A few days after I published my essay on the Met’s Galliano exhibition, an email arrived from a Jewish leader in the fashion industry. He had read the piece and asked to speak. When we did, he told me, gently, that I had aimed at the wrong target. Give him grace, he said. Accept his teshuvah (atonement). We gain nothing by manufacturing an enemy out of a man who committed his wrong fifteen years ago and has spent the years since repairing it.

I told them I disagreed, and I told them why. I had accepted his apology in the essay itself, high up, before a word of criticism appeared. My objection was the timing of the announcement and the way Anna Wintour’s gala handled it. The fashion industry leader read my objection as broader, and I understood why. The Jewish community feels embattled because it’s actually under attack. He had real reasons for not wanting me to invite the next fight on our behalf.

His words stayed with me, partly because of the calendar. We are a few weeks from Yom Kippur, and I believe in teshuvah. Repentance is proven when the same temptation returns, yet the person chooses differently.

This morning, Galliano chose differently.

“I understand that meaningful atonement is not achieved through an exhibition, institutional recognition or a single public gesture,” he wrote. Atonement, his statement continued, is a continuing responsibility, demonstrated through conduct over time. He acknowledged that an exhibition honoring his work would be painful for some. Then he walked away from the highest honor his industry’s most powerful institution can give, an honor extended to only two living designers before him.

Nobody forced that outcome on him. The Met never pulled the show. As of last night, the museum still planned to open Horizons in May 2027 and to build the Gala around it, and its trustees were treating the objections as a logistics problem. The gala was scheduled for May 3, 2027, which happens to be Yom HaShoah, when Israelis mark Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Confronted with that calendar, the museum’s answer, reported by the New York Times yesterday, was to consider moving the party one week later. That way, the celebration of a man who once praised Hitler would land a respectful distance from the day we mourn Hitler’s victims. The scheduling was never the main problem.

The pressure that produced his decision was quiet at first, and I can describe part of it firsthand. In the month since the announcement, I spoke with several Jewish supporters of the Met Gala. They told me they had decided to skip it. They described a wave of criticism behind the scenes, donors who found the decision inappropriate and said so to the museum’s executives before saying anything in public.

By yesterday, the Times had reported the same picture: donors threatening to rescind gifts if the exhibition proceeded, and the City Council speaker calling the decision a serious mistake in a letter to Wintour.

Anna Wintour went ahead anyway. Her choice is the part I cannot forgive. The announcement did not arrive carelessly. It arrived through a Friday exclusive as Jews were heading into Shabbat, after a year of closed-door meetings with rabbis and Jewish leaders, meetings in which some of the rabbis told the Times they worried they were being used as a Band-Aid. She sat in those meetings and heard the worry. She published anyway. Today, with the exhibition gone, she issued a statement calling Galliano’s withdrawal “very courageous and a measure of the man he is.”

She recognized courage accurately. But she made no comment on why she, the exhibit’s organizer, had failed to display it. The board had courage in 2024, when it killed this same show rather than absorb the reaction. By 2026, the institution had concluded that Jews’ objections no longer matter. Galliano would never have needed courage if the fashion industry’s most elite institutions had any moral fiber.

I keep returning to what that Jewish fashion leader said on our call, because he was describing fashion as a community with shared values, a world capable of extending grace or withholding it. This month settled something for me. Fashion talks about values more fluently than any industry I write about, yet it runs on money and power, and on people accustomed to getting their way. Wintour wanted this show for a decade. She planned it twice. The Costume Institute’s galleries carry her name, and in the end the man she championed had to be the one to tell her no.

Julie Menin, the speaker of the New York City Council who has been a bold advocate against the rise of antisemitism in the city, was unequivocal about the Galliano exhibit, calling it “a gut punch to the Jewish community.” On Sunday, she told me she was working hard to ensure it wouldn’t go forward.

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My cousin texted me this morning from Israel. She has been watching an American show, and she likes it, and she wanted to know something before she let herself like it more. One of the main actors is Jewish. She had gone through his social media and found nothing about Israel either way. So she assumed he was fine, but then reached out to me because she knows I would know.

I told her I met him last year, and he is on our side, and he spoke up before. I could feel the relief come through the phone.

I have been thinking about that call all day, and the part that stays with me is the assumption underneath her question: silence now counts as good news. A Jewish actor who has said nothing about the worst year of her life is, by her calculation, one of the safe ones. My cousin has learned to check before she watches, the way you check the ingredients on a package. This is what it looks like to be a Jew who still wants to live in the non-Jewish world in 2026.

I’m the one shrinking her world

I have to admit, some of the shrinking is my doing. Every few weeks I post about another singer, another actor, another novelist who said something awful about Israel, or about Zionists, or lately, without bothering with the code words, just plainly about Jews. I post it because it is true and because people should know. And every time I do, I take one more thing away from someone like my cousin, whether it be a show she liked, a band she grew up on, or a children’s author whose books she was going to read to her kids.

I feel the guilt of it. Nobody asked me to be the person who ruins things, but the alternative is that she finds out later, on her own, when they sign some despicable petition condoning the killing of our people, and that is worse.

The question she asked me is the question Jews have been arguing about for a very long time: Can you enjoy art made by people who hate you?

The oldest version of our call

In November 1938, days after Kristallnacht, the Palestine Symphony Orchestra pulled the prelude to Wagner’s Meistersinger from its program. That single decision became an unofficial ban that has held in Israel, with a few exceptions, for almost ninety years. Wagner wrote an essay in 1850 called “Jewishness in Music” arguing that Jews were incapable of real art. Hitler adored him, and Wagner’s music played at Nazi ceremonies. For survivors, the sound was the sound of the camps.

In July 2001, Daniel Barenboim, a Jewish conductor who grew up in Israel, brought the Berlin Staatskapelle to the Israel Festival in Jerusalem. He had planned to play the first act of Die Walküre. Survivors protested, the government objected, and the festival asked him to change the program. He agreed and played Schumann and Stravinsky instead. Then, after the last scheduled piece, he turned to the hall and asked whether they would like to hear the prelude to Tristan und Isolde as an encore. The argument that followed went on for about half an hour. He was called a fascist, was told to go home, and a few dozen people walked out. More than a thousand stayed, and when it ended they stood and applauded.

I have gone back and forth on Barenboim. He broke his word to the festival, and the people who walked out had every right to walk. But the hall that stayed was also full of Jews, in Jerusalem, choosing to hear the music and refusing to let a dead antisemite decide what they were allowed to love. Some would call it the ultimate act of defiance. Both rooms were right, and it is why the question has never been settled.

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On August 20, on his Twitch stream to millions of his followers, Hasan Piker said that “if Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to come around and take action, not against the State of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.” He added that Jews who tie their identity to Israel are “making antisemitism worse.” He also said that Israel is the “Jewish ISIS” and that American Jews who support Israel are supporting ISIS.

I have written about Piker in two different essays here, and I do not want to write about him a third time. He matters only because he stated an idea more clearly than anyone else has this year. That idea has moved from the fringe to the center of progressive conversation. You will hear it, if you have not already, from someone you like. The idea is that Israel causes antisemitism. Jewish support for Israel provokes it, and Jews could reduce it by supporting Israel less, or by staying quiet about their support.

I suspect that Piker and his mob are frustrated. Poll after poll shows that the vast majority of American Jews are Zionists, and that fact shatters the whole “we only call for violence against Zionists, not Jews” argument.

This idea, that antisemitism will stop only if Jews change, does not come only from streamers. Last July, on the New York Times podcast “The Interview,” the Jewish actor Mandy Patinkin said that Netanyahu and his government are “endangering not only the State of Israel, which I care deeply about and want to exist, but endangering the Jewish population all over the world.” His wife, Kathryn Grody, went further. She said Netanyahu’s politics are “the worst thing for Jewish people. It’s like lighting a candle for anybody that has any antisemitic feelings.” Patinkin is, evidently, a Zionist. He only wishes his anti-Israel circle liked him more, and he believes they would like him more if Israel changed. Piker and Patinkin stand at opposite ends of the same argument.

Here is why the argument matters this week. Piker was not speaking into an empty space. On the same stream, he displayed posts about Jeremy Moss, a Jewish state senator and the Democratic nominee in Michigan’s 11th District, including a clip that Moss says is fabricated. Piker has also spent the year campaigning alongside Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan. El-Sayed embraced him at campus rallies in April and at a Detroit event the night before El-Sayed won his primary.

Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, wrote that “the malicious claim that American Jews are inviting violence against themselves is dangerous and antisemitic,” and that there is “zero justification for threats against the safety of our Jewish brothers and sisters at a moment of rising hate.” Hillary Scholten called Piker’s remarks a call for violence against American Jews, “full stop.” Josh Gottheimer said the only person inciting violence against Jews was Piker.

That is the good news. Here is the rest of it. Jeffries did not name Piker in his statement, but later on CNN clarified it was aimed at Piker. El-Sayed put out a statement headed as a response to Piker’s comments about Moss. He added Piker’s name on a tweet, but he did not say whether the relationship changes. Moss is withholding his endorsement until El-Sayed does outreach to Oakland County’s Jewish community. That is the state of play: a Senate nominee avoids the name of a streamer he campaigned with, and a Jewish congressional nominee in his own party waits to see if he will say it. The idea in Piker’s sentence makes that silence possible. If Jews bring antisemitism on themselves, then a politician who condemns it too loudly takes a side against the base. So the idea has to be answered, and the answer is not complicated.

I should tell you what is true in this idea before I take it apart, because a reader who has watched three years of Gaza coverage will not hear the rest of this essay otherwise. Israel is unpopular in America right now, and among young Americans the numbers are worse than unpopular. Some people who have attacked Jews in the past three years said Israel’s name while doing it. The man who shot two embassy staffers in Washington in May 2025 shouted about Palestine. That is real, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.

So the claim is not stupid. It is wrong in a specific way, and history lets us test it.

The reason changes. The target never does.

Here is the test: Take antisemitic violence from before there was a State of Israel and ask what reason people gave at the time.

In Damascus in 1840, a Capuchin friar disappeared, and the city’s Jews were accused of murdering him for his blood. Authorities arrested and tortured Jewish notables. The reason given was ritual murder.

In Paris in 1894, a French court convicted Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army captain, of treason on forged evidence and sent him to Devil’s Island. Crowds outside the Ecole Militaire chanted for the death of Jews. The reason given was disloyalty to the nation.

In Kishinev in 1903, mobs killed forty-nine Jews over Easter after a local paper spread a blood libel. That same year, a Russian newspaper published the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The reason given was that Jews secretly controlled the world.

In Germany, between 1933 and 1945, the Nazis murdered the most assimilated Jewish community in Europe, decorated veterans of the First World War among them, on the grounds that Jews were a racial contaminant. The reason given was blood.

In Baghdad, over two days beginning on June 1, 1941, mobs killed somewhere between 150 and 180 Jews, injured hundreds, raped an unknown number of women, and looted around 1,500 homes and businesses. The reason given was that the Jews had welcomed the British.

Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948. None of the reasons above survived into the next generation. The blood libel gave way to treason, treason gave way to world control, world control gave way to race, and race gave way to collaboration with empire. The reason kept changing. The people on the receiving end did not.

When the stated cause of something changes every forty years, and the effect stays constant, the stated cause is not the cause. It is an excuse. Israel is the excuse this generation has been handed, and it works better than the earlier ones because, unlike the Protocols, Israel exists and does things, and some of what it does deserves criticism. That makes this version more durable than the last one. It does not make it a different thing.

What the demand really is

Read Piker’s sentence again as a proposal rather than a prediction. Jews should stop saying that they are invested in Israel. What does that mean in practice for a community in which, per Pew’s 2020 survey, 58 percent say they feel emotionally attached to Israel, and in which a Jewish Federations survey this February put that figure at 71 percent? It means hiding. It means a lawyer in Bloomfield Hills takes the Israel trip photos off her office wall. It means a college sophomore learns that silence is the safest position at the dinner. It means, as a friend’s cousin found out this month, a Jewish viewer checks a Jewish actor’s social media for evidence of what he believes before deciding whether it is safe to like his show.

Jews have tried hiding before. German Jews in the 1920s were doctors and judges and Nobel laureates, more German than the Germans by their own reckoning, and they went into the same ovens as the Ostjuden they had spent a generation trying to distance themselves from. Nobody has ever honored the offer of safety in exchange for erasure, and nobody extending it has ever been in a position to guarantee it.

There is also something worth noticing in the shape of the demand itself. No other minority in America is told that its physical safety depends on adopting the correct foreign policy view. Nobody tells Cuban Americans that attacks on them will stop when they soften on Havana. Nobody tells Ukrainian Americans to lower their flags for their own protection. The condition applies only to Jews, and a condition that applies only to Jews has a name. Piker used it in the same breath, when he said Jews who identify with Israel are “making antisemitism worse.” The victim is the cause. That sentence has existed in every language Jews have ever spoken.

Baghdad, 1941

My grandmother Hela was born in Baghdad. The Farhud is the reason there is no Jewish Baghdad for me to visit. Seven years before Israel existed, before there was a flag to be accused of loyalty to, her city decided its Jews had picked the wrong side of a war they had no say in, and it took two days to end 2,600 years of Jewish life on the Rivers of Babylon.

I have never found anyone who can tell me which Israel caused that. The question is not rhetorical. I would like an answer, because the people making Piker's argument owe one. Today I put it to Dov Waxman, a professor of Israel Studies at UCLA, known on X for his hostile views on Israel, as one user puts it, after he posted that "it's not victim-blaming to note" that people associate Jews with Israel partly because Jews themselves emphasize the connection. I asked: "What was the reason they murdered my Jewish family members in Iraq in 1941? Was it also a little bit about what Israel that didn't exist then did? What about the Holocaust? The Inquisition? What about the Hebron massacre of 1929? The Pittsburgh shooting?" He has not answered yet. If Jewish investment in Israel invites violence against Jews, then the Farhud, Kishinev, Dreyfus, and Damascus need some other explanation. The violence has a life of its own, and Israel is the current name it answers to.

The tools

If this conversation comes for you, and it likely will, here is what history hands you.

