Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel is no Queen Esther.

In a speech to the Michigan Jewish Democratic Caucus on Sunday, Nessel exhorted attendees grappling with the candidacy of Abdul El-Sayed for Senate to follow Queen Esther’s path “and sacrifice the comfort, safety, and security and even the very future of our own people to save the rest of humanity.” She exhorted those attending to follow in the path of Queen Esther and sacrifice themselves for the greater good.

Nessel, who ironically last made headlines for her refusal to attend the Michigan Democratic Convention out of fear for her own safety, seems to be making an about-face and suggesting that Jews in Michigan support El-Sayed despite his willingness to campaign with rabid antisemite Hasan Piker and his tasteless comments after a terror attack on a Jewish preschool. Apparently, she is willing to suggest that other Jews sacrifice themselves while she hides from public confrontation at the Convention. In short, she won’t risk her own hide, but a week later she will tell other Jews that they should. That’s some true bravery she exhibits.

She also must have skipped out on the Hebrew School lesson about Queen Esther and the meaning of Purim. The ancient heroine never sought to sacrifice her people for the greater good of the Persian Empire. On the contrary, she risked her own life by visiting the King without being summoned in order to protect and preserve her people. Nessel could not even brave a few keffiyeh-clad hecklers at a convention for her people.

The Jewish religion is not very keen on self-sacrifice. Rather, life is valued above all else. Pikuach Nefesh, or the saving of life, is paramount above all. In fact, saving lives overrides almost every other rule in Judaism. It is a cornerstone of our faith and tradition. Self-harm is strictly forbidden, as is suicide.

Furthermore, this is a remarkable statement to emanate from the chief law enforcement officer of the State. She suggests that Jews should accept their own demise by supporting a Democrat who similarly disdains Jewish existence. Does this mean the laws of the land apply less forcefully or less equitably to her own people? Would she willingly abandon Jewish rights, equal protection before the law, and the safety of her own kin for some imagined “greater good” that does not include us for some inexplicable reason? She holds a powerful position responsible for the enforcement of those rights and that protection. While suggesting that Jews uniquely should allow their rights and their lives to be obliterated, she seems to forget that it is her unique duty as attorney general to protect those rights and lives. Must we now question her willingness to do so?

Finally, her reasoning lacks logical force. How would Jewish self-sacrifice “save the rest of humanity?” In what way would selling out her own people just to obtain one more Democratic seat in the Senate save the world? The mass slaughter of Jews in WWII, the Inquisition, Soviet Russia, and the 1950s Middle East did nothing to improve the world. No attempt to sacrifice the Jewish people has ever resulted in a stronger, safer planet. How can sacrificing 0.2 percent of the world’s population in any way impact climate change, the economy, food prices, war, famine, disease, or any other great challenge of our time?

More importantly, she asks the wrong question. Instead of asking whether Jews are willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the Democratic Party’s success, she should be asking why that is necessary. What fundamental change in the Democratic Party requires its prior Jewish backbone to swallow a poisoned pill and accept rejection and demise? And why is she willing to tolerate that change and passively accept it? Why is she endorsing that change by openly calling for Jews in Michigan to vote against their personal interests and fundamental need for safety and security instead of fighting that change tooth and nail?

For that is what Queen Esther would have done. She would not have meekly accepted expulsion, rejection, or destruction of her people. She did not accept it. She battled it like a lioness.

Dana Nessel is no Queen Esther.

Elevation to the judiciary does not automatically signify elevated morality.

In 1930s Germany, the judiciary notoriously played an active and perniciously powerful role in bolstering and legitimizing Nazi racial laws. It silenced Jewish voices while robustly enforcing the Nuremberg Laws. Instead of standing against the Nazi regime and upholding preexisting laws, the German judiciary threw its weight eagerly behind the Nazi machine, lending the imprimatur of legality to its desecration of rights and stripping German Jews of their very humanity.

If we truly are living the repetition of history, then Judge Richard Gaylore Stearns is setting the stage for judicial acquiescence to institutionalized antisemitism. Judge Stearns is single-handedly 12(b)(6)ing Jewish civil rights out of existence.

It is the great misfortune of Jews everywhere that Judge Stearns happens to serve as a federal district court judge in the jurisdictions containing both Harvard and MIT, two of the worst collegiate offenders of Jewish civil rights post-October 7, 2023. His repeated granting of motions to dismiss cases filed by Jewish students against these institutions is shaping a body of jurisprudence that undermines the civil rights of American Jews at the very time we most need them enforced by federal authority.

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Last week’s dismissal of the DOJ’s case against Harvard is only the latest in a string of such dismissals. In his four page opinion, Judge Stearns seems to impose an arbitrary time bar on such cases, finding the antisemitic maelstrom on campus in 2023-2024 far too remote to support a claim of an ongoing violation of Title VI. (I mean, those incidents took place an entire year before the action was filed - almost a lifetime ago! I have salad dressings in my refrigerator that are older.) He then interprets the congressional statute to require notice of a failure to comply and a subsequent determination that compliance cannot be secured by voluntary means before violations become actionable and government monies recoverable.

This reading results in only three additional, later instances of antisemitism plead in the complaint that Stearns would consider as actionable claims, but he finds them “singly and collectively, to be too isolated and episodic to support a plausible inference that any institutionalized noncompliance with Title VI persists at Harvard to this day.” In light of the persistent rise of antisemitism across the entire planet with no sign of abatement as well Harvard’s own damning report on campus antisemitism, this dismissive attitude is eyebrow-raising. It also ignores the fact that violations of Title VI rarely involve the types of encampments and riots we saw two years ago and typically is of a quieter, more insidious nature involving systemic failures by campus investigators that requires discovery to uncover.

Stearns bent over backwards to impose an arbitrary time bar that Congress has never imposed for such claims. Even so, he could have given the Government the chance to amend its complaint to include more incidents of mishandled antisemitism on campus post-June 30, 2025 in light of his bizarre procedural reading. He chose to dispose of the pesky case.

The irony of this piece of judicial sleight of hand is that Stearns himself found that “Harvard failed its Jewish students” in the course of Shabbos Kestenbaum’s case in 2024. Kestenbaum is lucky that he settled his case with Harvard; there is no reason to believe that Stearns would have deemed Harvard’s acknowledged failures toward him as any more worthy of redress.

Stearns was similarly unimpressed with the attack on Harvard Business School student Yoav Segev, the young man who was surrounded by anti-Israel activists staging a “die-in,” prevented from passing through his own campus, and ultimately assaulted by those students. In dismissing Segev’s case on December 4, 2025 - a case which you will recall resulted in no repercussions for the students involved and featured Harvard’s stonewalling of the police - Stearns ruled that Segev failed the first prong of the test for Deliberate Indifference because he “has not shown that he experienced severe and pervasive racial harassment.”

I think it would be difficult to find a more clear-cut case of deliberate indifference by an institution to a racially-motivated, physical attack on one student by a group of other students, none of whom were penalized in any meaningful way.

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Stearns also dismissed an action against MIT brought by StandWithUS Center for Legal Justice on behalf of students subjected to repeated antisemitic conduct post-Oct. 7th, causing Jewish students to fear for their safety and violating their Title VI civil rights. It is no well-kept secret that MIT’s administrators showed an embarrassing inability to control their campus, shut down the encampments, and penalize students violators of the code of conduct meaningfully. Their farcical bungling, lackadasical reactions, and general ineptitude placed Jewish students in increasingly perilous situations.

In dismissing the claims against MIT, however, Stearns found that MIT’s failure was its inability to anticipate how bigoted some of its students were. Its incompetence was merely indicative of its slow realization that it had admitted a large number of students who did not have any regard for the rule of law, campus codes, or Jewish colleagues. How could he fault MIT for lacking the “clairvoyance” to know that students it had actively selected from among tens of thousands of applicants after a rigorous review were, in fact, racist thugs? How could they know after the first policy violation, or the second policy violation, or even the third? How could they have known in advance that enforcing their code of conduct might deter other students from violating it?

The good news is, this case will likely be appealed as were the MIT and Segev cases. This procedurally driven decision is eminently appealable. In the meantime, Harvard remains in the crosshairs of the DOE and DOJ, with new investigations already underway on campus.

But stepping back from procedural games, consider the message Stearns’ jurisprudence sends to Jewish students already afraid to seek legal redress for the violation of their civil rights. If you choose to put yourself through this process in this jurisdiction, you are most likely going to be slapped in the face. Statutes will be creatively interpreted to deny you of your civil rights and future cases made even less tenable.

I can tell you from first-hand knowledge that most Jewish students do not wish to file court claims, DOE complaints, or even use their campus reporting mechanisms. They either fear the target it paints on their back, have learned the hard way that reporting comes to nothing, or simply wish to get back to their studies without distraction - the reason they went to college in the first place.

Furthermore, Stearns’ growing body of federal jurisprudence is precedent available to every ne’er-do-well defendant who wishes to express their hatred of Jews openly and unabashedly on Boston campuses and elsewhere. Why should the schools who allowed rampant Jew hatred to govern their communities make any effort at all in light of the lack of consequences? This corpus of case law requiring Jews to run an increasingly unpredictable and impossible gauntlet to obtain enforcement of their civil rights smacks of a pattern of intent to deny those rights.

That perceived ill-intent gained disturbing perspective and clarity this week through Ira Stoll’s excellent journalistic endeavors at the Washington Free Beacon. His August 18th piece, “Judge in Harvard Antisemitism Case Was Anti-Israel, Anti-War Activist, McGovern Campaign Aide,” revealed Stearns background as an anti-Israel activist from back in his days as a George McGovern flunky. He embarrassed the campaign by signing several anti-Israel newspaper advertisements published in the wake of the Six Day War in 1967.

This remarkable piece of journalism revived Stearns’ ancient history as an anti-Israel student activist himself. He derailed his own involvement in Democratic politics throught those choices. When people complain about judicial activism, this is precisely the sort of personal vendetta they fear. He is now in a position of authority whereby he can impose his personal opinions to shape our society. Much like the bench of 1930s German society, he is highly educated, well-pedigreed, and polished. If that time taught us anything, it is that antisemitism does not solely fester among the ignorant, but rather infects the most sophisticated levels of society, including the judiciary.

Any Jewish students filing future federal claims against Boston schools for civil rights violations should expressly move for judicial disqualification. Stearns has no business deciding these cases, and he must be stopped from continuing to build a body of case law denying Jews their civil rights.

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I interview people fully intending to write an article. I research a topic and sketch out a piece. I agree to attend an event. I schedule time to engage in an activity.

