With Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) much talked about as a natural for a future Democratic national ticket, it’s possible that Diveroli/Botach/Boteach family history may be furnishing us with material for comic movies ripped from the headlines for decades to come.

From The Forward:

The Bromance Ends: What Split Cory Booker and Shmuley Boteach?

Nathan Guttman April 10, 2016 It was the future U.S. senator from New Jersey’s first Purim party, back at Oxford University in the 1990s. The home video shows a young Cory Booker dancing in circles and carrying on his back a bearded man dressed in a clown suit – Rabbi Shmuley Boteach.

Shmuley Boteach is the uncle of international arms dealer Efraim Diveroli of the Jonah Hill movie War Dogs.

But today, instead of bringing a smile to the faces of those involved, the recent re-emergence of this video has only served to worsen open wounds that have yet to heal. “It took me back all those years. And it made me incredibly sad,” wrote Boteach in his Jerusalem Post column, stating he feels it is now harder for him to forgive Booker, the junior senator from New Jersey. The battle waged last summer over the nuclear deal with Iran has left divisions still visible in many parts of the American Jewish and wider pro-Israel community, but nowhere more so than in its impact on the once-tight relationship between the black pol and the Jewish preacher. … The Booker–Boteach dispute also presents a broader question for the Jewish community: Do years of support, both political and financial, of a politician entail a promise in advance that he will side with the community on key issues with broad national impact? … Boteach prides himself on having introduced Booker to the Jewish community two and a half decades ago. It’s a role that no one denies he played.

Like I said the day I first heard about this clan: