(JTA) — A group of far-right influencers caught on tape singing along to the Ye song “Heil Hitler” has been split on how to respond to the allegations of antisemitism that have followed.

“Manosphere” brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate have distanced themselves from the footage, though not from the influencer who was filmed performing a Nazi salute.

Others have doubled down or flouted the criticism. Myron Gaines, who did the salute, posted a video in which he was dressed as an Orthodox Jewish man, wearing a tallit, fake beard and black hat, and dancing to a song with the lyrics, “Oy vey, the goyim know, time to shut down the entire show.”

The split responses come days after a video of the influencers alongside Sneako, Clavicular, Justin Waller and the avowed antisemite Nick Fuentes ignited controversy and recriminations in Miami. The group was on camera during an hourslong live stream that included multiple plays of Ye’s song — once during a drive to a Miami nightclub, and again inside the club.

In a podcast appearance on Tuesday, Andrew Tate absolved himself of blame, pointing out that he was not dancing or repeating any of the song’s lyrics, which include the phrase “Heil Hitler” repeated numerous times.

“I didn’t want to go to the club, I said I don’t want to go, I said this is bulls–t, they said it’s Nick [Fuentes’] first-ever time, and I truthfully believed I could get in and out of this dump in 15 minutes,” Tate said on the Patrick Bet-David Podcast on Tuesday. Bet-David, a prominent conservative media personality, has hosted figures like Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on his podcast.

“I’m sorry to anybody who was offended,” Tate added. About the allegations of antisemitism dogging him, he added, “If I had played the song myself, and danced around to it, sure. [But] I was in a car.”

Tate’s brother, Tristan, wrote on X that neither brother was involved in playing the song.

“Everybody on the bus saw @sneako take the phone from Justin wallers hand, turn off the country music and put on HH,” Tate wrote. “I normally wouldn’t ‘tell’ on him but it was LIVE streamed to 50,000 people in HD.”

The stream showed Waller handing off the phone to Sneako so he could add a song to the queue.

“I think you know what to play,” Gaines, smiling, said repeatedly.

Gaines, Sneako, Fuentes and Clavicular all sang along to the song, while Tristan Tate bobbed to the rhythm and Andrew was out of frame. Gaines, whose real name is Amrou Fudl and is Sudanese-American, did the Nazi salute multiple times.

“Jews mad! Jews mad!” he said.

The incident came amid rising concern on the right about antisemitic rhetoric and figures such as Fuentes, who has become more prominent since his interview with Tucker Carlson last year. The Tate brothers, meanwhile, have added considerable antisemitism and intensely anti-Israel content to their streaming content in the last few years; Mother Jones reported in 2024 that the Tates’ criticisms of Israel segued into “antisemitic claims clearly rooted in the blood libel.”

Andrew Tate acknowledged a rise in antisemitism online on Tuesday, which he said “must be scary” for Jews to encounter. He distanced himself from the Miami episode, saying that he had no say in the music being played — but he also denied that antisemitism was to blame for his fellow influencers’ actions.

“I don’t think that any of them are deeply antisemitic genuinely, and I don’t think that any of them really thought it through,” Tate said. “Honestly, I think they’re just kids. I think they’re just kids, it gets a reaction, they think they’re funny, they’re on the internet, they need a reaction, they want likes, and they did some f—ing dumb s—t.”

Adam Sosnick, a Jewish internet personality who is Bet-David’s co-host, pushed back against Tate’s framing, pointing out that Myron Gaines is nearly 40 years old. Tate’s comment mirrored J.D. Vance’s response to Hitler jokes and racist and homophobic slurs used in a Young Republican group chat; Vance had said the officials, who were reportedly between the ages of 24 and 34, were just “kids” doing “stupid things.”

“This,” Sosnick said, imitating the Nazi salute which Gaines did during the stream, “that ain’t no kid stuff.”

Tate replied that Gaines is a “great friend” of his, and that he has “a whole bunch of friends who do a whole bunch of s—t that perhaps I would not do myself, or I may not 100% agree with.”

Like Gaines, Braden Peters, who is known as Clavicular and sang along enthusiastically to the Ye song, doubled down over the weekend.

“I am not sorry. I don’t apologize for what I did,” he said. “I would do it again today.”

