The Democratic Party has a problem.

How do we keep gaslighting the American Jewish diaspora?

How do we continue telling one of our most reliable voting blocs that the party still supports them, even as the Red-Green alliance takes over its ideological leadership. How do we keep the Jewish voters, volunteers, fundraisers and donors who have sustained the Democratic Party for generations while Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed fundamentally change the party’s politics?

How much anti-Zionism can the party absorb before American Jews finally leave? How much humiliation will they take?

Nancy Pelosi recently decided to find out.

Scott Piro drew my attention to a remarkable vote Pelosi made in July. She joined 102 other House Democrats in supporting Republican Thomas Massie’s amendment to eliminate $3.3 billion in annual American security assistance to Israel.

Video credit: Scott Piro

The amendment failed, 314–104. But 103 Democrats—nearly half the caucus—voted for it. Pelosi later described the amendment as “ill-conceived,” but said she had supported it to send a message that American policy toward Israel needed to change.

Nancy Pelosi does not make votes like that casually. She calculates. She counts. She balances risks. She knows where the donors are and where the votes are. She knows exactly how much political damage the Democratic Party can absorb.

And so her calculation was not only about Israel. It was about American Jews.

Will we lose them? Will we lose the Jewish Americans who have spent decades stuffing envelopes, hosting fundraisers, writing cheques and volunteering for Democratic campaigns? Or has the American Jewish establishment become sufficiently demoralized that it will accept this too?

They accepted the campus encampments. They accepted the hostage posters being ripped down. They accepted the “globalize the intifada” chants. They accepted Jewish artists being ostracized and Israel being turned into the singular villain of the Western cultural world.

Now, will they accept a former Democratic speaker voting to eliminate the core security assistance promised to the Jewish state?

Nancy Pelosi’s wager was yes. They will take it.

My wager is that American Jews have already spent years proving her right.

The party’s ideological centre is being pulled toward a socialist movement in which hostility toward Israel is part of an entire moral worldview: Israel is the colonial oppressor, the Palestinians are the permanently innocent oppressed, and Jewish self-determination is a uniquely illegitimate form of nationalism.

This worldview did not remain confined to activist organizations or university departments. It took over museums, theatres, comedy rooms, publishing houses, newsrooms and the social lives of educated urban Americans.

Now it is moving from the culture into the political leadership of the Democratic Party. The party has already changed. The question is how to prevent American Jews from admitting it.

That requires a certain amount of gaslighting. It requires a certain amount of demoralization. It requires prominent Jewish Democrats who can translate the party’s abandonment of Israel into a story about Israel’s own failures.

Enter Rahm Emanuel.

Rahm Emanuel travelled to Tel Aviv University in July 2026 to deliver a sweeping indictment of the Israeli government. He warned that Israel risked becoming a “territorial pariah.” He condemned settlement expansion and settler violence. He blamed Benjamin Netanyahu’s government for Israel’s diplomatic isolation. He proposed ending the traditional American military-aid arrangement and reviving the promise of Palestinian statehood.

The speech was presented as tough love from a lifelong friend of Israel: an American Jew bravely telling Israelis what they needed to hear.

But I want to make one thing clear.

Rahm Emanuel’s performance was not really for Israelis.

It was for American Jews.

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I have just reached my first 100 paid subscribers on Substack.

Thank you to everyone who has subscribed, read, shared or supported my work. And to those of you reading for free: I hope you will consider upgrading.

Recently, I spoke to a friend who had subscribed. I asked whether she was enjoying my Substack.

She paused.

Immediately, I became anxious.

“Well,” she said, “not all of your essays are funny. And people come to you for humor.”

She is a marketing expert, so I understood what she meant. She was thinking about branding: What does the audience expect? What is the product? What promise has been made to the consumer?

But I am not a product. I am an artist.

I cannot spend the rest of my life conforming to someone else’s outdated understanding of who I am. The world has changed. Some people’s brains simply haven’t caught up yet.

There are probably still people who think I weigh 400lbs. They remember the version of me they encountered years ago and have preserved him in amber. They cannot reconcile that image with the person standing in front of them now.

People will leave or stay, and new people will find me.

For 18 years, I have done stand-up comedy as my main source of income. The sketches and monologues I posted online were a way of introducing people to my sensibility so that they might eventually come to one of my live shows.

I did not realize how drastically the world was changing around me.

At some point, posting comedic videos online stopped being a way to promote a career. People thought that posting material online had become my career. I hadn’t realized that hundreds of thousands of people had become “content creators,” represented by agencies and governed by marketing plans, brand partnerships and algorithms. And that every personality needed to become an instantly recognizable product.

This was the new context through which people were attempting to filter me:

Funny gay guy. Political commentator. Travel influencer. Israel advocate.

Writer. Comedian. Middle East Policy Expert.

Who are you? Choose one.

But those things are not separate careers for me. They are all expressions of the same point of view.

My Power Gay monologues are heightened comic performances. They exist within a larger body of work. I am not actually married to every imaginary husband I mention. I do not own every house I describe. These are theatrical monologues built from observation, fantasy, autobiography and camp.

I was operating under the assumption that audiences understood this performance tradition. Scott Thompson created Buddy Cole. Sandra Bernhard created an amplified theatrical version of herself. Drew Droege transforms disjointed social observation into heightened character sketches.

Some people (mainly older gay men) understand instinctively what I am doing because they understand the comedic sensibility and performance style. Others watch a ninety-second clip and begin conducting a criminal investigation into whether I really live in the house behind me.

The people who get it, get it.

The people who don’t may never get it.

Recently, I went back through the Power Gay monologues I have created over the past several years and amalgamated them into Highlight Reels. People can watch them together and see them as a coherent body of work rather than a succession of disconnected social-media posts.

Placed beside one another, the characters, rhythms, preoccupations and point of view become much clearer. A single monologue may look like a strange little glimpse into an imaginary life. Seen together, they reveal an entire comic universe.

The fragmentation created a more serious problem as well. When people encounter only isolated snippets of my work, they cannot see the larger artistic context connecting them. They see one comic character, one political observation, one video from Israel or one confrontation and assume that single moment represents the entirety of who I am.

That confusion also leaves room for people with malicious political motives to invent a character for me and then assassinate it. They remove one clip from the larger body of work, strip away the humor, history and context, and present it as evidence in a political prosecution.

Substack gives me the space to put the frame back around the picture.

Here, I can be funny. I can also write seriously about politics, culture, antisemitism, art, gay life, Israel, beauty, aging, Europe, world cities, and the strange experience of living through history outside a media eco-system that is DENYING that it is happening.

That is not a branding crisis. That is the work.

My friend’s comment made me think about the uneasy relationship between art and capitalism. Branding can be useful. An artist needs to understand how to communicate what he does. But when branding becomes the master rather than the servant, it begins flattening a human being into whatever portion of his personality has proven easiest to sell.

I thought about Bethenny Frankel on The Real Housewives of New York City after the death of of her boyfriend Dennis Shields.

Bethenny is brilliant at understanding capitalism. She could walk into almost any situation and immediately determine the product, the market and the opportunity. She built Skinnygirl into an empire by understanding that everything could be organized beneath a coherent brand.

But grief cannot be organized beneath a coherent brand.

On the show, Bethenny sat with a grief counselor, Dr. Norman Fried, attempting to understand her feelings about Dennis’s death and even what her place had been at his funeral.

Years later, when I moved to New York, I became friends with Norman. He was deeply involved in advocacy around Israel and antisemitism, tracking the explosion of antisemitic activity and the growing pro-terror movement as it unfolded around us. We met through that work, in an entirely different context from the one in which I had first seen him on television.

There was something surreal about realizing that the grief counselor I remembered sitting across from Bethenny Frankel had now entered my own life through the political and moral crisis consuming New York. He had moved from helping one person process private grief on television to documenting a public convulsion of hatred—and, in his own way, trying to help a community understand what was happening to it.

Video credit: https://www.instagram.com/normanfried/

In that episode, Bethenny had encountered something that could not be compartmentalized, branded or converted into forward momentum.

There is something heartbreaking about watching a person discover that no amount of commercial clarity can give emotional clarity to death.

Capitalism without spirituality does not merely sell your work. Eventually, it tries to sell you back to yourself. It tells you that your identity is whatever performed best last quarter.

If my “brand” means that I am only permitted to be a funny gay man making funny gay jokes, then the brand fundamentally misunderstands the artist.

People sometimes tell me that my comedy has become too political. I don’t think that is entirely true. I am still doing what I have always done: observing culture and filtering it through my personality, intellect and camp sensibility.

What changed is that culture became almost impossible to separate from politics.

Even an artist who does not wish to become political can now have politics forced upon her.

Last year Regina Spektor had to stop a concert in Portland after audience members began screaming “Free Palestine” and demanding that she say it too. According to people at the show, one protester moved toward the stage before being removed by security.

“You’re just yelling at a Jew,” she told them.

This was not a political rally. It was a concert. She had entered the room to play music. But an audience member decided that the physical presence of a Jewish artist constituted an opportunity for ideological confrontation.

Live performance is becoming dangerous for anyone openly Jewish, Christian, or who has crossed the artistic boycott against Israel.

When you appear on a stage, you are physically exposed to whoever has purchased a ticket. You do not know whether someone has come to experience the work, disrupt it, record a misleading fragment, scream a political slogan or manufacture a viral confrontation.

There is a reason so many famous people in the USA have podcasts now, bank the ad revenue, and rarely leave their mansions.

A podcast gives the individual control. You decide who enters the room. You can speak for two hours without someone charging toward the microphone. You cannot be shouted down by a stranger who has appointed himself the ideological representative of the audience. If something goes wrong, you can edit it.

The podcast studio has become a kind of cultural bunker.

But live performance depends upon the opposite conditions. It requires vulnerability, unpredictability and physical contact with an audience. That danger can create electricity. It can also create genuine risk.

For comedians, the danger is not only physical. A joke can be removed from its theatrical context, uploaded by someone hostile to the performer and circulated as evidence of moral depravity. The audience member no longer sees himself only as a spectator. He can become a prosecutor, surveillance operative and content distributor—all before the show has ended.

There is no longer any neutral cultural territory.

Even after Dolly Parton’s death, someone vandalized her Wikipedia page, replacing her photograph with a swastika and changing her name to “Jew lover.”

Dolly Parton may have been the least threatening and most universally beloved figure in American culture. She devoted enormous portions of her life and fortune to literacy, medicine and philanthropy. And still, within hours of her death, someone dragged her into the same hatred consuming the rest of the culture.

If even Dolly Parton cannot be left alone, nobody can.

Years ago, I had a joke in my European show about the Croatian singer Tajči. She had been the blonde bombshell of Yugoslav pop music—a huge star just before the country collapsed into war. Years later, I discovered that she had moved to Tennessee, embraced Christianity and begun performing religious music.

My joke was something like: “Nobody wants to hear your Christian crap, Tajči. We liked you better when you were a slutty communist.”

It always landed in shows in former Yugoslavia.

But now I realize that Tajči was right.

You are allowed to honor the person you once were without remaining trapped inside her forever. She could preserve the legacy of the young Yugoslav pop star while becoming a more mature woman with a different spiritual life and different things to say.

An artist who is never permitted to develop becomes trapped on a hamster wheel, desperately trying to reproduce the moment when the audience first fell in love with him.

That is not artistic integrity. It is spiritual taxidermy.

There is a reason Jerry Seinfeld is not broke and performing for fifty people in the back room of a comedy club. He took the success of his stand-up act and used it to create something larger. He wrote scripts. He developed a television series. He expanded the world contained within his comic voice.

That is what comedy is supposed to be: a platform from which an artist can move into screenwriting, books, documentaries, theatre, film and whatever comes next.

The short, bite-sized clips serve a purpose. They introduce people to me. They circulate. They entertain. Occasionally, they reach millions of people.

But they are fragments. They are not the whole person, and they are not the whole body of work.

That is what I intend to develop here.

I am a comedian. I am also a writer. I perform characters. I’m going to write books, and make tv shows, and movies. I offer political commentary. I advocate for Israel. I document the people and places I encounter. I write about gay culture, antisemitism, power, civilization and the absurdity of trying to remain human inside an algorithm.

Sometimes it will be funny. Sometimes it will be serious. Often it will be both.

The promise is that every essay will come from the same sensibility—the same set of eyes looking at the world. One hundred people have now decided that this larger body of work is worth paying for.

To every one of you: thank you. We are only getting started!

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I met my friend Jovan in Athens this past May at Minu, a beautiful café and concept store hidden inside an old neoclassical building in Psiri. It was one of those places Athens does so well: breezy and open, with clean white walls, pale beige details, hanging plants and enormous cacti. Everything appeared to have been placed with absolute precision while maintaining the illusion that it had all grown there naturally.

The food was fabulous. Upstairs, sunlight and a warm breeze moved through the open windows between two facing balconies. Jovan and I sat down for brunch and began catching up.

Jovan is Serbian. I am Croatian. And I have discovered that whenever I meet a Serb or a Croat abroad, we will almost certainly get along. Whatever our countries may have done to one another, we were raised with the same values, the same sense of humour and the same instinctive suspicion of anyone who takes Western European moral posturing too seriously.

“Ah, Daniel,” Jovan laughed. “You’re one of us.”

He told me how proud he was of everything I had been doing for Israel. He had watched the past several years unfold in Berlin with the grim satisfaction of someone who had warned his friends exactly what was coming and had been dismissed as a Balkan reactionary.

“All those Berlin gays,” he said. “They had no idea what they were getting themselves into. I told them ten years ago.”

One of his woke German friends had recently begun complaining about what had happened to his neighborhood.

“So, finally, you figured it out?” Jovan had asked him. “You’re not enjoying your new friends?”

There is a particular pleasure that people from the former Yugoslavia take in being proven right about things that affluent Germans spent years declaring it immoral to notice. We laughed, ordered more coffee and returned our attention to the beautiful sanctuary around us.

Jovan, like every proper Power Gay in Athens, understands that the final two weeks of August are reserved for Mykonos.

Every summer, someone announces that Mykonos is over. It has become too expensive, too exposed, too commercial. The parties aren’t what they used to be. The right people have supposedly moved on to some unspoiled island whose name you are meant to whisper carefully so the heterosexuals don’t hear it.

Well, I have news for you: in the power-gay world of Europe, Mykonos is most definitely not over.

For the past two weeks, my feed has been filled with the most beautiful men in the world diving into crystal-blue water, gathering for long dinners as the sun dissolves into the Aegean and dancing beneath spectacular productions assembled for the final weeks of summer. Eliad Cohen, the undisputed king of the Power Gays, was jumping fully clothed into infinity pools. International DJs were headlining the great circuit parties. Greek villas appeared to spill directly into the sea. Every morning brought another procession of tanned bodies, white linen shirts, immaculate hotels and tables overflowing with Mediterranean food.

Throughout August, Jovan kept sending me photographs from Elia Beach, where gay men cruised one another among the rocky hills above the Aegean. Against that ancient landscape, it appeared almost mythological, as if the satyrs had returned to Greece—only now with iPhones, gym memberships and extraordinarily well-managed Instagram accounts.

What impressed me was the effort behind it all.

It takes discipline to build the body, ambition to build the life and imagination to arrange your world so that, for two weeks in August, you can stand beneath the Greek sun looking like a god. These men had constructed careers, crossed continents, maintained friendships and shaped themselves over years. You do not arrive in Mykonos by accident. You have to create a life capable of taking you there. This was civilization fulfilling its promise.

The beautiful men in the infinity pools, the romantic dinners at sunset, the music rising above the Aegean—these were not symptoms of decadence. They were expressions of freedom, prosperity and peace. Here were men who had inherited the possibilities created by generations before them and fashioned those possibilities into something joyful, sensual and spectacular.

Greece is perhaps the only landscape capable of containing this much male beauty without appearing overwhelmed by it.

The mythology is already there. Hercules with his impossible body. Apollo as the embodiment of masculine beauty. Achilles grieving for Patroclus. Narcissus staring at his own reflection with the focus of a gay man examining photographs from the previous night. The marble torsos, athletic rituals and ancient stories are filled with a homoeroticism so foundational that even the most heterosexual tourists can stare directly at it without recognizing what they are seeing.

Mykonos does not impose gay culture upon Greece. It reveals something that has always been there.

Modern Greece has also understood that romance and sensuality are part of its national inheritance. In the 1960 classic Oscar-winning film Never on Sunday, Melina Mercouri’s Ilya moves through the port of Piraeus with a freedom, warmth and sexual confidence that made Greece appear not merely like a destination, but like another way of being alive. The film does not present pleasure as something shameful or politically trivial. Pleasure is the philosophy of the place.

That was part of what inspired me to create The Power Gays of Kolonaki. I wanted to capture the fantasy of Greece: the grand personalities, the gossip, the romance, the theatricality and the conviction that a beautiful lunch can become the central event of an entire day. Greece offers something Berlin & many big cities in Western Europe no longer can. It offers the possibility that life might be lived sensually rather than ideologically.

When I lived in Germany, I believed that Germany represented Europe’s answer to its historical problems. Germany had confronted its past. It had rebuilt itself as a prosperous liberal democracy. It appeared to have solved nationalism, antisemitism and war through memory, openness and a shared European identity.

But Germany’s determination to transcend its own identity eventually began to look like an inability to defend anything at all. The people who believed themselves too sophisticated for borders, patriotism and cultural continuity discovered that other people had arrived carrying very strong ideas about all three.

Greece is different. It still has an invested interest in remaining Greek, as I wrote about in my essay Athens is not the New Berlin

Like the Jewish people, the Greeks carry the memory of an ancient civilization into the modern world. The territories that became modern Greece and Israel both spent centuries under Ottoman rule. Both peoples have ancient languages, stories and national identities that they had to translate into modern political life. Both understand that history is not merely something preserved inside a museum. It must be lived, defended and passed forward.

This does not mean that Greece is immune to the ideological sickness overtaking other parts of Europe.

I spent much of the spring staying in Kypseli, a neighborhood where “Free Palestine” politics had become part of the visual landscape. On one walk through central Athens, I found myself surrounded by Palestinian flags, accusations of genocide and the familiar revolutionary slogans that now appear wherever Western radicals have made misery into a personality. I felt physically sick.

But whenever I told an Athenian taxi driver where I was staying, the reaction was remarkably consistent.

“Ugh,” they would say with disgust, rolling their eyes. “Communists.”

That eye roll gave me hope.

Athens certainly has its professional revolutionaries. It has anarchist graffiti, marxist propaganda and people who believe that covering their own city in the symbols of somebody else’s struggle constitutes moral courage. But it also has millions of people who want better lives. They want safe neighbourhoods, successful businesses, beautiful homes, strong families, good food and enough money to enjoy the country they have inherited.

Recently, I saw a video of a Greek man painting over a Palestinian flag that had been sprayed onto a wall.

“This is Greece! Not Gaza!” he said. “Leave us alone! We don’t want to see this flag!”

Perhaps he was simply tired of looking at it. Sometimes exhaustion is the beginning of political clarity.

For years, we were told that capitalism was shallow because it encouraged people to want things: beautiful apartments, successful careers, holidays, restaurants, technology and comfort. But wanting a better life can pull people out of extraordinarily dark places. Commerce asks people to imagine a future. It encourages stability, cooperation and the possibility that tomorrow might contain something worth building.

Sometimes problems really can be solved by making peace more profitable than war.

This is the idea behind the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor, known as IMEC. The proposed trade route would connect India to the United Arab Emirates, continue through Saudi Arabia and potentially Jordan and Israel, then cross the Mediterranean from Haifa into Europe. Greece, with the port of Piraeus, could become one of its principal European gateways.

It is difficult to imagine a more powerful geographic image: India, the Arab world, Israel and Greece connected not through conquest or grievance, but through railways, ports, energy, technology and trade.

Benjamin Netanyahu has described the choice facing the region as one between “the blessing” and “the curse.”

The curse is the IRGC model: a Middle East connected through revolutionary militias, rockets, tunnels, terrorism and permanent war. Iran’s Islamic regime projects its power through Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, armed factions in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen. It offers young people martyrdom, grievance and a future sacrificed to conflicts that can never be allowed to end.

The blessing is the alternative: normalization between Israel and the Arab world, peace with Saudi Arabia and a commercial corridor linking Asia to Europe. Rather than surrounding Israel with weapons, the countries of the region would connect themselves through infrastructure. Rather than exporting revolution, they would export goods, energy, technology and ideas.

