“Followers” in Substack lingo are those who have chosen to follow my notes and have access to all my postings via the Substack app. Subscribers (there are about 8,650 of those) receive all my postings via email, in addition to what they get on the app. Since I want to make these postings as accessible as possible, I don’t generally employ a paywall, but I am eternally grateful for those who opt for paid subscriptions and all who share my work. While my perspectives are very much in the mainstream, there is so much confusion these days that I feel a great need to present my views on Judaism (and religion in general) Israel, America and Trumpism to as broad an audience as possible - at the same time adding a little warmth, humor and spontaneity to our world’s increasingly coarse, artificial and knee-jerk conversations. Finally, for those who wonder how God is feeling about Trump’s insults to Pope Leo, Jesus, Catholics, Muslims, American Jews and just about every other religious entity, I responded to that question in my No Kings rally address. Check that out here.

Subscribe now

How the three worst places on earth for Jews have turned the tables on autocracy

• Click here for Holocaust Information Packet

• Click below for responses to common Holocaust denial claims

Holocaustdenier Responses

104KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

During the Holocaust, more Jews from Poland (3 million), Hungary (565,000) and Ukraine (1.5 million, as part of the Soviet Union) perished than from any other country, including Germany. But now, with the defeat of Victor Orbán last Sunday, a trifecta of wins against Putin puppets in each of these countries has transformed the political equation of Europe. Those three countries have led the way in throwing off the kind of autocratic government that made life unsafe for Jews and other minority groups. And a vibrant Jewish life is returning to all three places.

There could hardly be better news this week, for all freedom loving people, despite some skepticism among what seems like a minority of Jews, primarily from the right, in Hungary.1

Let’s look at each of the Big Three:

While the history of Jews in Ukraine has hardly been without blemish (a vast understatement), the country currently ranks as one of the least antisemitic in Europe. Three of the first four Israeli prime ministers came from present-day Ukraine, including Golda Meir, and some of the greatest literary figures and spiritual leaders of all time, including Nachman of Bratzlav and Chaim Nachman Bialik.

And did I mention that they have a Jewish president? President Zelensky is holding up his end amazingly as a contemporary Jewish hero, having replaced the corrupt pro-Putin leader Viktor Yanukovych, who was chased out in 2014. True, there have been some blemishes on the Ukrainian record, like the 1648 Cossack massacres (also a black mark for Poland) and Babi Yar; but Ukraine also houses the real-life Anatevka and Uman is a site of euphoric pilgrimage (called the Jewish Burning Man) to the grave of Rabbi Nachman.

• See also The stormy, yet rich history of the Jews in Ukraine. Also, the YIVO Encyclopedia article on Ukrainian Jewry.

And then there’s Poland. When I went to Poland with my congregation in 2017, we saw a country struggling to come to grips with its dark side. But we did not see outright denial of that history. In Warsaw’s spectacular Polin Museum commemorating 1,000 years of Jewish life in Poland, one display speaks with an admirable honesty about the topic, stating, in Polish and English:

What was the attitude of Poles to the Jewish tragedy? Few chose to risk their lives and the lives of their families by trying to save Jews. Many were simply too preoccupied with everyday hardships of the occupation to concern themselves with the fate of Jews. Some Poles denounced Jews to the Germans or murdered them themselves. How did those on the Aryan side react to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising? Some sympathized with Jews and admired their heroism. Most, however, were indifferent, while others made antisemitic comments.

While it may understate the degree of antisemitism that existed at that time, this hardly sounds like a whitewash. The museum was created by a unique partnership of the Polish government and the private sector, including Jewish groups. It has been praised universally and is part of an impressive and expanded array of memorials, museums and restored synagogues in Poland.

As the Holocaust recedes into history, it is becoming even more important for Jews to visit these places. The Polin Museum also describes the vibrant Jewish life that preceded the rise of the Nazis, when Warsaw was the second largest Jewish city in the world, trailing only New York, and its cultural life was unrivaled.

In assessing the complicated historical relationship between Poles and Jews, let’s acknowledge that Jews share quite a bit with the Poles. While horrible things happened to Jews in Poland, horrible things — though considerably less horrible — happened to Poles too.

Here’s something else Jews, Poles and Ukrainians share — the concern for an alarming erosion of fragile democratic norms all over the world, through dangerous demagogic tactics of strongman leaders who pit one group against another.

Which brings us to Hungary, the newest member of this Eastern European Axis of Democratic Rejuvenation. In Poland and Hungary, and to a lesser degree Ukraine, far-right wing governments consolidated power by following a familiar playbook. They demonized the press, co-opted the judiciary and directed the anger toward familiar scapegoats, especially the Jews.

A Shabbat in Budapest

And now, following this week’s shocking defeat for Orbán, the truth can now be told about how terrified Jews felt in Hungary under this regime. I believe those stories will quickly emerge, as Jews and other vulnerable groups emerge from metaphorical hiding.

When my congregation visited Hungary, We joined the Frankel Synagogue, one of the city’s most active congregations, for a Friday night service, and before that, we spent about a half hour conversing with the rabbi and his wife, an author and educator. The congregation comes from a branch of Judaism unique to central Europe – called Neolog. It’s sort of a fruit salad of Orthodoxy and Conservative. For example: there is separate seating, but the women get the better seats.

We came away from the conversation amazed at the vibrancy of the community – and we came away equally concerned for its future.

Before the Shoah, this was a thriving community - nearly a quarter of Budapest’s population was Jewish. But during the war, of the more than 800,000 Jews living in Hungary, nearly 620,000 died or were deported. In Budapest, Jews had a somewhat better chance of survival at first, until the notorious Arrow Cross – those rabid Hungarian nationalists who tried to out-Nazi the Nazis, took over, herded Jews into the ghetto beginning in December 1944, took as many as 20,000 out to the banks of the Danube, shot them and threw their bodies into the river. We saw the memorial that has been set up right by the riverbank, a sculpture depicting the shoes that were left behind. It’s incredibly moving, but equally problematic, because the memorial does not specify that the victims were Jewish.

The current Jewish population is about 100,000, they think – and that number is based on those who have received reparations for the Holocaust. But no one really knows, because the vast majority of Jews are afraid to be identified. They remain in the closet - literally, sometimes, because many still remember that proverbial knock on the door. While physical attacks are rare, anti-Semitism is plainly practiced by the extreme right-wing government and is embedded in the culture. I wrote about the antiSemitic poster campaign that popped up all over the country when we were there. Vandalism of Jewish gravestones and synagogues is commonplace. I asked the rabbi whether he wears a yarmulke in public, and he said no. Most Jewish children encounter anti-Semitism in school from a young age. The word “Jewish” is often used as a curse word in the vernacular.

Just imagine, their culture has, almost without a break, gone from medieval Christian antisemitism, to the Cossacks, then the racism and eugenics of the Nazi era, to Soviet-era antisemitism and right to Orbán’s castigation of “globalism” and castration of potential opponents in politics and the press.

And then, to add to antisemitism, there is Jewish illiteracy. After the Nazis were defeated, the country was “liberated” into nearly half a century of communist rule, where anyone living an openly Jewish lifestyle was subject to ridicule and discrimination. After the horrors of Auschwitz, most Hungarian Jews had little place for God in their lives anyway, so while the practice of Judaism wasn’t expressly forbidden, it was for all intents and purposes forgotten.

Yet despite all this, what we saw that summer was remarkable: Jewish life was rising in Budapest like a phoenix from the ashes. Despite impossible odds.

There is thriving summer camp called Szarvas near Budapest, which serves Jewish communities all over Europe. Many campers recall being dropped off and asking their parents why they were being sent to a Jewish camp. At that point, the parents would tell them, while driving off, “By the way, you’re Jewish.”

The Shabbat service at the Frankel synagogue was one of our most cherished moments on the trip back in 2017. There were a number of young families with kids there – well over a hundred people. The rabbi mentioned that very few Jewish groups visit them, so they were curious to meet their guests from America. I felt really good that we were there, as many Jewish heritage tours of Eastern Europe only visit the dead. We were determined to visit living Jewish communities too. It was another tearful moment. We were there to tell the Jews of Budapest that they are not alone.

And at the end of the service, we did the kiddish and ha-motzi prayers all together, because, we were told, very few of the congregants know how to do Shabbat at home. And there is often no grandparent to ask, because Bubbe and Zayde were murdered by the Nazis or Iron Cross.

If this congregation read from a yahrzeit list before the mourner’s kaddish, as we do (and they don’t), the list would have 1,000 names on it every week. So many were lost.

But even more to the point, they didn’t do the rituals at home because so many were afraid to. Their Jewish lives have been confined to their synagogue, a building so heavily barricaded that you almost expected Jean Valjean to make an appearance there too. The building is not visible from the street.

I came to Budapest to help people back home remember the last Holocaust, and I left Hungary more determined than ever to prevent the next one.

But that was back in 2017. I don’t know how the Jewish community was doing now, in the leadup to the elections. Trying to avoid politics, no doubt. I’m hoping to find some community members to interview as soon as the dust begins to settle.

And now, the people of Hungary have a fresh start - and the Jewish community too. They were apparently divided over whether to vote for the dictator, but given the final tally, I’d be surprised if many did. After defeating the Nazis, Soviets and Orbanist Illiberals, they are finally free. Like their Polish and Ukrainian cousins, they’ve thrown off the yoke of Putin, and centuries of irrational hate.

With the resounding defeat of the dictator, it feels like a new day is at hand.

Share In This Moment: A Rabbi's Notebook

Share

Leave a comment

I’ve spent my life seeking out the world’s most sacred places, and I’ve managed to visit quite a few. But as I looked at this photo of earth from space last week, taken by the Artemis astronauts, I realized that all my travels had been unnecessary. That most sacred spot on earth IS the earth - it was the very spot I was standing on. The perfection and the beauty of that photo they took had little to do with its astounding symmetry and balance and the gorgeous earth toned blues and browns. It had more to do with the fact that all of us are in it. We are right there, without even knowing it. And we are dwelling on a fragile raft that has just enough of this and that to sustain life.

We humans crave connection and we have never been more connected - all of us together - than in that photo. And all the sacred places we’ve constructed, from the tabernacle in the wilderness to the Western Wall and Dome of the Rock, to the Vatican to Machu Picchu to Angkor Wat - all of which I’ve made pilgrimage to - are mere facsimilies in miniature of the Oneness depicted in that photo. The word religion, after all, comes from the Latin religare, meaning to connect.

Manly Hall, philosopher and seeker, wrote in The Secret Teachings in All Ages (1928):

True religion must be universal: Christ, Buddha or Mohammed, the name means little, for we recognize only the light and not the bearer. We worship at every shrine, bow before every altar, whether in temple, mosque or cathedral, realizing with our truer understanding the oneness of all spiritual truth.

The moon mission reminded us of our essential unity.

I was skeptical about Artemis. It seemed anachronistic to retrace the steps of the ‘60s, in a bizarro way, no less, with a different senseless war and a crazier RFK, minus the Tang but with much better cameras.

And these days, rather than looking up, we’ve needed to keep our nose to the ground in dealing with the toxic mess we’re making of earth. But given yesterday’s earthshaking news out of Hungary, the irony was not lost on me that when he won in 2022, Viktor Orbán called it “a victory so great you could see it from the moon - and certainly from Brussels.”

And yesterday, in celebrating his win, Peter Magyar (whose last name means Hungary - it’s like calling him “Captain America” - retorted with this:

“Together, we have dismantled the Orbán system, liberated Hungary, and reclaimed our country. This victory is visible not from the moon, but from every Hungarian window—whether in the smallest rural home, a tower block apartment, a major city, or the countryside.”

Take that, Viktor! (and Donald and Vlad.)

Actually, Magyar’s statement isn’t totally true. Yesterday’s victory was so overwhelming that, unlike 2022, it should have been visible from space. And in fact, this drone footage indicates that it was.

The landslide broke the spell of inevitability for illiberalism. With a crashing thud, Putinesque autocracy was so thoroughly beaten that no one could even try to reverse engineer this election. The win was so enormous that it was un-riggable, even by Putin himself. We now know for November (and October in Israel), there is such a thing as unriggability. It begins with a landslide.

I marvel at the courage of Hungarian people, who, within the scope of a single century, have endured at least three brands of autocratic oppression and overcome them all: Nazi, Soviet and Orbanism - arguably the three most insidious and cruel incarnations of political evil this world has known over that span of time.

This landslide victory symbolized a return to the dream of a world with less rigid fences, where nationalism can nurture alliances rather than generate wars, and candles can illumine the windows of rural cottages and urban apartments with the light of peace. But the home writ large is earth, a home that we all share, a fragile, delicate, small and lonely place in a vast universe, a place where all humanity can be reminded that WE ARE ALL ONE.

Who could have known when Viktor Orban invoked the moon in his bombastic 2022 declaration of viktor-y that his downfall would coincide with the waxing of the lunar space program?

And as we watched this first wave of freedom sweep across the landscape yesterday, we were reminded, one and all, that this is what democracy looks like.

No wonder they call it the Blue Danube. Because last night was the first indicator of an oncoming Blue Wave.

This was today’s headline from a newly liberated Hungarian press.

Budapest must feel like a Disney movie when the curse is broken. Everything has been unfrozen and all the kitchen utensils restored to their human form. We’ll know the feeling here when we get to take down the Arch-de-Trump and rename the Kennedy Center for JFK alone once again.

And even before Sunday’s news, when we saw those photos from space, suddenly we all got it. Maybe it was the competing front page news, where a guy was threatening to bomb a country back to the Stone Age and taunting the pope. But suddenly the world was looking up, not to check the sky for drones but because four human beings were looking down (or sideways) - at us. And the headlines took notice, nudging us from the Stone Age to the Space Age.

When I saw the photos, especially that one of the earth - and this one of the moon and earth rise - I was reminded of the grandeur of the universe, the emptiness of space and how small and unique - and united - we are.

It was put perfectly by educator Troy D. Allen in the New York Times.1

And I heard the humility of the astronauts, reminding me of Apollo 8’s reading of Genesis as they looked down at the lunar surface and back at earth. And I was hooked.

Those photos became my prayerbook this past Shabbat. Check out these photo albums:

• Journey to the moon gallery

• The lunar flyby gallery

  

  

And what better way is there to remind us to care for this planet, that it’s not merely our home, IT IS US.

The Home Planet: Our Holy Place

Back in 1948, British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle predicted that, “Once a photograph of the earth, taken from the outside, is available, a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.” At the end of a catastrophic year, 1968, and just seven months before the moon landing, there was the flight of Apollo 8; we still don’t fully appreciate what it meant for humanity to see, for the first time, the earth rising, as the spacecraft emerged from the dark side of the moon.

And what did these awestruck astronauts do at that moment? They read from chapter one of Genesis, the story of creation. “To look out at this kind of creation and not believe in God is to me impossible,” John Glenn told reporters in 1998, just after returning from his final trip to space at age 77. “It just strengthens my faith.”

A while back, as the space race was winding down, a group of astronauts and cosmonauts came together to create a unique book called The Home Planet, a collection of their perspectives on what they alone have seen, the vision of earth from a distance. For Edgar Mitchell, an American astronaut, a revelation occurred when “looking at the earth and seeing the blue and white planet floating there, and knowing it was orbiting the sun, seeing that sun, seeing it set the background of that very deep, black and velvety cosmos, seeing – rather, knowing, for sure – that there is was a purposefulness of flow, of energy, of time, of space in the cosmos, and that it was beyond man’s rational ability to understand. I suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving and harmonious.”

Yuri Artykin, a Soviet cosmonaut said, “It isn’t important in which country see you observe an oil slick, or in the forests of which country a fire breaks out. You are standing guard over the whole earth.”

And another cosmonaut said “One morning I woke up and decided to look out the window, to see where we were. We were flying over America and suddenly I saw snow. I’ve never visited America, but I imagine that the arrival of autumn and winter is the same there as in other places, and the process of getting ready for them is the same. And then it struck me that it doesn’t matter what country you look at; we are all children of our earth.”

And, the words of Sultan bin Salman al-Saud, an astronaut from Saudi Arabia: “The first day or so we all pointed to our country, the third or fourth day we were pointing to our continents, and by the fifth day we were aware of only one earth.”

Oh how I wish we could all get a single glimpse of what they have seen, of our fragile sacred ball of life. How I wish it. For if we could, there would be no more fear, no more hatred. No more war. In Hebrew, man is Adam and Earth is Adama. We are one with our planet and with all who share it with us.

Earth Day and Yom HaShoah

Earth Day (April 22) is next week and Holocaust Remembrance Day is tonight and tomorrow. In Jewish tradition, respect for the health of the environment and concern for the dignity of human beings go hand in hand. The Nazis were notorious for their pillage of both the land and its inhabitants, and Eastern Europe is paying the price for that to this day. Judaism is so concerned about the earth that we have our own annual Earth Day, Tu b’Shevat, not to mention a weekly one, Shabbat.

Several years ago I visited the site of Dachau, the concentration camp just outside Munich. I say that I visited the “site” of Dachau, because it wasn’t Dachau. Yes, the name was there, right next to the infamous inscription, “Arbeit Macht Frei.” Yes, the barbed wire was there, and the barracks, remarkably well preserved, and the ovens. Yes, there were memorials to the dead, marking mass graves of nameless victims. But it wasn’t Dachau.

Dachau was hell and this wasn’t it. There were flowers at this place, surrounded by fresh-cut grass. The whole area is being marketed as an artist colony and tourism center. I could hear birds. I even saw a butterfly, which confirmed for me that this was not Dachau, for the famous Holocaust poem tells us that there were no butterflies in the death camps.

If this was not hell, then what was it, and why did it suddenly look so lovely, so natural? Was this a cruel trick by God, a vain attempt to reclaim that which God had ceded to the beast in humanity in 1933? Or was this God’s apology, this smattering of forget-me-nots and daisies embedded in cemetery sod, a plea for forgiveness, too little and too late?

Or maybe God was hoping, beyond hope, to give Jews one last chance to regain the illusion of an attainable paradise on earth, a thin veneer of April hope covering the reality of August hell.

“Here,” God is telling us, “I can’t give you redemption. All I can give you is this spring-like illusion. Let it ease the pain of your wanderings. Take it.”

On Yom HaShoah we say to God that this plan, however comforting and kind, can’t possibly work. We reject the illusion. We have seen hell first-hand; it won’t be forgotten. Time will not heal this wound. If renewal is possible following the Holocaust, a God who was absent during it cannot bring it about. God, who could not save the Jews, will also not redeem the earth. If renewal and hope are at all possible, only human beings can facilitate it.

Anyone can grow a few forget-me-nots.

There are two seemingly contradictory verses in Psalms: Psalm 24 tells us, “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,” while we read in Psalm 115, “The heavens are the Lord’s heavens, but the earth has been given to humankind.” This discrepancy can be resolved by drawing from it this lesson: Once upon a time, the earth was the Lord’s, but since the Holocaust, it is ours and ours alone.

Before the Shoah, when the earth still belonged to God, we, who had once experienced Paradise first-hand, could only imagine Eden’s opposite. As David Grossman wrote in his masterful novel, See Under: Love, “We always pictured hell with boiling lava and pitch bubbling in barrels,” until the Nazis came along, “showing us how paltry our pictures were.”

Now, nothing is left to the imagination. The earth is ours and we are utterly responsible for all that happens to it; all of it, the people, and the flowers, too. Those flowers at Dachau have become a symbol of God’s ultimate helplessness and our ultimate responsibility. We still pray, though no longer for divine intervention, but in gratitude for the basic tools provided us: warm summer days, rain in its season, the miraculous ecosystem. We look to heaven for resolve but little else, for “the earth has been given to humankind.”

And the blood of our brother Abel is screaming from that very earth. We must care for the earth because our ancestors and martyrs are buried within it. The earth is not only their legacy to us; it is them — their bones, their blood, their illusions, their dreams, and their follies. Their cries seep through the ozone layer. Their tears fall as polluted rain. Defoliated rainforests uncover their nakedness. We cannot go anywhere without walking on their bones. We must tend to their graves.

The earth is not only ours, it is us. Chief Seattle, a Native American leader of the last century, wrote, “This we know, the earth does not belong to us; we belong to the earth.” And in time our bones will rest there too, serving as a firm platform upon which our grandchildren will walk.

That is the earth that we see from space. Chief Seattle’s earth.

In caring for our planet, we sanctify the names of those who died and affirm life for those not yet born. We do it not out of the illusory hope that the world can be as it was, for we shall never return to Eden. We do it because we have to, because it is our responsibility. No one else will do it for us. And if we succeed, if the world becomes a better place for our grandchildren, then we’ll have taken a small step toward resuscitating a measure of hope. This is the best we can hope to accomplish in the aged of scorched flesh and earth.

As we look at our planet home from on high, doesn’t it seem a little silly for us to be squabbling over a few miles of water at Hormuz to transport a black crude that completely ruins the earth-toned hues of the Artemis photo. Why are we fighting in the sandbox for a few boats of oil to get through when we already have the means to resolve our energy and climate needs through wind and solar? Why are we killing one another over prehistoric fossils when the answer is being given to us right now, directly from God?

“From a distance, there is harmony,” penned Julie Gold in the song that eventually became a Grammy winner in 1991. This song, From a Distance, echoes that most Jewish of hopes, for unity and harmony, a vision that grows in the heart of everyone who has ever recited the Four Questions. From a distance, it all makes sense. Think of the satellite photo of a hurricane, taken from space. On earth, there is no force more chaotic and destructive. When viewed from space, nothing looks more orderly and perfect than a fully formed hurricane. Order and chaos, all at the same time. From a distance it all makes sense.

Artemis reminded us of that.

This year, I’ll mark Earth Day and Yom HaShoah with sadness and grim determination. And for the first time in quite a while, a touch of hope.

Because as a Jew, a human being and a guardian of the planet, I have no other choice.

Artemis reminded us that wherever we are standing is holy ground.

