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I am a Jew.

This is not a confession. I have nothing to confess.

It is not an apology. Jews have apologized enough. It only encourages people.

It is not an application for inclusion. I have seen what passes for inclusion lately, and I would rather wait outside with the smokers, the heretics and the one professor who still believes facts are not violence.

I am a Jew.

That means I belong to a people expelled from more countries than most activists can locate on a map—and who are now lectured about displacement by people who discovered the Middle East shortly after downloading TikTok.

We are too white for the campus revolutionaries, too foreign for the white supremacists, too religious for the secular fanatics, too secular for the religious fanatics, too successful for the socialists and too communal for the capitalists.

We were condemned for being rootless cosmopolitans. Then we returned to our ancestral homeland and were condemned for having roots.

We were despised when we were stateless. Now we are despised because we have a state.

We were mocked for going like sheep to the slaughter. Now we are condemned because the sheep bought fighter jets.

Pick a conspiracy and stick with it. This constant ideological wardrobe change is exhausting.

I am a Jew, and yes, there is arrogance in that sentence.

Magnificent, unreasonable, civilization-annoying arrogance.

The arrogance of slaves who looked at Pharaoh—the most powerful man on earth—and said, “No.”

The arrogance of a desert tribe that told kings they were beneath the law, told the rich they owed something to the poor, told farmers the land itself required rest, and told humanity that even servants were entitled to a day off.

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That was not meek spirituality.

That was a theological brick through the palace window.

We then had the astonishing chutzpah to record our own failures.

The Torah does not portray Jews as flawless superheroes. We lie. We panic. We complain about food. We build a golden calf approximately seventeen minutes after witnessing divine revelation. Moses loses his temper. David sins. Jonah runs away. Our kings fail, our priests fail, our judges fail, and our prophets spend most of their careers screaming at us.

If God wanted Jewish propaganda, the Bible was a terrible first draft.

We preserved our failures because Judaism was never founded upon the claim that Jews are perfect. It rests upon the more demanding claim that human beings are responsible.

Modern politics cannot process this. It requires one immaculate victim, one cartoon villain, twelve infographics and an idiot typing “educate yourself” beneath information he learned that morning.

So let me make my position offensively clear.

I oppose the creation of a Palestinian state.

Not reluctantly.

Not temporarily.

Not until the next “peace process.”

I oppose it categorically.

I support permanent Jewish sovereignty throughout the Land of Israel west of the Jordan River—from the river to the sea.

Yes, I said it.

You have heard that phrase screamed at Jews by masked mobs demanding the destruction of Israel. Apparently, it only becomes frightening when a Jew announces that he intends to remain alive within it.

I support Greater Israel.

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I do not support a Palestinian army overlooking Tel Aviv.

I do not support a Palestinian air force.

I do not support another sovereign government capable of importing Iranian weapons, signing military agreements with Israel’s enemies and converting the hills above Israel’s population centers into one enormous rocket platform.

I do not support turning Judea and Samaria—the geographical and historical heartland of the Jewish people—into the twenty-third Arab state because European diplomats need another signing ceremony and somebody in Oslo has already ordered the miniature flags.

There will be no sovereign Palestine between Israel and Jordan.

There is already an Arab Palestinian state carved from the territory of the original British Mandate.

It is called Jordan.

You may have heard of it. It is the large country immediately to Israel’s east that everyone discussing the “tiny remaining territory for Palestinian self-determination” mysteriously forgets to print on the map.

Britain severed the territory east of the Jordan River from the Jewish national home and handed it to the Hashemite dynasty. That territory comprised most of Mandatory Palestine. It is now overwhelmingly Arab and home to millions of people of Palestinian origin.

Call it the Hashemite Kingdom if royal stationery makes you feel sophisticated.

Geography is not fooled by letterhead.

Demanding another Palestinian state west of the river is not a “two-state solution.” It is demanding that Palestinian Arab nationalism receive another state while the Jewish people surrender half of their only one.

That is not compromise.

That is partition with a public-relations department.

And before some morally constipated academic begins hyperventilating, saying Jordan is the Palestinian state is not a call to load civilians onto buses. It is not permission to attack Arab families, seize private property or treat peaceful neighbors as enemies.

An Arab who wants to raise his children, earn a living and live without violence is not my enemy.

A terrorist is.

A terrorist’s recruiter is.

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A government that names streets after murderers is.

A political culture that pays salaries for slaughter is.

A propaganda machine that transforms every Jewish victim into “context” and every Jewish act of self-defense into a war crime is.

I refuse the idiotic binary that says I must either surrender my homeland or hate every Arab.

I will do neither.

Greater Israel means one sovereign power west of the Jordan: Israel.

It means Israeli military control, Israeli borders and Israeli security.

It means individual civil dignity without granting a collective national veto over Jewish existence.

It means freedom of religion and protection under law—not another hostile sovereignty established nine miles from Israel’s economic heart.

Local government can be negotiated. Administrative arrangements can be negotiated. Residency, citizenship and regional cooperation can be debated by serious people dealing with real conditions.

Jewish sovereignty is not negotiable.

Jewish survival is not a confidence-building measure.

And statehood is not a participation trophy handed out because the international community feels guilty.

A state is a military, diplomatic and territorial weapon. Handing one to a movement that has repeatedly glorified Jewish murder is not compassion. It is strategic malpractice with a peace dove printed on the cover.

The Palestinian national movement has been offered partition repeatedly.

Its leaders rejected partition because the objection was never merely to Israel’s borders.

The objection was to Israel.

The PLO was established in 1964—three years before Israel controlled Gaza, Judea or Samaria. Jordan then controlled Judea and Samaria. Egypt controlled Gaza.

What “occupation” was the PLO founded to eliminate?

Tel Aviv.

Haifa.

Ashkelon.

West Jerusalem.

Israel itself.

The Palestinian national movement was not born demanding a state alongside Israel. It was organized to replace Israel.

That is the inconvenient historical turd sitting in the middle of every elegant two-state-policy dinner party.

Then Israel withdrew completely from Gaza in 2005.

No settlements. No permanent Israeli military presence. No Jewish civilians.

Gaza could have become a Mediterranean commercial center.

Instead, Hamas took over and converted withdrawal into proof that terrorism worked. Greenhouses were destroyed. Rockets multiplied. Tunnels were dug. Children were trained to inherit a war their leaders had no intention of ending.

Then came October 7.

That was the Palestinian-state pilot program.

It did not produce Singapore.

It produced a slaughterhouse.

And now the same geniuses who promised that leaving Gaza would bring peace insist that doing it again—this time above Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion Airport—is the only imaginable path to peace.

Nothing says geopolitical wisdom like repeating a catastrophe on a much larger hilltop.

No.

You do not get to invade Jewish homes, murder families, kidnap babies, rape women, drag bodies through the streets and then have Western diplomats reward the political cause under whose banners it was done.

That is not peacemaking.

That is incentive compensation for barbarism.

Hamas is not a liberation movement. It is an Islamist death cult.

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Palestinian Islamic Jihad is not a human-rights organization with unfortunate branding.

The Popular Front is not progressive because it learned to speak Marxist.

The Palestinian Authority is not moderate because it wears suits while paying stipends connected to imprisoned terrorists and dead attackers.

And UNRWA is not solving a refugee crisis by turning refugee status into a hereditary political identity passed from great-grandparents to great-grandchildren.

This entire machinery survives by preserving the conflict it claims to alleviate.

It teaches the world that every refugee population must eventually resettle—except Palestinians, who must remain refugees until Israel disappears.

It teaches that millions of Jews expelled or driven from Arab and Muslim countries were absorbed and rebuilt their lives, while Palestinians must be kept in permanent historical suspension as weapons against Jewish sovereignty.

It teaches that Jewish refugees are history, but Palestinian refugees are foreign policy.

Bullshit.

I will not pretend this is about a tiny Palestinian state peacefully tending olive trees beside Israel.

A genuinely peaceful Palestinian polity could have been discussed decades ago. What developed instead was an international movement whose sacred vocabulary includes “resistance,” “return” and “liberation”—terms routinely understood to mean the elimination of Jewish sovereignty.

Ask a campus protester whether Tel Aviv belongs to Israel.

Watch the software crash.

The demand for Palestinian statehood is sold to gullible Westerners as a border dispute. Yet the maps at rallies erase Israel completely. The chants do not demand “two states for two peoples.” The keys displayed at demonstrations are not keys to imaginary houses in Ramallah. They symbolize Jaffa, Haifa, Ashkelon and Jerusalem.

They do not want a Palestinian state beside Israel.

They want a Palestinian state instead of Israel.

I believe them.

That apparently makes me an extremist.

Fine.

After thousands of years of Jewish history, I have developed the radical habit of believing people when they announce their intention to kill me.

Israel exists because Jews finally stopped allowing foreign diplomats to explain why the latest threat should not be taken literally.

The world adores dead Jews.

Dead Jews are wonderfully cooperative. They do not build homes. They do not patrol borders. They do not vote for inconvenient governments. They do not interrupt university seminars by producing historical evidence.

Dead Jews can be mourned without being respected.

Auschwitz is safe for polite society because Auschwitz asks nothing of anyone except a sad face and perhaps a wreath.

Israel asks something much harder.

Israel asks whether you still love Jews when they refuse to enter the cattle car.

There is no moral achievement in loving powerless Jews.

The test begins when the Jew survives.

Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people.

Or, to use the fashionable vocabulary, Zionism is an indigenous decolonization movement that everyone supports in theory until the indigenous people are Jews, the ancestral language is Hebrew and the decolonization succeeds.

Apparently, indigeneity expires.

I would love to see the policy.

After how many centuries of forced exile does a people lose its homeland? Five hundred years? One thousand? Does the countdown continue during pogroms? Do language, archaeology, prayer, literature and uninterrupted physical presence count?

Please publish the official regulations before the next Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

For two thousand years, Jews prayed facing Jerusalem.

We mourned Jerusalem at weddings. We remembered it after meals. We ended Passover with “Next year in Jerusalem.” We buried our dead with soil from the Land of Israel.