October 7 was not only an attack upon Israeli families and communities. It also struck at the possibility of this emerging regional order. Hamas and its Islamist patron understood what Israeli normalization with Saudi Arabia would represent. It would diminish the Palestinian veto over Arab–Israeli relations and weaken the IRGC’s claim to leadership through “resistance.” It would demonstrate that the future belonged not to the people digging tunnels, but to the people building railways.

The curse offers the ecstasy of destruction. The blessing offers the satisfaction of creation.

And this is where the Power Gays of Mykonos enter the geopolitical imagination.

The freedom to swim in the Aegean with the man you love, to dance until sunrise, to build a beautiful body, to open a hotel, to create a business, to travel across borders and to gather with friends from Athens, Tel Aviv, Belgrade, London and New York is not separate from politics. This life is the product of a particular kind of politics.

Pleasure does not exist outside civilization. Civilization creates the conditions in which pleasure becomes possible. Freedom requires people willing to defend it.

My Israeli friends in Mykonos understand this, whether they discuss it over dinner or not. Their presence there is itself an argument. They have spent years being told that their country is an obstacle to peace, only to discover that Israelis are among the people most enthusiastically participating in the cultural and economic life of the Mediterranean.

In Mykonos, nobody is conducting a seminar about the correct arrangement of gender identities or pronouns in an ever-expanding Queer Marxist theory. Nobody is demanding that anyone submit a political statement or voting records before entering the circuit party.

Everyone is living inside a Vogue editorial.

And perhaps that is political enough.

The choice between the blessing and the curse is not merely a choice between two systems of international relations. It is a choice between two attitudes toward human life. One sees beauty, success, pleasure and freedom as corruptions to be destroyed. The other recognizes them as aspirations to be protected and shared.

Greece still has a choice about which future it wants to inhabit.

It can allow the country’s beauty to become a backdrop for imported revolutionary resentments. Or it can recognize its natural place within a new Mediterranean alliance: democratic, commercially connected, culturally confident and capable of defending the inheritance that makes Greece unlike anywhere else in the world.

Greece could learn something from Israel—not by becoming less Greek, but by becoming more confident in its own identity. Israel’s strength comes from its refusal to separate modern innovation from ancient belonging. Greece possesses that same extraordinary combination. It can look backward toward the gods while building ports, businesses and technological connections that carry it into the future.

The revolutionaries offer Greece another flag to paint onto its walls.

The blessing offers Greece the world.

I believe Greece will choose the blessing. I believe it because of the taxi drivers rolling their eyes. I believe it because someone became sufficiently irritated to take a bucket of white paint to a Palestinian flag. I believe it because the cafés are full, the ports are expanding and the Power Gays are still arranging their summers around the Aegean.

And I need Greece to choose the blessing for one more profoundly important reason.

I want to go to Mykonos next year!

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Christmas of 2024 was the only Christmas I ever spent in New York City. It was also one of the most bittersweet, because I knew that within a few weeks, I would be leaving.

I had always wanted to experience New York during that strange, enchanted week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. I wanted to see the ball drop, watch Sandra Bernhard’s one-woman show at Joe’s Pub and participate in all the iconic holiday rituals I had absorbed through movies, television and comedy.

On Christmas Eve, I went to midnight Mass at the Catholic church near my apartment. I loved the candles, the music and the tradition of it—the feeling of people gathering in the darkness to participate in something ancient.

Then, on Christmas Day, I celebrated in an entirely different way: I went out for Chinese food with my Jewish friends.

Jewish Christmas at the Chinese restaurant had been part of my pop-culture comedy vernacular for as long as I could remember. It was in Seinfeld, in Saturday Night Live sketches and in that famous moment during Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing when Lindsey Graham asked her where she had been on Christmas.

“Like all Jews,” she replied, “I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.”

I had heard the joke a thousand times. Now I was finally getting to live it.

The tradition itself emerged from immigrant New York. Jewish and Chinese immigrants living beside one another, and Chinese restaurants remained open while Christian New York closed down for Christmas. Chinese cooking also used relatively little dairy, which allowed Jews to maintain the appearance of eating kosher-style food—as long as no one investigated the pork bun too closely.

Now this immigrant tradition was becoming part of my own tradition. I was an immigrant to the United States too, a Canadian who had spent years dreaming about New York before finally managing to build a life there. Something I had previously known only through American popular culture was now happening to me.

I was not watching it on television. I was inside it.

I went to dinner with my friends Noah and Benjamin. That year, Hanukkah also began on Christmas night, so the first candle would be lit that evening.

For the occasion, I wore my authentic Marius genser from Norway—a traditional Norwegian sweater with a geometric pattern—because I wanted to feel extra folksy and Christmassy.

On my way to the restaurant, I passed a group of Chabad men handing out little portable menorah kits.

“Are you Jewish?” one of them asked me.

“No,” I said.

“Then give it to one of your Jewish friends.”

I wanted to explain that I might not technically be Jewish, but I was probably the most Jewish non-Jewish person in New York City. I did not know how to communicate all of that to a Chabad man standing on the sidewalk, so I accepted the menorah and promised to deliver it to the appropriate authorities.

At the restaurant, Noah, Benjamin and I ordered dumplings, bok choy, pork buns and duck. The table filled with little plates as we talked about politics, Israel and the future of New York.

We wondered how long the progressive cultural consensus could survive before combusting under the weight of its own contradictions. Were proud Jewish Zionsit writers, actors & celebrities finally going to fight for their place in American culture? Would October 7 force people to confront what had been growing around us? Would there be a groundswell of Michael Rapaports—loud, funny, unapologetic Jews who would take back the microphone?

Or were we all eventually going to give up and move to Florida?

We did not know.

What we were going to get one year later was Mandy Patinkin singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” at Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration.

But we did not know that yet.

Once dinner was finished, I took out the little menorah Chabad had given me. Since it was the first night of Hanukkah, we decided to light it right there at the table.

The restaurant did not mind at all. They lent us a lighter.

We placed the menorah between the empty plates, lit the first candle and said the Hanukkah blessings together in front of the entire restaurant.

There I was: a Canadian-European immigrant in a Chinese restaurant in New York City, lighting a Jewish menorah that had been given to me by Chabad—even though I was not actually Jewish—after eating pork buns with my two gay married Jewish bros.

It felt absurdly specific and completely perfect.

This was not simply Jewish Christmas as I had seen it on television. I was finally inside the joke, inside the ritual and inside the immigrant story that had created it - and it was a part of my immigrant story!

Over the following nights, I went to a different Hanukkah party almost every evening. Every gay Jew in Manhattan seemed to be hosting something. There were menorahs in apartment windows, trays of latkes, bottles of wine, beautiful men discussing Israel and someone inevitably telling a story about his mother.

There was also Jewbilee, the enormous Christmas Eve party in Hell’s Kitchen for gay Jews and “bagel-chasers”. It was ostensibly a Jewish mixer, but really it was hundreds of hot gay Jews drinking vodka under nightclub lighting.

And yet there was a sadness beneath all of it.

We could feel that enormous changes were coming. We just did not know exactly what they would be.

At the time, everything remained suspended. We were still going to parties. We were still lighting candles. We were still eating Chinese food and having beautiful conversations about the future. We could all sense that one version of New York was ending, but none of us could imagine what was going to replace it.

And throughout that Christmas, I kept thinking about the woman who had been burned alive on the subway.

Her name was Debrina Kawam.

Three days before Christmas, Kawam had been asleep on a stationary F train at Coney Island when a man allegedly approached her and set her clothing on fire. Prosecutors said that he remained outside the train watching her burn and even fanned the flames.

I struggled to get the image out of my mind. I had seen the video.

It was not simply the depravity of the murder. It was the feeling surrounding it: that a vulnerable woman could be burned alive in public and that the city would somehow absorb it as another disturbing story before moving on to the next thing.

The man accused of killing her, Sebastian Zapeta-Calil, was a Guatemalan national who had previously entered the United States unlawfully, been deported in 2018 and then returned at an unknown date.

That fact mattered—not because the actions of one immigrant could explain an entire immigration system, but because no one was supposed to admit that political decisions might have consequences for public safety. I was supposed to regard the fear I felt as delusional. I was supposed to accept that acknowledging danger, disorder & cold-blooded murder was somehow more dangerous than the disorder itself.

By the time I had made it to Chinese restaurant for Christmas, I finally understood why Trump had won.

There is a limit to how much chaos people will tolerate. There is only so far you can push ordinary people before they begin to believe that their physical safety is being sacrificed to someone else’s ideology. Once people no longer trust the government to protect them on the subway, abstract language about compassion and inclusion begins to sound obscene.

We were all liberal, fun, provocative people. We wanted to live in an open society. But you cannot be open, fun and free when your physical safety is constantly in jeopardy.

Freedom requires order. It requires the basic expectation that you can ride the train without being pushed onto the tracks, stabbed or set on fire.

This was the great disconnect I had begun to feel in New York. It was an unbelievably rich city that could also be unbelievably cruel: hyper-capitalist, spiritually empty and increasingly indifferent to whether the people living inside it felt safe.

I loved New York. I did not want to leave. But I had recently undergone surgery, I had one month to give up the little room I was renting in Manhattan, and I could not find a realistic way to remain.

I had spent more than a year being a vocial supporter of Israel, the hostages and the ideological campaign being waged against the Jewish state — while still pursuing my career in live comedy. Instead of being valued for it, I often felt as though I had become an inconvenience to a Jewish cultural establishment, who all quietly hoped that the antisemitism would disappear if everyone remained polite enough.

It did not disappear.

Within a year, Zohran Mamdani would be elected mayor.

As I looked across the table at Noah and Benjamin, I knew this might be my last Christmas in New York. Just as the city’s traditions were finally becoming part of my life, I was preparing to leave them behind - for now.

In the weeks that followed, I returned to Canada and stayed at my mother’s house, trying to unwind after an exhausting year and a half.

I decided that I would spend the coming year moving between America and Israel.

I wanted to be in Israel to document the return of the remaining hostages, create my new one-man show and study public diplomacy under people such as Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, Einat Wilf and Harel Chorev—people who understood that the war against Israel was not merely a territorial dispute but an ideological war over the future of the West.

Perhaps God was putting me on a new path.

Then, one morning at my mother’s house before I left for Israel, I woke up to a barrage of messages from a former friend in Berlin. I will call him Jonas.

Jonas had apparently found one of the interviews I had given about Trump’s victory and the collapse of the left. He demanded to know whether I had become “one of those right-wing gays.”

He was hysterical & erratic. His great concern was that transgender people might have their gender markers taken away on their passports, and that trans prisoners would no longer be placed in prisons corresponding to their “chosen gender identities”.

I told him that, whatever my disagreements with Trump, I believed his administration would ultimately be better for Israel and for Western national security.

“No one gives a shit about Israel,” Jonas replied.

There it was.

For a year and a half, I had been trying to explain that the war against Israel was part of a much larger war against the West by the Islamic Republic. During that time, people in Jonas’s political world had insulted me, denigrated me, cyberbullied me and subjected me to endless vitriol. Many of them had aligned themselves with movements that openly celebrated the murder and kidnapping of Jews.

Yet I was still patient enough to try to explain what I was seeing.

Jonas was not interested.

The possibility that Israel might be annihilated by the Islamic Republic occupying Iran was, to him, an irrelevant abstraction. The survival of the world’s only Jewish state & half the world’s Jewish population did not matter. The hostages did not matter. The security of the democratic world did not matter.

What mattered—what had inspired him to contact me in a state of moral panic—was the placement of transgender prisoners. For instance: biological men with in tact penises, who could have potentially raped women, being allowed to serve their sentence in women’s prisons.

I remember thinking: This is where your head is?

I was recovering from surgery. I had to move out of my home in New York. My life was changing completely. Israel was still fighting a war on multiple fronts. And Jonas had chosen this moment to confront me because my priorities no longer aligned perfectly with the ideological hierarchy he had been taught.

His loyalty was not to me, his supposed friend. It was not to liberal democracy, the survival of the West, or even physical reality.

His loyalty was to the doctrine of WOKE. He was in a cult.

But somehow, I was the crazy one.

You can hear the same disconnect in the conversations taking place now. I recently watched the hosts of the Normal Gays podcast attempting to have a conversation with the Black transgender activist Blossom C. Brown.

video credt: https://www.instagram.com/normalgays/

The striking thing was not simply that I disagreed with her. It was that she appeared to have no idea how she sounded to someone outside her ideological world.

This is what happens when people spend years speaking exclusively to audiences already trained to applaud them. They create a heroic mythology around themselves, often invoking Marsha P. Johnson and Stonewall, until every disagreement becomes an act of oppression and every conversation becomes another chapter in their civil-rights epic.

They cannot hear how theatrical, self-important or completely detached from the concerns of the average person they have become.

Jonas could not hear it either.

He believed he was confronting a dangerous right-wing turn in an old friend. He could not imagine that perhaps I had not become irrational. Perhaps reality had changed. Perhaps I had been forced to reconsider my politics because the political movement I once trusted had become incapable of distinguishing between compassion and chaos, between civil rights and fantasy, and between oppressed minorities and Islamist movements committed to destroying Western freedom.

That conversation made me understand that much of the radical left was not coming back.

Its members had not simply adopted a collection of misguided political opinions. They had entered a closed moral system—a cult in which certain propositions could never be questioned and certain victims could never be acknowledged.

No amount of evidence would free them, because the ideology had given them a community, an identity and a sense of moral superiority. To abandon it would mean abandoning themselves.

That was when I finally understood that leaving New York, as painful as it was, might have been for the best for now.

My last Christmas in the city had contained everything I loved about New York: midnight Mass, Jewish humor, Chinese food, Hanukkah candles, hot gay Jews, friendship, argument, duck, dumplings and the stubborn belief that culture could still be saved.

But underneath it was the knowledge that something had broken.

New York had given me the Jewish Christmas I had always wanted. It had allowed an immigrant tradition I knew through American comedy to become part of my own immigrant story.

And just as I was finally inside it, it was time for me to leave.

The first Hanukkah candle was lit that night: a small flame against the darkness.

Then I started packing.

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A key to understanding the anti-Zionism that has eaten much of the Democratic Party alive is understanding the role played by anti-Zionist Jews themselves.

An outsider might imagine that the propaganda war against Israel is produced entirely by people hostile to Israel. But spend enough time in the country and you begin to recognize something more complicated: some of the most effective material used against Israel originates inside Israel itself.

This is part of what is sometimes called the Red-Green alliance—the convergence of the radical left and political Islam. The two movements have profoundly different visions of society, but they share a common enemy: the democratic West, with Israel serving as its most convenient symbol.

The Islamists supply the revolutionary violence. The communists supply the language that sanitizes it.

“Resistance.” “Decolonization.” “Liberation.” “Apartheid.” “Genocide”.

Once those words are repeated often enough, the murder of Israeli civilians disappears behind an ideological abstraction. The terrorists become “the oppressed.” The people fighting them become “colonizers.” History begins on whatever date is most useful to the argument.

I once heard Israeli historian Gadi Taub explain how this intellectual machinery entered Israel itself. Edward Said’s school of postcolonial theory migrated from the university into Israeli journalism: students absorbed a framework that cast Zionism as a European colonial project, then carried it into institutions such as Haaretz, particularly its influential literary and cultural pages. From there, an elite Israeli interpretation of Israel was exported back to Western readers as authoritative testimony from inside the country.

Hannah Einbinder belongs to the next stage of that cycle. In interviews about her political transformation—including her Zeteo conversation with Simone Zimmerman—she has invoked Said and credited Palestinian literature with helping her “unlearn” Zionism. She now repeats the framework almost perfectly, describing Zionism as a foundational ideology that necessarily produces Palestinian suffering.

But the Said framework contains an enormous—and, in its consequences, antisemitic—blind spot: it treats Jews as foreign Europeans arriving to colonize someone else’s land while erasing Jewish peoplehood, the continuous Jewish presence in the region and the Jewish people’s indigenous and ancestral relationship to the Land of Israel. Once that premise is accepted, every Israeli action becomes colonial aggression and every attack upon Israelis can be reinterpreted as indigenous resistance.

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Twenty years ago, Vincent Clarkson was considered too depraved even for daytime television. Today, I’m not sure he would be the villain.

In the early 2000s, there was nothing on television quite like Passions.

Created by James E. Reilly, the daytime soap combined conventional melodrama with supernatural horror and delirious camp. There were witches, demons, talking dolls, cursed jewels and characters returning from the dead. It was as outrageous as daytime television could possibly get.

Yet looking back nearly twenty years later, one of its most reviled storylines no longer seems quite so unimaginable. In fact, it may have predicted something genuinely disturbing: the moral collapse of the queer left—and the transformation of a movement once dedicated to equality into one increasingly fascinated by revenge, political violence and death.

The storyline concerned Vincent Clarkson.

Vincent was the long-lost child of two of the show’s central characters. He was also the masked “Blackmailer” terrorizing the fictional town of Harmony—and one of the most grotesquely depraved villains ever created for daytime television.

Vincent raped his own half-sister and framed her boyfriend for the attacks. He murdered a woman who discovered his identity. He carried on an incestuous affair with a relative, was revealed to be intersex, became pregnant by his own father and eventually gave birth to their child on his mother’s kitchen table.

In the series finale, Vincent and an accomplice poisoned an entire wedding party with mushroom sauce. Everyone died—temporarily—until the town witch renounced her powers, became a born-again Christian and resurrected them.

Even for Passions, it was a lot.

The storyline arrived when LGBT characters remained rare on daytime television. The relationship between Vincent and another male character (who was his half-brother) reportedly gave American soaps their first depiction of two men having sex. But this supposed representational milestone came attached to rape, incest, blackmail and murder.

The reaction was ferocious.

Critic Ira Madison III later called the representation “horrifying and offensive.” Herndon L. Davis condemned the transformation of a storyline about a Black man living on the down-low into an “outrageous intersex serial killer storyline.” Another critic simply called it “vile.”

Even the actors were appalled. Tracey Ross, who played Vincent’s mother, said that filming the birth made her feel physically nauseous. She completed it only after an acting coach persuaded her to approach the scene as comedy. Another cast member called part of Vincent’s story “the worst storyline ever done.”

At the time, our culture still possessed enough moral clarity to understand that rape, incest, murder and cruelty belonged within the deranged universe of a supernatural soap opera. Vincent was not misunderstood. He was not “problematic but necessary.” He was not a resistance fighter.

He was the villain.

Today, I am not entirely sure he would be treated as one.

He might be given a podcast.

He might be invited to address a university encampment.

He might become an influencer.

He might be celebrated for “decolonizing” Harmony.

Because somewhere along the way, a movement that was supposed to guarantee gay people equality, dignity and protection lost its moral center. Equality was replaced by ideological conquest. Persuasion was replaced by coercion. Compassion was replaced by revenge.

Increasingly, violence itself became part of the entertainment.

I have spoken repeatedly about “Queers for Palestine”: the spectacle of Western LGBT activists aligning themselves with a political movement whose most powerful organizations openly reject nearly everything those activists claim to represent.

But the contradiction is darker than the familiar joke about Chickens supporting KFC.

Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel on October 7, 2023, murdered families in their homes, abducted children and elderly people and dragged young women into Gaza. Across the Western left, October 7 was not simply contextualized. It was aestheticized. Romanticized. In some cases, openly celebrated.

People who had spent years insisting that words were violence suddenly discovered that actual violence could be “resistance”—provided the victims were Israeli Jews.

Hasan Piker has said that “Hamas is a thousand times better” than Israel and declared that whether rapes occurred on October 7 “doesn’t change the dynamic” for him. He has repeatedly minimized evidence of sexual violence while presenting terrorist organizations as understandable expressions of resistance.

Nearly a year after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Piker appeared onstage recently at a live Fear & Show and mockingly sang “We Are Charlie Kirk” as the audience laughed and cheered.

It was not political analysis. It was not satire directed at the powerful. It was a crowd reveling in the murder of a man with a wife and two young children.

Charlie Kirk held traditional beliefs. He opposed much of the modern LGBT political program. But he was also willing to sit across from people who profoundly disagreed with him. He had a long-form conversation with trans activist Buck Angel, allowing their differences to be discussed rather than settled through intimidation or violence.

That distinction should matter.

Buck Angel and I do not agree on everything. Neither do Arielle Scarcella, Brad Polumbo, Clarkson Lawson, Eve Barlow, Matthew Nouriel and the other heterodox gay and trans voices who have begun speaking out against the Queer political establishment.

But people misunderstand why we do it.

We are not sticks in the mud.

We are not trying to impress heterosexual conservatives.