And the Hungarian people, who courageously overthrew dictators three times, reminded us that today, their sacred homeland is our Holy of Holies.

Leave a comment

Share

1

Allen quote in the Times:

“Don’t look for the scary uniforms.” You’ll miss all the other signs.

When the fever-dream of hate returns to the world, they’ll look just like us, says psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, who was assigned to evaluate Nazi leaders, in particular Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe), in the excellent and timely docudrama about the Nuremberg trials, “Nuremberg,” that you can now find on Netflix.

See it. In fact, see it this week. Tuesday is Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah) and we are in midst of commemorating 80 years since a trial that, according to Rebecca West, who covered Nuremberg for the New Yorker, “was botched and imperfect” in large part because it had to deal with new crimes for which there was no provision in national law or international law.

Despite the risks, Robert Jackson, Chief Prosecutor for the United States at the trials (played with pitch-perfect humility by Michael Shannon), said, “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated.”

The following haunting interaction takes place at the end of the film, between a radio interviewer and Kelley (played by Rami Malek), who was promoting his book about the trial.

Radio Show Moderator: I have to be honest, Dr. Kelley. I find some of the conclusions in your book quite unbelievable. You were dealing with the Nazis, who you must admit are unique people.

Douglas Kelley: They are not unique people. There are people like the Nazis in every country in the world today.

Radio Show Moderator: Not in America.

Douglas Kelley: Yes, in America. Their personality patterns are not obscure. There are people who want to be in power. And while you say they don’t exist here, I would say I’m quite certain there are people in America who would willingly climb over the corpses of half the American public if they knew they could gain control of the other half.

Radio Show Moderator: Doctor, please.

Douglas Kelley: They stoke hatred. It’s what Hitler and Göring did, and it is textbook. And if you think the next time it happens we’re going to recognize it because they’re wearing scary uniforms, you’re out of your damn mind.

Kelley of course was right. But finding universal commonalities in the evils of the Nazis and what we see in our own society was not what Americans wanted to hear just after the war, as people swung into the 50’s, an era of mindless good times tinged with McCarthyist paranoia. And so the book failed and Kelley ended up taking his own life just a few years later.

Americans weren’t ready to hear that they were just like Nazis and that in fact every human being on the planet is susceptible to becoming part of a collective society of monsters. We didn’t want to hear of it, even as Jim Crow was going on. Even as lynchings were taking place regularly. Even as George Wallace blocked the school doors. We didn’t want to hear it even as actual real-live Nazis still existed among us.

But what of now? Could Nazi Germany happen in 21st century America? Could the haters Make America Über Alles Again?

Yes, prophesied Kelley.

Here’s another interaction, which turned out to be crucial for the plotline of the film, and for the trial itself:

Douglas Kelley: Let’s talk about Hitler.

Hermann Göring: It’s curious that you have not asked me this question directly before.

Douglas Kelley: I’m curious what the attraction was. There’s a failed painter, not a very good soldier, yet he was worshipped and revered.

Hermann Göring: He made us feel German again.

Douglas Kelley: How?

Hermann Göring: First of all, I had seen Germany crushed. And along comes a man who says “We can reclaim our former glory.” Would you not follow a man like this?

Douglas Kelley: Depends what else you were willing to do.

While Kelley’s original book 22 Cells in Nuremberg may have gone unnoticed at the time, you can now read it online. Here’s a key passage:

The failed painter murdered millions and his people averted their eyes. He made some economic promises and pledged to Make Germany Great Again, and that’s all they needed.

True, things were much worse for Germans in the wake of Versailles and the Great Depression than they were in America in 2016. Much worse.

So in that sense, Americans were more susceptible than Germans. But Weimar Germany didn’t have Fox News to fan the flames of hate.

I’m not equating the past fifteen months to what the Nazis did between 1933-1945, but even minus the death camps, we now have enough evidence to say that the analogy holds. Murder on the streets? Check. A school filled with little girls blown to bits without a hint of regret? Check. Concentration Camps where kids die? Yep. We’ve seen needless war. We’ve seen a war on civil rights and democracy. We’ve seen military adventurism and international extortion. We’ve even seen an attempt to shake down the pope. (Ironically, the film “Nuremberg” depicts Jackson’s attempt to strong-arm the pope for an endorsement of the trial, though it was nothing like the Mafia-like threats by the Pentagon toward the Vatican last January.)

What else do we need to see?

Douglas Kelley says of Herman Göring, “You know what sets him apart from us? Nothing.”

The only difference is that we know what happened back in Göring time. That’s why they had the Nuremberg trials in the first place. To prevent it from happening again.

We have enough of a sample size now to know that this is no longer a warning of what could be. It’s a description of what is. This is the true Trump Derangement, which has infected our society with a new variant of an old plague.

We don’t need any more Truth Social abominations about destroying a civilization. We don’t need any more proof from the Epstein files. We don’t need any more edicts aimed at keeping people of color from being honored, or employed, or serving our country, or voting, or eating lunch at school, or reaching their third birthday without contracting measles.

The sample size is large enough. Yes, Trumpists might not be Nazis. Mazal tov. But Trumpism embodies a new American strain of the same evil, a highly-mutated variant of the original disease. And this one is far more lethal than the one we fended off after 2016.

The film includes the actual footage shot at the death camps that was shown at the original trial. These are the clips they showed me in Hebrew School. We stopped doing that in Jewish education, not wanting to traumatize subsequent generations, but perhaps we’ve been too quick to whitewash the history books.

Somehow, despite this unedited footage, Nuremberg is rated PG-13. It needs to be seen.

Here’s what Kelley wrote at the end of his book. It’s not too late for us to heed his lessons.

We must never forget the lessons of Nuremberg.

Leave a comment

Still, there is something to be said for going halfway. Even UConn coach Danny Hurley said it was better to have reached the finals and lost than not to have gotten there at all. Half a redemption still matters, if it can keep us from blowing up the world.

Today we won’t achieve a full redemption. As 8 PM approaches, perhaps it’s enough to have a partial redemption, a piece of peace. Perhaps, just this once, it will be enough - Dayenu - to achieve “Peace in our time.” Perhaps half way is enough, as we aim to do what Trump has always been so good at - running out the clock. We aim to do just that, run out the clock on this most dangerous era, counting the minutes not to 8 PM, but to November 3.

And so I pray for a piece of peace.

It’s not everyday that I post every day. But it’s not everyday that my country’s president explicitly states that he intends to commit genocide - tonight…at 8:00.

Film at 11.

Timothy Snyder wrote eloquently about this unprecedented action earlier today.

Thinking about...

The president speaks genocide

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again…

Read more

10 days ago · 2412 likes · 82 comments · Timothy Snyder

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

These are not the words of Hitler, or Stalin, or Mao, or Pol Pot, or Assad, or Putin. These are the words of the president of the United States, today.

Do not be distracted by circumstances. Of course there are emotions, personalities, politics, a war. None of this excuses that sentence. The reason we have a notion of genocide, and a convention on genocide, is to define certain actions as always and definitively wrong.

Are these “only words”? No, they cannot be “only words.” As any historian of mass atrocity knows, there is no such thing as “only words.” The notion of killing a whole civilization, once spoken, remains. It enables others to say similar things, as when another elected representative compared the entire country of Iran to a cancer that had to be removed.

Whatever happens tonight, the president, by saying such things, has already changed the world for the worse, and made acts of mass violence more likely. If we are Americans, he has also changed our country. He has changed us, because he represents us; we voted for him, or we didn’t vote and allowed him to come to power, or we didn’t do enough to stop him. These words are America’s words, until and unless Americans reject them.

I just re-read JFK’s Speech About the Cuban Missile Crisis. It’s worth a read/ listen.

Such a stark contrast between JFK’s measured words and Trump’s insane rants. The situation was no less precarious then, and the stakes arguably higher, the threat to the homeland even greater. Much greater, in fact, although that could change tonight.

But the main difference was that back in the Kennedy era we could be confident that the fate of the world was still in the hands of rational actors. Such is not the case now.

Back then, the leaders of the USSR were not measuring the drapes in paradise, like the mullahs seem to be doing, and the leader of the US was not salivating about conquest next to the Easter Bunny. It’s hard to say whether Khrushchev cared at all about his people, but he was able to come to an agreement with his American counterpart, and Armageddon was averted.

If ever there were a day for prayer, this is it.

In Jewish tradition, the seventh day of Passover, which begins this evening, almost exactly an hour before Trump’s deadline - is the day when the Red Sea was crossed. That was a life-or-death moment for the newly-liberated Israelites. And for the world, echoing the words of Exodus 12, it will be a “Night of Watching.”

(יהוה is Adonai, God’s name)

The question this time is whether the Destroyer will cause a “whole civilization to die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Neither on that final night in Egypt nor in the midst of the swirling Red Sea did God’s Angel of Death wipe out an entire civilization. But that’s what Donald Trump says he intends to do.

And so, as both the Seventh Day and Zero Hour begin in just a few hours, I present a multifaith prayer for peace, a dozen prayers in one. I suggest that you read aloud the prayer from your own faith tradition and than at least one from another tradition.

I conclude with this plea for peace and security. Hashkivenu, which in the liturgy immediately follows the prayer of triumph at the Red Sea, Mi Chamocha.

Peace to you. Peace to all of us. Peace to the innocent people of Iran, the Gulf, Israel, so many of whom are sleeping in shelters tonight, America and the world.

Rabbi Joshua Hammerman

Share

Leave a comment

Some thoughts while we await, at long last, Trump’s “Infrastructure Day.” Only in typical Trump fashion, he is promising to break things, not build them. But it’s not Iran’s bridges, refineries and water plants that he will break, if he follows though on his threats, it’s the whole region’s - and beyond. As we await Trump’s next spasm of wanton destruction, take a look at what Jewish sources have to say about wanton destruction. And then read below why the Iran War is not the most important thing happening this week.

Remember how in June of 2016, Brexit’s shocking win stunned the world and presaged a successful fall for a certain disruptive, populist isolationist in America?

Well, this week, the first domino just might fall, and it might mark the beginning of the end for Trumpism.

People are rising up to defeat the axis of autocracy, and Trump, Orban and Netanyahu are groping to deal with spontaneous bursts of people power, on the streets and at the ballot box. With the unending wars, financial collapse and rampant corruption, three electoral tsunamis are forming. All three elections are crucial, and the first, Hungary, is happening right now.

Should Orbán lose, as appears quite possible, according to current polls, the first autocratic domino will fall. Netanyahu and then MAGA will be next. And they know it. The freedom-loving people of all three countries are clearing their throats and courageously daring to be heard. We know that Putin and Trump will do anything to keep that from happening, but they might be powerless to stop a popular mass movement.

And right on cue, Orbán is playing the terrorism card. Here’s how it was reported on Yahoo News on Sunday:

Opposition leader Peter Magyar accuses Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of staging a gas pipeline sabotage in Serbia to influence the upcoming elections.

Magyar calls on Orbán to provide information on the incident and convene a security council, warning against using the provocation for campaign purposes.

Investigative journalist Szabolcs Panyi suggests that the alleged sabotage looks like a staged “performance” to help Orbán avoid electoral defeat, with both Hungary and Serbia taking security measures in response.

Peter Magyar stated:

“I also want to stress that he will not succeed in disrupting next Sunday’s elections. He will not be able to prevent millions of Hungarians from putting an end to the two most corrupt decades in our country’s history. Hungarians have sufficient grounds to fear that a prime minister facing the loss of power, on the advice of Russian agents, is planning to instill fear in his fellow citizens through increasingly clumsy ‘false flag operations’. If Orbán’s propaganda machine uses this provocation for campaign purposes – that will be an open admission that this was a planned ‘false flag operation.”

Israelis and Americans should take good notes. Because Trump and Bibi certainly are. And so are democracy’s most vigilant defenders. Timothy Snyder is especially concerned1 about the ramifications of Trump’s scorched earth threats in Iran, along with the likely false flag drummed up this past weekend by Hungary.

We need to recall that just as with gerrymandered districts in the US were redrawn to give Republicans a massive advantage (Democrats have since fought back), Orban’s party Fidesz cooked the books in Hungary so that, in the 2022 elections, Fidesz secured 68 percent of the parliamentary seats in 2022 while only receiving around 53 percent of the vote. That could happen again on Sunday. The prime opposition party, Tisza, needs to secure at least 6 percent more of the vote than Fidesz in order to win. And they need to do it despite having control of most of the machinery of the election - and the media covering it and the judiciary evaluating it - in its hands.

And then there’s the polling itself, which can be deceptive. According to Eva Mulholland of the Atlantic Council, while independent polling places Tisza in a comfortable lead (about 10 percentage points), government-aligned polling shows a different story, with Fidesz up 7 percent from Tisza. She adds, “Diaspora Hungarians, who historically vote overwhelmingly for Fidesz, are not captured in domestic polls but are counted in the national vote threshold.” And to add to that, who knows what Putin has in mind for this Sunday? All we know is that if his boy loses, it could trigger a cascade of good news for Ukraine and the EU, which is bad news for him.

Right now the streets of Budapest are awash in pro-government propaganda, including this poster of Volodymyr Zelensky, with the tag line, “Let’s not let Zelensky have the last laugh.”

Yes, it’s a dog whistle. The exact same poster was plastered all over the country when I was there before a prior election, except the face was of another Jew, George Soros. I took this photo below, right on the Hungarian border with Slovakia. It was literally the first thing I saw when I entered the country.

Even the smile looks exactly the same. The Jew is laughing at us! Every trick in the book….

For those who may not be aware, THE LAUGHING JEW IS A CLASSIC ANTISEMITIC TROPE.2

Whoever calls Orban a friend of the Jews is not worth a moment of my time.

But according to Jill Dougherty, Distinguished Fellow at The Wilson Center who is in Budapest now (and her new report is well worth reading), there are zero posters of Orban! That, my friends, is telling.

So buckle up! If that first domino does fall, it will fall a long way, and the crash will resound more than any bombs in Iran. It will change the face of Europe and, like the Brexit vote in 2016, send a signal that a new world order is at hand.

But Hungarians are courageous and resilient. I saw that personally when I visited the Jewish community of Budapest in 2017.3 The people of Hungary have been taking to the streets with increasing temerity, such as last December in Budapest, when over 50,000 people walked the streets of Budapest to demand the resignation of Orban’s government. It followed the publication of videos showing staff at a Budapest juvenile correction facility physically abusing children. Orban’s main challenger, Peter Magyar, led the march.

• In addition, massive rival rallies took place just a few weeks ago.

  We all will be on the edge of our seats this weekend to see if MAGA’s darling takes a massive fall - which will only put the wind at democracy’s back heading into the fall.

  • See also: What Happens After Hungary’s Election? Four Scenarios to Watch (Center for Strategic and International Studies)

  • See also: Feels like history is being made. Will young Hungarian voters oust Orbán? (The Guardian)

  • See also: Hungary’s Turning Point (Wilson Center)

  • Read my Yom Kippur 2017 sermons - Listen to it below (that section begins at about 18:30):

  The Second Domino: Israel

  Meanwhile, while Israel’s long national nightmare is far from over, their next election will be no later than October 27, which is exactly a week before America votes on November 3. Polling is complicated there, but most recent surveys show the opposition with the only realistic path to governing. Here’s the most recent, from Friday’s Ma’ariv newspaper, which shows a surprising and unmistakable trend. Israelis, while supporting the war against Iran, have not fallen in line behind the wartime leader, as usually happens, but instead have turned on Netanyahu. A Hebrew University political science professor explains on X:

For those who don’t read Hebrew, the red is the opposition bloc, and the blue is Netanyahu’s. With a majority of the Knesset’s 120 seats (meaning 61 seats), you can form a governing coalition. According to this poll, the current government, which now has 64 mandates, would shrink to 49. The opposition parties would be right at the precipice of being able to form a coalition, even without the Arab parties, who are represented in gray, with ten seats. If the opposition parties find a way to incorporate the Arab parties into a new government - which I hope happens and would not be unprecedented - they could easily form a coalition. Below is the complete breakdown, party by party. Netanyahu’s party has 25 mandates to lead the poll, but the strongest parties shown here are all opposing him and easily outnumber Likud. He’s in a polling pickle, and he knows it. Which is why he didn’t move up elections to June when the war began. He easily could have.

The headline states, “ “The Cost of Political Opportunism and Lack of Progress: The Opposition is Getting Stronger.” And the article states: “The majority of the public believes the (just-passed) budget serves the needs of the coalition and not those of the public.”

Unless some sort of major reversal takes place, allowing for a clear win in Iran, Netanyahu is going down to defeat.

And we know where the Republican Party is headed this fall. In a free and fair election, the House is gone and the Senate is in play. The world could look very different this coming winter.

But that partly depends on what happens this coming week.

People Power

What the three elections have in common is that they’ve been preceded by a massive show of grass-roots potency that took shape on the streets. In Israel, before the massacres of October 7, 2023, People Power was deployed at weekly, mass demonstrations to oppose reforms of the judicial system that would have effectively ended democracy in Israel. The mass movement then adapted to embrace the cause of the hostages held in Gaza and to support displaced Israelis in the north and south. And now, even though the population has spent so much time in protective shelters, those grass-roots sentiments remain, along with the threats. Once the missiles stop flying, the campaign will begin in earnest and the streets will again be filled with protesting Israelis.

Which is why Netanyahu wants to keep the wars going.

The Third Domino: America

We can recall this statement by Trump before the 2024 election. Was he talking to Americans? Or Hungarians? Or any of Putin’s other protectorates?

Here in America, if anything, polling places Trump in worse shape than either Orban or Netanyahu. And the movement to the streets has been massive. I had the pleasure of seeing that first-hand when I spoke at the local No Kings rally on March 28. National estimates indicate that it was the largest mass protest in US history, with over 8 million taking to the streets.

If you thought nail-biting time begins in the fall, think again. This Sunday will give us huge clues as to how the rest of the year will go.

Like the proverbial Maine of yore, so goes Hungary, so goes the world.

Share

Leave a comment

1

This from Timothy Snyder on X on Sunday. See point #10 in the thread.

2

Laughing Jew Trope, from the American Jewish Committee

3

Here’s what I wrote about the Jewish community of Budapest in a sermon delivered upon my return:

One of the real highlights of our trip last summer was our encounter with the Jewish community of Budapest. We joined the Frankel Synagogue, one of the city’s most active congregations for a Friday night service, and before that, we spent about a half hour conversing with the rabbi and his wife, an author and educator. The congregation comes from a branch of Judaism unique to central Europe – called Neolog. It’s sort of a fruit salad of Orthodoxy and Conservative. For example: there is separate seating, but the women get the better seats.

We came away from the conversation amazed at the vibrancy of the community – and we came away equally concerned for its future.

Before the Shoah, this was a thriving community - nearly a quarter of Budapest’s population was Jewish. But during the war, of the more than 800,000 Jews living in Hungary, nearly 620,000 died or were deported. In Budapest, Jews had a somewhat better chance of survival at first, until the notorious Arrow Cross – those rabid Hungarian nationalists who tried to out-Nazi the Nazis, took over, herded Jews into the ghetto beginning in December 1944, took as many as 20,000 out to the banks of the Danube, shot them and threw their bodies into the river. We saw the memorial that has been set up right by the riverbank, a sculpture depicting the shoes that were left behind. It’s incredibly moving, but equally problematic, because the memorial does not specify that the victims were Jewish.

The current Jewish population is about 100,000, they think – and that number is based on those who have received reparations for the Holocaust. But no one really knows, because the vast majority of Jews are afraid to be identified. They remain in the closet - literally, sometimes, because many still remember that proverbial knock on the door. While physical attacks are rare, anti-Semitism is plainly practiced by the extreme right-wing government and is embedded in the culture. I wrote about the anti-Semitic poster campaign that popped up all over the country when we were there. Vandalism of Jewish gravestones and synagogues is commonplace. I asked the rabbi whether he wears a kippah in public, and he said no. Most Jewish children encounter anti-Semitism in school from a young age. The word “Jewish” is often used as a curse word in the vernacular.

And then, to add to anti-Semitism, there is Jewish illiteracy. After the Nazis were defeated, the country was “liberated” into nearly half a century of communist rule, where anyone living an openly Jewish lifestyle was subject to ridicule and discrimination. After the horrors of Auschwitz, most Hungarian Jews had little place for God in their lives anyway, so while the practice of Judaism wasn’t expressly forbidden, it was for all intents and purposes forgotten.

Yet despite all this, what we saw this summer was remarkable: Jewish life is rising in Budapest like a phoenix from the ashes. Despite impossible odds.

There is thriving summer camp called Szarvas near Budapest, which serves Jewish communities all over Europe. Many campers recall being dropped off and asking their parents why they were being sent to a Jewish camp. At that point, the parents would tell them, while driving off, “By the way, you’re Jewish.”

The Shabbat service at the Frankel synagogue was one of our most cherished moments on the trip. There were a number of young families with kids there – well over a hundred people. The rabbi mentioned that very few Jewish groups visit them, so they were curious to meet their guests from America. I felt really good that we were there, as most Jewish heritage tours of Eastern Europe only visit the dead. We were determined to visit living Jewish communities too. It was another tearful moment. We were there to tell the Jews of Budapest that they are not alone. Like Evan Hansen’s tree in the forest, they had been found. And like those legendary gingko trees that somehow withstood the nuclear attack on Hiroshima, the Jews of Hungary have survived.

And at the end of the service, we did the kiddish and ha-motzi all together, because, we were told, very few of the congregants know how to do Shabbat at home. And there is often no grandparent to ask, because Bubbe and Zayde were murdered by the Nazis or Iron Cross. If this congregation read from a yahrzeit list before the mourner’s kaddish, as we do, the list would have 1,000 names on it every week.

But even more to the point, they don’t do the rituals at home because so many are afraid to. Their Jewish lives are confined to their synagogue, a building so heavily barricaded that you almost expected Jean Valjean to make an appearance there too. The building is not visible from the street.

