Secretary of State Marco Rubio promoted an interview this week with a conservative influencer who has praised Hitler online, in the latest example of a Trump official conversing with a white nationalist figure.

Michael Benz, who served in the State Department in Trump’s first term, revealed in 2023 he was the author of “Frame Game,” an alt-right account that has for years posted rants about “the Jewish influence in the West” and promoted the idea that Jews have orchestrated a mass ethnic replacement. 

“Let me be clear: I am extremely proud of this,” Benz, who is Jewish, told NBC News after being questioned about the links between himself and the account. He described Frame Game as “a project by Jews to get people who hated Jews to stop hating Jews.”

Speaking to Rubio on Wednesday in a talk released by the State Department, Benz quizzed him on how the department would be changing its approach to free-speech issues under Trump. Benz praised the secretary for what he called “restoring free speech and America’s role as the beacon of free speech,” while Rubio criticized what he described as “disinformation” produced by the news media.

Under Rubio the State Department has engaged in sweeping revocations of international student visas, in an initiative the secretary has described as part of the administration’s fight against antisemitism. He revoked one student’s visa for writing a student newspaper op-ed critical of Israel, and in another case he has argued that “otherwise lawful” speech could still be prosecuted if it enabled antisemitism. 

But Benz and Rubio did not discuss Jews or antisemitism in their talk about free-speech issues.

Instead, the two men praised Darren Beattie, a Rubio staffer who, like Benz, was a Jewish first-term Trump official with extremist links. Benz alleged that Beattie, who had been fired from the first Trump administration after the Anti-Defamation League criticized his appearance at a white nationalist-adjacent conference, had been “targeted” by a “network” being “paid through the State Department through grants and contracts.” 

Rubio agreed with this assessment, adding that “Darren will be big involved” in future State Department efforts to “document what happened” during the Biden administration. 

In August 2017, around the time of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where one counter-protester was killed, Benz, as Frame Game, wrote a long blog post in which he promoted Holocaust skepticism and anti-Israel sentiment. He also stated, “If I, a Jew, a member of the Tribe, Hebrew Schooled, can read Mein Kampf & think ‘holy s**t, Hitler actually had some decent points.’ Then NO ONE is safe from hating you once they find out who is behind the White genocide happening all over the world.”

The following year, Benz joined the Trump administration first as a speechwriter for Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson. He moved to the State Department in 2020, and during the Biden administration launched a conservative free-speech organization.

Benz has also held several interviews with avowed white nationalists, and has been promoted by Richard Spencer, while YouTube issued several extremism warnings on his content. He has also garnered the ear of President Donald Trump’s top advisor: Elon Musk has promoted and replied to Benz’s posts on Twitter in the past, on a range of subjects including Ukraine and elections. 

This article was originally created as a newsletter. Sign up for the weekly Jewish Sport Report here.

Hapoel Tel Aviv won its first European basketball title last Friday, beating the Spanish team Gran Canaria 103-94 to sweep the EuroCup finals. It’s the first time since 2004 that an Israeli team has won the tournament. With the victory, Hapoel will be promoted to the top European basketball tier, EuroLeague, where it will compete alongside Maccabi Tel Aviv.

“I know that for you, we beat Valencia [in the semifinals] and the Canaries [in the finals], but for me, we beat Hamas,” said Hapoel owner Ofer Yanai. “They tried to break our spirit, and they didn’t succeed. We made history tonight. History in Israeli sports, national history.”

With the NCAA basketball and hockey seasons over — and college football still a few months away — we’ve reached the portion of the sports calendar where college athletes make career-defining decisions. This week, that included a number of Jewish players.

These rising Jewish stars are making serious moves

Most notably, Israeli-American basketball star Danny Wolf officially declared for this summer’s NBA Draft, where he’s expected to be a first-round pick. Wolf is coming off a solid season at Michigan, where he led the Wolverines to the Sweet 16. The 7-footer is the No. 19 prospect in ESPN’s NBA draft projections.

Israeli Ben Saraf also officially declared for the NBA Draft, where he could also be a first-round pick. Saraf, a 6-foot-6 point guard, has been playing professionally in Germany this year. He’s the No. 23-ranked draft prospect per ESPN, and has long been expected to enter this summer’s draft. “This is the right time for me,” Saraf told ESPN.

And NHL prospect Zeev Buium signed his first professional contract, a three-year, $2.925 million entry-level contract with the Minnesota Wild, who drafted him 12th overall in 2024. Buium, whose University of Denver recently lost in the NCAA Frozen Four, could join the Wild for their upcoming Stanley Cup Playoff push.

As Wolf departs from NCAA basketball, another Israeli arrives: 18-year-old Omer Mayer has committed to play at Purdue University. Mayer, a point guard, had been playing with Maccabi Tel Aviv and was viewed as one of this year’s top international recruits.

And lastly, Orthodox football player Sam Salz officially entered the transfer portal with one remaining year of NCAA eligibility. Last year, Salz became the first Orthodox Jew to appear in a Division-I college football game, while playing for Texas A&M.

Halftime report

GOLDEN BOYS. Fresh off his NCAA title, Florida basketball coach Todd Golden filled two vacancies on his coaching staff with fellow Jewish basketball veterans, Jonathan Safir and Dave Klatsky. Safir, like Golden, is a former Maccabi USA coach. And Klatsky, who was previously the head coach at NYU, had been chosen to compete in the 2001 Maccabiah Games while he was a college player at Penn, but bowed out because of the Second Intifada.

FIGHTING WORDS. Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy spent the first night of Passover waving an Israeli flag and cheering as UFC fighter Bryce Mitchell got choked out at a bout in Miami. “Always fun to see a Hitler lover get his ass whopped,” Portnoy tweeted about Mitchell, who had praised Hitler on a podcast in January.

MAY THEIR MEMORY BE FOR A BLESSING. A Jewish family was killed last weekend when their private plane crashed en route to upstate New York to celebrate Passover. Among the victims was Karenna Groff, a former soccer player at MIT who had been named the 2022 NCAA woman of the year. In 2019, she played for the USA women’s soccer team at the European Maccabi Games in Budapest.

NO(R) WAY. Released Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov spoke via FaceTime with Manchester City star Erling Haaland. “Thank you so much for calling me,” said Shem Tov, who is visibly starstruck in the video. Haaland, who also plays for Norway’s national team, is one of the world’s top goal scorers.

Why this week was different from all other weeks in baseball

For many of the Jewish players in MLB, the past week has been nothing short of impressive. It must be all that matzah they’ve been eating.