Entire empires invaded, renamed, occupied, taxed and divided our country. Those empires collapsed. We kept saying the same names.

Jerusalem.

Hebron.

Bethlehem.

Shiloh.

Judea.

Yes, Judea—the place from which the word Jew comes.

That is terribly inconvenient for people who believe Jews materialized in the Middle East in 1948 after being fired from a Polish real-estate agency.

I live in Judea.

You may call it the West Bank, as though a brief Jordanian occupation possessed the magical authority to erase three thousand years of Jewish geography.

I call it the land where Abraham walked, David fled, prophets thundered and Jewish children now miss the school bus.

History here is not preserved behind museum glass.

It is stuck in traffic.

I support Jews living in Judea for the same reason I support Jews living in Jerusalem: it is our homeland.

Calling a Jew a “settler” in Judea is like calling an Englishman a settler in England and then expecting applause for your anti-colonial sophistication.

That does not mean Jews are perfect.

We are not.

Israel has politicians who could turn manna from heaven into a procurement scandal. Our parliament occasionally resembles a family WhatsApp group after somebody mentions inheritance. Israeli bureaucracy can transform a one-page form into a multigenerational biblical ordeal.

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The secular Israeli says he does not believe in God, then shouts “Baruch Hashem” when he finds parking.

The religious Zionist arrives carrying a rifle, a volume of Talmud and forty-seven unsolicited opinions about the government.

The American Jewish progressive explains Israel from a brunch table in Manhattan.

The Israeli taxi driver explains America, Iran, military strategy, central banking and your own marriage before the next traffic light.

And I, an oleh living in Efrat, have become an expert on the entire Middle East after mastering eleven Hebrew verbs and discovering that Israeli customer service was designed to test whether redemption can survive being placed on hold.

We are impossible.

Put three Jews in a room and you will get four opinions, five political parties, six dietary restrictions and one furious disagreement about a synagogue none of them attends.

We survived Babylon, Rome, crusades, inquisitions, pogroms and genocide, yet we remain vulnerable to one synagogue member moving another synagogue member’s chair.

The miracle is not only that Jews survived our enemies.

It is that we survived one another.

But our internal chaos does not invalidate our national rights.

Israel does not need to be perfect to exist.

No other country is required to demonstrate moral perfection before being permitted another sunrise.

Nobody responds to French misconduct by demanding the abolition of France. Nobody places Spain on existential probation. Nobody proposes returning the United States to Britain whenever Congress embarrasses itself.

Only Israel is treated as a temporary political experiment whose license can be revoked by the international community.

Criticize Israel.

Israelis do it before breakfast, during breakfast and while blocking the road after breakfast.

Criticize ministers. Debate laws. Challenge budgets. Argue about courts, settlements and military tactics.

That is democracy.

But if your proposed remedy for Israel’s imperfections is the abolition or mutilation of Israel—and only Israel—your problem is not policy.

Your problem is Jewish power.

The far right hates Jews for being foreign.

The far left hates Jews for being indigenous.

One accuses us of secretly controlling countries. The other demands that we surrender ours.

One wants Jews back in exile. The other wants us permanently defined by it.

Both become strangely emotional when Jews decline the invitation.

Meanwhile, the United Nations can locate Israel with supernatural speed.

Iran hangs dissidents. Syria becomes a cemetery. China erases cultures. Women are treated as furniture across half the planet.

But somewhere in Geneva, an intern is preparing Resolution 94,372 concerning a Jewish balcony in Jerusalem.

That is not international law.

It is obsession wearing a lanyard.

I will not participate.

I will not apologize for Jewish power.

I will not apologize for Jewish soldiers protecting Jewish grandmothers.

I will not apologize for Jewish farmers planting vineyards in Judea.

I will not apologize for Hebrew being spoken by children in Jerusalem.

I will not apologize for a Jewish state rescuing Jews.

That is what a Jewish state is for.

I am a Jew, which means I remember.

Memory is our most dangerous weapon.

We remember Egypt when every empire expects its slaves to forget. We remember Jerusalem when conquerors rename it. We remember Spain, Kishinev, Hebron, Baghdad, Auschwitz and October 7.

We remember who sheltered us.

We remember who betrayed us.

We remember what happened every time someone promised that Jewish surrender would produce Jewish safety.

Antisemitism survives by changing costumes. It can wear a cross, a swastika, a keffiyeh, a suit, a lab coat or a faculty badge. Its vocabulary changes. Its appetite does not.

The Jew is accused of whatever a society fears most.

Capitalist and communist.

Tribal and cosmopolitan.

Weak and omnipotent.

Inferior and secretly superior.

Cowardly when defenseless. Bloodthirsty when armed.

Antisemitism is not a coherent argument.

It is a conspiracy theory with a costume department.

I am finished pretending incoherence deserves respectful silence.

I am a Jew.

I support Greater Israel.

I oppose a Palestinian state west of Jordan.

Jordan is the Arab Palestinian state. Israel is the Jewish state.

No amount of diplomatic theater, academic jargon or synchronized campus screaming will make me exchange the security of Jewish children for another failed experiment in Palestinian statehood.

Block me.

Unsubscribe.

Call me an extremist, a supremacist, a colonialist, a fascist and whatever other word you learned without understanding this week.

I have been insulted by people far more intelligent than you.

I am not asking permission to exist.

I am not auditioning for your empathy.

I am not submitting my indigenous identity to a committee chaired by people who discovered colonialism last semester.

I carry a covenant older than Christianity, Islam, Europe and every flag currently flapping outside the United Nations.

I belong to a people who returned to the language, land and capital engraved into our prayers while sophisticated people explained that history could not run backward.

They were right.

We did not run backward.

We came home.

We came home argumentative, traumatized, brilliant, neurotic, armed and approximately six minutes late.

We came home with Torah scrolls, startup companies, family recipes, terrible drivers, magnificent children and enough political parties to frighten a mathematician.

We came home because exile was never our identity.

Exile was something done to us.

So yes, I am arrogant.

I am arrogant enough to believe a Jew does not need to die to deserve compassion.

Arrogant enough to believe power can be moral.

Arrogant enough to believe memory can be revolutionary.

Arrogant enough to believe Jewish children should inherit more than memorial candles.

They should inherit mornings in Jerusalem.

They should inherit vineyards in Judea.

They should inherit Hebrew jokes, Jewish arguments, Jewish weddings and the exquisite luxury of being ordinary.

They should inherit a country stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, strong enough that nobody ever again gets to decide whether Jews are permitted to live.

I am a Jew.

I am a Zionist.

I support Greater Israel.

I oppose the creation of a Palestinian state.

I do not give a damn whether that ruins your carefully curated opinion of me.

If these words comfort you, stand beside me.

If they confuse you, open a history book.

If they enrage you, excellent. Perhaps the heat will restart whatever portion of your brain surrendered to slogans.

And if none of that helps, you are entirely free to block me, denounce me and go straight to hell.

We will still be here when you arrive.

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“I don’t care.”

Of course you care.

You care so little that you’ve spent the past forty-five minutes explaining precisely how little you care. You’ve drafted three furious replies, deleted two, posted one, checked whether anyone liked it, and then announced—with the emotional serenity of a raccoon trapped inside a garbage disposal—that none of this affects you.

Bullshit.

Apathy is rarely the absence of feeling. It is fear wearing sweatpants.

It is disappointment pretending to be sophistication. It is cowardice leaning against the wall with its arms folded, smirking at everyone brave enough to enter the arena. It is the emotional equivalent of refusing to play football because you might scuff your shoes—and then spending the entire match explaining how badly everyone else is playing.

Apathy has become fashionable because caring is dangerous.

If you care, you might fail.

If you care, someone might laugh.

If you care, you might discover that your magnificent theory collapses the moment it comes into contact with another human being.

Worst of all, if you care, you become responsible.

And responsibility is terrifying because it removes life’s most comfortable excuse: that everything is somebody else’s fault.

So people perform indifference.

They say politics is pointless, marriage is impossible, religion is outdated, ambition is toxic, patriotism is embarrassing, exercise is obsessive, success is luck, and anyone trying to improve the world is probably a narcissist with a podcast.

How wonderfully convenient.

If every institution is corrupt, every leader is a fraud, every dream is naïve, and every effort is doomed, then congratulations: you never have to get off the couch.

You can remain exactly where you are—half-dressed, fully opinionated, eating hummus directly from the container—while congratulating yourself for seeing through the illusion of human agency.

You’re not lazy. You’re “disillusioned.”

You’re not frightened. You’re “protecting your peace.”

You’re not avoiding responsibility. You’re “setting boundaries.”

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At this rate, people will soon describe sleeping through a house fire as practicing radical self-care.

Enough.

There is nothing profound about refusing to participate in your own life.

Cynicism is not intelligence. Sarcasm is not courage. Detachment is not wisdom. Sometimes the person rolling his eyes in the corner has not uncovered a deeper truth. Sometimes he is simply an asshole in the corner.

Real intelligence builds.

Real courage risks humiliation.

Real conviction gets out of bed when enthusiasm has packed a suitcase and fled the country.

Look at Jewish history. It is one long, stubborn refusal to surrender to apathy.

Abraham heard Lech Lecha and walked.

Moses stood before a burning bush and answered, Hineni.

The prophets did not shrug and announce that moral clarity was “complicated.”

Herzl did not sit in a Viennese café mumbling that sovereignty sounded unrealistic. The early Zionists did not conduct a twenty-year feasibility study on whether swamps were sufficiently inclusive. They arrived, drained them, planted trees, built farms, revived Hebrew, raised families, buried friends, and kept going.

They cared so fiercely that they turned longing into geography.

That is what caring does.

It takes something invisible—a belief, a promise, a memory, a ridiculous dream everyone else mocks—and gives it roads, schools, hospitals, orchards, airports, arguments, traffic jams, and an absurdly complicated parking app.

Israel exists because generations of Jews rejected the seductive bullshit of helplessness.

They did not wait for perfect conditions.

