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To turn out Jews against Mamdani, we need a ‘Great Schlep’ from Park Avenue to Park Slope
This piece is adapted from a sermon delivered on Oct. 18, 2025. It can be viewed here.
On Shabbat, I told my congregants something I believe strongly: that Zohran Mamdani poses a danger to the security of New York’s Jewish community.
Mamdani’s refusal to condemn inciteful slogans like “globalize the intifada,” his denial of Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state, his call to arrest Israel’s prime minister should he enter New York, and his thrice-repeated accusation of genocide in last week’s debate — for these and so many other statements, past, present, and unrepentant — he is a danger to the Jewish body politic of New York.
Zionism, Israel, Jewish self-determination — these are not political preferences or partisan talking points. They are constituent building blocks and inseparable strands of my Jewish identity. To accept me as a Jew but to ask me to check my concern for the people and State of Israel at the door is as nonsensical a proposition as it is offensive — no different than asking me to reject God, Torah, mitzvot, or any other pillar of my faith.
One need look no further than the events of the past week (or, for that matter, the past two years) to understand the shape and substance of the Jewish soul — how bound up we have all been with the plight of the hostages and our jubilation at their release. In our highs and in our lows, in our tortured angst and our fragile hopes, in our prayers and our protests, we feel our connection to Israel and its people. It is the invisible string that has tugged at our hearts since the very beginnings of our people.
Mamdani’s distinction between accepting Jews and denying a Jewish state is not merely rhetorical sleight of hand or political naivete, though it is, to be clear, both of those things. His doing so is to traffic in the most dangerous of tropes, an anti-Zionist rhetoric that, as we have seen time and again — in Washington, in Colorado, in ways both small and large, online and in person — has given rise to deadly antisemitic violence. This past summer, you may recall, at the Glastonbury Music Festival in England, the crowd erupted into chants of “Death to the IDF.” Where exactly would a Mamdani administration stand should that happen next summer in a concert on Governors Island, or in Central Park? I am not one to play the politics of fear. The entire thesis of my career is to play offense, not defense. But right now, I am throwing a flag on the field and calling out a threat to the Jewish people five minutes early rather than risk being five minutes too late.
For me, the breaking point came not with Mamdani’s earlier statements, his accusations of Israeli genocide, his refusal to name Hamas a terrorist organization, or, for that matter, the flimsiness of his experience, policies, and associations. For me, the damning moment came in a statement he made to a Brooklyn synagogue last week, when he sought to assure that community, as reported in the press, that his views on Israel would not amount to a litmus test for service in his administration. “I am not a Zionist,” he said. “I’m also not looking to create a city hall or a city in my image. I’m going to have people in my administration who are Zionists — whether liberal Zionists, or wherever they may be on that spectrum.”
And while one could commend Mamdani for focusing on professional qualifications rather than political inclinations, for me, the comment was a most unsettling tell. The comment was a most unsettling tell. When Mamdani says “Zionists are welcome” in his administration, he may think he’s offering reassurance, but in fact he reveals something darker — the assumption that Jewish self-determination is an ideology to be tolerated, rather than a birthright to be respected. The very need to say it betrays a bias so deeply held that it should make us shudder.
Some believe it unwise to raise alarms given the likelihood of Mamdani’s election. Better to hold our tongue in anticipation of the need to work with him. I hear the concern and understand the pragmatism. I choose principle instead.
A vote for Mamdani is a vote counter to Jewish interests. A vote for Curtis Sliwa, whatever his merits, is a vote for Mamdani. There is a path to victory — i.e., Andrew Cuomo — but it means every eligible voter must vote. In the last election, somewhere between 15-20% of eligible voters turned out; we must do better. Nobody can sit this election out.
And yet, as good as it feels to speak my mind — and important as it is to do so — the truth is, doing so neither moves the electoral needle sufficiently nor addresses my deeper concern in this mayoral race.
How so? First, in my synagogue, I am preaching mostly, if not entirely, to the converted. I had my congregants at hello. For me to name the dangers of an anti-Zionist mayoral candidate in this community is a declaration so self-evident that not only does it risk being cliché, but it could serve to feed the very intersectional politics that have fueled Mamdani’s campaign in the first place.