The first tool is a date. Pick one from before 1948 and ask the person across the table what caused that one. You are not trying to win. You are trying to move the conversation from a feeling about Gaza, which nobody can argue with, to a claim about causation, which anybody can check.

The second tool is the pattern. You know I love patterns. Every generation of antisemitism arrived with a reason, and every reason was replaced. Israel’s critics in 2026 did not invent a new kind of hatred. They inherited a very old and dark one and gave it a new reason.

The third tool is to name the trade. Ask what, concretely, Jews are being asked to do to be safe. The answer is always some form of becoming less visibly Jewish. At that point you are no longer discussing Israel. You are discussing whether a minority in America should have to pass a political test to walk home from synagogue, and most decent people, asked that plainly, know the answer.

The last tool is the one I hold onto. Zionism did not cause antisemitism. Herzl was a Vienna journalist covering the Dreyfus trial when he concluded that Europe would never let its Jews be safe as Jews. The state came after the hatred, as one of the answers to it. The people telling us to let go of the answer are not offering to remove the question. If they truly cared, they’d work twice as hard to fight antisemitism, instead of providing daily excuses.

In March 1941, nine months before Pearl Harbor, a comic book hit newsstands with Captain America punching Adolf Hitler square in the jaw. Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, the two Jewish cartoonists who created the character, sent their star-spangled hero after a real, living dictator while most of the country still wanted no part of the war in Europe. The comic sold nearly a million copies. It also brought death threats. Members of the German American Bund called Timely Comics and told Kirby to come down to the lobby, where men waited to show him what real Nazis did to people like him. Kirby rolled up his sleeves and went downstairs. The Nazis had already run.

Superman came from the same generation of Jewish immigrant sons, created a few years earlier by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two kids from Cleveland who gave America an alien refugee who used his power to protect the vulnerable. The industry that grew around them, mostly young Jewish writers and artists shut out of advertising and the more respectable arts, built a moral universe on cheap paper and sold it to children for a dime. The publishers worked with the government during the war, and soldiers carried the comics overseas. Superheroes told the world what America believed itself to be, in the same years the country was still deciding whether to fight the thing those heroes stood against.

In 1958, a writer named Alvin Schwartz gave Superman a mirror. He had been reading Carl Jung on the shadow self, the idea that every person carries a hidden double built from everything they refuse to look at. Schwartz built that idea into a character named Bizarro, an imperfect copy of Superman who lived by inverted logic. Bad meant good. Wrong meant right. Bizarro was not a villain in his own mind. He believed himself righteous by the only rules his world gave him.

Marvel’s movies now carry the cultural weight comic books once carried in soldiers’ duffel bags, and they still tell the world what America wants to believe about itself. Mark Ruffalo has played the Hulk across a decade of those movies, a character built entirely on internal contradiction. Bruce Banner fights for the right side. He also loses himself to a rage he cannot fully control, and the tension between the two defines his character.

Ruffalo’s contradictions didn’t stay on the screen. He has criticized the proposed Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery merger. One family controlling CBS, HBO, and CNN is worth worrying about, and plenty of people with no interest in Israel said so too.

But Ruffalo couldn’t keep it professional. He dragged in Oracle’s Safra Catz, her company’s Israeli military contracts, and then wrote that Larry Ellison was funding his son’s deal with profits from what he called a genocide. A question about who owns American newsrooms turned into a story about Jewish executives and blood money. He never had to say “Jewish.” The framing of the argument, targeting a Jewish family connection to Israel, said it for him. When Paramount called it an antisemitic trope, Ruffalo was outraged. Criticizing a military contract, he said, is not criticizing Jews. Maybe he believes that. But in 2021 he apologized for accusing Israel of genocide, admitting the word was inflammatory and was feeding antisemitism. He knew better once. Then he went back to the same word, this time aimed at named people and their family money. The merger fight didn’t need Israel at all. He added it anyway, intentionally.

Three days earlier, Ruffalo had joined more than twenty Marvel actors, Benedict Cumberbatch, Cate Blanchett, and Don Cheadle among them, in a letter urging world governments to free Marwan Barghouti. The letter describes his imprisonment and mistreatment at length. It never mentions that an Israeli civilian court convicted Barghouti in 2004 of five murders and one attempted murder, and gave him five life sentences plus forty years. They wrote an entire letter about a man in prison and left out why he is there.

I’ve watched Ruffalo play a hero for fifteen years. Millions of us have watched him play a man who fights his own worst instincts to protect people who can’t protect themselves, and cheered every time he won. It is strange to watch that same man sign his name to a letter that erases five murders, then call a fair question about his own reasoning appalling. Stranger still that he isn’t unusual. He is one name among two hundred.

Alvin Schwartz did not invent Bizarro as a villain. He invented a creature who lived inside a broken moral logic and never noticed the logic was broken, because nothing in his world ever pushed back. That framework seems like it was invented to reflect on the moment we are living through. The men and women who once made comic books were writing the country’s clearest moral instrument against fascism, sending a hero to lay hands on Hitler a year before America agreed the war was worth fighting. Their industry now produces the actors who wear that hero’s face and use it to launder a dictator’s grievance and a murderer’s record into causes worth a famous name.

Nobody in this story believes they are the villain. That was always true of Bizarro too. He never called himself the enemy. He called wrong right and thought the sentence was complete. Marvel’s stars are not comic book monsters plotting the world’s end. They are something closer to the world Schwartz built, a cast of people who confuse what feels like virtue for the thing itself, and call it morality because nothing around them says otherwise.

Last week in Alexandria, Virginia, a woman sat down to get her eyebrows shaped. The conversation started warmly enough: Afghan poetry, her new novel, food both customer and brow artist loved. Then she mentioned she was Jewish and half-Israeli. The owner ordered her out. On camera, the brow artist said: “I can’t provide service to an Israeli. It’s against my political beliefs.”

Then came a demand: say it’s a genocide. Afterward, the owner explained that the client would have “slid by” had she agreed a genocide was happening.

Slid by.

Do as you’re told, and maybe we’ll tolerate your existence. Refuse, and pack your purse as the stranger who took your money chants slogans at you.

I’ve written extensively about why the war Hamas started on October 7th is scrutinized as a genocide while other high casualty events around the world barely score headlines at all.

Here is where the matter stands legally now: The International Court of Justice is the body tasked with ruling on genocides, and they have not made any such determination. They are reviewing evidence in the case opened by South Africa. You don’t have to take my word for it. The former International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan, who took the extraordinary step of issuing arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu, said he didn’t try to charge the Israeli prime minister with genocide because “it would take a reckless prosecutor to move simply because of clamour.” Khan, it’s important to note, is no fan of Israel. When he was finally fired last month after multiple allegations of sexual abuse it came out that he had allegedly asked his victim not to come forward so it wouldn’t jeopardize the arrest warrants. He’s an alleged predator and staunch critic of Israel; even he stopped short of ruling on genocide before the ICJ.

There’s also a committee affiliated with the United Nations that issued a report alleging genocide. An independent International Commission of Inquire. The UN has not officially accepted this as its stance. The UN is a massive, sprawling organization. The members of this particular committee have been mired in repeated controversies about antisemitic or anti-Israel statements. I’ve written about how the UN weaponizes its bureaucracy to lend its credibility to the highest bidder, as you can read here.

All of this is complex and contested, which is exactly why on Sunday, a Miami news anchor named Glenna Milberg interrupted DSA-backed Florida congressional candidate Oliver Larkin when he simply called the war Hamas started a genocide with no caveat. “Factually incorrect,” she told him, reminding him that the UN’s own definition does not conflate a “disproportionate wartime action” with genocide.

She’s right. The statute defining genocide isn’t about casualty counts; it’s about intent: a deliberate aim to destroy a people as such, not a war fought brutally against an enemy hiding among them. The world court has held that where intent is inferred from conduct, it must be the only reasonable inference the facts allow. A genocide determination requires a court to decide that the perpetrators met this horrifying standard.

“My reporting is not supporting anything or anyone,” Milberg said in an email to someone who wrote to criticize her. Her goal, Milberg said, is “to stay true to objective facts no matter how many people are repeating something that is not.” In short, she was doing exactly what reporters should do, which is to tease out the precise meaning of the slogans politicians love to spout.

Then came the fallout. It’s the mob freely calling the war a genocide that would have you believe they are being censored and bullied. But it was Milberg who was forced to lock her social media accounts to non-followers in the public pile-on that followed what should have been a standard interview in a country with freedom of the press. Every producer and pundit in America got the lesson by Monday: affirm that a genocide has been determined when it hasn’t, or face the mob. That’s the tactic the bullies use in every industry. It’s why so many stay quiet.

“Genocide” is no longer being treated as an accusation that needs to be proven. It’s functioning instead as something closer to a loyalty oath. It’s become a badge that you wear, not because it helps anyone or because you’ve truly proven it, but because it makes you acceptable. It’s become the kind of slogan that does to truth what oxygen does to steel.

A culture that cares about truth cares about meeting a standard of proof. It cares about due process. Until that standard is met, the only defensible answer is: not yet proven. Innocent until proven guilty is the foundation of a free society. But when slogans become litmus tests, they end up outlawing that answer. Agnosticism becomes denial. “Show me” becomes complicity. The conclusion comes first and cannot be revised, so it isn’t a conclusion. It’s a creed. A movement that makes people recite what they cannot verify is generating believers who fear the consequences of asking questions at all.

Most American Jews I know are liberals. We’re Zionists because we’re liberals, not despite it. We believe that evidence matters. We believe that you can hold two griefs at once. The insistence that we rule on genocide while the international court is still out hasn’t made most of us into vocal adherents of the Free Palestine cause. But its effects are still visible. They are the grad student silent in seminar, the editor softening her own sentence, and the teenager reciting the pre-approved talking points so her friends will stay. Each time we trade truth for acceptance, it costs a sliver of self.

Back in the brow salon, the Israeli-American customer refused. She walked out minus the service she paid for, with something more valuable intact. The owner offered her the deal this moment offers every Jew in America: say the word, and maybe you slide by. The answer that keeps us whole is the one that got her thrown out, and publicly humiliated for it.

One ray of hope: A few days after that interview, Larkin lost his primary. Jewish, pro-Israel representative Jared Moskowitz won by a landslide. Larkin’s performance raked in likes and views on X, but it didn’t translate to support among Democratic voters in Florida. The mob substituting slogans for due process is still better at manipulating algorithms than at winning elections. It’s going to take a lot of people with integrity to ensure it stays that way.

I won’t describe what it said. The case is open, and anyway the contents are not the point. People who write these things all shop at the same store. The violence is generic, the sexual degradation is generic, the promises are generic. I have read enough of them that I could sort them into genres.

Then I reached the part where he named my husband.

Marc. Spelled with a C.

Not Mark. Marc. Which means the person who wrote this did not dash it off in a comment-section rage. He looked. He checked. He found the correct spelling of the name of a man who designs clothes for a living and has never written a column or given a speech in his life, and he put that name inside a death threat, and he got it right.

My body did something I still don’t have a good word for. Not shaking. More like a current: something moving through all of me at once while my hands stayed completely still. A shot of cortisol delivered to a man lying quietly in bed on Shabbat morning. And underneath the current, a question forming with almost bureaucratic calm: *okay. What do I do with this one?*

Because here is what I need you to understand, and it’s the reason I’m writing this dispatch at all.

The threat is not the thing that scares me.

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On Saturday morning, I woke up to anonymous death threats sent to my phone. The night before, a man walked into Shabbat services at Central Synagogue in Manhattan and punched a 63-year-old woman in the face. He headbutted the security guard who tried to stop him. In custody, according to police sources, he said, "F--k the Jews."

By Saturday morning, his aunt was quoted in the New York Post saying he was on crack and had been unwell since childhood, since his mother died giving birth to him. She said he loved Jewish people and wanted to become one of us.

My phone buzzed with the question Jewish group chats now ask before we ask anything else: is this good or bad for us? The question was whether the crack pipe means we don’t have to feel quite so afraid of the tidal wave of hate against Jews. I typed my answers like everyone else, and I understood what the question assumed. Somewhere along the way we all absorbed the belief that if the attacker turns out to be mad, the attack stops counting as antisemitic. 

I’m not disputing that many antisemitic attackers suffer from mental illness. Back in 2019, a former NYPD intelligence chief estimated that a third of the city's antisemitic attackers had psychiatric histories. Grafton Thomas, who stabbed five Hasidic Jews at a Monsey Hanukkah party that December, had diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia and a decade of documented decline. Kobili Traoré, who beat Sarah Halimi for an hour before throwing her from her Paris window in 2017, was in a psychotic state, as the French psychiatric experts who examined him unanimously agreed. And most people who share these diagnoses never hurt anyone. Researchers estimate that serious mental illness accounts for around four percent of violence in America, and studies show that coverage linking the two mostly teaches the public to fear patients. Flattening every mentally ill person into a Nazi defames millions of sick people who are far more likely to be victims than perpetrators. That’s not what I’m arguing we should do.

What I am arguing is that excusing antisemitic violence when it’s linked to mental illness only works if nobody looks closely at mental illness. The more seriously you take the illness, the less calm this “explanation” will make you feel.

Psychology has spent decades studying where delusions get their content. The finding holds in every country where anyone has looked: the shape of madness is universal, but its content is local. Paranoia exists everywhere. What the paranoid believe depends on where they live. In a study of schizophrenia patients in South Africa's Eastern Cape, nearly three-quarters believed jealous neighbors had bewitched them, because witchcraft was the explanation their culture kept in stock. During the Cold War, American patients heard the CIA on their radios. The clinical literature calls this delusional content and describes it as culturally plastic. A delusion is a container. The terror belongs to the patient. Its specific shape comes from the world around him.

The cases of mentally ill attackers striking out at Jews look different in that light.

Traoré did not throw a stranger from a window. He threw the Orthodox woman upstairs, whose daughter he had called a dirty Jewess two years earlier, and while he beat Sarah Halimi he called her a demon and shouted "Allahu Akbar." The French courts held two findings at once: the killing was an antisemitic hate crime, and the killer could not stand trial because cannabis had destroyed his discernment. He never faced a jury. Thousands marched in Paris, and Macron promised to change the law so that getting high before you go mad would no longer erase what you did. What Macron never addressed is why Traoré's psychosis took the shape of a Jewish demon, specifically. No courtroom ever had to answer that either.