They did not wait for universal approval.

They certainly did not wait for the comment section to reach consensus.

They acted.

That does not mean they were never frightened. Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is fear being dragged by the collar toward something more important.

And yes, sometimes exhaustion is real. Sometimes a person is wounded, overwhelmed, grieving, or genuinely depleted. Rest is not apathy. Healing is not cowardice. Sitting down for a while does not mean you have surrendered.

But building a permanent home inside your disappointment is not healing.

It is surrender with decorative pillows.

At some point, you must stop treating your wounds like diplomatic immunity from responsibility.

Maybe people betrayed you.

Maybe the business collapsed.

Maybe the marriage broke.

Maybe you were overlooked, underestimated, mocked, fired, rejected, humiliated, or spectacularly screwed by someone who later posted a LinkedIn essay about ethical leadership.

Welcome to humanity.

You have every right to be angry. You have every right to grieve. You do not have the right to use yesterday’s injury as a lifelong exemption from tomorrow’s duty.

The world does not improve because good people privately hold excellent opinions.

Children are not raised by intentions.

Businesses are not built by vision boards.

Communities are not defended by hashtags.

Friendships are not maintained through vague plans to “catch up soon.”

Bodies do not become healthy because you purchased expensive athletic shoes and placed them reverently beside the front door.

Eventually, something must move.

Usually you.

Make the phone call.

Write the first sentence.

Submit the application.

Apologize without attaching a legal brief explaining why you were technically only 47 percent wrong.

Tell someone you love them.

Tell someone else to go to hell.

Learn the language.

Start the company.

Lift the weight.

Book the flight.

Defend what you believe—even when the room goes quiet and every fashionable coward suddenly finds the carpet fascinating.

Do one thing that creates evidence you are still alive.

Not a plan. Not a post. Not an inspirational quote pasted over a photograph of a mountain you have no intention of climbing.

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An action.

Small is fine. Clumsy is fine. Imperfect is inevitable. The first attempt at almost anything worthwhile looks like it was assembled in the dark by a committee of drunk goats.

Do it anyway.

You are waiting to feel motivated because you have misunderstood motivation. Motivation is not a divine lightning bolt that strikes while you lie in bed scrolling through other people’s achievements. It usually arrives after you begin.

Action creates momentum.

Momentum creates confidence.

Confidence creates larger action.

Meanwhile, apathy creates another episode, another snack, another month, another year—and eventually an entire life spent explaining why beginning would have been pointless.

That is the real horror of apathy.

It does not destroy your life dramatically.

There is no explosion. No orchestra. No villain laughing beneath a thunderstorm.

It kills quietly.

One postponed decision at a time.

One unanswered message.

One abandoned idea.

One more morning surrendered to the lie that tomorrow will contain a braver version of you.

Tomorrow is not manufacturing a replacement.

This is the model you received.

Use it.

You will embarrass yourself. Excellent. Embarrassment means you entered the room.

You will fail. Wonderful. Failure is proof that your ambitions finally exceeded your excuses.

You will be criticized. Naturally. The world has never suffered a shortage of spectators willing to heckle the people carrying the stretcher.

Let them talk.

A critic can describe the battlefield. Only a participant can change the outcome.

So care loudly.

Care recklessly.

Care enough to become inconvenient.

Care enough to lose the approval of people whose greatest achievement is never being caught trying.

Care enough to defend your family, your people, your faith, your country, your work, your friendships, and the future you claim to want.

There is no shame in caring too much.

The shame is standing beside something beautiful while it is being destroyed and congratulating yourself for remaining emotionally neutral.

Apathy is not armor. It is anesthesia.

And anesthesia has its place during surgery—but nobody was meant to spend an entire lifetime unconscious.

Wake up.

Your life is happening.

Your people need you.

Your unfinished work is sitting there, staring at you.

And history, impatient bastard that it is, has never once stopped to wait for someone who “just wasn’t feeling it today.”

Stand up.

Choose something.

Give a damn.

Then prove it.

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The rightward turn is not a mystery.

It is an invoice.

History has presented the bill for half a century of asymmetrical tolerance, borderless sentimentality, epistemological vandalism, institutional cowardice and elite contempt. The people forced to pay it—through fractured communities, silenced speech, collapsing trust and the slow criminalization of common sense—have begun to revolt.

This is not the resurrection of some sepia-toned conservatism, preserved in mothballs between the family Bible and a portrait of Ronald Reagan. Nor is it merely an electoral spasm caused by inflation, immigration or the algorithmic derangement of social media.

It is something much larger.

It is the political consequence of a civilization whose liberal elite lost the moral courage to defend liberal civilization.

The modern right did not become mainstream because millions of people suddenly rejected liberty. It became mainstream because the institutions calling themselves liberal began treating liberty as a suspicious activity.

The last liberal became a conservative when he discovered that free speech was now “harm,” borders were “violence,” equal treatment was “oppression,” self-defense was “escalation,” terrorism was “resistance,” Jewish sovereignty was “colonialism,” and truth itself was merely a vulgar prejudice held by people insufficiently educated to understand why their own eyes were lying to them.

He did not abandon liberalism.

Liberalism abandoned him.

The Hidden Foundations of Freedom

The great error of the modern liberal elite was to imagine that liberal democracy could survive as pure procedure.

Pass the correct laws. Design the correct institutions. Establish the correct courts. Write the correct rights into the correct documents. Then humanity, relieved of its primitive loyalties, would float serenely into a post-national future administered by experts, international agencies and impeccably credentialed moral supervisors.

This was always a fantasy.

Liberalism was never self-sustaining. It lived on moral capital accumulated before liberalism itself: habits of restraint, family obligation, civic trust, religious conscience, national loyalty, historical memory and the willingness to sacrifice private interest for a public good.

The German constitutional thinker Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde formulated the dilemma with brutal clarity: the liberal secular state depends upon conditions it cannot itself guarantee.

A constitution can announce freedom. It cannot manufacture the character required to preserve it.

A parliament can record votes. It cannot force the defeated to regard the victor as legitimate.

A court can protect religious liberty. It cannot create a culture in which religious factions willingly accept that their doctrines do not govern everyone.

A free press can circulate information. It cannot survive if journalists decide their function is not to investigate reality but to protect the public from unauthorized interpretations of it.

Every liberal society rests upon a pre-liberal covenant: we will disagree without destroying one another; we will lose without reaching for violence; we will tolerate your conscience if you tolerate ours; and none of us will use liberty merely as a ladder to power before kicking it away.

That covenant is not sentimental.

It is the load-bearing wall of the entire democratic order.

John Locke understood that government derived legitimacy from consent. John Stuart Mill understood that truth requires collision with error. Tocqueville understood that democracy depends on customs, associations and moral habits that government cannot replace. Burke understood that society is not a temporary business arrangement among the living but a partnership between the dead, the living and the unborn.

These were not interchangeable arguments. Together, however, they disclosed the same terrible fact: freedom requires a particular kind of human being living inside a particular kind of culture.

The modern elite wanted the freedom without the culture, the rights without the duties, the harvest without the soil.

Then it expressed astonishment when the ground turned to dust.

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How Liberalism Became Anti-Liberal

Classical liberalism began with epistemic humility: no ruler, priest, professor or majority possesses enough certainty to silence everyone else.

The new liberalism begins with epistemic arrogance: enlightened institutions already know which opinions advance justice, and therefore disagreement with those opinions is evidence of moral or psychological defect.

This is not an evolution of liberalism.

It is an inversion.

The transformation occurred through the convergence of two intellectual forces that appeared, superficially, to be enemies.

The first was technocratic managerialism. It regarded the nation as an inefficient administrative unit, the citizen as a bundle of preferences, the border as friction, politics as a technical problem and government as a delivery mechanism for outcomes designed by people who attended the correct universities.

The second was identitarian radicalism. It rejected the individual as the basic moral unit and replaced him with the demographic category. It taught that language was power, objectivity was camouflage, universal principles concealed domination and moral authority flowed from one’s position inside an inherited hierarchy of oppression.

The technocrat supplied the machinery.

The radical supplied the theology.

Together they created the most suffocating political hybrid of the modern West: a bureaucracy that speaks like an activist and an activist class empowered like a bureaucracy.

This new regime does not need to abolish elections or send police into every home. Its preferred instruments are softer, more pervasive and therefore more difficult to resist: accreditation, professional codes, human-resources investigations, reputational destruction, algorithmic suppression, compelled declarations and the quiet conversion of every institution into an ideological checkpoint.

The citizen remains formally free while becoming socially unemployable.

No censor announces himself. A “trust and safety” specialist adjusts visibility.

No inquisitor asks whether you believe. A compliance form asks whether you are aligned.

No commissar arrests the heretic. A committee explains that his continued presence makes vulnerable colleagues feel unsafe.

Tyranny has learned to use therapeutic vocabulary.

The old liberal asked power to justify itself.

The new liberal asks the citizen to justify himself before power.

The old liberal defended the dissenter because majorities could be wrong.

The new liberal disciplines the dissenter because disagreement might weaken the approved majority narrative.

The old liberal believed that human beings possessed rights regardless of identity.

The new liberal arranges humanity into a moral caste system and calls the arrangement equity.

It turned moral intelligence into a seating chart.

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The Elite Is Not a Conspiracy. It Is Worse.

The liberal elite is not a secret committee meeting beneath Davos to coordinate the destruction of civilization over sparkling water and ethically sourced canapés.

The reality is more banal and more dangerous.

It is a distributed institutional class whose members share the same credentials, read the same publications, reward the same language, fear the same accusations and derive status from performing the same moral gestures.

They do not need to conspire. Incentives coordinate them.

A professor advances by identifying a previously unnoticed oppression. An activist organization raises money by magnifying a crisis. A corporation purchases moral absolution by adopting activist language. A journalist gains prestige by translating political disagreement into a drama of victim and oppressor. A bureaucrat expands authority by finding another sphere of life requiring expert supervision.

Each actor behaves rationally within the system.

The collective result is insanity.