My body, however, decides to make other plans.

It decides to play host to salmonella for two months (that was last summer). It welcomes a respiratory infection for month. It instructs my ankle to swell for no apparent reason. Don’t get me started on the five bouts of Covid. That stuff loves taking up residence in my chest.

As I sit in bed with my son’s camp cold, I find myself riddled with guilt that I have not written on here for some time. I will assuage my guilt by writing about it.

Overcommitment - this is the hallmark of my life. It is a life that thrives on being chock full to the brim with work, hobbies, children, activities, friends, and family. In the same year, I started a Brown Jewish Alumni group, served as president of my temple Sisterhood, threw a Bar Mitzvah, took over a book club, wrote umpteen articles, and mothered two extremely overcommitted children.

I am, as a past roommate branded me 25 years ago, a joiner.

So what happens to the joiners when their body rebels and chooses to cannibalize itself? What happens to the MCTD and other autoimmune warriors who attempt to play normie?

They make promises that they fail to keep.

Thus I sit here, wracked with remorse, because I know I have failed to complete writing projects or volunteer projects I have punted down the road.

I accepted and began a new job this summer, a job I am wholeheartedly enjoying. As anyone knows, though, beginning a new role in a new company involves a steep learning curve and requires the devotion of time and energy. And, ten years into this autoimmune journey, I have learned that this new corps of mine (corps, not corpse, but sometimes they’re not entirely distinguishable) is capable of expending only so much energy.

I devoted that energy where it needed to go - to my new position - and unsurprisingly have discovered I possess little to no energy for anything else at the end of the day.

As I find my equilibrium after the first month, I beg your forgiveness for vanishing. I am finding my footing, but also physically depleted. I have conceived of countless articles in the back of my mind during the course of the day, only to find myself utterly on empty when I reach the day’s end.

All you autoimmune warriors out there - I know you feel me.

I am getting there. I beg your patience and understanding.

Zero expiration date.

Four years and counting!

I am the Monster.

The mayor of New York City has declared it so.

My crime? I am an American Jew who loves my country but also identifies with my historical homeland in Israel and donates money to support its people and its survival.

I am not alone, of course. My spouse, who grew up in Israel, is Typhon, the father of all monsters. By day, he makes life-saving medicines to benefit the world; by night, his hundred dragon heads scorch the earth.

My daughter, the petite, blond-haired gymnastics champ and budding poet, champions Israel by making artwork at school that expresses her identity. She carved this wooden Star of David with her Harpy talons.

My son with the angelic voice of a St. Paul’s choir boy will lure you with his Siren song to your doom.

My parents who raised me to love a place they themselves had never been because it was etched in their DNA? Scylla and Charybdis.

My in-laws, who sought refuge in Israel in the 1990s before choosing to move to America and raise American children - I hear that if you look at them directly, you may turn to stone.

Mayor Mamdani would have you believe that each of us is a threat to you, a danger to American society, because we were born Jews. It is that simple. He would have you believe we seek power so that we can turn Americans against each other.

Who does this sound like? Where have we heard these identical polemics before?

How is Mayor Mamdani any different from Adolf Hitler at this point?

Mamdani would have you believing my amazing, brilliant, hard-working, talented, kind, beautiful children are a threat to you. And what do you do with threats?

You eliminate them.

Our knowledge of where such hyperbolic, fanatical language leads is not hypothetical. It is concrete and terrifying. It leads to the ghettos, then the camps, and finally the ovens. We do not know this from story books or history class. We know this because our grandparents showed us their tattoos and named us for their lost families.

When the leader of the greatest city in the world normalizes the dehumanization of an entire people, describing them as monsters who threaten your safety with their shadowy schemes, he lays a paving stone on the road to Auschwitz.

That is not hyperbole. That is history.

Monsters do exist, but they are not playing on the swingset in my backyard or minecrafting in bedrooms across America.

They are standing at podiums endorsing Nazis and Hamas supporters while demonizing my babies, my neighbors, my parents, my friends, all the while setting the stage with recycled, historical props of actual genocidal regimes.

Tell me what you accuse me of, and I’ll show you what you’re guilty of, Mayor Mamdani.

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The details of the so-called deal with the Iranian regime remain sketchy as of this morning, but one thing I can say for certain: it will prove a monumental mistake and very short lived.

Trump may have just flushed his foreign policy legacy down the historic drain.

Let me break down the many reasons I fear this absurd negotiation process and purported deal.

1. You cannot treat with this regime. Any alleged “deal” will not be worth the paper on which it is printed. Some days, Trump seems to understand that. On other days, he conveniently forgets who and what our adversary is. The only promise they keep is the promise to break promises. This is not a foe with whom you can negotiate. This is a foe to crush. Nothing short of that will accomplish any true regional change or usher in any new era of peace.

2. The people of Iran who have cheered for Trump and “Bibi-Joon” throughout the war will face violent reprisals akin to January’s massacre. Freed from the obligation to fight externally, the surviving regime will slaughter all those who supported its external foes. The world is likely to see a second bloodbath. It is equally likely to turn a blind eye as it did the last time. I feel sick already at the impending new round of violence against the Iranian people and terrified for my Iranian friends, all of whom had such high hopes that their families would finally be freed.

3. By all accounts, the agreement did not resolve the nuclear program question. That was purportedly the main goal of U.S. intervention. If the deal does not decisively end Iran’s nuclear ambitions and ensure the full tranparency lacking from all previous deals, Trump failed to meet a main objective. Even if it promises future transparency, we know the Iranian regime will not adhere to such demands. Nothing short of total abandonment of a nuclear program will suffice, and this regime will never abide by such a term.

4. By allowing Iran to tie this deal to Israel’s relations with Lebanon, it is bound to disintegrate in a matter weeks, possibly even days. Iran’s favorite means of striking at the West is through its terror proxies. The main surviving terror proxy after the past three years is Hizballah, the shi’ite militant group that has rained rockets onto northern Israel for decades. When Iran shot down one Apache helicopter, Trump yelled and screamed that they would face consequences directly after chiding Bibi for doing precisely the same thing only days earlier. The Israeli government is 100% right to resist such a provision. No country can survive if it allows its own defense strategy to be dictated by the interests of another country, even if that country is the U.S. and its greatest ally. We are not much of an ally if we leave our friends in such peril and expect them to live with perpetual cross-border attacks. Even the Lebanese government recognized that the problem is Iran’s meddling in their internal affairs through its insatiably violent wicked son, Hizballah. The failure to dismantle Hizballah is a massive shortcoming with which Israel cannot afford to live.

5. When Hizballah attacks (which it already has and will continue to do), Israel will rightly defend itself (which it already has and must continue to do.) The deal will dissolve, and the world will reflexively revert to its favorite activity - blaming Israel. Israelis know this. Jews around the world know this. Israelis will need to put cotton in their ears and go about enforcing their own defense strategy because they cannot rely on Trump or anyone else to barter with their safety. That is the prerogative of every nation-state - to protect its people and secure its borders. No ally can or should negotiate that right away from them. Calling Bibi “difficult” while hypocritically expecting the Israeli military to sit on its haunches as missiles are fired at civilians is hardly helpful.

6. Yes, the Iranian military is much weakened and its leadership in tatters. Its expansionist ambitions have been set back by the war. Any illusions that it will not rebuild and reconsolidate its chokehold on the Iranian people as it continues to set its venomous sights on undermining Western interests is utterly childish. You do not leave Hitler or his minions in power. You do not leave Hirohito or his minions in power. You do not leave Mussolini or his minions in power. A decisive end to ideologically-driven aggression requires ideological replacement. Anything short of that must be deemed a failure.

Not a great start to the week, my friends.

Dear Rachel,

We have met twice, but you never saw me. I stood halfway across the Mall from you in Washington, D.C. on November 14, 2023 when you spoke behind a barrier of large, round sunglasses to a spellbound sea, breaking across us with your wave of raw power and engulfing pain. A week ago, I sat in the hinterland of a cavernous ballroom, entranced again by your grounded, unapologetic realness in front of hundreds of Jewish women dressed to impress.

This time, something new struck me, though. I knew immediately that I wanted to write a reaction to the experience of hearing you. In my mind, you serve as the Poet Laureate of the Jewish Mother, someone whose native skills at articulating for all of us is so universally understood that you could draw a record crowd of professional women on a Wednesday afternoon who could not miss the chance to see you, even from the cheap seats at the back.

Halfway through your discussion, however, I was struck by a profound realization. I thought to myself, this woman is an introvert. Aside from the obvious fact that any mother would rather be doing anything other than discussing the brutal murder of a child, this particular mother - the one we have all set upon a pedestal as our spokeswoman and public face of suffering - is not naturally built to be living this life.

This woman is profoundly lonely in a room of 750 other women, all of whom revere and adore her, lapping her words like manna dripping from a microphone.

I went home and devoured your book, a generous gift of the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey to every attendee. I was more curious than ever to discover who this diminutive lioness truly is. And I discovered.

I realized that this human is a homebody. In her perfect world, she would have quiet, boring nights ensconced with her family or close friends. Globetrotting to speak pearls of wisdom to thousands at her darkest moment is the direct inverse of how she is emotionally constructed by Hashem to function.

As if her struggle is not hard enough.

All the expectations I (and likely many other women) have heaped upon you have only added to the burden beneath which you stoop. That has, as you reveal in your book, caused you literally to shrink since your life was tossed in the air and flipped like a poisoned pancake. It is utterly, perversely unfair that you are forced to live a life so antithetical to your nature, and that we have come simply to expect it of you. I cannot apologize more sincerely for that failure.

The most unfair realization of all for me, however, was that this is your WHY. I first learned the story of how Hersh inspired his fellow hostages with a quote from Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning when they miraculously convened beneath the Earth. Hersh, the baby of the group, taught seasoned men and fathers how to survive.

He taught them that, “He who has a why can bear almost any how.”

You write how you are searching for your WHY, asking Hashem, asking Hersh, asking the universe to manifest it in this time of your life you have named “The After.” You also shared with us that morning how the Baal Shem Tov taught that we all come into this world to do one act of chesed or kindness.

I think your WHY is inextricably linked with Hersh’s WHY, as if you are both required parts of the same machine. You are living with one foot in the Next World not only because Hersh is there, but also because your purpose is so tightly bound to his.

And your WHY is monumentally unfair. Brutally, cruelly, psychotically unfair.

It seems abundently clear that Hersh, so like you in so many ways from your bibliophilia to your precocious wisdom, differed in one key aspect: he was an extrovert. He seems to have thrived on being with people, connecting people, bridging cultures and communities. From his travels to his soccer community, he shone in company. You describe Or Levy’s conversation with you as shining a light into your darkness in The After, but for him to shine that light on you, Hersh had to shine it on him first.

