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‘Swastika boards’ and ‘surf Nazis’: New documentary explores surfing’s history of antisemitism
(JTA) — When he was 13 years old, Josh Greene moved with his family to San Clemente, California, a city known as one of the best spots for surfing on the West Coast. Greene quickly fell in love with the sport, even holding his bar mitzvah party at a local museum dedicated to it.
As a “skinny, very unathletic” teen, Greene said he endured a significant amount of bullying, including some that “extended itself into antisemitism.” Students at his school would compare his physique to that of a Holocaust survivor.
Surfing provided refuge.
“Surfing was my way to really carve my own niche and find the confidence, courage and physical strength I needed,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
But years after his bar mitzvah, Greene learned that his parents had arranged for the Surfing Heritage and Culture Center to remove swastika-engraved boards that were on display, to avoid disturbing the partygoers. Wanting to learn more, he discovered that the sport’s history is full of Nazi imagery: Particularly in the 1960s, seeing surfboards with swastikas or surfers giving “Sieg heil” salutes was commonplace. Serious surfers called themselves “surf Nazis” as a way to signal their intense dedication to the sport.
An aspiring filmmaker — he received his first “real camera” as his bar mitzvah present — Greene decided to combine his two passions and delve into the dark history.
The result, completed before he graduated from the University of Southern California in May 2022, is a documentary called “Waves Apart,” which chronicles the history of antisemitism in surfing. Directed by Greene, the student-produced film was a finalist in the fall for a Student Academy Award, given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
“Waves Apart” made its global debut at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival on Thursday, before heading to other Jewish and documentary film festivals in California, Denver, Toronto and Maryland.
After chronicling his own journey with surfing and the bar mitzvah incident in the film, Greene interviews surf writer Dan Duane and Jewish history professor Steven Ross, who provide a fuller picture of Southern California’s history of both surfing and Nazism, and their unfortunate overlap. As Duane wrote in a 2019 New York Times article, that overlap runs deep — The first commercially made surfboards made in California are thought to be the “Swastika model,” sold in the 1930s by the Pacific Systems Homes company, which also made prefab houses. The 1960s surfer icon Miki Dora was known to have painted a swastika on at least one of his boards.
Duane cites arguments that claim early surfers, who wanted to be seen as a rebellious subculture, used the swastika only to irk members of mainstream society. But Duane argues back that their antisemitism was part of a clear culture of racism in the largely white surfer community.
“I’ve heard all the predictable excuses for this stuff, like that the swastika was an ancient Sanskrit symbol,” he wrote in The Times. “Putting a swastika on something to anger people means you know that it angers them and very likely why.”
In his movie, Greene also speaks with Jewish surfers, both his classmates at USC and Jewish surfing legends like Shaun Tomson and Israel “Izzy” Paskowitz. Paskowitz shares a story of encountering a surfer with a swastika spray-painted on his surfboard — which his father, the famous surfer Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz, destroyed out of anger.
“Right as I was about to graduate, we had the first screening of our film, in our school’s theater,” Greene said. “We drew a packed crowd, and it was so rewarding and such a great sign of confirmation about the film’s message and connectivity with our audience. We saw people crying, people smiling at the end, with the way our film ends with a hopeful tone and message for the future.”
That hopeful message is where Tomson comes in. A former pro surfer and now a motivational speaker, Tomson reached the pinnacle of the sport by winning the 1977 World Surf League championship. He won 19 major professional surfing events in total and is a member of both the Southern California and International Jewish Sports Halls of Fame.
Shaun Tomson is a former world champion surfer. (Courtesy of Tomson)
Tomson, born in Durban, South Africa, also had a surfing experience tied to his bar mitzvah that would prove foundational. Tomson’s father took him on a surfing trip to Hawaii, which Tomson called “the Mount Everest of surfing.”
“For me, it was a total representation of what a bar mitzvah is — it’s coming into manhood,” Tomson told JTA. “And here I was, a young boy paddling out in a 25-foot surf in Hawaii, which was a moment for me that changed my life. I came back to South Africa, and my career and my role in surfing changed after that bar mitzvah present.”