This is how ideological escalation occurs without an identifiable dictator. Yesterday’s radical claim becomes today’s institutional baseline. Once absorbed, it can no longer provide distinction, so the prestige economy demands a more extreme claim tomorrow.

Moderation becomes career suicide because moral status is awarded to the person who discovers the greatest hidden evil, not to the person who asks whether the alleged evil exists.

The elite became intoxicated by its own language because it rarely paid the price of its abstractions.

Those who celebrated porous borders generally lived behind gates.

Those who romanticized disorder did not depend upon the neighborhood shop destroyed by it.

Those who treated policing as an embarrassing relic did not wait forty minutes for help.

Those who described national identity as primitive maintained ferocious loyalty to their own professional class.

Their cosmopolitanism was not the absence of tribe.

It was tribalism with airport lounges.

They converted privilege into proof of virtue and then lectured people bearing the consequences of their ideas about compassion.

This was not simply hypocrisy.

It was moral expropriation.

The Suicide of Asymmetrical Tolerance

A liberal order can survive profound disagreement. What it cannot survive is one-way tolerance.

Tolerance is reciprocal or it is surrender.

That principle should be obvious. Yet the contemporary elite made reciprocal obligation itself taboo. It demanded unlimited openness from liberal civilization while refusing to demand even minimal liberalism from movements entering, operating within or openly opposing it.

Here the confrontation with Islamism became decisive.

The distinction must be made with absolute precision because moral seriousness begins with intellectual discrimination.

Islam is a religion containing nearly two billion people, countless theological traditions and every conceivable degree of belief, doubt, observance and political opinion.

Islamism is a political ideology that seeks to subordinate individual conscience, civil law and democratic equality to religious supremacy.

A Muslim who believes in constitutional government, equal citizenship and freedom of conscience belongs inside the liberal democratic covenant.

An Islamist who regards those principles as temporary obstacles does not become liberal merely because criticizing him makes Western academics uncomfortable.

The most courageous enemies of Islamism have often been Muslims: Iranian women confronting compulsory veiling, Arab writers resisting censorship, reformist clerics challenging fanaticism, secular dissidents, gay Muslims, apostates and ordinary believers who want faith without theocracy.

The liberal elite’s refusal to distinguish these people from Islamists is not tolerance.

It is an insult.

It collapses hundreds of millions of autonomous human beings into a single political identity and then calls anyone who notices the difference a racist. It racializes a religion, infantilizes its adherents and grants its most reactionary representatives the authority to speak for everyone.

That is not multiculturalism.

It is colonial paternalism with a diversity office.

A liberalism that cannot protect a novelist, a woman, a Jew, a Christian, an atheist or a Muslim dissident from religious coercion is not liberalism. It is a public-relations department for its own extinction.

The alliance between the radical Western left and Islamism is frequently described as paradoxical. There is nothing paradoxical about it once one understands the underlying structure.

They do not share a destination.

They share an enemy.

The radical left sees Western civilization as an architecture of racial, capitalist, patriarchal and colonial domination that must be dismantled.

Islamism sees Western civilization as decadent, secular and spiritually corrupt territory that must eventually be subordinated.

One wishes to dissolve the house.

The other wishes to inherit the address.

Their temporary partnership is founded not on mutual affection but on convergent hostility toward the liberal nation-state, Western confidence and—most obsessively—Israel.

The progressive activist overlooks Islamist misogyny because acknowledging it would complicate the approved hierarchy of victimhood. The Islamist adopts the vocabulary of decolonization because it launders a supremacist project through the language of liberation.

Reaction does not become progressive because it changes languages.

Theocracy does not become emancipation because its victims are inconvenient to Western theory.

Fascism does not become anti-fascism because the fascist remembers to describe his enemy as a colonizer.

Yet the intellectual eunuchs of the modern academy have perfected the art of discovering “context” precisely where moral judgment is required.

They can identify seventy-three varieties of microaggression but cannot recognize a pogrom while watching it livestreamed.

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Israel: The Fact That Shatters the Theory

Israel is the unforgivable fact at the center of this ideological crisis.

It is unforgivable because it ruins the categories.

The Jewish people are ancient and modern, indigenous and diasporic, Middle Eastern and European, religious and secular, wounded and sovereign. Israel contains the descendants of Holocaust survivors, Jews expelled or driven from Arab and Muslim lands, Ethiopian Jews, Soviet Jews and families whose roots in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias reach backward through centuries.

The Jews cannot be neatly placed inside the crude postcolonial diagram because Jewish history predates the diagram, crosses its boundaries and exposes its intellectual poverty.

The Jew is white when his supposed privilege must be condemned.

The Jew becomes foreign when his belonging must be denied.

The Jew is indigenous nowhere and an intrusive settler everywhere.

He may be mourned at Auschwitz but condemned for refusing to build another Auschwitz in Israel.

The elite accepts the Jew most comfortably as a corpse.

A dead Jew can be memorialized, universalized and drained of political inconvenience. His suffering can become a museum exhibit about tolerance.

The armed Jew is another matter.

The armed Jew announces that memory has acquired sovereignty. That Jewish safety will no longer depend upon the intermittent decency of governments, mobs, kings, presidents, universities or fashionable political movements. That “Never Again” is not an annual ceremonial murmur.

It is a sovereign verb.

This is what anti-Zionism cannot forgive.

Not merely that Jews returned, but that Jews ceased asking permission to survive.

October 7 exposed the pathology with horrifying clarity.

The speed with which parts of the Western activist class moved from massacre to explanation, from explanation to justification and from justification to celebration was not an intellectual accident.

It was doctrine operating automatically.

The bodies had not been identified before the slogans arrived.

People who had spent years proclaiming that words were violence suddenly became metaphysically uncertain about whether torture, rape, kidnapping and the deliberate murder of families constituted violence when committed against Israelis.

They demanded “context” not to understand the crime but to dissolve the criminal’s agency.

That is one of the most repulsive features of the contemporary victimhood hierarchy: it grants limitless agency to the designated oppressor and no agency at all to the designated victim.

Israel is responsible for everything, including the choices of its enemies.

Palestinians, in this framework, are responsible for nothing, not even the murder of Israelis.

This is not solidarity with Palestinians. It is contempt for them. It treats an entire people as moral children, incapable of choice, strategy, fanaticism, courage, cruelty, compromise or responsibility.

Real respect demands agency.

Real compassion can condemn suffering without sanctifying those who manufacture it.

Real liberalism can defend Palestinian dignity without turning Hamas into an armed social-work organization.

But ideological liberalism can no longer make such distinctions. Its moral vocabulary has only two settings: oppressor and oppressed. Once the roles are assigned, facts become decorative.

Israel is guilty before it acts.

Its enemies are innocent after they kill.

That is not moral reasoning.

It is a secular theology of predestination.

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The Right’s Complicity in the Collapse

The right should not congratulate itself too quickly.

It helped create the wasteland through which it now marches.

For decades, establishment conservatism reduced freedom to economics. It worshipped deregulation, shareholder value and consumer choice while treating culture as a secondary concern and national solidarity as an obstacle to efficiency.

It defended the market but forgot to defend the society in which markets operate.

It allowed factories, neighborhoods and civic institutions to disintegrate while pointing triumphantly at aggregate growth. It treated workers as interchangeable labor units, towns as obsolete coordinates and citizenship as an inconvenient distinction inside a global supply chain.

It confused a market economy with a market society.

The first is indispensable to freedom.

The second dissolves everything that cannot be priced.

A man is not free merely because he may choose among thirty streaming services while fearing that an honest sentence at work will destroy his livelihood.

A family is not flourishing because the national economy grew three percent while its community collapsed.

A country is not a hotel with a gross domestic product.

The post-Cold War right imagined that history had ended, markets would liberalize tyrannies and cultural institutions could be abandoned to the left because politics was fundamentally about tax rates.

It ceded the universities, media, civil service, arts, schools and language itself.

Then it seemed surprised when people educated by its opponents eventually governed the culture.

The new right emerged from the ruins of that failure as much as from the failure of the left.

It no longer asks only, “How large is the economy?”

It asks, “Whom does the economy serve?”

It no longer asks only, “Is the individual formally free?”

It asks, “Does he possess the cultural, familial and institutional conditions required to exercise freedom?”

It no longer assumes that any movement of capital, labor or information across borders must be beneficial because movement itself is efficient.

It asks whether the nation remains capable of governing itself.

This is the philosophical evolution that explains the right’s movement into the mainstream.

The old right defended order.

The libertarian right defended choice.

The new right is attempting—often chaotically—to defend the conditions under which order and choice can coexist.

It combines Burke’s reverence for inheritance, Mill’s defense of dissent, Tocqueville’s insistence upon civic association, Hobbes’s recognition that order precedes liberty and Orwell’s understanding that political freedom begins with the right to state the obvious.

It is an unstable synthesis. It contains national conservatives, classical liberals, religious traditionalists, populists, working-class voters, dissident feminists, anti-communist immigrants, Muslim reformers, Zionists, secular free-speech advocates and ordinary parents who never intended to join a counterrevolution but discovered that reality had been declared reactionary.

Sometimes this coalition barely agrees on the meaning of breakfast.

But it understands one thing the elite forgot:

Liberty requires architecture.

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The Return of the Boundary

A boundary is not automatically an act of hatred.

It is the beginning of definition.

A free society distinguishes the citizen from the noncitizen, lawful conduct from coercion, religion from theocracy, immigration from invasion, compassion from capitulation, criticism from intimidation and peace from the temporary absence of resistance.

The contemporary elite treated every boundary as morally suspect because boundaries exclude.

Of course they exclude.

That is what makes them boundaries.

A legal system excludes lawlessness. A democracy excludes political violence. A home excludes uninvited entry. A definition excludes what the word does not mean. A civilization excludes practices incompatible with its continued existence.

The question is not whether society will exclude.

The question is what it will exclude, by what law and according to which moral principles.