Boston Red Sox third baseman Alex Bregman collected his first career five-hit game on Tuesday, going 5-for-5 with two home runs. The next day, he returned home to be with his wife as they celebrated the birth of their second son, Bennett. 

Miami Marlins first baseman Matt Mervis also celebrated a birthday in style this week — hitting a home run on his 27th birthday on Wednesday. The blast was the Team Israel alum’s sixth this season, three of which have come since Passover began last weekend.

New York Yankees ace Max Fried tossed another gem on Tuesday, striking out seven over 6 2/3 innings. Fried has been stellar in each of his last three starts, dropping his season ERA to 1.88 and proving why the Yankees gave him the largest contract ever for a left-handed pitcher (and for a Jewish player).

Fellow pitcher Dean Kremer earned his second win of the year on Wednesday in his best performance of the season, allowing only one run over 5 1/3 innings with two punchouts. 

And in the field, the gloves have been excellent, too. Minnesota Twins outfielder Harrison Bader has become a living highlight reel. During Passover alone, he has made two phenomenal diving plays and an impressive throw to nab a runner at the plate.

Seattle Mariners first baseman Rowdy Tellez took part in one of the best plays in the sport this week when he made a twisting catch on this crazy ground ball fielded by catcher Cal Raleigh.

And Texas Rangers outfielder Kevin Pillar, long known for his acrobatics with his glove, added yet another incredible catch to his collection.

For all their success at the plate, on the mound and in the field, dayenu.

Jews in sports to watch this weekend (all times ET)

🏒 IN HOCKEY…

The NHL playoffs begin this weekend, with a number of Jewish players in the hunt for the Stanley Cup. Luke Hughes and the New Jersey Devils take on the Carolina Hurricanes in Game 1 of the first round Sunday at 3 p.m. Zeev Buium and the Minnesota Wild play the Vegas Golden Knights Sunday at 10 p.m. Jakob Chychrun and the Washington Capitals face the Montreal Canadiens Monday at 7 p.m. Zach Hyman, Jake Walman and the Edmonton Oilers match up against the Los Angeles Kings Monday at 10 p.m.

⚾ IN BASEBALL…

Max Fried starts for the New York Yankees Sunday at 1:40 p.m. against the Tampa Bay Rays. Alex Bregman and the Boston Red Sox host the Chicago White Sox in a four-game series that begins today. Harrison Bader and the Minnesota Twins face the Atlanta Braves this weekend, while Rowdy Tellez and the Seattle Mariners play the Toronto Blue Jays.

⚽ IN SOCCER…

In European soccer, Manor Solomon and Leeds United play Oxford United in the English Championship today at 3 p.m. Matt Turner and his Premier League club Crystal Palace host Bournemouth Saturday at 10 a.m. In the MLS, Tai Baribo (Philadelphia Union), Daniel Edelman (New York Red Bulls), Liel Abada (Charlotte F.C.) and Ilay Feingold (New England Revolution) are all in action Saturday at 7:30 p.m. DeAndre Yedlin and F.C. Cincinnati face Chicago Saturday at 8:30 p.m.

⛳ IN GOLF…

Max Homa, Max Greyserman and Daniel Berger are competing at the RBC Heritage tournament this weekend in South Carolina. David Lipsky will be on the green at the Corales Puntacana Championship in the Dominican Republic.

🏎 IN RACING…

Aston Martin driver Lance Stroll races in the Formula One Saudi Arabian Grand Prix Sunday at 1 p.m. 

A hero’s welcome

Last week, our feature story focused on Israeli NBA player Deni Avdija’s breakout season, and what his star turn has meant to his Israeli fans. With the Portland Trail Blazers done for the season, Avdija returned home to Israel this week. This picture, taken by Josh Halickman (the “Sports Rabbi”) gives a great taste of Avdija’s celebrity status in Israel, where hordes of media and fans greeted him at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport.

GAZA ENVELOPE, Israel — Reut Ben Kamon was in third grade when her family was uprooted from the Neve Dekalim settlement during the 2005 disengagement from Gaza. The scenes of soldiers clashing with settlers left her traumatized, she said. Yet she waxes nostalgic about life before the evacuation, describing the sand dunes she and her friends would roll down behind her home, the fresh air, the blossoms and the diverse mix of Jews who were her neighbors.

“It was a place where you truly felt the essence of the people of Israel and the land of Israel,” Ben Kamon recalls.

Two decades later, Ben Kamon joined several other families who braved an unseasonal bout of rain to spend the Passover seder in tents near Kibbutz Sa’ad in the Gaza envelope, as a symbolic act calling for the Jewish return to Gaza. Organized by the Nachala Israel Movement — a settler group promoting new Jewish outposts in the West Bank and the resettlement of Gaza — the encampment featured repurposed sukkahs, bouncy castles and a full lineup of speakers, children’s activities and tours. Thousands of Israelis visited over the intermediate days of the holiday.

The settler movement has long viewed the seder as a symbolic act of redemption and a catalyst for establishing new settlements. In 1968, activists posing as Swiss tourists used the seder as a pretense for re-establishing a permanent Jewish presence in Hebron, three decades after the last of the city’s Jews fled following massacres. Today, Hebron is an epicenter of settler activity, with thousands of Jews living in and near the biblical city.

And in 1975, activists from the Gush Emunim settlement movement held a seder in the northern West Bank at a site that would later become Kedumim, where Nachala’s founder, Daniella Weiss, served as mayor for more than a decade. Now, Kedumim has close to 5,000 residents.

Three years ago, Nachala hosted a seder near the Tapuach Junction, a move that preceded the establishment of the controversial Evyatar outpost — the term used for wildcat settlements that do not have permission from the Israeli government. In June, Evyatar was legalized by Israel’s cabinet along with four other outposts.

According to Arbel Zak, a senior Nachala leader responsible for mobilizing families to relocate to new settlements, some 80 outposts in the West Bank have been formed since the outbreak of the war. For her and others in the movement, Gaza is the next frontier.

“People say it’s not logical, or that it won’t happen. But Evyatar, and Gush Emunim itself, proved that it is possible and it is logical,” Zak said.

Ben Kamon was one of those who never seriously considered the idea of returning to Gaza – until Oct. 7 happened.

“I never imagined for a second that moving back would ever be a possibility. But the second the war started, we knew it was a real option,” Ben Kamon said.

Last summer, Ben Kamon, her husband, and their four young children moved from the West Bank settlement of Eli to the southern community of Zimrat, to be closer to Gaza and to her dream. They now live in a temporary site meant for “pioneers,” she said – people ready to drop everything and settle a new place, sometimes with just a few hours’ notice.

