(JTA) — When I read the news about Kanye West, I didn’t know whether to turn off my phone, or throw it.

I knew it would only be a matter of time before the emails and texts began rolling in: What do you think about Kanye? What’s to be done about antisemitism in the Black community? You must agree that Ye is challenging systems of power, not being antisemitic! Have you read this article by Black person X? Have you read this thought-piece by Jewish person Y? You know Heschel and other Jews walked with King at Selma; what would it take to get back to that!?

Here’s the reality: I am Black, I am a rabbi and I am a theater artist who frequently makes work that probes the intersections of Black and Jewish identity. So yes, I get why any number of people reached out to get my “take.” But to be honest, I find the Kanye saturation of this moment to be more exhausting than instructive, harmful as his incessant flow of antisemitic bile is.

The reason for my exhaustion is that moments like this more often result in stale public rehearsals of facts-and-figures, rhetorical whataboutism and, in my case, private requests for explanations or defenses. In cases where there’s a public apology, we might get a heavily staged meeting between a symbolic Black person and a symbolic Jew, but no one really thinks that such a “coming together” does the real work of forging understanding.

In short, events like these tend to result in panic and punishment, not in introspection.

Lest I be misunderstood, let me state a few points clearly:

1. Kanye is antisemitic, and, like his equally egregious anti-Black and misogynist statements, his statements about Jews are appalling and deeply harmful.
2. Despite the number of books on such topics, Black antisemitism is not a thing, just like Jewish anti-Blackness is not a thing. Rather, antisemitism and anti-Blackness are longstanding structures of social prejudice that all peoples and societies fall prey to.
3. Regarding Black-Jewish civil rights solidarity, while it is worthwhile remembering the intrepid Jewish leaders who walked with Dr. King and other Black civil rights leaders in Selma, that act of righteous resistance from nearly 60 years ago will only take Black and Jewish communities so far into their shared futures.

Inhabiting a Black and Jewish identity in contemporary America can be maddening. It is like navigating a rhetorical funhouse: You know that your lived experience is fully coherent, but the reflections you encounter along the path distort, disfigure and “invisiblize” your reality. More precisely, as a Black Jew you are forced to consider your identities from the perspectives of others, very few of whom have given any thought to your particular existence. If this idea sounds familiar, well, it is. It’s actually quite old.

In his seminal 20th century masterpiece, “The Souls of Black Folk,” the eminent Black polymath W.E.B. Du Bois addressed the conundrum of living in a society where the structures of racism force Black people into a split consciousness. “It is a peculiar sensation,” Du Bois writes, “this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of [white] others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings…”

While I have reservations about aspects of Du Bois’s broader worldview (e.g. his intra-Black elitism, his romantic view of nations and peoplehood) I find deep resonance in his observations on “double consciousness.” I have been in countless situations where I have simply sought to follow my interests, only for my Blackness to be the cause for minor and major slights. I have also endured antisemitic aggression and witnessed anti-Jewish religious sentiment up close. What is more, I have experienced the above in Jewish communities and Black communities, respectively. I am not alone in this. Many Black Jews can attest to the same.

To live as a Black Jew in America means to live with an awareness of just how precarious group belonging can be. In the case of hate speech, it also means an unfortunate familiarity with the frequent intersections between anti-Blackness and antisemitism.  Such experience would lead me to believe that Black Jews might have something unique to say in this moment. And yet, predictably, what has happened since Kanye’s recent spate of antisemitic tweets is that Black Jews have been functionally overlooked in the public discourse — our voices relegated to small or parochial news outlets, niche podcasts, newsletters or Twitter feeds.

To me, this phenomenon places Du Bois’s observations in greater relief. Namely, being Black and Jewish in America is more than an act of “double-consciousness,” it is an act of “triple-consciousness.” In this configuration, I know by virtue of my Black, Jewish and American identities that I am an integrated being who embodies a way forward for our society, but I am often made to contend with the fact that my communities, and society in general, can only grasp my identity in its discrete parts, not as a whole.

In case you think this “triple consciousness” is theoretical, let me give a few concrete examples.

To live with “triple consciousness” is to notice that there were relatively few calls beyond those of Black individuals to condemn and boycott Kanye when he trafficked in white supremacist, anti-Black ideology.

