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| INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT. SINCE 1897. Give a tax-deductible donation In today’s briefing: BET to air special on Black and Jewish communities, Chicago's most influential Jewish newsletter writer, the 'Kevin Bacon of Israeli actors' and much more...
ONE BIG STORY 📱 (Photo by Brent Lewin/Bloomberg via Getty Images) The 912% increase in antisemitism on TikTok, explained. You may remember the other day when we reported an alarming statistic: that there’s been a 912% increase in antisemitism on TikTok. What does such a huge jump mean? And what does antisemitism look like on a social media platform that features short videos?
Mira Fox, who covers digital culture for the Forward, lives on TikTok (and Instagram), and wanted to dig a little deeper into these staggering numbers. She explains the shocking trend in a new article posted on our website, which serves as a pretty good primer for those who think TikTok is the sound a clock makes.
“While the findings sound alarming, they don’t necessarily show that TikTok is more of a magnet for antisemitism than it once was,” she explains. That’s because the app has also grown exponentially during the pandemic, and because some of the sample sizes are quite small. Also, the 912% number refers to comments, which are rife for hate speech across platforms, not to videos, the main TikTok content.
Which is not to say that antisemitism is not a problem for TikTok. “I’ve reported on TikTok for months, both on its inventive Jewish creators and the app’s struggles to contain antisemitism,” Mira says, referring to a recent article about “when, for Jewish Heritage Month, the platform highlighted Jewish creators on its ‘Discover’ page and exposed them to a barrage of antisemitic comments.”
Antisemitism on the app can include videos featuring Nazi salutes and Holocaust denial. There was also a filter that distorts the user’s face, exaggerating the nose and smile, set to the song “If I Were a Rich Man” from “Fiddler on the Roof.” Read Mira’s explainer >
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE 📺 Lacey Schwartz Delgado was tapped by BET to produce Thursday's special. (Photo courtesy Lacey Schwartz Delgado) A “Black x Jewish” way to confront racism and antisemitism: Tonight at 9 p.m., the BET Network will be airing “Content For Change: Black x Jewish," which explores the histories of oppression experienced by Black Americans and non-Black Jewish Americans, as well as the need to build solidarity between the groups. "The biggest challenge is that it’s such a huge topic — like the ocean — with a million things you could talk about it," producer Lacey Schwartz Delgado told the journalist and author TaRessa Stovall in an interview published this morning for the Forward. The documentary hones in on many topics – including the election of a both a Black and a Jewish senator from Georgia, the common enemy of white supremacy and the work of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel during the civil rights movement. Read the story >
Steve Sheffey is behind the Chicago Jewish newsletter that even Republicans have to read: Steve Sheffey – 61, father of three, charmingly low-tech – might be the most influential Jewish activist you’ve never heard of. His 15-year-old, free weekly email newsletter may be titled the “Chicagoland Pro-Israel Political Update,” but its reach stretches far beyond his hometown. The newsletter is read in the halls of Congress and the Knesset, the offices of AIPAC and JPAC, and living rooms in the Five Towns and Flatbush. “A member of Congress actually called me while I was driving in my car,” Sheffey told our contributor, Steve Friess. “I was told that another member of Congress sent my newsletter to the entire Democratic caucus twice during the debate on the Iran deal.” Read the story >
6 OTHER THINGS AMERICAN JEWS ARE TALKING ABOUT 🎥 Helen Mirren, who won an Oscar for 'The Queen,' will portray Israel’s legendary Prime Minister Golda Meir. (Getty Images) 1. A movie about the life of Golda Meir, starring Helen Mirren and directed by Oscar-winning Israeli filmmaker Guy Nattiv, was acquired by distributors this week and is on track to start filming soon. This is one of two movies currently in the works about the former prime minister; the other stars actress Shira Haas ("Unorthodox," "Shtisel") portraying a younger version of Meir during her time growing up in the United States. Read our roundup of 7 other actors who have played Israeli prime ministers.
2. A bipartisan trio of U.S. members of Congress has issued a warning about rising antisemitism against Jews in Chile. In a letter sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, they described a "dangerous climate" in which a “systematic campaign of delegitimization against Israel” in the South American country may have have “crossed the line” into outright antisemitism.
3. An Orthodox woman is suing the City University of New York for denying her admission to the social work school. Faigy Rachel Weiss of Brooklyn is alleging that a school dean said, "Jews from religious backgrounds are too conservative to be social workers." A U.S. District Court judge has ruled that the case can move forward.
