Protests held outside NYC comedy club for 'ask an IDF soldier' event

Protests were held outside New York City’s Comedy Cellar last Thursday night over a panel featuring three October 7 war veterans.

The event was co-managed by the Zionist literary magazine Green Golem and hosted by podcaster Coleman Hughes. It featured released IDF reservists Jonathan Karten, Corey Feldman, Samuel Fried, and Noy Leyb.

Anti-Israel activist groups, including Within Our Lifetimes, called on its supporters to protest the “pro-genocide event.”

The demonstrators were told to bring flags, keffiyehs, noisemakers, and protective masks against COVID-19 and surveillance to say “no to Israel Occupation [sic] Forces in NYC.”

“We do not accept the normalization of events featuring people who have murdered nearly 40,000 civilians with at least 13,000 of those being children and babies,” said an advertisement for the protest. “Shame on Comedy Cellar.”

NOW: Two protestors are arrested outside Comedy Cellar A man showed up with an Israeli flag which resulted in a scuffle pic.twitter.com/RG8gvi5Pyl

— katie smith (@probablyreadit) February 23, 2024

Arrests were made at protests

The organizers of the protest said there might be a beefed-up police presence. Two protesters were arrested by the police after they had scuffled with a man who had arrived with an Israeli flag, independent journalist Katie Smith reported. She shared a video of helmeted police officers armed with batons and said they had formed lines around the venue following the arrests.

Leyb, one of the speakers on the panel and a former paratrooper, said the event was not about “preaching to the choir.” It was open to the public to allow for difficult questions that the panelists were not used to hearing, he said.“The harder questions are much more interesting,” Leyb told The Jerusalem Post, adding a meaningful dialogue had taken place.

The event included 45 minutes of Hughes questioning the former soldiers, and another 45 minutes of the reservists fielding questions from the attendees.

Leyb said they had touched on challenging topics, including civilian casualties, accusations of collective punishment, and anti-Zionism. A manager of the venue had shown a video of IDF soldiers allegedly killing civilians over the past few decades and demanded to know how such actions could be justified, he said.

“It gave a platform to let people hear different things,” Leyb said.