The nation-state is not merely a bureaucratic container. It is the political scale at which democratic solidarity becomes possible. Citizens finance schools their children do not attend, defend towns they have never seen, accept election results they despise and support strangers in hardship because they recognize one another as participants in a shared national enterprise.

There is no democracy without a demos.

There is no welfare without a “we.”

There are no enforceable human rights without a government willing and able to enforce them.

Universal dignity is a moral truth.

Political responsibility is necessarily particular.

Humanity in the abstract does not patrol a street, protect a synagogue, rescue a hostage, maintain a court, collect a tax or defend a border.

Actual nations do these things.

The cosmopolitan who sneers at national loyalty is usually consuming security, law and prosperity produced by national loyalties he considers beneath him.

He is not post-national.

He is a parasite upon the nation.

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Why the Public Finally Revolted

The public’s revolt is often described as irrational, emotional or populist—as though people require a doctorate in political philosophy before noticing that their rulers despise them.

They do not.

A worker does not need to read Foucault to understand that the meaning of words is being manipulated.

A mother does not need to read Böckenförde to know that a society unwilling to transmit its values will eventually lose them.

A Jewish student does not need a seminar on discourse analysis to recognize the difference between criticism and a crowd glorifying those who murdered Jews.

An Iranian woman does not need Western feminists to explain the liberating dimensions of the morality police.

Ordinary people may lack the elite’s vocabulary.

They do not lack perception.

What enraged them was not merely failure. Governments fail constantly. It was the compulsory humiliation of being ordered to praise the failure as virtue.

They were told that noticing the consequences of uncontrolled migration was xenophobia.

That distinguishing a man from a woman was hatred.

That expecting assimilation was cultural violence.

That prosecuting crime was oppression.

That loving their national inheritance was fascism.

That defending Israel from genocidal terrorists was complicity in genocide.

That their memories were misinformation, their concerns were phobias and their eyes were unreliable instruments contaminated by privilege.

Eventually, people reach the limit of coerced absurdity.

When every ordinary opinion is labeled extreme, “extremism” loses its power to frighten.

When every defender of borders is called fascist, the word fascist becomes evidence not of the defender’s wickedness but of the accuser’s intellectual bankruptcy.

When every objection is declared dangerous, danger becomes the official synonym for dissent.

The electorate did not move because it mastered a new philosophical theorem.

It moved because it was sick of being required to lie.

Reality became politically homeless.

The right offered it a chair.

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The Danger Inside the Counterrevolution

But the right faces a test more severe than winning elections.

It must decide whether it intends to rescue liberal civilization or merely avenge itself upon the people who betrayed it.

Resentment is politically combustible. It can illuminate injustice or burn down judgment.

A movement organized around civilizational defense can decay into racial paranoia. A defense of borders can become blood mysticism. A demand for public order can become worship of force. A rebellion against bureaucratic censorship can become censorship wearing patriotic colors. A legitimate hatred of Islamist supremacy can degenerate into indiscriminate hatred of Muslims.

If that happens, the counterrevolution will have become another form of the disease it claims to cure.

The purpose is not to change which tribe controls the machinery of coercion.

The purpose is to dismantle the machinery of ideological coercion.

The standard cannot be whose boot is pressing upon the citizen’s throat.

The standard must be that no faction acquires the right to place it there.

A serious right must be merciless toward totalitarian ideas and scrupulous toward individual human beings. It must defend Muslims from collective guilt while confronting Islamism without apology. It must preserve borders without converting ancestry into destiny. It must protect public order without immunizing state abuse. It must defend tradition without sanctifying every injustice that happened to arrive before us.

It must possess the strength to identify enemies and the discipline not to invent them.

Otherwise it will not defeat identitarianism.

It will repaint it.

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The Death of the Liberal Elite

The liberal elite is dying not because it lost an election but because it exhausted its claim to moral authority.

An elite can survive incompetence.

It cannot survive becoming ridiculous.

These people presented themselves as guardians of nuance and became incapable of making elementary distinctions. They confused mercy with the refusal to judge, openness with the abolition of boundaries, tolerance with submission, diversity with ideological uniformity and moral sophistication with endless hostility toward their own civilization.

They made a profession of “speaking truth to power.”

Then they became power and declared truth a form of violence.

They transformed universities from houses of argument into seminaries for an aristocracy of grievance. They turned journalism from an adversarial investigation of power into the emotional management of the public. They turned corporations into moral ventriloquists, governments into therapeutic prefectures and language into a minefield patrolled by people whose livelihoods depend upon discovering mines.

They taught a generation to experience contradiction as injury and inherited civilization as shame.

Then the world supplied an enemy that felt no shame at all.

Islamism looked upon the West’s moral confusion and understood immediately what the elite could not: a civilization ashamed of defending itself has already begun negotiating the terms of its surrender.

History will not describe this as compassion.

It will describe it as decadence with footnotes.

The Counterrevolution

The new dividing line is not simply left against right.

It is reality against ideology.

Reciprocal tolerance against unilateral disarmament.

Citizenship against demographic bookkeeping.

Universal law against hereditary innocence and hereditary guilt.

Democratic sovereignty against both theocratic supremacy and managerial oligarchy.

Moral agency against the infantilization of designated victims.

Civilizational confidence against the obscene vanity of self-erasure.

This is why the right is becoming mainstream.

Not because humanity has become more cruel, but because millions have realized that compassion without judgment is merely cowardice performing kindness.

Not because freedom has failed, but because freedom cannot survive among people unwilling to distinguish it from surrender.

Not because every conservative is wise, but because the institutions of liberalism became catastrophically foolish.

The liberal elite imagined that the greatest danger to freedom was the person who loved his nation too intensely.

It failed to notice the danger posed by people who did not love freedom at all.

So let the obituary be written.

The elite died as it lived: correcting the grammar of the man shouting “fire,” investigating him for alarmist language, explaining the historical grievances of the arsonist and congratulating itself on maintaining civility while the library burned.

But liberty did not die with it.

Liberty changed its political address.

It went where the forbidden distinctions could still be spoken.

Where a woman remained a woman.

Where a border remained a border.

Where terrorism remained evil.

Where the citizen remained more than a racial category.

Where the Muslim reformer could be defended against the Islamist.

Where the Jew was permitted not merely to be mourned, but to be armed.

Where Western civilization was understood not as innocent—it has never been innocent—but as worthy of preservation because it created the moral vocabulary by which its own sins could be exposed.

We did not move right because we stopped believing in liberty.

We moved because liberty arrived at our door, half-frozen and bloodied, expelled by the institutions that had inherited its name.

We opened the door.

Call that reactionary if you wish.

Reaction is what living tissue does when touched by flame.

The political right is no longer merely conserving the past.

It is staging a counterrevolution on behalf of reality itself.

And the most revolutionary word of our age—the word that will separate free men from frightened administrators, sovereign nations from managed populations and civilizations from their undertakers—is also the smallest.

No.

No, censorship is not safety.

No, theocracy is not diversity.

No, terrorism is not resistance.

No, national suicide is not compassion.

No, Jewish helplessness is not peace.

No, reality will not apologize for contradicting your theory.

The liberal elite mistook its will to disappear for moral superiority.

We will not follow it into oblivion.

We are not here to preserve its ashes.

We are here to seize freedom from its undertakers.

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My mother died on July 3, 2022.

I can type those words.

I can say them.

I can tell you the date.

But there is still a part of me that does not quite understand how a person can be woven through your entire life and then suddenly become someone you speak about in the past tense.

My mother was.

I hate the word was.

There are certain words that should never have to sit next to the people you love.

My grandfather is another one.

He has been gone for decades, yet there are moments when the distance between then and now simply collapses. I can be a husband, a father of four, a man with gray in his hair and a lifetime of decisions behind him, and suddenly I am somebody’s grandson again.

That is the strange thing about grief.

It doesn’t care how old you are.

It doesn’t care how successful you became.

It doesn’t care how many countries you’ve lived in, how many times you’ve crossed the Atlantic, how many jobs you’ve had, houses you’ve owned, children you’ve raised or plans you’ve made.

It finds the little boy inside you and sits down beside him.

I grew up in Johannesburg.

Then South Africa became America.

America became more than twenty years of my life.

Arizona became home.

I went to university. Built a career. Got married. Had four children. We built the kind of life that, when you’re young, you imagine represents arrival.

And for years I kept moving.

Literally.

I have crossed the Atlantic more than sixty times.

Airports became ordinary. Passport control became ordinary. Suitcases became ordinary.

I became very good at going places.

What took me much longer to understand was where I belonged.

And even longer to understand that sometimes the people who make a place feel like home are disappearing while you’re busy building the next part of your life.

That thought bothers me more as I get older.

Because I remember being young enough to think my parents were permanent.

My grandparents certainly felt permanent.

Children believe that.

Grandpa has always been Grandpa, therefore Grandpa will always be there.

Mom has always been Mom, therefore Mom will always answer the phone.

Then life teaches you otherwise.

Brutally.

One day there is a person you can call.

Then there is a photograph.

A voicemail you wish you had saved.

An old email.

A story you tell your children.

A birthday that comes around every year even though the person whose birthday it was is no longer here to celebrate it.

And suddenly you understand that memory is a very poor substitute for presence.

I would give almost anything for certain completely ordinary conversations again.

Not some profound final exchange about the meaning of life.

Nothing cinematic.

I’d take an ordinary phone call.

I’d take five minutes.

I’d take my mother irritating me.

I’d take my grandfather telling me something I’ve already heard.

I’d take sitting in a room with someone I loved without realizing that one day I would desperately miss the privilege of being bored beside them.

That is what loss does.

It makes ordinary things sacred retroactively.

And now I look at my own children differently.

Because when your children are small, parenthood feels endless.

Another school morning.

Another meal.

Another pair of shoes somebody can’t find despite the apparently revolutionary concept of putting shoes in the same place twice.

Another argument.

Another mess.

Another request.

“Dad.”

“Dad.”

“Dad.”

Sometimes you think, Can everyone please stop saying Dad for five minutes?

Then they get older.

And suddenly you understand that one day nobody will be shouting it from another room.

