Jewish author Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” is part comic-book origin story, part immigrant saga and part love letter to New York City at its most scrappy and dazzling.

Published in 2000, the novel follows the trajectory of Joe Kavalier, a Houdini-obsessed escape artist who flees Nazi-occupied Prague, and his quick-witted Brooklyn cousin, Sammy Clay. Together they conjure The Escapist, a superhero who punches Nazis on the page while, at the same time, the cousins wrestle with them in real life. The duo’s ascent in the comic book world mirrors the Golden Age of American comics, and the novel delves into themes of Holocaust trauma, Jewish identity, ambition and the transformative nature of pop culture. 

And now, 25 years after the novel hit shelves, The Metropolitan Opera is opening its 2025-26 season with a new adaptation of Chabon’s bestselling book. Premiering on Sunday, “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” the opera, reimagines Chabon’s deeply Jewish comic-panel world for the opera stage, with a score that blends orchestral, jazz and electronic music.

At first glance, an opera based on a book about comics seems like an unlikely combination of high culture and lowbrow. But according to director Bartlett Sher, whose résumé includes the Broadway revivals of “Fiddler on the Roof” and “South Pacific” — as well as eight previous Met productions — there’s a natural affinity between comics and opera, as both are rooted in the storytelling of lived experiences. 

“Opera is a very good way to tell this story,” Sher said. “It can kind of cover a lot of time. It can take us to a different world; the music does a lot of that work. I had to build a world in which you can easily, and swiftly and satisfyingly, move from Prague to Brooklyn to a toy factory to the top of the Empire State Building. That’s just a fun challenge.”

Another challenge the creators faced was how to imbue the opera with the inherent Jewishness of the novel — a task that composer Mason Bates took head-on. Over the course of six months, Bates, who is not Jewish, attended services at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco, where he lives, to learn more about Jewish culture and tradition. 

While searching for a Jewish song of resistance to include in the opera, he came across a version of “Ani Ma’amin” — a song of hope that was reportedly composed in 1942 by Rabbi Azriel David Fastag on a boxcar on the way to Treblinka. Bates loved the musicality of it and incorporated a solemn rendition into the opera with traditional accompaniment. In “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” “Ani Ma’amin” is sung by a chorus of European Jews as they are carted off to Auschwitz.

“Ani Ma’amin” will also be performed at a “Kavalier & Clay” event at Temple Emanu-El’s Streicker Cultural Center (1 East 65th St.) on Tuesday, in one of several public programs sponsored by the Met. At the free event, members of the cast will perform selected numbers from the opera, and Bates, Sher and librettist Gene Scheer will discuss how the creators captured “the essence of New York Jewry,” among other things. 

According to immigration historian Miriam Mora — who organized the public programs about the Jewish origins of the comic book industry — Chabon’s novel “played a crucial role in elevating the Jewish history of the comics industry” when it was published 25 years ago.

“It was an incredibly important book for people’s understanding of the comic book industry as a Jewish one,” said Mora, managing director of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute at the University of Michigan. “Until ‘Kavalier & Clay’ came out, which is fiction, but fictionalizes a very real part of American Jewish literary history, it was a pretty unknown story. Since the book was released, interest in this story as a Jewish story, or in the comic book industry as being tied into the Jewish story, has been exponentially higher.”

The Met is also leaning into the World War II setting of the novel, specifically how the protagonists confront fascism and the approaching specter of the Holocaust. “With autocracy on the rise, ‘Kavalier & Clay’ couldn’t be more timely,” Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in a statement. “Mason’s epic of an opera, although set during World War II, should be an inspiration to those who wish to see present-day fascism defeated.”

As for director Sher, working on “Kavalier & Clay” was a way to connect with his Jewish identity. (Sher grew up Catholic but found out as a teenager that his Lithuanian-born father was Jewish.)  Sher told New York Jewish Week that he feels “a responsibility” to accurately portray the Jewish perspective in “Kavalier & Clay.” 

“I’m mostly there to help audiences see the truth of where we come from and who we are now,” he said.  

Many of the topics addressed in the novel — such as antisemitism, homophobia and tensions over immigration — are sharply relevant today. Just as the novel has continued to resonate with readers over the past quarter-century, Sher hopes the opera adaptation will connect with new and sympathetic audiences.

“This feels like the right story to tell at this time,” Sher said. “The Jewish history of the world, the Jewish commitment to what’s right, is very deep in the piece. And I have a lot of respect and love for that as a person who grew up respecting that culture very deeply.”

Two 17th-century paintings have been taken off the auction block after a Holocaust art restitution organization determined that they had been looted from a German Jew’s collection in France during World War II.

The two paintings, believed to be by Dutch artist Ambrosius Bosschaert, were set to be sold at an auction house in Newark, Ohio, this month until a tip submitted to the Monuments Men and Women Foundation prompted the group to intervene.

