Host of The Grindhouse Radio and serial entrepreneur, “Brim” now wants to show his fellow Jews how to kick some ass.
Building a personal brand is something of an art form, one which Brimstone – who calls himself “a serial entertainment entrepreneur” – has been perfecting most of his life. Condensing his career to those three words, he says, is simply “easier than trying to explain the five million different things that I’ve done.”
Ask him what he does for a living and you’ll understand right away. Brimstone, or Brim as his friends and family call him, doesn’t do just one thing. Look at his website therealbrimstone.com and you’ll find that over the course of four decades he’s been an actor, musician, marketer and salesman, professional wrestler, voice actor, author, comic book and video game hero, celebrity spokesman, corporate CEO, blogger, food critic, hot sauce slinger, podcaster and more.
But whatever piece of the career puzzle this “Swiss Army knife of entertainment” is currently putting into place, he said he always stays laser-focused on two things: building his brand and taking care of his family. And as a proud Jew, he would love to show the wider Jewish world how to kick a little ass.
Brimstone grew up William Kucmierowski on Long Island, New York, where he still lives with his wife and children. His long and circuitous path in show business began as his mother’s idea. When he was about 5 or 6 years old she got him a spot as a child actor on “Romper Room” and “Sesame Street,” where his most vivid memory is looking up during a break on set to see two men pulling the top half of Big Bird off and thinking, “Oh my God! They just killed Big Bird!”
His mother was also the parent who taught him to value his Jewishness. “She always kept it right there, smack dab in my face,” he laughed, acknowledging that these many years later he appreciates her tenacity.
He booked a few commercials, too, but as a little kid with divorced parents vying for his time, acting had to be set aside – at least for a while. Brim would later return to it with a vengeance, starring in multiple films, television shows, documentaries, music videos and as a voice actor in several video games.
Music and being a drummer in a band − “Man, oh, man, drumming - that was my thing” − was what propelled him back into performing. It allowed him to be completely ensconced in life as a working artist and to play the storied music venues of New York City, places like CBGB and The Continental. He incorporated the musical influences of his youth, which were many given all the back and forth between his mother’s more diverse Uniondale and his father’s more affluent Dix Hills. He learned hip hop and metal and much in between, including how to accept and appreciate people from all backgrounds.
But being on tour all the time and “living in a van eating scraps” wasn’t working so well when he got married and was expecting his first child. He fell back on a steadier, more 9-to-5 job in the music press, doing marketing work for various publications. In this way he was still a music insider but was “making as much money as possible to take care of my family,” he said.
Ironically, it was in the course of this more sedate work that he stumbled into his next big show business venture: professional wrestling. He went to an event to take photos for his publication. The Iron Sheik, a well-known Iranian wrestler, was there. He took one look at Brim and said, “You look like you’re going to be a wrestler.” Brim was surprised by the famous man’s offer to train him and introduce him to this world but the Sheik was “iconic, legendary,” Brim said. He took some time to consider, but soon enough he accepted and thus entered a new phase of his life, one in which he started to build his brand in earnest and where the name Brimstone was born.
He was encouraged not to think about any of those things until his training was finished, but he said, “I came from music and understood that in order to make it anywhere you have to have a viable brand. I’m very big on name value and branding and building a business no matter what you’re doing.”
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Choosing the name Brimstone was always kind of a joke given its association with a fiery afterlife, he said, “because as a Jew, we don’t believe in hell.” He sometimes has to explain that to people who accuse him of playing fast and loose with the dark side.
While he was wrestling, he was one of only a few Jewish wrestlers and he was often approached by rabbis to come and talk to Jewish kids. “I would always go simply to make sure that these kids, these young Jewish boys and girls knew that they could grow up and they could be a strong person, an athlete or whatever they wanted to do,” he said. He told them they could overcome stereotypes and stigma even if they did go on to be doctors or accountants. “I wanted them to know they can kick some ass, too!”
The Brimstone brand opened the door to everything he’s done since he stopped wrestling. He became the co-founder, president and CEO of Hound Entertainment Group, and from there he’s not only created comic books, something he adored as a kid and dreamed of writing, but has expanded his base of Brimstone-branded products, including children’s books, video games and toys – some of which have been featured on “The Big Bang Theory.”
