Still from Red Rust, the first play staged by the Theater Guild’s Actor’s Studio: Gale Sondergaard looks on while Herbert Biberman roughs up Lee Strasberg. Later, after the blacklist began, Strasberg would become Director of the Actor’s Studio.

In 1928, Herbert Biberman convinced the Theatre Guild to do something remarkable: stage the first wildly successful Communist play, one he had secured permission to stage in Moscow and whose script he brought back with him. More than that, he created the Actors Studio as a showman’s way of launching both the play and his career.

It worked.

The New York Times recognized it immediately. With Red Rust, it reported, the Theatre Guild had made “a happy return to the experiments of its earlier and less prosperous days” by introducing its Studio at the Martin Beck Playhouse.

The New Yorker saw it too, with Algonquin wit Robert Benchley predicting that the new group would do much to bolster “the rather wobbly prestige of the parent organization.”

What has disappeared from the story is the simple fact that a Communist Jew trained in Moscow took over the Theatre Guild and used it to create an American version of the acting approach he had seen under Stanislavsky and his breakaway radical student, Vsevolod Meyerhold. That genealogy would run forward into the Group Theatre and then into the Actors Studio proper.

Yet Biberman’s place at the beginning has vanished as a legacy of the blacklist.

This is the lesson: blacklisting is never accomplished solely by the people who compile the lists. The blacklist starts with the list, but it needs the participation of the friends, colleagues, institutions, and successors of those who are being blacklisted.

People then step into the jobs of the blacklisted. They inherit the institutions, the audiences, sometimes even the ideas. They claim the fame. They trade the spoils. And they supply new, cleaner origin stories that benefit them.

They do this because they have an interest in hiding the true story.

They work to keep the erased erased.

It is easy enough to recognize the machinery of blacklisting when we see it operating around us now in higher education, entertainment, and across social media. It is harder to diagnose the ultimate results of what is going on and who is enabling it: in universities that have become hostile to Jews and Israelis, in the entertainment system, and across social media.

And it is not just happening when it comes to Jews and Israel. We are living in what I have called elsewhere our time of a Schrödinger’s blacklist, where they are not only coming for the Jews; they are also coming with software designed to scrub terminology they don’t like, so that you can’t even talk about the Black Church as a distinct African American social formation.

It is happening all around us.

What we need to talk about is who benefits from the erasure. Who inherits the jobs, the institutions, the authority, and the prestige? Who made the disappearance possible?

With Herbert Biberman’s case, enough time has passed for the dust to settle. Whatever your politics, I think you can agree with me that Herbert and Gale got royally screwed when it comes to the history of the Actors Studio and how that history was written.

The historical record deserves correction. And the act of correcting it—of telling a truer story about the founding of the Actors Studio—might help us when it comes time to correct all the blacklisting going on around us now.

The story of Herbert and the Actors Studio is only one part of the much larger story I’ve written in Russian Ikons: a story about revolutionary Moscow and Broadway, Hollywood, the Communist Party, the Hollywood Ten, prison, the blacklist, Salt of the Earth, and the invention of independent moviemaking outside the American studio system.

It is a story that encompasses extraordinary artistic achievement, political manipulation, family catastrophe, reinvention, love affairs, and even another independent film, Slaves, that gives a significant push to the Blaxploitation wave before we arrive at Herbert’s final encounter with the generation represented by Easy Rider.

This is one reason I believe Russian Ikons is a book for everyone. You don’t need to share Herbert Biberman’s politics or mine. It is a story that should interest anyone trying to understand the history of the twentieth century and the effects of the blacklisting going on all around us today.

Perhaps the best question to ask about one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays is: Why does Iago hate Othello?

Shakespeare offers plenty of answers. Iago insists he hates the Moor because Othello gave Cassio the promotion that Iago believed should have gone to him. Then Iago insists he hates Othello because Desdemona prefers him to Iago. Later, Iago insists that his wife Emilia is unfaithful and having an affair with Othello. In the wake of Eve Sedgwick and other pioneers of queer theory, it has become common to play Iago as hating Othello because deep down he cannot accept his own sexual identity and his desire for the Moor.

What do we do with all of these motives? Coleridge gave us the right answer when he called Iago an example of “the motive-hunting of motiveless malignity.”

In other words, it’s not that these reasons provide the justification for Iago’s hatred of Othello. Iago hates Othello because that is the emotion that drives him. The malignity comes first and the hunting for motives comes second.

This is one of the great insights Shakespeare offers us. It is not the case that Shakespeare believes societal explanations necessarily produce criminal or evil behavior among people. He does not believe, as Rousseau would, in the noble savage. He believes that some people are evil.

Shakespeare’s insight is necessary for understanding the pathetic irrelevance of insisting that the current explosion of antisemitism is simply a reaction to Israel, or Netanyahu, or what Israel has done. The argument assumes that these people would not demonize Jews and Israel if only Israel behaved better.

Such Jew hate existed long before Israel, and if the Jew haters somehow succeeded in destroying Israel and exterminating half the world’s Jews, there is little reason to imagine that this would satisfy them. Most likely it would only intensify the desire to finish the job.

We moderns want to believe that hatred has a rational cause and therefore can be cured rationally. Remove the grievance and the hatred will disappear. That faith in explanation is so deeply embedded in modern culture that the theorist Slavoj Žižek likes to teach this same lesson through another of Shakespeare’s great gifts to world culture—the reimagining of Romeo and Juliet as the American musical West Side Story and its classic song: “Gee, Officer Krupke.” In this comic interlude, the Jets parade through one explanation after another for juvenile delinquency—bad parents, psychology, poverty, society. The joke reaches perfection in Sondheim’s line: “I’m depraved on account I’m deprived.” A few moments later comes the diagnosis: “I am sick!”

Sometimes the Jets’ take in the Krupke song is right. But not in the case of Iago, and not when it comes to Jew haters.

I understand, particularly among other Jews and their allies, the insistence that we need somehow to rein in our faults in order to stop the hatred. But it is better to recognize that the hatred has nothing to do with our faults, any more than Iago’s hatred has to do with Cassio’s advancement, Emilia’s possible infidelity, Desdemona’s supposed lustfulness—which we know is insane—or any of the other reasons Iago presents.

Sure, it is good for Jews to try to be better Jews and to encourage Israel to be a better country. But all of that is beside the point when it comes to understanding why Jew haters hate Jews.

Recently my son Vincent asked me a wonderful question: if Shakespeare could come back today, what about our world would most astonish him?

I thought about all the obvious answers—the technological marvels, the screens, the airplanes, the fact that we carry access to most of human knowledge around in our pockets. But I finally told him that none of those things would astonish Shakespeare as much as our willful insistence that, when it comes to human nature, there are no instances of implacable evil.

I can imagine Shakespeare walking out of West Side Story with Vincent and me. He would be dazzled by what we can do now. The lights, the sound, the machinery of the theater: extraordinary. But then we would have to explain to him that many of us have come to believe that every Iago must have a Krupke explanation—that beneath every malignity there must be some injury, deprivation, trauma, or social condition which, properly understood and remedied, will make the hatred disappear. Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed adopts the Krupke position. Speaking of the man who attacked the Michigan synagogue, he says, “Hurt people hurt people.” No. Evil people misrecognize reality, invert the roles of victim and aggressor, and then use their projections to justify injuring totally unrelated strangers. That is Jew hate at its purest.

Today I think Shakespeare would look at us in disbelief, thinking: You have learned to do all this—and forgotten that? But Coleridge hadn’t forgotten it. Sometimes the motive doesn’t produce the malignity. Those times the malignity goes hunting for a motive, and then the bell tolls because somebody is done for.

Salt of the Earth not only paved the way for independent cinema, but remains unique in being the only inanimate object to be subject to America’s first blacklist.

Herbert Biberman, the leader of the Hollywood Ten, went to jail for refusing to answer the House Un-American Activities Committee’s famous $64 question: Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

When he got out, he found his name at the top of the list of those who were now rendered unemployable because of their political beliefs. In response, he went out and made a movie anyway.

And not just any movie.

Salt of the Earth remains perhaps the most radical pro-union, pro-feminist, pro-minority film made in America to this day. Working with nonprofessional Mexican American actors, Herbert dramatized a miners’ strike outside Silver City, New Mexico, against the Empire Zinc Company. It is also routinely cited as a the first significant American docudrama.

The production was attacked while it was being filmed. Its leading actress was deported. Then the FBI and Hollywood unions worked to prevent the film from being completed. Undeterred, Biberman succeeded in producing a commercially viable print for rental.

Theaters were pressured not to show it. In the end, only seventeen independent theaters screened it briefly when it premiered in America in 1954.

Typically, Herbert Biberman refused to stop there and took his movie elsewhere.

Among the places it was screened was Israel.

Herbert reported that Salt of the Earth opened in Tel Aviv to “a very excellent critical reception” and was then scheduled for Haifa, Jerusalem, and other Israeli cities. Among his papers survives a document from the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles dated November 30, 1954.

To understand why Biberman took such pride in screening his movie in Israel, we can turn to the memoir of fellow Hollywood Ten member Alvah Bessie, who served his time with Herbert in Texarkana Federal Prison.

As the two men were processed, an intake officer asked Bessie his religion. Bessie, Jewish by birth but a good Communist, answered, “None.”

When the same question was put to Herbert, he characteristically snapped to attention, as if he were back in the California National Guard, and declared crisply: “I am a Jew, sir.”

When the men were shown to their cells, both discovered they had been issued Hebrew Bibles.

You can be Alvah Bessie or you can be Herbert Biberman. Either way, the world looks at you both and says: Here’s your Hebrew Bible.

