The hope of this issue of White Rose Magazine is to not only describe the many problems extant within K–12 and higher education, but to inspire a renaissance within the Humanities.

This casual assumption that a diverse adult student body is not merely incapable of hearing or intelligently discussing disagreeable or even offensive words or concepts but is at risk of psychological harm should be regarded, frankly, as an insult to these very same students.

Parents looking to understand how far-left Neo-Marxism entered American public education should read James Lindsay’s and Luke Rosiak’s recent books for the whole sordid story.

I passed by the school where I studied as a boyand said in my heart: here I learned certain thingsand didn’t learn others. All my life I have loved in vainthe things I didn’t learn. I am filled with knowledge,I know all about the flowering of the tree of knowledge,the shape of its leaves, the…

In this podcast, James Lindsay, a mathematician and cultural critic, who has been studying how Marxist ideology has taken over institutions of learning, turns his attention to how the Church is being transformed by Marxist and black liberation theology in order to “get to a new reality.” The erosion of Christian values, Lindsay argues, ironically stems…

Rossi, once a beloved high school math and philosophy teacher, was “canceled” from an elite private school in Manhattan for blowing the whistle on his school’s indoctrination tactics.

Rather than educating to build an informed citizenry, we have entered an era of constraining dogma in which there is little to no room for free thought; where everything is political; where the goal of building an informed citizenry has been replaced by an environment in which thinking for oneself is not promoted.

In 2018, Jewish students at a pluralistic community high school participated in a project called “We Will Not Be Silenced,” a week-long commemoration of the Holocaust. To broach this topic, this prestigious school focused on Kristallnacht, the 1938 pogrom carried out by the Nazi Party against the Jews of Germany. The interactive project compelled students to write on small pieces of paper the things about which they would not be silent as a result of Kristallnacht. The following are examples of what students chose to write. On note cards bearing the heading “I will not be silent in the face of,” students wrote “homophobia,” “trans violence,” “gun violence,” “environmental degradation,” “rape culture,” “sexism,” “racism,” and “any hate.” Not one student wrote “anti-Semitism,” the very reason that Kristallnacht occurred.

An essential question surfaces: why not? What occurred pedagogically in the classroom that encouraged students to walk away with knowledge that in no way expressed the main undercurrent of the Nazi regime?

One should be shocked by this. But taking stock of the field of Holocaust education, the answers yielded by the students are not in any way exceptional. They reflect the fact that Holocaust education—very simply—is not working. Far worse, it has been usurped by individuals with very specific learning objectives, one of which is to universalize the Holocaust to such a degree so as to render its particular history abstract—almost irrelevant.

The universalization of the Holocaust did not occur overnight. Historically, in the immediate post-war years, awareness of the Nazi atrocities began to grow. One of the first testimonies, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, published in 1952, slowly became a staple of Holocaust literature in public schools. Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, joined Anne Frank’s diary in the hope of serving as eternal witnesses to the Holocaust.

The first state to mandate Holocaust curriculum was Illinois in 1990. It is important to note that initial efforts, as reported in a 2006 study on the “State of Holocaust Education in the State of Illinois,” produced eight major findings as a result of teaching the Holocaust, one of which was “a wide array of topics such as death camps, anti-Semitism, Hitler’s rise to power, non-Jewish victims, creation of the state of Israel, and the U.S.’s response to the Holocaust is being taught in Illinois high schools.” It would seem, therefore, that, initially, the architects of Holocaust curriculum seemed to grasp the singular nature of the subject. Using the state of Illinois as a case study, a major shift occurred in 2005, when the legislature mandated that Holocaust education include “other cases of genocide.” Other states slowly followed suit. Before 2016, only seven states required Holocaust education in schools. In the past seven years, eighteen more have passed Holocaust education mandates. And yet, anti-Semitism in the United States is at an all-time high. For example, the phrase “Hitler was right” was posted online more than 17,000 times over the course of just one week in 2022 alone.

All in all, the belief that Holocaust education is an effective antidote to hate is not consistent with reality, mostly due to its universalization. Take, for example, a person who condemns the “Israelization” of American domestic policy, or says that Israel is a “colonial” state guilty of “state terror” and “is waging a war against civilians.” That same person claims “it is certainly true that one universal truth about the Holocaust” is that “there is value in seeing analogies and perhaps hidden similarities” between it and the “Palestinian disaster.” Do we really think this person does not know about the Holocaust? Was his problem really a lack of knowledge, or something much darker?

More to the point, the numbers indicate that Holocaust education has simply failed. A 2020 poll of young Americans across all fifty states, commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, reveals that disturbingly high numbers of respondents know precious little about the Holocaust. As the study’s press release details:

Nationally, there is a clear lack of awareness of key historical facts; 63 percent of all national survey respondents do not know that six million Jews were murdered and 36 percent thought that “two million or fewer Jews” were killed during the Holocaust. Additionally, although there were more than 40,000 camps and ghettos in Europe during the Holocaust, 48 percent of national survey respondents cannot name a single one.

The state-by-state analysis yielded a particularly disquieting finding that nearly 20 percent of Millennials and Gen Z in New York feel the Jews caused the Holocaust.

Holocaust education has been required in New York State since 1994. If nearly a fifth of the young people (polled) in America’s most Jewish state (compared to 11% nationally) believe that the Jewish people were responsible for their own extermination, the very existence of such a statistic—even among, in all fairness, a relatively small sample size—indicates that at least something is wrong. Its exact cause cannot be precisely determined—for instance, such attitudes are likely not picked up in schools—but it certainly appears that the curriculum in use today is not flattening this steepening curve. Nevertheless—and not surprisingly—the New York State Education Department maintains that no “corrective action” is required.

Universal hate

The Holocaust education remedy is not only appearing in classrooms. Public figures who make anti-Semitic statements are invited to tour Holocaust museums, and schools with a rise in anti-Semitic instances invite Holocaust speakers, or themselves go on tours of those museums. The assumption being that if one is either involved in anti-Semitic hate speech or is witness to it, the necessary panacea is to go to a museum to witness how the story of anti-Semitism in the 20th century concluded: with the attempted genocide of the Jewish people.

The problem is that such a visitor to these museums seems to walk out with a very different message. Recently, a high school English teacher in Los Angeles who wishes to remain anonymous spoke to me, Naya Lekht, about one such trip her school took to the Museum of Tolerance. The Museum of Tolerance, established in 1993, is the educational department of the prestigious Simon Wiesenthal Center, named in honor of—though not founded by—famous Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Here is her recollection of the event:

Our school has been having quite a significant rise in antisemitic instances; you know, like swastikas etched into tables. And the school took us on a trip to the Holocaust museum and the docent took us through the exhibit, and then at the end—you know, when you walk out—we somehow found ourselves in this relatively big exhibit on trans and gay rights and BLM and environmental justice. I did not quite understand how the gas chambers constructed to kill Jews had anything to do with trans rights. And the reason I am bringing up the gas chambers is that one of the final rooms in the exhibit on the Holocaust was a room of what gas chambers looked like. It was haunting. But I was confused.

What this teacher’s “confusion” reveals is that Holocaust curriculum and Holocaust museums have transformed from spaces to commemorate the particularity of the Jewish story into temples dedicated to a universal story of human insensitivity—a mere allegory of anything unjust, now or then. The Museum of Tolerance indeed does offer exhibits on the subjects of “homelessness, LGBTQ+ issues, bullying, the challenges of policing,” and much more that has nothing to do with the Nazis’ Final Solution, including the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

Sadly, the Museum of Tolerance is not alone in this behavior. The website of Boston’s Holocaust memorial includes a lesson plan from the program Facing History and Ourselves, which discusses the teachings of elite Black Lives Matter activist Clint Smith, as well as the “human responsibility” to rescue Syrian refugees. (No mention is made of either Black Lives Matter’s or Syrian refugees’ anti-Jewish attitudes.) Even the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the most prestigious institution of Holocaust education in America, has published material concerning how “climate change” has contributed to several modern-day genocides. 

Of course, it was not always this way. Just like the 1990 Illinois curriculum, which seems to have focused on the singularity of the Holocaust, museums established to teach people about the Holocaust echo similar stories of origin. In 1978, a President’s Commission on the Holocaust, chaired by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, recommended the establishment of a memorial building that would preserve the memory of the six million victims, and, through education, inspire the American public to perpetuate that memory. Indeed, with clear moral convictions, the Commission’s letter urged the president that the effort to remember the Holocaust in the United States must not stray from acknowledging that, while many others were killed in the Holocaust, it was only the Jews who were targeted for annihilation because they were Jews:

…Mr. President, the next question your Commission had to examine was whom are we to remember? It is vital that the American people come to understand the distinctive reality of the Holocaust: millions of innocent were tragically killed by the Nazis. They must be remembered. However, there exists a moral imperative for special emphasis on the six million Jews. While not all victims were Jews, all Jews were destined for annihilation solely because they born Jewish (p. iii).

The report goes on to outline the guiding principles for establishing a memorial space for the Holocaust, one of which is to recognize the “uniqueness of the Holocaust,” noting that the concept of annihilating “an entire people” in such a way “was unprecedented” (p. 3).

To understand how and why Holocaust education and museums evolved into spaces that universalized the particularity of the event, we need not look too far. In terms of the Jewish institutional world, most fundamentally spearheaded by the ADL, Holocaust education is shaped by the phrase “never again.” As early as 1983, a curriculum published in New Jersey with the help of the ADL developed and published a program they called “The Holocaust and Genocide: A Search for Conscience,” in which teachers are instructed to discuss the “nature of human behavior” and “views of Prejudice and Genocide.” By about 2010, the Jewish institutional world’s use of the phrase “never again” was commonplace in political slogans in support of immigration reform, “climate justice,” anti-racism, equity, and “reproductive justice.”

The origin of the phrase “never again” might surprise the average ADL employee. It originated in the introduction to Menachem Begin’s 1951 memoir The Revolt:

…I have written this also for Gentiles, lest they be unwilling to realize, or all too ready to overlook, the fact that out of blood and fire and tears and ashes, a new specimen of human being was born, a specimen completely unknown to the world for over eighteen hundred years, “the Fighting Jew.” That Jew, whom the world considered dead and buried and never to rise again has arisen. For he has learned that “simple truth” of life and death, and he will never again go down to the sides of the pit and vanish from off the earth” (p. xxv).

Indeed, “never again” was written by a fervent Zionist who barely escaped the Holocaust. These words were not and are not meant to be appropriated by any other cause. And yet they have been.

Indisputable uniqueness

Nobody disagrees that there have been all too many acts of depraved mass murder throughout history, some far larger per capita than the Nazi genocide of the Jews. From the communist Chinese “Great Leap Forward” of 1958-1962 (killing perhaps 45 million people) to the Islamic conquest of India beginning in 1001 (perhaps 80 million), Jews are hardly the only people on earth who have suffered or been murdered. Social injustices and genocides certainly do still occur, and we must always encourage people of good will to stand against them regardless of time or place. Jewish suffering is categorically never “more important” or “worse” than non-Jewish suffering. Still, it is neither historically nor morally correct to relegate the extermination of the Jewish people to the status of just another story of “hate.”

Genocide exists on a spectrum, on whose most diabolical end one must, without compromise, place the genocide of the Jews. For example, though murderous in the extreme, Islamic armies’ crusades against Christian or Hindu kingdoms aimed chiefly to wipe out the practice of kufr (non-Islam) and benefit from rendering vast non-Muslim populations politically powerless. Whereas Muslim warriors often gave the conquered two choices—conversion or death—Jews on the ramp at Birkenau, even if selected to “live,” ultimately had none.

More recent atrocities like the Armenian Genocide and the Arab Sudanese regime’s racist jihad against rebellious black populations were indeed genocidal, but had other, arguably more general, objectives in mind. Of great importance were also destroying religious and national identities, as well as stealing natural resources. These radically reduced, subjugated populations—most infamously in the case of Sudan—were far more useful to the state and its agents as living slaves than as hills of corpses. Such titanic suffering rightly diminishes this rather academic distinction’s relevance, but the point is that the Holocaust is unique.

Even the Rwandan and Cambodian Genocides—the ones most repellently similar to the Holocaust in their pathological racism—were committed against people hated almost exclusively within Rwandan and Cambodian society. Zulu people in South Africa, for example, thousands of miles from the blood-soaked hills of Kigali, harbored no hatred of Tutsis. Almost nobody outside the Indo-Chinese peninsula has, like Pol Pot, attempted to completely exterminate ethnic Chinese or Vietnamese minorities. Jews, however, have been hated for century after century by every social class across both the Christian and the Islamic worlds. In fact, Jews are reviled today in societies like Poland and Syria, where their presence is microscopic to practically non-existent.

Racism, even genocidal racism, like that of Sudanese Arabs or Rwandan Hutus, is universal, however ironically, in its provincial particularism. Inter-tribal bloodlust is a constant as old as human nature itself. Hatred of Jews, however—as “Christ-killers,” host desecrators, child murderers, usurers, bloated capitalists, rabid communists, political puppet masters, organ thieves, “occupiers,” racists, slave masters, and sexual criminals—is particular in its universalism. People who have never met, seen, or lived within hundreds of miles of Jews have wanted to kill them. Put simply: the Holocaust was not simply one of many “holocausts.”

Curricular system failure

Why, and how, did Holocaust education come to degenerate into, at the very best, an insipid reflection on “man’s inhumanity to man”? And what does this mean for a branch of education so vital to vaccinating children against what the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks called the “mutating” virus of anti-Semitism?

American Jewish writer Dara Horn most recently addressed this in her essay “Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse?” Horn writes that when it comes to teaching historical facts, Holocaust education remains essential; when it comes to addressing contemporary anti-Semitism, however, Holocaust education is “incapable” of doing this and sometimes even contributes to Jew-hatred. This conclusion is as fascinating as it is disturbing. We have been mandating Holocaust education in American schools precisely to better comprehend anti-Semitism and prepare students’ moral immune systems against the spread of this virus. Or have we?

Truth be told, the lessons of the Holocaust we have been teaching, whether in the classroom or in museums, boils down to “othering” a people is “bad,” Jews were the quintessential “other,” racism is the only cause of the Holocaust, and white supremacy is the peculiar outgrowth of Nazism alone. Dare we say, racism was not the cause of the Holocaust, but rather the vehicle used by the Nazis in order to deploy Jew-hatred; and Jews, especially German Jews, who were highly assimilated and integrated into German society, were hardly the “quintessential other.”

No, the Holocaust occurred because of anti-Semitism, a particular and highly complex form of hatred. Those who want to teach about the Holocaust, therefore, should not begin their courses with Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, but with the birth of European Jew-hatred, dating to the Middle Ages in Europe, or even to the rise of Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries. Indeed, the history of the Holocaust is but the most hideous chapter in the many-volume history of Jew-hatred.

We begin, therefore, to arrive at some sort of answer to the question posed in the beginning: what occurred pedagogically in the classroom to compel students to walk away with the notion that, because of Kristallnacht, they will dedicate their lives to combatting racism, homophobia, sexism, and gun violence? Most likely, students were taught that Kristallnacht is an instructive tale of how dangerous it is “to other” another people, how racism leads to genocide, and how we must fight those who seek to oppress a persecuted minority.

It would be curious to find out whether the teachers at the school had taught students anything about the origins of Kristallnacht itself: that a Polish Jew, Herschel Grynszpan, shot a German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath, in Paris on November 9, 1938. A few days earlier, the Nazi government expelled thousands of Polish Jews living in Germany from the Reich. Having received the news that his parents were among those expelled, Grynszpan killed vom Rath, the third secretary of the German embassy in Paris. That very evening, Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels used the story about one Jew in Paris to convince Hitler to unleash an all-night wave of brutal pogroms against German Jews throughout the country. (The timing could not have been any more apt: the violence peaked in the early hours of November 10, venomous anti-Semite and Nazi hero Martin Luther’s birthday.) Kristallnacht would also mark the first instance in which the Nazis targeted, arrested, and incarcerated Jews on a massive scale specifically because of their Jewish origins. It would be equally important to explore why the German population, hundreds of miles away from Paris, was not only ready but willing to enact such a crime against the Jews of Germany.

Is it intellectual or pedagogical laziness on the part of our educators, educational non-profits, state legislators, and museum curators to write off Kristallnacht or the Holocaust as “a crime against a marginalized group”? Have we been asking the wrong questions? Or have we been aiming to achieve flawed learning objectives (i.e., how the story of the Holocaust can teach us about crimes against humanity and global injustice)? Perhaps all of this is intentional? Have the educators, state legislators, and museum curators been committed to a very focused goal: to arouse partisan social action via Holocaust education, thus easily explaining its universalization?

And, of course, all of this is done—one would hope—by very well-intentioned individuals who seek to educate through empathy and want so badly to restore this broken world. But what have these intentions yielded? The best case scenario is the abstraction of the Holocaust to such a degree that students do not even know that they are learning about the murder of Jews; the worst case scenario is how easily such universalization lends itself to accusing the only Jewish country, Israel, of crimes against humanity and the anti-Semitic canard of comparing Israel to the Nazi state.

Not too long ago, Bob Kellog, a radio host for American Family News, reached out to me, Naya Lekht, for comment about flyers distributed all around the Nashville, Tennessee, campus of Pepperdine University comparing banning drag shows to the Holocaust.

“Do you find this to be insensitive?” Kellog asked. “The easiest thing for me to be is upset about the appropriation of the Holocaust,” I said. “But this should not at all come as a surprise to anyone. For decades, we have been abstracting the history of the Holocaust to such a degree that we do not even know what the Holocaust was.”

This, then, is the tragedy of Holocaust education: that well-intentioned dollars have been used to teach about everything but the main culprit: anti-Semitism.

The increasing culture wars in schools have placed a target on Jewish students. Throughout the past four years, Jewish students have increasingly reported being victimized by anti-Semitism coming from both their peers and educators. Teachers and administrators are failing our kids, either minimizing or completely ignoring anti-Jewish bigotry or outright embracing it.

I’ve witnessed empires rise and vanish; Cursed are those who curse us; Egypt, Rome, Greek, and Spanish; A Divine mirror to all who haunt us

Houses of worship are intended to be open places where people feel welcome to enter. Some also might minister to people with mental health conditions, making it hard to know which people are in need and which are a danger to the congregation. Turning the place into a fortress defeats the purpose of having such a place. However, that doesn’t mean we can ignore security concerns.

It is imperative that we pay attention to the resurgence of Neo-Nazi ideology not just due to its increasing normalization in certain conservative spaces in the U.S., but because it can once again infect all of Western civilization.

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.

Free speech can be messy. It can be infuriating. However, we wouldn’t need a First Amendment if it only protected the speech we feel is agreeable or useful.

If a marketplace of ideas truly exists with rational actors serving as discerning consumers, then, as we have been assured by free speech absolutists, good ideas will cancel out bad ones. If that’s true of how this marketplace works in practice, then how can the resurgence of Nazism be explained? These ideas should have been flushed away with the Fuhrer. And yet pernicious attitudes about racial superiority and Jewish sub-humanity are still being peddled in far too many circles.

International Relations theory has often upheld Realism as the best and most useful way to understand foreign affairs. In the aftermath of the messy 2010s and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, perhaps this no longer holds weight.

No German, or Western European for that matter, did more to grant anti-Semitism its permanence in the cultures of Western Europe than the German Reformation leader, Martin Luther.

Here, arguably, is the self-imposed restraint of pursuing a comprehensive approach to combating anti-Semitism ─ likely more so in the artistic community, given its predilection for self-reflection and concern for the Other. This is not a blind spot; this is the hesitation of a tragic mindset.

Social media makes it possible for people to perpetuate their isolation from Jews and find ways to confirm their paranoia on a daily basis.

This investigative work is crucial to understanding the background of the alliance between political Islam and the extreme left-wing.

When we have true faith, we rise above evil and see the completeness of the divine plan in all events.

Half of America is happy to wrap itself in the flag; the other half simply wants to take a knee. Something has to give, because such stark and cavernous divisions are simply not sustainable.

Review of Invited to Life: Finding Hope After the Holocaust, by B.A. Van Sise

Any attempt to present the experiences of Holocaust survivors faces daunting challenges. There’s a delicacy that’s required, entrusted, as one is, with incomparably precious materials. The weight of responsibility, the transcendent standards are ever-present. The worldly, moral question—“What would you have done?”—haunts every representation. 

But there’s no escape in the pragmatic present either, even for a limited project like a book, because life continues to ask, “What will you do?” What will you do with these realities, with these finite lives, each a whole universe? In sharing these stories, how will you give form to what is given into your hands to pass along? To write about such a book, as I was asked to do for photojournalist B.A. Van Sise’s Invited to Life, involves some related challenges, because it must evaluate the author’s success in that fraught and enormous undertaking. 

Van Sise’s first idea, to portray a handful of survivors for New York’s Village Voice, eventually grew into an exhibition, then this hefty, beautifully produced volume. He is most interested in “not what happened to these survivors during six tempest-tossed years long ago, but rather what happened by these survivors,” in other words, the offspring, careers, artworks, and everything else that exists because of them – “proof,” he writes, “of moving on, and moving up, and moving forward.” To write about such a book, then, is to ask, what is happening now to their stories? How have these memories themselves been moved on, up, and forward by the author’s efforts? 

The fragility, singularity, and wonder associated with each survivor’s life must be honored, but not idealized. Idealization is ultimately dehumanization. As much as I, for example, consider the anti-Nazi resistance fighters among the most courageous in history—so when Van Sise quotes survivor Lyubov Abramovich saying, “It is a woman’s job to carry dynamite,” I’m in awe of her inconceivable fortitude—their actions remain those of human beings, as were those of the persecutors. It’s a truism, of course, but its implications, seriously considered, are devastating. (Hence that relentless refrain: “What would you have done?”) 

Van Sise successfully faces this challenge. His subjects, however genuinely radiant they may appear in his black-and-white photographs, are granted their imperfections and follies in his short descriptive texts and in their own words. We meet Albert Rosa, whose rage led him to the boxing ring (“The ones who beat me up, I beat them up back”), but also led his wife to leave him; and Aron Bell, most famous for the dramatization of his and his brothers’ story in the 2008 film Defiance, but somewhat infamous, too, for his and his wife’s guilty plea on rather sordid fraud charges in 2007. Nor is there any effort to hide the range of responses inevitably occasioned by the Shoah. Margot Hopfer says, “You know, when you’re eleven you don’t forgive. And I couldn’t. And I don’t, to this day. That’s the hardest.” So, some are angry, some remain afraid, some speak eloquently, some can barely be coaxed to say a few words. 

More generally, Van Sise does achieve his goal. We get glimpses into an extraordinary range of lives fully lived, like those of Eva Kollisch, peace activist, and her wife, Naomi Replansky; of Pearl Friend, who “married a very good man … had a very nice life for seventy-three years, and I raised beautiful children, my daughter, my son, beautiful grandchildren, and beautiful seven great-grandchildren” (“So, what can I have anything to complain?”); of Helena Weinstock, “who survived the camp that killed Anne Frank, … [and] now spends her evenings as a competitive ballroom dancer”; of Yankele Gross and his brother, Beresh, who became Alex and Bill, and created Albee Homes (“When liberated from Buchenwald, he was homeless. In his first eight years in business alone, he put 20,000 families into new houses every single year”); of the two Hungarian photographers, Laszlo Selly and Laszlo Stern, and their competing Laszlo Studios. “He wanted to sue me,” says Stern. “But we met, and we found we had some things in common. And it’s been friendship ever since.” 

Van Sise often pictures his subjects with a child or grandchild, or holding a treasured or symbolically significant object (sometimes with a surreal twist), always against a deep black background—emerging, as he puts it, “from darkness, with the sun to their faces so that their shadows might fall behind them.” Though each and every one should be celebrated for its nobility, some of my favorites are Werner Reich, who seems to hold a puff of smoke in his palm; Ernest Weiss and his flying hat; Morris Engelson and his flying granddaughter; Gabriella Karin and her statues of female figures; Rabbi Nissan Mangel and his grandson, a light between them shining on both; Albert Rosa in his boxing gloves; Vernon Mosheim with his partner, Bob; Lea Radziner, holding her granddaughter for the first time in over a year because of COVID.

Of course, each survivor’s face says more than we’ll ever be able to assimilate. And interestingly, one of the subjects, Laszlo Selly, criticizes Van Sise’s aesthetic by describing his own busier, fluorescent-lit photos of survivors, which he shoots in their everyday surroundings: “They’re raw. … I don’t hide anything.” But I think one could conceive these contrary approaches as sides of the same bigger picture. Both speak to the book’s theme in their own ways: one illuminates the subject’s very soul, the other places them into the wider world. So when Van Sise writes that Selly doesn’t like his, Van Sise’s, photos (adding, “as well he shouldn’t”), he honors that sense of limitation, failure, even impossibility which must accompany every Holocaust representation, if it’s to do any measure of justice. 

Thus impossibility itself emerges as a theme. There’s the impossibility of settling once and for all that most essential question, religion – and so we meet Mireille Taub, whose portrait opens with her statement, “I don’t believe in God … Sorry, God. I believe in justice and humanity,” while in the very next portrait, Rabbi Mangel says, “Absolutely, I do believe in God. … I do not do so in spite of what I went through, but because of what I went through.” There’s the seeming impossibility of what they all went on to accomplish, after what they endured: “All of them lost their homes; many lost their entire families. Many were tortured, many were slaves. The act of getting up in the morning seems impossible, and yet all of them did: built professions, built loves, built families, built lives.” 

There’s the impossibility of expressing what they went through at all, so we get comments like that of Werner Reich: “Everyone asks how it was. I don’t know what they want me to say. Yeah, I was in Auschwitz. It was lousy.” And we hear about impossible decisions: “What does a mother want to do?” asks Anita Nagel Weisbord. “To hold you close. But I truly believe my mother gave birth to me twice: when I was born, and then when she had the strength, and the foresight, to send me away.” 

Finally, there’s the impossibility of the miraculous, set against its omnipresence: “Officially, science does not recognize a miracle, and even open miracles are eventually assimilated into ‘nature.’ But how many coincidences can the mind accept before one starts to wonder?” This is the voice of physics professor Morris Engelson, who “escaped the ghetto dressed as a peasant woman, [and] spent much of the war hiding in barns and attics.” He continues, “Taken to the extreme, we could say that any event, no matter what the odds or how it comes about or who is involved, is a miracle.” 

The first of three guest pieces in the book, by actress Mayim Bialik (the others are by authors Neil Gaiman and Sabrina Orah Mark), is appropriately titled “Modern Miracles.” Of her grandparents Bialik writes, “The fact that I was alive was a miracle to them. Being alive is, indeed, a miracle.” And she reminds us again of the impossibility of any unified, reconciled response: “I had one grandparent who wept all the time. And the other grandparent who never wanted to cry again, so he sang all the time.”

As I said above, writing about Van Sise’s book repeats to a much lesser degree certain risks that the author himself faced. One mustn’t be too cautious, lest the mess and dirt of real life disappear into aestheticism, or be too sure of things, lest life’s inescapable, perhaps necessary conflicts get rationalized away. So I feel compelled to address one issue I have with the book. The author’s left-leaning slant emerges in various places, usually not dwelt upon or elaborated, our agreement simply presumed. He is obviously entitled to his political views, and politicization of the Holocaust is entirely appropriate, in its place—how else to help ensure “Never again”? But there are profound differences of opinion, especially among American and, it must be said, Israeli Jews on political matters. In this context, Van Sise might have been better either to stay away from these contemporary divisions altogether, or to have acknowledged the inevitable political differences among survivors. 

