This piece first ran as part of The Countdown, our daily newsletter rounding up all the developments in the New York City mayor’s race. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. There are 74 days to the election.

🐝 Social media buzz

• Alisa Roever, a New York socialite with ties to Mayor Eric Adams, posted a message that appeared to blame Jews for Mamdani’s primary win on Thursday.

• “My dear Jewish family,” she said on her social media pages. “Stop calling me and complaining. NYC the largest Jewish after Israel! Jews own real estate, banks, media. Mamdani taking over the city your fault. It is slap in your face that you are not strong anymore Get together and get the city back!” Roever co-founded the charity Angels Helpers with Adams’ brother, Bernard.

• This may be the least of the mayor’s problems. Adding to a swirl of criminal cases, corruption charges were launched against several of his associates and supporters on Thursday. And don’t forget that his ally Winnie Greco handed a CITY reporter a potato chip bag stuffed with cash this week. The New York Times has since reported that was not an isolated incident, spotting other envelopes of cash handed out at Adams’ rallies.

• Cuomo jokingly had potato chips handed out to reporters at a press conference on Thursday, saying, “Sometimes a bag of potato chips is just a bag of potato chips.” Of course, he made sure to post the video on X as part of his social media rebrand.

🚨 Fact-check update

• After we fact-checked what Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said about Mamdani on CNBC, host Andrew Ross Sorkin issued his own clarification on air.

• Greenblatt “made a point of saying that Zohran Mamdani had not met with any mainstream Jewish institutions,” said Sorkin, who is Jewish. “The truth is, and I didn’t know this in the moment, but he had actually visited a whole number of synagogues.”

• The ADL told us Greenblatt meant that Mamdani did not visit any Jewish organizations after the primary. He gave Sorkin the same explanation, though the host noted accurately that no “time element” was mentioned on air. He added, “I don’t know about the extent of all of this, and by the way, I would welcome Zohran Mamdani to come on this airwave.”

🔭 The view from New York City

• We covered the triumph of Omar Fateh, a young democratic socialist who has drawn comparisons to Mamdani, in his bid to unseat Democratic Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. Fateh won the endorsement of Minnesota’s Democratic party in July.

• But yesterday, party officials revoked the endorsement. They cited “substantial failures” at the chaotic convention, which saw technological and procedural issues.

• Fateh’s campaign said the unusual move of stripping an endorsement represented the “disenfranchisement of thousands of Minneapolis caucus-goers and the delegates who represented all of us on convention day.”

• Frey, who is Jewish, said he was “proud to be a member of a party that believes in correcting our mistakes.”

An international hunger monitoring group says portions of Gaza now meet its standards for declaring a famine, crossing a threshold that it said had not previously been reached.

The declaration on Friday by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system adds to a contested field of claims about hunger in Gaza, with pro-Palestinian voices warning for nearly the entire length of the Israel-Hamas war beginning in October 2023 that mass starvation was imminent and Israel and its defenders contending that sufficient aid has entered Gaza to sustain civilians, despite temporary blockades and rocky distribution efforts.

The IPC report says a recent increase in aid, which followed a widespread outcry about hunger in Gaza, is not enough to stem the crisis.

“The complete halt of humanitarian and commercial food deliveries in March and April, followed by critically low volumes through July, coupled with the collapse of local food production has led to extreme food shortages,” the group said in its report. “While 55,600 metric tonnes of food entered Gaza in the first half of August, this remains largely insufficient to offset the prolonged deficits.”

Israel quickly rejected the determination. “If famine = falling prices + 300 daily aid trucks + open aid routes Gaza must be the first famine in history marked by abundance,” tweeted the Israeli office responsible for aid in Gaza, called Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories or COGAT. It alleged that the IPC had lowered its standards for declaring famine in order to smear Israel.

The IPC is a tool used by a consortium of food insecurity experts who monitor conditions around the world and advise the United Nations and other entities about what they learn. The report says the group’s conclusions about what is happening in Gaza were constrained by limited access and information about some portions of the enclave, home to about 2 million Palestinians.

Its declaration applies to a region that includes Gaza City, which the Israeli army is preparing to enter. The group said other portions of Gaza still face widespread hunger challenges and are projected to enter famine conditions by the end of September.

Some skeptics of claims about hunger in Gaza had cited the lack of an official declaration of famine as evidence that conditions were not as extreme as some claimed, and as viral photographs of emaciated children and lines at aid stations would seem to suggest.

The price of food staples in Gaza skyrocketed in recent months, offering evidence of scarcity, and President Donald Trump said he believed there was “real starvation” in the enclave, pressing Israeli officials to send more aid. Israel says the number of aid trucks entering Gaza has risen steadily.

This week, celebrity chef Jose Andres visited Israel and Gaza, where his World Central Kitchen nonprofit has distributed food for most of the war. He expressed sympathy for sympathy on both sides of the conflict — and clarity about conditions in Gaza.

“There is hunger in Gaza,” Andres told the Times of Israel. “I don’t know how much, but there is hunger in Gaza. And we need to make sure there’s no hunger in Gaza.”

When people think of Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate for NYC mayor, what first comes to mind is likely his signature red beret, which he’s been wearing since he founded the citizen-patrol group the Guardian Angels back in 1979.

But what people might not realize is that he’s the proud father of two Jewish sons — and in participating in Jewish ritual with them, Sliwa’s beret has taken on a secondary function.

“I have the biggest kippah in the world,” Sliwa joked in a recent sit-down interview. “When I go to a Catholic church — as a Catholic, I know you gotta take your beret off.”

He added, “I’ve never had to worry about that in a shul or a synagogue.”

Sliwa, who is polling ahead of incumbent Eric Adams but behind Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo, has appeared in Jewish spaces as a two-time mayoral candidate and a public figure over the years. On Tuesday, for example, his beret doubled as a kippah when he visited Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway to commemorate the anniversary of the 1991 Crown Heights riots, which he dispatched his group to help quell.