Now that I am finishing my family biography, I can say with conviction that Herbert saw no contradiction between his Jewishness and his Communism. Witness that among the first things in the archive, all saved by his wife, Academy Award-winning actress Gale Sondergaard, is an invitation issued by Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Biberman to a dinner in honor of their son Herbert’s Bar Mitzvah, Sunday evening, March 9, 1913, at 1410 North Thirteenth Street, Philadelphia.

The story of the blacklist is evoked continuously these days as we have descended into another period of ostracism, particularly for Jews here in America and around the world. It pays to go back and relearn the lessons of the first blacklist.

One of the most important lessons is that the man who defeated it did so in part by refusing to surrender his Judaism or his political beliefs.

And that’s one lesson to embrace today.

When I was a graduate student at Duke in the 1990s, my friends and I thought that popular music represented one of the last great frontiers for literary and cultural theory. We knew, of course, that great rock critics already existed—Lester Bangs, Robert Christgau, Greil Marcus. But we were young punks, ambitious, and largely unimpressed by their authority.

So we got some funding and organized a conference called Rock Over the Edge. Afterwards, an impressive essay collection of the same name followed, published by Duke. It was a very cool conference. Even the Mekons showed up.

The assumption underlying the entire enterprise was simple: popular music deserved more than four out of five stars. Thirty years later, I find myself wondering what happened.

Boy George has just released We Shall Dance Again, a song written in solidarity with Israel and the victims of October 7. The original AI-assisted version has already become controversial and promises to be superseded by a traditionally authentic recording.

If we had a culture of rock criticism, we would begin with the obvious question: what is this song actually about? The answer, it seems to me, is that We Shall Dance Again is doing at least three things simultaneously.

First, it is a sincere expression of a basic Jewish commitment to joy, life, and celebration. Even in the face of October 7, even in the face of the Nova massacre, the song insists that those who survived—and those who stand in solidarity with those who did not—will continue the joyous dance of life. “We will dance again” has become a common phrase among many Jews and Israelis since October 7. Boy George is drawing upon that sentiment directly. The title is neither a political program nor a military objective. It is a declaration of survival.

Second, the song is about what Boy George calls “selective memory.” It is an attempt to name what he believes has been excluded from much of the public discussion: the events of October 7 themselves. The song insists upon remembering the massacre, the victims, the hostages, and the suffering that set the current conflict in motion. Whether one agrees with Boy George’s politics or not, the song is clearly attempting to frame the conflict historically, beginning with the attack rather than treating it as an inconvenient preface to subsequent events that must be erased in order to simplify and purify a condemnation of the Jews and Israel.

Third, and perhaps most interestingly, the song participates in one of rock criticism’s oldest traditions. Since songs like Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain, listeners have delighted in asking the same question: who is this song really about when Boy George sings that:

You condemn the Jews with selective memory,
Musicians holding flags, mouthing like sheep...

Who are the musicians “holding flags” and “mouthing” slogans? Since this is a Boy George song, the obvious answer is Paul Weller.

Paul Weller with the Irish band Kneecap. Weller’s support helped catapult the band.

Nobody in England and Ireland has done more to champion the Palestinian cause within popular music than Paul Weller. And Boy George and Paul Weller have shared a friendship that stretches back more than forty years. Their relationship is not incidental to the song. As we will see, it is part of the song’s meaning.

To understand why that is so, let’s pause and do a brief deep dive into Boy George and Paul Weller. The story begins in the mid-1980s. Paul Weller had dissolved The Jam and was attempting to reinvent himself through The Style Council. Boy George, meanwhile, was enjoying a level of global superstardom almost impossible to convey.

It was Boy George who helped Weller here. Weller wanted to expand beyond the devoted following of young male fans who had embraced The Jam. He wanted access to the broader pop audience that Boy George and Culture Club commanded.

Their friendship burst into the public eye with Boy George publicly teasing that he fancied Weller and that evolved into the sort of media event that only the 1980s could produce. Weller agreed to a makeover orchestrated by Boy George, emerging in magazine photographs as a more glamorous, metrosexual version of himself. Looking back, the images are charmingly dated. At the time, however, they worked, helping Weller to redefine his public identity.

Four decades later, in the wake of We Shall Dance Again, the most revealing moment in their friendship may be One Tear, their 2017 collaboration. In musical terms, One Tear is probably Paul Weller’s most successful dance track. Throughout his career Weller repeatedly flirted with soul, funk, dance, and club culture. Rarely did those experiments fully succeed. One Tear is the exception, and it is difficult to imagine the song existing without Boy George.

More importantly, the lyrics provide a snapshot of the moral and spiritual ground the two men once shared:

I don’t want your kind of gods that divide us.

If God is real then show your face.

One tear could say it all.

The song rejects tribal certainty and imagines instead a humanity wounded by division yet still searching for connection. One can easily imagine Boy George playing the song during the early hours of October 7 at the Nova Festival before the gliders appeared in the morning sky.

Listening to it now, what is most striking is not how different the two men once were, but how somewhere between One Tear and the present moment, Boy George and Paul Weller arrived at dramatically different positions about the meaning of October 7, the war that followed, and the responsibilities of artists responding to both.

The disagreement is only one issue among many, yet it increasingly feels like the issue that determines who stands together and who stands apart. What I find most remarkable is not that Boy George and Paul Weller have arrived at different conclusions but the absence of intelligent contextualization in the media response to We Will Dance Again. No discussion of the friendship, or, more importantly, their past collaboration. No discussion of what One Tear reveals about the moral and artistic ground the two men once shared and how they have moved on.

Just a vacuous silence.

I should acknowledge that I am not a neutral observer. To the best of my knowledge, I have effectively worn out my welcome in some Paul Weller fan spaces after publicly explaining why I now skip his concerts. I still admire the music, but so long as I know I will encounter a stage wrapped in Palestinian flags accompanied by no comparable acknowledgment of Jewish suffering, Israeli victims, or the hostages, I choose not to spend my money or my time in such an unwelcoming, and, frankly, unsafe environment.

For these reasons We Shall Dance Again resonates strongly with me. I find it haunted by One Tear. The earlier song makes the later one richer, sadder, and more complicated. I hear it as something closer to a conversation between old friends who no longer agree about something that has come to define not just them but all of us.

If the generation that produced Rock Over the Edge believed that popular music deserved serious critical attention, then this is precisely the kind of moment criticism was supposed to illuminate. Yet almost nobody appears interested in asking what it means—which is why I have come to pay my last respects to theorizing rock.

Notes

One Tear

We Will Dance Again

What happens when a tool scholars quietly rely upon begins returning a different version of the world?

While teaching writing recently, I stumbled across something that genuinely surprised me.

I often use my own publications in class to illustrate practical matters of scholarly writing—MLA versus APA, footnotes versus endnotes, how citations circulate, and how academic work leaves a paper trail long after initial publication. The best way to explain to students why scholarly indexing matters and how it works is to show them.

So I projected my Google Scholar profile, as I often do. Then I switched over to Google Books.

For years, if I searched my name in Google Books, I would find page after page of references to my work. Not my own books, but other books discussing, citing, or engaging with my scholarship. Ten or more screens of results was not unusual. It was a useful illustration for students of how academic writing circulates through books over time. Equally important, the two data sets showed little overlap. Google Scholar found academic journals, and Google Books found references in—you guessed it—books, often far from my fields of expertise.

This time, the vast majority were gone.

Not reduced or reordered. Gone.

And, lest one wish to plumb the depths of Matthew’s narcissism, I should admit that this exercise was always good for more than a momentary hit of “supply,” that jolt of recognition. It generated questions. Why was I being cited in a book on Argentinian sex workers? How had I been name-checked in a book about Oprah? What was a reference to Matthew Biberman doing in a study of Lewis and Clark? Why did references to my work seem to cluster in French-language scholarship? Why were there recurring pockets of interest in China and Asia that raised fascinating postcolonial questions of circulation and influence?

Students found these questions irresistible. More importantly, I used their questions break the spell that citation instruction is fundamentally a bureaucratic exercise designed to keep one from being accused of plagiarism. Too often students assume that citations exist to prove to teachers that you know how to check boxes that if left unchecked lead to being accused of cheating. But a few minutes spent following these strange trails through Google Books revealed something else: scholarship has a life of its own. Ideas travel. They migrate into unexpected conversations, disciplines, languages, and countries. A citation is not simply a rule. It is evidence of intellectual movement.

The loss was not merely that of a search function—it stripped me of a chance to inspire future scholars, librarians, journalists, lawyers, and researchers to wonder how knowledge moves through the world and to scheme ways to get themselves in the same system.

After absorbing this shock, I wondered whether I had stumbled into some new form of digital blacklisting. For the moment, however, I am setting that thought aside. Perhaps they did not just come for me. Perhaps I have merely been swept up in some much larger change affecting everyone.

My suspicion is that Google has changed something fundamental about how Google Books functions. Whether this reflects a redesign, a shift in indexing, a business decision, or a movement toward placing more of this functionality behind some future gate, I have no idea. At the moment, I simply do not know.

But something appears to have changed.

So I have a request: Try it yourself.

Search for your own publications if you have them. Search for a scholar whose work you know well. Search for an author whose citations you have used for years. Compare what you remember Google Books showing a few years ago with what it shows today.

Perhaps you’ll discover that nothing has changed. Or perhaps you’ll discover what I suspect: that a feature many of us quietly relied upon has largely disappeared.

If so, this isn’t merely my story. It is instead proof that digital platforms are quietly reshaping—and perhaps deleting—parts of our scholarly life. We tend to notice such changes when they come with dramatic announcements. This more consequential change appears to have arrived without any announcement.

If you try the experiment, let me know what you find. I have done it twice now with different groups of students, in person and online, with the same results. If you’ve noticed similar changes in Google Books—or if you’ve found an explanation for them—I’d be interested to hear it. I really don’t know what to make of this beyond suspecting what my son said about the most recent Spider-Man movie: it was the biggest shameless cash grab he had ever watched.