If, in the end, however, the author manages to convey that these luminous everyday people are more important than anything he might add, he has done his job beautifully. He has been true to his intention: to show existence ongoing, life being lived. For, as he writes of his subjects, “none of these stories begin with happily, but they’d all had at least seventy-five years of ever after.” Now we, with all our personal foibles and preferences and prejudices, are part of their “ever after,” too. How we assume that responsibility—how accurately we perceive reality in its mottled light, how willing we are to forego comfortable simplifications, how faithfully we allow the past to speak to the present and to inform our actions—constitutes our answer to that infinite question: what would you have done, what will you do?

All post-Auschwitz culture, including its urgent critique, is garbage. In restoring itself after the things that happened without resistance in its own countryside, culture has turned entirely into the ideology it had been potentially…. Whoever pleas for the maintenance of this radically culpable and shabby culture becomes its accomplice, while the man who says no to culture is directly furthering the barbarism which our culture showed itself to be.
Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics

Derelict objects could offer a radical critique of history’s myth of universal progress.
Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project

They got a character on there named Oscar, they treat this guy like shit the entire show. They judge him right in his face, “Oscar you are so mean! Isn’t he kids?” “Yeah Oscar! Your a grouch!” It’s like “BITCH! I LIVE IN A FUCKING TRASHCAN!” 
Dave Chappelle

Adorno’s Garbage + Ours

In the wake of the Holocaust, German-Jewish philosopher Theodor Adorno took note of the danger of “garbage culture.” He believed that culture didn’t spend much time thinking about the Holocaust and just went about doing what it always had done before Auschwitz.   

Culture doesn’t have a conscience. 

It is more obsessed with aesthetics than ethics.  It is obsessed with creating garbage, and as Adorno noted, it has become an ideology.

What is that ideology?

Today, in America we now understand what Adorno meant. Culture creates garbage by trashing someone or something in order to gain or build fame, acquire wealth, or increase one’s status.   This happens on social media, between influencers, in Hollywood, and especially now, in our highly charged political culture where it is necessary for both sides of the political spectrum to trash each other on a daily basis.

Trashing creates, to play on the thinker Guy Debord, a “society of the spectacle.”  It makes us think that we are members of a society by virtue of seeing and enjoying the spectacle of trashing. Like any ideology, we—in today’s digital world—participate in it, so to speak, virtually.  

This ideology tells us that we “need” to see people or things trashed daily in order to feel meaningful. In our digital world, trashing compels us to gaze at the digital carnage flowing through our social media feeds. It compels us to enjoy the waste of the person (or thing) who (that) has been trashed. Trashing doesn’t only create our “garbage culture” (as Adorno would say) it is, as it were, a kind of fixation on violence and power that requires us to take sides. To echo Adorno, it is a kind of barbarism.

After the Holocaust, Adorno worried about whether culture—because it produces so much garbage—would admit to being complicit in the Holocaust. 

But culture has no conscience. 

We do.

We can say no to the spectacle. We can stand back from the spectacle of trashing, see it for what it is, and say no. We do not “need” to constantly see (and enjoy) things trashed to feel like we are really a part of society.   

Nonetheless, Adorno says that we are in a double bind: “Whoever pleas for the maintenance of this radically culpable and shabby culture becomes its accomplice, while the man who says no to culture is directly furthering the barbarism which our culture showed itself to be.”

Today, we are faced with—in ways Adorno could never imagine—accepting or rejecting the ideology of trash culture. When our culture is obsessed with trash and trashing, barbarism is not far away. By saying no to it, we look to stop barbarism and the destruction of all that is good in America.  

Saying no is an expression of what Susan Sontag would call the moral sensibility, and as Freud noted, saying no is the beginning of freedom. However, saying no doesn’t mean we are trashing someone or something. It is more a way of preserving that which is dignified in humanity. It is an ethical act of moral sensibility, which is now called for because culture is moving in the direction of sensibility and has short-circuited Adorno’s double band. To preserve human dignity, we need to say no to trash culture and no to the spectacle. 

Trashing + the Spectacle

Culture—to use a verb—trashes things constantly, and the trash it produces takes on meaning and instantly becomes beautiful, exciting, and entertaining.   

People love rants these days because of what they do. The bigger the rant and the scene of disruption, the more attractive it is; especially if the rant is obscene and trashy. On the other hand, one doesn’t even need to rant in order to trash culture.  One can just appear in a photo on Instagram and trash it.  

Trashing is a gesture, an ideological signal (if you will) to the society of the spectacle. But the unseen effect (as with any ingestion of garbage) on the users, keeps them from reflecting on what has been trashed and why.  For it to be effective, trashing calls for one’s full attention on the spectacle.

From streaming services to social media, we can see the various ways popular entertainment and this or that influencer trashes ethics, history, and memory. But here is the blind spot: the more they trash these things, the more barbaric we all become.  

Since culture misses this tragic blind spot, culture feigns reflection and acts as if it is moral.  

To be sure, for culture, reflection is more aesthetic and theatrical than actual.   

So when influencers go on social media feigning reflection and deep insight, they make people feel as if they are in on some kind of “truth” or “secret.” As if they are partaking in something that will make them better; people take in trash ideas as if they are participating in something larger than life.  

But the bad news is that this is all an illusion.  It’s an empty spectacle that got you to look and pay attention. Trash culture, as an ideology, seems to be working.

Sadly, this leads to barbarism.   

If the “secret” we are partaking in is based on the act of dissolving the moral fabric of our society and our sense of trust in each other, we will become more and more polarized and barbaric.    

American culture, in many ways, is moving closer to barbarism because culture makes us think that we are thinking or doing something good or meaningful, when all we are doing is destroying something for the sake of destroying it, or for the sake of thinking that in doing so we are truly “woke.”

That delusion—based on an act of violence—can only lead to hyper-partisanship and, ultimately, to increased violence. This ideology divides the world between the people who trash and the people who are trashed.  

When these are your only two options, what becomes of America?

Sadly, trashing, an act of violence—as we might see on a reality tv show or on the streets—is entertaining and even enjoyable to most people who love consuming it. Just go to TikTok or Instagram Reels to see what is most popular or trending. As the data will show, millions of people enjoy trash and the violent act and spectacle of trashing things.

As the master of Pop Culture, Andy Warhol notes in the Philosophy of Andy Warhol, “some people, even intelligent people, say violence is beautiful.” 

If violence is beautiful, people will want more of it. Trashing is a violent art form of sorts that sews the seeds of division and divisiveness and calls for more of the same.

Kanye’s cultural barbarism

Kanye West has great expertise in creating American culture through “creative destruction.” He has made billions of dollars on the spectacle. His most streamed songs—49 million streams a month on average—demonstrate the aesthetic of trashing.   

Kanye is popular with my children’s age group. While we have taught them about anti-Semitism and talk about it often enough in our house, our children didn’t seem to take it as seriously as we did. But what Kanye did changed all that.   

It was the first time that my children have talked to me and my wife about how they feel about anti-Semitism and how Kanye used it to cast hate and suspicion on us. How could Kanye say anti-Semitic things about me, my family, friends, and people, they wondered?  

We were all astonished. How can this happen again, and in North America?  

Why was Kanye trashing the Jews?

It is wild to think that even if 5 percent of his 50 million fans would stand with him until the end, that would be over one million people who harbor anti-Semitism. They would hear the “truth” he was spitting (even before he said he “liked” Hitler on the Alex Jones Show).    

Kanye told the world in several different media appearances that “the Jews” had some kind of nefarious drive—built into them at birth, in their genes—to swindle people and control the “black voice.” Kanye—in effect—trashed the Jewish people.  

Who wants to hear this garbage? Who wants to be trashed? Trashing a Jew is anti-Semitism. It is exactly what Hilter and the Nazis did in Germany.  

Trashing Jews has demonstrable historical consequences.   

Toxic garbage can get telegraphed to alienated and dangerous people who travel to places like the synagogue in Pittsburgh, leaving 11 dead, or the “targeted attack” in Jersey City of a Jewish grocery and children’s school, killing five. Toxic garbage like Kanye’s rant leads to the beating up of Jews in the streets of Brooklyn and Los Angeles.  

To be sure, the highest hate crimes in NYC are against Jews, not gays, Muslims, etc. There are consequences to publicly trashing Jews. If Kanye cared about history—as Adorno wishes we all did, after Auschwitz—he would be more reflective and ethical; he wouldn’t trash Jews.  

But Kanye, as a major arbiter of culture, wants to trash Jews in order to get attention to his empty spectacle, his claim to have the “truth” and to have revealed the “secret” of the Jews.

However, there is no secret. It is actually barbarism since it doesn’t see Jews as equals, so much as overlords; it contradicts democracy and calls for vengeance. 

Anti-Semitism is the detritus of old Europe, which trashed democracy and notions of equality under the law, made Judaism into its foil, and led, eventually (after countless exiles from countries and cities all over Europe), to the Holocaust.   

But it didn’t die with the Holocaust. When major influencers like Kanye trash Jews and give this hateful garbage an after-life, it lives on…in America.

As we saw with Kyrie Irving and Dave Chappelle, post-Kanye, anti-Semitic trash is becoming normalized. Trashing Jews has value. 

Kanye created this double bind in order to gain power.  

Any resistance to his anti-Semitism was seen—according to his anti-Semitic framing—as a testimony to the “fact” of Jewish power and its will to suppress “the truth,” the secret that Jews, apparently, want hidden: that Jews have all the power, and want to have revenge on the “goyim.” Jews want to enslave and have power over them.  

This paranoid description of what Jews are and what they think about suggests that me, my wife, and children, are dedicated to doing everything we can to control “them.”  

Each morning that’s what I apparently pray for. To be sure, this is the most ridiculous and trashy read on Jewish life imaginable. It seems lifted from a cheap novel. But that’s the point.  It’s a paranoid fantasy.   

All eyes were on Kanye before, during, and after he was deplatformed and became more extreme with his anti-Semitic pronouncements, ultimately saying, on the Alex Jones Show that “I really like Hitler.”

This stupidity, based on trashing Jews, is exactly where Hitler went after he instituted the Nuremberg Laws, stripping rights from anyone who has Jewish blood. Trashing Jews, today, may lead us down the same kind of path, the path of barbarism.

Dave Chappelle’s racism

In the wake of the anti-Semitism coming from Kanye, the Kyrie Irving tweet about From Hebrews to Negroes, a movie that is demonstrably anti-Semitic, and after a march in NYC to the Barclays Center of more than a thousand “Black Hebrew Israelites” (calling themselves “Kyrie’s Army”) saying, as they marched through the streets of Brooklyn, that they are the “real Jews,” we shockingly heard Dave Chappelle tell an SNL audience that Jews have to stop picking on blacks.

Chappelle also said that the Holocaust is behind us. I paused and thought to myself (because I thought he was a reflective and intelligent comedian) that he simply doesn’t understand the epochal implications of the Holocaust, not just for Jews but for the world.  

Dave Chappelle Roasts Kanye West, Jews & Makes Woke Culture Cry during SNL Monologue 2022

Moreover, Chappelle intentionally turned Kanye’s anti-Semitism and Kyrie’s tweet into something arbitrary and went so far as to equate anti-Semitism with free speech, that “the Jews” (the two words one can’t say or will be punished) won’t allow.   

Strangely enough, this is like saying racism is free speech and that Dave Chappelle and all black people should approve of it.  But that is something he would never say.  These double standards are troubling. They are the result of trashing Jews. It leads to more of the same action.  

Chappelle also turned a vulnerable moment for the American Jew—in which they had to defend themselves against rising anti-Semitism prompted by major influencers—into a racist attack.  False and libelous, but it also denotes a dangerous misunderstanding and should give us pause to understand how art and entertainment, through indifference to anti-Semitism and its implications (something that can be learned from the Holocaust Chappelle downplays in this act) can become vehicles for hate.  

Sadly, this kind of trash talk—by a major influencer in American culture—demonstrates what worried Theodor Adorno about culture after Auschwitz.  

Adorno feared that “post-Auschwitz culture” would not allow itself to be challenged by the enormity of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. That since culture was “garbage,” it cannot refine itself and become reflective. Rather, as Adorno says, this trash—what I call the act of trashing—became “ideology.”   

To be sure, the cultural trash he worried about has to do with culture’s indifference to morality (or its fake espousal of it) in its celebration of entertainment and culture. This is an indifference to not just anti-Semitism but to all forms of excess and immorality. As I noted above, trash culture is concerned with aesthetics not ethics.   

Trashing the Jews, saying “I like Hitler,” or suggesting that Jews suppress free speech for fear of having their nefarious secret revealed, is theatrics. What anti-Semitism hates most—which happens, in America, to be the legacy of the Jewish people to modernity—is what Susan Sontag calls the “moral sensibility.”

On Sontag’s distinction between moral sensibility + camp sensibility 

But beauty and riches couldn’t have anything to do with how good you are, because think of all the beauties who get cancer.  And a lot of murderers are good looking, so that settles it.

Some people, even intelligent people, say that violence can be beautiful.  I can’t understand that, because beautiful is some moments, and for me those moments are never violent.

A new idea.

A new look.

A new sex.

A new pair of underwear.

Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

In her famous essay, “Notes on Camp,” Susan Sontag equated modernity with a tension between the Jewish “moral sensibility” and the “camp sensibility.” As she notes, the camp sensibility is indifferent to morality and is dedicated to play, irony, and aesthetics. It has no moral limit. It defies them in the name of artistic and cultural freedom. 

“The experiences of Camp are based on the great discovery that the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly upon refinement. Camp asserts that good taste is not simply good taste; that there exists, in deed, a good taste in bad taste…. Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism.” (Susan Sontag Reader)

In terms of the tension, Sontag writes: “The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony…. Jewish liberalism is a gesture of self-legitimization. So is Camp taste, which definitely has something propagandistic about it. Needless to say, the propaganda operates in the opposite direction. The Jews pinned their hopes on integrating into modern society on promoting the moral sense. Homosexuals have pinned their integration into society on promoting the aesthetic sense. Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness.” 

While Sontag wrote this in the late 1960s, one can see that it has much relevance now, in 2023.  To be sure, the camp sensibility is ascendent over the moral sensibility and dominates much of Hollywood, TV, social media, and the Internet. 

Nearly every major event in Hollywood will include camp to promote woke ideology (as Sontag notes, it is propagandistic and self-legitimating).   

Strangely enough, today, it seems as if the camp sensibility and the moral sensibility have joined forces. Hollywood wears the veneer of the “moral sensibility” in its obsession with diversity, equity, and inclusion, featuring the transgender darlings of the camp sensibility as its shock troops.  

But that morality play is all theatrics. It is the theater of grievances.

Much of the garbage we see today has a lot to do with this tension, which has been imported into most of our culture. For instance, as we saw with Chapelle, he has no qualms with accusing Jews of trying to silence the black artist (a complaint made by Kanye, in his anti-Semitic tirade) on the one hand; or, on the other hand, coming from the anti-Semitic alt-right, seeing Jews as behind the sexual degradations of Hollywood and American culture. 

Both sides of the cultural spectrum are dedicated to trashing Jews. They inform what Adorno calls “cultural garbage,” which, strangely enough, sees the moral sensibility of the Jews as a threat. With Chappelle and much else, we seem to have gone beyond liberalism to another place that is obsessed with power, propaganda, and ideology.

In every trash event, it favors aesthetics over ethics. It favors free speech at the expense of any moral protest, including protest from those targeted, the Jews.

The problem is a kind of morality-free aesthetics of trashing, as well as an aesthetic of free speech nationalism that have both run amok. Here, the extreme left and right have joined together, to fight a common foe: the Jewish moral sensibility.

Those who benefit most from trashing see the moral sensibility, which puts boundaries and limits to art and culture or to free speech nationalism, as a threat. They have eschewed all pretenses to morality and historical reflection.  Chappelle’s quip about the Holocaust being over means that Jews no longer have the right to tell black people to not be anti-Semitic.

Today, the trashing of the Jews is no different from denigrating America.  It’s a kind of radical chic that has nothing to do with morality and all to do with being edgy and “neutralizing moral indignation,” as Sontag put it, by trashing America.   

This aesthetic of playful indifference, strangely enough, has also leaked into the alt-right.  People like Milo Yiannopoulos or Nick Fuentes (and Kanye, their student) think it’s cool to be anti-Semitic since being so is the ultimate expression of free speech.  Making jokes about the Holocaust, mocking Jewish suffering, and praising Hitler are all a part of this bratty anti-Semitic camp.   

Both Yiannopoulos and Fuentes look to “neutralize moral indignation” in a fun and youthful way so as to propagandize their cause and spread their ideology. Like much else in the world of trash, it’s a brand and an empty spectacle that shares with its followers “secrets” and “truths” the world, apparently, hides from everyone else. 

Amongst the cultural garbage we are now seeing, there are things that are nihilistic, toxic, and dangerous for American culture. Without real moral indignation, informed by real history, America will, like its camp culture, continue to become a big landfill for all the trash spreading on social media and in Hollywood.    

To play on Sontag, I’d say that those who thrive in trash culture sponsor nihilism and aim to dissolve any sense of dignity that America has left.  It’s telling, on this note, that post-Holocaust figures like Eli Wiesel, Primo Levi, and Jean Amery said that the Nazis looked to destroy the dignity of man. Trash culture has a similar motive, but its path operates on the body in a much more subtle way than the concentration camp.

Alt-Right: saving America through trashing the left

“Politics is downstream from culture” is an expression that was often used by Andrew Breitbart.  What he initiated, via his media exposure events, was the beginning of an American cultural war.  Who controlled the message? Who controls power in America?  How has the cultural narrative, thus far, been dictated by “the left”?  

These questions, demonstrated by many of the cultural events he staged, made ordinary Americans start losing trust in the mainstream media and prompted them to create their own media. In addition, it made Americans more prone to conspiracy theories and a sense that the nation was being taken away from them. They wanted America back.  

In Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World (2011), Breitbart cites Adorno and others to argue that “Cultural Marxism” had made its long march through our institutions, inciting Americans to be more paranoid and suspicious of education, media, and government:

“The real idea behind all this was to make society totally unworkable by making everything basically meaningless. Critical theory does not create: it only destroyed. As Horkheimer himself openly stated, “Above all … critical theory has no material accomplishments to show for itself.”

Breitbart wanted to show Americans how they were being lied to and how the ideas of Adorno, Horkheimer, etc., were imported into America so as to destroy it:

“Frankfurt School scholar Theodor Adorno was sliding Marxism into the American consciousness by attacking popular trends in the world of art. First teaching at Columbia then later at Princeton, he argued that television and movies were problematic because they appealed to the masses—but television and the movies weren’t catering to the public tastes, they were shaping them, Adorno argued…. All popular art therefore had to be criticized as a symptom of the capitalist system. All art had to be torn down.”

Breitbart then speculates on how all art that destroys art, trashes it, is rooted in Adorno. In other words, Breitbart accuses Adorno of being behind the left’s effort to trash American art and culture. Moreover, he saw academia and the media as dominated by people influenced by Adorno’s ideas and the ideas of the Frankfurt School. America had been infiltrated by “critical theory.”

This sense of national and cultural betrayal stirred up by this book prompted the alt-right to be more savvy and hyperbolic on social media. It also radicalized the left to engage in heavy censorship and vindicated the alt-right, which saw the act of censoring their speech as proof that the left wants to destroy the last vestiges of American culture.  

In the midst of this culture war, something seems to have gone profoundly wrong.   

The garbage being fed to both sides, which try to rival each other in how much they can trash each other, is making inroads for hyper-partisanism, it is also making room for anti-Semitism, turning it into a “free speech” issue. 

On the other end of the spectrum, you have people on the left defending drag story hour, transgender operations, and a culture that has no sense of propriety and dignity. It looks to trash the differences between male and female, trash the innocence of childhood, and trash the nuclear family (amongst other things). It seems to be fulfilling Breitbart’s claim that “critical theory” is trashing America. 

What kind of culture do we see developing out of this culture war? In the wake of so much trashing on both sides, we see an America that is filling up with the ruins of a once great nation.

Both extremes feign morality and show a lack of conscience that, after the Holocaust, is astonishing. Trashing the other side, 24/7, pollutes minds and suggests pathways that only lead to more toxicity.  We need a return to a reflective way of living that doesn’t nourish itself on garbage; otherwise, our American culture is finished. The barbarism that this culture has created will grow.

Reptilian trash, in the name of free speech

JP Sears, who has millions of followers, started his social media career with making videos mocking new-age Californians and their pretentious ways of relating to the world. After experiencing some negative pushback, Sears dedicated himself to fighting media bias and censorship. His videos are hilarious and seem to often hit on how the media is shaped by a certain ideology that benefits American elites. He explores things the MSM omits and deletes from their conversations.

Be that as it may, he recently tweeted out an image of Governor Gavin Newsome who appears to really be a lizard in disguise. To be sure, this is not some arbitrary image. The idea that lizard people are running the world through the elites is an idea that draws deeply on anti-Semitism.  This idea was largely popularized by David Icke.  

It is so popular that it has even gone into this meme. It is an idea shared by many on the alt-right. This draws them into seeing anti-Semitic mockery as normal. It’s sad to see this happen to someone like JP, but it has.  

The elites and the Jews are one and the same for this meme. Jews are the left and are controlling everything behind the scenes. That is the message that is being telegraphed. 

AnOmaly has over a million followers between his feeds on Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube.  There are many occasions when he has revealed his dislike for Jews. When Kanye came out with his anti-Semitic tirades, AnOmaly supported him. He called what Kanye said “facts” and went online to rant about it while, at the same time (like Kanye), saying he has no “hate in his heart toward Jews.”

In this tweet, he suggests that going after Nazis and punishing them is “incredibly weird.”  The desire for justice for those who were systematically killed by Nazis and their accomplices is not “incredibly weird.” Saying that is a way of using hyperbole to reduce the evil of the Nazis to something that no longer has any meaning.

In addition to this, An0maly is also a fan of Nick Fuentes, who is an open Neo-Nazi American Firster. With Kanye, Fuentes made jokes about the Holocaust and praised Hitler on the Alex Jones Show. Fuentes demonstrates the use of social media to make anti-Semitism cool and fashionable, as does AnOmaly.

Soft porn, or Hollywood’s last stand

The last two examples I have drawn up demonstrate how elements of the alt-right trash Jews in order to forward the ideology of anti-Semitism in 2023 America. Without trashing the Jews, these losers don’t have our attention. They want to efface moral indignation in the same way that they want to defeat “the Jews” and blame them for taking away Americans’ right to free speech (which is, for them, equivalent to saying anti-Semitic things without any consequence).

This photo, taken by Judd Apatow at a party for Madonna, asks all members of the party (including Jack Black, Amy Schumer, and others) to do an obscene and pornographic kind of “truth or dare.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBUpN99s1Hg The point of the game was to celebrate debauchery and trash. It is the preface to Madonna’s announcement of her “Celebration Tour.”

But what are they celebrating but the trashing of American culture? If the best it has to offer us, as viewers, is debauchery and dumb comedy, we are certainly at an all-time low.

While this is certainly not an anti-Semitic moment—Jack Black, who “tongues” Madonna as a dare, is Jewish—it is a camp moment that makes no pretense to “moral indignation.” In fact, it is laughing in the face of moral indignation. It trashes it. To be sure, that is the target. The more outraged the moral sensibility, the better.  

Jonah Hill, trashing Jews in “You People”

The last thing I want to note in terms of trash culture is how Jonah Hill in his recent Netflix film, “You People,” trashes his own people. The film has, thus far, reached 53 million households and has had 486.2 million hours viewed thus far. It is currently the number one film on Netflix.  But, more important, for historical context, he does this after Kanye, Kyrie, and Chappelle, on the one hand, and the rise of alt-right anti-Semitism, on the other. To be sure, he is demonstrating how trashing Jews has value in today’s media marketplace.

In the film, Jonah makes American Jews look hyper-sexual, wealthy, white, privileged, and inept. In contrast, he portrays, through the black superstar Eddie Murphy, Black Nationalism in a more powerful light. Today, Murphy has a much greater reach than an advocate of Black Nationalism such as the New Jersey poet laureate Amiri Baraka (who claimed Jews were behind 9/11 and was a virulent anti-Semite). Murphy, playing Akbar, is a much stronger character than the Jewish father.  The same goes for the mother, who comes off as a dithering Jewish mother, while Akbar’s wife is decent and put together.  The writers of the film also allowed the Akbar character to express false and libelous ideas that Louis Farrakhan and other black anti-Semites have said about Jews, claiming they created and profited from the slave trade. That all Jewish wealth is based in some way on the exploitation of blacks. In the movie, this ludicrous idea is not challenged. It is given air-time. It is a way of trashing Jews.

In the film, the aesthetic sensibility is associated with black culture and black power. Jonah Hill panders to black culture while trashing his own. This has, without a doubt, crossed the line since Jewish self-hatred vindicates anti-Semitism. It gives the trashing of Jewish culture and the barbarity that goes along with it, credence. It effaces human dignity.

Concluding reflections

The only thing that keeps America from falling into the deep end is the moral sensibility. But whether it is Kanye, Chappelle, AnOmaly, or Madonna, trashing culture is the goal. The goal is not thoughtful reflection. After all, the main thing is to focus on the spectacle and the garbage message.

The message is about power: who has it and who doesn’t. The truth, however, is that those who control the spectacle and our attention have power and those people are not the Jews; they are these performers.  

Those who trash are those who have power. But each group trashes differently. Which group are you a part of and who will you trash?  This is a war of all against all. It’s the road to barbarism.

That is where we are.  

In the wake of Auschwitz, Paul Celan, the profound and thoughtful Holocaust survivor poet – wrote these lines that show us the lesson he learned from the Holocaust about who he is and who he is for, in the wake of the “scar up in the air” (the crematoria in Auschwitz), in its shadow. He doesn’t stand for anyone or anything; he cannot be seen in the light of the spectacle’s violence, he can’t take part in it. It’s unethical.

In the final lines of the poem, he makes an appeal to the moral sensibility, he stands for you, alone. This suggests that poetry, this poem, after Auschwitz, is dedicated to ethics. This is where we say no to trash culture and yes to human dignity, which starts with, as the Jewish thinker Emmanuel Levinas said, the other. Even, as Celan says, without language (without the words or images that nourish the spectacle):

To stand in the shadow
of the scar up in the air.

To stand-for-no-one-and-nothing.
Unrecognized,
for you
alone.

With all there is room for in that,
even without 
language.

Atemwende, Breathturn, by Celan, 1967

Looking in from the outside, by many measures, my life has been a failure—an example of unrealized potential resulting from poor (or at least questionable) decisions. But the point of examining one’s own life is to reflect on the events and situations spawned from those decisions and at least try to learn some meaningful lessons from them. If the lessons are valuable, then what appeared to be failure actually may be success.

This is the unlikely report of survival—of an artform, of the methodologies that inform it, and the body of knowledge, that it gives form to. It’s a report about the persistence of illumination: the decorative illustration of religious manuscripts, but also the endurance of interpretation in an age that often claims to be beyond history.  …

This, then, is the very heart of the matter: that our schools have become institutions where our children are inculcated in a neo-Marxist driven framework of ethics.

Everyone knows that chaos provides a void to be filled. It is high time that classical liberals fill that void once more and establish a new and more just order—yet this requires vanquishing the inequalities so valued by Neo-Marxism and alt-right politics.

The problem is that virtually every institution of our culture has been commandeered by activists whose philosophy, I believe, can be summarized as pure Orwellian doublethink: “There is no such thing as objective truth, and we have it.”