It is impossible for us to appreciate what they have had to overcome in order to rebuild their Jewish community. It is something that we all take for granted. We need to think about it the next time we are tempted to toss off our priceless Jewish heritage like Grandma Sophie’s closetful of plastic bags from Fairway. I know I’m preaching to the choir. You are here. But please send this sermon around to the 53 percent of American Jews who no longer observe Yom Kippur. Not as a guilt trip. But as a reminder of how fragile is our precious legacy... OK, maybe a bit of a guilt trip too.

The Hiroshima ginkgo are called survivor trees – and how did they manage to overcome the fallout of a nuclear blast? It’s because they have very deep roots. Our roots are unnaturally deep as well. Any other people would have given up after the Shoah. But we saw in Budapest that the Hungarian Jews have not.

These Jews have chosen life. They have chosen to see “Am Yisrael Chai” not as a song, but as a summons. That is the call of the Torah of Auschwitz – Choose life, collectively, because survival IS victory.

In the midst of the wars in Iran and Lebanon and with Passover fast approaching, the Israeli government last week quietly cemented its legacy as the most destructive, corrupt, racist and un-Jewish in the nation’s history. It passed a budget that amounted to an enormous extortion payoff for the ultra Orthodox, and it passed a new capital punishment law1 that has enraged human rights advocates all over the world, including many in the Jewish diaspora2, along with many in Israel3.

But for the law’s champions it was cause for celebration and clinking glasses of champagne, even as rockets continued to drive their harried constituents into bomb shelters. “We’ve made history today,” exclaimed Itamar Ben Gvir with glee as he poured glasses of bubbly. “Death to terrorists!”

In Israel’s history, despite countless atrocities committed against its people, and some, unfortunately, also by its people4, only Adolf Eichmann and one other have received the death penalty.5 The reasons for that go way back to Judaism’s biblical and rabbinic heritage, as I’ll explain below.

Meanwhile, here is an explainer of the new law, from the Jewish Virtual Library (which, notably, while well-researched and comprehensive, often has a pro-government slant).6

And just in case you are thinking this new law can’t possibly be as bad as it seems, here’s the headline of the Times of Israel.

“…measure mandates hanging and bars right to appeal.” In laymen’s terms, that’s a rush to judgment, show trials, no appeal, no High Court review and ya gotta hang ‘em.

And this passed? In an election year? Are they serious? Stalin would be proud. For the rest of us, it’s not good noose and some of Israel’s staunchest defenders have admitted that.

The American Jewish Committee called the bill “troubling” and called out the “glorification of death” as exemplified by the noose pins being worn by Ben Gvir and his cronies, as “morally repugnant and fundamentally at odds with Jewish and Israeli values.” Even right-wing pundit Seth Mandel in Commentary, who tried to explain the law as “performative,” intending to discourage lopsided, mass prisoner swaps, couldn’t bring himself to fully justify it. 7

AIPAC? Far as I can tell, crickets. If they could defend it, they would. But even they can’t.

Here’s what they can’t say, but I’ll say it plainly: The bill is shameful.

Jewish law opposes capital punishment in practice while keeping it on the books

So here is the Jewish story with regard to the death penalty. What’s been on the books legally has been primarily off the books historically.

The Torah mandates the death penalty for 36 offenses, ranging from murder to kidnapping, adultery to incest, certain forms of rape, idolatrous worship and public incitement to apostasy, from disrespecting parents to desecrating the Sabbath. But the rabbinic sages effectively abolished the death penalty in practice centuries later.

The sages understood that while most convicted murderers may indeed be guilty, if only one innocent person is hanged by the state, all citizens of that state are guilty of murder. We can quibble about God’s role in the tenth plague, but there is no denying that Judaism is sending a clear message about human fallibility. If we kill someone innocent, someone created in the divine image, we’ve committed the ultimate crime. And human judges, precisely because they are not God, will make mistakes.

Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5 stresses the importance of presenting completely accurate testimony in capital cases, for any mistakes or falsehoods could result in the shedding of innocent blood. If any perjury were to cause an execution, “the blood of the accused and his unborn offspring stain the perjurer forever.”

In Talmudic times, capital cases required a 23-judge court, while only three judges sat for non-capital cases. Two or more eyewitnesses were required to testify to the defendant’s guilt, and their hands would, “be the first against him to put him to death” (Deuteronomy 17:6-7). In a capital case, a one-vote majority could acquit a defendant, but could not convict. Furthermore, if there was a mere one-vote majority or if any judge was undecided, additional judges were added in pairs until the majority ruled against conviction, or until one judge in favor of conviction was persuaded to err on the side of innocence (Mishnah Sanhedrin 5:5). A Jewish court that authorized the execution of one person in 70 years, Rabbi Elazar ben Azarya said, would be considered a "murderous" court, the equivalent of what we would call a “hanging judge.”

In practice, the death penalty became almost impossible to implement, though over the centuries there has been a diversity of opinion on the matter. Maimonides claims that murderers should not be executed if there was a question about how the trial was conducted. But if the trial was conducted properly there is no restriction even if it means that one thousand murderers are executed in a single day. The 20th century sage Rabbi Moshe Feinstein counters that the purpose of assigning the death penalty to so many crimes in the Torah is to educate people about the severity of the offenses, rather than to end the lives of the offenders.

Jewish law places the preservation of innocent life over almost everything else. Even were capital punishment proven to deter potential murderers – and that is not the case – the prospect of potentially saving a life in the future is superseded by the very real possibility that an innocent life, that of the wrongly accused prisoner, might be taken now.

In Israel, with few exceptions, only those convicted of crimes against humanity have been executed. In other words, Eichmann.

The un-banality of blood thirst

Hannah Arendt felt that the evil of totalitarianism could be traced not to maliciousness but to the dulling of the mind to policies that seem so ordinary and bureaucratic, leading to a virtual mental enslavement, the inability to think critically in the face of “orders.” She called it, “the banality of evil.”8 That may be true in the abstract but when I watch the champagne toasts of Ben Gvir and hear the taunting and trolling done by Trump9 (including his most-unhinged Easter morning rant) it is hard for me to believe that there isn’t a degree of maliciousness involved in their morbidity. As Rabbi Benny Lau of Jerusalem told the New York Times regarding the death penalty bill, “It’s clear that this is all about revenge. It’s a circus of violence pretending to be about security.”

Can blood thirst be banal? It is not banal to salivate over the lynching of your enemies. It wasn’t banal when done to Israelis on October 7 and it’s not unthinking now, to hang people “one by one” as Ben Gvir promises, and to murder Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis and clap in celebration. I must add, blood lust is NOT American and it is NOT Jewish. It is the antithesis of both (and the it perpetuates antisemitic tropes.

But Israel’s new law and ICE’s new policies also arendt banal, Hannah.

It’s simply evil to make murder, which is bad enough, into a public spectacle, to prefer your guillotines with a side of glee.

It’s just like this classic photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend.

The dead man is dangling in the back.

Adam Serwer wrote that it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stuck with him when he viewed this photo. “It’s the faces of some people in the crowd.”

Is it banality or blood thirst to turn carnage into carnival?

Journalist Joshua Leifer wrote:

"Death to terrorists" has long been a slogan of Israel's far-right, a chant at Itamar Ben-Gvir and his Otzma Yehudit party's rallies, where the yellow flag emblazoned with a black fist and Jewish star – the banner of the banned Kach movement – billowed over seething crowds. For years, it was more a populist provocation than a serious legislative proposal, wielded by the Kahanist fringe to foment anti-Arab hatred and incite public anger, often in the wake of terrorist attacks.

So here’s what’s happened. A movement that was banned from the Knesset decades ago has now shepherded through that very same Knesset its most racist, hate-inciting, discriminatory law ever. It is Kahane’s crowning achievement, delivered by his apostles of anger, while the people were too exhausted and stymied by war and Iranian missiles to take to the streets.

That is how autocracy happens. War wears us down, and then the fascists pounce.

There was just a little too much glee going on in the halls of the Knesset when this law passed. A few days later, Israel’s most popular satire program ran a segment where interviewers asked people on the street how and where they would like public executions to take place. (Can the lynchings occur on Shabbat? Should the final meal be the ever-popular Hummus Achla?) It was hilarious, because everyone bought into how absurd it is - and how un-Jewish it all feels. I needed a break from the stress of war and Passover preparations. So I laughed. Public execution is simply not what Jews do - at least it’s not what Jews did.

A carnival of carnage at the auto-da-fé

But we know quite well how they’ve been done to us. We’ve seen so many over the centuries.

I recalled traveling to Spain several years ago, where I saw places where hundreds of crypto-Jews, or Marranos – swine – as the Spanish called them, were burned at the stake. I had a wonderful, most civilized spread of tapas at the beautiful Plaza Mayor in Madrid’s historic center - hundreds of tables lining a grand arcaded courtyard – and all I could think about (aside from the gorgeous weather and reminding the waiter, “No ham!”) was what took place in that exact spot three centuries before in 1680, on the exact same date that we were there, June 30. The Spanish decided to celebrate the marriage of the young Carlos the Second with Marie Louise d’Orleans and what better way to do that than with a typically grandiose auto-de-fe. Dozens were executed that night. Those who refused to confess their sin of maintaining a secret Jewish identity were burned alive at the stake. The ones who confessed were the lucky ones. They were granted pardon; then, as a special favor they were killed first with a lance through the heart before their bodies were burned at the stake.

And I sat there sipping my sangria (not thinking about the fact that the word sangria means blood) feeling great to be on vacation with my family - but just a little bit uneasy about it all.

Jews have long had secret identities, and the conversos were legendary for holding on to them for generations. There are only 50,000 Jews remaining in Spain. But there are hundreds of thousands of Jewish ghosts.

Over fifty years ago on Face the Nation, Golda Meir uttered what might have been her most famous quote: "We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. But we cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children."

That statement rings true on so many levels then, and now one more. The hatred generated by terrorists has been the prime catalyst in the conversion of some Jews from the moral foundations of Judaism into a cult that I do not recognize, but one that is decidedly NOT Judaism.

There is still time to reverse this conversion, in Kahanist Israel and Trumpian America too, and we can begin by reversing this law.

And then we can begin to root out this evil completely, this fall at the voting booth.

Leave a comment

Share

1

News coverage from Ha’aretz and NYT:

2

From Ha’aretz:

The Rabbinical Assembly (Conservative movement) statement includes this:

And yet, while Jewish law is ambivalent about capital punishment, it is not ambivalent about the centrality of a rigorous justice system. The law passed by the Knesset seeks to compel any court to impose capital punishment even against the court’s own judgment, and to do so speedily — prioritizing deterrence over due process.

Perhaps most egregiously, the law applies only to those who by definition are not represented by Israel: non-citizens and non-residents. While terror is truly a plague upon all Israelis, this law, which purports to fight terror, does so in a way that completely uproots justice.

3

Criticism in Israel and beyond, from Jewish Virtual Library:

I am so honored to be here. I felt it was my obligation to be here, as a rabbi, even though it is the Jewish Sabbath. In the wake of recent hate-based attacks, especially on people of faith in their places of worship, there has never been a greater need to come together,

We must pool our spiritual resources, now more than ever, to reclaim the moral high ground that has for too long been given over to those who wear masks of piety to cover up their corruption, their greed, and their hatred of the stranger in our midst.

The upcoming days are a time of sacred celebration for so many of us:

For Christians, it’s Holy Week, a time of rebirth.

For Jews it’s Passover, the time of liberation.

For Muslims, Ramadan has just ended.

And for the White House, it’s April Fool’s Day.

Share

Leave a comment

They love to play us for fools, to fool us once, fool us twice, fool us every day.

That’s especially true when they clothe themselves in false piety.

Yes, this regime uses religion in the most, shall I say, godawful ways.

They use religion to divide and torture.

We use religion to unite and nurture.

They use religion to stoke fear and resentment

We use religion to teach coexistence and contentment.

They use religion to incarcerate children

We use religion to embrace the stranger

They use religion to turn mass carnage into a video game

We use it to proclaim that all human beings are created in God’s image.

They quote chapter and verse to justify their inhumanity.

We quote the Bible to affirm our resolve.

My favorite right now is Psalm 109 verse 81

יִֽהְיוּ־יָמָ֥יו מְעַטִּ֑ים פְּ֝קֻדָּת֗וֹ יִקַּ֥ח אַחֵֽר׃

May his days in office be few;

may another take over his position.

Something remarkable is occurring right now. Religion is making a comeback.

Not the fake religion that justifies oppression, abuse and discrimination, but real religion,

the kind that tells truth to power,

the kind that disdains corruption,

the kind that provides comfort when your life has fallen apart,

that brings communities together to defend the weakest and most vulnerable,

that picks up a neighbor’s kids and takes them to school because the parents fear they will be arrested if they leave the house.

We are seeing a religious revival, one keyed by values of compassion and courage.

Of kindness and honesty.

Of trust and truth.

While Trump is driving the world off a cliff, we are rediscovering our moral compass.

This is an American Reawakening

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “Indifference to evil is worse than evil itself…in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.”

We are all responsible to stop those who have killed and deported and lied and stolen and desecrated our moral foundation and trampled upon our Constitution. Nothing matters more right now than that we stop this evil.

We cannot be distracted by all the things that could potentially divide us.

We must be united!

And I have news for the man in Mar-a-Lago who calls himself God’s chosen:

GOD BEGS TO DIFFER.

God does not believe that might makes right.

God is not steering us into an apocalypse.

God did not choose you, Donald.

In the words of one coexistence advocate:

“May the convergence of Passover, Easter, and Ramadan remind us that we really do belong to each other, that our diversity is part of what makes us, us. That there is room at the table for us all.”

On D-Day in June of 1944, President Roosevelt went on the radio and recited a prayer to steady the resolve of the American people. FDR’s words apply almost perfectly to our current existential moment:

He said:

With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogancies. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister Nations, into a world unity that will spell a sure peace, a peace invulnerable to the scheming of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all (humanity) live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.

AMEN.

That is my prayer for America!

Now, I want to conclude by teaching you the Hebrew words for a very special passage from Psalm 133, words that imagine the true harmony that our faith traditions envision. “How good and pleasant it can be, when all God’s children dwell together as one.“

Hinay Mah Tov U’Mah Na’im Shevet Achim Gam Yachad.

PHOTOS FROM THE EVENT

1

Psalm 109 is filled with fitting quotes! Real zingers, straight from God to DJT.

Such was not the case during the Cuban Missile Crisis or even World War Two. During the Cold War, we assumed that even the Soviets understood the dangers of mutually assured destruction. President Kennedy, to my knowledge, never stared bare eyed up into the sun during an eclipse.

But last weekend, I had reason to fear that all the relevant governments were on board to set the whole world aflame, and that it didn’t matter what risks they took because God was on their side. That’s because all three of the principal governments in this war are controlled by religious crazies, all of whom act with few scruples, have little regard for telling the truth and even less for preserving innocent human lives.

If you are as concerned about the takeover of religion by our idolatrous, extremist, immoral, messiah-wannabees, and want to demonstrate that sacred texts belong to blue-staters too, here’s a sign for you to carry at “No Kings” rallies this weekend:

Here’s a quick disclaimer: I added the words “in office” to the literal translation. While I have no idea what the psalmist wanted for his enemy, I’m assuming that when he said, “May his days be few,” he was referring to his days in office, and the assertion was not health related. But you can never be too careful about being misinterpreted these days.

Here’s a pdf for you to download, for your convenience.

Psalm 108 9a

321KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

• Let me take this opportunity to remind you to attend a No Kings rally near you. There are 3,000 scheduled and it is so important to show up to protest peacefully, as we both celebrate democracy and strive to sustain it. I believe it is mitzvah to attend, even on Shabbat. And I will be at my local rally - and am honored to be speaking.

You know how we always see those biblical signs situated behind home plate or the goal posts for maximal exposure? Usually they say “John 3:16” or some such. If you look up that verse, which the sign holder wants you to do, you’ll find that the Gospel is saying, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

Cool. Evangelists gotta evangelize, and evangelism doesn’t offend me unless it’s stuffed down my throat… even though John 3:16 is a Tim Tebow thing, which makes me a little queasy (long story)1. But otherwise, I can tolerate signs that are moderately disrespectful of my positions. God bless the first amendment, which both protects proselytizing and levels the playing field in the marketplace of religions. And hey, on the scale of annoying religious intrusions, I’m sure it’s not easy for non-Jews to tolerate three aisles of matzah products at the supermarket this week. Live and let live.

But two can play at the sign game. I know my Bible every bit as much as Pete Hegseth does - maybe a little less for the “New” part, but more for the “Old.2” And I know my Book of Psalms.

So I found the perfect verse for No Kings rallies. Psalm 109:8

May his days (in office) be few;
may another take over his position.

Tattoo this, Pete Hegseth!

Verse 11 of the same psalm works too:

May his creditor seize all his possessions;
may strangers plunder his wealth.

How about verse 17?

He loved to curse—may a curse come upon him!
He would not bless—may blessing be far from him!

Or verses 15 and 16:

May GOD be aware of his family always
and cause their names to be cut off from the earth,

because he was not minded to act kindly,
and hounded to death the poor and needy man,
one crushed in spirit.

And the ever-popular verse 7:

may he be tried and convicted;
may he be judged and found guilty.

I’m telling you, Psalm 109 is the Golden Ballroom of Psalms. But verse 8 is the absolute best.

So I think it would be cool for people to show the spiritual power of a Blu-ish Bible if some carry signs at “No Kings” that say “Psalms 109:8.”

A Religious War

This current Iran war is at its core a religious war, but it’s not a battle of “my God vs. your God.” It’s a war to SAVE God - to save Judaism, Christianity and Islam from the captivity of extremist messianists controlling Iran, Israel and the US.

And this is a war we must win.

Now I’m not some moral relativist saying that Iran’s crimes are on the same level as those committed by the governments at war against it. The blood on the mullahs’ hands - just including the tens of thousands of its own people it has butchered in 2026 alone - guarantees that regime a unique place in hell. There is every reason to want them seriously weakened or replaced.

But make no mistake, all three countries, Iran, the US and Israel, are being controlled by religious extremists right now, some of whom also happen to be psychologically unstable, and who do not in any manner represent the majority of their populations. All three countries have leaders that seem hellbent on bringing us all to the edge of a global apocalypse - in no small part for their own selfish political purposes - and they seem to be relishing that thought. We are not safe right now, and the defcon 1 bluster of this past weekend, the open threats and counterthreats to commit war crimes against mass civilian populations that could blow the world economy to bits, demonstrated that once again.

I do not trust any of these leaders for a minute3 and I see it as my purpose in life right now to help change that, now, while such change is still possible. The way to save the world right now is to save religion from its most virulent, messianic strains, as embodied in these governments.

We see religious extremism in the Christian nationalist rhetoric of Pete Hegseth that is now filtering down to the marching orders delivered to US troops. He is heavily influenced by imagery from the Crusades, which can be seen on two of his tattoos, the Jerusalem Cross and the phrase “Deus Vult,” or “God wills it,” which Hegseth has called “the rallying cry of Christian knights as they marched to Jerusalem.”

It should be noted that, aside from liberating Jerusalem from Muslim rule, the Crusaders’ major goal was the elimination of the Jewish people, through death or forced conversion. At least 4,000 were killed in the Rhineland in 1096 alone, and many others along the way, including Jerusalem, where, on July 15, 1099, the Crusaders drove all the Jews into one of the synagogues and there burned them alive.

Nice tattoo, Heggy!

Hegseth’s inky homage to the Crusades is abhorrent for Jews. It would be like a government official wearing a KKK tattoo or doing a sieg heil salute at an inauguration rally and doubling down on it. I would love to see Peter Doocy ask Hegseth about his offensive tattoos at his next press availability, before he starts yelling at the reporters like a Himmler with hemorrhoids.

The point is, Hegseth’s White Nationalist Christianity is extremist, messianic and dangerous. And, for the vast majority of Christian believers in this country and world - including James Talarico, who is sending that message loud and clear in his campaign for the Senate - it is not reflective of Christianity. Which is why the far right is terrified of Talarico, and why I see his candidacy as potentially a game changer for religion in America.

Neither is the extreme form of Shiite Islam of the Iranian mullahs considered mainstream by most Muslims, or even many Shiite Iranians. Reports indicate that a 2023 speech to students by high-ranking cleric Mohammad Abolghassem Doulabi stated that two-thirds of that nation’s mosques — 50,000 out of 75,000 — have been closed due to declining worship attendance. Iranian youth are turned off by the religion of their parents. A far more moderate Islam is just waiting to emerge in Iran. Time will tell whether the past month has helped get us there.

Meanwhile, the Israeli government has done its best, even as the missiles have been falling this week, to promote the agendas of the Ultra-Orthodox and extremist Jewish nationalist components4 of the coalition, furthering army exemption for Yeshiva students and the intimidation of West Bank Palestinians. The majority of Israelis do not like it and hopefully by the fall they will change their leadership.

So the most significant war going on right now is a war to defeat religious extremism, in Iran, to be sure, but also a concurrent struggle in the US and in Israel. In many ways, it’s all one war. We need to defeat extremist religion everywhere.

And how do we do that?

By not backing down. By not allowing the extremists to incorporate religious symbols and sacred texts. By promoting values of kindness and love. By turning up at No Kings rallies to fight for a better America. By showing that God belongs to everyone.

You may have noticed that this has become for me something of a…Crusade. Yes, I even use the “C” word, without the tattoos.

And I use the “P” word too - “P” as in Psalms.

May his days (in office) be few! And may another take over his position.

Share

Leave a comment

• See The Secret Jewish History Of Rosie The Riveter (Forward)

The world is about to change, thanks to heroes like Epstein victim Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who should not be defined solely by her victimhood, and who wrote this in her memoir before her mysterious and tragic death:

“When you grow up female, danger is everywhere….”

