amalekites hoist David onto a tree to kill him while his mother weeps at his feet. This isn’t some first chapter of David’s rule but the foreshadowing of Jesus’ reign, and you can’t exactly crucify the little shepherd boy with the lyre. (Spoiler: He lives.)
While not to my taste, this would be forgivable if the film, however handsomely animated, didn’t fall into the same old timeworn tropes that even kids are surely bored of now: the precocious younger sister, the fat brother gorging on dates, the upstart Israelite army with vases for helmets who gulp, “Yup, we’re dead,” upon seeing the well-equipped Philistines and their six-cubit champion.
Worse still, the film calls to mind other, better ones, appropriate for children but nowhere near as condescending.
A standout number has David’s mother singing about the world as a tapestry (Carole King she ain’t) and “the view that heaven sees,” essentially a rip off of Prince of Egypt’s “Through Heaven’s Eyes.” You may also cringe at the line “like the way we work the loom, he knit you from inside the womb,” seemingly a play on Jeremiah 1:5, often used by Christians to justify pro-life positions.
David deserves better, but the good news is there’s competition. Amazon’s House of David, now in its second season, goes deep on the dynamics of Judah and Israel, often employing midrash to add texture to the intrigue, and it was reported in 2022 that Leviathan Productions, an outfit focused on Jewish stories, had optioned Brooks’ excellent The Secret Chord.
That shepherd boy from Bethlehem became a giant himself — and we will never stop singing his psalms or wrestling with his complicated, at times cancel-worthy, story. Angel Studios’ David may still challenge Goliath, just not the audience.
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This isn’t Mark Ruffalo’s first antisemitism controversy
Mark Ruffalo is in the spotlight after facing accusations of antisemitism for his criticism of the Ellison family — but this isn’t the first time the actor has been caught in controversy on this topic.
Last Friday, the actor connected the merger of David Ellison’s Paramount with Warner Bros. Discovery to Israel’s war with Hamas. He called Larry Ellison an “oligarch” due to his financial backing of his son David’s merger using wealth earned from his time at Oracle, which created technology used by the Israeli military. His statements immediately drew criticism, with Paramount leaders accusing Ruffalo of invoking antisemitic tropes.
Ruffalo, a four-time Academy Awards nominee best known for playing the Hulk in Marvel movies, has long been an outspoken advocate for progressive causes — including the Palestinian one.
In 2014, Ruffalo made his first public statements about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, posting criticisms of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge military operation against Hamas.
He criticized Israel for striking Gaza’s el-Wafa hospital, writing that, “Sorry, I thought blowing up Hospitals [sic] was something that all human beings could agree was off limits.”
Ruffalo also questioned the claim that Hamas used civilians as “human shields.”
“Do you honestly think these people, these fellow human beings, would use their own children as shields?” he wrote. “Use your heart.”
Around the same time, Ruffalo also disputed whether Hamas had actually kidnapped three Israeli teenagers, one of the incidents that sparked the 2014 hostilities — an incident that the terrorist group later admitted to.
Ruffalo received criticism for his posts, but stood by his perspective. “Empathizing w/ Gaza does NOT make me anti-Semitic, nor pro-Hamas or anti-Israel,” he wrote in 2014. “It makes me human.”
As clashes between Israel and Hamas sprouted up again in 2021, Ruffalo once again took to Twitter to denounce Israel, likening the situation to South Africa and calling “for sanctions to free Palestinians.”
Soon after, Ruffalo wrote another tweet apologizing for his rhetoric.
“I have reflected & wanted to apologize for posts during the recent Israel/Hamas fighting that suggested Israel is committing ‘genocide,’” he wrote. “It’s not accurate, it’s inflammatory, disrespectful & is being used to justify antisemitism here & abroad. Now is the time to avoid hyperbole.”
Following the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack in 2023 and Israel’s military response, Ruffalo returned to pro-Palestinian activism. Less than two weeks after the attack, on Oct. 20, Ruffalo — along with more than 50 others creatives through the organization Artists for Ceasefire — sent a letter to President Joe Biden demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. At the following Academy awards, Ruffalo wore a pin from the organization.
In Sept. 2025, Ruffalo, and along with more than 5,500 others in the film industry, signed a letter pledging to boycott “Israeli film institutions” that they believed were “implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people.”
Ruffalo has publicly aligned himself with the Boycott Divest Sanction (BDS) movement, calling to “boycott, divest, sanction and prosecute” Israel, on a podcast with Mehdi Hasan. During the same interview, he said that he has stopped talking to former friends who don’t agree with his perspective on the issue.
“I can’t talk to them anymore,” he said. “They’re either trying to convince me that the Palestinian people are all terrorists and they all deserve to die, or in the same breath will tell me that they’re actually human shields, and they deserve to die because they’re human shields.”
Now, after making statements connecting the Paramount-Discovery merger to Israeli military technology, Ruffalo has been accused of antisemitism by numerous Jewish organizations including the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Weisenthal Center.