Hopefully my words will prompt my congregants and their network of likeminded voters to turn out in this election, and that is not nothing. But all of my congregants — and there are a lot of them — who have emailed me, called me, and texted me urging me to go scorched earth on Mamdani, to invite Andrew Cuomo to address our community, all fail to understand that it is not the Park Avenue Synagogue community that needs convincing but the Korean, African-American and Latino communities of New York. We must turn out the vote, but if it is a win that you want, Cuomo needs to speak at more churches and fewer synagogues, more barbershops and fewer boardrooms, up his online game, and meet New Yorkers where they are. If it is a win you want, I’d encourage Jewish New Yorkers to redirect their angst from their rabbis who already believe what they believe and instead direct it to the issues, places, and people where the needle needs to be moved and can be moved.
Because my real concern is the painful truth that Mamdani’s anti-Zionist rhetoric not only appeals to his base but seems to come with no downside. What business does an American mayoral candidate have weighing in on foreign policy unless it scores points at the ballot box? I don’t doubt that Mamdani’s anti-Zionism is heartfelt and sincere, but its instrumentalization as an election talking point should frighten you in that it says more about the sensibilities of our fellow New Yorkers than it does about Mamdani himself. And the fact that the latest polls suggest that the Jewish community of New York is almost evenly split between Mamdani and Cuomo further names the problem to be not just one of our fellow New Yorkers, but our fellow Jews.
Which means that if there is a play to be made here, given the limitations of time, resources, and people, our efforts should be directed to where we have influence and where the needle can be moved. Those in the middle — the undecided, the proudly Jewish yet unabashedly progressive, the affordability-anxious, Netanyahu-weary, Brooklyn-dwelling, and social-media-influenced — who need to be engaged. In other words, other Jews. Jews who may not be you, but may be your friends, may be your children, and may be your grandchildren.
It is these Jews, our friends and our family, who need to be persuaded to prioritize their Jewish selves. I am imagining an informal campaign, reminiscent of what the comedian Sarah Silverman organized in 2015, when she called on young Jews to go to Florida to persuade their Bubbies and Zaydes to vote for then-Sen. Barack Obama. It was called “The Great Schlep.” Now, 10 years later, in 2025, we need a Great Schlep in reverse. Not from the Upper West Side to Surfside, but from Park Avenue to Park Slope, to remind the ambivalent and undecided that Jewish identity is not a partisan position but a sacred inheritance always in need of defense — especially today.
Who are these Jews about whom I speak? First, in many cases, they have grown up with an Israeli prime minister with whom they not only do not identify, but who represents the very antithesis of every other liberal Jewish value they hold dear. They don’t want anything to do with Netanyahu or the vision of Israel that he and his government represent. For them, Mamdani’s rejection of Israel may be a difference, but it is one of degree, not in kind. Second, these Jews feel strongly that they are not voting for the “Mayor of Jerusalem” and therefore local issues preempt everything else — like finding a job and living well in the city in which they were born without having to spend 50% of their monthly paycheck on rent. Third, the Cuomo you see as a commonsense experienced candidate – who, like any politician, comes with both personal and professional baggage — they see as an exemplar of the same-old, same-old tired politics in desperate need of being rejected.
For a Jew who wants to live a frictionless Jewish existence and return to a pre-Oct.-7 world when being a Jew was a nonevent, it is more appealing to vote for the candidate believed able to do the greatest good for greatest number of New Yorkers, no matter how preposterous some of his proposals are, even if that candidate lacks the credentials to run my fantasy football league, never mind the most complicated city in America.
So, when you talk to your friend, colleague or family member, under no circumstances roll your eyes or wag your finger. One should not do so because such an approach is sure to backfire, but, more importantly, because to do so delegitimizes the altogether legitimate feelings that person holds.
And when you do share your views, if it were me, I would begin the conversation by talking about love. How love — be it of another person, of family, or of country — never exists in a vacuum. How it evolves, it changes, it challenges. How the meaning of love comes not in the black-and-white cases — of love without question, or when there is no love at all — but in the gray areas — when love is tested. It is then — in those moments when we measure and re-measure, when the conditions of our love are challenged — that we find out who we really are, and discover what love is all about.
