July 3, 2026

(JEWISH GROUP) The 50 most interesting Jews in American history you've probably never heard of

The United States is turning 250 years old. You know the stories of many of the Jews who have helped to shape the country’s history and culture, including such luminaries as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Philip Roth and Barbra Streisand.

But behind the American Jewish names we know and revere are the stories of many other American Jews who influenced the nation — and whose lives reflected the country’s efforts to realize its founding promises — who have found less purchase in history’s spotlight. To celebrate the 250th anniversary of this country’s founding, we’ve collected 50 of those stories here.

Among their number are scientists, athletes, lawmakers, clergymen and a couple genuine American characters — the type of people who, no matter where they were born, ended up living lives that speak to the best of what the U.S. has to offer its citizens.

As one of our honorees, the author Edna Ferber, wrote: “America — rather, the United States — seems to me to be the Jew among the nations. It is resourceful, adaptable, maligned, envied, feared, imposed upon. It is warmhearted, overfriendly; quick-witted, lavish, colorful; given to extravagant speech and gestures. Its people are travelers and wanderers by nature, moving, shifting, restless; swarming in Fords, in ocean liners; craving entertainment; volatile. The schnuckle among the nations of the world.”

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There is a link there to play a history game. Try it out!

June 28, 2026

(JEWISH GROUP) For Mel Brooks and generations of his admirers, 100 years is not enough (HAPPY BIRTHDAY! 100!)

Of how many Jewish comedians can it be sincerely said that 100 years of life is not enough?

Mel Brooks (born Kaminsky) who celebrates his centenary on June 28, has long been inspiring belly laughs with Yiddishkeit that has only recently been judged worthy of academic attention, as a volume of scholarly essays proved last year. Inspired by slapstick from Jewish vaudevillians like The Ritz Brothers and Moe Howard (born Moses Harry Horwitz) of The Three Stooges, Brooks is at times literary, but never intellectually glib. Brooks’ inclusion of the Jewish clown Harry Ritz in his 1976 Silent Movie was a gesture to traditional sight gags in what may be his most personal film in its revelations about his comedic roots. And as almost all his admirers are younger than he, as seen in Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!, the two-part HBO documentary film directed by Judd Apatow, a full perspective of his life and times is difficult to find.

Brooks’ creativity derived from a Brooklyn upbringing of quaffing egg creams and spending summers at Camp Sussex, a New Jersey oasis for underprivileged Jewish children founded just before the Great Depression, as the Yiddishist Sandra Fox has explained.

Deeply imbued with the Yiddish sensibility, Brooks told an interviewer for Playboy in 1975 that as a boy, he believed that upon reaching adulthood, all New York Jewish kids would suddenly know how to speak Yiddish, the language of family elders, at which point English could be discarded as a useless secondary means of communication.

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June 18, 2026

(JEWISH GROUP) A secret bunker, tunnel and a Star of David tell a story of Jewish resistance in a Polish town

A secret bunker, an underground tunnel and an armband bearing the Star of David are among the rare findings in a house in southern Poland that was used by Jews, including young members of the resistance, to hide from the Nazis.

“This armband is a witness, it’s like directly touching that evil which people created for other people,” Karolina Jakoweńko from the Cukerman’s Gate Foundation, which organized the search, told The Associated Press. Seeing it felt like a “jolt,” she said.

Jakoweńko spoke inside a two‑story redbrick house in the town of Bedzin, within the former Jewish ghetto during the World War II. The house served as the site of a “kibbutz” organized by youth from left‑wing Zionist groups — in this case, a network that relied on each other to try to ensure its members survived and resisted the Nazi occupiers.

Each piece of rubble may hide a treasure
In the days before the interview, Jakoweńko and her colleagues cleared the house attic in preparation for renovation, lifting floorboards one by one and collecting rubble in buckets, then carefully examining each handful. Among objects spanning several decades, they discovered a Jewish prayer book from 1934, and the armband bearing the Star of David.

