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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.”
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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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Illinois primary pits Jewish candidate with deep Israel ties against AIPAC spending
Daniel Biss might seem like the kind of candidate the American Israel Public Affairs Committee could live with. The two-term Evanston mayor grew up partly in Israel, where his family spent summers. His mother is Israeli. He speaks Hebrew. And in his political career, he regularly engaged with pro-Israel groups, including AIPAC.
But with voters going to the polls Tuesday in Illinois for a closely watched Democratic congressional primary, Biss, 48, finds himself in the unusual position of defending himself against nearly $6 million in spending from an AIPAC-aligned super PAC. His district includes Evanston and Chicago’s North Shore suburbs, with one of the largest Jewish populations in the Midwest and a history of Jewish representation. An estimated 11% of the electorate is Jewish.
Speaking with the Forward, Biss acknowledged that the barrage of negative ads has been unpleasant. But he said the outside spending has become central to his campaign, as he seeks to highlight who is behind the attacks. Once voters learn about AIPAC’s role, he said, “they are repelled.”
Biss is the latest target of the major Israel lobby group’s campaign to eliminate candidates for Congress who have substantial engagement on Israel aimed at taking a more moderate path for U.S. policy — even if that means helping get far-left candidates who denounce Israel nominated instead.
That’s what happened in AIPAC’s first intervention in Democratic primaries this year, in a New Jersey special election for a House seat. There, progressive candidate Analilia Mejia — who described Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as a genocide — prevailed after an AIPAC-associated super PAC spent more than $2 million targeting former Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowski.
Elect Chicago Women, a super PAC aligned with AIPAC, has invested more than $5.7 million in attacking Biss and boosting State Sen. Laura Fine, who is also Jewish.
Recent polling, however, showed the spending has not necessarily reshaped the race in Fine’s favor. Kat Abughazaleh, a young Palestinian-American progressive candidate, has risen to second place in recent weeks. She is backed by Justice Democrats and a newer pro-Palestinian political group called Peace, Accountability, Leadership PAC. Her surge has fueled concerns among some Democrats that the race could produce another member of the progressive “Squad” in Congress and make it harder to win the general election.
Biss had tried to get into AIPAC’s good graces. He acknowledged that he had previously engaged with local AIPAC representatives in “good faith,” even submitting a position paper outlining his views on Israel. But he now believes the organization’s approach has become too inflexible to allow for meaningful dialogue.
He called “absurd” AIPAC’s stance opposing any conditions on U.S. military aid to Israel. “And then try to enforce it with millions of dollars of dark money, is certainly bad for democracy and bad for our politics here in America,” Biss added.
Biss said he supports a pair of measures that would restrict certain offensive arms sales to Israel and increase oversight of Israel’s policies in the occupied West Bank and in Gaza. Current Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who is Jewish and has held the seat for nearly three decades, is a co-sponsor of both the Block the Bombs Act and the Ceasefire Compliance Act.
Biss’ views on Israel are shaped in part by his own family’s history. All four of his grandparents were born in Europe. His father’s parents fled Nazi-era Europe in the late 1930s, settling in Decatur, Illinois, where his grandfather established a medical practice.
His mother’s family had a more harrowing journey. Ethnic Hungarians living in what was then Romanian-controlled Transylvania, they were deported to Auschwitz in 1944. Biss’ grandmother, her sister and one brother survived, while her parents and two other siblings were killed. After the war, the surviving members of the family returned to their hometown before immigrating to Israel, where Biss’ mother was raised. Much of his extended family still lives there today.
He said he visited Israel nearly every year from childhood through his early adulthood and speaks Hebrew, which he learned as a child from his mother.
“My connection to Israel is very deep, real and personal,” Biss said. “This is not some political position I take for a questionnaire.”
At the same time, he said, his Jewish upbringing also shaped how he thinks about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
If elected to Congress, Biss said, he would push the United States to bring diplomatic and economic pressure to bear on Israel, measures backed by J Street, a more liberal alternative to AIPAC. “I think that it’s important to have people in Congress who advocate for that kind of position, from a standpoint of supporting Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish democratic state, understanding Israel’s need to defend itself, and advocating for a vision of Israeli defense and security that is not inconsistent with basic humanitarian principles, and with the Jewish values of treating every life as equally sacred,” he said.
Steve Sheffey, a longtime Chicago Democratic activist who writes an insider politics newsletter, said that AIPAC’s attacks on Biss seem perplexing — until understood as targeting someone who poses a threat to uncritical U.S. backing. “Biss’ background on Israel is so much deeper and more extensive than almost any member of Congress in either party,” Sheffey said. “When Daniel Biss says something about Israel, it comes with authority.”
