Drawing by author (ink, pencil, and watercolor marker on paper, 9 × 12 inches)

I was on the phone yesterday, helping a friend who’s in the process of self-publishing his book. He’d been given the runaround while working with an online book-making service. I’d made one call in an attempt to resolve the issue he was having with the book’s cover. The person I’d spoken to grew angry, or so it seemed, when I’d asked to speak with a manager. She abruptly told me to hang on while she switched the call. After four or five minutes listening to excruciatingly bad on-hold music, I got the voicemail of the manager. I sensed another runaround.

I called a second time hoping to get someone less angry. I reached another person at the company, a woman, slightly less irritable than the one who’d sent my call to the manager. Explaining the issue as carefully and respectfully as I could, I felt her temperature rising. I was also getting frustrated, just moments away from blowing my top. And then, I took a breath, thought about the woman, let’s call her Florence.

Florence probably isn’t working in an office. That’s not how it is these days. She’s probably working from home, in a bedroom that doubles as her office. She was articulate, if not warm, on the phone, and I could imagine her aspirations — since childhood she’d wanted to be an author, wanted a role in the publishing industry, something she obviously knows a great deal about. As she spoke to me, polite as I tried to be, I imagined Florence looking at herself in the mirror, getting pissed off, still in that same bedroom, recalling with some sadness that she hadn’t made it to a big New York publishing house, just some online thing, dealing with a stream of complaints from otherwise unpublishable authors.

It was at that moment that I stopped dealing with an automaton and started thinking of Florence as a human being. Regardless of whether I’d gotten her imagined story right, and I’m sure I didn’t, the story itself was one of a human being. A vulnerable person, someone who, like everyone else on the planet, seeks acknowledgement, encouragement, joy, love, and acceptance. And so my tone changed. And quicker than you might imagine, so did Florence’s. There was now no need to get hold of a manager. The answers and the solutions I’d sought were found easily, and in record time. Florence had become a person in my eyes, and so had I in hers.

Why is this important?

We are missing the humanity in one another. Social media has us primed for a fight. We feel misunderstood from the moment we wake up in the morning to the time we lay our heads down to sleep. We have chosen sides. We now have implacable foes, people we’ve never met, but still hate. Many of us also feel that things are crumbling, that threats are omnipresent, and that we’ve been backed into a corner, all the while gallons of cortisol pump through our veins.

Sure, we’ve felt some of this before. But not like nowadays. There is more hate than ever, we think, and more hateful people by far.

We’re no strangers to these feelings. If we don’t do something about this — whatever “this” might be at any given moment — disaster is bound to come crashing down!

The thing is, this happened so gradually, or I should say, we’ve become accustomed to these feelings overtaking us so gradually that we’ve hardly noticed the shift. It’s too easy, we sometimes think, to blame this all on social media. (Social media, even the word itself is boring, obnoxious. It’s truly begun to sicken me.)

Perhaps you’re reading this and thinking: you can’t blame everything on social media Peter, there are real problems in the world.

This is true. And then again, maybe it’s also true that we can, in fact, blame much of what we’re feeling on social media.

Was there ever a time like this in history? Of course there was if you’re thinking about war, about violence, crime, rape, about hatred, and all the rest of it. But there was never a time when we had bad news cascading into our bloodstream from an IV drip. We’ve never had such a profusion of images, of amped-up, screedy people shouting at each other and at us.

My new friend Florence feels this too. Yes, she works at a company, the company’s been paid hard-earned cash, so there’s an expectation that she’ll just take whatever’s thrown at her. But that’s not a helpful thought. It won’t achieve much, not to mention, it’s dehumanizing. Not only for her, but also for us. It’s impossible, I’ve found, to dehumanize someone without becoming dehumanized.

If you haven’t noticed, human beings are vulnerable, soft of body and of spirit. Sure we’ve grown into adulthood, been taught a bunch of big words, learned to drive, grown some underarm hair, learned a bit about math and social studies, gotten a credit card or two, and had decades to wrestle with bad parents or teachers, lovers who’ve spurned us, friends who’ve been painfully disloyal. But at the root of it, most of us are little more than the children we once were.

Here’s an interesting fact, both obvious and for some, surprising: we are, each of us, looking at the world through the same eyes we had when we were newly born. That’s to say that we haven’t changed much. If we’re lucky, we’ve learned to rein in some of our worst tendencies and accentuate some of our better ones. But hardly more than that.

We hurt easily too. Our bodies — no matter how strong they are, no matter how much time we’ve spent in the gym growing muscles — are prone to great injury. That’s always been the case. The only thing that’s legitimately different, and what makes us so jittery, what sometimes makes us feel like the end of civilization is nigh, is that all the vulnerabilities we carry have been intensified. Nuance is gone. Of course it is. If what we were fed was nuanced we’d probably never watch.

The great wealth generated by the algorithmic industrial complex wouldn’t have been generated without the Internet-People knowing that while we abhor fear, fear also makes it so we can’t look away. Fear is a survival mechanism. A primitive thing, it exists to save our lives in case of real danger. So, when fed a constant diet of fear we stay very frosty.

True, it’s hard to say what danger there is sitting on the couch doom-scrolling with a bag of Doritos by our side. But the feelings of danger, the feelings of fear are absolutely present. How many times have you been scrolling and thought: “The fucking guy, I feel like beating the shit out of him.” “Listen to that bitch, I hate her so much.”

I sure have.

There’s a button on your phone. It’s on the side. Not so simple to turn off, is it? Maybe you’ve never even tried. Why do you suppose it’s so hard to shut down? The more it stays on, the more time you’re on your phone, the more you’re on your phone the more money is generated. Unfortunately not for you.

And conspiracy theorists, you may sit this one out: America’s enemies are just as bright as we are. They’re trying their best to defeat us, just as we’re trying to hold on to our hegemonic influence — and I surely hope we do. They’d prefer to do us in the cheap and easy way, without firing a shot. All they need to do is get us fighting with one another.

They long to hear a whole lotta “Goddamn that Florence!”

How simple it’s become. How easy it’s been to create and maintain a yawning maw between us and our fellow citizens. Throw in a little political hatred, a little Jew-hatred, a little racial stuff, a little class warfare stuff and bullseye. We are weaker by far.

So next time you’re about to blow your stack at Florence or a person online, or someone in the frozen food section of Trader Joe’s, think about that person, as a person. Someone, who even if they’re seventy-five, was just a kid not long ago. Who still remembers being a kid like it was yesterday, who when deep into REM sleep, still dreams about being held by his daddy or mommy or flying her kite near the beach in Northern Minnesota...

Think about the fact that each of us is sacred, each of us created by the same God, miraculously and fully alive at this same sliver of time.

It’s then you’ll have done some good. You may even get your book done right too.

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This is the book I referenced in the piece. It’ll be available soon. When Eran and I spoke several months ago, I promised him that I’d coax, cajole, and counsel him through the process of making his dream of publishing a book a reality. Eran is a dear friend and the best dog trainer in the world. I stand by that. And I stand by him.

Photo by Philip Dolin. Collage by the author

Last week I spent almost two hours on the phone with my uncle Sonny. He’s my dad’s younger brother, born sixteen years after him. Thanks to an even older brother, Sonny was already an uncle to two nephews before he was born. He wasn’t exactly a planned child, but taking into consideration everything I’ve learned from him, I’m grateful for the accident.

When I was fourteen Sonny hipped me to John Lee Hooker’s Endless Boogie and The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, by Gil Scott-Heron. One afternoon he came downstairs to my bedroom with a copy of Luther’s Blues by bluesman Luther Allison. He was the cool uncle who smoked pot with me, who became my lifelong mentor and champion. The two of us have been debating the nature of God, reality, and the sagas of the Jewish people for decades.

No matter what absolutes I carry (ridiculous or otherwise, and sometimes fiercely defend), Sonny just listens and asks questions.

On our phone call I brought up a question that’s taken on greater urgency of late: how has a people of roughly fifteen million, in a world of eight billion, exerted such an outsized influence across so many fields? The extraordinary attention the world has once again fixed on Jews has made me wonder anew about the strange disproportion between our tiny numbers and our presence in the human story.

For me it brings up another question. Could Jewish exceptionalism, by which I mean distinctiveness, not superiority, have something to do with a people that’s spent nearly four thousand years bringing what can never be fully known into the ordinary disciplines of life?

Judaism doesn’t have a monopoly on connecting the infinite and the everyday. Every mystical tradition builds that bridge somewhere. The Sufi has his dhikr, the Zen monk chops wood and carries water. What’s unique in Judaism is where this leads. Many traditions treat ordinary life as a ladder toward transcendence, something to climb and with enough practice, leave the ordinary behind. Halacha (Jewish law) is different. The infinite is drawn down into things as mundane as which shoe we tie first. The Chassidic masters gave this a name: dira b’tachtonim, a dwelling in the lowest places. God, they taught, doesn’t want us to leave the world, He wants us to build a place for His essence to reside.

My interest lies in the civilizational experience itself: four thousand years, roughly half of them spent in exile, of bringing the transcendent into continual contact with everyday life.

My uncle listened patiently as I tried to explain my idea. He then posed a question of his own.

“What would be the point of spending so much time dealing with what can never be known?”

What follows is my attempt at an answer.

Photo by the author

I began with a metaphor about songwriting. How my best songs are a product of something both tangible and ephemeral.

I’ve spent most of my life writing songs. Lots of them. I’ve released eighteen solo albums, three live albums, and five albums of children’s music. There are those who imagine songwriting as some hazy, freewheeling process. My experience, which began when I was eleven and has now continued for more than five decades, has been different.

Many of things I compose begin in uncertainty: a fragment of melody, a few chords discovered almost by accident. Maybe a phrase I overheard on a train or a girl’s face I recalled from my kindergarten class. The song, at this point, hangs somewhere in the ether. But eventually it finds its shape within a rigid architecture of harmony, rhythm, and balance. It’s the tangible structure that makes creative freedom possible. And it’s the mystery, that unknowingness, which allows the song to penetrate a listener’s subconscious.

