Latest news with #non-Jewish
New York Post
16 hours ago
- General
- New York Post
Michael Rapaport warns Jewish people the ‘cavalry ain't coming' to save them following antisemitic attacks
Comedian and actor Michael Rapaport is alarmed that more non-Jewish people aren't speaking out in defense of Jewish people following multiple violent attacks against them. In the latest episode of his podcast posted Tuesday, Rapaport warned fellow Jewish people to keep on guard over the rising antisemitic violence in the country as other people don't seem to be rushing to their defense. Advertisement 'I'm telling you something, Jewish people, the cavalry ain't coming. The cavalry is not coming for us. They don't give a f—,' he said. The comedian has become a prominent advocate for Israel and the Jewish people following the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack in Israel in 2023, and the raucous anti-Israel protests that consumed many US college campuses in its wake. Rapaport's latest words come after suspect Mohamed Sabry Soliman allegedly set pro-Jewish protesters on fire in Boulder, Colorado using a makeshift flamethrower and Molotov cocktails. Actor Michael Rapaport is seen among the pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli demonstrators during a rally calling for a cease-fire in Gaza at Columbia University on Tuesday, April 30, 2024 in New York, NY. James Keivom Advertisement Soliman, an Egyptian national who overstayed his travel visa, was arrested on Sunday following the attack on demonstrators protesting Hamas continuing to hold hostages in Gaza. Twelve protesters were injured. Before his arrest, the suspect was caught on video yelling 'free Palestine' and other anti-Israel slogans during the attack. Soliman later told police he wanted to kill 'all Zionist people.' The attack comes less than two weeks after two Israeli diplomats were gunned down outside a Jewish event in Washington, DC. Rapaport expressed frustration at having spoken up for multiple marginalized communities and feeling as though other groups have failed to speak up for Jewish communities now under threat. Advertisement Mothers Against College Antisemitism rally at Washington Square Park. John Roca 'I have spoken out on behalf of Black Lives Matter, George Floyd. I have spoken out on behalf on women's rights. I called [Supreme Court Justice] Clarence Thomas 'Uncle Clarence.' I've spoken on abortion rights. Every single thing under the sun on social media in the last, I don't know, ten years – let's say ten years – I have spoken out,' he said. 'I put a f—— black square up there like a f—— a—— during Black Lives Matter,' he continued, mentioning the viral social media post made in solidarity with that movement in 2020. Advertisement 'Don't you feel like an a—— now for putting up a black square during Black Lives Matter when nobody is coming and saying anything on our behalf?' he asked. 'Nobody is coming and saying anything on our behalf, Jewish people, Zionist people. They're not calling, they're not texting, they're not tweeting. They're not leaving comments. They're not DMing [Direct Messaging]. They're not doing s—.' The comedian added, 'It's sad, it's frustrating. You feel used. You feel manipulated. You feel like a sucker. I feel like it too!'