According to Nachala activist Batel Moshe, who signed up to move to Gaza weeks after Oct. 7, around 30 such families live in temporary sites, but a further 800 have signed up to move to six would-be Gaza settlements down the road. The settlement plans, some embedded deep within dense urban areas like Khan Younis, were first unveiled at a January 2024 conference in Jerusalem organized by Nachala and attended by far-right ministers.

“People call asking if they can invest in [Gaza] apartments for their children,” Moshe said.

Weiss pointed to a surge in participation in the group’s activities since the war – including tens of thousands at a recent rally – as evidence of strong public support for its goals.

“Most Israelis are in favor of resettling Gaza, if not immediately, than after an Israeli victory against Hamas,” Weiss said. “This is the real path of Zionism.”

Polling does not support Weiss’ claims, however. While early post-Oct. 7 polls showed support for resettling Gaza as high as 44%, more recent data, including a February survey from Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, indicates a decline to 23%.

Although Weiss and her movement have called for the expulsion — voluntary or otherwise — of Gazan Palestinians, not everyone who has signed up to relocate to the coastal enclave shares that view.

“Whether there will be three Arabs living there or 3 million, it doesn’t matter to me, I don’t care. The point is that Jews need to be there,” said Aharon Amos Ben Naeh, a Jerusalem resident who previously lived in the Old City’s Muslim Quarter.

He said IDF officers had visited the encampment and urged them to stick to their mission. “They came to our seder on the way out [from Gaza] and told us we need to move back there,” Ben Naeh said, in a recollection that another person who was present corroborated.

Accompanying a group of visitors to a nearby memorial for the female IDF spotters killed on Oct. 7, Zak pointed toward Gaza, identifying the sites where she hopes new settlements will one day be built. Pillars of smoke – likely from IDF activity – rose against the backdrop of the Mediterranean Sea. At that moment, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was touring the northern Gaza Strip.

“Who knows,” Zak quipped, “maybe we’ll be lucky enough to see a pyrotechnic show for him by our soldiers.” Then she turned serious. “Seeing the destruction doesn’t make me happy, but I like knowing the IDF is there.”

Like Weiss, Zak insists that only a Jewish presence can deter terror. “Fences don’t help. Oct. 7 proved that.” She rejected the argument that stationing troops for a handful of civilians drains military resources.

“The opposite is true,” she said. “When a soldier sees a mother pushing a stroller, he knows exactly what he’s fighting for.”

On the road back to the encampment, police had cordoned off the area in anticipation of a protest organized by anti-government groups to challenge the settlers’ presence.

Ben Naeh said he planned to go and greet the protesters. “I want to hug them. I want to tell them I’m proud of them. I don’t understand much about politics, I don’t even like Bibi. But I understand that, like me, these people care deeply about this country,” he said, using Netanyahu’s nickname.

At least one protester spurned Ben Naeh’s overture.

“I will never accept a hug from someone like him,” Yifat Gadot said.

According to Gadot, who was wearing a Bring Them Home T-shirt, the people involved in the encampment were complicit in thwarting a ceasefire deal that would see the release of the 59 hostages – 24 of whom are believed to be alive – still being held captive in Gaza.

“The only reason the war is not over, and that hundreds of soldiers are dead and the hostages are not home, is because for them, the land is more important than people’s lives,” she said.

At one point, tensions flared between protesters and Gali Bat Chorin, who came with members of the Café Shapira Forum to back Nachala’s efforts. Bat Chorin, who founded the forum, claimed it represents 15,000 mostly secular academics who, as she put it, “shifted right in one fell swoop” to reclaim Zionism in public discourse.

The protesters are “driven by a deep-seated hatred of Judaism and anything that is Jewish,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what our enemies have done to us, be it rape, abduction, slaughter, or burning children alive, [the protesters] feel the most important thing is to fight Daniella Weiss and stop her from taking land from Arabs at all costs,” she said.

Elchanan Shaked, an activist with Brothers in Arms, a protest group of reservists, from the central city of Rishon Lezion, also rejected the idea of a hug from the settlers.

“Tell them, before they hug us, they should quickly go hug the 59 families of the hostages and the deceased,” he said. “Then I’ll talk to them.”

Shaked rejected the notion that Jewish presence in Palestinian territories protected Israel’s heartland.

“Gush Katif wasn’t even located in an area that would have protected the border,” he said, referring to the name of the dismantled Gaza settlement bloc. “If there hadn’t been an evacuation, they would have been the first to have been slaughtered on Oct. 7.”

Shaked said he worried about an Oct. 7-style attack in the West Bank in the future.  “We won’t send our kids to the army just to protect a bunch of crazy messianists who want to fulfill some fantasy about sanctifying the land,” he said.

In the encampment, Ben Kamon’s newborn – her fifth child – cried in his stroller. As she soothed him, she reflected on the deeper meaning his birth held for her.

He was born last month during an emergency labor on the side of Route 232, between Kfar Aza and Kibbutz Mefalsim — on the same stretch of road where dozens were killed on Oct. 7. She named him Binyamin Ori, after the biblical Benjamin, whom she sees as a unifying force among the 12 tribes.

“And just like my Binyamin, Binyamin was born on the way to settling the land,” she said.

A 24-year-old man who was convicted of attacking the grandson of a Munich massacre victim over a year ago in Berlin was sentenced to three years in prison on Thursday.

The sentence, which was higher than what prosecutors sought, came after the judge determined that the assault was motivated by antisemitism, according to the German news agency DPA.

The case drew close attention in Israel because the victim, Lahav Shapira, 30, is the grandson of Amitzur Shapira, an Israeli athletics coach who was murdered by Palestinian terrorists in the Munich Olympics terror attack in 1972. Shapira moved to Germany from Israel with his mother and brother Shahak Shapira, a prominent comedian and writer, as a child.

“He was full of hate,” Shapira’s mother, Tzipi Lev, told Ynet about her son’s attacker, whom German police identified as Mustafa S. “We won’t be silent about this. We already have a bloody history here, but I’m not afraid. I raised my sons to be proud of their Judaism and their Israeli identity. If we start to fear, we lose our right to exist.”

The attack occurred in February 2024, amid heightened tensions at the Free University of Berlin, where both men were students, over the Israel-Hamas war. Police reports at the time said that the younger man assaulted Shapira after the pair argued, while Shapira said there had been no precipitating incident. He suffered severe facial fractures, a brain hemorrhage and significant eye damage in the assault.

Testimony during the trial showed that Mustafa confronted Shapira outside of a bar for allegedly tearing down pro-Palestinian posters, according to Ynet’s report, which said the two had known each other from a teacher training program, and Mustafa had previously accused Shapira of treating him unfairly for removing members of a WhatsApp group who shared antisemitic content.