The foundation, which is dedicated to recovering European artworks stolen during World War II and is named for the Allied military group, researched the pieces and discovered that they originally belonged to the family of Adolphe Schloss, a German Jew whose 333-work collection was seized and divided by the Nazis during World War II.

The discovery of the two paintings comes weeks after Argentine police recovered a painting that the Nazis looted from a Dutch Jewish art dealer during the Holocaust.

The painting, “Portrait of a Lady” by Giuseppe Ghislandi, was first discovered last month in photos of a real estate listing by the daughter of a Nazi finance official who fled to Argentina after World War II.

Now, the paintings in the auction in Ohio underscore how many looted works have yet to be recovered and the range of circumstances in which they are being found.

The Schloss collection, including the two paintings discovered in Ohio, was stored at Hitler’s headquarters in Munich before being stolen in the final days of the war as Allied forces entered the city. Schloss’ children survived (he had died in 2010) but were reunited with only some of their art.

After receiving the tip about the art sale in Ohio, Robert Edsel, the founder and chair of the Monuments Men and Women Foundation, flew to Newark to meet with the owners of the Apple Tree Auction Center and explain the painting’s history.

“Within 48 hours of receiving this lead, the Foundation documented the provenance of the works that supports the Schloss ownership, inspected the two paintings in person, attained the cooperation of the auction house to remove the pictures from their sale, and reached out to the attorney for the Schloss heirs,” Edsel said in a statement. “We look forward to completing this collaborative approach to resolving this matter and we hope they will return to the Schloss family soon.”

The two still-life oil paintings of flowers were listed as unclaimed property on the auction house’s website, which has not disclosed the name of the consignor to the foundation.

Looted paintings could have wound up there in a variety of ways. Some Nazis — including John Demjanjuk, convicted in 2011 of war crimes related to 27,000 murders at the Sobibor concentration camp — wound up in Ohio and elsewhere in the Midwest. But looted art also came home on occasion with U.S. soldiers as souvenirs of their time liberating Europe from the Nazis.

The foundation is seeking to obtain the name of the bank that owned the safety deposit box so they can turn over custody of the paintings to the Schloss family.

The highest bids for the paintings were listed on the auction house’s website as $3,250 and $225, but Edsel told Art News that the paintings could be valued at over $500,000.

“These two paintings surfaced at a small auction house in the Midwest, but it could have happened anywhere,” Anna Bottinelli, the foundation’s president, said in a statement. “Hundreds of thousands of cultural objects looted during WWII are still missing. Some are in the United States, tucked away in attics, hanging on walls, and stuffed in unopened boxes, passed down through generations.”

An Israeli conductor called for an end to Israel’s war in Gaza during concert at Royal Albert Hall in London Thursday, warning the audience that “every moment that passes puts the safety of millions at risk.”

“In my heart, there is great pain now, every day, for months. I come from Israel and live there. I love it, it’s my home, but what’s happening now is atrocious, and horrific in a scale that’s unimaginable,” Volkov said at the end of the concert with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

Many members of the audience cheered Volkov’s address, but there were also some jeers,  to which he replied, “You can go if you don’t want politics. Politics is part of life every day.”

In his remarks, which drew loud cheers and applause from the audience, Volkov decried the killing of “innocent Palestinians” as well as the Israeli hostages “kept in inhumane conditions for two years.”

He alluded to the gap between the vast majority of Israelis who want the war to end with a deal to release the hostages and the government, which is pressing forward despite public sentiment.

“Israelis — Jews and Palestinians — we are not able to stop this alone. I ask you, I beg you all to do whatever is in your power to stop this madness. Every little action counts while governments hesitate and wait,” Volkov concluded. “We cannot let this go on any longer. Every moment that passes puts the safety of millions at risk.”

Volkov’s address comes as the societal reckoning over the Gaza war flares in the classical music world. The day before his Royal Albert Hall concert, a Belgian music festival canceled the performance of the Munich Philharmonic because it was being led by Lahav Shani, the music director of the Israeli Philharmonic.

“Lahav Shani has spoken out in favour of peace and reconciliation several times in the past, but in the light of his role as the chief conductor of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, we are unable to provide sufficient clarity about his attitude to the genocidal regime in Tel Aviv,” the Flanders Festival Ghent said in a statement Wednesday.

The organizers said the decision was made in order to “maintain the serenity” of the festival and “safeguard the concert experience for our visitors and musicians. ”

The cancellation drew condemnation from several European leaders, including Wolfram Weimer, the German culture minister, who said the decision was a “disgrace for Europe” and “blatant antisemitism” in a post on X.

Belgian Prime Minister Bart de Wever, who recently drew Israeli condemnation for planning to recognize a Palestinian state, also rebuked the decision. He traveled to Germany to see Shani conduct on Saturday.

“There will never, ever be any room for racism and antisemitism in this country,” de Wever tweeted along with a photo showing him shaking hands with Shani. “I insisted on conveying this message to him personally and expressing my appreciation for his contribution to the power of music.”