That thought scares me.

Because this version of our family will not exist forever.

The six of us under one roof.

The kids walking through the door.

The shouting from upstairs.

Someone cooking.

Someone complaining.

Someone looking for a charger that apparently nobody on planet Earth has seen.

My wife and I trying to coordinate four lives while pretending we have any control over any of them.

This exact family, at these exact ages, in this exact moment, exists only once.

And it is disappearing while we live it.

God, that is hard to admit.

I spent so much of my adult life thinking in terms of the next thing.

The next role.

The next opportunity.

The next project.

The next financial goal.

The next move.

The next country.

I am an HR guy. We practically invented the idea that everything needs a strategic plan, a milestone and a spreadsheet.

But there is no spreadsheet for this.

There is no KPI for whether you noticed your life while it was happening.

There is no performance review at the end where someone tells you that you spent too many evenings worried about things that turned out not to matter.

There should be.

Most of us would probably fail it spectacularly.

Because I can remember work crises from years ago that felt enormous at the time.

Emails that had to be answered.

Meetings that could not possibly wait.

Problems that seemed worthy of losing sleep.

Many of them I can’t even remember now.

But I remember people.

I remember voices.

I remember rooms.

I remember Johannesburg.

I remember Arizona.

I remember my mother.

I remember my grandfather.

And now I live among the limestone hills of Judea.

Sometimes the morning light hits those hills and I still have the strange realization:

I live here.

After Johannesburg.

After America.

After more than sixty trips across the Atlantic.

After decades of moving through airports and countries and chapters of my life.

I am here.

My family is here.

Hebrew is outside my window.

And there are moments when thousands of years of Jewish longing suddenly stop being history and become something frighteningly personal.

I came home.

But coming home does not return the people you lost along the way.

That’s the part nobody puts on the postcard.

You can stand in the place generations dreamed about and still wish your mother could see it.

You can watch your children building Jewish lives here and desperately wish you could turn to someone who isn’t there anymore and say:

Look.

Look where we ended up.

Look at this.

You should be here for this.

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I think that may be one of adulthood’s deepest heartbreaks.

Eventually you accomplish things you once wanted your parents and grandparents to see.

And some of them aren’t here to see them.

So you imagine telling them.

You have entire conversations with dead people.

At least I do.

I wonder what my mother would say.

I wonder what my grandfather would think.

I imagine telling them about the children.

About Israel.

About the absurdity.

About the mistakes.

About how certain things worked out and others absolutely did not.

About how I spent years pretending I knew what I was doing.

And somewhere in all of this came the realization I have been trying not to look at too closely.

I am becoming the older generation.

There are fewer people above me in the family tree and more people below.

I used to be the child listening to family stories.

Now I am the one telling them.

I used to be the grandson.

Now my children hear their history through me.

Names.

Places.

South Africa.

Grandparents.

Great-grandparents.

People they never met who somehow helped make them who they are.

And eventually my children will tell stories about their mother and me.

That thought absolutely destroys me.

Because what will they remember?

Not what I hope they remember.

What will actually remain?

Will they remember that I loved them so ferociously that sometimes it frightened me?

Will they know how many nights I worried about them after they went to sleep?

Will they understand that sometimes when I was angry, underneath the anger was fear?

Will they know that nearly every major decision I made after becoming their father somehow had them hiding inside it?

Will they know how often I looked at them when they weren’t paying attention and thought:

How did I get this lucky?

Probably not.

Children do not get access to their parents’ internal monologue.

They see us from the outside.

Which means what I do now matters far more than what I someday wish they understood.

That is the uncomfortable realization.

I don’t get to preserve this.

I don’t get to freeze my children at these ages.

I don’t get another afternoon with my mother.

I don’t get another conversation with my grandfather.

I don’t get Johannesburg back.

I don’t get Arizona back exactly as it was.

And one day I won’t get this version of Israel back either.

Time doesn’t negotiate.

It just keeps taking.

Quietly.

A day here.

A year there.

A child grows up.

A parent grows older.

A photograph becomes precious because someone in it is gone.

Until one day you realize that the thing you kept calling “my life” wasn’t waiting somewhere in the future.

It was all those ordinary days you were rushing through.

It was the crowded kitchen.

It was my wife.

It was my children.

It was my mother picking up the phone.

It was my grandfather being alive.

It was South Africa.

It was America.

It is Israel.

It was every person I loved while foolishly assuming there would always be more time.

Maybe that is why I feel such urgency now.

I want my children to know the stories.

I want them to know where they came from.

I want them to understand that they are links in something much older than any one of us.

But more than anything, I want to stop missing my own life while I am still living it.

I want to hear “Dad” and remember that there will come a day when I would give anything to hear it shouted from upstairs again.

I want to sit across from my wife and understand that an ordinary dinner is not ordinary at all.

I want to look at the Judean hills and actually see them.

I want to remember the people who are gone without allowing their absence to make me miss the people who are still here.

Because I finally understand something I wish I had understood much younger.

We spend our lives collecting things we think we can keep.

Homes.

Careers.

Money.

Photographs.

Possessions.

Titles.

And eventually life strips the illusion away.

We keep almost none of it.

What we really leave behind is ourselves inside other people.

A story.

A value.

A stupid joke.

A phrase they catch themselves using.

A tradition.

A memory of how it felt when we walked into the room.

My grandfather lives somewhere inside me.

My mother does too.

And someday, God willing many, many years from now, I will live that way inside my children.

I just hope I give them enough worth carrying.

Because crossing the Atlantic more than sixty times taught me how to travel.

Loss taught me something much harder.

There are some places you can never fly back to.

And there are some people you don’t realize were home until they are gone.

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I love my wife.

Let me begin there, before rumors start racing through the Jewish world faster than news of a new kosher restaurant.

I love her faithfully, completely and without hesitation. But there is something I must confess: I have been carrying on another love affair.

My wife knows.

She has always known.

And, strangely enough, she approves.

Because this affair is not a sin. It is a blessing. It does not steal love from our marriage; it fills our home with more of it. There are no secret hotel rooms, no guilty telephone calls, no hastily erased messages. My beloved waits for me openly, dressed in Jerusalem stone, glowing gold beneath the Judean sun.

Her name is Jerusalem.

And G‑d Himself introduced us.

I loved Jerusalem before I ever knew the warmth of her stones beneath my hand. I knew her through the prayers of my ancestors, through Next year in Jerusalem, through the glass broken beneath every Jewish wedding canopy, through King David’s songs and the trembling promise:

If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill.

Other cities ask to be admired. Jerusalem demands to be remembered.

She followed the Jewish people into every exile. She slipped into our siddurim, sat beside us at our Seder tables and entered our happiest moments just long enough to remind us that something was still broken. Jews who had never seen her wept for her. Jews buried beneath foreign snow turned their faces toward her. Jews being marched toward death whispered her name.

That is not nostalgia.

That is love refusing to die.

And then I met her.

Not the imaginary Jerusalem of postcards and polished tourist brochures, but the real woman: beautiful, complicated, impatient and utterly incapable of standing quietly in line.

I fell in love with her pale stones at sunrise and the way they blush pink before evening. I fell in love with the smell of bread drifting from bakeries before dawn, with rosemary growing beside ancient walls, with the sudden scent of wet limestone when the first winter rain falls.

I fell in love with her crowded buses.

Yes, even those.

There is something wonderfully intimate about being pressed between a soldier returning to base, a grandmother hauling enough groceries to feed the entire Tribe of Judah, and a mother attempting to collapse a stroller while conducting peace negotiations with a screaming three-year-old.

Someone is reciting Tehillim. Someone is arguing with the driver. Someone is loudly explaining why the government will collapse by Tuesday. Then the bus jerks forward, an elderly passenger stumbles, and five complete strangers reach out to catch him.

Jerusalem has sharp elbows, but she also has gentle hands.

I love her crowded light rail, where the Jewish people reunite several times a day and immediately begin arguing over the available seats. Ethiopians, Moroccans, Yemenites, Russians, Americans, French Jews, secular students, Hasidim, soldiers and schoolchildren sway together as the train runs along Jaffa Road.

After two thousand years of exile, we finally came home—and naturally, nobody will move farther inside the carriage.

I love Jewish, democratic West Jerusalem: the cafés and synagogues, the Knesset and Machane Yehuda, the bookshops, protests, election posters and fierce arguments conducted over tiny cups of coffee. This is democracy with a Jerusalem accent. It does not speak softly. It interrupts, gestures wildly and calls you achi while explaining why every opinion you hold is catastrophically wrong.

It is imperfect, loud and alive.

It is Jews governing themselves in their ancient capital—not as guests begging some emperor for protection, but as citizens, voters, soldiers, judges, shopkeepers, rabbis and professional complainers.

But I do not love only West Jerusalem.

A man who truly loves a woman does not ask that she be cut in half.

I love a united Jerusalem—from the Knesset to the Kotel, from Jaffa Road to Jaffa Gate, from the Jewish Quarter to the City of David, from the Mount of Olives to the Temple Mount. I reject the idea that my beloved must once again be sliced into zones, guarded by barbed wire or divided according to the appetites of foreign governments.

Jerusalem is not a diplomatic cake to be carved at an international conference.

She is one city. One body. One soul.

For nineteen years, between 1948 and 1967, a wound ran through her. Barbed wire and concrete divided street from street. Jews were expelled from the Jewish Quarter. Ancient synagogues were destroyed. The Kotel stood only a short distance away, yet Jews could not touch its stones.

Then came the paratroopers.

I admire those young men more than words can carry. They entered through the Lions’ Gate exhausted, frightened and covered in the dust of battle. They were not figures from a legend. They were flesh and blood. Some were barely older than the children now racing through the Jewish Quarter. Some carried photographs of wives and sweethearts in their pockets. Some never returned home.

Yet they carried an entire people on their shoulders.

When Motta Gur’s voice crackled over the radio—Har HaBayit b’yadeinu. The Temple Mount is in our hands—it was not merely a military report.

It was history gasping for breath.

