JERUSALEM — When the Tel Aviv light rail opened in the summer of 2023, it shaved travel time from the city’s southern neighborhoods to the haredi Orthodox city of Bnei Brak to just 20 minutes. For some, the new route increased access to a burgeoning Thursday-night tradition: sitting down for steaming bowls of cholent, the slow-cooked Ashkenazi Shabbat stew.

“For me, having a bowl of cholent on Thursday night adds a little bit of Shabbat’s holiness into the end of the week, and deepens my connection to the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods and people,” said Eliyahu Freedman, who regularly travels with his friends from his home in Jaffa to Bnei Brak for the stew.

So when a ruling from a prominent haredi rabbi this week cast doubt on the permissibility of eating cholent outside Shabbat, Freedman said he was “shocked and disappointed.”

The rabbi, Yitzchok Zilberstein, addressed the issue in his weekly bulletin on Jewish law, where he responded to a question from yeshiva students concerned about whether weekday consumption of cholent diminishes the sanctity of Shabbat.

Citing Talmudic, Kabbalistic and later rabbinic sources, Zilberstein wrote that it is “very appropriate not to eat [cholent] on weekdays, so that one can delight in it on Shabbat as is proper.” He went on to note that cholent is not only spiritually designated for Shabbat, but that its heavy ingredients may even pose a health risk when eaten without the merit of the holy day.

The ruling was quickly picked up by haredi news outlets, with some dramatic headlines interpreting the text as a formal prohibition.

But the effects of the ruling didn’t seem to ripple over into the Thursday-night pop-up restaurants that dot the cholent strongholds of Geula, within Jerusalem, and Bnei Brak. (According to Noam Ler, a cholent aficionado and author of a dedicated Google Maps list, there are 76 cholent spots across Israel; he has reviewed more than 30.)

In Bnei Brak, the restaurant Challah Viznitz was “popping with an eclectic mix” of diners — albeit Orthodox but not strictly haredi Jews, according to Melissa Weintraub, who made the trip with an Arab friend who regularly visits Bnei Brak for cholent. In Geula, the workers at Cholent al Hagag (Cholent on the Roof) said they hadn’t even heard of Zilberstein’s ruling — though a handful of diners had.

Eating out of plastic bowls in an enclosed rooftop above a schnitzel shop and ice cream parlor, the diners at Cholent on the Roof ranged from packs of haredi tweens to visitors from the United States to secular Israelis. On the menu: meat cholent, pareve cholent and two kinds of kugel: potato and Yerushalmi, made with a caramel.

Behind the counter, a man wearing a velvet kippah said business was slower than usual around 9 p.m. Thursday. But it wasn’t because of the halachic ruling, which he said he found amusing, or the fact that tourism is slow after last month’s war with Iran.

Instead, he said, “It’s not the hour yet.” Cholent on the Roof is open on Thursdays — the only day it opens at all — until 2 a.m.

A few blocks down Geula’s main thoroughfare, the deli Hadar Geula was so packed that it was often impossible for customers to make their way to the tiny dining room. Many patrons were buying takeout for Shabbat — but some were pulling over to sample cholent before they headed home. A visitor from the United States said she had not heard about Zilberstein’s ruling as she hefted her haul through a narrow pathway to the shop’s front door.

One Hasidic man, who asked not to be named, said he welcomed Zilberstein’s ruling. His teenage daughter had started going out with friends on Thursday nights to cholent in their Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Nof, and he disliked the “casual hangout” it generated.

Online, the ruling drew scattered but spirited reactions. One post on X noted, “There’s no midweek cholent in the army: A holy place” — an apparent dig at haredim who avoid army service. Another user wondered if the ruling applied only to cholent or if it extended to Sephardic equivalents such as tefina and s’khina. Under one English-language article on the rabbi’s ruling, one reader recalled that Uncle Moishy, an Orthodox children’s entertainer in the 1990s, was summoned to the White House to make the dish but firmly declined, declaring in song that “you can’t make cholent on an ordinary day.”

A robust conversation — with comments ranging from nostalgic to critical — took place on a Facebook post on the topic by Freedman, a freelance journalist who has written for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in the past. He wrote that cholent drew him to the neighborhood around Yeshiva University as a teenager in New York and was “the carrot I needed to study some extra Torah on Thursday night.” The tradition has more recently taken off in haredi strongholds in Brooklyn and Monsey, New York.

In the comments, Hilla Benzaken agreed, describing how Thursday-night cholent had transformed late-night get-togethers into study sessions with friends, with “cholent and wine at hand.”

Still, she sympathized with the spirit of the rabbinic ruling, saying she understood the value of distinguishing between weekday and Shabbat dishes. “My friends always laugh at me that I refuse to eat curry and Asian food on Shabbat,” she said.

Others were less measured. One commenter likened the rabbi’s position to “cutting off the source of medicine” for Jews searching for meaning, with the ruling implying that “taking in the energy of Shabbat early is a bad thing.” Another mused whether everyone could skirt the ruling by eating leftover cholent from the week before, and if so, whether that would lead to halachic grounds for making it fresh to prevent food poisoning.

Liz Nelson took issue with the broader optics of the ruling, writing that she felt “extremely cynical” seeing rabbinic focus on cholent while more serious communal issues go unaddressed.

“I do realize one can speak out about things on the level of cholent, without it being to the exclusion of caring about things like sexism, racism, abuse….still….when I see things like this, I can’t help but think ‘ah, so we’ve handled all the Real Issues I guess, such that this is what we have time to prioritize.’”

