Uncategorized
The rabbinic backlash against Zohran Mamdani isn’t about Mamdani at all
The sheer number of letters by rabbis circulating about Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral campaign is “mind numbing,” a rabbi friend texted me earlier this week.
There’s the public letter decrying Mamdani, the Democratic candidate, sponsored by The Jewish Majority, which as of this writing has 1,138 signatures from rabbis, cantors and rabbinical students. But two or three other letters are also making their way through her circles. (One affirms a belief that Mamdani’s support for Palestinian rights comes from “deep moral convictions”; the others have not yet been made public.) “Make it stop,” she wrote.
The last two years have been unbelievably difficult for American Jews, and particularly so for rabbis. Rabbis have been tasked with counseling congregants deeply affected by the trauma caused by Oct. 7 and the rise in antisemitism, as well as the global outcry against Israel’s brutal bombardment of Gaza. Not to mention navigating efforts by certain political actors to weaponize Jewish pain in order to silence pro-Palestinian activists, remake higher education and accelerate an aggressive deportation agenda.
Now, the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas has created something of a vacuum, leaving rabbis to channel the complexity of the last two years into an unrelenting, disproportionate and often negative focus on Mamdani.
The old joke goes “two Jews, three opinions.” It’s rare to find Jewish consensus on where to get the best bagels, let alone a political issue. Yet rabbis from states as distant as Nevada, Illinois, Georgia, Indiana, New Mexico and Tennessee have signed the Jewish Majority letter, which calls out “rising anti-Zionism and its political normalization,” publicly affirming their opposition to a potential Mayor Mamdani. While the letter boasts 1,138 signatures, only around 100 of them actually live in New York City and would be directly affected by a Mamdani administration.
Isn’t it a bit strange that no cause has apparently rallied more American rabbis — not a devastating humanitarian crisis in Gaza; not an antisemitic AI chatbot developed by the richest man on Earth; not the Department of Homeland Security sharing antisemitic dogwhistles; not Immigrations and Customs Enforcement kidnapping people off the street — than opposition to a Muslim, Democratic socialist mayoral candidate who is not pro-Israel?
I find it hard to believe that New York City’s next mayor is truly the most vital issue facing American Jews outside this specific city. So why this level of focused condemnation?
I think there’s an answer in the striking timing of these letters. Mamdani won the Democratic primary overwhelmingly in June. Where were the letters then? If anything, his victory seems less assured than it did a month or two ago — recent polls suggest that former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, running as an Independent, has cut Mamdani’s lead in half following Mayor Eric Adams’ withdrawal from the race.
So what changed? With the ceasefire and the return of the last living hostages, I think that diaspora Jewry is suddenly unsure about our political role. Now that the living hostages — the one issue most of us agreed on in the last two years — are home safe, whom do we advocate for? What are we supposed to talk about now?
The flurry of these rabbinic anti-Mamdani letters less than a month before the mayoral election in November has been framed by some as an extraordinary expression of rabbinic unity in the face of a dangerous candidate. “Look at how many American rabbis have ever signed a letter,” one commenter on r/Jewish wrote on Reddit. “This is one of the largest rabbinic sign-on letters in history.”
But I worry this proliferation is a sign of insecurity in our community, not health.
In a time when it has felt so impossible to express nuance and to allow for a multiplicity of truths, Mamdani represents, for many, an easy opportunity to align against a figure whose position on Israel departs from the long-accepted political norm of vocal support.
A recent poll conducted by The Washington Post shows that nearly 40 percent of American Jews believe Israel has committed genocide. That number jumps to 50 percent between the ages of 18 and 34. Synagogue leaders, who are always trying to grow their community with new, younger members, must appease older, more pro-Israel congregants while remaining in touch with the changing views of the new generations — a balancing act that is increasingly untenable.
For a rabbi who is attempting to negotiate the tensions of differing political beliefs within their congregation, it is far easier to sign a letter than it is to reckon, both personally and communally, with the profound generational divide on Israel.
Mamdani’s campaign is not the only time that rabbinic leaders have spoken out since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023 — or this year. On Feb. 13, 350 American rabbis took out a full-page ad in The New York Times to oppose President Donald Trump’s plan to remove all Palestinians from Gaza. “Jewish people say NO to ethnic cleansing!” it read in bold letters. In July, 1,200 rabbis and Jewish leaders from around the world signed a letter urging Israel to open Gaza to humanitarian aid, followed by a letter in August from over 80 Orthodox rabbis, led by the former mashgiach ruchani of Yeshiva University, Rabbi Yosef Blau.
