Alex Edelman

Alex Edelman is a comedian who spends a lot of time doing one of the least funny activities imaginable: tracking down and reading antisemitic hate on Twitter, Gab and Telegram. “The first time I saw it directed at me, I did cry. It was a bad day. I cried in the Apple store,” Edelman told Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch in a Zoom interview last week. And yet it’s this activity — lurking in virtual white supremacist spaces — that serves as the inspiration for Edelman’s latest production, a one-man show called “Just For Us,” which premieres Off-Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Manhattan.

Nerf Nazis: “Just For Us,” produced by comedian Mike Birbiglia, is about a meeting of white supremacists that Edelman attended several years ago. “I used to say Nazi or neo-Nazi freewheelingly, and now I’m just like, ‘These are nerf Nazis.’ These guys are Nazis the way that people who fight each other in the park with, like, tinfoil swords are the Knights of the Round Table.” The show runs from Dec. 1-19.

Saturday Night Seder: Edelman was the lead writer and executive producer of “Saturday Night Seder,” a virtual production that took place early in the COVID-19 pandemic to raise money for a nonprofit set up by Congress to support the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “‘Seder’ set us up in a really interesting way. It was right at the beginning of the pandemic, and there was a bunch of really fascinating stuff happening,” said Edelman. “I helped rabbis prep for the High Holy Days” by leading discussions on how they could be engaging over Zoom. He has also since done fundraisers for Sharsheret, which works on breast cancer prevention and education; on his BBC radio show, he used an episode to explore his Jewish identity.

Natural tension: “Comedy comes from tension. There’s a natural incongruity in living a life, in a modern world, that is focused on tradition, or living in a traditional world where you’d like to have a little bit of the aspects of modernity,” noted Edelman. “There’s a joke in my act about how I never tried bacon. I have tried cocaine, but I’ve never tried bacon. Something about that deals with this sort of funny incongruity between a modern world, with unusual electric fences for the people in it.”

Read the full interview here.

Alex Edelman is a comedian who spends a lot of time doing one of the least funny activities imaginable: tracking down and reading antisemitic hate on Twitter, Gab and Telegram. “The first time I saw it directed at me, I did cry. It was a bad day. I cried in the Apple store,” Edelman told Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch in a Zoom interview last week. And yet it’s this activity — lurking in virtual white supremacist spaces — that serves as the inspiration for Edelman’s latest production, a one-man show called “Just For Us,” which premieres Off-Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Manhattan.

Nerf Nazis: “Just For Us,” produced by comedian Mike Birbiglia, is about a meeting of white supremacists that Edelman attended several years ago. “I used to say Nazi or neo-Nazi freewheelingly, and now I’m just like, ‘These are nerf Nazis.’ These guys are Nazis the way that people who fight each other in the park with, like, tinfoil swords are the Knights of the Round Table.” The show runs from Dec. 1-19.

Saturday Night Seder: Edelman was the lead writer and executive producer of “Saturday Night Seder,” a virtual production that took place early in the COVID-19 pandemic to raise money for a nonprofit set up by Congress to support the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “‘Seder’ set us up in a really interesting way. It was right at the beginning of the pandemic, and there was a bunch of really fascinating stuff happening,” said Edelman. “I helped rabbis prep for the High Holy Days” by leading discussions on how they could be engaging over Zoom. He has also since done fundraisers for Sharsheret, which works on breast cancer prevention and education; on his BBC radio show, he used an episode to explore his Jewish identity.

Natural tension: “Comedy comes from tension. There’s a natural incongruity in living a life, in a modern world, that is focused on tradition, or living in a traditional world where you’d like to have a little bit of the aspects of modernity,” noted Edelman. “There’s a joke in my act about how I never tried bacon. I have tried cocaine, but I’ve never tried bacon. Something about that deals with this sort of funny incongruity between a modern world, with unusual electric fences for the people in it.”

Read the full interview here.

Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) during the House Energy markup of the House healthcare bill.

Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) announced Monday that he would seek to replace retiring Sen. Pat Leahy (D-VT), entering the race as the odds-on favorite to win the seat and likely clearing the Democratic field well ahead of the August 2022 primary, Jewish Insider’s Marc Rod reports. A member of the House of Representatives since 2007, Welch has regularly sided with the left flank of the party on both domestic and foreign policy issues — including on Israel.

Countering settlements: The Vermont congressman, who spoke at a 2019 J Street conference, was an original cosponsor of a bill introduced by Rep. Andy Levin (D-MI) in September that would bar Israel from using U.S. aid to support Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank. The bill would also mandate that the U.S. consider all of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as occupied territories and rescind the Palestine Liberation Organization’s terrorist designation.