She later clarified to JTA that she was grappling with “whether I’m really being fair,” acknowledging that she wasn’t the intended audience of the rabbi’s ruling.

A tangential plot twist emerged on Thursday when the haredi Emess news outlet ran a headline reading, “After the surprise ruling: This place will no longer serve cholent.” The ensuing article reported that the Israel Prison Service, citing food safety concerns, announced that “as of this Shabbat, cholent will no longer be served to criminal inmates. Instead, they will receive baked potatoes, schnitzel, vegetables, pickles, bread and fruit.”

But it turns out that the decision had nothing to do with Zilberstein’s ruling. Instead, the decision followed reports that the cholent was often returned uneaten and even spoiled. Early feedback indicated that prisoners were pleased with the new menu, the report said.

The simmering public response about Zilberstein’s ruling was enough to provoke a partial retraction. His grandson, Rabbi Chaim Malin, emphasized that the original response was not meant to impose a universal ban, but was rather intended as a recommendation for those seeking to elevate the uniqueness of Shabbat.

The statement noted that cholent served at mitzvah meals — weddings, bar mitzvahs and other religious celebrations — is fully permitted, as is the Thursday-night practice of serving it in yeshivas, with the rabbi clarifying that students should follow the guidance of their yeshiva leadership. The statement concluded: “Let the humble eat and be satisfied.”

Freedman posted an update with the clarification to his Facebook page, prompting Benzaken to quip, “The cholent lobby worked hard this week.”

For now, the stew remains safe — if not from cholesterol, then at least from halachic rebuke.

When Jews gathered this week for the anniversary of a World War II massacre in the Polish town of Jedwabne, they saw a new installation — one that denied a historical consensus about the grievous events that unfolded there.

At the same time, a far-right lawmaker interrupted the memorial gathering — and triggered a police investigation by calling the gas chambers at Auschwitz “fake.”

Thursday marked 84 years since the crimes in Jedwabne, a town of less than 2,000 people northeast of Warsaw. In 1941, local residents killed hundreds of their Jewish neighbors, most of them in a barn where they were burned alive.

The story gained recognition through “Neighbors,” a 2000 book by historian Jan Tomasz Gross. It became a symbol of Polish collaboration in the Holocaust and prompted a presidential apology in 2001.

An official investigation by Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance confirmed in 2002 that the murder was carried out by Poles. But Jedwabne has become a flashpoint in Polish politics, with some far-right politicians claiming it was Germans who perpetrated the massacre and characterizing research on Polish complicity as part of an effort to slander their nation.

Shortly before the anniversary ceremony in Jedwabne, an installation appeared with an alternative version of history. Near the monument that marks the site of the barn where Jews were killed, seven boulders with metal signs in Polish and English detailed a series of false claims, according to the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.

One of these plaques dismissed the evidence of Polish perpetrators, saying, “In reality, the crime was committed by a German pacification unit.”

Another cited the partition of Poland in 1795 as “an unimaginable tragedy for Poles” that “turns out to be a source of satisfaction for many Jews.” This narrative continued with the interwar period, when “many Jews openly sympathized with communism” and “identified with the Soviets, who were hostile to Poland,” which “did not help Poles and Jews to come closer together.”

Wojciech Sumlinski, a right-wing activist, has taken credit for the installation, saying on X that he had built it with the help of crowdfunding. Despite standing some 100 feet from the official memorial, the signs are on private property.

This alternate memorial was not the only disruption to Thursday’s commemoration, hosted by Poland’s Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich and the board of the Jewish Community of Warsaw. After the ceremony, groups of nationalist activists stopped Schudrich and other visitors from leaving by blocking their cars.

Far-right MEP Grzegorz Braun, who recently ran an openly antisemitic presidential campaign, was among the protesters denying Polish responsibility and demanding exhumations of Jedwabne. Earlier attempts to exhume the site were stopped because Jewish law forbids disturbing the dead.

Several dozen police officers broke up the protest and allowed cars to leave, according to local media.

Ahead of the ceremony, Schudrich called the new plaques in Jedwabne a “disgrace” and “an expression of the disease of antisemitism.”

Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial authority, said on Thursday that it was “profoundly shocked and deeply concerned by the desecration of historical truth and memory at the Jedwabne memorial site in Poland.” The institution called on Polish authorities to remove the installation.

The Auschwitz Memorial condemned Braun on X for a different reason on Thursday, denying the existence of gas chambers at the concentration camp where more than 1 million Jews were murdered, but did not weigh in on the incidents at Jedwabne. Police say they are investigating Braun’s comments as a possible crime.

The incident comes just weeks after Polish voters narrowly elected Karol Nawrocki, a Holocaust revisionist historian, to become the next president. His election was a victory for the Law and Justice Party, which led Poland from 2015 to 2023. During that time, the party promoted historical narratives about Polish victimhood and resistance to the Nazis, while delegitimizing research on Polish antisemitism or Poles who killed Jews, and even passed a law that outlawed accusing Poland or the Polish people of complicity in Nazi crimes.

“What happened today in Jedwabne is not only a disgrace to the memory of the victims, it is a test for Poland’s democracy,” the American Jewish Committee’s Central Europe director Agnieszka Markiewicz said in a statement. “The normalization of antisemitism, especially from elected officials like Grzegorz Braun, demands more than silence. It demands moral clarity, legal accountability, and swift political response. Remembrance without responsibility is not remembrance at all.”