But Sliwa, a Catholic of Polish and Italian descent, has entered Jewish spaces in his private life, too — perhaps most significantly for the bar mitzvahs of two of his sons, in 2021 and 2024.

“I liked being with my boys on an important day in their life,” Sliwa said.

The sons’ mother, Melinda Katz, is the district attorney of Queens County; Katz and Sliwa, who lived together but were never married, separated in 2014. (Sliwa, who is married to his fourth wife, has an older son as well.)

“Melinda said, ‘You know I want to raise them Jewish.’ I said, ‘I don’t have a problem with it,’” Sliwa recalled.

Sliwa added that the kids went to a Jewish preschool: “The kids need to know who they are, they’re going to be Jews. There’s no escaping it, their last name is Katz — the tribe of Katz, right?”

Sliwa said the boys were given their mother’s last name to honor her late father, David Katz, who founded the Queens Symphony Orchestra in 1953. Melinda Katz did not respond to a request for comment.

In a mayoral race where antisemitism and Jewish security have been major areas of focus — Adams is seeking to run on an “EndAntiSemitism” ballot line, Cuomo has called antisemitism “the most important issue” of the campaign and Zohran Mamdani has been scrutinized for his views on Israel — the Republican Sliwa appears to be the candidate with the closest familial ties to Jews.

Sliwa is not the first non-Jewish Republican to have Jewish descendants. President Donald Trump has Jewish grandchildren, a fact that has endeared him to some Jewish Republican voters and at times insulated him from allegations of antisemitism.

Sliwa, too, has faced accusations of antisemitism in the past — and has mentioned his Jewish sons amid the backlash. In a 2018 speech he warned residents of the city’s suburbs that Orthodox Jews were trying to “take over your community” and are a drag on the tax system.

“We’re not talking about poor, impoverished, disabled people who need help. We’re talking about able-bodied men who study Torah and Talmud all day and we subsidize them,” he said. “ll they do is make babies like there’s no tomorrow and who’s subsidizing that? We are.”

When Sliwa ran for mayor three years later, the comments resurfaced and drew a backlash. “My two youngest sons have been raised Jewish. They need to read this?” he said in a video in which he did not apologize or disavow the comments but did offer to meet with Orthodox Jewish leaders. “To say to themselves, my father is an antisemite? Come on, even my worst critics out there would recognize that’s a shanda,”

In 2024, he told Haaretz that antisemitism is “in the DNA” of non-Jews. But in his recent interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Sliwa said he had “used the wrong term” when speaking to Haaretz. In fact, he said, his intention was to say that a “cloud of antisemitism” often gets “fed into the minds of people” who aren’t Jewish — and that he believed it was a regrettable dynamic.

Whether having Jewish children will help Silwa with Jewish voters in November remains to be seen.

“We’re a minority,” said Rabbi Adam Mintz, who leads a Modern Orthodox congregation on the Upper West Side. “Any connection to Judaism is good for us.”

But Mintz, who said his congregation includes both Republicans and Democrats, cautioned against attributing too much significance to Sliwa’s Jewish family.

“It’s cool that he’s running for mayor and he has Jewish children. You may say, ‘Maybe he’s more sympathetic’ – you have no idea,” he said. “You’ll never know the true answer to that question, like how you’ll never know how Trump gets along with his Jewish grandchildren.”

Mintz also noted that many Jews from more observant Orthodox communities — those that tend to vote for Republicans more often — are “not going to like blended families.”

Sliwa said he was happy to support his sons being raised Jewish — though when it came time for their bar mitzvahs, there was one problem: Sliwa said that Katz’s Conservative synagogue would not allow him to stand on the bimah as a non-Jew.

“The Conservative rabbi and cantor were very nice about it,” Sliwa said, but he wanted to have a bigger role than sitting in the audience. “So then I had the private conversation with Melinda: ‘I’d really like to be up at the bimah. I don’t know what they’re saying when they’re repeating their lessons, but I’d like to be up there. I think they would like me to be up there, too.’”

A 2019 Queens Jewish Link article said Katz belonged to the Forest Hills Jewish Center, a Conservative congregation. Her father, who died in 1987, is buried in the Forest Hills Jewish Center’s plot of Montefiore Cemetery in Queens.

The Conservative movement has been wracked by tensions over the inclusion of interfaith families, with some congregations barring non-Jewish family members from some forms of ritual participation. FHJC did not respond to questions about its policies. In an email to JTA, FHJC’s executive director, Donna Bartolomeo, wrote, “While we are unable to comment on a particular bar mitzvah, The Forest Hills Jewish Center as a community embraces families of all forms and includes parents of all faith backgrounds in Bnei Mitzvah celebrations.”

In the end, the bar mitzvahs were held at the Reform Temple of Forest Hills in Queens. Melinda Katz is currently a member, according to Rabbi Mark Kaiserman, who presided over both sons’ bar mitzvahs.

At his older son’s bar mitzvah, which was held at the synagogue with a Zoom audience amid COVID-19 restrictions, Sliwa read from the English translation of the service’s Torah portion, Parashat Behar. At his younger son’s bar mitzvah, he opened the ark and was part of the procession that carried the Torah around the sanctuary.

“You know, they pick up on Christianity just because it’s the majority,” Sliwa said of the two sons he shares with Katz. “But they’re proud Jews.”

The Reform movement’s Washington-based advocacy arm is urging Attorney General Pam Bondi not to seek the death penalty for the man accused of killing two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C., in May.

Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner, the director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, called on Bondi to forgo the death penalty in the trial of Elias Rodriguez in a letter sent Wednesday.

“Despite the pain of Sarah and Yaron’s murders and despite the hateful motivation behind their deaths, we believe that the death penalty is a stain upon civilization and our religious conscience,” Pesner said.

Rodriguez stands accused of shooting Israeli embassy staffers Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim to death outside the Capital Jewish Museum on May 21. He is currently charged with murder of foreign officials, first-degree murder and two federal counts of hate crime resulting in death. The federal charges make him eligible for the death penalty if convicted, but prosecutors have not yet said whether they plan to seek it.