Key evidence determining the antisemitic nature of the attack was found in a video on Mustafa’s phone where a friend is heard saying, “Mosti beat the shit out of that Jewish son of a bitch,” according to Ynet’s report.

Mustafa apologized to Shapira shortly before the verdict, saying, “I am sorry to have caused you pain,” according to DPA.

Shahak Shapira suffered an assault in 2015 when several Arab men beat him on a Berlin train after he objected to them singing anti-Israel and antisemitic chants. He has championed for justice for his younger brother on social media, and called on the Free University in Berlin to be held to account.

“The court declared the antisemitic motive proven beyond doubt. It’s a huge relief for us,” Shahak Shapira wrote on Instagram.” We’re not done yet. The university who put Jewish students in danger, hateful organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and Young Struggle who dehumanize and put a target on Jewish individuals, all the students who doxed their fellow students and called for violence upon them — I hope they will all get the what they deserve. We will try.”

This again?

Having grown up in the years after Nostra Aetate – the Vatican document rejecting the traditional accusation that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus – I assumed it was a settled issue. 

But only earlier this month, a major body that sets the liturgical calendar for a number of mostly Protestant churches said that “a common misreading of the Gospel story” fomented anti-Jewish bias. 

The Consultation on Common Texts, or CCT, recommended modifications to the reading cycle that would dispel the poisonous notion that “Jesus died because of the behavior of non-Christian Jewish people, rather than because of the decisions by Roman officials or the sinfulness of all humanity.”

Apparently, the charge that the Jews killed Jesus is itself the slur that will not die. Earlier this month, a newspaper columnist in upstate New York casually referred to the “Jewish Leaders” who persecuted Jesus in an article lambasting President Trump’s critics. Last year, Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene tried to scuttle a house antisemitism bill that she thought would prevent the “gospel” teaching that “the Jews” handed Jesus over to his crucifiers. A month later, the NFL player Harrison Butker gave a commencement speech in which he complained, “Congress just passed a bill where stating something as basic as the biblical teaching of who killed Jesus could land you in jail.”

Such insistence on the “deicide” charge — which for centuries turned the Easter and Passover period into open season on the Jews — has kept scholars busy. This month, the historian Nathanael Andrade weighs in with a new book, “Killing the Messiah: The Trial and Crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth.” In it, Andrade, a scholar of the Greco-Roman world, argues that the authors of the Gospels rewrote history to let the Romans off the hook, and shifted the blame for their messiah’s execution to the Jewish authorities in charge of the Temple in Jerusalem. 

In the New Testament, Andrade told me, Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judaea who sentences Jesus to death, “is more or less portrayed as believing in Jesus’ innocence, while the chief priest [or Kohen haGadol in Hebrew] is bringing Jesus to him out of jealousy or envy or hostility.” By the time you get to the Gospel of John, Jesus’ tormentors are framed as “the Jews,” while Pilate lacks the backbone to stand up to the mob and “basically executes an innocent man.”

A professor of history at Binghamton University, Andrade builds on the work of scholars who have used the historian’s tools to interrogate a story that combines both history and religious myth-making. They included Paul Winter in “On the Trial of Jesus” (1961), Paula Fredriksen in “When Christians Were Jews” (2018) and Helen Bond in “The Trial and Death of Jesus” (2024).

Andrades bases his corrective account on his knowledge of Roman law and precedent, noting it would be highly unusual for a governor in Pilate’s day to consider a suspect innocent and nevertheless sentence him to a particularly cruel and humiliating form of capital punishment. 

Both the Jews and the Romans certainly saw Jesus as a troublemaker. The Gospels depict Herod Antipas, the Jewish agent of Rome in the Galilee, as a fuming critic of this renegade rabbi. As for the Romans, they may not have believed that Jesus was engaged in armed insurrection, but still considered him a threat. 

“He’s really envisioning a reign of God that’s going to overturn the governing order and the social economic hierarchy,” said Andrade. “And when he’s preaching at the Temple, there is a potential for him to be incendiary enough to lead to an outbreak of violence.”

To understand how the Roman authorities would have treated a dissident like Jesus, Andrade turned to a historical account of a trial that took place some 30 years after Jesus would have been executed. In that episode, the Temple priests turn over a man who has been agitating against the Temple leadership and the Romans. The Romans find him guilty, but instead of executing him flog him harshly and let him go. 

To Andrade, that suggests that the Romans took crimes of sedition seriously, and makes it more plausible that Pilate considered Jesus similarly guilty. While the death sentence for Jesus was harsh, that could  suggest that Pilate was a hardass, not a flunky to the Jews. 

As to why the Gospels, written variously between 70 CE and 110 CE, would pin the blame on the Jews and insist Pilate thought Jesus was innocent, Andrade posits that the authors were not only hostile to the Jews who did not accept Jesus as their messiah, but hoped to curry favor with the Roman authorities who were still in charge of Judaea.

“They’re making the argument that the followers of Jesus really aren’t seditionist, they shouldn’t be prosecuted, they’re law-abiding,” said Andrade. The later Gospels become “more and more vocal about Jesus’ innocence,” insisting that Pilate thought so too. 

Andrade acknowledges that he is a scholar of Roman antiquity, and not an expert on the subsequent centuries in which the original church and its many branches used the charge of deicide to justify the persecution of the Jews. “But I do think it serves various purposes in the early church, that they have a New Testament that supersedes  the Hebrew Bible, and that even though there’s a shared origin, Jesus as a divine savior wasn’t accepted by people in his own community and the eyes of the early church,” he said.

That framing of the Jesus story haunted Jews for almost two millennia, as the Vatican admitted in Nostra Aetate, and the CCT explained this month.  “This misreading has in turn been used to support discrimination and violence against Jews. It still inspires anti-Jewish actions to this day,” the authors of the consultation said. “This is something for which Christians need to repent. We must acknowledge how we and members of the church before us have discriminated against and mistreated Jews. We need to seek ways to amend our personal and communal understanding of Scripture that shapes our attitudes and behavior toward the Jewish people.”

Andrade, who was raised Catholic, hopes his book becomes part of the process of repentance. 

“I certainly do want the book to negate that very harmful perception,” he said. “It may not be as much a part of the mainstream discourse as it once was, but it does exist in a way that raises a lot of worry. I like to think that if my work has an impact, it’s to make an argument against ethnically or religiously motivated hate in general, and in particular as it involves Christians and Jews.” 

D’yan Forest is, in the truest sense of the phrase, one of a kind.

