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My religion was ‘None of the above,’ until Oct. 7 and now Bondi
Judaism is on fire — or really, being Jewish is on fire. The mass murder of Jews on Bondi Beach during a Hanukah celebration was only the most recent example. But the reaction that surprised me the most was how unsurprised I was watching the news reports on Sunday morning. Like too many, I have become anesthetized to mass shootings in general and those targeted toward Jews in particular.
Antisemitism is raging across the world like a global pandemic, except the contagion this time is not a virus, it’s hate — and the fire is burning out of control. It shows up on our news platforms, our social media feeds, even, perhaps especially, in the polite company of dinner parties and faculty lounges. Jewish worshippers shot in a Manchester synagogue, an Israeli tourist viciously beaten on a busy Manhattan street while onlookers casually walked by, two Israeli embassy staff members murdered outside the Capital Jewish Museum in D.C. are just a few recent examples.
Space doesn’t allow a full accounting of all the Jewish hate crimes in the last few years. But this much is true: Jewish hate is old, truly biblical, but it’s become increasingly hot in the aftermath of the war in Gaza that, parenthetically, was initiated by a heinous attack against the Jewish people. Though obvious, sometimes, especially as it relates to this conflict, the obvious needs restating. And now, for reasons that are beyond baffling, who started the war seems beside the point.
Until recently, I could feel removed from this global phenomenon, given the ambiguity of my own religious identity. Despite my last name and appearance, for most of my life, I didn’t identify as Jewish. Instead, I was the confused product of a Baptist mother from Selma, Alabama and a Jewish father who escaped Nazi Germany just in time. Both my parents turned away from their religions, my mother because of the silence of churches in the South in the face of racial injustice and my father as protection against Jewish persecution that didn’t end when World War II did.
Growing up, my religious identity was None of the Above, a designation that made me feel as though I was aimlessly wandering around a non-denominational desert.
As I grew older, the subject of my religious identity made me immediately uncomfortable, whether as a topic of conversation at a dinner party or as a simple question on a form. At times it elicited a visceral response — flushing, a bit of nausea, a bead of sweat on my back — not just because I didn’t have a ready answer, but because it made me feel disconnected from the rest of society. I would have rather been asked anything else: Who did you vote for or How much money do you make?
The question What religion are you? felt like an interrogation, a bright light shone in my face. While most people could respond to the question with a one-word answer, that was never going to be an option for me. And that made me feel like an outsider, a person that could not fit neatly into a religious box, akin to the children in military families who stumble when asked, Where did you grow up?
Everywhere, nowhere.
Because not having a religion to call my own never sat well with me, I went on a decade-long journey, one that went here and there, ending only when I spent the time to, once and for all, put the matter to bed. After thousands of hours of research, discussion, and a significant amount of rumination, I’ve decided to embrace my Judaism, to run into the burning building, as it were, when the convenient choice would have been to run away from it, an easy choice for someone that had spent his whole life undifferentiated when it came to religion.
Which brings me to today, to where I am now, to where we all are now.
Oct. 7 happened to occur in the midst of my grappling with my own religious identity. But even if that was still a bit murky then, I felt rage nonetheless when anti-Israel protests ignited in many Middle Eastern and Western capitals, all before one IDF plane was in the air. As I watched these images from the comfort of my living room, I thought of my father and his family, the knocks on the door in the middle of the night, the trains, and yes, the burning furnaces. As ever, societal opinions that surround Israel and Jewishness today have become conflated, manifesting as antisemitism when it might simply have been disagreement with the Israeli prosecution of the war in Gaza.
This country finds itself in a rare situation where extremists on the Right and the Left have merged into an unholy antisemitic coalition, exemplified by Progressives yelling and screaming about “genocide” without having a clue what that word really means and voting overwhelmingly to elect a New York City Mayor who refuses to walk back his call to “globalize the intifada.”
Meanwhile on the Right, Tucker Carlson, who has a podcast that goes out to 16.7 million followers on X, recently gave Nick Fuentes two hours to spew antisemitic rhetoric, including his comments that with regard to his enemies in the conservative movement, “I see Jewishness as the common denominator,” and that Jews are a “stateless people,” certainly true if Fuentes had his way.
Not to be left out, Carlson helpfully added that the United States gets nothing out of the relationship with Israel. Given that Israel is the only functioning democracy in the Middle East, a part of the world not known for stability, I would argue that support of Israel is not just in the interest of the “Jews” (the monolith that Carlson and his ilk view them/us) but rather in America’s interest. Carlson obviously sees the geopolitics differently, arguing recently that Israel was not “strategically important” to the United States and, in fact, a “strategic liability.” For his part, President Trump defended Carlson, saying, “You can’t tell him who to interview,” without commenting directly on what was actually said in the interview.