But the Jewish Majority letter has made by far the biggest impact. And I wonder at the usefulness of its signatories expending limited political capital against a candidate who, by all accounts, is likely to become mayor. When historians write about this charged era of American Jewish life, when authoritarian power is aggressively taking hold, I doubt that this letter will be regarded as a worthy use of their considerable communal power.
In the end, the anti-Mamdani letters say very little about Mamdani and everything about American Jewry. Instead of coming together based on a shared commitment to Jewish values, American rabbis are choosing an enemy to ally against. Instead of drawing “a line in the sand,” as one commentator framed the letter, I fear it is simply a line that will further divide us.
Since Oct. 7, American Jews have been buffeted by anti-war protests, antisemitic attacks and institutional strife. The Hamas attacks and Israel’s war in Gaza have unleashed a profound internal and external reckoning about the previously sacrosanct relationship between the U.S. and Israel. With the tenuous ceasefire coming soon after the start of a new Jewish year, and the traditional pro-Israel consensus irrevocably cracking under the strain of war and religious extremism, American Jews have an important opportunity, now, to look inward.
What have we learned over these painful years? How can we heal, while also taking responsibility for the ways in which we did not use our power for good? How do we want to use our communal power, period? If the party line on Israel has changed, how do American Jews want to change with it?
The conversations within the Jewish community are just beginning, and will last long past the New York City mayoral election on Nov. 4. I pray that our rabbinic leaders will have the courage to help us have them.
The post The rabbinic backlash against Zohran Mamdani isn’t about Mamdani at all appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Conservative and Christian movies are coming for Hollywood
A star-studded new movie set in a Soviet prison is coming out in November. James Franco and Rob Lowe anchor the cast of Confession, playing a brutal prison guard and an imprisoned dissident professor, and a disheveled Nick Nolte appears as a fellow prisoner.
These actors were once huge gets, and their names could convey legitimacy to a project. Nolte and Franco both have received Academy Award nominations. Lowe was a member of the Brat Pack, and was a regular on The West Wing.
Confession, written by Ben Shapiro and produced by the rightwing tabloid-esque news site The Daily Wire, is not the expected fare for actors with that kind of name recognition; Shapiro’s screenwriting aspirations have been the target of ridicule for years.
Nevertheless, this isn’t the only Daily Wire production getting big names; Danny Trejo signed onto a pro-ICE movie about Minneapolis in the aftermath of the Renee Good shooting, and Jonathan Majors led Run, Fight, Hide: Infidels earlier this year.
Each one of these actors has been, in some way, canceled or in career doldrums so may have been more open to working with The Daily Wire. And some have claimed that they did not know who Shapiro was, or what his politics were; Trejo’s son, Gilbert, said his 82-year-old father did not endorse ICE and was misled about the movie before he signed his contract.
Movie studios have struggled through the pandemic and the streaming era, both of which have tanked box office receipts, leaving the field open for movies from offbeat production studios. In addition to The Daily Wire, there has been a whole ream of Christian movies attempting to shift the stereotype of bible movies — that they’re preachy, low-budget straight-to-TV affairs with cardboard acting — to something more prestigious, or at least profitable.
The Christian company Angel Studios has been placing screenings of the half philo-semitic, half-antisemitic Jesus TV series The Chosen in movie theaters across the country, produced the right-wing hit The Sound of Freedom and is pumping out faith-based movies like the animated King of Kings Christmas story and David, a kiddie movie about the biblical king. Recently, Pinnacle Peak Pictures, another faith-based production company, premiered Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, another bible movie that was notable enough to merit a review in The New York Times. (Though admittedly it wasn’t a particularly positive one.)
For decades, Hollywood, and the media industry at large, has been associated with liberalism, progressive politics and diversity. (This is part of why conservative conspiracy theorists often insist that Jews control the media.) Even when conservatives are in power, satirical movies have poked fun at the ruling class — Team America: World Police spoofed George W. Bush’s foreign policy, while M*A*S*H critiqued Richard Nixon. During the current Trump administration, we’ve seen One Battle After Another lambasting immigration policies and rising white nationalism, Eddington on misinformation and populism, and The Apprentice depicting Trump directly.
But a rising number of higher-budget, bigger releases from the right wing, whether The Daily Wire’s conservative political parables or the Christian fables, are bringing a new kind of messaging — about the importance of God and country, about gender roles, about about the centrality of Jesus to the U.S. — to the American movie-going public.