He added, “I would rather have free speech and the ability to make jokes and do content, a thousand times over, rather than being a little b—h who has to censor himself and do all that s—t.”

Sneako, whose real name is Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy, posted a video criticizing the Tate brothers for shifting blame to him, and denied that he was the one who played the song.

A sharp Israel critic, Sneako also criticized Tate for joining the PBD Podcast, which had previously hosted Netanyahu.

Fuentes, on the other hand, defended the Tate brothers on Tuesday, who he said are in a more delicate position because they are “quite literally under the gun in a few jurisdictions.”

Prosecutors have accused the Tate brothers of trafficking more than 30 women in Romania, where they’d been banned from leaving from 2022 until the ban was lifted in 2025, which was widely seen as reflecting the influence of the new Trump administration. They’re also facing criminal charges of rape and human trafficking in the United Kingdom, and have been under investigation by U.S. Homeland Security anti-trafficking agents since 2023, according to the New York Times.

“I do understand, not everybody is in the same place in their career,” Fuentes said. “He may not have the same license to say controversial things as everybody else.”

The post Andrew Tate insists he wasn’t really singing Ye’s ‘Heil Hitler.’ Others who were with him are doubling down. appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — The Hebrews’ flight from Egypt is on a lot of Jewish minds right now, as the annual cycle of Torah readings has reached the Book of Exodus.

But for many Jewish leaders in Minnesota, the ancient story has particular resonance.

With Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents descending on the Twin Cities in search of undocumented immigrants and stirring chaos and pushback, the story of Exodus — about a king who tries to thwart the growing number of “foreigners” in his midst, and the leader who seeks to protect them — is inspiring widespread anti-ICE actions.

“As we’re currently reading in the Torah, Moses confronts Pharoah knowing it won’t be easy, and feeling his own doubts about such an act,” Rabbi Aaron Weininger, who leads the Conservative Adath Jeshurun Congregation in the suburb of Minnetonka, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “And in doing so, the Israelites enslaved in Egypt are able to get unstuck. They’re able to taste freedom.”

Inspired by such teachings, and frequently invoked Jewish injunctions like “welcoming the stranger,” Jewish groups are signing on to open letters, and synagogues are actively involved in pro‑immigrant actions and advocacy. The Jewish presence at an interfaith anti-ICE rally this week is expected to be substantial.

“Our community members and staff live and work in every corner of society. There are too many stories of lives upended by what the government itself refers to as the ICE surge,” reads an open letter, issued Monday, spearheaded by the Jewish federation and signed by around two dozen Jewish groups.

Jewish groups “are deeply concerned by the current volatile situation throughout the Twin Cities and Minnesota,” according to the letter. Its signatories as of press time include 13 area congregations, ranging from Reform to Modern Orthodox; two Jewish day schools; Minnesota Hillel; the Minnesota JCC; the progressive group Jewish Community Action, and Jewish Family and Children’s Service of Minnesota.

ICE’s presence — which includes masked, heavily armed officers conducting aggressive traffic stops, neighborhood raids and street patrols — has led to a lack of caregivers tending to local Jewish seniors, according to the letter.

It follows an earlier open letter from 49 Minnesota Jewish clergy, distributed on Friday, that describes “grief” and “horror” over ICE “wreaking havoc across our state.”

Quoting Deuteronomy — “Love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” — the rabbis and cantors spotlight the “tragic death” of driver Renee Good at the hands of an ICE officer Jan. 7 and include a prayer to “spread a canopy of peace and protection over all those wrongfully targeted by ICE at this moment.”

Both of those letters precipitated what is turning into a larger institutional Jewish pushback to ICE. On Wednesday, leaders of the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements issued a joint statement to “condemn, in the strongest terms, the violence with which the Department of Homeland Security is enforcing American immigration law — above all, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as well as in cities and towns across the nation.”

“Our sages taught that the Book of Deuteronomy’s directive, ‘Justice, justice shall you pursue’ (16:20), implies that the law must be enforced through a fair process, and that one should pursue justice whether it would be to one’s advantage or to one’s loss,” the statement reads, with the Jewish leaders further calling on the Justice Department to investigate Good’s death.