The most infamous example of a public figure hiding hate behind mental illness is, of course, the rapper Ye. When Ye spent the fall of 2022 threatening "death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE" and then praising Hitler on camera, the debate that followed was this same one: the bipolar disorder he had disclosed, or the Jew-hatred he kept broadcasting. His doctors can settle the first question. The second stopped being about him within days, when a group hung a banner over the 405 in Los Angeles reading "Kanye is right about the Jews," arms raised in salute over rush-hour traffic. Millions heard a sick man talk. The sickness was not the part that traveled. I remember arguing this very point on Piers Morgan Uncensored, as Morgan kept pressuring me, asking, ‘shouldn’t we be more compassionate?’

The discourse around mental illness and antisemitic violence makes even more sense when you zoom out. Because in cases where it doesn’t fit, the same “explanatory” exercise still gets applied. When a man firebombed elderly Jews in Boulder, Colorado, or when a gunman murdered two Israeli embassy employees outside a Jewish museum, everyone from TikTok commentators to congressional candidates explained that the violence was criticism of Israel. When a Hezbollah-inspired bomber tried to blow up 140 Jewish preschoolers, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed explained this was a case of a traumatized victim of Israel lashing out. What stays constant is the search itself, the hunt for a reason the thing wasn't antisemitism, which is another way of describing the hunt for a reason not to care.

These mental health and Israel filters do let a very specific profile of antisemitic attackers through. He is white, male, and right-wing. He is even more permissible if he loves Nazis or hates other minorities besides Jews. Once you realize how much work these filters are doing, you begin to realize we aren’t really talking about protecting Jews, but about using the violence against us to push another agenda entirely. 

New York built the mental health explanations into its paperwork. The NYPD has a designation, "emotionally disturbed person," and it has served as the city's first explanation for attacks on Jews across three mayors. After a stabbing inside Chabad headquarters in Crown Heights in 2014, the mayor's statement pivoted within two sentences to the urgent need for mental health services. Three weeks ago, a man with dozens of prior arrests and a documented psychiatric file walked into a Jewish day camp in Queens with a hammer, days after being released from an unrelated arrest, and the first official word was that he appeared emotionally disturbed, with no hate crime designation. 

The NYPD intelligence chief who estimated that a third of the city's antisemitic attackers had psychiatric histories had a conclusion, and it was the opposite of an excuse. He wanted attackers evaluated and held for treatment instead of released. The city kept his diagnosis and dropped his prescription. What Jewish New Yorkers absorb is the failure of two systems at once: a mental health system that releases the same men over and over, and a hate crime process where “disturbed” too often arrives as the last word instead of the first fact.

I don't know what the Montes arraignment will show. He may be found unfit. His aunt's account of him may be true in every detail. None of it will answer the only question worth asking, which is why a mind coming apart in Manhattan in 2026 is filled with delusions about evil Jews. The delusions of the Eastern Cape turn on witchcraft because witchcraft is what that culture believes in. What does that say about the culture in New York?

The death threat I received on Saturday morning was sexual and violent. It mentioned my husband by name. I have received enough of these to evaluate them, which is its own grim sentence to write, and this one read differently. The person who wrote it sounded genuinely unwell. I noticed myself noticing that, the same reflex this whole essay is about, and then I understood that it changed nothing about what I had to do. I took it to the police that afternoon. Whatever is wrong with him, he found me the same way the man on Friday found the synagogue.

The woman he punched is 63. She had come to pray on a Friday night. The synagogue held services again the next morning.

You must be wondering why I spend so much time warning you about Hasan Piker. Most said he was a nobody. They were half right. He was a nobody.

Then came one of the most effective influence campaigns in American media.

Beijing, Doha, and Havana have hosted and celebrated Piker. A streamer who said “America deserved 9/11” became a man that members of Congress defend and campaign beside. This week, after the University of Washington canceled his speech, Rep. Pramila Jayapal posted on X that she was personally pressuring the school. A congresswoman bragging about using her influence to help a radical Twitch streamer.

He is not a nobody, but rather a test. And every excuse made for him tells you who is failing it. I’ve heard all the excuses. They go like this:

1. “He streams ten hours a day. Of course he says horrific things sometimes.”

The sheer volume of Hasan’s content that millions of young people are consuming daily is the problem, not an excuse. Daily repetition is how radicalization works. Piker’s record of pro-terror and bigoted statements isn’t a cherry-picked blooper compilation, it’s a consistent theme throughout seven years of his videos. “America deserved 9/11” in 2019. “If you cared about Medicare fraud, you would kill Rick Scott” in 2025, which resulted in his fifth Twitch suspension. Blessing “every type of armed resistance,” including PFLP terrorists, as “perfectly moral” later that same year. Words of kindness and understanding to the terror group the Houthis in Yemen who starve children, and Hezbollah’s flag in Lebanon, who murdered American soldiers. Plenty of people talk for a living, yet they manage not to call for the killing of senators. This isn’t a slip of the tongue; it’s a pattern.

2. “The clips are taken out of context.”

I suppose that is true in a sense; after all, nobody is posting all 10 hours of a livestream where he laughs at Jewish rape victims. But the reality is that his clips often get worse in context. When the Rick Scott line went viral, he didn’t retract it; he repeated it and explained why the senator deserved it. “America deserved 9/11” is not a phrase that improves with surrounding footage. But sure, if context is the standard, I’ll apply it. The context of a statement is the man who said it, and if you suspected he meant it in 2019— seven subsequent years of praising Hamas, blessing “armed resistance,” and declaring he has no patriotism in his heart— entitle you to your conclusion. The record doesn’t exonerate the clip. As for who has reviewed his statements, that was Twitch, which profits immensely from him and has, despite the obvious bias, suspended him five times. Britain’s Home Office barred him as “not conducive to the public good.”

Even attacks on him get converted into tribute. This week his defenders finally got the thing they've claimed to have for years: a genuinely distorted clip. Scott Jennings took an obviously sarcastic riff, Piker mocking his own chat, and presented it as a literal call to bring back lynchings. That was off. But look at what he built from one bad edit. He didn't just move to sue; he demanded that Democrats rally to his defense, mid-midterms, insisting he's no "toxic radical force"— turning a single deceptive clip into an alibi for seven years of unedited tape, and the party he spent years bashing, into his legal defense

3. “It’s just a persona. He was joking.”

He admits it’s partly a performance. Alex Jones ran the same defense in court, and the world understood immediately why it was worthless: the audience doesn’t receive the character. It receives the words. And what kind of joke is: “murder those motherf****rs in the streets, let the streets soak in their red capitalist blood.” If it’s truly all a persona, then incitement is his brand.

4. “He apologized. He walked it back.”

The pattern never varies: say it, harvest the outrage, apologize when the heat demands it, reoffend. He wrote the template in 2019. “America deserved 9/11” on his own stream; a doubling-down on Twitter the next day; then, after 48 hours of backlash, a contrite sit-down on his uncle Cenk Uygur’s network— what critics call “the family laundromat”— where he was asked if he meant it and answered, “No. Obviously not.”

Seven years later, while campaigning for a Senate candidate, he says he “could’ve phrased it better.” So his issue is not with the meaning behind his words, but how people took his words. If only he worded it in a way that the foolish masses would understand that America deserved to watch innocent civilians jump to their deaths hundreds of feet lest they slowly burn and choke.

We saw it again after October 7th. First he dismissed the documented rapes— which UN bodies themselves reported as very probable— as “rape fantasies” and “hallucinations.” Then when that didn’t work, he simply changed the wording: “It doesn’t matter if rapes f***ing happened on Oct. 7. That doesn’t change the dynamic for me.” The walk back was that raped Jewish women don’t matter. And weeks ago, mid-rehabilitation tour, he hosted Norman Finkelstein telling his millions of viewers there is “not one single frame” of sexual violence from that day. Again, he has not once reconsidered his despicable stances; he just changes the wording so he doesn’t get in trouble. And when he thinks people have forgotten or aren’t looking, he goes right back to it.

5. “He has millions of young men. We need them.”

An audience is not an electorate. His viewers are a para-social community of the young and already-converted, not the fifty-something suburban voters Democrats actually lose elections over. His defenders have never produced evidence that embracing him wins a single one of them while Republican operatives brag that their archive of his clips is endless. Every Democrat on a stage with Piker is filming the other side’s attack ad for free. And the demands works only one way: this week, while moving to sue a CNN pundit, he insisted Democrats rally to his defense mid-midterms as a former Biden aide advised against spending capital on him. The audience was supposed to be his gift to the party; instead, the party is being asked to staff his feuds. Reaching young men is a real problem. Nobody ever argued the answer to disaffected rural men was Alex Jones, because we understood some messengers cost more than their audience is worth.

6. “This is censorship.”

Whether a public university should cancel a booked speech is an entirely fair question, but that’s not what happened this week. UW says the event failed its own process: planning that “did not meet the necessary level of rigor” for its Speaker Series, with an unconfirmed co-sponsor, unresolved funding, and questions over how the invitation itself was issued. If the university botched its procedures, it should fix its procedures. But that is where the constitutional question ends. The First Amendment has nothing to do with whether a party makes him a surrogate or whether citizens can say who he is. Criticism and judgment is not censorship. Meanwhile Jayapal who now invoking the Constitution on Piker’s behalf, wrote in 2019 that “hate speech is not ‘free speech’” while urging Facebook to take down groups she deemed hateful. The principle didn’t change; the target did. And when Trump threatened to arrest Adam Schiff, clips circulated of Piker cheering it on. He isn’t fighting for free speech. He is fighting for his speech.

7. “Republicans platforms monsters. Look at Vance, Miller, Trump.”

This one is the essence of the entire argument in support of Piker. “Your monsters are worse” is not “we have no monster.” The Left’s entire case against the right is that association is endorsement. You cannot spend a decade demanding Republicans disavow their fringe and then call the same standard cancel culture when it knocks on your door. Either the standard exists, or it doesn’t.

8. “He’s a class traitor. He’s on our side.”

He’s a rich entertainer — millions a year in streaming income, a $2.7 million West Hollywood home, a $200,000 Porsche, photographed in t-shirts that read “make the rich pay” — who, when the tabloids droned his house, joked to Rolling Stone that he’s “like the new transgender or the War Against Christmas.” A man who gets wealthy broadcasting radicalism hasn’t betrayed his class. He’s found its most profitable niche. The rage is the product.

9. “He’s not antisemitic. He’s just anti-Zionist.”

For years the movement’s answer to nervous Jews was: when we say Zionist, we don’t mean you. We mean an ideology, one that includes tens of millions of right-wing evangelical Christians. Piker closed that loophole. “It’s like saying you’re a liberal Nazi,” he has said of liberal Zionists, repeatedly and on the record. “Like, you want an Aryan majority ethno-state?” Now ask who a liberal Zionist is. It isn’t Pastor Hagee. There are no liberal Christian nationalists in that category. It is the Bernie-voting Jew who wants two states and peace; roughly eight in ten American Jews. He calls them Nazis. Now add that with the rest of the record: calling Orthodox Jews “inbred” (apologized, after backlash), calling a Jewish critic a “bloodthirsty pig-dog,” comparing a Houthi terrorist to Anne Frank, and saying “I do still believe that Zionism is a racist ideology,” reaffirmed this spring.

10. “He’s a nobody. Ignore him?”

His defenders killed this one themselves. Jayapal is only the latest: Abdul El-Sayed made him a Senate campaign surrogate. AOC streamed with him and, asked on ABC whether he belongs in the movement, said he was critical to the party’s ability to win back young men. Ro Khanna says Democrats must engage him. Tlaib, Omar and Sanders have appeared with him; Mamdani went on his stream on the way to Gracie Mansion. Add a New York Times op-ed, a New Yorker Festival slot, a Rolling Stone glamour profile and a public university’s speaker series, and that’s the full architecture of legitimacy— built around the man you just read nine excuses for.

“He’s a nobody” was true in 2019. It described the exact window when caring could have prevented this. The window is closed.

So the next time someone tells you Hasan Piker isn’t that bad, you don’t have to argue. Just ask which number they’re on. I watched all of this happen. He was a nobody, and no one cared. Now GQ shoots him for a cover story, Rolling Stone asks why anyone’s scared of him, The New York Times sends Ezra Klein to launder his words, NPR devotes a special episode to what he sees “that the rest of us are missing,” and members of Congress work the phones on his behalf. A rehabilitation campaign on this scale usually has to be bought. I don’t know if or who is paying for this— though Beijing, whose embassy promoted his travels while congressional investigators trace Chinese-linked money around his orbit, could hardly have purchased better. Neither could Qatar, which had just handed him a stage at its state-backed Doha summit, days before the same city hosted Hamas leadership. Any regime that wants America talked out of itself is getting the influence operation of its dreams.

Don’t let them fool you.

My surname, Mazzig, comes from Amazigh, the name of the indigenous people of North Africa. You probably know them as Berbers, which comes from the same root as barbarians. For obvious reasons, they prefer the name Amazigh, the name they call themselves, which means ‘free people.’ At the end of the seventh century, when Arab armies swept west across the Maghreb, colonizing every land, an Amazigh queen named Dihya led the resistance against the conquest. The Islamic armies called her a Jewish witch, Al Kahina. Even after the conquest, my father’s family carried the name Mazig through thirteen centuries in Tunisia, through every empire that claimed the place, until they were forced to leave to Israel with what little they could carry. My last name is older than the Arab presence in the land where it was given to me.

I’m telling you all of this because New York Magazine has just devoted its latest issue to defining my region, and by its definition, I am not from it.

The issue is called Habibi City. Its essay, When Eating Out Is Political: The Middle Eastern restaurant world has never been bigger, better, or more fraught, celebrates the rise of what it calls SWANA cuisine in New York, restaurants of Southwest Asia and North Africa, a region the magazine maps as running “from Palestine to Iran to Sudan.” And, don’t get me wrong, parts of this issue certainly deserve praise; the reporting on Little Syria in the 1880s is lovingly done. The portraits of the Persian and Afghan chefs are warm and informational, and those chefs have earned every praise. The history of Arab restaurateurs having to hide behind the word “Mediterranean” to survive post-9/11 suspicion is a real injustice that ought not to be forgotten.