Yahoo
17 hours ago
- General
- Yahoo
Following antisemitic attacks, Rapaport warns Jewish people the ‘cavalry ain't coming' to save them
Comedian and actor Michael Rapaport is alarmed that more non-Jewish people aren't speaking out in defense of Jewish people following multiple violent attacks against them. In the latest episode of his podcast posted Tuesday, Rapaport warned fellow Jewish people to keep on guard over the rising antisemitic violence in the country as other people don't seem to be rushing to their defense. "I'm telling you something, Jewish people, the cavalry ain't coming. The cavalry is not coming for us. They don't give a f---," he said. 'Usaid' Paperwork Found In Car Of Boulder Terror Attack Suspect Targeting Pro-israel Group The comedian has become a prominent advocate for Israel and the Jewish people following the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack in Israel in 2023, and the raucous anti-Israel protests that consumed many U.S. college campuses in its wake. Rapaport's latest words come after suspect Mohamed Sabry Soliman allegedly set pro-Jewish protesters on fire in Boulder, Colorado using a makeshift flamethrower and Molotov cocktails. Read On The Fox News App Soliman, an Egyptian national who overstayed his travel visa, was arrested on Sunday following the attack on demonstrators protesting Hamas continuing to hold hostages in Gaza. Twelve protesters were injured. Slain Israeli Embassy Workers Were On Verge Of Engagement, Ambassador Says Before his arrest, the suspect was caught on video yelling "free Palestine" and other anti-Israel slogans during the attack. Soliman later told police he wanted to kill "all Zionist people." The attack comes less than two weeks after two Israeli diplomats were gunned down outside a Jewish event in Washington, D.C. Rapaport expressed frustration at having spoken up for multiple marginalized communities and feeling as though other groups have failed to speak up for Jewish communities now under threat. "I have spoken out on behalf of Black Lives Matter, George Floyd. I have spoken out on behalf on women's rights. I called [Supreme Court Justice] Clarence Thomas 'Uncle Clarence.' I've spoken on abortion rights. Every single thing under the sun on social media in the last, I don't know, ten years – let's say ten years – I have spoken out," he said. Click Here For More Coverage Of Media And Culture "I put a f------ black square up there like a f------ a------ during Black Lives Matter," he continued, mentioning the viral social media post made in solidarity with that movement in 2020. "Don't you feel like an a------ now for putting up a black square during Black Lives Matter when nobody is coming and saying anything on our behalf?" he asked. "Nobody is coming and saying anything on our behalf, Jewish people, Zionist people. They're not calling, they're not texting, they're not tweeting. They're not leaving comments. They're not DMing [Direct Messaging]. They're not doing s---." The comedian added, "It's sad, it's frustrating. You feel used. You feel manipulated. You feel like a sucker. I feel like it too!"Original article source: Following antisemitic attacks, Rapaport warns Jewish people the 'cavalry ain't coming' to save them
Atlantic
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
Between Tradition and Modernity Stands One Bumbling Rabbi
In recent years, an impressive number of particularly charming actors have played rabbis on TV. Adam Brody, Sarah Sherman, Daveed Diggs, and Kathryn Hahn have all donned a kippah, wrapped themselves in a tallis, and shown how fun loving (even sexy) it can feel to carve a path between the rock of tradition and the hard place of modernity. I'm not sure why progressive rabbis are the clerics to whom pop culture tends to assign this role, as opposed to, say, quirky priests or wacky imams. Maybe Judaism is well suited as a religion that revels in questioning and doubt. Maybe rabbis are just funnier. Add to the scroll of TV clergy Rabbi Léa Schmoll, played by Elsa Guedj. In Reformed, a new French series now streaming on Max, Léa has the joyful burden of making millenia-old rituals matter anew. Unlike many other shows that feature rabbis, this one focuses on the actual work of rabbi-ing—and it isn't easy. The drama (and sitcom-style comedy) of Reformed comes out of her struggle against both the nihilism of our fallen world, which provides no answers to the bigger questions of life, and a rigid form of Orthodoxy that provides too many easy answers. In the middle stands utterly human Léa, who has the sweetly befuddled air, wild mane, and wide eyes of a young Carol Kane. Her shirts are often misbuttoned and half-tucked. She's perpetually late. And she is brand-new to the job, having just taken her first rabbi gig when the show opens in her hometown of Strasbourg, in eastern France. She is also a woman rabbi in a country where they are rare—the show makes a running gag of what title to use for her, because both the French word for a female rabbi, rabbine, and a stuffier alternative, Madame le rabbin, sound so unfamiliar that they regularly provoke giggles. After rabbinical school, she moves back into the book-lined apartment of her misanthropic father, a weathered Serge Gainsbourg look-alike (Éric Elmosnino, who actually played Gainsbourg in a biopic). He's a psychotherapist and a staunch atheist for whom a rabbi daughter is a cosmic joke at his expense. 'There was Galileo, Freud, Auschwitz,' he declares over dinner when she discusses her new job. 