Rabbi Jill Avrin, campus lead at the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas, said it was “unprecedented” for such a wide variety of local Jewish groups to sign onto such messages.

“We have a really diverse Jewish community here, and we felt that this is a moment that is impacting all of us,” Avrin, who helped draft the letters, told JTA.

The multiple open letters are trying to appeal to shared spiritual values as the standoffs between protesters and ICE agents become increasingly fraught. A number of prominent figures — most recently Bruce Springsteen — have compared ICE’s tactics to the Gestapo; at the same time, an anti-ICE protest that disrupted a church service over the weekend has prompted concern and controversy across the interfaith community and led at least one Republican to compare the protesters to Hamas.

Local Jewish leaders say they are not dissuaded from what they view as a Jewish imperative to respond.

“Judaism isn’t about skipping the hard parts,” Weininger said. “It’s about noticing the struggles for centuries that have led us to this point: slavery, persecution, destruction, exile, coming home.”

Rabbis have been active in local mobilizing against ICE. They attended a community vigil for Good; Weininger discussed the issue during his Shabbat sermon. He also helped draft the rabbinical open letter, and this week is one of around 80 to 90 rabbis — many others from out of town — planning to attend an interfaith march in Minneapolis with more than 600 clergy present. Around 50 of the rabbis expected to attend are part of T’ruah, a Jewish social justice network, which mobilized after local clergy put out the request.

“What’s scary is that lawful actions are being targeted,” Weininger said about the situation on the ground. “We’re talking about protest and prayer and taking action in community, and even those modes of engagement are under attack.”

Recalling how Minneapolis Jews similarly mobilized in 2020 to protest George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police, the rabbi described “a real sense of civil society here, and I think that is true of the Jewish clergy community in how people care for one another.”

Rabbis also spoke out at a Tuesday interfaith press conference denouncing ICE and outlining plans for this week’s march. “As people of faith, as leaders of faith communities, we are called to say, ‘Enough. Not on our watch,’” Rabbi Tamar Magill-Grimm, who leads the Conservative Beth Jacob Congregation in Mendota Heights, said while standing next to a local imam.

Some Jewish groups across the country have raised concern about ICE’s activities for months, with some synagogues posting signs identifying themselves as houses of worship that agents do not have authority to enter. Rabbis affiliated with T’ruah have participated in “ICE watch” actions in other cities.

But Minnesota’s Jews have now witnessed firsthand the effects of a sustained, targeted ICE presence on their community. Local synagogues have hosted “upstander” training seminars for congregants to learn how to react in the face of an ICE encounter. For many congregants, the experience has pushed them to action — but it’s also invoked an eerie sensation, bringing echoes of a dangerous past.

“As a Jewish parent in Minneapolis, history feels too close right now,” one Twin Cities resident told Daci Platt, a fellow Minnesotan who works at Kveller, a JTA sister publication. “The sense of safety we usually rely on feels shakier than it ever has.”

Jewish community organizations are particularly concerned about the threat the ICE raids, which have focused primarily on non-white Twin Cities residents, pose to a caregiving workforce largely composed of immigrants.

“Jewish seniors are not having their basic needs met because their caregivers are too afraid to come to work,” says the letter spearheaded by the federation.

Amy Weiss, CEO of Jewish Family and Children’s Service of Minnesota, told JTA that ICE has also affected her organization’s ability to serve its nonsectarian clients more generally. Much of their own staff are from immigrant communities, and Weiss worries about drawing attention to them by sending them out into the field to help clients.

“People are afraid to go to work. They’re afraid to leave their homes,” Weiss said. “I don’t see this as political. When you look at our mission, to support people in need, then this is very basic. These are the very basic needs of the community.”

The open letter also notes that there are Jews “who are immigrants themselves, have family members who are immigrants, or could be reasonably perceived to be immigrants. Many of these people are scared to leave their homes out of fear of being arrested and deported.”

The federation-backed letter is careful not to deride all law enforcement. It states, “We affirm our commitment to the rule of law, the lawful implementation of statutes, and the thousands of law enforcement officers charged with keeping us safe, whose efforts we deeply appreciate.”