I would share with that other person that love is a commodity that neither is endless nor can be distributed equally. To be a Jew, to be anything for that matter, means to prioritize one love over another. The math is not precise; love cannot actually be measured in bushels and pecks. Concerned as we are with the well-being of humanity, we simply cannot nor should be expected to care for every human the same way. To paraphrase the moral philosopher Bernard Williams: A man who sees two people drowning, his wife and a stranger, and pauses to consider which one maximizes the public good, is a man who has had “one thought too many.”
Self-preservation and self-interest are not only legitimate, but essential to sustaining an ethical life. It is why, when the rabbinic sage Hillel was asked by a would-be convert to distill all of Jewish teaching into a single sentence, he did not quote the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Rather Hillel said, “What is hateful to you, do not do to another.” One cannot love another as yourself, argued Hillel and Jews throughout the ages. The best we can do is to love another because they are like us, created alike in God’s image. There are limits to love. There is a place for self-concern.
And for Jews, ahavat yisrael, love of Israel, does take precedence over other loves. Every human being is created with equal and infinite dignity, yet we prioritize the needs of our families, our people, and our nation. This week we began reading the book of Genesis, the most universal story of all — not the creation of the first Jew, but the first human being. Universal as the story is, the 11th-century commentator Rashi immediately reads it as a justification for the Jewish claim to the land. In the 11th century, Rashi’s comment served as a defense against the Crusader-era argument that Jews have no claim to Israel. In our day, Rashi’s comment can be read as a reminder to progressive Jews of the legitimacy of the Jewish claim to the land. You can love Israel without loving all Israelis. You can love Israel without loving its government. In this moment when the Jewish connection to Israel sits precariously at the intersection of identity politics and rising antisemitic violence, it is not only allowable to place the Jewish body politic at the forefront of our concern; it is required of us.
Some will argue that disqualifying Mamdani because of his anti-Zionist posture only feeds the antisemite’s charge of dual loyalty. I hear this objection and respect those who say it, and I fully reject the argument. I reject it first because it surrenders to a Jewish insecurity and fear about what the antisemites might think. I don’t care what the antisemite thinks, and neither should you. And second, I reject it because it betrays a category error with regard to the place Israel has in my Jewish being. Israel is not a detachable policy preference; it is integral to my Jewish identity. To delegitimize Israel, as Mamdani has repeatedly done, is an attack on my personhood as a Jew, as an American, and as an American Jew. This is not about dual loyalty; this is about my fundamental security and the security of my co-religionists.
And lest you think I don’t understand, be assured that I do. I understand that it is not easy. It is hard to prioritize love of Israel when the government of Israel does not reflect your sensibility — that feeling of your love being tested. I understand that it is hard to prioritize one’s Jewish self over the array of other identity labels we wear. I understand that it is hard to reach beyond the sparkle of the shiny new object in favor of the one that is scuffed, worn, and familiar.
I wish it were otherwise. I wish we had two candidates with equal interest, or better yet, equal disinterest in the Jewish community. I would love nothing more than our mayoral contest to be focused solely on affordability, food instability, education, policing, sanitation, taxes — the everyday issues that shape our great city’s life. A contest where all of you could argue to your heart’s delight about which policies best serve the future of our great city, and I could give sermons on, well, anything else. But this election cycle, that is simply not the case. We can only play the cards we are dealt. And in this hand, I choose to play the one that safeguards the Jewish people, protects our community, and ensures that our seat at the table remains secure. I choose steadiness over spectacle, tested loyalty over reckless gamble.
It’s a story as old as the Bible itself. We stand in the Garden — staring at that Big Apple — wondering what is in our long-term best interest. The options are before us. We are wrestling within and with each other and we know we have to make a choice.
Let us choose wisely: To engage, mobilize, turn conviction into action, self-concern into ballots and most of all — vote. Now is the time to make our voices heard.
—
The post To turn out Jews against Mamdani, we need a ‘Great Schlep’ from Park Avenue to Park Slope appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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For years, Jewish activists tried to get the NYC Dyke March to accept Zionists. Now, they’re moving on.
Tens of thousands of queer women are expected to take to the streets of Manhattan on Saturday to celebrate the women who fought for their right to celebrate safely and to declare equal rights for all. Some will also be there to condemn the state of Israel, as organizers of the renowned Dyke March insist for the second year in a row that anti-Zionism has become a core value of the event.