In the letter, Pesner — who noted that Milgrim grew up attending a Reform synagogue — said Jewish courts have prohibited capital punishment for “2,000 years,” adding, “Jewish tradition found capital punishment repugnant, and we continue to do so today.”

During the trial of the Tree of Life synagogue shooter, the families of the 11 victims were divided over whether the death penalty was appropriate, and the rabbi of the New Light congregation also wrote to the U.S. attorney general to say he opposed the death penalty. In August 2023, Robert Bowers, was sentenced to death for the 2018 mass shooting. He is one of just three people remaining on federal death row after then-President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 37 others before leaving office last year.

Pesner emphasized that he was not calling for a lack of accountability in the case, in which Rodriguez is alleged to have yelled “Free Palestine” after shooting Lischinsky and Milgrim multiple times at point-blank range.

“We pray that as you work to hold the perpetrator accountable for his actions, you ensure he is both punished for his crimes and is never again a threat to Jews or anyone else,” Pesner wrote . “As you do so, do not compound the already deep pain by pursuing the taking of another life.”

Most Americans — 58% — believe that countries in the United Nations should recognize a Palestinian state, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll.

The poll surveyed U.S. adults from Aug. 13 to 18, as several world powers announced plans to recognize a Palestinian state at next month’s U.N. General Assembly in New York City.

The leaders of Australia, France, the United Kingdom and Canada have all said they would take the step nearly two years into the war in Gaza and amid sharp concerns about Israel’s prosecution of its offensive against Hamas in the Palestinian enclave.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long opposed recognition of a Palestinian state. Israel’s allies had until recently supported recognition only in the context of a negotiated peace. This week, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told Al Arabiya English that a Palestinian state was not a priority for the Trump administration and urged European leaders to “reassess their actions” on recognizing Palestinian statehood.

Polling on the issue has been limited, but a poll by the Arab-American Institute, which advocates for a Palestinian state, ahead of last year’s presidential election found that half of Americans supported U.S. recognition of a Palestinian state.

The new poll comes amid mounting indicators of diminishing support for Israel among Americans. It also found a partisan divide, with 78% of Democrats and 41% of Republicans supporting the idea that U.N. members should recognize a Palestinian state. A majority of Republicans, 53%, opposed the idea.

The poll, taken at a peak of concerns about a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, found that 65% of U.S. adults believe the United States should help people who are facing starvation in Gaza. And it found that 59% of Americans believe that Israel’s military response in Gaza has been “excessive,” up 9 points since last year.

Opinions between Democrats and Republicans were also split over those questions. It found that 55% of Republicans believed the United States should help people facing starvation in Gaza, compared to 83% of Democrats. Just 38% of Republicans believed that Israel’s military response in Gaza is excessive, compared to 82% of Democrats.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll gathered online responses from 4,446 U.S. adults nationwide and had a margin of error of about 2 percentage points.

This piece first ran as part of The Countdown, our daily newsletter rounding up all the developments in the New York City mayor’s race. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. There are 75 days to the election.

Like The City’s Katie Honan, who turned over to law enforcement a bag of chips filled with folded bills handed to her by an Eric Adams ally, we would certainly not accept a bag of cash from any campaign or official. But that didn’t stop us from debating what snack sack would be the best-designed attempted-bribe-holder for us. Our conclusion: Bamba all the way.

Here’s today’s New York City mayoral election news.

⚖️ Eric Adams’ impossible choice

• Adams is in a pickle with his ballot line: He has to choose between the bodies “Safe & Affordable” and “EndAntiSemitism” by Tuesday, according to a letter seen by City & State reporter Holly Pretsky. Adams said he would go to court to contest the election board’s decision that he had to pick one.

• Adams’ spokesperson Todd Shapiro said the campaign was still pursuing “legal options” — but he also said that Adams would certainly appear on the “Safe and Affordable” ballot line, suggesting that “EndAntiSemitism” may get the boot.

• Adams’ support among Orthodox Jews helped him win the 2021 mayoral election. His initial petition to run on “EndAntisemitism” was seen as a challenge to Cuomo, who previously called antisemitism “the most serious and important issue” in his campaign. It also presented a counter to Mamdani’s criticism of Israel, which drew accusations of fueling antisemitism.

• But New Yorkers, including many Jewish New Yorkers, say affordability is their top issue in this election. Whatever Adams chooses, the polls aren’t in his favor — a new one out today concludes he has no path to victory. (More on this below.)

💸 Battle of the billionaires

• Elizabeth Simons, a Jewish philanthropist and daughter of the billionaire investor James Simons, gave $250,000 to a super PAC supporting Zohran Mamdani last week.

• It was the largest single donation made to New Yorkers for Lower Costs, which says it is “the official support PAC to elect Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New York City.” The PAC has raised more than $1.8 million from nearly 300 donations.

• Mamdani said in a “Meet the Press” interview days after the primary, “I don’t think that we should have billionaires, because frankly it is so much money in a moment of such inequality.” He added that he hoped to “work with everyone, including billionaires, to make a city that is fairer for all of them.”

• Simons has donated to a range of Democratic candidates and political causes. Her father was also a prominent philanthropist who gave away billions to support Democratic candidates, along with medical and scientific research.

• Meanwhile, a pro-Andrew Cuomo PAC is galvanizing moneyed New Yorkers to block Mamdani. Fix the City, which spent $22 million unsuccessfully trying to bury Mamdani in the primary, announced a new group called MainStream that said it will “protect our city from extremism.” The group had an introductory Zoom call last night, according to Politico.

• Fix the City receives much of its funding from billionaires, including influential Jewish donors like former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and hedge funder Bill Ackman. Bloomberg, who strongly opposes Mamdani’s plans to tax the rich along with his views on Israel, gave $5 million to Fix the City in June.

💻 Does Mamdani have tech support?

• Mamdani’s rise has many tech titans in a panic, including the White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks, who is Jewish, and heads of Gemini, Palantir, Coinbase and Y Combinator.