For a confused maybe/maybe not a Jew like me, Oct. 7 provided an impetus to reassess my faith. So I did. But after hundreds of hours of research and thousands of miles of travel, I realized my Judaism didn’t start on Oct. 8, 2023 — it began in 1320 when the progenitor of my family, Juda Weill, was born. Juda was then followed by generations of Jewish family members, mostly rabbis and including the famous composer Kurt Weill, until the German Weills were either murdered by the Nazis, or for the lucky ones, dispersed all over the world. My grandfather, fresh off the horrors of Buchenwald, made it to America with my father, grandmother, and uncle.
Then — at nearly age 60! — I learned that my mother converted to Judaism, and the path toward my own Judaism was set, when all that was left was to walk along it and pick up the breadcrumbs along the way.
What did I find at the end of that road?
A burning building. And what did I do as I looked at that place on fire, whether in Australia, Europe, or on the streets of American cities?
I ran in, because that’s what we all must do, Jews, Christians, Muslims, and everyone else of any religious identity.
If any of us wonder what we would have done, Jews or Gentiles, during the early days of the Nazi regime, we are doing it now.
The post My religion was ‘None of the above,’ until Oct. 7 and now Bondi appeared first on The Forward.
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With the last hostage released, is American Jewish unity over?
When the remains of the last Israeli hostage in Gaza returned to Israel this week, Scott Spindel, a lawyer in Encino, Calif., finally took off the thick steel dog tag he had put on after the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023.
His friend Lauren Krieger, an orthopedic surgeon, did the same. And he pulled down the last of the names of the hostages remaining in Gaza that his wife, Jenn Roth Krieger, had placed in the window of their Santa Monica home.
During the nearly 28 months that Israeli hostages remained in captivity in Gaza, Krieger, 61, and Spindel, 55, consistently argued over Israel’s war in the strip.
“Lauren would say that we probably were a little too extreme,” Spindel, whose daughter serves in the IDF, told me in a telephone interview. “I don’t think we blew up enough buildings.”
But those differences paled beside their mutual concern over the fate of the hostages.
“Unfortunately,” said Spindel, “it took tragedy to pull us together.”
So it was across the American Jewish landscape. Then, the body of Staff Sergeant Ran Gvili, the 24-year-old Israeli police officer killed on Oct. 7 and taken by Hamas terrorists back into the enclave, was returned to Israel — the last of the hostages to come home.
Jews from across the political spectrum unpinned yellow ribbon buttons from their lapels, removed the hostage posters from their synagogues, and folded up and put away the blue-and-white flags displayed as a symbol of the missing Israelis.
The marches and vigils American Jews held on behalf of the hostages — small but meaningful echoes of the mass rallies that roiled Israel — came to a quiet halt.
Jewish unity is forged in adversity. Without it, we are apt to find enemies among ourselves. And as painful as the hostage saga was, it unified an otherwise fractious American Jewish community in a time of crisis.
Without that common concern, are even deeper rifts our future?
“As committed and connected as we were,” said Spindel, “it doesn’t change the fact that we also were still divided about solutions.”
A family in distress
Across the United States, synagogues of all religious and political bents regularly joined in the same Acheinu prayer for the release and return of the hostages.
“Our family, the whole house of Israel, who are in distress,” the prayer begins — a wholly accurate summation of the totality of Jewish concern.
Surveys showed that the hostages unified American Jews even when Israel’s Gaza campaign divided them. An October 2025 Washington Post poll found that a plurality of American Jews disapproved of Israel’s military actions in Gaza — but a whopping 79% said they were “very concerned” about the hostages.
There have been other moments in recent Jewish history when calamity created unity. The 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, for instance, brought together the vast majority of American Jews in mourning, even those who opposed his policies.
And, of course the brutal Oct. 7 attack, which claimed almost 1,200 lives, created a near-universal sense of shock and sorrow.
But the hostage crisis may have had an even deeper emotional — and perhaps political — impact.
“Even for people who were not affiliated Jewishly, those hostages struck a deep, deep chord,” Krieger told me. “It felt personal. I don’t think we’ve had that level of collective trauma in our lifetimes in that same way.”
And a family divided
The hostage crisis bonded American Jews to one another, and to their Israeli counterparts, at a time when enormous political rifts were opening within their communities.
In the U.S., as in Israel, there were sharp disagreements over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct of the war and whether he was even prioritizing the hostages’ safety.