But the bitter internal fight that shift sparked last year has vanished, along with many of the march’s longtime Jewish participants. Many will attend a separate event on Saturday hosted by Shalom, Dykes, a group created in 2024 by former Dyke March participants who have been shut out of the celebration.
“There has been an exodus,” said Nate Shalev, who spent a decade on the march’s organizing committee. Shalev stepped down when the organizers turned on them and other Jewish supporters of Israel after the Oct. 7 attacks. “Anyone who has dissented, anyone who has any sort of connection to Israel, anyone who is quote unquote not a good Jew.”
Dyke March organizers reject the notion that the march’s anti-Zionist stance disproportionately excludes Jews.
“We have Jews on the NYC Dyke March committee, and we do not believe anti-Zionism is antisemitic,” organizers told the Forward in a statement.
The split reflects broader fractures in queer spaces nationwide, as Pride Marches from Vermont to San Francisco have also splintered over positions on Israel and Gaza in recent years.
In New York, that divide now feels permanent. After getting doxxed and ousted from their roles, activists who once pushed back on the march’s anti-Zionist stance say they have given up on making change from the inside, instead directing their energy toward queer Jewish spaces.
“There’s this feeling of, where do we want to put our energy?” Shalev said. “Fighting against these folks who clearly don’t care about me or my communities, and don’t have the desire to be able to see multiple perspectives or truths, that’s not worthwhile.”
‘Settled in for the long haul’
Shalev, whose wife is Israeli, said the organizing committee debated for years whether the march would ban national flags — and by extension, the Jewish pride flag with a Star of David. But the committee allowed for open discussion, Shalev said, and they never ended up banning the flags.
That culture changed after Oct. 7, 2023, when Shalev said fellow organizers showed little understanding of the personal toll the attacks had taken.
“Here I was, post-October 7 with my Israeli wife, navigating all of this in our home, trying to understand if her friends and family were OK,” Shalev said. “And then having to navigate this with the Dyke March committee.”
A year later, an attempt at reconciliation was short-lived. In June 2024, the Dyke March Instagram account put up a post acknowledging that the committee’s delay in condemning the attack of Oct. 7 had caused harm and insisting that “unequivocal solidarity and empathy for Jewish safety can coexist alongside unwavering commitment to Palestinian safety and freedom” — then removed it after a half hour.
Organizers’ reason for deleting the post, they wrote in a subsequent post, was that “any language we put out which is not clearly opposed to a Zionist, imperial agenda is harmful to all.”
The 2024 march — dubbed “Dykes Against Genocide” — raised funds for five groups including Within Our Lifetime, a group that voiced support for Hamas after Oct. 7 and defends “the right of Palestinians as colonized people to resist the zionist occupation by any means necessary.”
That same year, Shalev co-founded Shalom, Dykes, a group that describes itself as a place where “Jewish dykes can exist fully and freely as themselves, no questions asked.”
What began as a one-off alternative to the Dyke March quickly became something larger. Roughly 300 people attended the group’s first celebration with dancing and a performance by drag queen Matzah Belle Soup at an East Village bar, scheduled at the same time as the Dyke March.
“I definitely thought it was going to be a one-time event,” Shalev said. “Immediately during and after that event, I understood that this was actually much, much larger than I thought.”
Even after the split, Shalom, Dykes encouraged members who wanted to attend the Dyke March to do so together. But two years on, Shalev said, fewer people are interested in reengaging with the Dyke March, while Shalom, Dykes has continued to grow.
One of those attendees was Amy Vernon, who came out as bisexual at age 50 and said she was still finding her footing in queer communities when she attended her first Dyke March in 2023. Marching proudly through the streets surrounded by thousands of queer women was an “electric feeling,” she said.
But the following year, the march’s statements about Zionism made Vernon feel like she couldn’t attend. Shalom, Dykes gave her an alternative.
“It really just felt like this lifeline,” Vernon said. “Because I was still trying to figure out where I even belonged anymore.”
Last year’s Shalom, Dykes dance party drew about 600 attendees — double the turnout of its first event — and the group has expanded into a year-round community, hosting holiday celebrations and happy hours.