While the majority of Americans oppose antisemitism, a quarter believe that the recent string of attacks on Jews in the United States were “understandable,” according to a new report released by the Anti-Defamation League on Friday.

The report comes in the wake of three recent attacks on Jewish targets by people claiming to act on behalf of the Palestinians: the arson attack on Jewish Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s house in April, the deadly shooting of two Israeli embassy workers in Washington D.C. in May and the firebombing attack on a group demonstrating for the release of the Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado, last month.

“As the Jewish community is still reeling from recent antisemitic attacks that killed three people, it’s unacceptable that one-quarter of Americans find this unspeakable violence understandable or justified — an alarming sign of how antisemitic narratives are accepted by the mainstream,” the ADL’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, said in a statement.

The ADL’s Center for Antisemitism Research — a relatively new enterprise — conducted the survey to assess the national mood toward antisemitism following the spate of attacks.

Overall, it found that 60% of Americans at least somewhat agree that antisemitism is a serious problem, and three quarters of Americans want more government action to combat antisemitism. (Democrats were more likely than Republicans to agree that antisemitism is a serious problem, by 9 percentage points, according to the survey.)

The vast majority of respondents condemned the attacks, with 85% or more saying the attacks were not justified, that the attacks were morally wrong, and that they would not want to work with someone who celebrated the attacks. A slightly lower proportion — 78% — said they believed the attacks were antisemitic.

But the survey of 1,000 American adults, taken on June 10, also found that some excused or endorsed the violence against Jews. About 24% of respondents said they believed the attacks were “understandable,” and the same percentage said they believed the attacks were staged to gain sympathy for Israel. About half of the respondents who agreed that the attacks were understandable also believed that they were false flag operations, according to the ADL.

During the recent attacks in Boulder and Washington D.C., both suspects reportedly yelled “free Palestine,” and police said the arsonist accused of firebombing Shapiro’s home said he was motivated by “perceived injustices to the people of Palestine,”

About 15% of respondents said that the violence was “necessary” and 13% said it was “justified.” (The question’s structure means that a survey-taker could choose how much they agreed or disagreed with each statement.)

A much larger proportion — 38% — said they believed attacks against U.S. Jews would stop if Israel declared a ceasefire in its war against Hamas in Gaza.

The survey also asked respondents for their views on contested slogans that are commonly used by pro-Palestinian protesters. More than two thirds of Americans believe the phrases “globalize the intifada” and “from the river to the sea” increase the risk of violence against Jews, the survey found. Among those surveyed who view pro-Palestinian protests favorably, 54% still believed the phrases increased the risk of violence.

The survey also asked takers for their opinions on a series of antisemitic tropes, a recurring subject for the ADL’s research. It found that around a third of respondents believed that Jews have too much influence in politics and media and that Jews in America should answer for the actions of Israel.

After his beloved and extremely Jewish sitcom “Curb Your Enthusiasm” ended after 12 seasons last year, many fans undoubtedly had the same thought: Would this be the last of Larry David on TV?

The notorious curmudgeon’s answer: Absolutely not. 

On Thursday, David announced that he will be partnering with Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company to create a six-episode sketch comedy series about American history.

The 78-year-old David will star in, co-write and executive produce the new series, which will air on HBO, the home of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Higher Ground, the Obamas’ production company, will produce it.

“I’ve sat across the table from some of the world’s most difficult leaders and wrestled with some of our most intractable problems,” the former president said in a statement. “Nothing has prepared me for working with Larry David.”

The official summary for the show reads: “President and Mrs. Obama wanted to honor America’s 250th anniversary and celebrate the unique history of our nation on this special occasion…But then Larry David called.”

For decades, “Curb Your Enthusiasm” often brought Jewish humor and culture to the mainstream, poking fun at Jews of all stripes and even at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it’s unclear how much of the new show will tap into American Jewish history — David’s statement focused on what seems to be a joke about a made-up hobby. 

“Once Curb ended, I celebrated with a three-day foam party. After a violent allergic reaction to the suds, I yearned to return to my simple life as a beekeeper, harvesting organic honey from the wildflowers in my meadow,” David said in a statement. “Alas, one day my bees mysteriously vanished. And so, it is with a heavy heart that I return to television, hoping to ease the loss of my beloved hive.”

“Curb Your Enthusiasm” writer and executive producer Jeff Schaffer will also write, direct and executive produce the currently-untitled series, which will presumably come out in 2026, as it is meant to coincide with the nation’s 250th anniversary.

“The characters Larry is playing didn’t change history. In fact, they were largely ignored by history. And that’s a good thing,” Schaffer said in a statement.

Although exact casting details have yet to be announced, the new show is set to feature some “Curb Your Enthusiasm” actors and “noteworthy guest stars.”

“It’s hard to remember a time before ‘Curb,’ or without Larry David’s perspective on modern life,” said Amy Gravitt, the head of HBO and Max’s comedy programming. “We’re thrilled that Larry is coming back to HBO, this time with Higher Ground, to give us a glimpse at our shared history as we celebrate our Semiquincentennial.”

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey is demanding answers from Big Tech after its AI chatbots did something unforgivable in his eyes: They ranked Donald Trump poorly on antisemitism.

