Latest news with #HavaNagila
USA Today
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Melissa Rivers talks TV tribute to unapologetic mom Joan: 'She kicked down the door'
Melissa Rivers talks TV tribute to unapologetic mom Joan: 'She kicked down the door' Show Caption Hide Caption President Trump, comedy, absent at White House Correspondents' Dinner The White House Correspondents' dinner went along without an appearance from President Trump or any comedians. One goal overshadowed all others for Melissa Rivers when producing a television special honoring her mother, 'Joan Rivers: A Dead Funny All-Star Tribute.' It had to be hilarious. 'My mom always said, and I say it in the special, when you make someone laugh, you give them a mini vacation, and God knows we need a vacation," Rivers says. The hourlong tribute airs May 13 on NBC (10 ET/PT), with an extended, uncensored version streaming on Peacock May14. 'The Peacock version is what really happened in the room," Rivers teases. In the special, taped in November, Tiffany Haddish raps to a rendition of 'Hava Nagila' recalling how Joan's jokes 'split your side like a kidney stone.' Nikki Glaser applauds Joan's candor about aging and plastic surgery, and Aubrey Plaza retires Joan's not-so-politically-correct jokes. Rachel Brosnahan, who cites Joan as an inspiration for Midge on Amazon Prime's 'The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,' rapidly fires off as many Joan quips as she can in one minute. Chelsea Handler praises Joan as 'a pioneer for women in comedy,' explaining 'she walked so that we could run!' Joan Rivers (born Joan Molinksy), died in 2014 after she stopped breathing during a procedure on her throat. She became the first woman to host a late-night show, was celebrated for her brutally honest appraisal of celebrity fashion on red carpets and built a billion-dollar QVC brand. 'These women wanted to be there,' Melissa Rivers, 57, says. 'I think it's because she kicked down the door. It wasn't a glass ceiling; it was a door, and she kicked it down. And they all know that. They know that they would not be able to do what they do, especially the material they do, if she hadn't made it OK first.' Patton Oswalt tells the audience gathered at the Apollo Theater for the taping that Joan wrote 70,000 jokes. 'I would find random pieces of paper with five words on it and be like, 'Oh, this is yours. You left it,'' Rivers says. Joan 'would record all of her standup when she was working in clubs and working at new material, and then start to figure out why something didn't work or why something did work. She was very, very disciplined.' Sarah Silverman, also featured in the tribute, recalls in an interview with USA TODAY that Joan was 'always writing. She was a comic's comic 'til the end, and she still had so much more in her. What a tragic, frustrating death. 'She was 81,' Silverman continues, 'but she was the youngest, hippest 81, with so much more. One thing that really inspires me about Joan is she once said that she didn't feel like she hit her stride in standup until she was in her 70s.' Melissa Rivers marries attorney Steve Mitchel after pair lost home in LA fires Rivers' favorite part of the taping was seeing how her mother's humor can still captivate an audience today. 'Every time on the monitor (in the green room), when one of my mom's clips would roll, everyone would stop and watch and laugh," she says. "And a number of people said to me that night, 'She's still the funniest person in the room.'' Rivers says her mother 'didn't like talking about legacy,' because it "was for people who aren't relevant.' But the tribute gives Joan one more opportunity to bask in the love of a crowd. 'She was truly a writer, and she loved performing live,' Rivers says. 'She loved an audience more than anything.'