“We’ve reached the point where we’re settled in for the long haul,” Vernon said. “I don’t know what future there is for American Jewry if we can’t eventually build bridges back, but to my knowledge, there is no interest from the Dyke March or other queer organizations to welcome us back.”
Dissenters depart
Founded in 1993 by a group of activists called the Lesbian Avengers, the Dyke March — which unlike New York’s Gay Pride parade the following day takes place without corporate sponsorship, permits, or police presence — originally had a strategically narrow focus: lesbian visibility. By separating themselves from male-dominated parades, the Avengers sought to specifically highlight women’s issues.
Today, organizers frame the Dyke March through a broader, intersectional lens. Its “statement of values” includes not only “anti-Zionism” but also “anti-militarism,” and standing “in solidarity with all oppressed peoples and occupied lands, including Palestine” among its many priorities.
According to Shalev, the change in approach reflected the exodus of dissenting voices in recent years, which left the committee without the intergenerational perspective that had long characterized the march.
By 2025, committee member Jodi Kreines found herself as the lone voice opposing a proposal to reaffirm the march’s anti-Zionist commitments.
“The only qualification was you had to identify as a dyke, and that was really what I was holding to,” said Kreines, who has been marching for two decades. “The idea that creating an explicitly anti-Zionist message would be really exclusionary of a large swath of dykes, especially within New York City.”
After Kreines voiced her concerns about the group’s anti-Zionist stance in the Forward last year, the committee voted to remove her in a 15-2 vote.
Kreines said she never shared her personal opinions about Israel with the committee. Her argument, rather, was that the march should remain open to all dykes regardless of their beliefs.
“You don’t get to determine who is a good dyke or a bad dyke, just as you don’t get to determine who is a good Jewish person or who is a bad Jewish person,” Kreines said. “There is no one way to exist.”
Other Jewish activists who challenged the committee’s anti-Zionist stance last year faced similar treatment, including Judith Kasen-Windsor, the widow of legendary gay rights activist Edie Windsor — the lead plaintiff in the landmark marriage equality case at the Supreme Court. Kasen-Windsor was also told she was no longer welcome at any Dyke March planning or organizational meetings.
“It was our community, and now it’s not our community anymore,” Kasen-Windsor told Gay City News after she was ousted from her role.
Dyke March organizers did not address questions about the committee’s process for removing members or their tolerance for dissent, instead directing the Forward to their “value statement” on Zionism.
“We oppose the nationalist political ideology of Zionism, particularly as it is promoted within U.S. institutions, which continues to be used to subjugate, displace, and marginalize Palestinian people,” the document reads. “We stand against antisemitism in all its forms and recognize that Jewish people have faced historical and ongoing oppression. Our critique is directed at a political system and ideology, not at Jewish people or Judaism.”
Kreines decided not to fight the committee’s decision.
“I needed to choose to protect my peace,” Kreines said. “I was not in any place that I had the capacity to fight anymore.”
The post For years, Jewish activists tried to get the NYC Dyke March to accept Zionists. Now, they’re moving on. appeared first on The Forward.
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For Mel Brooks and generations of his admirers, 100 years is not enough
Of how many Jewish comedians can it be sincerely said that 100 years of life is not enough?
Mel Brooks (born Kaminsky) who celebrates his centenary on June 28, has long been inspiring belly laughs with Yiddishkeit that has only recently been judged worthy of academic attention, as a volume of scholarly essays proved last year. Inspired by slapstick from Jewish vaudevillians like The Ritz Brothers and Moe Howard (born Moses Harry Horwitz) of The Three Stooges, Brooks is at times literary, but never intellectually glib. Brooks’ inclusion of the Jewish clown Harry Ritz in his 1976 Silent Movie was a gesture to traditional sight gags in what may be his most personal film in its revelations about his comedic roots. And as almost all his admirers are younger than he, as seen in Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!, the two-part HBO documentary film directed by Judd Apatow, a full perspective of his life and times is difficult to find.
Brooks’ creativity derived from a Brooklyn upbringing of quaffing egg creams and spending summers at Camp Sussex, a New Jersey oasis for underprivileged Jewish children founded just before the Great Depression, as the Yiddishist Sandra Fox has explained.