Photo by the author

Then I moved into the realm of theology. How the Oneness of God, the inexplicable unity of God, is such a central element of Jewish faith.

Aside from the well-known idea that there is only one God and not ten, twelve, or twelve thousand gods, the Sh’ma, Judaism’s central prayer, points toward something even more radical: the absolute unity of God. Elsewhere in the Torah this idea is expressed as Ain Od Milvado. “There is none beside Him.”

This goes further than saying God is invisible or all-powerful, further even than saying God is inconceivable, which is itself another attempt at a fixed definition. The impossibility of grasping an understanding of God may be why idolatry has always been so seductive. Human beings seem incapable of resisting the urge to reduce Divinity to something manageable. God will always stay an abstraction. Even so, Jewish practice insists on merging the abstraction back into ordinary life.

Jews are commanded to observe chukim, a category of commandments whose logic remains beyond the ken of the human mind. Shatnez and the red heifer are classic examples, as are certain aspects of the laws of kashrut. These aren’t irrational laws, not exactly. They’re “supra-rational” laws, beyond human understanding. The chukim require us to submit to an intelligence and a will unimaginably beyond our own.

I’ve heard people tell me that keeping kosher is no longer necessary. “We have refrigeration,” they’ll say. “We have antibiotics. Peter get in the car, let’s hit that rib joint!”

Trying to rationalize the laws of kashrut misses the point. The Torah never prohibited pork for reasons of health. A chok is observed precisely because it exceeds our understanding. Its transformative power comes from bringing that encounter into something as ordinary as an afternoon snack.

A “stiff-necked people,” Jews have inherited a tradition that reveres argument as well as agreement.

The Talmud is full of disputes that remain unresolved and are still considered sacred. Minority opinions survive for centuries as a crucial part of the tradition, whether or not they persuaded the majority. I’ve often thought about how extraordinary this is. A civilization in which one of the prized intellectual achievements is fruitful argumentation. It creates a system of learning that teaches its children to question instead of simply memorizing answers. (Personal note: more than once as a kid I was asked to leave a classroom, not because I was disruptive, but because I’d asked questions the teacher couldn’t answer. And this happened most often at Hebrew school. Go figure.)

I’m interested too, in what lies beyond the theology itself, in what this way of being does to the people formed by it. How could that not shape their habits of mind if for four thousand years, generation after generation has been trained to encounter mystery through mundane acts like eating, studying, and doing the work of raising families?

I’ve been wondering whether this has any bearing on why so many Jews found themselves drawn to places where mystery and pragmatism meet. I think of people like Einstein, the Rambam, and the Alter Rebbe, each exploring in radically different ways the limits of human understanding. While none of this can be proved empirically, it makes me curious as to whether a civilization that has spent four thousand years bringing the transcendent into continual contact with everyday life might not have trained itself for the frontiers of human thought.

Shabbat is a day I’ve observed for almost four decades. Because of that commitment, I’ve turned down television appearances, concert tours, and opportunities that many musicians spend their entire careers hoping for. One day a week I stop trying to shape the world. The phone stays off. The piano and the art easel wait. What’s left is a walk, a meal with people I love, an afternoon with a book. It’s a return, in a literal sense, to reality.

What does it mean that there exists an ancient tradition in which people voluntarily disconnect from technology every week, one that insists that their encounter with reality needs no machine as an intermediary? And what can humanity learn from a people who have been practicing Shabbat for thousands of years?

Photo by the author

“Why spend so much time with what is unknowable,” my uncle Sonny asked on our phone call.

Maybe it’s living in the presence of an unsolvable mystery, and encountering it through the recurring practices of life that forms a particular kind of mind. And what kind of people has that mind produced? I think it’s enough to say that Jewish creativity and its contributions to humankind speak for themselves.

We live in an age with zero patience for uncertainty. We have answers for everything, almost magically. And somehow, we still seem to know nothing about what it means to be here.

I’m pretty sure my uncle Sonny would appreciate that.

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Mark Ruffalo wearing the notorious Red Hand pin

Hard as it’s become to watch him, Mark Ruffalo is one of my favorite actors. My wife and I chanced upon Task, the series he starred in. He carried the show. Ruffalo says he’s not an antisemite. “The accusation that I am antisemitic is appalling and fundamentally dishonest.” He wrote that after Paramount Skydance accused him of trafficking in “antisemitic tropes” during his campaign against the studio’s merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. I’m not in his head, so there’s no telling what drives him.

I’m a songwriter and even in my regular conversation I can barely stay away from metaphors, let alone in my essays. Here’s one about a group of people who don’t actually exist. Let’s call them the Purple People. (No relation to Prince, it just came out that way.)

There aren’t many Purple People in the world, but as is well known they’ve done incredible things for humankind. They’ve also been persecuted for centuries, expelled from their countries of origin. Been falsely accused of horrible crimes, subjected to pogroms. Not to mention murdered by the millions simply for, well… for being Purple. Today, there’s just one country where Purple People make up a majority: Purple Peopleland. Bear in mind that roughly half the world’s Purple People live there.

Mark Ruffalo loves Purple People. He’s said so. I have “deep love and respect” for them. Everything he knows about “acting, activism and humanism,” he’s told us, has been shaped by his Purple friends and colleagues. Some of his best friends, if you must know, are Purple.

Yet, despite the lovefest he says Purple Peopleland is committing “genocide.” And that Purple Peopleland is built on “an apartheid system of oppression.” Ruffalo demands sanctions be imposed on Purple Peopleland. “Sanctions on South Africa helped free its Black people,” he wrote in 2021. “It’s time for sanctions on Israel to free Palestinians. Join the call.”

Join the virtuous call, indeed.

In 2025 he, along with hundreds other like-minded famous folk, signed a pledge refusing to work with Purple Peopleland film institutions, including festivals, cinemas, broadcasters, and production companies. But please, Ruffalo has nothing against Purple People. He says what all the Purple Peopleland haters seem to be saying these days: Purple People are people and Purple Peopleland is a country.

Nope. Nothing in common. Anyone with a brain can see that. The fact that roughly half of all Purple People live there… um, that’s purely incidental. The fact that many of the other half have relatives there, friends there, religious and historical attachments there, and an understandable interest in whether it continues to exist, is irrelevant. There is no connection between Purple People and Purple Peopleland.

None whatsoever, god dammit!

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Ok, enough Purple. I’ll step out from behind my metaphor.

In August 2026, Ruffalo spoke about Larry Ellison publicly. He’s the Oracle co-founder helping bankroll Paramount Skydance’s $111 billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery. Ruffalo described Ellison as a “classic Oligarch” warning that the deal “would hand one family control over CNN, HBO and Warner Bros., backed in part by foreign money whose influence on editorial decisions has never been fully explained to the public.”

In a 2024 clip of Oracle’s former CEO describing surveillance technology built for Israel’s military as “really profoundly scary,” Ruffalo added “these will most likely be merged into one of the largest media conglomerates in the world and one day used on you.”

Gulp.

As if the conflation was obvious, he then tied the whole arrangement back to Gaza, writing that the war was “a genocide, which was built on an apartheid system of oppression powered by Oracle.” Take a second and look again at that line from the previous paragraph: it will “one day be used on you.” Ask yourself whether it wouldn’t fit neatly into a Der Stürmer article from the 1930s.

Here’s the shape of the thing Ruffalo is trying to get across: a wealthy family, foreign entanglements, an inherited grip on a communications empire, its frightening and concealed technological reach, and that warning—it will “one day be turned on you.”

Israelis use a test to see if criticisms of Israel are legitimate. And of course, many are. The test was developed by the former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky and consists of these “three Ds”: does the criticism demonize? Does it hold to a double standard? Does it delegitimize?

Looking at a media merger for its surveillance-technology ties and its concentration of editorial power passes that test. No worries there. Plenty of people who’ve never mentioned Israel make the same argument about Ellison’s deal on antitrust grounds. Ruffalo himself said: “Scrutinizing the Ellisons, including Oracle’s business built on data, surveillance technology and government contracts, and the serious threat to editorial freedom and the loss of a livelihood for thousands of families, is fair and necessary.” That’s all true, and it’d be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

What doesn’t pass the three D’s test is the mention of national origin, generational inheritance, media control, and “profoundly scary” hidden power. What fails spectacularly is the perceived connection to an unrelated and false genocide accusation about a war the family had no hand in prosecuting.

I’d be skeptical, but Mark Ruffalo may hold these views without any animus toward Jews. Whether he loves Jews or despises them barely matters. It’s in the stacking of things unrelated to the argument that clearly rings with anti-Jewish canards.

Israeli genocide. Israeli apartheid. Sanctions and boycotts on Israeli institutions. Follow the Jewish money. Examine the Jewish billionaire. Examine his Jewish son. Fear their technology. Remember: it may “one day be used on you.” The fact that Ruffalo’s moral attention keeps finding the same country and the same associations, all of it growing in intensity, is the real issue here.

There are, of course, other things happening in the world. There is real genocide and real starvation in Sudan. There is the forced labor and internment of Uyghurs in China. Why don’t they take up the same real estate in Ruffalo’s very public moral imagination?

Ruffalo says, “Criticizing the actions of the Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract, or the executives who supply it is not the same as criticizing Jewish people.” True, all true, but only as a hazy proposition.

I’ve never spoken to Natan Sharansky—although I’d love to. My guess is that his opinion would be that Mark Ruffalo fails the three D’s test. And by a long shot.

Ruffalo’s intent? Don’t know and don’t care. Rhetoric has its own power, power that can do great harm even as it separates from the person who spews it.

Mark Ruffalo may well love Purple People. But as they say, “with friends like that guy, who needs enemies?”