This is no accident. A group of powerful conservative Christians, many of whom worked on Project 2025, are proponents of the Seven Mountains Mandate, a blueprint for Christian nationalism that instructs Christians to gain influence and control over the “seven mountains” of society — which include media, entertainment and the arts. The Mandate is part of the New Apostolic Reformation, a decentralized evangelical movement embraced by millions of Americans.
Jeremy Boreing, the director of many Daily Wire movies — though he has since left the company — said on a podcast hosted by businessman Patrick Bet-David that “It had always been part of our strategy to move into making culture, not just criticizing culture” as a way of proving that “there is a future where conservatives aren’t losing. There’s a future where we have political power and cultural power.”
Cultural power, of course, requires more than just a lot of movies; they have to be well-done, or at least appear to be. Previous Daily Wire productions, as well as other right-wing, MAGA movie ventures, have been hacky. Lady Ballers, about an unsuccessful men’s basketball team pretending to be women so they can dominate the league, was an unsubtle, unfunny and ultimately unwatchable spoof of transgender athletes. And even plenty of higher-budget attempts, like Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, can still fall victim to wooden acting and writing.
But now, with the financial success of movies like The Sound of Freedom and biblical parables like The Chosen, bigger stars are being drawn to projects like the Daily Wire’s lineup of pro-ICE, anti-immigration and anti-LGBTQ movies. With those bigger stars may come new audiences who might not have watched a Christian movie or Daily Wire project otherwise. And where there is money and viewers, mainstream Hollywood will go, too, no matter how progressive people expect the industry to be. We’ve already gotten a biblical epic from Amazon Prime, with The House of David, and there are likely to be many more to come.
After all, it wasn’t so long ago, after all, that Cecil DeMille’s The Ten Commandments was the biggest movie in town.
The post Conservative and Christian movies are coming for Hollywood appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
‘Heil’ Mary? New Atlanta Falcons logo inspires Nazi comparisons
If there was something off about the logo the Atlanta Falcons unveiled on social media Wednesday, whoever runs their accounts did, uh, not see it.
Behind the black falcon graphic that began appearing on the football team’s helmets in the 1960s was a new background — a flag of red, tan, black and white vertical stripes. To thousands of people who responded to the logo, it looked distinctly German — in a 1930s kind of way.
“The Atlanta Falcons are preparing to invade Poland,” one fan wrote.
A day after its posting, the new profile picture had unleashed a deluge of Nazi memes in the 4,000-plus replies on X. One picture swapped in the logo for Nazi flags in the background of a historical photo of a Hitler rally. Another edited the Falcon claw to look like a Nazi salute.
Others depicted Hitler in a Falcons cap, references to Inglourious Basterds and the Battle of the Bulge and a World War II joke invoking a blown lead in Super Bowl LI.
“Falcons were up 28-3 at Dunkirk,” that tweet read.
The Falcons’ snafu enters a small but growing catalogue of Reich-coded brand mixups. Who can forget the German national soccer team’s ‘44’ soccer jerseys? There was also the swastika-emblazoned Hallmark gift wrap; the accidental Hitler mugs; and (for my money) the worst of the bunch, Zara’s concentration camp uniform shirt.
All of those have been addressed; so far, the Falcons’ has not. We’ve reached out to them for comment.
The post ‘Heil’ Mary? New Atlanta Falcons logo inspires Nazi comparisons appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Netanyahu’s Torah exemption pledge highlights election stakes
Sometimes a statement can contain multitudes, or at least provide a crystallizing moment in an election campaign. So it was when Benjamin Netanyahu, while criticizing the detention of about 40 Haredi draft evaders by military police at Ben-Gurion Airport this week, declared in a radio interview: “We need to protect the world of the Torah … But whoever doesn’t study must serve in the military.”
Netanyahu was effectively saying that yeshiva study should continue to be, as it has been under an informal arrangement, a free pass out of military service – and he went on to repeat a pledge to turn this into law. It is a position opposed by the overwhelming majority of Israelis.
The statement came amid such a calamitous two-week stretch for Netanyahu’s campaign leading up to the Oct. 27 election that it has some people joking that agents of the opposition might have infiltrated Likud headquarters and taken charge.
In a tragicomic episode, one of Netanyahu’s chief propagandists called leading opposition candidate Gadi Eisenkot – a former military chief who is of Moroccan Jewish background – a “monkey” who is under the control of Ashkenazi elites.
Yinon Magal, who has described himself as a vessel for Netanyahu’s messaging, made the comments on Channel 14, the pro-Netanyahu propaganda TV channel where he is the leading host. He later filmed himself explaining that the simian reference, in Israel’s mafia parlance, merely refers to a junior criminal who is a puppet of more heavyweight mafiosi. His clarification did little to stem the tide of criticism.