Tomson said he has faced antisemitism before outside of the sport — he was called a “Jew boy” by a fellow member of South Africa’s army as a teenager — but never as a member of the surfing community in the 1970s onward.
“While it’s not an excuse, I think there’s just a lot of ignorance,” Tomson said. “When I say ignorance, perhaps it wasn’t actually directed at Jews, it was more just blatant stupidity, and a lack of awareness of what actually happened in the Holocaust.”
There weren’t many Jewish surfers in South Africa when Tomson grew up, but he said he feels a direct link between his identities as a Jew and as a surfer.
“When you’re out in the ocean, there’s certainly a spiritual and a religious connectivity there, which is totally aligned with Jewish values,” he said.
No experience exemplifies this connection more powerfully than the tragic death of Tomson’s son, Matthew, who died in 2006 at the age of 15 as a result of a schoolyard “choking game” gone wrong. Tomson tells the story in the documentary.
Tomson explained that his particular expertise is tube riding — the picturesque but challenging technique of riding inside a tunnel-like wave. Two hours before Tomson’s son died, he called his father to share an essay he had written about how in tube riding, “the light shines ahead.” Just hours later, Tomson received the devastating news.
“So when I was trying to make sense of the world and my life, and why God had done this to me, I went back to my old shul,” Tomson said. “The old shul where I’d had my bar mitzvah. And I look at that lamp of everlasting light that represents the hope and faith of Judaism. And I thought of the words that my son wrote, ‘the light shines ahead.’ And I realized that Judaism’s about hope.”
The film ends on that hopeful tone: The last scene features a group of Jewish surfers at a beach in Malibu, reciting the Shema prayer in the water, before hitting the waves as the sun begins to set. In the last shot, the group sits down to a Shabbat meal on the beach.
“Surfing can be seen as a microcosm for issues like that and I think we would be doing our sport a great disservice if we ignored our own signs of darkness,” Greene said. “I think that by making a film like this, we can dispel ignorance and divisiveness, and instead promote inclusivity, community and equality for all surfers and all people.”
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‘A Bushy Beard and Easy Smile’: Western Media’s Grotesque Framing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s Death
A woman holds a poster with the picture of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as people gather after Khamenei was killed in Israeli and U.S. strikes on Saturday, in Tehran, Iran, March 1, 2026. Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was only the second Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran. He assumed power in 1989 following the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and ruled for decades as the ultimate authority over a regime defined by repression, regional destabilization, and violent ideological extremism.
His tenure was marked by:
- The systematic crushing of political dissent
- The imprisonment, torture, and execution of dissidents
- The violent suppression of nationwide protest movements
- The arming and financing of proxy militias across the Middle East
- The institutionalization of chants of “Death to America” and repeated threats to destroy Israel
Under his leadership, Iran’s security forces opened fire on protesters during successive waves of unrest in 2009, 2019, and during the nationwide demonstrations that followed the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022. In January of this year, fresh nationwide protests were again met with force.
Independent analysts estimate that at least 30,000 people were killed in the crackdown, a figure the regime has never credibly refuted. Across these cycles of repression, human rights organizations have documented thousands more deaths and tens of thousands detained.
Yet when Iranian state media confirmed Khamenei’s death nearly 24 hours after US and Israeli airstrikes struck his compound in Tehran, segments of Western media coverage adopted a tone that bordered on reverential.
The most notable example appeared in The Washington Post, which described Khamenei as known for his “bushy white beard and easy smile,” noting that he cut a “more avuncular figure in public” than his predecessor. The obituary highlighted his fondness for Persian poetry and classic Western novels, including Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.
The New York Times summarized him as a “hardline cleric” who had made “Iran a regional power” while maintaining hostility toward the United States and Israel.
Sky News labeled him the “arch foe” of President Donald Trump, framing the moment as a personal rivalry.
The Wall Street Journal observed that he “nurtured the country’s global ambitions but struggled at home with a withering economy.” Reuters referred to his “fiery ambitions” toward Israel and the United States. The BBC aired images of mourners drawn from regime-controlled broadcasts with little scrutiny of their staging.
Across outlets, the pattern was consistent.