It was backstage after a show in Minneapolis that I had an hour to speak with a friend. He’s a reader of my Substack, and we quickly got around to the subject of Israel and Jews. We first talked about how a plurality of younger Jews, mostly those who, perhaps for lack of Jewish education and Jewish observance, have come to be aligned with Israel’s antagonists. Either way, imagine being a young Jewish high school student who supports Israel. It would be as if she were a Nazi or Ku Klux Klan supporter.

He then brought up the idea that the false genocide charge against Israel and its supporters resembles the way Jews were first dehumanized by the Nazis in the years leading up to the Shoah. “Traitors.” “Pornographers.” “Fifth column.” “Responsible for Germany’s defeat in World War I.” And then, “scum and vermin.” Like a thick coat of dark grey paint, these were the 1930s version of today’s words now being used to paint Israel.

It’s human nature that those seeking reasons for their failures, whether governmental or personal, will be receptive to scapegoating others. And when the label is applied so vigorously that people come to see it as fact, those being labeled are more easily seen as inhuman, deserving of whatever punishment comes their way.

It’s fascinating to me that the Jews have once again become the choice of scapegoat-hungry consumers everywhere. You’ll hear it’s not the Jews, it’s only the Jewish state.

Right. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say, Peter, why do you constantly conflate Israel with Jews? One is a religion, the other is a country!

In junior high my friends and I would simply reply with “duh” to a statement like that, one that completely misses the point. The country in question is home to half the world’s Jewish population.

Sometimes I feel like I’m in an episode of the Twilight Zone, where the entire world believes that the water is sand and sand is water. And I’m the only one who knows how insane that is. Today, the charge is genocide.

Let’s understand the implications of that accusation. If a person, a nation, or a supporter of a nation is responsible for genocide, they are morally fit for elimination. That’s how strong it is.

Jewish institutions in America now spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on security. Jewish day schools have watched their security costs double since October 7th. Reinforced doors, bulletproof glass. Most institutions have armed guard posted at the entrances and security protocol reviews are commonplace. As the genocide charge has grown louder and more common, so has the price of just showing up to pray.

That these things have become part of ordinary Jewish life in America also feels like an episode of the Twilight Zone.

I won’t turn this brief essay into a refutation of the genocide charge, although a few things merit mentioning. Throughout the war, even as kidnapped victims were still being held and tortured, Israel continued to supply water and electricity. It facilitated mass polio vaccination campaigns in Gaza and permitted enormous quantities of humanitarian aid to enter.

Remind me, please, what genocidal nation in history did that.

One also wonders how quickly this fact is forgotten: Hamas started this war. When that’s mentioned at all, it tends to get a nod at best. “Okay, I accept that Hamas did some terrible things…but.” Often, it’s not even that.

Here’s my guess, and it’s only a guess. If a proportionally equivalent share of Americans had been murdered and raped, or kidnapped, the way Israelis were on October 7th, would our response have been gentler? Would France’s? Germany’s? Australia’s? In a word: unlikely.

The charge of genocide goes hand in hand with another charge: that Israel willingly created a famine to annihilate Gazan Palestinians. The images and headlines were everywhere. “Israel was starving Gaza.” “Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war.” “Israel was deliberately starving children.”

In August of 2025, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, working with UN agencies including UNICEF, declared famine in Gaza Governorate. UNICEF reported that more than 12,000 children had been identified as acutely malnourished in July alone, and projected tens of thousands of severe cases by the following June. The famine became evidence for the genocide charge. The numbers went around the world, repeated at demonstrations and taught on campuses as settled fact.

Now we have some new information. Between the end of May and the middle of June of this year, UNICEF coordinated the first population-based SMART nutrition survey of its kind in Gaza. Researchers measured 1,335 children under five in accessible areas containing roughly 83 percent of Gaza’s population. The rate of acute malnutrition they found was 1.3 percent. The IPC subsequently classified acute malnutrition in the areas it analyzed as “Acceptable,” its lowest category.

UNICEF hasn’t entirely walked back the earlier famine finding. It says the ceasefire and the aid that followed explain the turnaround. Maybe so. Today, nobody seems to mention that Hamas, by many credible accounts, survived economically on aid it had stolen, aid intended for Gazan citizens. That’s a significant omission.

But more than numbers, it’s the photos that tell the story. A New York Times front-page photograph of an eighteen-month-old boy named Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq went around the world as a portrait of starvation caused by Israel. The photo itself was beautifully rendered, almost biblical in its sorrow. As has happened many times in this conflict, the paper of record later added an editors’ note disclosing that the child had preexisting health issues affecting his brain and muscle development. These were considered by some to be small details. I can only imagine the conversation: …let’s not get bogged down by the medical stuff.

Headline: Israel is starving children. It reached hundreds of millions of people in one fell swoop. It definitely captured my attention. The update, however, reached a fraction of that audience. It also helped convict Israel in the court of world opinion.

As my friend had mentioned, once an accusation this explosive becomes accepted as fact, it changes the moral status of the accused. Israelis become genocidaires. Zionists become supporters of genocide. Jews who support Israel become apologists for genocide.

When the accusation is as widespread as it’s now become, it can be morally acceptable to hate a Jew with a kippah just for standing in line at Starbucks. Voila! That’s a successful hate campaign if there ever was one.

The Nazis weren’t, let’s say, my favorite folks, but they weren’t stupid. They knew how to convince ordinary Germans that Jews were evil enough to make murdering them seem necessary. They had their words for us.

Today there are different ones. “Genocidaire” is the most dangerous one of all.

I was with my mom outside her house in suburban Minnetonka on a porch overlooking a water feature, a small formation of rocks that made up a miniature waterfall. We sat there on metal lawn chairs, listened to the water pour over the flat stones and looked out at the preternatural greenness of the golf course. My mom remarked on the old-growth oaks that broke the monotony of the grass. She is 93, still quite beautiful and very astute. The two of us picked up a conversation we’d begun earlier.

I had just read her an essay I’d written about Israel. These days I’ve been writing a great deal about the place and the people, about the way Israel is spoken of, and the way Jews are being looked at. When I finished reading, she looked at me with an intensity she hadn’t had until then.

“Where is this going to end?” she asked. “The fighting and the back and forth. Where does it end? You don’t mention any solution.”

She was right. I hadn’t mentioned one.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think anybody knows.”

There is no grand solution sitting somewhere waiting for the right politician to discover it. I don’t think this ends because of a committee, a new UN resolution. I don’t think it ends with a new prime minister or another proposal drafted and redrafted. I have, unfortunately, come to think of this as an intractable problem. I used the word intractable, and I thought I saw my mom wince.

“Well, how is it going to end?” she asked again.

“How do you think it’s going to end?”

She looked out toward the little waterfall. We both listened to the sound.

“I don’t know.”

The absence of an answer, at least a logical one, hung in motionless summer air. Nobody knows.

I’ve been thinking about this on two different planes. One is intensely practical. What is the best way to prevent death? What can be done now? What policies make sense given the world as it actually exists? Those are questions the human mind can attempt to answer, and those are the questions I write about most often. The other plane exists in the realm of faith.

A Jew is bidden to pray three times a day, and throughout those prayers one encounters the word shalom. Most people know shalom as the Hebrew word for peace. It’s true. But what is peace? The root of shalom is shalem. Wholeness. Completeness. A state in which the fractured parts of the world are seen as belonging to a single whole.

All these words stumble.

Somehow, bound up in that idea for me, is the possibility that all human beings will one day, at the same time, come to perceive that oneness, feel themselves to be part of it. Feel it viscerally. Feel it as we feel heat or cold, sorrow or joy.

I told my mom this. Told her that I believe, or perhaps aspire to believe, that there will come a time when all of humankind understands this at the same moment. She looked at me as she often does when the younger of her two sons begins to resemble a crazy person.

“You don’t actually believe this do you?”

I tried to explain. Shalom isn’t an idea. Ideas are easy. They come a dozen at a time. We can agree with an idea and still hate somebody. I mean something deeply felt, something that changes the state of mind itself.

My mom rolled her eyes.

Think about holding your new baby for the first time. There’s a state of mind that comes over you. For that flicker of a moment, you aren’t thinking about which new car to buy. You aren’t thinking about what your annoying neighbor said to you yesterday. You aren’t rehearsing some argument or nursing an old grievance. You’re holding this tiny human being and you’re filled with wonder.

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Something similar happens when someone we love passes from the world. Here too, the ordinary state of mind is interrupted. For a time, we are lifted out of our normal concerns. The little things that irritate us last lose their importance. We not only see something larger, we become larger. These moments seem to me like homeopathic doses of shalem. They are gifts, hints of what could be, perhaps even of what one day will be.

I experience this in music as well. A sound can suddenly remove the little prisons we spend so much of our lives building around ourselves. For a few seconds the world is actually different. We are different. What would happen if that state of mind came upon all of humankind at one time?

I don’t know what could cause such a thing. A song, perhaps. A strand of words in a certain order, one that has never been heard before. Something beyond anything we have experienced or are presently capable of imagining. This is where my practical mind has nothing useful to say.

Tomorrow there will still be governments and armies. You’ll hear about negotiations and accusations and terrible decisions on CNN. There will be people who want to murder other people, and there will be people who need to prevent them from doing so.

I will continue to write about Israel and my people and the strange and often disturbing way Jews are being looked at in the world. I will keep on arguing for what I believe is true. These things matter to me, but they aren’t the entirety of how I see the world.

Three times a day I encounter the word shalom. I am reminded of shalem, of wholeness, of the possibility that everything we experience as separate might somehow belong to a unity we cannot presently perceive.

I don’t know how the fighting ends. I couldn’t tell my mom. I can’t tell anyone. But sitting beside her on those metal lawn chairs, looking out at that little waterfall, I realized, with no small measure of gratitude, that somewhere inside me there remains a glimmer of hope for shalem. For a rupture in the flow of time when the oneness of things is deeply felt by all of humankind. Like a lightning strike. One everybody sees, marvels at.