To live with “triple consciousness” is to argue with non-Jewish acquaintances that pointing out the number of Jews in finance and media does not a keen observation make, nor does it provide evidence of a powerful cabal.

To live with “triple consciousness” is to carry the distinct, lived histories of two peoples in your heart and mind at all times. To live with “triple consciousness” is to know in the most intimate way that anti-Black rhetoric hurts Jews, and antisemitic rhetoric hurts Black people, because there are many of us who carry both identities and cannot disentangle them one from the other.

Finally, and most personally, to live with “triple consciousness” is to wonder whether my mixed Jewish child will grow up in an America where she feels compelled to closet aspects of her identity because society cannot hold the wonder of her complexity.

I cannot solve the issue of “triple consciousness” — after all, I did not create the strange reality underpinning it. Such a feat calls for a tremendous amount of work, honesty and humility. It also requires a critical willingness to interrogate how multiple oppressions are interlinked, rather than to dismiss such language as performative and overly “woke.”

I am not interested in virtue-signaling, much less ideological purity. Rather, I want what everyone wants, what Du Bois wanted: the simple dignity to be myself — Black, Jewish and American, “without being cursed and spit upon.”

(JTA) — Dan Snyder, the Jewish owner of the Washington Commanders who is ensnared in a scandal involving sexual harassment in the team’s workplace, announced today that he and his wife and co-owner Tanya Snyder are exploring a possible sale of the NFL franchise.

The Commanders released a statement Wednesday saying that the Snyders have hired Bank of America Securities to “consider potential transactions.” The release did not specifically mention selling the team.

“The Snyders remain committed to the team, all of its employees and its countless fans to putting the best product on the field and continuing the work to set the gold standard for workplaces in the NFL,” the team said in the statement.

Snyder has been under intense scrutiny since July 2020, when a Washington Post investigation revealed a series of allegations of sexual harassment and toxic workplace culture by former team employees, including the use of “Jewish slurs” by a high-ranking team executive. 

“Dan Snyder created a culture in which this behavior was accepted and encouraged,” former team staffer Emily Applegate said in February during testimony to Congress.

The organization, and Snyder in particular, are under investigation by multiple entities, including Congress and the NFL. An initial NFL investigation into the team’s alleged toxic culture resulted in a $10 million fine in July 2021. Snyder stepped back from his day-to-day responsibilities as a result. 

The Commanders are also under investigation for possible financial improprieties, which the organization denies.

This past summer, Snyder asked to postpone a scheduled deposition in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform because of a trip to Israel to observe the anniversary of his mother’s death.

“Given that these plans are part of religious observances honoring his mother’s memory on the one-year anniversary of her passing, Mr. Snyder’s trip to Israel cannot be rescheduled,” said Snyder’s attorney Karen Patton Seymour in a letter obtained by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

According to a document released in June by Rep. Carolyn Maloney, the House committee’s chair, Snyder conducted a “shadow investigation” to discredit their allegations, including hiring private investigators to intimidate witnesses and filing an overseas lawsuit to obtain phone records and emails.

Snyder, who is a member of the Greater Washington Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, purchased the team in 1999 for $800 million. According to a Forbes estimate, the franchise is now worth $5.6 billion.

BOSTON — Just days before the U.S. midterm elections and amid growing concern about the conflict in Ukraine, a recent gathering in Boston of Jews from the former Soviet Union was dominated by talk of the war and ways U.S. politics might affect its outcome.

The all-day event on Oct. 23 at Boston University’s Hillel was organized by Limmud FSU, which holds Jewish learning conferences around the world for Jews from the former Soviet Union.

“We are at a very historic moment,” said Jewish political consultant Lincoln Mitchell, a commentator on democracy and governance issues in the former Soviet Union.

Elana Broitman — who immigrated to the United States at age 10 from Odessa and now, two generations later, is a senior vice president of public affairs at the Jewish Federations of North America — spoke about her group’s priorities for helping in Ukraine. Jewish Federations already has raised over $73 million in Ukraine-related aid this year and has helped resettle Ukrainian refugees in 12 communities around the country, including New York, Chicago and Youngstown, Ohio.