We are trying to warn the public that what we are witnessing is no longer eccentricity, lovable quirkiness or catty diva behavior. It is demoralization. It is sociopathy. It is the normalization of cruelty by people who have convinced themselves that membership in an oppressed class makes cruelty righteous.

Consider the public fascination with Luigi Mangione, the man accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

Jonathan Van Ness responded to news of Mangione’s arrest by calling him “the cute shooter.” The joke was supposedly harmless because the victim was rich, the company was unpopular and the alleged killer was handsome.

But murder does not become less murderous because the accused has good cheekbones.

Rosie O’Donnell has even developed a close friendship with Lyle Menendez, who was convicted alongside his brother of murdering their parents with shotguns. O’Donnell says that Lyle helped her process her own history of childhood abuse and made her feel safe enough to “love a straight man.” Whatever one believes about the brothers’ abuse claims, it is revealing how easily a convicted murderer can be transformed into an emotionally redemptive celebrity figure.

This casual delight in death appeared again after Senator Lindsey Graham died. A comedian aboard an Atlantis gay cruise described passengers learning of Graham’s death after docking in Montenegro. According to the routine, a rainbow appeared in the sky and the passengers erupted into celebration.

One can detest Lindsey Graham’s politics without treating the death of a human being as a circuit-party theme.

Then came Charlie Kirk.

After his assassination, social media filled with celebrations, jokes and justifications.

Savannah Craven interviewed a young man with purple hair who looked so much like Vincent Clarkson that he could have been his body double. At the end of their conversation, he smiled giddily and announced that Kirk deserved to be murdered.

video credit: Samantha Craven https://www.instagram.com/savannahacraven/

The resemblance was almost too perfect.

But Vincent Clarkson was a character in a soap opera. This was a real person discussing the real assassination of another human being with the excited grin of someone sharing celebrity gossip.

This is what I mean when I speak about moral collapse.

The original gay-rights movement asked for something comprehensible and just: that gay men and lesbians should be able to live freely, work without discrimination, form relationships and participate in public life with dignity.

But equality was achieved, and equality was not enough.

The new movement demanded the destabilization of gender itself. It demanded that women surrender intimate spaces and accept biological males in competitive sports, even when female athletes were injured or displaced. Parents who hesitated before medicalizing distressed children were accused of causing their potential deaths.

Every objection was described as violence. Every boundary became hatred. Every request for compromise was answered with doubling down, then tripling down.

Trans actress Alexandra Billings gave a speech at the Human Rights Campaign in which she declared, “I want revenge. And my revenge is righteous.”

Watching it, I did not see a civil-rights leader asking the public for understanding. I saw a theatrical villain delivering a prepared monologue: a rejected musical-theater student who had discovered that social media would applaud any performance, however grotesque, as long as it was dressed in the language of oppression.

Once people believe themselves to be permanently oppressed, anything done in the name of liberation can be excused. Humiliation becomes accountability. Censorship becomes safety. Terrorism becomes resistance. Murder becomes comedy.

Revenge becomes righteous.

We are told these are isolated incidents: one influencer, one joke, one crowd, one radical encampment, one person cheering an assassination.

But they are not isolated anymore.

When the same moral inversion appears across universities, activist organizations, media personalities, LGBT institutions and political movements, it is no longer a fringe phenomenon.

It is the culture of the contemporary left.

Friends in Israel sometimes ask why I devote so much attention to these people. They worry that speaking about them gives them more power than they deserve.

What they do not understand is that I am not talking about a few strange characters living on the margins of society. These people educate children, staff cultural institutions, influence elections, shape media narratives and command audiences of millions.

This is not a subplot anymore.

It is the show.

Passions eventually collapsed beneath the weight of its own excesses. Its storylines became so grotesque, confusing and self-parodic that even devoted viewers could no longer follow them. The show had pushed outrageousness so far that outrageousness itself became tedious.

The audience stopped watching.

Perhaps that is the most hopeful part of the comparison.

Perhaps the contemporary left will meet the same fate. Perhaps ordinary people will finally become exhausted by the rage, the melodrama, the ideological blackmail and the endless demand that they pretend not to see what is directly in front of them.

But a soap opera can be cancelled without anything replacing it.

A civilization cannot.

It is not enough to point at the madness. We must create something more compelling in its place: a culture grounded in equality without nihilism, compassion without delusion, freedom without the destruction of boundaries and disagreement without bloodlust.

Until then, we remain trapped in Harmony—watching Vincent Clarkson grin as the bodies pile up, while the audience is instructed to applaud his bravery.

Twenty years ago, everyone knew he was the villain.

Today, that may be the most controversial thing one can say.

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I have a distinct memory from my childhood.

I was driving to school with my mother when I told her that I wanted to become a Hollywood actor.

She smiled.

“That’s a nice idea,” she said, “but I don’t think it will work out for you.”

“Why not?”

“Because that industry is run by horrible people,” she said. “And in order to succeed, you have to be very cutthroat. You’re such a good boy. You just don’t have it in you.”

Nearly thirty years later, I have come to realize that my mother was right.

I have talent. I have intellect. I have the performance chops and the experience. But when it comes to navigating the entertainment industry, I cannot handle the fakery, the betrayal, the inability to speak one’s mind, the carefully maintained delusions and the moral rot.

Nothing has illustrated this more vividly than watching Rosie O’Donnell guest-host Jimmy Kimmel Live! this past week.

Rosie O’Donnell is talented. She is funny. She has supported Broadway performers, championed young artists and created television moments that remain genuinely moving. I have written before about the psychological wounds that appear to animate her politics because I do not think she is simply an evil or unintelligent person.

But Rosie has also descended into a political worldview increasingly defined by conspiracy, distortion and hostility toward Israel. She has become one of the entertainment industry’s most prominent anti-Israel voices despite the extraordinary number of Jewish people who have loved, mentored and supported her throughout her career.

This is a woman whose emotional life was profoundly shaped by Barbra Streisand and Barbara Walters. A woman whose career was inseparable from the Jewish and gay world of Broadway. A woman who once played Golde opposite Harvey Fierstein in Fiddler on the Roof—the wife of Tevye, the matriarch of a Jewish family being driven from its home by a pogrom.

And yet, on December 5, 2025, months after the ceasefire & the 20 remaining living hostages were ransomed and extorted back into Israel, Rosie posted an image of a woman wearing a hijab and keffiyeh and holding a sign that read:

“ISRAEL IS STILL KILLING KIDS. ENJOY YOUR WEEKEND. FREE PALESTINE.”

No context, no curiosity and no acknowledgement of the jihadist organization that started the war, embedded itself among civilians and held kidnapped Jewish women underground for months.

I wrote about the emotional architecture behind all of this in my essay, “The Psychodrama of Rosie O’Donnell.”

I posted a carousel of the essay on Instagram. Actress & activist Debra Messing wrote:

“Thank you. This is brilliant. It’s clear you’ve put a lot of work into this piece, and it’s powerful. As a former friend of Rosie’s, I can attest that her closest friends have confronted her on numerous occasions, trying to understand the hurt that she is causing, the facts she is ignoring, and they were never successful.”

Debra Messing has become something like a modern-day Queen Esther for the Jewish people: one of the few major Hollywood actresses willing to walk into the fire, speak plainly and risk her social position in defense of her own people.

She took a stand for truth and has stood by it despite the backlash.

Would Debra go out of her way to humiliate Rosie? No, that is not in her character. But would she publicly celebrate Rosie’s “triumphant return” to national television as though the past three years had never happened—as though the demonization of Israel and laundering of jihadist propaganda were merely harmless disagreements among old friends?

Definitely not.

That is why it must be baffling to many Americans to watch Jewish women like Fran Drescher and Ricki Lake publicly celebrate Rosie’s comeback. It is strange to see Camryn Manheim gush over Rosie’s one-woman show, Common Knowledge. It is confusing to see Andy Cohen welcome Rosie back onto Watch What Happens Live, where she was given another opportunity to charm the audience and discuss a possible return to The View.

And then there is Barbra Streisand.

During her week hosting Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Rosie proudly shared an email from the woman she has idolized for most of her adult life:

“It’s good to see you back on TV! Welcome home!”

“Welcome home.”

Knowing what Hamas did to Israeli women on October 7—what was done to their bodies, how women were abducted and how long some of them remained in captivity - for 482 days. Knowing the physical, sexual, psychological torture they endured in their kidnapping—it is difficult for an outsider to understand why Jewish women in Hollywood would continue embracing Rosie publicly after she participated in a propaganda campaign that repeatedly erased the culpability of these women’s captors.

How can they continue “welcoming her home?”

As someone who occupies a strange position inside and outside both the Jewish world and the entertainment industry, I would like to offer a possible explanation.

First, celebrity relationships are transactional.

Show business is a business. People remain in good standing with one another because no one knows who will suddenly become hot again. The person whose calls you ignore today may have a hit television show tomorrow. The celebrity dismissed as washed up last year may become the centre of a national conversation next week.

People in Hollywood like to say that you should be kind to everyone you meet on the way up because you will meet the same people on the way back down.

There is certainly some truth in that. Celebrities need other celebrities. They need people who can promote their books, appear on their programs, praise their shows and validate their continued cultural relevance. Public warmth is not always evidence of private agreement. Sometimes it is simply professional maintenance.

But I think something more specific is happening with Rosie’s Jewish friends.

It has to do with an idea Ivanka Trump once discussed in an interview: Lashon Hara.

The Hebrew phrase literally means “evil tongue.” In Jewish teaching, it refers to harmful speech about another person—even when what is being said is true.

Ivanka described it as something almost impossible to repair. You can apologize for injuring another person’s reputation, but you cannot collect every word once it has escaped into the world.

There is something deeply beautiful about this principle. It encourages humility, self-discipline and mercy. It demands that we resist the temporary pleasure of humiliating another human being.

But like every moral principle, it can become dangerous when applied without discernment.

Since spending so much time in Israel, I have begun to believe that part of Israel’s public-diplomacy problem comes from a related instinct. Israelis and many diaspora Jews understand the basic moral distinctions so clearly that they assume everyone else must see them too.

Surely people will understand the difference between a democracy and a jihadist death cult.

Surely people will recognize the difference between a military defending its civilians and terrorists filming themselves murdering families.

Surely the lies are so grotesque that no decent person could believe them forever.

And so they wait. And they keep waiting for the world to figure it out.

Newsflash: I don’t think it’s happening. We might need to tell them more blatantly.

Nevertheless, they refrain from confronting the ugly lies too forcefully because they do not want to become ugly themselves. They do not want to speak with hatred. They do not want to lose their humanity while defending themselves from people who deny theirs.

Perhaps Rosie’s Jewish friends believe that rejecting her would only send her deeper into darkness. Perhaps they imagine that by embracing her, praising her work and welcoming her home, they can elevate her consciousness. Perhaps love, generosity and familiarity will eventually remind her of the Jewish people who shaped her life.

I do not believe that Fran Drescher, Ricki Lake, Camryn Manheim or Barbra Streisand are stupid. I am not accusing them of being traitors, nor am I claiming to know their private political beliefs. I admire each one of them deeply as artists & people.

I suspect that some of them support Israel strongly, and are putting aside their political opinions to champion a friend who needs support. But public forgiveness is not politically neutral when the transgression is still occurring.

Forgiveness without repentance becomes permission.

And kindness without moral clarity becomes complicity.

We are not living in 1998 anymore.

The Broadway world of 1998 was filled with Jewish people and gay men vibrantly creating extraordinary work together. It was imperfect, narcissistic and frequently ridiculous, but it still possessed a fundamental belief in America, freedom and the civilizational conditions that allowed that culture to exist.

The Rosie O’Donnell of 1998 is not the Rosie O’Donnell of 2026.

The New York culture industry has changed. Since October 7, the poison of the “intifada revolution” has seeped steadily into Broadway, comedy, publishing, universities, museums and historically Jewish cultural institutions.

My friend Ari Axelrod has spoken about Broadway actors entering Jewish theatres and casually describing Hamas as a movement of “indigenous resistance fighters.” This is no longer an eccentric opinion confined to a few radical activists. It has become a social language—a way of signalling that one belongs to the supposedly enlightened cultural class.

Broadway actors are celebrating Rosie for highlighting Sydney James Harcourt, even bringing back her bizarre “girl-crush routine” gushing over him as she did with Tom Cruise in the 90s, despite always been massive Lesbian. Broadway actors see it as win for their perspective careers: one of their own is being introduced to middle America on Jimmy Kimmel Live! What they aren’t understanding is that if Middle America KNEW about their love of political violence and glorification of jihadism: Middle America would reject them. This stuff makes the average person want to vomit.

The moral inversion does not stop at Israel. It is part of a larger ideological conformity that has turned against America itself.

Rosie does not merely post against Israel. Her feed is a constant stream of “No War in Iran,” “No War in Venezuela” and other slogans that reduce every confrontation between America and a hostile regime to the same infantilizing story: America is the aggressor, the West is the oppressor and anyone resisting it must therefore be liberated.

She amplifies other anti-Israel personalities, including Cynthia Nixon, Marcia Cross and Ms. Rachel. Different conflicts, countries and ideologies collapse into a single emotional narrative in which America and Israel are always guilty and their enemies are almost never granted moral agency.

What Rosie seems unable to understand is that the artistic freedom she treasures did not descend from heaven.

The freedom to perform on Broadway, marry another woman, raise a nontraditional family, mock the president and relocate safely to Ireland exists because Western democracies possess enough military, economic and technological strength to defend the order that protects those freedoms.

That order is not natural. It is not permanent. It must be maintained.

America’s geographic isolation and military power allow its artists to imagine that national security is merely an unpleasant abstraction. But the wars on the edges of the free world—Ukraine against Russia, Israel against the Islamic Republic, South Korea’s continuing confrontation with the North—are not unrelated curiosities. They are pressure points in the system that permits people in Manhattan and Los Angeles to regard history as something that happens elsewhere.

video by https://www.instagram.com/mommyrn88/

Rosie is free to ridicule the military power of the West because that military power has protected her from ever having to understand what its absence would mean.

Her final Kimmel monologue was a sing-song attack on Donald Trump set to “Danny Boy.” She mocked his hair, his age, his poll numbers and his presidency. The studio audience cheered because they knew the ritual. Trump is a buffoon. Trump is uniquely evil. The country is collapsing. Everyone enlightened agrees.

It was less political satire than a cultish catechism.

There are many valid criticisms to make of Donald Trump. But outside the sealed cultural world of Manhattan and Hollywood, millions of Americans believed the border needed to be controlled, that fentanyl was destroying their communities and that profound changes to sex, gender and the family were being imposed without democratic consent.

People may disagree with those voters. But pretending their concerns never existed does not make them disappear.

In the New York cultural sphere, however, certain realities are unsayable. To acknowledge them would mean questioning the delusion that holds the entire social world together.

I do not want to live inside that delusion anymore.

And I suspect many American Jews are confronting a related crisis. Since October 7, much of the outspoken support for Israel has come from people on the right: evangelical Christians, national-security conservatives and others with an acute awareness that Western civilization is neither invincible nor self-sustaining.

That support can make liberal Jews uncomfortable. These are not always the people they grew up trusting. They do not necessarily share their views on abortion, gay rights, immigration or Donald Trump. Meanwhile, many of the artists, activists and progressive organizations with whom they do share a cultural vocabulary have either abandoned them or openly joined the movement against them.

It creates an agonizing temptation: preserve the old social world and pretend the betrayal was not decisive, or swallow the red pill.

Before Charlie Kirk’s assassination, and before Megyn Kelly began routinely platforming antizionists. They spoke about the pressure they received over their continued association with figures such as Tucker Carlson. They spoke about the frustration of being Pro-Israel, but receiving criticism & being labelled antisemitic by some in left-leaning Jewish establishment, because they refused to excommunicate personalities whom were hostile to Israel—

The conversation revealed a widening fracture on the right. But it also revealed something about the left: political loyalty increasingly matters more than moral coherence.

We can see it in Chuck Schumer embracing Abdul El-Sayed after El-Sayed won the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan, despite their profound disagreements over Israel. The machinery of party politics demands unity. The preservation of power requires everyone to swallow whatever supposedly inviolable principle they defended yesterday.

But culture teaches people how to perform these betrayals before politics institutionalizes them.

First, a celebrity publicly welcomes home a friend who has spent years maligning Israel.

Then the entertainment industry rewards that person with another national platform.

Then a political party embraces candidates who oppose the policies its Jewish leaders once described as fundamental.

At every stage, everyone assures themselves that maintaining the relationship is wiser than drawing a line.

This is how moral boundaries disappear: not always through hatred, but through politeness.

It is difficult to take an unpopular position when that position requires actual loss.

Debra Messing lost something when she spoke out. I have lost something too. Friendships, professional opportunities and the comforting illusion that talent and hard work are enough to earn a place in the entertainment industry.

My mother understood something about Hollywood long before I did. She knew that success often depends on one’s willingness to smile through betrayal, congratulate people one considers morally bankrupt and remain silent when honesty might cost an opportunity.

She thought I was too good a boy for that world.

Perhaps she was right.

But there must come a point when protecting your soul means risking your reputation. There must come a point when refusing to speak becomes more corrosive than the dreaded lashon hara. There must come a point when welcoming everyone home means there is no longer any moral meaning to home at all.

Maybe Rosie’s Jewish friends believe that their love will eventually bring her back to sanity and reality.

I hope it does.

But love is not merely an embrace. Sometimes love is a boundary. Sometimes it is a refusal to applaud. Sometimes the most loving thing one can say is:

You are not being persecuted. But you are not telling the truth.

And until you understand the harm you have done, we cannot pretend that nothing happened.

History will eventually reveal what each of us was willing to sacrifice—and what we were willing to excuse.

Only then will we know who was truly speaking from love, who was protecting their place in the industry, and who was simply too frightened to tell the truth.

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It was the beginning of summer, and I found myself wandering aimlessly through Prenzlauer Berg, looking for the passageway into Tante Klara.

Tante Klara is an old-fashioned Gartenlokal hidden inside the Bornholmer allotment gardens in the north of Berlin. To reach it, you have to leave the street and follow a narrow path through a small forested oasis of trees, hedges and garden plots. Berlin is full of these secret little worlds: miniature republics tucked behind railway lines and apartment blocks, where pensioners grow tomatoes, drink enormous glasses of beer and preserve a version of Germany that the rest of the city has spent thirty years trying to forget.

By the time I found the entrance, the sun was beginning to set.

I was meeting my friend Navid Ansari, an Iranian dissident who had moved to Berlin and was actively campaigning against the Islamic Republic, the IRGC and the pro-Hamas demonstrations that had taken over so much of the city.

My outspoken support for Israel had pushed me into an increasingly narrow social existence. Palestinianism had become pervasive in Berlin nightlife—not simply sympathy for Palestinians, but an entire aesthetic and moral identity that seemed to govern who could be invited, followed, promoted or spoken to. As I began my European tour, I had no idea which of my old friends I could safely contact anymore.

Even Jewish organizations had become difficult to approach. While promoting my shows, I struggled to get local Jewish groups to return my messages. Everyone was exhausted. Everyone was frightened. Everyone understood that one wrong association could bring a mob of strangers to their Instagram page.

But Navid was a safe bet.

He was sitting outside Tante Klara with three friends, all of whom appeared to be three or four drinks into a magnificent evening. They were lovely, but the conversation had already entered that familiar alcoholic loop: repeated stories, abandoned subjects and sudden bursts of unnecessary volume.

As a sober person, I have no problem being around drunk people—up to a point.

The bar had the atmosphere of an old East Berlin Kneipe. It was cash only. Enormous glasses of beer kept appearing on the table. The furniture looked as though it might have survived reunification without being informed that reunification had occurred. Sitting there among the allotment gardens, I felt as though we were waiting for the Berlin Wall to fall. Again.

I had hoped to spend some time alone with Navid, but first we had to endure the classic German drinking-group crisis of deciding where to go next. Nobody wanted to stay. Nobody wanted to leave. Everyone had a suggestion. No one was capable of implementing one.

Finally, I stood up.

“I’m going to get food with Navid,” I announced. “Have a wonderful night.”

Navid and I escaped.

We walked toward Bornholmer Straße and continued in the direction of Schönhauser Allee, beneath rows of trees and the wires of the M13 tram. Berlin looked peaceful in the evening light: the yellow streetcars, the old apartment buildings, the cyclists gliding past us. It looked like a city in which history had been resolved.

We began talking about Iran.