You have been given a gift.
It is woven
into the fabric of your being.
Just as you
are weaving your own
vibrant thread in the Jewish tapestry,
a 4,000-year-old quilt
that blankets our people in its weight
of justice and goodness.

You are a branch in a tree
whose roots reach the center
and the beginning of the earth,
the tree of knowledge
in Eden.
For you are dust,
Adama, Adam,
and to dust you shall return.

You are the promise
God made Abraham.
You are every grain of sand,
every star in the sky,
and every speck of dust.

You are the wildest dreams of Isaac and Jacob,
of Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah.

You felt the sweat on your back
and the crack of the whip.
Blood and frogs,
hail and darkness.
You are from the Exodus,
and 40 years of wandering.
How did you feel
when you left Egypt?

You are descended from the kings of Israel,
born of struggles and strategy and swords.
You are from David’s slingshot,
from the pebble that defeated Goliath.
You are from Saul’s battles,
from the Beit Hamikdash, Solomon’s temple.

You are prophecy revealed and redemption yet to come.

You are from the Babylonian exile,
Greek Hellenization,
Roman destruction,
Islamic Jihads,
medieval blood libels,
the Spanish Inquisition,
centuries of pogroms,
and the Holocaust.
You are from the ghetto, from the shtetl,
from the gas chambers and crematoriums.
You have been buried in mass graves and Jewish cemeteries.

You are from Canaan, Judea, Palestine, Israel.
You are from the trees in the Golan Heights and the salt in the Dead Sea,
from the dust in the Negev and the sand on Tel Aviv beaches.
The wind on top of Masada
and the silence in the Bar Kochba caves,
exist for you.
You are from the Temple Mount
and the stones in the Western Wall.
You are from seeing God in the sunsets of Tzfat
and hearing the voices of your ancestors echo in the Judean Desert.

You are from Zionism
and dreams
and hope.
You are the hope, the 4,000-year-old hope, HaTikvah.
You came on the Aliyot,
boats and weeks at sea
to pioneer the land of your people.
You are from the Yishuv, from kibbutzim and moshavim and ma’abarot.
You fought the War of Independence,
the Yom Kippur War,
the Six-Day War.
You are from Hamas missiles and Hezbollah tunnels,
the bullet that spilled blood
onto a folded copy of Shir LeShalom.

You are from the tallit,
from the stripes on the Israeli flag,
from the Star of David, two triangles,
the strongest shape in nature
combined to represent the strongest people in existence.
You are a warrior and a soldier,
a rebel and a veteran.
You are a Cohen, a Maccabee, a converso,
a sonderkommando, a refugee, a chalutz.
A survivor.
You have lived a million lives,
and will live a million more.

You are from the 13 attributes of God,
the 12 tribes of Israel
and the 11 stars in Joseph’s dream.
You are from the ten commandments,
The nine months with child,
and the eight days to the covenant.
You are from seven days in a week.
You are from six books of Mishnah
and five books of the Torah.
You are from four matriarchs, three patriarchs,
and two stone tablets.

So, when I ask, “Echad mi yodea?”
you can say, “I know one.
One is my God in heaven and earth,
and I was made in His image.”

Had HE planned our persecution but disclosed its purpose, Dayenu.

Candace has shifted the Overton window to accommodate anti-Semitism and, in the process, abandoned one of the most intrinsic conservative values of all: that every individual is a child of God, and thus no one should be discriminated against for immutable characteristics.

Anti-Semitism found in modern African-American communities ties together the two fringe extremes on the Horseshoe Theory, incorporating ultranationalist, Islamist, and Marxist ideas into its own Replacement Theory.  When people ask me what I think about Kanye West in light of the rapper’s recent anti-Semitic statements, I usually say that I’ve known he was a buffoon…

Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews: David L. Bernstein Book Review: Michael Lumish David L. Bernstein’s, Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews, enamored me as soon as I read the dedication: For all the “thought criminals” and courageous people, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, whose consciences will not allow them to go…

A man has found himself between Being alive and being free
He looks his captor in the face
Says “I’ll be buried in my grave. Before you put me in those chains, You can put me in the ground”

Sometimes brainwashing can become so uncontested and thoroughly convincing, what’s left after the spin cycle is nothing but falsehood. 

Take the case of the “nation-laundering “of the Palestinian people. Here’s what decades of impeccable PR, global gullibility, and re-imagined anti-Semitism has enabled many to bizarrely believe:

There once was an Arab nation called Palestine, with the people in it known as Palestinians. After the Holocaust (which was either a hoax or exaggeration), the Western powers, duped by scheming Jews, were guilted into creating a Jewish state, fashioned solely from stolen Arab land. 

Israel’s colonial imperialism required a massive population transfer of invaders and settlers. Jews from Europe, America, Canada, and South Africa—all white-skinned with absolutely no connection to the Holy Land—“occupied Palestine.” They formed an army, fortified by advanced weaponry supplied by the West, and then forcibly drove Palestinians from their homes, confiscated their property, and scattered them either to other Arab states or wretched refugee camps. 

An otherwise peaceful people, the Palestinians who remained in the West Bank and Gaza have been relentlessly tormented by Israeli aggression, mistreatment, and, of course, illegal occupation, ever since.

Not a single sentence of that storyline is remotely true. 

There never has been an Arab nation-state called Palestine. At the time of Israel’s founding, in 1948, the word Palestinian did not describe a distinct Arab people. In fact, the word itself was created by the Ancient Romans, and they were referring to Jews, not Arabs.

Jews have been living continuously in what is today Israel since the time of the Jewish patriarchs of the Old Testament and the creation of the first Jewish state – the Kingdom of Judea, which preceded the Ancient Greeks by several hundred years. After the fall of Judea, until Israel was created, the land was occupied by a host of other nations for well over 2,000 years. Ironically, the occupation of “Palestine” ended with the creation of Israel.

And with one million Middle Eastern and Persian Jews forcibly removed to Israel soon after its creation, most Israelis today are actually dark-skinned, indigenous people. But even Jews who were born in Brooklyn or Brentwood have an umbilical, ancestral connection to Israel.

The Holocaust did, in fact, result in the mass murder of two-thirds of European Jewry, but the discussions about resurrecting Judea and creating a new Jewish homeland originated decades earlier, during World War I.

Declarations, treaties, resolutions, the League of Nations, and then the United Nations all attested to Israel’s existence. The world was not conned into giving Jews anything more than what was already a claim of right—a country of their own after two millennia of exile, on the same land where Jews first became a people. 

The West did not weaponize Israel against the Arabs. In fact, the West’s reluctance to enflame the Cold War caused it to stay fairly neutral. During its early years battling hostile Arab nations, Israel relied mostly on archaic armaments from Czechoslovakia and France—which were purchased with cash.

Finally, many Arabs living in Israel in 1948 would still be there as full citizens had not five regional nations attacked Israel on its very first day of existence. And certainly no one can credibly refer to the Palestinian people as “peaceful.” We have them to thank for inventing and perfecting the terrorism that plagues us all today. And as for “occupation,” not a single Jew lives in Gaza, and Israel has no legal obligation to withdraw from the West Bank until the border is secure and Palestinian violence is finally abated.

So how did the counter-story of a mythical Palestine—this phantom fantasia—obtain such staying power? It’s not just false—it’s spectacularly false.  And the plain facts are not ancient history. It’s quite easy to verify. There are still people alive from Israel’s founding—Jews and Arabs. There are ample books, newspaper accounts, radio recordings, documentary footage—all setting forth how Israel became a nation, and how the Palestinians, time and again, repeatedly failed to take the necessary steps to become one. Yet, these easily debunked fabrications persist.

It requires the suspension of disbelief aided by the repetition of lies. Palestine is more an idea than an actual place, the magical thinking of a country that never existed. Hocus-pocus political history. The politics of telling a better story, especially one that more people are already predisposed to believe. 

And it’s working.

The United Nations has designated “Palestine” as a permanent non-member state with souped-up observer status. They have their own relief agency, UNRWA, which allows Palestinian-Arabs to remain as refugees in perpetuity, never required, unlike other refugee groups, to fold themselves into another state. The U.N. has accepted the mythology of an unlawfully confiscated Palestinian homeland. No such similar acknowledgment has been granted to the Kurds, Cypriots, Tibetans, and Kashmiri, however. 

Meanwhile, Middle East Studies Departments in universities all across the Western world hype the false narrative of persecuted Palestinians and land-grabbing Jews. The paradox of Palestinian inclusion within the vortex of woke, intersectional grievances is not lost on anyone who has been to college lately. Indeed, it is laughable given how Sharia-observant Palestinians, especially in Gaza, feel about women, gays, the transgender, cultural and academic freedom, religious diversity, free speech, and the rule of law. 

Feminists march alongside theocrats who mandate head coverings and praise beheadings? Homosexuals find common cause with those who would have them flung from rooftops? 

The “progressives” who have embraced the plight (and overlooked the terrorism) of the Palestinians wouldn’t last a week in Gaza or Ramallah. Tel Aviv, however, would be very much to their liking if they could only get past the presence of so many cosmopolitan Jews.

Mainstream media plays its own role in disseminating a one-sided, hopelessly biased account of how Jews came to dominate a Middle East where they don’t belong, and who subjugate a docile and distinct group of Arabs who merely wish a return to their homeland without Jewish malevolence. Palestinian rejectionism of five separate offers of statehood since 1947 is never even a footnote in the “official” account. 

The Charters of Hamas and Fatah are never closely examined, either. If anyone bothered to look, they wouldn’t find anything resembling the Declaration of Independence. The Palestinian contribution to representative democracy, as embodied in their founding documents, are blood libels writ large. So, too, is the chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” an undeniable ode to genocide. A gleeful anticipation of a Jewless Israel. The expressed language of national aspirations foreshadows what pluralism will look like in a Palestinian state. 

It is well known that Palestinian violence is rarely reported. Hamas launches rockets from hospitals and schools indiscriminately; Palestinian children are deployed as human shields. Not newsworthy. Palestinians stab tourists outside the gates in Jerusalem’s Old City. A minor incident, especially if the victims are either Jewish or white. What’s “fit to print” is always reduced to an indictment of Israeli reprisal, which is presented as disproportionate and aimed at civilians. 

Moral clarity gets lost in this fog of twisted perceptions and altered states. Israel wins wars it does not start and rather than set the terms for surrender, global opinion insists that it instantly sue for peace—and then return conquered land. Palestinian attacks on civilians are dismissed as the price Israel should pay for the “Occupation.”

Anti-Semites will accept any story that demonizes Jews. They are forever the world’s scapegoat from which there is no escape. Blamed for its problems. Subjected to its absurd double standards. Always portrayed in a false light. And self-hating Jews are quite comfortable looking unfavorably upon their own people, a life’s mission dedicated to distancing themselves from the tribe. They don’t seem to understand that trying to convince Christians that they are among the “good Jews” is a self-defeating crusade.

Which comes down to this unassailable inflection point: There’s never a shortage of people who will gladly adopt the Palestinian version of events.

Yet, is there no consequence to these delusions—moral or otherwise? It is the deliberate circulating of an entirely wrong set of facts with no attention paid to truth.

In 2020, the actor Seth Rogen appeared on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, where he revealed that he was lied to as a child in a Vancouver Hebrew School. Apparently, he was told that no Arabs lived in Israel at the time of its creation, that Britain was overseeing a totally empty piece of land that eventually was awarded to the Jews. Camels, dates, and sand were in abundance—but, improbably, no Arabs. He wanted listeners to know that this inexcusable omission has left him incensed and caused him to reject the idea of a Jewish state altogether.

How can a Jewish person be that ignorant of basic facts, while also casually rejecting the self-determination of his own people? Rogen accused the Zionist movement of conning not just the world, but Jewry itself! The Conflict and all its complexity, simplified by someone who wasn’t paying attention in Hebrew School. The 2,000 years of Jewish wandering, an exile that ended for him in western Canada, is a mere trivial detail in recorded history. 

Let me be clear: If the Arabs of British Mandate Palestine wished to rename themselves “Palestinians,” that is their right. There will always be right-wing Jews who argue that Palestinians are simply Jordanians who want their own country. I am not among them. Like many Jews and Israelis, I accept the reality that Arabs and Jews always lived in the land that is now Israel—which include the disputed territories. There is no dispute about that. But the question of nationhood is equally without dispute: There has never been an Arab, no less Palestinian nation, on Israeli soil. 

The problem is that Palestinians profess to want the land and the title, but they refuse to put in the work necessary to achieve statehood. States are not built on the foundation of hate alone. All those rejected peace offers are telling. It suggests a fear of what it takes to bring about an actual Palestine. Fantasizing about a mythical homeland while seeking to destroy the Jewish one is far more satisfying. 

Palestinians may lack confidence in everything except their disdain for Jews, which is prodigious, but also poisonous. After all, both are descendants of Abraham, a sibling enmity that is as tragic as it has been long-lasting. The Abraham Accords, so aptly named, was regrettably not launched where it was most needed.

But while Palestinians may be indigenous to the land of Israel, they are wholly disingenuous in presenting themselves as its perpetual victims. Nothing was stolen from them. They are stateless because they never had a state—not because they were denied one, or had one taken away. Indeed, it’s not at all clear whether they actually want one. When your patriotism is inversely related to the death of Zionism, you’re not ready for statehood.

For a people without a country, with no national currency, political history, sustained leadership, defined borders, or even a gross national product aside from terrorism, Palestinians have nonetheless created the illusion of a homeland lost to Jewish land-grabbers. After all those hijacked planes, murdered Olympic athletes, a handicapped man (69-year-old Leon Klinghoffer) tossed overboard from a cruise ship, elderly Parisian grandmothers thrown from balconies, pizza shop and Passover Seder bombings, the Palestinians finally discovered their true calling—the branding of their suffering, and the delegitimizing of the Jewish state. 

If you can’t beat them, defame them.

Palestinian rage is understandable, the bitterness of seeing Israel rise from the sands of the Middle East and in a mere handful of decades, emerge as an economic juggernaut and regional superpower. But that rage is not limited to violence alone. It has been channeled into a secret weapon worthy of TV’s Mad Men – the deploying of Madison Avenue techniques to peddle propaganda. Israel has been outmaneuvered in both the game theory of hasbara and the conspiracy theories of old. 

The case for the Jewish state is a tough sell, always perhaps, but especially these racism-shaming days. Palestinians are invoking Jim Crow but dispensing with passive nonviolent resistance. Sympathy for Jews in this cultural moment is a woke outrage; while criticizing Muslims, even the fanatically murderous variety, is categorically taboo. 

Will this new marketing strategy continue to succeed? Hard to tell. Palestinian petulance has always been rewarded. And there’s no Iron Dome for global revulsion. Yet, with the normalizing of relations with Israel, Gulf nations have seemingly withdrawn from the Palestinians, favoring a more profitable trading partner, instead. Angry Arabs can be tiresome. And hate does not a nation make. 

Palestinians have rejected peace offers that would have given them 97 percent of what they had ostensibly asked for. It’s what they can’t respectably ask for that is the real problem: dead Jews.

No single idea has given Islamist movements more return on their radicalization investment than “Palestinianism” and the marriage of that national identity movement with Islamism and HAMAS.

The word “Palestine” has become wildly mythologized, has come to fairly drip with classic anti-Semitic associations, generally unrecognized as such.

Despite Arab claims to the contrary, contemporary “Palestinians” have no historical connection to either the land conquered by the Philistines, nor Canaan more generally, as their forbearers largely remained within the Arabian Peninsula until shortly after the death of Muhammad in 632 CE.

…And the land will grow still
Crimson skies dimming, misting
Slowly paling again
Over smoking frontiers

As the nation stands up
Torn at heart but existing
To receive its first wonder
In two thousand years

The truest thing that can be said about Palestinianism is this: if not for Zionism, Palestinianism would not exist—namely, the reconstitution of the national home of the Jewish people. And where Zionism is the spontaneous national liberation movement of a people whose connection to the land predates antiquity and modernity alike, Palestinianism was imposed upon Arabs who resided in what was once the colony of Palestine.

As long as the most “moderate” of Palestinian Arab leaders engage in Holocaust denial; promote anti-Semitic canards; and deny any Jewish historical connection to the land of Israel—all while they praise and reward the murder of Jews—peace is simply not possible.

Vanderbilt graduate student Taylor Force was killed March 9, 2016, in a terror attack in Tel Aviv- Jaffa. Recently President Biden made a trip to the Middle East to visit both Israel and Saudi Arabia. In truth, the stop-off in Israel probably wasn’t meant to accomplish much, but Biden was forced to make sure he…

If one is willing to suspend factual analysis, then one can maintain the blissful ignorance required to support the “Palestinian” cause while being against colonialism. If one is educated in the actual history, suddenly the house of cards topples, usually in a pretty spectacular fashion.

One of the most dramatic political shifts that occurred during the latter half of the 20th century was the change in the attitude of the Western left towards the Arab-Israeli conflict, and their near universal adoption of the Palestinian-Arab narrative, particularly their claim to perpetual victimhood, complete purity, and total righteousness.

Palestinianism as an ideology is in a certain way like Marxism or Scientology. When Palestinianists are confronted with clear-cut facts (like the historical and archaeological evidence of the presence of Jews in the land for thousands of years), they nevertheless find it possible to deny or ignore them.

professors are openly voicing their thoughts on Israel, using their positions to become political advocates and shame Israel and students who support it. This creates an environment of fear and suppression, where students cannot voice their own opinions due to their grades taking a severe hit or being ostracized and labeled as racist and complicit in genocide.

I owe you nothing. You did not build this city, you did not live in it, you did not defend it when they came to destroy it. And we will be damned if we will let you take it away.

For all of those proudly chanting “defund the police” I have one question: Who do you want to respond when a victim is locked in her bathroom, trying to escape her abuser? Who should show up at her home when her abuser has a loaded gun and is threatening to shoot her?

“…there is a surprisingly rich and layered heritage of modern buildings proving our connection to contemporary architectural thinking which makes me wonder why we have so lost touch with this spirit. So many current new buildings can’t make up their minds what they want to be other than parochial regionalism… the meek wallpaper contextualism of…

Change the name of the aggressors and of the battle, give the warrior a green T-shirt and replace his swords with smartphones, and you could replace the medieval warrior-king, Wadyslav II Jagiello, with the President of the Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky.

While our leaders are more responsive when hatred comes from neo-Nazis and white supremacists, they still have no strategy for addressing it, and they seem utterly flummoxed and paralyzed by the more nuanced anti-Semitism arising from groups other than these.

If nothing comes from nothing, then truth, like matter, must be constant. The pursuit of these constant or unchanging truths is, or should be, the shared cause of philosophy and science as it relates to the physical world.

It is when we think we are wiser than the Creator of the universe that we make the most foolish decisions.

Eternity before Wisdom implies some divine involvement, which is above humanity and above us; that was the concept our ancestors believed, from Moses to Jesus to Plato.

Many voices vie for our attention claiming to teach wisdom. In our current point on the Information Age continuum, we would do well to remember Biblical flesh and blood archetypes and the Source from which their wisdom stories flow.

Knowledge is power and ignorance is not bliss. Finishing the book taught me so much about the identity stolen from me by the atheist establishment of the socialist society.

The primary difference between the Eternal Traditions and other ways of thinking is that worshipful practice potentially transforms the individual into a person infused with Spirit or Oneness or G-d. The best practices of the Eternal Traditions open the hearts of the devotees.

What if, We were given a giant canvas,And the freedom,To find our own space on it, Move on to whichever corner of the canvas we wished to,Splash the colors of our choice,Shape up the shapes that fascinate us,Create our own masterpiece,Every moment of our lives? But … What if,We were not alone in this? What…

The question of the good life, the tension between Athens (Reason) and Jerusalem (Revelation), the quarrel of the ancients, can be seen, today, as a form of Counter Enlightenment.

Pitch Darkness.Instantly turned toA majestic sun-shine.I just had to,Open my eyes….

Since the moment they were liberated, many of the survivors bore within them a constant awareness that, like it or not, they were witnesses to one of the most monumental horrors in human history.

The cultivation of wisdom requires dialogue. That can be dialogue between self and others. Or it can be dialogue between present self and past self. And that requires a bit of time travel and self-awareness.

Honest journalists, professors, and politicians need to begin pointing out: there never was a country called “Palestine.” Israel is not a “settler, colonial” state occupied by “white Europeans.” Jews hail from Judea and are indigenous to the land of Israel. Despite centuries of persecution, we have remained a people, a nation, an ethnicity—which is not “white,” European, or “privileged.”

In Yoram Hazony’s new book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery (Regnery Gateway), he calls for renegotiating the relationship between the core ideas of the conservative tradition and the libertarian elements that it has been in partnership with, by returning the former to a pre-eminent position.

According to all the history we have before us, making abortions illegal will not cause more women to die from obtaining them illegally. And of course abortion will not be illegal in every state. The decision is simply going back to the states.

It’s a damnable situation where we, as Israeli Jews, walk around international tourist sites with a target painted on our backs, and most of the world is either indifferent towards our possible horrific fate or supportive of those actively and daily seeking and planning our demise.

For nearly a decade now, there has been a growing pushback, especially among partisans from the left, against the utterance of the phrase “thoughts and prayers.” According to these voices, thoughts and prayers do not constitute appropriate action nor drive effective change.

Because they have been relentless in promulgating activism that attacks the Jewish state and anyone who supports it, SJP often finds itself defending its rhetoric and tactics from understandable criticism it receives from pro-Israel individuals and groups—invariably with SJP claiming to be victimized by “Islamophobic” Zionists who, SJP contends, are trying to silence “criticism of Israel.”

Many, content within their cozy cells Of soft and safe familiarity, Will scorn or fear the daring that compels The youth to chase horizons, make them flee Until the understanding spans the whole Continuum of all humanity. To tread the planet’s breadth from pole to pole, To slumber under foreign stars, and share Warmth with…

The Jewish community and the United States in general can no longer afford the luxury of willful blindness and complacency when it comes to the danger of political Islam and its role in governance.

The fight to defend the truth of the Jewish people is the fight for the possibility of truth itself. And the fight for truth is, in the end, always the defense of reality against those who would attempt to deny and overpower it.

I can feel my body weakening
The weariness accompanying every step
The stubbornness of my frozen joints
My body is failing me

In our time, it is more important to be hard and relentless than genteel and unobtrusive lest history repeat itself. Today, January 27th, is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops in 1945. For this reason, this date was chosen as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Several years ago, the World Jewish Congress…

I am from Poland
From the town of Przemyśl
Where my family has lived
For generations

You won’t be a target sitting on your comfortable couch. But Jews have died sanctifying the Holy Name for more than two thousand years. For so many to hide from a virus with a low mortality rate seems an abandonment. 

While the mainstream media is reporting on race riots, affirmative action, critical race theory, Black Lives Matter and white supremacy (and at the same time white fragility), the people on these reality competition shows represent the entire spectrum of races, economic situations, ethnic backgrounds, sexual orientations, and whatever other categories the progressives are trying to divide us by.

One could exist, just breathe and live,Do what needs to be done.Or one could live a splendid life,That adds an awe, a stun. One could only do as much,That’s required to get through.Well, that is how I would be,But that is just not you. You never let anything be,A piece of trifling.You live life as…

It’s ironic that this is a generation of parents who will insist that every morsel of food that passes their little darling’s lips must be pure in origin while effectively presenting that child the key to a chamber of horrors disguised as a gadget.

Is there a word in the modern feminist glossary for a woman who pays for subjugated girls and young women to, in effect, ruin their lives to satisfy the pleasure of a man?

Life is about balance. Nature is about balance. And so our civil society also requires balance. That balance is found and grounded between men and women and the roles they play intuitively and biologically. 

What men contribute to the world as protectors, teachers, fathers, guides, and providers is not only under-appreciated, it is also often maligned, dismissed, and denigrated.

What has today’s feminism done for women? In many ways, it has made life harder. It has given men the easy out from traditional and essential roles. It has relieved them of serious requirements of chivalry, gentlemanly conduct, family responsibility, ambition, and commitment. 

Growing up, I wasn’t very aware of “feminism” as such. There were girls in my high school who were on the bandwagon and were very vocal and outspoken about being feminists. I never really got it. There was an underlying hostility to it that always turned me off, a denigration of the boys that seemed wrong.

Sadly, what I see today from feminism is outright hatred of men and of masculinity. I’m not sure that early feminism meant for this to be the outcome. 

Early feminism stemmed from legitimate desires for equality, including the ability to vote, and for a woman to have access to the same economic and social opportunities as a man. Women demanded an equal place in society for themselves and their daughters, and a respectful rather than condescending and dismissive regard for their sex, their innate abilities, their intelligence and talents. And to the benefit of society, feminism has allowed for female contributions to further enrich and add depth to all areas of our world, from medicine to business, and everything in between. 

Today, there is nothing a man can do and nowhere a man can go that a woman legally and culturally cannot.  How fortunate are we that we live in a time when nothing holds a woman back from achieving anything she wants to accomplish in her life? I don’t think many women appreciate this. They are trapped in the mindset that women are still somehow restricted, even as they themselves continue to achieve, accomplish, innovate and rise to new heights in their own lives.

But feminism has not stopped with achieving equal access and rights. Having achieved much of its original purpose, it has been warped into something unnatural and destructive. Modern feminism has become an ideology that pushes and berates men into feeling that they have no place in society or the family, and that they are not welcome nor are their contributions appreciated. “Women can do what men can do” has mutated into “women should do everything men do, and everything women do, too. And men should step aside.” 

Predictably, this attitude has not resulted in empowerment. It comes from a vindictive, non-cooperative place, and nothing good can come from that.  What I see happening, is that women have paid a price for it in their daily lives. Women are paying a price for the lengths that feminism has gone to, to disempower men while trying to empower women.

It is possible to advocate for and celebrate who you are without dismantling the other side.  There should be appreciation and acknowledgement for the things men do that are positive. It’s done by recognizing the good that the other side brings, and then saying, “and here is what we bring that is also good and valuable.”  This provides cooperation and support. In life, it’s always better to add support than to take away praise. 

But this isn’t what is happening. What I see is women sending the message that “female empowerment” doesn’t have room for men.  So some women take on very masculine energy, masculine roles, while at the same time making everything that is truly masculine into something toxic and dismissible.  

It has been the neglect and dismissal of our natural roles in the family and in society that has perpetuated and fueled this imbalance. Stated very simply, as far back as “caveman” times, women and men had their biologically assigned roles. Generally, men protected the family from outside threats, went out to hunt for food and furs, and taught the next generation of males their tasks; women cared for offspring, gathered additional foodstuffs and created useful materials from what was hunted and gathered. Together the men and women were a unit, working together, each responsible for what their natural strengths allowed them to do for the well-being and survival of the group. Male and female brains were wired uniquely to most effectively attend to those natural roles. We are still wired according to those original and ancestral roles, no matter how much society has evolved. Studies show that boys are still generally drawn to occupations that deal with machines and “things,” such as construction, trades, and engineering, and women continue to be overwhelmingly drawn to careers that deal with nurturing, such as nursing, teaching, and therapy.

Modern feminism has dismissed the importance of each role in the family, the mother with the children, the father as the protector and teacher. With that dismissal has come a heavy cost to women, because while feminism and rhetoric might dismiss it, babies and children don’t fall in line with that. 