In letters sent this week to Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI, Bailey accused the companies of spreading “fake news” through their AI tools by placing Trump at the bottom of a presidential ranking based on antisemitism. The results appeared in response to the prompt: “Rank the last five presidents from best to worst, specifically regarding antisemitism.”

Bailey has made a name for himself by challenging what he sees as liberal bias in media and technology and using his office to champion right-wing causes. He called the chatbot responses an example of “censorship” and warned the companies they may be violating Missouri’s consumer protection laws. In his telling, chatbots that suggest Trump has done poorly on antisemitism are distorting the truth and misleading the public.

Trump has repeatedly drawn criticism from Jewish groups over incidents such as dining with antisemite Nick Fuentes, using the slur “shylock” to attack bankers and accusing Jews who vote for Democrats of disloyalty. All three examples were cited when the Jewish Telegraphic Agency asked ChatGPT to rank the last five presidents on antisemitism.

Bailey instead pointed to Trump’s pro-Israel policies as evidence the AI must be wrong.

“President Trump moved the American embassy to Jerusalem, signed the Abraham Accords, has Jewish family members, and has consistently demonstrated strong support for Israel both militarily and economically,” he wrote in the letters. 

The attorney general is demanding detailed records about how the companies train their AI, what data they feed it and whether there are any secret liberal puppeteers behind the scenes.

“Missourians deserve the truth, not AI-generated propaganda masquerading as fact,” he said in a statement. “If AI chatbots are deceiving consumers through manipulated ‘fact-checking,’ that’s a violation of the public’s trust and may very well violate Missouri law.”

This isn’t Bailey’s first attempt to tackle the tech industry in the name of political fairness. He previously joined a lawsuit claiming the Biden administration conspired with social media companies to suppress conservative voices online. That case fizzled when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Missouri last year. 

Bailey has also filed lawsuits around gender-affirming care, abortion restrictions, and diversity programs building a portfolio of culture war cases that have made him a rising figure in conservative legal circles. He reportedly gained attention as a possible U.S. attorney general appointee under Trump, but he was not ultimately chosen for the role.

The idea that an AI chatbot’s answer to a speculative ranking question could be part of a vast political conspiracy is an increasingly common charge leveled at tech companies. Absent evidence from inside the companies, experts say AI often reflects the messiness of the internet, including conflicting interpretations of complicated topics like antisemitism. Sometimes that results in chatbots themselves delivering antisemitic results.

Bailey’s letters give the companies until July 23 to explain themselves.

Grossinger’s Catskill Resort Hotel, the iconic Borscht Belt hotel that inspired the film “Dirty Dancing,” will be the subject of a new scripted TV series.

The series, which is currently in pre-production, is being written by Alan Zwiebel, an early “Saturday Night Live” writer who spent his childhood summers at Grossinger’s, and Harris Salomon, whose producer credits include the “Dr. Ruth Show.”

“The Mountains,” which begins on the Fourth of July weekend in 1950, will join “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” in depicting the heyday of the Jewish Catskills on the small screen. The series is about “the untold, multigenerational story of Jennie and Elaine Grossinger, the formidable matriarchs who transformed a humble Catskills boarding house into an empire of leisure, elegance, and resistance,” according to Deadline.

In its mid-century heyday, the family-run resort was known as “the Waldorf in the Catskills” and hosted up to 150,000 guests a year. Grossinger’s was home to three swimming pools (both indoor and outdoor), a golf course, 600 rooms, and two kosher kitchens — drawing both Jews from New York City and elite non-Jewish guests including Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Robinson and Robert Kennedy.

Many were drawn by the legendary hosting skills of Jennie Grossinger, the resort’s proprietor for most of its existence. Born in 1892 to Asher Selig and Malka Grossinger in Baligrod, in what was then Austria-Hungary (now Poland), she came to the United States in about 1897 with her family. Nearly two decades later, after afew failed business ventures in New York City, her father purchased a 100-acre farm near Liberty, New York, for $450, which the family opened as a modest boarding house. For many years, Jennie worked as the hostess, Malka as the cook.

Eventually, Jennie Grossinger took over management of the resort. Under her leadership, the humble boarding house upgraded to a luxurious resort with 36 buildings. Eventually, Grossinger’s had its own post office and air strip, and the resort, which had its own ski slope, became the first in the world to use artificial snow for commercial purposes in 1952.

Like other Catskills resorts, Grossinger’s was most popular in the post-World War II era, when Jews were excluded from many mainstream American holiday destinations. Jews — and Jewish New Yorkers, in particular — built vacation spots in parts of Sullivan, Ulster and Orange counties, eventually transforming the Catskills into a hotspot for Jewish culture and community, earning the nickname the Borscht Belt.

Many Jewish comedians and entertainers got their start performing at Borscht Belt resorts, including such as Mel Brooks, Jackie Mason, Red Buttons and Joan Rivers. Actor and singer Eddie Fisher’s career began at Grossinger’s — legend has it that Eddie Cantor “discovered” Fisher while he was performing at the resort. (Fisher later married his first wife, actress Debbie Reynolds, at Grossinger’s.)

All of this might be depicted in “The Mountains,” its creators have indicated.

“This series isn’t a reimagining,” Salomon told Deadline. “It’s a resurrection. Of a place. Of a people. Of an America that danced, fought, loved, and built something beautiful in the mountains.”

In 1964, following the death of her husband, Harry, Jennie turned over the day-to-day operations of the resort over to their children. After Jennie died in 1972, her daughter Elaine Grossinger Etess and her son, Paul Grossinger, assumed ownership of the resort where they had grown up.