The uprising had already happened. I had just left Israel after the forty-day war. Navid, like me, was frustrated that everything was taking so long. After a massive military campaign & the assassination of the Ayatollah — the Islamic Republic was still in power, and Reza Pahalavi had failed to rally support from the international community.

“Navid. This is the problem.”

I held up my phone.

“This is a weapon. We are completely fucked.”

“The West has been fighting a cold war for decades,” I said, “and most Westerners don’t even know they’re in it. Do you think these drunk Hipsters in Berlin know anything about the Islamic Republic? Do you think they know what the IRGC is? They probably think Iran is a place where women wear beautiful scarves and Evil America & the Zionist entity want to kill everyone there. They’re nuts.”

That week, Reza Pahlavi had been moving through Europe, giving interviews, holding press conferences and attempting to persuade Western governments to support Iran’s democratic opposition. In Berlin, roughly 150 journalists reportedly attended one of his press conferences. Yet much of the resulting coverage seemed more interested in interrogating Pahlavi’s legitimacy than in examining the regime he was trying to overthrow.

This was the maddening trap.

How was Pahlavi supposed to conduct diplomacy on behalf of the Iranian people when the institutions through which diplomacy must be conducted were ideologically suspicious of him before he entered the room? How could he communicate the scale of the Islamic Republic’s terror network when so many journalists regarded any alliance with Israel as more disqualifying than decades of hostage-taking, executions, regional warfare and nuclear blackmail?

European media had not literally been purchased in its entirety by Qatar, but let’s just say: when I lived in Germany Al Jazeera would pop up into my Youtube page as if it was real, legitimate, substantive news. Qatar had invested enormous amounts of money in influence, institutions and narrative production, while Al Jazeera had become one of the dominant sources through which Western audiences encountered the Middle East. Its language and framing were repeated across European media ecosystems already predisposed to understand every conflict through the categories of colonialism, race and Western guilt.

The result was an information environment in which an Islamist regime could be interpreted as indigenous resistance, while the people fighting it were somehow agents of Western imperialism.

Iranian dissidents had to explain themselves.

Israel had to explain itself.

The IRGC never did.

And then there was social media.

For the first four months of the 2026, my Instagram account had averaged approximately four million views per month. The moment my European tour was announced, my reach dropped by roughly 75 percent. My marketing team was using specialized targeting software to reach my existing audience in Germany, and still people who followed me could not find advertisements for my shows.

Could I prove that someone inside Meta had pressed a large red button marked SILENCE THE POWER GAY?

No.

But I knew what the numbers had been. I knew what happened to them. And I knew that thousands of creators who challenged the dominant narrative about Israel were describing the same experience.

In America, at least, an alternative media ecosystem existed. Conservatives had built television networks, podcasts and digital platforms capable of challenging the progressive consensus. Fox News had its problems, but it regularly gave audiences factual information about the IRGC, Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran’s regional terror network that European audiences were simply not receiving.

In Europe, political comedy programs imported the language of The Daily Show, while respectable broadcasters deferred to figures such as Christiane Amanpour, whose interviews with Pahlavi often seemed more preoccupied with disciplining the Iranian opposition than understanding what it was opposing.

The information war was not taking place alongside the real war.

It was the real war.

By this point, Navid and I had reached a Turkish Döner Kebab shop. We ordered schwarma wraps and sat outside beneath the harsh fluorescent light, surrounded by Turkish men and the smell of grilled meat.

Two enemies of the Islamic Republic, sitting outside an Turkish Kebab shop in Berlin, eating our wraps and arguing about the future of Iran.

I told Navid about an Italian friend of mine named Mauricio who lived in Norway. When my show premiered at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood, I posted a short video beneath the venue’s marquee. People who had unfollowed me over Israel had apparently assumed that my career was over—that I had been blacklisted, abandoned and professionally destroyed after devoting so much time to public diplomacy.

My continued success & mere existence seems to infuriate them.

Mauricio responded by sending me a conspiratorial video explaining that October 7 happened because Benjamin Netanyahu had allowed Qatari money into Gaza in order to strengthen Hamas and prevent the creation of a Palestinian state.

“No, Mauricio,” I replied. “That was a failed appeasement policy. Netanyahu offered them a state & they turned it down. There was even a potential state outlined by Trump in 2020. The appeasement strategy was, because Netanyahu thought he could buy quiet. He thought economic concessions would buy time with Hamas. Israel underestimated its enemy.”

There was certainly a catastrophic policy & security failure. But that did not erase the existence of the IRGC’s ring of fire surrounding Israel: Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, militias in Syria and Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen and the Islamic Republic coordinating the entire architecture. It did not change the reality that the West was under the existential threat of Arab Conquest and Islamism.

Mauricio told me I was delusional, insane and brainwashed. He told me he doesn’t follow my social media anymore, but occasionally will look at it every 6 months to see how much more unhinged I’ve become.

He had never been to Israel. He had never attempted to understand Israeli society. He had almost certainly never watched conservative media, spoken to an Iranian dissident or seriously studied the Muslim Brotherhood. But an algorithm had given him a video, and the video had given him an explanation, and the explanation had given him the confidence to diagnose me.

“This is my life now,” I told Navid.

I put down my schwarma wrap, I couldn’t finish it.

“If I fail, my failure is celebrated. If I succeed, my success becomes evidence of a conspiracy. If my shows are empty, it proves everyone hates me. If I sell out the Laugh Factory, it proves the Zionists arranged it.”

Navid laughed.

“I’m serious. There is no outcome that can penetrate their delusional belief system. Every new fact is simply absorbed into the conspiracy.”

This was what the phone had done to us. It had not merely divided society into echo chambers. It had created parallel realities with their own histories, villains, heroes and standards of proof. Basic facts no longer changed people’s minds. They disregulated them. The truth itself felt like an attack.

“This is two generations of indoctrination. Maybe more. The United States and Israel can destroy nuclear facilities, missile launchers and IRGC command centers. Those are physical structures. We know where they are. We can see them on satellite images.”

I held up my phone again.

“But how do you destroy this?”

The infrastructure inside people’s minds had been constructed over decades: in universities, newspapers, NGOs, comedy programs, arts institutions and now algorithms. Millions of people had been taught to distrust their own civilization while romanticizing every movement that wanted to destroy it.

The Islamic Republic could fall tomorrow, and much of the Western left would still regard them as revolutionaries, as reactionaries. They will never admit they were supporting Islamists. Owen Jones will never look back in shame at the photos of himself in a hoodie with the Palestinian flag, filled with hate, declaring on Piers Morgan “What else was Hamas supposed to do?”

Their minds will never be able to process the embarrassment & shame. They would be forced to reconsider their entire perception of reality.

To maintain its self-image as the defender of the oppressed, the left had been forced to block out more and more of reality: Iranian women, Israeli hostages, murdered gay men, persecuted Christians & Druze, tortured dissidents, child brides, political prisoners. Every contradiction had to be pushed outside the frame.

Eventually, defending the delusion required defending the regimes, militias and religious fanatics who enforced it.

But eventually the truth comes out.

I looked out at Bornholmer Straße, the historic border crossing where the Berlin Wall first opened on November 9, 1989. The tram moved beneath the trees, carrying Berliners home through a city that had already survived several enormous political delusions. Tante Klara was still hidden somewhere behind us, full of Germans drinking beer in the twilight, largely unaware of the war being fought around them—or inside their own phones.

Perhaps the next time Navid and I sat together in a Schrebergarten, the Islamic Republic would be gone. Perhaps we would drink (non alcoholic for me) among the trees and celebrate the liberation of Tehran.

Or perhaps we would still be sitting outside a shawarma shop, holding up our phones and trying to explain why it had not happened yet.

Either way, the delusion could not survive forever.

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Earlier this spring, just as Berlin’s outdoor swimming pools were opening for the summer, I was walking through Kreuzberg with my friend Peter.

Kreuzberg was once my neighbourhood. I knew its streets intimately: the cafés, the clubs, the Turkish market, the beautiful young Germans pretending not to have trust funds. It had always been multicultural, but Peter and I could not get over how radically its cultural atmosphere had changed & how islamized it had become.

We passed the Sommerbad Kreuzberg, the enormous public swimming pool Germans call the Prinzenbad. A line had formed outside. But instead of the parade of toned young Berliners I remembered, we saw Muslim families—women in hijabs pushing baby carriages, surrounded by children.

“Daniel,” Peter said, “everywhere I go, it feels like I’m living in Syria.”

Peter is a gay German man in his thirties. Unlike many older Germans living safely in manicured homes in Potsdam, he does not possess the luxury of treating Islamism as an abstraction. He sees the demographic and cultural changes taking place all around him and understands instinctively that the people most eager to surrender Western liberalism will not necessarily be the people who suffer once it is gone.

“When they go into the pool,” he said, “they keep all of it on. The scarves. The robes. Everything. Can you imagine swimming through all that fabric?”

I pictured layers of wet cloth drifting through the water.

“Peter,” I said, “this is beyond what Germany can handle. If this continues, we could see areas of Berlin under Sharia Law within our lifetime. You don’t even have to formally declare Sharia law. You only need enough people who are afraid to challenge it.”

That was when I began noticing the necklaces.

Young Muslim women passed us wearing the same pendant: an old-fashioned key whose teeth formed the shape of the entire territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

“Do you see that?” I asked Peter.

He looked more closely.

“What is it?”

“It’s Dawah.”

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New York comedians are terrified that they are living under fascism.

They talk about Donald Trump as though he has transformed America into Nazi Germany. They ask whether comedy can even continue during a fascist takeover. They compare themselves to the performers in the first forty-five minutes of Cabaret—dancing and telling jokes while the Third Reich rises around them.

And yet, every night, they go onstage and call the president a fascist.

They ridicule him on television. They denounce him on podcasts. They post about him to millions of people. They win awards, sell tickets, collect applause—and go home.

Nobody arrests them. Nobody closes the theatre. Nobody disappears their families.

They are not living under fascism.

They are living in Brooklyn.

And Brooklyn is its own kind of upside-down world.

I first entered that world in 2022.

I had performed my one-man show at the New York Comedy Festival at Baby’s All Right, a funky little music venue in Williamsburg. I had just undergone weight-loss surgery. My entire life was changing. I was losing weight, building my career, and imagining that New York would become the beginning of this exciting new chapter.

Everything appeared to be proceeding according to plan.

One of my closest friends from Europe was already living in New York. I’ll call her Veronica. She was an American who had spent most of her life in the Netherlands, and we had been friends for 8 years.

Veronica had started doing comedy as a hobby and was gradually finding her way into the Brooklyn scene. During my visits to New York, we would go to local comedy shows together.

And if you want to understand Brooklyn hipster comedy, you have to understand Littlefield.

Littlefield is a performance space in Gowanus. The audience is generally young and artistic—and very often “from family,” as they say.

That is one of the first illusions you discover about Brooklyn.

Everyone looks poor. Almost nobody is poor.

It is an ecosystem populated by the children of wealthy families who have enough financial security to spend ten years pursuing comedy while dressed like a dishwasher at a vegan restaurant.

They live in half-million-dollar condos, but every outfit suggests they have just escaped from a condemned squat in Leipzig.

They are incredibly ambitious people performing a total lack of ambition.

They are relentless networkers pretending to be slackers.

They want television shows, book deals, representation, cultural influence, and social status—but wanting anything openly would be tragically uncool.

They are purposely uncool in exactly the right way, which they think makes them cool.

The comedy had the same energy.

It was low-energy, ironic, detached: the comedic equivalent of shrugging while checking whether everyone noticed you shrugging.

Onstage that night was a lesbian comedian talking about her elective mastectomy. There was a soft-spoken gay Latino historian whose comedy existed somewhere at the intersection of intersectionality, gay history, and communist theory. Then there was a high-strung diabetic gay man in a tank top speaking with the cadence of a 1930s newsboy undergoing free association.

It was very specific. It was very “queer.” And everyone in the room understood the codes.

Outside, Veronica introduced me to people. I was cheerful. I wanted to meet everyone. I had undergone all my surgeries, and was imagining a future in the city.

And I could immediately feel that my energy was wrong.

The message was:

You don’t belong here. You seem happy. You seem eager. Please leave.

I watched Veronica change around these people. She made herself smaller. Her speech became more hesitant and deliberately Valley Girl. She entered strange, affected conversations and behaved as though she were auditioning to play a more eccentric version of herself.

This was how belonging worked.

You didn’t merely have to share the politics. You had to share the posture, the vocabulary, the clothes, the neuroses and the precise level of enthusiasm permitted by the group.

After October 7, I understood that it was something more.

I had followed many of these comedians online. After Hamas invaded Israel, murdered families, raped women and kidnapped civilians, the quirky Brooklyn identity politics hardened almost overnight into something extraordinarily dark.

The non-binary lesbian comedian began wearing a keffiyeh and a shirt depicting the entire territory of Israel as one enormous watermelon.

The soft-spoken intersectional LatinX communist insisted that Hamas’s use of human shields had been disproven—and that only a genocidal maniac would believe otherwise.

Everywhere I looked, people who had built their identities around sensitivity, trauma and protecting minorities were rationalizing atrocities against Jews.

Islamist propaganda became social justice, and anyone who objected became a fascist.

I refused to participate.

At first, my viral videos were confrontational and comedic.

As the months past, I could feel Veronica becoming more hesitant around me. She never directly ordered me to stop speaking. She didn’t need to.

Her discomfort communicated everything.

By Spring 2024, I began interviewing and sharing the voices of people who complicated the approved narrative: Gazan dissident Hamza Howidy, Yemeni activist Luai Ahmed.

Eventually, after I began speaking more openly about the Islamic Republic, Veronica unfollowed me. Then she removed the collaborative videos we had made together on Instagram. Then she removed me as a follower.

Nearly ten years of friendship disappeared without a conversation.

I cannot claim to know every thought inside her head. But the message I received was unmistakable:

My association with you threatens my new social life.

I want to remain inside this world.

I want to keep performing at its open mics.

Your presence pierces the delusion, and I cannot permit people to associate me with you.

If you are killed in Israel by an Iranian missile: I will say nothing.

Your friends’ relatives were kidnapped by Hamas? that does not change anything.

Your friend’s brother was murdered by the IRGC in the uprising? that does not change anything.

Your reality is socially inconvenient to me.

This is the personal cost of the ideological culture that now dominates so much of New York’s artistic world.

Recently, comedian Gary Gulman posted a clip asking, essentially: How can we continue doing comedy while a “fascist takeover of America” is occurring? He compared the moment to the first forty-five minutes of Cabaret.

And my response is:

Gary, you are right about Cabaret.

You are simply starting the film too late.

The first forty-five minutes were the eighteen months between October 7 and Trump’s inauguration.

That was when we watched people tear down posters of kidnapped children.

That was when terrorist apologism migrated into universities, cultural institutions and the streets of American cities. That was when Jewish students were intimidated while administrators explained that the situation was complicated.

That was when seemingly progressive people adopted the language, symbols and propaganda of Islamist movements—and the rest of us were instructed to pretend it was not happening.

That was when “Globalize the Intifada” was treated as an innocent request for human rights.

That was when people who warned about political violence were called hysterical, racist and fascist.

Then the language moved beyond comedy clubs and campuses.

Charlie Kirk was murdered while speaking at a university.

Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were murdered outside the Capital Jewish Museum.

The man accused of murdering Yaron and Sarah allegedly shouted “Free Palestine,” said he had acted for Gaza and wrote that the people he blamed for the war had forfeited their humanity.

Forfeited their humanity. And once someone has been linguistically expelled from society, violence against him no longer feels like violence. It feels like resistance.

I am not saying that every progressive comedian supports murder.

I am saying that language has consequences.

If you spend years telling people that their political opponents are fascists committing an unfolding genocide, you should not be shocked when a radicalized or unstable person imagines himself as a resistance fighter.

This is why the word Fascism matters.

Fascism is not a synonym for “politics I hate.”

Historically, fascism means an authoritarian political system built around centralized power, the destruction of pluralism, the subordination of individual rights, the suppression of opposition, and often the cult of a leader, nation or race.

In a fascist state, the government does not merely criticize its opponents.

It eliminates their ability to oppose it.

The state controls or suppresses the media. Opposition parties are destroyed. Dissidents are imprisoned, exiled, brutalized or killed. The citizen exists to serve the state.

When Zohran Mamdani visited the White House, a reporter asked whether he still believed Donald Trump was a fascist.

Trump interrupted and told him, “That’s okay. You can just say yes.”

Trump laughed and said, “I don’t mind.”

The man these comedians describe as a fascist dictator stood inside the White House and gave a political rival permission to call him a fascist in front of the international media.

Would an actual fascist dictator do that?

Would he invite his opponent into the seat of power, allow the accusation to be broadcast around the world, laugh, and continue the meeting?

No.

That single exchange does not prove that every action taken by Trump is admirable. It proves something narrower but important: extraordinarily hostile political speech remains possible—even directly in front of the president.

Then there is Rosie O’Donnell.

Rosie has spent years attacking Trump. She left America, described the country as politically unsafe, promoted obsessive theories, and made opposition to him central to her public identity.

And this week, Rosie O’Donnell was given a national television program.

She guest-hosted Jimmy Kimmel Live! on ABC. She opened the show by addressing Trump directly and calling him “Mango Mussolini.”

Millions of Americans could watch it.

Would a fascist state permit one of the ruler’s most famous enemies to take over a network television show and ridicule him?

No.

In an actual fascist state, the state determines what appears on television.

In America, Rosie gets a week to host one of the country’s most iconic late night shows, and a multi-million dollar promotional campaign to rehabilitate her image.

This doesn’t mean America is perfect. Freedom is never guaranteed, and every administration should be watched carefully.

But if you can call the president Mussolini on a major television network, you may have political problems. But the inability to speak freely is clearly not one of them.

And here is the final inversion:

The government these comedians call fascist generally permits their dissent.

The cultural world they call “tolerant” frequently punishes dissent.

Inside the Brooklyn comedy scene, saying something as elementary as “Hamas is a terrorist organization” can cost you friendships, bookings, professional connections and your place within the tribe.

The punishment is not prison: that distinction matters.

A comedy scene cannot become a fascist state. It has no army, secret police or prisons.

What it can become is socially authoritarian.

It can enforce ideological conformity through ostracism, blacklisting, cyberbullying, denunciation and character assassination.

It can make people afraid to express what they actually believe.

It can train Veronica to erase a ten-year friendship because maintaining contact with the wrong person may threaten her social position.

It is an intensely illiberal culture whose members have confused conformity with rebellion.

This is the upside-down world of Brooklyn comedy.

The people permitted to call the president a fascist on television imagine themselves to be dissidents—while refusing to be socially connected on Instagram with someone who disagrees with them about basic facts that question their delusions.

They aren’t living in Cabaret.

They’re performing in a political echo chamber with a two-drink minimum.

More people can see the inversion now.

And they are beginning to understand that diversity without intellectual freedom is merely a collection of different identities repeating the same opinion.

The answer is genuine pluralism.

It is the courage to let people speak, to argue with them, to remain friends with them, and to recognize that disagreement is not contamination.

Because a free society is not one in which everybody agrees.

A free society is one in which Gary Gulman can call Donald Trump a fascist, Rosie O’Donnell can call him Mussolini, Zohran Mamdani can say it inside the White House—and I can tell all of them that they have no idea what fascism actually means.

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At a stadium in Arnhem, I witnessed something I never expected to see in postwar Europe.

Young men laughed at quotes praising Adolf Hitler.

They smiled beneath them.

They posed for photographs.

Some held up T-shirts. Others gave a thumbs-up. One called Hitler “the GOAT.” Another described him as “a good lad.” Several questioned whether the Holocaust had happened at all.

None of them appeared embarrassed.

None of them seemed to feel the weight of history.

The strangest part wasn’t the hatred.

It was the complete absence of seriousness.

The event itself wasn’t the concert.

It happened outside.

A group of Dutch Jews had organized something that was part protest, part social experiment. As thousands of concertgoers queued to enter Kanye West’s first European concert in more than a decade, they projected some of his own statements onto a giant screen.

“I’m a Nazi.”

“Hitler was soooo fresh.”

Quotes praising Hitler.

Comments about Jews.

Holocaust-related statements.

The question wasn’t whether Kanye had said these things.

The question was simple.

How would people react when confronted with them?

I joined the organizers and began interviewing concertgoers as they passed the screen.

The answer came quickly.

Some laughed. Some shrugged. Some defended Kanye. Others seemed genuinely amused by the entire spectacle.