The man who presided over decades of repression was reframed through aesthetic detail and political positioning. His beard. His smile. His literary tastes. His “ambitions.”
His victims were secondary.
This is not about demanding polemics from obituary writers. It is about proportion.
When authoritarian rulers die, the moral weight of their record should not be softened by lifestyle detail or neutralized by euphemism. Calling a regime ideologue a “hardliner” obscures the reality that he headed a theocratic state apparatus that jailed journalists, executed political prisoners, funded Hezbollah and Hamas, and ordered violent crackdowns against his own people.
Headlines shape historical memory. The first paragraph matters more than the 12th. In death, reputations are distilled and authoritarian rulers should not be granted the luxury of dilution.
So while newspapers fawned over what they chose to highlight, from his wry smile to his love of literature and carefully cultivated image, the rest of us should remember him for what he was: a brutal dictator who deserved the fiery end he met.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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Hezbollah Opens a Second Front and Israel Gets the Blame
Smoke billows after an Israeli strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs, following an escalation between Hezbollah and Israel amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, Lebanon, March 2, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir
While the question of whether or when war between Israel and Iran would break out, so too was the question of whether Iran’s proxy Hezbollah would join the fight and act as a layer of protection for the Iranian regime.
Since Hezbollah and Israel agreed to a ceasefire in November 2024, the terrorist organization has worked to rebuild its infrastructure and regain its status as Iran’s strongest terrorist proxy in the Middle East. In doing so, it has consistently and relentlessly broken the ceasefire, committing at least 1,925 violations up to near the end of 2025.
The threat posed by Hezbollah has been greatly diminished after the year-long war, as Israel destroyed much of its infrastructure and forces, thus stripping the terrorist organization of its ability to conduct large-scale operations it was once capable of. But the danger persists.
Hezbollah still maintains considerable political influence inside Lebanon, which results in direct leverage over policies and daily life in Lebanese society. It has effectively been recognized as a state within a state, threatening the very existence of the Lebanese state itself. For this reason, Lebanon has failed to fully disarm Hezbollah, despite the Lebanese Army’s claim that the first stage in the process was completed.
Since its inception, Iran has funded Hezbollah, making the organization the most prominent proxy in Iran’s regional power structure. In fact, Hassan Nasrallah, the late leader who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in September 2024, had referred to himself as a “soldier” in the Iranian regime’s army. Thus, Israeli and US intentions to collapse the Iranian regime are a direct threat to the very foundation on which Hezbollah is built.
Despite repeated warnings by Israel not to join the fight (as well as the pleas from Lebanon’s fragile government), in the early hours of Monday morning, Hezbollah fired rockets towards Israel. This marked the first time since the full-scale war with Hezbollah that the terrorist organization fired rockets into Israeli territory.
Similar to Hezbollah’s reaction of launching what it called a “solidarity” front for Hamas following the attacks of October 7, 2023, Hezbollah claimed that the firing of rockets into Israel was “revenge for the blood of the Supreme Leader of the Muslims, Ali Khamenei,” who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on the first day of the war.
Despite even Hezbollah acknowledging it was the party to fire first, the narrative in the media reversed the order of events, referring to Israel’s “attack” on Lebanon as the cause for the widening conflict.
Yet the timeline of events remains abundantly clear: Hezbollah opened a second front in the war — breaking the ceasefire to do so — by firing at least six rockets and two drones.
Immediately after Hezbollah joined the war by attacking Israel, the IDF responded with a series of strikes on Hezbollah targets across Lebanon, including targeting senior leadership. While Israel has responded to previous ceasefire violations, the firing of rockets into Israeli territory crossed a clearly defined red line set by the IDF. As a result, Israel initiated direct kinetic action aimed at further degrading Hezbollah’s operational capabilities and deterring escalation.
Shifting the attention away from Hezbollah’s initiating actions and instead framing Israel’s response as the catalyst for escalation obscures the reality of the war Israel is now fighting on two fronts.
Although the dangers posed by the Iranian regime have been the primary target of the war, Israel’s commitment to deterring and removing the threat of any terrorist actor remains steadfast. When media coverage downplays Hezbollah’s responsibility, Israel’s defensive measures risk being perceived as unprovoked aggression. This reframing not only distorts the sequence of events but also seeks to undermine Israel’s ability to maintain deterrence.
