Netflix's new Israeli drama, lawsuit against Haredi news site, Bernie declares war on AIPAC, new podcast is all about Holocaust boxers, and the secret Jewish history of 'Top Gun.' Plus: Play today's Vertl puzzle, the Yiddish Wordle |
Our Jacob Kornbluh shot this video, which has been viewed 431,000 times (so far) on Twitter. |
Here’s some more from Jacob’s notebook… Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani got into a shouting match with an onlooker during Sunday’s “Celebrate Israel parade,” calling the man a “jackass,” “brainwashed” and “probably as demented as Biden.” Giuliani, a Trump loyalist who helped lead the efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, was at the parade with his son, Andrew, who is running for governor. Also in attendance were Mayor Eric Adams, whose aides held a banner reading “We got this, New York,” Gov. Kathy Hochul and another of her Republican challengers, former U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin, who donned a black yarmulke for the occasion.
Adams will host the annual Jewish American Heritage month reception at Gracie Mansion on Tuesday. The menu won’t include burgers or BBQ ribs, since the mayor insists on plant-based food at his official events. Adams, who is rumored to be considering a presidential bid in 2024, met with 55 women rabbis and other Jewish leaders at City Hall last week and was photographed with Hasidic leaders at the completion of a housing development project in Brooklyn on Friday.
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A small sliver of Borough Park, above, is now in the same district as the Lowet East Side. (Getty) |
In New York, a Supreme Court judge finalized new congressional district lines after a long dispute. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, chair of Congress’s Democratic Caucus, blasted the judge for eliminating “the most Jewish district in the country by severing the historic connection between the Upper West Side and Borough Park,” while David Greenfield, a former City Councilman and head of the Met Council, welcomed the fact that, as he put it, 95% of Orthodox Jews now live in one district. Here’s how the new map is shaping some June 28 primary contests: Most of the Orthodox population in Brooklyn, once represented by Rep. Jerry Nadler, will now sit in a district (the 9th) currently represented by Rep. Yvette Clarke, who is backed by both AIPAC and J Street.
Jewish communities on the Upper West and Upper East sides of Manhattan are combined into a single district (the 12th), triggering a primary face-off between Nadler and Carolyn Maloney, two senior and influential Democrats. Speaking at a Met Council legislative breakfast on Sunday, Nadler noted that he is the only Jewish House member from New York, “and that’s an interesting commentary.”
The redrawn 10th District will include the West and East Village and the Lower East Side of Manhattan, plus Park Slope and a sliver of the Orthodox-populated Borough Park in Brooklyn. Mondaire Jones, a first-term Congressman from the Hudson Valley, announced he would run in this district to avoid another incumbent-vs.-incumbent primary with Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, who lives in the district Jones currently represents (the 17th). Former NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio and Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou also announced their candidacies in the 10th district. |
Sen. Bernie Sanders campaigned for Jessica Cisneros at a rally on Friday in Texas. (Getty) |
Sen. Bernie Sanders declared war on AIPAC ahead of a high-stakes Democratic runoff in Texas on Tuesday between a moderate House incumbent and a progressive firebrand trying to unseat him. AIPAC’s Super PAC, United Democracy Project, spent $1.8 million on the race backing Rep. Henry Cuellar and attacking the challenger, Jessica Cisneros, a human-rights lawyer. In an interview with The New York Times, Sanders said that AIPAC is “doing everything they can to destroy the progressive movement in this country.” The comments come after AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups spent close to $10 million across last week’s primaries and won most of the battles, though Summer Lee, a state legislator in Pennsylvania that AIPAC opposed, won a close contest. A spokesman for the PAC said it “will not be intimidated from supporting pro-Israel candidates.”
Meanwhile, 57 members of Congress signed a letterto Secretary of State Antony Blinken and FBI Director Christopher Wray urging an independent investigation into the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American journalist, while she was covering Palestinian protests of an Israeli military raid in the West Bank. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York drew the ire of Jewish groups for saying aid to Israel should be cut because of the killing. Israel’s defense minister, Benny Gantz, who was in Washington last week, told the Forward that he had complained to Biden administration officials that the Palestinian Authority had refused to cooperate in a joint inquiry or turn over the bullet from Abu Akleh’s body.