I also understand the reasoning behind using the acronym. SWANA exists because older labels erased people. The term “Middle East” was coined in naval strategy to denote a region defined by its distance from Europe. “The Arab world” swallows the Amazigh, the Kurds, the Copts, the Assyrians, the Yazidis, the Druze, the Christians, the Zoroastrians, and every people who lived in the region before the conquests and never stopped living there. The magazine notes that letters keep getting added to the acronym so that no one is left out.

But the magazine is wrong. Every indigenous people of the region gets a letter, except one.

One million Jews were driven from Southwest Asia and North Africa in the twentieth century. From Baghdad, where my mother’s family had lived since the Babylonian exile. From Tunisia, Cairo, Sana’a, Tripoli, Aleppo, and Tehran. It was one of the largest forced displacements in the modern history of the region that the magazine has just spent a full issue celebrating— and not one of the articles mentions it once.

The omission is clearly intentional, and it’s not the only part I have a problem with.

Consider what the essay does say about Jews from the region. It quotes an old joke, “To succeed in Israeli cooking you need a Moroccan grandmother and if you don’t have one you better invent one.” It’s a subtle dig that implies Israeli identity is invented. But I did not invent the taste of my grandmother’s homemade hummus or the way her amba stings my tongue with just enough spice. Those meals she spent hours to prepare were not an illusion, but memories I hold dear. Maybe the food wasn’t first invented by a Jew in Israel, but Israel is the one place Jews can make it in peace, without headlines tearing us apart for stealing our own recipes.

The ridiculous gatekeeping of “Arab” cuisine is a structure that exists only to exclude certain people, in this case Jews. Think about the reality of food, for a minute. Let’s look at Shakshuka, a food my grandmother has made for me many times and a food people have said I have “appropriated” many times. The Tunisian food historian Rafram Chaddad traces it to the Amazigh triangle, the stretch of southern Tunisia and its borderlands where the indigenous people of North Africa simmered vegetable stews centuries before the Arab conquest. Before Amazigh people were forced to learn to pronounce the word “Habibi.”

It is also a dish whose most prominent ingredients are eggs and a tomato sauce. Tomatoes are, of course, from South America. So, obviously, it isn’t an ancient Arab dish, is it? And yet millions of Arabs enjoy it every day because, of course they do. It’s food; it exists to be shared and enjoyed, and when we discover ways to make it better, we make it better. Yet with Jews, our enjoyment is seen as nothing more than a diabolical scheme to steal what isn’t ours.

The essay even profiles an Israeli chef and describes her “Persian and Yemeni Jewish roots” without ever pausing to consider why the chef ended up in Israel. The answer is, obviously, that Jews were exiled from numerous Muslim countries simply because they were Jewish. But the essay fails to acknowledge the history of the region it is trying to educate on because it does not fit a narrative they are trying to spread.

‘Palestinian tartare’ is highlighted in the piece, too. A Levantine dish that Syrian Jewish families in New York have been serving for a century. One of the largest Syrian Jewish communities on Earth lives there, in fact. But the essay doesn’t mention them when it goes on about Syrian food. I wonder why.

Once you see the gatekeeping, you can’t unsee it. What seemed at first like a wonderful deep dive into Middle Eastern and North African history is instead a purity test that the author is determined to pass. Where it once mourned the harsh reality of Arab restaurants rebranding to “Mediterranean” to avoid harassment and violence, it subtly makes jabs at Israeli restaurants doing the same.

Diverse cuisine staying alive and being passed down for generations is great, unless a Jew is doing it.

And, of course, the justification is that it has nothing to do with Jews. Oh no, the New York Jews having their restaurants boycotted and vandalized aren’t suffering because of antisemitism; it is because, as the article, the whole issue even, claims, “Israel is committing genocide.” A statement made as if you were saying the sky is blue: an undeniable truth. For the record, Israel hasn’t been convicted of any such thing. The International Court of Justice has not once ruled that such a thing is true. But if the article left even any room for the question “Is this being done because of antisemitism,” then they would have failed the purity test they are so desperate to pass.

This isn’t the first time New York Magazine has engaged in the erasure of Jewish people. In early 2024, the magazine published an essay asking whether America was implicated in genocide in Gaza. The cover story came next: Israel indicted for the crimes of the century, published the very week that Iranian ballistic missiles were falling on Israeli apartment buildings, meters from my home. Media watchdogs documented its factual errors, and the editors corrected four of them. But the direction stayed the same.

To pretend that a people don’t have food is a way to dehumanize them. No nation lacks cuisine. Deprive Jews and Israelis of a culture, and you deprive us of our humanity.

We all have memories of tables with food, smiles, and family. It’s the most basic human experience there is. That is why it is turned into something else when it comes to Jews. I wasn’t eating a recipe that my grandmother’s grandmother perfected; I was devouring stolen food for the joy of having stolen it. It’d be comical if it wasn’t so hateful.

The only possessions my grandmothers could take with them from Iraq and Tunisia were the clothes on their backs and their recipes. I will die protecting them, as it’s the only inheritance I have, and I will be damned if I allow New York Magazine to steal it.

After Abdul El-Sayed won his Michigan primary, one of his first orders of business was to reassure the Jews.

“AIPAC and Israel are not the same as Judaism and the Jewish people,” he said. “I love Judaism and I love the Jewish people.” He went further. The Jewish people, he said, are a light unto the world.

I would like to believe him, but his record loudly disagrees. This is a man who has refused to say whether Israel should exist, and whose response to an attack on a Michigan synagogue was a speech about how “hurt people hurt people.” So the love is not unconditional. He loves Judaism, minus the roughly half of world Jewry who live in Israel and the vast majority elsewhere who feel bound to it.

He did not invent this arrangement. When Ms. Rachel, the most trusted children’s entertainer in America, faced a wave of antisemitism accusations over her Gaza posts, she answered through tears with her credentials: We have Jewish family, she said. A lot of my friends are Jewish.

A gentile accused of antisemitism can usually produce a Jew willing to vouch for him. She had her husband’s relatives. El-Sayed loves the good Jews.

Sure, a person can oppose an Israeli government and remain a friend to the Jewish people. I oppose Israel’s current government, and so do many Jews I admire.

But El-Sayed, and others who echo this rhetoric, are not talking about a certain government or policies they disagree with. They are talking about the country where half the world’s Jews live.

When Jewish actress Hannah Einbinder won her Emmy, she closed her speech with “free Palestine.” Pressed on it afterward, she explained herself. “It is my obligation as a Jewish person, to distinguish Jews from the state of Israel.”

Why is it a moral duty for Jews to proactively distinguish ourselves from the only country that gave many of our ancestors, both my grandmothers included, refuge? How can we be obliged to do something that is not actually possible, when you consider the centrality of Israel to our people’s liturgy? Judaism and Israel can’t be conflated, as El-Sayed has noted before. Judaism is an ethno-religion; Israel is where it began, where the civilization it sustained grew up, and where Jews sought sovereignty after thousands of years of persecution culminated in the Nazi genocide against us.

Israel and Judaism cannot be ripped apart either, and any Jew trying it anyway, to gain acceptance by the mob, is promoting a falsehood that gets those of us who can’t pretend away our connection killed.

The separation is meant to signal that bad Jews exist, and that the Jew performing it is nothing like them.

Matt Bernstein, an American Jewish influencer with millions of followers, endorsed El-Sayed. Michigan voters wondering who to choose, he wrote, needed only to look at where Ms. Rachel put her money. She donated $3,000 to El-Sayed.

In London, the singer Jessie Ware gained popularity with the queer community for years. Before October 7th she used to share my educational posts about Jewish identity and Israel. Her beloved podcast with her mother began around the Shabbat dinner table. These days she posts about American Jewish chefs and artists.

Throughout the war, she posted repeatedly against Israel, signing petitions to strip Israel of its ability to defend itself. This year, she performed at an anti-Israel concert in London, while people in her crowd held antisemitic posters aloft. On her platform, Jewishness is abundant. The Jewish state is the one thing that cannot be loved there. Jewish guests keep accepting the invitation anyway.

These are the Jews who get loved. They arrive kosher for gentiles.

Hannah Arendt watched this arrangement destroy a civilization. In The Origins of Totalitarianism she called them exception Jews (Ausnahmejuden).

Nineteenth-century Europe admitted certain Jews, the cultivated and the useful, on the explicit understanding that they stood apart from the Jewish masses.

Arendt described the bargain in one line: to be accepted, a Jew had to be a Jew and yet be unlike other Jews.

She also saw the trap. An exception proves a rule. The Jew who accepts the title of a good Jew has signed a statement that bad Jews exist, that they are the many, and that the suspicion aimed at them is fair. He has endorsed the hatred and negotiated a personal exemption from it. He doesn’t control the terms of the exemption, whether he admits that to himself or not.

A century later, the entry fee has changed and the door has not. Arendt’s exception earned his place through assimilation, through Goethe and good manners and distance from the shtetl. Today’s exception earns it through denunciation. He keeps the Jewishness on display and aims it at the Jews who remain attached to Israel, which is to say most of us. The old exception left his people quietly. The new one makes the leaving his brand. Einbinder calls it an obligation. Arendt would have recognized the terms.

The deal has been tested before, and we know how it ends. The assimilated Jews of Germany believed their exemptions were permanent. They had the war medals and the professorships. Some had baptismal certificates, too. When the mood turned, the society that had granted every exception revoked them together, and the lines those Jews had drawn between themselves and the Ostjuden meant nothing.

Conditional acceptance is a lease, and the tenant never holds the pen. Every Jew who agrees to be the acceptable kind confirms that an unacceptable kind exists, and that the unacceptable kind is most of the Jewish world. The circle of Jews permitted to live in peace gets smaller each time, and the exception stands inside it only until the man at the door redraws it.

So when El-Sayed says he loves the Jewish people, I take him at his word, with one correction. He loves a Jewish people of his own design, small enough to fit on a stage beside him. The rest of us, stubborn and bound to Israel, he has already turned away. A few years ago I wrote a book about being the wrong kind of Jew, and I meant it as memoir. Men like El-Sayed are working to make it a prophecy. The Jews standing beside them should understand that the title has room for everyone, eventually.

On Sunday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on ABC’s This Week and was asked about Hasan Piker. She answered: “Much hay was made about the fact that we lost young men in the last election. Many of the same consultants that are wringing their hands today were the same ones talking about how we have to go on Joe Rogan and not be so willing to engage in cancel culture.”

AOC appeared to throw up her hands, abandoning her usual idealism. It’s not as though she agrees with Piker, the thoughtful monologue implied, but that is what the kids are watching these days. What to do?

It’s amazing how the Democratic Socialists’ political imagination dries up the moment they are asked to think of an alternative to wholesale endorsement of a man who has repeatedly pronounced his support for China, Russia, terror groups and recently claimed that liberal Zionists (read: Jewish Democrats) are actually “liberal Nazis.”

She’s right about the problem. Democrats did lose young men, badly. The consultant class that spent a decade lecturing everyone about tone has no standing to clutch pearls now. That’s the right problem. But we need to talk about the wrong solution being pushed right now.

Start by asking which young men? AOC left that part vague. The collapse she described was concentrated among young white men. CIRCLE, the youth-vote research center at Tufts, found that young white men broke for Trump 63 to 35 in 2024 after favoring Biden by six points in 2020, a thirty-four point swing in a single cycle. Young women moved the other way, backing Harris by seventeen points. Some of that swing is about media diets. Some of it, and this deserves saying out loud, is about how young white men responded to a Black woman at the top of the ticket. The Piker theory answers neither. His audience already leans white, male, and progressive, and no booking strategy on any stream addresses sexism.

The word “incendiary” is doing a lot of work in the coverage of Piker, so his record is worth quoting . Piker said America “deserved” 9/11, then called it satire, then stood by it again. He told Dan Crenshaw, a Navy SEAL who lost an eye in Afghanistan, that service doesn’t earn respect. For the past two years he has explained away the men who filmed themselves murdering families in their homes, because those families were Israeli. His charisma was never in doubt. Father Coughlin had charisma too, and thirty million radio listeners a week in the 1930s. What Democrats keep dodging is the question of what they legitimize when they sit in the chair.

Exposure carries values whether the guest intends it or not. When a sitting congresswoman treats a streamer as the indispensable bridge to young voters, she places him inside the Overton window. Every Democrat who books the stream tells young men that this counts as serious politics.

Here is what makes the bargain truly absurd: the messenger doesn’t even deliver. Democrats lost one group of young men, and Piker supplies a different one. His audience is self-selected for agreement; he shed a third of his viewers the moment his takes on October 7 got uncomfortable, and the ones who stayed ranked Bernie Sanders as their favorite politician, according to research on his base. The Rogan and Theo Von voters who drifted right are somewhere else entirely. As for the fabled Hasan bump: the three candidates he championed in California all lost, and in Michigan, the state where he was crowned kingmaker this week, eighty percent of voters had not heard enough about him to form an opinion. El-Sayed won on the strength of young, college-educated progressives, the coalition Democrats already own. Sixty percent of American voters have never heard of Piker at all. The party is trading its oldest moral commitment for an audience it mostly already had.

The generation absorbing all that borrowed legitimacy makes the gamble worse. The ADL’s tracking survey, which has measured antisemitic attitudes since 1964, found for the first time that the youngest Americans hold the most anti-Jewish views: Gen Z and Millennials now agree with more classic antisemitic tropes than Gen X or Boomers. More than half of Gen Z told the ADL it would be at least somewhat acceptable for a close friend to support Hamas. In a survey published this year, only 52 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 said Israel has a right to exist, and nearly a third of adults under 45 called Jews a threat to the unity of American society. The most antisemitic generation in modern American polling is the one Democrats propose to reach through a man who presents terror apologia as anti-establishment candor.

So what’s the alternative? Because “right problem, wrong solution” is a cheap line unless I offer one.

The consultants frame the choice as Piker or silence, and I know that framing is false because disproving it is my job. For years, I have convened creators and influencers with combined audiences in the tens of millions, most of whom had never touched the subjects we brought them into. Gaming streamers, Broadway actors, comedians, fitness creators, food writers. What that work taught me is that young audiences follow individual people they trust, and that those people are everywhere once the fixation on a single savior ends. The reach Democrats believe only Piker can deliver is scattered across dozens of platforms. None of them has ever legitimized hostage taking as political protest.