It doesn’t exist in the pages of The New York Times or on Joe Rogan’s podcast. I can’t defend it with statistics. I can’t draw a map of how we get there. Still, I pray for it. Still, I endeavor to believe.

I’m not sure, but somewhere, deep down, I think my mom does too. I am her son, after all.

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The guy on the left, master guitarist Greg Herzenach, is the “new” guy. He’s been with us for over thirty years. The woman next to him is Kristin Mooney. Around 1990 she came downstairs to the dressing room at Minneapolis’s 7th Street Entry on the first night of a three-night run. She told me she was a singer and that she knew a bunch of my songs. “Let me hear you sing,” I told her. She did. The next thing I said was, “You sound great. Let’s get onstage.” She’s been with us ever since.

The guy to the right is Jeff Victor. I’ve written about him here many times. He’s my second cousin, my main confidant, and a singularly talented keyboard player and writer. To the right of me is Andy Kamman. He and I have been playing together since he was in the fifth grade and I was in the sixth. A better drummer simply cannot be found. Nor can a better friend.

Al Wolovitch, on the far right, is a consummate bass player. I’ve played with players considered by many to be the best. None are better than Al.

The funny thing is how close we all are to one another. This is the true joy of performing together.

With gratitude for your support, I look forward to making music for you tonight.

Peter

Find the link below. The show starts at 7:00 PM Central Time.

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Park hotel, Netanya, Israel

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Before you read: I put a great deal of time and thought into these essays. If they bring something of value to you, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It’s the most direct way to support my work.

You say you don’t hate Jews or Israel, only Netanyahu. What exactly do you know about him? I mean, other than what you’ve read? He’s Trump! He’s Putin! A genocidist and a racist! Mmm hmm. And foremost among his ongoing crimes is that he doesn’t support a Palestinian state. I see.

But do you know why, especially after 10/7 and for the foreseeable future, most Israelis think a Palestinian state in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) overlooking Israel’s major population centers is a dangerous idea?

After the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority was allowed to create a police force of 30,000. Its stated duties were maintenance of public order and combating terrorism. It wasn’t supposed to become an army. The agreement was specific, down to the number of weapons. But surprise! During the Second Intifada, members of that same Palestinian force engaged in multiple deadly attacks against Jewish civilians. In Israel, this had a stark and memorable name: “The turning of the guns.”

According to a recent report by former IDF Lt. Col. Maurice Hirsch, the PA security apparatus has grown to some 70,000 armed personnel. Hirsch now heads the Initiative for Palestinian Authority Accountability and Reform. Hirsch reports that many in the enlarged security services received training that goes beyond ordinary police work, including armored warfare, sniper operations, and the use of shoulder-fired missiles, along with training assistance from America, Europe, and Pakistan.

Apropos of the report, in an October 2025 survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, 59 percent of West Bank Palestinians said Hamas was right to launch the October 7 attack, while 78 percent opposed the disarmament of Hamas. The obvious question then is: who makes up this force?

I asked a friend if he knew the distance between the Israeli coastal city of Netanya and Tulkarem, one of the major Palestinian cities in the West Bank. “Fifty miles?” he guessed. Nope. Try again. “Okay. Three hundred miles?” The answer is roughly ten miles, as the crow flies.

Ten miles. Think about that.

Victims of the Park Hotel massacre

During the Second Intifada, Netanya became one of the cities most brutally hit by Palestinian terrorism. On Passover eve in 2002, at the Park Hotel just steps from the beach, a Hamas suicide bomber walked into a dining room filled with people celebrating the Seder and detonated his bomb, murdering thirty people, including elderly Holocaust survivors.

It’s ten miles from Tulkarem to Netanya. A bicycle ride away. That’s like going from downtown Chicago to Evanston. Or, in Minneapolis, traveling from downtown toward the Mall of America. In Los Angeles, think of pedaling from downtown to Beverly Hills. In New York, it’s driving from Lower Manhattan to Washington Heights.

Now imagine that at the other end of your ride is a well-armed force, many of whose members could presumably be Hamas supporters. You’ve already lived through “the turning of the guns.” Then imagine how you’d feel about groups of people living thousands of miles away, arguing that your reluctance to create your enemy’s sovereign state next door is proof of your immorality.

Your own wars of, call it, “territorial consolidation” happened long ago. The native populations where you now live in tranquility were decimated or reduced to tiny minorities. Well, it’s easy enough to argue against the Jewish state in a pleasant after-dinner salon. But not so easy if that 70,000-strong army were just ten miles from where you live.

Before you reach for the “colonialism” charge against Israel, you may bump up against a logical inconvenience. Jews have lived continuously in the land of Israel for thousands of years. The ground itself bears witness to its Jewish character. You will find Jewish coins, synagogues, ritual baths, inscriptions, graves, and the remains of Jewish cities everywhere. And the Torah, whether you regard it as the word of God or a dusty old book, records the connection between the Jewish people and this particular piece of land with obsessive specificity.

You can dismiss Lt. Col. Maurice Hirsch. You can find reasons to dislike his politics or question his conclusions. None of that makes Tulkarem any farther from Netanya. None of it erases the reality of October 7 or the very real potential of an even bigger tragedy, God forbid.

Israelis were told for decades that territorial concessions would make them safer. Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon. Hezbollah entrenched itself further along Israel’s northern border. Israel withdrew from Gaza. Hamas spent the ensuing years and billions in aid money building the largest tunnel network in military history.

So when you tell me that Netanyahu’s refusal to support a Palestinian state on the high ground above Israel’s costal plain proves that he is uniquely monstrous, you might first ask yourself why the idea has become so difficult for Israelis far beyond Netanyahu’s political camp. They don’t need to love him, and many Israelis hate him bitterly, to understand what ten miles means.

You have your opinions. Keep them. And the next time you find yourself sitting back, drink in hand, demanding that Israelis take a risk that you would never take, get on a bicycle and ride those ten miles.

Paid subscribers to Morning Musings, look for a link to a livestream of our Thursday evening performance at the Dakota in Minneapolis. They have a high-quality broadcast, which I’m pleased to offer you in appreciation of your generous patronage. I’ll be sending it out Thursday afternoon.

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Photo: Maria Himmelman

I am often dwelling at the bottom of a great and murky pond, entranced by the mud, in the thrall of tiny bugs, dead and dissolving carcasses of animals: salamanders, snakes, the unfortunate rabbit or squirrel.

And though I know very well that I must come up for air, it is difficult to do so, engaged as I am with loathsome things. I feel I need to know about what is lost to the world of the living. I need to know what can bite me, hurt me, take my life away. But even as I imagine I am protecting myself from death, I drain away some portion of my life.

Each morning, just as I awaken, I am bidden by a small voice, faint but still appreciable, to leave that murky pond, to see beyond all that is dark and deathly.

There comes a moment, a sliver of time, where the daylight beckons, says, I am here for you. The sun is here for you, the sky and the clouds too. Your hands are here for you, your eyes are here for you, your capacity for speech is here, to write and to say things that take you away from all that is against life. Your mind is here for you, alert and fully able to choose that which is life-giving.

To think about the sound of children’s feet running across wood floors, to hear birdsong, to listen as many birds sing at once, their layers of sound an astonishment. To recall joyful times with your family. Laughing together at the table, or sleeping soundly in their beds as you lie awake thinking about each boy and girl, and then, after many years—each man and woman—with children of their own. To turn to your wife and wordlessly, gratefully acknowledge the life the two of you have built.

To think about the strangeness of life itself, your sentience, your consciousness, to feel the exquisite sense of aliveness that, while constant, so often goes unnoticed. To create and to use your power of will and desire to sow goodness, to elevate those around you, those you know and love, and strangers too. All are in need today. All are in some ways lonely and hurt, and in want of tender care. To leap and to run far away from those dark and dreary things that fear, sly and unannounced, never tires of setting before us.

And for a moment, you wonder why you so often choose to remain at the pond’s bottom. While you’re there, it always seems to take the greatest effort to rise to the surface, to wrest your attention away from its unholy allure.

But this morning, on a day in truth no different from any other, I see that leaving the darkness is the easiest thing in the world, and that staying transfixed by the darkness of the world is what is most effortful.

I thank you Creator of heaven and Earth for restoring my soul to me. For reminding me of what is up and what is down, of what is real and what is imagined. Of what is life and what is life’s opposite.

Of what to hold and what to set down.

Yahya Sinwar: AI image

Dear inhabitants of the world of the living,

First, may I say, hats off to all who have aided and abetted me in the endeavor of a lifetime. It’s not often that one aspires to something they have great passion for, and then, only after much time and toil, sees it come to pass.

Yes, it’s true that this culmination point is best experienced from the perspective of those who still walk the earth. And yet, to see it from—shall we say—another, er… vantage point, is not without its gleeful aspects. I should add that I’m thought of rather fondly by those in charge here.

As I was saying, I had planned very well, and for a very long time, to create a change in attitude, a different way for a mass of individuals to view a situation, which had over many years, become moribund. That shift in mindset was my real goal. But to do so on such a grand scale and to have it come to fruition. That is what I call the impossible dream, “to dream the impossible dream…” as was sung in Man of La Mancha. A wonderful film, by the way, if you’ve not seen it.

My own impossible dream was to capture the world’s attention, to bring into focus something that would, in some sense, stir the soul of a goodly number of earth’s inhabitants. To bring to bear three things. First, a human being’s latent animosities toward a certain, stiff-necked and stubborn people. Secondly, to awaken his deepest sympathies to the pain this people inflicted on our, admittedly, disposable brethren, whose martyrdom was a great gift to our cause. And thirdly, to rely upon humanity’s propensity toward mental sloth—a dullness of mind, as it were. All this would, of course, require an act, which some might understandably call diabolical. Nonetheless, it was a gamble I was willing to take.

