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With goblins, spellcasters and delis, board game makers are imagining new Jewish worlds
(JTA) — Running a not-so-Zagat-rated deli, dropping into a Chinese restaurant for Christmas Eve dinner and acting out a bat mitzvah that involves a vampire — for contemporary board game fans, those can be all in an evening’s play.
That’s because a crop of new games aims to merge Jewish ideas and experiences with the aesthetics and language of games such as Dungeons & Dragons. Dream Apart places players in a fantastical reimagining of a 19th-century shtetl, for example, while J.R. Goldberg’s God of Vengeance draws inspiration from the Yiddish play of the same name. In the games in Doikayt, a collection released in 2020, players can literally wrestle with God.
Known as tabletop role-playing games because they ask players to take on a character, these games and their creators imagine exciting new worlds, subvert classic tropes in fun and irreverent ways, and reinterpret Jewish history and identity.
Tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and Call of Cthulhu have exploded in popularity over the past several years, with many — including at least one group of rabbis — picking up the Zoom-friendly hobby during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. But the new Jewish games aim to do more than just provide a diversion or even an escape.
“Depending on your family, depending on your synagogue, depending on your community, you may have gotten more or fewer options of what Jewishness could mean in your imagination,” said Lucian Kahn, who created a trilogy of humorous Jewish role-playing games.
“What some of these games are doing is opening that up and pointing to alternate possibilities of imagining Jewishness, not as a way of converting anyone to anything else, but just as a way of showing the tradition is enormous,” he added.
Kahn is the creator of If I Were a Lich, Man, a trilogy of humorous games whose name is a mashup between a “Fiddler on the Roof” song and an undead character, the lich, that frequently appears in fantasy fiction and games. In the title game, players are Jewish liches — spellcasters whose souls, in the lore of Dungeons & Dragons, are stored in phylacteries, the Greek word for tefillin used by Jews in prayer. Representing the four children of the Passover seder, they debate how their community should address the threat of encroaching holy knights.
In some cases, the association of Jews with monsters has given rise to charges of antisemitism — the goblins of “Harry Potter” offer a prime example. But Kahn said he sees Jewish-coded monsters, and queer-coded villains, as figures of resistance.
“There’s a long tradition of looking at the monster and seeing that the reason why these are monsters is because the people who have oppressive power have decided that these are going to be the enemies of the ‘good’ oppressive powers,” Kahn explained. “But if you don’t agree with their ideology, if you’re seeing yourself as being a member of a marginalized community and being in opposition to these oppressive powers, then you can look at the qualities assigned to these monsters and some of them are qualities that are good.”
For Kahn, Jewish-coded monster characters also provide more of an inspiration than the archetypes of more traditional games.
“Maybe somebody thinks they’re insulting me or insulting Jews,” he said. “My response is: I like vampires and liches and trolls and goblins and think they’re much more interesting than bland white muscular humans running through the fields with a cross on their chest hacking at the same things with a sword over and over again.”
Kahn’s outlook has resonated in the tabletop role-playing game community. In February, he and Hit Point Press launched a Kickstarter to fund production of If I Were a Lich, Man. The campaign smashed its $5,000 goal, raising $84,590, enough to hit one of the campaign’s stretch goals of funding a grant to support independent zines about tabletop role-playing games.
The successful campaign means that Kahn’s three games will go into production. In addition to the game about liches, the trilogy includes Same Bat Time, Same Bat Mitzvah, in which players act out a bat mitzvah where one guest has been turned into a vampire, and Grandma’s Drinking Song, inspired by how Kahn’s Jewish great-great grandmother and her children survived in 1920s New York City by working as bootleggers during Prohibition.
In Grandma’s Drinking Song, players write a drinking song together as they act out scenes. Kahn, the former singer/songwriter and guitarist for Brooklyn Jewish queercore folk-punk band Schmekel, wanted to carry over elements of music into this game.
A throughline in all three games is the power of creative resistance to authority — a narrative that Kahn said strikes him as particularly Jewish.