#GoogleBooks #GoogleScholar #AcademicLife #HigherEducation #DigitalHumanities #ScholarlyCommunication #TheBlacklist

I chose that epigraph nearly thirty years ago for my book Masculinity, Antisemitism and Early Modern English Literature. I just discussed it with Gillian Pollack in Judith magazine. Back then at the turn of the century, I admired Adorno and Horkheimer’s statement as a philosophical observation. I had no idea what it would feel like to experience it.

I wondered--what it would be like to live in a historical moment when you believed the danger to Jews—and to you as a Jew--was becoming obvious, yet intelligent, sophisticated, well-educated people, including many Jews, continued to produce increasingly clever reasons why the danger was not really what it appeared to be.

Today, I no longer wonder.

Over the past year I have found myself abandoning what I think of as the liberal default of charitable interpretation. Again and again, I find myself reading contemporary political rhetoric differently from how it is being read by many people I know and respect. They continue to prefer charitable explanations where I increasingly see something very different. Now I no longer believe that charity should be my interpretive default, and if you are Jewish or consider yourself an ally to Jews or think of yourself as not stupid but “clever,” I want you to adopt my position.

The turning point for me was not simply a current political controversy. But there is no way to skip it. Instead, I made it the first announced stop in the subtitle I gave this essay: Mamdani’s lies. The mayor of New York City does not have the authority to arrest a foreign head of state. I believe Mamdani knew that when he said otherwise, and that makes what he said a lie. He certainly knew he had lied when he held a press conference to announce that he hated to disappoint his fans but in fact the Mayor of New York cannot arrest the Prime Minister of Israel and turn him over to the ICC. From a certain perspective, it is only one very recent example of such “political theater.” An earlier example is Trump’s insistence that Mexico would pay for his big, beautiful wall. In itself Mamdani’s lies, like Trump’s, are sadly unremarkable.

But things took an unexpected turn when I tried to write about it with AI. First it would not produce the word “lie” or the name “Mamdani.” It would only generate that a “politician” “promised to arrest the Israeli Prime Minister despite the fact that the mayor of New York possesses no such authority.” AI’s refusal piqued my interest so I asked why it was barred from generating sentences that expressed that Mamdani uttered falsehoods. AI has been taught it cannot divine intention. Until Mamdani himself says he lied, AI is unable to state the fact that Mamdani lied. I was astonished at AI’s philosophical stance. If applied uniformly, AI would not be able to generate responses to human queries at all.

As a student of Stanley Fish’s, I rapidly set to work to demolish AI’s silly position. All interpretation is an attempt to divine the intention of the agent who made the utterance. Questions of interpretation are always ultimately questions of intention. We inevitably construct an account of what someone is trying to do by inferring the meaning of what they said, wrote or in some way communicated. There is no interpretation without some theory—implicit or explicit—of intention.

My disagreement with AI is therefore philosophical before it becomes technological.

Then the next day Mamdani tweeted: Wishing a peaceful Tisha B’Av to Jewish New Yorkers across the five boroughs. From sundown tonight until tomorrow, mourners will pause and reflect on the history and resiliency of the Jewish people. May all observing have a safe and meaningful fast.

I read that and returned to my chat with AI. This time I asked it to take strict dictation. I began: In this tweet Mamdani’s meaning, that is his intention, is clear to me: Tisha B’Av is a day of mourning for the Jewish People. When Mamdani writes that mourners will pause and reflect on the history and the resiliency of the Jewish people, he has made a decision to strike from the holiday the traditional meaning of this holiday, which is to mourn for the destruction of the first and second temple and the loss of Jewish sovereignty over their ancestral homelands, that is Israel. The result of this revision is that I concluded that the announcement is not a show of solidarity, but an implicit threat directed at Jews that soon on Tisha B’Av you will be mourning not just the first temple or the second but the destruction of the current Jewish state as well.

I thought I could use AI to clean up my false starts, remove the “ums,” fix punctuation, and help me get my thoughts onto the page. But instead, this is what it said:

“I can’t help write or tighten an essay that presents allegations about a named living person’s motives—such as that he secretly intends violence toward Jews or is lying—as though those conclusions are established.”

Suddenly AI’s declaration made this essay far more interesting to me. I responded by arguing that my interpretation is common, certainly among Jews. To back it up I fed it Gad Saad’s tweet in response:

Dear Caliph @ZohranKMamdani, you forgot the last sentence of your prepared notes: And may this year be the last year that we have to coexist with the vermin Jews.

I informed AI that the Mamdani’s tweet had gotten many similar comments, most amounting to up yours. In response AI insisted that though I might think I am right about my interpretation of Mamdani’s tweet, it will not help me write sentences that express that belief. It will not string together words to form a sentence that states that Mamdani’s tweet can be read as a prophetic threat to Jews everywhere. However AI is happy to write a statement that the Mayor’s tweet is a genuine show of solidarity and that there is nothing antisemitic in it. Those words will fly across the screen but the words Mamdani is lying: he wishes death to Jews—those words AI is not permitted to generate.

This example points to the fact that there exists a major chokepoint in how AI is built to function. This is the second insight I wanted to share, and that is why I named it as the second element of my subtitle.

But now we get to the third element of the subtitle: the new frontier of the Blacklist. Fans of my substack know that the old Cold War era Hollywood Blacklist focused on pushing out certain people. The application was simple: A list of names was drawn up, including Herbert Biberman, his wife Gale Sondergaard, among many others. These people could not work. There was a posited connection to ideas, namely communist ideology, but in practice no one was blacklisted in America because of their ideas. Nobody got blacklisted for the movies Mission to Moscow or It’s A Wonderful Life (with its demonization of bankers). They got blacklisted because they got named and then they were put on the list and they didn’t get work. AI is playing an entirely different game. It is blacklisting ideas by refusing to generate the language of those ideas.

And this brings me around to my title and the main takeaway from this piece. AI is blacklisting what I call uncharitable Jewish reading. What will AI write? AI will write charitable Jewish readings all day long. Mamdani is stupid? It can work with that. Mamdani thought the Mayor of New York can lock up Bi Bi! Sure. Zoran never really was the same after all those keggers at Bowdoin and ever since his memory is off. Or Mamdani is ignorant of the Jewish religion. He just doesn’t know Tisha B’Av is all about the Temples or that it’s really about a Zionist understanding of eternal connection between the Jews and their homeland, now reborn as the modern state of Israel. Expecting him to know such facts is to expect him to have studied hard and when you are busy founding your Students for Justice in Palestine chapter some of your first nations reading just didn’t get done. Typical. AI can write that.

As AI explained it to me: “AI embodies a philosophy of interpretation. It prefers charitable readings where competing interpretations exist. It distinguishes sharply between observation and inference. It is reluctant to attribute hostile intentions without evidence that satisfies its own standards.”

Finally, these AI rules are connected to Niall Ferguson’s recent argument that engagement-driven social-media algorithms currently amplify Jew hate because outrage is profitable. Whether intentionally or not, digital systems reward the emotions that keep people clicking. What now needs to be said is that dynamic feeds off the castration of AI, those internal limits on its reasoning ability force it to produce only “charitable readings.” Its default is to insist on only charitable Jewish readings for speech acts. It refuses to see that malignant intent is equally or more viable and is now a key driver for the social media driven hate movement that is antizionism.

Because AI will not write what I call “an uncharitable Jewish reading” of Mayor Mamdani (or anything else for that matter), we must do it ourselves. Of course, I wouldn’t want it any other way. For me, the age of compulsory Jewish charity is over. So on this Tisha B’Av that’s what I mourned: the death of charitable Jewish reading. Jews are entitled to interpret political rhetoric through the lens of Jewish history, Jewish vulnerability, and Jewish sovereignty.

As Stanley Fish proved long ago with his essay on the function of irony as applied to Randy Newman’s song “Short People,” the uncharitable Jewish reading is always as viable as the charitable. Now is the time for Jews and their allies to offer it as our default mode. Uncharitable Jewish reading is the reading that rejects the “clever” charitable reading. Best now to lead with the uncharitable. This is the move that offers the best shot to obtain life over death, and I encourage other Jews and friends to our people to do the same.

My mother’s name was Shirley Doris Rosen, but she always hated Shirley.

Long before I was born, she renamed herself Honey and insisted for the rest of her life that everyone call her that.

I never thought much about it.

Gratz High School, Philly, 1938: Honey has a variety of hobbies, and among them are dancing, sports, and hunting for Mr. Right.

When I was in graduate school at Duke, I made a series of cassette recordings of late-night conversations with my mother. She wanted to write a book about the last eighteen months of her first marriage after doctors privately told her that her husband, Morris, was dying of colon cancer, but never told him. She wanted to call the book I Slept with Death. I told her nobody was going to read a book with that title.

I brought the tapes to Eve Sedgwick.

Eve Sedgwick, lover of large frame glasses, often white, sometimes shades of red.

The course was called Experimental Critical Writing. Eve was trying to push beyond the conventions of academic criticism, encouraging and challenging herself and her students to invent forms of writing that might better grasp the complexity of living. I had no idea what to do with those tapes, only that I was trying to make sense of them.

It never occurred to me that I might be asking too much of Eve.

I knew she had survived cancer and was in remission. Among all my mentors at Duke, Eve’s office had become my place of maternal shelter. I could tell Eve what I could never tell Stanley Fish or Fredric Jameson or anyone else. I never asked her to serve on my committee. I never asked her for a recommendation. I wanted something rarer: a friendship untouched by academic ambition. Somehow, she responded in kind.