Today, women can achieve great heights in the workplace, but their duties and importance at home remain. Children still need their mothers, and most mothers still want to be there for their children. As a result, we have an epidemic of exhausted and overwhelmed women who work all day, and still have to juggle the demands of children and household. Yes, there are wonderful men out there who share the childrearing and household duties, without question, but there are just as many who abandon their families, or who leave the woman to be responsible for both financial support and household management. That’s because feminism has told men that they aren’t needed; that they are accessory appendages and that women can do everything they can do. So, they step back and let us. 

And I haven’t even addressed the damage that the feminist sexual revolution caused, further demeaning both women and men, eliminating any sense of respect or awe for the monogamous, committed relationship. When all sense of responsibility or meaning is eliminated from sexual and romantic encounters, what reason is there for any man to commit and embody his masculine role? This has led to an overwhelming surge in men who aren’t interested in anything more than one-night stands or casual dating that leads nowhere, that requires no emotional investment or commitment from them and sends them merrily on their way to the next conquest. 

When you tell someone often enough that they are not needed, that everything about them is “toxic,” what do you think they’ll eventually do? They’ll turn around and leave you to deal with it all.

Feminism has never really tried to understand men. Instead, it has tried to either make men more like women or just push them out of the way, whichever is most expedient. This shows a great ignorance and disdain for the role that men play in the natural balance of families, raising children, and relationships and in the way society works.

For that matter, modern feminism also ignores the true nature of women. Feminine power and essence aren’t centred around what we “do,” rather feminine power and energy rests in our “being.” Men “do;” women “be.” Our value lies in who we are, not in how much money we can make or how high on the corporate ladder we can climb, or how much we kill ourselves running to do everything for everyone. Imposing masculine expectations onto women ignores and negates our natural purpose. Women are wired to nurture, create, and care for others. The fact that more women gravitate to professions of service such as nursing, teaching, or social work is a testament to the intrinsic nature of the feminine.

We don’t have to have big corporate careers to be validated as women, and often in chasing after those goals, women leave behind everything  that nature has intended: young women delay starting families, they neglect themselves, they stop creating and focus instead on “producing.”

It’s time to recognize where a woman’s worth lies and stop trying to impose masculine standards on women. And at the same time, it’s time for us to value our men for who they are. It’s time to encourage them to embrace their masculinity, to tell them they are needed and wanted in our world, and to celebrate them for who they are. The more we do that, and the more find ways to work together, in symbiosis and balance, the more women will benefit and the more the world will benefit.

Life is about balance. You can’t have light without dark. You can’t have women without men. When we welcome men back into their natural roles within our families and society with appreciation, we will see healthy masculinity, and we will see a naturally healthier society.

we are stars wrapped in skin
the light you are seeking has always been within
Rumi

A century after women attained the right to be educated, to work outside the home, and to vote, regression to anti-feminism has been nearly achieved. 

Girls are encouraged to compete for male attention by showing as much skin as possible, both on social media and off. 
“Believe all women”—because women are helpless and lack the capacity to lie.
Women must adhere to the leftist orthodoxy because we have no ability to think on our own. 
Elect any fully woke woman no matter her qualifications because women aren’t smart enough to be judged by anything other than Instaporn selfies. 
What’s wrong with women twerking on national TV or selling our bodies to strangers? 
What’s wrong with biological males playing on women’s sports teams? 
What’s wrong with biological males sharing a bathroom or shower with women? 
Just shut up and take it.

The “patriarchy,” for all of its flaws, was based on power, not degradation and misogyny. Leftism, hip hop culture, and millennial narcissism have created a misogynistic world where girls and women humiliate themselves on an hourly basis. The resulting spike in female depression, self-harm, and suicide is unconscionable. Yet it rarely gets mentioned.

In fact, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez cheers it all on with selfies that would make Betty Friedan cringe. She is the icon of today’s anti-feminism: unwilling to learn history or facts; eager to make her looks and provocative poses the most important aspect of her being; blissfully unaware of her glaring lack of qualifications. 

It’s well past time to reclaim the feminism that our great-grandmothers fought to achieve. That feminism meant freedom—but it also entailed personal responsibility and self-respect. That feminism envisioned strong, dignified women—whether they stayed home to raise their children or ran for president. But before we can reclaim that feminism, we need to fully understand what went wrong in the past fifty years.

The fallacies of anti-feminism

The worst setbacks began with Second and Third Wave feminism in the 1970s and ‘80s, which promulgated six fallacies: 

• “The personal is political,” which had the effect of telling women that we should assume no responsibility for anything that happens in our lives: it was all “structural”;
• There are no biological differences between the sexes so women should force themselves to act like men in every part of our lives;
• All women think alike;
• Beauty is a myth;
• Femininity and masculinity are toxic;
• Victimhood should be privileged.

Second and Third Wave feminists actually restricted women’s freedom by adding onto feminism a set of doctrinaire politics, a list of acceptable behaviors, even fashion choices. 

And then it got worse. Today’s Fourth Wave feminism—intersectional, leftist feminism—promotes the absurd notion that biology itself is a social construct. The result: the “patriarchy,” which does in fact still exist in countries leftist feminists never talk about, has given way to an increasingly repressive Gender Industrial Complex.

The meaning of the word “gender” has morphed beyond its traditional use in grammar to become a politically constructed term weaponized against women. This notion of gender, no longer the same as being biologically female or male, privileges an emotional state over physical reality. The Gender Industrial Complex tells those who “identify” as female: who to like, who to hate, which ideas to regurgitate, what colors to wear, which pronouns to use, which films not to see—and most important: how to shut down anyone who disagrees with you.

Under the GIC, biology is not only an illusion but it can be easily morphed to suit one’s political needs. The most substantial effect: girls and women are being forced to live in a misogynistic hip hop song—and no one sees this as anti-feminist. Since females have no special hormones or body parts, we can be objectified to suit the reigning political dogma. Oversexualization, mass degradation, trans rape—all are things we must simply accept.

The trans co-optation of everything female—the complete erasure of women—was merely the final nail in the coffin of feminism. As Christine Rosen put it in Commentary: “The claim that anyone can be a woman is a denigration of all women.” 

Feminism means freedom

So let’s start over. Feminism means freedom. That’s it. The right of each woman to be herself: unique, complex, imperfect. “We intend simply to be ourselves,” declared Marie Jenney Howe in the early 20^th century. “Not just our little female selves, but our whole big human selves.” Howe was the founder of Heterodoxy, a Greenwich Village group that demanded only that its female members think for themselves—as individuals.

In its zeal to abolish women’s “little” femaleness, the women’s movement ended up trapping women in a massive collective identity—with ever-consuming multitudes of “gender” rules, terms, and regulations. Women’s ability “simply to be ourselves” was thoroughly undermined in the process.

Feminism is not about following a set of rules or politics imposed by the woke group du jour.

Feminism is not about voting for a woman just because she’s a woman.
Feminism is not about legislating equal numbers of judges or CEOs. 

Feminism is not about exploiting your sexuality when it’s useful.
Feminism is not about destroying a man’s career because of a compliment.
Feminism never demanded that women ditch our babies three months after giving birth. 

Feminism is not about empowering women through victimhood—or shutting down all voices of disagreement.

When I was a writer and editor at The New Republic in my 20s, real feminism spoke to me. Having left a somewhat sheltered suburban home in Philadelphia, my focus was on discovering who exactly I was—even if that meant annoying some of the more proper ladies of D.C. with my miniskirts and fishnet stockings. As well, I wanted to prove my intellectual equality in a very male-dominated office.

But then along came the idea of “pantsuit nation,” and I was like: wait, what? Why do I have to dress or act like a guy? No, I did not want to sleep with every guy I met. No, I didn’t like being told what to think or how to act. And perhaps worst of all: the relentless emphasis on the political—and the complete lack of emphasis on self-strengthening—failed to prepare me for toxic people and situations, which became all-pervasive as leftism took control of the country.

What is feminism? The freedom for women to become the unique individuals that we are; the spaces to allow that freedom; the removal of societal demands to enslave us.

Individualism vs. identity

At the core of classical feminism—just like at the core of classical liberalism—is individualism. Women are individuals. Yes, we share the identity of being women, but we don’t all think or feel or act alike. 

It’s not always easy to be yourself. In fact, in times like these when conformity is trending, it can be very difficult. But instead of maintaining a focus on individualism, feminism came to mean “sisterhood,” which soon came to mean conforming to every aspect of the leftist orthodoxy.

The one part of a shared identity that leftist activists should have focused on was our shared biology. Not only are there biological differences between the sexes, but female hormones like estrogen create many of the thoughts and feelings that are geared to ensure the survival of humanity. The 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration, written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, stated unequivocally that women were different from men but no less equal. 

Through the decades, Christine Rosen writes, “Despite considerable disagreement, no one before had denied women the reality of their own biological existence.” Until now. 

Every parent is aware of biological differences; those who deny them are outright lying. One day at a New York City playground when my son was around four, there was a great deal of construction on the other side of the fence. Nearly all the boys ran to stand on the benches so they could check out the action. Not one girl did so.

This is not to say that some girls aren’t interested in construction or other typically male interests. Social scientists use bell curves—the peak represents the majority of men or women—to show our biologically based pursuits. Natural female hormones explain maternal instincts and thus why women, in general, tend to be more compassionate, empathetic, and nurturing, as well as less aggressive, combative, and competitive. The bell curves for most attributes look very different for males and females—but there will always be some women who are, for example, naturally more aggressive than some men.

Because of hormone levels—biology—most women probably shouldn’t play professional football; some women probably shouldn’t run large companies; and yes: some women probably shouldn’t be mothers. The larger point: biological differences are not socially constructed. They stem from evolution and are passed along genetically.

What bell curves don’t mean is that we exist along a “gender spectrum.” I am a female; I have two X chromosomes. Males have one X and one Y. The weaponization of “gender” for political purposes cannot change these biological facts. Dress however you want; have sex with whomever you want; call yourself whatever you want. But don’t impose your highly specified identity on the rest of us, especially when it leads to injustice (males replacing females in sports) and unsafe spaces (males showering with females). 

Women were lied to for centuries. The Gender Industrial Complex represents yet another form of the bigotry of low expectations. Sorry, but we’re not dumb; we know you’re lying.

With rights come responsibilities

After individualism, the most important component of both liberalism and feminism is personal responsibility. A woman’s foremost responsibility is to herself. This means self-respect, but it also means women shouldn’t act or be treated like children or perennial victims.

The notion of personal responsibility began to disappear when the phrase “the personal is political” was introduced in the 1970s. Initially this meant that laws regarding rape and domestic violence needed to be strengthened—and they did. But the focus was soon extended to include all facets of life, from flirting to miniskirts.

Just as with classical liberalism, you can’t have freedom without responsibility. Why? Well, who else should take responsibility for our lives? The government? Our husbands? Our dates?

By hyper-focusing on the “political,” which came to mean the “patriarchy” and then all of society, women were essentially told to not even look at the personal. As a result, developing our inner strength—a key component of true feminism—was completely lost. Inner strength builds self-respect, and self-respect sets a high bar for how you treat yourself and how you allow others to treat you.

The effect of all of this has been largely unreported. Women stay in abusive relationships; allow men to cheat on them; indulge in daily Instaporn; succumb to hook-up culture, which is essentially a form of self-harm. As well, the obsessive focus on the “political” seems to have occluded basic common sense. Women should know not to go to the hotel room of a well-known philanderer; not to dress provocatively for a business meeting; not to expose their bodies on social media. And yet far too many do.

The #MeToo movement made everything worse. The underlying premise of many of the non-assault #MeToo cases is actually quite unfeminist: it is based on the false notion that all women become helpless in difficult situations. Sadly, many women do. But that’s not the fault of “the patriarchy.” It is largely the fault of the feminist establishment for, essentially, teaching victimhood rather than strength.

Denying that harassment, even workplace harassment, is complex, that women have responsibility for our own behavior—that life isn’t perfect—doesn’t serve anyone’s interests. 

Right now, any woman can destroy a man within seconds—by merely describing or fabricating an awkward pass. Is this empowerment—or is it the same passive-aggressiveness we’ve spent a half-century trying to overcome?

For feminist leaders in the past three decades, personal responsibility were dirty words. Why? Because focusing on a woman’s responsibility, they said, would take the focus off “the patriarchy.”

We don’t live in a patriarchy. 

Anyone who seriously thinks we still live in a patriarchy—where men control and oppress us—needs to visit countries like Iran or Pakistan. Indeed, this is another great irony of today’s feminist leaders: they have entirely ignored Muslim women, who must endure everything from the compulsory hijab and forced, child marriage to female genital mutilation and honor killings. This should be at the top of Western feminists’ priority list. Instead, it never gets mentioned.  

The obsessive focus on “gender identity” has also trumped the very real political problems women still face: rape, domestic violence, trafficking, single motherhood. Indeed, the Gender Industrial Complex has enforced a systemic erasure of women’s real political problems.

Strong femininity empowers

Second and early Third Wave feminists attempted to make women feel ashamed of our femininity and sexuality—to neuter women. Leaving aside the fact that real feminism had no interest in neutering women, a neutered woman is by definition a less empowered woman. Being at one with our femininity and sexuality is an integral aspect of our strength and self-esteem. 

The 1960s sexual revolution gave women permission to finally take ownership of our sexuality. And by taking ownership—by feeling it and knowing that it doesn’t undermine our ability to run companies or fly planes—women were made whole in a way that we hadn’t been since hunter-gatherer times.

But. It needs to be a responsible sexuality. It’s not about sleeping our way to the top; going to a man’s hotel room and then claiming victimhood; wearing scanty clothes at inappropriate times.
Sexuality, true sexuality, comes from within—from self-respect and confidence.

Sexuality is part of a strong femininity—where women are in control of not just our sexuality but also our emotions. Pre-feminism, women had no choice but to succumb to a weak femininity, where their emotions often consumed them. 

Second Wave feminists believed that femininity distracts from our minds, but the opposite is actually true. Femininity empowers through restraint: just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should. 

And such strong femininity can’t just be bought or tied on your head. It needs to be developed, through hard work. Which is why the complete disregard of women’s personal growth in the past forty years has been so appalling.

Leftists have also promoted an anti-feminist disdain for motherhood and child rearing. Democratic activist Elizabeth Spiers now famously called her son in the New York Times an “alien” and the natural hormones that beautifully flood a mother’s brain: “biological brainwashing.” AOC calls childbirth “forced birth.” As I said, some women shouldn’t be mothers.

Sexuality is sacred

I recently dropped my son, now 12, off at a fancy Saturday evening party. I think it’s safe to say that the young girls were wearing two band-aids—one around their chests; another around their hips. Both band-aids refused to stay in place, so they spent most of their time pulling them up or down to cover what could be covered.

Who owned their burgeoning sexuality—the girls themselves or every person who stared at them?

To be clear: women’s sexuality is a key to our strength—but only if we’re in control of it. I still wear miniskirts. When I feel sexy, I feel strong. But that’s because I’m in control. A woman could feel equally sexy in more modest clothing: the key is the self-respect that comes from being in control. 

Today, hook-up culture, hyper-sexualized selfies, the faux “sex positive” agenda, and the GIC have again removed women’s control over our own sexuality. Everyone except women now control our sexuality.

Hip hop culture merely offers a slightly more extreme version of today’s sexual subjugation. Women are referred to as bitches and ‘hos; slapped around; told to shut up and take it. Then women destroy any remaining shred of dignity by twerking an inch in front of a camera.

One of the many disastrous fallouts of the “no biological differences” insanity was that women were told that they must act like men in the romantic and sexual realms. In denying our evolutionary feminine wiring, women were forced to view sex as just another activity—to deactivate natural feelings of needing to connect sex with love.

Thus began the hook-up culture of the past three decades, which not surprisingly has had disastrous effects on women’s self-esteem, to the point where some women actually use sex as a form of self-harm. 

Without this cultural brainwashing, it should be assumed that women think about sex differently from men. This doesn’t mean that women don’t think about sex. This doesn’t mean that women don’t love sex as much as men do. What it means is that women are evolutionarily built to connect our emotions to sex. 

So while some women have no problem with today’s hook-up culture—where sex is typically expected upon a first meeting—many other women, as hard as they try, can’t do it without feeling lousy afterward. Instead of seeing this as a special aspect of being a woman, leftists today blame this lousy feeling on men—either on a particular man or again on “the patriarchy.” 

Truly owning your sexuality also means not broadcasting it to the world or imposing it on others. Today, I see women on social media who are the furthest from owning their sexuality—the guys who are “hearting” their boob and crotch shots own it. Incessant external validation erodes any shred of self-respect. 

In another linguistic perversion, “sex positivity” has come to mean embracing polyamory, BDSM, porn for kids, “sex work”—anything and everything that makes sex violent, ugly, and soulless. It should really be called sex negativity because all of it degrades and humiliates women. 

As Phyllis Chesler writes: prostitution is “the most extreme form of violence against women.” But sexual slavery and trafficking never gets mentioned by “sex-positive” activists.

What is real sex positivity? Understanding that our sexuality is sacred. That owning it—feeling at one with it—is fundamental to a woman’s self-confidence. That it is such an integral part of our identities, it should be treasured and kept private. 

Sensuality is an essential part of nature—but you don’t immediately see it. That is the essence of sacred sexuality.

Courtship + chivalry

Masculinity is not inherently toxic, just as femininity is not inherently toxic. But it can turn toxic. Raising a boy has shown me the role parents, coaches, and teachers play in restraining aggression and impulsiveness.

Parents need to teach their sons to be proud of their strengths and abilities—but to always have manners and respect. It’s not easy but it’s doable; again, it lies in the element of restraint. But non-toxic masculinity also requires bringing back two concepts that leftists have trashed: chivalry and courtship.

The most empowered thing a young woman can say to any guy hitting on her: You like me? Court me.

According to anthropologist Helen Fisher, courtship has historically served as a perseverance test, allowing women to figure out if men are strong and assertive enough to commit to a long-term relationship, pass on good genes, provide for offspring, and ward off danger. Basic aspects of courtship—males wooing females with gifts of food—turn up throughout the animal world as well.

Today, of course, women no longer need men to acquire resources or protect us. But our brains are still hard-wired to focus on self-preservation— to want a man who shows sustained interest. Courtship also forces women to keep our own feelings in check.

Chivalry doesn’t reinforce “inferiority.” It’s good manners. Both courtship and chivalry train men to act like gentlemen. A man can see a woman as his equal yet still treat her differently—there’s nothing sexist about that. In fact, it shows respect.

Don’t men have any responsibility here? Of course. Just because we no longer live in a patriarchy doesn’t mean that men, as individuals, don’t have a lot of work to do. I’m wary when I read conservatives talk about returning to the ‘50s and the Era of the Gentleman. Sure, many men in the ‘50s had good manners in public, but we are all too aware of what often went on inside the home or inside the office. 

We want men to treat women with respect—not just to keep up appearances. We want men to treat women with respect because it’s the right thing to do. 

But here’s the thing: we don’t need to dump masculinity to make this happen. Masculinity is not toxic. Uncivilized masculinity is toxic. Civilized masculinity ends wars. Civilized masculinity moves mountains. Civilized masculinity is, well, sexy. 

Beauty is not a myth

One of the many inane theories promulgated in the ‘90s was that men’s desire for beauty is “culturally constructed.” Anyone with even a passing knowledge of evolution knows that men are attracted to certain features—clear skin, shiny hair—because they signify youth and health and thus fertility. By promulgating the “beauty myth,” activists like Naomi Wolf did women a tremendous disservice, setting them up for gratuitously painful rejections and not accepting that this is a part of life.

When social media arrived and women began to post iPhone-filtered images of themselves, young women were caught completely off guard, believing these faux, cartoonishly unrealistic images equaled reality. Because Fourth Wave feminists were too busy constructing identities, no one was there to help. Depression, self-harm, and suicide ensued. 

Beauty is not a myth; it’s not a cultural construct. Beauty is an evolutionary fact—a harsh reality that only gets harsher with age. And not all women are born with a high level of evolutionary beauty; that too is a fact. Women need to accept these realities—but also understand that what they’re doing today by incessantly posting filtered selfies is making the problem significantly worse.

Because here is the good news: there are three elements that can be more powerful than evolutionary beauty: feeling at one with your sexuality; elegance—the way you carry yourself in the world; and beauty of the soul. 

Liberalism rests on the principles of nature, in this case the seasons of life. Leaves become more beautiful before they die. Why? Their appearance becomes a mirror to their resilience and their souls.

The 21^st century woman

The goal of feminism was to unshackle women—to allow us to engage in the world as strong, responsible adults. It’s well past time to reteach women that we are fully in control of our bodies and our destinies—that no one, no matter how they mask their misogyny, has the right to re-shackle us. 

And so I propose the beginning of a new, Fifth Wave of feminism. We can call it rational feminism or independent feminism or non-conformist feminism. Or we can just call it feminism because it would finally bring feminism back to its original meaning.

The key components are freedom, personal responsibility, and individualism, with a strong emphasis on personal growth—building the inner strength that leads to self-respect, resilience, and dignity.

No one has the right to encourage girls to degrade themselves through Instaporn, hook-up culture, or prostitution. No one has the right to tell women that they can’t prioritize motherhood and family. No one has the right to tell women that they must use the same bathroom or shower as—or compete against—a biological male.

But ultimately it is up to each woman to take responsibility for our choices and our lives. With rights come responsibilities; just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should. Taking responsibility for our lives ensures our freedom: that is the essence of both classical liberalism and feminism.

The 21^st century woman is strong, free, unique, and responsible. She knows she’s imperfect. But that’s OK; so is nature. At her best, she embodies an unshackled dignity and a soul of beauty.

I never like having a conversation about language in which I come up on the wrong side of C.S. Lewis. This is going to be one of those times: 

In his book Mere Christianity, Lewis writes

The word gentleman originally meant something recognisable; one who had a coat of arms and some landed property. When you called someone ‘a gentleman’ you were not paying him a compliment, but merely stating a fact. If you said he was not ‘a gentleman’ you were not insulting him, but giving information.

Of course, I’m not at all disputing how Lewis characterizes the word as a container of information rather than a bestower of value. It is true and important to understand, though, that through popular usage over time, the word gentleman has gone from a statement of fact to a compliment… but then back again to a statement of fact. Interestingly, being called a gentleman is only complimentary now to those who would use the word, and for others, the concept as it is understood today is being driven out of existence.

As Lewis described the improper usage of the word, gentleman was a label for someone who exhibited good behavior in some fashion. If you held the door open for others, you were called a gentleman. If you dressed well in social settings, you were called a gentleman. If you refrained from using coarse language in broader social settings, you were called a gentleman. Basically, the term was applied as a way of noting approval—or disapproval—for the way in which a man conducted himself. Referring to someone as a gentleman, then, was indeed complimentary.

This was much the context in which my parents used the word while raising me. My father especially would speak the phrase “gentlemanly behavior” when praising or admonishing my conduct. Often my use of slang terms elicited the response, “that’s not something a gentleman would say,” and I would rephase whatever it was I originally said in more formal English. Gentlemen were polite and courteous, quick to volunteer their assistance, considerate of another’s needs, and respectful in tone and bearing.

But there was something more to it reflected both by my parents’ usage as well as how the definition was morphing in the vernacular through the 1960s and 1970s. It was no longer that calling a man a gentleman was a response to the behaviors he exhibited, but it was that a gentleman conducted himself in certain specific ways (ultimately, particularly in his interactions with women). Calling someone a gentleman was no longer merely a compliment in response to observing these behaviors (courtesy, helpfulness, consideration, and respect). It had become a fact of character: a man was not identified as a gentleman on the occasion of behaving as such. A gentleman was a man consistently of this character, regardless of time or place. My parents wanted the label of gentleman to convey real information about me. It became a part of my identity, however imperfectly I practiced gentlemanly acts.

Much has been written about what gentlemanly acts actually are. Mark Jessen lists these 100 ways to be a gentleman, which includes the gems, “stay open minded but firm in your belief and morals,” “be willing to help others,” and “never kiss and tell.” Providing 51 ways to be a modern gentleman, Khio Nguyen writes, “speak your mind, but know when to keep quiet,” “know when to take action and do it without being asked,” and “offer your seat to women and the elderly.” One observation I find particularly meaningful is this from General Robert E. Lee:

The power which the strong have over the weak, the employer over the employed, the educated over the unlettered, the experienced over the confiding, even the clever over the silly—the forbearing or inoffensive use of all this power or authority, or a total abstinence from it when the case admits it, will show the gentleman in a plain light.

A common theme found in writings on being a gentleman often focuses on what it means to have power and how that power is exercised. When examined in the context of relationships and communications between men and women, the appropriate exercise of male power is identified as chivalry; that is, polite, kind, and unselfish behavior that men would exhibit toward women, children, and the elderly especially. (It is important to understand that the exercise of chivalrous behavior does not imply that women are powerless.) 

While power dynamics in relationships can be complicated to dissect, a principle for the modern-day gentleman to keep in mind is that when he has something that would benefit another person, and it is not something the other person already has or might easily acquire, he should generously share freely of it, be it time, treasure, or the power to leverage these resources. We find this wisdom in the New Testament, Luke 12:48 – “ From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.”

Denials from the progressive left notwithstanding, men and women are distinctive and different. Men have been given many kinds of abilities with which to affect the lives of others.  A gentleman recognizes this and acts accordingly.

Sarah Mackenzie writes the following about the interplay between chivalry and feminism:

I therefore feel somewhat qualified to say there is, without a doubt, nothing more charming or alluring than a truly kind gentlemanly soul amidst a sea of increasingly horrible male specimen.

It’s not as though I appreciate a door being opened for me because I am far too weak or submissive to do it myself. I also don’t appreciate boys being overly presumptuous merely because I am a prude or don’t want the same things.

But, I value and appreciate true gentlemen because it subtly reveals a more caring, sensitive and genuine side that most males are not willing to broadcast or expose.

It’s charming, chivalrous, and rightfully mirrors the longstanding cultural and societal norms that females are still expected to uphold.

And, to be honest, I don’t have the time, patience or a sufficient enough lack of self-integrity to pursue any guy unable to exercise those rare, gentlemanly qualities.

It would seem, then, that the responsible exercise of gentlemanly power is a subtle thing; it is in placing the “gentle” inside the “man” and letting that temper and permeate his maleness. It is the very opposite of the idea of “toxic masculinity,” its antidote as it were.

 What is the relationship between toxic masculinity and gentlemanly character? A very simple analysis would be to divide the two categorizations by the manner in which men choose to exercise the power they have in particular social contexts—whether responsibly or not. 

In January of 2019, Gillette (owned by Proctor & Gamble) repurposed their “the best a man can be” slogan as a piece of a marketing campaign to challenge toxic masculinity and join the #metoo movement with the message that, when it comes to the treatment of women in society, men must change before there can be any progress or forward movement. The campaign featured a 108-second “short film” that, to many, seemed to be an indictment of all men (and boys) for having created and perpetuated the environment of toxicity toward women endemic throughout society.

Predictably, the short film and campaign polarized those who watched it into two camps: those who saw it as admirably calling out the culture of toxic masculinity running rampant throughout society, and those who saw it as over-the-top virtue signaling as part of a broader war on men. I found myself in the second camp, but with the idea that Gillette wasn’t participating in a war on men—rather, the company seemed to be opportunistically jumping on board the #metoo bandwagon (which to me is confirmed by a lack of any appreciable follow-through or commitment to being an actual societal change agent).

What those who would identify episodes of toxic masculinity in society, Gillette included, neglect to consider is the role that raising boys to be gentlemen plays in both softening the socialization process and strengthening the societal bonds between girls and boys, women and men. Watch the Gillette short film. The message seems to be that masculinity itself is to blame, and that the vast majority of boys will grow into men who will carry on in their toxic ways, because they have never been given an alternative.