“But just because justice has been served in a handful of high-profile cases doesn’t mean we’ve solved the larger problem: a culture that tells girls their primary worth is to appeal to men; a culture that tells men that young girls are the ideal—the younger, as Epstein said, the better. I’m not saying those cultural trends cause most men to become child molesters. But I do believe that because of those societal forces, when a molester shows his face, many people tend to look the other way.”
― Virginia Roberts Giuffre, Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice

While the world is on fire all around us, we can’t forget that so many of the catastrophic events we are confronting were designed and timed primarily to overshadow the Epstein files. Donald Trump literally broke the world to keep us from finding out the truth behind the shameful history of all the President’s men. It’s not working, but at the same time, we haven’t yet had the chance to fully absorb Epstein’s impact on our society, and Trump’s full involvement in this story. Still, even at this early stage, the Epstein saga has reignited the #MeToo movement and with each new revelation from the files and witnesses, our anger will only intensify over the coming months. With each passing day, countless independent journalists and amateur sleuths are crowdsourcing the millions of pages of files and coming up with more vivid descriptions of the disgusting patriarchy that Epstein exemplified.

The Epstein files are revealing the depths of a depraved system that has repeatedly failed to protect women and girls. Women who did speak out were not heard; instead their voices were suppressed. To quote The Guardian:

The Epstein files reveal a patriarchy in action. This is a world where the men are rich and powerful, and the women are not. The emails showcase the private behavior of a male ruling class, as they network, joke and trade information. Women exist at the periphery, tolerated because they organize the diaries of the busy men, they arrange food, they grace a table, they provide sex.1

I believe that when all the testimony is revealed and absorbed, the disruption will be monumental, and, if we can get beyond the initial period of grief and shock, ultimately positive.

A Seismic Shift

We are on the cusp of a seismic societal shift with regards to women in America. And when we look back at this second Trump presidency, with all the destruction he has wrought, the Epstein saga will have the greatest long-term impact.2

Sunday March 8 was International Women’s Day, commemorating a New York uprising of women wanting to unionize in 1908, and the later a women’s strike that sparked the Russian Revolution in 1917.

When I would ask my mother of blessed memory what she wanted for Mother’s Day, she would reply with a smirk, “Every day should be Mother’s Day.” And indeed, Women’s Day didn’t end on the 8th. All of March is Women’s History Month, and this year that month leaves us off on the doorstep of Passover, which begins on April 1. So before Women’s History Month ends next week, it makes sense to take a closer look at the historic significance of this Epstein Moment.

It’s fitting that it leads into Passover. For at no time have Jewish women traditionally felt more enslaved than in preparing for a holiday that demands so much work with so little appreciation.3

I recall my own mother, Miriam, who was from the transitional generation following the Great Immigration, born here in America to refugees from Czarist Russia. She had the honor of being liberated, but in a very liberated, Betty Crocker kind of way, by the dishwasher and the vacuum cleaner; plus she feared the judgment of her mother-in-law, who was one tough unleavened cookie, and who, fortunately, did not live close by. But as hard as she worked to clean and cook for weeks on end - and yes, we even had a carp in the bathtub as she prepared her gefilte fish from scratch. I helped, and took great pleasure in seeing the ingredients hit the chicken soup pot, including the neck, claws and pupik. No wonder I became a vegetarian!

And then came the baked goods. The cakes and cookies were, well, suitable for Passover consumption, but her Passover rolls were divine. Yes, I said rolls. They were “risen” but still unleavened because they were made with matzah meal instead of flour, along with plenty of egg. Eggs are the unofficial food of Passover, aside from matzah. And yes, there’s even egg matzah.

My mother would slave over the stove and then, with my sister, would serve the men and guests at the Seder table, even walking around with the basin for us to ritually wash our hands. She rarely complained about that, though I didn’t get the impression she enjoyed all the thankless, hard work. It’s just what a woman did.

Ironically, no biblical story celebrates the contributions of so many badass women as the liberation from Egypt, from Miriam, Moses’ sister, to Jocheved, his mother, to the Egyptian (or Hebrew) midwives, to Pharaoh’s daughter, to all the women who danced with their timbrels at the Red Sea. This all changed with the advent of feminism, which brought us Women’s Seders4, Miriam’s Cup5, which has become ubiquitous, and the marvelous music of Debbie Friedman, who sang of women dancing at the Red Sea.

So as Women’s History Month draws to a conclusion by leading us into Passover, let’s take a moment to look at where women stand in 2026, this Year of Epstein.

The Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security describes a Trump-led global backlash against women’s rights and gender equality. The Trump Administration’s gutting of USAID has been particularly harmful to women and families, and women have been disproportionately impacted by Trump’s immigration and trade policies too.6

And then there’s the decline of women in leadership positions.

According to Pew, at this moment there are 13 female heads of state in the world - it was 23 a decade ago. The current number includes Japan, where Sanae Takaichi became prime minister in the country’s last parliamentary elections and was summarily insulted by Donald Trump on her first state visit to the U.S. last week, with his idiotic locker-room Pearl Harbor joke, which was almost as insulting to the families of vets who died there as it was to the Japanese. At least Trump didn’t bring up Hiroshima, or the WW2-era mass incarceration of Americans of Japanese descent.

We can add to that lucky 13 the dozens of other nations that have had female leaders in the recent past, including such bastions of feminism as Mozambique and Bulgaria. The first was Sri Lanka, in 1960. In all, of the 193 United Nations members, 63 have ever had a female leader. The club of nations who have been led by women is surprisingly large. There have even been a handful of female dictators. But America is still looking on from the outside, and given recent history, it’s hard to imagine that changing any time soon.

America’s lack of a female president, sadly, can be blamed on the two R’s, Russia and religion.

For Russia, you’ll have to look back at the legacy of the report filed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who passed away this weekend. Mueller showed conclusively that the Russians were instrumental in denying America its first female president. Don’t let Trump’s Big Lies about Mueller, or his despicable tweet following his death, distract you from the facts that Mueller uncovered.

Mueller Report Fact Sheet

359KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Adam’s Better Half

As for religion, well, like so many of the world’s other social ills (like racism) the institutionalization of sexism can be traced back to Genesis:

Interestingly, Genesis 1:27 indicates that male and female were created simultaneously, perhaps even androgynously, which would have made it very hard for them to use a bathroom in a number of states. Commentators have tried to reconcile this depiction with a second version of the story in Genesis 2, where Eve is created out of Adam’s side (“rib” is a mistranslation), which again could have indicated an androgynous origin, or perhaps the world’s first conjoined twins.7 But in this account Eve goes on to take a role of subservience to Adam (Gen. 3:16) as her punishment for that little fruit-eating, snake-inspired caper.

That still leaves us with the woman from chapter 1, who disappears mysteriously but never is relegated to a submissive position. Folklore has ascribed to her the name of Lilith, and ancient sources are replete with stories about her.

• See a large collection of sources here8 and see Judith Plaskow’s modern midrash based on the ancient formulations, The Coming of Lilith.

Our ancestors were both fascinated and scared to death over the prospect of a powerful, independent she-creature. In order to protect their newborns from being absconded by this cold-hearted demon, Jews buried magical bowls with Aramaic incantations in front of their homes.

So as soon as there was a woman, there was a demonized woman. Unlike other strong women who followed, from Hagar to Hillary, Lilith’s demonization was quite literal — she was turned into an evil spirit — and that demonization set a precedent for insecure baskets of testosterone like me to replicate until the end of time.

The long, slogging process of achieving equal status for women has been, in many respects, a process of Eve-tizing Lilith in the eyes of males; that is, domesticating Lilith by transforming her from demon to help-mate, while simultaneously transforming Eve from Betty Crocker into a post-feminist apron burner, unabashedly equal, with no more glass ceilings to shatter or even any idea that such ceilings ever existed. That transformation is not yet complete, but with #MeToo, the near misses of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris and the possibilities of positive change when the Epstein dust finally settles - including a massive electoral rejection of the Old Boy culture that Trump has brought us - we might find ourselves right back at the place where God and original couple were at twilight of the Sixth Day.

At that instant, the apex of the Creation saga, the perfect balance between male and female was forged: male and female, distinct, powerful, and utterly equal. But before you could say “Shabbat shalom,” the balance was shattered and God called for a fateful cosmic do-over. It’s as if God couldn’t contemplate the implications of what God had wrought. Humanity’s first cold night produced divinity’s first cold feet, as God backtracked away from the unimaginably harmonious world that was about to be born.

God was about to forge this perfect male-female balance, and then rigged the system so Lilith would lose. Yes, God rigged it, not the Russians or Venezuelans. The glass ceiling was installed, and what was shattered was not that ceiling, but the harmony between man and woman and the unity between Adam’s two better halves, Lilith and Eve.

If the polls are to be believed, Lilith, Eve and Adam might just be coming closer to a new merger. In the coming midterms, America may once again take up the cause of empowering women, not by accident or by revolution, but by design. Not by might, not by power, but by the power of the vote.

Israel’s Retreat from Progress

Compared to Israel, America’s long been stuck in the Neanderthal age. But Israel is showing signs of heading back there.

Just to refresh our memory, let’s peruse some old posters from the pre-state period , as well as the early days of the state.

Not a single Suzie Homemaker is to be found. In iconic posters, especially those produced by the Shamir brothers, we find strong women with clenched fists, who weren’t just keeping the seat warm for males, like America’s Rosie the Riveter, they were literally parachuting in with the big boys - cue Hannah Senesh.

There is something to be said for Israel’s socialist origins. See this poster, where a couple who could pass for Adam and Lilith, awash in their worker’s utopia, proclaims, “How beautiful it is that we are a free people.”

Here’s a young Golda Meir, then still called Myerson, in a mayoral race, at around the same time that, in America, June Cleaver was bringing Ward his slippers and serving Brussel sprouts to the ‘Beve.

Look at the posters above and you’ll see a proud pioneer, a worker, an army recruiter, a Warsaw Ghetto fighter. None of them could have made the secretarial pool on Mad Men. While Americans were watching “And God Created Woman” and dreaming of Brigitte Bardot, and while Rat Pack dudes fondled and were objectifying their dames, Israel was enlisting and electing theirs.

Now I have no illusions of Israel’s ever having been an ideal society for women. Far from it. One could justifiably claim that America recently has lapped Israel many times over in the area of women’s rights, especially in the practice of Judaism.

And of late, Israel is going in the wrong direction.

A few years ago, when a new Israel government was sworn in (don’t ask me which, there have been a lot of them!), one Ultra-Orthodox newspaper tried to airbrush women out of the picture completely. See below, first the original photo and then the airbrushed version:

Even Golda, the gold standard for female achievement, was praised in her day primarily for masculine qualities, her rock solid cojones - David Ben Gurion famously described her as “the best man in his cabinet.”

It’s likely that a woman would not be able to be elected Prime Minister today, even with Israel’s indirect parliamentary system of choosing its leaders.

But Israel can still point to Golda and say, “We’re in the club,” and at this moment, America cannot.

Meanwhile, let’s hope the dads are doing their share of the Passover cleanup this week.

It’s time for men and women to join forces to defeat the Epstein Class, and send them back to the kitchen - I mean prison - where they belong.

And my mom’s wish will be fulfilled, and it will be Women’s Day, every day.

Share

Leave a comment

4

From a Women’s Seder Haggadah into:

5

Miriam’s Cup, explained

:

7

Rashi’s comment on 1:27:

8

Some feminist interpretations of Lilith:

Today’s message: WAR IS HELL. No matter who is winning, no matter whom you are rooting for, it’s not fun and it’s not supposed to be fun. WAR IS NOT A GAME.

And if you are Secretary of Defense, stop calling yourself “Secretary of War.” Stop glorifying it. If you are looking to get your rocks off, get a room and don’t involve the rest of us. Don’t revel in killing thousands at the push of a button. Don’t make fun of your enemies, much less your allies, even less the people whose job is to uncover truths in the fog of battle. This is a serious business.

Don’t pretend this is fun, especially if you are then going to pretend that you are pious, that you are doing it all in the name of God. Onward Christian Fratboys!

US News is calling this Iran thing “The Meme War.” Anne Applebaum is condemning “the war’s memefication.”

What are they responding to?

This:

Applebaum notes how Trump and Hegseth exult in dehumanizing the Other, even those who are not explicitly the enemy. Trump has taken pride in calling foreign immigrants “vermin,” and Hegseth has also denounced the “dumb, politically correct wars of the past,” in favor of “warfighting,” without explaining what he means. Trump has come right out and said that the United States might drop bombs on Iran’s oil industry “for fun.”

It’s all just a video game to them. In his piece, Olivier Knox of US News demonstrates how they actually “spliced real-world explosions with video game footage to exult over the destruction in the language of Internet memes.”

So one early clip blended images from actual strikes with footage from “Call of Duty.” Another spliced footage and icons from “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas,” while another edited decidedly G-rated footage from “Nintendo Wii Sports” into scenes of explosions.

And then there’s the more-is-more video the White House posted that draws on “Top Gun: Maverick,” “Braveheart,” “Better Call Saul,” the “Halo” games, “John Wick,” “Superman,” “Transformers” and “Deadpool,” among others. It ends with the “Flawless Victory” message players get from the “Mortal Kombat” franchise when they win a round without sustaining any damage.

Here’s the problem, and I know I need to repeat myself because our president has the attention span of a gefilte fish. War is not a video game. And - here’s where my religious tradition comes into play - even our enemies are human beings. While sometimes war is necessary, even when it is, it is a sacrilege not to treat it with the utmost of seriousness.

Trump and his lackeys are simply unserious people, aside from their other significant deficiencies. The proposed new ICE-Meister and Homeland Security Secretary Senator Markwayne Mullin told a Senate committee that he thinks duels are cool (not knowing that they’ve been illegal since the 19th century) and refuses to condemn political violence. And Trump thought it was funny to humiliate his guests by bringing up Pearl Harbor in front of the Japanese Prime Minister. Thank God he didn’t mention Nagasaki. He needed Basil Fawlty there to remind him, Just don’t mention the War!

Our government is being run by a bunch of frat boys and for them it’s All-Spring-Break-All-the-Time.

Memo to you, Hegseth, who deems himself to be such a religious guy: Your memefied war is an affront to God. It is what Jews call a “Hillul ha-Shem,” a desecration of the divine name. Why? Because all human beings, even our enemies, are created in God’s image.

The Talmud actually gets into a debate as to whether God exults or, unlike Galinda’s fellow Ozzians, mourns the death of the wicked. (As an aside, doesn’t “memefication” sound like such an Ozzian term?)

Here’s a pertinent passage:

And here’s a parallel source that reinforces the message:

These passages have a direct bearing on the Passover Seder, specifically on the custom of spilling a drop of wine with the recitation of each of the Ten Plagues, something Jews have done since the Middle Ages. As each plague is recited we diminish our joy, one drop at a time, remembering our enemy’s pain.

It should be noted that, as with so many rabbinic debates, there is another side to the conversation. The origins of the wine-spilling may not be purely humanitarian. The custom seems to be very old and could have been instituted as a means to keep the “evil eye” from inflicting those same plagues on us.

• See Rejoicing at the Downfall of Enemies: From Ancient Egypt to Modern Israel (The Lehrhaus)

• See also Why Do We Spill 16 Drops of Wine While Reciting the Ten Plagues During the Seder? (Schechter Institute)

• See also: The Original Reason for Spilling Wine: Protection from the Plagues and Spilling Wine While Reciting the Plagues to Diminish Our Joy? (TheTorah.com)

Perhaps the drip-drip-drip of wine/plagues could be an instrument of revenge on enemies other than Pharaoh. Or an imitation - or parody - of Greek and Roman practice of pouring a libation to the gods before drinking wine at a symposium. Or a mystical way of discerning God’s active role (God’s finger) in salvation history.1

The idea of spilling the wine as a means to remind that our salvation required the regrettable suffering of the Egyptians appears to be a relatively recent one, attributed to Rabbi Dr. Eduard Baneth, a well-known German rabbi and scholar, who died in 1930 and to Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888), the founder of neo-Orthodoxy in Germany.

The spilling of the wine lends itself to fascinating debates at Seder tables - especially timely during a war, i.e. this year. (You didn’t really think this war will be over before Passover and Easter, did you? Sure Trump promised “4-5 weeks” at the outset, but he also told us Covid would be over “by Easter” when the outbreak happened - he just forgot to tell us which year).

As the question is posed by Daniel Roth of the Pardes Institute:

So which one is it? Do we spill the wine as a symbol of lessening our cup of salvation and rejoicing as an act of solidarity with our fallen enemies? Or are we praying to one day rejoice over the future complete and utter destruction of our enemies and not just a few drops of plagues?

In the New American Haggadah, edited by Jonathan Safron Foer (with translations by Nathan Englander and scintillating commentaries by other leading literary lights), we find a number of contemporary takes on spilling the wine and rejoicing at the vanquishing of our enemy - each one fits our current situation.2

Do you prefer this explanation?

It is one kind of moral victory to be rescued from wrongs that are done to us. It is another kind of moral victory to rescue ourselves by facing the wrongs that we do. Let some of the drops that we spill be for our own wrongdoing selves, grieving our hurtful mistakes, forgiving ourselves for our lack of moral perfection, remorseful but hopeful that we can learn and go on.

Or this?

Mercy, according to the rabbis, should outweigh justice. The kabbalists go one step further. For them, justice that has been severed from mercy is the root of evil. And that is what the tenth and final plague looks like. Justice severed from mercy. The rabbis also teach us that the Jewish people have the power to ensure that God’s mercy tempers the potential excesses of his justice. After being enslaved and nearly extinguished by the Egyptians, we can understand why our ancestors did not press God to show their oppressors mercy during the ten plagues. But we, their free descendants, must not rejoice over the punishment of the Egyptians. It is not a moment for singing.

That explanation is a perfect rebuttal to the unserious memefying of Hegseth and Trump.

Or this?

Why did God harden Pharaoh’s heart against the Jews, even after it seemed Pharaoh was ready to let them go? Did God want to make a point-”Don’t even think of challenging me”? Why did America shower death on Nagasaki, when it seemed that the Japanese were readying themselves to surrender? Was the firebombing of German cities so necessary as to neutralize all moral qualms? The Exodus story ends in freedom for Jews; the Civil War ended with freedom for African-Americans; World War Il ended with fascism utterly vanquished, and the death camps liberated. Can we say that the ends didn’t justify the means?

Fine, but if the Prime Minister of Japan is at your table, just DON’T MENTION THE WAR.

So which one is it? Do we spill the wine as a symbol of lessening our cup of salvation and rejoicing as an act of solidarity with our fallen enemies? Or are we praying to one day rejoice over the future complete and utter destruction of our enemies and not just a few drops of plagues?

Regardless of its association with the plagues and the Seder, the idea of God not mourning the wicked goes all the way back to the Talmud. It is unquestionably a powerful expression of the prevalent Jewish value of never trivializing war and seeing each human being as being created in God’s image.

There’s no easy answer to the wine-spill question, but there is a very easy one to the way Trump and Hegseth are glorifying war and the way this administration has feishized violence, at home and abroad, against the weak and the wily, against women and trans, especially, as well as people of all genders.

It is shameful, It is sinful. And it is wrong.

And oh by the way, it’s stupid politics too.

I don’t know what God did when Pharaoh’s army was drowning, but the God I believe in will have to summon enormous Godly strength to suppress a devine smile when some of these characters meet their inevitable comeuppance.

And I just don’t believe God was dancing on the rooftops singing this when the Ayatollah Khameini was killed a few weeks ago.

Good news! The Witch, she's dead
Come out, come out, she's gone
Good news! She's dead
The Witch of the West is dead
The wickedest witch there ever was
The enemy of all of us here in Oz is dead
Good news! Good news!

There’s a video for you to splice into your clever little memes, you little fake-pious fratboys. Take that to your basement.

Anyone who didn’t have at least a little sadness and regret over the deaths of around 170 Iranian girls at their school is an inhuman boor - and those who gloated over the killing of the wicked ayatollah like they had just sacked the quarterback forgot that there was a younger, potentially meaner ayatollah waiting on the sideline, ready to enter the game.

Oh wait. It’s not a game at all.

Share

Leave a comment

1

From Rabbi Moshe Isserles’s commentary on the Tur, a halachic work, - 16th century.

2

See these pdfs from the New American Haggadah on the question of spilling the wine:

2026 03 19 17 34

526KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

2026 03 19 17 36

530KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Iranian missile shrapnel landed perilously close to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem today, and not far from the Knesset and Israel’s National Library.

Along with many other American Jews, particularly of the rabbinic ilk, I’ve been corresponding with friends here and in Israel these past few weeks, trying to get a handle on why almost all Israelis support the current war (for now), while the vast majority of Americans do not. American Jews, many of whom feel “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” with regard to this war, are in a state of epic confusion, not just about the war, but in some cases, about being Jewish altogether.

I’m hearing from people, particularly former students, who want my take on that question. I’ve spent a lifetime hoping to promote Jewish values and peoplehood, but the challenge has never been so great, nor the confusion so acute, as now.

I would love to hear your take, whether you are Jewish or not.

Leave a comment

In my desire to take a crack at this, I’m calling in the cavalry.

I’m sharing here, with his permission and in its totality, the perspective of one well-known thought leader, my colleague and long-time friend, Rabbi Irwin Kula, one of the great Jewish visionaries of this generation. This essay was actually shared in the Substack of Professor Shaul Magid, a noted intellectual in his own right, and it moved me greatly. In it, Irwin is responding to a defense of Israel written last week by Alana Newhouse of Tablet, entitled Zionism for Everyone, which is well-worth reading in tandem with Irwin’s.

Irwin’s complete essay is at the bottom. Here is one key passage:

The people who most loudly claim to be defending Jewish civilization seem, in this moment, least in contact with that tradition. What genuine fidelity to Jewish moral seriousness requires right now is not a more elegant defense. It is the willingness to pause, to feel the weight of what is happening to human beings made in the image of God on all sides, and to ask with honesty the question teshuvah demands: how did we get here, and what is our portion of responsibility for where we are?

That is not a betrayal of Zionism. It may be its only redemption.