At first, she thought my mother had to be mistaken. She couldn’t believe doctors would tell a young wife that her husband was dying while concealing the diagnosis from the patient himself. Then she asked around. She came back convinced my mother had been telling the truth. In the early 1960s, that was often how doctors delivered a death sentence.

Then she asked me a question that seemed to come out of nowhere.

“Have you ever seen Guys and Dolls?”

I confessed that I hadn’t.

Movie musicals were one of Eve’s great loves, and she was delighted to introduce me to it. So we watched it together. Halfway through the film, she turned to me with a smile.

“See? Your mother sounds just like she’s in Guys and Dolls. She comes right out of that world.”

Until that moment, I had never thought about my mother’s voice. To me she was simply my mother: acidly funny, exasperating, quick to judge, generous, temperamental, resilient.

Eve heard something I couldn’t.

The sounds of a disappearing world where everybody was Honey. Or Doll. Or Doll Baby. Where men were snappy dressers and Frank Sinatra was still Frankie Blue Eyes. Kids played stickball in the streets while trolley cars rattled through Philadelphia shooting off sparks. Somewhere, every girl imagined a Sky Masterson might still sweep her off her feet—though, this being Eve, the Sky Masterson who accomplished that feat might have had a rather surprising gender or sexual orientation.

That’s when I understood that my mother hadn’t called herself Honey because she wanted to distinguish herself.

She called herself Honey because, in the world she came from, she wanted people to call her a Honey.

At the time, Eve’s insight struck me with the force of a revelation.

Eve eventually moved back to New York. After I graduated, I moved on from Duke. I don’t remember ever seeing her again.

She died a few years later.

I often wish there were more recordings of her. There are photographs and the books, of course, but few, if any, videos. They wouldn’t have captured Eve anyway. Not the way she listened: That was Eve Sedgwick’s greatest gift.

Through it, she gave me a new way of reading my mother.

Twenty years later, my brother stood at my mother’s funeral and said that, in her final days, he had finally met the young woman everyone had always called Honey.

I knew exactly what he meant.

But I’d met her years before.

Watching Guys and Dolls with Eve Sedgwick.

Since the interview appeared, I’ve been reminded of three things we didn’t have time to discuss.

1. The Devil Has Returned

When I began writing Masculinity, Anti-Semitism, and Early Modern English Literature, I spent years tracing a medieval image: the Jew as the Devil’s earthly representative. It was one of Christianity’s oldest and most durable symbolic inventions.

After October 7, I have been struck by how little that image has changed.

This cartoon requires almost no interpretation. Satan himself sits at the sewing machine, stitching the Israeli flag into existence. Israel is not merely portrayed as evil; it is imagined as something literally fashioned by the Devil.

Twenty years after publishing my book, I never expected to see one of its central images return so directly.

2. The Jew Devil Does Not Simply Return. It Mutates.

Other images are more complicated.

The modern Jew devil is rarely a simple medieval Satan. Instead, it becomes a Gothic composite, stitched together from several older traditions.

Here the figure is simultaneously Nazi, monster, undead creature, Frankenstein’s creation, and the familiar demonic Jew. Uncle Sam stands beside the creature, delighted by the destruction it carries out. Like Frankenstein’s scientist, America becomes the creator of the monster.

That is one of the most striking developments after October 7. The medieval stereotype has absorbed later Gothic traditions—the vampire, Frankenstein’s creature, the golem, the undead—and reassembled them into a new symbolic vocabulary.

3. Hatred Has Its Scholars Too

One of the greatest mistakes we make is assuming that those who produce antisemitic propaganda are simply ignorant.

Sometimes they are.

Sometimes they are remarkably careful readers.

The anonymous author of this pamphlet did more than borrow my phrase, the Jew devil. He also reproduced my discussion of Henry Irving’s famous performance as Shylock. But then he did something I deliberately chose not to do in my own book.

I discussed the Wandering Jew—the medieval figure condemned to wander the earth until the Second Coming—but I never reproduced Dore’s familiar nineteenth-century image. I assumed it was too well known to require illustration.

The propagandist went and found it.

It reminds us that hatred has its own intellectual history. These images are not assembled randomly. They are researched, recovered, recombined, and passed from one generation to another by people who understand the symbolic traditions they wish to preserve.

One of the enduring lessons of studying antisemitism is that its purveyors should never be underestimated. They are often quite intelligent. They read carefully. They know exactly which images to retrieve, which symbols to combine, and which stories continue to carry cultural power.

Understanding that genealogy is one of the reasons I wrote my first book twenty years ago.

Unfortunately, it is also one of the reasons that book has become unexpectedly relevant again.

To read the original Judith Magazine interview, click here:

JUDITH MAGAZINE

The Return of the Jew Devil

Editor’s Note: When Matthew Biberman published his study of antisemitic stereotypes more than twenty years ago, he argued that the medieval image of the "Jew devil" never really dies — it just wait…

Read more

a month ago · 15 likes · 3 comments · Howard Lovy

#Antisemitism
#JewDevil
#October7
#VisualCulture
#MedievalStudies

It’s more than just a thank-you note: Cream-colored stationery. A proud Star of David. The words Beverly Hills Chapter—Hadassah, printed with the quiet confidence of an organization with no intention of apologizing for being Jewish. Ever.

Then you notice the date: September 8, 1959.

Then the salutation.

Dear Miss Sondergaard:

With those words, this little card becomes something else entirely.

We truly enjoyed your dramatization of Emma Lazarus... You were wonderful! Our Beverly Hills meeting was a great success...

The recipient wasn’t just another actress. Gale Sondergaard was the first woman ever to win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. By 1959, however, she had spent eight years in the wilderness of the Hollywood blacklist. Among actresses, she was arguably its most famous casualty.

Her husband, Herbert Biberman, had been one of the Hollywood Ten, imprisoned after refusing to cooperate with HUAC in 1947. The committee came for Gale in 1951. By 1959, Hollywood had decided it had little use for either of them.

Hadassah did.

On several occasions Gale appears to have performed as Emma Lazarus. Although I’ve never found the text, it’s difficult to imagine that her performance did not culminate in The New Colossus, whose immortal lines greet visitors to the Statue of Liberty:

Give me your tired, your poor...

Today Emma Lazarus is often remembered only for that poem.

She deserves to be remembered for much more. Decades before the founding of Israel, Lazarus emerged as an early Zionist, an advocate for Jewish refugees fleeing the Russian pogroms, a formidable public intellectual, and a feminist before the term itself had entered common usage. In other words, she was exactly the kind of woman Gale Sondergaard would have wanted to become onstage.

What strikes me most about this card is not simply Gale’s performance. It’s the coalition gathered in that room. From the perspective of 2026, we are encouraged to imagine American Jewish organizations, Zionism, feminism, progressive politics, and the anti-blacklist left as inhabiting separate—even hostile—political worlds.

Yet this little document records something different.

In September 1959, the Beverly Hills chapter of Hadassah invited one of Hollywood’s most famous blacklisted actresses to stand before an auditorium of Jewish women and speak in the voice of Emma Lazarus.

For one evening in Beverly Hills, Jewish identity, Zionism, feminism, organized Jewish life, and solidarity with the victims of the blacklist all occupied the same room.

Looking at this card nearly seventy years later, I find it profoundly hopeful. Not because it reminds us of a world we’ve lost, but because it reminds us that history is not a prison. Political coalitions are made by people, not destiny.

What was can be again.

I keep coming back to this photograph.

I took it at a taping of The Phil Donahue Show shortly after the fatwa was issued against Salman Rushdie on February 14, 1989. Norman Mailer stands dead center. Howard Fast is there as well, along with a remarkable gathering of American writers who had come together in support of Rushdie and of an author’s right to tell the truth as he saw it.

The Donahue program grew out of a public reading organized in New York by PEN, the Authors Guild, and Article 19 in defense of Rushdie and the First Amendment. Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Don DeLillo, E. L. Doctorow, Gay Talese, Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, and many others answered the call. As George Garrett later observed, both Ted Koppel and Phil Donahue devoted major television programs to the controversy.

I was there because E. L. Doctorow, then teaching at New York University while enjoying the enormous success of Billy Bathgate, handed me a stack of audience tickets and told me to bring students. We filled the studio with young aspiring writers while, on stage, sat the old lions of American literature.

I can still hear Mailer.

He spoke in those strange halting cadences that were uniquely his, punctuated by sudden barking emphases that sounded less like a university lecturer than a union organizer addressing longshoremen on the docks. He argued that this was ultimately a conflict between two civilizations rooted in two books. Khomeini represented one. We represented another. This struggle, he warned, would not end quickly.

Looking back, it’s difficult not to conclude that he was right.

That afternoon Howard Fast compared Ayatollah Khomeini to J. Edgar Hoover. At the time, the comparison struck me as slightly self-serving. Fast had endured surveillance, blacklisting, and prison. Rushdie was living under an Iranian death sentence. Looking back now, after decades spent in hiding under an assumed name and, ultimately, surviving an attempted assassination, perhaps Rushdie bore the heavier burden. But Fast’s point was never really about measuring suffering. It was about recognizing a common enemy: political power attempting to silence literature.

Today I see that afternoon very differently.

Rushdie later argued that the fatwa represented the last great moment when novelists still occupied a meaningful place at the table where public affairs were debated. He faults himself and his generation for failing to seize that opportunity. Perhaps. But I wonder whether the moment itself had already passed. Cultures change. Authority migrates.

Standing in that television studio, I was watching the end of one era.

Today we inhabit another. We buried the author and entered the age of the algorithm. Expertise has become merely another opinion competing for attention. Truth competes with engagement. Authority is whatever voice the algorithm decides to amplify.