Deeply imbued with the Yiddish sensibility, Brooks told an interviewer for Playboy in 1975 that as a boy, he believed that upon reaching adulthood, all New York Jewish kids would suddenly know how to speak Yiddish, the language of family elders, at which point English could be discarded as a useless secondary means of communication.
His early recreational experiences prepared him for a career as a tummler, amusing Jewish businesspeople on holiday. Yet even then, Brooks offered a tragicomic twist, prefiguring Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman by appearing circa 1940 schlepping two suitcases and leaping fully clothed into a swimming pool as a mock gesture of suicidal despair because business was purportedly bad. The young Brooks was flummoxed by school lessons portraying Jews as simultaneously plutocrats and their anarchistic enemies. His 1991 tragicomedy Life Stinks, echoing the Book of Job in the Bible, is perhaps part of his inner investigation of the place of Jews in American society.
Complicating this understanding was antisemitic propaganda during Brooks’ youth. The German American Bund, a Nazi organization, filled Madison Square Garden in 1939 to denounce President Franklin Roosevelt as a Jew whose real name was “Frank D. Rosenfeld,” and scorn Roosevelt’s New Deal as the “Jew Deal.” For Brooks, who worshipped Roosevelt, this ethnic stereotyping was all too credible. At 17, he enlisted in the military, and like Don Rickles, another diminutive Jewish comedian who survived combat during World War II, Brooks emerged with an explosive penchant for humor as violence. The savage ridicule of “Springtime for Hitler” in The Producers was authenticated by early experience against Nazi adversaries in The Battle of the Bulge.
Rather than try to untangle such complexities, Brooks has tended to sum up life’s wisdom in bits of homespun wisdom attributed to his relatives, like “Never run for a bus; There’ll always be another” on the 2000 Year Old Man comedy album.
As a young comedy writer for Sid Caesar, he worked with the head writer Mel Tolkin (born Shmuel Tolchinsky near Odessa, Ukraine) who advised him to read Russian literature, and this acquaintance with Tolstoy, Turgenev, Gogol, and even the antisemitic Dostoyevsky, made an indelible impression. Comedy in the latter two writers, born of absurd pain, transfixed Brooks, who would go on to adapt a novel by two Ukrainian Jews, Ilya Ilf (Ilya Arnoldovich Feinsilberg) and Yevgeny Petrov (Yevgeny Petrovich Katayev) in the 1970 film The Twelve Chairs.
Although not a box office success, Twelve Chairs gave the English Jewish actor Ron Moody one of his few leading roles on film, after starring as the villainous Jew Fagin in the stage musical Oliver! and its screen adaptation in 1968. About Russian anti-Jewish pogroms, Brooks concurred with his friend Tolkin, who told the Los Angeles Times in 1992 that the violence “created the condition where humor becomes anger made acceptable with a joke.”
This comic fury was expressed by Brooks to Jewish friends like Howard Morris, a Bronx-born fellow comedian working with Sid Caesar, who was repeatedly mugged by Brooks, once by tying him up and stealing his wallet on a Greenwich Village street, and again in a Central Park rowboat. These ludicrous, yet intensely realized and enacted pranks were part of his persona over the past century.
And critics, Jews and non-Jews alike, whom he has long referred to as “crickets,” were other targets of aggression, as Brooks’ biographer Patrick McGilligan notes. The apotheosis of feedback deriding opinionated filmgoers is Brooks’ narration as a grumpy old Jew kvetching about avant-garde images in the Oscar-winning 1963 short film The Critic, directed by the American Jewish filmmaker Ernest Pintoff. As animated shapes form and reform, Brooks-as-Jewish-spectator concludes: “I don’t know much about psychoanalysis, but I’d say this is a dirty picture.” With each Jewish cinemagoer being an amateur Freud, the need for most critics is hilariously eliminated.
Similarly, Brooks became his own songwriter in hit musicals, despite lacking any memorable melodic gift. So he borrowed from Brahms the tune for the theme song of Twelve Chairs. The song characteristically expresses a generous life philosophy with the lines “You could be Tolstoy, or Fannie Hurst/ hope for the best, expect the worst.” Mentioning the sentimental bestselling American Jewish author Fannie Hurst was part of Brooks’ all-inclusive optic, writing leading roles for African American performers like Richard Pryor in Blazing Saddles, a part eventually played by Cleavon Little. And Brooks’ affectionate recognition, albeit mocking, of gay men in The Producers continued in 1983 with his remake of To Be or Not to Be, in which he interpolated a rescue of Sasha, a flamboyant dresser, from deportation to a Nazi concentration camp.