“There are all these stories in Jewish folklore that are really overtly about finding trickster-y or creative ways of fighting back against oppressive and unjust governmental regimes, evil kings, bad advisors,” Kahn said. “One of the first stories I ever heard in my life was the Purim story, so it’s very embedded in my mind as a part of Jewish consciousness, when evil rulers come to power and try to kill us all, we’re supposed to find these outside-the-box ways of preventing that from happening.”
For some Jewish creators, Jewish holidays are an explicit inspiration. Like many Jewish kids of the ‘80s and ‘90s, Max Fefer, a civil engineer by day and game designer by night, grew up loving the picture book “Herschel and the Hanukkah Goblins,” which remains a popular festive text. But as Fefer notes, goblins are often associated with antisemitic stereotypes. Fefer’s first Jewish game, Hanukkah Goblins, turns the story on its head — players interact as the jovial goblins, who are here not to destroy but to spread the spirit of Hanukkah to their goblin neighbors.
Last year, Fefer launched a successful Kickstarter for another Jewish holiday-inspired tabletop role-playing game, Esther and the Queens, where players assume the roles of Esther and her handmaidens from the Purim story, who join together to defeat Haman by infiltrating a masquerade party as queens from a far-off land.
Esther and the Queens channels Fefer’s Purim memories and includes carnival activities, including Skee-Ball; a calm, relaxing Mishloach Manot basket-making; and a fast-paced racing game.
“All of our holidays, they’re opportunities for us to gather as a community in different ways,” Fefer said. “Watching this satirical, comedic retelling of the story of Purim and the Esther Megillah and coming together into a theater, in a synagogue, to watch these spiels and laugh together and spin the graggers when we hear Haman’s name — all of those things help us build identity and community, and I think games in particular surrounding identity, that’s a great way for a Jewish person themselves to feel seen in a game and reinforce their identity, and share their background with friends.”
Another pair of Jewish game creators, Gabrielle Rabinowitz and her cousin, Ben Bisogno, were inspired by Passover.
“The seder is kind of like an RPG in that it’s a structured storytelling experience where everyone takes turns reading and telling, and there’s rituals and things you do at a certain time,” Rabinowitz said. “It’s halfway to an RPG.”
The game became a pandemic project for the two of them, and alongside artist Katrin Dirim and a host of other collaborators, they created Ma Nishtana: Why Is This Night Different? — a story game modeled on their family’s seder. The game follows the main beats of the Exodus story, and in every game, there will be a call to action from God, a moment of resistance, a departure and a final barrier — but different characters and moments resonate depending on the players’ choices.
As an educator at the Museum of Natural History, Rabinowitz said she is often thinking about how to foster participation and confidence, and she wanted to create a game-play mechanic to encourage players to be “as brazen as her family is.” The result was an in-game action called “Wait! Wait! Wait!” — if players wish to ask a question, make a suggestion, disagree with a course of action or share a new perspective, they can call out “Wait! Wait! Wait!” to do so.
The game also includes a series of scenes that are actively roleplayed or narrated, and each includes a ritual — one that can be done in-person or an alternate remote-friendly version. For example, at one point each player must come up with a plague inspired by the new story they’re telling together, and in the remote version, players go camera-off after reciting theirs.
“The fact that it was created during the pandemic and a way for us to connect and other people to connect with each other is really the soul of the game,” Rabinowitz said. “After each person tells a plague, by the end, all the cameras are off and everyone stays silent for another minute. It’s a hugely impactful moment when you’re playing remotely. The design is interwoven in the game itself.”
Rabinowitz said by playing a story of a family undergoing these trials, the themes of family and identity deepen every time she plays the game.
“A lot of people say, ‘Wow, I’ve never felt more connected to this story,’” she said. “Embodying these characters gave me a feeling of relevance and that makes it feel important as a Jewish precept.”
For other creators, that deep connection comes in more lighthearted scenarios. Nora Katz, a theatremaker, game designer and public historian working at the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life (ISJL) by day, created the Jewish deli-centered game Lunch Rush, which was included in the Doikayt anthology.
“There’s also types of institutions that come up a lot in [tabletop role-playing games], especially sort of high fantasy,” she said. “Everyone meets in a tavern, there’s an inn, things like that. So the idea of a deli as a central gathering place in a world like that felt fun to me.”