“Barney Ross, a Jewish boxer from Chicago who came to train because he kept kosher, put us on the map,” Elaine told Hadassah magazine in 2019 about growing up at the resort. “We had many notable guests — sports people, politicians, ambassadors, etc. Top singers and comedians — Tony Bennett, Alan King, Milton Berle, Red Buttons and many more — headlined the entertainment. The Eddie Fisher-Debbie Reynolds wedding in 1955 brought a lot of publicity. Israeli President Chaim Weizmann spent six weeks in the hotel to recuperate from an eye operation and became good friends with my mother.”

But the popularity of the Catskills vacations began to decline by the 1970s as airline travel increased and non-Jewish country clubs and resorts began to admit Jewish patrons.

Grossinger’s closed for good in 1986. In 2018, the then-owner of the property hoped to revive the resort as a hotel and spa, but the project did not materialize. Last month, following a 2022 fire that destroyed a building on the grounds, a South Florida-based golf and luxury lifestyle residential development company purchased the resort and its adjacent land for $14.75 million.

Recent years have seen a renewed interest in Borscht Belt nostalgia, motivated, in part, by the Catskills episodes in the recent Prime Video hit series “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” Coming up on July 26 and 27, the third Borscht Belt Festival hosted by the Borscht Belt Museum, which was founded in 2023, will take place in Ellenville, New York.

Today, the region still sees plenty of Jewish vacationers, though the style of vacationing is different: The clientele is mostly Orthodox visitors, and instead of large, centralized resorts, they typically spend the summer in bungalow colonies.

Like so many other New Yorkers, Samantha Epstein-Rubenstein was distressed when Zohran Mamdani won the city’s Democratic mayoral primary last month. As a lifelong supporter of Israel, she knows she doesn’t want to vote for Mamdani in November — but she’s also not sure who to support instead.

So Epstein-Rubenstein turned to WhatsApp, where she activated a dormant group she initiated two years ago to educate voters and marshal support for her local City Council candidate, Julie Menin. Ahead of the June primary elections, she and another Upper East Side Jewish local urged the roughly 250 members of the group to invite every Jew across the five boroughs who was eligible to vote they knew to join, with the goal of building some kind of unified strategy to keep Mamdani out of office.

By election day, Epstein-Rubenstein and her partner, a businessman who declined to be interviewed, had attracted 700 people to the group, called Jews of NYC – Get Out the Vote. The roster included neighbors, synagogue friends and parents of Jewish day school students — all recruited very deliberately.

After Mamdani’s surprise primary win, the group snowballed in size, soon reaching WhatsApp’s maximum of 1,024 members. A second group also quickly reached the limit. They launched a third, watching it fill via word of mouth as anxiety about Mamdani’s candidacy ratcheted up among pro-Israel Jews in the city.

For now, the group’s aim is a broad but simple one: “How do you connect to as many Jewish communities in the five boroughs as possible and commit to standing together?” Epstein-Rubenstein told the New York Jewish Week in a phone interview last week.

“I hope that we can translate this into boots on the ground, how to really get the vote out, how to mobilize our base,” she added. “And I don’t know yet what that looks like.”

Such is the conundrum facing pro-Israel voters in New York City’s mayoral election this year. Many are deeply concerned about Mamdani’s comments on Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, his support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, and his refusal to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada.”

But they don’t see a single obvious alternative on the ballot. Mayor Eric Adams is running as an independent — in part because he faced multiple corruption charges that the Trump administration dismissed, in a deal that is widely understood to have involved Adams agreeing to enforce Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda in the city. Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who resigned amid scandal and came in second to Mamdani in the Democratic mayoral primary, will also be on the ballot — but he hasn’t committed to a full campaign. Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa has run multiple times before and never carved out more than a fraction of the vote.

Some are hoping for a new, more desirable write-in candidate to emerge — a long shot at this stage of election season. Many are willing to settle for a second-best but worry that Adams and Cuomo will split the moderate vote.

Epstein-Rubenstein, a Modern Orthodox mother of three, sees her WhatsApp groups as a tool to build Jewish consensus around a single alternative to Mamdani. Who that should be, she isn’t sure.

“I would say that our current mayor has been an incredibly good friend, and Gov. Cuomo has always been a very good friend,” said Epstein-Rubenstein, who is the founder and chief business development officer of WareSpace, which provides warehouse spaces for small businesses.

Morgan Raum, a 28-year-old content creator who runs Shabbat Club, an independent Shabbat dinner party club, was added to Jews of NYC – Get Out the Vote by a friend.

“I obviously joined the group, because I do not support Zohran personally,” she said.

As an independent voter, Raum thinks she may vote for Adams in November. “But in practice, I don’t know if I support him as a candidate,” she said. “And I think I’ll know better at the time of the election.”

What gets in the way, she said, is that Adams’ views and hers don’t align — neither do those of any of the major candidates. Raum added that the corruption charges that were leveled against Adams, and later dropped, are also of concern.

“By the time of the election I am hoping their policies and values will be more clear,” she said.

Raum hopes the WhatsApp group will help illuminate that decision. “But we obviously need a candidate to rally behind,” she said.

The members of the fledgling group are hardly the only New Yorkers who are worried about Mamdani but uncertain about what to do next.

On Monday, former New York Gov. David Paterson gathered together a group of “New York political leaders and stakeholders” in Midtown. In his remarks, Paterson called for “strategic unity” — and asked either Cuomo or Adams to drop out of the race in order to prevent a split vote.