Avrin, too, praised local law enforcement, whom she called “amazing” and “not the same thing as the ICE agents who are here on the ground.” She also noted that not all of the Jewish communal leaders shared the specific goals of this week’s march, which other Jewish leaders helped plan. The march’s demands include “ICE must leave Minnesota immediately” and “ICE should be investigated for human and Constitutional violations of Americans and our neighbors.”

“This moment is a moment that calls for coalition,” she said. “We are acknowledging and naming that we might be showing up with people whom we don’t actually agree with their broader platform.”

That discomfort has also arisen in some of the language of the opposition. As ICE protests in Minnesota attract growing national attention, comparisons to Nazis and the Gestapo have also grown. Avrin said the JCRC discourages such rhetoric

During a concert in New Jersey last weekend, Springsteen decried “heavily armed, masked federal troops invading an American city and using Gestapo tactics against our fellow citizens.” He then repeated a catchphrase popularized by Jacob Frey, Minneapolis’s Jewish mayor: “ICE should get the f–k out of Minneapolis.” (On Tuesday, Frey, along with other state officials, was subpoenaed by the Justice Department for alleged obstruction of immigration agents. Some of his critics have called attention to his Jewish identity.)

The faith-based protests suffered a distraction when anti-ICE protesters disrupted a St. Paul church service. The protesters, including Black Lives Matter Minnesota, claimed that one of its pastors also works as a local ICE field office leader. The Trump administration has announced an investigation into the protest, which officials said could amount to a violation of a federal law permitting free access to any worship site.

Following the protest, Cities Church in Minnesota issued a statement saying the protesters “accosted members of our congregation, frightened children, and created a scene marked by intimidation and threat. Such conduct is shameful, unlawful, and will not be tolerated.”

The statement added, “Invading a church service to disrupt the worship of Jesus — or any other act of worship — is protected by neither the Christian Scriptures nor the laws of this nation.” A founding pastor of the church has ties to Pete Hegseth, Trump’s defense secretary.

One Republican, Rep. Will Self of Texas, said the protesters — who had livestreamed themselves from inside the church — reminded him of Hamas livestreaming on Oct. 7.

“When you livestream something, you want it to cause terror in the population,” Self told the far-right TV network Newsmax. “So when they livestreamed it, I compare them to Hamas, who livestreamed the attack in Israel that killed thousands of people.”

American Jewish leaders, for whom the freedom of worship in America has long been a key policy plank, say they disagree such a protest in a house of worship. Rabbi Jill Jacobs, who heads T’ruah, told JTA her organization “would not organize a protest of a church.”

The local JCRC also criticized the church protest, which comes in the aftermath of recent pro-Hamas synagogue protests in New York that were widely condemned by Jewish and progressive leaders alike.

“That is something we are absolutely opposed to. We would never encourage people to disrupt a worship service. That is not aligned with our values in any way,” Avrin said. “In my opinion it doesn’t reflect the broader efforts that are happening on the ground. That’s going to happen any time you have a large movement.”

Jews in that movement are focusing on injunctions drawn from the Bible. Speaking at New Birth, a historically Black Baptist church in Georgia with links to the family of Martin Luther King Jr., Georgia Democrat Sen. Jon Ossoff, who is  Jewish, gave a biblically inflected anti-ICE message.

“How can it be that masked federal agents set up checkpoints in American cities, demand papers, rip Americans from their cars, and throw them to the ground? Kill? Kill? With apparent license from the very top,” Ossoff told the congregation. “There’s a wickedness to the program. I don’t know, Pastor, where it is in scripture that it says ‘deny care to the sick, take from those with the least to give to those with the most, violate the house of worship to hunt down the refugee.’ Where in the scripture are those lessons taught?”

Ossoff, who is defending his seat in a tight reelection campaign, added that he and the church’s pastor had been “texting” about the Exodus journey of Moses, and how he used his staff to rally  the Israelites.

In the face of the groundswell in Minnesota, President Donald Trump again forcefully rebuked the protesters and defended ICE.

“They’re apprehending murderers and drug dealers and a lot of bad people,” the president said of the agents during a press conference to mark one year of his second term.

Holding up images he said were of immigrant criminals apprehended by ICE, including one who he claimed was connected to Hezbollah, Trump asked the White House press pool, “Why don’t you talk about that more?… Do you want to live with these people?”