An important element of Lunch Rush is that players must be eating while playing, so for Katz’s first round with friends, they got together with chocolate chip ice cream and dill pickle potato chips. She said the deli is a shared language, and her fellow players were all bringing in their own favorite things about delis they loved into the fictional place they were building together.
Tabletop role-playing games “at their core are about collaboration and relationships and storytelling and community, and for me, all of those things are also what Jewishness is about, to me they totally go hand in hand,” Katz said.
The games are not meant to be for Jewish players only. Rabinowitz said the guidebook for Ma Nishtana includes essays to encourage people to further engage with the narrative.
“Jewish players, non-Jewish players, priests, non-religious people, all different people have played it and almost all of them have told us it’s given them a new way of thinking of how they relate to religious tradition, and I didn’t really set out to do that,” Rabinowitz said. “I feel really privileged to have helped create that space.”
Rabinowitz and Bisogno also commissioned other creators to build alternate backdrops for their game, so it can be repurposed to telling the story of another oppressed people’s fight for freedom. Players can interact as embattled yaoguai, spirits from Chinese mythology; explore a Janelle Monáe-inspired Afrofuturist world; play as Indigenous land defenders; or unionize as exploited workers at “E-Shypt.”
Fefer, who has been amplifying the work of other Jewish creators in the tabletop role-playing game space, said the harm of stereotyping and reinforcing negative tropes is still present in the industry, and not just for Jewish people. For example, fans recently criticized Dungeons & Dragons publishers Wizards of the Coast for reinforcing anti-Black stereotypes in the descriptions of a fantasy race, the Hadozee.
“I think it’s a process of talking to people who are from these groups and bringing them onto your teams and making sure you’re incorporating their perspectives into, in the example of Dungeons & Dragons, a hundred-million-dollar industry, being intentional about that design and looking at things from lots of different angles,” Fefer said. “How could our branding, our games be reinforcing something we’re not even aware of?”
Fefer hopes people who play Hanukkah Goblins and Esther and the Queens feel seen and have moments of shared joy, and also that they learn something from these games — about the antisemitic tropes in fantasy, or about underrepresented groups within the Jewish community. With Esther and the Queens, Fefer collaborated with a writer and artist, Noraa Kaplan, to retell the Purim story from a queer and feminist lens, drawing on Jewish texts that the pair said shows the long presence of queer and trans people in Jewish tradition.
“We have a lot of richness within Judaism to share our culture and share our upbringing but also just be representation,” Fefer added. “We’re living in a time of heightened antisemitism and the world being a gross place to be at times, and we can really bring the beauty of Judaism into game design and create experiences for people that are both representative of Judaism and also just very Jewish experiences.”
But for all the important conversations and learning experiences that can come from Jewish tabletop role-playing games, Katz said the goofiness and joy is important, too.
“We live in such a horrendous society that is of our own making,” she said. “If you can, for a little while, enjoy an anticapitalist fictional deli that you and your friends live in, I think that’s great.”
—
The post With goblins, spellcasters and delis, board game makers are imagining new Jewish worlds appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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He researches antisemitism for a living. Why does the State Department want to kick him out of the country?
(JTA) — For years, Imran Ahmed has presented his research on how tech platforms enable the spread of antisemitism to receptive audiences across the ideological spectrum.
He’s worked with the Anti-Defamation League and Jewish Federations of North America; the latter credits Ahmed with the backbone of much of its own policy proposals. He’s appeared at a conference organized by the first Trump administration, with Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also in attendance.
He’s joined Republicans in advocating for an end to Section 230, a law granting special protections to social media platforms. During the first Trump administration, on the strength of his research, the British-born Ahmed received a priority visa as an “alien of extraordinary ability” — the so-called “Einstein visa,” after the German-born Jewish physicist.
All of that only added to Ahmed’s befuddlement when, just before Christmas, the current Trump State Department announced it would be revoking his visa because of what Secretary of State Marco Rubio tweeted were “egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.”
“It is confusing,” Ahmed told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday, speaking from his home in Washington, D.C. “Certainly there was some alarm.”
