Remembering the golden age of Ivanka Trump clickbait

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Loomering large: Phoebe Maltz Bovy on Jews and fake news

From the autumn into spring of 2016-17—a period in which the U.S. was adjusting to its 45th president—I ran the female-focused ‘Sisterhood’ section for The Forward, the venerable New York-based publication, which was figuring out how to reach a digital audience as its newsprint era wound down.

And so, during that time—day after day and week after week—living up to the job description required consistently covering the goings-on of a certain Ivanka Trump.

She had become, you see, the most famous Jewish woman in America—if not the world. It was all a bit difficult to parse, though, because on the one hand, converts to Judaism are Jews, and on the other… her father was settling into the White House. Prior to that year, Ivanka was little more than a name that might be on some clothes at a ‘designer’ discount store. Anyway…

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Can Israeli films ever be screened again at film festivals without being protested?

The Toronto International Film Festival is going on, and while it only has a handful of Jewish-themed or Israeli-produced films, those films have drawn some of the biggest spotlights. Chiefly among them has been The Bibi Files, a new work-in-progress documentary that received its world debut last week, and which shows never-before-seen leaked footage of people admitting to bribing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The prime minister himself amplified the film’s popularity even more when he tried to block the Toronto screening in Israeli courts mere days before the event itself. (It remains unclear how, even if the Israeli court agreed with Netanyahu, they would have prevented an American film by an Australian director from screening in a Canadian festival.)

Yet while The Bibi Files got the most press attention, it didn’t face the largest crowd of protests—that honour may go to Bliss, an actual Israeli film that is apolitical in nature, which debuted on the night of Sept. 11. That happened to be the same night Bari Weiss delivered a keynote address at the campaign launch of the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto—an event which also received an ample crowd of angry protesters.

Podcast producer Michael Fraiman joins Avi and Phoebe on Bonjour Chai to talk about these issues and more, including the minor political controversy that erupted when an NDP candidate in Montreal distributed leaflets depicting his smiling face before a Palestinian flag.

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Coming soon to our show…

The author of “My Auschwitz Vacation” will be joining the Bonjour Chai interview queue: Tanya Gold has also been a columnist for the U.K. Jewish Chronicle, which is enduring drama of its own these days, a story that we’ve also been watching this week.