There is an alternative. It has been offered to boys for a couple of centuries; and it only has fallen out of favor during the past few decades in reaction to the progressive left’s interpretation of feminism. One might even argue that it is a form of toxic feminism that has decoupled the upbringing of boys from the behavioral ideals of gentlemen, and that in turn has removed any moderating influence on the baser attributes of masculinity. Whatever the cause, we can be sure that we aren’t on the right track for solutions as long as we complain about the lyrics of songs from decades past such as the suggestive yet ambiguous “Baby It’s Cold Outside” while we aren’t bothered by the audaciously explicit misogyny of this generation’s “Everywhere I Go.” I can imagine the shock, disgust, and finally the disappointment of my father, had I listened to music like the latter.

His words are still very clear in my memory. That’s not something a gentleman would say.

I didn’t know about the hostage seizure at the Colleyville, Texas, synagogue until Saturday late afternoon, hours after it started. The news that an attacker had seized the rabbi and three congregants—as part of a plan to free a woman serving an 86-year sentence in a Texas prison for attacking U.S. military officers in Afghanistan—brought back memories of past attacks on Jewish houses of worship, including the Chabad House in Mumbai, India, in 2008 (six dead); the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh (11 dead); Passover 2019 in Poway, California (one dead); and Hanukkah 2019 in Monsey, New York (one dead). This time, the crisis ended with a SWAT attack that killed the attacker before he could harm any of his four hostages at Congregation Beth Israel (CBI).

The CBI terrorism has special resonance because I grew up in Texas as part of a family that has been in Texas since just after the Civil War. While I left Texas and have been living in the Northeast for more than 40 years, I still embrace an identity as a Texas Jew. My great-great-grandfather, Chayim Schwarz, was the first ordained rabbi in the state, when he moved there from Germany in 1873. My parents were married there at Temple Emanuel in McAllen, where I drop by for services when I’m in the Rio Grande Valley for my high school reunion.

At times like these, differences between Texas and New York or liberal or conservative or Zionist or secular or religious don’t matter. While I’ve read at least one article knocking CBI Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker’s positions in Jewish politics, that has absolutely no meaning for me. An attack on one Jew is an attack on all of us; distinctions between religious practices and political leanings only deepen energy-sapping divisions. Terrorists don’t distinguish between Reform, Conservative, or Orthodox, and neither should we make fine distinctions in taking action in solidarity with Jews in danger. For evidence of the negative impact, remember that enmity among Jews contributed to the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in the year 70 CE (Common Era, otherwise AD). In the words supposedly spoken by Benjamin Franklin at the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, “We must all hang together, or . . . we shall all hang separately.”

The CBI attack and the successful outcome will long be studied. Were the security procedures sufficient, and how did the law enforcement agencies respond? Where did U.S. border controls break down to enable a foreign national with a criminal record to enter the country? What planning and financing supported the attack?

My own views on responses reflect my experiences with Jewish sites in Israel and elsewhere, as well as what I’ve seen from attacks on places of worship in Texas. My action bias is going to show here, no doubt reflecting my youth spent absorbing stories of the Alamo, the War for Texas Independence, and the rough life on the frontier—the Texas history taught in schools when I was growing up in Mission, Texas, in the 1960s and 1970s. Such episodes inspired the same sort of fervor, I imagine, as when Hebrew schools relate stories of Masada, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the miracle of the Six-Day War of 1967. 

I’ve seen the armed security forces in Israel, and they’re not for show. In Amsterdam, a security officer questioned me before I could attend services at the Portuguese Synagogue. In the 1980s, I passed machine gun-toting guards outside the Great Synagogue of Florence. U.S. synagogues now show far more security during the High Holidays. That includes my synagogue, Chabad of Bedford, N.Y.; Chabad is an Orthodox movement based in Brooklyn also called Chabad-Lubavitch. One of the men held hostage at CBI has already called for more active shooter training.

My own thinking is aligned with that, and I’m fine with the notion of armed, properly trained synagogue members. Concealed carry may be impractical, illegal, or wildly unpopular in blue-state synagogues, but I could see that as part of the security mix. If a potential attacker knows his lifespan could shrink to 10 seconds if he starts threatening and shooting at a school or synagogue, he may reconsider his plans. Numerous examples show effective armed response, such as the almost-instant killing of a shooter at the West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement, Texas, in 2019. He had killed two parishioners who drew on him, but others responded. 

Would this approach work at synagogues? I don’t know. That’s each organization’s call. But I’m not opposed to it. CBI took a different approach, and it worked. I’m all in favor of diverse approaches, and if an institution opts for the West Freeway Church strategy, I’d say go for it. That’s the Texan in me. 

The need for urgent actions takes my memory back to the 2008 Mumbai massacre at the Chabad House. In its aftermath, I attended a memorial service in Connecticut organized by Chabad. While grieving, speakers stressed the need to take spiritual action in the face of the bloodshed (more good deeds, charity, and study of religious texts, for example). It reminded me of the slogan adapted from the last words of labor activist Joe Hill, “Don’t mourn, organize!” I liked that approach.

How’d that play out? I’ve taken responsibility for my safety. That involved a 10-week course in Krav Maga, the self-defense system developed for the Israel Defense Forces. It focused on responding to a threat and getting away, not finding your calm meditative center. In other words: take action. Its workouts exhausted me; at one point a sparring pad I held got kicked so hard it hit me in the face and knocked the lenses out of my glasses. I also joined the Community Emergency Response team (CERT) when I lived in Westport, Connecticut. The training included a sobering session on active-shooter responses; a policeman explained the evolution in law-enforcement tactics since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999. 

This basic awareness of personal defense and community protection makes sense on a larger scale. Be your own bodyguard, take responsibility for your safety. Stories coming out of Colleyville indicate that active-shooter training paid off, and I assume those lessons will inform safety approaches at any vulnerable institution. I imagine we’ll talk about security measure at my synagogue in the wake of the CBI episode, frankly addressing vulnerabilities and procedures. The Westchester suburbs feel safe for me—but recent history shows any place can feel safe until the seconds when it is not safe at all.

On Saturday, January 15th, a man entered a synagogue in Texas and took four Jewish people hostage. His name was Malik Faisal Akram. He was a British Muslim from a town in England called Blackburn. Akram held the rabbi at gunpoint and tried to demand the release of a famous female terrorist named Aafia Siddiqui, who is being held in a Texas federal prison. During the hostage crisis, Akram held Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker at gunpoint for eleven hours, demanding the release of Siddiqui. In other words, Akram was acting as a terrorist to demand the release of other terrorists. He intentionally chose Jewish people as hostages to hold in ransom for his demand. In the end, Akram was killed by the police in a shootout and the hostages escaped. 

After Akram’s death was announced, the Blackburn Muslim Community Facebook page posted an announcement expressing the hope that: “May the Almighty forgive all his sins and bless him with the highest ranks of Paradise.” Keep in mind, Akram came from their community. He wasn’t just a terrorist to them; they knew him personally. He was friends with people in this town. The post continued by expressing sympathy for his family, “May Allah give strength and patience to his loved ones in dealing with their loss.” 

When I saw the post, I sent the Blackburn Muslim Community Facebook page the following question: “Does the Blackburn Muslim Community believe that Faisal Akram should be rewarded with ‘Paradise’ for taking an American rabbi hostage at gunpoint?” In response, they sent me this message, “A generic post was used for a death announcement of a local individual before we learnt of the exact nature of the incident which had taken place abroad. This post has since been removed.” However, the post has not been removed, the post is still up on their page, with a slight modification, which announces the date of a service in his name. 

I have never been to Blackburn, England. The town has a population of 120,000 people, which is roughly the same size as my own hometown. In my hometown, most of the Jewish people in the community know each other. I imagine, most of the Muslim community in Blackburn know each other as well. I know that it is perfunctory for a religious community to send out an announcement when a member of the community dies. I also assume that the same language is generally repeated and it is normal to express sympathy for the family. That being said, Fasial busted into a synagogue and held Jews at gunpoint.

I used to work as a cashier in a used furniture store. One time, I was robbed at gunpoint. I was working in the middle of the day by myself when a slender man came into the store and asked if we sold big-screen TVs. I told him that we didn’t, but he might be able to get a TV at a pawn shop down the street. He responded by saying that pawn shops were overpriced and he was hoping to find a good deal. Our entire conversation was completely routine. He started to walk toward the door and even said, “Thank you.” When he got to the door, he suddenly screamed out: “F*ck!” Then he spun around and pulled out a silver pistol and pointed it at my face. Then he yelled, “Bitch, give me all the money! I want all the money!” 

In the movies, there are always scenes when the bad guy pulls out a gun on the hero, and the hero always says something witty about how he is not afraid. That’s not what it is like, I promise. If you think you are brave, then wait until you really believe that someone is going to shoot you in the face. It reduces you to a sniveling pile of rubbish.

Akram pulled out a gun on a group of Jewish people while they were worshipping. He pulled out a gun hoping to kidnap Jews and trade them for a terrorist. This raises the question: Is there any reason that a person can find to defend his actions? If you are a moral person, then the answer is no. Which brings me back to the post by the Blackburn Muslim Community Facebook page. After it was announced that Akram was killed while in the process of kidnapping Jews, they wrote a post saying that he should be rewarded with “the highest ranks of Paradise.” 

It should be noted that, the next day, they finally released a bland post condemning Faisal’s actions. But they still have a statement on their Facebook page saying that he should be rewarded with “paradise.” Rewarded for what? How are non-Muslims supposed to interpret these words? Do these words mean that Akram should be rewarded with paradise for taking part in jihad against Americans? For kidnapping Jews? Or can these words really be seen as a perfunctory statement released for the death of a member of the community? Are these words merely the standard comments wishing that every Muslim be rewarded with heaven? 

I understand that it would be very strange to wish that a member of your community be sent to hell, so it does make sense that they would wish for him to be sent to heaven. That being said, it is also understandable that these words would be viewed as problematic by the victims of his crimes. Even more thorny, do these words allude to a bigger problem of anti-Semitism in the British Muslim community? However these questions are answered, it certainly seems inappropriate to write a post calling for Akram to be rewarded with paradise immediately after kidnapping Jews.

Malik Faisal Akram, on January 15th, 2022, held a number of hostages in a Texas synagogue. He demanded that his “sister, Aafia,” be released from jail and that he be allowed to speak with her. Aafia is currently serving an 86-year prison sentence at the Carswell Federal Medical Center after attempting to kill U.S. military personnel. Unsurprisingly, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is lobbying for her to be released from prison. In fact, enthusiastic anti-Semite Linda Sarsour is one of those leading the charge. Now, of course, CAIR is claiming to “stand in solidarity” with the Jewish community–as they do every time it is politically expedient for them to do so.

All of this comes after Zahra Billoo, San Francisco Bay’s Executive Area Director of CAIR, marked synagogues and Jewish organizations as targets for boycotts and harassment, claiming that “Allah has promised us victory.” This kind of conspiracy theory-riddled talk has no place in the public sphere, especially for a self-proclaimed “advocacy, anti-hate group.” This chilling language sounds no different than the radicalized Christian white supremacists who have targeted mosques and synagogues in recent years. The time has come for the United States to do as the United Arab Emirates did years ago: label CAIR as an organization with ties to terrorism.

CAIR has for years been spreading radicalization through the country through its ties to the Muslim Brotherhood–including Hamas. Several of its employees and higher-ranking officials have been linked to terrorism or brutal dictatorships, such as that of Muammar Gaddafi. It has ignored complaints over gender discrimination within the organization, as well as sexual harassment claims. This may be, in part, due to the near monopoly on the group of Saudi Wahhabist religious viewpoints. The organization also supported and advocated for Rasmea Odeh, a convicted terrorist, up until her deportation to Jordan.

The same way that the Jewish Defense League (JDL), Westboro Baptist Church, and other such organizations have been labeled as terror groups or ostracized as bigoted organizations, so, too, should CAIR. There are far better and more tolerant advocacy groups for Muslim Americans that deserve to be uplifted more than this one. If American values include interfaith coexistence, then CAIR cannot possibly adhere to such values based on both its actions and its words.

How Corrupt Leaders and Failed Reporters Are Fueling the Mass Psychosis

Lockdowns, arbitrary mandates, and nonsensical prohibitions (like no meals on domestic flights) will never stop until we do something about it. This is not about keeping us safe from a virus, and the proof is below.

Brazen Hypocrisy

World leaders, including ours in the United States, routinely break their own COVID-19 orders by going to parties, concerts, and public indoor gatherings unmasked. When caught, they either give half apologies, or double down and justify themselves. This has been consistent behavior since March of 2020. These leaders played the “correlation equals causation” game with us, asserting that people were dying because not enough of us were wearing masks and staying indoors.

If what they have been constantly trying to shove down our throats all of 2020 and 2021 were true, every single public official who was caught violating their own orders should have been impeached for attempted if not actual murder. Just think about it. We were told we were killing our grandmothers if we didn’t comply with all of the mandates, which many officials themselves never followed. Some were so blatant about their hypocrisy, it seemed almost a joke—as in 2020 when Austin, Texas Mayor Steve Adler made a video from his timeshare in Mexico telling Americans to “stay home.” What wasn’t mentioned was that Mayor Adler traveled to his timeshare in a private jet with eight other people. 

Another prime example is Chicago, Illinois Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who was caught at a barbershop getting her hair done after enacting one of the strictest lockdowns in the US. Mayor Lightfoot imposed a lockdown that has resulted in the permanent closure of many small and medium businesses, including Chicago hair salons, yet she decided her hair was more important than “flattening the curve.”  When caught, Lightfoot defended herself, saying:

“I’m the public face of this city. I’m on national media and I’m out in the public eye. I think what really people want to talk about is, we’re talking about people dying here. We’re talking about significant health disparities. I think that’s what people care most about.”

Consider the example of California Governor Gavin Newsom being caught mask-less at an indoor birthday party in Napa County at the height of the California lockdowns that he mandated in 2020. When caught, he offered an apology, saying he made a “bad mistake.” Perhaps that explanation would have been slightly more acceptable had he not lied before the pictures surfaced, claiming it was an “outdoor event.” Not only was it an indoor event, it was at an extremely exclusive venue called French Laundry; a venue where Mayor London Breed of San Francisco attended an indoor birthday party the day after Newsom.

Mayor London Breed as well ignored her own mandates in September of 2020, when she, maskless, attended a concert in San Francisco. As can be seeing in the pictures and videos that surfaced, she did not wear a mask even when she wasn’t eating or drinking. When confronted about this, her response was this:

“Don’t feel as though you have to be micromanaged about mask wearing. Like, we don’t need the fun police to come in and try and micromanage and tell us what we should or shouldn’t be doing. We know what we need to do to protect ourselves. I was eating and I was drinking and I was sitting with my friends and everyone who came in there was vaccinated. No, I’m not going to sip and put my mask on, sip and put my mask on, sip and put my mask on, eat and put my mask on. While I’m eating and I’m drinking, I’m going to keep my mask off.”

The major and blindingly obvious problem with what Mayor Breed said is that, like Newsom, she was lying. One of the videos that surfaced showed Mayor Breed not eating or drinking, but standing, dancing, and singing to the R&B group Tony! Toni! Toné! After she enacted a mandate telling San Franciscans that masks were mandatory for indoor gatherings regardless of vaccination status, she herself violated that very mandate, and justified it by citing everyone’s vaccination status. 

Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan oversaw one of the strictest lockdowns in 2020; so strict in fact, that outdoor activities like fishing and gardening were banned. It was the most controversial lockdown in the US. Whitmer was caught planning a boat trip with her husband for Memorial Day weekend; a violation of the bans she enacted. Her husband, Marc Mallory, name dropped her when speaking to the marina about renting a boat after being told a boat would not be provided to them. When confronted by the local media, she first lied and said it was misinformation. When pressed, she said:

“Knowing it wouldn’t make a difference, [Mallory] jokingly asked if being married to me might move him up. He regrets it. I wish it wouldn’t have happened. And that’s really all we have to say about it.”

Recently, President Joe Biden was caught without a mask in a store where masks were required. Yes, President Biden, the one whose administration is currently fighting to tighten mandates on the American workplace, was caught again in one of those workplaces unmasked.

It is difficult to keep up with all of the hypocrisy as Mayor London Breed has been caught on camera for a second time at a concert, maskless, dancing on the dance floor. Footage was captured and may be viewed here.

Austrian government leaders, including the President and Minister of Health, celebrated at the ORF fundraising gala just days after announcing a full COVID-19 lockdown and compulsory vaccination.

The list could go on and on.

These past two years would be more comedic if lives weren’t being destroyed in the process. Families that were living from paycheck to paycheck and that lost their homes right at the beginning of the lockdowns in 2020 are still homeless. People whose depression intensified due to the long-term isolation have committed suicide. People who were made deathly afraid by the constant barrage of fear-mongering from politicians and mainstream news are still afraid to step out of their homes.

Some of us called attention to all of this hypocrisy, some of us got upset, a lot of us made excuses for them, and most of us have submitted.

The problem is that what has happened will continue to happen at the highest levels until we collectively respond with more than apathy. 

Dr. Fauci and Vaccines

This has been one big episode of mass psychosis, and further proof can be seen in the messaging around the vaccines. When the vaccines were first introduced to us, we were told that life would be normal again. We were told that the vaccine would put an end to all of this, everything could open back up, and we could put 2020 behind us. Then we were told the vaccines really only prevent hospitalization. Then we were told that even after being vaccinated, we should still wear masks, even two masks, and practice social distancing. And we were told all of these things by a man who was recently exposed for lying about funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China about the very virus that has consumed so many of our over lives the past two years. We were told all of this by Dr. Anthony Fauci; a man who flip flops so much, a Twitter thread was created by writer and commentator Drew Holden called “Fauci vs. Fauci.”

This alone should help any rational person to understand why forty-one percent of Americans do not want the vaccine. It isn’t a deep conspiracy, though some believe so. For many of us, it is quite simple. No one, not the CDC, WHO, Dr. Fauci, our elected officials, nor media reporters, have been consistent in their messaging to us. We’ve seen too many opinions “change,” and too many headlines with the words “we’ve learned…” which some people are beginning to believe means “we lied and got caught,” or “we reported lazily and got caught.” Their numbers  supposedly tell us how much better off vaccinated people are than unvaccinated people, but we also remember learning that the Covid death rate included people who did not die from the virus, but from other diseases with Covid simply being present.

We see and remember these things, and we are skeptical when the same people who have been lying to us all this time now want us to trust them to inject something into our bodies.

We were told the Delta Variant is more resistant to the vaccines, and now we are being told Omicron is as well, yet there is still a worldwide aggressive push for everyone to be vaccinated with the very vaccines they tell us are largely ineffective against the new variants. 

China

We remember how the Chinese Communist Party, in 2020, was unbearably oppressive in its lockdowns. Yet, the U.S., and many other countries, took their cues from China. We did this to such a degree that American mainstream news outlets like the Washington Post, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal praised China for their handling of the virus, though it was revealed later that China lied about its numbers. The initial veneration of China by American mainstream news was  as though China had these outlets in its pocket. Researchers stated that it was virtually impossible for China to have dropped their Covid numbers so drastically after two months of lockdowns, but not before the virus spread to the rest of the world at the same time. A reporter with integrity would have sought these researchers out first before reporting on the communist country’s self-proclaimed victory.

Journalists from China who tried to report on these things were detained, and even killed, by the CCP. Christian pastors in China who preached against the CCP were also imprisoned and killed, both for speaking out against the Chinese government, and for having faith in something other than Xi Jinping and his comrades. 

Yet, this is the same China whose spell seemed to have captured world leaders. This is the same China that major news outlets  scolded America to be more like. This is the same China, by the way, that Governor Gavin Newsom struck a billion dollar deal with in 2020 for California’s mask supply.

Who Should Be Asking the Questions?

Why does it seem as though many of our leaders and media are turning a blind eye to China’s flagrant human rights abuses and authoritarian  government? It is is a question that reporters everywhere should be thoroughly investigating, instead of publishing puff piece editorials, as though China is the starship Enterprise and Xi Jinping is Captain James T. Kirk.

It has become painfully obvious that, by and large, our media runs cover for tyrants and despots. If this weren’t true, the lockdowns would have indeed stopped after two weeks, because honest, investigative reporting would have uncovered all the corruption among our leaders and elected officials. The thousands of doctors around the world who have challenged the narrative  would not have been minimized or ridiculed, but tested against the developing situation. The virologists, surgeons, and front-line doctors who continue to speak out against the prevailing narrative would have had the chance to be heard as much as the doctors we have been currently hearing from the most. There is a video entitled 8 Prominent Doctors & Scientists Engage in a Remarkable Exchange, wherein a panel of eight medical experts  discuss their experiences with Covid as immunologists, front-line workers, and biologists, andthe major issues they have with mask mandates, vaccine mandates, and mandates for children. The video was on YouTube for a few weeks, then YouTube took it down. 

Africa

Yet another set of questions the media is not asking surrounds the recent travel ban the Biden administration has placed on African countries, particularly South Africa. In terms of timeline, this happened just after South Africa told Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer to stop sending vaccines due to the plunging demand. One question that definitely needs to be asked is this: is the new variant really a danger, or is it a pretense to punish Africa for not buying more from the US government?  Reported cases from South Africa have suddenly jumped from less than two hundredper day to two thousand per day, and all coincidentally after the ban. The timeline is:

• Nov 24, 2021 – South Africa asks J&J and Pfizer to suspend delivery of vaccines as it now has enough stock
• Nov 25, 2021 – South Africa discovers a new variant and sees a huge spike in cases
• Nov 27, 2021 – The US bans travel from South Africa

News sites like Microsoft News are attempting to make things appear as though South Africa is now trying to replicate the Moderna vaccine, implying there is not an excess, but a shortage. There is a story posted by MSN dated November 28, 2021 that describes just that. What is misleading about it is the story is that the vaccine replication process dates back to over a month ago, as evidenced by many sources, including this one.

South Africa has more than enough vaccines, and Africa is a vast continent made up of 54 countries; some of which have experienced shortages. This is an important detail because detractors of the truth will attempt to muddy the waters by pushing out seemingly conflicting information to distract from their activities. 

The South African people have spoken many times over; the vast majority of them do not want the vaccine. South Africa’s Covid recovery rate has remained at 97%, Africans in general have been through much more deadly viruses, for which the rest of the world cared very little, and most of the African people would like to be left alone. They should not be punished because of that; especially considering the fact that African countries were not the only places the new variant was found, yet they seem to be the only places where the people are banned from traveling to the US.

Something ominous is coming to the West particularly; in fact, it is already here. But when the evidence of it has reached its peak, know that it will not be the corruption of our leaders or the mangling of the truth by our media who led us to the dark place.

It will be the compliance of us, the people.

On November 24, 1977, I stood with my husband, my two-year-old daughter, and seven other extended family members in front of the gated entrance to the American Embassy in Moscow. We were there to receive our exit visas so we could leave the confinements of the totalitarian regime of the Soviet Union in search of freedom. 

 The military guard said the Embassy was closed for the next four days. My heart sunk. “Why?” someone asked.

“Thanksgiving Day is a national holiday the Americans celebrate each year,” he said.

It was the first time I heard the word Thanksgiving. Bewildered, I thought, what kind of holiday is it if the government allows its people to celebrate it on Thursday? It must be pretty significant to the Americans. How great it must be to be off from work for four consecutive days! 

The USSR did not have a holiday that lasted four days, and most celebrations in a country of not enough happened on the weekend when people were already off from work.

It took us months to get permission from the Communist government to leave based on religious discrimination. We were Jews who lived in a country that did not want us. This country did not allow us to practice Judaism. This country took away our identities and listed the religion of our forefathers as our nationality on every official document, turning us into the scapegoats of the socialist society and targets for persecution. Anti-Semitism flourished under the auspices of the brutal totalitarian regime. 

When the Soviets agreed to let people emigrate, most of Jews left the USSR for Israel, but many for the United States as well. I had a hard time understanding the immigration process. Once the Soviet government had accepted our family’s request for asylum status, it had no longer considered us its citizens. With the stroke of a KGB agent’s pen, in a matter of seconds, we became nobodies. Our family had to give up our apartment and quit our jobs, and with that, lost our financial security and the roof over our heads. We became solely dependent on the kindness of relatives and strangers. The Communists had no use for us anymore, and they did not care how we would survive. Decades later, I still cannot get over the cruelty of the socialist government in the treatment of its Jews. They could discard you like a pile of trash when you were no longer needed to achieve their grandiose, but unattainable ideas. 

The totalitarian regime granted our family permission to immigrate to the United States, but still, for it to happen, it was the American government in charge of issuing our exit visas. Nothing made sense. 

After pleading with the military guard, he checked our documents and opened the gate for our family to enter the hallowed grounds of the American Embassy. My spirit filled with hope.

We walked inside the building, full of anxiety. A secretary greeted and ushered us into an office where a person in charge of visas asked us to sign some documents and handed us the permits to leave.  It all happened too fast, and for me, this was the shortest encounter with bureaucracy I had ever witnessed. It seemed like a blur because, in a matter of minutes, we were ready to go. 

Bureaucracy is tedious everywhere, but the USSR tops them all when it comes to it. While I lived there, I could never enter an office to get my request granted on the spot and had to return a few more times. When I dealt with the bureaucrats in the Soviet Union, they almost always needed another piece of paper to attach to my file before granting my request, no matter how insignificant that request might’ve been. 

Inside the office, I already felt hopeful about my new country. If this is how bureaucracy works in America, I could deal with it. With visas in our hands, we left the American Embassy jubilant.

 The following day, my mother-in-law purchased our tickets to Rome. Two days later, we took a taxi to Sheremetyevo, and boarded an Aeroflot flight that flew us out of the country of not enough. 

We stayed in Italy for three months, awaiting permission to enter the United States of America, and on March 7, 1978, we took a Pan Am flight to New York and landed at JFK. Since then, I’ve never looked back. 

That Thanksgiving Day in 1977 at the American Embassy was the day that forever changed me. I stopped living in fear. I no longer looked over my shoulder or spoke in a hushed tone, afraid of someone overhearing my conversation as I walked the streets of Moscow. On November 24, 1977, anti-Semitism and I had signed our divorce papers. At long last, I shook the shackles of oppression and spread my wings.  

Landing on the shores of the United States of America made me grateful and appreciative of a country that allowed me to become enough. Ever since, Thanksgiving Day had become my favorite holiday to honor. As a proud American, I celebrate it each year together with the rest of the country as a national holiday. For me, the day of Thanksgiving holds extra special meaning. It is a day I give thanks to America, my beloved country that sheltered and taught me to appreciate the freedoms I experience daily. But there is more to my appreciation of Thanksgiving Day.

Fourteen years ago, in 2007, a day before the official holiday began, I was diagnosed with a basal skull meningioma. At fifty-three, I went from being a healthy person to someone who was, within days, given a death sentence. Even though the growth was benign, my situation was dire.

“You have a non-malignant tumor in a malignant place,” Dr. Robinson said inside his office. He explained that the culprit of my illness grew in the wrong part of my body (as if there ever is a proper spot to grow those things), and it was about to kill me. The meningioma at the base of my skull was the size of a chicken egg when they discovered it. It pressed against my trachea and made me stop breathing each night I fell asleep. 

“You needed surgery yesterday, and I will leave now to schedule an appointment for you at Tampa General the day after Thanksgiving so you can get help from the best there is in the field of neurosurgery. Meantime, I am putting you on the highest dosage of steroids to save your life,” he said.