Yahoo
15-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Meta Could Fight Harassment If It Wanted To
The Maccabeats are the premier Jewish a cappella group in America. Their bubblegum bops have drawn millions of views on YouTube, live gigs around the world, and a devoted following on social media. But on January 27, the group's lighthearted attempt to dance the hora turned into an anti-Semitic mosh pit. The Maccabeats had posted to Instagram a 46-second recording of 'Hava Nagila,' the Jewish folk song that is a staple of weddings, bar mitzvahs, and the occasional Bruce Springsteen concert. Before long, comments flooded the post, echoing every possible anti-Jewish stereotype. 'The sound you hear when you accidentally drop a coin,' read the top comment, with just under 30,000 likes. 'Pornography, banking industry, CIA, and US government main theme,' read another, referencing entities that anti-Semites allege are controlled by Jews (12,942 likes). 'Last thing a politician hears before being enslaved' (7,300 likes). 'My nose is already growing' (3,439 likes). 'Palestina Libre!'—a completely reasonable response to an American Jewish a cappella jam (3,158 likes). And of course, an animated GIF of a machine counting money (16,168 likes). [Read: How Glee and Pitch Perfect paved the way for a Jewish music tradition] A brigade of bigots had apparently stumbled upon the post and made a sport out of trying to top one another's insults. Some of the comments and likes came from accounts with verified checkmarks. As of this writing, so many responses contain slurs, conspiracies, and crude taunts that any one person who tried to report them would sacrifice untold time and sanity. And yet, this is the world that Meta has seemingly chosen. On January 7, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would be reforming its content-moderation regime and dialing back its automated filters to focus on 'illegal and high-severity violations,' such as terrorism and child exploitation. 'For lower-severity violations, we're going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action,' Zuckerberg said. 'The problem is that the filters make mistakes, and they take down a lot of content that they shouldn't. So by dialing them back, we're going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms.' The Meta CEO acknowledged that this change would involve a 'trade-off,' but one that he felt was worthwhile: 'It means we're going to catch less bad stuff, but we'll also reduce the number of innocent people's posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.' There's much to recommend this position in the abstract. A lot of content moderation, although well intentioned, has failed to combat hateful and misleading material while sweeping up legitimate speech in its dragnet—not just on Meta's platforms but on Twitter turned X, TikTok, and YouTube. Moderation gone amok has confused journalists and researchers reporting on bigotry and conspiracy theories with people advocating bigotry and conspiracy theories; has mistaken jokes for incitement; and has blocked political posts that happen to accidentally trip a poorly designed keyword search. Given these drawbacks, it's reasonable for platforms to seek an alternative approach somewhere between that of Elon Musk's X—where neo-Nazism is not just permitted but monetized—and the heavy-handed moderation regime of old Facebook. But in practice, Meta's new policy means that content creators like the Maccabeats have to either report every single instance of harassment they receive, even when the invective arrives en masse, or live with their own corner of social media being turned against them and their fans. 'Families watch our videos,' the group's musical director, Julian Horowitz, told me, 'and for them to have to read that stuff, and for the platforms to allow it at all, is just totally unacceptable.' The Maccabeats are not instinctual critics of Meta or Instagram. In fact, they first attained fame when one of their pop-culture parodies went viral during Hanukkah in 2010. In a real sense, the group owes its success to social media. But now they feel like they are being hounded off of it. 'This is where we live,' Horowitz said, only to have 'other people come into that space and just destroy it.' Unlike X, Meta has not fired its content-moderation team, although it has loosened restrictions on offensive speech. The company still has Community Standards for its platforms, both a spokesperson and a leading member of its policy team emphasized to me when I reached out. Yet since shifting gears to put the onus on users to report problematic content, Meta has not given those users tools that would allow them to truly shape their experiences on Facebook and Instagram. But it could—in ways that would uphold a commitment to free speech too. What would that look like? Consider the Maccabeats again. Meta currently allows Instagram users to individually block and restrict other users, but this toggle is insufficient to the task of confronting thousands of trolls and their posts. Horowitz told me that 'hundreds of comments of just the most vile nature' were continuing to pour in, some arriving even as we spoke. 