One Black American man explained to me that Kanye’s hatred of Jews could be traced to his divorce from Kim Kardashian. According to him, Jewish lawyers had prevented Kanye from seeing his children. In his telling, Kanye’s antisemitism was therefore understandable: Jews had wronged him.

I pointed out that Kanye had publicly praised Hitler, had released a song called Heil Hitler, and that Hitler was responsible for the murder of six million Jews.

“Allegedly,” he replied.

I remember staring at him.

Allegedly?

That single word stayed with me because it captured something about the atmosphere that evening. Facts seemed to possess very little authority. History had become negotiable. Hitler was a meme. The Holocaust was something to debate. Antisemitism could simultaneously function as a joke, an act of rebellion and, for some, an apparently legitimate political worldview.

When an Instagram reel of our interviews appeared online, the responses disturbed me almost as much as the evening itself.

I had assumed people would understand what we were documenting. Instead, many comments mocked us. Some seemed to believe that because the concertgoers were laughing and enjoying themselves, our demonstration had somehow backfired. Others openly supported what they were saying.

It was as though we had entered a world in which being disturbed by young Europeans praising Hitler was more embarrassing than praising Hitler itself.

And that made me think about Germany.

I lived in Germany for years. I built much of my adult life in Berlin. I worked in comedy and the arts, made friends, toured the country and absorbed its strange combination of cultural experimentation and historical seriousness.

One thing I came to admire deeply was Germany’s willingness to confront its own history.

As a Canadian, I had of course learned about the Holocaust in school. In Germany, remembrance was different. It existed physically around you.

Stolpersteine beneath your feet.

Memorials in the center of Berlin.

Plaques on buildings.

School trips to concentration camps.

Germany had constructed an enormous civic project around a simple proposition: what happened must never happen again, and preventing that requires understanding how it happened in the first place.

To me, this was never simply “German guilt.”

It was German responsibility.

There is a difference.

Guilt is toxic. Responsibility is empowering.

Germany’s postwar achievement was not that Germans learned to hate themselves. It was that they constructed a democratic culture in which the crimes of the past could not simply be explained away, relativized or forgotten.

That is why one slogan I began encountering after October 7 disturbed me so much:

“Free Palestine from German guilt.”

The slogan was chanted at pro-Palestinian demonstrations, on protest signs, stickers and online. Its implications deserve more scrutiny than they receive.

Germany’s relationship with Israel is not simply the product of irrational guilt over something that happened eighty years ago. It grew from an understanding of what antisemitism had done not only to European Jews, but to Germany itself.

The Holocaust murdered six million Jews.

Nazism also destroyed Germany.

Its cities were reduced to rubble. Its institutions collapsed. Millions died. The country was divided. An entire society discovered what could happen when conspiracy theories, racial hatred and political fanaticism became organizing principles of the state.

The Germany I admired understood that remembrance was not a punishment imposed upon Germans by Jews. It was one of the foundations of the new Germany.

And yet after October 7, I watched that understanding come under extraordinary pressure.

Before Israel had even launched its ground operation in Gaza, crowds were already on European streets chanting “Free Palestine.” By October 8, Hezbollah had opened another front from Lebanon, saying it was acting in solidarity with the Palestinians. The regional wars that followed would eventually stretch to the head of the snake: the Islamic Republic occupying Iran.

I was personally in Israel for both the 12-day war in 2025, and the 40-day war this year.

In Germany, arguments about Israel increasingly became arguments about Germany itself: its memory culture, its relationship with Jews, and whether its historical responsibility toward Israel represented wisdom or pathology.

At the same time, another uncomfortable question became increasingly difficult to avoid.

Germany had spent generations educating its population about the antisemitism produced by European fascism. But contemporary Germany also contains ideological currents whose antisemitism emerged from very different historical traditions.

For years, Berlin was home to an annual Al-Quds Day demonstration, part of an international political tradition inaugurated by Iran’s Islamist occupiers in 1979.

The Islamic Republic has made hostility toward Israel central to its politics and has supported armed groups committed to the elimination of the Jewish state.

I believe Europe has been far too reluctant to reckon with the antisemitism carried by these Islamist political movements.

The Islamic Republic’s hostility is not simply a disagreement with the policies of a particular Israeli government. Its leadership has repeatedly envisioned a future in which the State of Israel ceases to exist.

I see in this an uncomfortable historical echo: a political ideology that places Jews and Jewish sovereignty at the center of an elaborate story about what is wrong with the world.

That does not make Islamism and Nazism identical.

They plainly are not.

Their origins, theology and political objectives are different.

But antisemitism does not have to reproduce the ideology of 1933 in order to be antisemitism.

That is precisely the problem.

Germany has spent generations learning to recognize antisemitism through the imagery of its own past.

But what happens when Jew-hatred no longer arrives wearing a swastika?

Today it can speak the language of anti-imperialism, religious fundamentalism, revolutionary politics or internet irony.

One young man can praise Hitler because he thinks doing so makes him rebellious, while an activist from the opposite end of the political spectrum compares the Jewish state to Nazi Germany.

They may believe they have nothing in common.

But Jew-hatred has never required ideological consistency.

It requires a story explaining why the Jews are uniquely guilty.

That story has proved remarkably adaptable.

And this is where I believe Germany may actually have an advantage over some of its neighbours.

Having lived in both Germany and the Netherlands, I noticed a difference in their relationship to historical responsibility.

Dutch culture possesses qualities I love: openness, informality, irreverence, a willingness to say what one thinks.

But irreverence has a shadow side.

Standing in Arnhem watching young Dutch men grin beneath quotes praising Hitler, I found myself appreciating something about German seriousness that I had previously taken for granted.

There are things a civilization should not become casual about.

There are taboos worth preserving.

There are historical lessons that should not become memes.

Germany knows this better than almost any country on Earth.

Which is why I reject the idea that Germany needs to be “freed” from its historical memory.

Germany should deepen it.

It should have enough confidence in the lessons it learned after 1945 to apply them consistently, regardless of where contemporary antisemitism comes from.

That means confronting the far right when it traffics in fantasies about Jewish power.

It means confronting Islamist antisemitism without pretending that doing so is inherently xenophobic.

And it means challenging elements of the radical left when criticism of Israeli policy crosses into conspiracy theories, collective guilt or the erasure of Jewish history.

A serious culture should be capable of doing all three.

There is another reason this matters.

As I left Arnhem, I kept thinking about the age of the people I had interviewed.

They were young.

In twenty years, their generation will run Europe.

They will become teachers, journalists, judges, civil servants and politicians.

Some will become police officers and soldiers.

And that raises a question far more important than whether anyone should listen to Kanye West.

What happens when Jewish citizens need the protection of their society?

Who stands between a synagogue and the person who wants to burn it?

Who protects a Jewish school when it receives threats?

Who confronts a mob?

Ultimately, constitutions cannot do these things by themselves.

People do.

If the young men who will one day become police officers, soldiers and political leaders see Hitler primarily as a joke, what exactly have eighty years of remembrance accomplished?

If they cannot understand why the safety of their Jewish neighbour is connected to their own freedom, something fundamental has been lost.

This is not only about Jews.

Antisemitism is rarely only a Jewish problem.

It is often an early symptom of a society losing its relationship with reality.

The antisemite requires conspiracy because reality is too complicated. Personal failure becomes Jewish manipulation. Political frustration becomes Jewish power. Historical complexity becomes a morality play.

That was what I heard outside the stadium.

Kanye West experienced extraordinary personal and professional turmoil and eventually arrived at one of the oldest explanations in Western history:

Blame the Jews.

What frightened me was not simply that some agreed with him.

It was how little many seemed to care.

Germany cannot solve this problem for Europe. But Germany possesses something much of Europe increasingly lacks: a national history that has forced it to understand.

That inheritance should not be treated as shame.

It should be treated as knowledge.

Germany does not need liberation from its memory. It needs the courage to use it.

I left Arnhem thinking less about Kanye West than about the society outside the stadium.

The Stolpersteine can remain beneath our feet.

But remembrance becomes meaningless if the people walking over those stones no longer understand what they are being asked to remember.

The uniforms change. The slogans change. The political alliances change.

The responsibility does not: to possess enough confidence in civilization to say, without embarrassment, that some things are worth defending.

I was in New York when I ran into Jewish rapper Kosha Dillz at an event at the 92nd Street Y. We were standing around talking when he asked if I wanted to come with him to an Azealia Banks concert.

I looked down at myself.

I was wearing khaki pants, a button-down shirt and some kind of plaid jacket-shirt situation. I’d look like a Midwest father who had arrived to collect his drunk teenage son. This did not feel like the correct vibe for an Azealia Banks concert. Surely I needed streetwear. Something urban. Something cool.

Kosha looked at me and said, essentially, “You’re fine. Let’s go.”

So I went to see Azealia Banks dressed like I was about to buy a lawnmower at Home Depot.

And she was spectacular.

There are performers who entertain a room, and then there are performers whose energy seems wildly disproportionate to the size of their bodies. Azealia is tiny. Petite. Almost shockingly small when you see her in person. But onstage she occupies everything. Her intelligence, sensuality, humor and aggression arrive all at once. She does not merely command attention; she reorganizes the atmosphere around herself.

Watching her, I kept thinking of Eartha Kitt.

Not because they make the same kind of music, or because their politics are the same. They aren’t. I thought of Eartha because both women possess that rare combination of feline glamour, ferocious intelligence and social danger. Both are unmistakably American icons, but neither is the kind of American woman an institution could ever safely place behind a podium and expect to follow the program.

After the concert, Kosha brought me backstage. Azealia was wearing a Star of David necklace and a T-shirt that said “FUCK QATAR.” Around her were members of her team—Black people, Jewish people, her sister, who was also working with her. It felt familial rather than corporate. There was no sterile wall of handlers protecting a brand. The brand was standing in front of us, completely alive.

At the time, Azealia had become an unlikely and unusually outspoken defender of Israel. That month, she had returned from a solidarity visit during which she called herself a Zionist, did a massive concert in Tel Aviv, visited the Nova music festival massacre site and Yad Vashem, performed draped in an Israeli flag, and praised Benjamin Netanyahu as “iconic.” In the cultural world Azealia inhabits, almost any one of those gestures could get an artist socially excommunicated. She did all of them at once.

Then came the inevitable blowup. After she praised Netanyahu in an Israeli interview, critics inside Israel attacked her from the left. She had already exposed herself to the fury of the international boycott movement in order to support the country; now she was being scolded by Israelis for supporting the democratically elected Prime Minister. Azealia responded as Azealia responds: she dissed people.

She lashed out on X, and said things that landed far more seriously than she intended and discovered that some people who had embraced her were listening not as rap fans accustomed to a beef, but as members of a traumatized community who believed an ally had turned on them.

People backstage spoke about the controversy almost as if a small tornado had passed through the building. The general assessment was that Azealia had fucked up, that she did not understand what she was saying or the consequences her words would carry. But this was the first mistake: assuming Azealia Banks could be understood according to the normal rules of celebrity advocacy.

Afterward, Kosha and I decided to get food at Carnegie Diner, a classic late night spot a few blocks away. We invited Azealia, although I did not believe for a second that she would appear. Famous people say they are coming to dinner in the same way normal people say, “We should get coffee sometime.” It is a ceremonial expression of goodwill. Nobody is expected to arrive.

But she did.

No entourage. No posse. No theatrical entrance. She simply walked in by herself, a little tired from the concert, and sat down with us.

Up close, the contrast became even more astonishing. Here was this petite woman who had just filled an entire venue, and the moment she began talking, another performance started—not a calculated one, but a natural overflow of the mind.

If you ever get the chance to talk with Azaelia: take it! She could move through history, race, empire, religion and power with extraordinary speed. She spoke the way she raps: ideas arriving in rhythmic bursts, one association opening into another until she had built an entire argument in the air.

She could rattle off what sounded like encyclopedic knowledge about the Arab slave trade in Black Africans and connect it to contemporary racial politics, Jewish history and the strange expectations placed on Black Americans. She was not delivering approved talking points from a Jewish organization. She had reached her conclusions through her own volatile and highly individual intelligence.

Sitting across from her, I realized that Azealia has an extraordinarily high IQ. I do not mean that in the casual celebrity-profile sense, where anyone who has read half a book is declared “surprisingly smart.” I mean she has the frightening speed and associative power of a crazy genius.

Then the conversation turned to October 7 and the Nova music festival.

Something in her changed. The dazzling flow of information slowed down, and she became emotional—crying as she thought about the young people who had been murdered at a music festival. She had visited the Nova site while she was in Israel, and whatever she had encountered there was no longer an abstraction or an argument happening online. It had reached her.

She was also genuinely upset about the backlash she had created.

“I didn’t mean to say anything bad,” she told us.

She seemed wounded by the fact that her words had been taken with such gravity, as if she had only just discovered that the people celebrating her support were not hearing the free-associative provocations of an artist. They were hearing declarations from someone in whom they had placed their trust.

I did not see a calculating celebrity trying to repair her brand. I saw someone who had been deeply affected by what happened at Nova and who was startled by her own capacity to hurt people she had not intended to hurt. For all the mythology surrounding Azealia Banks as an unrepentant chaos agent, there was real tenderness in her. There was remorse. But there was also a profound mismatch between how she experienced her own words—as thoughts, reactions, riffs, sometimes even verbal improvisations—and how the public received them.

That is when I understood something both thrilling and terrifying about her: Azealia Banks is operating on a different wavelength from almost everyone who tries to use her politically.

It may even have been useful that she did not fully appreciate the consequences of supporting Israel. Had she understood the entire machinery waiting to punish an artist for crossing the cultural boycott—the messages, threats, denunciations, lost opportunities and permanent moral suspicion—perhaps she would have calculated the risk differently.

That is the punk-rock quality of Azealia’s Zionism. Not that Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu or the State of Israel are inherently punk rock. Governments are governments. Politicians are politicians. Punk is not a fixed set of opinions inherited from 1977. It is the willingness to violate the enforced orthodoxies of your own cultural world.

In today’s entertainment industry, fashion world, queer culture and artistic left, saying “Free Palestine” is not an act of rebellion. It is the price of admission. It comes with the correct friends, the correct festivals, the correct nonprofit language and the soothing knowledge that everyone at the afterparty agrees with you. An artist openly calling herself a Zionist, supporting Trump, praising Netanyahu and walking onstage in a Star of David is doing something much more socially dangerous.

You do not have to agree with all of it to recognize the transgression.

Counterculture cannot simply mean repeating the politics that were countercultural sixty years ago. In 1968, Eartha Kitt became intolerable by confronting a Democratic administration over Vietnam. The politics point in different directions, but the position of the artist is strikingly similar: she is the woman who says the forbidden thing and makes the respectable table fall silent.

Eartha Kitt arrived at the White House on January 18, 1968, for one of Lady Bird Johnson’s “Women Doers Luncheons.” The subject was juvenile delinquency and “crime in the streets.” Kitt had not been invited merely because she was famous. She had worked with disadvantaged young people, created the Kittsville Youth Foundation and supported a youth organization in Washington. She had even testified before Congress about allowing young people to participate in solving the conditions they were actually living through.

When President Lyndon Johnson stopped by the luncheon and delivered what Kitt considered empty platitudes about children and the home, she challenged him about parents who had to work and lacked adequate childcare. He gave a brief answer about government funding and left.

Later, when the women were asked to discuss the causes of juvenile crime, Kitt refused to stay inside the decorative boundaries of the event. She connected the despair and rebellion of American youth to Vietnam.

“You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed,” she said. “They rebel in the street. They will take pot and they will get high.”

The press turned the encounter into a story about Eartha Kitt making the First Lady cry. The substance of her argument disappeared beneath a national debate about her manners. Lady Bird responded that the existence of a war was no reason to be uncivilized.

This is one of the oldest techniques available to respectable power: invite the artist to speak, then punish her for failing to speak respectably.

Kitt’s American career effectively collapsed. Bookings disappeared. She was pushed out of the country’s entertainment industry and spent much of the following decade working in Europe and Asia. It later emerged that the CIA had assembled and circulated an invasive dossier filled with gossip about her personality, family and sex life. The government did not merely disagree with what she had said. It helped convert an “unruly Black woman” into a national security object.

Kitt survived because Eartha Kitt could not be reduced to the approval of Washington or Hollywood. Europe had cabaret, nightclub culture and, later, a dance and disco world that had room for her. America made her radioactive; the rest of the world kept applauding. By the 1980s, she was recording disco hits turning political exile into yet another act in a career that refused to end.

You could not cancel Eartha Kitt because Eartha Kitt was larger than the institutions trying to cancel her.

The parallel with Azealia is not exact, and it should not be. Eartha challenged the most powerful political administration in the world to its face, and the retaliation involved the actual power of the state. Azealia’s provocations are often impulsive, personal, contradictory and, at times, genuinely destructive.

But both women expose the same institutional hypocrisy. Society loves an unruly artist when her claws are pointed in the approved direction. It wants her glamour, authenticity and courage. It wants to borrow her danger. Then the moment she turns her intelligence inward—or simply refuses to observe the coalition’s etiquette—everyone acts shocked that the wild animal was not house-trained.

This is especially true in the world of Israel advocacy.

Israel is culturally isolated, and its supporters are understandably desperate for the embrace of international artists. Every performer who refuses the boycott is treated as a minor diplomatic victory. But desperation can produce wildly unrealistic expectations. A performer comes to Israel and is immediately asked to carry the emotional burden of an entire besieged country.

The problem is that artists like Azealia Banks do not understand support as a contract of permanent obedience.

She had already endured the fury of people who believed that merely performing for Israeli fans made her complicit in evil. Then she arrived in Israel, praised Netanyahu and discovered that Israelis themselves were perfectly capable of attacking her from the left, from the right and from whichever direction offered a journalist the most clicks. This is something nobody prepares you for when you become publicly associated with Israel. You survive the external boycott only to encounter an internal purity test.

I know this experience intimately. You absorb abuse from people who want Israel isolated, dismantled and treated as a contamination. You lose friends. People block you, unfollow you and reconsider working with you. Then you arrive in Israel bruised but still standing, and some freelance journalist is waiting to explain that you are also supporting Israel incorrectly. You cross an ideological minefield to get there and are greeted by a deranged Israeli leftist holding a machete.

Azealia’s response to that dynamic was not diplomatic. Of course it wasn’t. She is a rapper. She dissed people.

This is where the collision became inevitable. They expected steadiness from a woman whose entire public mythology is built around volatility. They wanted the fearlessness that had allowed her to defy the boycott without accepting that fearlessness cannot be selectively activated.

This does not mean a community must tolerate abuse from anyone who offers support. Nor does it mean artists should be exempt from criticism. It means we should stop confusing an artist with an ambassador under contract. An ambassador is expected to maintain message discipline. An artist is expected—sometimes constitutionally compelled—to violate it.

Eartha Kitt had the CIA compiling a dossier about her. Today, the internet does the work for free.

Every joke, friendship, photograph, “like,” badly worded sentence and moment of irritation becomes part of a permanent ideological file. Somewhere, someone is always assembling the case against you. The crime may not be anything you have done. It may be an association, an insufficient denunciation, an excessive enthusiasm, the wrong adjective, or your failure to anticipate how a stranger will interpret a joke three years from now.

For anyone publicly connected to Israel, that surveillance becomes relentless. One side is searching for proof that you are a genocidal monster; the other is watching for a moment of disloyalty. You begin to inhabit a digital version of the thought police, in which no statement is allowed to remain a statement. Everything is evidence.

Back at the diner, none of this seemed very important.

As we got ready to leave, the entire waitstaff finally approached. They had apparently spent the evening trying to remain professional while Azealia Banks sat in their restaurant. Suddenly the waitresses were surrounding her.

“Miss Banks, we love you. Can we get a picture?”

We began taking photographs and arranging selfies. Azealia—alone, exhausted and fresh from commanding an entire concert—was gracious with everyone. The supposedly impossible woman stood there giving the waitresses a memory they would keep forever.

That was when the limits of cancellation became clearest to me.

The internet can prosecute Azealia Banks indefinitely. Journalists can compile every offense. Political communities can adopt her, reject her and adopt her again. None of that erases what happens when “212” comes on, or what it feels like to watch her seize a stage, or the affection on the face of a waitress who has been waiting all night to ask for a photograph.

This is not an argument that talent excuses everything. It is an acknowledgment that audiences have a more complicated relationship with artists than political institutions can tolerate. People know that an artist can be brilliant and foolish, generous and cruel, perceptive and catastrophically wrong. They also know what her work has given them.