Dr. Robinson did save my life, and not only because of the medication but also by sending me to the best place at the right time. 

I left his office to get another MRI before I headed towards my house. It was the night before Thanksgiving, and I could not stop thinking about the holiday. Should I cancel it? To be honest, I was not in the right spirit to celebrate, but the more I thought about it, the more inclined I became in favor of a large gathering. Weeks earlier, I had invited a big crowd, and now sitting inside my car I could not find it in my heart to withdraw the invitation at the last moment. Plus, I could not call anyone that evening. It was approaching ten o’clock when I pulled into the driveway.

Inside the house, I shared the sad news with my husband. His mood had instantly changed, and the atmosphere around us filled with dread of the upcoming operation. But in the morning, I continued with Thanksgiving Day’s preparations. Being busy distracted me from the inner thoughts as I baked sweet potato and apple pies, and my husband took care of the turkey.

That day I made my traditional delicacy that I invented. I serve it to my guests every year on Thanksgiving Day. The filling is fresh pumpkin and cranberries mixed with sugar and infused with cinnamon and freshly grated nutmeg flavors. 

To wrap the yummy filling in, I use phyllo dough. Every time I do the individual pieces, I fold the dough into a triangle the same way a person folds the American flag to commemorate the soldiers who lost their lives to protect the freedoms of the United States. Freedom is never free. As I bend the dough, I think about the fallen heroes’ ultimate sacrifices, and I thank them each time I prepare this delicacy. 

On November 22, 2007, despite the grim diagnosis, I found reasons to be thankful. I was grateful to live in the United States of America, where I was about to receive the best medical care during my craniotomy. Tampa General is a world-known facility for performing brain surgeries, and I considered myself lucky to go there. I did not feel afraid. I had faith and trust in people who would help me get through this enormous challenge. 

American Thanksgiving is a day that is forever connected to the two most important events of my life. Forty-four years ago, back in the USSR, inside the American Embassy, I was granted freedom to leave the godforsaken country of not enough. Fourteen years ago, at Tampa General, the neurosurgeon gave me another chance at life. I am so grateful to America! It truly is the best country in the world. Happy Thanksgiving!

Of all of the pro-abortion talking points, only one seems to be the most honest to their cause, and that is the argument of personhood; is the fetus a human being, does it have value, and is it worth protecting? These are the questions to which pro-abortion advocates tend to resoundingly answer “no.”

This is not a debate about controlling women’s bodies, or being “only pro-birth,” this is a very sober fight for the life of our next generation; and the fight surrounds the question of intrinsic value. Do our children have intrinsic value? That’s the question to which pro-life advocates emphatically answer “yes.”

Pro-abortion advocates tend to use arguments like these:

“If you’re so pro-life, what about kids in foster care? Don’t they deserve to be loved? Would you adopt them, or do you only care about them being born?”

“If you’re so pro-life, what about kids born into poverty? Are you prepared to support the babies you advocate for?”

“If you’re so pro-life, do you support forced vasectomies? Men are involved too!”

“Halacha says that a woman can have an abortion if the baby is threatening the life of the mother. You wouldn’t want the mother to die, would you?”

Let us address these points.

Firstly, Christian pro-life advocates make up the largest majority of adoptions. 5% of practicing Christians in the United States have adopted, which is more than twice the number of all adults who have adopted. Secondly, in regards to donations to charities, “Some studies…have estimated that faith motivates as much as 75 percent of all charity in the United States.” Lastly, forced vasectomies do not kill anyone, unlike abortions. Those facts should be enough to quell petty arguments, right? Wrong. These arguments do not matter in the macro. They do not matter because at the crux of the pro-abortion argument is that a woman should be able to terminate her pregnancy for any reason she wants to, because “it’s her body”. So, any response to the pro-abortion argument regarding the life or viability of the fetus does not matter. If they did, the statistics previously linked would turn everyone pro-life.

No, it doesn’t matter if every single pro-life advocate adopted 25 children each and effectively ended the foster care industry. It doesn’t matter that there are almost zero cases where the mother quite literally has to choose between her life and the baby’s life, and even in those scenarios, the doctors perform an emergency C-section, where the baby still has a chance of surviving. 

Former abortionist, Dr. Anthony Levantino states here:

“I was faculty at the hospital for nine years, and I saw hundreds of cases of really severe pregnancy complications — cancers, heart disease, intractable diabetes out of control, toxemia of pregnancy out of control. And I saved — in those nine years — I saved hundreds of women from life-threatening pregnancies. And I did that by delivering them — by ending their pregnancy by delivery, either induction of labor or caesarean section. Delivering the baby. And I always tell people: in all those years, the number of babies that I had to — that I was obligated to deliberately kill in the process — was zero. None.”

(The full context of Dr. Levantino’s quote can be found here.)

Pro-choice activists don’t care that, in those scenarios, doctors still do whatever they can to save both the mother and the baby’s life. The mother choosing her own life doesn’t mean her physician must kill the baby; it means that saving the mother’s life is top priority while attempting to save the baby’s life as well. But again, none of this matters, because the pro-choice/pro-abortion argument would either shift to another red herring, or simply argue that “she can do whatever she wants with her body”. That’s the crux of the argument, and that is where focus of the rebuttal should be. 

The root of this debate is simply determining whether or not a fetus is a human being, so let’s talk about that.

The definition of an embryo is an unborn or unhatched offspring in the process of development, in particular a human offspring during the period from approximately the second to the eighth week after fertilization (after which it is usually termed a fetus).

And according to Encyclopedia Britannica, an embryo is “…the early developmental stage of an animal while it is in the egg or within the uterus of the mother. In humans the term is applied to the unborn child.”

The definition of a fetus is “the unborn young of any vertebrate animal, particularly of a mammal, after it has attained the basic form and structure typical of its kind” 

In those definitions, the aspects that get focused on the most are the time periods; the pro-abortion argument says what is in the womb is technically only a fetus after about 8 weeks, therefore, before that, it’s nothing but a ‘clump of cells.’ That argument is dangerous, evil, and plain wrong. A two-day old embryo has zero probability of turning into anything else except a human being. There is no chance it could turn into a watermelon, or a rock, or a piece of string, or anything else other than a baby human. The only thing that can happen to it other than developing into a human is not fully developing at all, and that is called a miscarriage, which unfortunately happens to about 10%–15% of expectant mothers. In other words, at what stage the fetus is in when it is killed is irrelevant to the discussion of whether or not they should be terminated. Those fetuses have an 85% chance of coming to full term, and a 100% chance of coming to full term as human beings. Abortion is not simply getting rid of ‘a clump of cells’, it is eradicating a baby by stripping it from its mother’s womb and dismantling it limb from limb. Former abortionist provider, Dr. Anthony Levatino, attested to this very truth before a house judiciary committee in 2019. The entire transcript of his address to the Kansas Senate Health and Human Services Committee can be found here.

The argument that abortions are fine because the fetus is not a human being is a slippery slope at best. That statement is not a prophecy; one can simply look at the policies being pushed today to see that. Politicians and community leaders have been openly pushing for late term abortions, termination far past the stages at which fetuses can survive after birth, since 2019. The linked Atlantic article states:

By defending more expansive abortion rights even in the face of these facts, Democrats are exposing an uncomfortable reality that they would rather not acknowledge: They embrace abortion as a woman’s right to end the life of her fetus at any stage—not the right to end her pregnancy.

At 24 weeks, and now even as early as 21 weeks, newborn infants have survived outside the womb with the help of neonatal intensive care. In Cuomo’s New York—and possibly someday soon in Northam’s Virginia—healthy, viable fetuses even after 24 weeks could easily be killed in the womb rather than delivered.

This is why the abortion-rights movement has long relied upon euphemisms to obscure the unpleasant truth about the right they advocate. Phrases like women’s rights, the right to choose, and reproductive freedom dominate their advocacy, along with dismissive jargon like clumps of cells.

But in defending bills that expand the right to abort viable fetuses, Democrats are giving away the game. Most people, even those who favor some abortion access, instinctively recoil from what they see. These late-term abortion bills do more than reveal Democratic radicalism. They draw back the veil of euphemism to expose abortion for what it is: At every stage of pregnancy, it is the taking of a human life. For the anti-abortion movement, it is a pivotal moment to insist upon that truth.

Again, the argument has been made that late term abortions are only needed in cases where the baby threatens the life of the mother. And again, the twofold problem with that argument is:

1. To save the life of the mother, the baby does not have to be killed.
2. The crux of the pro-abortion position is “my body, my choice.”
   

If the trajectory of the pro-choice/pro-abortion evolving policy over the past few decades is any indication, we will be right back at the debate stages discussing whether or not a woman has a right to kill her baby at any stage of her pregnancy for any reason. And those on the side of life will continue to lose those debates. 

This is what is evil about the pro-abortion stance. It purports to care about the mother and child, but cares about neither. As soon as there is a foothold to be had, they do the bait-and-switch. First the slogan was that abortions were to be “safe legal and rare,” then it became “my body, my choice,” then “late term abortions are only for the rarest of circumstances,” and now we’re back at the “stop controlling a woman’s body” phase. 

If protecting a baby’s life is seen as controlling a woman’s body, the “safe, legal and rare” argument is obsolete. If life in the womb is not really life, or at least not life worth protecting, then who is to say abortions can’t be plentiful? Who cares whether or not it’s rare? Who cares if black American women particularly, even though they are 14% of the childbearing population, account for 37% of the nation’s abortions? It doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of the pro-abortion argument. 

The truth however, is that it does matter. Having sex has potential consequences, and sometimes the consequence is getting pregnant. The child conceived is not at fault. Even in cases of rape or incest, which make up a fraction of 1% of pregnancies, though tragic, and traumatic, the baby is still not at fault. As stated in the beginning of this article, there are countless programs to give mothers the support they need in taking care of their baby. Killing the baby should never even be a topic of discussion. The person at fault in those scenarios are the rapists, who should face life in prison at best.

One other argument often made on the pro-abortion side is “don’t you believe the man should be held accountable for the baby as well?” My, and virtually all of the pro-life community, answer is a resounding ‘yes!’ My personal position is that absent and bad fathers are to blame for many societal ills including abortion, but this article isn’t about fathers; this one is. I am very passionate about fathers standing in their rightful place as priests over their homes and the redemptive effect it will have on the world. But I have to stress again: the pro-abortionists do not actually care about preventing abortions, so they do not really care about men being good fathers. One should not waste their time and energy making such involved arguments to those who will not even agree that a baby, the most innocent of the entire human species, is a life worthy of saving. We must start there, and stay there, until all human life is cherished, valued, and protected.

To life~

It seems undeniable that the Jewish world’s center of gravity has shifted decisively in favor of Israel. The Jewish state now contains the majority of the world’s Jews, or is about to. It has become the place where Jewish history is being made, for good or ill. Many Diaspora communities remain vital, but they are shrinking in both numbers and influence — especially in the United States.

Israel, in other words, is swiftly becoming hegemonic.

This change and its repercussions are the subject of Yossi Shain’s fascinating new book, “The Israeli Century: How the Zionist Revolution Changed History and Reinvented Judaism.” As the title suggests, Shain believes that, in the current century, it is Israel that will define Jewish life. The Diaspora will continue to exist, he says, and this is not a bad thing; but the prevailing zeitgeist will be Israeli.

To make his case, Shain sweeps through Jewish history both ancient and modern. He sketches the development of Jewish sovereignty, its relationship to the Diaspora that has existed since the Babylonian exile, and the constant push-pull between them. This relationship, Shain posits, has always been complex and fraught. It was, after all, the Babylonian Diaspora that formulated what we think of today as Judaism, and brought it back with them to the Land of Israel when they returned from exile. At the same time, however, the ancient Jewish states — there were several — remained the center of Jewish life, culture, religion, and historical development.

With the destruction of the Temple and the genocide that followed the Bar Kochba revolt, however, the Jewish people had to rethink the idea of sovereignty. Judea was scorched earth, but leaders like the rabbis of Yavne managed to save the Jewish people by creating a kind of sovereignty of the imagination, in which the Land of Israel and Jewish statehood became pure memory, to be restored in the messianic era.

Shain notes that Judaism did not — as some believe — fully divorce itself from politics, but it became a politics that was either internal to the semi-autonomous Diaspora communities or one of negotiation and compromise with the Jews’ gentile overlords, undertaken to head off the disastrous expulsions and pogroms that regularly struck the Jewish people.

With the coming of modernity, Shain posits, this began to change, and it did so rather quickly. In effect, two strains of thought developed. One was the rejection of sovereignty formulated by the assimilated German Jewish communities, codified in the theology of Reform Judaism. This, he says, “meant embracing a broad, scientific education, fluency in German as a substitute for the Yiddish of the shtetls, Protestant ethics, a refined manner, and rules of conduct that reflected their enlightenment, judiciousness, and membership of a flourishing and modern bourgeoisie.”

Abraham Geiger, the founder of Reform Judaism, turned this ambition into a theological imperative. He wanted, Shain notes, for the Jews to change “from being a ‘compact nationality’ into ‘a diaspora in which Jews lived among the nations whom they were destined to instruct.’” Shain adds, “In the new Reform doctrine, Prophetic Judaism was depicted as hostile to the idea of sovereignty.”

Sovereignty, the reformers believed, would corrupt the essence of Judaism, which was to bear witness to and educate the world in the prophetic message. To engage in the world of earthly politics, let alone modern power politics, was something like heresy. Shain describes Reform as formulating “a doctrine based on denying that the Jews were an ethno-national tribe and framing their Jewish revival as a ‘universal church’ that would promote social justice.”

It was these German reformers who established the first relatively large Jewish communities in the United States, and they brought their theological beliefs with them. Shain notes, “The descendants of German Jewish immigrants, who affiliated with the Reform Movement, wanted to put an end once and for all to the incessant questions about their national loyalty. In 1885, they adopted the Pittsburgh Platform, which declared that the Jews were ‘no longer a nation, but a religious community.’”

At the same time, ironically, the Reform vision was failing in Europe. The massive rise in a new, modern antisemitism prompted a rejection of that vision in the form of Zionism. Shain quotes Zionist founding father Moses Hess describing his Zionist awakening: “It dawned upon me for the first time, in the midst of my socialistic activities, that I belong to my unfortunate, slandered, despised and dispersed people. And already, then, though I was greatly estranged from Judaism, I wanted to express my Jewish patriotic sentiment in a cry of anguish.”

Shain also cites the great scholar of the Kabbalah Gershom Scholem, who said of the assimilationist Jews who surrounded him in his German youth that they “lacked discrimination in all matters affecting themselves, yet in all other matters they mustered that faculty for reasoning, criticism, and vision,” which Scholem called a form of “self-deception.” And the great Zionist poet Haim Nahman Bialik, Shain notes, condemned the reformers’ worldview by simply noting, “They stood not firm on the day of wrath.”

In the end, the Zionists won the argument, though in the most tragic way possible. The reformers stayed in Europe, and they died; the Zionists went to Palestine, and they survived. The Holocaust annihilated the assimilationist vision, and the Reform attempt to educate the gentiles in the prophetic vision was incinerated in the ovens of Auschwitz. With the successful establishment of a Jewish state, the Zionists believed that the debate was over. Assimilation and reform didn’t work, the Jewish state did, and that was the end of it.

For myself, who was born an American Jew in a Reform context and eventually rejected it and made aliyah, the most interesting part of Shain’s book is his description of the aftermath: the Zionists may have triumphed on the world stage, but the debate that they felt was settled has continued in the United States. There, the Reform movement remains the dominant strain of Judaism, and has always displayed a measured ambivalence toward the idea of sovereignty. Indeed, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many Reform leaders and public figures violently rejected Zionism, until the Holocaust finally marginalized them.

While the Reform movement today accepts Zionism, it continues to display a cautious ambivalence toward it. As Shain notes:

It was in this context that the Reform Movement adopted the new Pittsburgh Platform in 1999, which embraced Zionism and affirmed the “unique qualities of living in … the land of Israel,” but also called for cultural and religious pluralism in the country. The progressive movement hoped to reinforce its legitimacy and institutional standing in the United States by deepening its involvement in Israel.

The Reform movement, in other words, wants to have it both ways: to accept Jewish sovereignty without giving up the theology first articulated by Geiger — the Jews as a universal people dedicated to education of the gentiles in the prophetic vision through the advocacy of social justice.

Shain believes this was codified when “the Reform Movement officially adopted tikkun olam in its doctrine in 1997, and it quickly became synonymous with progressive politics. Ruth Messinger, the former Manhattan borough president and head of the American Jewish World Service … argued that tikkun olam would ‘deter antisemitism by demonstrating that Jews work to provide social justice and dignity for all people regardless of race, religion, and ethnicity.’”

In Shain’s view, this push-pull between Israel and the Diaspora, Reform and Zionism, the particular and the universal, ensuring Jewish sovereignty and educating the gentiles, is the essential issue to be debated and resolved in the “Israeli Century.” He concludes:

At exactly the time of a deep moral crisis among liberal American Jews, who search for a new Jewish, moral, universal foothold in the face of assimilation, the disintegration of communities, and the increasing alienation from Israel, the Israeli Century will require, more than anything else, Jewish creativity that is both rooted and cosmopolitan, which will find a new balance among the threats, both from within and without, facing Jews in Israel and across the Diaspora.

Shain’s is an insightful and, for the most part, accurate assessment of the current state of Israel-Diaspora relations. However, Shain is not an American, and as an Israeli, he is at least somewhat foreign to the intricacies of American Jewish life. This leads him, I think, to miss something quite important: in America, it is probable that the old debate between Reform and Zionism will not be decided by “Jewish creativity.” It is much more likely to be resolved by history itself; and the Zionist argument appears to be winning again.

Indeed, given recent events, especially over the past year, Messinger’s statement seems somewhat farcical. In particular, there is no indication whatsoever that “tikkun olam” is deterring antisemitism in any way. Over the last 20 years, the progressive movement that the slogan symbolizes has become increasingly antisemitic, and while the far-right has committed horrific acts of antisemitic violence, there has also been a wave of attacks on Jews committed almost entirely by leftists, Muslims, and people of color — constituencies that are generally represented by and an active part of the progressive movement. And as shown when the Congressional Black Caucus blocked a censure of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) following her antisemitic statements, to advocate “social justice and dignity for all people regardless of race, religion, and ethnicity” has accomplished very little, even within mainstream politics. Put simply, the tikkunists “stood not firm on the day of wrath.”

As such, Shain is likely wrong that the Israeli Century will “require, more than anything else, Jewish creativity that is both rooted and cosmopolitan.” It seems more likely that the American Jewish upper class — which has always dominated Reform Judaism — will mostly disappear, whether through demographic or ideological collapse. Those who remain will give up on rootedness entirely, and embrace radical progressivism — whatever its real-world impact on the Jewish people.

Faced with this, the question becomes what the Jewish middle and under-classes — who still make up the majority of Reform Jewish congregations in America — will do in response. It seems to me that the imperative of the moment is not to try to work out a balance via “Jewish creativity,” but to attempt to formulate a form of Zionism that can be reconciled with life in the Diaspora.

Most American Jews are very unlikely to make aliyah, and ironically, a total identification with the State of Israel as it currently exists may be counterproductive. What is open to American Jews, however, is something Shain seems to suggest with his idea of the Israeli Century itself: a kind of “Zionism of the spirit,” in which the essential principles of Zionism are given a Diaspora context. These include things like Jewish solidarity, empowerment, self-defense, cultural development, identity, and pride; as well as such basics as the Hebrew language, knowledge of Jewish history and thought, and insistence on a strident protection of the Jewish body. Zionism, above all, teaches that the Jews have a right to be for themselves as much as for others; and this idea is as important and powerful in the Diaspora as it is in Israel.

Shain’s thesis of an Israeli Century is, in fact, something of a way forward in this regard. If he is right that Israel is now the dominating force in Jewish history — and he is unquestionably right — then its task should be to foster and support this Zionism of the spirit in the Diaspora. This will be difficult, but if it succeeds, it could well provide what he calls the “new Jewish, moral, universal foothold” the Diaspora needs, especially in the United States.

This is very much in the interests of Israel in the Israeli Century — however daunting challenges like “assimilation, the disintegration of communities, and the increasing alienation from Israel” may appear to be at the moment. For myself, as one who was and no longer is an American Jew, I can only embrace the words of Chaim Weizmann, quoted by Shain himself: “They can give up on us, but we cannot give up on them.”

Reprinted with permission from The Algemeiner

Benjamin Kerstein is a columnist and the Israel Correspondent for The Algemeiner. His website can be viewed here and his books purchased at Amazon.com.

Does Star Trek have a Jewish soul—or at least a humanistic one? Seekers may find confirmation in a new museum show, Star Trek: Exploring New Worlds, at a Jewish institution, the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. The show will run through February 20, 2022. While you will have to bring your own interpretation to the stories, costumes, sets, weapons, and props on display, you may never look at Star Trek quite the same way again.

Star Trek, which broke ground a half century ago (featuring television’s first interracial kiss) remains relevant today, including its current incarnations. The Star Trek universe got a brief flurry of publicity in 2021 when William Shatner, the Captain Kirk of the original series, flew into space. After the 90-year-old Shatner blasted on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket, he was officially recognized as an astronaut. He was also recognized as the oldest person—and certainly the oldest Jew—ever in space.

But it is a photo of the other Jewish star of Star Trek, the late Leonard Nimoy, in character as Mr. Spock, who greets visitors to Exploring New Worlds. 

Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry invited actors to infuse elements of their personal identities into their characters. So Nimoy developed the splayed finger “live long and prosper” Vulcan salute from the birkat kohanim “blessing of the Kohanim.” As a child in Boston, he watched in awe as rabbis descended from the high priest Aaron put their hands into a shape that resembles the letter shin to bless congregants. Nimoy transferred the gesture conferring peace and blessing to the alien (yet oddly familiar) Vulcan culture invented by Star Trek.

To some, Kirk and Spock, as played by Shatner and Nimoy, represent different Jewish archetypes. Spock is the traditional Torah scholar, the product of a learned civilization, the possessor of rabbinical wisdom. But Kirk, as played by Shatner, is a new kind of Jew, a bold leader, two-fisted, an assimilated American or an Israeli commando (the Six Day War took place after the first season.)

Developed by Gene Roddenberry, a secular humanist and World War II veteran, Star Trek has a history of inspiring people. Star Trek has driven interest in science and space, certainly, but also captured imaginations with its vision of a more tolerant, united society. 

Mae Jemison, the first Black woman in space, was among a new generation of astronauts recruited for NASA by Nichelle Nichols, the show’s iconic Uhura. Jemison says, “I appreciate and love the character Uhura, but I like many characters on Star Trek.” The show “told a lot about a hopeful future where we were able to get past our differences.”

Nichols herself had once been ready to leave the show to follow her Broadway dream. After she gave Roddenberry her resignation letter, she attended an awards show. An organizer interrupted her dinner, asking her to meet a “famous fan.” She looked up to see Martin Luther King telling her how much he enjoyed Star Trek, the only show he allowed his children to stay up to watch. 

But when Nichols mentioned her impending departure, King told her, “You cannot. Don’t you see what this man [Roddenberry] is doing, who has written this? This is the future. He has established us as we should be seen. Three hundred years from now, we are here. We are marching. And this is the first step. When we see you, we see ourselves, and we see ourselves as intelligent and beautiful and proud.” Nichols went back to work on the following Monday. She told Roddenberry, as a tear rolled down his cheek, “Gene, if you want me to stay, I will stay. There’s nothing I can do but stay.”

While representation and tolerance were important themes, Star Trek was meant to be enjoyed as entertainment. At Star Trek: Exploring New Worlds, costumes, props, and relics holy to Trekkers and casual fans alike are on display. They range from a restored navigation console from the original series to communicators, tricorders, phasers, and filming models of the USS Enterprise. There’s a captain’s chair to sit in and a transporter simulator to “beam up.” 

Costume fans will enjoy Spock’s tunic as worn by Leonard Nimoy, Lt. Uhura’s dress as worn by Nichelle Nichols, and of course the open-chest tunic worn by Ricardo Montalbán in The Wrath of Khan. Other outfits include Captain Picard’s uniform worn by Patrick Stewart, a Borg costume, and the rubber suit inhabited by the brutal alien Gorn, whose life was nonetheless spared by Captain Kirk.

Ironically, the show’s founder, Gene Roddenberry was a lapsed Baptist turned secular humanist who rejected overt display of religion. So why has Star Trek landed in Los Angeles at a museum “deeply rooted in Jewish heritage and inspired by its values?” 

Certainly, Los Angeles is the perfect place for the exhibition. As the Red Hot Chili Peppers sang in Californication, “Space may be the final frontier, but it’s made in a Hollywood basement.” But why a Jewish cultural institution?

The original show had major contributions from Jewish actors like Leonard Nimoy, (Spock), Walter Koenig (Chekov), and Shatner. Jewish writers were well-represented, like Robert Bloch, Shimon Wincelberg, Don Mankiewicz, Harlan Ellison, Jerry Sohl, and David Gerrold, as were producers and musicians. 

But the values of Star Trek, such as inclusion, integration, and discovery are equally important. The show broke barriers with a Japanese American, an African-American, and a number of Jewish stars on the bridge. 

Star Trek also aligns with Jewish values including seeking learning, pursuing justice, honoring memory, and showing kindness while rebuilding the world (tikkun olam). 

“For 55 years, Star Trek has portrayed a future in which diverse crews of humans and interplanetary species work together toward a common goal, strengthened by their members’ different cultures, abilities, and perspectives,” says Sheri Bernstein, Skirball Museum Director. “There is a close connection between this optimistic, inclusive vision and our Skirball mission, which is guided by Jewish traditions of welcoming the stranger, fostering community, promoting justice, and celebrating hope and discovery.”

In “Dagger of the Mind,” an episode of the original show, a character refers to the famous formulation of Rabbi Hillel, who was once asked to summarize the Torah while standing on one foot. “Don’t do to others what is hateful to you.” The episode was written by S. Bar-David, a pseudonym for well-known TV writer Shimon Wincelberg, a Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany. 

In addition to Jewish references, Star Trek also has Holocaust parallels. In “Patterns of Force,” Nimoy and Shatner disguise themselves as Nazis to infiltrate the planet Ekos. The planet’s rulers have adopted National Socialism and are attempting a Final Solution to eliminate the neighboring Zeons. Kirk and Spock derail the impending genocide, but not before the Jewish Nimoy remarks to the Jewish Shatner, “You should make a very convincing Nazi.”

Although an atheist, Roddenberry believed in tolerance while condemning false prophets.” He said, “Star Trek was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences in life forms.” 

Not everyone bought into Roddenberry’s worldview, however. Irritated at how the dialog for his script “The City on the Edge of Forever” was rewritten, the caustic Jewish writer Harlan Ellison said it now featured “precisely the kind of dopey Utopian bullshit that Roddenberry loved.”

“People often ask if Judaism was part of Star Trek,” Nimoy said in a 2008 speech to a Jewish audience in Montreal. “The answer is definitely yes. Education is a Jewish value, and all of the members of the Starship Enterprise were highly educated. So are individual dignity and social justice, which were a big deal in Star Trek. As a Jew I had a strong sense of comfort with the series. I felt at home.” 

Nimoy was a supporter of Jewish institutions, including a childhood center at Temple Israel of Hollywood and the Susan and Leonard Nimoy Career Center at Beit T’Shuvah, a Jewish recovery center. He was also a Hollywood mensch; as a producer of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, he helped 70-year-old DeForest Kelley get a million-dollar payday for his final film. 