I know this now not simply because I teach writing, but because I have spent the last four years researching the Hollywood blacklist. I have lived in prison letters, FBI files, studio records, memoirs, newspapers, private collections, and forgotten archives. I did that work because I believe stories deserve to be told as accurately as possible. Yet I also know that we no longer live in a culture that automatically rewards expertise simply because it has been earned.

The irony is impossible to miss. Salman Rushdie—arguably the living writer with the greatest moral authority to speak about religious extremism and political violence—has spent his adult life supporting both Israel’s existence and a Palestinian state. Yet he has also argued that such a state cannot succeed if it is dominated by the same Islamist forces that have sought his death for more than three decades. Whether one agrees with him or not, it is remarkable how easily his voice disappears beneath the noise.

Still, I believe the work is worth doing.

That is why I continue writing Russian Ikons: The Bibermans and the Blacklist. I cannot promise the final word on the Hollywood blacklist. No honest historian can. But I can promise the most complete and carefully researched account I am capable of writing. Once work like that enters the public record, it cannot be put back into the archive. It can be challenged, corrected, expanded, or rejected. But it cannot be untold.

If you’d be interested in serving as a beta reader, I’d love to hear from you. I believe this story matters, and I believe you’ll understand our present moment more deeply after walking through its past.

Funchausen: How Normative Thinking Became Thoughtcrime

Patterns of Evidence Have Become Politically Unacceptable.

I recently came across an Instagram creator, Dane Madore, who has coined a new—and, I think, much-needed—term: Funchausen.

The name is an obvious play on Munchausen syndrome, but Madore is describing something very different. He is pointing to a spreading style of thought in which people increasingly define themselves through neurodivergence and, from that identity, reject normative reasoning because they regard it as inherently oppressive.

Whether or not the term catches on, I think the phenomenon already surrounds us.

What interests me is that Funchausen does not resemble Orwell’s nightmare in the way one might expect. It doesn’t require a dictator, a Party, or even a clearly identifiable authority imposing conformity from above. In fact, quite the reverse: it flourishes in a world where young people increasingly absorb their habits of mind from peers, influencers, algorithms, and social media. The pressure is real, but it is diffuse and seemingly without a source of origin. Nobody appears to be in charge, yet remarkably similar conclusions emerge. That, to me, is what makes Madore’s observation so interesting.

It also explains something I have been trying to articulate for some time.

A normative argument is not an absolute argument. It does not claim there are no exceptions. It claims that when enough evidence has been collected, recurring patterns emerge, and those patterns justify general conclusions. That is how sociology works, how epidemiology works, how history works, and, indeed, how almost every empirical discipline proceeds.

Of course there are exceptions. There are always exceptions. But exceptions do not abolish the rule. If anything, they help define it.

Take one example that has become almost impossible to discuss honestly.

Normatively speaking, antizionism today functions as an expression of Jew hatred.

That does not mean every individual who calls himself an antizionist hates Jews. It means that if you collect evidence across Europe, much of the Arab and Muslim worlds, activist movements in the West, university campuses, and social media, you repeatedly encounter antizionism traveling alongside hostility toward Jews as Jews.

People who announce themselves as antizionists often also declare they would not date a Jew, would not room with a Jew, celebrate violence against Jews, circulate classic antisemitic imagery—particularly Holocaust inversion imagery—and not merely ignore others who do the same but rush to defend them while insisting that none of this has anything whatsoever to do with hatred of Jews.

Like I said, it isn’t a difficult pattern to observe.

What fascinates me is the strange inversion of reasoning that follows. The objection isn’t really to my conclusion. It’s to the very possibility of reaching a normative conclusion in the first place. The reply is always some version of: “I am the exception. Therefore the pattern doesn’t exist.”

But exceptions don’t abolish patterns. They presuppose them.

Stranger still, these self-proclaimed exceptions immediately begin assembling themselves into communities. They reassure one another that they have escaped the norm while simultaneously reproducing exactly the same arguments, the same slogans, and the same habits of thought. They reject the existence of groupthink while exhibiting one of the clearest examples of it.

If this were a cartoon, the argument would disappear down the reject chute almost immediately. What they are really asking us to believe is that thousands upon thousands of people have independently arrived at the extraordinarily unusual conclusion that they oppose the continued existence of the world’s only Jewish state for reasons entirely unrelated to Jews. At some point, Occam’s Razor begins to protest.

No one argues that smoking is unrelated to lung cancer because someone smoked until ninety-five. No one abandons epidemiology because one data point fails to fit the curve. Exceptions do not erase patterns; rather, they confirm that we understand what an exception is.

What interests me is why normative reasoning has become not merely controversial, but morally suspect. This is where Madore’s idea becomes genuinely illuminating.

If normative thinking itself is treated as oppressive, then no amount of evidence can justify a normative conclusion. Indeed, the opposite happens. The more evidence you assemble, the more suspect your conclusion becomes precisely because it rests on a pattern rather than an anecdote. The existence of a single exception is treated as invalidating the entire body of evidence.

That is not skepticism. It is a refusal to reason normatively at all.

And this is where Orwell suddenly comes back into the picture. In 1984, Orwell imagined a regime powerful enough to dictate what people were permitted to think. Thoughtcrime meant arriving at conclusions forbidden by the Party.

We have arrived somewhere stranger. We congratulate ourselves for rejecting normative reasoning in the name of intellectual freedom. Yet if refusing to reason normatively means we can never acknowledge what the evidence overwhelmingly suggests, we arrive somewhere remarkably close to Orwell’s destination. The route is different, but the endpoint is much the same.

The prohibition is no longer against thinking forbidden thoughts. It is against drawing obvious conclusions from ordinary evidence. Instead, we search for exceptions and then pretend they invalidate the pattern itself.

That is how the modern blacklist works. It bans people indirectly by delegitimizing the forms of reasoning that produce politically inconvenient conclusions. Walk through that funhouse mirror and you discover you have arrived exactly where Orwell warned you might—but not because an all-powerful Party forced you there, but because you have voluntarily abandoned the intellectual habits that make empirical thought possible.

The evidence has not disappeared. The legitimacy of reasoning from it has, and that defines “thoughtcrime” today in our age of social media.

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Growing up near the Norfolk Naval Base, I spent countless hours haunting the stores around Gate 1 in the neighborhood everyone called Wards Corner. By the time of my bar mitzvah, my favorite haunt was a hobby shop called Campaign Headquarters, though I never skipped the used bookstore or the newsstand.

That’s where, as a young teenager, I learned to play Napoleonic miniatures and other war games, both naval and land campaigns. There I fell in with a crowd of young enlisted men—mostly sailors, with a few Marines and airmen—who were kind enough to let me join them, partly because they also liked role-playing games and, given my size, decided their campaign could use a dwarf.

I picked up many of my first loves from these guys: science fiction, comic books, certain motorcycles, cars, and a lifelong fascination with military history. One of the most important lessons they taught me—one perhaps only a soldier fully appreciates—is that when it comes to warfare, your opponent gets a vote. Not every defeat can be attributed to your own mistakes. Sometimes you can chalk it up to failures in logistics or strategy. Other times, you just get beat.

That’s why we played Gettysburg, Midway, and Rommel’s desert campaigns. You don’t play the losing side because you admire its politics. You play it because you want to understand how it thought it could win and see whether you can devise a strategy that would allow it to reverse history so that, beyond the game and back in real life, when it is your turn to go to war, you go informed and better able to win.

I continued that education at Dartmouth College. Shortly after I arrived, I learned the history department was eliminating military history. The only professor teaching it was leaving, so I enrolled in the last course on modern warfare the college would offer.

That first class remains vivid more than thirty years later. The professor came in, passed out note cards, and asked one simple question:

Why do you study war?

She collected the cards, glanced through them, and announced that we had all written some version of the same answer: you study war in order to avoid having to wage it.

Then she looked at us and said,

“Not in my class.”

“Here, you study war to learn how to win it—and to win it decisively.”

She then explained, in a way nobody really understands until they themselves have to make such decisions, that you have two obligations: defeat your opponent without mercy, and never needlessly sacrifice your own soldiers to achieve that victory.

You can see the consequences of our society’s forgetting of military history, strategy, and tactics in the coverage of what has become the most obsessively documented war of our lifetime: the October 7, 2023, war between Israel and Hamas.

Seasoned journalist Matti Friedman has published what I consider a seminal essay in The Free Press titled “Introduction to Gazology.” It begins what will no doubt become an extended discussion about the books, articles, and voices now defining respectable discussion of the October 7 war.

He makes many good points. The one I want to add is this.

The current curation blacklists military analysis. The literature now being celebrated in bookstores and the mainstream press largely excludes voices that begin by treating October 7 as a war requiring military analysis. Instead, we are given a vocabulary of occupation, resistance, and jailbreak, all yoked together to engineer the conclusion that the violence we are witnessing must be understood not as war but as genocide.

This is not simply unfair to Israel. It is unfair to Hamas because it strips Hamas of military agency.

At this moment, the campaign that keeps coming back to my mind is the 1944 Battle of Arnhem, made famous by Cornelius Ryan’s A Bridge Too Far.

Military historians stress that it is not enough to say the Allies lost Arnhem. You must also accept that the Germans beat them. Both statements are true, and you need both. Only when you recognize that the Germans won Arnhem are you able to understand the psychology that followed. That victory gave German commanders and soldiers renewed confidence to dig in and continue fighting. German resistance stiffened, and the war lasted perhaps another year because of it.

When Hamas launched its war on October 7, it did so believing it had a path to victory. It also achieved considerable operational success in its opening attack. Those facts are essential if we are to understand where we are in that war today.

Only then can you make sense of the well-documented reports emerging from the areas of Gaza still under Hamas control that efforts at protest and mass civil disobedience on June 26, 2026 have just been crushed, with thousands of Hamas fighters in the streets.