That’s because at the age of 90, she is the oldest female stand-up comedian in the world, per Guinness World Records. And on Thursday and Sunday, as part of the New York City Fringe Festival, she is performing the last of her four-performance run of “90 Years of Songs and Scandal.” The one-woman show she co-wrote with Stephen Clarke and Eric Kornfeld covers topics like Forest’s Jewish upbringing and experiences in showbiz, as well as some raunchier subjects like dating apps and her exploits abroad.

Born Diana Shulman in Newton, Massachusetts, Forest has had a long and fruitful career in show business, originally singing and performing in cabarets before adding comedy to her repertoire. 

After attending Middlebury College in Vermont and divorcing her husband in Boston, she moved to Paris in the 1960s. There she learned to sing in French — a skill that’s served her well in the decades since. In 1966 she moved to NYC, and has lived in the same West Village apartment building since.

With Forest’s run in the Fringe Festival heading toward the final stretch, the New York Jewish Week sat down with her in that very apartment, its walls covered with ukuleles and artwork from France, Israel and other cherished destinations.

Between some performances on the piano and ukulele, Forest chatted with us about her show, her golf game, and why she changed her name.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

What can audiences expect when they see “90 Years of Songs and Scandal”?

At 90, I’m a little scandalous — not much, but enough so you’ll have fun. Because I’m fun, and I play my ukulele, and we sing all together, and I try to make it so everybody’s having a good time and joining in. If you’ve got nothing to do Easter Sunday afternoon, I’m performing.

You talk about your upbringing in the show. What was it like growing up Jewish in in Massachusetts?

I’m from Newton, which is right near Boston. First [Boston Jews] lived in the [city’s] Jewish community, but then they moved to Newton and Brookline, and they all became as non-Jewish as possible. There was only one temple in Newton, and then years later came another temple. It’s like, it wasn’t big. Here in New York, I guess being Jewish was always big. But we all assimilated. You know, my friends at the golf club [on Long Island], they know all the Yiddish words and all that. I only knew two Jewish words ‘til I got here to New York.

What were the words?

Mother would use [redacted]. And the other was, mother would say “Gey schluffen.” And I said, “What does that mean?” “Go to sleep!”

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 Your birth name was Diana Shulman. How did you come to take on the name D’yan Forest?

When I started in show business, and I was 23, 24, taking singing lessons, we had to choose a name — because you couldn’t be Jewish. So I picked the name Diana Lunn, my mother’s maiden name, and that didn’t quite work because they thought it was Lum; they thought I was Chinese when I walked into an audition. So I changed Lunn to something else, then something else wasn’t working. So then I had a nose job. And I wanted a name that nobody would know nothing. So now I’ve been D’yan Forest for 15, 20 years. Isn’t that ridiculous?

Have you grown any sort of personal connection to the name Forest?

No! At the golf club, which was, let’s say 60 or 70 percent Jewish, a lot of people didn’t know I was Jewish when I joined 30 years ago. So no, that’s showbiz, and then Shulman is business, and who I really am.

How does your Jewishness show up in your work?

Well, I bring up my ex-husband, Irwin Cohen. He didn’t turn out to be a great husband because he didn’t know how to pleasure a woman. And ordinarily that wouldn’t matter, but the woman was me. And I talk a lot about the experiences being Jewish in my life, things that would hit me and they’re funny. So I always bring in the Jewishness. I guess you just can’t avoid it — even with the nose job.

That idea of assimilation, or of having to hide your Jewishness, comes up a bunch in your work.

My writer Stephen [Clarke] picked up on this over the years. I was living in Paris for a couple years in 2017, ‘18, and I joined a golf club there. And then I talked to people and [said] my club is very Jewish out in the Hamptons, because Jews couldn’t join the private golf club. And people in France can’t believe this, they think we’re the land of the free and the brave. Even I’m finding Americans have no idea that we couldn’t join any golf clubs. And this is what started me to think of this show [that I’m working on]: [Stephen and I] have written a show seeing what happened to me from age 5 to, I’ll be 91 [when I perform it in July], all the antisemitism that I’ve had to approach. 

Wow, we’ll stay tuned for that! And early in your career, when you performed, were you explicitly Jewish in your work?

When I came back from Paris [in the ‘60s] I still had a French accent. I have a French repertoire, everybody thinks I’m French. OK, so I became French, and for 20 years I just played piano, I did cabarets, I was French, Italian, Irish, whatever you want! And then I had to go to the Catskills, so Hebrew, I had to learn Yiddish. 

What were the Catskills performances like?

I got to New York in the ‘60s, and I would go to these bungalow colonies. I’d get up there at 8 o’clock at night and they’d be like, “Are you the stripper?!” Everywhere I go! Because there was me, the singa, and then there was the strippa. I’d go on first and they wouldn’t really listen. 

You are officially in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s oldest female stand-up comedian. Have you had any contact with the oldest male comedian? Is there a rivalry?

No. We’re trying to get not only the oldest female stand-up, but the oldest stand-up. And we have gone through the internet, and there isn’t anybody! But they’re very gender-based in Britain. So now I got them to change it to Oldest Stand-up Comedian, parentheses female… for another 800 bucks. [The $800 fee — which Forest said she did not intend to pay — was to receive the certificate within a week, rather than in a number of months.]

You have a Guinness World Record. You’ve spent decades in showbiz and are currently performing a one-woman show, while working on another one. What have you not done?

Well, right now I don’t have any partner! I’ve had them, maybe 20 years at a time. But the problem is — you’re 90, and a lot of my friends are dead. And that’s bad. And people think “You’re 90,” they don’t know that I’m a young 90. They have no idea. So, je suis seul — I’m lonely tonight. You know that French song? [singing] Je suis seul ce soir…

What’s your secret to a long life?

Oh, God help us. One reason is that I keep the brain active and I do comedy, I do the singing, I do one-woman shows, so I’m always memorizing. And it’s very hard when you’re 90 going on 91, but I think it’s working the brain. The other thing is I do a lot of sports. I swim every day either at the pool here or out in Southampton, and then I walk the golf course when it’s golfing weather. And I do at least nine holes walking, while all my other friends are in carts.

How far do you hit a driver? 

Not very far. Because as you get older, it doesn’t go far. And this is what the men ask. You notice it was a man who asked this question?

What’s your favorite Jewish food?

Believe it or not, my favorite is gefilte fish, and my mother knew how to make it best of all. And even though she isn’t here anymore, I still have that chopper — because in the old days they didn’t buy it in the store, and Mother would spend the whole day chopping the fish. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.

Where in New York do you feel most Jewish?