• But Mamdani has attracted the interest of some tech executives who live or work in New York City, including several who went to a private meeting with him in July, according to Wired.

• Some Jewish tech workers are pressing Mamdani on his Israel stance. At the meeting, one person asked him about the pro-Palestinian protest slogan “globalize the intifada,” which critics interpret as a call for violence against Jews. Mamdani has declined to condemn the phrase.

• An attendee told Wired that Mamdani assured the crowd he would not use the slogan, but “did not back down from his belief that Palestinian rights are really important.” The person said they found his response to be “thoughtful.”

• Despite the stances of some of their bosses, workers at big tech companies are among the most significant donors to Mamdani’s campaign. Google employees donated nearly $40,500 through July 11, more than workers from any other company or institution.

📊 Numbers to know

• Mamdani’s lead remains strong in a survey by American Pulse Research & Polling released Thursday.

• The poll predicted 36.9% of the vote going to Mamdani, followed by 24.6% for Cuomo, 16.8% for Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa and 11.4% for Adams. The margin of error is 3.9%.

• Lead pollster Dustin Olson said cracks in Mamdani’s voter base depended on the information people received about his platform. “Mamdani’s support is real and durable, but not overwhelming,” he said. “When crime and public safety enter the conversation, his ceiling shows.”

• The firm’s first mayoral poll found that half of New York City voters were deterred by Mamdani supporting a boycott against Israel and declining to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” while a third said the same positions made them more likely to vote for him.

After a crisis that led to the resignation of its top leadership last month, Friends of the Israel Defense Forces was looking to rehabilitate its reputation.

In his first address to supporters, the group’s new CEO, retired Israeli general Nadav Padan, pledged to turn the page and focus on the future. He also leaned on one of the organization’s most longstanding and potent claims: that FIDF is the only group officially authorized by the Israeli military to collect donations on behalf of its soldiers in the United States.

Days later, FIDF published a thank-you letter from the IDF’s chief of staff, underscoring its special status. It was a powerful message in a crowded field, especially since the war in Gaza began, when American donors have been inundated with appeals to support Israeli troops, from grassroots crowdfunding campaigns to multimillion-dollar galas.

Since 2017, that claim of exclusive endorsement has helped FIDF raise roughly $1 billion. At a time when dozens of organizations are vying for American donations on behalf of Israeli soldiers, that claim gives it a potent marketing edge.

But when the Jewish Telegraphic Agency asked the IDF spokesperson’s office to confirm the claim, the military declined to do so, which suggests the reality is more complicated than the group presents.

The military instead referred questions to the Association for Israel’s Soldiers, its official charitable partner in Israel. The group did not respond to an inquiry from JTA.

Another charity, American Friends of LIBI, claims it has authorization equivalent to FIDF’s. LIBI refers to one of three Israeli charities that merged by 2016 to form the Association for Israel’s Soldiers. “It’s marketing — we are both authorized. They are misstating the situation,” the group’s vice chairman, Shimshon Erenfeld, told JTA.

After being contacted by JTA, FIDF acknowledged American Friends of LIBI’s status, saying its claim of exclusivity was based on a certificate issued by the IDF in 2019. “Thank you for making us aware of the status of American Friends of LIBI (LIBI USA). We commend them for their efforts to care for the soldiers of the IDF and wish them continued success,” a spokesperson said in an email in July.

For donors, the picture is even murkier: Beyond FIDF and LIBI, there are dozens of other groups that contribute meaningfully to Israeli soldiers.

One witness to the impact of FIDF’s attempt to monopolize fundraising is Adi Vaxman, the head of Operation Israel, an American group set up soon after the war in Gaza broke out.

“When donors hear exclusivity claims or misleading messages about wartime support, they hesitate,” she said. “They assume that organizations like ours may not be recognized, authorized or effective, when in fact we are often the first to respond and able to make a much larger impact on the ground.”

Vaxman gave an example from the recent conflict between Israel and Iran when an Israeli commander asked for sleeping bags and basic gear for troops housed in an empty school.

“FIDF told him their process would take 30 to 90 days,” Vaxman said. “We filled the request within 24 hours.”

For donors seeking the reassurance of Israeli endorsement, FIDF is hardly unique, as several other organizations also appear to carry an official imprimatur.

For example, the Association for Israel’s Soldiers directly solicits donations in the United States through online crowdfunding platforms like Jgive and IsraelGives. Virtually all Israeli charities focused on troops, from those serving lone soldiers to groups aiding in recovery from battle-related PTSD, receive American tax-exempt donations funneled through U.S.-based pass-through organizations such as PEF Israel Endowment Funds, the Jewish Communal Fund and the Central Fund of Israel.

Meanwhile, various individual Israeli military units have their own affiliated American fundraising arms, including American Friends of Unit 669, American Friends of Israel Navy SEALs, and Friends of Duvdevan.

The field has grown exponentially since the war in Gaza began. When the Israeli military mobilized hundreds of thousands of reserve soldiers, the scale of the logistical challenge quickly became apparent. There were not enough helmets, boots and other basic gear for everyone, including combat soldiers heading into battle.

In response, soldiers turned en masse to social media to solicit donations directly. Israeli civilians and Jews in the Diaspora answered the call, raising and shipping hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of gear over the following months. Much of the effort was coordinated with individual soldiers and their commanders, bypassing both the FIDF — which, as a policy, does not supply combat equipment — and the IDF’s central command, which has publicly denied that any shortages exist and threatened to penalize those who accept donations.

In the wake of the war, dozens of new and existing American tax-exempt charities positioned themselves to collect donations, buy equipment, and funnel it to Israeli soldiers. The rush created a murky environment in which donors often had no clear way to separate legitimate aid from opportunistic schemes. To bolster credibility, fundraisers circulated video testimonials from soldiers and even letters on official brigade and battalion letterhead.

One of the most prominent is Israel Gives, whose website showcases endorsements from Israel’s foreign minister and a senior Defense Ministry official, signs of political backing that few others can claim.