The actor has now taken to social media to denounce the accusations of antisemitism, calling the accusation “appalling and fundamentally dishonest,” and saying that criticizing “the actions of the Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract, or the executives who supply it is not the same as criticising Jewish people.”
He added, “Everything I know about acting, activism, and humanism has been profoundly shaped by the Jewish friends, colleagues, and loved ones who have been integral and family throughout every point of my life.”
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American synagogues are spending more than ever on security. How much is enough?
At Temple Israel in Bloomfield, Michigan, which was attacked in March by a gunman, getting ready for the High Holidays this year means more than preparing for crowds of worshippers.
The synagogue is spending millions of dollars on security upgrades, including a new gatehouse, artificial intelligence technology and physical and ballistic hardening of its building.
“There are major changes coming,” Rabbi Josh Bennett of Temple Israel said in an interview. “I think that extends then to many of the other places of worship in town, and then, by extension, the entire Jewish community around the country.”
But as congregations install barriers, hire guards and tighten access to their buildings, Jewish leaders are struggling to balance budgets and keep their synagogues welcoming.
Bennett fears fortressing the Jewish community through ever-expanding security upgrades is “unsustainable at all levels,” from the emotional to the financial.
The Secure Community Network, a Jewish security organization that provides threat intelligence and safety training to Jewish institutions across the country, told the Forward that the American Jewish community now spends between $765 million and $1 billion annually on security and safety.
CEO Michael G. Masters said that figure is dramatically higher than it was several years ago, when it was the exception, rather than the rule, for a Jewish institution to have a security plan, let alone layers of cameras, guards, and coordination with law enforcement.
The spending reflects what Mitchell Silber, CEO of the Community Security Initiative, a New York-focused Jewish counterterrorism and security organization, described as “the most complicated threat picture that the Jewish community in the United States has ever faced.”
According to the FBI, Jews were the victims of nearly two-thirds of religion-based hate crimes in the United States in 2025. And these days, Silber’s analysts are tracking threats from white supremacists and neo-Nazis, Islamist extremists and actors inspired by or connected to Iran and Hezbollah, and left-wing violence connected to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“That’s taking a tremendous toll just financially on our Jewish institutions,” Silber said.
The growing costs have pushed Temple Israel to lobby Congress in support of the bipartisan Jewish American Security Act, which would increase federal funding available to protect Jewish institutions. Last week, members of Congress, including the bill’s co-sponsor, Rep. John James of Michigan, visited the Temple to see the security updates.
When congregants help screen for danger
But as congregations pour money into keeping potential attackers out, another question looms: At what point does protecting a synagogue begin to change the experience for those coming in?
“The more you build, there’s, I think, an inverse proportion to how safe people will actually feel when they’re coming in,” said Bennett, whose congregants have been emotionally rattled since the March attack, during which a gunman rammed a truck loaded with gasoline and fireworks into the synagogue. “Nobody wants to walk into a building where you walk by loaded semi-automatic machine guns.”
A person arriving at a synagogue for the first time could have harmful intentions. They could also be new to town, exploring Judaism, or simply looking for a place to spend Shabbat. Distinguishing between those is an important challenge.
Unlike an outside guard, a longtime congregant may know who normally attends services, which unfamiliar face is expected for a wedding or bar mitzvah, and when someone’s behavior genuinely seems out of place. That’s why organizations like SCN and the Community Security Service train community members to serve as additional protection at their own institutions.
In 2026 alone, SCN has conducted close to 1,000 in-person safety trainings, reaching roughly 25,000 people. For the High Holidays, they are offering Zoom Webinars for Jewish institutions across the country, as synagogue-goers who ordinarily recognize most people walking through their doors may suddenly welcome hundreds of unfamiliar worshippers.
Preparation was put to the test at Central Synagogue in Manhattan last Friday, when a man stormed the temple, punched a congregant, and headbutted and spat on a security guard while directing a racial slur at him.
Silber described the response as a “tactical success.”
“Their security team had drilled. Their clergy and staff had drilled. And when the moment came, within less than 60 seconds, they had this individual moved outside of the sanctuary.”
At Temple Israel, the congregation has been fundraising specifically for security. After the March attack, Bennett said, some congregants would like to see “a moat and a full army around our buildings.”
He understands the impulse. But he worries there may be no end to what a synagogue can spend in pursuit of safety.
“How do you do this with the knowledge that it’s financially unsustainable?” Bennett said. “This is not the way we should be spending dollars.”
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The far right is more dangerous to Jews than the far left. A historian explains why.
When Jewish leaders speak out these days, it’s often to blast the anti-Israel actions of one Democratic Socialists of America politician or another. Given all the attention — and the millions of dollars raised within the Jewish community to help defeat these candidates — you’d think the greatest existential threat to American Jews was coming from the left.
But a new book by historian Steven Ross is here to tell you: You’d be mistaken.
“What you’ve seen seeping in on the far left is more anti-Israel and some antisemitism,” Ross told me in a phone interview. “But here’s the thing: the left has never called for death to people, the right has.”