I feel it in Southampton at my golf club! In the city here [my friends] are young people, they’re not Jewish, they’re all from different countries. But then I go to the golf club and most of the club is Jewish. And then I become Jewish for the summer. 

What’s the wildest thing you’ve encountered in New York?

I got here in the ‘60s, and all the girls in their T-shirts weren’t wearing bras. And that, to me, was the craziest thing in the whole world. Now, this is… 2,000-whatever-it-is, 25. Now they’re walking down Greenwich Avenue with even the pupik [Yiddish for belly button] showing. And I feel like telling them, “Does your mother know you’re wearing that?” But probably the mother was wearing it too… I can’t help it, I’m conservative from Boston.

In the show, you bring up the story of when you were randomly sucker-punched in public. 

Oh gosh, okay that’s the craziest thing. I try not to think about it — last year, July 10, at quarter of nine in the morning, I was standing on the corner ready to go swimming. And I was hit from behind, and I thought it was a phone pole, and it was so hard I fell to the ground. I got hit by a 31-year-old woman, if you can believe it — a sucker punch. And believe me, when I walk outside now — even in the Village — I look around because I guess you can never know.

Do you have any advice for young people in show business?

Get your college degree and have another business besides show business. Because show business is sometimes great, and then sometimes there’s zero. I happen to have a master’s in education, and that has kept me going through thick or thin. I was always able to substitute or teach somewhere.

You’ve been singing and performing music practically your whole life. How did you first get into stand-up comedy?

I made my living being a pianist and singer, in Paris, here in New York, and I did private shows, I did cabaret. And then 9/11 happened, and all U.S. union jobs were cancelled. Everything was cancelled, nobody was going out. And I got sick of not performing. So, I play golf with Caroline Hirsch, and she owned one of the biggest comedy clubs in Manhattan at the time (Carolines on Broadway). I said, “How do you get into comedy?” Right away I got in touch with a coach, and we started doing parodies on the ukulele. And that’s how I’m unique in the comedy world.

And you’re a record holder.

Oh yeah, I’m a record holder. I’m the oldest comedian in the whole world. And let’s hope I keep being here!

D’yan Forest is performing her one-woman show, “90 Years of Songs and Scandal,” at Wild Project (195 East 3rd St.) on Thursday, April 17 and Sunday, April 20. Get tickets here.

It was a Passover miracle: A sign for a bagel shop had risen again outside the storefront vacated abruptly in December by Absolute Bagels.

“Reopen: New Absolute Bagel,” reads a banner outside the shuttered Broadway store. An image of a stack of two bagels, cream cheese spilling out their sides, appeared next to the words.

“Is it real? We need some investigative journalism!” one Upper West Side reader texted our staff as he passed the sign this week.

Another Manhattanite and Absolute Bagels fan had a similar reaction. “Oh my god THANK GOD. Is it real? It’s like the actual same bagel place? I want THOSE BAGELS,” he texted, followed by a crying emoji.

Here’s what we can report: The sign first went up on Monday, according to the West Side Rag, but despite the name the new store does not appear to have any particular relation to the old one.

Absolute Bagels was founded in 1990 by Samak “Sam” Thongkrieng, a Thai immigrant to New York who earned his bagel stripes making the doughy Jewish bread at Ess-a-Bagel. Absolute Bagels, which was also known for its Thai tea, became a cult favorite in New York, and was frequently rated among the best bagels in the city despite its numerous health violations. Its closure in December sent New York into days of public mourning.

Exactly who has assumed the lease is not public. Rafe Evans, the broker for the building at 2788 Broadway, told the West Side Rag that the new tenants own a few bagel shops in New York and New Jersey but are “not household names.”

He said the new store won’t look like the old one.

“They are going to rebuild it from scratch,” Evans told Pix11 Wednesday. “They need everything. Floors, walls, ceilings, the works.”

Evans told Pix11 that the new sign had been a surprise to him, saying, “We were surprised to see they’re calling themselves the new Absolute Bagels. We do get why they’re doing that.”

But he said he does not know whether the name “New Absolute Bagel” will be sticking around.

“We don’t know what they’re going to call it — if that’s the name now or just a placeholder,” he told neighborhood blog I Love the Upper West Side. (He did not immediately respond to a New York Jewish Week request for comment.) “We just don’t know.”

Absolute Bagels isn’t the only beloved Jewish-adjacent bakery in its stretch of Broadway to be undergoing dramatic changes. Silver Moon Bakery, which was known for its challah, recently closed but is reportedly reopening in a new spot with the former owner’s equipment and endorsement.

New Absolute Bagel, or whatever it will be called, doesn’t seem to have as close a relationship to its predecessor — leaving uncertainty about whether the new bagels will taste the same as those they are replacing.

“Sam, the former owner, was asked if he wanted to sell his recipes,” Evans told Pix11. “And he said anyone can make a bagel.”

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro revealed on Thursday that investigators had managed to retrieve ritual Passover items from the dining room that was heavily damaged by an arsonist’s fire shortly after his family’s seder on Saturday night.

“Some just required a dusting and a cleaning,” he said outside a Harrisburg firehouse where he and his wife Lori were serving lunch to first responders who rescued his family and doused the flames early Sunday morning. “Others are destroyed.”

Shapiro, one of the most prominent Jews in politics, said he and his family had concluded the public seder around 10 p.m. and had retired to their private quarters before heading to bed around 1 a.m. It was less than an hour later that State Police officers roused them abruptly to evacuate the building, as a raging fire burned in the space they had just vacated.

He also revealed that the family had found solace when a fire chaplain recited the Jewish Priestly Blessing for them.

“It’s a prayer we recite in Hebrew for our kids. It’s from the Book of Numbers: ‘The Lord bless thee and keep thee. The Lord make his face shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee. The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee and give thee peace.’ That’s a prayer and a hope that we have for our kids every day, that they have peace in their lives,” Shapiro said. “Obviously, that peace was shattered on Sunday morning, but it is a hope and a prayer that we have, not just for our kids, but every child across Pennsylvania that they live in a society that’s free and peaceful where they are protected and they are watched over by God.”

Police say Cory Balmer started the blaze in part because of his opposition to “what Shapiro wants to do to the Palestinian people.” The revelation of his motive on Wednesday confirmed for some that the attack was antisemitic in nature. Shapiro’s comments came shortly after Sen. Chuck Schumer called for a federal hate crime investigation.

“While the local district attorney has not yet filed hate-crime charges, he acknowledged that Governor Shapiro’s religion appears to have factored into the suspect’s decisions,” Schumer wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi. “Our federal authorities must bring the full weight of our civil-rights laws to bear in examining this matter.”