“We have to focus on the most impactful priorities,” Broitman said. “What we’re lobbying for are three things: overall Ukraine aid, refugee resettlement in the U.S., and extension of the Lautenberg Amendment, which provides for a particular program for religious minorities.”

Despite the geopolitical challenges, much of the Boston conference focused on celebrating. Participants danced to the Hebrew and Yiddish melodies of Israeli vocalist Vladi Blayberg. Actress Ronit Asheri, who starred in the Netflix series “Unorthodox,” talked about her upcoming series, “Transatlantic,” which tells the story of a rescue network in wartime France that helped thousands of Jewish refugees escape the clutches of the Nazis. There was a session on the challenges of creating art during wartime, and a children’s theater program for kids.

In all, over 150 people attended the festival, which was held in English and Russian.

“We are very happy to open our first-ever Limmud FSU conference in Boston,” said Limmud FSU’s founder, Chaim Chesler. “We’ve been wanting to do this for five years, and now we’re finally fulfilling our dream.”

Among Limmud FSU Boston’s key supporters are the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, Genesis Philanthropy Group, the Jewish National Fund-Keren Kayemet LeIsrael, Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston (CJP), Wilf Family Foundations and others. Since Limmud FSU’s first conference in 2006, the group has hosted more than 80 events worldwide, drawing over 80,000 participants. The organization’s co-founder is Sandra Cahn, Matthew Bronfman is its chairman and Aaron Frenkel is president.

In November, Limmud FSU will be going to Australia, with festivals in Sydney and in Melbourne. Limmud FSU will also hold its annual event in Israel in December, with an event in Tiberias expected to draw more than 1,000 participants.

The event in Boston covered topics from Soviet history and the Holocaust to Israeli politics. Mark Novikov, publisher of a blog for Israelis with roots from the former Soviet Union, spoke about the complexities of Israel’s upcoming elections. Pam Cohen, a longtime Chicago-based activist for Soviet Jewry in the 1970s and 1980s, discussed her new book, “Hidden Heroes: One Woman’s Story of Resistance and Rescue in the Soviet Union.”

Rabbi Shlomo Noginski, who in July 2021 was stabbed eight times near his synagogue in the Boston suburb of Brighton, spoke of his experience with antisemitism.

Ukrainian-born IT consultant Julia Kotlyar Volkovich, a Limmud FSU veteran, said Boston was an ideal place for a gathering focused on Jewish learning for Jews from the former Soviet Union.

“Boston is a global educational hub, and many Jews in our FSU community work in academia,” she observed. “There’s no place like it anywhere else in the world.”

(JTA) — A. James Rudin, a leading Reform rabbi and educator and the longtime director of interreligious affairs at the American Jewish Committee, will be knighted under the Papal Order of St. Gregory for his work on Catholic-Jewish relations.

He will become the ninth Jewish person to receive the honor in the Order’s nearly 200-year history. Other Jews so knighted include Walter Annenberg, the philanthropist and creator of TV Guide; the prominent Conservative rabbi Mordecai Waxman; Argentine interfaith advocate Rabbi León Klenicki; Rabbi David Rosen of the AJC; and various philanthropists, businesspeople and musicians with Jewish ancestry.

The honor recognizes people whose work has supported the Catholic Church, which can include Jews focused on interfaith projects.

Earlier this year, Rudin, 88, published a memoir, “The People in the Room: Rabbis, Nuns, Pastors, Popes, and Presidents,” which recounts his many trips abroad during his time working at the AJC as part of his work to improve Jewish-Christian relations in the years after the Holocaust.

“For more than 50 years, Rabbi James Rudin has worked to advance Catholic-Jewish relations, and interfaith relations on a wider scale, with extraordinary skill, dedication, and success,” Cardinal Sean O’Malley, archbishop of Boston, said in a statement. “The impact of this work continues to grow as successive generations build on the foundation Rabbi Rudin has established.”