Democrats already know how to do this, because they’ve done it. Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg both sat for hours on Flagrant, Andrew Schulz’s comedy podcast with millions of young male listeners, and Buttigieg’s appearance was widely judged a grand slam. Kamala Harris went on Club Shay Shay to talk directly to young Black men, a group who gave her 63% of their votes. Gavin Newsom spent four hours on the Shawn Ryan Show debating guns and lockdowns with a veteran host who openly disagrees with him. Those are the mainstream shows the lost voters actually watch, and none of those hosts required the party to swallow terror apologia as the price of admission.

AOC is right that the hand-wringing consultants failed, and she’s right that the party has to show up where young people actually are. Where she loses me is the premise that showing up requires Hasan Piker. It doesn’t require him strategically, because most of his American audience was voting blue anyway. And it can’t require him morally, because a party that claims moral clarity cannot treat hatred of Jews as the cost of doing business with young voters.

Abdul El-Sayed has won the Democratic primary for the Michigan Senate seat and will face off against Mike Rogers in the general election in November.

El-Sayed is projected to lose against Mike Rogers, the Republican candidate. Rogers served Michigan in the House of Representatives between 2001 and 2015. He was narrowly defeated by Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin in their 2024 Senate race, and is now running again.

Heading into the Senate elections in November, Democrats have now weathered the nomination of El-Sayed in Michigan despite his gloomy prospects and the Graham Platner fiasco in Maine. Forty-seven Senate seats currently vote with the Democrats, to Republicans’ 53. In short, an already near-impossible challenge just got more difficult. The likelihood that Republicans will maintain control of the Senate just increased enormously with El-Sayed’s primary win.

On the same night, two other DSA-backed House candidates, Cori Bush in St. Louis and Nila Devanath in Virginia, lost their races. In Virginia’s second district, Jewish, pro-Israel candidate Elaine Luria defeated Devanath in the primary with a whopping 80 percent of the vote.

Despite that, and despite all the evidence against it, you’re about to see adherents of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) flank of the Democratic Party claim their strategy has what it takes to win swing states and propel a Democrat back to the presidency.

It’s tempting to believe that a few anti-Israel slogans are all it will take to win elections, but El-Sayed’s victory is actually more evidence to the contrary. Here’s why.

New York City doesn’t reflect the United States

In New York City, where Democratic nominees are almost assured to win in the general election, the recent wins by candidates backed by the DSA could fairly be interpreted as vindication of the DSA’s populist strategy of bashing Israel and AIPAC to energize voters.

But even in hyper-liberal and wealthy NYC, the failure of that strategy among working-class, Black, and Hispanic voters was evident. In Upper Manhattan and the Bronx, where Mamdani-backed candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier ultimately prevailed, she did so while losing the Bronx portion of her district, as well as majority low-income precincts and majority Hispanic precincts.

Claire Valdez, another of Mamdani’s picks, won handily in a district that includes the Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Ridgewood, and Bushwick neighborhoods.

These are neighborhoods that have undergone intensive gentrification in the past two decades. For example, in Greenpoint/Williamsburg, the share of households making more than $250,000 a year skyrocketed from 2 percent to 20 percent in the last two decades, whereas the share of households making less than $20,000 fell by 10 percent, from 21 percent to 11 percent.

In Bushwick, the white population increased from 3 percent in 2000 to 31 percent in recent years; the Hispanic population fell from 68 percent to 40 percent in the same timeframe. Meanwhile, the share of households making more than $250,000, as in Williamsburg, rose from 1 percent to 9 percent.

Valdez’s victory was thus less a story of who voted for her, and more a story of who was no longer there to vote. The champions of the working class in the DSA essentially reaped the rewards of two decades of gentrification and displacement that drove working-class voters from NYC. Their victories there aren’t a weathervane for the nation. They’re just a weathervane of the wealthy.

Doesn’t a win in Michigan prove the DSA’s strategy?

A close read of New York clearly weakens the hypothesis that the DSA’s strategy should be adopted by the Democratic Party writ large to win back the presidency. But what about El-Sayed’s primary victory? El-Sayed isn’t a member of DSA, but the group championed him throughout the primary season. Doesn’t his victory mean the DSA was right that bashing Israel wins votes? Michigan is a swing state, after all. Does an anti-Israel candidate’s victory there mean the next Democratic presidential candidate should come out swinging for BDS?

Not exactly.

When analyzing to what extent the El-Sayed/Stevens race can be considered instructive for the presidential election, it is important to note that Michigan uses a winner-takes-all method to determine which presidential candidate receives its 16 electoral college votes. The statewide winner of the popular vote is awarded all of the state’s electoral votes. The same method is used in 48 states and Washington, DC.

Similarly, for Senate races, the winner is determined by the statewide popular vote, not a county-by-county tally. Theoretically, a candidate could lose the majority of counties, but have such overwhelming wins in the most populous areas that they still take the state.

What’s interesting about El-Sayed’s primary victory, when looked at from the perspective of its value as a proxy for presidential elections, is that it worked exactly the opposite of how recent Democratic presidential victories have been won.

Michigan is 77 percent white as of the last census, and 14 percent Black. It is home to the United States’ largest Black-majority city, Detroit. Of Detroit’s 650,000 residents, 75 percent are Black. Detroit is in Wayne County, Michigan’s most populous county, which is home to over 17 percent of Michigan’s overall population.

In the 2020 presidential election, massive Black turnout in Detroit was key to Biden’s win in Michigan. That victory, and Michigan’s 16 electoral votes, propelled Biden to the presidency. Conversely, Michigan swung Republican and helped secure Trump’s victories in both 2016 and 2024, when turnout in Wayne County trended lower.

“It is unquestionable that Black folks in Detroit is what carried Joe Biden to victory in the state of Michigan,” Reverend Kenneth Flowers of Greater New Mount Moriah Baptist Church in Detroit told the Detroit Free Press after Biden’s win in 2020. “The Black folks in Detroit, Oakland County, Wayne County, we’re the ones that took Joe Biden over the top.”

More broadly, Biden’s strong support from Black voters helped him win Georgia, a state Democrats hadn’t won since Bill Clinton clinched it in 1992, and likely in other states, too.

In the El-Sayed/Stevens race, what’s most notable isn’t El-Sayed’s victory in a primary, as he will likely lose in the general election. It’s that Haley Stevens, a pro-Israel moderate, won handily not just in Wayne County (home to Detroit), but in nearby Oakland, Macomb, Genesee, and Saginaw counties as well. These five counties account for 45 percent of Michigan’s overall population, and 80 percent of its Black population.

In short, while El-Sayed managed to win a race against another Democrat by a razor-thin margin, it was Stevens who demonstrated her popularity with the voters who have actually helped Democrats win Michigan over Republicans in recent presidential races.

The more obvious caveat is that El-Sayed carried the state by a little over a percentage point. Of course, a win is a win. I’m not debating his victory’s legitimacy.

But it would be foolish for the Democratic Party to mistake El-Sayed’s win for a referendum, whether or not Twitch streamers and social media algorithms spend the next news cycle declaring it one.

My husband has been in the fashion industry for decades. Fashion is the language of our home. I have sat through more conversations about draping and bias cuts than I ever expected to, and I have come to love the industry’s seriousness about innovation and beauty.

So when I say John Galliano is one of the most gifted designers alive, I am repeating what everyone in fashion already knows. My husband knows it better than most.

Years ago, at one of the biggest fashion houses in the world, Galliano came to the store and my husband refused to work with him. Everyone understood why.

Here is what everyone understood. In 2011, at a restaurant in Paris, Galliano told strangers at the next table that he loved Hitler. He told the women filming him that their mothers and their forefathers would have been gassed. On another night, at the same restaurant, he abused a woman with antisemitic slurs. It was on video. A French court convicted him. Dior fired him.

On Friday, the New York Times reported that Galliano will be the subject of the Met’s next Costume Institute exhibition, the show that sets the theme for the Met Gala. The exhibition is called Horizons. It makes him the third living designer in the museum’s history to receive a solo show, after Yves Saint Laurent and Rei Kawakubo. There is no higher honor the institution can give.

I’ll start with the strongest counterargument: Judaism has a word for return from error: Teshuvah. It demands recognition of the wrong, repair toward the wronged, and changed behavior when the person is tested the same way again. Galliano spent years in recovery. He studied with a rabbi in London and with the late Abe Foxman, who led the ADL, survived the Holocaust as a hidden child, and vouched for his sincerity until the end of his life. Rabbis who sat with Galliano this spring came away believing him. The ADL accepted his apology years ago and says his repair should be applauded. I take all of that seriously. If the question were whether John Galliano the man deserves a path back to his craft, that question was answered in 2014, when Margiela hired him and the industry exhaled. That was a question about one man’s soul. This is a question about an institution’s risk management.

In 2024, Anna Wintour and curator Andrew Bolton planned this exact exhibition. The Cut reported what happened next. The museum’s leadership panicked, board members stepped in, and the show was killed. The replacement theme, assembled at the last minute, was Sleeping Beauties. Bolton now tells a different story: the board simply needed more time, and the hesitation had nothing to do with Galliano’s past.

He is entitled to that account. He gave it on launch day, with a show to sell, and it asks us to believe the museum shelved its biggest exhibition over scheduling. Meanwhile a person familiar with the deliberations told the Times that the Met’s own leaders understand this decision could be a mistake with serious repercussions. A fashion journalist I spoke to after the announcement told me the same: the museum knows exactly what it is walking into. Institutions do not brace for repercussions from a scheduling choice.

The canceled show got its coronation anyway. Galliano dressed two of the four celebrity co-chairs at the replacement gala, and Zendaya wore him twice, arriving in his Margiela and returning to the carpet in a gown from his first Givenchy collection. The board had killed the retrospective. The industry staged it on the steps.

So the Met’s own board looked at a Galliano retrospective two years ago and would not touch it. Then the same institution looked at the same designer, with the same record, and announced him as the centerpiece of fashion’s biggest night.

Galliano did not change between those two decisions. The video did not change. The conviction did not change. His apologies were already a decade old when the board said no.

The only variable that moved is us.

In 2024, honoring a man convicted of antisemitic abuse carried a cost the Met was unwilling to pay. In 2026, the board ran the numbers again and found the cost had fallen to roughly zero. That is a market read on how much anyone cares when Jews object, delivered by the people best positioned to know.

They did not reach that conclusion in a vacuum. Last fall, Glamour named Ms. Rachel a Woman of the Year while she flooded her feeds with accusations against the Jewish state, advocacy she wraps in her Christian faith. She accepted the award in a dress embroidered with drawings by Palestinian children and told the room they were victims of the Jewish nation targeting non-Jewish children. The magazine called her a trailblazer.

A few weeks later, Anna Wintour sat beside Sheikha Moza bint Nasser at the Fashion Trust Arabia gala in Doha. Moza is Qatar’s most glamorous export and a woman who publicly mourned Yahya Sinwar, the man behind October 7. I wrote about that evening, and about her own fund, which bought Valentino outright in 2012 and still controls it.

Vogue never addressed any of it. There was nothing to address, because nothing happened. No advertiser flinched, no invitation was rescinded, and the woman who eulogized the architect of the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust remained a perfectly acceptable seatmate for the most powerful person in fashion.

In January, Galliano sat front row at Dior’s couture show, his first time back at the house that fired him, and was mobbed afterward by Bernard Arnault and his family. The owners embraced him where the cameras could see. In March, Zara signed him to a two-year collaboration. The response to both was excitement.

In June, Prada named Saint Levant a global brand ambassador. His music claims Haifa, Jerusalem, and Gaza as one Palestine, from the river to the sea. After the Amsterdam attacks on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, he suggested the Israelis had it coming for setting foot in a country that “isn’t theirs” and thanked the violent mob. Prada studied that record and saw a marketing asset. I wrote then that hate sells, and that the brands know it. The ambassadorship stands.

This is how antisemitism actually returns. It does not arrive in boots and uniform. It arrives as a series of quiet tests, each one small, each one deniable, each one watching the one before it. A magazine crowns a woman who claims Jews intentionally murder non-Jewish children for pleasure, and pays no price. An editor sits beside a eulogist of Sinwar and pays no price. A fashion empire embraces the man it once fired, a retailer signs him, a luxury house hires a man who celebrates attacks on Jews, and none of it costs anyone anything. A museum board that said no in 2024 studies those outcomes and says yes in 2026. I have spent this year documenting the influence operations built to make hating us feel organic. The incidents look unrelated. They are the same experiment, run at different scales, returning the same result.

And this time, the museum saw the objection coming and planned for it. The announcement did not just arrive. It arrived through an exclusive in the Times, by Vanessa Friedman, on a Friday, as Jews were heading into Shabbat. It arrived with a year of closed-door meetings between the museum and rabbis and Jewish leaders in New York, meetings that included Wintour, Bolton, and Galliano himself. It arrived with accountability language already drafted. Some of the rabbis in those rooms told the Times they worried they were being used as a Band-Aid. They said it themselves, in the paper that broke the story. The consultation was real. So was its function.

Bolton’s own defense threw me off: “I completely understand why the timing might feel particularly difficult now, given the alarming rise of hate,” he told the Times, “but I do feel it makes the current questions more urgent — not less.”

Follow that logic in one direction only: antisemitism is surging, therefore the museum hands its grandest stage to the most famous fashion designer alive ever convicted of it. Our pain is the exhibition’s justification, and the worse this year gets for Jews, the more urgent the celebration becomes.

No museum would run that argument about anyone else.

A surge in anti-Asian violence would not make a convicted anti-Asian abuser’s retrospective urgent. It would make it unthinkable. And notice when the urgency arrived. In 2024, when confronting these questions carried a price, the museum’s sense of responsibility told it to wait. The responsibility to confront arrived together with the all-clear. Notice, too, the vocabulary. He speaks of “the alarming rise of hate,” of “a moment of heightened division.” Hate. Division. Weather. Conditions that rise and fall with no one committing them. A man told women at a restaurant table that their families would have been gassed, and the curator honoring him fifteen years later, in a statement about accountability, prefers not to say the word for what that was.