Even in the dark of the tunnels, he connected people and served this world as a Light.

That was his WHY. And perhaps that, too, was his act of kindness fulfilling his purpose in this world, because he carried so many souls through survival after a short, three-day encounter. Literally single-handedly. He smiled and laughed and showed them how.

And you, someone not naturally given to crowds or communal suffering or public displays, are now called to carry forward that legacy. Your WHY isn’t something that comes naturally to your persona, introverted and home-based and bound by preference and nature. You are forced by your inextricably linked WHY to give speeches to strangers and eat lunch with them in strange cities, to go on television, and to communicate with thousands upon thousands, completely outside of your comfort zone.

Your WHY runs totally counter to who you were in “The Before.”

Your WHY was not simply to birth this gorgeous soul of which you were robbed too soon, although that could and should have been enough.

Your WHY is to channel the poetry of your soul on behalf of your son, your family, and the families of those stolen from us as an interpreter of both grief and hope. Your son did that at the tender age of 23 - imagine - and it is abundently clear that he learned it or inherited it from you. So your WHY is to play that role for him in “The After.” To serve the inspiration you inculcated in him and that he served publicly so readily with his easygoing manner, but that you would prefer to serve on a quiet platter in your living room.

Your WHY sucks. It really does.

You also taught me, though, that a person’s feet will always take them where they are supposed to be. And here you are. At this unnatural place in this unnatural situation being forced to act in this unnatural manner.

This is your act of kindness, Rachel. You are not doing it for us, the throngs of fangirls who aspire to think and write with your grace. We might like to think you are, and we might unfairly place you on that uncomfortable pedestal because you inspire us without intention.

You are doing it for - and with - Hersh. Straddling two worlds, two existences. Living for two people. Showing the world how to do it even though you think you don’t know how to do it yourself. As you grapple in the dark of your own tunnel, he is with you in the same manner as he was with Or and Alon and Eli, whom I also heard sing the praises of his wisdom. Your wisdom.

And as lonely as you seemed on stage and may feel in this mission, you are not alone. Not even close to alone. Every parent who comes to one of your talks, every person who reads your book, and every “fan” who bothers you with her opinion - ahem, like me right now - loves your son even though they have never met him. They have profound gobs of love for you, as well. We grieve for him; we grieve for the Rachel from “The Before.” We are coming in throngs to hear you not solely to lap up your words, but to show you with our feet: you are not alone.

On page 200, you wrote, “…when someone does something they don’t want to do, yet they do it out of love and respect, that, to me, is holy.” That is precisely what you are doing. Something you do not want to do, that runs completely counter to who you are as a person, but you do it out of love and respect for your child, your family, and all of the families of those stolen.

That is your WHY. Bless you for it.

It is starting to feel as if Brown does not want to get out of its own way.

On Monday evening, Brown’s Students for Justice in Palestine (“SJP”) chapter sponsored an event at the Warren Alpert Medical School entitled “The Realities of Healthcare in Gaza: A Conversation with Dr. Thaer Ahmad.”

The event was streamed live, so any number of people could listen to it alongside the hundred or so audience members in the room, many clad in their keffiyehs and self-righteousness. I will provide a transcript and recording of the event for those who missed it.

What of value can be gleaned from this event? What did we learn from the evening to inform our fight against anti-Israel blood libel?

I found this event more chilling than the antizionist conferences held every few months or so at Brown. Apparently, so did its attendees, given that roughly ten complaints were filed in its aftermath. It disturbed me more because the speaker is a medical professional - a man who ostensibly treats any patient who walks into the emergency room at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Chicago. And this medical professional, so soft-spoke and polished, calmly and confidently lied to a room full of future medical professionals.

Sociopaths lie in this fashion. They cooly assert their false claims - claims that, in this case, have been refuted with physical evidence time and again - with a sense of confidence and assuredness that can manipulate even the most saavy listener. One hundred future and current Brown physicians were exposed to this individual and will take this experience with them into their professional lives.

One could expend pages refuting Dr. Ahmad’s blatant lies, propaganda, and legal errors, spoken with such disturbingly calm authority and assuredness. I will outline some highlights in the hopes that it reaches the ears of those he miseducates across the country on his endless tour of campuses.

1. Dr. Ahmad insisted that there is zero evidence that Hamas operated in Gazan hospitals.

A physician and Medical School faculty member politely asked Dr. Ahmad to address Hamas’ documented misuse of medical facilities, including running tunnels under them, using them to store weapons, and hiding and torturing hostages within their walls. She asked him, “How do you work around this problem where you have a terrorist organization that stores their weapons and Israeli hostages at these hospitals where there are innocent civilians trying to get medical care? How do we reconcile these issues?”

Dr. Ahmad’s response was categorically to deny the weaponization of hospitals by Hamas. He was unequivocal. He stated that there are “over 400 international healthcare volunteers that have entered in the Gaza strip.” He added:

“That claim that you cited, nobody has corroborated that who was on the ground in these hospitals. I’m just talking about the independent international doctors from the UK, from Germany, from the US, from Ireland. So nobody saw that.

So inside the actual hospitals, they saw nobody in military fatigues, nobody carrying weapons.”

Do you know who has corroborated that claim? Actual surviving hostages. People like Emily Damari, who was tortured in Nasser Hospital by a “Dr. Hamas” who fused her injured fingers together that subsequently had to be amputated in Israel. I will note that Dr. Ahmad worked in Nasser Hospital while he was volunteering. Perhaps someone should ask him whether he knows this “Dr. Hamas.”

We have video, photographic, and ultrasound evidence of the tunnels running underneath al Shifa Hospital and tunnel entrances at Nasser Hospital. We have photographs of weapons caches in radiology labs. We have evidence that locations such as Nasser Hospital were used as command centers from which to launch military attacks. We have first-hand testimony from hostages.

Lastly, Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres) recently withdrew volunteers from Nasser Hospital for several months expressly because Hamas was using the site in contravention of international law. Armed men were seen arresting Palestinian patients in the hospital. So it seems that at least some of those 400 international healthcare volunteers did, in fact, see people in military fatigues with guns inside the hospitals.

Dr. Ahmad knows this. Dr. Ahmad lied.

When the faculty member attempted to respond to this lie, she was silenced and disrespected by students, while deans stood by silently. When she voluntarily left the event, students applauded her exit. Are these the physicians Brown is turning out into the world?

2. Dr. Ahmad incorrectly described international law by claiming that, even had Gazan hospitals been used as Hamas operations sites, that would never transform them into legitimate war targets.

Dr. Ahmad’s second bald-faced lie:

“Even if there were military operatives in these hospitals, which there wasn’t, nobody witnessed this. Even if they were in these hospitals, let’s say they got injured and they came to get treatment, or let’s say that they were functioning as security for the hospital. Under international humanitarian law, it does not allow the hospital to be targeted….

The Russians went after hospitals in Ukraine. And the American Medical Association said, this is totally unacceptable. There’s no justification because an actual attack was not launched from the hospital, and the hospital was not converted into a military base.

That has not happened in Gaza. And not even the Israeli military claims that these hospitals were where there was operations taking place there. And then finally, as far as tunnels, of course, we had no access to any tunnels because, I mean, we’re doctors working in a hospital.

But there has yet to be the discovery of any tunnels directly underneath the hospitals. There’s been a large showing of adjacent to hospitals at Shifa and the European Gaza Hospital. Oh, here’s a tunnel here….

And part of accountability is obviously investigating the claims that you just mentioned, but also when those claims prove to be false, which I think they’ll be false. It sounds like you don’t think they’ll be false, but between us, whoever’s proven correctly, when those claims are found to be false, then the perpetrators who attacked these hospitals, who rendered them defunct, killed the doctors and nurses, then there should be some degree of accountability and justice as a result of that.”

First, factually this is a lie. As noted, the IDF repeatedly discovered evidence of the use of hospitals as militant command centers. The claim was not that injured militants were being treated, but rather that they were hiding underneath hospitals and orchestrating military ops from beneath civilian patients. We have camera footage of soldiers walking through the tunnels under the hospitals. We also have testimony from hostages that they were being kept in these hospitals.

Second, Dr. Ahmad needs to stay in his lane. International law is not his field. Under Article 19 of the Geneva Conventions, hospitals absolutely can be transformed into legitimate targets if used as weapons caches, command centers, or to hide combatants. One cannot wholesale obliterate the facility, and that has not occured in this situation. Attacks must be proportional, and due warning must be afforded the facility, which the IDF consistently does.

In Dr. Ahmad’s own words when he mocked the critics of reports of widespread famine, “You don't know what you're talking about. The confidence to speak up when you're saying nonsense, it's beyond me.”

No, Dr. Ahmad, it is clearly not beyond you.

3. Dr. Ahmad claimed there is famine in Gaza while simultaneously admitting that conditions do not meet the definition of famine.

Dr. Ahmad’s discussion of famine in Gaza was practically incomprehensible yet unchallenged. He noted that famine is a “very scientific term,” that it “has a lot of different criteria that you’re supposed to meet,” and that “in Sudan right now, there are conditions that meet the criteria for famine.” He acknowledged that “Sudan by far is the largest famine in terms of size, volume, and people who are affected.”

In the next breath, he claimed that Gaza’s situation was worse because the crisis in “Gaza was entirely manufactured by the limiting of trucks that had food in them and was already in an area where there was malnutrition that existed amongst the population.” He never mentioned the more than one million tons of food aid Israel permitted into Gaza or Hamas’ theft of that aid and extortion of its citizens for food. He never mentioned that Hamas executes Gazans in the street for daring to take humanitarian aid directly and not through Hamas.

He outlined the five distinct categories of food insecurity, with level five being an actual famine. He admitted repeatedly that Gaza never reached level five. “The situation is critical, but we're not really in any point at this point in a stage five, which is kind of that famine catastrophic level. Most people are in that emergency level phase.” This is not to discount the humanitarian crisis that most assuredly exists in Gaza, but he was adamant that one must treat famine as a scientific term and that the situation in Gaza did not reach that catastrophic level.

Yet he derided the analyses that debunked reports of famine in North Gaza, saying their authors lacked expertise. He stated that, even though we may not have actual proof of famine in North Gaza, the conversation is “dumb” because it is better to act as if there is a famine, help the people, and then if it was inappropriately labeled a famine, go back and correct that mistake later.