In his memoir, Rudin recounts how growing up in Alexandria, Virginia, among Southern Baptists, he and his Catholic classmates were singled out during a class reading on the New Testament and asked to leave the room. After graduating from rabbinical school at Hebrew Union College, Rudin served as an Air Force chaplain in Japan and Korea, where he befriended a Catholic priest with whom he partnered to lead Catholic-Jewish programming. When he finished his service in the Air Force, Rudin served as a pulpit rabbi at multiple midwestern synagogues before joining the American Jewish Committee in 1968. He eventually became the AJC’s director of interreligious affairs and continued his work in the Jewish-Catholic interfaith space.

Rudin also founded the Center for Catholic-Jewish Studies at Saint Leo University, a Catholic liberal arts university in western Florida, where he is currently listed as a visiting professor and serves on the advisory board. The investiture ceremony honoring him will take place on Nov. 20 on the Saint Leo campus.

Rabbi Eric J. Greenberg, director of the United Nations relations and strategic partnerships for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, helped nominate Rudin for the honor.

“This knighthood clearly demonstrates the evolving positive relations between Catholics and Jews,” Greenberg said. “Rabbi Rudin well deserves this historic, international honor.”

(JTA) — The around 120,000 Jews who live in Brazil make up less than 1% of the country’s total population, of approximately 214 million people.

But today, according to Marcio Bellora Saraceni, a 29-year old lawyer from Rio de Janeiro, “all of Brazil knows” the name Nissim Ourfali — a bar mitzvah boy who became one of the country’s first viral memes 10 years ago.

Footage of the then-13-year-old playing video games, wrapping tefillin and even standing on top of a whale (a nod to a beach called “Whale” near São Paulo) were all put together in this video that was originally played on a big screen at Ourfali’s bar mitzvah in 2012. Set to the music of “What Makes You Beautiful” by the British boy band One Direction, Ourfali sings new lyrics about his Jewishness and his love for his family (and Israel), in a very sheepish way.

According to the Estadão newspaper, the family published the video online so it could be accessed later by friends and family. They didn’t predict that the video would reach two million views in less than a year and explode into various realms of Brazilian pop culture.

According to a 2020 podcast interview with Noemy Lobel, who produced the video for the Ourfali family, the video became the subject of one of the top 10 tweets in the world just days after it was first published. The song soon became a favorite at house parties and in nightclubs around the country. 

“I remember being in middle school when the video first came out and my friends and I would sing it together all the time,” Bellora Saraceni said. “Whenever the original One Direction song would play, everyone would sing Nissim’s version.” 

The fame extended well beyond the Jewish community. “Jew or non-Jew, everyone knows Nissim Ourfali,” said André Liberman, a 22-year-old law student and progressive Jewish activist in Recife.

But with the unanticipated fame came obstacles — the family suffered online antisemitic attacks and were hit with death threats as their son’s name and Jewish identity became part of public discourse. 

In 2012, the family filed an appeal with a Brazilian court, asking for the video to be removed. Judge Athurs Wady ordered removal of some of the videos, including the original. But two years later, Wady ruled that he could not force Google, YouTube’s owner, to remove all videos mentioning Ourfali — it had been copied and spread around in countless versions that could not be tracked. The family appealed that decision and, in 2016, a state court ordered Google Brasil to take down as many of the videos as possible. Despite that ruling, the video is still widely available in different forms across the internet.

Little is known about Ourfali’s life 10 years after his shocking rise to internet domination. According to Brazilian website Aventuras na Historia, he does not speak publicly about the viral video and does not have any public-facing social media accounts. In 2018, right-wing influencer Arthur do Val posted a photo of Ourfali alongside right-wing parliament member Kim Kataguiri, who in a podcast earlier this year stated he was against the criminalization of Nazism in Germany. Do Val captioned his Instagram post of Ourfali and Kataguiri saying that Ourfali was complimentary of his work.

According to the Além do Meme podcast, Ourfali now lives and works in the United States. 

Back in the Ourfali craze heyday, in sweat-filled night clubs dotted with neon strobe lights, Jeff Oliveira, a 34-year-old visual artist and DJ in Rio de Janeiro, would play both the original and new remixes of Nissim’s song throughout the course of night. “Every time I played Nissim’s music, people went crazy,” he said. “First they screamed in surprise and then they sang and danced together.”

Now, though, he’s moved on to newer and more relevant songs from Brazil’s pulsing internet culture. 