The president also referenced the church protest. “I have such respect for that pastor. He was so calm. He was so nice. He was just accosted,” Trump said of the clergyman whose sermon was interrupted. (He was not the pastor the protesters were targeting.) “What they did in that church was horrible.”

Trump, too, has been a mobilizing force for Jews in Minnesota. Following the president’s derogatory comments last month about the Somali population in the state — which Trump said justified the ICE raids — many local Jewish leaders had held coalition meetings with interfaith partners.

For some in the room at the time, Avrin recalled, it was the first time they had come face-to-face with these partners since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel and the start of the war in Gaza, which frayed many Jewish-liberal coalitions when other communal groups denounced Israel and “Zionists.”

Such partners had “stopped speaking to us, basically,” she said.

But for the Jewish leaders in the room, the Talmudic imperative to love the stranger overcame lingering uncertainty about reconfiguring these coalitions: “We can’t walk away from that just because we’ve been hurt,” she said.

The post Invoking Torah, Minnesota Jews mobilize against ICE operations appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — The organizers of a Martin Luther King Day event in San Diego have come under fire from local Jewish groups after a rabbi said he was disinvited from speaking at the event due to his “connection to Israel.”

Rabbi Hanan Leberman, the leader of the Conservative Tifereth Israel Synagogue in San Diego, had initially been slated to give the closing prayer at the city’s All Peoples Celebration, which was organized by a community group called Alliance San Diego.

“This year, for the 38th annual All Peoples Celebration, we invite you to Choose Courage; to decide, with intention, to do what is right even when the fear and opposition are loud,” a description of the event read. “Now more than ever, our voices must rise above hesitation. We must claim our dignity and echo the notion that any attack on one, is an attack on us all.”

But in a post on Facebook Sunday, Leberman said he was “deeply upset” to learn he had been disinvited from the ceremony, writing that the reason behind the decision was due to his “connection to Israel.”

Born in Chicago and raised in Philadelphia, Leberman moved to Israel at 20 and served for three years in the IDF’s undercover counterterrorism unit, often as its cantor. He was ordained as a rabbi in the Masorti movement in Israel and worked there before moving to San Diego in 2024.

“The decision to disinvite me is, in my view, a disservice to the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,” wrote Leberman. “I believe the organization would benefit from deeper education about what Zionism truly is and about what the Jewish community is facing today—from both the left and the right.”

Alliance San Diego appeared to dispute Leberman’s account in a post on Instagram Sunday. The group wrote in a statement that it had asked two speakers to give up their slots “in response to concerns about potential disruption related to Zionism and anti-Zionism” but said they had not been disinvited. The other speaker has not been publicly identified.

“Our intention was never to exclude Jewish faith leaders or Jewish voices from this space,” the statement said. “As an organization working across many communities under immense strain and confronting assaults on immigrant communities, including Jewish and Israeli immigrants at a time of rising anti-semitism and fear, we acknowledge that our decision contributed to that pain rather than alleviating it.”

The MLK Day event was sponsored by the San Diego PBS station, several local universities and the American Federation of Teachers, whose head Randi Weingarten has faced criticism from the right over her response to antisemitism and from the left over her support for Israel.

No Jewish clergy spoke at the event, now in its 38th year, according to the Times of San Diego.

The decision to disinvite Leberman was decried by nearly four dozen synagogues and Jewish groups in San Diego in a joint statement published Sunday.

“Calling this gathering the All Peoples Celebration is difficult to reconcile with the exclusion of a Jewish leader for holding beliefs that are held by a strong majority of the Jewish community globally and here in San Diego,” the groups wrote. “Many now see this decision as turning the event into an ‘All Peoples (except for Jews) Celebration.’ That outcome should give everyone involved pause.”

Over the summer, all of the participating Jewish organizations in San Diego’s annual Pride festival pulled out of the celebration over the inclusion of a performance by anti-Israel R&B artist Kehlani. At the time, the Jewish groups cited “serious safety concerns” as the reason behind their withdrawal.

The post San Diego Jewish groups decry disinvitation of rabbi from MLK Day event over ‘concerns about potential disruption related to Zionism’ appeared first on The Forward.