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The cast of 'The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem' on Netflix. (Osnat Rom)
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Can a new Israeli Netflix historical drama succeed if it flunks history? “The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem,” released in the U.S. over the weekend, follows four generations of a wealthy Sephardic family, from Ottoman rule to the late 20th century. Yet somehow, the politics and events of the era are missing from the show. British soldiers seem oblivious, Palestinians are mostly unseen, and burgeoning Nazism in Europe goes unmentioned. It “seems off for a show billed as a sweeping historical drama,” writes our digital-culture critic, Mira Fox, “and possibly dangerous for an American audience with little context for the real events.” Read the review ➤ The ingenious coders who digitized the Jewish calendar:Digitizing the calendar amounted to a translation effort that only someone versed in Jewish law, Hebrew, mathematics and coding could undertake. David Zvi Kalman looks at the long and strange history of the people who shepherded this effort, including the groundbreaking work of Hadassah Itzkowitz, a Ukrainian-born mathematician. She developed many of the United States government’s early computer systems, programming both the Social Security Administration’s first computer and designing software for the census. And, apparently, programs that could calculate Hebrew dates. Read the story ➤ Opinion | A call for grassless cemeteries:As California struggles with the West’s longest mega-drought in 1,200 years, our senior columnist, Rob Eshman, asks what it will take for Los Angeles’ Jewish cemeteries to go green — by “going brown.”
In case you missed it: Nora Berman, our deputy opinion editor, recently returned from a trip to Auschwitz where, she writes, “it is impossible to not imagine yourself in both the prisoners’ and the prison guards’ shoes.”
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WHAT ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY |
A Haredi newspaper blurred our faces of women in a meeting with Israeli President Isaac Herzog. (Courtesy IRAC) |
📸 Haredi news outlets often blur out the faces of women in photos, citing Jewish law regarding modesty. Now a group of female Jewish leaders in Israel is suing one such site there, saying the practice causes them “harm and humiliation.” (Times of Israel) 🇮🇷 Iran said it will avenge the assassination of a colonel in its Revolutionary Guards, which the U.S. designates as a terrorist organization, after he was shot dead in Tehran on Sunday by two assailants on motorcycles. After the killing, Iran said its officers had arrested several “thugs linked to the intelligence agency of the Zionist regime.” (Jerusalem Post) 💰 Weeks before the Trump administration ended, Jared Kushner and Steven Mnuchin took official trips to the Middle East and met with wealthy monarchs who invested more than $3 billion into private funds they were each setting up. Now ethics experts and Democratic lawmakers are questioning if those payments will be used to curry favor with former President Donald Trump should he run for office again. (New York Times) 🎧 With more than 2 million podcasts worldwide (including our very own Bintel Brief!), it’s no surprise there are ever-more-niche subjects. Case in point: a new show chronicles the little-known stories of boxers during the Holocaust. (JTA) 🧑🚀 In a growing shift from defense needs to commercial ones, Israel announced it would invest $176 million into its space technology industry over the next five years. (Calcalist) 🎬 Tom Cruise’s “Top Gun” sequel received a five-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival. Did you know the film’s plot is based on a story by an Israeli journalist? Read about that, and more in our secret Jewish history of “Top Gun.” (Forward)
What else we’re reading ➤ How Shabbat dinner helped launch Autumn Rowe, a Grammy-winning songwriter … A 47-year veteran of Brooklyn’s Acme Smoked Fish said farewell on his final ‘Fish Friday’ … What’s the impact of major TV series that feature Jewish con artists?
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On this day in history: “The Shining” was released in theaters on May 23, 1980. Its director, Stanley Kubrick, was born in New York to Jewish parents, although he never fully claimed his heritage in public. He pulled from Judaism for his movies but, according to a biographer, Nathan Abrams, often “took these Jewish texts” and “scrubbed them clean of their Jewishness.” In 2019, when Abrams and Robert Kolker wrote for the Forward about the Jewish elements in Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut,” they said that the director “wanted any reference to Jewishness scrubbed from the script.” Read their essay ➤ Last year on this day, we published our deep exploration of the Jewishness of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah.’ Wrote our PJ Grisar: “Debates about its meaning take on a Talmudic intensity.”
On the Hebrew calendar, it’s the 22nd of Iyar, the date of the first Shabbat observed by the Jews in the desert after receiving a double portion of manna that Friday morning.
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Comedy Central has a new web series called “Jewish or Goyish.” In each episode, comedian Eliot Glazer chats with a fellow Jewish celebrity and runs down a list of random topics – Veganism? Thank you cards? The Pittsburgh Steelers? – to determine if they’re, as the possibly-offensive name of the show implies, “Jewish or Goyish.” The video above features Abbi Jacobson, who starred in “Broad City” with Glazer’s sister, Ilana. ––– Thanks to Jacob Kornbluh, Amanda Rozon and Talya Zax for contributing to today’s newsletter. You can reach the “Forwarding” team at editorial@forward.com. |
Support Independent Jewish Journalism The Forward is a non-profit 501(c)3 so our journalism depends on support from readers like you. You can support our work today by donating or subscribing. All donations are tax-deductible to the full extent of US law. Make a donation ➤ Subscribe to Forward.com ➤ "America’s most prominent Jewish newspaper" — The New York Times, 2021 |
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