The confusion came not least because Ahmed, as a legal permanent resident, no longer has a visa to revoke. He received an EB-1 visa, which provides a fast pathway to permanent residency, in January 2021, at the end of Trump’s first term and now has a green card.
Ahmed was different from the four other digital anti-hate activists named in the State Department announcement, all of whom are based in Europe. Since 2021, his organization, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, has been registered as a U.S. nonprofit — a status that he notes should confer First Amendment protections. Last year, the group reported $4.2 million in revenue.
Ahmed has received no formal notification of an effort to revoke his residency. Neither Rubio’s own tweet, nor a State Department press release announcing the sanctions, mentioned him. There’s just a tweet, from a State Department undersecretary, mentioning him by name as a “key collaborator with the Biden Administration’s effort to weaponize the government against U.S. citizens.”
The State Department did not answer questions about Ahmed’s case. “The Supreme Court and Congress have repeatedly made clear: the United States is under no obligation to allow foreign aliens to come to our country or reside here,” a spokesperson told JTA in a statement.
At a time of aggressive immigration enforcement activity that has ensnared others with green cards, Ahmed isn’t taking changes. He sought (and was granted) a legal restraining order to prevent the government from seizing him and moving him to an immigrant detention facility without trial, as officials have done to an estimated 59,000 migrants in the last year. On Monday he returned to court, petitioning to make the order permanent.
“We want to make sure that they can’t take me away from my friends, family and support network,” he said. He’s optimistic on that front. “I have faith in the courts, and I have faith that the rule of law is still intact in the United States.”
What happens next is anyone’s guess. But Ahmed’s ordeal has cast a cloud of uncertainty over the work of a trusted Jewish communal ally — and further muddled the Trump administration’s own stated commitment to fighting antisemitism.
“Absolutely fascist — and dangerous — effort by the admin to ban my colleague Imran Ahmed and others from the US,” Amy Spitalnick, head of the Jewish Council of Public Affairs, wrote on X last week.
Ahmed partnered with Spitalnick’s group on a report about the rise of antisemitic influencers on X after Oct. 7. “He’s dedicated his career to fighting online hate and extremism,” Spitalnick recently told JTA, noting the two had first connected after the 2017 “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, Virginia, during which one counter-protester was killed.
A columnist at Britain’s Jewish News also criticized the Trump administration’s targeting of Ahmed: “Imran Ahmed was a friend to America and an important voice in debates about free speech,” wrote David Hirsh. “He obeyed the law, just as the Americans he worked with obey the law, and he should be treated the same, while working in and contributing to the United States of America.”
The Trump administration has taken special pains to prevent immigration by Muslims, last month blocking visas for passport holders from 20 mostly Muslim countries and targeting Afghans especially after an Afghan national shot and killed a National Guard member in Washington in November.
Ahmed’s parents are Afghan, and in his column Hirsh called Ahmed, “a brilliant Muslim Brit.” Ahmed, who was born in England, has said that he now considers himself an atheist.
His allies see his case as part of a different Trump administration priority. Spitalnick told JTA the targeting of Ahmed was “all part of the broader weaponization of the federal government to go after perceived political enemies and advance an extremist agenda, which in this case is to push back against any regulation of tech.”
In the State Department’s targeting of him, Ahmed sees the handiwork of his longtime foes: the tech “oligarchs” who control the social media giants he seeks to rein in.
“This is quite clearly an attempt to silence the work that we do studying and exposing the way that social media platforms encourage, amplify and reward — with money — antisemitism and other forms of hate,” he said. “These guys have been lobbying aggressively in Washington long before President Trump was president. They’ve been invited to the White House and treated like demigods for decades now.”
Fighting antisemitism is central to the CCDH’s origin story, Ahmed said. A former staffer with the British Labour Party with plans to run for office himself, he quit after the 2015 ascension of Jeremy Corbyn, whom Ahmed calls “an avowed antisemite.” (Corbyn, who came to lead Labour amid a party overhaul that saw a massive influx of antisemitic sentiment, was suspended by his party over his handling of the antisemitism issue before ultimately being expelled in 2023.)