Thus, it is better to paper the world with blood libel against Israel, pretend there is famine, acknowledge there has never been a famine, and after the fact quietly retract the accusation. But we also have to use these scientific terms very carefully.

If you can untangle this web of nonsense, you are better than I am.

4. Dr. Ahmad claimed that the Israeli army is intentionally targeting medical professionals and UN aid workers.

Shifa, that major hospital, was rendered totally defunct and destroyed. Nasser Hospital and Al Aqsa that I worked at was surrounded. We were forced to leave that hospital and many of the healthcare workers were abducted or killed and were buried in a mass grave in the courtyard of the hospital.

Note what he said: he was forced to leave the hospital and sent to a different one. How does he claim to have first-hand knowledge of a mass grave when he was forced to leave? He was not there.

He cites to an incident in which a bullet hole was discovered in the wall of a room where a physician was sleeping between rounds. There is no evidence of the source of the bullet hole. No one was injured. No one was shot. This he cites as evidence of Israel targeting Palestinian doctors.

Ultimately, as he noted, he is fine. He was never targeted, never injured, never “abducted,” never arrested, never harmed. He is living proof of the lies he weaves.

Further, he repeatedly claimed that 500 aid workers were killed and that 400 of them were UN employees.

The other thing that I just wanna point out, this has been a massive problem that we’ve seen over the last two and a half years. This 588 aid workers killed.

The last two and a half years. Almost 400 of them are UN workers, mostly to the organization known as UNRWA, or the UN. Refugee agency that was specifically created to help with the Palestinian refugee problem.

He glaringly omitted the copious, publicly available evidence that UNRWA has been fully infiltrated by Hamas and complicit in war crimes. Again, let us ask Emily Damari about her time as a hostage in an UNRWA facility. If you are an enemy combatant, the fact that you wake up in the morning and switch your UNRWA badge for Hamas fatigues does not absolve you of your humanitarian crimes nor does it shield you in war.

5. Dr. Ahmad blames Israel for closing its borders to Gazans seeking to flee the war and hunger while selectively ignoring the existence of Egypt.

Dr. Ahmad acknowledged that 8 million people have been forced to flee their homes in Sudan because of starvation and violence, some to Egypt and some to different parts of the Sudan. But Gaza? Gaza is worse because it is a “manufactured” crisis by Israel closing its borders to its military enemy. Gazans, therefore, have nowhere to go.

Between sentence one and sentence two, Egypt seems to have disappeared as a bordering country and bears zero responsibility for closing its border to Gazans.

He discussed how miles of food aid trucks sit at the Egyptian border but cannot cross it, and in his next breath blames the Israeli military for Egypt’s closed border. His mental gymnastics - again, conveyed through a calm, professional demeanor - is wildly disturbing.

6. Dr. Ahmad denied all agency to Palestinians, portraying the war as if October 7 never occurred.

Dr. Ahmad made one undeniably true statement in the course of the evening. He stated: “…on October 6th, before any of this, you know, catastrophe was inflicted on the Palestinian people of Gaza, around 500 to 600 trucks a day were coming into the Gaza Strip in order to sustain its function.” (Emphasis added.) Before October 6, none of this was occuring. He had nothing to say about why life changed on October 7, only that a catastrophe was inflicted.

Note his use of the passive voice. At no point in the evening did Dr. Ahmad mention October 7, the hostages, Hamas’ role in the conflict, or lend any agency to his own people. If you were to wander off the street into this lecture, you might be forgiven if you believed that Israel woke up one day and decided to bomb the hell out of Gaza for no reason. He described Israel’s response to thousands of Hizballah rockets being fired unprovoked on the northern border as “Israel’s invasion of Lebanon.” Israel is invariably described in the active voice and its foes in the passive.

The fact is, he is correct. Prior to October 7, Gazans received much of what they needed from Israel. This fact alone refutes the claims of genocidal intent. The further fact, though, that Israel permitted over 3,500 calories of food per day per person to enter Gaza in humanitarian aid trucks in 2025 was never mentioned. The fact that Hamas steals the aid and upcharges people for it was never mentioned. The fact that Hamas has now been credibly accused of raping women and impregnating them in exchange for what was meant to be food aid was never mentioned.

This event was a glaring exhibit of propagandizing on campus under the guise of education.

Let me surprise you. I believe that, on its face, the Medical School was within its rights to hold this event. In fact, technically, SJP can invite as many genocide-libeling, dishonest brokers, and blatant liars as they wish. Brown does not pay Dr. Ahmad’s salary. He is not employed by the Medical School. His is free to speak his mind anywhere he wishes. Brown cannot control what he will say when handed the microphone. Heck, Brown cannot control what its own academics say and do when handed a microphone.

(As a side note, I would dearly love to know who is paying for Dr. Ahmad to speak at Brown, Harvard, Rutgers, MedGlobal, the United Nations, on every major news network, to write for Mehdi Hassan’s Zeteo site, and to make a movie about his experience called “American Doctor.” He certainly does not seem to have the time to practice emergency medicine in Chicago. That is a rabbit hole I am not prepared to enter, but if anyone has the resources to pull on that thread, I imagine the findings would be worthwhile.)

We will never win the war for hearts and minds by trying to stifle the lies or sweep the prejudice and hatred under the rug. Silencing the speakers will only send them underground. I prefer to know who my foe is. Fighting fire with fire will never succeed.

We need to douse the injurious fire of libel and lies with the salutary water of truth and scholarship.

If the Medical School hosts Dr. Ahmad who provides a completely one-sided account of his experiences in Gaza as a humanitarian doctor, it ought to bring in an Israeli physician to discuss the trauma inflicted at the Nova Festival or hostage survivors who can tell their own, first-hand accounts of their experiences in Gaza.

This is balance. This is perspective. This is education. If week in-and-out, only one perspective is aired to our students, we do them a grave disservice. We make up their minds for them. We withdraw their agency to make intellectual deductions based on a variety of sources of information when we feed them one side of the story day after day after day. We subtly tell them that this is the perspective we endorse when it is the only perspective we spoon feed them.

I challenge Brown’s Medical School to host someone like Emily Damari, the Israeli hostage who was held in al-Shifa hospital and operated on by a physician who identified himself to her as “Dr. Hamas.” That physician intentionally fused her fingers, committing gross violations of humanitarian law and the hippocratic oath. That is also a first-hand account and direct evidence and testimony from someone who was in a Gazan hospital.

I challenge them to host Noa Marciano’s parents, who can testify to her documented murder in al-Shifa Hospital when air was injected into her veins by Hamas.

I challenge them to host Palestinians who have been abused by Hamas, women raped and impregnated by Hamas members, in exchange for the food that Dr. Ahmad claims Israel withheld from Gazans but apparently is actually there and being sold at extortionary prices, including the price of human dignity.

If an institution of higher learning insists on platforming a physician who has transformed himself into a pubic figure by spending most of his time propagandizing what could have been a noble, humanitarian act, it ought at the very least to platform others with first-hand experience who can present another perspective.

Freedom of academia.

Freedom of speech.

We hear these rights invoked time and again by university administrators and professors to legitimize the proliferating antizionist conference and speaker scene. Brown. Yale. NYU. Berkley. UCLA. Harvard. Princeton. April appears to be the chosen month for antizionist dog-and-pony shows across the nation.

This interminable road show appears innocuous on the surface. After all, these are just minor league professors who are just speaking words. Their speeches and papers are replete with invocations of human rights, equality for all, and condemnation of genocide. Even if fellow academics and students disagree with those words, they cannot truly fear them. Those are the “good” words, right? Even if misguided, what harm could they possibly cause?

Now, what if I were to tell you that professors at these conferences are normalizing violence as a solution to conflict? And not just violence by Palestinians in the region, but by people everywhere.

I obtained an audio recording of Panel 1 of last week’s conference at Brown University entitled “The Future of Holocaust and Genocide Studies After October 7,” sponsored by the Watson School of International and Public Affairs and hosted by Professor Omer Bartov. The conference, held on April 16-18, included a veritable who’s who of antizionist academics, as I detailed in my last article. It offered little in the way of balanced or alternative perspectives.

Panel 1 of the conference was entitled “Gaza and the Nakba.” I approached such a session with low expectations. Unfortunately, it surpassed even my worst assumptions regarding the level of discourse and rhetoric employed.

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I want to provide you a glimpse into what occurs at these antizionist meetings being hosted across the country right now at some of our finest academic institutions. It is my belief that what occurred at this event eviscerates the freedom of academia/freedom of speech excuse offered by administrations who permit such gatherings to occur unchecked.

The panel included Maha Nasser of the University of Arizona, Orwa Switat of Brown University, and Raz Segal of Stockton University. Each speaker presented papers with theses wholly unrelated to one another. There was no logical thread to the session other than a common belief that Israel is genocidal. The inclusion of some of these speakers in a conversation about the future of Holocaust Studies remains baffling. Ironically, Maha Nasser, the subject of my article, began her own talk noting that she was surprised when Omer Bartov invited her to his conference. She stated that her first reaction was, “Why was I invited? I am not a Holocaust scholar. I am not a genocide scholar.” Switat is a student of urban planning. He, too, is not a Holocaust scholar. In fact, many of the participants speaking at other sessions made similar comments during introductions.

Thus, the event and this particular session began from a place of shoehorning anti-Israel speakers into a conference about Holocaust Studies who themselves acknowledged they do not belong in this conversation but were happy to hijack it for their own political ends.

Nasser understood the assignment. And, boy, did she hit the ball out of the park.

In commencing her talk, she noted that,

“One of the things that has irked me ever since I was a young Palestinian-American growing up in the States is precisely the ways in which violence in the region is described as being inherently anti-Semitic, targeting Jews as Jews, invoking the Holocaust and so forth. And for a while I've been thinking about how to think about, how to talk and write about armed resistance, but I frankly have been reluctant to do so, given this broader environment that we're all familiar with.” (emphasis added)

One must assume she means the broader environment that frowns on armed resistance.

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She noted that her work until now focused on “cultural resistance.” Her new project, however, examines “a broader conceptualization and historicization of the Palestinian concept of sumud, which is Arabic for Palestinian resilience or steadfastness.” She presented her newly developed concept of “overlapping spheres of sumud” at the conference.

Typically, sumud refers to non-violent forms of Palestinian resistance through acts such as education, agriculture (think replanting olive trees), and preserving cultural heritage and memories. It is an ideological and political strategy aimed at retaining and preserving Palestinian identity and advocating for justice.