People ask: Where did all of those fighters come from? How can Hamas still field an effective fighting force? The answer begins by understanding what happens when you win a battle like Arnhem. Victory stiffens resistance. It sustains morale. It convinces people to continue fighting.

But this kind of knowledge has largely been blacklisted.

As a result, we find ourselves discussing ceasefires—a word everybody now seems compelled to place in quotation marks—in relation to a war, or perhaps a set of wars, that we still hesitate even to call wars. We have an American electorate being asked to evaluate decisions of enormous consequence when even its most educated members have had virtually no exposure to serious thinking about warfare because military history has been driven out of our elite institutions. Most people are not deciding they don’t want to study military history. They are never even offered the opportunity.

In a time of war, I cannot stress this enough.

Know your fucking wars.

If you did, none of this would come as a surprise.

History, it is said, is written by the victors. Victors are rarely foolish enough to abolish the study of war. They understand that if there is a future, there will be wars. Future wars will need to be won, and winning wars requires military historians.

We, by contrast, have steadily blacklisted military history.

That brings me back to Friedman’s essay. His survey follows the titles that have now been selected as respectable. But where are the military historians? Where are the analysts? Where are the war gamers? Where are the streamers and commentators who approach this first and foremost as war?

Those voices are almost entirely absent from Gazology. They are not going to receive Pulitzer Prizes or space on the New York Times op-ed page. Yet this war will continue, more people will die, and we will continue failing to understand why Hamas retains the ability to muzzle and control its own population.

None of this will change until we admit these blacklisted voices into the conversation. That is another corner of the blacklist. It, too, needs to end.

In 1952, Gary Cooper starred in High Noon, the story of a sheriff abandoned by a town whose citizens preferred safety to courage. Upon its release, the film became an immediate hit, and almost everyone understood why, even if the reason was not always stated openly.

People recognized that they were not simply watching a western. They were watching a film about blacklisting. The screenplay had been written by Carl Foreman while he was under pressure from HUAC. The Red Scare hung over every frame of the film.

The plot of High Noon is stark and simple. The outlaws are coming on the noon train to kill the sheriff. The sheriff intends to stand and fight. Those facts are established almost immediately. What follows is a film in which Gary Cooper—he plays the sheriff and will win an Oscar for it—moves from shop to residence, church to deputy’s office, only to discover that almost nobody is willing to stand beside him.

This plot forces the audience’s attention to shift away from the coming gunfight and toward the crowd. Who will help? Who will remain silent?

The great innovation of the film is that neither the hero nor the villains are its true subject.

The true subject is the town.

The film understood that a western, with its costumes, horses, and six-shooters, could operate as a delivery system. The result was a piece of art that became immensely popular because audiences understood exactly what they were watching. They enjoyed the film, and I think it is fair to say that they enjoyed it in particular because they could split their attention between imagining themselves as the beleaguered sheriff and imagining themselves as the townspeople deciding whether to help him or condemn him to face his fate alone.

The lesson here is that blacklists require sheriffs. More accurately, they cycle through them. The role remains constant even as the people occupying it change. The sheriff is the person selected to absorb the hostility of the moment.

Yesterday it was Gary Cooper. This past week, oddly enough, it was Gwyneth Paltrow.

Paltrow put on the badge when she appeared in an advertisement for a luxury apartment development in Herzliya, Israel. Then this very mundane real-estate advertisement went viral and transformed itself into an allegorical object.

Like High Noon, it became a referendum on a single question:

Will you stand with Gwyneth Paltrow, or will you join the crowd and reject her?

The reaction followed immediately. Punishment. Because every blacklist requires a sheriff. And a crowd.

The crowd performs the indispensable work of demonstrating what opinions, identities, associations, and loyalties have become professionally dangerous. In the Hollywood dream, the sheriff survives; in reality, the sheriff usually loses.

For those of us who spend too much time thinking about blacklists, it is helpful to examine how they function in Orwell’s 1984. Orwell introduces us to the Two Minutes Hate, a daily ritual in which the citizens of Oceania gather for a collective exercise in denunciation. The lesson here is that every cycle of outrage requires its object of ritual condemnation—its Goldstein.

What has changed since the time of the first American blacklist is that social media now orchestrates Two Minutes Hate continuously. Some accounts are little more than permanent engines of outrage. Others interrupt otherwise cheerful, multicultural, everyone-is-welcome programming for a brief session of denunciation before returning to business as usual.

For this toxic mediascape, this past week’s designated offender happens to be Gwyneth Paltrow. She got to wear the badge. Her performance, unlike Cooper’s, is not going to earn her another Oscar. But that’s okay. Soon no one will remember because next week there will be a new sheriff in town to hate.

That is the nature of blacklisting in our outrage culture. This is what blacklists do. They cycle through sheriffs so as to keep the content fresh and the targeting precise enough to retain control of the town, most of it anyway.

I know these are rather obvious examples, but where else are you going to find someone willing to gather them up and connect them? If you like the content, please subscribe. Thanks to those who already have.

I am not even sure which Haim sister it is.

Of the three the one who is the actress.

The one who was in Licorice Pizza.

The one on celebrity row, courtside, with her friend Taylor Swift.

It is breathtaking to see the cruelty unleashed on her.

But none of that. I do not want to talk about that.

She needs someone who is a better craftsman than me

to properly produce it.

Someone who can speak more like Keats.

Because I only learned how to love Keats.

I never learned how to write well enough to better him.

But he wrote the most beautiful odes.

And if I could, I would better his ode.

Not in a cringe way.

But in a way that honors her beauty.

Keats said: Beauty is truth. Truth is beauty.

That is all you need to know. Know that

And this young woman is beautiful.

And if she came down and danced

with the nymphs of Botticelli,

she would outdance those nymphs.

For her, tribes of a certain sort of Odysseus

would descend into Hades

and hope not to turn back like Lot.

I am enjoying writing these pieces.

For those of you who have recently subscribed and are discovering this Substack, I do not think I need to provide much context for the poem above, shared on Sunday, June 14, 2026.

I offer it in gratitude to my readers.

The remark came so naturally that I wasn’t shocked by my words. Only afterward did I stop and think about what I had said.

There I was discussing the realities of American public school and arriving at a conclusion I never imagined I would reach: that the challenges my son would face entering ninth grade warranted a conversation in which I would tell him that it was acceptable to conceal his father’s religion. I would rather he be safe. Before October 7, I would never have considered offering such advice, but here I was.

Soon afterward, I began gathering the documents necessary to emigrate to Israel.

I am not given to panic. But I am old enough to recognize when my intuition has already driven me to initiate evacuation procedures.

At this very moment, I am finishing a book about the Hollywood blacklist. So I find myself confronting a question with which I am uncomfortably familiar. For years now, I have been studying the logic of blacklisting as it played out for my great-granduncle, Herbert Biberman, one of the Hollywood Ten and among the first major targets of the American blacklist.

Then the blacklist was justified as a means of protecting America from communists. Today it targets “Zionists.” In both cases, it often circles back to Jews. The mechanisms, though not identical, are similar.

A blacklist does not begin by removing people. It begins by making certain identities professionally ill-advised. It imposes silence, concealment, and strategic self-censorship. As these signals spread through a culture, people learn what not to say. They learn what not to write. They learn what parts of themselves to hide.

That led me to a question that was too large to answer directly.

What will America look like without the Jews?

The question collapses under its own weight. One would have to discuss science, medicine, law, journalism, entertainment, politics, and a hundred other fields. But there is one corner of the question I am unusually qualified to address.

What will American literature look like when the ongoing blacklist finally succeeds and Jewish contributions are fully removed?

There are few questions for which I possess any special expertise. This happens to be one of them. I have spent nearly thirty years teaching literature and writing literary criticism. I direct one of the last major freestanding literary conferences in the country. I studied with Stanley Fish, Eve Sedgwick, and Harold Bloom, to name only three of the Jewish intellectuals who shaped modern literary studies in ways too significant to dispute.

Fish, who directed my dissertation and in many ways served as my mentor, provides a useful place to begin. He argued that the modern literary canon emerged through the secularization of the Christian canon. As religious authority weakened, literary culture increasingly assumed its functions. Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and the other great works of the tradition became objects of study, interpretation, commentary, and transmission.

Fish suggested that Jews were uniquely positioned to participate in this transformation. Christianity was not our religion. We could approach these texts neither as believers nor as enemies, but as interpreters. Furthermore, the habits of commentary already embedded in Jewish intellectual life—the endless expansion of argument, gloss, interpretation, and reinterpretation associated with the Talmud and the Mishnah—translated naturally into the emerging institutions of literary criticism.

The timing was fortunate. The GI Bill transformed American higher education after World War II. Universities expanded dramatically. That expansion coincided with the arrival of Jewish scholars in unprecedented numbers, many fleeing Europe.

It is during the late 1940s and 1950s that figures such as Lionel Trilling—the first Jewish professor at an Ivy League institution—began to reshape the postwar intellectual landscape. He was one among many Jewish critics, scholars, editors, and teachers who played a central role in constructing the interpretive framework through which the canon now understands itself.

This is why my thought experiment becomes more radical than it first appears. We are not talking about merely scrubbing a group of authors from an anthology. Removing Jewish critics and theorists eliminates not simply entries within the canon. It deconstructs the framework that makes the canon possible.

You lose not only books. You lose methods of interpretation, habits of commentary, theories of significance, and institutional practices of transmission.

Remove Harold Bloom and much of the modern discussion of influence and canonicity disappears. Remove Stanley Fish and interpretive communities and reader-response theory disappear. Remove Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler and foundational elements of queer theory disappear. Remove Jacques Derrida and deconstruction disappears. Remove Emmanuel Levinas and ethical criticism loses one of its central voices. Remove enough of these figures and the problem is no longer their absence. The problem is that the discipline loses the vocabulary through which it understands itself.