I also want to share a link to a related Substack essay, by Yehuda Kurtzer of the Shalom Hartman Institute, entitled Daylight.

He comments that this war is the first time where American and Israeli public opinion has meaningfully diverged, with Israelis expressing overwhelming support for it and Americans the opposite - with American Jews caught in the middle (and simultaneously facing steep antisemitic blowback).

Kurtzer, whose father Daniel was once US Ambassador to Israel (and at one point to Egypt too), knows what it’s like to have close ties to both countries. He writes that while “daylight in the US-Israel relationship may be inevitable, daylight in the relationship between American and Israeli Jews need not be. Peoplehood should not demand the kind of loyalty that would require us to subordinate our profound and different political needs and interests that stem from being good citizens of different societies.”

Jews have gotten used to being counter-cultural, often standing on the margins to offer honest criticism where needed, to be the voice of the prophet to counter a consensus marching in lockstep.

In war, it becomes even harder to accomplish, particularly in a media environment that suppresses news that doesn’t fit the official narrative, as happens often in Israel, or when leaders apply extraordinary pressure to suppress truth entirely, as we increasingly are seeing here. We saw it from the White House just today, when Trump’s unhinged media-bashing included cries of treason.

It’s hard to tell painful truths, but that is precisely what makes me so proud to be a Jew. We are able to do that because we are required to do that. Transparency is the best policy, and the Talmud informs us (Shabbat 55a) that “God’s seal is truth.”

And in tractate Avot we read:

But truth is not the end of the story. Why be Jewish? Well, because, as Alana Newhouse describes, the Jewish state has the potential to bring civilization to a higher level, to provide “a blueprint for human defense and flourishing in the coming century.”

But at the same time, the Torah provides a blueprint for morality, reaching out to one’s neighbor, seeing the Other as one created in God’s image, and of taking ownership of one’s misdeeds rather than sweeping them under the rug. And as Irwin Kula suggests, it requires an ability to lament as well, to grieve the loss of one’s own and others, and those losses one has helped to engender.

Somehow, we’ve forgotten how to do that. We’ve lost our sense of shock when children are killed needlessly in school shootings, missile attacks or bombings, or from hunger. We’ve forgotten how to lament. That’s a fatal flaw in Newhouse’s essay, according to Irwin Kula:

The Jewish tradition has an extraordinarily rich vocabulary for sitting with devastation without converting it into argument — Lamentations, the kinot, the entire tradition of arguing with God, of refusing to make the suffering of the innocent theologically tidy. The scroll of Eicha doesn’t answer the how. It cries it. But Newhouse doesn’t offer a single moment of grief.

That “rich vocabulary” that Jews have to express grief, empathy, and a ceaseless quest for justice and truth, all of these - including Israel’s accomplishments, are why I’m prouder than ever to be Jewish. They are why Jews have never been so essential to the world, and why autocrats, including ones who call themselves Jews, want to neutralize us. We are required to both stand apart to resist peer pressure and yet not to separate from the community. It’s quite a balance that we need to strike. But neither my Jewish moral sensibilites nor my deep loyalties will preclude me from standing against the tide when Israel - and in particular its leadership - does something that can’t be defended.

As I send this out on Monday afternoon, my phone tells me that rockets are falling on Israel once again. This morning, fragments of Iranian missiles fell in Jerusalem, perilously close to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In the before-days, Jerusalem was supposed to be off limits. Now that rules no longer apply, it appears that even when it comes to the holy places, nothing is sacred.

Here is Irwin Kula’s essay in full:

“The Sophistication of the Defense: A Critique of Alana Newhouse’s ‘Zionism Is for Everyone’”

Irwin Kula

Alana Newhouse’s recent essay in Tablet, “Zionism Is for Everyone,” is a remarkable piece of writing — erudite, wide-ranging, and in places genuinely illuminating about the civilizational crisis facing Western liberal democracies. It is also, I want to argue, a deeply troubling document - not despite its sophistication but because of it. The essay’s intellectual ambition serves, in the end, as an elaborate permission structure for avoiding the one thing the current moment most demands — honest moral reckoning with what Israel is actually doing, right now, to actual human beings. What follows is an attempt to name what the essay accomplishes, and what it forecloses.

Newhouse’s article is a 6,000 word argument affirming that Zionism now serves as no less than the “civilizational model” for the West. This written during Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza that has killed tens of thousands of civilians, displaced nearly the entire population of a territory, and generated genocide proceedings at the International Court of Justice — while simultaneously at war with Iran and Lebanon, and accelerating the annexation of the West Bank. Israel is described positively as passing the “survival test” of self-defense. Gaza is mentioned once — as the location of an invasion ordered “in response to” October 7th, with the Hamas atrocities detailed and the subsequent two and a half years of devastation elided entirely. Iran and Lebanon appear only as theaters of Israeli military prowess. The West Bank does not appear at all. This isn’t an oversight. It is the essay’s organizing psychological move - a defensive operation requiring that the thing being defended against — the actual moral weight of what Israel has and is doing — never be allowed to fully appear.

In its place, Newhouse offers something that can only be described as fantastical triumphalism. Israel is not merely a legitimate nation state deserving of security and support. It is, in her telling, “a blueprint for human defense and flourishing in the coming century” — the answer to the civilizational crisis of the entire Western world, the model for Argentina and Singapore and India, the heir to Herder’s theory of peoplehood, the fulfillment of a 3,500-year national aspiration, and now the template for everyone else’s national renewal. The extraordinary, almost ecstatic sweep of this claim is itself diagnostic. When reality on the ground includes tens of thousands of dead civilians, the systematic destruction of a civilian infrastructure, and credible accusations of war crimes, the only way to remain fully detached from any ambiguity, any moral qualm, any flicker of self-questioning, is to inflate, as Newhouse does, the counter-narrative to a scale that makes the darkness literally invisible. The fanaticism of her claim — Israel at the center of the revival of Western civilization — is proportional to the intensity of what Newhouse is keeping out. This is ethno-nationalism not merely as politics but as psychological fortress and the grandiosity of the vision is the measure of the armoring required to sustain it.

This sophisticated defensive posture — well-constructed, intellectually serious in places, engaging on questions of nationhood and identity — is essentially unfalsifiable by design. Any critique, however carefully argued, however grounded in Jewish values, however compassionate toward both Israelis and Palestinians, will be metabolized by this framework as antisemitism, or as naïveté, or as envy. The essay has pre-loaded its responses. Critics are either projecting Western civilizational failure onto Israel, or they are failing to understand the true nature of the threat, or they are unconsciously longing for Israel’s national vitality they themselves have lost. Disagreement becomes evidence of pathology. The defense is self-sealing. This is what makes Newhouse’s essay not merely over the top but dangerous. It is constructed precisely to make accountability impossible, and to make the attempt at accountability feel like betrayal.

Newhouse writes with tremendous velocity — from Houellebecq to Herder to the erev rav/mixed multitude to Javier Milei to Olympic skating to Yiddish proverbs — and this velocity serves a function. Manic defenses work precisely by keeping the mind in motion, generating enthusiasm and connection faster than anxiety or grief can consolidate. Newhouse is brilliant and the associative leaps she makes are often illuminating. But her breathless pace is not incidental to the argument — it is the argument’s immune system. Any reader who slows down to ask “but what about the 1000 children under one years old killed in Gaza?” will find themselves already three paragraphs ahead, learning about multiple ethnoses, an HBO series, effective altruism, and Olympic skater Alysa Liu.

The most telling diagnostic is what is entirely absent from the essay’s 6,000 words: lament. The Jewish tradition has an extraordinarily rich vocabulary for sitting with devastation without converting it into argument — Lamentations, the kinot, the entire tradition of arguing with God, of refusing to make the suffering of the innocent theologically tidy. The scroll of Eicha doesn’t answer the how. It cries it. But Newhouse doesn’t offer a single moment of grief. Not one acknowledgment that children are dying and literally millions of innocent people suffering. Not even one mention of moral injury to Israeli combatants. Not one beat of tragic consciousness — the sense that even if everything the author argues is correct, something irreplaceable is being lost and that loss deserves to be felt and mourned before it is explained. This absence is not accidental. A manic defense requires the suppression of lament because lament is precisely the crack through which the defended-against material would enter. To grieve even one dead Gazan child — genuinely, not performatively — is to begin to feel the full weight of what is happening, and that weight cannot be felt while the defense is simultaneously maintained. Newhosuse’s warmth, her wit, the intellectual excitement, the cute Yiddish sign-off — all of that remains. Lament is surgically removed.

This moral coarseness is not a character defect. It is a psychological achievement — something that required the gradual suppression of our more naturally responsive moral sensibility. People who write with this author’s intelligence and passion don’t start out unable to feel the burden of civilian deaths. That capacity had to be managed, contained, redirected. And the energy required to do this managing shows up as the essay’s velocity that never pauses long enough for feeling to consolidate. What is being defended against is almost certainly a combination of grief, guilt and shame that, if fully felt, would be at least temporarily unbearable: sadness at the loss of a dream, guilt for what is being done, and shame — more primitive, more destabilizing — for what it means about the community one loves and has organized one’s identity around.

In arguing Zionism is the “civilizational model” for a West in crisis, Newhouse offers survival tests for free societies that she claims, as of today, only Israel passes. The first, “Can you defend yourself?” is framed entirely in terms of military courage — the Air Force commander flying with his pilots into battle. But the capacity for military self-defense and the ethics of how that capacity is used are entirely different questions. A country can be both genuinely brave and genuinely wrong in what it does with that bravery. The essay collapses this distinction without acknowledgment. A second test “Are you happy?” — cites Israel’s high happiness scores amid war as evidence of national vitality, with no consideration that a society’s psychological relationship to the suffering it is causing might itself be a moral and civilizational datum worth examining.

By grounding national legitimacy in cultural distinctiveness and future-orientation, the essay creates a framework in which Palestinian national claims simply cannot appear. Palestinians are never described as an ethnos with their own mix of language, religion, land attachment, and historical memory — even though by the essay’s own criteria they clearly constitute one. Their absence from the framework is total. This isn’t argued; it’s assumed. The essay discusses the erev rav, Herder’s genetic method and Ruth the Moabite with intellectual generosity, but the people actually living in Gaza and the West Bank are not granted the analytical dignity extended to Bulgarians or Slovenes.

Newhouse’s most audacious claim that anti-Zionism is really Western envy — that critics of Israel are unconsciously longing for what they cannot achieve — is a sophisticated version of a closed loop. Disagreement becomes evidence of pathology, which means it cannot be engaged as disagreement! This is particularly troubling coming from someone writing with apparent psychoanalytic awareness, because the interpretive move of turning critique into symptom is precisely what psychoanalysis, at its best, is supposed to guard against. It can be deployed to make any position unassailable. The essay uses it to inoculate Israel against criticism without having to answer the criticism.

The author lists Narendra Modi alongside Argentinian President Javier Milei and the late Lee Kuan Yew as practicing “Zionism for their own people.” How unnervingly revealing given Modi’s government has systematically dismantled India’s secular constitutional framework, overseen anti-Muslim violence, stripped citizenship from millions of Muslims, and presided over what credible scholars describe as a Hindu nationalist project defined by ethnic and religious exclusivism. Including him without a word of qualification reveals something important - in this framework, the actual content of nationalist policy — what it does to minorities, to dissidents, to democratic norms — matters less than the forward-looking energy and cultural particularity it projects. This is a genuinely dangerous criterion, and one that should alarm anyone who cares about what Zionism and Judaism actually stand for.

Writing this I know that the answer to a sophisticated defense is not counter-sophistication. Newhouse’s implied audience is people who are already persuaded or nearly so — sophisticated defenders who want a more elegant vocabulary for a position they already hold. But this won’t help people who are genuinely troubled, who are holding the tension, who haven’t yet resolved the dissonance by collapsing into either uncritical defense or wholesale abandonment of the Jewish community or the Zionist project. Something harder and more demanding is needed - what might be called accountable solidarity — loyalty that can simultaneously hold genuine love for the Jewish people and the Zionist project, honest acknowledgment of Palestinian humanity and suffering, painful reckoning with the ethics of power, and the psychological maturity to tolerate the profound anxiety that comes with not having a clean narrative, let alone a triumphant one. Accountable solidarity does not resolve the tension between communal love and moral accountability. It insists on inhabiting that tension rather than escaping it — because the escape routes, in both directions, come at too high a cost. Newhouse’s defensive escape forecloses accountability. (The activist escape too often forecloses community.) What is needed is the capacity to stay in the tension and to refuse the consolation of certainty in either direction.

The most dangerous thing Newhouse’s essay does is not its politics. It is that it makes thoughtful, influential Jews feel that moral seriousness and communal loyalty are on the same side as uncritical defense — that to question, to grieve, to hold Israel and ourselves accountable is somehow to betray the community, while to defend with sophistication is to honor it. This is a profound inversion. A mature and deeper loyalty — the kind the Jewish tradition has always demanded of those who love it most — runs precisely through the vulnerability this essay is designed to foreclose. The prophets were not the enemies of Israel. They were its most demanding lovers.

In foreclosing vulnerability, the essay abandons one of the Jewish tradition’s most profound moral resources - teshuvah. Teshuvah is not simply repentance in the narrow sense rather it is a practice of rigorous self-interrogation — the willingness to ask, whatever the external causes, however justified the grievances against the other, however real the threats from outside: what have we done that has contributed to where we are? What choices, what uses of power, what failures of imagination or compassion have helped create the enabling conditions for the tragedy we now find ourselves inside? This question does not erase or minimize what others have done. It does not require false equivalence. It requires only the courage to turn the moral gaze, even briefly, even partially, on oneself — which is precisely what the essay’s triumphalist momentum makes structurally impossible.

The people who most loudly claim to be defending Jewish civilization seem, in this moment, least in contact with that tradition. What genuine fidelity to Jewish moral seriousness requires right now is not a more elegant defense. It is the willingness to pause, to feel the weight of what is happening to human beings made in the image of God on all sides, and to ask with honesty the question teshuvah demands: how did we get here, and what is our portion of responsibility for where we are?

That is not a betrayal of Zionism. It may be its only redemption.

(Needless to say, spoilers ahead)

“A March morning is only as drab as he who walks in it without a glance skyward.”

― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

Vanity Fair has shared a sneak peek at the stage design for Sunday evening’s Oscars, revealing a stage featuring “scattered trees and a more organic feel to create a calming space in a chaotic world.”

Sounds perfect.

At a time when mortality seems to be knocking hard at our civilization’s door and our world is teetering on the edge of disaster, with environmental safeguards being blown away, bombs and gunfire spanning the continents and nukes in the hands of megalomaniacs, Oscar comes running to the rescue with a calming message.

We look around for spring’s promise and hope to see rushing waterfalls and returning geese, and what we are getting instead is burning refineries and outbreaks of measles. But fear not, the nominated movies are saying, order is about to be restored. Spring is indeed arriving, and with it nature’s regenerative kiss.

For Jews, the “Month of Spring” (as it’s literally called in the Torah1 - also called Nisan in subsequent literature) begins this Wednesday evening, meaning that Passover, the “Festival of Spring” (as it’s literally called), follows two weeks later. For people of many cultural and faith backgrounds, nature’s resurrection is at hand - which means humanity’s salvation might be too.

And Friday in my backyard, as if on cue, I saw the first snowdrops starting to bud.

It is customary to recite a special blessing when seeing blossoms of fruit trees for the first time during Nisan.

• Translation by Rabbi David Seidenberg. See more details about this beautiful, life-affirming ritual in the pdf below.

Nisan Blessing Over Flowering Trees

249KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

• See also this explanation and creative rituals by Rabbi Jill Hammer:

Nisan Tekufat Nisan Passover

221KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

As Shakespeare wrote in Troilus and Cressida (Act III, Scene 3),

A number of this year’s nominated films, like the stage design for the awards broadcast, assist in reminding us of what is eternal and beautiful in our natural world, and what transcends the artificial boundaries of a single life - how nature and we can be immortal, if we can only begin to grasp our place in the grand scheme of things.

These films celebrate the potential for life beyond death, whether in the form of a living creature assembled from dead body parts (Frankenstein) or vampires recognizing the transcendent, restorative power of music (Sinners), or escapees from a Witness Protection Program ready to re-engage in life’s battles, confronting, yet again, an enduring evil (One Battle After Another) .

The heartbreaking nominated documentary All the Empty Rooms brings school shooting victims back to life, granting them a form of immortality, through photographs, trinkets, memories and even smells from their untouched bedrooms-turned-shrines - while granting their parents an ounce of comfort from their never-ending grief. We see grieving parents in Hamnet too, where immortal words of the Bard arise like a phoenix following the death of his son.

In Train Dreams, my personal favorite, we witness the extraordinary impact of a completely ordinary life. We see a man with no parents and no living kin, his years filled with brief, intense love and incalculable grief, finding comfort through a deepening connection with the world around him.

In that film’s last scene, the protagonist, Robert Grainier, who had spent much of his life cutting down trees, gets a tree’s eye view of the world while riding on a single engine plane doing figure-8s in the sky, and that new perspective enables him to look back at his life.

The narrator picks it up from there:

When Robert Grainier died in his sleep sometime in November of 1968, his life ended as quietly as it had begun. He’d never purchased a firearm or spoken into a telephone. He had no idea who his parents might have been, and he left no heirs behind him.

But on that spring day, as he misplaced all sense of up and down, he felt, at last, connected to it all.

I loved this simple film about a simple man, because it presents us with a view of life that is so necessary right now, a stark contrast from what we read in the news. At a time when the world is being run by megalomaniacs who think that they and they alone steer the currents of history, we discover, instead, that what matters is how we forge connections with everyone and everything around us, and it is from the strength of those connections that we sanctify life and can transcend mortality.

The lone-wolf-narcissist will die alone and be gone. The everyman from the log cabin will be embraced by the landscape that he cultivated and pruned.

The director, Clint Bentley, wrote:

“Robert Granier leads a simple life. He has a family, finds work where he can, and, when his life ends, he leaves behind no real record he was even here. If he made any impact on the course of history, it was small - just a pebble thrown in a river. And yet he led a profound and beautiful life.

With this film, I wanted to celebrate the magic and the beauty of the everyday. So often we’re either worrying about or chasing some future that may or may not come. We often forget that while we’re doing that, our life is happening all around us. All of these little moments that seem so simple - a quiet morning with our family, dinner with a friend - these moments come to define our life and give meaning to our time here.”

The very first camera movement in Train Dreams takes us all onto a tree for a trunk’s eye view as it falls in a forest. No one is there to hear. So, as the old conundrum goes, if a tree falls in a movie and no person is in the shot, does it really fall?

Not only does it fall, but it makes an enormous crash, and the camera vibrates with shockwaves that reverberate on the forest floor, and everything in its landing zone is changed irrevocably. The camera brings us into this Goliath’s experience of its own downfall. We become the tree. (It’s at about 4:30 of this clip below).

Trees are key characters of this film (and none were harmed in its production, we are told). Toward the end of his life, Granier, already grieving the loss of his wife and daughter, meets a National Parks naturalist named Claire Thompson, also grieving a recent loss, who shares these rapid-fire pearls of wisdom that outline the film’s main message:

• “In the forest,” she tells him, “every last thing’s important. It’s all threaded together, so you can’t tell where one thing ends and another begins if you really look at it. The dead tree is as important as the living one. There must be something for us to learn from that2

• The little insects you can’t even see, they play a role as vital as the river.3

• And then she adds a line that resonated with me on a most personal level: The world needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit.4

So many priceless bits of wisdom in just a few lines. This is not a verbose film. Words are almost incidental to the visual impact.

Hamnet’s first scene also zeroes in on the centrality of trees. We meet Agnes, who will later marry Will, as she lies curled up in a fetal position beneath a mossy, ancient tree where, later in the film, she gives birth. She is seen as an outgrowth of this landscape, one with the world around her. The tree, with its dark, hollowed-out roots and gaping hole at its base that appears to be a passage to the underworld, serves as a place of transition between life and death.

That same forest imagery comes back into play later on, as the cloth backdrop for the production of Hamlet at the film’s recreation of the Globe Theater.

One other nominated film touches on our relationship to nature, and the consequences of our abusing it. It’s Bugonia, which many consider to be a climate change parable. It has to do with bees, and that’s all I’ll say about that.

A salute to one of America’s great naturalists

And so we have arrived at the doorstep of spring. Let me celebrate that by sharing a few March poems by Aldo Leopold.

In 1949, a small book was published that revolutionized the environmental movement. When I read it in college, it certainly changed my life. In Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold collected his nature writings into a year-long diary, bringing us in tune with the rhythms of the seasons in his native Wisconsin. The book was published just after he died, ironically while fighting a wildfire. Nature’s beauty and its cruelty were felt most acutely by this conservationist, who defined ecology as the “science of relationship” and understood that our relationship to the Land is the most fundamental of all.

With so many urgent concerns swirling around these days, from war to immigration to health care, it is too easy to neglect that increasingly dark cloud of climate change that is a looming emergency. Somehow, this NASA webpage (below) is still standing (Shhh - Don’t tell anyone), which details the unequivocal evidence of the accelerating warming and its human causes.

As one of the last century’s great environmentalists, Aldo Leopold had no idea where things were heading. He reminds us of simpler times. So does the Jewish calendar, which places the annual celebration of our national rebirth squarely in line with nature’s. The Jewish calendar places Jews right in the front row of nature’s miraculous blessings.

Here are some memorable passages from Leopold’s work:

The Geese Return
One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring. A cardinal, whistling spring to a thaw but later finding himself mistaken, can retrieve his error by resuming his winter silence. A chipmunk, emerging for a sunbath but finding a blizzard, has only to go back to bed. But a migrating goose, staking two hundred miles of black night on the chance of finding a hole in the lake, has no easy chance for retreat. His arrival carries the conviction of a prophet who has burned his bridges.

A March Morning
A March morning is only as drab as he who walks in it without a glance skyward, ear cocked for geese...Once the first geese are in, they honk a clamorous invitation to each migrating flock, and in a few days the marsh is full of them.