Two steps back, three steps forward, as the saying goes.

Now, some will say, “my word, Yahya, you’ve gone quite a bit far now, haven’t you? I mean, the so-called, October event was certainly, ahh… certainly bold. Quite attention-getting.”

That is exactly the point. It needed to be big. I mean, that’s showmanship isn’t it? That’s what a successful performance needs to be, a spectacle. And what a spectacle it was! The event itself really had been something to talk about.

But it would only belabor the point to rehash the details, don’t you agree?

At any rate, I think the results speak for themselves. In the eyes of the world, we truly became the “oppressed.” To hear that word on the tongues of so many is itself a delight to the ear! And our oppressors, funny enough, those we… what’s the word I’m looking for — yes, those we “resisted.” What can be said? They somehow become the oppressors. Again, I relied upon that dullness of mind I mentioned, that bovine mentality which causes a huge swath of humanity to lose all sense of perspective over simple a word like “resistance.”

Of course, there was the, uh… relocating of some 250 people. That surely gave cause to those on the other side of the fence to come looking for us; obviously a linchpin of my plan. Not to mention those GoPro cameras. They did a world of good. Let me tell you how much I abhor the Luddite! The footage sent everyone screaming into action, didn’t it? Strange to me even now, how rapidly it had the effect of making our side look like the “good guys,” to use an American expression. I’ve heard it said that if people can be driven to such acts as we performed, they must surely be a beleaguered lot.

But look where it got us. Just look.

We do something catastrophic—or wonderfully bold, depending on your perspective. And just as I’d predicted, knowing the capriciousness and inability of most people to think beyond their noses, the wrath of nations quickly shifted from us to our, shall we say, Hebraic interlocutors.

Not to sound haughty, but my plan has indeed reshaped the political posture, in a very fundamental way I might add, of the most powerful nation on Earth. I can’t tell you how proud this makes me, how elated.

Once more, I wish to congratulate everyone involved for making this possible. This has been my dream, my impossible dream. And with hope, Inshallah, we shall prevail, thanks in no small part to the gullibility of so much of the world.

I must admit, I sometimes have to repress a laugh. Seriously, how insipid can people be? Oh well, such is life. And in my case, death. Things being what they are, I must get back to the kitchen, my new vocation for the time being.

As you might have guessed, the stoves down here are inordinately hot.

(A Note for the Satirically Challenged: For anyone who remains uncertain about what, precisely, they’ve just read, a brief note may be in order. The preceding is satire. It is an imagined letter from hell, written by October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar to those who helped make his dream of a world turning against Israel a reality.)

Come see me in NYC!

“Woke 1.0 was crazy!” So said Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about the politics of 2020. It was, well… kind of a lark. She’d been responding to questions about positions that she and others on the progressive left championed, including defunding the police. It came with a laugh, as if it had been a party that got a little out of hand..

In a recent Substack piece, journalist Glenn Greenwald lambasted AOC and her ideological cronies for giggling their way out of a moment that was nothing to laugh about. People were canceled. Careers were ruined. Institutions adopted ideological orthodoxies conceived not over decades, but over months. Say the wrong thing and you’re out.

Like a matryoshka doll, with “interesting” new developments popping out daily, another has just emerged from an old one. “Defund the police,” if you’ve noticed, is now being shied away from, just as a segment of the progressive left is distancing itself from ideas and rhetoric that reached their apogee (or nadir, depending on how you view it) in 2020.

The political motivations for this are impossible to miss. A successful presidential run in 2028 has to appeal to working-class voters, including Black and Hispanic voters, who don’t necessarily share the progressive activist class’s pet projects. The cost of housing and groceries means more than something cooked up by a professor in a cubicle.

AOC is smart. She and others of her ideological persuasion understand that a democratic-socialist economic program can attract a much broader constituency if it removes itself from the cultural and identity politics of 2020. There is, however, something curious about this sudden housecleaning. One idea has survived the Ajax and the Lysol: the progressive movement’s hostility toward Israel.

None of what follows is an argument that Israel is above criticism. It isn’t, and there is, in Yiddish syntax, what to criticize. But why, I ask, has this one idea been granted an exemption?

Minneapolis 2020.

The same movement that’s willing to treat its 2020 excesses as laughable indiscretions has left them intact when they apply to the Jewish state. Israel continues to be described in the same language that became ubiquitous during the height of Woke 1.0: colonialist, imperialist, racist, apartheid, ethnostate. And most powerfully of all, genocidal.

But it only works if the complexity of the actual history goes missing: Jews of “color” exiled throughout the Levant and North Africa, millennia of Jewish presence in the land, Jewish refugees from Europe and Arab countries, wars begun by neighboring Arab states, Palestinian nationalism, terrorism, occupation, settlements, competing national claims, failed negotiations, Israeli political divisions, Palestinian political divisions.

To the progressive, the case against Israel fits perfectly within the simplicity of the moral architecture of that period: oppressor and oppressed. The words appear so often I’ll just say O&O.

Among Democrats, particularly younger Democrats, attitudes show what voters want. Affordable housing, affordable food. But also politicians who know the rules and regulations of O&O. A Pew survey conducted in late March 2026 found that eight in ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents hold an unfavorable view of Israel. That’s up from 69 percent a year earlier.

Defunding the police is only a problem when you need the votes of people who dislike crime. Race and Gender Speak becomes an issue when most of the people whose interests you claim to represent don’t speak that language. But hostility toward Israel doesn’t carry that cost. A progressive-left politician with national ambitions like AOC understands that dropping “defund the police” helps her chances of election, while softening hostility toward Israel would shrink them.

That makes Greenwald interesting to think about. He wants the canceling and the speech-policing investigated and accounted for, not giggled away. At the same time, he has been, and continues to be, one of Israel’s harshest critics. His case against Israel snakes through the same O&O framework he treats as a symptom of the illnesses of 2020.

If Woke 1.0 really was crazy, everything it produced deserves attention. And if a movement is willing to re-examine its assumptions about policing, race, gender, and speech, it ought to explain why its assumptions about the Jewish state remain untouched. Perhaps the answer is simpler than we’d like. Those other ideas became politically expensive.

Hostility toward Israel still gets great bang for the buck.

There’s been an intense effort on the part of anti-Israelists to separate Judaism from Israel and to convince people that Jews and Israel are two different things. It’s a false notion, and one that serves a purpose: to weaken Israel and make it less safe for the vast majority of Jews who support it.

That said, it’s very difficult to explain Jewish peoplehood, and Jewish connection to Israel, to someone who either doesn’t see themselves as part of a people, or isn’t Jewish. Let me try to explain this through an event that happened to me a few months after October 7.

I happened to see the Twitter feed of a well-known actor. She had perhaps half a million followers. What caught my attention was her tagline: “I love all peoples.”

I’ve always been struck by statements like that. They feel like an annoying form of virtue signaling. Better to come out and say, I’m just better than you.

I scrolled through her feed. It was full of pro-Palestinian posts. That, in itself, isn’t a problem. To each his own. But for a person who “loves all peoples,” I couldn’t find a single sentence about what had happened on October 7. Nothing about the murders, the rapes, the burning of people in their homes, the slaughter of entire families.

So I left a comment, never expecting her to see it. I wrote: Madam, I question the veracity of your tagline. You say you love all peoples, yet I’m afraid I can’t find anything on your feed about what happened in Israel.

Interestingly, she sent me a direct message. Maybe she knew me from my music, I’m not sure. She wrote, “You misunderstand me. I do love all peoples. Would you like to meet and discuss this?”

I thought, ok let’s see where this goes.

She lived not far from me. We met at a coffee shop, I bought her a latte and we sat down.

“I have an admission to make,” she began. “Something I feel a little strange about.”

“What is it?”

“Because I work in the entertainment business, I have a lot of Jewish friends. I may have more Jewish friends than non-Jewish friends. And they’ve asked me where I was on October 7. And I feel bad, like I should apologize, because I don’t really remember where I was.”

She told me that her Jewish friends knew exactly where they had been. Who they were with. What they were doing. Some even remembered what they were wearing. October 7 had become the kind of date that gets frozen in memory.

“I just don’t remember,” she said.

I told her there was nothing to apologize for. In fact, there was no reason she should remember.

“You’re seeing something about your Jewish friends that you may never have seen before,” I said. “You’ve gone to the same restaurants with these people. You’ve been to their children’s bar and bat mitzvahs, their baby namings and brisses. You’ve gone to their Hanukkah parties and they’ve come to your Christmas parties. You’ve sat in business meetings with them.”

She knew them very well. At least she thought she did.

“But now you’re seeing an aspect of their essential selves. You’re seeing them in relation to Jewish peoplehood. You’re seeing them react to what happened on October 7 as if members of their own family had been raped, murdered, kidnapped, or tortured in their homes.”

She had told me she was a lapsed Catholic, that she didn't feel any particular connection to Catholicism, either as a religion or as a community.

Again I said, “why would you have known where you were on October 7?

She’d told me about her boys, fourteen and seventeen.

“You love your sons,” I said. “Of course you do. I get that. But wouldn’t it be strange if you loved your neighbor’s boys like you loved your own? Wouldn’t it be disturbing to your sons to learn that they weren’t loved particularly, but only in some general sense?”

Because love is, by nature, particular.

The idea of universal love is an abstraction. People love their own children more than other people’s children. They love their own families more than other people’s families. There is no moral defect in this. And none of it precludes us from loving other people. In fact, our particular loves—our relationships with our parents, our children, our siblings, our closest friends—are how we learn to love other people in the first place.

Her own Twitter feed had already disproven her claim. Among the dozens of things she’d posted about Palestinians, there was nothing about what had happened to Jews in Israel on October 7. Not a word. Her universal love had turned out to be highly particular after all.