'I thought the problem was solved. God doesn't exist. The Creation is meaningless. We're alone. We live. We suffer.' (In French—I promise—this sounds like a very normal dinner conversation.) Already in the first episode, in her very first interaction with a congregant, Léa has to defend one of the most primitive forms of religious practice: circumcision. A new mother asks for Léa's help in convincing her non-Jewish partner to get over his resistance to their son having a bris. She senses—after many initial bumbling missteps—that what pains the father is that his son's body will be different from his own, no longer an extension of himself. Léa reaches for a biblical story, the binding of Isaac. As they stand outside the synagogue, where the father has been nervously pacing, drinking espressos, and smoking cigarettes (again, France), she offers her explanation for God's seemingly sadistic command that Abraham sacrifice his son. This was done, she argues, not to test Abraham's faith—God, being omniscient, would presumably know Abraham's faithfulness already—but ultimately to stop Abraham's hand before he brought his knife down, proving the limits of a parent's power over their child's life. Shira Telushkin: The new American judaism As Léa tells it, this brutal story becomes a comforting parable about learning to stop projecting yourself onto your children, about letting them go. 'The binding of Isaac is actually the moment when he is unbound from his father,' Léa says. 'God says to the Hebrews, 'Your children are not your children. They come from you. But they are not you.'' A bar mitzvah, a wedding, a Passover seder, and two funerals will follow. And though the same dynamic repeats, Léa's confidence grows as she learns how to give sense to the rituals. 'In the end, our job is about accomplishing certain gestures and trying to understand their meaning,' she says, providing a pretty good synopsis of the show. Interpretation is her creative act, and part of what makes Reformed enthralling is that she gets really good at it. Reformed is roughly based on the book Living With Our Dead, by Delphine Horvilleur, which was published in an English translation last year. Horvilleur is a liberal rabbi (she'll even accept 'secular rabbi') who has become something of a celebrity in France. The book would not seem to be an obvious fit for adaptation into a comedy series—in it, she recounts 11 instances of mourning, and how she has worked to integrate death into her life. She also argues eloquently for her more liberal form of the religion. The birth of rabbinic Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, in 70 C.E., was the moment, she writes, when exegesis began to trump blind obedience. The rabbis were exiled, and had no temple where they could make sacrifices to God. They invented a religion that was a form of 'literal a-theism,' she writes, 'a world where God doesn't intervene and where human decisions prevail when there is controversy.' In the show, Léa has an antagonist on this point, a soulful local Orthodox rabbi named Arié (Lionel Dray) who was once her teacher. The friction in their relationship is more than just theological—their 'Will they? Won't they?' sexual tension adds another sitcom element to the show (though given his black fedora and many children at home, I'm guessing they won't). They tussle in a friendly, and sometimes not-so-friendly, way about whether an 'authentic' form of Judaism exists. In one climactic scene, while on an interfaith panel discussion, their argument overwhelms the event. Arié refers to Léa's approach to Judaism as 'à la carte': She picks and chooses what suits her interests. 'Why not practice meditation or oriental-spirituality seminars, if the goal is to confirm one's own beliefs?' he asks her. Léa shoots back by asking him if he practices polygamy. Religion evolves, she says, and besides, 'many people aspire to connect with the wisdom of biblical texts, and they have a right to it, even if you claim exclusive ownership of them.' That's fine, Arié responds, but 'don't call it Judaism. Because that's not Judaism. It's something else.' Franklin Foer: The golden age of American Jews is ending As someone who is on Léa's side of this debate—I agree with Horvilleur that 'Judaism doesn't require its adherents to pass a final exam'—I appreciated her fierce defense of this more open-ended version of the religion, as well as her look of self-doubt as she was arguing it. Judaism that tries to be alive to a changing world has an inferiority complex. It's not even a fair fight when one side takes the accommodation of reality as its mandate and the other cites the direct mandate of God. Léa's work seems more rewarding, though, because the comfort she provides feels more like grace. When she teaches a man sitting alone with his mother's coffin about the Jewish tradition of tearing a piece of your clothes when in mourning, explaining that it symbolizes 'that the survivor will never be entirely whole again,' the gesture breaks the stark nothingness on the son's face. I'm moved by watching a show that finds drama in all of this, because, at the moment, I'm helping my 12-year-old daughter prepare for her bat mitzvah. She has to write a speech responding to the section of Torah she will be reading, one that includes the biblical proscription to 'not boil a kid in its mother's milk.' From this, early rabbis extrapolated the strict dietary laws that prohibit mixing milk and meat. My daughter had a different reading, though. In a commentary on the text, she found that in the ancient Near East, meat cooked in soured milk was a delicacy. Maybe God didn't intend for this to be a restriction on food at all, she wondered. Maybe he was just asking people to not show off by eating fancy dishes. Maybe he was telling them to live simply. I liked that in the old words she found her own significance, one an Orthodox rabbi like Arié would find ridiculous but that Léa would smile at. Reformed is a lot more entertaining than this doctrinal back-and-forth would suggest. The show is ultimately about people feeling confused as they face life at the moments that most require an injection of meaning. Can religion still have purpose for those of us who don't believe? The show answers with a qualified yes—as long as it is religion that is never too sure of itself. 'There are lots of rabbis full of certainties,' Arié tells Léa in one consoling moment. 'Perhaps all those who are looking for something else need you.'