In this war, accurate reporting of terrorist organizations and the sequence of events is not optional — it is essential to understanding the realities shaping the conflict and the decisions that follow.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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In Gaza, Palestinians and Hamas Now Face a Moment of Choosing
A Hamas Police officer directs traffic in Gaza City, Jan. 28, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
With Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei now dead, all eyes are naturally on what comes next for the Iranian people, as the Iranian regime veers between desperation and collapse.
The war in Iran is also stoking unease among the Islamic Republic’s proxies, as terror groups like Hamas figure out how to proceed without Iranian support.
Hamas still refuses to disarm — but its situation is growing more perilous.
Prior to Khamenei’s killing, Israel had already struck an unprecedented blow to Hamas’ military infrastructure. Now stripped of its sponsor, Hamas’s weakening posture should leave Palestinians questioning if Hamas really has their best interests at heart.
The strategic and economic opportunities for building a healthy society for its citizens have never been greater.
Less than two weeks before the US military and Israel Defense Forces (IDF) began striking Iran, US President Donald Trump convened the inaugural meeting of the Board of Peace, as member states from nearly 48 nations gathered to discuss the future of Gaza.
Chaired by President Trump, the newly established international body is tasked with overseeing Gaza’s reconstruction and transitional governance.
Trump announced at the summit that the United States would donate $10 billion to the Board, with other countries participating in the rehabilitation of the Gaza Strip contributing an additional $7 billion combined.
In an interview on Fox News’s My View with Lara Trump, Middle East Envoy Steve Witkoff reaffirmed the government’s commitment to “jump-starting” construction in Gaza and plans for a “renaissance” in the seaside area.
After launching the deadliest attack against Jews since the Holocaust, members of the international community are still willing to give Gazans a chance to forge a future rooted in prosperity and dignity.
By dispensing with failed frameworks and outdated Oslo-esque accords, the current US administration is not only creating the conditions for a freer Iran, but it is also unshackling Palestinians from Hamas rule and creating economic enticements to liberate Gazans from their terrorist trappings.
The responsibility now rests with Palestinians to embark on an earnest campaign of deradicalization and abandon their armed struggle against Israel.
It’s worth noting that, to date, much of the history of the region has been driven by an embrace of radicalism and violence.
Following Israel’s 2005 disengagement from Gaza and the eviction of 9,000 Israelis from their homes, billions of dollars in foreign financing flowed from international entities to the Gaza Strip.
The money meant to bolster the lives of Gazans was instead used to foment terror against Israelis.
The latest poll released by People’s Company for Polls and Survey Research (PCPSR) is similarly discouraging and illustrates that “support for Hamas’s decision to launch the [Oct. 7] offensive, while declining from its peak, remains a majority at more than 50 percent, with recent gains in Gaza and sustained high support in the West Bank.”
The goodwill shown to Palestinians by Israelis living in the Gaza envelope — which included numerous peace initiatives and work opportunities — was repaid in blood on October 7, as familiarity and friendship were used as fuel to achieve maniacal aims.
As Palestinians watch what is happening to Iran — a state that trafficked exclusively in terrorism — the Palestinians are now seeing they have their own choice — to choose peace over terrorism, encouraged by economic incentives by the US and the international community.
What happens to Palestinians in Gaza going forward largely depends on their motivation to confront and eliminate their fixation on eradicating Israel, and for their leaders to reorient their energies around building better lives for their citizens.
The Trump administration’s refreshing and untested approach to accelerate Gaza’s recovery is not packaged in empty two-state platitudes but rather wrapped in historic strategic changes and tangible economic benefits to Palestinian society.
Palestinians in Gaza now have the daunting duty of proving their readiness for reform.
For regional stability to be achieved, let’s hope that Palestinians in Gaza renounce their prior path of demonization and terror, and are indeed ready for rational governance that will ultimately yield long-term success for their people.
Irit Tratt is a writer residing in New York. Follow her on X @Irit_Tratt