Sheffey suggested that independent thinking may be exactly what worries AIPAC.
“AIPAC sees me as a threat because they know that in Congress, I can’t be dismissed,” Biss said in a recent statement.
More districts, more division
The contest is not the only Illinois primary where hardline Israel advocacy groups are playing a major role.
In the 2nd District, a crowded race to replace Rep. Robin Kelly — who is running for the U.S. Senate — has drawn attention after Schakowsky withdrew her endorsement of Cook County Commissioner Donna Miller over her ties to AIPAC-aligned donors. One of Miller’s chief rivals is State Sen. Robert Peters, a Black Jew who has been endorsed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, accused Israel of genocide and signed on to the Block the Bombs Act. Peters wrote in an op-ed for the Forward that AIPAC’s opposition to him is driven by concern that outspoken Jewish critics of Israeli policy like himself will prompt “others who may have been nervously hanging back…feel like they can take bolder action as well.”
In the crowded race to replace retiring Rep. Danny Davis in the 7th District, the campaign of Chicago City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin has received about $5 million in spending from AIPAC’s United Democracy Project and an endorsement from Democratic Majority for Israel. Jason Friedman, who is Jewish and previously got AIPAC support, has been “approved” in the primary by J Street.
AIPAC is also boosting former Rep. Melissa Bean, vying to replace incumbent Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, who is running in a Senate primary. Elect Chicago Women spent $3.9 in the race. Bean’s campaign also received more than $400,000 in donations from AIPAC donors. Her chief rival is Junaid Ahmed, a critic of Israel who supports an arms embargo on the Jewish state. Chicago Progressive Partnership, a group that shares vendors and donors with other AIPAC-affiliated PACs, aired an attack ad against Ahmed, attacking his personal wealth and investments in Tesla.
In an email to its supporters, AIPAC attempted to frame the races as a fight against potential “Squad” members. It listed Abughazaleh, Peters and Ahmed, along with an additional three progressive lower-tier candidates, as people with “dangerous visions for America,” who need to be stopped. “The pro-Israel community is taking the political fight to them, and we are not backing down,” Jake Braunstein, AIPAC senior director, wrote.
Biss, the candidate most heavily targeted by AIPAC-aligned spending, was not mentioned.
“AIPAC is backing a candidate who has almost no chance of winning,” Sheffey said, referring to Fine.
Joe Rubin, a Democratic commentator and foreign policy expert, said the Biss-Fine-Abughazaleh race differs from AIPAC’s earlier intervention in New Jersey in ways that could prove more embarrassing for the group. In the New Jersey election, AIPAC sought to defeat Malinowski without backing a clear favorite and was willing to take that risk. In Illinois, however, the group is investing heavily to elect Fine — so far unsuccessfully.
“I don’t believe AIPAC is necessarily heartbroken” if they empower a far-left candidate, Rubin said. “But I do think that they’re trying to defeat who they feel will be a very strong opponent.”
The post Illinois primary pits Jewish candidate with deep Israel ties against AIPAC spending appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump Proclaims Isolationist Critics ‘Are Not MAGA’ While Defending Mark Levin From Vulgar Insult
US President Donald Trump speaks during a visit at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, US, Feb. 13, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
An uncouth online argument between two of the most prominent American conservative commentators inspired an intervention on Sunday night from US President Donald Trump, who backed radio host Mark Levin during a heated exchange with podcaster Megyn Kelly.
Trump also defended his policy toward Iran in his Truth Social post, lambasting isolationist critics of his foreign policy as not being part of his so-called “Make America Great Again (MAGA)” movement.
“Mark Levin, a truly Great American Patriot, is somewhat under siege by other people with far less Intellect, Capability, and Love for our Country. Mark is Tough, Strong, and Brilliant, hence the nickname, ‘THE GREAT ONE,’ conceived by our MAGA friend, the wonderful Sean Hannity,” Trump wrote before effusively praising Levin as “a true Conservative, and Intellect” who was “far smarter than those who criticize him but, above all, he is a man of Great Wisdom.”
Trump warned that “those that speak ill of Mark will quickly fall by the wayside, as do the people whose ideas, policies, and footings are not sound.” He went on to proclaim, “THEY ARE NOT MAGA, I AM, and MAGA includes not allowing Iran, a Sick, Demented, and Violent Terrorist Regime, to have a Nuclear Weapon.”