In the hands of modern academics like Nasser, however, emboldened by the limitless “freedom of academia,” sumud means so much more. Nasser presented her new “five-part schema of personal sumud, which is just like moving in the world as a Palestinian.” She described the five prongs of sumud as:

“Civic sumud, which is a lot of what we saw actually here in the US with the resolutions and the protests. [Political] sumud on your congressman. Community face of sumud, through mutual aid, through just building a reviving community in the face of destruction. International sumud, which ranges from everything from diplomatic efforts to sort of cross-cultural social media, et cetera. And then a fifth dimension that I’ve sort of gone back and forth about, which is the, which is the military aspect of it.”

She noted that, in the West and in the U.S., Palestinian resistance is often bifurcated into violent and non-violent and that “Palestinians are told that non-violent forms of resistance are legitimate; violent forms are not.”

“But in Palestinian discourse, the way that Palestinians, regardless of their location, the way that they tend to talk about resistance is not as an either or, but as a continuum or as part of this sort of Venn diagram that I’m conceptualizing.”

She wants to study resistance “in all its forms as complementary rather than being in tension with each other.” In short, she wants to normalize and integrate into the conversation the violent part of resistance.

“So that was the impetus of the project, and really wanting to find a space to test out what it means, or how can we talk about Palestinian armed resistance in a way that’s not immediately condemnatory, and in a way that decenters, frankly, the Holocaust, and decenters the kinds of genocidal violence that is usually invoked whenever armed resistance comes up.” (emphasis added)

Nasser does not view this concept of the five-pronged sumud including armed or violent resistance as limited to the West Bank or Gaza, however. She expressly explained that this model is intended for all Palestinians, including those in diaspora.

“So trying to think about sumud broadly as encompassing not just Palestinians' insistence on staying on their land, which is how it's usually invoked, but also thinking about what that means for Palestinian refugees, Palestinians in the diaspora, and a sort of different realm.”

Nasser’s entire broadened theory of sumud applies to people here, as well. Carried to its logical conclusion, Nasser’s outlined concept of sumud acknowledges and legitimizes violent or armed resistance not just in Gaza or the West Bank, but also here in college encampments, on the streets of New York, and throughout Palestinian diaspora.

Brown’s conference on the future of Holocaust and Genocide Studies opened with a blatant promotion of violence against Jews worldwide as a legitimate response to Israel’s existence. It subverted a topic meant to preserve the teachings of the Holocaust to ensure it never recurs, morphing it into a conversation justifying violence against Jews.

I presented direct quotes from a transcription of this presentation because I want the world to know how antizionists are talking in these purportedly academic sessions. These are Nasser’s words, not mine. There is a reasonable argument that incitement to violence occurred at that conference last week. At the very least, academics sat around nodding and approving of the boldness of this presentation to normalize violence as a part of resistance.

In the later Q&A session, Nasser clarified that in the West, we talk about violent versus non-violent resistance, but in Palestinian discourse it is framed as armed and non-armed resistance. She presented a theory promoting armed resistance by Palestinians and their supporters throughout the world. She is writing a book about it. She used this conference to present the concept and obtain feedback from other academics. Someone will publish her screed, and others will read and absorb its message. There is a good chance someone will act on it.

Brown is a school still reeling psychologically from gun violence and murder on its campus only this past December. The trauma many students feel is quite real. Now consider that Professor Bartov invited an academic to present about validating armed, violent resistance. Israelis and Jews sat in that room and felt unsafe. Community members filed formal reports in its aftermath.

And nothing will happen because it will be deemed academic freedom and free speech, and the perpetrator is employed at another college so there is little recourse available.

Schools that play host to these brainstorming sessions promoting violence cannot claim innocence or ignorance when violence later ensues. Their hands are filthy with the guilt of promoting incitement because they offered the floor knowingly. In the same week as Brown hosted Nasser, Yale ceded the floor to professional hater Hasan Piker and UCLA ceded the floor to convicted suicide bomber Israa Jaabis, both to thunderous applause.

Antizionist academics have been so empowered and emboldened by our institutions of higher learning that they are voicing openly the most vile and dangerous theories. These presentations do not just make Jews less safe. They make everyone less safe. No one who attended or listened to Bartov’s conference was surprised that a Holocaust Studies conference devolved into an Israel hate-fest. The only surprise in this instance is how far presenters pushed the envelope this time.

You can bet they will push it farther the next time Bartov hosts his ten-year conference series. The question is: will Brown permit it?

Something remarkable is about to occur at Brown University this week.

I am not referring to the antizionist “Conference - The Future of Holocaust and Genocide Studies after October 7” spearheaded by Brown’s chief cheerleader for self-loathing, Professor Omer Bartov. Far from remarkable, such conferences peddling the theory that Israel committed genocide in Gaza have become commonplace, not just at Brown but throughout the academe. In fact, they have become so monotonous that they seem not to attract many attendees anymore. Rather, if the last antizionist conference hosted at Brown (only one month ago) serves as any indication, these events are becoming an echo chamber for a select group of professors claiming their free speech is curtailed as they ironically freely spew their twisted ideas without the slightest repercussion.

What will set this antizionist conference apart is the fact that the Westboro Baptist Church has decided to make it the target of protest.

You read that correctly. The remaining participants of the hate-agnostic Phelps family cult have booked flights to Providence, RI and plan to picket this conference at Brown and then head down the road to Temple Emanu-El to picket their Jewish existence. Westboro Baptist sent a letter to the Providence Police to inform them of their intention to protest and further publicized their plans on their revolting website, www.godhatesfags.com. (I am intentionally not live linking to their site. It was nauseating enough to type it.)

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Think about what this means. As some of the leading antizionist Jewish professors - members of what I refer to as “The Genocide Squad” - sit in their ivory tower throwing their fellow Jews under the bus by accusing them of genocidal intent thereby fueling the flames of Jew hate the world over, Westboro Baptist Church members will be standing outside protesting these same professors as Christ-killing, pedophilic, sodomite-loving Jews.

And they still won’t get it.

Omer Bartov still will not get that he cannot distinguish himself in the eyes of antisemites with his antizionist propaganda dog-and-pony shows, no matter how many of them he peddles across the land. No matter how many books he writes about how “Israel went wrong,” some people will never accept him because they will never see him as anything but a Jew.

Raz Segal still will not understand that publishing a special edition of the Israel/Palestine Review entitled “From Nakba to Genocide” with another antizionist conference participant, Maha Nasser, will not stop Jew haters from calling him a pedophile based solely on his genetic composition.

He will not comprehend that keeping company with and promoting the work of U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Territories Francesca Albanese, a publicly denounced antisemite who has been sanctioned by the United States State Department - literally placed on the Office of Foreign Asset Controls (“OFAC”) Specially Designated Nationals no-no list for her ties to and support of Hamas and other proscribed terror groups - will not protect him from Jew haters.

No matter how many times Segal calls the war in Gaza “a textbook case of genocide,” these antisemites will still see him as a Christ killer just like every other Jew.

Shira Klein will not understand that, no matter how many petitions she drafts and circulates among professors calling Israel’s actions plausible genocide and promoting an end to the U.S. providing arms to Israel, she will still end up standing next to me in a gas chamber if history repeats itself.

Frances Tanzer will not grasp that, no matter how many letters she signs accusing Israel of committing genocide, bigots will still target her based purely on her identity.

Ben Ratskoff will not see that his denigration of the Nova Festival Exhibit in an interview entitled “Schlock and Awe” in The Diasporist and in his article “Prosthetic Trauma at the Nova Exhibition: Holocaust Memory, Reenactment, and the Affective Reproduction of Genocidal Nightmares” for having the gall to draw parallels to the Holocaust, “misuse its memory,” and serve as garish “atrocity propaganda” would not protect him from being slaughtered himself should he ever be unfortunate enough to find himself similarly situated to the beautiful music lovers murdered in cold blood on October 7th.

Michael Rothberg and Marianne Hirsch will not absorb that trading on their positions as “scholars of genocide” to create the Genocide and Holocaust Studies Crisis Network, a group of 400 scholars they gathered to accuse Israel of atrocities and genocide, will not prevent the madmen standing on the street outside of the Watson School for International and Public Affairs on Friday morning from calling them baby killers.

While the conference includes several non-Jewish academics who accuse Israel of genocide, it is specifically to the Jewish participants drawing a line between themselves and their brethren to whom I address this missive.

It is to the seven-out-of-ten Jewish senators who voted yesterday to block the sale of bulldozers to Israel that I send this message.

It is to the thirty percent of Jewish New Yorkers who voted for Zohran Mamdani to whom I speak.

In every generation when people sought to blame, persecute, and murder Jews on the basis of our identity, there were members of the Jewish community who attempted to stand apart. Eighty years ago, they made deals with the Nazi devils to sacrifice some lives expecting to save others. They believed they were preserving their lives by playing ball with the enemy until, inevitably, their day of deportation arrived.

Make no mistake - those Jews are never accepted and they are never spared.

You are still indistinguishable to Jew haters from those Jews who stand by Israel’s right to self-defense and fundamental military morality. Attempting to posit yourselves as the “good Jews” in the eyes of the manic far-left and far-right has zero impact on how they see you and how you will be treated in the end.

Jew haters have a form of blindness akin to color blindness. They cannot distinguish us from one another. To Westboro Baptist, the ultra-liberal members of Temple Emanu-El are just Jews. You, the antizionist academics gathered to denounce your own people, are just more Jews. We are all uniformly Christ killers and sodomites who “foam at the mouth in rage” like dogs.

Make no mistake. The antizionist crowd to whom you have hitched your wagons for the sake of career advancement, attention, and purported prestige will cut you loose in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, when you finally realize the mistake you have made, it will be far too late to rectify the damage you have wrought to yourself and to your people.

Since the U.S. and Israeli conflict with Iran escalated on February 28th, 2026, a fascinating psychological transposition has occurred among the anticolonialist “intelligentsia.” This shift demonstrates not only a remarkable lack of self-awareness but also reveals a hollowness to international relations and development studies concepts of decolonization as applied by their subscribers.

The very people who brought you the concepts of anticolonial dialectic - the notion of struggling, often violently, to throw off the yoke of colonialism in the battle between settler and native in an often messy, chaotic fashion - suddenly rejected that notion in favor of allowing the interloping, brutal regime to maintain its iron grip on its subjugated populace.

They silently observed the wholesale slaughter of protesting, indigenous Iranians in January (and, frankly, for decades) by an unquestionably oppressive regime that denies the people their native culture and the most basic human rights. They decried U.S. and Israeli intervention in defense of Americans and Israelis as well as the people of Iran as the actual colonialist project, entirely disregarding the nature of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s external roots and imposition of foreign dominance not only on Iran, but also on Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Gaza. They act as if they are unfamiliar with their own theories, their own writing, their own arguments in every other global context.

