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Three simple rules for navigating a new season of protest against Israel
Spring. The season of graduations and protests.
A tenured professor and faculty chair at my alma mater, the University of Michigan, recently used the commencement stage to denounce Israel’s war in Gaza — remarks that drew applause from some as others experienced them as alienating and unwelcome. At New York’s Park East Synagogue, a group of masked, hate- spewing demonstrators waving Hezbollah flags while protesting the “Great Israeli Real Estate Event.”
If the settings of these incidents differ, one underlying question they raise remains the same: What are the ethics of protest? At what point does dissent deepen democratic life and moral accountability, and when does it begin to fray the trust, dignity and shared sense of belonging upon which a society depends?
While these tensions may be hard to resolve, I’d like to put forward three guiding principles for how best to engage on the subject of free expression in such a hot-zone climate.
Protest is essential
Protest is foundational to what it means to be both a Jew and an American.
Look to Abraham standing before God at Sodom and Gomorrah; Moses standing before Pharaoh; the prophets calling kings and nations to conscience; and Esther risking all for her people. All of their examples show that to be a Jew is to take note of the gap between the world as it is and as it ought to be, and then to summon the moral courage, communal will, and spiritual audacity to help close that gap.
Jews understand that to protest is a religious act. That’s why rabbis so often quote Abraham Joshua Heschel’s famous reflection after marching alongside Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma in 1965: “I felt my legs were praying.”
And as the United States turns 250 years old, it’s worth remembering that our country began with a protest movement. Since then, many of our country’s finest moments have emerged from moral protest — including the labor movement, the fight for women’s suffrage, and the Civil Rights Movement.
As Jews and as Americans, we are heirs to two traditions of protest.
So is self-interrogation
Where we draw the lines around acceptable protest says as much about us as it does about the protest itself.
A prime example of this: During my 25-plus years as a rabbi, no congregant has ever told me that the pulpit is no place for politics — so long as they agree with my politics.
I had little difficulty admiring the activist Greta Thunberg when she sailed across the Atlantic to raise awareness about climate change. I found it much more challenging to view her kindly when she joined a flotilla protesting Israel’s war in Gaza.
Similarly, the faculty speaker at Michigan’s commencement sounded pretty good when championing the university’s first Jewish faculty member and a curriculum more attentive to Black American history. It was only when he condemned Israel that many listeners, myself included, recoiled at his remarks.
None of us are the neutral arbiters of protest ethics we may imagine ourselves to be. Progressives who passionately defend buffer zones around abortion clinics but not around houses of worship should ask why one form of vulnerability warrants protection and another does not. Student activists who champion on-campus encampments protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza, but would never tolerate a white nationalist rally on campus, should ask where principle ends and preference begins. Conservatives who invoke the First Amendment to defend provocative speech they favor, yet denounce positions they dislike as treasonous or un-American, should examine where principle gives way to ideology. And activists who mobilize when civilians die in Gaza but remain deafeningly silent when tens of thousands of Iranians are murdered by their own regime must interrogate what moral framework governs that selective outrage.
Where we draw the lines — whom we applaud, what we excuse and what we denounce — reveals not only our principles, but also our loyalties, fears and tribal attachments. Moral seriousness requires the humility to examine ourselves before we protest — to check ourselves before we express ourselves.
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should
As Jews, we believe in buffer zones — not just the kind debated at City Hall. The rabbis believed in moral buffer zones, a principle they referred to as living “lifnim mishurat hadin” — “beyond the strict line of the law.”
Rabbinic tradition in part explains the semi-somber period between Passover and Shavuot, in which we currently find ourselves, using precisely this idea. When 24,000 of Rabbi Akiva’s students died in one day, the Talmud teaches, they perished because they followed the letter of the law but failed to go beyond it and treat one another with respect — “kavod zeh lazeh.” They failed to embody the deeper demand of leadership: to live not merely according to what one is allowed to do, but by what one ought to do.