And the encampments and protests against the war at college campuses — in which many Jewish students participated, and to which many others objected — created even deeper divisions over support for the Jewish state.
But if the hostage issue didn’t erase such differences, it muted them. Krieger and Spindel could frustrate each other in conversations about the conduct of the war, or American support for it. But in the end, they were both in that 79% that the Washington Post poll identified.
What will hold them — and the rest of us — together, now?
The hostage crisis provided something history unfortunately bestows upon Jews with regularity: an external enemy that transcended ideological differences. With it gone, American Jews return to what they’ve always been — a community bound by tradition, and riven by politics.
Krieger and Spindel have already resumed their arguments. But even though the dog tags are gone, they’re both still wearing Jewish stars on silver chains around their necks. When someone admires Krieger’s, he takes it off and gives it to them. He buys his metal stars in bulk on Amazon, and has given away dozens since Oct. 7.
“I want people to feel like I do,” he said, “like we’re a peoplehood worth cherishing.”
Worth cherishing — even though we can’t agree on much else.
The post With the last hostage released, is American Jewish unity over? appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran President Says Trump, Netanyahu, Europe Stirred Tensions in Protests
Amnesty International Greek activists and Iranians living in Athens hold candles and placards in front of the Greek Parliament to support the people of Iran, in Athens, Greece, January 30, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Louisa Gouliamaki TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said on Saturday that US, Israeli and European leaders had exploited Iran’s economic problems, incited unrest and provided people with the means to “tear the nation apart” in recent protests.
The two-week long nationwide protests, which began in late December over an economic crisis marked by soaring inflation and rising living costs, have abated after a bloody crackdown by the clerical authorities that US-based rights group HRANA says has killed at least 6,563, including 6,170 protesters and 214 security forces.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi told CNN Turk that 3,100, including 2,000 security forces, had been killed.
The US, Israeli and European leaders tried to “provoke, create division, and supplied resources, drawing some innocent people into this movement,” Pezeshkian said in a live state TV broadcast.
US President Donald Trump has repeatedly voiced support for the demonstrators, saying the US was prepared to take action if Iran continued to kill protesters. US officials said on Friday that Trump was reviewing his options but had not decided whether to strike Iran.
Israel’s Ynet news website said on Friday that a US Navy destroyer had docked at the Israeli port of Eilat.
Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Europeans “rode on our problems, provoked, and were seeking — and still seek — to fragment society,” said Pezeshkian.
“They brought them into the streets and wanted, as they said, to tear this country apart, to sow conflict and hatred among the people and create division,” Pezeshkian said.
“Everyone knows that the issue was not just a social protest,” he added.
Regional allies including Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia have been engaging in diplomatic efforts to prevent a military confrontation between Washington and Tehran.
The US is demanding that Iran curb its missile program if the two nations are to instead resume talks, but Iran has rejected that demand.
Foreign Minister Araqchi said in Turkey on Tuesday that missiles would never be the subject of any negotiations.
In response to US threats of military action, Araqchi said Tehran was ready for either negotiations or warfare, and also ready to engage with regional countries to promote stability and peace.
“Regime change is a complete fantasy. Some have fallen for this illusion,” Araqchi told CNN Turk. “Our system is so deeply rooted and so firmly established that the comings and goings of individuals make no difference.”
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CBS News Chief Weiss Touts Commentator Push, Draws Mixed Reaction in Newsroom
FILE PHOTO: Bari Weiss speaks at the 2022 Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, U.S., May 3, 2022. REUTERS/Mike Blake/File Photo
Three months into her tenure, CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss presented a vision this week to revitalize the nearly century-old broadcaster, in part by applying the same formula that fueled the rise of The Free Press – recruiting commentators who offer observations about news, politics and culture.
From adding 19 new commentators, including some drawn from The Free Press ranks, to introducing new podcasts, newsletters and live events, employees were variously energized or skeptical of the ideas presented by CBS’ new boss. Weiss’ notions about how to thrive in a post-Walter Cronkite era struck some as in conflict with the stated mission of doing great journalism, according to seven current and former CBS News employees and industry insiders.
In her presentation, Weiss also envisioned a galaxy of cross-platform stars, like New York Times columnist and CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin, whom she highlighted with a meme: “Sorkining.” The Dealbook founder is the author of several business books, executive producer of the Showtime series “Billions,” and maestro of the New York Times premiere live event, and a Davos fixture.
“It’s like saying ‘Hey, Hollywood. Why can’t you just be like Leonardo DiCaprio?’ If people knew how to bottle that magic and make someone a star, they would do it,” said a former CBS employee.