Then Rabbi Shlomo Goren arrived, clutching a Torah scroll and a shofar. Standing beside the paratroopers at the Kotel, he lifted the ram’s horn to his lips and blew.

The sound tore through the ancient stones.

It was Iyar, not Elul. Yet no shofar ever spoke the language of Elul more clearly.

Wake up.

Return.

Come home.

The shofar of Elul calls the soul back to G‑d. Rabbi Goren’s shofar called a nation back to Jerusalem. Perhaps those were never two separate journeys. To return to Jerusalem after centuries of exile was to rediscover something buried within the Jewish soul.

Every Elul, when I hear the first notes of the shofar, I hear an echo of Rabbi Goren’s blast hiding inside them. I see those paratroopers touching the Kotel, tough soldiers weeping without shame. I hear generations of Jews answering through them.

We are here.

We came home.

Elul is the season of love. Its name is found in the first letters of the verse:

Ani l’dodi v’dodi li.

I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.

Those words describe my relationship with G‑d. They also describe the ache I feel for Jerusalem. In this city, the two loves intertwine. Jerusalem is not my god; she is where G‑d’s presence feels close enough to touch. She is the love letter He wrote to the Jewish people in stone.

Nowhere do I feel that more intensely than in the Jewish Quarter.

I walk through its narrow lanes and hear children laughing where conquerors once tried to erase every trace of Jewish life. I see the rebuilt Hurva Synagogue rising above rooftops—a building destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed again and raised once more.

That is not merely a synagogue.

That is the biography of the Jewish people.

Empires reduced it to rubble. Jews returned and built it again.

The Jewish Quarter is where history stopped being an obituary and became a home address.

And then I descend toward the Kotel.

I place my hand upon those enormous stones and feel the prayers pressed into every crack. I think of my ancestors, who would have surrendered almost anything for one moment there. I think of the paratroopers who made it possible for me to approach without asking a foreign soldier’s permission.

I kiss the stone.

But then I look upward.

Because the Kotel is not the end of my longing. It is a retaining wall.

Above it stands Har HaBayit—the Temple Mount—the holiest place in Judaism, the mountain toward which Jews have prayed throughout every exile. It is the heart of our faith, the site woven into our prayers, our mourning, our weddings and our dreams of redemption.

And something inside me screams.

I long for clear, unapologetic Jewish sovereignty on the Temple Mount.

Not because I wish to humiliate anyone. Not because another human being’s prayer threatens mine. Jewish sovereignty need not mean cruelty; it must mean courage. A Jewish democratic state can protect the sacred places of every faith without pretending that the holiest place in Judaism somehow has no Jewish owner, memory or soul.

The Mount is not vacant real estate.

It is where heaven and earth kiss in the Jewish imagination.

I long for the day when a Jew can whisper the Shema there without that prayer being treated as an act of aggression. I long for the day when Jewish sovereignty on our holiest mountain is understood not as a provocation but as the final ending of exile.

My scream is not a curse.

It is a prayer.

It is Rabbi Goren’s shofar still echoing.

It is Elul commanding us to awaken from the comfortable lie that Jews must remain strangers at the center of their own story.

Return to G‑d.

Return to Jerusalem.

Return to who you are.

My wife understands this affair. She sees what happens to my face when Jerusalem first appears in the distance. She knows why I touch her stones, why I pause when I hear the shofar and why the sight of Jewish children playing beneath the walls of the Old City can suddenly leave me unable to speak.

She does not compete with Jerusalem.

She loves me enough to understand that some loves enlarge the heart rather than divide it.

I love my wife.

I love G‑d.

And I love Jerusalem—whole, united, Jewish, democratic and sovereign.

These are not competing loves. They are threads of the same covenant: marriage, faith, peoplehood and home. Each teaches me loyalty. Each demands that I remember. Each calls me to become more than I was yesterday.

So my affair continues.

It continues through crowded buses and shofar blasts, through golden sunsets and whispered prayers. It continues in the Jewish Quarter and upon the stones of the Kotel. It continues in my longing for the Temple Mount and in my gratitude to the paratroopers who reunited a city and returned the Jewish people to the heart of their history.

Every Elul, my beloved calls again.

Ani l’dodi v’dodi li.

I am my beloved’s.

My beloved is mine.

And when Jerusalem asks whether I still love her, I answer with the word our people have carried across centuries:

Hineni.

I am here.

German Jewry was one of the greatest Jewish communities ever built.

Not the largest. Not the wealthiest in every period. Not the longest-lived. Babylonian Jewry produced the Talmud. Spanish Jewry gave the Jewish world poetry, philosophy and statesmanship. Polish and Lithuanian Jewry created vast centers of Torah learning. American Jewry would eventually …

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That sounds like a joke.

The punchline is City Hall.

I used to think Woodstock represented the bottom of Western civilization: half a million people wallowing around a dairy farm in mud, drugs, garbage, and their own self-importance, convinced they had achieved world peace because nobody had showered since Thursday.

How innocent Woodstock looks now.

At least the hippies claimed to love peace. Their ideological grandchildren have moved on to something more fashionable: loving the people who hijack airplanes, slaughter concertgoers, kidnap children, rape women, and promise to exterminate Jews.

“Make love, not war” somehow became “Globalize the intifada.”

That is one hell of a moral collapse.

And standing proudly atop the rubble is Zohran Mamdani—the perfect mayor for a civilization that has replaced moral clarity with fashionable cowardice.

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Mamdani Is Not an Accident

Mamdani did not wander into City Hall because nobody noticed his politics.

New York elected him because millions of people saw those politics and either supported them or decided they did not matter.

That is worse.

His Muslim faith is irrelevant to this criticism. There are millions of Muslims who despise terrorism, reject Islamism, want democracy, and understand that Hamas and Hezbollah are not liberation movements. Attacking Mamdani because he is Muslim would be both bigoted and intellectually lazy.

His religion is not the problem.

His politics are.

Mamdani co-founded a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter while at Bowdoin College. He has supported the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel throughout his adult political life. He has refused to affirm Israel’s right to exist specifically as a Jewish state, instead offering carefully engineered language about a state with “equal rights.”

That sounds lovely until one notices that the world contains dozens of countries built around national, religious, or cultural identities, yet the Jewish state is somehow the one national project Mamdani finds morally intolerable.

Britain may retain an established church. Islamic republics may write Islam directly into their constitutions. Arab states may define themselves as Arab. Palestinian nationalism may be treated as sacred and unquestionable.

But Jewish national self-determination? Suddenly Zohran discovers his passionate opposition to religious and national particularism.

What an extraordinary coincidence.

He has described support for the Palestinian cause as central to his identity. He has accused Israel of genocide. He once declared that when “the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF,” dragging Israel into American policing because apparently no progressive grievance is complete until a Jew is blamed for it.

He has supported applying boycott politics to the Cornell-Technion partnership in New York. He promised to have Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrested if he entered the city, despite a New York mayor having neither the constitutional authority nor the international jurisdiction to conduct his own little foreign-policy circus.

And then there was “Globalize the intifada.”

When repeatedly asked to condemn the slogan, Mamdani initially refused. He said the mayor’s job was not to police language. After the political backlash became impossible to ignore, he eventually said he would “discourage” it.

Discourage it.

As though globalizing the intifada were chewing gum on the subway.

The Second Intifada was not a vigorous disagreement at a Brooklyn book club. It was a campaign of suicide bombings, shootings, stabbings, and mass murder. Israelis remember buses ripped apart during the morning commute. We remember the Dolphinarium. We remember Sbarro. We remember the Park Hotel seder massacre, where a terrorist walked into a Passover meal and murdered thirty people.

Jews do not need Mamdani to explain what “intifada” really means. We buried its victims.

Yet when frightened Jewish New Yorkers asked for an unequivocal condemnation, Mamdani produced an academic seminar on language, context, and mayoral responsibility.

His refusal was not sophistication.

It was cowardice wearing glasses.

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He Condemned Hamas—And Then Presented the Invoice

Mamdani’s defenders insist that he has condemned Hamas.

Yes, he has. Later, he called the October 7 massacre a “horrific war crime,” mourned the victims, and called for the hostages to be returned.

Congratulations. The mayor of New York eventually reached the daring conclusion that massacring families and kidnapping babies might be bad.

But his first response after October 7 mourned deaths “across Israel and Palestine” and immediately pivoted toward blaming occupation and apartheid.

Hamas terrorists were still roaming Israeli communities. Families were still hiding in safe rooms. Bodies were still being collected from burned homes. Parents did not know whether their missing children were dead or dragged into Gaza.

Mamdani was already preparing the invoice for Israel.

That is the pattern: acknowledge Jewish suffering just long enough to establish moral credentials, then hurry toward the real objective—putting the Jewish state on trial.

His condemnations of antisemitism operate like a smoke detector with the batteries removed. Technically present. Reassuring when inspected. Completely useless when the house is burning.

Mamdani will condemn antisemitism in the abstract. He will say Jewish New Yorkers deserve safety. He will pose with rabbis, attend meetings, and recite the appropriate language.

But ask him to affirm the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty, reject BDS, or condemn the slogan that evokes the murder of Israeli civilians, and suddenly everything becomes terribly complicated.

That is not solidarity.

That is political choreography.

New York Has Heard Islamist Terror Before

New York City should be the last place on Earth requiring a refresher course on Islamist extremism.

On September 11, 2001, nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four passenger aircraft and murdered 2,977 people from ninety countries. Two planes struck the World Trade Center. Another hit the Pentagon. The passengers of Flight 93 fought back, forcing the final aircraft into a Pennsylvania field.

New Yorkers breathed pulverized concrete, jet fuel, office paper, and human remains.

Firefighters climbed the towers while thousands fled downward. Families covered walls with missing-person posters even as they understood that the missing were never coming home.

For a brief moment, the West remembered that evil existed.

Then the professional idiots arrived.

They explained that identifying Islamist extremism was insensitive. They transformed perpetrators into victims of Western foreign policy. They buried religious totalitarianism beneath a mountain of academic vocabulary. Every terrorist acquired “grievances.” Every murderer came with “context.” Every victim was expected to apologize for surviving.