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June 16, 2026

(JEWISH GROUP) 13,000 Jews were driven out of Poland in 1968. Now, some are returning to tell their story.

In March 1968, Rachelle Halpern walked into her university in Szczecin, Poland, and found a group of her classmates gathered around a newspaper. She asked what they were reading about. The answer came: “Zionists.”

Halpern didn’t understand. Who were the Zionists? One classmate said, “The Jews.”

“But I’m a Jew,” said Halpern. Her classmates looked at her in disbelief. She couldn’t be, one said. She had no horns.

Halpern was about to be swept up in a spiral of social and political crises in communist Poland, culminating in a government-sponsored antisemitic campaign that stripped Jews of their jobs, schools and citizenship, forcing some 13,000 to leave the country. Within months, Halpern would find herself renouncing her Polish nationality and leaving everything she knew for a new life in the United States.

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Some music to calm your nerves...

June 15, 2026

Cornell student turns down interview, saying 'not interested in working for a Jew'

A Cornell University student turned down a job interview with a New York company because he found out it is owned by Jews.

In response to New York City startup VryfID contacting him after he applied for a summer internship, Austin Franco wrote back, “Not interested in working for a Jew,” the New York Post reported on Saturday.

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Franco, who reportedly studies industrial and labor relations, followed up with a typo-ridden post to his own X feed in which he tagged Einhorn, and explained his initial application to work at VryfID because “I found out you were Jewish after the fact.”

Addressing Einhorn, he wrote that “My experiences with Jews have not been pleasant, both in person and online. This is not to say I havent had positive experiences, but on the aggregate that is not the case.”

“Obviously, the reactions by your community only serves to further prove my point,” he added.

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June 13, 2026

(JEWISH GROUP) This Israeli filmmaker harshly criticizes his country. Pro-Palestinian activists boycotted him anyway

Earlier this year Nadav Lapid, the award-winning Israeli dissident filmmaker, traveled with his son to Marseille for a screening of his latest film. He fell in love.

“This city reminded me of Tel Aviv, in a way, with the beach and everything,” he recounted Wednesday to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency — referring to the city he no longer lives in, having built a career with movies that take sharp aim at what he calls the “moral abyss” of Israeli society. When a Marseille film festival then invited him to serve on its jury for its upcoming installment in July, he readily accepted.

Then the boycotts started. Last month around a dozen pro-Palestinian filmmakers threatened to pull out of the upcoming Marseille International Film Festival over Lapid’s planned participation because, they said, he had accepted funding from the Israeli government to support his work. (Lapid’s movies, including his latest, have received funding from Israel’s film fund.) Following this, according to the accounts of both Lapid and the festival’s director, the festival had second thoughts about him serving on the jury.

While the festival offered him the opportunity to participate in a public master class instead, Lapid said, the protesters hadn’t relented: “It’s not enough for these people.”

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June 13, 2026

10 years have passed since the massacre at The Pulse

https://www.clickorlando.com/rememberingpulse49/

June 3, 2026

(JEWISH GROUP) How can I live freely as a Jew in a world where strangers rip my mezuzah off my doorframe?

Twice, the mezuzah on my front door was ripped off.

The first time, I was shocked. The second time, I made a decision that still pains me. I did not put it back up.

This was before the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023.

That is the part I keep coming back to. The fear did not begin after the Hamas attacks. It was already there, intruding with the quiet calculation of whether a small Jewish symbol on my home made me less safe.

A mezuzah is not a political statement. It makes no argument about a government or a war. It is a sacred object, a marker of memory, a tiny declaration that says: Jews live here. I thought about that mezuzah again recently when the Anti-Defamation League released its annual audit showing that antisemitic physical assaults in the United States reached record highs in 2025. That increase reflects something many Jews already feel in daily life: the slow erosion of ease, the daily calculation of whether to speak up or stay quiet — things I have felt since the first time my mezuzah was violently torn off my doorframe.