He started a web-based celebrity food show called “Food Hound: Tidbits,” and most recently, he became the host of The Grindhouse Radio, a pop culture podcast with a weekly audience of close to four million people worldwide. He said he likes to keep the conversation light in general, but he will sometimes rant about things, especially racial and sexual injustice and gun violence on his personal companion podcast “Within Brim’s Skin.”
These are just a few highlights on a very long list, all of which he’s very careful to weave into his brand.
“Everything I do,” he said, “is intertwined. People who pay attention, get it, people that don’t pay attention, don’t get it. And that’s OK too. But it’s subliminal. For example, little Brimstone memorabilia was all around the guys’ apartments in “Big Bang Theory” for a few seasons.”
The brand of Brimstone is at the top of his priority list, but right now it’s Grindhouse radio that takes most of his attention, as it’s what allows him to stay home more with his family. He’s also hoping to do more in the Jewish community. “This is my community,” he said. “I have always been somebody that’s holding the torch saying, ‘Hey, you know, I’m Jewish,’ and I would love for my own community to embrace me and to show me some love back.”
Just like in his wrestling days, he wants to be the one telling Jewish kids to stand up for themselves, a message he stands by and shares when he can. He said he’s not expecting anyone to “go gaga over me,” but he wants Jews to know who he is and how supportive he is. “I would do more,” he said. “I would do a lot more if I was asked.”
A dedicated high school student starts an online petition to change how visitors pay respect at the Auschwitz Memorial
Christian Barbour is a young man on a mission. A senior in high school, while he’s not Jewish himself, he is passionate about making sure the memories of the more than 1 million men, women and children who lost their lives at Auschwitz are honored properly and not disrespected by visitors to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial. He’s doing this through an online petition that, to date, has received over 13,000 signatures, raising awareness, and the hopeful creation of a nonprofit organization.
“What inspired me to start this petition was a TikTok comment that I received when I first started my TikTok journey saying that there should be some kind of change to the number of disrespectful visitors that come to Auschwitz and other camps like it,” Christian says. “The video that I had posted and the comment was talking about several instances where there had been disrespectful visitors in Auschwitz in 2019, which was the last primary year that they had their usual 2 million visitors.”
The petition’s idea is to establish an honor guard at Auschwitz. According to the petition and Christian, this is the general idea: “The goal is not to remilitarize the camps. The term honor guard can be used loosely here instead as a blueprint for what I am trying to accomplish—the honor guard functions solely for ceremonial purposes… It would exist as a never-ending formal funeral with a specific number of people to represent a particular part of the history of the camp, such as the number of years or the number of victims or the number of survivors. This is not to draw in tourists but to preserve and protect the memory of those who have died and maintain the level of respect that the site commands.”
“The people that will do this will also not be holding any type of firearm, such as The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier,” he continues. “They will have candles as it’s customary to light candles on Holocaust Remembrance Day or, in general, when referring to the Holocaust, candles are associated. The goal is not to remove the tourist aspect from the site entirely but rather add more emphasis on the memorial as a historical site in human history. One of the goals is to stop the picture taking, specifically selfie-taking and other disrespectful acts toward the campsite.”
Christian adds that this idea is flexible and he’s still in the planning stages. He encourages those who support this effort to sign the petition but there will be more work to make his idea a reality.
“I have been in contact with members of the Polish government in order to get this done,” he adds. “I have not talked to them in a couple of months, mainly because Russia invaded Ukraine, which put everything on hold, so I need to contact them again, but that is a significant step in formulating this process.”
In addition to signing the petition, he is also in need of help to start a nonprofit organization.
“Currently, I’m in the process of creating a nonprofit organization in order to show that I have a way to fund my project,” he explains. “I am looking for people who have suggestions or are interested in shaping my project further because I have a rough outline of what I want to do. I have created my presentation, I just need other opinions, especially ones from the Jewish community and those communities that were affected to approve of everything that I’m doing or add their take.”
At the helm of this effort for nearly two years, Christian is passionate about making it a reality.
“I believe this is important because at the end of the day, places like Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen, Sobibor, Treblinka, and many others that are lesser known graveyards or mass graveyards, are some of the worst tragedies to ever happen on the face of this earth and it’s not something that if you go visit should be a one-stop, check-the-box, get it out of the way visit,” he explains. “It should be a time to reflect, learn about the past, and learn from our mistakes. I believe in showing people how important this place is. Just because it happened a lifetime ago doesn’t mean that it doesn’t still have repercussions.”