Repeating his pledge to obliterate the Islamic regime in Iran, Trump vowed that “MAGA is about stopping them cold, and that is exactly what we are doing. GOD BLESS OUR GREAT MILITARY, WHICH I HAVE REBUILT SINCE THE BEGINNING OF MY FIRST TERM, TO ACHIEVE EVERLASTING PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
While not naming the specific individuals who had attacked Levin, online observers recognized the commander-in-chief had written in response to a provocative exchange between “the Great One” and Kelly which had devolved into grade-school-level taunting.
In recent months, Kelly has earned the ire of pro-Israel advocates due to her decision to align herself with the antisemitic positions and conspiracy theories promoted by fellow podcasters Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes. During a discussion with Carlson in January, Kelly praised Fuentes — a man who has celebrated Adolf Hitler, promoted Joseph Stalin, supported Hamas, and urged his “Groyper” followers to rape women — as “very interesting and he’s very smart.” She said, “There is value to be derived from that guy’s messaging.”
Kelly, Owens, Carlson, and Fuentes have also been adamantly opposed to the US military campaign against Iran, claiming without evidence that Israel dragged Trump into the conflict.
On Sunday, Levin wrote on X: “Poor Megyn Kelly. An emotionally unhinged, lewd, and petulant wreck. She’s completely revealed and destroyed herself. She’s everything people say she is, but much worse. Never an intelligent, thoughtful, or substantive comment. Utterly toxic.”
Kelly reposted Levin’s remarks before she struck below the belt. In a post that has since received 6.3 million views, Kelly wrote, “Micropenis Mark @marklevinshow thinks he has the monopoly on lewd. He tweets about me obsessively in the crudest, nastiest terms possible. Literally more than some stalkers I’ve had arrested. He doesn’t like it when women like me fight back. Bc of his micropenis.”
Levin then reshared Kelly’s jab at his manhood and responded with a Freudian implication, writing, “Busy Sunday morning for Megyn Kelly. She wakes up and has ‘micrope*is’ on her mind. Suffice to say, if it talks like a harlot, and posts like a harlot, it’s … well, you know the rest. Shalom!”
Early Monday morning, Kelly doubled down on her vulgarity and responded to Trump’s Truth Social post, suggesting that Levin had requested support.
“Micro penis @marklevinshow is such a SMALL MAN he had to go beg the president for a pat on the head (in the middle of a war!) to make himself feel better about … well, you know,” Kelly wrote. “This, after one mean tweet about him – following his 111 (!) nasty, non-stop, personal, misogynistic attacks on me. (Fox has an OBSESSED HARASSER on its hands.)”
Kelly added, “Just like all feckless, weakling bullies Micro can dish it out but he can’t take it. After just one post putting the so-called ‘great one’ in his place, he ran crying to Daddy.”
Rejecting the charge that he had solicited support in their flame war from the president, Levin wrote on X that “no, I did not speak to the president about releasing any statement. These reprobates have nothing but lies and conspiracies and hate. And the more they talk and post, the more people have had enough of them. They will eventually dry up and blow away, like those who’ve come before them.”
On Sunday night, Levin thanked Trump for his praise, writing, “I am beyond humbled by your words and graciousness in writing such a beautiful note and sharing it on Truth Social. I am honored that you took the time to write it. Your courage, strength, and moral clarity are truly unparalleled. And your leadership has made our country and the world much safer.”
Six hours after Kelly’s initial insult against Levin, her ally Owens took her own shot, writing in a long note on X that “no matter how many articles Bari Weiss publishes or how many monologues Mark Levin stammers through, the overwhelming majority of people in the world sense that Charlie Kirk was murdered for opposing this war and that Israel’s hands are not clean in the story.”
Owens further aligned herself with Carlson and Kelly, stating, “People like myself and like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly (however ignorant we may or may not have been in our earlier assessments) once genuinely supported Israel and thought Zionism was a moral position.”
Continuing to advance her conspiracy theory of Israeli involvement in the murder of her friend Kirk, Owens wrote, “In their sheer arrogance, rather than meaningfully working to restore relationships, zionists continue to use tactics of slander, deception, law-fare and yes, murder to force their perspectives. They no longer seem capable of making a distinction between illusion and reality. They wrongly assumed that with enough money, they could purchase truth.”
On Monday, former US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene backed Kelly in the feud, writing, “I wholeheartedly support Megyn Kelly telling the world that Mark Levin has a micropenis. It’s the most deserved insult and I don’t care if it’s vulgar. And Trump’s gigantic defense of Levin only enraged the base more. People are DONE. MAGA destroyed by micropenis Mark Levin.”