An online petition calling on the Ghent festival to reverse its decision, led by prominent classical musicians including Jewish conductor Joshua Weilerstein, has drawn over 16,000 signatures.

“This decision will do nothing to save a single Palestinian life, bring a hostage home, or to make any improvement to the unbearable civilian suffering currently taking place in this conflict,” the petition read. “It will, however, resonate loudly with those who equate an artist’s nationality with an excuse to exclude them from the cultural sphere.”

Hannah Einbinder made her ardent pro-Palestinian views known on one of the entertainment industry’s biggest stages when she won an Emmy award for best supporting actress in a comedy Sunday night. 

“Go Birds, f— ICE and free Palestine,” the Jewish comedian and actress, wearing a red Artists4Ceasefire pin, said to cheers during her acceptance speech for her role in the HBO show “Hacks.”

The pointed political commentary (mixed in with a cheer for the Philadelphia Eagles) came as Hollywood continued to wrestle with a growing petition to boycott Israeli film institutions amid its ongoing war in Gaza. Einbinder, a vocal pro-Palestinian advocate, was an early signatory to the petition circulated by Film Workers For Palestine and one of the most prominent Jewish names on a list of entertainment industry personnel that now numbers more than 4,000.

That list also includes several top-draw talent and filmmakers, including Emma Stone, Adam McKay, Ava DuVernay, Ayo Edebiri, Ilana Glazer, Abbi Jacobson and Yorgos Lanthimos. More notable Jewish names have joined the list since its release, including actor Andrew Garfield, whose father is Jewish; musician Mica Levi, who scored the Holocaust drama “The Zone of Interest”; and Rebecca Lenkiewicz, the screenwriter of acclaimed Jewish-themed films “Ida” and “Disobedience.”

Two days prior to the Emmys, Paramount — whose network CBS aired the telecast — became the first major American studio to publicly oppose the boycott. 

“We do not agree with recent efforts to boycott Israeli filmmakers. Silencing individual creative artists based on their nationality does not promote better understanding or advance the cause of peace,” the company said in a statement. “The global entertainment industry should be encouraging artists to tell their stories and share their ideas with audiences throughout the world. We need more engagement and communication — not less.” 

Both Paramount’s former chair Shari Redstone and David Ellison, its new owner following a high-profile merger, are Jewish and avid supporters of Israel. Ellison is rumored to be planning to install a pro-Israel media executive, The Free Press editor Bari Weiss, into a leadership role at CBS News. The studio is also reportedly preparing a bid to acquire rival studio Warner Bros. Discovery, which also owns HBO.

One of the boycott’s biggest supporters, actor Javier Bardem, responded to Paramount’s objections on the Emmys red carpet Sunday.

“I want to clarify something based on Paramount’s letter,” Bardem, wearing a keffiyeh, told Variety. “Film Workers for Palestine do not target any individuals based on identity. The targets are those film companies and institutions that are complicit and are white-washing or justifying the genocide and its apartheid regime. We do stand with those who are helping and being supportive of the oppressed people.”

Bardem added, “I cannot work with someone that justifies or supports the genocide. That’s as simple as that.” (He wasn’t the only red-carpet personality to sport pro-Palestinian garb: A non-Jewish “Hacks” castmate of Einbinder, Megan Stalter, wore a sign reading “Ceasefire!” on her handbag as she walked the red carpet.)

Einbinder herself elaborated on her acceptance speech in interviews after her win. “It is my obligation as a Jewish person to distinguish Jews from the state of Israel, because our religion and our culture is such an important and long standing institution that is really separate to this sort of ethno-nationalist state,” she said backstage, adding that she had “friends in Gaza who are working as frontline workers, as doctors.” She, too, insisted the boycott was not intended to target individuals.

In its own statement, Film Workers for Palestine also accused Paramount of “intentionally misrepresenting” the boycott. Like Bardem, the group said the boycott did not apply to Israeli individuals, only to institutions. Israeli entertainment-group leaders have disputed this claim, responding that all Israeli creatives work with the targeted institutions and would be harmed by a boycott.

Other Jewish winners at the Emmys on Sunday included Seth Rogen, whose Apple TV+ sitcom “The Studio” took home several comedy awards, and the HBO documentary “Pee-Wee as Himself,” a posthumous portrait of Jewish actor Paul Reubens. 

When critically acclaimed stand-up comedian Gianmarco Soresi introduces himself to a new audience, he explains that his father is Italian, his mother is Jewish, and that he identifies as a “cultural Jew.”

That, he says, “means I have all the gastrointestinal problems and stress and anxiety of regular Judaism — without the sweet comfort of God.” 

The line always gets a big laugh, and draws on a nuanced relationship with Judaism that he mines for laughs and which he elaborated on in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, discussing his family, his formerly Orthodox girlfriend, antisemitism and his disillusionment with Israel. 