No group claims exclusivity — except for FIDF. For donors unfamiliar with Israel’s nonprofit terrain, the label “the only official” carries the implication that their contributions will be deployed efficiently and with the military’s explicit endorsement.

That dynamic, where a strong claim can shape donor perception, is familiar to Laurie Styron, executive director of the nonprofit watchdog group CharityWatch. 

“At CharityWatch, we see charities playing fast and loose with the facts in their marketing claims on a regular basis,” she said, describing the field in general, not the discourse around support for Israel’s military. “Some charities lie outright, while others define words in ways that are extremely narrow or broad so they ‘technically’ aren’t lying. They know most donors will infer what they want them to infer based on how they frame a particular fact.”

Styron said that misleading or exaggerated marketing is rarely punished, even if it influences donor behavior. “A charity has to work really hard to get into legal trouble for its marketing claims,” she said, noting that regulators often lack the resources to investigate unless harm to donors is significant and clear-cut. That, she added, is why donors should be cautious about taking any charity’s promotional language at face value.

Amid the proliferation of grassroots fundraising campaigns for Israeli soldiers, FIDF has moved to caution donors against what it describes as “unauthorized” efforts. Its leaders have urged supporters to give only through established, officially sanctioned channels — a stance that critics say unfairly discredits and undermines volunteer-driven initiatives.

“It is not only misleading, it’s actively harmful to the grassroots ecosystem that has played a vital role in Israel’s defense since Oct. 7,” Vaxman said. “In reality, dozens of grassroots groups, ours included, have been operating in close coordination with IDF commanders, logistics officers and special units to fulfill urgent wartime needs that official channels could not meet fast enough

She continued, “To suggest that only one organization is ‘authorized’ while ignoring the actual needs and solutions on the ground is irresponsible and dismissive of the tremendous work being done by Israeli and diaspora volunteers alike.”

Despite the intense competition and criticism, FIDF remains the 800-pound gorilla of Israel-related soldier philanthropy. In 2023 , it reported about $282 million in revenue and $336 million in assets, according to its latest IRS filing, putting it among the very largest Jewish charities in the United States.

But the group’s standing was shaken in July, when Ynet reported on the contents of a leaked internal investigation that alleged financial mismanagement, cronyism and a toxic workplace culture. The report described board chair Morey Levovitz as sidelining then-CEO Steve Weil, steering no-bid contracts to associates and declaring, “I run the show.”.

The leak rattled FIDF’s donor base. Some regional chapters reportedly froze contributions, and staff were privately warning of a potential exodus of donors. Within two weeks, both Levovitz and Weil resigned. FIDF moved quickly to install new leadership, naming longtime donor Nily Falic as national chair and Padan as chief executive, and to hire crisis communications specialists in a bid to reassure donors.

Announcing the start of his tenure, Padan wrote, “I reaffirm our exclusive partnership with the IDF. FIDF remains the one and only official organization in the United States authorized to raise charitable donations for Israel’s soldiers.”

What exactly is “Slam Frank,” the purported hip-hop musical that reimagines the Holocaust’s most famous victim as a pansexual Latinx girl today?

Is it a real show with real actors and real songs constructing a real story for real audiences? Or is it an elaborate social media prank designed to pillory the left and rage-bait the right? Or could it be both?

The show’s Instagram account, its primary engine of promotion, has stoked the confusion. 

Co-creator Andrew Fox posts snippets of songs, rapping in character as Anne Frank — or Anita Franco, as she’s named in the play — about being “straight from the barrio” and calling people “gringos.”

“Storytellers like me are trying to make the Holocaust diverse,” Fox said in one Instagram post. “Because you watch movie after movie after movie and everybody looks like this — white, white, white,” he remarked, pointing to a still from “Schindler’s List.”

The posts range from sneak peeks of the show to broader, seemingly tongue-in-cheek commentary. Fox, who is Jewish, frequently posts on the account about being a Latinx artist (through his father’s Ecuadorian third wife) and his efforts to “decolonize Broadway.” Another post satirizing inclusivity issues decries the fatphobia of both Broadway theaters and Nazi concentration camps. (“Neither of these environments were built to accommodate people of size.”)

Fox and the “Slam Frank” team have built a social media campaign that is, like the premise of the show itself, inclusive to a fault. Many don’t know what to make of it, or whether this build-up is leading toward a real production.

“You guys are joking right?” one Instagram user commented. “I genuinely can’t tell in this political landscape.”

“You can’t actually think that making this is a good idea,” another user pleaded in a DM.

Among the at-least dozens, and often hundreds of comments on each “Slam Frank” post, you can be sure to find commenters asking something along the lines of, Is this real??

But lately, as the show has opened workshops to critics and sold out the first eight nights of its upcoming Off-Broadway run, its devoted but somewhat befuddled fan base has started to trust that there might really be a full performance ahead — one that bears out its billing as “The Diary of Anne Frank” meets “Hamilton” meets “South Park.”

“It’s a real musical,” Fox said in a recent phone interview. “I think that once the website went up, and then the tickets went up for sale, and then we actually had the concert [in June], everybody kind of went, ‘Oh, we get it now.’”

Anne Frank’s diary has been adapted for film, television, opera, Broadway and as a graphic novel, but never as a sendup of the discourse around inclusivity. Inspiration for the play came from what Fox and co-creator Joel Sinensky, who is also Jewish, were seeing online a few years ago. An earnest social media discourse in 2022 — which followed a similar one from the previous year — asked whether Anne Frank, despite having been murdered by the Nazis, benefited from “white privilege.” The debate that followed focused on whether identity politics had gone too far. That discourse also served the argument, discussed in works like David Baddiel’s “Jews Don’t Count,” that today’s progressive identity politics care less about antisemitism than about other forms of discrimination. 

Around the same time the Anne Frank debates went viral, Fox said, he was also noticing “all these instances where identity politics issues, and theater representation issues, would twist back on themselves and bend and morph. 