4. New hotels and restaurants are changing the way tourists think about Tiberias – turning the Israeli town into a luxury destination. “What happens around the Sea of Galilee in the next few years will be a key step in the country’s balancing act of forward-thinking and profitability, progress and preservation,” reports food and culture writer Flora Tsapovsky. “And it probably won’t be smooth sailing.”
5. A trio of Israeli filmmakers shooting a documentary in Nigeria about obscure Jewish communities were arrested after they allegedly came into contact with anti-government separatists. One of the Israelis arrested is Rudy Rochman, who founded Columbia University's Students Supporting Israel activist group. The arrests were confirmed by Israel’s Foreign Ministry, but the reason for the detainment and their charges were not released.
6. In the mood for a good pastrami on rye and happen to be near Chicago? There's a new kosher deli opening in suburban Oak Park called Fritzi's. “My dad, Fritz, fled Austria when they started rounding up Jews,” the owner, Paul Stern, told the Wednesday Journal. “He went to Switzerland, then London and eventually emigrated through Ellis Island where he was re-named Fredrick. He never spoke German to anyone but his mother — she always called him Fritzi.”
FROM THE FORWARD ARCHIVES 🚢 Iceberg ahead! Front pages from the Forward's coverage of the Titanic disaster. (Photo from our archives) As the oldest Jewish newsroom in America – the Forward launched in 1897, so we're 124 years old – we've seen a lot: Two world wars, the civil rights movement, some guy named Einstein.
And so decades before Celine Dion provided the soundtrack to Leo and Kate's doomed seafaring voyage, there was the actual Titanic disaster. It was on a cold night 109 years ago that the ship sank in the North Atlantic Ocean. With more than 1,200 casualties, the disaster made international headlines. The Forward covered the tragedy — including the Jewish lives lost and saved. Pictured on the left above are some of the faces of those who perished. And on the right, a photo of Jewish women and children who were rescued. They were housed at Hakhnoses Orkhim, a shelter at 229 East Broadway. Read our April 16, 1912 front-page story about the sinking >
"It was still early days for front-page photos in our paper," said Chana Pollack, the Forward's archivist, "and this group portrait of women and children survivors, newly arrived to the city as refuge, still offers an after-image of dignity and poignancy. While those folks survived and were enveloped within the Jewish communal resources in town, many who did not are buried in the Halifax Jewish cemetery in Nova Scotia."
Did you know? The meat on the Titanic's menu was provided by a kosher butcher shop and the ship was memorialized in Yiddish folklore?
ON THE CALENDAR 🗓 Tomer Capon is that guy you bump into and say, 'Where do I know you from?' (Photo by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images) 📺 On this day in history: Happy birthday to Tomer Capon, dubbed the “Kevin Bacon of Israeli actors” because of the volume and variety of TV shows he has appeared in (Fauda, Hostages, When Heroes Fly, The Boys, etc.) “I'm not in everything,” Capon, who is 36, once told me. “I'm just in the good ones."
📱 Today is the 15th anniversary of Twitter’s launch. A fitting occasion for you to follow our automated Twitter feed that posts a link every time we publish a story. Follow it here >
🎬 "Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain," an intimate and fascinating portrait of the beloved Jewish chef and TV host, is released tonight. In his review of the film, our culture reporter PJ Grisar pinpoints a particular episode of Bourdain's food travel show – the one in Beirut – that helps encapsulate the idea that Bourdain was his own best storyteller.
PICTURES OF THE DAY 📸 Members of the Forward staff in our Manhattan newsroom perusing the archives and posing in a legendarily long hallway. Some of our employees worked in Forward headquarters in Lower Manhattan Wednesday for the first time in more than a year. They arrived to piles of packages and, I kid you not, an empty bottle of whiskey and a not-empty cup of coffee. (Too bad it wasn’t the reverse.)
Deborah Greenberg, our director of development operations, found the Mylar balloons from her birthday, March 4, 2020, in her office intact – until she touched them. "I tried to pull them off the wall and they crumbled," she said.
Several members of the team hired during the global pandemic were meeting for the very first time. "This experience is kind of like the movie ‘Space Jam,’" said our grants manager, Josh Mandell, who came on board this spring. "Seeing people go from two dimensions to three dimensions.”
Zoom can be the great equalizer: Jodi Rudoren, our editor-in-chief, reported that the journalists “spent a lot of time discussing who was taller and shorter than we expected.”
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