There is a world in which a legitimate Galliano exhibition could take place. It would show the Givenchy years and the Dior years in their full brilliance, since the brilliance is real. And it would place the fall at the center of the room. What he said, who was wounded, what repair he attempted. It would treat his Teshuvah as an open question the visitor has to answer. That show would honor Jewish pain and Galliano’s craft at the same time, and I would buy a ticket.

Bolton has promised something close to it. He plans to open the show with an orientation gallery about what he calls “the rupture.” He says euphemisms should be avoided, a standard he credits to the Jewish leaders he met. He says his job is the most accurate version of events, and Galliano’s own words will carry much of it. Good. Write it down. Those commitments were made in public, on the record, before a single gown was hung, and they are now the test. The rupture has a name, a date, a video, a conviction, and a firing. If they appear in the galleries as themselves, at the same scale as the dresses, the Met will have built the first honest show of its kind, and I will say so. If “the rupture” turns out to be a soft gray panel near the coat check, we will know that “ethical accountability” was a phrase drafted for a press release, and that the rabbis’ worry was the most accurate sentence in the whole announcement. The catalog and the wall text lock long before May. The checking can start now.

Wintour is her own line item. The Times calls her Galliano’s most powerful champion. She orchestrated his return and was among the first to wear his clothes in public after the disgrace. She has argued for years that our culture condemns too quickly. She planned this show twice, chairs the gala that funds the department, and the Costume Institute’s galleries are literally named in her honor, which means the institution weighing the risk and the person who spent a decade eliminating it are not at arm’s length. She sat in the meetings with the rabbis this spring, months after sitting beside Sinwar’s eulogist in Doha. She has never been made to answer for the pattern on the record. Every journalist with access to her between now and May has the question ready. Someone should ask it with the cameras on. Several of you reading this have that access. You know who you are.

And the stakes are larger than one museum. The show is planned to travel after New York, a rare honor, and the leaders of those institutions are watching the reaction closely. They are not waiting to see the gowns. They are waiting to see what the Met gets away with. Whatever survives the reaction in New York ships to the next city as settled precedent, wall text and all.

And the women from the restaurant, the ones who were told their mothers and their forefathers would have been gassed, have no names in this story. They never did. In May, a thousand cameras will climb the museum steps. Every gown will carry a credit. Every guest will be announced. They will still be women who sat down for a drink in Paris and found out what they were worth. The exhibition will tell his half of the story. Someone has to keep theirs.

In January 2009, a judge at Snaresbrook Crown Court sentenced George O’Dowd to fifteen months in prison. The world knew him as Boy George. A jury had convicted him of falsely imprisoning Audun Carlsen, a Norwegian model he handcuffed to a wall fixture in his London flat. Carlsen told the court he wrenched the fixture loose to get free, then ran into the street in his underwear while the singer swung a metal chain at him. The judge called the act premeditated, callous and humiliating. Carlsen has said he was diagnosed with PTSD and spent a decade in therapy.

George served four months. Then British entertainment welcomed him home. He coached on The Voice UK for the BBC, then The Voice Australia. In 2022 he joined I’m a Celebrity, and when a few viewers objected, ITV issued a statement about spent convictions and kept filming. In 2024 he starred in Moulin Rouge on Broadway. This summer he was cast as King Herod in Jesus Christ Superstar at the London Palladium, sharing the role with Richard Armitage and Julian Clary. Opening night was set for August 3.

He never made it to the stage.

On July 26, he posted a song called “We Will Dance Again,” captioned with a single word: Shalom. The title is the phrase survivors of the Nova festival massacre made into a vow. The lyrics reject the word genocide and call the war what he believes it is: a war. They describe what happened to young women at Nova on October 7. They accuse fellow musicians of waving flags and following the herd, and they close with a plain declaration that he stands with the Jews.

The backlash took hours. Within four days, his manager announced he would no longer appear at the Palladium. The statement praised George for standing by his “personal convictions” and never named them. It did not have to. Everyone reading it knew which convictions were meant, because nothing else about the man had ever cost him a job.

His critics deserve one concession. George makes a poor martyr. His record is real, and his victim is real, and I hold no brief for him. The song itself is an awkward piece of work. He admitted he made it with AI, and joked that he would have struggled to write it with a human. If your complaint is that a pop icon outsourced his conscience to software, that complaint has merit. The sequence tells the truth anyway. Nobody organized to remove him from a stage over synthetic vocals. The campaign began when the words became clear, and the words were about Jews.

Here is what the timeline establishes, and it should unsettle you far more than one aging pop star’s career. A violent conviction was survivable. Pleading guilty to filing a false police report in New York, where officers found cocaine in his apartment, was survivable. Four decades of feuds and provocations were survivable. The industry priced all of it, paid it, and booked him again and again. One song of solidarity with Jews exceeded the budget in four days.

If George were the only data point, you could argue his history finally caught up with him. He is one of two.

In June, Gwyneth Paltrow appeared in a commercial for 51 Park, a luxury residential tower in Herzliya, a coastal city north of Tel Aviv. The ad was filmed in New York, and it contains no politics of any kind. The tower stands on undisputed ground in a wealthy beach town. She wakes up, goes for a run, and tells her driver the building she lives in is in Herzliya. For this, an influencer with 3.4 million followers renamed her “Gwynicide Paltrow,” and her Instagram flooded with accusations of complicity in genocide over an ad she never even posted herself. One celebrity asked publicly whether she was a genuinely nasty person or just stupid, and concluded she needed to be cancelled.

Her actual record is worth reviewing. Paltrow spent two decades selling pseudoscience through Goop, including a settlement with California prosecutors over unsupported health claims for jade eggs. She sat through a televised ski-crash trial. She has delivered enough out-of-touch moments to sustain a small meme economy. Through it all, the public response was mockery: parodies and jokes about kale. The first time in her adult life that she faced organized hatred, actual venom, demands for her erasure, was the moment she said the name of an Israeli city out loud.

Two celebrities, opposite profiles. One carries a conviction for chaining a man to a wall. The other’s worst offense is a rock crystal. One made an explicit political statement. The other made none at all. Both discovered the same tripwire in the same summer, and it had nothing to do with harm or guilt. Proximity to Jews was sufficient.

That is the finding, and it required no leaked memo to uncover. The enforcement mechanism published its own price list in real time. Assault, drugs, deception and quackery all sit in the forgivable column. Standing with Jews, or standing near them, sits alone in the other one.

The same runs in the opposite direction. In June, Prada named the rapper Saint Levant its global ambassador and pushed a campaign video to 33 million followers in which he wore a pendant of the land from the river to the sea with Israel removed from the outline. This is the same performer who stood on a stage in November 2024, days after mobs hunted Israeli soccer fans through the streets of Amsterdam, and thanked the attackers for taking care of business. A luxury house reviewed that record and saw the face of a brand. Then in November, Glamour crowned Ms. Rachel a Woman of the Year for her Gaza advocacy, and the room rose to its feet as she described the war with the exact word Boy George was pushed off a stage for refusing. Weeks earlier she had become a global ambassador for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. Her care for children in Gaza pushed her to such extreme that she repeats extreme anti-Jewish rhetoric in the name of Christianity. The asymmetry is still the story. One vocabulary earns ovations and ambassadorships. The other vocabulary earns an unlit theater.

I have documented this pattern from other angles, from the DJ hounded out of her own concert in France for being Jewish to the coordinated networks that manufacture outrage on demand. Boy George and Gwyneth Paltrow are useful because they remove every excuse. You cannot claim this is about accountability when the industry forgave the chain and punished the song.

September will bring the dates George was supposed to perform, and other artists will keep making the same calculation he made, weighing solidarity against a career. The evidence of what that costs is public now, and the score is easy to keep: which people face campaigns, and which never do, whatever they have done.

If this reached you, share it with someone who still believes cancellation follows wrongdoing. And if you want this work to continue, subscribe. I intend to keep the record either way.

Last week I had dinner with a woman I met at a conference. She isn’t Jewish. Somewhere in the middle of the meal, she told me she was surprised. What she sees about Israel on social media had convinced her she understood how Jewish people felt about it. When she started actually talking with Jewish people, including me, very few of us matched the image of Jews cultivated on her feed.

Then she said something I haven’t stopped thinking about. “I think it’s because people felt for a long time like they can’t speak about antisemitism,” she said. “They can’t ask questions. And now that the dam is open, it’s a flood.”

She was describing the conversation around Jews. She could have been describing the conversation around almost anyone. For a long time, asking about each other’s cultures became taboo, all in the name of tolerance.

There are good reasons why it isn’t socially acceptable to walk up to a stranger and interrogate them about their visible identity. It is exhausting to exist as a walking exhibit of one’s culture, sexuality, religion, or race. No one should be forced to hold all the answers to questions they are still working through themselves. When a gay man flinches at an “innocent” question about his life, he is drawing on data. When Black Americans decline to serve as a free seminar for every curious stranger, they are protecting something real. The guardrails came from experience, most of it bitter.

The stakes of getting this wrong became clear again this week. The J7 Large Communities’ Task Force Against Antisemitism released its second Annual Report on Antisemitism, and it documents the deadliest year for antisemitic violence in the diaspora since the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires. Twenty people were murdered in J7 countries in 2025 alone: fifteen at a Hanukkah event on Bondi Beach in Sydney, two at Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur, two at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., and a grandmother in Boulder, Colorado. The Sydney attack came several days after the J7’s first Australian summit closed with a warning that threats to Jewish communities were rising. Behind those murders sits a much larger pattern of everyday hostility. The seven countries with the largest Jewish communities outside Israel recorded more than 91,000 antisemitic incidents between 2021 and 2025, with Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom each logging thousands in 2025 alone. Four of these countries saw incidents dip slightly from their 2024 peak, but the dip barely registers against the trend. Every country still sits far above where it stood before October 7, and Ireland, covered for the first time this year, shows the same climb. Two years ago, a body count like this would have been unimaginable. Now it reads as the expected outcome of a slow slide toward normalization, where each fresh attack shocks less than the one before it.

None of this violence exists because someone failed to ask a Jewish colleague a curious question at lunch. Antisemites did this. But solving antisemitism requires more than stopping attacks after they start, and one piece of that larger project is rebuilding a culture where people feel safe enough to ask honest questions instead of forming opinions from a feed.

So where did the idea take hold that asking is itself an act of aggression?

The idea that we should speak correctly to avoid harming others has its roots in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, developed in part by Edward Sapir and his student, Benjamin Lee Whorf. The idea is that the language available to a culture shapes what that culture is able to perceive. Sapir was himself the son of a cantor, raised in an observant Jewish household. He grew up speaking Yiddish. His linguistic work fed directly into a broader mid-twentieth-century American project: choosing words carefully because words carry power. The New Left and second-wave feminists built on that insight, insisting that inclusive language mattered because exclusionary language did real harm. This was a defensible and often correct idea.

Then it met a culture where every conversation is recorded, and every misstep can end a career. Cancel culture did not invent the instinct toward careful speech. It weaponized it, transforming “choose your words with care” into “do not risk the question at all.” The safer move became silence. The flood the woman at dinner described is what happens when the dam of silence finally breaks.

Americans have tried to answer each other’s curiosity. In the 1930s and 1940s, the National Conference of Christians and Jews sent a rotating trio, a priest, a minister, and a rabbi, on tour together for what became known as Brotherhood Week. For plenty of Americans in small towns, that rabbi standing next to his Christian counterparts was the first Jew they had ever knowingly met. Tom Lehrer later mocked the whole enterprise in his song “National Brotherhood Week.” The criticism that proclaimed tolerance couldn’t mask very real racial inequality was fair. The tolerance-trio format was stiff and performative. But it also put Jews in front of Americans who had no other point of contact, and it treated the resulting curiosity as normal rather than dangerous.

Sesame Street did something similar for children, introducing many diverse characters and holidays into a format built on direct, simple questions. Its limitation is built into its premise. Children ask their questions on the show. Where are adults supposed to ask them?

In his 1974 book “The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity” in 1974, John Murray Cuddihy examined an earlier collision: European Jewish intellectuals entering nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Gentile institutions built on Protestant codes of civility. Freud, Marx, and Levi-Strauss each carried Jewish culture, shaped by centuries of Talmudic argument and shtetl debate, into rooms that expected something gentler. Cuddihy called that mismatch the ordeal of civility, and the phrase describes a demand still being made today: trade a tradition built on blunt questioning for a tradition that avoids questions altogether.

We should refuse that trade. Bad-faith provocateurs like Candace Owens do not get to own the act of asking questions about Jews. Their questions function as accusations dressed up with a question mark. But the answer to bad-faith interrogation is not silence. It is confident, substantive answers to people asking in good faith.

Asking a question other people consider too rude to ask is not a break from Jewish tradition. It sits closer to its center. The Talmud records arguments that never fully resolve. Yeshiva study pairs two students against a single text and expects neither one to let the other off easy. The Passover seder includes an entire ritual around asking four questions. The seder answers the questions, instead of quieting them.

Israel has built its own modern answer to the same problem. Kan, Israel’s public broadcaster, has a recurring series called “Sorry for the Question.” “Sorry for the Question,” adapted from the Australian format “You Can’t Ask That,” gives one stigmatized group inside Israeli society an episode at a time. Transgender Israelis, Holocaust survivors’ grandchildren, autistic adults, recovering addicts, terminally ill patients: each group sits alone in front of a camera and answers anonymous questions submitted by the public, the ones people are usually too afraid or too polite to ask out loud. The show does not fix Israeli society’s own blind spots, and it has plenty. But it treats a stranger’s uncomfortable question as something worth answering honestly rather than something to dodge. Perhaps that instinct is worth borrowing, before the flood sweeps us away.

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Marc was cooking with one AirPod in, half listening to a podcast. I was at the kitchen table with my laptop open. He looked up and said, honestly, why are we even staying here?

He didn’t say where he meant instead. He didn’t need to. It’s Tel Aviv or Miami, and it has been for a while.

I used to be the one who asked. For the first couple of years in London, I would raise it, and he would talk me down. Now he raises it, and I go quiet.