The 37-year-old Soresi has seen his online popularity explode in recent years, as he joins a generation of comics finding audiences outside the comedy clubs. After amassing more than one million followers on TikTok, another million on YouTube, and 800,000 on Instagram, Soresi will debut his first full-length special, “Thief of Joy,” on his YouTube channel on Sept. 19. 

The special displays Soresi’s strong writing and storytelling skills and cleverly crafted punchlines: Variety, naming him one of “10 comics to watch out for in 2025,” described “his knack for filtering life through a dark prism.” (Deadline also named him to its “Future of Funny” list for 2025.)

Soresi’s quick rise, however, has largely been fueled by his popular crowd work videos, which feature lightning-fast improvisation with audience members, as well as what the New York Times described in 2023 as his “silkily feline physicality and frenetic gesticulation.” 

In a typical piece of crowd work, an audience member pipes up during a bit about people who are polyamorous. “I know you have a girlfriend, but you’re on the road all the time,” they ask. “Are you in an open relationship?” Soresi’s response: “Are you kidding? My girlfriend grew up Hasidic. I’m just lucky that she lets me mix meat and dairy products!” 

In a recent interview, Soresi shared more details about his Jewish background and experience. Raised in Potomac, Maryland, Soresi said his parents divorced before he was a year old. 

“My mom’s maiden name was Rothkrug, and she grew up in Great Neck, on Long Island. When she was 12 her parents told her she could either have a bat mitzvah or a Sweet 16 — and she decided to wait for the latter,” he said. There was no religious influence from his father, who Soresi describes as a “lapsed Catholic.”

Soresi himself did not have a bar mitzvah, but “I wouldn’t necessarily call my upbringing secular,” he said. “We did go to temple twice a year, we did Hanukkah, and we also did Passover — which was my favorite because it made the Jews seem cool.”

In addition, Soresi, a passionate “theater kid” who would earn a degree in musical theater from the University of Miami, got to perform during seders. “I really liked reading at the table,” he said.

While his mother married twice and his father was married and divorced three times, Soresi has been in a committed relationship for more than five years with Tovah Silbermann, who was raised in New Orleans in a Chabad community. After attending Yeshiva University, “she wanted to leave what I would call the strictness of that life and just gradually pivoted away, although her family remained Orthodox,” he said.

Soresi recalls an awkward moment when Tovah’s younger sister attended one of his shows, and he breached a rule of Orthodox etiquette. “Given my Italian side, I’m a hugger,” he recalled. “So I wrapped my arms around her and multiple people said, ‘no, no!’ It’s a horrible feeling to hug someone and have people shout ‘no!’” 

Silbermann — a talent manager who is listed on Soresi’s new special as executive producer, manager and muse — remains connected to her family and Judaism. “Unfortunately, I’m not in town a lot on Friday nights, which is sad for her, because she wants to do Shabbat dinner,” said Soresi. Shabbat dinner, he has said, “is like a standing date for Jews to get together every week.”

Silbermann declined to comment, but in a recent episode of Soresi’s popular podcast, “The Downside,” she offered a fairly lengthy primer on the kosher laws, the distinction between the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud and the laws of conversion. In the same conversation she acknowledged that in the beginning of their relationship she found herself missing the Jewish rituals and customs she shared with old friends. 

“That was a struggle for me,” said Silbermann. “It’s like, how do you integrate two lives?” In time, she added, she’s gotten accustomed to the choices she made, and said, “This is my thing.”

Soresi sprinkles references to their varied Jewish backgrounds throughout his appearances. “Tovah and I once got stuck in terrible traffic in Miami, and she yelled ‘Let my people go!’” He also picks up on antisemitism, intentional or not. During crowd work at a New Hampshire show earlier this year, he was speaking with a woman named Carol about whether she was raising her daughter to be religious. “Well, I did bring her to church,” Carol said. “But not Catholic; that’s worse than Jewish.” Soresi flinched theatrically, and the audience gasped before howling with laughter. “OK, let’s rank all the religions,” was his comeback. “What kind of Christian are you? Nazi?!” 

When he was 24, Soresi went on Birthright, the free trip to Israel offered to young Jewish adults. “It wasn’t a particularly political trip, and I wasn’t necessarily paying the closest attention. But I had exposure to a lot of Jewish people that I hadn’t interacted with in my own life,” he recalled. “And the soldiers who joined us for a couple of days seemed to be on the left side politically, talking about how they believed in a two-state solution.”

These days, Soresi is an outspoken critic of Israel and its actions in Gaza, as well as its policies toward Palestinians in general. He’s incensed with American Jews who equate such criticism with antisemitism, and he often receives vicious comments online. 

“Jewish people have written me the most angry emails of late, like, ‘you’re just pretending to be Jewish.’” 

While many liberal Jews have been critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extreme right-wing coalition, Soresi goes further by declaring he’s not a Zionist. 

In a July appearance at Montreal’s “Just For Laughs” comedy festival, Soresi told the crowd he might be in favor of a three-state solution: one for Zionist Israeli Jews, one for Palestinians and one for secular, cultural Jews like himself. 