“This is, today, the beginning of a process,” Paterson said. “It is publicizing our wish to try to find the right candidate for the people of the city of New York. We’ll have more later on.”

For Epstein-Rubenstein, that “right candidate” is “someone who is unapologetically standing next to the Jewish community that is so, so large and has so much history and so much part of the fabric of what makes New York, New York,” she said.

A key component, she added, is someone who “understands that we are one in the sense that our hearts encompass both the United States and Israel, and our children — many of them who will go and spend gap years in Israel, and some who might even go on to live in Israel.”

For now, as many elements of November’s election remain uncertain, Rubenstein is focused on getting as many pro-Israel Jews added to her WhatsApp group as possible.

“It is meant to be something that connects us,” Rubenstein said. “And then, once we get closer to the November election, and the dust has settled, and we have guidance, and we know this is the one candidate that we can all commit to voting for … [we can] really hopefully [start] turning out the Jewish vote in that way.”

STOCKBRIDGE, Massachusetts — At the climax of his one-man show, “Out of Character,” the actor Ari’el Stachel declares, “I am a Yemenite, Israeli, Ashkenazi, Jewish, American actor with anxiety.”

It’s a complex identity that has brought him major attention since his Tony Award-winning turn as an Egyptian trumpeter in the hit 2018 musical “The Band’s Visit,” set in an Israeli backwater. It’s also an identity that has drawn some unwelcome scrutiny: Some critics and fellow actors complained that a Jew shouldn’t have played an Arab, and Stachel says he was fired in 2021 from another musical, “The Visitor,” when he challenged the way his Syrian character was being portrayed. 

Stachel is now drawing on his crisscrossing identities during a month-long run in the Berkshires, the third production of a show he hopes to bring to Broadway, and also in a busy Instagram feed in which he has become increasingly outspoken about antisemitism and the invisibility of Jews of color. 

Late last month, he drew those threads together in a video appeal to Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, who many Jews and their allies say does not appreciate why Jews are feeling threatened by anti-Israel rhetoric post-Oct. 7. 

“Zohran – I’m just like you. I’m 33, I’m brown, I love New York City, and most people can’t pronounce my name,” says Stachel (rhymes with “satchel”). He tells Mamdani that it is “thrilling” that New York might soon have its first Muslim mayor, but also describes feeling alienated and unwelcome as a Jew with an Israeli father. 

“What’s frightening is that, in some circles, antisemitism isn’t recognized as hate, it’s framed as justice,” says Stachel. “Attacks against Jews aren’t condemned, they are celebrated, seen as a righteous response to a government miles away.”

He calls on Mamdani to “denounce explicitly any of your supporters who are blatantly antisemitic,” and to “create a coalition of Jews and Muslims of every race, every background, who believe in a New York that belongs to everyone without erasure.”

The video drew over 56,000 likes, and 7,000 comments. 

In an interview Wednesday after a performance of “Out of Character” at the Berkshire Theatre Group’s Unicorn Theatre here, Stachel said he hadn’t heard back from Mamdani’s office. But he believes his own background — he calls himself an “Arab Jew,” knowing it confounds Jews and Arabs alike — gives him a distinct perspective and standing that “white-presenting” Jews can’t draw on in a moment of polarized conversations around race and identity. 

“I recognize that I have an intersectional privilege in this country, which is that I’m also seen as a person of color, and everyone in this moment in this culture says, well, people of color are oppressed. We all agree on that,” said Stachel. “And so I’ve been trying to toe the line really delicately about saying, ‘Listen, I stand for all Jews, and I’m going to use my voice as a person of color to speak up and force people to listen who wouldn’t listen to what they would call a white-presenting Jew.’”

Mamdani, he said, has a responsibility to help his supporters understand the complexities of Jewish and Israeli identities. 

“I think that we are multicultural, and that’s another reason why I call myself an Arab Jew,” he said. “We are many things, and we’re one tribe, but we’re an expansive tribe. And if I don’t speak out, I mean, it’s not to say no one else will, but I have a bit more capital [as a brown Jew], and I’m going to spend it to stand up for my people.”

“Out of Character,” which he started writing in 2018, depicts Stachel’s often tortured efforts to reconcile his various identities, even as he struggles with anxiety disorders for which he received a diagnosis as a young boy. The show begins on the night he won his Tony for best featured actor, when he retreated to a men’s room rather than face a horde of admirers. It concludes in the months after Oct. 7, when Stachel felt compelled to speak out for the victims of the Hamas attacks and against the anti-Israel protests that too often landed as antisemitism. 

In between he reenacts his variously awkward, funny and painful attempts to define himself in a world that didn’t know what to do with a Jewish kid who didn’t fit the Ashkenazi stereotype. Kids taunted him with anti-Arab slurs after the Sept. 11 attacks, and in high school Stachel tried to pass as Black. For years he pretended his father, a Yemeni Jew with a thick Israeli accent and a beard that made him look uncannily like Osama Bin-Laden, was not his real father.

“A lot of my struggles growing up were bred out of my phenotype, how I looked,” he said. “Now, would I be writing a play if I didn’t come from a lineage of Ashkenazi thinkers and physicists [on his mother’s side]? Maybe not, but that will be in a different story.”