Shapiro declined to back Schumer’s call, saying he was confident in Dauphin County District Attorney Fran Chardo to handle the case.

“As to Senator Schumer or anybody else, I don’t think it’s helpful for people on the outside who haven’t seen the evidence, who don’t know what occurred, who are applying their own viewpoints to the situation, to weigh in in that manner,” he said. “My trust is with the prosecutor to make the decision. He’ll make the right decisions and I will be fully supportive of whatever decision he makes.”

Shapiro said his return to the dining room for the first time on Thursday had been jarring — and had redoubled his commitment to making Pennsylvania safe for people of all backgrounds.

“At one point today when we stopped to see the chandelier that had come down from the ceiling and was kind of partly melted and partly covered, you know, in soot, what have you, from the fire — it was resting on a place on the floor where just the night before, we had celebrated our Passover Seder, where two or three weeks earlier, we had celebrated an Iftar dinner at the conclusion of Ramadan, and about a year before that, where kids danced and played at our son Ruben’s Bar Mitzvah, and right where the Christmas tree stands every December in the governor’s residence,” he recounted, standing with his wife Lori.

“We really believe that Pennsylvania and this residence should be a place where people of all faiths are welcome and all faiths are comforted and feel as though they can celebrate openly and proudly who they are,” he said. “And we’re going to get that room back to being a place that’s warm and welcoming for all.”

The Texas House of Representatives signed off Thursday on a $1 billion school voucher program, in a move that some Jewish groups are hailing as a win for school choice while others are expressing dismay over potential losses for Texas public schools.

Texas is home to 20 private Jewish schools whose students and families stand to have their tuition supplemented up to $10,000 per student by tax dollars, according to the Houston Chronicle.

The move, which comes as the Supreme Court considers the constitutionality of publicly funded religious schools, has divided Jewish organizations.

Ahead of the vote, rabbis affiliated with the Religious Action Center of Texas, a Reform advocacy group, called on the Texas legislature to vote down the bill, writing that although they support the choice of their congregants to send their children to private schools, it shouldn’t divert resources from public schools.

“The school voucher bill being considered this week will undermine public education, threaten religious freedom and harm the children of Texas,” wrote Rabbi Eleanor B. Steinman of Austin and Rabbi Joshua R. S. Fixler of Houston in an op-ed published by the Austin American-Statesman.

Proponents of the legislation, many within the Orthodox community in Texas, argue that the program would allow families who choose Jewish day schools to enjoy the same state benefits as families sending their children to public schools.

“All of the members of our school are taxpayers who support the various public works that they utilize on a regular basis,” Rabbi Jordan Silvestri, the head of Beren Academy, a Modern Orthodox Jewish day school in Houston, told the Houston Chronicle. “They’re looking for a religious school environment, and to have an opportunity to have state money put toward supporting them in a similar vein as their neighbors in public school, I think is really critical.”

The legislation passed with near-total Republican support, with two Republican lawmakers joining the Democrats in voting against it. Gov. Greg Abbott has vowed to swiftly sign the bill into law once it reaches his desk following a reconciliation process with the Texas Senate.

The bill comes after Texas lawmakers voted to adopt a public school curriculum that includes instruction on Christianity and drew significant backlash from Jewish groups.

Lisa Epstein, the director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of San Antonio, told the Houston Chronicle that the curriculum issue was affecting Jewish families — in some cases driving them toward private schools that could soon become more affordable with vouchers.

“I have Jewish families who have exited schools because of some of these issues, and I have families who say they have chosen a private school because of these issues,” Epstein said. “It’s already happening, so certainly it will happen the more that public schools become Sunday schools.”

At least two Jewish organizations have announced events next week with Israel’s Itamar Ben-Gvir when the far-right politician makes his first trip to the United States since becoming Israel’s national security minister.

When Ben-Gvir first joined Israel’s cabinet in 2022,  the Biden administration considered banning him from the United States and American Jewish groups rose up in near-unison to condemn his extremist views and record. At various times he and his Jewish Power party have called for the expulsion of “disloyal” Palestinians, the annexation of the West Bank and intensification of the war in Gaza. 

Major Jewish organizations said this week that they were unaware of Ben-Gvir’s visit or had no plans to meet with him. And far-right pro-Israel groups have backed away from their initial claims that they were brokering his visit.

But Shabtai, a Jewish society based at Yale University whose founders include Sen. Cory Booker, is hosting Ben-Gvir twice: once on Yale’s campus in New Haven, Connecticut, on the evening of April 23, and again the following afternoon on New York’s Upper East Side. (The engagements overlap with Yom Hashoah, the Jewish Holocaust memorial day.)

The first talk will be attended by Yale students and faculty, according to Shabtai. The second talk, the invitation says, will focus on “securing Israel post-October 7th.” Guests are expected to include “federal judges, bankers, Columbia/NYU professors, and NYC notables that care about Israel,” Shabtai’s director said.

Later that evening, a branch of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement is hosting Ben-Gvir for a Brooklyn fundraiser for Chabad of Hebron, in the West Bank. Bais Shmuel Chabad, in Crown Heights, is advertising a $36-a-head “open panel discussion” with Ben-Gvir to “gain behind-the-scenes insight into the fight for Jewish sovereignty over all the Land of Israel and the push for victory through strength at the highest levels of government.”

Prior to the event’s announcement, a spokesperson for Chabad told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the Orthodox movement, whose synagogues operate autonomously, was unaware of any meetings being planned with Ben-Gvir. 

Rabbi Shmully Hecht, a Shabtai co-founder and its current rabbinical advisor, told JTA he was proud to host Ben-Gvir. 

“Shabtai believes in free discourse and hosts speakers with a variety of views on American politics, business, ethics, religion, literature, the arts and more. We promote Judaism and free speech. It’s Talmudic,” he wrote in an email.

Hecht, who also founded Yale’s Chabad center, is not shy about his support of the minister. “I admire Ben-Gvir,” he wrote, comparing him favorably to Booker and another Democratic senator, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, who is Jewish. “Itamar promotes what he believes is best for his people that democratically elected him.” 

He also had positive words for Rabbi Meir Kahane, the Jewish extremist whom Ben-Gvir admires. “Ben-Gvir, like Meir Kahane, warned Israelis, the Jewish people, and the West of the dangers of Radical Islam and the Jihadists,” Hecht said. “Sadly they have been rejected by naïve liberals who delusionally presume Westerners can make peace with the likes of ISIS, Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian Mullahs. Oct 7th must be the last war of Israel. Only bold, resolute leaders like Ben Gvir can assure same.”