“I think memes are always about being used at the right time,” he said. “People felt a connection from talking about Nissim all week with friends, co-workers, family, and on the weekend the DJ played just that.”

(JTA) — Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania who has drawn scrutiny for his association with antisemites, acted in a 2019 film about the rescue of Jews that has drawn criticism from Holocaust scholars — and from its Jewish star — for Holocaust distortions.

The New Yorker and The Washington Post this week both reported on “Operation Resist,” which purports to depict the rescue of Dutch Jews by American spies. Mastriano plays an American spy and also helped finance the movie.

The film, which is fiction, operates from a thesis that abortion and gun control pave a path to Nazi-like control. It begins with an effort by liberals in the present day to remove Holocaust education from a school board curriculum, then flashes back to the rescue of a Dutch Jewish girl, Miriam.

At the end, the film returns to the present, in which a Holocaust survivor who attends a meeting of the school board explains that Miriam is his sister, and uses her experience to decry abortion, gun control and government overreach.

“How about the millions of babies today whose lives are snuffed out before they’re even born because they are inconvenient. It’s time to say never again!” the fictional Holocaust survivor says. Some conservatives have invoked the Holocaust to decry policies that permit abortion and restrict gun sales, a practice that Holocaust scholars have decried as a manipulation.

Mastriano said at the time the movie was made that he and his family were “blessed” to be involved by fundraising for the movie. “This exciting movie grapples with sacrifice and heroism during the horrors of the holocaust,” he wrote on Facebook.

Multiple family members also appeared in it, Mastriano as an American spy and his son a Nazi whom his character chokes into losing consciousness. “When you wake up Fritz, tell Hitler he’s next,” Mastriano’s character says.

Matsriano has drawn scrutiny for his association with Andrew Torba, the antisemitic founder of Gab, a social media platform favored by many far-right extremists. He has also been criticized for calling his opponent, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, an elitist for sending his children to a Jewish say school.

The Washington Post screened the film for four Holocaust experts, who all hated it. “It is offensive to weaponize the Holocaust for political ends, yet that is what this film does and quite proudly,” Neil Leifert, the director of the Center for Holocaust and Jewish Studies at Penn State, told the newspaper.

The film also gets Jewish ritual wrong as well as details of the Holocaust; it imagines an impossible meeting of the fictional Miriam, Anne Frank and Audrey Hepburn. It depicts Nazis slaughtering Jews through mass shootings, when most Dutch Jews were deported to death camps.

Ashleigh Burnette, who plays Miriam, is Jewish and was unsettled by the overt Christianity on the set, where days would start with Christian prayer, and in the movie, in which rescuers would declaim about their Christian belief while carrying out the rescue.

“Maybe the movie was really about shedding light on Christianity? That a great Christian lady was helping me, so bless the Christians?” she told The Washington Post.

James Moran, the film’s director, blamed inaccuracies on his tight budget — he made the film in his native South Carolina — and said that he hoped Burnette and her mother, who accompanied the actress, would have corrected any errors he made in depicting Jewish ritual.

But Moran said his film’s analogies to abortion access and gun control were appropriate. He was inspired, he said, by an article in a South Carolina newspaper that reported the removal of Holocaust education from a social studies standards guide.

“My main point in the movie was that the Holocaust has lessons for us regarding today’s environment politically,” Moran told The Washington Post. “Once you start down the trail of whose life matters, you have entered the mind-set of Nazism … and it’s what I saw happening today as people are seen as inconvenient lives and as the government seeks to remove the guns of innocent civilians.”

The article in The State, in 2017, made clear that the omission was an oversight that the state schools chief said would be immediately rectified. There was no indication the removal was driven by liberals, some of whom were appalled at the omission. The only challenges to Holocaust content in schools in recent years have come from the right wing, and most of them have been retracted amid public outcry. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have advanced legislation to require Holocaust education in dozens of states.

(JTA) — The London-based theater group behind a Romeo and Juliet-inspired Nazi-Jewish love story has canceled the play after receiving an onslaught of criticism related to the story’s premise and a botched casting call.