Edmonton Journal
25-05-2025
- Politics
- Edmonton Journal
‘It feels so good': Toronto's Walk with Israel breaks record with 56,000 participants
Article content There was a heavy police presence lining the route, particularly at the Bathurst and Sheppard intersection, which slowed marchers down during the walk's final stretch, just south of its endpoint at the Prosserman Jewish Community Centre (JCC). Tensions flared in the logjam as police did their best to distance the two camps from one another. No arrests were witnessed at the time. The pro-Israel crowd was diverse and boasted many non-Jews. Several Iranian flags featuring a lion — an icon embraced by members of the diaspora critical of the current regime — were spotted often. Members of Allies for a Strong Canada, a group of non-Jewish advocates established after October 7 to combat antisemitism in the country, were also present. 'On the question of antisemitism, on the question of the rights and freedoms of the Jewish people, you need to stand up right away,' the chair of the organization's board, Tim Egan, said. His comments came just hours after Israel's National Security Council elevated its Canadian travel advisory level from 'no warning' to 'potential threat' posed to Jews and Israelis. 'As a Canadian, I've been horrified for a very long time about how antisemitism is on the rise,' Egan continued. 'I've always seen Israel as an ally, we should stand with our allies. Israel is an ally under attack and with the attack on Israel has come, I think, a disgusting attack on the Jewish people within Canada.'
NDTV
24-05-2025
- Politics
- NDTV
Auschwitz Museum Warns Against Fake AI Images Of Victims
The Auschwitz museum warned on Friday against Facebook posts with "harmful" AI-generated fictional images of victims of the Nazi German death camp, condemning them for "falsifying history". The museum at the site of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau camp has long used its own social media accounts to publish authentic victim photos, names and information to raise Holocaust awareness. Now the museum has discovered that at least a couple of Facebook pages were producing similar victim bios but with fictional information or photos. "People have started to notice that there are pages, including one called '90's History' where there are short bios of the victims as well as photos that were clearly made by artificial intelligence," said museum deputy spokesman Pawel Sawicki. "Producing artificial images of real people, or what is even more troubling, producing false identities of victims, is certainly troubling and also very harmful for the memory of those who died at Auschwitz," he told AFP. Such posts were harmful because "producing artificial information, last names, is falsifying history", said Sawicki. This sort of disinformation could even lead to Holocaust denial, he added. "There is of course a danger that if we have these fake people, then perhaps someone could claim that the whole thing is made up," said Sawicki. He said the museum was in touch with US tech giant Meta, which owns Facebook, in the hopes that it could look into the matter. Nazi Germany built the death camp in the city of Oswiecim after occupying Poland during World War II. The Holocaust site has become a symbol of Nazi Germany's genocide of six million European Jews, one million of whom died at the camp between 1940 and 1945. More than 100,000 non-Jews also died at Auschwitz-Birkenau, including non-Jewish Poles, Roma and Soviet soldiers.