A quarter-century after Islamist terrorists murdered nearly three thousand people in New York, the city elected a mayor who could not immediately condemn a call to globalize the movement associated with suicide bombings against Jews.

No, Mamdani is not Adolf Eichmann. Only a historical illiterate would equate an elected politician with one of the principal organizers of the Holocaust.

But the civilizational absurdity is still staggering.

Imagine postwar Berlin elevating a politician who treated the slogans of genocidal movements as unfortunate misunderstandings. Imagine survivors being told that they had interpreted the slogans too emotionally. Imagine the intellectual classes praising the politician’s nuance.

That is the comparison: not identical men, but a society so drunk on self-hatred that it launders the language of those who want its people dead.

October 7 Exposed the Fraud

On October 7, 2023, Hamas and its accomplices invaded southern Israel and murdered approximately 1,200 people. They kidnapped 251. They attacked homes, kibbutzim, roads, military bases, and the Nova music festival.

They murdered children. They burned families alive. They dragged hostages into Gaza while crowds celebrated. Investigators found substantial grounds to conclude that rape and gang rape occurred during the attack and that hostages suffered sexual violence in captivity.

And before Israel had identified all the bodies, Western activists marched—not against Hamas, but against Israel.

The blood was still wet, and the signs were already printed.

That told us everything.

These people were never primarily motivated by civilian suffering. If they were, October 7 would have horrified them into silence. Instead, many treated the massacre as an exhilarating revolutionary spectacle.

They tore down hostage posters.

They celebrated “resistance.”

They harassed Jewish students.

They demanded a ceasefire before Israel had even finished counting its dead.

The same activists who insist that using the wrong pronoun constitutes violence developed endless patience for terrorists who filmed themselves murdering Jews.

A Hamas gunman can record his own atrocities, and some professor will still demand additional context.

A Jewish student raises his voice, and suddenly campus security must be called.

When Jews are dead, we receive candles.

When Jews defend themselves, we receive indictments.

And Mamdani’s political rise emerged from that exact moral swamp. He did not create the movement, but he understood it, rode it, and gave it a handsome, smiling, social-media-friendly face.

He is not the wild-eyed protester screaming outside the synagogue.

He is the polished politician who makes the protester’s worldview respectable.

That may be more dangerous.

Meet the Rats, Thugs, and Thieves

The thugs are easy to recognize.

They hijack airplanes. They fire rockets at civilians. They storm bedrooms. They seize hostages. They murder dissidents, persecute minorities, execute homosexuals, brutalize women, and then send English-speaking spokesmen onto Western television to discuss human rights.

The thieves steal the language of civilization.

They steal “resistance” to describe murder.

They steal “justice” to excuse antisemitism.

They steal “liberation” to advertise religious tyranny.

They steal “genocide” and hurl it at Israel while embracing movements that openly promise to destroy the Jewish state.

Then come the rats—not Muslims, immigrants, or any ethnic group, but the cowardly opportunists scurrying through Western institutions.

They saw October 7. They heard the testimony. They watched hostages dragged through Gaza.

But they also knew which opinion would earn applause, attract donations, protect careers, and secure political endorsements.

So they hid behind language.

“Violence erupted.”

“Tensions escalated.”

“Both sides traded accusations.”

Apparently terrorists simply materialize from the atmosphere, like humidity.

Mamdani is the political triumph of that cowardice. He packages anti-Zionism as equality, boycotts as nonviolence, intifada slogans as linguistic complexity, and hostility toward the world’s only Jewish state as enlightened universalism.

It is an impressive trick.

Bullshit, but impressive.

Civilization Requires the Courage to Judge

A civilization survives by distinguishing between democracy and tyranny, soldier and terrorist, citizen and hostage, imperfection and evil.

Israel is imperfect because it is a country populated by human beings. It has elections, opposition parties, protests, independent courts, argumentative journalists, and citizens who can insult their prime minister without disappearing into a torture chamber.

Hamas is not an imperfect democracy.

It is a terrorist organization.

Iran is not merely culturally different.

It is an authoritarian theocracy that imprisons dissidents, brutalizes women, sponsors terrorism, and openly seeks Israel’s destruction.

America is not morally equivalent to al-Qaeda. Israel is not morally equivalent to Hamas. Democracy is not morally equivalent to jihadist tyranny.

Mamdani’s politics depend upon blurring those distinctions until the terrorist becomes a resistance fighter, the democracy becomes an apartheid regime, and the Jew defending his family becomes the true obstacle to peace.

That is not progress.

It is moral brain damage.

I write from the hills of Judea, where history is not a graduate-school theory. Jewish life is carved into the stone, spoken in the language revived on these streets, and defended by young Israelis who know exactly what happens when Jews outsource their survival to the promises of fashionable politicians.

The Jewish people have heard every version of “Trust us.”

We know how that sentence ends.

But the Jews are no longer waiting helplessly behind locked doors. Israel exists. It fights, argues, builds, mourns, votes, and survives. It will not commit national suicide because Zohran Mamdani, a campus activist, or some keffiyeh-wrapped revolutionary with an iPhone finds Jewish sovereignty offensive.

New York may choose Mamdani.

It does not get to redefine the intifada for the Jews who buried its victims.

It does not get to boycott Jewish sovereignty and call itself inclusive.

It does not get to elect the smiling face of anti-Zionism and then lecture frightened Jews about tolerance.

Western civilization is not dead yet. But it is lying in the gutter, drunk on its own moral vanity, while rats pick through its inheritance, thugs test its gates, and thieves carry away the language of justice.

Its epitaph will not say that it was conquered.

It will say that it saw evil, consulted the polling, and elected the euphemism.

Civilizations do not collapse merely because barbarians arrive at the gates.

They collapse when arrogant fools open those gates—and call it progress.

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I am building Jewish life in the Jewish homeland. Brussels, Washington, Tehran, Doha, Moscow, and every other foreign capital can file their objections directly into the nearest toilet.

I am a settler.

There. I said the terrifying word.

Not a “resident of a disputed area.” Not an “obstacle to peace.” Not an apologetic Jew trembling behind a stack of intern…

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How a murdered Torah civilization rose again in Jerusalem, Bnei Brak, Brooklyn and Lakewood—and became larger than Europe had ever imagined

Walk past the Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem late at night and listen.

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The building is still alive. Thousands of voices rise and fall over pages of Gemara. Questions collide with answers. Fingers stab at Rashi. Someone insi…

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History has a sick sense of humor.

Sometimes it whispers. Sometimes it taps politely on the window. And sometimes it watches the president of the United States sign an agreement with the Islamic Republic of Iran at the Palace of Versailles and screams, “Have none of you read the plaque?”

On June 17, 2026, President Donald Trump signed the 14-point Islamab…

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Land Back—unless the land is Judea. Believe women—unless they speak Hebrew. Never Again—unless the Jews actually mean it.

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I am writing from Efrat, in the hills of Judea, where the limestone glows gold at sunset and every archaeological excavation causes another nervous breakdown in a Western humanities department.

Another Hebrew inscription.

Another Jewish…

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Rosh Chodesh Elul 5786 — the Judean Hills, Israel

My teacher, Rabbi Azriel Chaim Goldfein zt”l, once described what happened when Elul arrived in the Lithuanian town of Telz. The change was not confined to the yeshiva. It entered the street. People spoke differently. They carried themselves differently. There was a sharpened sense of responsibility, a fe…

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Before dawn, the Judean Desert is almost unnaturally silent. The Dead Sea lies below like a sheet of dark metal, the mountains of Moab form a black wall across the water, and a thin procession of hikers zigzags upward along the Snake Path. Headlamps flicker. Shoes scrape against stone. Nobody has enough coffee.

Then the sun rises.

Light spills across the …

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I walked through the City of David today—the ridge where Jerusalem became Israel’s capital, Jewish engineers carved survival into bedrock, and 3,000 years of history refused to behave like a political slogan.

Today I walked into the City of David and watched a modern political slogan lose a fistfight with 3,000 years of stone.

The entrance sits just downh…

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By Friday afternoon, Tzfat had attempted to murder my knees, confuse my GPS, and force me into a deeply personal relationship with gravity.

Every street is either a staircase, the beginning of a staircase, or a staircase pretending to be a road. Google Maps tells you to turn right. There is no right. There is a blue door, three cats and a wall built when…

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Haifa attacks vertically.

The sea is at your feet, Mount Carmel is in your face, and every place you want to visit appears to be directly above or below wherever you happen to be standing. The city planner’s guiding philosophy was apparently: let them buy stronger knees.

I spent the day moving through Haifa by foot, bus, cable car and sheer determination—…

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The air is different.

Laugh if you want. Bring your scientist. Bring your oxygen meter. Bring your PhD and your clipboard. Stand on Har HaBayit for twenty minutes and tell me it’s just another hill.

It’s not.

There are places you visit.

Then there are places that visit you.

Har HaBayit grabs you by the soul.

I’ve stood all over Israel. On the cliffs of Rosh H…

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I have reached the conclusion that living in Israel permanently damages your ability to take the rest of the world seriously.

It just does.

You wake up.

Drink your coffee.

Drive past a vineyard older than half the countries giving us lectures.

Wave at a reserve soldier buying bourekas.

Hear kids arguing in Hebrew like the language didn’t spend nearly two thou…

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To understand me, one must first understand a place in which I never lived.

Before South Africa, before America, and long before I climbed the hills of Judea and understood that I had finally come home, there was Lithuania.

Not the modern country drawn neatly between Latvia, Belarus, Poland, and the Baltic Sea. Jewish Lithuania was never so easily contain…

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I used to think Tu B’Av was Judaism’s answer to Valentine’s Day.

I could not have been more wrong.

The older I become, the more I realize that Tu B’Av is not about finding someone to love.

It is about remembering what love actually is.

That realization came to me not in a synagogue, but while wandering through the Jerusalem Botanical Gardens.

The world teach…

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