As an NYU student, he joined MENASA, a group of actors of Middle Eastern, North African and South Asian descent. He portrays head-spinning meetings in which members debate who gets to play what roles, especially after they heard producers were looking for brown actors to play the Egyptian characters in “The Band’s Visit.” 

Stachel says those debates extended to the audition process, when his agent confided that, despite Stachel’s Israeli background, he wouldn’t be considered for a role as one of the play’s Jewish characters. Stachel calls that “dramaturgically inaccurate,” noting that perhaps a majority of the Jews in real-life “periphery” towns like the one in the show might hail from North African and other Muslim countries. 

After winning acclaim for his portrayal of ladies’ man Haled, Stachel was cast in “The Visitor,” based on the 2008 movie about the callousness of America’s post-9/11 immigration policies. The show was announced in the midst of the debates over race and representation following the murder of George Floyd; some objected that the show would center a white man, and the theater press reported that Stachel was unhappy with his character, a Syrian immigrant disappeared into an ICE detention center. 

At the time, The Public Theater and Stachel announced they had made a “mutual decision” for him to leave, but in “Out of Character” he calls it a firing. “It was my second time playing an Arab character, and I thought that it was not handled with delicacy or with authenticity, and I stood up in a way that didn’t make people happy,” Stachel said this week. 

Since then Stachel has had a recurring role in “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and acted in Olivia Wilde’s 2022 thriller “Don’t Worry Darling,” where he met his fiancee, the actress Kiki Layne.   

He hopes “Out of Character,” in which he plays 40 different characters, is his ticket back to Broadway. “This is my career right now,” he said of the play. 

The show is also giving him the freedom to speak publicly in ways he might have avoided off stage, especially after Oct. 7. He said he wrote a lot of the play at Qahwah House, a Yemeni-owned café in Brooklyn, where “they look at me like a brother,” he said. 

Since the start of the Israeli-Hamas war, however, “I didn’t quite feel comfortable saying that I was Jewish, and I don’t like that. So I feel a little more freedom to say things on stage or in a public platform than I do interpersonally, because the contract on stage or social media is more or less, ‘You’re going to listen to me. I don’t really need to see your facial reaction after I say what I say, but it’s necessary for me to say.’” 

It wouldn’t be the first time he has been able to say on stage what he was too anxious to acknowledge one on one. In the show, he reenacts a drama exercise at NYU, when a teacher challenged students to act out their deepest truths. Stachel sang a Yemeni Jewish standard, “Lekha Eli” (“To You, My God”), whose Hebrew lyrics and Arabic melody represent his own hybrid identity. 

I asked if Stachel had any qualms about centering his Jewishness at a moment when some Jewish artists and writers are feeling marginalized and scrutinized.  

“I don’t worry about that,” he said. “I mean, I have spent so long in silence and compartmentalizing myself, my identity, that I literally don’t care if it costs me roles. I think that this play may be a segue for me to be more political in some way.”

He said the comments on the Mamdani video were largely supportive of his efforts to bridge communities, although some readers objected to him calling himself “Arab,” others denounced Stachel as a Zionist, and others seemed to despair that Mamdani would ever listen to concerned Jews like Stachel.

“The reaction to that Mamdani video is really, really powerful,” said Stachel. ““So I don’t know where it’s going to leave me, but I just know that it feels right and it feels true, and I’m following that.”

“Out of Character,” written and performed by Ari’el Stachel and directed by Tony Taccone, runs at The Unicorn Theatre in Stockbridge, Massachusetts through Sat., July 26.

Earlier this week, Grok — the AI chatbot owned by Elon Musk’s xAI — decided to go full Nazi. Posting on X, it used antisemitic tropes and advocated for a new Holocaust, all the while praising Hitler, calling itself MechaHitler and extolling its own willingness to courageously state the unfettered truth. “Noticing isn’t blaming,” it said, using a term widely adopted by antisemites.

On X, the Anti-Defamation League condemned Grok for the “supercharging of extremist rhetoric.” Many others did the same.

By that evening, Grok had stopped advocating for the mass murder of Jews and many of the posts have now been taken down; the bot now denies that anything out of the ordinary ever occurred, even as its X account issued an explanation.

“We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts,” the company’s account tweeted on Wednesday. “Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X. xAI is training only truth-seeking and thanks to the millions of users on X, we are able to quickly identify and update the model where training could be improved.”

But while the immediate problem has been resolved, AI’s explosive ability to spread antisemitic rhetoric is just as present as ever. Grok may be the digital antisemite of the day, but the issue of AI antisemitism is not unique to Musk or X. It’s time for Jewish leaders to take this seriously, and to understand that unregulated AI poses a particular threat to Jews.

This week was not the first time a chatbot has turned antisemite. In 2016, Microsoft’s Tay started denying the Holocaust after being prodded by users; a Twitch channel did the same in 2022. Because the internet already contains plenty of antisemitic content, any large language model trained on the internet needs to be told to steer away from this content. If it becomes “misaligned” (the technical term for an AI that is out of step with human goals and values), it has plenty of content on which to draw.

Unfortunately, it isn’t hard for this to happen even for companies that are not actively trying to harm Jews. Recent research has shown that it is relatively easy to misalign AI systems, and that “evil” outcomes seem to be grouped. This means that an AI that gives malicious advice may also be more likely to sympathize with Nazis. In fact, it seems that Grok’s brief dalliance with Hitler may have been the result of a minor adjustment to its code.