'I could probably check over the course of this conversation, and there will have been 10 more GIFs of goblins and swastikas and nose emojis,' Horowitz said. Simply put, blocking every bigot who comments on content is impractical and onerous. But there is a better solution: allowing users to ban with one click not just the author of a bigoted remark but also every one of the thousands of people who liked the offending post. As noted, the top anti-Semitic comment on the Maccabeats' 'Hava Nagila' clip has some 30,000 likes. It seems unlikely that any of those people have a real interest in Jewish a cappella. Many of them likely left their own slurs in the comments. Nuking the top response and everyone who liked it would not only prevent thousands of bigots from trolling in the future but also clean up many of the other anti-Jewish attacks on the targeted video. And because trolling becomes less fun for the troll when they know they will get only one shot before being one-shotted themselves, such a feature would discourage the entire enterprise. This 'megablock' is not science fiction: It existed as a third-party extension for Twitter before Musk bought the site and killed most outside add-ons by charging their developers exorbitant fees. Meta could easily adapt the concept. Similarly, the company could provide a straightforward way for users to report an entire page as having been targeted for brigading—that is, a mass influx of malevolent users engaged in directed abuse that has nothing to do with the post. In this way, rather than needing to flag individual comments, users would be able to raise the alarm about a page or post as a whole, then have Meta's moderators investigate the accounts involved and bar them from the page as needed. All of these ideas are free-speech friendly. They do not involve top-down censorship, but bottom-up user choice. Letting people police the content on their own pages and feeds is the natural next step for platforms that want to empower users rather than constantly surveil and censor them. Such features are also just common sense. No one has an inherent right to graffiti another person's real-world home; they shouldn't have a right to vandalize a virtual one. Most important, these sorts of changes are necessary to resolve a fundamental flaw in the structure of sites such as Instagram and TikTok. Social media is a numbers game, where popularity dictates what the algorithm ultimately amplifies. Because Jews and other minorities constitute such a small subset of the population, they are easily outnumbered on social media by those who want to deride them. Without powerful new user tools to counter these odds, platforms will quickly become a competition that minority populations can't win, and will instead be swarmed and overwhelmed by those who want to bully them and drown out their content. Owners like Zuckerberg don't have to imagine what that looks like—they can just log on to Musk's X. That platform may be a lost cause, but the rest of them don't have to be. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Yahoo
13-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Scarlett Johansson calls out AI celeb video slamming Kanye West
Actress Scarlett Johansson is calling for urgent AI safety legislation after a deepfake video of her and other Jewish celebrities went viral for slamming antisemitism by Ye, formerly Kanye West. The viral post shows AI-generated versions of Johansson, rapper Drake, Jerry Seinfeld, Ben Stiller, Mila Kunis, Steven Spielberg, Lenny Kravitz and other big names wearing white T-shirts with the Star of David inside of a hand making a middle finger gesture with 'Kanye' written below. It features the Jewish folk song 'Hava Nagila' in the background and ends with the message 'Enough is Enough' and 'Join the Fight Against Antisemitism.' The video started circulating after the 'Donda' rapper's recent hate-fueled tirade on X where he professed his love for Hitler and made many antisemitic and other hateful comments. Then, during Super Bowl LIX, he aired a commercial advertising his Yeezy clothing brand and urged viewers to head to his website. There, the site was selling a T-shirt featuring a swastika. The item has since been taken down, the store removed from Shopify, the e-commerce online store platform, and his X account deactivated. Mandy Moore slams Amazon for delivering package to home lost in L.A. wildfire Johansson said her likeness was used without her consent and is calling for lawmakers to regulate the use of artificial intelligence and prioritize passing legislation to limit AI use. 'It has been brought to my attention by family members and friends, that an AI-generated video featuring my likeness, in response to an antisemitic view, has been circulating online and gaining traction,' Johansson said in a statement obtained by CNN. 'I am a Jewish woman who has no tolerance for antisemitism or hate speech of any kind. But I also firmly believe that the potential for hate speech multiplied by AI is a far greater threat than any one person who takes accountability for it. We must call out the misuse of AI, no matter its messaging, or we risk losing a hold on reality.' 