Ahmed wanted to understand why what he perceived as a newfound flurry of antisemitic social media activity seemed to follow Corbyn and his allies. He was also disturbed by the 2016 murder of Labour parliamentarian Jo Cox by a far-right figure associated with neo-Nazi groups who had been radicalized online. Together, he reasoned, there was something yet undiscovered about the role social media was playing in pushing out antisemitism across the political spectrum.
“This has always been an organization that, at its heart, has been trying to answer the question, how is it that ancient lies about Jews have been able to gain such purchase in our society?” he said. “And what can we do to change that?”
In the years since Ahmed founded the CCDH (which he relocated to the United States after receiving his green card), his group has published a series of papers on the various ways social media algorithms promote and reward antisemitism and other forms of hate speech. With the ADL, they published a 2023 report on Iranian state media’s use of social media to spread antisemitism. In November, with JFNA, they released a report on how Instagram has effectively monetized antisemitic content.
Ahmed presented those findings at JFNA’s annual meeting, in front of federation heads from around the country; he credits his work with helping groups like JFNA focus more of their attention on the problem of social media algorithms instead of individual bad actors online. A JFNA representative recently told JTA that Ahmed’s research has been integral to the umbrella group’s crafting of its own online antisemitism policy proposals.
“He is a valuable partner in providing accurate and detailed information on how the social media algorithms have created a bent toward antisemitism and anti-Zionism,” Dennis Bernard, a JFNA lay leader who heads their government relations efforts, told JTA.
Ahmed’s work has made him enemies, too. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and head of X, sued the CCDH in 2023, alleging that it violated the X’s terms of service in gathering data for a report on its amplification of hate content. A judge threw the case out, but Ahmed isn’t so sure Musk — who wielded tremendous power over the federal government at the helm of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency and remains close with administration figures, including the president — has moved on.
“I think it’s incredibly telling that the earliest and most vociferous reactions [to the visa sanction] were actually from people like Elon Musk, who himself has spread antisemitic lies and presided over the descent of this platform formerly known as Twitter into a hellscape of antisemitism,” he said. On X, Musk responded to news of the visa sanctions with fire emojis.
If the State Department is indeed targeting activists like Ahmed as a matter of policy, it would seem to be at odds with its newly confirmed special antisemitism envoy, Yehuda Kaploun. He recently indicated that he, too, wanted to see more restrictions on social media platforms that promote antisemitism.
“It makes it very confusing for them to claim foreign policy problems, which is what they’ve claimed, when U.S. foreign policy is to reduce antisemitism,” Ahmed said.
Another possibility: that the State Department’s targeting of Ahmed has to do with something else entirely. In her post blasting him, the public diplomacy undersecretary Sarah Rogers focused on a different research project the CCDH had undertaken during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Ahmed’s group, Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), created the infamous ‘disinformation dozen’ report, which called for platforms to deplatform twelve American ‘anti-vaxxers’, including now-HHS Secretary @SecKennedy,” Rogers wrote. She was referring to a 2021 CCDH report finding that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and 11 other anti-vaccine activists were responsible for more than 65% of all anti-vaccine content on social media. Kennedy, now Trump’s secretary of health and human services, also celebrated the visa restrictions on Ahmed and the others.
Ahmed dismisses the idea. “The pandemic is long over, so it would be very odd to be targeted for work that we did four years ago. That seems implausible to me,” he said.
He is convinced, instead, that he’s being singled out because he seeks to put guardrails on the big technology platforms more generally.
In their case to the judge for the restraining order, Ahmed’s lawyers — including prominent Jewish attorneys Roberta Kaplan and Norm Eisen — brought up one striking comparison: to the pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder detained for months for what the U.S. government argued was exhibiting support for terrorism. Ahmed insists his case and Khalil’s are nothing alike in substance; the government has so few cases of threatening the citizenship of green-card holders that a legal comparison just made sense, he said.
While Spitalnick has vocally rebuked the Trump administration over its targeting of Ahmed, his other Jewish partners have remained relatively quiet. Many Jewish organizations have found themselves torn since Trump took office as the administration has taken an aggressive stance on fighting antisemitism while also pursuing policies that Jewish communities have historically opposed, including barring immigration.