Restricting aid: Welch also cosponsored a bill from Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) seeking to add restrictions on U.S. aid to Israel. That bill accuses the Israeli military of a campaign of unlawful detention of Palestinian minors and of discriminating against Palestinians in construction planning. It further calls Israeli settlements in the West Bank “including East Jerusalem” a “flagrant violation under international law.” In 2015, he cosponsored a similar McCollum bill focused specifically on the Palestinian minors issue. The congressman was one of the quarter of House members who did not sign onto a letter earlier this year that opposed conditioning U.S. aid to Israel.

Speaking out: In June, he led a letter urging the Biden administration to reverse much of the Trump administration’s Israel policy, including withdrawing the Trump administration’s peace plan, issuing guidance deeming settlements as contrary to international law, opposing evictions of Palestinian families in East Jerusalem and reopening the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem serving Palestinians. Welch led a letter calling on then-President Donald Trump to continue U.S. aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) as well as direct aid to the Palestinians, both of which were cut by the administration.

Good relationship: Yoram Samets, a Jewish activist in Vermont, told JI on Monday that Welch has a “very positive” relationship with the state’s small Jewish community. “There are times when I’m not in agreement with him, but I think, by and large, he’s been a good friend to the Jews and a good friend to Israel,” Samets said. “I think there are a couple of places where he stands out, primarily [the] Iran [deal] voting a few years back, but I think mostly he’s been a friend.”

Clear frontrunner: Matt Dickinson, a professor of political science at Vermont’s Middlebury College, told JI that Welch’s entry into the race will likely clear the field on the Democratic side. “I doubt that anyone will challenge him, at least anyone with any concern about reputation within the Democratic Party,” he said. As for the Republican side: “I’m not trying to say that Republicans have no chance. The reality is, though, this will be an uphill battle for them.”

Read the full story here.

Bonus: Entrepreneur Brock Pierce, who launched an independent bid for the White House in 2020, filed a “statement of organization” with the Federal Election Commission, priming himself for a potential run for Leahy’s seat.

Reporters wait for live shots during the first day of jury selection for James Fields Jr.’s murder trial at the Charlottesville Circuit Court, November 26, 2018 in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Nearly a century separates the antisemitism of Henry Ford’s newspaper The Dearborn Independent and Andrew Anglin’s Daily Stormer. But the time and distance between them dissolves this week in a courtroom in Charlottesville, Va., as a verdict is awaited in the civil case against the white supremacist and neo-Nazi organizers of the deadly Unite the Right rally held in the college town in the summer of 2017, Debra Nussbaum Cohen reports for Jewish Insider.

Sines v. Kessler: In their case alleging a conspiracy of hate made possible by the internet, the plaintiffs’ attorneys in Sines v. Kessler aim to bankrupt those, like Anglin, who were behind the rally, during which a counterprotestor, Heather Heyer, was killed, and many others injured. The attorneys, in a lawsuit brought by the nonprofit Integrity First for America, are using a Civil War-era conspiracy statute, the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, to undergird their arguments. But the libel case that brought Ford’s antisemitic newspaper to its knees in 1927, initiated by a little-known Jewish lawyer named Aaron Sapiro, provides rich historical context for the events playing out in Charlottesville.

Successor to Sapiro: In 1925, Sapiro sued Ford for libeling him in The Dearborn Independent, which claimed he was ruining the agriculture industry. Ford took aim at Sapiro, who was organizing California and Canadian farmers into cooperatives to improve their financial security. Under pressure from national Jewish leaders who feared a trial would further spread Ford’s well-known antisemitism, Sapiro was forced to settle. He won significant damages — $135,000, a lot of money at the time but hardly a dent in the coffers of a man as wealthy as the car manufacturer. The settlement also shut down The Dearborn Independent, the newspaper Ford purchased in order to publish articles about what he saw as “the Jewish problem.”

Beyond Charlottesville: The strategy of using civil litigation to try and shut down antisemites and white supremacists has an impact beyond the defendants in the Charlottesville case, said Amy Spitalnick, executive director of Integrity First for America. “The financial operational consequences create a deterrent to others considering participating in hate like this,” she said at the Anti-Defamation League’s recent “Never is Now” conference. “Some of the defendants have already said that the case has undermined their ability to go about their business, and forced operations to shut down.”

Crypto challenges: Neo-Nazis and white supremacists have moved into cryptocurrency because “as we’ve become more and more successful in marginalizing purveyors of hate, they’ve had to stop using the usual banking system and go into more esoteric and underground ways of funding their hateful operations,” Daniel Kramer, a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, told JI. “Different methods of buying and selling crypto change all the time. As we try to marginalize them they come up with new ways of trying to get funding, and we’re hot on their trail.” Anglin continues to fundraise, asking for donations in cryptocurrency, on websites like 4chan and 8chan, Kramer said. “We would like to disrupt his fundraising. It’s as simple as that.”

Read the full story.