'I urge the U.S government to make the passing of legislation limiting AI use a top priority,' she continued. 'It is a bipartisan issue that enormously affects the immediate future of humanity at large.' Why John Legend is considering leaving California The video was created by Ori Bejerano of Israel whose Instagram bio states he's a 'Generative AI Expert, Creator, Researcher & Lecturer, Leading AI-Driven Advertising.' 'F–k you Kanye West,' Bejerano's caption translated to. 'In recent days, Kanye West has again crossed every possible red line. The man who had previously proclaimed 'I am Nazi praise Hitler' and spread anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, used one of the biggest stages in the world – running an ad during the Super Bowl – to spread antisemitism and hate.' He said West's recent actions were not a 'gimmick' or 'artistic provocation' but an 'intentional incitement against Jews.' However, this is not the 'Black Widow' actress' first issue with the technology. 'I have unfortunately been a very public victim of AI, but the truth is that the threat of AI affects each and every one of us,' she continued. 'There is a 1000-foot wave coming regarding AI that several progressive countries, not including the United States, have responded to in a responsible manner. It is terrifying that the US government is paralyzed when it comes to passing legislation that protects all of its citizens against the imminent dangers of AI.' In 2024, she claimed OpenAI used her voice for a version of ChatGPT even though she declined the offer many times. OpenAI eventually removed the voice. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Guardian
13-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Scarlett Johansson warns of dangers of AI after Kanye West deepfake goes viral
Scarlett Johansson has warned of the 'imminent dangers of AI' after a deepfake video of her and other prominent Jewish celebrities opposing recent antisemitic remarks from Kanye West went viral this week. The video contained AI-generated versions of more than a dozen celebrities, including Johansson, David Schwimmer, Jerry Seinfeld, Drake, Adam Sandler, Stephen Spielberg, and Mila Kunis. It opened with a deepfake likeness of Johansson in a T-shirt that was emblazoned with a hand and middle finger extended, a Star of David and the name Kanye. The video was set to 'Hava Nagila', a Jewish folk song that is typically played at celebratory cultural events, and ended with the slogan: 'Enough is enough. Join the fight against antisemitism'. Other stars depicted included Sacha Baron Cohen, Jack Black, Natalie Portman, Adam Levine, Ben Stiller, and Lenny Kravitz. 'It has been brought to my attention by family members and friends, that an AI-generated video featuring my likeness, in response to an antisemitic view, has been circulating online and gaining traction,' Johansson said in a statement to People. 'I am a Jewish woman who has no tolerance for antisemitism or hate speech of any kind. But I also firmly believe that the potential for hate speech multiplied by AI is a far greater threat than any one person who takes accountability for it. We must call out the misuse of AI, no matter its messaging, or we risk losing a hold on reality.' West, now known as Ye, repeatedly referred to himself as a 'Nazi' and praised Hitler on X before deactivating his account. He also appeared in an advert during the Super Bowl directing people to his website, which started selling only one product – T-shirts with swastikas on them. The site was later taken down by Shopify due to policy violations, while Fox Television Stations CEO, Jack Abernethy, also condemned the ad in a note to staff. Johansson has been one of the most vocal celebrities against the use of AI without consent. Last year she threatened legal action against OpenAI after the company used a voice resembling her own in its new ChatGPT product – nine months after she said she turned down the company's request to voice their AI system. OpenAI eventually removed the heavily promoted voice option from ChatGPT after a widespread reaction. Johansson said she had been 'a very public victim of AI, but the truth is that the threat of AI affects each and every one of us'. She added: 'There is a 1,000 foot wave coming regarding AI that several progressive countries, not including the United States, have responded to in a responsible manner. It is terrifying that the US government is paralysed when it comes to passing legislation that protects all of its citizens against the imminent dangers of AI.' The actor urged elected officials to take legislative action against AI abuses, calling it a 'bipartisan issue that enormously affects the immediate future of humanity at large'. Her comments come as the UK's Advertising Standards Authority said fake adverts featuring celebrities remain the most common type of scam adverts appearing online. The AI video was created by Ori Bejerano, who describes himself as a generative AI expert on his Instagram bio. His original post included a notice that said the content was 'digitally created or altered with AI to seem real'.