While the Biden administration blackballed Ben-Gvir and sanctioned violent settler groups that advance his vision of increased Jewish settlement in the West Bank, Trump has lifted those sanctions and echoed some of the minister’s calls to depopulate Gaza — possibly clearing the way for a warmer reception for his trip. One of his traveling companions, according to Haaretz, will be Akiva Hacohen, an American-born settler convicted in 2013 of spying on the Israeli military to protect illegal settlements.

For Ben-Gvir’s many critics, the events — as well as an additional schedule of engagements that Ben-Gvir’s office has promised Israeli media — signal the degree to which the politician’s views are being normalized.

“Mobilizing against Ben-Gvir is mobilizing against extremism,” said Offir Gutelzon, a leader of UnXeptable, the protest movement of Israelis in the United States. The group is organizing an anti-Ben-Gvir rally in the Upper East Side on Thursday, around the same time as the Shabtai event.

A letter circulated by the group states, “As Israelis in America and as American Jews, we believe this visit requires a clear, clarion call: Itamar Ben-Gvir is not welcome in our community.

“He is not welcome in our country. He does not represent us as Jews or as Israelis. We steadfastly oppose his dark vision for Judaism, Israel and for the Middle East.”

The letter is co-signed by several progressive Jewish groups and individuals, including the Union for Reform Judaism; the New York Jewish Agenda; We Are All Hostages, which advocates for Israeli hostage families; J Street; and several individual hostage family members.

Ben-Gvir’s office told Israeli media his U.S. visit would encompass stops in Miami, New York and Washington, D.C. At one point he was reportedly expected to meet with his counterpart in the Trump administration, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, but that meeting is no longer happening, according to a report in Haaretz. A Homeland Security spokesperson did not return a JTA request for comment.

Not many other details about Ben-Gvir’s planned visit have been made public, but most major American Jewish groups contacted by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency said they had no plans to meet with him. Some hadn’t been aware he was making the trip.

Representatives for the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee, Jewish Federations of North America and umbrella group Conference of Presidents all told JTA they were not meeting with Ben-Gvir, with the latter three emphasizing that no meeting request had been made. 

Two years ago, the heads of some of those groups met in secret with Ben-Gvir ally Bezalel Smotrich during the Israeli finance minister’s visit to the United States. Their meeting, when publicized months later, prompted blowback from liberal and centrist Jewish groups. (Smotrich himself made a brief return visit last month to meet with Trump’s Treasury secretary.)

The visits that are confirmed are with groups with a record of engaging people with extreme views. 

Founded in the 1990s by several figures including Booker, then a Yale Law student, Shabtai (which at various points was named the Chai Society and Eliezer) styles itself as an intellectual salon and hosts various Jewish speakers for on- and off-campus events. Past events have featured right-wing Israeli politician Simcha Rothman; Israeli Supreme Court justices; former Trump administration official Anthony Scaramucci; anti-Zionist Jewish blogger Philip Weiss; and Booker himself, in 2022. The group made headlines during the 2024 Republican presidential primary, when former member Vivek Ramaswamy, who is not Jewish, ran for president with a platform of limiting aid to Israel.

Hecht, Shabtai’s director, worked directly with Booker in Shabtai’s early days. Booker did not immediately return a request for comment made to his office about the Ben-Gvir event. The senator has issued harsh words about Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his governing coalition that includes Ben-Gvir, calling it “ultra-right-wing.”

Also participating in the Beis Shmuel Chabad Ben-Gvir event are Yishai Fleisher, an advisor to Ben-Gvir who is also a spokesman for the Jewish settlement in Hebron, and Rabbi Danny Cohen, leader of Chabad of Hebron. 

Chabad has found close purchase with the political right in the United States and Israel. Trump’s border czar Tom Homan attended a dinner at a Chabad yeshiva last month, and last week Trump announced that a Chabad businessman, Yehuda Kaploun, would be his pick for antisemitism envoy. Linda McMahon, the education secretary, swung by a Chabad school on one of her first school visits, and Trump himself has visited the Ohel, the gravesite of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the movement’s last leader known as the Rebbe.

But some within Chabad say the embrace of Ben-Gvir in Crown Heights is a bridge too far.

“I was very disappointed in this community specifically,” Tzofiah Frieden, a liberal-leaning Chabad artist and social media influencer in Crown Heights, told JTA about her reaction to the Ben-Gvir event. Citing Schneerson’s opposition to taking political stances, Frieden said she believed hosting Ben-Gvir was “against the values of what we should be promoting as Chabad.” 

But she acknowledged that the Crown Heights community has shifted rightward in recent years, and she said she doubted that many in Crown Heights, who generally support a one-state solution that privileges a Jews majority, would understand the political significance of hosting Ben-Gvir. 

“A lot of the very frum people who live in Crown Heights are not super politically aware,” she said. “From what they’re aware of, he wants a united Israel, he wants a one-state solution. And I don’t know that they would be aware of the history of Kahanism.”

Meanwhile, Betar US, which frequently antagonizes both pro-Palestinians and other Jews on the street and online, tweeted and later deleted that they “will warmly welcome a leader of the Israeli government Itamar Ben Gvir on his first trip to the US next week,” and that they would “host events warmly in DC, NY and Miami.” 

Betar —  which in recent days has called for a “mass Jewish exodus” to Israel, while also pressuring Israel’s Knesset to ban certain progressive Jews from entering the country — immediately drew blowback from Democratic pro-Israel Rep. Ritchie Torres, who has recently floated running for governor of New York. Torres shot down the group’s suggestion that he meet with Ben-Gvir.

“There is no universe in which I would ever grant an audience to an extremist like Ben Gvir or any organization like yours that embraces his extremism,” Torres, who has in the past called the minister a “despicable disgusting dangerous demagogue,” tweeted at Betar. “If you had done your homework, you would [have] known that I have nothing but contempt for [Ben-]Gvir.”

Betar initially claimed to be co-sponsoring his visit with the Zionist Organization of America, with whom the group has allied in the World Zionist Congress. But ZOA head Mort Klein told JTA he “did not give permission to host Ben-Gvir,” without elaborating on his own views of the minister. 

Shortly afterward, Betar deleted the tweet and walked back their hosting proposal following questioning from JTA. Reached again on Thursday, the group did not say it would host its own event with Ben-Gvir.

“Betar US supports all israeli government ministers at this time as they travel,” a spokesperson said. “We are pleased the mainstream Zionist and Jewish community will welcome the minister to America during his visit.”

Correction: This story originally mistakenly named as a cofounder of Shabtai Society someone who was not involved. The name has been removed.