What she was encountering in her Jewish friends was something she didn’t understand, couldn’t understand, because she had never experienced it herself: peoplehood.

She had communities, of course. She had her community of like-minded people in the entertainment business. She had groups of friends. But that isn’t the same thing. The Catholic world she had left behind was far too vast, and in her case too distant, to give her this particular experience.

There are roughly fifteen million Jews in a world of more than eight billion people. Nearly half of them live in Israel. For most Jews, those seven million people are brothers and sisters. Even at seven thousand miles away. Even when they don’t know their names, their faces, or anything about them.

For more than three thousand years, we have prayed toward Jerusalem. At the end of the Passover Seder we say, “Next year in Jerusalem.” Mentions of Israel run constantly through the Torah, through Jewish prayer, through Jewish history and memory. Even Jews who are not religious understand this instinctively. A Jew who rarely enters a synagogue will still reach out and kiss the Torah as it passes.

Israel is not alien to us. It is within us.

And the seven million Jews who live there—nearly half the Jewish people—are not alien to us either. They are, in a very real sense, family.

That was what this actress had seen in her Jewish friends after October 7. She had known these people for years. She had eaten with them, worked with them, celebrated with them. But suddenly she was seeing something she hadn’t known was there.

She was seeing a people.

And to those, politicians and pundits, trying on for size the new and insipid battle cry: "Judaism is a religion. Israel is a country," to somehow make the point that what we feel is wrong and illogical, I say the same thing: you are seeing a people.

Inseparable from each other. Inseparable from Israel.

Am Yisrael Chai.

Drawing by the author (Ink and watercolor marker on paper. 17” x 14”)

It was 2020. COVID was just starting to be worried about. A heavy rain was coming down on a rooftop deck outside my window, and I was drinking my PG Tips and preparing to leave the apartment when I got an email from a friend, a guy I knew from the music business. It felt urgent, something I didn’t expect, since it’d been a while since I’d heard from him and because our day-to-day dealings over the years were pretty business-like.

His email got straight to the point.

He asked me how I could have faith in God when we live in a world as frightening and uncertain as ours is. A world where evil shows its face every day. He knew, as everyone at Sony did, that I only ate kosher food and kept Shabbat. He must have thought I’d have a better response than a rabbi would. I figured he didn’t want a perfunctory answer, as if there was one.

I started out by citing a short but crucial Hebrew phrase that’s said when the Torah is removed from the ark during festivals and Sabbath services. In transliterated form, the phrase is written as Ain od milvado. It literally means “There is none but Him.” Its most familiar interpretation is that there’s only one God, as opposed to two gods or twenty gods. 

But it also has a deeper meaning: there is no conceivable, or inconceivable, object, entity, or truth other than God.

Look, even if this isn’t your thing, stay with me for a little while longer. I promise, it won’t hurt.

When I think of how to explain the vastness of this concept, I find myself going back to a physician, philosopher, and arguably the greatest and most influential Jewish thinker of the Middle Ages — Moses Maimonides, better known as the Rambam. He lived from 1138 to 1204 CE.

Unlike today, this was an age when belief in God was a given. The Rambam wasn’t trying to prove God’s existence — he was expanding what it meant to think about God. He famously explained God’s omniscience this way: “God is the knower, the known, and the knowledge itself.”

What the Rambam is describing is a oneness so comprehensive, so entirely unique, that it precludes the independent existence of anything else. In a poetic sense, it also suggests that God alone is truly alone.

Whatever your conception of God may be, believer or skeptic, it will inevitably fall short. To call God “inconceivable” is itself a conception. The moment I make that claim, I have already reduced what cannot be reduced.

Here’s a simpler way to think about this.

At the moment I was writing the email to my music-business friend, God was, in some sense, responsible for my fingers tapping my sentences onto the keyboard, for every raindrop striking the rooftops beyond my window, and for every feather on every pigeon taking shelter beneath the eaves.

Since only God exists, there can be no separate force of evil in the world. The devil, if there such a thing, could not operate independently of God. The dilemma is unavoidable and troubling. It speaks directly to the question my friend posed in his email: if there is truly nothing but God, where does evil come from? How does one account for the Holocaust, or the death of a single child?

An adequate answer lies well beyond the scope of this essay, but Jewish thought offers one enduring possibility. It proposes that what we experience as evil is not a separate or competing power to God, but a necessary pre-condition for free will.

If human beings are commanded to choose goodness, there must also be the possibility of choosing otherwise. God continuously sustains even that which appears to stand in opposition to His will, because without that apparent opposition there could be no moral freedom. I use the word “apparent” because nothing—not even what we call evil—exists outside God’s sustaining presence.

This may help explain why evil exists, but it does little to ease the pain of those who suffer from it. I remain wary of anyone who presents this, or any explanation of evil, too quickly or with too little sensitivity.

The human tragedy is that we have, through our choices, enlarged that tiny portion of evil far beyond its intended scope and purpose. Therein lies the inherent challenge of mankind’s free will. The idea is crystallized in the famous biblical dictum “I set before you life and death; choose life.” It’s humanity’s wrong choices (although they are choices “allowed” by God) that are responsible for the preponderance of evil in the world.

God should have no restrictions. Why not banish all evil? Perhaps it’s as I’ve said, to allow for free will. Did this make my friend go: “Ah, yes, thank you Peter. Now I understand!” Hardly. And yet, it’s a perspective that’s been held by generation after generation of people, many of whom were, and are today, incredible geniuses.

For me, the question of faith in God comes down to more practical matters: How do we cope with the not-knowing that surrounds us at every moment? How do we reconcile ourselves to the fact that we will never understand many of the things we take as a given — air, for example, or light, or water, or the ability to communicate our thoughts, or to give birth to a child who can give birth to a child of her own? How do we get used to the supernatural phenomenon of our own consciousness? Or do we just ignore the idea that our existence and the existence of the entire universe is a miracle?

My friend died not long ago. That email, I would later realize, was one of the last exchanges we had, and, in hindsight, one of the most honest. He was a brilliant man who argued for a rationalist approach to life, death, the existence of consciousness, and the creation of the world.

I never argued the case for the existence of God with him. That would have been pointless. But I did once ask him if he believed there were things that lay so far outside the ken of the human mind that they could never be conceived of, much less understood.

It was his opinion that with enough time and effort, theoretically, at least, everything is knowable. My belief is that the human mind is limited, and that the number of things we are capable of truly understanding is utterly overshadowed by the things we will never comprehend.

At some point, I asked him why, if he didn’t believe in God, he was seemingly so upset that his daughter had married out of her Jewish faith.

I knew I’d hit a nerve.

He finally said, “I don’t know why. I find it difficult to explain.”

I left it at that.

I consider it my spiritual and creative practice to make a kind of peace with the unknowable. With it I’ve found a sort of elevating humility, a state in which I begin to perceive myself as a tiny part of the world rather than the center of it. I’ve tried to put myself in a place where everything doesn’t revolve around what I need, what I want, what I feel, and what I believe.

That doesn’t always work. And whether it does or not, it doesn’t make me special or insignificant. It just is.

I only know that the more willingly I approach the unfathomable, the nearer I come to my own ever-evolving connection to God.

Faith is difficult. It isn’t about belief. It’s about adjusting to being human.

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(This essay grew out of a shorter piece that first appeared in my book Suspended By No String.)

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It shouldn’t be too difficult to understand why the progressive movement is celebrating the recent primary victories in places like Michigan, and before that in New York City. From their perspective, this has been a long time coming.

For nearly a decade, and through three election cycles, they’ve felt shut out by the Democratic establishment. Many still believe that in 2016 Bernie Sanders, who in their minds was the obvious frontrunner and had inspired an enormous grassroots movement, was denied the nomination by party insiders determined to usher in Hillary Clinton. Whether that perception is entirely accurate is beside the point. It became part of the movement’s identity. Down with the tired, nepotistic establishment. Bring in the fresh voices, the people who can truly make America great! Sorry, um, not great “again.” That wouldn’t be right. Lots of unforgivable flaws—chattel slavery, for one—it never was great.

Then came Donald Trump. For many, a nightmare come true.

Joe Biden’s victory brought relief to most Democrats—he wasn’t Donald Trump. But not to the progressive wing. Biden governed as a centrist, occasionally throwing a bone to the language and priorities of the left, yet never quite convincing its most committed activists that he shared their ambitions. Then, after Biden withdrew, Kamala Harris, another establishment Democrat, became the nominee, shoehorned into the election without having gone through a competitive primary. She lost to Trump, and the nightmare continued.

Housing, once attainable for most Americans, has become so expensive that owning a home no longer feels like something to imagine, let alone hope for. Healthcare is scarcely more encouraging. If you are self-employed or working freelance, premiums alone can cost well over a thousand dollars a month, often more than most people, young or not so young, can realistically afford.

It’s not difficult to imagine how all of this looks to a twenty-five- or thirty-year-old who may not know much about the failed history of socialist movements and is simply trying to build a life.

Into that very real need come candidates promising dramatic change. Most are intelligent, articulate, energetic, and they speak with confidence about transforming institutions that many voters have come to distrust. Whether one calls their politics democratic socialism, progressivism, or something akin to Marxism, the appeal is easy enough to understand. When existing systems seem incapable of solving problems that affect everyday life, proposals that once sounded radical begin to sound practical.

In that sense, I understand why someone might vote for Zohran Mamdani. I understand why someone might vote for Abdul El-Sayed. Even though I disagree with almost everything they advocate, I don’t find their appeal mysterious.

What I do find mysterious is something else.

Why does Israel occupy such a central place in this movement’s imagination?

These are politicians, the bulk of whose supporters are worried about rent, mortgages, medical bills, childcare, student debt, and the simple possibility of building a decent life. Yet somehow the Jewish state, a country of about ten million people, repeatedly finds itself at the center of every conversation.