The Icarus Theatre Collective, the group behind the play, put out a casting call on Friday for their “Romeo and Juliet” over email and on social media, specifically calling for “non-binary artists, and/or those of global majority, black or Asian heritage” to audition for the reimagined roles of Romeo and Mercutio, as well as a female-presenting actor to play the traditionally male character of Tybalt.

But for the role of Juliet, the Jewish counterpart to Romeo’s character in the Hitler Youth, the Icarus Theatre Collective did not include a specific request for Jewish actors to audition as part of the casting call. In an era of increased scrutiny over the casting of Jewish actors to play Jewish characters, the omission drew criticism.

Speaking with the Jewish Chronicle, Max Lewendel, the Jewish founder of the Icarus Theatre Collective and director of “Romeo and Juliet,” said the initial casting call specified that Juliet Capulet and her parents be played by actors with “preferably Jewish heritage.” Lewendel said the final draft of the casting call was put out by the casting director and should have included a preference for Jewish actors.

“That is absolutely not what was intended, and apologies to anyone that was understandably affected by this,” Lewendel told the Jewish Chronicle.

In an apology tweet on Monday, the Icarus Theatre Collective wrote, “These are NOT two households both alike in dignity,” referring to lines from the prologue of “Romeo and Juliet,” which the group says it had cut from their version of the play because it put the Nazi Montagues and the Jewish Capulets on equal footing.

“Please understand our intention in Romeo & Juliet is to portray the Montagues as the bad guys and the kids brainwashed as per Jojo Rabbit,” the thread continued, referencing the 2019 comedy-drama film about a boy in the Hitler Youth. “Particularly as a criticism of the current political situation.”

https://twitter.com/icarustheatre/status/1587077367058530304?s=20&t=N5m3XKJ-EpxTxROzVwQ3Fw

The group also wrote that part of its research and development process “has always been to include members of the Jewish community to presentations, as we recognise that the director’s background is not sufficient to ensure proper presentation of this dangerous concept: These are NOT two housholds [sic] both alike in dignity.”

The Campaign Against Antisemitism, a British watchdog group, publicly criticized the play. In a tweet, the group said, “It is staggering that anyone would find this play about morally-equivalent feuding families to be an appropriate way to explore Nuremberg-era persecution of Jews by Nazi Germany.”

“It’s the increasing fascism in the world today that has kind of become a trend in my work,” Lewendel told the Jewish Chronicle about his decision to situate the play during the Holocaust.

Public response to the premise of the play itself has been mostly negative.

“This is a monumentally terrible idea,” one user wrote on Twitter.

“This new Romeo and Juliet nazi idea feels so genuinely like a 30 Rock Episode that I simply have to laugh at the absurdity!” another person wrote.

The group’s official description of the play reads: “In defiance of their entire society and in secrecy from their closest friends, hopeful young lives burn amidst a cataclysmic backdrop of impending war and the horror of the Holocaust. Sun and moon shine down on star-crossed lovers as a Jewish girl falls for a member of (Hitler) Youth and the boy questions everything he was taught to believe.”

The show was scheduled to run in March 2023.

(JTA) — Former NBA star Charles Barkley slammed NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, who is Jewish, for not suspending Brooklyn Nets All-Star Kyrie Irving after he promoted an antisemitic film on his Twitter account.

“I think Adam should have suspended him. First of all, Adam’s Jewish. You can’t take my $40 million and insult my religion,” Barkley said, referencing Irving’s contract, during a Tuesday night segment of the popular “NBA on TNT” panels that airs on the network before, during and after game broadcasts.

The NBA has “suspended people and fined people who have made homophobic slurs, and that was the right thing to do,” Barkley added. “If you insult the Black community, you should be suspended or fined heavily.”

Fellow former star Shaquille O’Neal, also a longtime member of the TNT panel, called Irving “an idiot” for sharing a link to a film that promotes the idea that Jews dominated the slave trade, among other antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Barkley — who has called out antisemitism from Black athletes in the past and has a Jewish son-in-law — was the latest to join a chorus of increasingly sharp criticism aimed at Irving, the Nets and the NBA over the situation. Irving, who doubled down on his right to share a link to the film but later deleted his tweet, has not been disciplined; the Nets’ general manager said Tuesday that the team is in discussions with the Anti-Defamation League about next steps.