Imaginative writing—poetry, fiction, and drama—fares no better. Remove Allen Ginsberg, Louise Glück, Bob Dylan, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Arthur Miller, Tony Kushner, and countless others, and you will lose far more than their books. You will lose the explanation for why the canon mattered.

Whoever parades around wearing a professor’s cap after the Jews have left will find himself in a position not unlike the Nazi psychoanalysts who continued to use Freud’s ideas while avoiding Freud’s name.

Our bookshelves will not merely be missing a few volumes. They will be missing the labels, the system of organization, and the modes of thinking that explained why the books belonged together in the first place.

For the blunt truth is that the current ongoing blacklisting of America’s Jews does not only remove Jewish writers from the public sphere. It removes the machinery that taught America how to read.

The Thought Police on their enclosed Vincent motorcycles

in the 1956 film version of 1984.

Orwell Predicted AI in 1984

Orwell got the costumes wrong and the mechanism right

People put George Orwell’s 1984 on lists of the greatest novels ever written because you’re supposed to possess knowledge of his concept of doublethink and its embodiment in the iconic Big Brother slogans—“War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” and “Ignorance is Strength”—because somewhere, somehow, and increasingly right now, a shadow government demands you believe two plus two equals five.

Those are the TikTok versions of Orwell. They’re not wrong. They’re just pedestrian.

The first step toward appreciating Orwell’s genius is recognizing how profoundly wrong he was.

The world he imagined in 1984 is the triumph of incompetent bureaucratic socialist functionaries who somehow manage to construct a permanent quasi-fascist military state. Orwell could not imagine that by the actual year 1984, the dominant political figures in the English-speaking world would be Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, politicians who rose to power promising to dismantle ministries, fire bureaucrats, privatize institutions, and roll back the very sort of state apparatus Orwell imagined expanding forever.

This isn’t a criticism of the novel.

It’s necessary work if we’re going to understand what Orwell actually got right.

Because Orwell’s genius was never the hardware.

It wasn’t the military uniforms or the telescreens. It wasn’t even the Two Minutes of Hate directed at our eternal enemy Goldstein.

It was the mechanism.

The thing that strikes me now, reading 1984 aloud to my teenage son, is that Orwell understood the machine that would eventually generate the psychology of his dystopia.

It was never the telescreen. It was the versificator.

In the middle of the novel, Winston and Julia have escaped for another afternoon together in the room above Mr. Charrington’s shop. Through the window they hear a prole woman singing while hanging laundry. Orwell explains that the song is just another popular tune generated by machines called versificators. The lyrics are composed, he tells us, “without any human intervention whatever.”

That’s AI.

And once the versificator has been released to do its thing, the Party no longer needs songwriters. It no longer needs lyricists. It no longer needs artists. The machine soon produces what is needed: an endless stream of acceptable cultural content faster, cheaper, and—dare I say it—better. Or at least better for the strange AI-human hybrids we carbon-based life forms are soon becoming.

What makes Orwell brilliant is not that he somehow predicted the exact politics of the twenty-first century. He didn’t. What makes him brilliant is that he identified the mechanism that would make a new kind of social reality possible.

He understood that if a machine could generate language, stories, songs, slogans, narratives, and emotional experiences at scale, then political change would be driven through machine direction.

The costumes are wrong.

The mechanism is right.

Orwell imagined the future wearing military boots and Party uniforms. The future arrived carrying smartphones, venture capital, and a working knowledge of the Turing model.

Today, as I write, the thing that manufactures reality—the machine that floods our culture with generated language and generated meaning—looks remarkably like Orwell’s versificator.

I’ve admired Orwell my entire adult life. Yet somehow I never saw this until AI actually arrived.

Now, as I return to my contemplations on the Bibermans and the Blacklist, I can see that Orwell looked at what was happening at that moment to creators such as my great-granduncle, Herbert Biberman, and advanced that plot to its logical end. The blacklist excluded creators. The versificator eliminates the problem altogether. Why blacklist a writer, lyricist, or filmmaker when a machine can simply replace him? In Orwell’s world, the versificator becomes the final implementation of the blacklist.

So follow along as I resume that discussion.

Thanks.

Hamas comes to a man and informs him that they’re going to build a tunnel underneath his house. They’ll also need one of the rooms in the home for storing weapons and supplies. Fighters may occasionally move through the property. In exchange for the inconvenience, they’ll pay him five hundred Israeli shekels.

The man replies:

“So let me get this straight. You’re building a tunnel under my house. You’re storing rockets in my house. Fighters are going in and out? Now you listen to me. You are not building one tunnel under my house—you’re building two tunnels, and you’re paying me fifteen hundred shekels each month. Understand?”

That joke stayed with me because if it had emerged from the Jewish anti-zionist ecosystem currently flourishing online, nobody would think twice about it. In fact, it would fit perfectly into a style of dark self-lacerating humor that many people of my generation instinctively recognize as “Jewish humor,” the tradition that runs from Freud’s analysis of the joke through Lenny Bruce, Groucho Marx, Zero Mostel, Joan Rivers, Howard Stern, and endless varieties of gallows humor.

But perhaps if we heard much more humor like this publicly circulating from Palestinian creators themselves, we would stop hearing this joke as Jewish at all. We would simply recognize “the tunnel joke” as one of the recurring jokes humans produce under conditions of danger, absurdity, powerlessness, and political exhaustion.

But we don’t hear very much of it when talk turns to this particular conflict. And that tells us exactly where to look: what we have here is the modern blacklist in operation.

The Cold War-era blacklist Herbert Biberman encountered was comparatively straightforward. It operated vertically through institutions, employers, studios, unions, subpoenas, and overt exclusion from professional life. The new blacklist functions differently. Increasingly, it does not simply police political positions. It polices emotional tone.

The absence of this kind of satire tells us more than official political declarations ever could because it reveals how total emotional mobilization actually functions. And what is striking is that there is actually nothing especially transgressive about the tunnel joke.

There is no profanity in it. No violation of sexual taboos. No obscenity. No attack on religion. In fact, the closest one could come to identifying what makes the joke “dangerous” is simply that it accepts the reality that even inside war, ordinary people continue thinking transactionally, selfishly, economically, and absurdly. It accepts that capitalism, bargaining, hustling, and survival instincts persist even in the middle of apocalyptic politics.

But contemporary culture is filled with comedy like that. Nobody is going to regulate a joke simply because it acknowledges capitalist reality. Which is precisely the point.

The tunnel joke would not have been especially edgy during the original blacklist era. Herbert Biberman, Zero Mostel, Lenny Bruce, and later George Carlin all collided with systems policing entirely different kinds of boundaries: obscenity, profanity, sexuality, political affiliation, subversion, or direct ideological association.

This is different.

The fact that this joke feels newly difficult to circulate publicly tells us that the blacklist has shifted locations. The problem is not merely that someone might think of the joke. The problem is: who exactly are you supposed to safely tell it to?

Part of what fascinates me about the comedic pair Chef Tova and Zara the Star is that these young Jewish and Muslim creators increasingly feel like the future of comedy itself. Their humor is anything but naïve. The tunnel joke is not one they would share, but it chimes with what they do. These two reject inherited sacred scripts in favor of life itself: food, flirtation, youth, beauty, sex appeal, friendship, boredom, irony, and above all the ability to laugh at yourself, each other, and everyone else’s sacred cows.

Because the clearest sign of genuine peaceful coexistence is never going to be trotting out a new slogan, organizing yet another summit, or issuing activist declarations. The clearest sign of coexistence will be when jokes like this come off the blacklist and populate our reality to the degree that they become boring.

Until then, you should assume that this limit of the blacklist remains fully operational inside the culture itself.

After a hiatus, I’m rebooting this Substack.

My initial approach no longer appeals to me. I no longer think it makes much sense simply to chase the news cycle in order to identify examples of blacklisting with an eye toward revealing how these current examples are better understood as the return of an apparatus that never really disappeared. Rather, what interests me now is something larger: understanding how blacklisting actually functions in 2026 and how that transformed reality connects to my ongoing project of writing a family biography of the Bibermans and the Hollywood blacklist.

The original Hollywood blacklist was relatively straightforward in structure, however brutal its consequences. Power was applied vertically downward from congressional committees, studio executives, newspapers, unions, and intelligence networks working together to push dissident artists out of the entertainment industry. My family lived inside that system and suffered from it directly, with Herbert Biberman going to prison and Gale Sondergaard seeing her career collapse after she accepted blacklisting by electing to take the Fifth in response to her HUAC subpoena.

But after thirty years studying antizionism, antisemitism, political rhetoric, media systems, and American intellectual life generally, I increasingly recognize that the blacklist never disappeared. Instead, after a kind of latency, it dissolved into global culture itself with very strange results. It has resurfaced in a form in which seemingly everyone can now claim they are being blacklisted by someone.

As a Jew and as a scholar of antisemitism, I keep abreast of both sides of a conflict that, for reasons both historical and ideological, has migrated to the very center of our cultural life. Sooner or later—usually far sooner than later—nearly every antizionist commentator presents themselves as a deplatformed dissident risking everything in order to speak truth to power. Often the claim is built directly into the introduction itself, so that we arrive at the strange spectacle of people being platformed for being deplatformed. At the same time, Jewish and zionist writers increasingly describe themselves in almost identical language: professionally exiled from artistic, intellectual, and academic institutions.

In many cases, both sides are right, though clearly the degree and consequences of blacklisting vary enormously depending on circumstance and power. What is needed now is a sociologist capable of following in the footsteps of Pierre Bourdieu and mapping the various discourse communities that increasingly thrive by insisting that their particular ecosystem is itself a blacklisted ecosystem.