Wild Things
There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot....Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them.

Share

Leave a comment

And finally, as I wish you a happy spring this week and Oscar night on Sunday, here’s an excerpt from John Denver’s Seasons Suite

Open up your eyes and see the brand new day, the clear blue sky and brightly shining sun.
Open up your ears and hear the breezes say: “everything that’s cold and gray is gone.”
Open up your hands and feel the rain come down,
taste the wind and smell the flowers’ sweet perfume.
Open up your mind and let the light come in, the earth has been reborn and life goes on.
Do you care what’s happening around you? Do your senses know the changes when they come?
Can you see yourself reflected in the seasons? Can you understand the need to carry on?

Riding on the tapestry of all there is to see, so many ways and oh, so many things.
Rejoicing in the differences, there’s no one just like me.
Yet as different as we are, we’re still the same.
And oh, I love the life within me, I feel a part of everything I see.
And oh, I love the life around me, a part of everything is here in me.
A part of everything is here in me, a part of everything is here in me.

1

Spring Month:

Here’s part of what I wrote a week ago following the first weekend of the American-Israeli attack on Iran, weighing the potential pros and cons of the war from a Jewish perspective:

Paradoxically, while Israel has vanquished all its regional foes, Jews are less safe anywhere in the world than at any time in my lifetime. I do not make that statement lightly. True, I did not live during the Holocaust, the Crusades, the Black Death or the Inquisition. But in my lifetime I can not think of a time when, as a Jew, I felt less safe - anywhere.

I refrained from advising people to stay away from synagogues, because it was Purim and in any event, I just can’t bring myself to do that. It would be giving in to the haters.

Unfortunately, I may need to revise that comment, given what’s happened over the past week, culminating in the terror attack on a Detroit-area synagogue on Thursday afternoon.

Thanks to heroic security guards, the attacker might have been the only one killed. We’ll see. But the fact that every synagogue needs a security guard these days is both obvious and sickening.

CNN is now reporting that a large amount if explosives - described by one source as mortars - were found in the back of the suspect’s vehicle. An early childhood program was in session. A twofer for haters: Jews and kids. This could have been catastrophic.

Just since the beginning of the war, there have been three shooting attacks on synagogues in Toronto alone.

At this point, it isn’t wise to make assumptions about who attacked the synagogue in Detroit and whether there is a direct connection to the war or Iran’s possible activation of terror cells in the US.

But these two things I can say for sure.

• Since the beginning of 2025, 1 in 3 American Jews has reported being targeted for antisemitism, according to the American Jewish Committee.

• Since the beginning of 2025, Donald Trump has been president.

While Jews already felt unsafe during the prior administration, particularly on college campuses, there was no let-up last year, even as the Gaza War ceasefire took hold and tensions somewhat reduced.

The Times of Israel reports that respondents to the AJC survey were asked if they felt “less safe” as a result of several high-profile antisemitic attacks in 2025, including the arson attack on Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home in April; the deadly shooting of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC, in May; and the firebombing of a demonstration for the Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado, in June. About a quarter of respondents said the attacks had made them feel “a great deal” less safe, while 31% reported feeling “a fair amount” less safe and 32% responded that they felt “a little” less safe.

How do you think those respondents feel today? The number declaring “less safe” has certainly risen from that “golden age” of 2025, just in the past hour.

Oren Siegal, the senior vice president of counter-extremism and intelligence at the Anti-Defamation League, told The New York Times, “The operations against Iran have triggered almost an immediate surge in antisemitism and conspiratorial commentary on various social media platforms, and across the ideological spectrum.”

Israeli journalist Nadav Eyal commented on X:

I don’t think this Detroit terrorist necessarily was a Candace Owens fan, or someone who shouted “Globalize the Intifada” on a collage campus, or someone who might have been more of a follower of, say, the Ayatollah(s) Khomeini. You can pick your poison. Temple Israel just conducted an active shooting drill a few weeks ago and for good reason.

If you read Michelle Goldberg’s current NYT portrait of James Fishback, the openly and proudly antisemitic Gen. Z MAGA candidate for governor of Florida, it is easier to understand how this sickness has metastasized through all segments of our body politic.

She writes of a Fishback campaign speech where he referenced about a half dozen antisemitic conspiracy theories in just a couple of lines:

As he often does, he drew elliptical links between Israel and the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking scandal. Someone recently asked him, he said, if he thinks Israel has a right to exist. “I believe that American citizens have a right to exist in their country without being replaced, without being trafficked, and without being sent to war and distorted and converted by foreign powers,” he said.

When Marco Rubio all but admitted last week that Israel had dragged America to war with Iran — before trying to walk his comments back — it was a gift to Fishback, who presented it as confirmation of his assertions about malign Israeli influence. Unlike most Republicans, he isn’t shy about criticizing Trump for starting the war, demanding that he publicly explain his objectives and plans for getting out. But Fishback puts most of the blame for the conflict on Israel.

Israel’s leader has not yet chimed in with “thoughts and prayers.” Netanyahu just had a news conference where Michigan apparently was not mentioned - nor did he show much empathy for his own people, who are going through hell.1 I wonder whether he, and Trump, thought about the impact of their holy war on innocent bystanders like school children. I wonder whether the terrorist in Michigan was inspired by the massacre of schoolgirls in Iran, which a Pentagon probe indicates was likely perpetrated by the US, to attack a synagogue at a time when it was filled with kids.

I wonder whether the two leaders thought about the economic implications, the human costs, in Israel and across the region and the world and the cost to the families of US servicemen who have died or been injured thus far.

When I entered the rabbinate, I hoped to help invigorate the Jewish people. I did not sign up to be collateral damage in an endless war devoid of clear, achievable goals and the means to achieve them. But that’s where things stand today, especially for the Jews of Michigan and Toronto.

To be clear, no one should be blamed for acts of antisemitism other than the antisemites themselves.

But it would help to have leaders, in the US and in Israel, who possess a sense of responsibility and empathy - and a little wisdom wouldn’t hurt too.

An Israeli poll on Channel 12 this evening shows that Netanyahu’s coalition remains behind as elections approach, and the Trump administration, whose popularity has also decreased, remains clueless and, to all accounts, unprepared.

How were they not prepared for Iran to block the Straits of Hormuz?

I still hope - really, really hope - this war can have a positive resolution, but the strategy of decapitating leaders and praying for a street-led revolution is not showing signs of working out. Bibi is still going for the “total victory” that has eluded him in Gaza and Lebanon. Netanyahu just said at his news conference that he doesn’t know if Iranians will oust the regime, saying, “You can lead someone to water, you can’t make them drink.”

This is an Iranian people that took to the streets in January by the millions and were butchered by the tens of thousands. And now they’re being scolded by the guys who seem to have totally botched their liberation. I hope I’m wrong - but for anyone still believing this is going well, I have a “Mission Accomplished” banner to sell you. If this war’s new name is “Operation Lead them to Water,” we’re all in big trouble.

Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Post reports that, today - TODAY - President Trump endorsed Brandon Herrera, the de facto GOP nominee for a Texas congressional district whose past comments about Nazis have drawn scrutiny.

She owns a copy of Mein Kampf - a book that would have felt quite comfortable on Trump’s night table, next to Hitler’s speeches.

That ought to help the moms and dads of Temple Israel in West Bloomfield feel even more secure about the safety of their kids.

I say it again. Jews are less safe than at any time in my lifetime, almost everywhere in the world.

Especially here.

And the rest of America is not too far behind.

Leave a comment

1

Tweet from the opposition leader:

America’s stockpile of subversive comedy is about to be severely depleted, with the departure of Stephen Colbert from network TV in May. It is essential that he finds a way to stay in front of large TV audiences. We need to deny the Trump Regime a victory over this indispensable form of dissent and free speech.

We need to prepare to draw from our strategic reserves of Kimmel, Colbert, Stewart, Oliver, Fallon and Myers.

We have seen, from the reinstatement of Jimmy Kimmel by Disney and the botched censorship of Colbert’s James Talarico interview, just how important these comedians are, both for our sanity and our democracy.

Speaking at the National Democratic Institute’s conference in 2019, NDI President Derek Mitchell said, “The core of humor and laughter is a freedom of spirit, certainly of speech, an irreverence, an assertion of individualism that are essential to a democratic culture.” At a time when democratic values are under attack by humorless stooges and bullies, satire plays an even more urgent role.

Ben Franklin, who understood the need to speak truth - with wit - to power, even suggested that the motto of the Great Seal of the United States be “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” Oooh. I know a certain megalomaniac who, if he saw this challenge to his absolute authority, might consider taking Franklin out of the national statuary he’s planning.

I only wish Big Ben were available at 11:30 on weeknights.

So this past weekend, as Israeli and American planes bombarded Iran and Iranian missiles pierced the skies of the Middle East (and beyond), I settled back for a couple of moments of elusive sanity, seasoned with hilarity.

Once again, satire is showing us the way to speak truth courageously, by exposing hypocrisy and revealing what lies beneath the propaganda and the lies.

In America, there’s SNL. And in Israel, there’s Eretz Nehederet (Wonderful Country). Last weekend, they both came through.

SNL’s cold open featured that tough-guy frat boy, Pete Hegseth.

“What’s happening? I’ll tell you what’s happening. We don’t know! And that’s the whole point. If we don’t know what we’re doing, then Iran definitely doesn’t know what we’re doing!”

Amusing, but it’s in Israel where the satire never pulls punches, even during a war. Eretz Nehederet closed its program last week with a special message direct from the recently killed Ayatollah - and no, that apocalyptic scene behind him is not the Iranian refineries bombed by the US and Israel, it’s the inferno of Hell.

His words to Israelis (click here to see video on Facebook) are translated in the article below, from Ha’aretz, which also details the controversy surrounding them.

Khameini says:

You know, Iran was like you too once. Yes, yes. Wealthy, developed, with a splendid culture. And then we did a revolution! We put an end to that Western silliness. We started to invest only in what’s really important: religious education with morals, with modesty, without all of this nonsense about science and knowledge. And when all the bitter liberals left Iran, we told them to go to hell - who even needs you! We’ll do just fine without you!

And we got rid of those gross women in the army, too… And most importantly, we taught our nation to stop grumbling and stop saying “We have it so hard” day in and day out. We taught them that you need to give respect to the supreme leader, because he’s always right and no judge or journalist can tell him what’s good and what’s bad, and he’s strong like a lion - but you know, a real lion in nature, not one of those drugged out ones that sleep all day in the safari that kids take pictures with.”

Eretz Nehederet should broadcast with subtitles all the time, but since October 7 they have shared some viral videos aimed specifically at English speakers, such as this parody of antisemitism at Columbia University.

Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, John Oliver and all of TikTok are about to become part of one giant mega-media monopoly, owned and controlled by a single family of Trump allies - unless state attorneys general can somehow gum up this merger in court. Colbert has already become a martyr in this war for control of the media.

Jews understand the importance of humor in tough times; it even played a key role before, during and after the Holocaust. From Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator to the late Robert Clary, who went straight from Buchenwald to Hogan’s Heroes, to Mel Brooks’ Springtime for You-Know-Who, Jews literally got the first and last laugh on Hitler.

For the all-time Jewish humorist Shalom Aleichem at the turn of the 20th century, it was about “laughter through tears.” For Eretz Nehederet, it’s a much more empowering, self righteous mockery, that puts into words how so many felt about, say, the BBC, during the weeks after October 7. For edgy comics like Lenny Bruce, Shalom Auslander, Sacha Baron Cohen and Larry David, comedy is a necessary moral compass, even if at times a messy one.1

Though Kimmel and Colbert are not Jewish, many of their writers are. And their humor fits right into the classic genre of Jewish satire. Of late they have been particularly merciless, especially since Colbert’s canning and Kimmel’s digital resurrection - and subsequent ratings boosts for both. Like Trump himself, neither is constrained by ordinary checks and balances for the TV business. Kimmel has proven himself to be invulnerable to a direct threat by the chair of the FCC (“we can do it the easy way or the hard way”) and Colbert’s a goner anyway. Plus, Trump and his minions are so clueless and cartoonishly malicious that they virtually write the jokes themselves.

But what happens when Colbert leaves CBS in May.

There’s been speculation about a presidential run in 2028, which he has not completely ruled out, but I think that would be a waste of his talents. What makes him special is that he can stand above the BS. Sure he’s not “fair and balanced” in his political leanings, but he’s very open about his political leanings and in any campaign candor is the first thing to be sacrificed.

I’d love to see him join forces with one or more of the others, possibly giving a weekly monologue on Kimmel’s or Fallon’s stage or a weekly guest hosting stint on The Daily Show. Sure he could do a podcast or send out YouTube clips. It worked with the Talarico interview, but I want him on normal, old people’s TV, the kind that they watch at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave or in the Ellison lair.

Colbert needs to stay on the air and stick it to those who tried to shut him up.

And he needs to be there often, especially in the lead-up to the midterms.

We also need to plan for what lies ahead. It seems to me that The Daily Show is on a very short leash and once the Ellisons own Warner Bros. and its subsidiaries, John Oliver could well be deported - from HBO.

Which brings me back to Colbert. He’s the only one right now who is a “free agent.” I hope he is making plans to transition immediately to something high-profile and buzzy. We don’t have the luxury of his taking a long vacation to think things over. In normal times, that would be expected. But not now.

Scott Dworkin’s Substack reports today that on Sunday night, Colbert accepted the prestigious Writers Guild’s Walter Bernstein Award, named for a writer who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era.

“As we know, the revolution will not be televised,” Colbert said. “It was going to be televised, but then Paramount bought it.”

Colbert added that he heard the revolution was thinking about starting a Substack. Hey Stephen, you don’t need to start one. I’d be happy to host your new show!

Just, please, don’t take your foot off the gas. Not now. Not ever.

Share

Leave a comment

The most earthshaking, existential event for Israel came last weekend, and it had nothing to do with their bunker busting bombs in Tehran. It was this headline from a Gallup survey released before the war began, and it is a grave threat to the Jewish state.

The shifts away from Israel - both partisan and demographic - are dramatic.1

That’s particularly true among Democrats, Independents and young people, but not exclusively. There’s a ten point drop in Republican support since 2024. But as a lifelong Democrat, and one who is 100 percent convinced that the current MAGA-Republican regime - one that has hitched its wagon to Israel’s current government - is a mortal threat to democracy and the world order, Israel’s steep and dramatic decline in American public opinion is a five-alarm fire.

And now, with the Gaza War having metastasized into a global conflict, with Israel’s and America’s strongman leaders in apparent lockstep, and with both facing crucial elections just months away and a slew of legal problems, I feel that it is more urgent than ever for those who love both countries to speak out fearlessly.

Here is where things stand, one week into the second Iran war:

• I am heartsick over the suffering of so many this past week, including the parents of dead Iranian schoolchildren, Israelis who died in a Bet Shemesh synagogue bomb shelter, and so many others. I’ve downloaded Israel’s “red alert” app so I am awakened hourly through the night by Iranian missile firings - though I still can’t imagine what it is like to run for shelters again and again, day after day. I am fearful for Jews and others who face an onslaught of hate fueled in part by this war, including shooting attacks on two Toronto synagogues this weekend.

• While I understand the need for Israelis to fall in line at a time of national crisis, especially when there is a chance to eliminate, once and for all, a perceived existential threat, I’ve got to believe that there is an undercurrent of skepticism that more closely approaches what Americans are feeling. I want to grasp the fears and hopes that guide Israelis, but they also need to understand the prevailing skepticism over here that will likely help to derail their hopes unsatisfactorally.

• The current war is historically unpopular2 here in America3, and its American architect is even more despised than his war.

• While there are indications of an initial support for the war among a plurality of American Jews,4 although with significant concerns about its impact on Israel’s standing in America, I believe that support is shallow and, as has almost always been the case historically, over time it will likely wane.

• That’s in part because American Jews have turned from Israel in devastating numbers. In a Washington Post poll of American Jews conducted in early September, about half disapproved of the military action Israel had taken in Gaza and 61%, think Israel has committed war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza. So the baseline of support before the current Iranian war was disturbingly low.

• Unlike the Gaza War immediately following October 7, this is clearly a war of choice. Even if there were top-notch, trusted communicators making the case for its necessity now (and there are not), it’s hard to garner support for a war of choice. But with this war’s shifting and unclear goals, politically-motivated timing and an American president demonstrating deep mental and psychological decline, there is little confidence among Americans, including Jews, that the ship of state is in good hands. No one trusts this cast of miscreants.

• Also, this war is increasingly being prosecuted - on both sides - by glazed-eyed religious fanatics who believe they are bringing about the Rapture5 or otherwise conjuring a Messianic age, led, on our side, by the most profane man on earth who truly believes he is God’s chosen. Newsweek reports that “some U.S. military leaders are telling troops that the Iran war is part of "God's divine plan" featuring President Donald Trump and Jesus, according to a religious freedom advocacy group.” That goes over really well with mainstream Jewish audiences, who would sooner not see the world come to an end over biblical references to the “Battle of Gog and Magog.”

• While Israel has long faced mortal threats from Iran and it would be a desirable outcome for Iran’s fundamentalist government to go away or be severely weakened, Israel has historically been much better at starting wars than ending them. It has never succeeded in accomplishing regime change, though it has tried (notably in Lebanon). Its military and intelligence services are top-notch and its people are resilient and fearless, but they too find themselves at the mercy of America’s rudderless leadership.

• The longer this war enflames the region without clear and definitive goals or outcome, the more Israel will devolve into a pariah state - not merely around the world - but in particular right here in America.

• In other words, Israel could possibly win the battle of Tehran - it already has - but lose the war for the hearts and support of America. And while destroying Iranian desalination plants and frying its oil infrastructure are of questionable long-term benefit, the strategic consequences of losing American support are almost impossible to understate.

• Forget about bipartisan support. AIPAC and Bibi willingly sacrificed that a decade ago. Now, as of last month’s Gallup poll, they’ve lost all of America, not just Democrats. We are heading toward bipartisan condemnation. Since it has failed so acutely in its one essential mission (it’s even helped turn “Zionism” into an epithet), if AIPAC were an employee of any one of the companies owned by its major donors, it would have been fired by now.

• The Day of Reckoning is close at hand (240 days to the midterms, minus the hour we lost when we turned the clocks ahead last night). Unless Trump succeeds in putting a halt to a free and fair American election, Israel will have to answer to a Democratic House - and possibly Senate - that will punish Israel not only for it’s actual transgressions, but for its alliance with Trump. Ignoring that likelihood has been an act of political malpractice on the part of the Israeli government. Do they not see this coming?

• After the midterms, Israel will need its real allies in America to stand up for it as never before. That’s me and those like me - the battered and broken moderate and progressive American Jews.6 Israeli politicians have long cared very little about what American Jews think of them, particularly progressive and moderate American Jews, who comprise the vast majority. (Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid are notable exceptions to this). We’ve been considered a sideshow, cheering spectators in the Zionist drama. Well, now they need us more than ever before. And it may be too late.

• For that support to be there, and for Israel to have a chance to rebuild its image, one thing is absolutely essential: a new government in Jerusalem. That has helped before, in 2021, when a “change” government was briefly in place. Israel’s image improved dramatically. The sample size is small during the Netanyahu era, but lots of the damage can be undone. 7 Healing can happen.

• For healing to happen, the defeat of Benjamin Netanyahu in the next election, to be held, God willing, no later than October, is fast becoming Israel’s most urgent, existential, prerequisite.

• There’s not a minute to lose. Gavin Newsom’s nuanced but jarring criticism (where he did not actually call Israel an “apartheid state,” as Steve Shaffey has pointed out8) is a sign that the Democratic establishment has been completely alienated by Netanyahu’s government, though not by Israel as a whole.

As Emily Tankin wrote in The Forward:

Given that Newsom is broadly a centrist, his words made a clear statement: Politicians understand that uncritical support for Israel is no longer compatible with the Democratic mainstream. Democratic voters are pushing politicians to, if not abandon Israel entirely, then at least condition their support for it.

And the future of American Jews and the Democratic Party is now not only up to Democratic politicians who decide how much to give Israel and under what conditions. It is also up to American Jews, who have to decide whether those politicians, in doing so, are moving away from their values or bringing them back into alignment.

• I implore my Israeli friends to understand: This is not just American Jews we are talking about whose support is waning, and not just Democrats. Gallup tells a sobering tale. Americans are falling into line with their suspicion that Israeli Prime Minister is manipulating the US President and American foreign policy toward his personal ends. Every minute that this toxic bromance continues places the US-Israel relationship in more acute danger.

• So end the war ASAP. Take the win and negotiate a ceasefire that eliminates the short and immediate term dangers emanating from Iran and its proxies. Protect the Iranian people from their own leaders mowing them down on the streets and foreign bombers turning their cities into chemical infernos. Do both. And then, move on to elections. And then with a clean slate of leaders on all sides, start building a new Middle East.

• And let the good people of Israel and America spend the rest of 2026 trying to rebuild their tattered democracies. Now, unless there is a definitive victory in Iran very soon, Israel will be judged even less kindly by all Americans, including Jews themselves. The next Gallup poll might make this one look sanguine by comparison.

  Leave a comment

  Share

1

Gallup breakdown:

2

For those who think there is broad support for the war here, see this Saturday posting from the Strength in Numbers Substack:

The Iran war is historically unpopular — and it’s only going to get worse. Across five high-quality polls, an average of about 38% of Americans support the military strikes in Iran and 50% oppose them. That makes this the most unpopular war at launch in the history of modern polling. For comparison, 92% of Americans backed the war in Afghanistan, and 72% supported the Iraq invasion when those conflicts began. If history is any guide, war polling only moves in one direction from here: down.

PBS/NPR/Marist, on Friday:

4

See JPPI poll from last Thursday: Connected US Jews back Iran strikes, wider US public stays skeptical. And See Jerusalem Post coverage:

A survey conducted by the JPPI found that many US respondents hold two views: Iran’s threat must be addressed, but what will the fallout in America be?