Deborah Lipstadt made her first trip to the Middle East in August in her new job as the U.S. State Department’s antisemitism monitor, and she started in Saudi Arabia.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that during a virtual press briefing in the kingdom, Lipstadt said, though Saudi Arabia is not “perfect according to our human rights standards,” her presence in “a place which had once been the source of so much Jew hatred, so much extremism,” could be seen as a sign of progress.
“If I can lessen that degree of animus [toward Jews], if I can make it so that that degree is not spread amongst others, I think I would have to,” she said. “I would be derelict not to do so.”
After all, Lipstadt has devoted her entire adult life and career – amounting to about four decades – to the work of understanding and diffusing antisemitism.
Lipstadt was born in New York City to immigrant parents, who raised her in an observant Jewish home. Her parents were not Holocaust survivors, but she has pointed out that she grew up around survivors and spent her junior year of college in Israel also surrounded by survivors, and their stories were always present to her.
In 1969, she received her bachelor’s degree at the City College of New York before enrolling at Brandeis University, where she completed a master’s in 1972 and a Ph.D. in 1976. While working on her doctorate, she spent time in Moscow to learn about Refuseniks, Russian Jews who wanted to leave the Soviet Union but were refused.
“I was there and I saw what it was like not to live in freedom, and it all came together that this was something I wanted to look at and try to understand,” Lipstadt told journalist Chris Hayes on his podcast in May 2019, in order to explain her initial desire to study antisemitism.
After teaching at both the University of Washington in Seattle and the University of California at Los Angeles, her focus narrowed even further from Jewish studies to Holocaust denial when she received a research fellowship from the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
In 1993, Lipstadt moved to Atlanta, to teach Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory, where she was part of creating the Institute for Jewish Studies.
A few years later, she found herself and one of her many books, “Denying the Holocaust,” in the crosshairs of David Irving, an English writer and Holocaust denier, who sued her in an English court for libel because she had characterized his writing and public statements as Holocaust denial. Irving disputed the idea of the Final Solution and repeatedly claimed that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Both she and Penguin, the book’s publisher, were sued in a nation where the burden of proof is on the defendant rather than on the plaintiff, as it is in the American system. The co-defendants won the case by demonstrating to the court that Lipstadt’s accusations were substantive.
Lipstadt wrote “History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier,” a book about her ordeal. It was later made into a film called “Denial” in 2016.
She is also known for warning the public about what she calls “soft-core denial” of the Holocaust. She has said that people who don’t outright deny the Holocaust but minimize the atrocities of Hitler and Nazi Germany are protected by outright Holocaust deniers and their radical arguments; by comparison they seem safe. Therefore, she told The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, their sinister and inaccurate views break through to the mainstream with worrying results.
Holocaust denial is not a mistaken form of history, Lipstadt has said. It’s a form of antisemitism.
Lipstadt told Hayes on his podcast that antisemitism is like the herpes virus. “It’s a terrible thing and once you have it you’re never quite free of it,” she said. Under pressure people with herpes have outbreaks, and in the case of antisemitism, “it sits in society and in times of heavy pressure, it’s unleashed.”
When Lipstadt was first considered for the Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism in President Joe Biden’s administration in May 2021, few thought there would be any issue with her Senate confirmation.
However, Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson objected and significantly delayed her nomination because Lipstadt had tweeted that the senator advocated “white supremacy/nationalism.”
Nearly a year after she was first nominated, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings on her nomination and favorably reported it out of committee in February 2022. She was finally confirmed by the full Senate on March 30, 2022.
This Arizona rabbi chooses Judaism, again and again
At 10 years old, the boy who would grow up to be Rabbi Dr. Shmuly Yanklowitz – one of the 50 most influential American rabbis according to both the Forward and Newsweek — made a choice. He chose to be a Jew.
Yanklowitz was raised in an interfaith home, and his Christian mother and Jewish father left his religious destiny in his young hands. He chose Reform Judaism then, the faith of his father, and went through a Reform conversion and eventual bar mitzvah. He was very active in the Reform movement — so active, in fact, he became head of the Reform minyan at his college, the University of Texas at Austin.
That’s not the end of the story, however.
At about 20 years old and still a student at UT, Yanklowitz found himself wanting something different, “something very fervent, very intense,” he said. Thus, he chose Orthodox Judaism and a second conversion.
“I had a number of experiences in the ultra-Orthodox world that gave me that fulfillment that I was looking for,” he said. He became “ultra-Orthodox, like in the ‘black-hat world,’ and then I moved to a hilltop caravan in the West Bank and was kind of like a religious settler for a while.”
While his religious practice would change and change again, Yanklowitz would keep choosing Judaism, because, he said, “saving lives and reducing suffering in the world is crucial to what Judaism is about,” in all its myriad forms. Eventually, he came to a more pluralist ideal of Judaism, a place where all Jews can learn from one another and work together for a more just world.
Yanklowitz draws strength from being in conversation with all Jews, no matter their affiliation, or lack thereof, he said. “I see the struggles and benefits, pros and cons to each kind of denomination, and I think we do best when we learn from Ben Zoma in Pirkei Avot, that the wise person is someone who can learn with everyone and from everyone.”
He said his own religious journey taught him “both the sweetness and the inclusivity of the Reform world and the fervency and the intensity of the ultra-Orthodox world.”
In 2013, he accepted a job offer in Phoenix, Arizona, a city neither he nor his wife, Shoshana, had any connection to. Taking charge of Valley Beit Midrash (VBM), a nonprofit for Jewish learning and progressive activism, allowed him to work with the entire Jewish community, one which was large but largely disengaged.
Here was a city with a lot of very sophisticated, professional Jews who simply found Judaism unappealing “because they still have a seventh-grade understanding of it,” Yanklowitz said. Under his leadership, VBM became a place “to add depth to the Jewish discourse and raise the intellectual bar of what American Jews are talking about.”
He brought with him all that he had learned from his early humanitarian work in the global South when he was volunteering and working in places like El Salvador, Guatemala, Senegal and Thailand with American Jewish World Service, an international development and human rights nonprofit organization.
“That experience really affected me a lot,” he said.
Social action, in the form of helping immigrants on the U.S.-Mexico border, resettling Afghan refugees and pushing for climate change legislation, as well as advocating for a host of other social justice issues, is one of the three pillars VBM is built upon.
Learning is another. That’s unsurprising, given Yanklowitz’s own biography. He has three rabbinic ordinations, two master’s degrees, one from Harvard and another from Yeshiva University, as well as a doctorate from Columbia University. He also served as the University of California Los Angeles’ Hillel’s senior Jewish educator and director of Jewish life and has written 22 books on Jewish ethics.
Leadership development, the third pillar, is harder to measure, he said, but “you never know the people you’re going to inspire and how they will use this learning in their life.”
Yanklowitz’s view is that if you teach people Jewish values they will act upon them, which means saving lives, a goal he takes very seriously.
In 2015, after months spent researching live kidney donation and discerning what a call to save lives really means, he became a kidney donor for a person he had never met. He and Shoshana, a nurse practitioner, discussed the idea, worried about bad possible outcomes, but ultimately, went forward with the donation, because, he said, he “couldn’t look away.”
Similarly, he founded YATOM: The Jewish Foster & Adoption Network, and he and Shoshana have fostered children in addition to having their own four, ages 3 to 9.
After years of writing books and articles for various national publications, public speaking appearances, building organizations and social justice activism, Yanklowitz is a very visible presence in Phoenix and his progressive views are widely known. Though he sees VBM as a meeting place for Jews across the political spectrum, he admitted that he’s troubled when he sees “apathy or hate emerging from our own Jewish community, or I see Jewish alignment with white supremacists in our state,” he said. Those ideas can come from the belief that it’s “good for Israel even if it’s bad for all minorities,” he said, which is “very painful and misguided.”
He’s not interested in fighting with local Jews who disagree with him, but, he said, “it is exhausting to feel oftentimes like a lone voice on many issues, and a little bit like a punching bag of the far right of our Jewish community.”
He’d much rather focus on his work of advancing Jewish knowledge and welcoming all Jews, especially those on the margins, meaning Jews of color, people with disabilities, and Jews from interfaith families. “We’re not just willing to accept them, but we really affirm who they are and welcome them in,” he said. Some of his attitude reflects his early experience of religious alienation.