Furthermore, do not anticolonialist theorists reject the interpretation of local events through a “western” lens? Do they not despise imposing the foreigner’s worldview on the complexities of a people’s struggle in a foreign land? I thought they eschewed the civilizing mission, the erasure of indigenous culture, politics, needs, desires, and voices? I thought that devaluing local worldviews and replacing them with our own was anathema to the goals of the anticolonialist?

I ask these questions because all I have witnessed for the past two weeks is so-called liberal westerners imposing their worldview on what Iranians should want and should do. I see them screaming in the faces of actual Iranians at rallies across the globe. I see them lecturing in universities, penning articles, and crying on cable news shows about the evils of Trump and Netanyahu invading and killing, waxing lyrical about dead Iranian clerics and dictators in sickening, euphemistic eulogies, and silencing the voices of the actual, indigenous people involved in the conflict.

These professional hypocrites all share two issues in common:

1. An inability to consistently apply their own verbal gobbledygook in service of Iranians; and

2. The inappropriate application of these theories to Israel.

What is going on here? The complete overlap between those who fall into these two categories cannot be accidental. How do so many theorists, academics, and pundits fail to see how Israel is the most inspirational anticolonial story in world history while inverting their theory to accuse it of being the colonizer? How do these anticolonialists simultaneously fail to support the most significant anticolonial project of our time - the dismantling of the Iranian regime and its nefarious tentacles that stretch across the region? Why do so many fail to consistently apply their own theories and lexicon in these two circumstances?

Leftist, western, anticolonialists fell into the trap of enfeebling their own logic and delegitimizing their own work by allowing it to stray from academic theory into political weaponization. They rendered a century of scholarship worthless by politicizing their entire movement and solely - solely - because of an irrational hatred of the Jewish state and its people. The inability to emotionally de-link the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the separate story of Iranian subjugation belies their intellectual dishonesty and enervated logic.

Linkage of Israel/Palestine to the rest of the region’s issues was formally, publicly debunked through the Abraham Accords. If the conflict with Iran concludes in the most efficacious way, we could end up with a parallel Cyrus Accords and an end to the specious linkage of all regional issues to a demonized Israel.

Anticolonialists howling in opposition to the war in Iran openly link their slogans, most recently and publicly with Javier Bardem’s performative statement at the Oscars: “End War. Free Palestine.” It is as if the two are inextricably linked, as if Israel has forced Iran to threaten its existence since 1979 both directly and through its host of proxies.

Ideologically, chanting “Free Palestine” in the same breath as chanting to keep Iranians imprisoned is nonsensical. Anyone with common sense can see the incongruity of these purported defenders of international law and indigenous rights. The Iran war unmasked the fathomless depths of inconsistency that have eroded any value to the decolonization movement and its mindless minions.

The psychological erasure of what actual Iranians want nailed shut the movement’s coffin. Turning a deaf ear to the pleas of the murdered and silenced in January only to defend subsequently the murderers in February and tell Iranians to shut up because the anti-war crowd knows better what is good for them revealed what a sham the decolonial movement has become.

All because they loathe Israel and Israelis so much that they were willing to torpedo their own theories to stand in opposition.

When people tell you that antizionism is a mental illness, there is no better proof.

1. The Iranian regime murdered more civilians in the span of a long weekend than the sum total of casualties in Gaza over the course of a two-year war started by Hamas. In response to American and Israeli intervention, you continue to mindlessly drone on about Israel committing genocide and lose all power of speech when asked about the Ayatollah’s death rate.

2. You consider what the U.S. and Israel are doing to be a “war of aggression,” but you consider the creation and funding of Hizballah, Hamas, the Houthis, Shia Iraqis, Assad’s regime, etc. etc. more akin to the IRGC sharing free cookies with its neighbors. Except the cookies are bombs.

3. You find yourself defending the modern-day world’s chief employer of colonialism while sprinkling that word into every other sentence to describe the single Jewish country on earth that is so small, cartographers cannot fit its name inside its borders and have to bleed into the Mediterranean.

4. You just turned on your Iranian friends in a bizarrely similar fashion to how you turned on your Jewish friends two years ago.

5. Conversely, your Iranian friends seem to have blocked you on every social media site and won’t return your calls.

6. You’re marching in the streets on behalf of a regime that kills women for showing their hair and hangs gay men from construction cranes.

7. You find yourself screaming “Death to America” after a guy in your dorm whose face you have never seen because it is permanently covered in a keffiyeh instructed you to do so.

8. Last week, you attended a “No Kings” protest, and this week you are attending a “Mourn the Ayatollah” protest.

9. You screamed that Israel and the U.S. committed a war crime by bombing a girls’ school in Iran, but upon discovering that it was actually the IRGC that bombed the school, your concern bizarrely vanished instantaneously and, like, who cares anymore, right? It’s still Israel’s fault for existing!

10. You can no longer recall the 44 times since 1979 that Iran has taken military action against the U.S. and U.S. citizens. Your brain simply refuses to remember.

11. Your brain similarly refuses to process the fact that Iran systematically destroyed much of the Middle East through its imperialist meddling, wrecking Syria, Libya, Yemen, Gaza, and Iraq. Oh, and Iran.

12. You hear the other states in the Gulf region condemning the Iranian regime, standing with the U.S. and Israel, and celebrating the fall of the Ayatollah, but you continue to believe you know better than they do what is good for them. But you aren’t colonialist. Heaven forbid.

13. You see millions of Iranians dancing, singing, and partying in the streets both in Iran and across the planet, yet you cannot stop your mouth from saying statements like, “we are killing innocent Iranians, making their lives more unsafe, and stealing their sovereignty.”

14. You also find yourself uttering this statement with a straight face: “The world is less safe today because the Ayatollah is dead.”

15. You smugly call yourself a humanitarian and anti-war, but are furious that the chief exporter of war on the planet is finally - FINALLY - being neutralized.

16. You’re shedding tears for mass murderers.

To borrow from Hamlet, something is rotten in the state of Judaic Studies at Brown.

Starting this afternoon and continuing through tomorrow, Brown’s Judaic Studies Department is hosting a two-day conference entitled “Re-Thinking Israel Studies: Power, Politics, and Academic Responsibility.” It is billed as a “two day workshop that brings together international scholars to reflect on the formation and transformation of Israel Studies as an academic field and its potential reconfiguration within an expanded framework of Israel and Israel–Palestine Studies.”

In reality, the participants are a veritable who’s who of antizionist, leftist Jewish professors whose opinions are already well publicized. The lack of viewpoint diversity maps to the nature of Israel-related conferences nationwide and is reminiscent of Brown’s conference on antizionist Jewish perspectives held in the fall of 2024.

Hosted by the newly-minted head of Judaic Studies, Paul Nahme, and Professor Katharina Galor, the conference bills its goals as follows:

“In recent years, Israel Studies has become a site of innovative theoretical work, with self reflexive and critical scholarship gaining influence, incorporating feminist, decolonial, and transnational perspectives while engaging directly with Palestine Studies. These developments invite reconsideration of the field’s intellectual boundaries, institutional dynamics, and ethical responsibilities, and, most importantly, the perception of particular biases rooted in unspoken assumptions about the field as a whole.

This workshop will explore the historical foundations of Israel Studies, its intersections with adjacent fields and disciplines, and its redefinition within a broader interdisciplinary framework. It aims to foster open and substantive dialogue among scholars whose work challenges, expands, and reimagines the field.”

And yet, in “aiming to foster open and substantive dialogue” with Israel Studies experts, it is being led by those who evince no interest in open dialogue with opposing perspectives and appears to exclude heavy hitters within the actual department who have either not been included or invited to participate. Where is Michael Satlow? Where is Adam Teller? Where is Rachel Rojanski? Where is Ruth Adler ben Yehuda? Why have they not been tapped to participate in this conversation?

The conference suggests that one of two events are underway:

1) Brown is considering creating an Israel Studies Program and these individuals seek to scuttlebutt the effort; or

2) Brown is considering creating an Israel Studies Program and these individuals seek to subvert its nature before it even gets off the ground.

My money is on the latter. Let us examine the roster of participants, however, to gauge just how “self-critical” this conference is shaping up to be.

Consider the academics leading each conference session.

Omer Bartov, Brown’s poster boy for Jewish antizionism, will moderate a panel tomorrow on “Universities, Donors, and Academic Freedom.” The goal of the session is to “[e]xplore the institutional forces that shape how Israel and Palestine are studied in universities today, considering the impact of endowments, donors, and administrative frameworks on research agendas and public discourse.”

The very topic suggests a curious focus in preventing donors from controlling a narrative, an ostensibly legitimate and noble concept if it did not suggest an intention to undermine the purpose of an endowed chair or center. Bartov, himself Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, has subverted his own chair to shill for antizionist Jews. His personal expertise in undermining the purpose for which he himself was hired indicates the likely nefarious purposes behind his panel discussion. Notably, it includes Professor Liora Halperin of the University of Washington who pulled a similar stunt in subverting the role for which she was hired and ignited a firestorm, and Professor Dov Waxman of UCLA who has fully jumped onto the “Israel is committing genocide” bandwagon and is a regular participant in Bartov’s genocide dog-and-pony show.

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Elias Muhanna, Chair of Brown’s Center for Middle East Studies (“CMES”), will lead another panel tomorrow entitled, “Re-Framing the Field: From Israel Studies to Israel/Palestine Studies.” This session “[c]onsiders how the field’s boundaries are being re-imagined in U.S. academia through new institutional models, interdisciplinary collaborations, and evolving ethical commitments.”

I have so many questions regarding the choice of Muhanna as a moderator.

(1) Why would the conference choose someone to lead this discussion who runs a rejectionist Middle East Studies center that refuses to include Israel Studies under its umbrella? Former CMES leader Beshara Doumani famously refers to Israel as “The Zionist Entity.” Muhanna’s first act as its new leader was to host Francesca Albanese as a speaker. Is he truly an objective and rational choice to lead any conversation on how to frame Israel Studies?

(2) Will anyone present ask him if the Center for Palestine Studies, which is housed within CMES, has ever considered reframing itself as the Center for Israel/Palestine Studies? Or is it only Israel Studies that must (a) justify its right to exist and (b) include the study of another people in order to render it worthy of existence?

When alumni hoped that new leadership within CMES and Judaic Studies would open up the possibility of improved interdepartmental relationships, a collaboration that undermines Judaic Studies as a discipline was not what we had in mind.