A majority of connected American Jews supported the United States entering the war against Iran while simultaneously expressing concern that the conflict could damage Israel’s image in the US and fuel antisemitism, according to a new flash survey conducted by the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI). The survey, conducted on Thursday (March 5), found that 68% of respondents supported the US decision to go to war against Iran, while 26% opposed it and 7% said they did not know.

The results highlight a community that largely views Iran as a serious threat while remaining deeply aware of the potential political and social consequences of the conflict inside the United States. Support for the war varied sharply along ideological lines. Among strong liberals, 62% opposed the war, and 28% supported it. Among centrists, support climbed to 88%. Among leaning conservatives and strong conservatives, support reached 98% and 100%, respectively.

Voting patterns in the 2024 US presidential election also played a major role. Trump voters overwhelmingly supported the war, with 99% backing the US decision. Harris voters were far more divided, with 47% supporting the war and 42% opposing it. JPPI uses “connected American Jews” to mean respondents who are more engaged in Jewish communal life and more attentive to Israel and Jewish issues than the broader public. The group does not represent all US Jews.

The survey also asked respondents what the war’s main objective should be. A clear majority, 58%, said the goal should be a broad dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program, ballistic missile capabilities, and support for terrorism. Another 27% supported regime change in Tehran as the primary objective. Only 3% said the focus should be limited to Iran’s nuclear program alone. Support for regime change rose among respondents on the political Right. Nineteen percent of strong liberals supported that goal compared with 41% of strong conservatives. Across the ideological spectrum, however, the most common answer remained the broader objective of weakening Iran’s military and terror infrastructure.

Another question touched on a central political debate surrounding the war: whether US President Donald Trump had been persuaded by Israel to take military action. A large majority, 72%, said Trump had intended to go to war with Iran from the outset and required little persuasion. Fourteen percent said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convinced him, while another 14% said they did not know. Even among strong liberals, more than half believed Trump already intended to go to war. Among strong conservatives, that view reached 85%.

War’s potential impact on Israel’s image

Despite broad support for the war itself, respondents expressed significant concern about its potential impact on Israel’s standing in American society.

Forty-five percent said the war would harm Israel’s image in the United States, while 32% said it would make no difference, and 10% said it would improve Israel’s image. The expectation of reputational damage was strongest among liberals. Seventy-two percent of strong liberals and 64% of leaning liberals said Israel’s image would suffer. Among centrists, the most common response was that the war would have little effect on Israel’s standing.

Respondents also voiced concern about antisemitism.

Fifty-two percent said the war would likely increase antisemitism in the United States, while 33% said it would make no difference, and only 4% said antisemitism would decline. Concern was particularly strong among Reform and Conservative respondents, with 52% and 54% respectively predicting a rise in antisemitism. Among Modern Orthodox and Haredi respondents, the expectation of increased antisemitism was lower, though still significant.

The findings offer a snapshot of opinion among highly engaged Jews regarding Israel and Jewish communal life. That group often responds more quickly to geopolitical developments involving Israel and the Middle East. At the same time, the survey suggests that support for confronting Iran militarily does not eliminate anxiety about the domestic environment for Jews in the United States. Many respondents appear to hold two views simultaneously. Iran represents a threat that must be addressed. The political fallout in America could still be severe.

Today is Purim, the Jewish calendar’s, most raucous, delirious - and anxious - holiday, all rolled into one - and it’s all about Persia. As I write this on Tuesday midday - right now - more rockets are being fired at Israel by a supposedly decapitated enemy with a nuclear program that was supposedly “obliterated” last June. Thus far over 1,500 alerts have been triggered by Iran missile firings since Saturday in Israeli villages and cities, sending people scurrying into shelters, and even there security is not guaranteed, as people in Bet Shemesh unfortunately discovered on Sunday, when nine were killed.1

This feels either like some kind of Purim-Haman plot to destroy the Jewish people from two thousand years ago. And yet, so many Israelis are exuberant, even as Americans, Israelis and Iranians bury their dead, the whole region is blowing up and Trump proclaims with confidence that this thing will be over in a few days….or is it four weeks?…Certainly by Easter!

Easter? Easter… Where have we heard that before?

Yes, back during the early days of Covid, in March 2020, Donald Trump called himself a “wartime president.” So we have experienced Trump as a “wartime” leader, and the experience was not good. We have precedent for this president’s ineptitude as a leader during emergencies. If you look closely at him right now, he is scared to death.

And even if the benefits of the decision to attack Iran turn out to outweigh the costs, I stand my “Hammerman Doctrine” articulated during last year’s Iran 12-day bombing run:

I will never give Donald Trump credit for anything - even acts that prove to be for the betterment of humankind - because his ultimate goal is to end American liberal democracy,2 which would be disastrous for America and the world. Trumpism is a virulent autocratic agenda, fascist to the core, and the only way to defeat it is through complete vigilance, all day, every day.

In case you’ve forgotten that, read this:

2024 05 Peoples Guide Pro 2025

1.49MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

I can say that, even as I pray for the diabolical Iranian regime to fall and be replaced by a peaceful, more democratic alternative. I can chew gum and curse Haman at the same time. I’m not at all confident that Mr. Wartime President can accomplish what even a more stable, geniusy person like every president other than him could not. Remember: The last time he led us into battle, he was heavily armed with Clorox.

There are many ways to evaluate the war on Iran and it is foolish to make snap assessments just a few days in. So I’m not going to do that. Thomas Friedman’s framing of the main issues was spot on. He makes four assertions3 that highlight the complexity of the current situation, synthesizing a desire that the Iranian regime be at least declawed without enabling Trump and Bibi to continue to degrade democracy here in the US and in Israel.

Why did Trump and Netanyahu attack Iran now, when it is clear that there was no immediate existential danger to either country? Timothy Snyder explains it on his Substack:

A war is a time when we will be told not to ask questions. But a war is actually when questions must be asked. And they must be asked in light of what we already know. The presumption created by the surrounding evidence is that this war could very well be about (1) subverting US democracy, (2) enriching the president, or both. These are presumptions, not proof — but they provide the solid lines of inquiry as we learn more about the war. War does not create a clean slate where suddenly we have to believe the absurd just because a leader says it. On the contrary, war provides the opportunity to see the core of the absurdity and the destruction that is being offered to us.

So let me add a few observations, framing it from the perspective of my expertise, in a “traditional” Jewish manner, asking whether what’s going on is “Good for the Jews.” Yes, i know it’s the very essence of chutzpah to ask what the impact of a global event of this magnitude will be on a group that constitutes 0.2% of the world’s total population. But that’s just who we are :) My answers might seem internally inconsistent - but if Purim teaches us nothing else, it’s that life is messy.

So here goes:

1. 

   We are safer: The world is potentially safer with a decapitated and defanged Iranian leadership. It could potentially weaken forces for disruption and have negative geopolitical consequences for Russia. That would make the world safer for Jews too. But a weakened Iran is not necessarily going to be a democratic Iran. So it remains to be seen what the region will look like.

   

   2. Justice has been served. The Ayatollah was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iranians and others - Google’s AI says up to a million. Probably more. He mowed down thousands of his own people in just the past few weeks. There is no defending him - and no defending anyone who defends him. Where justice prevails, Jewish values prevail as well.

   

   3. We are less safe: An emboldened Donald Trump could be the greatest force for disruption on earth right now whose name isn’t Putin. And once again he’s been enabled by his cronies in Congress to rip up the Constitution by not consulting with them. That poses a grave danger to the rule of law. Jews like the rule of law.

4. We are less safe: Paradoxically, while Israel has vanquished all its regional foes, Jews are less safe anywhere in the world than at any time in my lifetime. I do not make that statement lightly. True, I did not live during the Holocaust, the Crusades, the Black Death or the Inquisition. But in my lifetime I can not think of a time when, as a Jew, I felt less safe - anywhere.

   

5. That includes Israel, which rules the skies a thousand miles from its borders but can’t seem to destroy Hamas right next door or stop rockets from harming its citizens. Right now, as we speak, the State Department is calling on American citizens to evacuate Israel. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of Americans, most with dual citizenship, many who have lived through, God knows, maybe dozen wars. Is it that dangerous? What gives? I’ll show you. Look at the map below. This show locations of missile “red alerts” during the first 24 hours of the war.

   

   As mentioned above, Israelis have endured over 1,500 “red alert” alarms over the past three days, each one sending people to their shelters and, at some point later, to their therapists. What Israel has gained over the past couple of years in deterrence - which is substantial - it has lost in the potential for coexistence and peace - including peace of mind. The long-term impact of these years of continuous existential struggle has already been dramatic, as Yair Rosenberg wrote this week in the Atlantic, The Israel of October 6 Is Never Coming Back. Israel can no longer abide by a policy of caution and containment:

   The Hamas massacre of October 7—whose atrocities were broadcast online by its perpetrators and seared into the Israeli consciousness—upended and discredited this approach. With Israel’s borderlands in ruins and hundreds of its citizens taken hostage, the country’s voters could no longer countenance their leader’s quietism, which now looked like a historic blunder. An Israeli public that had elected Netanyahu to steward its security now felt profoundly insecure and demanded dramatic action. To respond to the attack was not enough; the government needed to ensure that others like it would never happen, by confronting threats at their source.

   Here’s the newest New Normal. On Monday night, Israelis heard the Scroll of Esther while praying in bomb shelters - like this one in a parking garage in central Tel Aviv (click to play). Fun.

   

6. Nowhere on earth is it safe to be a Jew these days.4 Yes, even Antarctica.

The good news is that most people still don’t hate us. The bad news is that those who do now have been given the green light to show it. Jews (yes all Jews, not just Israelis or self-proclaimed Zionists) are now in danger of becoming the bogeymen for the three quarters (73 percent) of all Americans (including many Jews) who did not support war with Iran in a recent YouGov poll. Israel is increasingly being seen by both the left and right as having driven the US into this battle. Trump denied it today, which means it probably has more truth to it than we would wish for.

What makes this all even sadder is that not only is Israel hardly the refuge it was meant to be, but its leadership has shown that American Jews are expendable to them. Netanyahu’s cronies care about antisemitism only when it comes from the left and their actions will do nothing to make our lives safer, all the while alienating an entire generation of our kids. A January Conference on Antisemitism, held in Jerusalem, was a right-wing love fest, a Star Wars bar scene brought to you by the people who celebrate Victor Orban, one of the most vicious antisemites on this planet.

So it’s not safe in Israel, and certainly not in America, where many associate Jews with various Epstein conspiracy theories, which is as logical as blaming all atheists for the Unabomber. True, the Epstein billionaire class includes shady types that make me cringe, who happen to identify as Jewish, like the Ellisons, whose goal appears to be to turn CNN and CBS in to Fox Jr.5 On the right there’s Tucker Carlson and his eugenics obsession and on the left, the defenders of Hamas. And now, Iran is releasing its terror cells - which may have led to the mass shooting in Austin. We’ve got neo-Nazis and Iranian terror and all that stuff on campuses. And now increasingly this hate is trickling down to middle America.

The problem is that when you have all these sources of antisemitism from all over the political map, they validate and embolden one another. Tucker Carlson, Linda Sarsour, and Jeremy Corbyn could never have coffee together, but their combined hatred reinforces those crazies who might be considering attacking Jews and their institutions, verbally or physically. They feed off of each other.

Sadly, the killing of Sinwar, Nasrallah and the Ayatollah hasn’t changed that, just as the killing of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein didn’t end anti-Americanism. It only led to the growth of ISIS, which is the kind of thing that might happen this time.

However, if all goes relatively well, Israel will have a chance to establish closer ties with its neighbors…if it is ready to accommodate with the Palestinians. Meanwhile, even as nearly the entire Middle East is on Israel’s side of this war, and, unlike the first Gulf War, Israel isn’t being asked to sit on its hands this time out of respect to those countries who hate it, old habits die hard.

Notice which country is conspicuously missing from this headline in the National, a newspaper out of Abu Dhabi. “Arab states and US united…..” someone is missing here.

Israel will have its precious deterrence when Trump is long gone and this chapter concludes.

But will it ever have peace?

How can Purim help us through these treacherous times?

• Here’s a little Purim backgrounder to download, for those who are curious:

Purim Background

296KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

• You can find the Book of Esther here. and below, listen to it being read in a very fun and creative way last night at B’nai Jeshurun in New York. it’s a mitzvah to hear every word!

Given the apprehension that has filled our lives, it is hard to shift our sights to the merriment of Purim. Fortunately, Purim itself shows us the way. teaching us how to survive in a dangerous world. All too often, Jewish communities and others have faced catastrophe. Occasionally, miraculous interventions have enabled us to avert certain doom. Based on the Talmudic idea of saying blessings at places where narrow escapes have happened, the custom arose for communities to celebrate anniversaries of Purim-like events. These became known as “Special Purims.”

Pardon the Purim pun, but there are lots of them. Take your pick.... and as you do, think of all the Purims that could not be celebrated - and the Purims yet-to-come. Destiny seems to ride on the luck of the draw, for Jews and others. We just keep on drawing those lots. Check out a few of these Special Purims (see notes below).6

One more thought about Purim - and Adar, the most joyous month of the Jewish calendar. Despite it all, be happy!

Even as I fretted this weekend over the events in Israel and Iran, I heard a symphonic array of birds on my morning walk on Sunday, and it reminded me that March has begun. I checked my bird ID app and here’s what I was hearing around me:

In Conclusion

It remains to be seen whether this attack on Iran succeeds in making the world a safe place for everyone and Israel a safer place for Jews. But when people begin asking the hard questions - which will happen about five minutes after something goes wrong - what is plainly obvious already will become even more obvious. This attack didn’t have to happen - at least not now.

I’m hopeful that whatever happens in Iran will matter when Americans vote in November - unless we allow Trump to use this as an excuse to delay or deny that vote. Ironically, in doing so, he would be mimicking the Iranian autocrats he is currently trying to depose. Israel’s political situation is more complicated, but I pray they have the wisdom to replace their current government, no matter how this war plays out, because this government’s ultimate goals remain unchanged, and one of them is to subvert Israeli democracy and the other is to keep Bibi out of jail.

Meanwhile, synagogues across the world, and especially in America, had best triple their security budget and make sure the local police show up in uniform in the weeks to come, as Passover approaches. I would never suggest that people stay away from services and other gatherings. That would be giving in to fear. But I am very concerned.

I’m not saying we should despair. The Purim story is illustrative. Things were even more hopeless for the Jews of Persia, who faced a royal decree of total decimation (sort of like the Hamas Charter, but with a sell-by date). But fighting a war of self defense and led by a woman of other-worldly courage and a man with unimaginable integrity (something so lacking among our leaders now), the Jewish people prevailed. I am confident that things will work out for the best here too, for Jews, Americans and maybe - hopefully - even the Iranian people, who have suffered so much.

But it’s going to be a rough ride, and anyone who promises otherwise is taking us all for fools.

Hold on tight.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

1

Bet Shemesh headlines:

2

If you don’t get that, it’s time for you to bone up on Project 2025. See below.

2024 05 Peoples Guide Pro 2025

1.49MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

The #MeToo movement, which prompted the cancelling of such icons as Harvey Weinstein, Woody Allen, Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose, somehow gave only glancing blows to the ones most responsible for the plague of misogyny that afflicts our society: Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump.1

#MeToo 2: The Sequel is changing all that.

Trump’s offhand “joke” belittling the US Women’s Hockey gold medalists last Sunday was almost innocuous, except that it pointed to far greater transgressions. As sports columnist Tara Sullivan wrote in The Boston Globe:

Women, particularly those in sports or other traditionally male-dominant spaces, have come to expect nothing less from a political career based on baseline misogyny. But that no one else in that moment seemed to realize or even acknowledge how demeaning it was to laugh out loud at the idea of equal inclusion for the similarly golden women’s team is such a disappointment.

As Sullivan pointed out, it was not enough for the male champs to clarify that they do support the women and even “hang out with them,” as one said, they needed to apologize simply for laughing at Trump’s “joke” and playing along with the idea that the women’s gold medal was somehow second-class.

Trump should have apologized too, for not reaching out to congratulate the women while they celebrated - it would not have been the first time his voice would have been heard in a women’s dressing room, after all.

Trump used the “locker room talk” excuse after the Access Hollywood revelation. This time the affront literally took place in a locker room, but still, “Boys will be boys” is no excuse for mistreating women. With Purim just a few days away, we are reminded that “locker room talk” can quickly devolve into locker room stalk. In chapter one of Esther, Queen Vashti2 is ordered to parade naked before her king’s bros and mega donors; she refuses, but with real world consequences: execution for her and an executive order that all wives in the kingdom must obey their husbands.

Hardy har har.

So much for “just a joke.”

Trump’s slight of the gold-winning women was so expected as to appear almost innocent, and I don’t believe it was premeditated. He just doesn’t give women a second thought as human beings. To him, they are just pieces of meat, that is if they are attractive enough to draw his eye. Rosie O’Donnell need not apply. And if they are black, they are “low IQ” pieces of meat.

This week’s incident may be relatively innocuous, but it points to a deeper truth. It is almost impossible to estimate how much damage Donald Trump and his pal Jeff Epstein have done to an inestimable number of women, even aside from the girls and women most directly abused3

• The Dobbs decision alone has resulted in a significantly higher rate of maternal mortality during pregnancy and childbirth, especially in abortion banning states.

• Rates of Domestic Violence have become unspeakably high during the Trump era. On average, nearly 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner in the United States. Treating women like chattel, a Trump/Epstein specialty, undoubtedly has had something to do with that.

• Even early on in Trump 2.0, it was clear that White House policies would apply a sledgehammer to healthcare and family planning, anti-sex discrimination in the workplace, hunger and childcare and victim’s rights. It’s only gotten worse. See this primer, “A Threat to Women,” put together by Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro almost a year ago:

  

  Threat To Women Report Full March 19 Final

  436KB ∙ PDF file

  Download

  Download

I came across a significant posting by Dr. Susannah Heschel, professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth, a noted Jewish feminist and daughter of the iconic social justice prophet, Abraham Joshua Heschel. Here’s what she wrote:

Heschel scratched the itch that has been tormenting me lately, more and more with each day’s revelations from the Epstein files. Powerful men, respected men, with names like Bill Gates and Ehud Barak, as well as long-confirmed creeps, and so many of them: Republicans, Democrats, Brits, French, Israelis, Russians, and did I say Russians….rich, and, well, richer. So many people, all of whom shared one thing in common - that women for them were pieces of meat. The press sometimes calls their most victimized subjects “underage women.” Epstein and his cadre had other euphemisms for them. But there is no such thing as “sex with an underage woman.” It’s called raping children. And if they are a little older - listen up, Megyn Kelly - they are still children and it is still rape.

Of course Trump denigrated the women’s hockey team. This is the guy who drew the birthday scribble for Epstein (see it on CNN’s YouTube channel while you still can!), and this is the guy in the Access Hollywood video. That’s the same guy. The guy from the Epstein files, whose alleged victim’s rape accusations were quite possibly illegally removed by the DOJ. We know who he is. And we know what women are to him.

But Heschel doesn’t let the rest of us off the hook. The misogyny built into our culture is similar to other cultural ills that afflict us, racism, antisemitism, and religious supremacism included. But since misogyny victimizes half the population, even those who willfully submit to inferior status, it requires more immediate attention.

In the Jewish world, second class status for women is somewhat baked in, a given for those who live within the traditional realm. Many women choose that status willingly. Mazal tov to them. But in Israel, where only the most traditional streams of Judaism are officially recognized, this can mean that women are not allowed to lead public worship at our holiest site, the Western Wall. There’s an imbroglio going on right now that might remove the one spot in the Wall’s plaza where egalitarian prayer has been allowed. It’s a major attack on half of world Jewry, the non-Orthodox streams, but thus far, many of the (primarily) men who run major American Jewish organizations are not rushing to the defense of women’s rights for egalitarian prayer.4

In a sermon that I delivered during the height of the #MeToo tsunami, I shared the words of Brandeis professor Keren McGinty, who wrote, “It’s time for the Jewish community to face its own #MeToo crisis. If we want to create positive cultural change for ourselves and for our daughters, women must speak out and the Jewish community must act— regardless of the individual’s position or influence.”

Go back and read it, or listen to the sermon here.

At its conclusion, I make the following suggestion:

Real reconciliation between the sexes will only happen when we create a new structure, a transformed culture, where these offenses will stop happening.

The rabbis of the Talmud were amazing and wise leaders, but they lived in misogynistic times that colored their own views of women – and of men. The rabbis both revered and feared women, seeing women as mysterious and dangerous creatures and men as weak and susceptible to temptation. What they feared most was their own lack of self-control. So, they proceeded to create barriers to keep themselves and other men from succumbing. Unfortunately, most of those barriers came at the expense of women.

But in some ways the rabbis were quite progressive for their time. Here are three key examples:

• The marriage document, the Ketuba, was designed to protect women from abandonment, something that was widespread at the time.

• Second, Ashkenazi Jews banned polygamy long before it was banned by cultures around them.

• And last but not least, there is overwhelming consensus in Jewish law that the life of the mother always takes precedence over her unborn child. A fetus is a life, but not yet a human life, and therefore abortion is not murder. With all the meshugas that goes on with the rabbinate in Israel, abortion has never been controversial.

Columnist Christine Lemba wrote in The Washington Post that the task for the next generation is to develop a sex ethic that is not just a set of rules but also truly respects the human person. At a time like these, maybe the best advice is to stop treating other human beings as objects, in the office, online, at home — or anywhere.

Martin Buber believed that one meets God through one’s encounters with other human beings. He said, “When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.” We also need to restore a sense of equilibrium between the sexes, as it was way back in the beginning, in Genesis 1, when men and women were created simultaneously, as equals.

When people cease to treat others as objects, relationships can be three dimensional and authentic, rather than manipulative. In that environment, even office banter that might be perceived as slightly flirty might not be an excuse to take out that can of mace.