“And I just kept going, ‘There’s something interesting here,’” Fox said. “And if I take this logic — ‘Well, you have to make people more marginalized! There’s a marginalization hierarchy!’ — if I take it to its extreme, it starts to break. And I want to see it break so I can understand it better.”

Is Fox an anti-woke conservative? Or a liberal who thinks progressives hurt themselves by going too far? He says he’s keeping his own politics private, and doesn’t like when playwrights and writers “come out of the closet politically, in any direction.”

“Once people know which direction you’re coming from, they can decide whether to dismiss you or not,” Fox said.

Like “South Park,” which before its recent anti-MAGA turn enjoyed skewering liberal pieties, Fox and Sinensky are running with the idea of being so inclusive that it becomes offensive — like, for example, when they posted on Instagram that they “intend to maintain fully segregated mezzanine access to ensure safety of BIPOC,” the popular acronym for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.

The pair have built out a cast of characters based on the real-life Jews who hid in the Secret Annex in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. That includes the pansexual Latinx Anita Franco, Peter van Daan as a non-binary dancer and Mister van Daan, the play’s only cisgender heterosexual male, who is described as “literally worse than the Nazis.”

The show is framed as an ultra-progressive regional theater company staging an adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary. According to YouTube theater critic Matthew Hardy, who caught the concert reading in June, the show starts off with “a hilarious monologue from the straight white producer/director” of the theater group, who is “earnestly explaining” the concept of his show — a diverse, race-swapped version of Anne Frank’s Holocaust story — as if “it’s the most progressive thing ever.”

Then, the play-within-a-play ensues, encapsulating the show’s story that Hardy calls “hilarious,” “aggressive” and “subversive.” 

“It’s not trying to give you a warm, clear moral,” Hardy says. “Instead, it really undercuts every resolution — you think you’re about to learn something, or have a cathartic moment, and then bam. The song flips and you’re in a darker place.”

Fox has worked as an orchestrator, composer and musical producer for a number of shows and musicians; before “Slam Frank,” he most recently wrote the music for “The Last Magic Negro,” a short satirical musical about the “magic Negro” movie trope (a wise, perhaps mystical character whose only purpose is to help the white protagonist). He’s also published a series of Stephen Sondheim songs adapted to various musical styles, and a viral cover of Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles” set to the chord progression of jazz standard “Giant Steps.”

Fox, who grew up Jewish in Los Angeles before moving to New York in 2005, calls himself a “pretty secular” Jew. His grandfather was the ritual director for a Conservative synagogue in L.A. for 60 years. Fox said he grew up going to synagogue for the High Holidays and had a bar mitzvah, but his relationship with Judaism has been “complicated.” (He also shared that he was kicked out of Hebrew school as a kid.) 

Sinensky is Jewish, as well — and in Fox’s words, is “the most secular a Jew can get.”

Assuming it is real, “Slam Frank” is set to join a lineage of provocative Jewish-written comedies — headlined by Mel Brooks’ “The Producers” — that tested taboos around the Holocaust, including the 1993 British comedy “Genghis Cohn” and Taika Waititi’s 2019 dramedy, “Jojo Rabbit.” 

Avinoam Patt, who co-edited the book “Laughter After: Humor and the Holocaust,” said that “Slam Frank,” from the looks of it, differs from works like “The Producers”: While Brooks set out to mock Hitler and his followers, Fox and Sinensky’s play is “using the backdrop of the Holocaust to raise and amplify the satire that they’re trying to make.” 

With the backdrop of the Holocaust comes controversy, especially if “there’s a feeling that it sort of trivializes the memory of the Holocaust,” said Patt, who teaches a Jewish humor class at New York University. “If you situate a joke against the backdrop or the context of the Holocaust, it ups the ante. It raises the level of tension and the stakes.”

That the play comedically deals with the story of Anne Frank, in particular, raises the ante even more, said Patt. Comedic treatments of Anne Frank have been done before, he pointed out — “Family Guy” has cutaway jokes about the young diarist and Jewish comedian Jeff Ross hosted a “roast” of Anne Frank on Netflix, to name two examples. 

But at a time of rising antisemitism, and with accusations that Jews are “weaponizing” the Holocaust to defend Israel’s actions in Gaza, are people losing their tolerance for Anne Frank humor? 

Fox said he’s received death threats, as well as threats of people protesting at the show. But, he pointed out, “There has already been massive political and artistic, and discursive co-opting of Anne Frank, in every direction.” 

“So if you’re the type of person who will post a picture of Anne Frank for your own political cause — ‘Anne Frank would be for the earned income tax credit,’ or whatever — and I start playing with that, then you get bothered?” he said. “That’s a you thing.”

Performances of “Slam Frank” begin Sept. 17 at Asylum NYC (123 E 24th St.). The upcoming dates are part of a developmental run, meaning the script is still being tweaked for later performances.

This piece first ran as part of The Countdown, our daily newsletter rounding up all the developments in the New York City mayor’s race. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. There are 76 days to the election.

🧌 A memelord makes a mess for Cuomo

• Andrew Cuomo’s social media makeover, marked by a proliferation of online replies and memes, backfired after meme creator Jason Levin proudly took credit for an image reposted on Cuomo’s X page. He also posted a photo with Cuomo that appeared to be taken at a young professionals fundraiser on Monday night, according to Politico’s Playbook.

• Why does that matter? Well, it turns out that Levin is a vocal supporter of Donald Trump, in addition to an online provocateur. He has called Trump “the best supporter of the Jewish people and Israel we could ever ask for” and posted a photo of Trump in a kippah with the caption, “I’M A PROUD JEW WHO VOTED FOR HITLER.” (Calling Trump “Hitler” seems meant to provoke liberals.)

• Cuomo spokesperson Rich Azzopardi said that Levin “is not paid by the campaign” despite suggesting one meme, adding that “hatred, bigotry, misogyny and anything like that has no place in this race.”

• Still, the connection is notable because …

👀 Is Cuomo counting on Trump?

• At a fundraiser in the Hamptons on Sunday, Cuomo predicted that Trump could intervene in the race to stop Zohran Mamdani. He said the president could convince his base to support Cuomo over Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, according to audio obtained by Politico.

• Cuomo was hosted at the home of Jewish media executive Jimmy Finkelstein in Southampton. Also co-hosting was Finkelstein’s brother, Andrew Stein, former New York City Council President and a longtime friend of Trump who has briefed the president on Cuomo’s chances of beating Mamdani, according to The New York Times.

• “Trump himself, as well as top Republicans, will say the goal is to stop Mamdani,” Cuomo said at the fundraiser. “And you’ll be wasting your vote on Sliwa. So I feel good about that.”

• Sliwa and Mayor Eric Adams, the other main contender running as an independent, both snapped back at Cuomo and have said they won’t drop out to help him.

• Cuomo has publicly denied any coordination with Trump, instead saying he is the only candidate who can “deal with” him. But privately, he has told business leaders that he isn’t “personally” looking for a fight with the president.

• Trump is unpopular in the overwhelmingly Democratic city of New York, and Mamdani has a commanding lead in recent polls, including an edge with Jewish voters. But in the 2024 presidential election, Trump picked up votes from an estimated 46% of Jewish New Yorkers, compared with 37% in 2020.

🥊 NYPD whistleblower joins Mamdani’s corner

• Mamdani has a former undercover detective in his corner. He got an online endorsement on Tuesday from Frank Serpico, who testified about corruption in the NYPD and inspired the 1973 movie “Serpico,” starring Al Pacino and produced by Jewish filmmaker Martin Bregman.

• “Go Mamdani,” Serpico said on X, adding, “He could be the next LaGuardia. NY needs new leadership, not the old boys dead wood crowd.”

• Mamdani has called Fiorello La Guardia, who led the city from 1934 to 1945, the best mayor of “all time.” A Republican who was among the country’s most progressive leaders, La Guardia had a Jewish mother and spoke out against the Nazis when few other U.S. politicians did in the 1930s. His sister, who lived in Hungary before the outbreak of World War II, was sent to concentration camps and survived.

• One place where the two progressives would disagree: La Guardia, who died in 1947, identified as a Zionist.

TEL AVIV — Two former Soviet republics that have been sworn enemies ever since the breakup of the USSR are suddenly on the verge of making peace.

Since even before their independence in 1991, predominantly Christian, landlocked Armenia and mostly Muslim, oil-rich Azerbaijan have fought many wars over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region and accused each other of human rights abuses, ethnic cleansing — even genocide.

But now, their leaders say they have decided to bury the hatchet — and Jews in both countries could benefit.

On Aug. 8, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev met at the White House with President Donald Trump. Together, the three men signed documents aimed at ending the hostilities that had defined Armenian-Azerbaijani relations for more than 35 years.

“We are very happy about this agreement,” said Shneor Segal, chief rabbi of the Ashkenazi community of Azerbaijan and head of the Chabad movement there. “As Jews, we always pray for peace. Friendship between neighbors can only bring good things, so any move toward peace and co-existence is positive.”

Alexandra Livergant, a Russian Jew who’s been living in Armenia’s capital, Yerevan, since early 2022, said the Armenians treat her kindly — but that attitudes toward individual Jews they meet and towards Israel as a state are two distinct things.

“Overall, the situation may improve, because a peace agreement means there will be no war —  which also means that Israel will stop selling weapons to Azerbaijan,” said Livergant, a journalist who hosts public talks, interviews and podcasts. “This could ease a major source of tension.”

Azerbaijan has roughly three times the land area and population as Armenia, with roughly 10.2 million people inhabiting a country the size of Maine. Home to indigenous Jews since shortly after the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem, in 586 BCE, Azerbaijan also boasts the world’s first oil well. By the 1920s, it was producing more than half the planet’s petroleum.

Today, this republic bordering the Caspian Sea still relies on energy exports for most of its revenues — helping to turn its capital city, Baku, into a mini-Dubai. About 96% of its inhabitants are Muslims, with no restrictions placed on the practice of other faiths.

That has allowed the tiny fraction of Azerbaijanis who identify as Jews to thrive — a rarity in the Islamic world.

“Azerbaijan’s Jewish community wrote a letter to our president congratulating him for this agreement. And of course, we would love to have peace with Armenia. But here in Azerbaijan, we are already living in peace and harmony,” said Rabbi Zamir Isayev, chairman of the Sephardic Community of Baku. He said Azerbaijan represented the rare “Muslim country where Israeli tourists can speak Hebrew, relax and feel at home.”

Estimates of how many Jews live in Azerbaijan vary wildly. Shneor and Isayev put the number at 25,000 or even 30,000 — with roughly 70% of that total being so-called “Mountain Jews” of Persian origin (whose ranks include a member of the country’s Eurovision act this year), another 25% Ashkenazi Jews fleeing Europe who began arriving in 1811, and the remaining 5% Jews from neighboring Georgia.

But the World Jewish Congress puts the number at 7,200, and Itsik Moshe, a former Jewish Agency official who runs the Israel-Georgia Chamber of Business from Tbilisi, doubts that more than 10,000 Jews reside in all three countries combined — maybe 8,000 in Azerbaijan and 1,000 each in Georgia and Armenia. At the same time, he said, Israel is now home to 200,000 immigrants from the three South Caucasus nations.

Armenia, roughly the size of Maryland, has a population of 3 million. In 301 CE, it became the world’s first country to adopt Christianity, and its unique 39-letter alphabet dates to the year 405 CE. About 97% of Armenia’s inhabitants follow the Armenian Apostolic Church, with Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jews and others making up the remaining 3%.

Proof of Armenia’s ancient Jewish heritage is a cemetery in the remote village of Yeghegis — about two hours’ drive east of Yerevan. Here, past a metal gate decorated with a Star of David, lie 64 complete tombstones and fragments of others dating from 1266 to 1346, with inscriptions written in Hebrew and Aramaic.