Greene had written her comment in response to Kelly defending her rhetoric to far-right influencer Mike Cernovich, who criticized the intra-right battle as a “total distraction to spend hours a week reacting to each other. It’s slave behavior.”
Kelly responded to Cernovich by justifying herself, writing, “Disagree. You can take the high road and ignore for a while but eventually after hundreds of tweets/attacks you punch the bully in the rhetorical face. And then he goes running to daddy about his Micropenis.”
While debates about Israel and the Iran war may engage online pugilists with audiences to entertain, polling shows that the vast majority of Republicans (85 percent) and self-identified “MAGA” supporters (91 percent) back Trump’s decision to bomb the Islamic regime in Iran.
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German Antisemitism Commissioner Leaves the Left Party Over Anti-Israel Stance, Lack of Support Amid Death Threats
Andreas Büttner (Die Linke), photographed during the state parliament session. The politician was nominated for the position of Brandenburg’s antisemitism commissioner. Photo: Soeren Stache/dpa via Reuters Connect
Andreas Büttner, the commissioner for antisemitism in the state of Brandenburg in northeastern Germany, has resigned from the Left Party, citing a rise in antisemitism within the ranks, relentless personal attacks, and a party climate that has become intolerable.
“I struggled with this decision for a long time, as I have felt a deep connection to the party over many years,” Büttner wrote in a letter to the party leadership, as reported by German media.
“But I have reached a point where I must acknowledge that I can no longer remain a member of this party without betraying my own convictions,” he continued.
According to several German media reports, the commissioner, who had been a member of the Left Party since 2015, said he was resigning over the party’s handling of antisemitism, internal expulsion proceedings aimed at removing him, and relentless personal attacks.
“The fight against antisemitism is a task that transcends party lines,” Büttner wrote in his letter. “All the more shocking for me is what I have had to witness within my own party for years.”
He criticized the Left Party’s rejection of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, noting that the party falsely regards it as a tool to repress protest while continuing to relativize antisemitic rhetoric.
IHRA — an intergovernmental organization comprising dozens of countries including the US and Israel — adopted the “working definition” of antisemitism in 2016.
Since then, the definition has been widely accepted by Jewish groups and lawmakers across the political spectrum, and it is now used by hundreds of governing institutions, including the US State Department, European Union, and United Nations.
In his letter, Büttner also condemned the Left Party in Lower Saxony, a federal state in northwestern Germany, for its position on Zionism, insisting that challenging Israel’s right to exist is unacceptable — especially after the state convention passed resolutions branding Israel a “genocidal state” and an “apartheid state.”
“These resolutions are no longer acceptable to me,” he said.
In recent years, Büttner has faced not only external threats but also a sustained campaign of insults and defamation from members within his own party.
“The way my own party has handled attacks against me is particularly troubling,” Büttner wrote in his letter. “Instead of clear solidarity, I have too often experienced silence.”
Federal party leader Jan van Aken expressed regret over Büttner’s resignation but rejected any accusations of antisemitism within the Left Party, reiterating that the party “stands unequivocally against antisemitism.”
Earlier this year, Büttner endured two personal attacks within a single week, the second escalating into a death threat.
The Brandenburg state parliament received a letter threatening Büttner’s life, with the words “We will kill you” and an inverted red triangle, the symbol of support for the Islamist terrorist group Hamas.
A former police officer, Büttner took office as commissioner for antisemitism in 2024 and has faced repeated attacks since.
In the week prior to this latest attack, Büttner’s private property in Templin — a town approximately 43 miles north of Berlin — was targeted in an arson attack, and a red, inverted Hamas triangle was spray-painted on his house.
According to Büttner, his family was inside the house at the time of the attack, marking what was at the time latest assault against him in the past 16 months.
In August 2024, swastikas and other antisemitic symbols and threats were also spray-painted on his personal car.
Like most countries across Europe and the broader Western world, Germany has seen a shocking rise in antisemitic incidents over the last two years, in the wake of the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
According to newly released figures, the number of antisemitic offenses in the country reached a record high in 2025, totaling 2,267 incidents, including violence, incitement, property damage, and propaganda offenses.
By comparison, officially recorded antisemitic crimes were significantly lower at 1,825 in 2024, 900 in 2023, and fewer than 500 in 2022, prior to the Oct. 7 atrocities.
Officials have noted that the real number of antisemitic crimes registered by police is likely much higher, as many do not get reported.