This weekend the Times of Israel ran another piece about Jews leaving New York. A single mother who moved to Jersey City three days after the primaries. A woman who left Greenwich Village after her sixth grader got a group text from classmates asking if any Jews wanted to go to the chambers. Aliyah applications from New York are up 31 percent since the mayoral election.

I have read this article many times. In 2015, it was The Atlantic asking whether it was time for the Jews to leave Europe, based on a poll in which 58 percent of British Jews said Jews may have no long-term future here. Before that, it was France, over and over, since 2000. The story is true every time somebody writes it, and every time someone decides to leave.

For many Jewish communities that no longer exist, like my grandmother’s in Baghdad, leaving took years. My grandmother, Hela, left a full decade after the two-day pogrom that destroyed any semblance of security Iraqi Jews once felt in 1941. Even when you know it’s time, it takes time. There are hold outs. There are people who stay. There are people who return after the grass doesn’t end up any greener in Miami or Tel Aviv. And to their credit, the reporters write the stories with a question mark at the end. I’m not claiming to know where this leads for New York, or Paris, or London. I’m just telling you how it feels.

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A woman was killed in Berlin’s Tiergarten Park on Saturday night. I still don’t know her name.

I know a great deal about the man who killed her. He flew to Lebanon in 2025 trying to reach Syria and join ISIS. A military court there sentenced him to three months. A German court found he had posted Islamic State propaganda to his Instagram account. Berlin prosecutors requested in May that he stay in custody and were told no. All of that information was repeated endlessly in post after post.

She is “a woman.” The other twenty-nine are “injured, several critically.” A man named Abdul drove a white van down a path a few hundred meters from the Brandenburg Gate, where the closing party of Christopher Street Day was still going on. He drove into a crowd of people walking home from the largest queer celebration in Germany, crashed into a tree, and stabbed several people. Then he ran away.

By Sunday afternoon, before anyone knew who she was, the argument about what her murder “proved” was raging.

Support for the murderer

Al Jazeera English put the story on its Facebook page on Saturday night. Eighteen hours later, the post had collected around 9,700 reactions. Roughly 3,200 of them were the laughing emoji. About a thousand were sad ones.

The comments didn’t hide their contempt for the murdered woman. Just one died!? Salute. Salute to the person who did it. A message from God. One man asked whether the car was all right. Another wrote that God had used the driver to put a stop to the devil’s work, and 112 people agreed with him.

A comment section is not a country. I have spent years telling Jewish audiences that the ugly rhetoric online is not the same as a poll of public opinion. I am not dropping that standard the moment it would be convenient. Nobody in that thread drove the van into the crowd. I’m sure there were Muslims across Europe who spent the weekend the way I did, sick about it.

What is worth noticing is that none of it was hidden. Those were profiles with faces and names attached, sitting under a major broadcaster’s own post for most of a day, laughing at a dead woman in a park. Not one of them thought they needed a burner account to do it.

Condemnation of a community

By Sunday afternoon, a second argument had taken over my feed. It sounded like: “This is what Muslims do, for the five hundredth time, and everyone too well-mannered to say so is complicit.” This message travels on social media, which promotes people who claim to “speak forbidden truths.” You don’t need to ignore the attacker’s ideology, past crimes, or connection to ISIS. But blaming an entire population for an individual’s actions is still wrong.

It is also no use to me, and I say that as the grandson of people who lived their whole lives among Muslims in Baghdad and Djerba until they were driven out. A man who kills a woman at Pride in the name of the Islamic State is not standing in for an entire population. He is a specific man with a specific record. His crime was his own. It speaks for itself.

What was already known

Berlin prosecutors laid it out on Sunday. In 2025, Abdul Ballout traveled to Lebanon intending to cross into Syria and join ISIS, where he made contact with people he believed were members of the group. Lebanese authorities arrested him and a military court sentenced him to three months for offenses including incitement. He returned to Germany and was arrested on arrival. A German court found that he had published Islamic State propaganda on his Instagram account in 2024. In May 2026, he was sentenced to twenty-two months.

Prosecutors asked for a longer sentence, without probation, and for the arrest warrant against him to stand. They were overruled. The court released him under probation supervision and deferred its final decision on suspending the sentence by six months. On July 3, police searched his address over a suspected weapons offense.

Twenty-two days later, he ran a van through a crowd celebrating Pride.

None of that requires a theory about 1.9 billion people. It requires an answer from a German court about what it believed it was doing in May. Germany has not offered one.

New York, Thursday

Two days before Berlin, on Tisha B’Av, a man walked up behind a 57-year-old Asian man near West 84th Street and Central Park West and stabbed him in the back with no warning. He kept walking. Witnesses say he passed a synagogue shouting “Justice for Islam” and “Allahu Akbar.” Four blocks on, he found Moshe Grunhaus, a 50-year-old Jewish man who had just stepped out of a synagogue in a kippah, and drove a screwdriver into his chest. Both men are expected to live. Raul Morales, 51, was arrested within the hour and charged with hate crimes.

The attack came just days after the mayor, Zohran Mamdani, released a dramatic video on X that was viewed millions of times. In it, he claimed that Prime Minister Netanyahu is a war criminal and that the war Hamas started is a genocide. By the time he got around to mentioning that he doesn’t have the power to arrest him, his supporters had gotten the message.

Today, with zero mention of the double stabbing, one of Mamdani’s supporters said explicitly what she understood from his video. She took to TikTok to explain that while Mamdani can’t arrest Netanyahu, he was signalling that New Yorkers should make his visit “as uncomfortable as possible.” And they shouldn’t stop there. New Yorkers should be protesting Israeli businesses and politicians, too, she said. Mamdani, for his part, should not let the NYPD protect anyone associated with Israel from violence.

The mayor said he can’t arrest Netanyahu. His followers heard that he won’t stop them from harming Israelis. His allies spent the weekend explaining why he’s not responsible. And two men are recovering after being stabbed on the street.

I’ve seen many of the same people now denying Mayor Mamdani bears any responsibility be more than willing to accept that politicians’ rhetoric can incite violence when that rhetoric comes from, say, President Trump. I am not drawing a direct parallel. I am simply asking for people who claim to oppose antisemitism to apply their analysis consistently.

And from Berlin to Manhattan, I am calling on every leader and every authority to take this seriously. You have freedom of speech, but we don’t have the freedom from the violence your words incite.

What they have in common

The thing Berlin and West 84th Street share isn’t just the authorities deflecting responsibility. It’s the speed with which everyone jumped past the people who were actually hurt.

And as we see this polarized response to violence repeat itself in cities across the world, I have begun to think that the two phenomena are more connected than I’d assumed.

Authorities like Zohran Mamdani are to blame for inciting violence by spreading outrageous claims and focusing disproportionately on Israel. Berlin authorities are to blame for releasing a man whose record seems, in retrospect, like a clear indication he was still a threat. And the attackers are to blame for maiming and murdering innocent people.

But politicians are also a reflection of the public. And the public’s response to tragedy, lately, and seemingly from all sides, has been to polarize before we mourn.

I am not saying we should ignore the identities of murderers or their victims. I am not letting any leader off the hook for failing to do their job. And I’m not saying that it is “too soon” to broach these discussions. I am saying that the timbre of the conversations, as they are amplified on social media, is transforming murder from a tragedy into a talking point. The goal cannot be to win an argument. It must be to stop the next attack.

Being gay and Jewish means finding out, from two directions at once, what your death is worth as an argument. One side would file it under Islamism and move on. The other would check first whether mourning you complicated anything about Gaza. Since October 7th, I have received both hourly death threats and daily derision for “playing the victim card.” I am living through what it means for our lives and protection to become political footballs. I don’t wish it on anyone.

Germany owes the public an answer about why a man its own court convicted of Islamic State propaganda in May was walking free with access to a van in July, and the prosecutors who asked for him to stay in custody deserve to have that question put loudly, in the Bundestag, by people with subpoena power. New York owes its Jews an apology for ignoring their valid fears until it was too late.

And when Berlin releases her name, I want to see it travel as fast as her murderer’s did. May her memory be a blessing.

The video reached me a dozen times before I finished my coffee. Friends, followers, strangers, all sending the same two minutes and thirteen seconds: the mayor of New York behind a desk, an American flag on one side and the city’s on the other, warm cinematic lighting, an orchestral score under his voice, the caption reading “Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal.” The staging is an Oval Office address. The content is a municipal legal memo about a promise that cannot be kept. By Wednesday morning, it had 55 million views across platforms. Twelve hours. The coverage focused on the rhetoric. Almost no one covered what the video actually announced.

The video opens cold on the accusation. Second zero: “Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal, the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people.” The litany fills the first forty seconds. The sentence that constitutes actual news arrives at the 1:40 mark of a 2:13 video: “It is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant.” Anyone who has ever read a social video retention graph knows what that sequencing does. Most viewers are gone long before the final thirty seconds. The video is built so the accusation reaches everyone and the retreat reaches only those who stay to the end.

Zohran Mamdani promised to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu from the earliest days of his candidacy in 2024. He repeated the promise in the final weeks of the race. Days ago, he told the New York Times his attorneys were still reviewing it. On Monday, the president announced that Netanyahu would not be arrested anywhere in the United States. On Tuesday night, the mayor admitted his city’s Law Department had reached the same conclusion. The pledge that helped elect him is dead. The video is its funeral, staged as an offensive.

There is nothing inherently wrong about a politician criticizing Benjamin Netanyahu. The ICC warrant exists; it was issued in 2024. Israel is contesting it. The ICC prosecutor who delivered those arrest warrants, Karim Khan, may lose his job this week over accusations of sexual assault. Be that as it may, Israelis have protested Netanyahu’s government in numbers an American mayor can only envy, week after week, for years. If Tuesday’s video had been criticism, even brutal criticism, it would have been an ordinary iteration of an old argument. My quarrel isn’t with criticism. It’s with political theatrics that trade in truth for exposure.

Here is the trade. What Mamdani promised his voters was an act of government: an arrest, jurisdiction, handcuffs, the full strength of the law applied to a foreign leader. What he delivered instead was language. “War criminal.” “Architect of a horrific genocide.” A casualty figure, 73,000, recited without a word about where it comes from or whom it counts. When a politician cannot produce the act, the language inflates to cover the difference, and the more impossible the deliverable, the more extreme the words. An arrest was off the table, so the accusation had to do the work of handcuffs. “Genocide” is what a broken promise sounds like when it needs to trend.

And it trended. Fifty-five million views in twelve hours, in a city of 8.5 million people. The mayor’s words reached six times as many people as his government ever could. On X alone, the video crossed 15 million by the end of the evening. No achievement of Mamdani’s actual mayoralty, no bus route, no childcare pilot, no housing number, has moved attention within an order of magnitude of this. Every ambitious politician in America absorbed the lesson by sunrise: a broken promise wrapped in maximal accusation against Israel outperforms a kept one. Attention has replaced delivery as the unit of political success. Mamdani’s video is the best demonstration of the exchange we have yet been given.

In my recent article “What Happened to Jeremy,” I documented how state-linked networks from Iran, Russia and Qatar amplify Western content about Israel. These operations rarely invent material. They find authentic domestic content that serves their aims and push it until the algorithm concludes the whole world is speaking. A sitting American mayor accusing Israel’s prime minister of genocide, in a professionally produced video, weeks before that prime minister is expected in New York for the UN General Assembly. That’s the exact material foreign influence operations exist to amplify.

Did they touch this one? I cannot tell you. No one can, because the platforms do not publish origin or coordination data even for political content at this scale. Fifty-five million views, and no public way to know how many arrived organically and how many came from accounts that have never once posted about a pothole in Queens. I am not claiming the surge was foreign. I am telling you that no one in America is currently allowed to check, and that the networks whose fingerprints I have traced elsewhere would consider this video a gift.

There is a fix, and it is boring, which is why it might work. After 2016, public pressure forced the platforms to build political ad libraries. The same should now apply to virality itself: when a piece of political content crosses a defined threshold, the platform publishes an engagement breakdown by country of origin and account age, and accredited researchers get the underlying data. If the surge behind Tuesday’s video was 55 million Americans, the numbers will show it, and Mamdani’s supporters can claim their moral clarity honestly. If it was something else, New Yorkers deserve to know who was shouting over them.

I am writing this on the even of Tisha B’Av, the day the Jewish calendar sets aside for mourning the destruction of both Temples and the catastrophes that gathered around the same date across two thousand years. The rabbis taught that the Second Temple fell to sinat chinam, baseless hatred. They argue that the problem was slander, not mere military weakness. I don’t believe Mamdani consulted a Jewish calendar before posting; the timing is likely coincidence. But the fast lands differently this year. Jews keep a national day of mourning because we have long experience with accusations that travel faster than any correction can, and with what happens in the years after they land. Fifty-five million views in twelve hours is the largest audience such an accusation has ever found this quickly. The day exists because accusations like this one have never, in our history, stayed on the page.

In September, Netanyahu is expected in New York. The video will circulate again, the mayor will be at ribbon cuttings, and the gap between the sentence and the act will still be sitting there, unexamined, because examining it benefits no one with power. Somewhere this week, a candidate for some other office watched those numbers climb and quietly took a note. The note had nothing to do with promoting peace for Palestinians, and everything to do with exploiting Jews to gain power.

On Saturday night in Grenoble, France, at a city festival that has run for twenty-five years, the DJ Barbara Butch got twenty minutes. She went on around 10:20. In front of the stage stood a crowd of hundreds of protesters, waving Palestinian flags, whistling, and shouting insults. The city of Grenoble says glass bottles and other projectiles were thrown, deliberately aimed at her, and that electrical installations were sabotaged. Citing threats against the artist and the safety of the crowd, the city suspended the concert. Butch left the stage while John Lennon’s “Imagine” played over the speakers.

If you know Barbara Butch, it might be from the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics in 2024. She was the DJ at the center of the “Festivity” tableau, the woman in the silver halo whom half the internet decided had blasphemed against a Renaissance painting. What followed was one of the ugliest harassment campaigns in recent French memory: tens of thousands of messages, including threats to kill her and to rape her. The abuse was antisemitic before it was anything else, with plenty left over for her body and her sexuality. She filed complaints. French prosecutors opened investigations, and some of the people who threatened her were charged and convicted. A month after the ceremony she carried the Paralympic torch through a Paris suburb and told an interviewer she had chosen not to be afraid to exist in public.