Nike, Irving’s biggest sponsor, said in a statement that the company condemns all forms of hate speech.

Several prominent sports writers and commentators have begun arguing that the Nets’ reaction time on the Irving saga has been too slow. NBA reporter Brian Windhorst devoted an episode of his podcast to the controversy, calling the Nets’ reaction “feckless.”

Rich Eisen, an NFL Network host who is Jewish, got emotional in criticizing Irving in a podcast episode on Monday.

“You’re dehumanizing me, Kyrie — I’m a Jewish man, OK?” Eisen said, referring to Irving’s claim that a reporter at a press conference was “dehumanizing” him with a question about the tweet. “Descendant of people who died in gas chambers and got incinerated by Nazis…. [I]t’s not funny.”

"I know what anti-Semitic tropes look like, what they sound like and what they feel like."@richeisen on the dangerous behavior of @KyrieIrving:#NBA  #NBATwitter pic.twitter.com/N70dM8Gbg1

— Rich Eisen Show (@RichEisenShow) October 31, 2022

Eisen also noted that the words “Kanye was right about the Jews” appeared on antisemitic banners being hung over highways in recent days and were projected onto a college football stadium. He called those incidents “really scary.”

Nets head coach Steve Nash was fired on Tuesday, ostensibly for the team’s poor 2-6 record to start the season. The team is close to hiring Ume Udoka, the former Boston Celtics head coach who was suspended by the team for an improper relationship with a subordinate.

Amar’e Stoudemire, the former NBA star and former Nets coach who converted to Judaism in 2020, pushed for Irving to have “intensive conversations with the commissioner about what he’s doing and what his plans are as a basketball player.”

(JTA) — Atlanta Braves ace Max Fried grew up idolizing Jewish Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax. The 28-year-old has accomplished something even his childhood hero never did: win a Gold Glove — let alone three.

For the third consecutive season, Fried has been named the National League’s top defensive pitcher, beating out finalists Tyler Anderson of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Corbin Burnes of the Milwaukee Brewers. The award is given to the best defensive player at every position in each league. 

Fried has established himself as one of the game’s best starting pitchers, and his 2022 performance only solidified that standing. Fried was named to his first All-Star team, while going 14-7 with a 2.48 earned run average, seventh-best in baseball. His wins above replacement of 5.9 — a sabermetric stat used as a catch-all for a player’s overall value — was tied for fifth best among all pitchers.

On the defensive side, Fried ranked third among all pitchers with three defensive runs saved, and tied for fourth with three pickoffs. Since his debut in 2017, Fried has 23 pickoffs, the most in the sport.

"It's as good of a pickoff move as there is."

— Brian Snitker on Max Fried's pickoff wizardry 🪄 pic.twitter.com/lXiwar23Fj

— Bally Sports: Braves (@BravesOnBally) June 10, 2022

Finalists for the Cy Young award, given to each league’s best pitcher, will be announced Monday, and the winners will be revealed Nov. 16. While Fried is not expected to win — Miami’s Sandy Alcantara is the frontrunner — he may finish in the top two or three.

Fried is the third Braves pitcher to win the award multiple times, joining legends Greg Maddux (10) and Phil Niekro (five). Last year, he also won a Silver Slugger award, given to the best hitter at each position — and with MLB’s newly instituted universal designated hitter, Fried is the last pitcher who will ever win the award.

The Santa Monica native was a member of the 2009 gold medal-winning USA World Maccabiah Juniors baseball team.

(New York Jewish Week) — A New York revival of the 1998 Broadway musical “Parade” — about the 1915 lynching of a Jewish man, Leo Frank, at the hands of a Southern mob — arrives at an auspicious, if not ominous, time. Antisemitism is again part of the national conversation, while nationalism and accusations of racism form the backdrop to next week’s midterm elections.

As the star of the revival, Ben Platt, told The New York Times: “This show is all about not only antisemitism, but the failure of the country to protect lots of marginalized groups, and we’re all feeling that really intensely right now.”

Of course, a musical about national trauma is not everyone’s cup of sweet tea, and despite its Tony-winning book and score, “Parade” has always been dogged by criticism that it is too relentlessly downbeat to pull in the crowds.