Brooks’ equally wide-ranging literary sensibilities are evident in a series of films produced by his Brooksfilms company, a number of them with an Anglophile flavor. Of these, his 1987 production of Helene Hanff’s 84, Charing Cross Road, an ode to bibliophilia, offered a plausible Jewish role for his wife, the actress Anne Bancroft.
But ultimately, Brooks’ passion for Russian literature as a Jewish reader best coincides with cinema in a vignette from the 1975 Playboy interview; in an extended Dostoyevskian narration, Brooks recounts how at age ten, he chased after his “Yom Kippur sweater” that had been swept away by an automobile. Arriving in an antisemitic neighborhood, Brooks was obliged to run further until, mentioning a celebrated freeze-frame closeup on a fleeing boy at the end of the French Jewish director François Truffaut’s film The 400 Blows, little Mel arrived at the ocean in Coney Island, his Yom Kippur sweater safely recovered. This happy ending, as is proper in comedy, echoes the long, productive life and career of Mel Brooks, who deserves all our birthday thanks for his comedic gifts to audiences over the decades.
The post For Mel Brooks and generations of his admirers, 100 years is not enough appeared first on The Forward.
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‘There was a campaign’: UN torture official says colleagues tried to block her letter documenting Oct. 7 atrocities
An Australian lawyer tasked by the United Nations with monitoring and documenting allegations of torture and cruelty is accusing colleagues within the UN human rights system of trying to block the publication of a Jan. 2024 letter she wrote documenting allegations of abuses committed during the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel months earlier.
Alice Edwards, who since 2022 has served as United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, said she faced weeks of pressure from colleagues who argued that allegations included in the letter she drafted were false and urged her not to send it.
“There was a campaign to prevent that letter going out,” Edwards said in remarks delivered earlier this month at University College London and obtained by the Forward. “There was weeks of being bullied and deterred from writing it and telling me that everything in it was false.”
Edwards’ statements resurfaced a long-simmering conflict in the UN human rights system around its treatment of Israel, which is frequently singled out by UN resolutions and by rapporteurs as a perpetrator of human rights violations.
Meanwhile, other UN rapporteurs have declared doubts on evidence of sexual violence committed during the Oct. 7 attacks — prompting a surviving hostage and the head of an investigative commission that published a report last month compiling witness and survivor testimonies to confront them this week at a hearing in Geneva.
Edwards’ letter, sent in early 2024 to Palestinian authorities and copied to Hamas, detailed allegations of torture, sexual violence, including rapes and gang rapes, burning people alive, and other abuses committed during the Oct. 7 attacks.
According to Edwards, colleagues had given extensive feedback on drafts of the letter, with some items removed from the final version as a result. “All the comments of these individuals had been taken into account,” she said, adding that “the letter shrunk considerably.”
Even after those revisions, Edwards said, only one counterpart — the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, Morris Tidball-Binz — ultimately signed the communication before it was sent.
Other special rapporteurs and working groups who had expressed interest in signing it, she said, “had also been bullied by others not to sign on.” Edwards added: “There was this concerted effort for this letter not to put on record some allegations that had been received.”
Contacted by the Forward, Danny Danon, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN sent a written statement. “Dr. Alice Edwards’ testimony exposes an uncomfortable truth: when it comes to Israel, facts are too often sacrificed on the altar of politics,” said Danon. “The evidence is overwhelming and undeniable. For more than two years, Israel has documented and presented the horrific crimes committed against its citizens.”
UN special rapporteurs are independent human rights experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council to monitor, investigate and advise on thematic topics that include torture, violence against women, and education among others. While their recommendations are not binding, their advice informs UN action and aims to influence governments’ responses to alleged violations.
Israeli officials and advocacy groups had long argued that the United Nations devotes disproportionate attention to Israel’s alleged wrongdoing compared to other countries and holds Israel to a double standard. Since the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, they say, the UN and its rapporteurs have not adequately condemned Hamas’ atrocities and the treatment of Israeli hostages.
Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, has said that the Israeli government’s failure to cooperate with her mandate has undermined investigative efforts and “represents a profound injustice to all the victims.” She also has called into question reports from victims, witnesses and investigators who described rape as part of the Oct. 7 violence.
In a post on X in November 2025, Alsalem wrote: “No Palestinian applauded rape in Gaza. No independent investigation found that rape took place on the 7th of October 2023.”
She also wrote of allegations of Hamas perpetrated sexual violence against Israelis: “I firmly believe that never have we seen such a weaponization of accusations of sexual violence as well as disinformation to manufacture consent for the commission of a genocide – aided and abetted by the media and governments around the world.”
The tensions resurfaced publicly this week at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva when Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, founder and chair of the Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children, presented findings from the commission’s recently published report, Silenced No More.
The report, which has been received by governments, international organizations, academic institutions, and policymakers around the world and boasts many endorsers, is the most comprehensive body of evidence yet of sexual violence on October 7. It catalogues witness testimonies, accounts from hostages about sexual abuse during their captivity, and analysis of over 10,000 photos and videos, including hours-long videos recorded by the perpetrators.
“For two years, we immersed ourselves in testimonies of unimaginable violence,” Elkayam-Levy said Wednesday during her presentation of the findings at the UN in Geneva. “We revealed 13 patterns of abuse — including rape, gang rape, sexual torture, burning, and the deliberate mutilation of victims’ faces and genitalia.”
She went on to single out the UN human rights representatives as unresponsive to the evidence. “Will the UN rapporteurs who doubted or denied these crimes acknowledge the truth?” she said, adding, “We call upon you to recognize our findings.”
A day earlier, Ilana Gritzewsky, a survivor of Hamas captivity who has spoken publicly about sexual violence she experienced, confronted Alsalem directly during a live testimony in an emotional appeal.
“Ms. Alsalem, you said there was no evidence of sexual violence on October 7,” she said. “I am the living proof of sexual violence by Hamas. When I and other Israeli women begged not to be raped, why were you silent?”
‘She was very brave’
Asked about Edwards’ allegations, the UN office that supports the special rapporteurs and other independent human rights experts provided a statement to the Forward: “While the experts frequently issue joint communications on issues that engage multiple mandates, participation in any particular communication remains at the full discretion of each expert, in line with their mandate.”
According to Dr. Shelly Aviv Yeini, the former head of the international law department at the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, Edwards and the United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Pramila Patten, were among a small number of UN officials who meaningfully engaged with hostage families after the terror attacks. Individuals within the Office of the Secretary-General reached out later in the war.
Aviv Yeini told the Forward that her group and the International Jewish Lawyers Organization provided Edwards with a report that informed Edwards’ later work. Edwards published a report determining that the families of hostages should also be recognized as direct victims of torture and hosted an event in Geneva alongside the forum to present and discuss those findings.
“I think she was very brave, acknowledging the families and defending us in a time when it wasn’t so easy,” said Yeini.
Adam Wagner, who spoke at the event and represented hostages with British ties taken by Hamas, told Edwards that she was “the only UN official” whom hostage families felt “ever reached out to them or did anything for them.”
Edwards’ position at the UN, like those of all other UN rapporteurs, is unpaid. As a part of her work, she is able to go on one official visit to a country for the purpose of investigating allegations of torture per year. Edwards says she supplemented this with several other trips, which she funded herself. In December 2024, she embarked on a self-funded trip to Israel to investigate the Oct. 7 atrocities, during which she visited southern Israel, including kibbutzim that had been decimated by Hamas, and spoke with victims and hostage families, among others.
Edwards said at the talk that she believes she was the only UN special rapporteur to request access to the video compilation assembled by Israeli authorities to personally review footage from the Oct. 7 attacks. According to Yeini, Edwards met repeatedly with hostage families, visited attack sites, and reviewed evidence firsthand.
Edwards told the Forward in a statement that the role of independent experts is “to document violations wherever they occur and regardless of the identity of the victims or the perpetrators.”
“Our credibility depends on maintaining public confidence that human rights are applied universally,” she said. “Where people perceive selectivity, double standards or political alignment, confidence is weakened.”
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