In March, Butch signed a letter in Le Point, alongside the philosopher Elisabeth Badinter and former prime minister Bernard Cazeneuve, supporting the proposition de loi Yadan, a bill whose stated purpose was to fight what its drafters called new forms of antisemitism. The case against that bill was real. Its critics, La France Insoumise loudest among them, argued that the drafting was vague and that it risked criminalizing legitimate criticism of Israel. The government withdrew the text in April. If the story ended there, it would be ordinary democratic politics: a contested bill and a government retreat. Protesting a law and supporting it are both speech. Both are legitimate.

The campaign against Butch began in May, a month after the bill died. There was no law left to oppose. What remained was the person. Allan Brunon, an LFI city councilor in Grenoble, posted a call to cancel her booking at the Cabaret Frappé festival, accusing her of supporting a colonial and genocidal regime. His evidence was the tribune, plus the claim that she had played Tel Aviv Pride in 2025, during the war. Tel Aviv Pride was canceled in 2025. What she actually played was a private event for the French Embassy in Israel. The full case against her, stripped of its phrasing, comes to this: she signed a letter against antisemitism, and she took a booking from her own country’s diplomats.

Grenoble’s mayor, Laurence Ruffin, refused to cancel the show, on the reasonable ground that city governments should not run ideological background checks on musicians. So the protesters came to the show instead. Afterward, Brunon, who attended, described the evening as a peaceful demonstration and said he was proud to have taken part. He denies that any projectiles were thrown, which puts his account in direct conflict with the city’s. He also offered a line worth quoting in full: “It is not Madame Butch who is being censored. It is everyone fighting the genocide in Gaza who is censored in our country today.” At the national level, LFI’s Manuel Bompard said he could understand a political position drawing protest, provided the protest stays peaceful. Given the city’s description of glass bottles aimed at her, that condition had already failed by the time he offered it.

The institutions, at least, were not confused. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez condemned the violence in the strongest terms, writing that antisemitism and intimidation have no place in the Republic and that preventing an artist from performing is an unacceptable attack on free expression. The International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism (Licra), a French nonprofit, demanded an investigation and named what it saw: an antisemitic conflation that assigns Jewish people collective responsibility for the policies of the Israeli state. The mayor called the acts unacceptable and announced that the city will file a complaint.

Here is what makes Grenoble more than a local story. Barbara Butch is not a borderline case. She is a lesbian activist decorated by the Republic for services to culture, and the public face of the fight against fatphobia in France. In 2024 she absorbed a year of far-right hatred for representing inclusion at the most-watched event her country has staged this century. By every standard the progressive left claims to hold, she should be among its most protected people. None of it transferred. What disqualified her was the Jewish part, and one public statement: antisemitism in France is real, and it is present in the anti-Israel movement.

She never said anything about Israeli policy and has never defended the Israeli government. Her stated politics amount to fighting the hatreds she has personally received and warning against the conflation of Jews with a foreign state. That is the same conflation Licra denounced on Sunday. The crowd in Grenoble enforced it. To them, a French Jew who once played a party for French diplomats and French Jews, is an agent of Israel, answerable for its wars. The far right spent 2024 telling Butch she did not belong to France’s story. On Saturday, the left joined in.

In the video she posted afterward, she repeated what she has said for two years and warned once more against hating Jews because of the actions of a foreign government. The new note was darker. She said a society this divided is heading toward defeat. The city's complaint is expected within days. It will sit in a legal file. Files like hers are how this period of European Jewish life is going to be read later. Through all of it, her position has not moved: she stands for love.

In late 2023, a few weeks after October 7, my husband and I had dinner with our friend Jeremy. He is British, mid-thirties, with a decent job and the kind of progressive politics that used to mean food banks and climate marches. He asked about my family in Israel by name. He wanted to know if my mother was sleeping. He paid for dinner and hugged us both on the street, and on the walk home my husband said what I was thinking, that we were lucky to have friends like him.

Over the following year I watched his feed change. First it was the accounts he followed, then the language he used in his own captions. The escalation had a rhythm to it, each week slightly further than the last, the way water finds a slope. The last real conversation we had, he said this to me: “Israel’s existence is the reason antisemitism exists. Even Jews say it.”

He is no longer our friend. That was our choice as much as his. What I want to examine is how a kind man arrived at a sentence like that in under two years.

The simplest explanation deserves to go first. People watched a brutal war on their phones and drew their own conclusions. Grief and anger at images from Gaza are human responses, and holding them requires no puppeteer. Criticism of the Israeli government is legitimate; I publish it myself, in detail, under my own name. If Jeremy had told me the war was unbearable to watch, that he believed Israel’s government had lost its moral bearings, we would still be having dinner. Plenty of people I love believe exactly that.

But that is a conclusion. What Jeremy said to me was a product. “Israel’s existence causes antisemitism” reverses cause and effect with a confidence no one reasons their way into alone, and the tag at the end, “even Jews say it,” is the laundering step, the borrowed permission slip. Products have supply chains, and this one’s is documented in sanctions designations and forensic reports that almost nobody reads.

Start with Tehran. Microsoft’s threat analysts found that from October 7 onward, Iran combined targeted hacks with influence operations amplified across social media, and by late October nearly all of its influence and cyber actors had converged on Israel in what researchers called an all-hands campaign. The most damning evidence arrived by accident. When Israeli strikes hit Iran in June 2025 and the regime’s internet went down, a network of AI-generated personas embedded in ordinary British political conversation went dark for sixteen days, then came back online pushing pro-Iranian and anti-Israel content. The analysts at Cyabra who caught it called the gap a before-and-after snapshot of state interference; the fake campaign had already collected 224 million views. During the 2026 fighting, a separate analysis found that 60 percent of the most viral posts about Iran on X in the war’s first week came from accounts outside the United States that presented themselves as American voices.

Moscow’s method is different. In October 2023, blue Stars of David appeared stenciled on buildings across Paris. A Moldovan couple was arrested for painting them at the request of a pro-Russian businessman, and France’s foreign ministry formally accused the Kremlin’s Doppelganger network of artificially spreading the photos online. Moscow staged the incident and then sold the panic.

Then there is the money that never touches a bot farm because it buys the street instead. The People’s Forum, the group that co-organized a Times Square rally celebrating October 7 the day after the massacre, received over $20 million between 2017 and 2022 from Neville Roy Singham, a tech mogul based in Shanghai with documented ties to Chinese state propaganda outfits, routed through shell organizations and donor-advised funds. Congress is now investigating whether the arrangement violates the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Samidoun, a “charity” that helped energize campus encampments, was designated by the U.S. Treasury in 2024 as a sham fundraiser for the PFLP, a terrorist organization, and listed as a terrorist entity by Canada.

And Qatar, which I know from my own meetings with officials to be among the heaviest investors in this space, does most of its work in the open, the most audacious part of all. Since 2016 Doha has spent roughly a quarter of a billion dollars on 88 registered American lobbying and PR firms, and from 2021 to mid-2025 its agents logged 627 in-person meetings with U.S. political contacts, more than any other country on earth. The American arm of its flagship network, AJ+, was ordered by the Justice Department in 2020 to register as a foreign agent because it operates, in the department’s words, at the direction and control of Qatar’s leaders. Five years later it has neither registered nor stopped broadcasting. Over Thanksgiving 2025, Qatar flew a group of American conservative influencers to Doha on a luxury trip that researchers described as an influence operation wearing an educational costume. When one government’s talking points can reach both a Brooklyn leftist and a Fox News audience in the same news cycle, the word “grassroots” has stopped describing anything.

I know this terrain from the receiving end. In 2018, a newspaper reported that Israel’s Government Advertising Agency had paid my Israeli limited company roughly $3,500 a month, about $49,000 over fourteen months, for consulting on social media and LGBTQ outreach in Hebrew, and raised the question of FARA. The work was the ordinary kind a communications consultant does anywhere, lawful whoever the client, and top American lawyers I consulted found that registration did not apply. The contract ended that year, and I have taken nothing from any Israeli government agency since. Anonymous accounts still recirculate the article on schedule whenever my work reaches a new audience. A consulting contract that ended nine years ago works as a permanent weapon in the feed, while a Qatari state network spends its fifth year defying a formal Justice Department registration order without consequence.

None of these operations invented anger at Israel, and no honest account can pretend they did. Their work is subtler than invention. They manufacture consensus, and consensus is the one thing a decent person never thinks to verify. Jeremy could have checked a statistic. A sensation that everyone he respected had already moved is not checkable. When he saw a post with tens of thousands of likes, shared by an influencer he trusted, echoed by accounts that looked like nurses and veterans, he did what social creatures do. He assumed he was late to a truth his community had already reached, and stopped asking what the PFLP is or who funds the group organizing the march. Jeremy believed he was following his conscience through a crowd. Parts of the crowd were rented.

Here is what I cannot do, and it took me two years to understand that the inability is deliberate. I cannot point to the post that took him, or tell you whether the account that first taught him the sentence about Israel causing antisemitism belonged to a man in Manchester or a shift worker in a Tehran content farm. Neither could any investigator on earth. Attribution dies at the level of the individual, and the entire enterprise is built on that grave. Missiles have return addresses and memes do not. Every Jeremy reads as organic. Every friendship dissolves as if by weather. Anyone who says the word campaign out loud sounds paranoid at exactly the moment the evidence is strongest, and I spent months doubting my own eyes about a man I loved. That doubt was somebody’s deliverable.

The output is now measurable in people, and in power. A survey released this week found that 29 percent of Americans aged 18 to 44 view Jews as a threat to the unity of American society, against 13 percent of those over 60. The same polling shows the share of respondents whose answers mark them as openly prejudiced against Jews more than doubled since June 2023, while the share of informed allies collapsed from 15 percent to 6. Those are the numbers of a campaign that worked. The same survey carries the feed’s other signature: 53 percent of Americans were unfamiliar with the murder of 15 Jews celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach, and 66 percent with the arson of Mississippi’s largest synagogue. An information environment that hands a fake campaign 224 million views leaves an actual massacre unseen. And electorates produce politicians. In Britain, the Green Party has organized much of its identity around Palestine. Across Democratic primaries in the United States, candidates who once led with healthcare now lead with Gaza, and the ones who don’t are learning what the algorithm does to their fundraising.

This week, New York's mayor spent much of a Times interview on Gaza, and I read the comments under the clip as they arrived. Real New Yorkers arguing about buses and rent, and braided through them, accounts with stock phrases and no history, until the commenters began accusing one another of being bots. Nobody could tell. He won office with real votes; the information environment those voters live inside is another matter, and both things are true at once.

To believe every one of those politicians is a foreign asset would be its own conspiracy theory, and I don’t believe it. They are responding rationally to a public opinion environment that four governments spent years and fortunes helping to build. A democracy that cannot tell organic opinion from purchased opinion has lost something it needs to function.

There are moments when a state finally acts, and the shape of Britain’s is instructive. Beginning in March, proxies directed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard attacked British citizens on British streets: arson at a synagogue and at a Jewish ambulance charity, the stabbing of two men in Golders Green. The ban on supporting the IRGC came on July 13, four months later. For those four months, a political class that finds time to condemn Israel from a far, week after week, could barely bring itself to name the state whose agents were setting fires in London. Israel poses no threat to Britain and asks nothing of it, yet it occupies British politics as a permanent emergency, while the government that actually exported violence to British soil enjoyed the presumption of complexity until the smoke made denial embarrassing. The information war is engineered to produce this distortion. Its design is deniability, an ocean of content with no single author, so that naming the arsonist feels reckless and blaming the familiar villain feels safe.

So the response has to happen without the fire. FARA should be enforced against every state broadcaster that defies it, starting with the one that has ignored a Justice Department order for five years. Platforms can label state-linked amplification the way they already label a paid ad; it is the same transaction. Britain’s new law against state-backed organizations deserves use at home and imitation abroad. The forensic researchers at firms like Cyabra, whose findings reach a fraction of the audience of a single fake account, need funding and distribution. And the billions flowing from Doha into Western schools and universities without meaningful disclosure belong in the same ledger as the lobbying money.

And there is a second audience, the one the analysts’ reports never mention. The campaign that runs at people like Jeremy also delivers something to people like me. It taught me to read my friends the way a security officer reads a crowd. A slow reply, or a friend who never mentioned my wedding, now arrives with a question attached that I hate and cannot stop asking: is this a life being busy, or is this the operation reaching someone else I love? Jews across the West are living inside that question. The suspicion corrodes from both directions, and the corrosion is part of the design. A people taught to suspect its friends, and friends taught there is virtue in walking away, will separate on their own. Nobody has to order it.

I used to frame this as a choice we would eventually face. I no longer think the choice is ahead of us. The 29 percent are already voting, and some of them are already teaching. My fear, the one I carry into places where I am told to be optimistic, is that we are past the point where exposure alone fixes anything, because the generation that was farmed does not remember a feed that wasn’t.

Somewhere in London or New York this week, a dinner like ours in 2023 is happening. Someone kind is asking someone Jewish about their family, and meaning it. Whether that friendship survives the next two years is being decided partly by the two of them, and partly by people neither of them will ever meet, working from Tehran and Moscow and Shanghai and Doha. Jeremy never met them either.

My friend’s name has been changed.

Sources: Microsoft Threat Intelligence reporting on Iranian influence operations following October 7, 2023; Cyabra, "The Bot Network Collapse That Exposed Iran's Influence Operation," 2025; Argyle Consulting analysis of viral X posts during the 2026 Iran conflict; statements of France's Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs on the Doppelganger network, November 2023; The New York Times investigation into Neville Roy Singham, August 2023; George Washington University Program on Extremism reporting on The People's Forum; U.S. Treasury Department designation of Samidoun, October 15, 2024; Public Safety Canada terrorist entity listing; Quincy Institute analysis of Foreign Agents Registration Act filings, 2016–2025; U.S. Department of Justice FARA order to AJ+, 2020; Foundation for Defense of Democracies reporting on Qatari influence operations; Blue Square Alliance Against Hate, Spring 2026 Antisemitism Survey; UK Home Office proscription announcement, July 13, 2026