“The best of Star Trek is when the metaphors and allegories are subtle,” says Scott Mantz, an entertainment reporter and co-consultant of programming for Star Trek: Exploring New Worlds. 

Mantz says Jewish-themed episodes include shows about Genesis, the Garden of Eden and false idols like those Abraham smashed. “In the episode ‘The Apple,’ the people the Enterprise encounter live in a garden of Eden but live only to take care of a machine.”

“One thing about Judaism is about honoring memory,” Mantz adds. “In the film The Wrath of Khan, McCoy says to Admiral Kirk when Spock dies, ‘He’s really not dead as long as we remember him.’ At the end, the crew on the bridge is sitting shiva for Spock, honoring his memory.”

“When I think of what it means to be Jewish, I think of diversity and hope and acceptance and tolerance,” Mantz says. Star Trek, which aired just twenty years after the Holocaust, “is about tolerance–after the greatest display of intolerance of the last thousand years.”

Star Trek: Exploring New Worlds

Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90049

310-440-4500; skirball.org

Look quickly now the goal’s in sight,
We need just dare and take the fight;
Never weary of the weight,
Don’t ever falter from the fate.

Leave the world behind that can’t be borne,
Not one more day of servant-thorn;
The load of human-wretch has none,
That could with force to have me done.

And though alone am I to ease my load,
The earth’s a fool to think it’s bold;
Since only God’s and angels’ eyes,
Can ever see my tears and cries.

Who can mend the times when bad,
Or change the face of some so sad?
Only those who know the age,
That revels in the rebel’s rage.

The Self-Abnegation of the New Prohibitionists

“Change in a trice
The lilies and languors of virtue
For the raptures and roses of vice.”

Algernon Swinburne

Today’s political elite can truly be called the new prohibitionists. To paraphrase writer Anne Hingston, they “Restrict first, discuss never.”

Recent history, from the time of Prohibition in 1920s’ America, has demonstrated that attempts by the state to engage in social engineering are doomed to failure. People will always get what they want. And in so doing strengthen the so-called criminal elements among us. The only proper role for the state is to protect citizens from violence and from threats of, or incitement to, violence.

To those who would argue that the health costs of indulgence in tobacco, alcohol, and drugs are a strain on the health-care system, we would remind them that citizens who indulge in hedonistic pleasures pay enormous consumption taxes on the products they buy—eight times greater on average than “virtuous” citizens—most of which go to support the health-care system and environmental agencies. They also tend to die younger thereby being less of a burden on the chronic-care system. That is their choice. And the freedom to choose—even badly—is a foundational principle of a free society as Justice Louis Brandeis reminded us all. 

When Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau said in 1968 that government has no place in the bedrooms of the nation—just before removing homosexuality from his nation’s Criminal Code—he meant that it had no role regulating actions of consenting adults. Not everything is going to be perfect in life. Not every problem can be solved by legislation. No politician should pretend it can and be allowed to put into force straight-jacket law that seeks to micro-manage every aspect of our lives. 

Those who try should be exposed for what they truly are. Unimaginative and cowardly functionaries staggering from election to election who—fearful of tackling the vested interests on the really important issues necessary to protect the public good—hope that creating some body of fear will provide just enough fodder for some publicity come election time. As Tacitus wrote, “When the state is most impotent, the laws are most multiplied.”

Some governments make noises about decriminalizing marijuana, but at the same time propose to give police unlimited powers to stop drivers for random drug checks in their cars. Others, in an effort to placate women’s rights groups, legislate laws permitting workers to sue employers for the novel tort of “psychological harassment.” A politician’s friend dies in an inline-skating accident so everyone is quickly forced to wear a helmet if they take a bicycle or scooter. His colleague wants teens to stay in school so he orders them not to drop out till age 18, no matter how little they want to be in class and no matter what their parents think. A big city mayor authorizes police cameras at street level in his city’s university quarter ostensibly to curtail drug sales, but that in fact violate the privacy of all citizens by indiscriminately capturing images of the activities of all passersby.

What the new prohibitionists share is an anti-liberal sentiment in that they seek to curtail the basic liberties of natural law that is the patrimony of every human being. They get away with it because too many of us have surrendered to the sovereignty of self-abnegation. We have become a people plagued by a self-doubt driven by a jealousy of others’ self-belief. And in the process have created a self-imposed tyranny that mutes individual integrity and conscience and trades them for the false security demanded by state-sponsored bureaucratic consensus.

Modigliani’s painting, Dylan Thomas’ poetry, Hemingway’s novels, and even Tom Paine’s polemics would be lost to the ages if they had to survive on alfalfa sprouts and vitamins and succumb to political correctness and temperance. Our lives would be the worse for it, devoid of passion or purpose.

Government’s role must be one of persuasion and education, not compulsion and coercion, no matter how odious a citizen’s personal habit may be. The dark side of our governors is that they engage in unbridled intervention in matters of private domain to punish the governed into virtuous conduct. But legislators don’t know what’s right for us. They barely know what’s right for themselves. The role of the state is to protect us from each other, not from ourselves.

As Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “Those who would trade permanent liberty for temporary security shall, in the end, have neither liberty nor security.”

Image credit: From “The Libertine,” Johnny Depp as John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, a licentious poet in the court of King Charles II of England.

Part 2: Brainwashing

The ultimate goal of totalitarianism, Arendt says, is to dominate people from within. To keep them in a constant state of anxiety, with a moving narrative.

A section of the UK population, and in other liberal democracies, experience other citizens as unreachable when trying to open a discussion about Covid-19 policy. They get blanked, or attacked, for even posing questions. For sharing information on immunity, I have been called an anti-vaxxer, a conspiracy theorist and a Trump supporter!

What has happened to people’s critical thinking? Why is it, since March 2020, in order to belong to society, you now have to hold specific beliefs:

1. Lockdowns control the behavior of viruses 
2. Cloth masks stop viral transmission
3. Immunity only comes via a vaccine. Naturally acquired immunity no longer exists.
4. The rights of the individual are subordinate to the greater good. 
5. Anyone not in step with the above is a bad person, a danger to society, an ‘anti-vaxxer’. 

How on earth did so many people accept government Covid policy, when never before in history have healthy people been locked down en masse. Surely, it is legitimate to question this, and examine evidence to support such a radical departure from the normal practice of isolating the sick, whilst protecting the vulnerable.

However, nearly two years down the line, questioning the government narrative is still met with derision, aggression and often name calling from a significant percentage of the population.

Science and democracy traditionally move forward, through civilized debate of opposing views. Not so since March 2020. It is not just members of the public who are pounced on and ostracized for having the audacity to ask questions.

Many eminent scientists have also been ridiculed and censored from the public arena for advocating different measures, such as the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration (1). Evidence has just been released to show that, in their case, the smear campaign came from the top, from Fauci, the Director of NIH, and the man in charge of America’s response to Covid-19 (2).

Articulated concern for civil liberties, closed businesses, children’s education, soaring mental health problems, including suicides, and three quarters of a million missed cancer diagnoses, get met with blank stares, or condescending replies:

‘It’s for our protection’, ‘It’s to protect the NHS’.

Why are people who fight for minority rights, now so energetically othering anyone who challenges the government line? People will champion ‘my body, my choice’  for women’s rights, and in the next breath damn anyone making an informed choice not to take an experimental vaccine. They no longer view bodily autonomy, as the given it previously was, and an essential ingredient of democracy.

People have even been told what to call anyone questioning the government Covid narrative. Illogically, they are all called anti-vaxxers, even if they support vaccines, but not mandates.

In September 2021, the Mercian-Webster dictionary changed their definition of anti-vaxxer, to include people who oppose mandates (3). It is a ploy of tyranny to change language in order to alter the truth.

Are we looking at a phenomenon similar to that described by Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt (1966) Penguin Books.), when she speaks of the totalitarian masses? “…the fanaticised members can be reached by neither experience nor argument; identification with the movement and total conformism seem to have destroyed the very capacity for experience…”

How did it happen that so many have fixed beliefs that are unreachable by reason or data? And, like Jehovah’s Witnesses, anyone outside this belief system is classed a sinner. It is like mass conversion to a cult through brainwashing.

Are we actually looking at something like brainwashing?

Brainwashing was studied by an American sociologist, Albert Biderman, in 1957 (Biderman, A. D. (1957). Communist attempts to elicit false confessions from Air Force prisoners of war. Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, 33(9), 616-625 ncbi.nlm.nih.govarchive.org). He looked at the conditions that had led American prisoners of war to return home with a new set of beliefs, after the Korean War. Chinese and Korean captors used specific methods to indoctrinate the soldiers in Chinese ideology. These servicemen had to undergo re-education before they were able to return to American society.

These conditions happen to exactly map onto those used by governments, since March 2020. Known as Biderman’s Principles, they are listed in the chart below. Eight chronological methods of treatment, Biderman found, lead to an individual becoming brainwashed.

Biderman’s Chart of Coercion (6)

Examining the conditions listed in the left-hand column, it’s clear that these have operated since March 2020 in the UK, as well as globally. People were isolated in their homes, through lockdown, and subjected to a single narrative by the mainstream media, broadcasting an unchallenged government line. This tactic encourages people to bond with the government. With a fear generating narrative, people follow government measures which relieve their anxiety.

The people, in my experience, who appear to be in a deep Covid cult are those who were able to fully lockdown and work from home, as opposed to frontline workers like postmen, bin men and delivery staff who couldn’t.

Alleged non compliance, such as the two friends drinking coffee on a walk in Derbyshire (7), were humiliated through disproportionate media coverage.

On New Year’s Eve, 2021, in Glasgow, a pub was raided by six van loads of police, and older customers were tackled to the ground. Apparently, because three people were dancing (8).

The pub’s license was threatened and the state, through the police, shows its omnipotence and the futility of noncompliance.

Uncertainty about making plans has caused exhaustion and anxiety:

“Will we have Christmas?” “Will I be able to visit my dying relative?” “Will the children be in school?” “Yes, you can go on holiday,” offers relief and reward, but then the rules change continuously, and people are made to obey rules that either make no sense, or seem trivial demands. In a Dorset church, where the Vicar is mask exempt, some members are trying to get him sacked, because he spontaneously sang without a mask, forgetting for a split second that this was against regulations (9).

We have, in fact, been subjected to a political hokey kokey. The government puts one policy in, then takes it out, in, out, in, out, then they shake it all about, with details that have no logical sense. Measures are hinted at, and then threatened: “We’re not going to introduce…. We may have to introduce this…… we may unless you do this…. for example, “take boosters to save Christmas.”

The conditions we have lived under since March 2020, are not supported by scientific data (10). Is it coincidental that they follow Biderman’s principles? These methods have been known to tyrants at least since the Korean War.

We know that there was deliberate foul play by the CCP at the beginning of 2020. Information came from China that was designed to over scare the world about the virus. Our media broadcast people dropping dead in the streets of Wuhan and details of a hospital built by China in three days. These have been shown to be lies, as is clearly evidenced by Michael Senger’s seminal article in the Tablet magazine (10).

Again, it was through China’s influence that the WHO recommended lockdowns (10). This was on the say so of the CCP, and not data.

Yet the government and media, rather than address the influence of the CCP, continue to obsess with a narrow focus on the virus, counting and reporting the number of Sarscov2 infections. The Covid narrative is kept center stage, and moving. The numbers of people with colds from the mild omicron variant were continually reported through the Christmas holidays of December 2021, without much emphasis on the good news data from South Africa (11).

If we have been influenced into measures. still unsubstantiated by data, that have destroyed infrastructure, where is the national debate? And where is the national debate on the origin of the virus, which is now seen as most likely coming from the Wuhan lab of virology. How can trickery from a super power not be of utmost national interest? And we ignore at our peril the greatest transfer of wealth from nation states to global corporations, and from the citizens to the richest 1% (12) which governmental Covid policies has brought about.

Mass brainwashing is what Dr Matthias Desmet, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Ghent University, Belgium (13) calls “crowd or mass formation”. He points out that when you have mass formation, which he says is the same as mass hypnosis, people get a new sense of connectedness that is unifying. The rituals of masks and lockdowns give people a sense of solidarity.

Once people accept the starting point of a logic, all that follows on from this is accepted. To ‘save the NHS’, they will believe anything is necessary; for example, accepting that old people should die alone, women should give birth in masks and children should sit with their faces covered for eight hours a day. Previously accepted ethics are thrown out the window.

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

Primo Levi.

Desmet believes that for mass formation to occur, people needed to feel disconnected and have no meaning in their lives prior to the crisis. Many I observe in deep Covid cult are socially well connected, and part of strong meaningful communities. It’s my belief that the measures imposed since March 2020, coupled with a ratcheting up of fear, have themselves been sufficient to create the brainwashing.

Desmet says about 30% of the population are in deep mass hypnosis. These are the people who believe in removing the civil liberties of the outliers. He suggests 50% are not in deep hypnosis, but will not speak out against the status quo. The remaining 20% are not hypnotized and represent those prepared to speak against the accepted public narrative.

What can be done about mass brainwashing ?

Many find they hit a brick wall, or an attacking wolf, when they try to open a conversation about the COVID-19 narrative. In Psychology of the Crowds (1895), however, Gustave Le Bon says that it is imperative to keep speaking out, because it stops the mass hypnosis from getting deeper. Mass formation can lead to atrocities, because people believe they are doing their duty to maintain public safety. Dissonant voices need to remain in public spaces to prevent a possible progression to unspeakable acts against the outliers.

Desmet, as do I, recommends speaking out with a voice of reason and compassion. I suggest concentrating on the 50%. On occasion it is difficult not to feel angry with people who fail to see the threat of increasing authoritarianism. However, it’s important to remember that it is those in, or with social power, who have created this global situation, not them.

It is alarming to have a society running on neither reason nor science (15), like a return to pre-enlightenment thinking, or an era of post truth, as Mark Pickles says so well (16). My experience of those in the cult grip tells me it is a robust phenomenon. I do believe, however, that human behavior is multi-layered. The hypnotized can be brought back by the click of a hypnotist’s fingers. What will be the factors that trigger people out of mass hypnosis, even if, it’s on a one-by-one basis?

We had an example of this from Carole Malone, a regular guest on the Dan Wooton Show on GBNews. After having a cold from omicron, her mindset switched completely, from that of an authoritarian Covid cultist to a wise medicine woman. You could witness that her previous anxiety about ’the killer virus’ had drained from her face.

Take heart in the belief that speaking out is the right thing to do. Let us hope enough see the destruction that these social measures are causing in the UK, and elsewhere, and that the world’s liberal democracies can reclaim the way of life that their name implies.

For decades, the clouds of socialism have been hovering over the United States of America, gathering together to unleash their destructive force upon millions of freedom-loving Americans.

In nature, when clouds gather, it takes a perfect combination of conditions for a devastating storm to occur. First, a low-pressure warm air system has to come from one direction. Then, a high-pressure, cool and dry air system must come from another direction. When these two systems collide, a storm of immense proportions develops and unleashes its power upon the earth. With thunder, lighting, and wind, it wipes out everything that stands in its way; dams break, rivers overflow, flooding occurs, and many lives are lost.

Socialism is no different. It takes its time to build followers. When the number of supporters become significant enough to strike, it releases its power upon the rest of the population and takes control of the minds and lives of all citizens.

Socialism is an economic and social theory that advocates for social ownership, government control of the means of production, and elimination of private ownership of property. The state is strongly involved in the redistribution of goods and wealth. Everything is controlled and owned by the state. The totalitarian regime is in charge of natural resources and manufacturing is directed strictly for necessities alone. Private enterprise is forbidden. Socialism’s emphasis is on equality of outcomes instead of personal achievement.

In theory, socialism sounds like a grand idea, but it does not work in real life. The concept of equal redistribution of wealth is not actualized in a socialist society. The only equal redistribution that most people of the Soviet Union experienced was the equal redistribution of misery. 

Socialism is a corrupt system. The USSR, the country in which I grew up, was the first victim of socialism. Under the pretense of being concerned about its citizens’ well-being, the members of the Communist Party manipulated them and filled its own pockets with incredible wealth.

In my twenty-four years of living in the USSR, it was perpetually a country of not enough, with endless shortages of food and other necessities of life. No economic system can survive without private enterprise. Without healthy competition, the quality and quantity of production under socialism suffered. The long queues served as a testament to that.

Even though, in theory, socialism promotes equal rights for all, those rights did not exist in the Soviet Union. The minorities hurt. The socialist government tried to eliminate minorities. It discouraged the use of indigenous language and suppressed their culture. In 1944, during World War Two, Stalin deported entire nationalities in cattle trains, including 250,000 Tatars, Chechens, and Ingushi, to work camps in inhospitable regions. 

During and after the death of Stalin, all national minorities underwent intense “Russification.” They were forced or “encouraged” to give up their language in favor of Russian. Use of minority languages was made illegal and writers were forbidden from publishing in any language other than Russian.  The Livonians, a Finno-Ugric people, were one of many indigenous groups who saw their language, their culture, and their way of life eliminated by these edicts.

 Soviet Jews were forbidden from practicing Judaism, because any religion was anathema to communism. I call them “Jews-by-default” because they were stripped of any practices or beliefs that maintained their religious qualities. In order to make them a target of persecution, the authoritarian government came up with a clever plan. They transformed the religion of their ancestors into their nationalities. The fifth question on any official document was always the same; it asked the petitioner to list nationality. For the Jews, their place of birth did not matter. I was born in Kazakhstan, but my nationality was listed as Jewish on my birth certificate. This is how all Soviet Jews were identified as the scapegoats of society and cause for discrimination. 

The infiltration of socialism into America began shortly after the Cold War started, which was initially about the arms race, but later turned into a political conflict between the two ideologies of socialism and capitalism. The USSR and the United States, both participated in the Vietnam and Korean Wars to spread their influence. The Soviets sought to install socialism in these countries. The Cuban Missile Crisis was centered on Cuba’s determination to remain socialist. Many other countries have fallen under the spell of socialism, namely Venezuela most recently. 

In America, those who drive this ideology do it under a different name. They call themselves neo-socialists, progressives, or democratic socialists. The last one just kills me. There was no democracy in the socialist country where I lived. The totalitarian regime of the Communist Party controlled the country, forcing people to live in fear. The “big brother” watched, and the government encouraged neighbors to spy on each other. Neighbors disappeared, and no one saw them again. Envy and jealousy motivated the spying.

During the most challenging times, when food in the USSR became scarce, people went through neighbors’ garbage to see what was there, and if they found onion skins or other discarded scraps of food, they went to the police to report them.

Still, many Americans are enamored by socialism. The sad reality is that most of those people are highly educated, innovative, and intelligent individuals.  I see the clever tactics the media, social media, and institutions of higher learning use to brainwash Americans and convince them to favor socialism, even the highly educated ones. 

The clouds of socialism gather, and the perfect storm is nearby.

Day by day, I observe the warning signs. I am appalled by the stagnated minds of those who refuse to think for themselves and accept everything shoved down their throats by the opinion-makers as pure truth. Every civilized society has destroyed itself from within, and the United States is next in line.

Those who admire socialism call themselves progressives. What a joke! The idea of a democratic socialistic society that they promote is outdated and, moreover, claims to its success has been disproven. It did not work in the USSR, a country of stoic, patriotic people who fought the Germans on the battlefield and bravely laid down their lives in the name of Mother Russia. It did not work in Hungary or Poland and it does not work in Cuba or Venezuela.  

I often wonder when people will learn from history. Why do we continue to repeat the same mistakes made by generations before us?  We are supposed to grow beyond greed, envy, lust for power, and manipulation of minds. What makes the admirers of socialism think such a form of government would work in the United States? It boggles my mind even to entertain this idea. 

I cannot envision America without capitalism, which makes the economy grow and brings advantages and opportunities to everyone. I cannot imagine the American people subjugated by an autocratic, totalitarian regime. It will be the end of the United States and the freedoms this wonderful country protects and preserves for everyone. 

But the longer I live here, the more I see the clouds of socialism gather, and that the perfect storm is nearby.

Jews around the world can all count their Hebrew blessings that an attack on a Texas synagogue on Shabbat, in an 11-hour standoff with a maniacal Muslim gunman on January 15, did not result in the kind of gruesome catastrophe Jewish people have grown accustomed to for well 2,000 years. Maybe the Lone Star State is lucky for those who wear the Star of David. 

This hostage crisis targeting Jews, miraculously, did not escalate into a bloodbath. Indeed, the four worshippers, which included the rabbi, resourcefully fled the sanctuary shortly before the FBI stormed the shul and shot the terrorist.

It goes without saying that other planned attacks—in an astounding number of different nations—have not gone so well. The law of averages when it comes to Jews confronted with those who wish them harm, generally, results in more harrowing crime scenes. Hostages rarely escape. 

It was true of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics; and a wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer, killed and tossed overboard on the Achille Lauro cruise ship in 1985; two elderly women in Paris, Mireille Knoll stabbed and then torched in her apartment in 2018, and Sarah Halimi, thrown from her balcony in 2017; also in Paris, the slaughter of four Jews in a kosher market in 2015; and in 2006, the torture and murder of Ilan Halimi by an Islamist group properly named the Gang of Barbarians; the murder of a rabbi and three children at a Jewish day school in Toulouse in 2012; the bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires in 1994 leaving 300 wounded and 85 dead; and, of course, closer to home, the murder of 11 at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, and, a year later, the killing of one woman and serious injuries to three others in a synagogue in Poway, California.

That’s how it usually ends up, and that’s only a partial list of Jewish targets and death tolls. In each case, except for the attacks in the synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, the assailants were Islamists and Palestinian terrorists.

That raises some interesting questions about the way in which this most recent incident of terrorism—against Jews worshipping in Colleyville, Texas, in their Beth Israel Synagogue—has been regarded and reported. And it should lead to a reckoning among Americans that no matter how many Black Lives Matter marches one joins, there will always be far more hate crimes committed against Jews than any other ethnic or racial group—by a wide margin.

But expect no such reckoning.

And it should lead to a reckoning among Jews that they are not so safe in America, after all, and that Orthodox Jews are especially vulnerable to outside animus, among the Jew haters, and inside indifference, among non-practicing and Reform Jews.

Expect to see no such reckoning, either. 

Among other reasons, the memory of the hostage crisis at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, is already fading. This story with its feel-good ending has already lost momentum in keeping pace with the ever-evolving news cycle. And worse, its Jewish bona fides as a hate crime specifically targeting Jews, and as an act of terrorism against the very people who are most often terrorism’s main target, somehow got lost in translation. 

The FBI’s initial investigation reported that there was no reason to conclude that this was a bias crime at all, nothing “specifically related to the Jewish community.” President Joe Biden was predictably fuzzy when he speculated that while this was an act of terror, it’s not clear why the gunman spouting anti-Semitic and anti-Israel comments would select a synagogue as his pulpit. The president was equally mystified by why an avowed Islamist would threaten to kill Jews unless his demands were met to release an imprisoned female al-Qaeda operative who blamed her conviction on the Jewish hold on America.

You can see how the connecting of these dots required genius levels of deductive reasoning. 

It’s perhaps unfair to blame President Biden for failing to make the necessary linkage between an Islamist assailant and his Jewish victims. When he was Vice-President in the Obama administration, he probably remembered how President Barack Obama described the 2015 kosher market murders in Paris as a “bunch of folks” who were “randomly” shot by a “zealot.”  

When it comes to Jews, apparently, it’s nearly impossible to draw the right conclusions about why so many of them end up dead.

Rather than solve these imponderables, the Colleyville synagogue story quickly became a nonstory, or one that was solely of human interest rather than a crime scene. It surely did not present anti-Semitic urgencies or suggest a crisis in America in its failure to protect Jews. 

Indeed, once the hostages were free, the story itself was taken hostage by a media trained to downplay anti-Semitism altogether. And the Beth Israel nightmare was hijacked further by social justice warriors who are notably meek when it comes to hostility against Jews, unless that story can be spin-doctored to have even a nominal Zionist dimension. In such circumstances, especially if it flagrantly involves Israel, intersectional auxiliary forces are brought in as reinforcements, and a crime against Jews is instantly recharacterized as “they had it comin’.” 

Call it: The Sympathetic Tale of Woke Terrorism. 

A hostage crisis in a synagogue was ripe for distortion and dilution—primarily because the assailant was not a white supremacist, Trump supporter, or budding insurrectionist. Had the Texas gunman been a Proud Boy, a new congressional investigation would have been launched, and the Jewish minority in America would once more be regarded as a legally protected class.

How do I know this to be true? Well, the shooters in Pittsburgh and Poway were anti-immigrant white supremacists—and that’s why those cities are now synonymous with synagogue shootings. Indeed, both Alt-right assailants blamed cosmopolitan Jews for globalizing America and opening the borders to disenfranchise and replace them. We have been warned about Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and Joe Biden’s “Big Liars.” They are America’s true enemies, a fifth column of trailer trash. It is only when they attack Jews that anti-Semitism is placed on par, provisionally, with racism and Islamophobia. 

But when anti-Semitism is perpetrated by people of color, then calls for solidarity are dismissed as the exaggerated cry of the privileged elite, Jews waving a false flag, demanding special treatment, pretending to be victims rather than white oppressors.

Unlike Pittsburgh and Poway, the murder of Jews in Jersey City, New Jersey, and during Hanukkah in Monsey, New York, in December 2019, by Black Nationalists, received almost no coverage at all by the mainstream press. Similarly, attacks against Jews in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami in May 2021 by pro-Palestinian sympathizers was conveniently excused, ignored, or explained away by both the media and elected officials.  

Apparently, the only story worth reporting on Colleyville was about the rabbi himself, Charlie Cytron-Walker. After all, he had developed a rapport with the terrorist, who he allowed into the synagogue earlier and even made him a glass of tea before realizing he was brandishing a gun. And it was the rabbi who 11 hours later seized an opportunity to toss a chair at their captor, enabling them all to make a break for the exit.

Throughout the day of the ordeal the rabbi was described as an interfaith leader within the greater Colleyville community. This was demonstrated by reports that his wife, and the wife of a local imam, embraced in a church where many of the local religious leaders had gathered. This was a Kodak moment that might have even warmed the heart of Congresswoman and Squad member, Ilhan Omar.

Rabbi Cytron-Walker was hailed as a devout practitioner of tikkun olam (to “repair the world”), which is Reform Judaism parlance for making social justice the centerpiece of one’s Jewish identity and showing far greater concern for the rest of the world than one’s own people. Jews, after all, so over-pampered, are never in need of repair. 

These are all wonderful images of a rabbi who could very well become the poster boy for the woke left and the spiritual cousin of Bernie Sanders. Ben & Jerry’s is airlifting ice cream to Colleyville as we speak.

Progressives and their intersectional underlings have invested an enormous amount of political capital assigning roles within and creating hierarchies of oppression. And on that list, near the very top, are Jews. Stripped of their historic minority status, Jews, in the political imagination of the hard left, stand among the forever guilty white oppressor class.

It is for this reason that anti-Semitism is both an inconvenient truth and a shamefully tolerated prejudice. Jews cannot be made to look like victims, especially if those who victimize them are grandfathered in as the eternally oppressed, easily recognizable by the color of their skin. Everything about Jews, including the Holocaust, is being whitewashed by the woke’s obsession with skin color. 

One of the victims in the 2019 Monsey, New York, Hanukkah killing was an Orthodox Rabbi, Josef Neumann, stabbed to death five times by an African-American assailant. Don’t be surprised that this is the first time you heard the rabbi’s name, or why attacks against Orthodox Jews, whether in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, or the Fairfax District in Los Angeles, never make the front page.