Eartha Kitt and Azealia Banks are American icons not because either woman represents an American consensus, but because both embody something more essentially American: the unruly individual who refuses to be absorbed by the group. Their politics are different. Their eras are different. Even the machinery used to punish them is different. But both women reveal what happens when power invites a diva into the room and then discovers that she has brought her own mind.

You can denounce a diva. You can disinvite her. You can exile her, screenshot her and compile a dossier on her. You can decide that she has betrayed you because she refused to become the person you needed her to be.

But you cannot invite an unmanageable woman into history and then demand that she behave.

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By the end of 2021, once the worst of COVID appeared to be behind us, many of my friends—and certainly most of my Power Gay friends—had reached the same uncomfortable conclusion: Europe was changing, and not for the better.

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Apparently gay men had nothing to do with gay liberation. Thank God everybody else arrived to save us! Once you see how ideologues have incepted popular culture, it becomes impossible to unsee it.

Every historical event has been retrofitted with an intersectional heroine who, by an astonishing coincidence, reflects the precise politics of a queer-studies department in 2026.

Gay men are being removed from the story of our own liberation. We are still allowed to appear, of course, but primarily as supporting characters: vain, privileged, oversexed and politically suspect. We may have supplied the bodies, the funerals, the art, the nightclubs, the fashion, the demonstrations and most of the dead people, but the moral heroism must now be redistributed elsewhere.

We watched it happen with Stonewall.

A chaotic uprising of multi-racial working class young gay men who had finally had enough of police harassment was gradually turned into a children’s fable in which Marsha P. Johnson threw the first brick and single-handedly launched the modern gay-rights movement.

“Marsha” or Malcolm Michaels Jr. never claimed to have started Stonewall. By his own account, he arrived after the uprising had already begun. But history is apparently no match for a good Instagram infographic.

I have already written about the Marsha P. Johnson mythology, so I won’t relitigate the entire thing here. The point is the method: take a small or complicated piece of history, remove all scale and context, inflate it into an origin myth, and then accuse anyone who objects of attacking marginalized people.

And where were gay men in this new version of gay history?

Apparently at brunch being cunty.

Now the same machinery has produced another revelation: Lesbians saved gay men during the AIDS epidemic!

Did you know this?

Apparently gay men did nothing for ourselves. We did not care for our lovers, bury our friends, create organizations, raise money, make art, or turn inconceivable grief into one of the most consequential activist movements in modern history.

No. We were lying helplessly on a chaise longue until the lesbians arrived with soup.

Comedian Judy Gold recently appeared on a podcast with Sam Jay and announced that gay men are privileged assholes who treat lesbians like shit. How dare we, she demanded, when lesbians were the ones who came to our rescue during AIDS?

Sam Jay and her co-host laughed and clapped along. Everybody had a fabulous time!

But let’s cut the shit. Hate us all you want, that doesn’t change the fact that Lesbians are in love with Hamas & are obsessed with trans-ing children.

The straight people noticed. The Gay men noticed. Everyone noticed.

I know Judy. I understand the cultural world in which she operates. There are concessions one must make to remain welcome in certain progressive social circles in New York City. You confess your privilege. You repeat the approved history. You apologize on behalf of whichever demographic you have been assigned to represent.

And if you are a white Jewish lesbian comic in 2026, occasionally you must throw gay men under the Subaru.

But Sam Jay is no stranger to historical revisionism.

She appeared in You People, the Jonah Hill and Kenya Barris film that attempted to update Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

Eddie Murphy plays a Louis Farrakhan-adjacent Black-power father whose daughter is marrying Jonah Hill. Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays Hill’s mother as an aging JAP: wealthy, socially desperate and so intoxicated by her own performative progressivism that she cannot interact with a Black person without behaving as though she has just discovered one at Whole Foods.

It could have been hilarious. Black people and Jews have supplied American comedy with enough neurosis, family dysfunction, religious guilt and unsolicited opinions to power HBO for another century.

Instead, the film turned Black–Jewish relations into another ideological courtroom.

The Black family’s hostility toward Jews is presented as political, historically grounded and therefore understandable. The Jewish family’s behavior is presented as embarrassing, privileged and in need of correction.

The film was widely criticized, and many Jewish viewers hated it because they recognized the trick. A complicated and historically significant alliance between Black Americans and American Jews had been rewritten through the racial politics of Marxism. Jews were no longer participants in the civil-rights struggle. They were clueless white people who needed to sit down, apologize and learn.

Martin Luther King Jr. was a Christian minister, an anti-communist and a supporter of Israel. The Black–Jewish alliance was imperfect, but it was real. Jews marched, organized and worked alongside Black Americans during the civil-rights era.

Now Sam Jay appears in a film that flattens that history, then sits on a podcast clapping while Judy Gold flattens gay history.

Apparently every alliance must be rewritten as a rescue operation. Gay men must be rescued by lesbians. Jews must be recast as the people Black Americans had to overcome. And the approved victim class must never be asked to examine its own hostility, contradictions or political choices.

Once you recognize the formula, it becomes embarrassingly easy to spot.

The preferred evidence for the Great Lesbian Rescue of Gay Men is usually the San Diego Blood Sisters.

During the AIDS epidemic, gay men were prohibited from donating blood. In response, a group of lesbians in San Diego organized blood drives. The first, in July 1983. At their height of popularity, they attracted nearly two hundred women.

Over a decade, the Blood Sisters held twelve blood drives.

Twelve.

Not twelve hundred. Twelve.

Roughly one blood drive a year.

Was it a decent thing to do? Yes. Put it on the historical record. Send a thank-you card. Name a plaque.

But this is now being offered as evidence that lesbians saved gay men during AIDS?

Come on.

A small lesbian organization in San Diego held around a dozen blood drives over ten years, and forty years later gay men are being told that we owe an entire identity class eternal gratitude. At this rate, if I bring hummus to a lesbian potluck twice, I will have personally saved womenkind.

The mythology presents an army of lesbian Florence Nightingales sweeping across America while helpless gay men waited to be rescued.

Is it remotely possible that gay men participated in our own history?

Did gay doctors, nurses, researchers, fundraisers, lawyers, writers and activists perhaps do something? Did men care for dying partners? Did gay friends sit beside one another in hospital rooms while families refused to visit? Did gay men establish clinics, create organizations, stage demonstrations and force a government to acknowledge that an entire generation was dying?

Or were we all waiting in bed for Marsha P. Johnson, a Blood Sister and Judy Gold to arrive?

Gay men must lose ownership of our past because ownership gives us authority in the present. A population that remembers saving itself is difficult to intimidate. A population taught that everybody else saved it can be kept permanently grateful, guilty and quiet.

Consider Elizabeth Taylor.

At a time when AIDS patients were treated like radioactive waste and most of Hollywood discovered an urgent scheduling conflict, Jewish-convert Elizabeth Taylor used the full force of her celebrity to raise money, confront political cowardice and help establish what became amfAR. She raised millions of dollars.

She did not call gay men privileged assholes. She loved us.

She saw people suffering and used everything she had to help them.

Perhaps that is why she has become less useful to the current mythology. Elizabeth Taylor’s story is about personal courage, loyalty and love. It cannot easily be converted into a Marxist parable about one identity class rescuing another.

Gay men saving one another is even less useful. That version would make us protagonists in our own history, and apparently we can’t have that.

The erasure is not restricted to AIDS.

Debra Messing starred in Will & Grace, one of the most culturally consequential gay television shows ever produced. That sitcom brought gay men into millions of American homes. It allowed people who had never knowingly met an openly gay man to laugh with us, recognize us and eventually care about us.

Yet because Messing has been unambiguously supportive of Israel, she has been subjected to relentless cyberbullying by many of the same people who insist they represent queer liberation.

The woman who helped humanize gay men is now treated as morally contaminated because she refuses to abandon Jews.

Are we seeing the pattern yet?

There are people working to degrade the historic Black–Jewish alliance. There are also people working to degrade the Gay–Jewish alliance.

Gay men and Jews are inconvenient to this new ideology because we can explain things. We have memories. We recognize authoritarianism even when it arrives wearing a keffiyeh and carrying a tote bag from an independent feminist bookstore.

We know what happens when a movement decides that language is more important than reality. We know what it looks like when a minority is declared socially contaminating. And we know that putting the word “liberation” after an idea does not make the idea liberating.

That is why gay men who object - must be portrayed as privileged, misogynistic and ungrateful.

The average person looks at “Queers for Palestine” and wonders why homosexuals are campaigning for movements that would never tolerate homosexual life. Parents look at the gender ideology entering schools and wonder how childhood discomfort became a political emergency requiring permanent labels and medical intervention.

Ordinary people sense that something profoundly strange is happening, but they have been bullied into believing that noticing it constitutes prejudice.

But once they encounter theorists such as Judith Butler and legal academics such as Katherine Franke — the intellectual machinery behind the madness begins to reveal itself.

Suddenly it makes sense that Cynthia Nixon can become a celebrity through a television franchise celebrating female sexual freedom and then become consumed by a political movement whose heroes would never permit that freedom.

It makes sense that Rosie O’Donnell can summon oceans of emotion for nearly every approved victim group while struggling to extend the same imagination to Israelis.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist. It barely takes a functioning Wi-Fi connection.

These Lesbian figureheads are not simply expressing concern for Palestinian civilians. They are enforcing an ideological worldview. And gay men who can identify its contradictions are a threat to it.

So we must be made ashamed.

We must be told that lesbians saved us. We must be reminded that we owe them. We must accept that disagreement is misogyny, questions are betrayal and memory is privilege.

Judy Gold’s video with Nova massacre survivor Mazal Tazazo reveals just how distorted this moral universe has become.

Mazal is a Black Jewish Israeli woman who survived the October 7 massacre at the Nova music festival. Judy interviewed her at the site of the attack.

Why did it require Mazal?

Because apparently Israeli suffering cannot be understood on its own. It must first be translated into the only American racial language Judy’s intersectional friends still recognize.

A light-skinned Jewish man surviving a massacre? Complicated.

A Black Jewish woman surviving a massacre? Wait—now perhaps we can assemble a panel!

Perhaps if an Israeli victim can be passed through the approved categories of Blackness, womanhood and trauma, these people can briefly recognize her as human? Perhaps Blackness can smuggle a little sympathy for Jews past the intersectional border police?

Even then, Islamism could not be mentioned.

We could discuss trauma. We could discuss resilience. We could stand at Nova looking solemn. But the religious and political ideology of the perpetrators remained politely outside the frame.

The victim must be intersectionalized.

The killers & kidnappers must be decontextualized.

I would like us to reach the point where we can call a spade a spade.

And that brings me to Sandra Bernhard.

Ryan Murphy’s Pose supplied the mythology of lesbian salvation with one of its most emotionally effective images: Sandra Bernhard as Nurse Judy Kubrak, the tough lesbian nurse who runs the AIDS ward at Roosevelt Hospital and organizes alongside AIDS activists.

I am sure women like Judy existed.

But I was not alive during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic. I cannot personally tell you what Sandra Bernhard was doing in 1985.

But I can tell you what I experienced in 2026.

I was in Israel as the Islamic Republic occuyping Iran fired missiles at the country. I went into bomb shelters. I listened for alerts. I lived under attack from a regime that would happily murder me twice: once for being in Israel and again for being gay.

Sandra Bernhard was one of the first comedians who ever made Israel feel real to me. Her show Songs I Sang on the Kibbutz about living on a kibbutz in the 1970s introduced me to a country I barely understood. I loved her monologues and anecdotes about Jewish life in New York CIty in the 80s & 90s. Before I understood the Jewish world politically or historically, I understood it through Sandra: glamorous, neurotic, Jewish, sexual, irreverent and completely original.

I admired her for years.

So imagine the absurdity of sitting in an Israeli bomb shelter while the woman who played Nurse Judy politically inhabits a cultural scene that cannot bring itself to confront the people firing the missiles, campaigns for Zohran Mamdani for mayor, and celebrates the DSA primary win of Adbul El-Sayed.

I am expected to celebrate a fictional lesbian nurse for standing beside gay men forty years ago while remaining silent about (ME!) a real gay man being bombed today?

Excuse me?

You do not get to build a moral throne then mysteriously lose your voice when the Islamic Republic tries to kill actual Jews and homosexuals.

If Judy Gold wants gay men to remember what some lesbians did during AIDS, then lesbian celebrities must also be prepared to answer for what they are doing now.

Where were Cynthia Nixon, Rosie O’Donnell and Sandra Bernhard while I was in a bomb shelter?

Where was the legendary lesbian concern for gay male survival when the people trying to kill me were Arab Islamists rather than Bigoted Christian Televangelists from 1987?

Where were our saviors?

The truth is that the myth of lesbian salvation is not really about honoring lesbians who helped during AIDS. The myth is about power in the present.

The San Diego Blood Sisters held twelve blood drives.

Elizabeth Taylor helped change the world.

And gay men were not passive extras in our own extermination.

I hate being lied to.

I hate watching gay men disappear from our own history and reappear only as its spoiled beneficiaries. I hate being ordered to perform gratitude toward an entire identity group while its current figureheads align themselves against me.

That is not solidarity.

That is emotional blackmail with front-row tickets to an Indigo Girls concert.

Gay men have the historical memory to call this out. We have the cultural knowledge to identify the trick. We can see how the same activists rewriting Black–Jewish relations are rewriting gay history and attacking the Gay–Jewish alliance.

If your alliance with gay men requires our silence, it is not an alliance.

Everyone can see the contradictions now.

The house of cards is falling.

And, darling, we are going to talk about it.

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The best-kept secret of New York City is that New Yorkers don’t live in New York.

By the beginning of 2026, I had realized that it was entirely possible to maintain a full social life in New York City without actually living there. You could arrive for five days, pack the calendar with parties, dinners, galas and meetings, and leave before you had time to remember what the city was like on a wet Tuesday morning, when the garbage bags split open on the sidewalk and the subway smells like rats and crack cocaine.

Many of the people we think of as quintessential New York figures merely keep a pied-à-terre there. Once they reach a certain level of success, they quietly escape to Connecticut, Sag Harbor, or Palm Beach. They spend half the year in Europe. They return to Manhattan just often enough to be photographed, seen and discussed. Then they disappear again to somewhere with a garden.

Power Gays have always understood this. Power Gays are inherently multi-city. A Power Gay does not simply go home. He migrates between homes, lovers, climates, tax jurisdictions and invitations. His life is a constellation of keys he may or may not still be legally entitled to possess.

On one of my visits to New York this year, I arrived for five tightly scheduled days of events. One of them was the annual One Israel Fund gala, which supports Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and is among the more conservative fixtures on New York’s Jewish philanthropic calendar.

Seated beside me was Brooke Goldstein, the Canadian-born civil-rights attorney and founder of the Lawfare Project. Brooke is one of the most eloquent, photogenic and fabulous Jewish public figures in American life. She was iridescent in a fuschia pink suit. IREDESCENT. That is the only word for her. She seems to emit light even while talking about litigation.

I was quiet that night. These events often overwhelm me. Part of it is the magnitude of the rooms themselves—the donors, activists, politicians and public figures gathered under chandeliers to address problems that feel ancient and suddenly immediate. But part of it is what those rooms have come to represent in my own life.

Over the previous few years, I had watched my career and social world reorganize themselves around my support for Israel. People I had known for years disappeared. Friends blocked me. Colleagues unfollowed me. Collaborations became strained or impossible. Venues felt less predictable. Threats, cyberbullying and attempted boycotts were no longer theoretical, and neither was the possibility that someone might bring violence into a room where I was performing.

I wasn’t only asking myself where I should live. I was trying to reconceptualize my entire future. How was I supposed to make money? Where could I perform? How could I tour when I could no longer assume that a venue, a promoter or even parts of an audience considered my safety important? How do you build a career in the entertainment industry, when large factions of that scene treats your social ostracization as morally deserved? How do you move forward when so many of the people who once made up your world have decided that you are part of a conspiracy simply because you refused to lie about what you had seen, and experienced, and KNOW?

Brooke noticed.

“Daniel, are you okay?” she asked gently.

“Brooke. Everything is so crazy. I lived in Europe for most of my adult life. Half the people I knew watch Al Jazeera as if it’s real news. They’re whacked out of their fucking heads. They’ve been completely radicalized by Islamist propaganda, and now they think I’m part of some Zionist conspiracy funded by the Israeli government. I don’t know how I’m supposed to keep doing this. I don’t know how I’m supposed to work.”

She nodded with the compassion of somebody who did not need the problem explained to her.

“Listen,” she said. “This is something we’ve all had to face. We have to keep moving forward. We have to make new friends.”

Then she paused and added, almost maternally, “Maybe you should move to Miami. You’ll be happier there.”

There is a reason people have started calling Miami the new Jerusalem.

Over the following year, I spent more time there, subletting a little place on the Venetian Islands. At first glance, Miami can feel tacky, glitzy and overdone. Miami Beach can resemble the exhausted after-party of Gianni Versace’s 1990s: sun-bleached Art Deco, dated glitter and men who appear to have been assembled from spare Lamborghini parts.

But Miami is a city that reveals itself to you as your nervous system adjusts to it.

The longer I stayed, the more I felt the accumulated stress of New York and Europe begin to leave my body. I had spent years surrounded by hyper-reactive politics, social surveillance and the kind of progressive extremism in which every conversation could suddenly become a tribunal. In Miami, people seemed to have opted out.

Miami is where woke goes to die—not because the people are ignorant of politics, but because many of them have already lived through the consequences of ideology. Cuban and Latin American families escaped communism. Jews and Israelis understand what happens when polite society rationalizes hatred. The city has its own innovative Black urban culture, a residue of Southern hospitality and a sturdy belief in good old-fashioned Americana. It is Latin, Jewish and intensely gay male.

The gay bars are even gay bars.

There were no psycho queers lecturing everyone about settler colonialism, no activist lesbians conducting a land acknowledgment, no Purple-haired girls glaring at homosexual men for enjoying homosexuality. From the clubs of Miami Beach to the bars of Wilton Manors, I found physically fit, masculine, muscular and surprisingly down-to-earth gay men of every race: Black, White, Latino, Asian, and Jewish. Nobody appeared to be dismantling anything. Mostly, they were trying to get laid.

It was restorative.

During one of my stays, my German friend Peter happened to be visiting Miami. He had also begun looking at the city as a possible future home while contemplating how much longer he wanted to remain in Berlin.

Peter could breathe there. Back in Berlin, his neighborhood had come to feel defined by disorder: visible homelessness, untreated schizophrenia, violent crime and the constant possibility of another knife fight or stabbing between Arab clans.

Berlin had once marketed itself as poor but sexy, a city of perpetual nightlife and erotic possibility. But the party had curdled. Nothing about Berlin felt sexy anymore. It felt dangerous, disgusting and exhausting.

Peter and I met up as soon he landed, and went to an event hosted by my friend Micki Weinberg, the founder of SHIUR. A shiur is traditionally a Jewish lesson or class, but Micki had expanded the form into something multidisciplinary: text-based salons that placed Torah and Jewish thought in conversation with philosophy, literature and contemporary art.

The gathering took place in a gallery in Miami’s warehouse district. We moved among paintings and sculptures, comparing the work with philosophical passages and sacred texts. Micki led the room through a discussion about art, Jewish thought and how meaning changes depending on what we place beside it. It was rigorous without being joyless, Jewish without being defensive, intellectual without making everybody miserable—essentially everything I had once gone to Berlin looking for in a culture scene.

Afterward, Peter and I headed to the Standard Spa on Belle Isle. I had already gotten a day pass, and the concierge was kind enough to let Peter slip in with me.

He was amazed by the city. The streets felt safe. The harbor water was clear. Palm trees framed the pastel Art Deco buildings. Everything seemed clean, warm and improbable compared with the broken glass and ambient threat he had left behind in Berlin.

“There is one problem with Miami,” I told him.

“What?”

“There are no lesbian jihadis here. But we got a problems with the straight girls.”

“What’s wrong with the straight girls?”

“They’re not like Israeli women, who go through military training, or German women, who are taught to be self-reliant. American girls in Miami are looking for husbands. All the entrepreneurs moved here, so now the women are constantly throwing themselves at us.”

“But we’re gay,” Peter said.

“It doesn’t stop them, Peter. You’ll see.”

We went into the steam room, which, unfortunately, was coed. A young woman entered, spotted the two of us and began arranging her towel on the steps across from us with a degree of coquettish physical theater that could only have been choreographed. She turned, lifted her ass into the air and slowly adjusted the towel beneath her, the outline of everything visible through her bathing suit.

Peter turned toward me and rolled his eyes with an intensity I had never seen from him before.

“You were right, Daniel.”

We left the steam room and escaped to the outdoor infinity pool overlooking Biscayne Bay. It was February, and we were swimming in the warm water in our trunks long after we would have been trapped indoors anywhere in northern Europe. The light softened over the harbor. Peter and I floated there into the evening, talking about our lives and what might come next.

For years, I had imagined that the proof of a successful life would be its coherence. You chose a city, built a community, developed a career and moved forward in a straight line. If you were talented enough and worked hard enough, the structure would hold.

But my life had not held that shape. The cities I loved had changed. The communities I trusted had revealed their limits. The career I thought I was building might no longer be possible in the form I had imagined. I had been treating every closed door as evidence that I had failed, when perhaps it was also information. Perhaps rejection really was God’s protection—not as a slogan pasted over disappointment, but as a force that sometimes removes you from a future you are still trying to force into existence.

Floating beside Peter, looking out at the harbor, I understood that there was nothing wrong with a life unfolding differently from how I had expected. A path can feel like a detour only because you do not yet know where it is taking you. Sometimes the old life has to become impossible before you are willing to imagine a better one.

Brooke had told me that I needed to make new friends. Maybe I also needed new cities, new rooms and new ways of working. Maybe the future would not be built by winning back the people who had rejected me. Maybe it would be built among the new people who appreciated me.

Miami had not solved my life. But for the first time in a long time, I could picture another version of it.

And that was only the beginning.

In the spring of 2024, I was invited to an Israel Day party at a beautiful brownstone on the Upper East Side. It was being hosted by a group of gay Jews, and after months of watching the progressive world lose its fucking mind, I was happy to go somewhere I would not have to explain why kidnapping Jewish grandmothers was bad.

Then the host sent me a message.

I was welcome to come, but I could not take any photos or videos. I had a large platform, he explained, and some of the guests were not publicly out as Zionists.

I asked whether it was simply a no-photos party.

No. The rule was specifically for me. Somehow I was the dangerous one.

Some of the guests were Israeli. Others were proudly Zionist in private, but terrified of being seen in one of my Instagram stories because it could affect their jobs, friendships or social lives. They were not prepared to confront the people who had made Zionism socially dangerous. It was easier to control the person who refused to hide it.

That was when I began to understand: the terrible secret.

Batya Ungar-Sargon often reassures people that America is still a deeply Zionist country. The woke left screaming on campuses and running cultural institutions does not represent most Americans. Most Americans are not spending their evenings debating settler colonialism. They are trying to pay their bills, feed their children and find out why a single bag of groceries now requires financing.

My friend and mentor Fleur Hassan-Nahoum once put it to me this way: fifteen percent of people love Israel, fifteen percent hate Israel, and seventy percent are busy living their lives. They do not know very much about the conflict, they do not particularly understand why it matters, and they certainly are not sitting around contemplating the Muslim Brotherhood’s long-term plans for Western civilization.

Batya is probably right about America.

But Batya and I have experienced very different Americas.

Batya wears a large Star of David everywhere she goes. She has spent years working in journalism and politics, discussing populism, class and the failures of the progressive left. Nobody meets Batya Ungar-Sargon and is shocked to discover that she is Jewish or that she has opinions about Israel.

I came to October 7 from a completely different world. I was a gay comedian working in culture, living between New York, Tel Aviv, Berlin and other European cities, surrounded by artists, performers, drag queens, bohemians, writers, actors, and left-wing gay men.

It was like a light switch flipped.

People I had known for years began repeating exterminationist slogans as though they had learned them at a weekend workshop. People who could find fascism in a salad dressing commercial were suddenly unable to recognize it when mobs of ecstatic Palestinian men paraded the bodies of murdered Jews through Gaza. Hostage posters were ripped down. Kidnapping became resistance. Rape became complicated.

I did not merely discover that half my friends disagreed with me about Israeli policy. I discovered that many of them had been completely radicalized, and that beneath all the language of social justice was a moral framework capable of justifying almost anything.

Because I spoke out early, I also became very easy to hate.

There is a reason most gay men do not express controversial political opinions.

There is a reason we deepen our voices when we want to be taken seriously.

There is a reason we work out like lunatics, build abdominal muscles and post photographs of our beautiful bodies. Human beings want to belong, and gay men know what it feels like not to. After fighting our way into the party, very few of us want to be thrown out for saying something unfashionable like the truth about the Islamic Republic.

I made myself extremely throwable.

At first, my videos were confrontational and sensational.

But the work changed. I met hostage families. I spoke at rallies. I traveled to Israel and began showing people what life there actually looked like. I spent time with academics, public-policy scholars and counterterrorism experts. What began as a reaction became an education, and many people learned alongside me.

People often assume that the Jewish community in New York must have rallied around me. Some did. Many people were enormously grateful. They told me that they finally felt less alone.

But my biggest cyber bullies & tormentors were often Jews: a particular kind of culturally progressive Jew for whom denouncing Israel had become the most important expression of being Jewish.

Anti-Zionism gave them a new identity: the Good Jew. The Jew who could enter the progressive room and reassure everyone that he was not like those embarrassing Jews in Israel who insist upon remaining alive.

Then people like me, Elica Lebon, James Lindsay, Michael Rappaport, and Lizzy Savetsky came along to spoil their delusion.

A non-Jewish gay comedian speaking at hostage rallies, spending months in Israel, during both Iran wars, and refusing to apologize created an uncomfortable reflection. I was publicly doing what many of them had decided was socially impossible.

They were surrounded by people who hated Israel, worked for people who hated Israel, slept with people who hated Israel and attended parties with people who hated Israel. Their way of surviving was to remain silent, blame Netanyahu for everything or become louder than the antisemites.

My existence suggested that another choice had been available.

That drove them crazy.

For some, I was not the ally they wanted. I was too loud, too gay, too public and much too difficult to quietly place in a drawer. I could appear in their Instagram feed at any moment, standing beside another hostage family or deconstructing their Queers for Palestine fantasy world.

They did not see me as a whole person who had studied the issue and reached my own conclusions, with deep friendships and a connected history in Israel. I was an inconvenience. An embarrassing ally.

And behind this entire phenomenon stood some of the most powerful Jews in American culture, giving moral permission for it all.

Which brings me to Jon Stewart.

Jon Stewart occupies a sacred place in the minds of a certain generation of American liberals. He taught millions of Americans that if you could make the other side look ridiculous, you had also proved them morally wrong.

For years, Stewart’s particular genius was making ideology feel like common sense. He did not need to tell his audience what to believe. He created a world in which only an idiot could believe anything else.

After October 7, that talent became much darker.

Jon Stewart knew there were hostages in Gaza. Of course he knew. Everybody knew. Their faces were hanging across New York City until his ideological fellow travelers began tearing them down.

The issue was never that Stewart had somehow missed the story. The issue was that the hostages interfered with the story he wanted to tell.

If he sat across from the parents of a kidnapped twenty-year-old and allowed them to describe what Hamas had done, Israel might begin to look like a country full of actual human beings instead of an abstraction called “the occupation.”

The hostages complicated the bit.

I understood this more clearly after meeting the family of Omer Neutra, an American-Israeli hostage from Long Island. Omer’s father, Ronen, was from the same generation as Jon Stewart. This was not an unknowable conflict happening to distant people in a country Stewart had only read about. This was a New York family whose son had been taken by terrorists.

So I began confronting Stewart publicly. Why did he never give the hostage families the attention he gave Israel’s critics? Why could he find endless time for conversations that portrayed Israel as uniquely monstrous, but not sit down for a serious, humane conversation with the Americans whose children had been dragged into Gaza?

It was not an absence of information. It was an editorial choice.

Jon Stewart has found plenty of time for Peter Beinart. He has found time for Ta-Nehisi Coates and his grand tour through a conflict he had barely begun to understand. He has found time for the fashionable intellectual architecture in which Israel is distorted into a white supremacist project and Palestinians are stripped of all moral agency.

What he could not seem to find was curiosity about anything that might disturb that architecture.

Recently, Senator John Fetterman appeared on Stewart’s podcast, and the conversation revealed something fascinating. Fetterman, a non-Jew, would not surrender his support for Israel simply because Stewart, a Jew, had decided that Zionism had become embarrassing.

That is the power of “the Good Jew” in progressive culture. He does not merely criticise Israel. He gives everyone else permission to despise it. His identity becomes a moral hall pass.

But identity does not make an argument true. Sometimes it simply makes the argument more useful.

This: is the terrible secret.

I recently heard Alan Dershowitz speak about Jewish self-hatred and the role it played in the Soviet Union. Some Jews became willing participants in the persecution of other Jews because they believed in the larger communist project. Their commitment to the ideology allowed them to justify the betrayal. The cruelty was temporary; the revolution was forever.

The modern progressive version is not identical, but the psychological mechanism is familiar. Human beings are capable of justifying behaviour that violates every principle they claim to possess if they believe it serves a greater moral good. Jews can excuse antisemitism if confronting it threatens their place within the progressive movement. Gay people can excuse Islamism if acknowledging it threatens their outdated theory of oppression coming from only from Christians. Feminists can explain away rape if the rapists have brown skin.

The ideology does not collapse when reality contradicts it. Reality is simply rewritten.

That is why the hostages had to disappear.

The hostage families were useful only as long as their grief could be separated from their political meaning. They could be pitied, but they could not be listened to for too long. Because if you listened to them—really listened—you might begin to understand why Israelis could not simply return to October 6 and wait for the next massacre.

By the summer of 2025, nearly two years into this nightmare, I received an email from hyper progressive a synagogue in New York.

What struck me was not simply the content of the email. It was the emotional posture behind it: nervous, cautious, managerial. American Jews were living through the largest explosion of public antisemitism in generations, yet so much of the institutional response remained trapped in the language of dialogue, nuance and community sensitivity.

What it did not know how to do was confront the bad actors inside its own community.

“The Good Jews” such as Jon Stewart were not challenged with anything approaching the force used against outspoken defenders of Israel.

The Jewish celebrities gave anti-Zionism its cultural legitimacy in New York City.

That is what Jon Stewart’s “comedy” now does. It does not merely criticize an Israeli government. It creates an emotional world in which Israel’s fears are ridiculous, its enemies are simply reactive, and its defenders are either corrupt, stupid or bloodthirsty. The details may change from segment to segment, but the moral casting has already been completed.

Jon Stewart is intelligent enough to understand what he is doing.

He understands editing. He understands framing. He understands that the guest sitting across from him is not merely providing information but being granted legitimacy. He understands that repetition creates a worldview. And he understands that what you leave out can matter as much as what you put in.

So when he repeatedly amplifies people who portray Israel as the central moral horror of our time while giving comparatively little emotional space to the Israelis living with the consequences of jihadist violence, we should stop pretending this is an oversight.

It is the show.

John Fetterman refused to perform the role Stewart had prepared.

There was something almost comical about it: the non-Jewish senator defending Israel against the Jewish comedian who appeared determined to make him feel embarrassed for doing so.

But Fetterman had nothing to be embarrassed about.

That is ultimately the weakness of identity politics. It asks us to believe that identity confers moral authority, but only when the person with that identity reaches the approved conclusion.

A Jew may speak “as a Jew” if he is condemning Israel. A Black person may speak “as a Black person” if she is endorsing the correct progressive program. A gay person may speak “as a gay person” if he agrees that every global conflict can be explained through colonialism, whiteness and oppression.

And if you do not, the same movement that claims to celebrate your identity will use it to humiliate you. You become a bad Jew, a race traitor, a transphobe, a fascist, a white supremacist in a homosexual tank top.

This is not liberation. It is a cult with better graphic design.

The Democratic Socialists of America have turned this technique into an entire political movement.

This is also why the movement becomes more extreme. A cult cannot tolerate the person who says, “Actually, I have looked at the evidence and I disagree.” Disagreement threatens the system. The dissenter must therefore be reclassified as evil, ignorant, compromised or secretly motivated by hatred.

Jon Stewart’s terrible secret is not that he is a Jew who criticizes Israel. There is nothing remarkable about that. The terrible secret is that he knows how much his Jewish identity is worth to the people who want Israel condemned, isolated and eventually dismantled. He knows that when he delivers their arguments, he makes them sound safer. Kinder. Funnier. Kosher.

And the terrible secret of the American Jewish establishment is that it has been more willing to manage people like me than confront people like him.

Perhaps Batya is right. Perhaps America remains fundamentally decent, sensible and far less radical than its universities, media institutions and artistic scenes would suggest.

I hope she is.

But culture is not controlled by the average American buying groceries in Ohio. It is controlled by the people deciding what can be said, who can be hired, which stories receive sympathy and which people become socially untouchable. Those people may represent a minority, but minorities with institutional power can make everyone else feel alone.

The guests at that Upper East Side party were afraid of being seen with me because I had made my choice publicly.

They had made theirs privately.

Sooner or later, every one of us will have to decide which choice allows us to live with ourselves once the party is over.

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“They’re coming for you next, Susan.”

Those were the words activist and lawyer Keren Picker said when she confronted Susan Sarandon over her response to October 7—a rare and almost surreal instance of a Hollywood celebrity being challenged in public by someone unwilling to flatter her.

Sarandon had just dismissed reports of babies burned in ovens and the sexual violence committed during the massacre as “myths” that had been “debunked.”

“Educate yourself,” she told Keren.

It was the perfect Susan Sarandon response: patronising, flippant and delivered with the serene moral confidence of a woman who has spent decades being assured that wearing the correct pin is approximately the same thing as understanding history.

Well, Susan, I educated myself.

I educated myself by living in Israel. I educated myself by speaking to survivors. I educated myself by watching Western feminists discover an astonishing number of qualifications whenever the victims of sexual violence happened to be Jewish or Iranian. I educated myself by watching people who had built their identities around believing women demand forensic evidence, video footage and a signed confession before believing Israeli ones.

And I educated myself by looking at a map.

The map shows the expansion of the early Islamic caliphates across the Middle East, North Africa, Persia and eventually into the Iberian Peninsula. It shows territory inhabited by Jews, Christians, Samaritans, Zoroastrian Persians, Egyptian Coptics, Amazigh peoples and countless other communities whose histories have been flattened beneath the charming modern fiction that conquest only becomes conquest when Europeans do it.

What do you notice about that map, Susan?

The first thing I notice is the Levant was part of the Caliphate. What modern present-day state is in the Levant now: Israel.

The tiny Jewish state that activists describe as an alien colonial imposition sits in the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, where Jewish kingdoms existed centuries before the Arab conquests.

The re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the Levant is precisely what Islamist movements cannot tolerate. It interrupts the story. It reverses the hierarchy. It places Jews outside the condition in which history had taught them to remain: scattered, dependent and permanently available for persecution.

The second thing I notice is: Iran.

Persia was conquered in the seventh century, but the modern Iranian catastrophe arrived in 1979, when communists and Islamists cooperated to destroy the existing order. The Islamists then did what Islamists have a habit of doing after the useful Westernized revolutionaries help them seize power: they eliminated their partners and kept the revolution for themselves.

Iran is not merely governed by an unpleasant conservative administration. It is occupied by an Islamic revolutionary regime that imprisons women, murders dissidents, exports terrorism and devotes enormous resources to destroying Israel while ordinary Iranians pay the price.

This should be the great warning to people like Susan Sarandon. It never is.

The third thing I notice is: Spain.

Beginning in 711, Muslim armies conquered much of the Iberian Peninsula. The territory became known as Al-Andalus. Its borders changed over the centuries, but Muslim rule remained on the peninsula until the fall of Granada in 1492.

This is not evidence that every Muslim arriving in Spain today is secretly carrying a blueprint for a restored caliphate. But history does matter—especially when contemporary Islamist movements openly invoke its symbols, grievances and territorial imagination while Western activists insist that only one civilization is permitted to possess memory.

That brings us to Ceuta.

At the end of July, tens of thousands of people surged across the Moroccan border into the Spanish enclave. Some entered by land; others swam or used flotation devices. Ceuta was overwhelmed. Despite reports that most returned to Morroco, thousands have remained & there is video evidence that they are arriving in continenal Spain.

The scenes were extraordinary. They showed how quickly a border can buckle, how social media can mobilize enormous numbers of people and how completely unprepared Europe remains—practically, politically and psychologically—for events of that scale.

They did not prove that every person crossing was a member of ISIS. But they did prove that dismissing all concern about borders as racism is no longer a serious political position.

This is where I would insert Rebecca’s comment, because Rebecca represents the respectable moral reflex perfectly: before the facts have even settled, the first priority is to police the language of anyone alarmed by what they can see with their own eyes.

I used to have friends in Barcelona with whom I could reliably go dancing, drink too much and create something gloriously ridiculous like Power Gays of Barcelona & Power Gays of Madrid. Today, some of those same people genuinely believe that Israel is committing genocide and that I must be receiving instructions—or at least money—from the Israeli government because I refuse to repeat the narratives delivered to them through algorithms.

Nothing has exposed the success of modern propaganda more clearly than watching intelligent Western people become incapable of imagining that someone could support Israel after reaching his own conclusions.

Susan Sarandon remains the celebrity embodiment of this condition. She wraps herself in a keffiyeh, appears beside Code Pink and wears her ceasefire pin while speaking with great feeling about the professional consequences of her activism. In February, she received the International Goya Award in Barcelona and discussed being dropped by her agency, as though losing representation after repeatedly making inflammatory public statements were a mysterious suspension of the laws of cause and effect.

Even her pin performs this moral confusion. Artists4Ceasefire says the hand surrounding a heart represents shared humanity. But to many Jews and Israelis, the image is inseparable from the bloodied hands displayed after two Israeli reservists were lynched in Ramallah in 2000. Whatever its designers intended, the ease with which celebrities wear it without understanding—or caring about—that association captures the entire problem.

The costume matters more than the history. The gesture matters more than the victims. The celebrity’s self-image matters more than the consequences of the movement she helps normalize.

Susan believes she is standing beside an emancipatory cause. She cannot contemplate that the people she romanticizes may regard her feminism, her secularism, her sexuality and her entire artistic world not as virtues, but as symptoms of a civilization they despise.

“They’re coming for you next, Susan” was not a threat. It was a warning.

Keren Picker understood that the ideology capable of celebrating the murder of young people at the Nova festival will not become tolerant when it reaches people whose names are less obviously Jewish. It will not pause respectfully before Hollywood royalty. It will not examine Susan’s résumé, notice her decades of left-wing activism and issue her a lifetime allyship exemption from Islamists.

One day, history may remember this period of celebrity activism with the same revulsion now attached to photographs of Jane Fonda sitting on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun: an image of glamorous moral vanity standing triumphantly beside a violent force it never truly understood.

But this is Hollywood. Susan will probably receive another lifetime-achievement award. Steven Spielberg may still give her a role. Much of the American Jewish establishment will continue its tradition of underestimating its enemies while under-appreciating its allies.

Keren Picker did something much rarer. She stood directly in front of a powerful person and told her the truth.

They’re coming for you next, Susan.

Educate yourself.

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I just watched a clip of Boy George from 1980. He couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. Sitting in front of a television camera, full of eyeliner, optimism and impossible ambition, he talked about making hate unfashionable. There would be Star of David motifs. Hebrew writing. Colour. Style. Joy. Music. It was the kind of statement only a young artist could make, spoken with the confidence of someone who still believed that beauty naturally defeats ugliness, that creativity could soften the hardest edges of society, and that the world was slowly becoming more tolerant, more playful, more human.

Watching it now, I find it unexpectedly moving.

Not because it felt naïve, but because it reminded me how much faith that generation placed in culture itself. They believed songs could change people. They believed fashion could challenge prejudice. They believed that once humanity had seen the horrors of the twentieth century, we had learned enough never to repeat them.

Forty-six years later, Boy George has done something that may prove to be the bravest act of his career.

He released a song called We Will Dance Again, written in memory of the victims murdered at the Nova Music Festival on October 7. It wasn’t a geopolitical manifesto. It wasn’t a speech about borders or military strategy. It was, in essence, an act of human solidarity with people who had been slaughtered while dancing.

He immediately had to part ways with his record label, and dropped out of the cast of Jesus Christ Superstar at the London Palladium. The song briefly appeared on Bandcamp before being removed. Boy George has since made it available on payhiphq.

Something ignited in Boy George. Several months ago, after two Jewish men were stabbed in Golders Green. Boy George spoke publicly in support of Jewish people on the Late Late Show. The studio audience was audibly uncomfortable as he asked: “Do you actually know any Jewish people?” The silence was deafening.

I know something about that silence.