Not this new, stream-lined production, part of New York City Center’s limited-run series of “Encores!” revivals. (The last performance is Nov. 6.) Thanks to Platt and a huge, excellent cast that includes Gaten Matarazzo (Dustin from the Netflix series “Stranger Things”), the show manages to be stirring and, yes, entertaining, without losing sight of the tragedy at the core. 

The Leo Frank story is America’s Dreyfus Affair. Frank was a Jewish, Brooklyn-born college graduate who managed a pencil factory in Atlanta, Georgia owned by a relative. In 1913 the body of a 13-year-old factory worker, Mary Phagan, was found in the factory’s cellar, and the police fingered Frank in the rape and murder. After a trial marked by flimsy evidence and implausible “eyewitness” testimony, Frank was found guilty and sentenced to death in 1915. A rabid local press demonized the Jewish outsider, leading progessive politicians and newspapers from outside the South to demand that Georgia Gov. John M. Slaton commute Frank’s sentence and reopen the case. 

Slaton relented, but on Aug. 16, 1915, an armed mob snatched Frank from prison and lynched him in Marietta, Georgia. The case famously inspired a revival of the Ku Klux Klan — and led to the founding of the Anti-Defamation League, today’s powerful Jewish defense and civil rights group. 

“Parade,” with a book by Alfred Uhry (“Driving Miss Daisy”) and music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown, leans hard into the hysteria surrounding the Frank case. The various townspeople form a Greek chorus demanding “justice.” There are characters representing the racist, sensationalist press; there is a politically ambitious prosecutor, a cynical judge and, in the case of Slaton’s character, a genteel Southern governor caught between an angry public and his own instinct to do the right thing.

The musical centers what begins as a strained relationship between Frank and his wife Lucille, a Jewish Atlanta native. There are laughs early in the show when Platt talks and sings about the differences between the Jews he grew up with and the Southern variety. Their marriage is portrayed as a cold, sterile affair, with Frank too concerned with things at the factory to notice the loving, generous Lucille. The warming of their relationship — culminating in a jailhouse duet, “All the Wasted Time” — forms the emotional arc of the show. 

This could come off as schmaltzy, but the City Center production stays grounded in historical reality. Contemporary newspaper clippings and images of the real-life historical figures being portrayed are projected on the rear wall of the stage in lieu of conventional scenery. (“Encores!” productions are only partially staged.) Platt — small and vulnerable, with a catch in his singing voice — humanizes Frank. I object to the idea that only Jews should play Jewish characters, but I concede that Platt’s background — he is famously Jewish in a Camp Ramah, his-mother-is-a-leading-Jewish-philanthropist kind of way — adds a level of resonance to his performance. 

The show is a helpful reminder about the potent force antisemitism was in America until it was driven largely to the fringes after World War II. The Frank case is a historical rebuke to those who cannot imagine Jews as a “minority” or persecuted class. It helps explain why groups like the ADL remain so adamant in exposing and combating antisemitism in its present-day forms: die-hard conspiracy theories, political dog whistles, online harassment, street attacks on Orthodox Jews — and, yes, spasms of deadly violence.

And yet “Parade” is careful not to take this refutation of “white privilege” too far. Act II begins with a duet sung by the Black domestic workers at the governor’s mansion. Anticipating the hordes of Northern reporters coming to cover the Frank trial, they sing bitterly, “The local hotels wouldn’t be so packed/If a little Black girl had gotten attacked.” Nor, they sing, would the press have cared if the wrongly accused defendant was Black. Their song is a necessary corrective in a musical about the post-Reconstruction South that focuses on the lynching of a white man.

The audience for Tuesday night’s premier was ecstatic, and the wild applause for the performers was well-deserved. Brown led the orchestra, and invited Uhry, now 85, to join him and the cast during the curtain calls.

Still, there is something strange about cheering a musical that begins and ends with a pulse-quickening, pro-Confederate anthem called “The Old Red Hills of Home.” The song is clearly meant to be ironic, and its power effectively implicates the listener in the kind of nationalist fervor that so often goes so terribly wrong. The question that lingered is whether we were being invited to look down on backwards Southerners of yore, or recognize the ugly nativist trends that still animate American politics.