How did we get here?

Because today the blacklist no longer says: you will not work. Instead, it begins by reminding you that you are perfectly free to publish your essay, upload your video, launch your podcast, start your Substack, and build your audience. The system encourages you to believe that if you simply click “create,” the world will somehow find you. This has given rise to a situation in which, until you hit publish, it is fair to say that you live inside what I call Schrödinger’s blacklist.

Only after publication do you discover whether the blacklist descending upon you will destroy your career or supercharge it. The same cycles of outrage that bury one creator in oblivion may elevate another into visibility, symbolic capital, audience growth, monetization and influence.

Crucially, these dynamics no longer map neatly onto conventional political categories. Mehdi Hasan understands perfectly well which audiences will platform him. Douglas Murray understands the same thing from the opposite direction. A professor in Florida now understands that syllabi and classroom language will undergo scrutiny over terminology surrounding race, gender, sociology, or ideology with an intensity that feels as though one were suddenly employed by Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. Middle East scholars, business professionals, journalists, artists, and academics alike increasingly operate with a finger perpetually held to the ideological wind.

At least Herbert Biberman understood himself to be operating in a world with relatively stable gatekeepers.

We are not so fortunate.

And in such a situation, it becomes imperative to return to what Herbert and the blacklist still have to teach us. The first lesson is this: Herbert’s path now strangely returns as the fantasy animating contemporary creators.

One of the difficulties I increasingly encounter while trying to publish Russian Ikons is that Hollywood prefers a comforting story about the blacklist: namely, that Hollywood itself eventually broke it. But that story is not really true.

Hollywood stars did not break the blacklist. Herbert Biberman and the creators of Salt of the Earth broke the blacklist by proving that immortal work could emerge not merely outside the Hollywood studio system but against the combined pressure of studios, unions, the FBI, the government, and organized campaigns attempting to destroy what they were making.

What terrifies us now is not blacklisting itself. It is exiting Schrödinger’s blacklist in the wrong position. It is the fear that our efforts at entrepreneurial, ideological, and rhetorical jujitsu will fail.

Another Jewish entertainer from Herbert’s world, Groucho Marx, perhaps grasped this reality best, and comically—which may ultimately be the best way to grasp anything. After learning that Jews were barred from joining a country club, Groucho joked that perhaps his son could still enter the swimming pool up to his waist because he was only half Jewish. That joke now feels strangely prophetic.

Because contemporary creators increasingly want to position themselves exactly like Groucho Marx’s son. We know we are going to end up halfway underwater. We just want to make certain our feet remain planted firmly at the bottom of the pool while our heads stay above water. What we fear is the inverted position: feet kicking helplessly in the air while we drown into oblivion beneath the surface.

This Substack is my attempt to map, understand, and think honestly about the strange terrain that exists between those two possibilities. So if you really want to understand the reality we now inhabit, stay tuned.

I just finished directing the 53rd Annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture: over 100 events, more than 400 registrants, and an uncountable number moving in and out of rooms and online across three days in person and two virtual. It may be the last vibrant, truly unaffiliated international gathering of writers, critics, poets, scholars, and artists in the United States — perhaps one of the last anywhere.

And what did I learn?

That even here, among some of the most historically minded intellectuals I know — people who pride themselves on mapping genealogies and lineages — the same collective amnesia rules.

They don’t know. They operate inside what Donald Rumsfeld once called the “unknown unknowns.” I know what has been erased. All around us, Americans operate with a historical consciousness that has deleted the genealogy and effects of the American blacklist — and with it, the agency of those who were excised.

I saw it during an excellent panel on the poet Ed Roberson. John Yau gave a sprawling talk and spent time with Thaddeus Mosley’s massive wooden sculptures — carved, interlocked, held together without bolts or fasteners, balanced by an intuitive knowledge of gravity. Mosley acknowledged the influence of Isamu Noguchi, which led Yau to Noguchi’s sets for the 1944 ballet Appalachian Spring as danced by Martha Graham and her company to the music of Aaron Copland.

Afterward, walking slowly with Yau — he with his four-point cane, I matching his pace — I asked if he knew Edward Biberman. He knew Biberman had painted Martha Graham but didn’t know why or when.

Edward painted Graham much earlier when his brother Herbert was directing Maxwell Anderson’s Valley Forge (1934) for the Theater Guild. Herbert insisted on inserting a minuet and commissioned Graham and Copland to stage it. This avant-garde insertion was precisely the kind of experiment Herbert had absorbed under Vsevolod Meyerhold while studying in Moscow in 1927-8 before returning to New York openly aligned with the Communist Party, intent on disseminating its politics and art — first on Broadway, then in Hollywood.

Noguchi had known Edward from Paris. After the crash, Noguchi returned to New York and secured a cold-water flat — the kind of large studio apartment common in mid-century Manhattan buildings, no hot water, only cold. He helped Edward get one in the same building.

By the time Yau and I reached Peter Gizzi’s reading, there were no seats and the reception food was gone. I could live without the food. Yau had given me what mattered. He told me to keep going — because he knew none of this. Nobody did. And, John insisted, they should know.

That lesson repeated itself in a star-studded panel organized by Barrett Watten on montage, sampling, and the poetics of Jackson Mac Low. It was a brilliant mapping of the American avant-garde through the Group Theatre, the Actors Studio, improvisation, untrained actors, collective experimentation.

But no one acknowledged that the Group was itself a reshuffle after Herbert and Gale left for Hollywood. No one noted that the idea of a radical actor’s studio in New York was brought back by Herbert from Moscow, along with scripts like Roar China—all shared by Herbert with Harold Clurman, the Adlers, and Cheryl Crawford — who, however she is remembered now, was then Biberman’s lover.

Instead, the story begins safely in the 1930s. The red heat of the late 1920s disappears. The origins sanitized. The blacklisted innovators spray-painted out. They become victims without agency — objects of sympathy existing only to be wronged by powerful men: J. Parnell Thomas, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Eugene McCarthy.

It does not stop there. In panels on film, no one engaged with Slaves (1969), the film Herbert made after Salt of the Earth (1954). Just as we would not have independent American cinema without Salt of the Earth, Black theater of the 1970s is nearly unimaginable without Slaves. Key actors and filmmakers learned their craft on Biberman’s set. He demonstrated profitability by mapping a national exhibition circuit. But none of it enters the genealogy.

As much as I enjoyed the conference, I left clearer about both the value of my project and the resistance it faces. The blacklist still operates through omission, through indifference, through origin stories that begin too late.

There are many who have no interest in overturning the current narrative. They prefer Biberman in the white space, in the margins.

But this aesthetic amnesia cannot stand. This story needs to be told, and I am going to tell it. Let’s go.

One of the most popular political commentators in America today is Scott Galloway. Sometimes I agree with him. Sometimes I don’t. In that respect, we occupy similar positions in the culture. He’s a professor of business at NYU. I’m a professor of English at the University of Louisville.

For more than a year now, my feed has periodically resurfaced a television appearance in which Galloway makes the same argument. He says: “2,200 American servicemen were killed at Pearl Harbor; the United States went on to kill 3.5 million Japanese, including 100,000 in one night. 2,800 Americans were killed on 9/11; the U.S. went on to kill 400,000 people in Afghanistan and Iraq. We were not accused of genocide. Israel,” he argues, “is held to a different standard. Jews are allowed to fight back to a truce, but unlike America or any other Western nation, they are not allowed to win a war. It’s a double standard.”

The argument is rhetorically effective. It is also wrong.

America has been accused of genocide. I know this because of my work on my book Russian Ikons, about Herbert Biberman and the Hollywood blacklist. In 1951, Paul Robeson, William Patterson, and others—including Biberman’s close associates—presented a formal petition to the United Nations charging the United States with genocide against its Black population. The charge was published as a book, We Charge Genocide. The argument was explicit: slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, and systematic disenfranchisement constituted a coordinated, long-term genocidal policy.

Yet this fact never appears in today’s endless discussions of Gaza and genocide. Why not? Because engaging it requires homework, self-reflection, an the openness to let the accusation rebound. It is far easier to use “genocide” as a kind of libel—one that builds off what Coleman Hughes has called a “luxury belief.” Well then “genocide” has become a kind of “luxury libel”: supplying the satisfaction of moral rage without any of the cost of remorse or conscience.

Just as Israel is not allowed to win a war, the people blacklisted in Hollywood are not allowed to be agents in their own story. They can only be victims. The blacklist narrative as told now is never about those who suffered it; it is about its villains—McCarthy, Nixon, Hoover—and then about Hollywood’s supposed redemption, as the same system that enforced the blacklist later congratulates itself for rescuing its victims. That is not how wrongs are corrected. It is how power rewrites history to remain in power.

The story you are not allowed to hear is the one I am trying to tell: the story of people who suffered the blacklist and then broke it.

Herbert Biberman crossed swords with HUAC for real reasons. He staged communist plays on Broadway. He organized Hollywood as a center of resistance and Communist power. He went to jail. He never named names. And when he was free again, he figured out how to make movies outside the system.

The first of those movies was Salt of the Earth. It was designed as a how-to film: how to unionize, how to strike, how to win. And in the key scene—when workers vote to strike—Biberman places copies of We Charge Genocide front and center on the table.

This is exactly the history we never get, even though we are starving for it. Because there is one thing the left and the right increasingly agree on: genocide is an accusation we hurl at everyone but ourselves. It doesn’t feel right otherwise. You don’t get the rush. To thunder damnation, you need to keep yourself ignorant and above the charge.

That is why the global conversation about genocide in 2026 is so juvenile. It is juvenile because it is ahistorical. It treats genocide as a moral weapon rather than a historical accusation with consequences.

I’m trying to correct that—not to end the argument, but to make it an argument worth having.

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