When a reporter reminded him of that, he said, “Let me be clear. That wasn’t exactly a real policy proposal!” As to whether he considers himself anti-Zionist (opposing a nation-state that privileges Jewish citizens) or non-Zionist (supporting a Jewish homeland for others but not necessarily a nation-state), Soresi said he would prefer not to “quibble.”

“I would say I’m extremely anti what is being done to the Palestinian people in this moment,” he said. 

As always, though, Soresi manages to create comedy from calamity. “I have an Israeli barber,” he recently said onstage, “and while he was cutting my beard, he asked me my thoughts about Israel and Palestine. And I noticed that the closer the blade got to my throat, the more I was getting pro-Israel.”

Soresi’s career has clearly hit a sweet spot. In addition to the YouTube special, his live shows, podcast and periodic acting roles, his recent international tour was a sold-out success. 

Soresi and Silbermann have just moved from Manhattan’s Lower East Side to Brooklyn. After five years together, might there be an announcement involving a chuppah and a broken glass? 

“Um, did my girlfriend put you up to this?” he said, laughing. “I love her very much and we have an incredible life.”

Gianmarco Soresi’s special “Thief of Joy” debuts Sept. 19 on his YouTube channel.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has delivered her long-awaited endorsement in the New York City mayoral race, backing Zohran Mamdani in a New York Times op-ed on Sunday.

Her endorsement comes amid a string of polls predicting Mamdani’s victory with 50 days to the election. It also follows months of questions about how the governor, a moderate Democrat who calls herself a “staunch capitalist” and supporter of Israel, would approach a democratic socialist who plans to tax the rich and has vowed to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visits New York City.

Hochul said she reached her decision after months of conversations with Mamdani, which gave her confidence that overrode their “disagreements.” She emphasized that Mamdani had assured her of his commitment to Jewish New Yorkers.

“We discussed the need to combat the rise of antisemitism urgently and unequivocally. I’ve been glad to see him meet with Jewish leaders across the city, listening and addressing their concerns directly,” she said.

The statement marks a departure from remarks in July, when Hochul chastised Mamdani for having “a lot of healing to do with the Jewish community.”

Her endorsement comes amid a flurry from prominent Democrats as Mamdani solidifies his frontrunner status and publicly softens some of his stances.

An early example came around the pro-Palestinian slogan “globalize the intifada,” which Mamdani declined to condemn during the primary. In recent months, he has repeatedly said he would “discourage” the language and does not use it himself, often referencing a meeting with a rabbi that shifted his perspective. (While many pro-Palestinian activists argue the phrase represents a nonviolent call for liberation, many Jews and other critics interpret it as a call for violence against Jews.)

Hochul also said she shared Mamdani’s goal of addressing New York City’s affordability crisis. And she said that he agreed on her priorities of giving the police “every resource to keep our streets and subways safe” and hiring a “strong” police commissioner.

“I urged him to ensure that there is strong leadership at the helm of the N.Y.P.D. — and he agreed,” she wrote.

New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican who is likely to challenge Hochul in next year’s gubernatorial election, slammed the endorsement. Stefanik declared that Hochul now owns “every radical position” of Mamdani’s, including “every heinous pro-Hamas antisemitic position.”

The left flank of the party had been pressuring Hochul, along with other Democratic leaders, to rally behind Mamdani as President Donald Trump has weighed interfering to attempt to block his victory for weeks. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, both New Yorkers, have yet to make an endorsement in the race.

Just before going into recess on Saturday, California lawmakers approved legislation to create new mechanisms to address antisemitism in public schools, sending the measure to Gov. Gavin Newsom after closed-door negotiations that saw its provisions significantly pared down.

If enacted, California would become the first state to create a statewide antisemitism prevention coordinator for public schools. Advocates hope the model could be replicated nationally.

Newsom has not said whether he will sign Assembly Bill 715, and his office has so far declined to comment to the media. Supporters are urging swift action, arguing that with schools already back in session, the bill’s provisions should be implemented as soon as possible.

AB 715 received near-unanimous approval, passing the state Senate late Friday in a 35-0 vote with five abstentions. Hours later. the Assembly voted 71-0 in favor, with nine abstentions.

If signed into law, the bill will establish a new state Office of Civil Rights that reports to the governor’s cabinet and create specialized coordinators to address different forms of discrimination. Among them will be the antisemitism prevention coordinator, tasked with training teachers and school administrators, tracking incidents and advising on accountability measures.

“This bill is about more than policy. It’s about protecting children, defending civil rights, and ensuring every student can walk into school proud of who they are,” said David Bocarsly, executive director of the Jewish Public Affairs Committee of California, which sponsored the bill and built a coalition of 70 Jewish groups in support.

Bocarsly called the vote a “historic stand against antisemitism in our schools” and underscored its significance by noting that he broke from religious custom to mark the moment.