Bernard, while praising Ahmed’s work, also said JFNA would review its collaboration with him and, “if there’s something there we don’t know about,” would “terminate our relationship.”
The ADL, which has found itself in the Trump administration’s crosshairs, has not made any public statement about Ahmed’s case and did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Ahmed isn’t bothered by any of this, though he is grateful for the Jewish support he has received. He says he’s received “hundreds of texts” from Jewish supporters, and even spent his first “Jewish Christmas” with some last month, chowing down on Chinese food and watching American football. Despite their years of collaboration, he didn’t expect the big Jewish names to come rushing publicly to his aid.
“I’m not asking anyone else to fight this fight for me,” he said, worried the spectacle will “distract us from the job” of pressuring tech platforms. “They’ve made this about me as a person. And when they can’t defeat the message, they go after the messenger.”
The post He researches antisemitism for a living. Why does the State Department want to kick him out of the country? appeared first on The Forward.
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He stormed the Capitol wearing a Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt 5 years ago. Where is he now?
A joint session of Congress peacefully certified President Donald Trump’s election victory last year on the date federally mandated: Jan. 6. But five years ago, after President Joe Biden won, the U.S. Capitol was overrun with people aiming to prevent a smooth transition of power.
Standing out among the mob of rioters was a long-haired, bearded man in a black hoodie with the words “Camp Auschwitz” emblazoned across the front.
Who was the ‘Camp Auschwitz’ rioter?
Robert Keith Packer, a former pipefitter and unlicensed plumber from Newport News, Virginia, gained national attention for wearing the sweatshirt. It had “STAFF” printed on the back, and a drawing of a skull and the phrase “Work Brings Freedom,” a translation of the slogan at the entrance of the Auschwitz concentration camp, on the front. The hoodie drew widespread condemnation.
“Why the instant notoriety?” asked the Forward’s Irene Katz Connelly the day after the attack. “The ‘Camp Auschwitz’ sweatshirt isn’t covetable or beautiful in any way. Even in the midst of a day full of shocks, it immediately stood out. But it is the absurd endpoint of extremism that disguises itself in styles we enjoy.”
Packer, who spent 36 minutes inside the Capitol, was arrested a week after the riot. When the FBI interviewed him about the outfit, he said he wore it because he was cold. Underneath the sweatshirt, he was wearing a “Schutzstaffel” shirt, referring to Adolf Hitler’s SS paramilitary unit.
The sweatshirt was indicative of a larger trend
Packer’s shirt stood out for its audacity, but it was not the only antisemitic symbol on display that day. Some people were also marching with a flag of Kekistan, a fake country created by members of the alt-right. The flag resembles a Nazi swastika. There was also imagery of Pepe the Frog, a cartoon amphibian which was co-opted by extremist groups and which the Anti-Defamation League labeled a hate symbol.
In the weeks leading up to the riot, the ADL reported on a Washington, D.C., demonstration of the Proud Boys, a far-right militant group, who were wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the initials 6MWE, short for “Six Million Wasn’t Enough.”
The nooses displayed on Jan. 6 evoke the “Day of the Rope,” described in the 1978 white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries by William Luther Pierce. The book is often regarded as a blueprint for far-right extremists and antisemites, and has been cited as an inspiration for various acts of violence — including the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 and the 1984 murder of Alan Berg, a Jewish radio host.
How was Packer charged?
Packer, who was 56 at the time of the riot, was arrested and charged with unlawfully entering the Capitol and engaging in disorderly conduct. Federal police who conducted a search of his home found a whole host of Nazi and other white supremacist material, including “swastika artwork” and an “image of Hitler.”
Prosecutors said Packer was a “habitual criminal offender for 25 years with 21 convictions for mostly drunk driving, but also for larceny, drug possession, and forgery.”
Hoping for lenient sentencing, Packer’s sister said you can’t “judge a book by its cover.” Packer’s lawyer, Stephen Brennwald, compared his client to Forrest Gump, “a man who went through life almost as if he was outside of his body and mind, looking in.” Brennwald also argued that Packer’s sentence should be set by his actions, not his attire.