An industry veteran said the idea suggested a lack of appreciation for the power of television, which has been making stars for generations: among them “CBS Evening News” anchors Dan Rather, Connie Chung, Walter Cronkite and Katie Couric.
The 41-year-old Weiss, who has no broadcast experience and has been described as a distant leader by six current and former CBS News sources, now has to deliver on her promise of capturing new and younger viewers – including political independents who don’t see themselves reflected in mainstream media. It is a daunting undertaking that has hobbled executives across broadcast and cable, including former CNN chief Chris Licht, ousted in June 2023.
One supporter sees the charismatic Weiss as a modern-day Katharine Graham, the legendary publisher of the Washington Post, who was undermined by underlings when she took over in 1963. Graham transformed the paper and led it through its Watergate-era heyday, and generally left editorial decisions to Executive Editor Ben Bradlee.
A current staffer, speaking on background, said, “People are saying, ‘Let’s give her a chance’ … I want to see her succeed. If she succeeds, we all succeed.”
CBS News and Weiss did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
PRIORITIES FOR CBS NEWS
Weiss, a former opinion journalist and media entrepreneur, joined CBS after parent Paramount owner David Ellison bought her five-year-old media company, The Free Press, for $150 million in October.
Some see Weiss’ playbook of expanding CBS’s journalism ranks with commentators as conflicting with other initiatives including breaking news and landing deep investigative stories, according to three current and former CBS News staffers and an industry veteran.
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” said the former employee. “But is that what a news division is or are they craving something completely different? That’s fine but don’t pretend it’s a news division.”
Another current CBS News staffer talked about past failures to capitalize on new ways of reaching the audience, such as leveraging the power of the Paramount+ streaming service to promote news shows, observing, “We have done a wretched job of being on the internet.”
Weiss is also attempting to change the news network’s political orientation, appealing to a wider cross-section of Americans, according to her remarks Tuesday. Weiss said she wants CBS News to reflect the friction animating the national conversation.
In broadening its perspective to include more diverse viewpoints, CBS News could ultimately lay claim to the uncharted ground for a center-right broadcaster, said Integrated Media Chief Executive Jonathan Miller, a veteran media executive who has held senior positions at News Corp and AOL.
“We need to commission and greenlight stories that will surprise and provoke – including inside our own newsroom,” Weiss said in her address to employees. “We also have to widen the aperture of the stories we tell.”
On that front, CBS has had mixed results so far. Earlier this month, “CBS Evening News” broadcast a widely panned segment featuring U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in various meme-like situations, saluting him as “the ultimate Florida man.”
EARLY SUCCESSES
It has also seen successes, including Lesley Stahl’s interview with Trump son-in-law and Middle East advisor Jared Kushner and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, within a week of brokering a peace deal between Israel and Hamas, and Norah O’Donnell’s “60 Minutes” interview with Trump. Paramount paid Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit over its editing of an interview with his White House rival, former Vice President Kamala Harris.
It landed journalistic scoops, including interviewing the man who charged one of two gunmen who attacked a Jewish community gathering in Sydney, and exclusive video of Alex Pretti, the man killed by Border Patrol in Minneapolis, reading a tribute to a veteran who died in 2024.
Weiss announced that the network would bring in contributors with expertise in politics, health, happiness, food and culture, whom she encouraged staffers to use on-air. The roster includes Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson of the conservative Hoover Institution, as well as Casey Lewis, a former Teen Vogue and MTV editor who writes about youth culture.
“It’s great to have younger people, a diverse demographic and diverse ideology represented,” said Kathy Kiely, the chair in Free-Press Studies at the Missouri School of Journalism. “Newsrooms can’t do a good job unless we have that diversity in our ranks. What worries me is the emphasis on opinion over primary-sourced, reported facts.”
Weiss emphasized making content available online before it airs on TV to reach more viewers. CBS has long been in third place behind rivals ABC and NBC and, like most mainstream media, is struggling with audience declines as consumers migrate to social platforms.
Pew Research estimates about one-third of all adults get at least some news from podcasts. CBS News does not appear among Spotify’s or Apple’s rankings of the top 50 news podcasts.
One former employee expects the digital-first goal to be complicated because CBS hasn’t devoted sufficient resources to helping correspondents or anchors curate their social media presence or re-edit television interviews for YouTube or streaming.
Weiss encouraged staffers to think of the news organization as the best-capitalized media startup in the world.
“We are in a position, with the support of all of the leadership of this company, to really make the change we need.”