Right-wing extremist groups have spent 80 years calling for the death and deportation of Jews and minorities — and sometimes acting upon those calls. The far left, whatever its failures on antisemitism, has not. And unlike in previous years, the far right today has found the two things it lacked: a single leader to unite behind, and a technology to reach millions.
In The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy, Ross, a professor of history at University of Southern California, tracks the continuous, noxious activity of hate groups in the United States from the end of World War II to the present day — and the brave and secretive men and women who sought to thwart them.
The book reads like a great suspense novel, except, unfortunately, it’s nonfiction. And its conclusion — spoiler alert — is that the threat is only growing more dangerous.
Uncannily, in his research, Ross found that Jewish leaders predicted as much — in 1945.
Even before the Allies declared victory in Europe, leaders of the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Nazi League, who had launched undercover operations to infiltrate and disrupt hate groups, had come to a disturbing conclusion. They could defeat any hate group, even the Ku Klux Klan, unless the disparate groups could one day “communicate on an instantaneous basis,” and unless the far right figured out a way to make it into one of the two mainstream political parties.
“Here we are,” Ross said. “Everything has come true.” Social media has enabled hate groups to communicate and organize at scale, and President Donald Trump’s pardon of the Jan. 6 rioters — direct ideological descendants of the postwar far right, Ross says — was but one example of the Republican flirtation with extremist and violent groups.
Descendants of the ‘Betrayed Generation’
In the early 1940s, Jewish leaders also predicted that when the war ended, antisemitism and racism would increase — despite Americans having just fought a savage battle against prejudice and fascism.
The Greatest Generation also birthed what Ross calls “the Betrayed Generation,” men and women who returned to a changed America in which liberals, Blacks and Jews were mobilizing and upwardly mobile.
“The Founding Fathers, they insisted, had created a nation based on white Christian rule and they would not allow traitors or people of color to change that,” Ross writes.
Groups like the American Nazi Party, the Columbians and the National States Rights Party warned that Jews were behind “race suicide,” plotting to replace white people with non-white immigrants. They accused Jews of being secret Communists and undermining the cause of “America First.”
“I will solve the Jewish problem once and for all,” James Madole, founder of the fascist National Renaissance Party, told a boisterous rally in Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood in February 1953. “I will finish the job that Hitler started.”
During this period, there were an estimated 3,114 right-wing organizations and periodicals that reached a combined membership of over 10 million Americans, says Ross.
The groups carried out a series of bombings against synagogues and Black churches that were, Ross writes, “unrelenting, unpredictable, and unnerving.”
How to fight back
J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which should have been tracking these groups, was far more concerned with persecuting potential communists. So the ADL, AJC and the ANL fielded undercover agents to infiltrate and disrupt these groups, often at the risk of their lives.
One of them, a 19-year-old Columbia University student named William Goring, rose to the head of the National Renaissance Party’s leadership. In a memo to his handlers, Goring described the far-right members he encountered as “the failures, the lonely,” who feel “abandoned by their government and gain a strong internal feeling of camaraderie” from the far-right parties.
“To ease their lack of self-respect they make up excuses and find scapegoats. Some fix upon the Jews, others on the Blacks,” Goring wrote.
By the 1970s, this spy network as well as internal strife had weakened these hate groups, their memberships dwindling to hundreds.
Jewish groups “thought they had won the battle against hate,” wrote Ross, and turned their attention to the causes of civil rights and Israel.
But the ideology and organizations festered and regrouped, manifesting in the anti-government militia movement, the white supremacist march in Charlottesville and the Jan. 6 riots. Between 2008 and 2016, the number of militia and anti-government groups rose to 1,400.
Media personalities with millions of followers, like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, push warnings against shadowy Jewish influence and the “great replacement theory,” the new term for “race suicide.”
The bombings that wracked Jewish communities in the postwar period have declined, Ross acknowledged. What’s replaced them is a constant stream of hate pushed into people’s social media feeds. Social media has made it harder to infiltrate and disrupt hate networks, while making it easier to constantly find new recruits.
“You don’t have to bodily harm someone,” he said. “Creating a life where they’re afraid, whether it’s Muslim, Jew, immigrant — that’s terrorism, that’s domestic terrorism.”
Meanwhile, Trump and others in his administration openly engage with Holocaust deniers and antisemites. In Florida’s Republican primary races earlier this month, two candidates, Dan Bilzerian and Jake Lang, spouted raw antisemitism. Bilzerian, who lost to a Jewish congressman, had asked his 30 million online followers if Hitler “was a good person.”
Ross, whose father survived the Warsaw Ghetto and Dachau and whose mother survived Auschwitz, said he believes the answer is better education, but that’s “long term.”
I asked him what the short-term solution is.
“Take two people to the polls,” he said. “Get two people in their young 20s who aren’t used to voting, and get them out to the polls. That will change things right now.”
Bilzerian lost badly, but he’s not going away, and neither is the ability to infect minds and harvest hate. The question isn’t whether the far right is more dangerous — Ross has answered that. It’s whether we’re paying attention.
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