CNN
13-02-2025
- Entertainment
- CNN
Scarlett Johansson calls for AI laws after fake video of celebrities condemning Kanye West's antisemitism goes viral
CNN — Scarlett Johansson is condemning antisemitism and calling for legislation to protect the public from artificial intelligence after a deepfake video of her and other celebrities, created with the technology, widely circulated on social media this week. The AI video showed an image of Johansson in a T-shirt emblazoned with a hand and middle finger extended, a Jewish star and Kanye West's name. Though fake, the video implied she and others were responding to West's most recent antisemitic remarks and a swastika shirt he was selling on his Yeezy website, before it was pulled down by Shopify. 'It has been brought to my attention by family members and friends, that an AI-generated video featuring my likeness, in response to an antisemitic view, has been circulating online and gaining traction,' Johansson said in a statement obtained by CNN. 'I am a Jewish woman who has no tolerance for antisemitism or hate speech of any kind. But I also firmly believe that the potential for hate speech multiplied by AI is a far greater threat than any one person who takes accountability for it. We must call out the misuse of AI, no matter its messaging, or we risk losing a hold on reality.' Johansson's statement continued, 'I have unfortunately been a very public victim of AI, but the truth is that the threat of AI affects each and every one of us. There is a 1000 foot wave coming regarding AI that several progressive countries, not including the United States, have responded to in a responsible manner. It is terrifying that the US government is paralyzed when it comes to passing legislation that protects all of its citizens against the imminent dangers of AI.' The fake video also included AI-generated imagery of Adam Levine, Mila Kunis, Lenny Kravitz, Mark Zuckerberg, Sacha Baron Cohen, Ben Stiller, Natalie Portman, David Schwimmer and others, set to 'Hava Nagila,' a Jewish folk song that is typically played at celebratory cultural events. Johansson has been one of the most vocal celebrities to take a stand the use of AI without consent. Last year, the Marvel star lawyered up in a fight against OpenAI as she spoke out about a synthetic voice 'eerily similar' to hers being used for ChatGPT. In her statement on Wednesday, Johansson called on elected officials to take legislative action against AI abuses. 'I urge the U.S government to make the passing of legislation limiting AI use a top priority,' she said. 'It is a bipartisan issue that enormously affects the immediate future of humanity at large.' The AI video was created by Ori Bejerano, who describes himself as a generative AI expert on his Instagram bio. His original post of the video includes a notice that reads, 'This content was digitally crated or altered with AI to seem real.' 'It's time to stop being silent and response to antisemites like Kanye West in the strongest way possible,' Bejerano's Instagram caption, written in Hebrew and translated to English by CNN, read in part. 'We must demand from the social networks to stop giving stage to antisemitism and hatred.' While Johansson is the only celebrity in the fake video to speak out against the use of AI so far, some others have previously spoken out against West. Over the weekend, before his Super Bowl ad aired, 'Friends' star Schwimmer pleaded with Elon Musk to block West from X. 'We can't stop a deranged bigot from spewing hate filled, ignorant bile… but we CAN stop giving him a megaphone, Mr. Musk,' Schwimmer wrote on Instagram. 'Kanye West has 32.7 million followers on your platform, X. That's twice as many people than the number of Jews in existence. His sick hate speech results in REAL LIFE violence against Jews.' West, who now goes by Ye, deactivated his X account late Sunday night. Hen Mazzig, co-founder of the Tel Aviv Institute, an organization that works to combat Jewish hate and misinformation across social media, weighed in on the AI video. 'Misusing AI is dangerous, no doubt,' Mazzig wrote on X. 'But you know what's even more dangerous? Unchecked antisemitic hate being platformed to millions every single day.'