“It’s not our typical practice to work on Shabbat, but with the 2025 legislative session closing, we wanted to share this late-breaking update from tonight,” he wrote in an email to supporters sent just after the Assembly tally was announced late Friday evening.

Lawmakers introduced the measure after Jewish organizations raised alarms about how antisemitism is surfacing in classrooms, particularly within some ethnic studies courses. Critics say students have encountered slurs, bullying and in some cases, instructional materials they view as biased against Jews. Several pointed to curricula that link discussions of race and power to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which they say can marginalize Jewish students.

Reports of antisemitic hate crimes have risen sharply in California in recent years. According to the state’s Department of Justice, religiously motivated hate crimes increased by 142% between 2015 and 2024, with Jewish people experiencing the majority of such incidents.

The bill’s path was far from smooth. The California Teachers Association, which represents more than 300,000 educators, strongly opposed the measure after it was first introduced, warning it could chill classroom discussions of controversial subjects, particularly around Israel, and could open the door to politically motivated complaints.

“AB 715 is the wrong response to a real problem,” Mara Harvey, a Jewish member of the CTA’s board, wrote in August about an earlier version of the bill, which she characterized as a vehicle for “right-wing, Trump-style censorship.”

The union’s resistance forced lawmakers to revise the bill. Most significantly, they removed a section that sought to define antisemitism through a list of examples, including ones where criticism of Israel might cross the line. Instead, the bill now draws from antisemitism strategies issued by the Biden administration and by Newsom last year.

But when the new language was unveiled, the union maintained its opposition, frustrating supporters such as Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat who chairs the Legislative Jewish Caucus.

“I am disappointed that they’re still opposing the bill so aggressively. We’ve worked so hard to address their concerns,” Wiener told Jewish Insider last week. “It’s a narrower and more focused bill than it was before, but it’s still quite impactful and it sets some clear standards, and creates an antisemitism coordinator, so it’s a good bill.”

In another interview, Wiener said he eventually suspected that much of the pushback was in bad faith.

“I have increasingly come to the conclusion that if we had introduced a bill with three words — antisemitism is bad — a bunch of these people would still oppose the bill,” he told the J.

Theresa Montaño, a university professor and a member of the California Faculty Association, which opposes the bill, told KQED she worries that it could open the door to politically motivated complaints.

“This bill does nothing to challenge antisemitism,” Montaño said. “It does everything to create an environment that is divisive and that creates fear where teachers have to look around to see who in their classroom is likely to report them when they teach issues.”

As more than 900,000 New York City public school students enter their second full week of school, they have lots of learning to look forward to, including new lessons that focus on American Jews’ contributions to the history of the United States.

A nearly 300-page curricular supplement, “Hidden Voices: Jewish Americans in United States History, Volume 1,” aims to educate students in kindergarten through 12th grade about who the Jewish people are, beyond what they might know about the Holocaust and European Jewry.

The new resource, which is available to all New York City public school teachers, is the result of a nearly two-year collaboration between the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, an advocacy group, and the New York City Department of Education.

“We have to make sure that students understand that the Jewish community is more than just a faith-based group — that [it] is an ethnic group, that they have an origin story,” said Mark Treyger, CEO of the JCRC and a former high school history teacher. “And also, the Jewish community is not new to New York and American life, and that they have positively contributed to New York and American life.”

The curriculum supplement has lessons that span many decades, from the colonial era through the labor union movements of the early 1910s. It spotlights New York Jewish luminaries like poet Emma Lazarus and newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer, as well as to lesser-known American Jews like Philadelphia’s Rabbi Isaac Leeser, who was credited with starting the Jewish Sunday school, and New York socialite Bilhah Abigail Levy Franks, whose letters have helped historians understand what it was like to live as an assimilated Jew in New York in the 1700s.

This Jewish-centered resource is part of the Hidden Voices Project, which the Department of Education initiated in 2018. The project aims to provide educational materials on groups underrepresented in American history, including the LGBTQ+ community, the Asian community and the Black and African diaspora communities. Earlier this year, the DOE published “Hidden Voices: Muslim Americans in United States History” and “Hidden Voices: Latines in United States History.”

The Hidden Voices Project is not a mandatory part of the city’s public school curriculum. Rather, it supplements the city’s Passport to Social Studies curriculum, which meets Common Core and New York State K-8 standards.

Treyger said the decision to expand the project to include Jewish Americans was catalyzed partly by the tense environment in New York after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, including a November 2023 incident in which a Jewish teacher in Queens was harassed by students over her participation in a pro-Israel rally.

Nonetheless, the focus of the Jewish American curriculum supplement is not antisemitism.

“Unfortunately, a lot of times when Jewish stories are told, it’s about acts of antisemitism,” said Brian Carlin, the DOE’s director of social studies. “That’s not what we want it to be. We want it to be how Jews and other groups always contribute to American society, economics, sociopolitical, cultural. So that’s the beauty of Hidden Voices. It gives a teacher these resources and information and ways that they can think about how they include it when you’re teaching history.”