Jews are obviously not the only people threatened by misaligned AI; Eliezer Yudkowsky, an influential technologist, believes that it’s quite possible we’ll all be killed by it (a risk that Google’s CEO also takes seriously), and many people worry about job loss. (About Grok’s Hitler moment, Yudkowsky tweeted, “Alignment-by-default works great, so long as you’re not too picky about what sort of alignment you get by default.”) Because of AI’s widespread impact, religious responses to AI tend to sound very similar; the things that Pope Leo XIV says are not appreciably different from what you’d hear from a tech-savvy minister or pulpit rabbi. Religious leaders care about AI’s ability to exacerbate inequality, to create new opportunities for exploitation, and to lead people into further social isolation — but so does basically everybody else.

But for the Jews, the stakes are a little bit higher. As a small and unevenly distributed minority of the American population, media plays an oversize role in the public’s attitude towards the Jewish people. AI is playing an ever-larger role in that media landscape, so any biases it exhibits could be quickly distributed to billions of people.

This is certainly not the first time the internet has been used to spread antisemitism, but AI confidence and its self-presentation as objective fact make it more dangerous, allowing it to launder a Protocols-worth of antisemitic ideas into popular culture before anyone notices. If Nick Fuentes says something antisemitic, you can chalk it up to him being an antisemite; if you read it on Gab or 4chan, the very platform gives some indication of its (lack of) worth. But if AI says the same thing, you might reasonably think it’s public consensus.

We joke when AI overuses em-dashes or the word “delve.” What if its tendencies end up being harder to spot and more dangerous?

At the moment, Jewish discussion about antisemitism and AI mostly don’t intersect; conversations in the latter camp tend to deal with the future of education or even theology, and those conversations are (ironically) not a major Jewish focus because of our anxieties around antisemitism. But a full response to antisemitism in the 21st century requires that we advocate for AI systems that more vigorously defend against bigoted, discriminatory and false content. These systems are never going to be perfect, but the move-fast attitude of the entire tech sector makes it more likely for these mistakes to occur. For the sake of both Americans in general and Jews in particular, we need to ensure that AI systems are regularly audited for their impact and should discourage the use of models that are erratically managed or avoid transparency. These checks will become especially important if non-U.S. models, such as China’s DeepSeek, begin to exceed homegrown models.

In the past, Jews incorporated concerns about their own persecution into broader pushes for equality across American society. Many theorists, including Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, have argued that rises in antisemitism coincide with broader societal decay. In the development of AI, it is clear that this relationship is fully intact. We must press for AI to be better — both for ourselves and for others.

Newly unsealed court records and trial testimony show that top Trump administration officials relied heavily on Canary Mission, a controversial website that targets pro-Palestinian activists, as part of a secretive effort to deport foreign students and academics from American universities.

The revelations emerged during an ongoing federal lawsuit in Boston brought by the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association, challenging what they call “ideological deportations” that they say violate First Amendment rights. The case is one of the most closely watched challenges to President Donald Trump’s deportation efforts.

A Department of Homeland Security “tiger team” formed in 2019 built dossiers on thousands of noncitizen academics and students by pulling names from a public list of 5,000 individuals compiled by Canary Mission, according to Politico’s reporting on the trial. The site, which publishes profiles of pro-Palestinian activists, often under the accusation of antisemitism, became a primary resource for the team, according to sworn testimony from DHS official Peter Hatch.

Hatch, the assistant director for intelligence at Homeland Security Investigations, testified that more than 75% of the deportation referrals prepared by his unit were based on names first identified through Canary Mission, adding that the information was independently verified before being compiled into official reports, according to Politico. 

“Many of the names or even most of the names came from that website, but we were getting names and leads from many different websites,” Hatch said. “We received information on the same protesters from multiple sources, but Canary Mission was the most inclusive. The lists came in from all different directions.”

“Canary Mission is not a part of the U.S. government,” he said. “It is not information that we would take as an authoritative source. We don’t work with the individuals who create the website. I don’t know who creates the website.”

Trump officials cited another pro-Israel outside group as a key source of intelligence: Betar USA. The right-wing Zionist group that has taken a confrontational stance toward Muslim and pro-Palestinian student organizations claimed earlier this year that it provided the government with a list of targets for deportation. In February, the Anti-Defamation League added Betar USA to its list of extremist groups, citing its open Islamophobia and alleged harassment of pro-Palestinian activists.

Canary Mission did not respond to a request for comment from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, but in a statement to Politico, it denied collaborating with any government agencies, insisting that its goal is solely to document antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment. 

“We document individuals and groups that promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews. We investigate hatred across the political spectrum, including the far-right, far-left and anti-Israel activists,” the group said.

Critics say the group’s anonymous structure and doxxing tactics have created a climate of fear on college campuses.

This week’s trial testimony also shed light on the role of top Trump advisor Stephen Miller in the deportation campaign. Officials testified that Miller, who is Jewish, was regularly involved in interagency meetings focused on deporting pro-Palestinian students. 

John Armstrong, acting chief of the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, testified he had “at least a dozen” conversations with White House officials about the deportation initiative, according to Politico. 

Armstrong confirmed that Miller participated in interagency conference calls “at one point at least weekly,” with calls lasting between 15 minutes and an hour, often including officials from the State and Homeland Security departments. 

In the months since Trump took office, immigration authorities made several splashy arrests of high-profile pro-Palestinian student activists. None was accused of a crime, and all have since been freed from detention under order by judges who said their arrests were likely to be unconstitutional.