In Sep. 2022, a federal judge sentenced Packer to 75 days in jail and ordered him to pay $500 in restitution.
Where is Packer now?
Packer was pardoned last year by President Trump, along with about 1,500 other people charged with crimes related to Jan. 6.
Since then, Packer was arrested for an animal attack in Newport News. The September dog attack left four people hospitalized and requiring surgery, according to local reports.
Packer’s dogs were taken by animal control and Packer was taken to jail then released, but faces several charges, including a felony that could bring a five-year prison sentence, according to documents described by The Virginian-Pilot. At the time of the September attack, he also had charges pending from a separate May dog attack.
A hearing in Packer’s case is scheduled for Jan. 7.
The last time the Department of Justice updated their case file on Packer was in June 2023, when he tried to appeal his sentence, arguing that the “court erroneously considered the offensive T-shirt in fashioning the prison sentence.” The judge ruled it “moot” since Packer had already completed his prison term.
Are Camp Auschwitz sweatshirts still around?
Yes and no.
Packer may have brought the Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt to the public’s attention, but it has been around for over a decade, according to an extremism expert at the ADL. Copycat versions popped up online shortly after Packer wore it, but were taken down after complaints. A search today on Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Walmart and Zazzle found none available. A couple of off-brand sites are still offering Camp Auschwitz attire — including a tank top and a baby onesie.
The post He stormed the Capitol wearing a Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt 5 years ago. Where is he now? appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump Threatens to Hit Iran ‘Very Hard’ if More Protesters Killed as Supreme Leader Said to Be Prepared to Flee
Protesters march in downtown Tehran, Iran, Dec. 29, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
US President Donald Trump on Sunday evening warned Iran that it will get “hit very hard” if the regime kills more protesters, as anti-government demonstrations enter a second week and the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is reportedly preparing an escape amid rising domestic unrest.
“We’re watching [the situation] very closely. If they start killing people like they have in the past, I think they’re going to get hit very hard by the United States,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One.
Trump’s latest threat comes after he warned last week that Washington will intervene if Iran “violently kills peaceful protesters.”
Sparked by a shopkeepers’ strike in Tehran last week, protests have swept the country, sparked by the soaring cost of living, a worsening economic crisis, and the rial — Iran’s currency — plunging to record lows in the wake of renewed United Nations sanctions.
For more than one week, anti-regime protests have shaken Iran, with violent clashes between demonstrators and security forces escalating amid intensifying domestic crises.
On Saturday, Khamenei accused “enemies of the Islamic Republic” of stoking unrest and warned that “rioters should be put in their place,” Iranian media reported.
Iran’s judiciary chief, Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei, also said that while citizens have a right to protest, the government will show no leniency toward “rioters.”
According to the US-based Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRAI), protests have spread to at least 78 cities, with the regime killing 20 people — including three children — arresting nearly 1,000, and detaining more than 40 minors.
Amid a deepening economic crisis worsened by a 12-day June war with Israel and the US that struck several of Iran’s nuclear sites, the regime has ramped up its crackdown on protesters and opposition figures trying to maintain stability.
Media reports indicate that anti-riot forces — including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Basij militia, local police, and the army — have used violent tactics such as live fire, tear gas, and water cannons to suppress demonstrations.
In widely circulated social media videos, protesters can be heard chanting slogans such as “Death to the dictator” and “Khamenei will be toppled this year,” while also calling for Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian to step down.
Videos sent to Iran International show security forces confronting protesting shopkeepers in central Tehran on Monday, with riot police deployed around the Grand Bazaar and tear gas used on Jomhouri Street near the Hafez underpass. pic.twitter.com/OyhQlyUJaN
— Iran International English (@IranIntl_En) December 29, 2025
Meanwhile, Khamenei reportedly has a backup plan to flee the country if his security forces fail to suppress protests or begin to desert, according to The Times.
“The ‘plan B’ is for Khamenei and his very close circle of associates and family, including his son and nominated heir apparent, Mojtaba,” an intelligence source told the British newspaper.
Khamenei would reportedly flee to Moscow, following the path of ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in December 2024.