What might that mean for us today?
The answer: just because you have the legal right to express yourself doesn’t mean you should.
The Michigan commencement speaker may have been within his rights to voice his objections to Israel. But his decision to do so in that setting reflected a breathtaking failure of leadership, reminding us there is no direct correlation between tenure and wisdom, expertise and judgment. Like a teacher who hijacks a classroom to air political grievances under the guise of education, the speaker demonstrated an astonishing lack of discernment by alienating a sizable portion of the very students and families he was there to honor and congratulate.
Regarding the protests outside Park East Synagogue, the letter of the law may protect those who wave the flags of a terrorist organization, chant antisemitic slogans, or proclaim that the Jewish state itself should cease to exist. That such speech is protected does not mean it is right. It is, instead, intimidation masquerading as activism.
I was also deeply troubled by the response of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who prefaced his condemnation of the protests by first denouncing the event itself. The mayor should have simply said: no house of worship should be targeted or intimidated, full stop.
To imply that the nature of the event somehow mitigated the harassment outside was not only irresponsible, offering moral cover for behavior that crossed the line from protest into menace, but also a troubling form of moral equivocation that shifted responsibility onto those being targeted — if not outright victim blaming. A peaceful protest calling for Palestinian self-determination alongside Jewish self-determination? As a liberal Zionist, that sounds like my kind of protest! But in an age in which there is a direct line between anti-Israel rhetoric and antisemitic violence, our mayor must do more than merely follow the letter of the law. True leadership begins where the letter of the law ends.
The issue is not whether dissent is permitted, but whether we are not losing the capacity for kavod zeh lazeh.
As the secular prophet of our time, Bruce Springsteen, has been reminding audiences across the country on his current tour: “America, from the beginning, was born out of disagreement. It was built on argument, on disagreement. We can argue about what course we thought the country should take while recognizing our common humanity, our dignity and, yes, our unity.”
Whatever our differences, the challenge before us is whether we can disagree without severing the ties that bind us — as Americans, Jews and human beings.
The post Three simple rules for navigating a new season of protest against Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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VIDEO: A Hasid gives us a tour of Morocco in Yiddish
דער ירושלימער יוטוב־שטערן וועלוול קירשנבוים האָט לעצטנס אַרויסגעשטעלט אַ ווידעאָ אויף ייִדיש פֿון אַ פּרעכטיקן וויזיט, וואָס ער האָט געמאַכט אין מאַראָקאָ. עס באַגלייט אים זײַן חבֿר אַבֿרהם פּרץ.
אינעם ווידעאָ זעט מען ווי קירשנבוים דאַוונט שחרית מיט די אָרטיקע ייִדן און באַזוכט אַ גוט אָפּגעהיטענעם בית־עולם, וווּ עס ליגן באַערדיקט גרויסע צדיקים ווי למשל הרבֿ חיים בן עתר (1696–1743), באַקאַנט ווי דער „אור החיים“. „מענטשן מיינען, אַז נאָר אין אייראָפּע זענען דאָ קבֿרים פֿון צדיקים!“ זאָגט קירשנבוים.
מיר זעען אַ גרויסע, שיינע שיל מיט אַ פֿײַנער אַרכיטעקטור אין קאַזאַבלאַנקאַ; דעם גרויסן אַראַבישן שוק, וווּ קירשנבוים קויפֿט זיך אײַן מלבושים פּונקט ווי די מאַראָקאַנער גייען אָנגעטאָן. ער באַוווּנדערט אויך די שיינע טיי־גלעזער און טשײַניקן, וואָס מע פֿאַרקויפֿט דאָרט, און באַקענט זיך מיט אַ ייִדישן סוחר וואָס האַנדלט מיט זילבער און גאָלד, פּונקט אַזוי ווי זײַן טאַטע און זיידע האָבן געטאָן פֿאַר דור־דורות.
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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.
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‘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.
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