His session further includes Anwar Mhajne of Stonehill College who supported withholding U.S. aid from Israel and Professor Lihi Ben Shitrit of NYU who published a piece in the Forward entitled, “As an Israeli political scientist, I resisted thinking this war is a genocide. Here’s what changed my mind.”

Professor Ruth ben Artzi of Providence College moderates another panel: “Scholarship, Advocacy, and Critique” which “[e]xamines how scholars negotiate the intersection of ethics, research, and public life in relation to Israel and the academy.” Ben Artzi is a harsh and proud critic of Israel and her uncle, Benjamin Netanyahu. That’s fine, but is this the appropriate person to moderate a balanced, academic discussion about Israel scholarship?

Other participants in the conversation will include Professor Michael Barnett from GWU who sullied his academic chops by claiming that Hamas has the right of resistance in a December 2023 faculty panel entitled “Understanding the Conflict in Israel and Palestine,” requiring a public apology by the GWU. He has further written “The Responsibility to Protect Palestinians,” in which he gives credence to the apartheid libel against Israel, states that the U.S. should be the guardians of Palestinians rather than an “enabler of the oppression,” and called for U.S. sanctions on Israel. Professor Lior Libman of Binghamton University, another participant, has signed an open letter denouncing Israel, along with Waxman and Halperin.

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Finally, conference host Professor Nahme himself opened a zoom antisemitism training with other Brown professors over a year ago with the disclaimer that he is not a Zionist and further could not bring himself to attend the celebration of 130 years of Jewish life at Brown last October. Co-host Professor Katharina Galor published a Brown Daily Herald article excoriating President Paxson for reaching a settlement with the federal government to address antisemitism on campus because she believes it conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism and she would like to be able to continue with that criticism without being prevented from speaking her mind - student harassment be damned. Meanwhile, she is allowed to host this conference and publish that article without any professional repercussion.

The final and possibly most disconcerting element of this conference is the message sent to participants informing them that they may not photograph or record the session. While limiting participation to those with Brown IDs and prohibiting recording will admittedly limit the negative impact of the event, it also begs the question - what do these people fear? What do they not want people to know they plan to say? What policies will they be free to contravene in the absence of evidence of their policy breaches?

Surely, they know that nothing happened to any of the participants of the antizionist conference held in the fall of 2024. In fact, nothing has ever happened to any of the antizionist professors at Brown, even when they have discriminated against students, harassed them in the classroom, and been investigated for their behavior.

So ask yourselves: what could be the legitimate value in or purpose of a conference with no viewpoint diversity and closed doors? What do they not want the outside world to know is going to be discussed tonight and tomorrow?

What is it that they seek to hide?

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Queen Esther has arisen.

Haman falls once more.

My Louisville peeps

You’re my spirit animals.

Let’s go change the world.

There is no silver bullet. There is no miracle cure. There is no magic word. There is no way to reduce the causes of Jew hate to such a limited subset that it can be defeated with one formula.

The devoted cadre of people expending both their free and professional time combatting the tsunami of Jew hate increasingly appear at odds with one another. While a social media post by Adam Louis-Klein inspired this essay, it is emblematic of a growing trend to nip at each others’ heels in a very human but flawed manner. As activists, we are not fighting a zero-sum game against one another. The success of one of us does not need to result in the defeat of the other.

In a post yesterday on X and Facebook, Mr. Louis-Klein took aim at Bret Stephens and Shabbos Kestenbaum for promoting the funding of Jewish Day Schools, publicizing Chabad, and encouraging Jewish pride as a solution to our troubles. He cast “building Jewish life internally” as ineffective because, as he notes, “Jewish students are routinely threatened with expulsion for being labeled ‘Zionists’” and “influencers like Guy Christensen can openly call for the murder of ‘Zionists’ with no consequences at their own universities.” He asks: “How is Jewish life supposed to function when antizionism has effectively criminalized it - socially, institutionally, and increasingly legally?”

He concludes that Stephens and Kestenbaum refuse “to confront the basic problem: Jewish life cannot be sustained by inward-facing pride projects alone when the surrounding environment is actively hostile, punitive, and exclusionary. You don’t preserve the inside of the house while the walls are being set on fire.”

In answer to his questions, building Jewish life internally is a necessary part of the complex equation we must employ to fight Jew hate. That equation involves numerous variables and factors. We are losing a generation of young Jews to the leftist activists who are able to coopt them because their parents and teachers failed to gird them against the lies about their identity. Both elements are necessary: fighting the hate from without and girding the future from within. In short, what is the point of dousing the fire on the walls of the house if there is no longer anyone inside of it to save?

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I am a huge fan of the gifted Louis-Klein and his battle to name and shame antizionists and their modern incarnation of antisemitism. I follow him avidly. But it helps none of us to take aim at two other great warriors - Stephens and Kestenbaum - both of whom have contributed greatly to naming and shaming our enemies on their own terms and in their own way.

Throughout his long, illustrious writing career, Stephens has assailed our enemies not from an inward-facing angle but often by explicating foreign policy, legislation, military actions, U.S. politics, and Israeli politics from a pro-Zionist stance. He has brought us Sapir Journal, thereby generating an ingathering of intellectuals devoted to preserving our people and approaching this cause from a vast array of angles. He is helping us define the variables in the equation that require our attention.

Kestenbaum actively sued Harvard University - quite the opposite of an inward-facing pride project - and is on a speaking tour to combat antisemitism across the nation.

Mischaracterizing the efforts of two fellow warriors detracts from the brilliance of Louis-Klein’s own writing as a budding academic combatting antizionism in the higher education setting and beyond. If he and those around him insist that only naming and exposing antizionism is the answer, they will weaken their own just and brilliant cause. In doing so, they will weaken the entirety of our army.

Fighting antisemitism and antizionism - with or without a hyphen - cannot be a vanity project. We do not fight for the glory of being right. We do not fight for the attention or to boost our own careers or win a coveted byline in a paper.

We do it for our children.

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Defeating the age-old scourge of antisemitism will take all of us. We cannot eat our own in the fight. Each of us brings a wealth of experience, knowledge, skills, and ideas to this war for survival. Just because someone else with skin in the game promotes a different game plan from our own does not mean it has no value.

This war must be fought on numerous fronts because it is being waged in every possible venue. It must be fought in the grade school classroom and the university lecture hall; in the newspapers and on social media; in the courtroom and in the halls of government; in the military and in the nursery.

Jew hate surrounds us so holistically that we cannot pass a single 24-hour period without some horrendous event or report stealing our breath. So how can any of us honestly believe that one workstream will solve the problem? Let us each play to our respective strengths and bring what we personally can bear to the battlefield. As a people, we are able to muster great strength in times of trial, but we do not all need to wield the same weapons.

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I bring to the battle a mother’s perspective. I understand that each parent and teacher plays a vital role in the battle for our Jewish childrens’ souls and thereby our future as a people. It is not meaningless nor does it demonstrate refusal to confront the systemic antizionism pervading society to address concomitantly the education of our youth to ensure their pride in their identity. We must construct a wall of defense around our children upon which they can draw when they leave the nest.

One of the most disturbing features of the current round of antisemitic fervour is the success with which our foes have permeated our circles and concertedly programmed a generation of our children to turn against their own.

I know my job. My role requires me to educate my children so that they do not one day end up in a tent on a college campus screaming at their brethren because they were raised in ignorance of their own history. I must raise proud Zionists who will maintain the lines and connections of our people through their own progeny. This is not window dressing. This is existentially crucial. That does not mean it is the only battle front, nor does it mean it is all I can contribute, but the entire fight is worthless if we do not consider this a worthwhile, central aim.

Furthermore, the concept of promoting Jewish pride through Jewish schools and Chabad houses serves a second purpose: to create spaces where our children can safely learn their history without living in daily fear of retribution for being themselves because of the rife antizionism in schools. As a mother, I understand the value that such spaces offer. Even our youngest are being persecuted by classmates without repercussion. Funding and supporting development of these spaces feeds our community and strengthens us internally so that we can stand strong externally. They mean we can send our children out into a terrifying world and know that they will have places to go where they can be themselves and gather with like-minded Jews.

Lastly, this struggle often feels insurmountable. Facing so many antagonistic fronts, it is hard as an individual to know how to contribute. Supporting spaces for our children to be Jews and learn to be proud of their past, present, and future is something everyone can do. Not everyone can sue a university. Not everyone can organize a rally. Not everyone can publish a magazine. Not everyone can stand up in the U.N. and condemn its hypocrisy.

Everyone can, however, teach their children to love who they are and where they came from. Each of us can play a significant role through the simple task of educating our offspring. We have the Brandeis Center, MACA, Hillel Neuer, Sapir, Jewish Alumni organizations, MAAZ, the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, and so many other warriors taking up discrete aspects of chipping away at this mammoth wall of hatred. But we do not have to feel helpless and place all responsibility into the hands of a few all-stars.

Ensuring one more child grows up a proud Jew who raises the next generation of proud Jews is no small feat today, and it should never be undervalued.

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The past couple of weeks bore witness to a noticeable uptick in Holocaust analogies. ICE agents are cast as the modern-day Gestapo. Illegal immigrants represent the modern-day Anne Franks. As ever, Israelis are the modern-day genocidal Nazis.

Governor Tim Walz considers ICE to be “Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo.”

Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts doesn’t “think that the comparisons with Nazi Germany are extreme.”

Stephen Colbert considers the Gestapo a step up from ICE because “the Nazis were willing to show their faces.” (I wonder how he felt about pro-Hamas campus protestors and their masked countenances.)

Within the same time span, International Holocaust Remembrance Day - observed annually on January 27th - was marked by a notable and intentional downplay of its actual victims.

BBC anchors spent the day repeatedly referring to a vague “six million victims” of the Holocaust, oddly omitting their Jewish identity. J.D. Vance joined the bizarre club of people who have trouble identifying the targets of the Holocaust by name in his message marking the occasion.

My friends, none of this is accidental. The concept of Jewish exceptionalism so bothers the contemporary antisemite that he or she cannot even tolerate recognizing Jews as the target of the greatest organized genocide in modern history literally called the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” by its own perpetrators.

By inappropriately analogizing the historically unique experience of the Holocaust to situations that bear not even the most remote resemblance to mass extermination on a continental scale, those who no longer wish to labor under the guilt wrought by antisemitism run amok in the 1940s can both cheapen its meaning and undermine the continuing threat that antisemitism run amok poses to Jews globally at this very moment.