Ever since October 7, I have spoken publicly about what I have witnessed, both in Israel and across Europe. I have watched friendships evaporate almost overnight. Colleagues quietly stopped returning messages. People I had worked with for years blocked me without explanation. Others removed themselves from collaborations, unfollowed me on social media, or quietly erased me from their own digital worlds, as though association had become a kind of contamination.

Pushing truth into a culture that has become emotionally invested in a comforting lie is exhausting. It changes your relationships. It changes your career. Eventually it changes the way you move through the world.

That is why I find myself worrying about Boy George.

Not because I think he is wrong.

Because I don’t know if he fully understands what he has stepped into.

The battle being fought in the West is no longer simply military or political. It is cultural. It is psychological. It is algorithmic. It is fought through social media feeds, entertainment, universities, arts festivals, podcasts, celebrity endorsements and public rituals of moral approval. It is a struggle over perception itself. Entire reputations are now built or destroyed according to whether someone reinforces the approved narrative or disrupts it.

George Orwell understood this long before social media existed.

In 1984, the citizens of Oceania gather every day for the Two Minutes Hate, directing their rage toward Emmanuel Goldstein, a symbolic enemy whose image is endlessly projected before them. Whether Goldstein is guilty almost becomes irrelevant. His function is to absorb society’s anger, to unify people through repetition and emotional conditioning rather than independent thought.

Whenever I revisit Orwell now, I find myself thinking less about dictatorships than about modern information systems. A society does not have to imprison everyone to limit what can be said. Sometimes it simply teaches people which opinions will cost them their friendships, their careers or their social standing. Fear becomes internalized. The censorship begins to administer itself.

That is the new world Boy George has walked into.

It is also why I suspect the backlash against him has only just begun.

I don’t know exactly how the Red-Green alliance will try to destroy him. I don’t know whether they will accuse him of being hateful, paid by Israel, a racist, a tired hack, or an opportunist. I don’t know which headlines will be written or which influencers will produce carefully edited clips explaining why Boy George is no longer acceptable.

I only know that the machinery exists because I have watched it operate.

It operates against me anytime one of my videos go viral.

The saddest part is that it rarely announces itself as censorship. The hate & silencing arrives wearing the language of justice. It insists that disagreement itself is violence. It tells artists which tragedies deserve songs and which victims deserve silence.

That moral confusion extends far beyond Israel.

When I look at today’s queer activist culture, I struggle to recognise the world that produced artists like Boy George. The movement that once celebrated eccentricity, music, wit, fashion and rebellion increasingly asks its participants to demonstrate ideological extremism before anything else. Slogans have replaced genuine individuality. What was once a space for outsiders to create beauty has, in many places, become a space where deviation from the prevailing political consensus is treated as betrayal.

One image from London has stayed with me ever since I saw it.

At London’s Black Trans Pride, a large black drag queen stood draped in the Palestinian flag as a dress, wearing a keffiyeh woven into towering braided hair, clacking a fan. She lead chants while her pasty, frail supporters echoed every word back in unison. The scene unfolded almost like religious liturgy rather than a political demonstration. It wasn’t simply a protest. It felt ritualistic, theatrical, devotional. Worshipping the God of Marsha P. Johnson. Everyone knew their role. Everyone knew the script. Nobody appeared interested in questioning the premise.

The symbolism lingered with me long after the event itself.

Because something deeper seemed to be happening. A movement that once encouraged people to think independently increasingly seemed to demand submission to the most perverse and bizarre theatrics: going as a far as expecting LGBT people to fetishize and cheer on the Arab Islamist conquest of destroying the free world.

It truly boggles the mind.

That is what worries me most for Boy George.

The young man who wanted to make hate unfashionable has entered a Brave New World where culture rewards hate, and celebrates terror and death, provided it is directed toward the approved targets.

And those targets increasingly include Jews.

The irony is that many of the people who now congratulate themselves on opposing prejudice have remained conspicuously quiet while Jewish communities across Europe and North America have faced rising intimidation, attacks, vandalism and exclusion. Jewish comedians have had their shows cancelled at the Edinburgh Fringe. Academics have been pressured to stay silent as jihadist rallies ravage their campuses. Music Festivals have become hostile spaces. Synagogues & Jewish schools require heightened security.

Perhaps even more painful has been the silence from much of the entertainment industry. A few Jewish public figures have spoken forcefully. Most have not. Some have criticized Israel sharply while saying comparatively nothing against Hamas and the IRGC. Whatever the reasons, the result can leave those who do speak out feeling unexpectedly isolated.

Being an ally is complicated when the people you hope to stand beside are themselves divided. It’s difficult to call out keffiyeh-clad Javier “Free Palestine” Bardem, when Stephen Spielberg will still smile on a red carpet beside him. Hugs & kisses!

Push that new Cape Fear series! It’s show business!

I suspect Boy George is beginning to discover that reality.

But perhaps that is precisely why his decision matters.

Artists are always praised for courage in retrospect. We celebrate those who challenged consensus once history has already vindicated them. We erect statues after the danger has passed and the war is won. The real test comes much earlier, when speaking honestly carries genuine professional risk and there is no guarantee that history will ever thank you for it.

As I watched that clip from 1980, I wanted to reach through the screen and tell that young man what lay ahead. I wanted to warn him that there would come a time when wearing a Star of David would itself become controversial in certain artistic circles. That expressing sympathy for murdered Israeli concertgoers would provoke a tsunami of chaos. That some of the people who claim to oppose hate are actually the most hateful people.

Then I remembered something else.

1980 was not only the beginning of Boy George’s extraordinary career. It was also the year the Iranian Revolution consolidated a new Islamist regime that would spend decades exporting its ideology throughout the region and beyond. Looking back now, it feels strangely symbolic that these two stories began at almost exactly the same historical moment: one rooted in creativity, freedom and self-expression, the other in revolutionary absolutism and darkness.

Forty-six years later, they have collided.

Perhaps history really does move in cycles. Perhaps every generation is eventually forced to decide whether it values comfort more than truth.

I don’t know what will happen to Boy George next. I don’t know how intense the campaign against him will become, or how many people will quietly distance themselves now that he has stepped outside the approved script.

But I hope he knows that there are people watching who understand exactly what it costs.

The standing ovation may come decades later.

The difficult part is telling the truth while the audience is silent.

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When I was a little gay Canadian boy, my politics were Melrose Place.

Like a lot of gay kids, I escaped into television. Television was where beautiful people lived. They had perfect hair, ridiculous apartments, and lives infinitely more glamorous than suburban Canada. And like every little gay boy, I had hopeless crushes on straight men.

Mine was Antonio Sabàto Jr.

He wasn’t some Shakespearean actor. He was a gorgeous soap star and Calvin Klein model. That was enough for me.

I would also like to point out that my taste in men has been impeccable since approximately 1996.

Fast-forward twenty years. Hollywood had decided Antonio Sabàto Jr. was no longer a heartthrob. He was now an extremist.

Why?

Because he stood on the stage at the Republican National Convention and said he believed America should have secure borders, that he loved his country, that faith mattered, that America was rooted in Judeo-Christian values, and that growing up in a family that escaped communism shaped how he saw politics. Looking back ten years later, it’s remarkable how ordinary those positions sound.

Progressive commentators piled on. Among them was Ana Kasparian, who was part of that media culture that treated views like Sabàto’s as beyond the pale.

Looking back today, after years of watching debates over Israel and the Middle East become increasingly polarized, I’m struck by how different the conversation feels.

The people who once presented themselves as the sober guardians of acceptable opinions have themselves embraced positions that would have seemed extraordinary to many Americans a decade ago.

As Ana Kasparian herself has sprialed into blatant Jew-hatred, conspriacy theories, hateful rants, declaring on X “Long live the resistance. Fuck Israel." in June 2026.

Calling Israel evil, genocidal.

“Hey, bitch, the goyim are waking the f*** up. Deal with it." - February 26, 2026

“To Any Israelis watching this. I need you to understand something clearly. You are hated internationally. Hated. Don't be mistaken based on the propaganda you hear in American media. That's not representative of how the American people feel about you. You're hated.

The whole international community loathes you. Young American citizens in this country, both left and right, loathe you."

Israel's days are numbered as it pertains to America backing its disgusting, loathsome behavior." - March 17, 2026

Has Ana ever dedicated this much hatred to the Islamic Republic occupying Iran and it’s proxies who chant “Death to Israel! Death to America!” who hold 90 million Iranians prisoner under Sharia Law?

But Antonio Sabato Jr. is the extremist?

Funny how much clarity comes with the passage of time.

The people who called everyone else extremists somehow never seem to notice how far they’ve travelled themselves.

At exactly the same time Antonio Sabato Jr spoke at the RNC, I was living in Europe.

Angela Merkel opened Germany’s borders during the refugee crisis.

My Canadian, Australian and German left-leaning friends mostly thought it was beautiful.

Humanitarian. Progressive. Germany would absorb everyone. Diversity would make the country richer. Love would conquer all!

My Balkan friends had a different opinion.

“It’s an invasion.” They’d tell me in their thick Serbian & Croatian acccents.

I thought they were SO IGNORANT.

I grew in the multicultural, hippie-dippie West Coast of Canada in the 90s.

And after all, Hollywood had already explained the story to everyone. These were refugees fleeing war, they were desperate, they needed Europe’s help!

Forget about their Islamist ideologies, the safety of women, gays, Christians and Jews. Don’t see the hundreds of thousands of military-age men invading Europe — just see Nageen Mustafa!

I remember watching John Oliver introduce audiences to a disabled Syrian refugee girl who loved Days of Our Lives. The cast surprised her. How heart warming!

And that’s exactly the point.

The individual story was real.

The emotion was real.

But it also became the perfect way to avoid asking harder questions about what happens when migration takes place on a scale that fundamentally changes the social fabric of a country.

That was political storytelling.

Find one sympathetic person.

Zoom in.

Play the music.

Anyone who asks what happens to an entire civilization is obviously the villain.

Fast-forward another decade.

I’ve watched Germany change.

I’ve watched friends in Berlin—people I once thought of as intelligent, thoughtful, liberal people—become so ideologically captured that they now excuse or rationalize movements I never imagined they would defend. After October 7, I watched people who could dissect every perceived injustice in the West suddenly lose all moral clarity when it came to Hamas. It wasn’t just a political disagreement. It felt like watching an entire cultural class abandon reality in favour of ideology.

Maybe if I’d never spent time in Israel, I would still be living inside that Hollywood worldview.

Maybe I’d still believe every difficult question about immigration can be answered with a celebrity monologue and a string quartet.

But reality has a nasty habit of interrupting good storytelling.

Now Europe is once again confronting migration pressures.

Spain is once again asking questions that, not very long ago, respectable people insisted could never even be asked.

Yesterday, an estimated 60,000 Arabs (mainly young men) breached the security perimeters of the Spanish enclave Ceuta from Morocco to gain entry into Continenal Spain to seek refugee status under Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s government.

A government that has been so anti-Israel that the leader of Spain's opposition held up images showing IRGC missles bearing Pedro Sánchez's words, and accused the prime minister of giving propaganda to a regime that was firing those missiles to kill innocent civilians.

The current crisis in Cueta is impossible to ignore because reality has made it impossible to ignore.

At some point, our culture needs catch up — and take reality seriously.

Stop taking moral instruction from the WRONG actors in the entertainment industry.

Personally, I don’t want to hear from Billie Elish, Don Lemon, Drag Queens, or Islamists. I don’t want sactamonious speeches that “no one is illegal on stolen land.”

Entertainers don’t just want to entertain us anymore.

They want to parent us. They want to lull us into a bedstory of delusion.

Hollywood wants to decide which opinions are compassionate, which questions are hateful, and which people deserve to be excommunicated from polite society.

I don’t buy it anymore.

The irony is that the people they mocked ten years ago increasingly sound less radical than the people doing the mocking.

As for me?

I started this journey as a little gay Canadian boy who thought Hollywood had all the answers.

Then I lived through Europe’s refugee crisis.

Then I watched Germany change.

Then I spent time in Israel.

And somewhere along the way I realized that the biggest fantasy Hollywood ever sold me wasn’t Melrose Place. It was the idea that civilization could survive without the confidence to defend itself.

That’s what I keep coming back to.

Antonio Sabàto Jr.

Not because I think celebrities are political philosophers.

Quite the opposite.

But if Hollywood was determined to destroy his career simply for saying that countries have borders, that nations have a right to preserve themselves, that faith matters, and that loving America isn’t something to apologize for, maybe he was the one worth listening to.

Then Hollywood turned around and told me my political education should come from drag queens, pop stars, influencers, and celebrities reading slogans off their phones.

Sorry.

I’ll take the immigrant whose family escaped communism over another celebrity explaining why borders are basically fascism.

Every time.

Hollywood wasn’t trying to convince me Antonio Sabàto Jr. was wrong.

It was trying to convince me not to listen to him at all.

Because that’s how cultural gatekeeping works.

You don’t defeat an argument.

You just make sure the person making it is treated as untouchable.

As someone decent people aren’t even supposed to hear.

Looking back now, after Germany, after Israel, after watching Europe struggle with questions it insisted it would never have to answer, I don’t think Antonio Sabàto Jr. looks particularly radical anymore.

I think reality caught up with him.

Maybe that’s what barbarism actually is.

Not defending your civilization.

Not believing your borders matter.

The real barbarism is teaching a civilization that protecting itself is immoral.

The real barbarism is convincing good people to feel ashamed of their own survival.

The real barbarism is applauding while a society abandons its own instincts in the name of virtue.

Now we know who the barbarians are.

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When I moved to New York, I thought I was moving to the heart of Jewish intellectual life. Funny enough, that’s exactly how I ended up in Jerusalem.

I had a vision of working among the best of New York’s of Jewish comedians, writers and intellectuals. Following in the legacies of Joan Rivers. Larry David. Nora Ephron. Philip Roth. Newspaper columnists arguing over coffee. Stand-up comics workshopping new material in tiny clubs. The city where conversation itself was elevated into an art form.

As a comedian, I thought I was entering that tradition.

I had no idea history was about to send me somewhere else.

After October 7, my life slowly drifted east.

The rise of antisemitism across the West, the information war surrounding Israel, and my own growing curiosity pulled me away from Manhattan and toward Jerusalem. Instead of spending my afternoons in comedy clubs, I found myself on the set of The Quad, a political talk show on JNS, discussing Iran, Hamas, public diplomacy and the future of the Western world with people who had spent decades thinking about these questions.

It has been a steep learning curve.

For three years, I felt like I was trying to earn a degree in geopolitics at double speed. Every week another piece of history would click into place. Every week I’d realize I’d misunderstood something I thought I already knew.

And then something unexpected happened.

I realized I had stumbled into exactly the kind of Jewish intellectual life I’d been looking for all along. It just wasn’t in Manhattan.

After filming, a few of us would usually head to Grand Café in Jerusalem’s Baka neighbourhood.

It’s not especially fancy.

It’s just a reliable kosher café with good coffee, decent shakshuka and the strange habit of attracting some of the most interesting people in the country.

On any given afternoon you’d find journalists, activists, policy analysts, former diplomats, professors, politicians, rabbis, young families and the occasional retired general all sharing the same room. One table would be arguing about judicial reform. Another would be talking about the Islamic Republic. A toddler would be throwing hummus across the room while someone nearby explained American electoral politics.

For years I had imagined these conversations happening in a deli on the Upper West Side.

Instead, they were happening over cappuccinos in Jerusalem.

One of my favourite people to have lunch with is Bellamy Bellucci.

Bellamy has one of those biographies that completely short-circuits people’s assumptions. She’s a Black transgender Jewish convert from South Africa, and she likes to joke,

“I’m a social justice warrior’s dream... until I tell them I’m a Zionist.”

I’ve always admired Bellamy because she isn’t especially interested in fitting into anyone else’s ideological tribe.

A few weeks ago, Bellamy, Ruthie Blum and I were at the Grand Cafe talking politics. It was the week Clavicular, a controversial internet personality arrived in Israel.

He had become famous by turning outrage into a business model.

Everything was calculated to provoke.

Attention wasn’t the by-product.

Attention was the product.

As we were talking, the sweetest Orthodox American grandmother recognized us from The Quad, and wandered over holding her grandchild to say hello.

She smiled warmly.

“What do you think about that young man who’s come to Israel?” she asked.

Bellamy and I looked at one another.

“I think he’s a sociopath,” I said.

She looked genuinely surprised.

“But he’s such a handsome boy.”

I laughed.

“Well… Historically, that’s been part of the problem. Sociopaths can be very good looking -- that’s how they get away with their awful behavior. He’s a nazi.”

She smiled politely, bounced the baby on her hip and said,

“Hopefully he’ll work through all of that. What a beautiful boy.”

Then she wished us a lovely afternoon and wandered away.

Bellamy and I just looked at each other.

Neither of us was laughing at her.

If anything, I found her incredibly touching.

She simply couldn’t imagine evil arriving wrapped in beauty. She reminded me of many Jews that I met in America. Completely unable to process how much danger their community is facing whether from Islamists or Right-wing Neo-Nazi youth.

“I understand why so many people in the West don’t understand what’s happening,” I said.

“But I still have a hard time believing that so many educated Jews and famous Jewish celebrities don’t know what they’re looking at. Why are they so silent?”

Bellamy didn’t hesitate.

“They know, Daniel.”

She took another sip of coffee.

“They stayed in Egypt.”

The sentence landed with astonishing force.

She wasn’t talking about historical certainty.

She was describing a permanent feature of human nature.

The biblical story tells us that not every Israelite chose freedom. Many, roughly 80% preferred the familiarity of being a slave in Egypt to the uncertainty of the desert.

Whether one reads that literally, historically or symbolically, the point is timeless.

Freedom demands responsibility.

Truth often demands sacrifice.

Comfort asks nothing at all.

I found myself thinking about an essay I’d written back in 2021 called We’re All Going to Have Our 15 Seconds of Fame for Hunger Magazine. At the time, I thought I was writing about social media. I argued that Hollywood’s monopoly on celebrity was ending. Instead of a handful of movie stars, we’d have millions of micro-celebrities—people famous enough to shape culture, build audiences, and make fortunes without ever becoming household names.

What I didn’t understand then was what fame itself had become.

Hollywood had become religion.

Celebrities were like apostoles who needed followers.

With the democratization of fame, celebrities have become desperate to maintain their flock.

Suddenly, hyper-woke celebrities like Kathy Griffin made more sense to me.

Not because I agreed with her politics or disagreed with them.

Because I finally understood the role she was playing.

When she held up a fake severed head of Donald Trump - or now - as she compares him to Hitler, and spirals into deranged rants & bizarre performative activism.

She isn’t simply expressing political opinions. She is performing moral authority. Every controversy had to become absolute. Every disagreement had to become good versus evil. Every opponent had to become the next Hitler.

The performance had become the product.

Clavicular, the influencer we’d been discussing couldn’t have been more different from Kathy Griffin on the surface. But like her, he built his audience through shock, vulgarity and nihilism.

Different aesthetics.

The same economy.

Both depended on attention.

Both depended on followers.

Both depended on keeping millions of people emotionally invested in them.

And that’s when something clicked.

The old political binaries that Bellamy and I had spent so much time talking about—left and right, progressive and conservative—suddenly seemed far less interesting than something much older.

Worship.

Every civilization worships something.

Sometimes it’s a king.

Sometimes it’s the state.

Sometimes it’s a political movement.

Sometimes it’s race.

Sometimes it’s celebrity & fame.

That’s why Jewish celebrities & intellectuals are so silent about Israel.

If they chose truth: what would they lose?

Money. Friendships. Connections. Maybe it’s been to stay silent in their mansions.

Every totalitarian movement, in its own way, demands the same thing: that human beings transfer their highest loyalty away from truth, conscience, and ultimately God, and place it instead in the movement itself.

That was Bellamy’s insight.

“They stayed in Egypt.”

Not because they lacked information.

Because freedom is frightening.

Freedom means standing before God yourself. It means taking responsibility for your own conscience instead of outsourcing it to the crowd, to the party, to the algorithm, or to whoever currently occupies the cultural throne.

That’s why I no longer think antisemitism is only hatred of Jews.

At its deepest level, it is hostility toward a civilization built around the radical idea that no Pharaoh, no emperor, no celebrity, no ideology and no state gets to take God’s place.

The Jewish story insists that every human being can wrestle directly with God.

That every person carries moral responsibility.

That no cult of personality—whether political, cultural or religious—gets the final word.

Maybe that’s why the religion of fame feels so familiar.

Every false god eventually asks for the same sacrifice.

Your conscience.

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