Isayev said that once real peace comes to the region, “we hope Armenia will learn from Azerbaijan how to respect minorities and protect its Jews.”

That’s a reference to the repeated vandalism in recent years of Armenia’s only synagogue, the Mordechay Navi Jewish Religious Center in Yerevan. In September 2023, then again on Oct. 3 — four days before the Hamas assault on Israel — and again in November of that year, unknown assailants attacked the shul, according to its spiritual leader, Rabbi Gershon Burshtein.

In each case, damage was minimal, though the third time, masked men set the building on fire and later claimed to be acting on behalf of a shadowy Armenian “liberation army” that opposes  Israel’s ties to Azerbaijan. Burshtein told JTA at the time that he believed the attacks were perpetrated not by locals, but by people acting on behalf of Azerbaijan or Russia in a blatant false-flag attempt “to portray Armenia as a country where antisemitism dominates.”

Antisemitism is, in fact, a recurring problem in Armenia.

Much of it stems from the billions of dollars’ worth of Israeli heavy artillery, rocket launchers and drones that helped Azerbaijan defeat Armenia in a 44-day war in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War of 2020. That victory allowed Azerbaijan to reclaim Nagorno-Karabakh and, in September 2023, expel virtually the entire population of 120,000 ethnic Armenians who had been living there.

Armenia subsequently accused Azerbaijan of ethnic cleansing, though the Azerbaijanis point to the earlier Khojaly massacre of Feb. 26, 1992, in which Armenian forces were said to have killed at least 200 Azerbaijani civilians — and possibly as many as 1,000 — depending on the source. Genocide museums in both Yerevan and the Azerbaijani city of Quba attest to the horrific crimes attributed to each countries’ respective enemies.

Notably, an entire exhibit at Azerbaijan’s Museum of Mountain Jews in Krasnaiya Sloboda is devoted to Albert Agarunov, a 23-year-old Jewish tank commander who was posthumously awarded the title National Hero of Azerbaijan after an Armenian sniper shot him to death. That 1992 conflict displaced up to a million people, including Jews who had been living in the disputed Karabakh region.

Armenians are also unhappy that Israel hasn’t officially recognize the 1915-23 genocide of 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Turks — a step 34 other nations including the United States has taken.

Under the deal initialed Aug. 8 by Azerbaijan’s Aliyev and Armenia’s Pashinyan, as well as Trump — who’s made no secret of his desire to win a Nobel Peace Prize — both countries agree to end their hostilities and renounce all legal claims against each other.

Central to the deal is the 27-mile Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, known as TRIPP, formerly known as the Zangezur Corridor. It aims to connect Azerbaijan with its exclave, Nackchivan — separated by a swath of Armenian territory — and is to be developed by U.S. companies to include rail and communication lines as well as oil and gas pipelines. It also seeks to prevent Russia from monopolizing the conflict, which is something neither side wants.

“Now they’re friends, and they’re going to be friends for a long time,” Trump told reporters at the White House signing ceremony. “You two are going to have a great relationship. If you don’t, call me and I’ll straighten it out.”

Nathaniel Trubkin, coordinator of the Yerevan Jewish Home community, hopes the possibility of peace between the two Caucasus countries will also improve Armenia’s ties with Israel.

“In Yerevan, many people see Israel more as a supporter of their enemy than as a partner. But this peace accord could change the atmosphere,” said Trubkin, who’s originally from Moscow. “Armenia now has a chance to build productive relations with Israel outside the context of war.”

The vast majority of Armenia’s 1,000 or so Jews are, like Trubkin, recent arrivals from Russia and Ukraine who fled both countries after war between them broke out in February 2022. Many of them hold Israeli passports, he said.

“From my perspective, Armenia has many educated, modern people who would like to build productive relations with Israel,” he said. “But for this to happen, there must also be initiative from Israelis, and our Russian Jewish community in Yerevan can play an important role in this.”

Indeed, contact between Armenian and Azerbaijani Jews is nonexistent, largely because for years it’s been virtually impossible for Armenian citizens to visit Azerbaijan and vice-versa. That lack of communication extends to the rabbis themselves.

“Most Azerbaijani Jews didn’t even know there were Jews in Armenia. They learned it only after they saw on the news that a synagogue in Yerevan was attacked,” said Isayev, who’s served as a rabbi for 18 of his 44 years.

Added Segal, 46, who arrived in Baku from Israel in 2010: “My duty is to work with the Jews of Azerbaijan. Until now, there was no need to reach out because you couldn’t travel to Armenia. But if things open up, everything could happen.”

In contrast to Armenia, neighboring Azerbaijan currently has eight active synagogues — three in Baku, three in Quba and two in Oğuz, a city near the Georgian border. Chabad also has seven emissaries throughout the country, as well as the Or Avner Educational Complex, which currently has 203 students from ages 3 to 18.

In addition, Isayev has supervised Baku’s only kosher restaurant, Rimon, for the past three years, as more Israelis start streaming into the country.

Jamilya Talibzadeh, director of the Azerbaijan Tourism Office in Israel, said AZAL currently offers 14 flights a week between Tel Aviv and Baku. Arkia will start flying that route in October with three flights per week.

During the first seven months of 2025, she said, about 30,000 Israelis visited Azerbaijan — nearly double the number who visited in 2024.

In early November, Azerbaijan will host the 70th anniversary convention of the Conference of European Rabbis. Expected to attract 500 Orthodox rabbis, the Nov. 4-6 gathering will mark the first time the group has convened in a Muslim nation. High on the agenda: expansion of the Abraham Accords to include Azerbaijan and possibly other predominantly Muslim nations in Central Asia.

“I think peace in this region will not only be good for Jews in both Armenia and Azerbaijan, but also for Georgia and the whole region,” said Moshe. “Stability will bring more trade among Israel and Azerbaijan, but also between Israel and Armenia. But personally, I think the only solution for Jews is to make aliyah. Then they can come back here to work if they want — but as Israelis.”