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NOTE: This is not me. This is by Gayle Kirschenbaum. I haven't put my secondary door frame one up yet. Still waiting on a prayer scroll.

June 3, 2026

(JEWISH GROUP) The Farhud (video What Happened to Iraq's Jews?)

The outbreak of mob violence against Baghdad Jewry known as the Farhud (Farhud is an Arabic term best translated as “pogrom” or “violent dispossession”) erupted on June 1, 1941. It was a turning point in the history of the Jews in Iraq.

In the 1940s about 135,000 Jews lived in Iraq (nearly 3 percent of the total population), with about 90,000 in Baghdad, 10,000 in Basra, and the remainder scattered throughout many small towns and villages. Jewish communities had existed in this region since the 6th century BCE, hundreds of years before Muslim communities established a presence in Iraq during the 7th century. The Jews shared the Arab culture with their Muslim and Christian neighbors, but they lived in separate communities. Jewish assimilation into Muslim society was rare.

With the establishment of the Iraqi state under the British Mandate in 1921, Jews became full-fledged citizens and enjoyed the right to vote and hold elected office. The Jewish community had between four and six representatives in the Parliament and one member in the Senate. The community was headed by a president, Rabbi Sasson Khedhuri (1933-1949; 1954-1971), an elected council of 60 members, and two executive committees—the spiritual committee for religious issues and the secular committee for managing the secular affairs of the community organizations. Its elite included also high-ranking officials, prominent attorneys and dignitaries, and wealthy merchants. This status of the Jews did not change in 1932, when Iraq gained independence under British informal rule.

In the spring of 1941, Britain was enduring one of its worst periods in World War II. Most of Europe had fallen to the Axis forces, German planes were bombing British cities in the Blitz, and German submarines were exacting a tremendous toll on British shipping. Having driven the British out of Libya, the Afrika Korps under General Erwin Rommel was camped along the Egyptian border and poised to thrust eastward to the Suez Canal. The German Wehrmacht (armed forces) had driven the British out of Greece and Crete, eliminating their last beachhead on continental Europe. British chances of winning the war appeared slim.

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June 1, 2026

Never Lose Your Smile --Skull

Never Lose Your Smile is a design/meme consisting of the phrase “Never Lose Your Smile” accompanied by the Totenkopf skull image or, more commonly, merely the bottom half of that skull, which obscures its true nature and thus allows the image to pass unnoticed as a white supremacist symbol. The deceptive nature of this design has also allowed extremists to sell clothing, patches, and other items featuring the image on major internet platforms without triggering moderation.

Some Never Lose Your Smile images may also contain the colors or designs of national flags. Other variations use Totenkopf imagery with a slightly different phrase, such as “Never Lose Your Love” or “Never Lose Your Hope.”

Some white supremacists have also used the phrase alone, without the skull, in circumstances such as screen names. However, use of the phrase by itself without a clear white supremacist context should not be taken for granted as hate-related.

White supremacists likely borrowed this concept from older, non-extremist designs that combined the phrase with non-Totenkopf skull images. Use of the “Never Lose Your Smile” slogan in combination with generic skulls or other non-white supremacist images, such as generic clowns, should not be considered hate related.

https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/never-lose-your-smile



"Totenkopf" is German for "death's head" or skull and typically refers to a skull-and-crossbones image. During the Nazi era, Hitler's Schutzstaffel (SS) adopted one particular Totenkopf image as a symbol. Among other uses, it became the symbol of the SS-Totenkopfverbande (one of the original three branches of the SS, along with the Algemeine SS and the Waffen SS), whose purpose was to guard the concentration camps. Many original members of this organization were later transferred into and became the core of a Waffen SS division, the 3rd SS "Totenkopf" Panzer Division, which engaged in a number of war crimes during World War II.

Following the war, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists resurrected the Totenkopf as a hate symbol because of its importance to the SS and it has been a common hate symbol since. It is this particular image of a skull and crossbones that is considered a hate symbol, not any image of a skull and crossbones.

https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/totenkopf