By inappropriately erasing Jews as the exceptional victims of the Holocaust, contemporary antisemites, leftists, and Islamist sympathizers are able to maintain and bolster the illusion of the Jew as victimizer. This suits the delusional narrative that hypnotized so many in the past two years who psychotically scream about Israeli genocidal colonialist apartheid baby killers. Has any word been more overused and inappropriately applied since October 7th than the word “genocide?”

“Holocaust” and “Nazi” are now giving “genocide” a run for its money.

Jews cannot be victims when we are the victimizers. Jews cannot be the targets of genocide when we are the ones committing genocide.

The same lies that serve as the foundation for today’s eruption of antisemitism require the downplay of the Holocaust’s exceptionalism. Holocaust distortion and minimization are an embedded and essential feature of the contemporary attack on Jews; it is necessary both to overcome global guilt that held haters at bay for roughly 80 years as well as maintain the illusion of the Jewish aggressor with which the weak-minded currently are besotted.

Employing inflammatory language that belittles the traumatic experiences of a people in order to score political points accomplishes a secondary, more nefarious end - the depreciation of that people’s suffering. Is it necessary to depreciate historical Jewish suffering in order to argue that specific federal agents may have acted beyond the bounds of legality? Certainly not. But it does dovetail suspiciously well with the narrative of those seeking to undermine both Jewish safety and U.S. security.

Let us try to speak in plain fact.

Two people died while actively protesting ICE agents.

Six million Jews died simply because they were Jews.

Illegal immigrants are being detained and deported to their countries of origin.

Jewish citizens were rounded up and either shot into mass graves or shipped off in cattle cars to death camps where they were gassed and burned. By the millions.

Is it really that difficult to see the vast difference between these situations? No. It is not.

Give those making these illogical and inappropriate analogies the benefit of knowing exactly what they are doing: cheapening the value of Jewish trauma and lives. This convenient feature in their strategy thus advances the dehumanization of Jews so rife in society today, ironically making a second Holocaust more and more likely. In point of fact, more American Jews have been murdered in cold blood in the past year in antisemitic hate crimes than have been killed by ICE. I do not see people other than Jews caring a great deal about that fact grounded in reality.

And remember: their concomitant, long-term goal is the destabilization of American society at large. You do not see protests and rallies opposing the wholesale, brutal murder of tens of thousands of Iranians in a matter of days because those who fund, promote, and organize protests in America today serve a foreign master. Do not forget who stood behind the campus protests - the murderous thugs of the Iranian regime and their stable of puppet organizations around the world. The significant overlap in those who participated in protesting a litany of seemingly unrelated causes over the past two years cannot be denied or ignored. It is not an accident or a coincidence.

It, too, is a feature and not a bug.

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We won’t ever get

A better shot at freeing

Iran from this scourge.

People prefer to exist in the stark simplicity of unrelenting duality. Perhaps it is soothing to frame an uncontrollable world around a less complicated lens, but it no more changes the material nature of that world than it absolves us of using our brains to attempt rational comprehension of the actions we see and choices we make.

A president whom many people dislike deposed another president whom many people dislike. In an objectively illegal manner, he removed an objectively illegally ruling criminal and tyrant. In contravention of international law, he extracted and put an end to the reign of terror of a serial contravener of international law.

People believe they cannot simultaneously dislike a politician or administration while also approving of a particular act that that administration takes. We tell ourselves and each other that an individual is so innately evil that no good could ever come of them. Perhaps it makes life easier. We do not have to challenge the political bubbles we construct around our social circles. We do not have to live a morally fractious existence. We cease having to question our instincts, battle our own consciences, or - heaven forbid - change our minds.

Has our intellect become so reductionist and our moral capacity so stultified that we cannot hold space for or fathom two not entirely consistent truths simultaneously?

Reality isn’t simple. It isn’t straight forward. It isn’t easy. Neither is life.

It can simultaneously be true that the war in Iraq post-9/11 was a fraught conflict based on flawed intel while it is true that the world is a far better place without Saddam Hussein in it.

It can simultaneously be true that there is a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip and the majority of Gazans prefer war to acknowledging their Israel neighbors’ right to exist beside them.

It can simultaneously be true that your pro-Palestine activism stems from a place of good intent while also exposing historical ignorance and making your Jewish friends less safe.

It can simultaneously be true that the extraction of Maduro contravenes international law and that his removal is an objective good worthy of the joyous celebration and hopefulness we see in the millions of Venezuelans flooding the streets to mark an and to his iron grip on their homeland.

So many of our societal ills today stem from a preference for intellectual and emotional laziness. A childlike need for stark simplicity in the moral world order that yearns for black and white choices and refuses room for subtle shade. Internal debate, self doubt, and iterative questioning help us to hone our understanding of the complexities that compose the fabric of our existence. When we teach our children at a tender age that there is a right and a wrong, we know implicitly that life is usually not so simplistic and that one day they will be faced with choices that question the effectiveness of that neat, dichotomous framework.

Shouldn’t we also then teach our children how to grapple with such complexities as they grow and struggle to navigate them? Such is a dying art, so much so that many so-called top academics eschew nuanced thinking and instead insist upon preaching politicized, one-sided propaganda.

President Trump can be an unsavory, grotesque person at times. That does not mean he cannot also be the only person who was able to save the lives of the remaining hostages starving to death in Gaza. He may be flexing American muscle to revive the Monroe Doctrine for a modern age as he seeks access to Venezuelan oil reserves. That does not mean that it also is not in America’s best interests to end the foreign footholds in Venezuela of Iran, Russia, and China that threaten our national security.

The generation that loves to march, scream and hurl slogans they do not comprehend missed some vital portion of their education that would enable them to think critically, see more than one factor of an equation, and make mental space for incongruous facts. They were sold a lie - whether it be in college or grade school or at home - that if they stand consistently on one side of an equation they will always be in the right. They believe they need not question their logic or good sense if a stance feels good or the right people are taking it against a predefined group of always-wrong people.

If you have been yelling that resistance is justified when people are occupied, then you should be thrilled for the eight million Venezuelans just freed from two decades of brutal occupation by drug lords and dictators. If, however, you cannot fathom doing so because you so despise the president who took the action that freed them from the grips of cruelty, then you are not doing your intellect justice. It is possible to dislike the president and to question how the act came about, but also to acknowledge the good that is the act of freeing Venezuelans from tyranny.

When we lie to ourselves in order to fit a messy world into our prebaked constructs of right and wrong, left and right, liberal and conservative, we omit the space for critical thinking that results in the current world order in which we shout at each other without hearing the other. When we are so mired in loathing for one man that we deafen ourselves to the voices of actual Venezuelans who have lived through the hell of Maduro and Chavez before him, we lose whatever perceived moral high ground we think we occupy.

Don’t fall for the Big Lie. Morality isn’t strictly dual. Sometime Jean Valjean needs to steal bread to feed his starving nephew. Sometimes dictators need to be forcibly removed for the sake of millions, and the means of doing so are never clean or easy. Sometimes innocent people die to save other innocent people.

Perhaps if we find it within ourselves to release the self-righteous and create room for the ambiguity of real life, we might all stop shouting at each over the widening chasm. We just might grow that much wiser.

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American Jews watched New York City’s new Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration ceremony with a mixture of trepidation, fury, and depression. Ironically, however, it was Jewish performer Mandy Patinkin’s rendition of Somewhere Over the Rainbow that cut the deepest.

There is no accounting for Patinkin’s descent into useful idiot for the antisemites other than the typical Hollywood combination of ignorance, arrogance, and replacement of religion with political affiliation. His use of a song written by Jewish immigrants about the Jewish immigrant story, however, particularly galls. At this historical juncture in which American Jews begin to see the unravelling of our unprecentedly safe and successful century in the United States, Patinkin thumbed his nose at the the true meaning behind the classic ode to those who dream of a better life.

Who would know better about yearning for a better life than the Eastern European Jewish immigrant of the early 20th century? Certainly, the authors of the Wizard of Oz’s seminal piece did not have to dig deeply to understand that feeling - the feeling of yearning to escape the hopelessness and despair of Tzarist Russia, the dream of rising above the limitations of a life hemmed in by prejudice, violence, and poverty, the ache to fly over the rainbow to a world of acceptance, tolerance, and opportunity.

Isadore Hochberg and Hyman Arluck, better known to the music industry as Lyricist Yip Harburg and songwriter Harold Arlen, poured centuries of Jewish yearning into a song that rends tears from the hardest heart. Their parents had brought them far from Russian and Lithuanian pogroms, lifted in the turbulent winds of a tornado of Jew hatred, to a seemingly magical world where Orthodox Jewish children who spoke Yiddish at the dinner table could grow up to write a piece ultimately voted the 20th century's No. 1 song by the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Where else but America could such a dream transpire? Where else could the impoverished children of an unfavored people write an Academy Award-winning song and capture the world’s imagination for over a century? The very song is a living testament to those dreams coming true. Twentieth century America was the land our forebears dreamed of in their ghettos and shtetls. At the time it was penned in 1939, European Jews caught in a deadly maelstrom of political and ideological forces with no safe haven for their escape must have felt this song in their very bones. Later, to survivors in post-WWII displaced person camps who sought to take wing to a new place unscathed by the horror they had survived, it must have sounded like siren song.

And as Mandy Patinkin lent his angelic voice to the devil, he eviscerated its soul, laughing in the face of the generations of bold Americans whose legacy of building a new life in this land while contributing tirelessly to its many wonders is in peril at the hands of the very man whose rise to power he celebrated. The men who wrote the song into which he proudly breathed life rolled in their graves at the dissipation of the rainbow they painted with their industry, talent, and freedom.

Mamdani took office and promptly made Jews less safe by rescinding Mayor Adams’ adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism and efforts to better control protests in the vicinity of houses of worship. Literally within hours of being sworn into office, he sent a message that the safety of New York Jews is not only of no importance to him but will degenerate further than it already has. He lit the skyline green in honor of his own heritage as he sent the concomitant message that the other colors of the rainbow are no longer in favor.

Jewish immigrants built New York City. They built the music industry and Hollywood. They built law firms and hospitals and banks. Contrary to the antisemites, this was not the result of shadowy conspiracy, but rather a capable people set free to be their best in a land of opportunity at a truly magical time when dreams could come true. As American Jews see that dream dwindling and curdling into a nightmare, we mourn this golden time, this shining era of the possible. If New York no longer welcomes us, if America dims its lights to us, we do not know where we can fly to next.

America of the 20th century will become a land that our children heard of once in a lullaby, but a reality no more. Mandy Patinkin celebrated that dark, historical turning point by basterdizing an ode to Jewish promise on these shores.

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