The Hebrew words for he and she, Hu and Hee, are almost identical. Just a little break in the letter vav. Often in the Torah, the two words are often interchangeable. Sometimes it’s written as “hu” but pronounced “hee.”

In Kabbala, the emanations of God are both masculine and feminine, and there is a yin-yang type of balance between masculinity and femininity in the universe. That balance has gotten all out of whack. But it’s not just about men and women. I bet you didn’t know that in rabbinic Judaism, there are actually seven genders – not two. Along with male and female, there are other categories that reflected the real-life world of the rabbis, a world of gender fluidity where some people possessed androgynous physical features.5 We need to grow beyond old stereotypes.

You can see that we have a lot of work to do. We can’t blame this worldwide epidemic of misogyny on Trump and Epstein alone.

But we need to use the revelation of the Epstein files as a teachable moment. So that maybe this time, we can truly make things better and finish the job that #MeToo started. No more locker room jokes.

No more “Boys will be boys.”

Maybe they should try becoming men.

Share

Leave a comment

4

See Times of Israel - https://www.timesofisrael.com/progressive-jews-sound-alarm-over-bill-cementing-orthodox-control-of-western-wall/ - Jewish Federations of North America: WHERE ARE YOU? See this editorial in Thursday’s Jerusalem Post. It’s a big deal.

The Empathy Monster is rearing its ugly head again. In light of the Epstein revelations, with millions of files featuring various Epstein-endorsed “Masters of the Universe” taking turns raping the underage Sabines, spouting crackpot theories of eugenics and spitting out expletives, Caroline Bologna, writing in The Huff Post, discussed the “E” word last week:

Proponents of the “toxic empathy” critique now argue that empathy can cloud moral judgment or be manipulated to advance policies they see as unbiblical. That shifting view on empathy in this era of “MAGA Christianity” concerns many religious scholars and advocates.

“In the last several years, especially within MAGA-aligned Christian spaces, I’ve watched empathy get rebranded as weakness,” said Malynda Hale, executive director of the Christian nonprofit The New Evangelicals. “In choosing to care about the lived experiences of others ― whether they are immigrants, LGBTQ people, Black communities, anyone outside the white evangelicals’ space and ideological lane ― people are framed as being ‘too emotional,’ ‘unbiblical,’ or even ‘compromising your faith.’”

Hey, in the category of “the sun came up today and a Trump regime official used the R-word,” we have this breaking news from Yahoo: White House Communications Director Steven Cheung called two lawmakers the R-word in a social media post shared Friday evening.

Well, it’s not as if the man is in charge of communications or anything.

Cheung called Democratic Representative Ro Khanna and Republican Representative Thomas Massie “some of the dumbest r****** ever to be in Congress.”

In fact he is in charge of communications. And his job is to communicate abuse of anyone who is not white, male, Christian and wealthy. He was staying on brand. Donald Trump’s ungracious treatment of the US women’s hockey team isn’t the most egregious thing he’s ever done to women. It doesn’t even crack the top 10,000. But it demonstrated just how ungracious a boor he is. Again, staying on brand. They really think empathy is evil.

I’m sending this out before tonight’s State of the Union so that you can all make sure to put the R-word on your Bingo cards. If Trump doesn’t use it, you can be sure it will be on a t-shirt or sign somewhere. It has become MAGA’s badge of pride.

Oh, Trump’ll make fun of empathy. And Canadians. And especially Canadians who have empathy.

To all our friends up north, I’m with you, Canada!

“MAGA Christianity” has spread like a virus to other faith traditions, including Judaism. Trump’s lapdogs in Israel have been quick to take their cues from the American religious right, as they’ve been doing for decades. In Ha’aretz, columnist Odeh Bisharat writes in today’s edition:1

“People who used to advocate for public diplomacy have largely reached the conclusion that there’s no chance of Israel convincing the world that it is in the right. The old view, that the Arabs were the aggressors and Israel was only defending itself, has been broken. So the world will get used to Israel’s cruel face.

This approach has been internalized to such a degree that people here actually believe the aggressive approach is what will convince the world, and that other nations will support harassing the Palestinians. This internalization of aggression, crudeness and supremacy runs so deep that those who adopt this approach even think the world agrees with it.”

Might makes right also applies to internal politics in Israel. The majority rules and if you don’t like it, no soup for you! That’s what Israel’s Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich basically said this week when a Supreme Court ruling reasserted a decade-old agreement where part of the Western Wall plaza would be set aside for mixed-gender, egalitarian and progressive Jewish worship.2 That area has been partially closed since 2018, when a 400-pound stone fell and the state failed to repair the structural flaws. The court gave the government 90 days to submit a plan to complete the repairs. The government is trying to pass a law putting the entire Kotel area under the Ultra-Orthodox auspices, which would end any discussion of representation for half of world Jewry.

Any sane government wishing to gain an easy PR win would take the decision as a tiny loss but then use it as a chance to show support the vast majority of diaspora Jews, who support the liberal religious movements and other progressive organizations like the Women of the Wall. It was a no-brainer.

Unfortunately, it can’t be a no-brainer if you don’t have a brain. Or, more to the point, a heart. And face it, since we’re going all Elphaba here, no courage either.

The courts gave Netanyahu’s government an easy offramp, but much like the Trump administration’s doubling down on its cruel immigration policies every time the courts slap them down, Israel’s worst-of-the-worst Finance Minister took a few minutes off from trying to annex the West Bank to stick his thumb in the eye of the majority of American Jews, saying "I cannot understand how some tiny group, which weighs a quarter of a percent of the population, comes and demands to be respected and wants to pray on its own terms.”

How dare a small minority seek respect! What nerve!

While Reform Jews are a minority in Israel, there are 300,000 of them, according to CEO of the Israel Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism Anna Kislanski.

She added, as reported in Ha’aretz,

“Reform Judaism is the largest Jewish denomination in the world and serves as a central bridge between the State of Israel and the Jewish diaspora. Disregarding this community is a disservice both to Israeli citizens and the country’s moral and strategic ties with world Jewry,” Kislanski warned, adding that the movement sees egalitarian Jewish prayer at the Western Wall not as a provocation, but as a demand to “honor the rule of law, which should be fundamental in a democratic state.”

“Every Jew has the right to practice their traditions and prayers freely and equally,” she said. “The Western Wall belongs to all Jews, not just one denomination.”

Not according to Smotrich. 3

They want to be seen as bullies. They think smashing those who are weaker or smaller is good for their brand. They want to be Trump. They really want to be Putin.

I’ve dealt with the topic of empathy often, as recently as yesterday. But in the face of this relentless push of brutality, with the American president sharing AI videos of himself in a hockey fight, this most powerful and obvious religious message bears repeating again and again.

Empathy is good.

Here’s what the Talmud teaches (clip and save in your pocket - this passage is golden)

This verse is a perfect example of how the Jewish ethos is based on the notion that all creatures are linked in a web of interdependence. Blogger Natalia Cervantes notes that the Hebrew word for empathy is Rachamim, which is derived from the word “rechem,” meaning womb. “Empathy is this idea of our ability to connect with others on a deep and nurturing level, similar to the bond between a mother and her child.”

Empathy comes from parental nurturing, not from raping Sabines.

Elon Musk believes all empathy is weakness. No love of another is allowed, save for the love of Dear Leader. For MAGAniks, empathy is at the root of all evil, precisely the opposite of what psychologist Gustav Mark Gilbert said after he interviewed Nazi leaders during the Nuremberg trials:

“I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil,” Gilbert wrote. “I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

As we juggle the question as to whether this administration is premeditatively evil or blissfully incompetent, I agree with the point made by Paul Krugman:

My answer is both. Musk is incompetent and evil. He suffers from billionaire brain — that special blend of ignorance and arrogance that occurs all too frequently in men who believe that their success in accumulating personal wealth means that they understand everything, no need to do any homework. But he also clearly detests anything that makes life better for non-billionaires.

Yes, Musk, Trump plus the cast of characters in the Epstein Universe - they’re all ignorant and arrogant, incompetent and evil.

My dogs showed more compassion for me when I came home from my prostate surgery a year ago than Elon Musk showed for Holocaust victims when he visited Auschwitz. And that’s how we beat back this plague of Trumpism and Bibiism. Demonstrations help. Political posturing, fundraising and media messaging have their place. Winning a few races and court cases will help enormously. But that’s the playing field Trump, Musk and Co. are used to being on. They can fend off their enemies by amping up the aggression, crudeness and white-Christian supremacy.

But they can’t compete on the field of empathy, which is why they are constantly demeaning it. All they can do is put out hockey memes.

Kill ‘em with kindness. Stand up for the smallest. Bury the bullies with ballots. Torture them with acts of love.

We look strongest when supporting the weakest.

Share

Leave a comment

1

Full article:

2

The Smotrich article, from Ha’aretz:

Something remarkable is occurring right now. Religion is making a comeback. Not the fake religion that justifies oppression, abuse and discrimination, but real religion, the kind that preaches love of the stranger and stands up to power, the kind that disdains corruption, the kind that provides comfort and community when your life has fallen apart, the kind they taught in religious schools of all faiths and denominations when I was growing up. We are seeing a religious revival, one keyed by values of compassion and courage. Old faith groups are finding new voices and new denominations are coalescing around time-tested messages.

The fact that the FCC and Trump administration didn’t want the nation to hear James Talarico on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last week, however they tried to parse the matter later on, stemmed from their fear that Talarico is reasserting the religious symbolism that the right had co-opted and perverted for decades. His message of social justice and love-of-neighbor has hit a nerve, countering the anti-empathy ideology of the Trumpists. They know that cruelty might be the point, but it ‘aint selling.

On his website, Talarico defines why he’s running as a chance to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather, a Baptist minister in Texas, and…

“…a barefoot rabbi who gave us two commandments: love God and love neighbor. Because there is no love of God without love of neighbor. Every single person bears the image of the sacred; every single person is holy — not just the neighbors who look like me or pray like me or vote like me.”

I’m a rabbi too, though I typically wear shoes, and I can attest that precisely these same ideals are the soil from which Talarico’s rabbi and my rabbinic sages emerged, though there were religious hypocrites then as there are now.1

I must say that I also admire the political courage of Talarico’s opponent, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, but Talarico’s candidacy is one of the most important statements about religion and state that has happened in some time. If successful - and that’s a huge “if” - he could accomplish something that neither Crockett nor just about anyone this side of Raphael Warnock might accomplish: he could help take religion back to a place of political neutrality and spiritual centrism, so it can be precisely the fount of wisdom the Founders wanted it to be.

The message of Talarico’s candidacy is loud and clear: Right wing nationalists no longer own religion.

This reaction to the Christian nationalist perversion of faith has been a long time in coming, but thanks to the Trump administration’s excesses, it has arrived. The corruption and the cruelty were always there, and the hypocrisy and racism predated Trump by decades, but it has all hit a tipping point with the Epstein revelations and ICE excesses.

Even the Pope has gotten off the fence on this one, and the Catholic church is leading the charge against the abuse of immigrants.

And meanwhile, while Colbert has sparred with Trump in one corner, for the main event the religious wing of the Republican Party has been engaged in a massive slugfest over whether Tucker Carlson or Mike Huckabee has it right about Israel. Their conversation last week at Ben Gurion Airport (Carlson visited Israel for the interview but never left the airport) has become a cause célèbre on the right. For me, both of them are scary, Huckabee for his evangelical zeal for West Bank annexation and Carlson for his antisemitic embrace of eugenics, leading to his wacky obsession over whether Ashkenazic Jews have Abraham’s DNA. As you can see from this analysis by JTA, both sides of this debate are throwing wild haymakers, and this is a small indication of how Christian nationalism has been thrown back on its heels.

The religious right is reeling.

All that will assist the sane center to assert itself as the true religion of Jesus, as well as the Talmudic rabbis, moderate Muslims and love-thy-neighbor supporters everywhere. With centrist religious leaders like Talarico and Warnock jumping to the fore, the Trump-Epstein tipping point may just be enough to tip Texas, spiritually as well as politically.

I can imagine a day in the near future when pastors and pols in Texas will follow Talarico’s cue in arguing for the removal of the Ten Commandments from public school walls. As Talarico told Joe Rogan on his podcast last summer, “If we have to force people to put up a poster, that means we have a dead religion.”

Comments like that are why religion is still relevant. As Talarico argues. posting the Ten Commandments and other issues of religion and state are best handled not as a matter of protecting secular principles but of affirming deeply religious ones. If we adopt that posture, we can assert religion’s prominent place in the public square, its rightful place in each policy debate.

Perhaps religion is more relevant than ever right now, and that’s why we need to rediscover the power of our faith traditions and take pride in them, even as we struggle with aspects of them. Even if we struggle with God.2

Leave a comment

Share

Mikaela Shiffrin gave the world a courageous lesson for our times after winning her gold medal in slalom. And we need it right now, since the world has going through an epidemic of death for the better part of an especially traumatic decade. As of 9:30 Friday morning ET,1 8,614,366 people have died in the world this year (and it’s still February), and this following the huge spike during Covid in the first half of this decade. See the spike below:

Given that so many of us have been immersed in grief following a period that included the millions who died of Covid, those brutalized on October 7, and the bloody wars in Ukraine, Gaza and so many other places, along with victims of gun violence other biproducts of a chaotic era that still engulfs us, Shiffrin’s words are especially valuable to those who are grieving (essentially, all of us).

See them here:

Shiffrin had spent 300 days away from skiing after her father’s tragic passing. And then, when she finally came back, her greatest moment of triumph was also the one she most feared, the prospect of moving forward with her life, of imagining a world beyond the grief and without her dad.

She told reporters, “I could imagine doing the skiing, cross the finish line, and to have this moment actually kind of for myself to connect with the people who can’t be here. This was a moment I have dreamed about. I’ve also been very scared of this moment. I don't want to be in life without my dad, and maybe today was the first time that I could actually accept this reality, and instead of thinking I would be going in this moment without him, to take the moment to be silent with him."

She explained that everything that you do after you lose someone you love is like a new experience. “It’s like being born again.”

When we lose someone we love, our instinct is to make time stand still. I felt that way the night my father died. I was just 21 at the time, and I had spent the new year in New York at my rabbinical school apartment, having returned for a party just a couple of days before. My last in person interaction with my dad was a cursory goodbye as he and my mom left my childhood house in Brookline, Mass. to bring a few boxes down to our second home on Cape Cod. They had closed a sale on our primary home just that week and were looking forward to retiring on the Cape.

Here’s how I described the night of my father’s death in my book Mensch-Marks: Life Lessons of a Human Rabbi.

You can listen to that full chapter below, taken from the audiobook of Mensch-Marks.

Anderson Cooper has an excellent and timely podcast about grief called All There Is. Recently he interviewed writer Megan Falley, who, mourning the loss of their spouse, poet Andrea Gibson, spoke of how “dying is the opposite of leaving.”

Andrea left this most moving love poem to Megan, which you can read in full on Andrea’s Substack:

I am more with you than I ever could have imagined. So close you look past me when wondering where I am. It’s Ok. I know that to be human is to be farsighted. But feel me now, walking the chambers of your heart, pressing my palms to the soft walls of your living. Why did no one tell us that to die is to be reincarnated in those we love while they are still alive? Ask me the altitude of heaven, and I will answer, “How tall are you?”

When a loved one dies, we want to freeze-frame the moment and not allow time to move forward. Mikaela Shiffrin could not imagine experiencing that gold medal without her father being there. Andrea and Megan both could not bear the thought of a permanent breech in their experience of their lives together2. I did not want to enter my home to learn the truth that I already knew full well, that the rest of life, all of my future experiences, would take place without the physical presence of my father.

But I saw my newborn son and that helped heal me, just as Andrea’s poem helped to heal Megan.

Here’s what we need to understand: There are so many people in need of healing right now. Every cry in pain needs to be seen through that prism. Given the increase in the world’s population,3 I think we can safely say that there has never been more death around us than right now.

While it’s true that there never has been a period without grief, I think we are far too willing to deny that the past century has been exponentially more painful to more people who have borne more grief, even as health improvements have expanded life expectancy.

There is a statistic in baseball called W.A.R. It means Wins Above Replacement and places a metric on how many more wins a given player would earn his team, based on his hitting and fielding statistics, than an average replacement player would. I propose that the past half decade would have an extraordinarily high number of D.A.R. - Deaths Above Replacement. Far more grief than expected - or that our 2019 selves could have thought imaginable.

And indeed, a 2023 Boston University study shows that “excess deaths in the United States kept rising even after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 1.5 million in 2022 and 2023 that would have been prevented had US death rates matched those of peer countries.”

The data show a continuation of a decades-old trend toward increasing US excess deaths, mainly among working-age adults, largely driven by drug overdoses, gun violence, auto accidents, and preventable cardiometabolic causes, the researchers say.

“The US has been in a protracted health crisis for decades, with health outcomes far worse than other high-income countries,” says lead and corresponding author Jacob Bor, ScD, said in a BU news release. “This longer-run tragedy continued to unfold in the shadows of the COVID-19 pandemic.”4

Heaven knows that with the clowns now in charge of our health department, mortality and disease will continue to be increasingly problematic.

My point here is not simply that more people have been dying, but that more people are grieving. In the US, there have been 1,234,749 confirmed deaths from Covid. Many more millions have been left behind to pick up the pieces from those losses. Do we have a day to memorialize them? We do not. Do we ever talk about that catastrophic period in daily conversation? For the most part, we don’t. Instead, we’ve relegated that recent era to an attic far in our past, an Al Gore-style lock box from which no painful memory might escape.

We are left to our own devices, and the prime device most people use is suppression and denial. This was shown magnificently in the first season of the Emmy winning series, The Pitt, which depicts a big city emergency room where doctors face current challenges while confronting the demons of Covid-PTSD. I know all about what first responders had to endure during that harrowing period and I can see the trauma that never quite goes away. I saw it first-hand at hospitals and cemeteries, and had to bury innumerable friends and relatives, including my mother-in-law, because someone ate a bat half a world away, or some such, and someone running this country at the time was unable to protect us from it.

Even as the memories recede, the pain can’t be suppressed entirely and denial shows its face in the ugliest of ways. Certainly behind the wheel. I can barely recall a time when an hour’s drive on a US interstate wouldn’t feature at least one idiot passing me going at least 90, wagging his middle finger for all to enjoy. We see Covid grief in the coarseness of language that has afflicted our society, and in the lack of decorum and dialogue in the public square.

There’s no excuse for the rudeness. but we need to understand where it’s all coming from.

Each of us should carry a trauma-o-meter to measure the degree of grief-driven stress that crazy co-worker or meshugenah relative is feeling right now, and where all the excessive indignation is coming from.

• It’s about a dog lover being triggered by stories of Kristi Noem’s marksmanship.

• It’s how people like me with intellectually challenged loved ones who want to punch out anyone who uses the R-word.

• It’s about how someone born in Haiti wants to spit on anyone spreading rumors about the immigrants in Springfield eating the dogs and cats. Or someone from Somalia - or St. Paul - watching ICE atrocities unfolding on Minneapolis’s streets.

• It’s about someone whose great uncle died in a measles epidemic who wants to send RFK Jr. to a leper colony.

• It’s about an American who values the sanctity of human life hearing that our own government is enabling a Russian dictator’s unprovoked onslaught on Ukrainian civilians.

• It’s about Holocaust survivors - and their still traumatized children and grandchildren - hearing that the Jewish state is being accused of genocide. A group of Jewish leaders, all moderates whom I respect greatly, has circulated an open letter pleading for academics, politicians and journalists to cease using the term “genocide” in regard to Israel’s actions in Gaza.5 The point of this letter, in my mind, is to lower the temperature and to avoid the most triggering language imaginable. To be clear, I do think Hamas had genocidal intent when it raped, murdered and captured innocent people on October 7. Those actions come much closer to fitting the initial definition of genocide as it was applied to Nazi crimes6 then anything Israel did as a country, though statements of intent made by some of its more notoriously racist ministers are extremely problematic. There’s no doubt that Israel’s leaders are going to have to answer for their malice toward innocent populations, including likely war crimes, as well as their neglect of their own people’s security.

• And it’s about lying, conniving leaders who ignore the grief of survivors and should just step aside. Prime Minister Netanyahu, for political reasons, is now insisting in Orwellian fashion that there was no “massacre” on October 7. His entire country is grieving and yet he resorts to alternative facts, and with his friend Donald, who also wishes to ignore the traumas of survivors (those of the Epstein variety), will probably attack Iran just to change the subject. 7

• And face it, I recognize my own anger, my own unresolved grief. I cannot escape the conclusion that Donald Trump killed my mother-in-law in how he handled Covid. And it fuels my rage. Without either forgiving or forgetting, I need to find more constructive ways to memorialize the departed. We all do.

Ours is a world immersed in grief right now, much more grief than one would expect in an era when we’ve overcome so many diseases. To overcome this cycle of death and despair, we need to listen to the advice of courageous people like Mikaela Shiffrin and listen to podcasts like Anderson Cooper’s. And we need to understand that with grief, whether for an individual or for a community, nation of tribe, there is no “whataboutism.” My grief cannot be measured against yours. Grief is deeply personal and when you are in it, it feels infinite.

Megan Falley compares answering the question, “How are you?” to being a thimble at the mouth of a river. “That’s how small it is trying to catch something so big and rushing and vibrant and not static. And it just really falls short.”

We need to move forward. Somehow. Desperately. Before our sadness consumes us and our entire world.

And the best way is to reach out and help others do that too. The degree of suffering within and around us is too great to bear alone.

Share

Leave a comment

1

World population today:

2

Andrea wrote this:

3

World Population:

4

If you want to get into the weeds as to why we are pushing up more daisies, see below:

6

From the Holocaust Encyclopedia:

7

See this Substack commentary from Daniel Gordis and see below this response to Netanyahu’s outrageous removal of the term “massacre” in describing Ocvtober 7. from the Times of Israel’s editor David Horovitz: