How is it possible that Jews in New York could support a mayoral candidate that labels Israel genocidal and calls for the “intifada to be globalized?” The New York Times would have us believe that there are many such Jews. I have trouble believing anything the NYT prints on this subject given the overwhelming evidence that they lie, distort and manipulate when it comes to Jews and Israel, as proven by their recent story about starving children in Gaza based on an altered photo, and their infamous lie about a bombed hospital in October 2023. So, it’s no surprise that in their Mamdani story, two of the five Jews interviewed work for the Mamdani campaign. Even without such distortion, however, it is true that some Jews voted for Mamdani in the Democrat primary, and will vote for him again in the general election.  I am an Orthodox Jewish film director, author and influencer, which is to say, a visible Jew both on the street and online. So, I’ve been getting asked, “What’s the story with your fellow Jews? How could they vote for a man who hates Israel and hates the Jews?” To understand this, you first need to know something about Jews, namely, that we’re all different. We’ve been around for so long, and lived in so many countries, and fallen into so many different categories, that there is no such thing as a typical Jew. Non-Jews, whether they love us or hate us, tend to lump us all together. They’re not entirely wrong because we’re not primarily a religion or a nationality – we’re a family. Now, every family contains different types of and categories of people, but the family remains distinct because relatives resemble each other physically, intellectually, temperamentally and spiritually. Jews are not only a family, but we are also uniquely bound to God through the Torah and its system of commandments, as well as our shared destiny and connection to the Holy Land of Israel. The question is, why would a Jew who inherits our unbroken wisdom tradition stretching back 3,700 years turn his back on it? Some chafe at the demands of the commandments. Others simply think they have a better idea, be it a credo they dreamed up or an “ism” to which they subscribed. And some turn their backs on our family to fit in at work, school, cocktail parties or online. In seeking to curry favor with the Jew-hating mob, these Jews do enormous harm. They often open their statements about Israel with, “As a Jew…” and then they parrot lies about Israel fabricated by the Gaza Ministry of Health, an entity created by Hamas to serve as the media arm of their terrorist organization. One glance at a fact-based website like StandWithUs.com, or even at a simple map of the region renders the bulk of these lies comically inept. After all, how can one Jewish state among 56 Muslim countries – most of which were not Muslim before the sword brought Islam to their lands – be labeled the “colonizer?” End of Summer Sale – Get 40% off New DailyWire+ Annual Memberships Statistically, Jews are well-educated, high-achieving and score above average on IQ tests. Why then do some Jews fall for these obvious fabrications? One reason is that siding with Jew-haters against Israel makes them feel virtuous, and we must never underestimate the power of feeling virtuous. That feeling is so addictive that they indulge in it even at the cost of lives: when the As-a-Jews speak out against Israel and get quoted by the enemies of Israel, they strengthen the hearts of Hamas terrorists. Senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad said on Al Jazeera that the recent push by multiple nations to recognize Palestine as a state is the fruit of October 7. In other words, their plan is working. Why would any government reward a terrorist state for the murder and rape of Israeli civilians? Because Hamas claims, “Israel commits genocide, and even the Jews admit it.” And as long as that plan is working, Hamas will keep firing rockets from their children’s bedrooms so they can shriek with victim-glee when Israel inevitably counter strikes. This is how the Hamas death cult operates. This is the modern version of that ancient evil, child sacrifice. And the murderous phase of the present cycle is lasting longer than it would otherwise because those As-a-Jews give cover to our enemies. Their virtue-signaling costs lives. Now let us recall that despite our family resemblances, Jews are all different. Most Jews are not As-a-Jews. In my Orthodox community, Jews are overwhelmingly supportive of Israel, even when they disagree with its government, and we also oppose communism, socialism, and any “ism” that privileges people based on their genes rather than merit. In this time of elevated danger to the Jewish people, we’re also profoundly grateful to live in a country that rejects antisemitism like every other racism, and to have allies who can see through Hamas/Iran lies about Israel. Increasingly, we’re also exercising our Second Amendment right to bear arms – with care and training – to protect our families. God forbid the Jew haters who daily chant violence against us come to kill us, we will not be a soft target. The percentage of Jews who subscribe to these societal views drops significantly when we look at Jews in non-Orthodox denominations, collectively known as liberal Judaism. This term should not be confused with liberal politics, because there are many religiously liberal Jews who are politically conservative. It’s true that religiously liberal Jews do tend to be politically liberal but even so, they are not Mamdani Jews. If they’re affiliated with a synagogue, they tend to support Israel and feel a visceral connection to the Jewish people. Mamdani Jews are usually those who’ve untethered themselves from Torah entirely. Either they’ve never been exposed to Judaism, or they’re actively against it. They’ll give many reasons why, but their disconnection allows them to generate their own system of morality, and to fit in with the Jew-haters who lionize them. At least for a while. Historically, such Jews get attacked in the end just like the rest of their family. The Jew-haters offer new and different reasons for their hatred in every generation: we’re too stand-offish or we’re too assimilated, we’re too rich or we’re too poor, we’re stateless or we have a Jewish state. Perhaps the simplest reason is that we’ve lived in exile for so long, that we’ve learned how to arrive on a new shore, identify what success looks like in that culture, and attain it in one generation, even while retaining our ancient traditions and transmitting them to our children. Invariably, we succeed by contributing to the nation that hosts us. The Mamdani Jews go awry because they jettison the guard rails of Torah and tradition while retaining otherwise positive Jewish qualities like studiousness, generosity of heart, and sympathy for the underdog. Without the Torah’s holistic system for living, these lovely traits can cause an individual’s moral system to skid off the rails and cause great harm. This process is summed up by an old adage: one who is kind to the cruel will end up being cruel to the kind. In this case, Mamdani Jews support the Hamas death cult because they’re moved by pictures of sickly children, and they shut their eyes to the evidence that the sickly child’s well-fed siblings have been cropped out by cynical terrorists and their willing accomplices in the media. The result is more innocent lives lost, not less. We try desperately to open the eyes of our brethren to these facts, yet they remain clenched shut. Perhaps they keep their eyes shut because if they were to absorb these facts, they would have to open their eyes to many more. They’d have to make an accounting of their choices in a life untethered from Torah and Jewish tradition – a fearless moral inventory – and such a process is not for the faint of heart. I pray these Mamdani Jews will remember who they are, and the family they come from, before our enemies force them to remember with a globalized intifada. In the meantime, I hope the rest of the family will join our allies and vote against Mamdani because he is an enemy of the Jews, meritocracy, Israel, and America. * * * Salvador Litvak is the director of “Guns & Moses,” coming back to theaters across America Sept. 7-11, and the author of his bestselling book, “Let My People Laugh: Greatest Jewish Jokes of All Time!” Learn more at salvadorlitvak.com The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Two-time Oscar-winning actor Denzel Washington said taking home Hollywood’s biggest honor doesn’t matter much to him in the long run. The 70-year-old star, who has also been nominated for Academy Awards nine times, made the remarks while speaking to “Jake’s Takes” on his “Highest 2 Lowest” press tour. He confirmed that he did not choose projects based on his likelihood of winning an Oscar. “I don’t do it for Oscars. I don’t care about that kind of stuff,” Washington said. “I’ve been at this a long time, and there’s time when I won and shouldn’t have won and then didn’t win and should’ve won. Man gives the award. God gives the reward.” “I’m not that interested in Oscars,” the “Training Day” actor added. “People ask me, ‘Where do I keep it?’ Well, next to the other one. I’m not bragging! Just telling you how I feel about it. On my last day, [Oscars] aren’t going to do me a bit of good.” This attitude aligns with statements he made in the past. While many of his fans believed Washington was snubbed for his work on “Gladiator II” last year, he reacted to the idea by telling The New York Times, “Are you kidding me? Awww. Oh, I’m so upset. Listen, I’ve been around too long. I’m getting wiser, working on talking less and learning to understand more — and that’s exciting.” Washington has also been outspoken about his Christian faith for years. “Things I said about God when I was a little boy, just reciting them in church along with everybody else, I know now. God is real. God is love. God is the only way. God is the true way. God blesses. It’s my job to lift God up, to give Him praise, to make sure that anyone and everyone I speak to the rest of my life understands that He is responsible for me,” Washington wrote in a personal essay published in Esquire last year.  “When you see me, you see the best I could do with what I’ve been given by my lord and savior. I’m unafraid. I don’t care what anyone thinks. See, talking about the fear part of it — you can’t talk like that and win Oscars. You can’t talk like that and party. You can’t say that in this town.”

A new study reveals that roughly nine in ten students fake leftist views to please their professors or their peers. Between 2023 and 2025, Northwestern University psychology researchers Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman interviewed roughly 1,500 undergraduates at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan, two of the most prestigious universities in the country. They asked themselves this overarching question: “What happens to identity formation when belief is replaced by adherence to orthodoxy?” In order to test their question, they asked the students if they had ever pretended to hold more progressive views than they truly endorsed to succeed socially or academically. “An astounding 88 percent said yes,” they wrote in The Hill. They continued: Seventy-eight percent of students told us they self-censor on their beliefs surrounding gender identity; 72 percent on politics; 68 percent on family values. More than 80 percent said they had submitted classwork that misrepresented their views in order to align with professors. Perhaps most telling: 77 percent said they disagreed with the idea that gender identity should override biological sex in such domains as sports, healthcare, or public data — but would never voice that disagreement aloud. “We do not fault students for perpetuating a climate that is hostile to intellectual integrity,” the researchers opined. “We fault the faculty, administrators, and institutional leaders who built a system that rewards moral theater while punishing inquiry.  In shielding students from discomfort, they have also shielded them from discovery. The result is a generation confident in self-righteousness, but uncertain in self.” As far back as 2018, an article published by the National Association of Scholars found that roughly 40% of colleges across the United States did not have a single professor identifying as a Republican. This bias toward the Left was illuminated by Mitchell Langbert, an associate professor of business at Brooklyn College, who wrote, “The political registration of full-time, Ph.D.-holding professors in top-tier liberal arts colleges is overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, faculty political affiliations at 39 percent of the colleges in my sample are Republican free—having zero Republicans.” Langbert added that the remaining 61% are “absurdly skewed against Republican affiliation.” He noted that 78.2% of the academic departments that he sampled had either zero Republicans, or “so few as to make no difference.” Between February 2017 and September 2017, Langbert sampled 8,688 tenure-track professors with PhDs from 51 of the 66 top-ranked liberal arts colleges in the U.S. News 2017 report. Of those 8,688 professors, 5,197 (59.8%) were registered as either Republican or Democrat. He wrote, “The mean Democratic-to-Republican ratio (D:R) across the sample is 10.4:1, but because of an anomaly in the definition of what constitutes a liberal arts college in the U.S. News survey, I include two military colleges, West Point and Annapolis. If these are excluded, the D:R ratio is a whopping 12.7:1.” Langbert pointed out that in response to the widespread bias displayed at universities, over 1,000 professors and graduate students had started Heterodox Academy, an organization committed to increasing “viewpoint diversity” in higher education. There were exceptions to the pervasive prejudice against conservatism at colleges and universities, but notably, they were primarily either religious or military colleges. Thomas Aquinas had 33 full-time faculty; all were Republican. West Point and Annapolis were more balanced than most universities; they had D:R ratios of 1.3:1 and 2.3:1. Claremont McKenna and Kenyon colleges also featured more viewpoint diversity.

President Donald Trump took control of Washington, D.C.’s, police force on Monday, exercising his presidential powers over the nation’s capital to crack down on rampant violent crime. The federal takeover of D.C.’s law enforcement comes in the wake of a brutal assault on a 19-year-old former Department of Government Efficiency worker earlier this month during an attempted carjacking. “I’m announcing a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse,” Trump said Monday. “This is Liberation Day in D.C. and we’re going to take our capital back.” On Monday, Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, called Trump’s takeover of the city “unsettling and unprecedented” and an “authoritarian push.” But this is not the first time the federal government has come to the troubled city’s rescue. In the 1990s, Washington, D.C., was drowning in debt because of a recession and the crack epidemic, among other issues. It had a $722 million deficit, and Wall Street had dropped the city to “junk” bond status, meaning loaning to D.C. was risky. In April 1995, Congress established the District of Columbia Financial Control Board, which took over the city’s finances until 2001. During most of that period, the mayor of D.C. was Marion Barry, who was reelected after getting out of federal prison following his arrest for smoking crack cocaine in an FBI sting operation. The federal control board severely curtailed Barry’s power and quickly balanced D.C.’s budget, keeping it balanced for five years before relinquishing control. During those years, the board mainly sought to clear out the rot of mismanagement primarily caused by corrupt local D.C. politics, such as firing the public school superintendent and installing a new one. The federal board also asserted broad authority over the police department, which had fallen into chaos — investigations found drug money sitting around in boxes, an unguarded gun warehouse, and more than 135 bungled homicide cases. Crime dropped sharply after the federal control board took political control of D.C.’s police department — violent crime sank 18% during the first year in 1997. By 2000, violent crime in D.C. had plummeted a whopping 40%, coinciding with a broader nationwide drop in crime, although the control board’s efforts were credited for much of the improvement. “There was massive, positive, healthy, productive change. We went from being a joke to having the best equipment, having the best uniforms, massive policy changes for the better,” Joshua Ederheimer, a professor and 23-year veteran of D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department, told The National Desk this week. “I can’t see how anyone can say that the federal takeover of the police department was bad because it transformed the agency,” Ederheimer said. Public safety is also the reason for Trump’s takeover this week, and the D.C. police union is desperate for federal help. “We completely agree with the president here that crime in the district is out of control, and something needs to be done about it,” D.C. Police Union Chairman Greggory Pemberton said over the weekend on Fox Business. The police union head cautioned that he believes police commanders are “ordered from the top” to make sure D.C. crime statistics do not look bad. “This concept that crime is down is really an old trope,” Pemberton said. “They’re using the statistics in a way that makes it appear that crime is going down, but our rank and file officers know that we’re going call to call to call for armed carjackings, stabbings, robberies, shootings, homicides, and the crime isn’t going anywhere.” “We welcome the assistance, and whether that’s federal agents or the National Guard we’ll use it, we’ll do whatever we can to get bad guys off the streets and try to keep citizens of the District safe,” Pemberton said. The police union boss noted that federal agents assisting law enforcement is likely only a temporary fix. The D.C. police force is authorized for 4,000 officers but currently has only 3,180, Pemberton noted, saying this is the “main reason” the force is struggling to keep the streets safe. Officers are logging two million hours of overtime a year, he said. Pemberton said he hopes federal authorities will see how bad the situation has become. On Tuesday, the city’s police chief, Pamela Smith, stood alongside Bowser and emphasized working together, saying the “enhanced presence” of federal agents would “make our city even better.” About 850 federal agents deployed in D.C. arrested 23 people, including murder suspects, and seized six illegal guns on Monday, the first day of the takeover, the White House said.

'Violence and intimidation have no place in our elections'

'Just 36% support the move'