Why this country? Why this issue? Why has Israel become the barrel into which so many unrelated grievances seem to be poured?

First, there is AIPAC, a fully legal, bipartisan American lobbying organization that exists to support Israel. It’s not unlike any number of other American advocacy organizations that support allied countries, including those representing Armenia, Greece, India, and Taiwan. So, what’s different about AIPAC?

For starters, AIPAC supports Israel. Why that should be an issue will be covered in a moment. Secondly, it is extraordinarily successful. Arguably more successful than any other country-focused advocacy organization in the United States. Jewish success has always produced two very different reactions. Some people admire it. Others resent it.

Abdul El-Sayed has repeatedly described Israel as committing 'genocide and apartheid' and condemned American support for what he calls a genocidal state. But if AIPAC disappeared tomorrow, I suspect Israel would remain every bit as central to the progressive imagination. In a recent CNN interview, El-Sayed stated that his opposition to U.S. military aid for Israel also extends to defensive systems such as Iron Dome. 'I don't believe that there's really a difference between offensive or defensive weapons.”

Israel has become the poster child for a progressive movement that sees it—wrongly, I must add—as the embodiment of everything it has been trained to oppose: colonialist, imperialist, white, privileged, an ethnostate—genocidal. The last word has become the most potent of all. Repeated often enough, the charge requires no proof. The accusation becomes evidence. Once a country has been successfully branded genocidal, many people conclude that almost any punishment becomes justified.

Yahya Sinwar would have appreciated the technique.

Third, candidates like Zohran Mamdani slurped up hostility toward the Jewish state with their breakfast cereal. His father, the influential post-colonial scholar Mahmood Mamdani, has for decades described Zionism as a settler-colonial project, referring to Israeli survivors of the Holocaust as 'yesterday's victims turned today's perpetrators.' One hesitates to blame the son for the ideologies of the father, although in cases where there is such continuity, it becomes hard not to notice why Zohran Mamdani repeatedly describes Israel as an apartheid state, accuses it of genocide, and says he cannot support Israel as a Jewish state.".

That Mamdani spews animus against Israel is readily apparent. It has become a regular feature of his public discourse. And yet, from his telling, he has nothing against Jews. Like Abdul El-Sayed, he has gone to considerable lengths to distinguish anti-Zionism from antisemitism. He insists that his objection is not to Jews, but to the Jewish character of the Jewish state. I suspect the day is coming when people in positions of power will no longer feel the need even to make that distinction.

But let me be clear about what is being discussed here. Israel is a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious democracy. It is also the only Jewish state in the world, home to roughly half of the world’s Jewish population. So the idea of separating Jews from Israel, which has become a regular talking point of progressive politicians and on social media is, from my perspective, ludicrous.

A final thought.

Some people, not all, but some, simply do not like the idea of the Jews, once bedraggled, stateless for two thousand years, scorned and scattered through exile, having a state of their own. They cannot countenance a strong Israel that is well armed and unwilling to tolerate its own people being slaughtered, as occurred on October 7. A defenseless Israel, dependent on a fickle world to come to its aid, is easier to accept than one capable of defending itself.

For anyone interested in that same phenomenon, I recommend Dara Horn’s remarkable book People Love Dead Jews. Its title is sardonic. Its argument is devastating.

So, with a hearty mazal tov to Abdul El-Sayed, I also recommend that he find a scapegoat other than the Jewish state—and, by extension, the Jews themselves—as a rhetorical device for solving the world’s problems.

History offers no shortage of examples of where that habit leads. It has never ended well for those who couldn’t shake it.

8/20/26 The Dakota: Minneapolis, MN

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8/25/26 Beachland Tavern: Cleveland 8/25

8/26/26 Drom: NYC, NY

As a Rhodes Scholar with a doctorate in public health, Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed understands well the effects of cortisol and chronic stress on human beings — much as Trump, without a medical degree, seemed to understand instinctively in 2016 how angry people pay attention, and how, once attentive to a message, they often begin to follow the messenger.

While El-Sayed’s message is not based entirely on his animus toward the Jewish state, it unquestionably plays an outsized role. The role anti-Israelism has come to occupy in transforming the Democratic Party — the speed of that transformation and its growing appeal to voters — should be alarming to anyone who holds even a modicum of support for Israel.

Let’s discuss for a moment not simply the current government of Israel, led by Netanyahu, a man who chose to bring into his coalition Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, two far-right politicians who have made inflammatory statements and whose actions may be worthy of criticism. If the criticism of Israel were directed only at specific actions and accompanied by suggestions for change, that would be entirely reasonable.

But El-Sayed, like Zohran Mamdani, goes much further. He has repeatedly described Israel’s conduct in Gaza as “genocide.” He has argued for ending or dramatically restricting U.S. military aid to Israel. He has portrayed AIPAC as a corrupting force in American politics and has suggested that its influence has helped perpetuate the war. Those are legitimate political positions to advocate. What concerns me is not simply the positions themselves, but the political energy they now generate. In a CNN interview he said the Israeli government is “pretty damn evil” — and, pressed on the comparison, extended the same word to Hamas: “We can say both.” It is a strange kind of evenhandedness, one that treats a sovereign government at war against the organization who just murdered, raped, and kidnapped some fifteen hundred of its citizens, and the terrorist organization that started it as morally interchangeable.

Consider his response to the March 2026 attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, where a man drove a truck loaded with explosives — and carrying a rifle — into a synagogue housing a preschool of roughly 140 children. The explosives failed to detonate; the attacker died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound before anyone else was hurt. His brother, reportedly a Hezbollah commander, had been killed days earlier in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon, along with a niece and nephew. Asked about the attack, El-Sayed said only that “hurt people do hurt people” and that events six thousand miles away don’t stay there.

As I read it, the implication was hard to miss: an act of terror against a preschool recast as the downstream consequence of Israeli policy — the same logic that has been used again and again to rationalize the atrocities of October 7, 2023. Temple Israel’s own rabbi, Jen Lader, publicly rebuked him for it.

Given that El-Sayed comes from an Egyptian family background and has spoken critically about Israel throughout his political career, his views are, in some regard, understandable. What is far more alarming is his attractiveness to voters who have no such personal connection to the conflict. For them, Israel represents everything wrong with America and American power. Their complaints are based largely on an ideology of oppressor versus oppressed — a simplistic, myopic worldview that sees wealthy Western nations as inherently suspect and those of the Global South as inherently virtuous.

There is an urge among many in our country to tear down our institutions and remake them wholesale. The problem with this, among many others, is that the framework for what comes next is rarely articulated with any clarity. That, of course, presents little problem for voters who have themselves become radicalized. And where do we find one of the major engines of that radicalization — one that has become a litmus test for anyone wishing to find a place within much of the Democratic Party? In the demonization of Israel.

As I write this, I find myself thinking about the upcoming second anniversary of the murder of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was shot at point-blank range in a tunnel in Gaza, together with five other hostages. They have come to be known as the Beautiful Six.

It isn’t hard to recognize a certain sickness: the relentless excoriation of Israel coupled with the silence surrounding these cruel and senseless murders.

El-Sayed’s criticism of AIPAC — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — has been vitriolic and false. He has repeatedly argued that AIPAC’s influence distorts Democratic politics. “The reason that we’ve seen this war fought is because of the impact of AIPAC in our politics.”

Only a short time ago, many people would hardly have recognized the name, much less known what the acronym stood for. Now this entirely legal organization, which until recently enjoyed broad bipartisan support, has become the principal villain for much of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. I should add, the ascendant wing, as we have seen in the New York primary elections and elsewhere.

El-Sayed’s goals are about the remaking of America. That is not unusual for politicians. What is unusual is that one of his principal political instruments is the same instrument that has so often been used by those seeking power throughout history: the demonization of the Jews, this time through the medium of the Jewish state.

It is easy to say that anti-Israelism has no connection to anti-Judaism. I have heard many people repeat what has now become a familiar refrain: “Being anti-Israel doesn’t mean you are anti-Jewish.”

The sheer frequency, popularity, and political force that anti-Israelism now possesses should make anyone pause before accepting that claim too readily.

Imagine someone devoting enormous energy to arguing that Mexico should cease to exist as the nation-state of the Mexican people, while insisting they have nothing against Mexicans. One would naturally wonder whether those two claims could comfortably coexist.

As propagandists have long understood, repetition has extraordinary power. Repeat something often enough and it begins to feel self-evident. “Israel committed genocide.” “Israel is an apartheid state.” “Israel is uniquely evil.” Repeated often enough, assertions begin to acquire the status of unquestioned facts.

Michigan’s primary takes place on Tuesday, August 4. El-Sayed is an American citizen — bright, well-spoken, highly educated, and telegenic — the kind of candidate whose ambitions plausibly extend well beyond a Senate seat.

It is that history — not paranoia, but memory — that makes the current moment feel different. There are Jews who, since the Shoah, have kept a travel bag ready by the door: a passport, some cash, maybe a few diamonds — portable wealth, as they call it.

No doubt they were told, more than once:

“This is a bit crazy, no?”

It’s not easy being an anti-Zionist these days. Especially if you’re determined to live in accordance with your most important moral imperative: the denigration of the world’s only Jewish state.

Let me show you why.

Karyn L. is having a dinner party for a dozen friends. She’s an excellent cook, and this morning she went to her local co-op to purchase produce.

Her meal will consist of Middle Eastern specialties: baba ghanoush, hummus with techina, an assortment of grilled meats marinated in olive oil and za’atar, and a large salad that will sit in the middle of a long table as a centerpiece. It consists of Persian cucumbers, feta cheese, and cherry tomatoes.

Just before her guests arrive, she learns that many of the modern cherry tomato varieties now sold in supermarkets were developed by Israeli agricultural researchers—a country she abhors.

Does she throw out the salad? Pluck out the tomatoes and leave just the cucumbers and feta? Or quietly hope no one notices?