But he can also see what’s happening in the Jewish world. Last year, Pew Research Center released a survey of Jews, which found that American Jews are increasingly either Orthodox or unaffiliated. Orthodox Judaism, he said, has a high entry barrier and “deep content,” while other Jewish spaces have “very watered down content but are very inclusive.” He wants to bridge that gap and provide meaningful content in a space where all Jews feel welcome.
Liberal Judaism, he said, needs “a renaissance” so that it’s rooted in both tradition and progress. As always, the key is “to demonstrate more clearly and powerfully how Judaism matters for the world, how it makes our lives better and how it makes the world better.”
He worries that in a world full of competing ideas, people will simply identify as spiritual and go to yoga instead of seeing all that Judaism has to offer. “That would be the death of the Jewish future,” he said. But instead of focusing solely on continuity and survival, he said, the goal should be “to thrive and to make sure that Jewish wisdom is applied to improving the world. If we’re doing that well, the Jewish community will be sustained in the process.”
And if you don’t believe it, you clearly haven’t been paying attention for the last few decades. From Drake to Doja Cat to the Dessner Brothers of the band The National (who also have worked with Taylor Swift), Jews are all over the musical spectrum. But one unique voice continues to stand out from the vast field of talent in the Tribe, and it belongs to the lead singer of the band Disturbed.
That’s right: not only do Jews rock, we rock HARD.
One listen to Disturbed’s brilliant cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sounds of Silence” (which also adds to the Cool Musical Jews factor) and you know you’re in the company of greatness from the moment you hear lead singer David Draiman’s interpretation. Originally trained to be a cantor (nu?), Draiman’s full control and command makes for a compelling listen. But it’s even more intense when you watch the band perform it live.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk7RVw3I8eg
A former cantor might seem like the least likely guy to front a metal band, but David Draiman has never fit into your typical Nice Jewish Boy mold. Born in New York in 1973, Draiman was raised by non-observant Jewish parents who still chose to send him to Orthodox schools. His father, YJ, worked as a real estate developer and small-business owner before he was arrested for embezzlement and sent to prison when Draiman was 12 years old. He later ran for mayor of Los Angeles and moved the family around the country; David attended different Jewish schools in Chicago and Milwaukee as well as L.A, and took cantorial training lessons despite feeling “resentful” about his Jewish education.
Draiman had a difficult few years in his teens, dabbling in heroin and attempting suicide not long after his girlfriend had taken her own life. After surviving his near-death experience, Draiman quit heroin and spent a year in Israel studying at a Yeshiva before returning to the United States in 1992.
Draiman considered a career in law after graduating from Loyola University, but has said he decided that “lying for a living and protecting criminals” wasn’t the life he wanted for himself. Never one to be pinned down, he then got an administrator’s license and spent five years running his own healthcare facility before joining Disturbed as their frontman, which then propelled the band to its greatest successes. The same man who once chanted the Torah and is fluent in Hebrew is the same man who wrote some of Disturbed’s most successful singles, such as “Stupify”, “Down with the Sickness”, “Indestructible”, and “Inside the Fire”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09LTT0xwdfw
Draiman has also really leaned into his cultural Jewishness this year by moving his family from Hawaii to Florida, as he recently revealed to a fan on Twitter. Unapologetically political–he has called himself “liberal about everything issue-based” and “a very, very strong supporter of Israel forever and for our people”–Draiman isn’t at all shy about holding both parties accountable and says he prefers small government. He also has no problem calling out other musicians for their politics; in 2019, for example, he slammed ex-Pink Floyd legend Roger Waters “and his Nazi comrades” for their demands to boycott Israel. That same year, Disturbed made their live debut in Israel and performed its national anthem, the Hatikva.
There is also that practical side to Draiman that all Jewish parents seem to have. Asked by a fan why he sought “the humidity” and Florida’s ultra-conservative governor Ron DeSantis, the ever-pragmatic singer (who had spoken out about the state’s controversial “Don’t Say Gay” bill) replied: “The schools, the sun, and no state income tax”. In July, Draiman, who supported Bernie Sanders in 2016, commended President Joe Biden for signing an executive order designed to bolster access to abortion in states that are banning it following the court’s ruling in June to overturn the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1yOMGy1GPU
Don’t try to pin down David Dramain: he’s a family man, he’s a metal frontman, and he’s a passionate advocate for both American and Israeli Jews. Best of all, Disturbed is still making new music and will play several festival dates this fall.
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