The supplement includes primary sources and guiding questions for teachers, as well as suggestions for educators on how to support their Jewish students — including a note on making sure not to single out students for their beliefs on Israel, or making them feel responsible for the actions of the Israeli government.

“For a healthy social emotional environment, it is important to create spaces for students to share their experiences and feelings,” the resource says. “From a social studies disciplinary thinking perspective, it is also important for students to study the evidence of harm and associated data, such as the prevalence of hate incidents, and analyze their effects.”

There’s also a map with significant places in New York City’s Jewish history — such as Ellis Island and the childhood home of Ruth Bader Ginsburg — and contextualizes Jewish influence in broader American history.

It also defines Zionism as “The right to Jewish national self-determination in their ancestral homeland.” It continues: “Zionism as a movement emerged in the late nineteenth century during a time of rising nationalism across the globe and widespread antisemitism across Europe.”

The curricular supplement will be piloted in a yet-to-be-determined number of schools this semester, according to Carlin. Teachers at the participating schools will have some professional development around the curricular supplement, participate in focus groups, and provide feedback to the education department.

To create the resource, the JCRC and the DOE collaborated with multiple institutions, including the American Jewish Historical Society, Columbia University Libraries, the National Council of Jewish Women, the National Archives, UJA-Federation of New York, the Library of Congress, and dozens of other groups.

For Treyger, teaching public school students about who the Jews are is part of a broader mission to combat hate in all its forms.

“Our hope is that this will get this will grow, and this will get scaled, and in a very meaningful way that’s sensitive to our community, and also to the needs of our school community, to combat not just antisemitism, but to combat just complete the impact of propaganda from social media — a lot of ignorance out there,” Treyger said.

“Hidden Voices: Jewish Americans, Volume 2” is scheduled to be released in the spring semester, and will focus on Americans who are well-known but whose Jewish identities are less prominent.

“We want to tell stories that people don’t know about,” Carlin said. “That’s why they’re hidden, right?”

A documentary about a dramatic rescue in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, won an audience award at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sunday, one month after it was reinstated to the lineup after a brief cancelation.

“The audience voted and I appreciate that. And we look forward to the rest of this journey,” director Barry Avrich said while accepting the documentary People’s Choice Award, which the festival boasts is an Oscar bellwether.

“The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue” tells the story of retired IDF general Noam Tibon’s mission to rescue his family during Hamas’ attack on Kibbutz Nahal Oz. Tibon killed Hamas terrorists and saved other Israelis while driving from Tel Aviv to the kibbutz near Gaza after concluding that the army could not be relied upon to save his son and his family.

It had secured a slot at TIFF for its premiere when the festival told Avrich and his collaborators last month that it could not be shown. They cited both safety concerns and questions about whether the filmmakers had the legal rights for some of its footage — eliciting disbelief that the festival would require Israelis to get permission from Hamas to use atrocities it filmed.

Amid a backlash, the festival said it was still open to working with the filmmakers to resolve the concerns. Within days, it was back on the schedule.

The premiere on Thursday drew an ovation as well demonstrations by both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel protesters outside the festival in downtown Toronto.

Avrich thanked TIFF’s CEO, Cameron Bailey, for his support for the film. “I appreciate everything that TIFF has done for us,” he said.

The movie is expected to play in about 20 cities in the United States beginning in late October.

On stage last Sunday at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the comedian Alex Edelman told a Jewish joke that he said he once read in an academic journal. 

It essentially goes like this: A man goes to heaven and meets God. Eager to please, the man asks God if He’d like to hear a joke. “I love jokes,” says God. So the man tells God a Holocaust joke. God doesn’t laugh and says, “I don’t find that funny.” “Well,” says the man. “I guess you had to be there.”

That startling punchline echoed as I read “The Last Jewish Joke,” a new book on the rise and decline of Jewish humor by the eminent French sociologist Michel Wieviorka. The son of Holocaust survivors from Poland who also enjoyed a good Jewish joke, Wieviorka, 79, asserts that after a period of communal security and acceptance that followed the horrors of World War II, the conditions that led to the flourishing of Jewish humor have been depleted, both in the United States and France. 

“This book is not a catalog of Jewish jokes,” Wieviorka, professor of sociology at EHESS, Paris, told me in an interview. “It’s really an analysis of a golden age which is past.”

I understand what he means, even if I don’t necessarily agree with his conclusions. From the 1960s to roughly the year 2000, he suggests, American and French Jews enjoyed a period of openness: antisemitism was in decline, both countries moved toward a form of multiculturalism, there was a general consensus that the Holocaust was bad and that Israel was a force for good. 

In such an environment, he writes, “Jewish humor had a very clear and visible place, often found in political debates and also in literary, artistic, and intellectual life.”

The past 25 years, however, saw a rise in antisemitism on both the right and the left. Islamists, Holocaust deniers and conspiracy theorists targeted Jews each in their own ways. Openness fasttracked assimilation, and a waning of engaged secular Jewishness. Israel was on its way to becoming an international pariah state, and Jews lost their status as a historically persecuted minority and were promoted to the status of privileged whites. 