As Netanyahu awkwardly tried to distance himself, he also charged that opposition figures had used racist slurs, referring to a recent podcast interview with businesswoman Galia Albin in which she said his supporters are Mizrahis who plan to vote for him mindlessly.
Then came leaked comments (made last year) by Haredi Rabbi Dov Lando, leading spiritual leader of the Netanyahu-allied United Torah Judaism party – proclaiming that Zionism had brought disasters upon the Jewish people, that life under Arab rule would have been preferable and that religious Zionist soldiers were being killed because their rabbis taught them “distorted Torah.” Once again, outrage boiled over, and received mostly silence from the Likud.
Donald Trump’s enthusiastic endorsement of Netanyahu might have qualified as good news – but the U.S. president seemed to connect a Bibi reelection to a renewed assault against Iran. That rests on the dubious assumption that Israelis are eager for another few weeks (or more) in bomb shelters.
A punctuation mark arrived a few days later with reports, albeit unverified, that Netanyahu actually had planned to attack Iran earlier this month but was blocked by Trump. Many expected that scenario, which would have been interpreted as a gambit to delay, by dint of national emergency, an election in which he’s badly trailing in credible polls.
Polling is not available on every such twist and turn of the campaign, but decades of studying Israel and a nose to the ground tell me none of this is popular. And there is no question that most Israelis want to end the draft evasion by Haredim. Recent polls put support for that at 85 percent, which essentially means all non-Haredim.
The issue, as I have said before, is easily the most effective axe for the opposition to grind – because the current situation with the Haredim is utterly untenable.
Tens of thousands of Haredi men of military age remain outside the draft system, while soldiers and reservists from other communities carry an increasingly intolerable burden that has ,in many cases, reached hundreds of days a year.
Whether all those registered as yeshiva students genuinely study – a central question for some people – should be beside the point. Why should Torah study confer a privilege unavailable to Israelis studying physics, medicine, engineering or law? Why should one form of education exempt citizens from defending the country while every other form does not?
The consequences of the Haredi parties’ extortion extend far beyond the army. Israel has created an incentive system in which prolonged religious study preserves military exemptions, public subsidies and a way of life often characterized by economic dependence. Many Haredi educational institutions reject the core curriculum essential for participation in a modern workforce, even as the state helps finance them.
This is an extraordinary arrangement for a country whose security depends on its economic strength, and whose economic strength depends on scientific education, technological innovation and a highly skilled workforce.
Demography makes the issue existential. Haredim already account for roughly one-sixth of Israel’s population, and their exceptionally high birth rates – almost seven children per family on average – mean their share will continue to skyrocket. Unless patterns of education, employment and military participation change dramatically, Israel faces the prospect of an ever-smaller proportion of its citizens supporting and defending an ever-larger population.
The danger is compounded by the mobility of the people on whom Israel’s prosperity depends. Engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs and physicians have opportunities elsewhere. If enough conclude that the country’s trajectory has become irreversible, the resulting brain drain could be catastrophic.
Earlier this year, my friend Rabbi Hershel Grossman arranged for me to meet senior rabbis associated with the Mir and Hebron yeshivot. They were gracious and pleasant, but strikingly candid about their opposition to compulsory core education, military service and ordinary employment whenever these conflicted with Torah study. More troubling was their confidence that demographic change would eventually give their community decisive political power.
The necessary alternative is a comprehensive overhaul of the incentives governing Haredi education, military service and employment. Every child should receive a core curriculum. Young adults should perform military or meaningful national service, with appropriate accommodations for religious observance. Public funding should encourage economic participation rather than prolonged dependence.
Opposition parties promise various versions of such plans. None of this will be easy, and it will not be accomplished by dialogue alone. But the alternative is a version of national suicide. There is no question that – alongside accountability for Oct. 7 and the demand for an independent state commission of inquiry – the future of Haredi military service, education and economic participation belongs at the center of this election.
So why would Netanyahu effectively say that studying Torah should entitle an able-bodied young man to exemption from military service?
There are several possible explanations for this – and the rest of the parade of seeming political misjudgments.
One might be a calculated strategy of mobilizing the base through fear and resentment rather than persuading the center. This might be useful in various scenarios involving a messy outcome of the election.
The others might be overpowering hubris, a toxic contempt for the public or the myriad other pathologies that often accompany too long a time in power.
The post Netanyahu’s Torah exemption pledge highlights election stakes appeared first on The Forward.