Edward F. is late for a critical business meeting somewhere outside Salt Lake City. It could mean the difference between a substantial raise and losing his job.

He finds a paper map from the rental car agency in the glove compartment and struggles to unfold it across the passenger seat. He can’t drive and navigate at the same time. At this rate, he’s almost certain to arrive late.

“I’ll just use Waze,” he tells himself. “There’s still plenty of time.”

He’s right.

Or rather, there would have been.

Just as he starts the engine, a friend calls.

“Dude, Waze was built in Israel,” the friend says. “It’s bitch-ass Zio tech.”

Edward places his phone in the cupholder and searches the map for Interstate 80.

Alex T. owns an organic vineyard in central California. Two consecutive years of drought have pushed him to the brink of bankruptcy.

An agricultural specialist recommends installing drip irrigation, a technology pioneered in Israel that has transformed farming in arid regions around the world. It would dramatically reduce water usage, improve yields, and perhaps save the vineyard his grandfather planted.

But Alex has pledged never to benefit from anything that comes from Israel.

He ponders whether it’s better to let the vines wither and die.

Angela M. has spent the last five years urging everyone she knows to boycott Israel.

This afternoon she’s driving her teenage son to look at a college in the Hudson Valley. Somewhere along the Taconic Parkway, she glances down for just a second to take a sip of coffee. Her car begins swerving into the next lane.

Instantly, the steering wheel nudges itself and gently guides the car back into position.

Later she learns that the driver-assistance technology that may very well have saved both their lives was developed by Mobileye, an Israeli company.

Should she disable the feature?

Robert H. has been experiencing unexplained internal bleeding for months. His gastroenterologist recommends a PillCam—a swallowable capsule developed in Israel that contains a tiny camera capable of photographing parts of the digestive tract that standard endoscopes often cannot reach.

Robert has long supported a complete boycott of Israel.

He thanks the doctor and asks whether there is a “less Zionist” way to look at his innards.

The doctor thinks for a moment.

“There are other tests,” he says. “I just don’t think they’re as good for what we need to see.”

Robert nods and stares blankly at the doctor.

Daryl B. is having a rough go of it this morning.

His mother is undergoing treatment for an aggressive form of cancer, and her doctor has recommended a promising new course of treatment. Daryl has taken on the role of liaison between physician and patient. The data suggest the treatment may be particularly effective against the very form of disease his mother is suffering from.

Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be a big deal. But Daryl, a longtime advocate of BDS—the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel—understands the treatment’s potential, yet he’s deeply troubled to learn that an important component of the technology behind it was developed in Israel.

He now finds himself weighing his mother’s health against his disdain for the Jewish state.

Come what may, stalwart anti-Zionist Jeremy C. has made the decision to live entirely in accordance with his principles.

Zero Israeli products.

Zero Israeli technology.

Zero Israeli innovations.

He sits down at his computer to make a list of everything Israeli he needs to eliminate from his life.

He gets no further than turning it on.

“The goddamn chips,” he mutters. “They’re all developed in Israel.”

Wearing an uneasy expression, he goes in search of a stone and chisel.

Author’s Note: While this essay has a sardonic bent, I don’t consider its subject humorous. I see the now-global fixation on the lone Jewish state as a civilizational crisis—a breakdown of moral intelligence and the release into the world of its oldest and most enduring hatred.

For many, this has moved well beyond political protest into something darker and more menacing. What follows is a tiny sample of the images people are circulating about Jews and Israel.

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The Dakota Minneapolis, 8/20

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Drom NYC, NY 8/26

Photographs by the author

It’s hard for many of us to tease out the beauty in a world that feels fractured, one that often seems cruel and chaotic. Our neurobiology predisposes us to look for danger—to notice the things that can hurt, anger, or unsettle us. We’re more attentive to threat, and perhaps that includes ugliness as well: ugly faces, ugly voices, the ugliness of violence and hate, the feeling that hope has departed, leaving only desolation in its wake.

I’m here to point in another direction. It’s one toward which I’ve had to deliberately orient myself.

I want to show you some photographs of beautiful things.

It would be easy enough to share pictures of sunsets and flowers, songbirds and blue skies, babies and puppies. Instead, I want you to look elsewhere.

I don’t feel the need to explain what this means. I can’t even begin to do that.

I will, however, share what the experience of photographing these things has meant to me. As you might imagine, I’ve taken hundreds of such photos. Beyond the idea of finding beauty in unlikely places, there is, for me, something strange enough to make me pause and consider whether I even feel comfortable sharing the following.

But why stop now?

In some sense, I feel like I’m giving life to abandoned things, to objects—yes, even stains and skid marks—revitalizing neglected pieces of our world. Bringing to light the voiceless and seemingly meaningless parts of existence.

Perhaps, in doing so, I’m saying that I wish to bring to light those parts of myself that I have neglected, that I have found shameful and embarrassing. Those things that I have concealed, not only from others, but from myself. Some may ask: What is the efficacy of this? What purpose does it serve?

It’s a fair question, one which reveals the fact that we often look upon our lives, not in terms of our intrinsic value as human beings, but only insofar as that value relates to our accomplishments.

As though the totality of our being can be measured out on some imagined abacus and adjudicated by numbers alone.

I take these pictures to rescue their subjects from unimportance. But for myself too. And for others who sometimes feel lost in a world where quantity can feel much more important than quality. To represent to myself—and to you too—that we are more than we can possibly imagine. That by our very being, we purvey a great and sacred truth: we matter.

That greatness isn’t properly measured by great weights and great numbers, but by the fact that we are alive, joined by the limitless and profound beauty of a wholly miraculous universe.

Photographs, in order of appearance

• A stain in the parking structure at the YMCA

• Discarded wood near a construction site

• A bike lane marker on a city street

• Grease and dirt marks on a busy street

• Sidewalk detritus

• Exposed roots of a dead tree

• A smudge of unknown substance on a sidewalk

I’m often asked why I take a public stand on behalf of Israel. Some have asked how I have the fortitude to do so. Others wonder about the “reputational risk.” Still others wonder about subjecting myself to the “awful” comments. To me, they’re like weather reports—a way to gauge the sentiments of those with whom I disagree.

I support Israel, not because of any government, any particular policy, or anything having to do with geopolitics. I support Israel because half the world’s Jewish population lives there. This is about peoplehood—my people. I understand well how this kind of particularity is easy to criticize, how in an era where the ideology of oppressor versus oppressed has caught the imagination of many people, where thinking about one’s sense of belonging to an ancient nation is thought to be anachronistic, and where a vague notion of universalism has become the new moral imperative.

But as I’ve written many times in my column, all love and all concern begin with specificity. We only learn how to love and be concerned about others through the ways we have loved—and have been loved—by our own.

I see it this way. There are seven million Jews in Israel. They are people of many races and ethnicities, many talents, and many political affiliations. They and their supporters worldwide are now under siege. They have been fighting for their survival, surrounded by neighbors seeking their destruction since before the Jewish state came into existence in 1948—and they have continued to do so since the pogrom of October 7, 2023.

Some have asked me, by way of accusation: do you now believe in genocide? Have you become a warmonger? (I assume my former fan (above) feels this way.) Do you support the murder of children? What happened to the man who wrote songs like “Been Set Free,” Impermanent Things,” and “Mission Of My Soul”? Have you suddenly become cruel, hard-hearted?

The questions are too absurd to warrant a response.

For me, support of Israel and the Jewish people more broadly doesn’t take special courage or insight.

If someone were attacking a close relative or friend, my reaction would be the same. It would be reflexive, instantaneous. What consequence could outweigh the idea of sitting back while your loved ones are imperiled? There are those who have argued that whatever cruelties have been meted out are “acts of resistance” and justified military actions by the oppressed against their oppressors. One wonders what logic brought Hamas and its supporters to conclude that K’fir (who was 10 months old at the time of his murder) and Ariel Bibas (who was 4 years old at the time of his murder) were oppressors deserving of death by strangulation.

Such is the strangeness of the current moment, when it feels as though much of the world has once again chosen to place a target on the backs of Jews. Justifications are conjured up and offered, just as they were during the pogroms in Europe, the forced conversions and auto-da-fés of Spain, the fabricated Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Russia, the institutionalized anti-Jewish and anti-Israel campaigns of the Soviet Union that found expression at the United Nations in 1975, and in the demonstrations that erupted immediately after October 7—before Israel had fired a shot.

Synagogues in America are more than three times as likely as other U.S. houses of worship to employ armed security guards. Jewish day schools too, like the ones my grandchildren attend, face extraordinary security costs. Today, the average Jewish institution spends more than $400,000 annually on security. That represents an average increase of roughly 125% since before October 7.

Let’s pause here.

This means that after the largest massacre of Jews since the Shoah, synagogues and Jewish schools have to spend 125 percent more to protect themselves from another one. The idea should stun any normal thinking person. Though sadly, I believe it would stun very few people these days.

Most recently, in NYC, Mayor Zohran Mamdani employed the magic words that brought him more attention on social media than ever before. The last time I checked the video in which he said the following received upwards of 90 million views: “I will arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if he comes to New York City.”

Not long afterward, a brutal double stabbing occurred, amid shouts of the now all-too- familiar “Allahu Akbar. One of the victims was a man wearing a kippah as he left a synagogue service. The attack happened on the Jewish holiday of Tisha B’Av, no more than a two-minute walk from my daughter’s apartment.

I leave it to you to decide whether this kind of rhetoric helps create a more peaceful New York City.

So I ask: How could I not speak up? How could I not use my voice in support of my people at a time like this? Isn’t it obvious? And why shouldn't anyone who cares about Jews and Israel use their own voice?

You don’t need a huge platform. You simply need to speak out in whatever sphere you find yourself. This is the moment your parents and grandparents hoped you’d never see.

How you choose to act matters. It matters a great deal.