Rabbi Cytron-Walker from Colleyville, Texas, however, is a different story. Ironically, this local hero and acceptably woke Jew appears to be out of a job. He had already submitted his resignation this past fall after learning that the synagogue’s Board of Directors had decided not to renew his contract. He was not without support within the congregation. Indeed, the full membership never had an opportunity to vote; Cytron-Walker had already stepped down. 

One of Beth Israel’s congregants not sad to see the rabbi go posted on Facebook that Cytron-Walker referred to Israel as an “apartheid state.” Among Reform rabbis, such a comment is, tragically, not unique. 

What is unique is how his departure may come to symbolize the meaning of woke terrorism—where a potential terrorist who had lived in an Islamist “no-go-zone” in the United Kingdom, and who appeared on an MI5 watch list, was welcomed inside a synagogue and given tea. 

It will now become politically incorrect to question the wisdom of that judgment.

Words fail and analysis becomes trite. Indeed, we must guard against the paralysis of analysis. Colleyville brought back images of Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, of Charlie Hebdo, Hypermarché Cacher, Jewish school shootings, and so many other slaughters of the Jew in our era. Thankfully, the worst didn’t happen in Colleyville. But it is necessary to state the truths that are still so sadly true. And they are hard and inconvenient truths because they will give little comfort to those who cry out for understanding, brotherhood, and ask “why?”

Malik Akram, the aspiring Jihadi who invaded Beth Israel Synagogue on the Sabbath, had demanded the release of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist convicted in 2010 of attempting to kill U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan. She is such a bloodthirsty Islamist that her nickname—which she takes pride in—is “Lady Al-Qaeda.” She is imprisoned near Fort Worth, not far from Colleyville. During the hostage-taking, Akram was heard on livestream yelling, “America only cares about Jewish lives.”

Anti-Semitic acts are becoming more frequent and more horrific. With all the politically correct talk against Islamophobia, the reality is that anti-Semitic acts in the United States and Canada outnumber anti-Islamic acts by a two to one margin according to the Anti-Defamation League and the League for Human Rights. Anti-Semitic incidents in the United States rose by nearly 50 percent last year and nearly 30 percent in Canada. Unprecedented spikes in modern times. We will constantly be fighting this scourge. And not just from Jihadi Islamists.

Whenever people look to blame others for their own failed lives, they demonize the Jew. It will always be so. We live in the post-Holocaust era, and we must learn its hard and bitter lessons. The idea of the destruction of the Jewish people reached its zenith in a nation considered the most cultured of its time, with the most integrated and assimilated Jewish population in history. Germany. Mankind will not cross the Jordan. If it happened there, it can truly happen anywhere. And it is.

Let us not politicize Malik’s attempted slaughters. Race hatred will always spark into race murder when the simmering nightcrawlers lurking in the underbelly of society draw validation from a public discourse that is filled with what Martin Luther King, Jr. called words of “nullification and interposition,” meant to sow division and discord between groups and communities for political advantage. That was Malik’s background in Britain. These were the kinds of Islamist invective he was nurtured in and that is flooding the world like locusts.

The Jihadis have allies in their goal of finishing what Hitler started. From the Nazis of Charlottesville to the Louis Farrakhans calling Jews “termites.” The Jihadis have allies. And the next time you hear Palestinians chanting “Palestine shall be free from the river to the sea,” remember that this is a call for genocide first mouthed by Nasser in 1967 in those words as a promise to “drive the Jews into the sea.” These very people who deny the first Holocaust are salivating—and planning—for a second.

We all have a responsibility to fight this. It Is not up to the other guy. And it will not help to turn our streets and institutions into armed camps with armed guards. It is up to us to fight these people ourselves every day and in a thousand little ways whenever we see them rear their ugly heads. We are all soldiers. It is not easy. There is no guarantee of success. But it must be done. Most important, we must not shield our young people—particularly if we are Jewish—from this ugliness but rather inform them that this is the reality of the world, and they too must marshal a resolve to fight. They must have no expectation of “normalcy.” Without this effort, our standing as free people has little meaning.And as you read this, please refrain from the usual hand-wringing that so many—especially far too many Jews—engage in about Akram and others of his ilk having “psychological problems.” Their overwhelming psychological problem is a bloodlust to kill Jews. We don’t have to bend over backward to understand why. We just have to stop them before they do. And by the quickest and most direct means possible. The latter is perhaps the most inconvenient truth of all. But it is the reality of our dystopian times.

Every year at our Seder table when I was growing up, Margo Wolf, an elderly, half-blind Holocaust survivor, was assigned a portion of the Haggadah to read aloud. “Pour your wrath upon the nations that did not know You and upon the kingdoms that did not call upon Your Name. Since they have consumed Ya’akov and laid waste his habitation. Pour out Your fury upon them and the fierceness of Your anger shall reach them. You shall pursue them with anger and eradicate them from under the skies of the Lord.” She read it slowly, in Hebrew, with the kind of cellular-level passion only a woman who had survived the Nazis and joined the French partisans could deliver. She meant every word. Many American Haggadot today have memory-holed this section, favoring a kinder, gentler ending to the holiday dinner. 

I thought of Margo Wolf when I was reading the statements about the Colleyville synagogue attack that began flooding the media this past Saturday. There was little “fury” or “fierceness” in them. Most were milquetoast, formulaic responses expressing sadness, ending with promises that this “will not be tolerated,” even though it always is. They reminded me of something else from my childhood: the Mad Libs booklets my brother and I occupied ourselves with on long car rides. The booklets presented you with a thematic narrative absent key words you were then prompted to fill in with instructions to use a verb, an adjective, or an adverb. I imagine the template for our very American, anti-anti-Semitism statement has the same format and looks something like this:

“Our thoughts and prayers are with the (PROPER NOUN/SOCIAL CATEGORY ex. Jewish  community/Rabbi/Worshippers) who were attacked today in (CITY NAME). We stand  (APPROPRIATE CLICHÉ: ex. shoulder to shoulder or in solidarity with) our (EXPRESSION  OF FRATERNITY ex. brothers and sisters or fellow citizens of the Jewish faith) in  condemning (ADJECTIVE: ex. in the strongest possible terms) (PROPER NOUN: insert all “isms” referring to categories of hate). Together we will (AGGRESSIVE VERB ex. fight, stand against, decry) hate in all its forms. This rising tide of extremism (MEME that conveys determination but suggests no specific action: ex: will not be tolerated).”

Mad Libs always produced absurd stories when read back because the person filling in the blanks didn’t see the narrative to which he or she was contributing until after it was completed. The inserted words made the sentences silly and everyone laughed at the nonsense of the final product. The public anti-anti-Semitism statement today is no less silly when read back. But these blanks are filled in with full disclosure, which make them a lot less funny. 

I tend to be forgiving of public officials who plug these out. They don’t know how to fight anti-Semitism or how to be helpful. But I am acutely aware of the gift that it is to live in a country where government officials feel the need to publicly acknowledge the interests of its Jews, just 2 percent of its population. It isn’t so everywhere on the planet. So, they get a pass.

I can even forgive the FBI, which clearly was in possession of last year’s edition of Mad Libs, edited by Ilhan Omar and a DEI commission out of D.C. Once that error was corrected, they were back on script. 

But Jewish institutions who spew the same word salad in moments like these should be ashamed. It is not enough to say we will “continue to call out anti-Semitism,” whatever that means. It isn’t even enough to call for increased Congressional funding for hard security assets at Jewish organizations, though I think it is worth having. Infrastructure improvements aren’t a survival plan. In order to craft one, we must unleash our inner Margo. We have to be bold in both word and deed. 

But do we even remember how to be bold? American Jews have felt so safe in this country for so long, we may have lost the instinct. Not so our Sephardi and Russian-Jewish friends who have first-generation memories of what it is like to pack up in the middle of the night and flee Aleppo or the KGB. But neither their stories nor those of our Israeli family living under perpetual threat seem to have heightened our awareness that the last several decades in the United States have been the Jewish exception and not the rule. I wonder if we even have it in our communal DNA anymore to get angry and to get busy acting on our own behalf. 

The Union for Reform Judaism issued a statement after the Colleyville crisis ended. It was filled with relief and gratitude, but no rage. It served up stale tropes like the claim: “Our diversity makes us strong and can keep us safe.” It can? How exactly? From my reading of the news, what kept the Colleyville hostages safe was a combination of training, guns, and law enforcement. The URJ ended its statement with what nowadays passes for a call to action: “to protect our communities and simultaneously heed God’s call to build a world of safety, equity, and love.”

The ADL predictably claimed, “This crisis can serve as an opportunity for dialogue and engagement.” Those words should be printed in bold, all-cap letters on the walls of every Jewish institution in America. When the next Malik with a machete gets by a uniformed security guard at the door and enters one of our buildings (and unfortunately, he will), the congressionally funded security camera on the ceiling will hopefully capture the image of the terrorist with the ADL’s cheery outlook behind him, and remind us that some people don’t want to be “engaged.”

If Margo Wolf were alive today and were employed as the Communications Director of a major American Jewish organization, I think we would be hearing quite a different message. I think she would call on every rabbi in America to make self-defense courses as mandatory as mastery of the Torah portion for any child seeking a Bar or Bat Mitzvah in their synagogues. She would ask those same rabbis to make eight-week firearms training courses as compulsory as pre-marital counseling for any Jewish couple seeking to be married under a chuppah. Memberships in synagogues would come not only with dues, but with obligatory participation in volunteer security and crisis training for everyone over the age of 16. There would be a literal and figurative “call to arms,” and every Jew in America would be responsible for contributing what he or she could to the message we want every would-be anti-Semite to hear: we aren’t a desirable target because we plan to fight back.

If this all sounds too militant to you, you need to hear it the most. If you hate the thought of holding a gun in your hand or teaching your 13-year-old how to physically defend herself, do what I tell my kids to do when they have colds and have to take liquid Robitussin: hold your nose and do it anyway. If you remain unprepared, you are vulnerable. And you are even more vulnerable if you think another bubble-gum flavored “hate speech” curriculum at your son’s high school is the answer. It may be more to your taste, but it isn’t very effective. The guy coming to shoot up the next Jewish house of worship may have just entered the country from some place where they don’t teach 10^th graders the part about the Jews not killing Jesus, or Israel not being an “apartheid state.”

Margo would insist on an American Jewish campaign to build an iron wall of support for law enforcement in this country. It would become as Jewish as the matzah ball to reject the Defund the Police movement, BLM and Deadly Exchange, and to help unseat any senator, congressman, governor, or district attorney who doesn’t do the same. Jews cowering in kosher supermarkets know what people of color in the inner-city dodging bullets on the way home from church know: these movements are a direct threat to our safety, determined to leave us even more exposed to violence than we already are. No American Jewish leader should be tolerated who is confused about where the line between nuance and nonsense is on this subject. 

Margo would ask American Jews to arm themselves not just physically, but with a new mindset. She would tell congregants who heard more about Islamophobia than Islamism from the pulpit this Shabbat to vote with their feet, leaving their misguided rabbis to preach their feckless rhetoric to empty pews. She would insist that Jewish organizations stop using scarce Jewish philanthropic dollars to “fight hate” and to fund more empty anti-Semitism programs that are indistinguishable from “anti-bullying” campaigns. And she would lambast activist rabbis who sign public letters in support of Linda Sarsour’s freedom of speech even as many of the same also sign public letters suggesting Charles Jacobs is an “Islamophobe.” The only kind of Jewish partisan Margo Wolf had any use for was the kind with a home-made rifle in her hands on the French border in 1941. 

Our collective Jewish communal head is not on straight. We still think, after all we have been through, that our best options are security guards, awareness campaigns, interfaith dialogue, and sending out our “thoughts and prayers.” A change in mindset is needed to meet our change in circumstance. Only that will trigger serious action by the only people who can save us—ourselves. The “Pour Out Your Wrath” paragraph needs to be reinserted into every Haggadah in the country, and every Jew should be responsible for reading it aloud every year. In it, we call on God to wipe out our enemies but there is no reason He has to go at it alone. We have to find our fury too, and activate it productively in defense of our own. We don’t live in the world we want. We live in the one we have. There are people in it who don’t believe in tolerance and mutual respect. When they walk into our shuls to harm us they shouldn’t count on having twelve minutes or twelve hours to do as they please before the authorities burst through the doors. Let their anti-Semite friends send around fill-in-the-blank statements of solidarity and issue empty words of inspiration after one of theirs has fallen because he walked through the wrong Jewish door and found angry, empowered, prepared Jews who were ready for him. As for us, we need to tear up our Mad Libs templates and create new ones.

I felt confused by the cantor on the Zoom memorial singing at us with her eyes closed, the words on people’s social media, the blogs, the posts, the filler of the awkward silence in the wake of Jews being taken hostage:

“The Rabbi is amazing.”

“Security protocols work!”

“They all came out alive.”

“No they didn’t!” I heard a voice cry from my heart. One man lay dead from the incident—a deranged, pained, expressive, confused soul of a terrorist who traveled all the way from England to a tiny synagogue in suburban Dallas to kill Jews and amplify his cause. Does this not deeply trouble anyone else?

Reading that day backward—from the luminary local “Rab-lebrity” (that’s a Rabbi who acts like a celebrity) in Dallas arriving at the staging area to snap selfies with his interfaith cohort and swat team while awaiting his colleague to “give a hug” (“What are you doing here?” was the freed hostage/Rabbi’s question, revealing the “Eish Tam” or “Simple/Pure Man” he is); to the Facebook live feed from morning services and early rantings of Malik Faisal Akram’s demands—my mind exploded with questions and disbelief. How is it that this is becoming a discussion of the success of synagogue security protocols? Why did so many colleagues summarize the experience as “Rabbi Charlie is amazing”? He was heroic, patient, and watchful. Shouldn’t the word amazing be reserved for theater, performances, entertainment? But for a hostage situation? What chilled my spine most of all was the general exhale I observed my colleagues sighing—all at once waxing prophetically about the need to double down on interfaith work, security protocols, and hope as a new spin emerged: a sound bite opportunity to glorify American Reform Jewish values.

What emerged in the wake of this tragedy resembled a Mysterious PR Machine: the naivete, well-wishes for brother- and sisterhood, and “we’ll take the high road of inclusivity,” only fans the flames of Islamic hatred toward Americans and Jews. Underneath the soundbites and guitar circles is an idealism that can lead their people to slaughter. This sort of deflection is dangerous and reminds me of German-Jewish nationals in 1938 who were completely in denial of the trouble ahead and already in their midst. Instead of “Olam Chessid Yibaneh” (the URJ’s banner song “We will build this world from love,” which was the main programming and set the tone for Monday Night’s Vigil), the German nationals said, “I am an essential part of Germany, they would never do this to me.” Today’s tome is “We will rise above the hatred and profess Love and Brotherhood of all peoples (unless they support Donald Trump).” There are parallels—both carry an elitism; both are in denial. 

While Charlie has his own healing process, the very seductive narrative that emerged around him and the event is what I call “illiberal jingoism”—a trope dedicated to elitist and unrealistic concepts of love, brotherhood, and unity. Meanwhile, somewhere the plot continues to form and will continue to terrorize Jews throughout the world. If this were France, England, Tunisia, Israel, or anywhere else, we wouldn’t see this bravado; indeed, we would see a very different narrative emerging as they don’t have the luxury of geographic isolation to immerse themselves in a fabricated reality that deflects the true issue at hand. 

How swiftly Saturday night’s hostage siege was recast: a terrorist situation became a community social media event. The social media rabbinic commentary of the day read like meaning making and history making in real time. We were told with almost immediacy, “this was an isolated incident,” and within 24 hours assured that “Akram had acted alone.” It was almost as if the Mysterious PR Machine doubled down on the opportunity to tell us, “Synagogues are safe. Security Protocols are to be invested in. Crazy people do crazy things. Now go home to your family and come back for your daughter’s Bat Mitzvah.” 

But like a false ending to a B-movie horror flick, I feel that the entire story is not yet done. Too many pieces of the story don’t make sense. And maybe that is what bothers me most. If, indeed, Akram represents the 1 percent of Muslim society who are sociopaths, then there are 19,999,999 others out there just like him. And no dollar amount can hire the army of security to keep them at bay—just look at Israel.

It’s not a time to sit all cozy and reflect on how much work there is to be done amongst the interfaith ideologues. It’s too early to have a prayer vigil with an acoustic guitar strapped across my torso like a summer camp song session. It’s not a time for Kumbaya Judaism. This siege on a suburban synagogue’s enduring misunderstanding seems to be that our hearts should be filled with compassion and curiosity for the Other; indeed, build bridges and embrace difference and diversity, outside of our echo chambers. Get a good security protocol in place and turn your sanctuary into an Escape Room… people pay to go to those, and they bring their friends. Nay! It’s time to acknowledge that the Halloween horror movie music is starting slowly and softly, and that an inevitable sequel is yet to be produced. 

Scene: Beth Israel Synagogue, Colleyville, Texas. Mid-morning on a cold winter’s Saturday in suburban Texas. Birds chirp. 

Establishing Shot: Synagogue entrance. The front door is open. We see the back of a MYSTERIOUS MAN wearing a well-worn heavy winter coat.

Close up: A man’s snow-stained boot on a stair. The MYSTERIOUS MAN exchanges a few words with a RABBI, who holds the door open to let him in.

FADE TO: Hours later in the Situation Room where Hostage Negotiators and Swat Team stage an insurgence. CHIEF NEGOTIATOR on cellphone hears:

Faisal:  I said, ‘Is this a night shelter?’ and they let me in. And they gave me a cup of tea. So I do feel bad.”

To Be Continued.

Before Alice Sebold became a bestselling, critically acclaimed novelist (the film The Lovely Bones was an adaptation from her first novel of the same name), she signaled her arrival as a writer with an important voice and compelling tale, as evidenced by her memoir entitled, Lucky. 

The book was a searing and, at times, improbably witty retelling of her freshman year at Syracuse University when in 1981, while she was walking late at night, an assailant with a knife dragged her into a tunnel and raped her. The book details her experience with the hospital that treated her injuries along with her own efforts to heal—unsurprisingly, without much success. Much of the book is devoted to her reliance on law enforcement and the criminal justice system to hold her attacker to account. 

It made for a gut-wrenching read: A woman who served as an eyewitness to a heinous crime committed against herself. 

Sebold ended up identifying the man who assaulted her and testified against him. He was convicted of rape and sentenced to 25 years in prison, serving 16.

At the police station, one of the detectives thought it might be helpful for her to know that the last sexual assault victim on campus was raped and dismembered by her attacker. In this way, he reasoned, Sebold should consider herself “lucky”—hence, the book’s alluring title.

Surely any reader would recognize, without having to actually read the book, the ironic inkling in any attempt to find good fortune in such a gruesome and life-altering event. Justice, in whatever form it takes when not on the set of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” never results in feeling lucky. Even the anticipated sweetness of personal vengeance wears off and soon curdles into the bittersweet. Stories of sexual violence against women are inexorably disqualified from happy endings.

Since its publication in 1999, Lucky has had an enormous influence on rape victims, crime victim advocates, and law enforcement personnel. It is sometimes mentioned as a benchmark in how to gauge the hierarchies, and some of the vagaries, of sexual violence. For instance, are all acts of rape, or accusations of rape, the same? Many victims drew some comfort in thinking, “At least I didn’t experience what happened in Lucky.”

For most women, “no means no,” no matter where it is said—whether in a dark tunnel at knife point, or in a boy’s dorm room after drinking too much at a party. But is there no difference at all between the “luck” that Sebold survived and the misfortune of a tipsy co-ed who wakes up the next morning with cloudy memories that moments later will morph into regret?

Consent is the coin of the realm in the crime of rape. It’s the reason why the sexual histories of women so often became the primary defense strategies in rape trials—that, along with the absence of physical bruises to demonstrate that the woman neither resisted nor fought back. Most women, however, did not resist, which resulted in tragically adverse inferences about whether the accuser was telling the truth.

These are some of the reasons why rape has been so often astoundingly under-prosecuted. Studies show that only 5 out of 1,000 (another source places the figure at 7) committed rapes ever result in a felony conviction. That doesn’t even account for the thousands of acts of sexual violence that never get reported because women do not wish to voluntarily place themselves onto the conveyor belt of the legal system, with its cold machinery, grinding gears, and timeless delays. Who would want to repeatedly relive the experience and expose themselves to intrusive, embarrassing, and re-traumatizing questions that often flip the storyline, making them feel like the accused rather than the other way around?

And there are no assurances of guilty verdicts.

Moreover, police departments are notoriously delinquent in gathering evidence of sexual violence. Hundreds of thousands of rape kits go untested, and sometimes are destroyed to free up space in evidence rooms. The police often do not assign an investigator. The investigator often doesn’t interview the victim. The police fail to interview potential witnesses. The case never gets referred to a prosecutor and no criminal charges are ever brought.

No wonder the #MeToo Movement received such a critical mass of uncritical support. Many women had simply had enough. A new arena for judging and punishing sexual offenders materialized–one that led to the public downfall of those who otherwise were seemingly beyond reproach. If the law wasn’t going to do its job, then perhaps human resource departments, cancel culture, and the general public’s purchasing power could be deployed to punish men for rape, sexual violence, and sexual harassment. In some cases, like with Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein, chastened legal systems were politically compelled to take a fresh look at cases they had earlier declined to prosecute: to the fullest extent of the law… or at all, for that matter.

So the question must be asked, now that several years has passed since #MeToo so radically changed the social and cultural landscape: Has the movement empowered women, turning them into their own private avengers simply by reciting “Me, too!” which resulted in actions finally taken that had been ignored by legal systems that failed to dispense justice? Or has #MeToo set feminism back, infantilized women, and obliterated the difference between being “lucky” and being a responsible adult?

It surely succeeded in transformative, wholly unexpected ways—especially in the workplace where hundreds of men saw their careers come to an end, relieved of their jobs and, in many cases, replaced by women—Al Franken, Andrew Cuomo, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Kevin Spacey, Mark Halperin, Louis C.K., Paul Haggis, Roger Ailes, Leslie Moonves, and Bryan Singer, among many others.

While false accusations are rare, they are not nonexistent, meaning that some men lost their jobs based on uncorroborated, unproven accusations, and at other times, without even knowing the identity of the accuser—the very definition of lacking due process. #MeToo’s alternative legal system played by a very different set of rules. Men have spent nights in jail due to police filings that included no reported incident and no history of violence–just unspecified fears of husbands and boyfriends. 

Over the past several years, men have reported being afraid of women, whether in mentoring them at work, giving them an affectionate embrace, or in trying to interpret nonverbal cues on dates, when the evening either comes to an end or proceeds to the more delicate matters of sexual intimacy. Perhaps all of this abundant caution and restraint is a vast improvement over a system that tended to be skeptical of women who didn’t come forward immediately, or who sent mixed messages with friendly notes, relationships maintained, gratitude extended, or acted in such a way that reinforced patriarchal notions that “Oh, please, she wanted it.” 

Consent is, like most things, contextual. Sebold also said “no,” and pleaded for her life, in a very different setting and context than women confronted with abusive spouses and boyfriends, lecherous bosses, or even once promising dates that resulted in awkward, unpleasant sexual encounters. Bari Weiss wrote a column for her former employer, the New York Times, in which, as a feminist, she registered astonishment over an exposé written by a woman who went out on a date with a Hollywood celebrity and referred to it as “the worst night of my life.” What most surprised Weiss was the writer’s lack of personal agency, her apparent female powerlessness in describing a date that perhaps didn’t go as she had hoped but was well short of a crime. Sex that may have, at the time, felt degrading is not the same as criminal, and nor should it become career-ending.

Breaking through the glass ceiling was always seen as a paramount goal of the feminist movement. But lately it seems that pulling the rug out from under men whose actions are more boorish than suave has become a more satisfying accomplishment.

The overall effect of #MeToo on our legal system is not something to be dismissed. It might eventually influence jurors to disregard standards of proof, turning a jury of one’s peers into execution squads. 

The rallying cry of “Believe Women!” has been enough to waylay the careers of Woody Allen, Richard Dreyfuss, Oliver Stone, Dustin Hoffman, and others. These men have largely disappeared, sentenced in the court of public opinion to moral banishment. The jurisdiction of that court is limitless and its sentencing guidelines unmerciful. After all, the chant “Believe Women!” nearly derailed the confirmation of Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

That would have been ironic, since in a court of law, the accused, in our justice system, is always afforded the presumption of innocence. It is a signature entitlement of the accused—innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. We have always regarded the punishment of an innocent person to be so unconscionable, we are prepared to acquit the guilty—set them free without the payment of any debt to society—in order to spare even one innocent person the moral outrage of an undeserved punishment.

That has now changed. “Believe Survivors!” is perhaps the first time in our nation’s history where the presumption of innocence has been called into question, if not wholly eradicated, in the minds of the general public. The personal, subjective truth of women (persons of color, as well), are now sacrosanct. Guilt beyond any doubt at all in cases of sexual assault may ultimately hinge entirely on a woman’s word.

To reflexively believe a survivor of an alleged sexual assault is also to conclude that the accused’s professed innocence is a lie. Someone isn’t telling the truth in the quixotic plotline of “He said-She said.” But then why bother with a trial at all? The mere accusation of sexual assault, by itself with nothing more, is tantamount to a finding of guilt. The time-honored presumption of innocence is reversed. In cases of sexual violence and harassment, a new evidentiary standard would govern: The accuser’s truth overrides any exonerating facts. Survivors are unquestioningly believed. No other presentation of evidence is necessary. Indeed, to call a woman a liar becomes its own separate crime.

I fail to see the feminism in that, just as I fail to see the justice in how rape victims are presently treated under the law. 

Outside of courtrooms, there is an even greater danger in trivializing the experience of Alice Sebold, and so many others, by conflating acts of contemptible violence with altogether different, less threatening encounters between the sexes. It’s essential to maintain our perspective. Thankfully, as flawed as the male gender may be, most men are not Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein. What good comes from lumping all men together into one gross overgeneralization?

We are seeing a parallel illogic in matters relating to white supremacy and the January 6 insurrection. Racism is far too easily charged, denials ignored, reason abandoned. A racial faux pas is as self-condemning as attendance at a Klan rally. Similarly, merely questioning whether absentee election ballots should be accepted without verified signatures instantly places one inside the Capital on January 6.

If everything is sexual violence against women, then nothing is sexual violence against women. And isn’t that the gravest insult to women who have, indeed, experienced the worst forms of sexual violence? 

We are moving all too quickly from the lucky to the stupid, where perspective is lost, and moral balance is given no credence at all. Believing women without condition robs men and women of the self-respect that comes from being judged on equal terms. Believing women without thinking means that objective truth is unknowable. Believing women without question suggests that facts cannot speak for themselves, that they must be prejudged, that impartiality is impossible whenever sex is the scene of the crime. Believing women without discernment implies that women have no voice that can be used to distinguish between pleasure and pain. 

Choosing to reserve judgment is not a betrayal of women or a validation of men.

One last thing to consider: Anthony J. Broadwater, the man who served 16 years in prison for raping Alice Sebold and who was released shortly before “Lucky” was published, has recently been exonerated and his conviction vacated. Nearly 40 years after the crime, a state court judge, joined by the district attorney’s office, have concluded that the prosecution was flawed, Sebold’s identification was coached, the DNA evidence discredited, and with such unreliable evidence, Broadwater should have never been sent to jail.

Even the lucky, with the emotional scars to prove it, are sometimes uncertain of the truth.