“The space for benevolent feelings toward Jews became narrower and narrower,” he said. “And when this space is narrower and narrower, it’s more difficult to make humor, not only for your group, but also for people other than those that belong to your group.”

The golden age that he describes — which in the United States roughly extends from the heyday of the Borscht Belt to the finale of “Seinfeld” — encouraged what Wieviorka considers three essential traits of Jewish humor. First, it laughs at ourselves — not at others. Second, it doesn’t punch down: Anti-Belgian jokes may work in Paris cafés, but Jewish humor doesn’t thrive on cruelty. Third, it needs community. You can’t tell a Jewish joke in a vacuum; you need a knowing audience, a minyan of laughter.

The ideal Jewish joke also says something funny about the Jews without giving succor to antisemites. There is an assumption, says Wieviorka, that everyone is in on the joke, Jews and non-Jews alike. 

He offers an example, a joke told by a family friend who worked in the shmatte, or clothing, business: A client places a large order at a wholesale clothing store in the shmatte district. When he asks for a receipt, the perplexed clerk consults with his boss. “A receipt?” says the boss, indignantly. “What kind of scam is he trying to pull?”

Wieviorka loves the joke, first of all, because his own forebears worked in the rag trade. While the joke leans into an antisemitic trope — the wily businessman — it does it in a way that a non-Jewish audience would identify with: nobody wanted to pay taxes in postwar France. And he likes the way it is a joke Jews tell on themselves — recognizing the absurdity of the boss’s paranoia, and how his accusation is a confession.

It’s a joke that could be told without reservations from the 1970s to the 1990s, when the Diaspora, he writes, “felt things were going rather well.” 

In describing how things ended up going rather poorly, Wieviorka’s analysis seems spot on. “When the genocide and indeed the shock of its discovery lose their primacy as references, when interest in the intellectual heritage and cultural vitality of Yiddishkeit begins to wane, when Israel ceases to be viewed in a positive light, and when the capacity for bringing to life a Jewishness that also interests non-Jews is absent, these jokes can only appear as vestiges from the past,” he writes. 

Except when they don’t, and that’s where I part ways with Wieviorka. Despite his dire warnings, Jewish humor appears alive and well, at least in the United States. The new Netflix animated series, “Long Story Short,” is a satire of a contemporary Jewish family, slathered with Yiddishisms and insider Jewish jokes and references. Another Netflix series, 2024’s “Nobody Wants This,” is about a single rabbi who falls in love with a non-Jewish podcaster. It abounds with jokes about Shabbat, rabbis and, of course, intermarriage, and will return for a second season on Oct. 23.

Edelman, meanwhile, has had uncommon success with his one-man show, “Just for Us,” a stand-up comedy special about his boyhood at a Jewish day school and his more recent attempts to understand the antisemitism of white supremacists. The show moved to Broadway, is available on Netflix and launched Edelman into a higher plane: He’s in the cast of “The Paper” on Peacock. The show is a spinoff of “The Office,” NBC’s wildly popular and influential sitcom. 

Even Edelman’s appearance at JTS was confirmation that Jews still love their comics. He shared a stage with the memoirist and novelist Shalom Auslander at “Spoiler,” a three-day festival celebrating the new MFA in Creative Writing program at Conservative Judaism’s flagship university, where both are teaching. The director of the program is the Israeli writer Etgar Keret, whose short-short stories seem to start as jokes — a talking goldfish grants wishes, a man dates a woman who transforms at night into a beer-drinking bro — and end with an emotional punchline.

All of the comic projects above are trying to say something new. Yes, “Long Story Short” propagates the Jewish mother stereotype and “Nobody Wants This” includes cringey “shiksa” jokes and a few unpleasant stereotypes of its own. But both shows mine laughs from specific Jewish folkways in ways even the great Jewish comedians of the ”golden era” would not have dared. The same can be said for the 2020 comedy “Shiva Baby,” Adam Sandler’s 2024 movie “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah,” the 2025 farce “Bad Shabbos” and choice episodes of Larry David’s sitcom “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

Even the Holocaust joke Edelman told feels fresh. In the guise of a staple of Jewish humor — guy goes to heaven, gets to meet God —  it poses the central challenge of post-Shoah theology: “Where was God in the Holocaust?” Try that in the Catskills.

So much of what we call Jewish humor — of the Ashkenazi, American kind, anyway — is based on nostalgia. That’s not a bad thing. Judaism itself is a culture of retelling old stories, in hopes of connecting generations with a common vocabulary. Jewish humor can itself be a form of identity — which is better, as Wieviorka concedes in the conclusion of his book, than a “pure and simple forgetting.” 

So maybe the last Jewish joke isn’t the last after all. Maybe it’s just the latest retelling of an old story — ours — one that keeps finding ways to make us laugh when the world conspires to make us cry.